Federal regulators yesterday froze Employment Insurance premiums for 2027 though the “outlook remains uncertain” due to tariffs, says the Chief Actuary. Premiums remain far below rates charged workers and employers a decade ago: “The rate is expected to generate sufficient premium revenue.”
A cabinet proposal to eliminate a backlog of air passenger complaints may cost travelers, says a consumer advocacy group. The amendment to Air Passenger Protection Regulations would see airlines refer complaints to binding arbitration: “What standards will they be held to?”
Twenty-five Canadian diplomats were fired last year and another 11 abruptly quit while under investigation, says the Department of Foreign Affairs. Wrongdoing included security breaches and suspicious activities in an unnamed “country of concern.”
Most Canadians who applied for subsidized dentistry under the federal Dental Care Plan were already regular patients in private care, new data show. Federal agencies to date have not accounted for billions in cost over-runs on the program: “If employers were to start dropping their plans because there is some new federal plan, that is a potential concern.”
Canadian corporate media from the outbreak of the pandemic acted as government propagandists, says a former foreign correspondent. Speaking at a public hearing, Rodney Palmer said media dependent on cabinet for licenses or subsidies worked to quash criticism of Covid-era mandates: “I know they shifted their allegiance from the people of Canada.”
A federal labour board has ordered the Canada Revenue Agency to pay a total $13,500 in damages to two Christian employees suspended for defying its vaccine mandate. The discipline was discriminatory, an adjudicator ruled: “How does a manager decide?”
Federal researchers will spend three years and $12.6 million attempting to substantiate claimed benefits of a Trudeau-era venture, the $1 billion National School Food Program. “More data are needed,” the Canadian Institutes of Health Research said in an internal memo.
When did it all fall apart?
A bill given Royal assent?
A memo sent on some Friday in November?
A million bad decisions by a million stupid people?
Or merely, a bite into an apple?
It’s a Great Game,
Played for our amusement,
We, the vulgar and profane.
But deadly serious,
And a contest to the end,
For those born into it.
Lost lives lived and still,
They circle around the pale blue flames
Faces lit,
Beauty and laughter in the light,
Horror and madness as the shadows fall.
Black and White, Light and Dark,
All end in the same place,
Bound, howling in terror and rage,
Cast into the Outer Darkness,
For an eternity plus a day.
By W. N. Branson 
Canadians of a certain vintage can still recall when DDT was found in every kitchen cupboard and it was considered eccentric not to throw candy wrappings out the car window. The Ontario Department of Highways used to spend $1 million a year clearing roadside litter.
This did not change by osmosis. It took years of litigation and dramatic protest by a comparatively few people. “It was a burn-out job but you loved it,” one organizer tells author Ryan O’Connor. “It was what needed to be done so you did it.”
O’Connor’s First Green Wave chronicles the birth of environmental activism in Canada. It is a fresh account of Pollution Probe, a citizens’ committee that grew from the University of Toronto to include chapters from Halifax to Regina. Pollution Probe was never a mass movement; its membership peaked at some 1,500. The Kinsmen Club had 16,000. Yet its impact was far-reaching.
It launched the first recycling drive of its kind, a 1971 campaign to collect a million discarded Toronto telephone directories. It created the Canadian Environmental Law Association in 1972, still indispensable after all these years. It warned Canadians we were poisoning our lakes and streams, a phenomenon dramatized when Lake Erie’s Cuyahoga River caught on fire in 1969.
“One of the impressive things was they couldn’t be dismissed as sort of hairy radicals,” one University of Toronto faculty member tells O’Connor. “They were all so conformist looking.” Pollution Probe organizers had neat haircuts and wore ties and knew how to write a press release.
O’Connor, a research associate at Trent University, traces environmental activism in this country from a TV documentary, a 1967 CBC film called Air Of Death. There were earlier attempts, of course: U.S. author Rachel Carson’s 1962 work Silent Spring made Canadian bestseller lists and a 1960 National Film Board production Poisons, Pests & People savaged the use of farm pesticides, but was withdrawn from distribution amid industry protest.
Air Of Death was more dramatic. It preempted the Ed Sullivan Show, drawing a national audience of 1.5 million. The documentary chronicled the poisoning of crops and cattle by a phosphate plant near Dunville, Ont. on Lake Erie. “Something mysterious burned the peppers, burned the fruit, dwarfed and shriveled the grains,” filmmakers reported. “Cattle lie down and die.” The poison was fluorine. The plant’s operator, Electric Reduction Co., quietly paid out $198,000 in damages to nearby farmers, the equivalent of $1.3 million today.
“Every day your lungs inhale fifteen thousand quarts of air and poison,” viewers were told. “Death has been gathering in the air in every Canadian city.” The documentary would be startling even if broadcast today. In 1967 it was hypnotic.
O’Connor credits the film with inspiring an entire generation of publicity-wise Canadian activists. Their work had such an impact that by 1970 the leader of the federal Progressive Conservative party made sure to be photographed wearing a Pollution Probe button.
The First Green Wave is lively and provocative, nostalgic and compelling. Professor O’Connor recounts the words of Toronto’s parks superintendent, caught sanctioning the use of pesticides so lethal they killed mallards that washed up on a Lake Ontario beach. “It’s either that or have the trees dying and people getting covered in slimy caterpillars,” he said.
By Holly Doan
The First Green Wave: Pollution Probe & The Origins Of Environmental Activism In Ontario, by Ryan O’Connor; University of British Columbia Press; 264 pages; ISBN 9780-7748-28093; $29.95
Federal employees who witness criminality at work are now required to report it under a revised Code Of Conduct, says a Department of Public Works report. It follows in-house government research showing few employees were eager to “rock the boat.”
A federal program to name newsrooms deemed reliable and trustworthy is not an attempt to profile Liberal Party-friendly media, says a lead researcher. “There is no role for government oversight,” said Professor Colette Brin of Laval University: ‘Criteria are not related to editorial opinions, political perspectives or relationships with government.’
MPs yesterday at a public hearing wept over Canadians who suffered death or injury from Covid shots, including a Conservative parliamentary aide. “I don’t think we have properly acknowledged the harm that was done to many people,” said Conservative MP Blaine Calkins (Ponoka-Didsbury, Alta.).
There is no chance based on current projections that cabinet’s housing targets will be met, new CMHC figures showed yesterday. Data contradicted claims by Housing Minister Gregor Robertson that cabinet was “building big.”
A second Liberal MP yesterday sponsored a petition to end decades of free trade with Israel. The action by MP Pat Weiler (West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast) followed a Department of Foreign Affairs announcement Tuesday that Canada would boycott Jewish imports from West Bank territories: “Suffering in Gaza has gone on too long.”
A government-approved Local News Directory is paying researchers to list media deemed trustworthy and reliable, according to Access To Information records released yesterday. The initiative follows disclosures federal managers circulated blacklists of reporters who met with government disapproval: ‘It will help people struggling to find news they can trust.’
