The Public Health Agency’s multi-million dollar pandemic early warning system is so poorly run it should be privatized at least in part, a federal report said yesterday. Health Minister Patricia Hajdu did not comment on findings that staff spent most of their time compiling news clippings: “It is not always clear who is responsible.”
Google searches are subject to censorship through federal privacy law, a federal judge has ruled. The decision came in a case Google lawyers warned threatens Charter rights in Canada: “An interpretation of the Act that required it to delist lawful public content is contrary to freedom of expression.”
Applicants for federal grants typically call the Department of Employment more than three times, and as many as ten times, says in-house research. The findings follow the department’s admission it improved service standards by not answering the phone: “People would get in and the call would never get dropped, it was just never answered.”
The Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Katie Telford, says she played no role in the federal appointment of a Liberal Party friend as a judge. It was Telford’s first comment on the appointment of a Toronto lawyer whose lobbyist husband previously employed Telford: “We’re not perfect.”
There are no valid statistical studies confirming the number of green jobs in Canada, says the Department of Natural Resources. The admission followed cabinet claims of hundreds of thousands of jobs, and Minister Seamus O’Regan’s pledge to subsidize any green project, “anything really.”
Cabinet polled Prairie focus groups on Western alienation just days before appointing Winnipeg Liberal MP Jim Carr as the Prime Minister’s “voice in the West,” records show. Research indicated perceptions ranged from indifference in Manitoba to anger in Alberta: “Provide three words that would best describe the current relationship.”
Social Insurance Numbers are assigned for life, says a federal judge. The ruling came in the case of a tax protester who petitioned to have his number deleted from a federal database that stores every SIN card issued since 1964: “Information is updated as required.”
Employers who hire migrant labour will be required to provide workers private health insurance, according to a cabinet proposal. Changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program would also mandate that employers post labour regulations in the migrants’ own language: ‘They have the same rights as Canadians.’
Newfoundland & Labrador has per capita the greatest literary output of any province, producing a stream of wonderful novels and non-fiction accounts of island life. There were only 22 members in Premier Joey Smallwood’s 1949 Liberal caucus, but two of them – Herbert Pottle and Harold Horwood – wrote memoirs that rate among the most candid, insightful and intelligent depictions of Canadian political life.
With fame comes caricature. Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are long accustomed to being depicted as quaint, funny, hard-drinking bumpkins. In Most Of What Follows Is True, poet Michael Crummey of St. John’s laments the literary misrepresentation of his home province. Crummey has the self-awareness to note this has the ring of the Congolese bushman who protests National Geographic expropriated part of his soul when it took a picture, but the complaint stands nonetheless. His target is a certain U.S. novel that “caused me to foam at the mouth,” says Crummey.
First, the fame. “It’s hard now to remember what things were like for writers before Newfoundlanders began regularly appearing on major literary prize and best-of-the-year and bestseller lists,” writes Crummey. He credits the breakthrough to the 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Shipping News by Annie Proulx.
“For the first time in Newfoundland’s history, local stories are being read and celebrated by ourselves and by strangers abroad,” he writes. “And being seen and acknowledged in this way makes Newfoundland and my life within it feel more substantial, more solid. That this place is in a book!”
Now, the caricature: “I was at a literary festival reception somewhere in the United States almost twenty years ago. I was talking to a festival-goer who had no idea who I was, which is generally my experience at literary events in the U.S. I mentioned I was from Newfoundland and was expecting the usual blank stare, but her face lit up. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I know all about Newfoundland.’ ‘You do?’ I said, and I’m sure my face registered my surprise. ‘Yes, absolutely,’ she insisted. ‘I just read The Bird Artist. Do you know it?’ ‘I do know it,’ I told her. ‘And I hate to break it to you, but you know nothing about Newfoundland.’”
The Bird Artist was published in 1994 by America novelist Howard Norman of Washington, D.C. It tells of a schoolboy painter, Fabian, in WWI-era Witless Bay. “I started the book years ago but wasn’t able to finish it,” writes Crummey: “From start to finish, it is complete and utter bullshit.”
Characters have Greek names like Odeon (unlikely); they encounter raccoons (there are none in Newfoundland); they eat scones for breakfast (!) and sea bass, lettuce and tomatoes for supper. “No such supper was eaten in Newfoundland at the turn of the 20th century,” says Crummey. There are no sea bass on the Grand Banks.
The novel is “Codco satire,” he laments: “It is impossible for me, and I think for anyone with even the vaguest sense of the realities of life in Newfoundland, not to feel insulted by the book’s cavalier use of the place for its own ends. I know from my parents’ stories what people endured simply to keep body and soul together in those communities. And it’s exasperating to see the world appropriated by someone with so little regard for the most basic truths of those lives.”
Such is the price of fame.
By Holly Doan
Most of What Follows is True, by Michael Crummey; University of Alberta Press; 72 pages; ISBN 9781-77212-4578; $11.99
The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board holds millions’ worth of stock in Chinese propaganda film studios even after the Commons censured China for genocide, accounts show. The Board five years ago had claimed to make human rights a “focus area of concern” when investing Canadians’ money: “This is our great homeland.”
A federally-subsidized history society in a published commentary says British Columbia should be renamed to purge its colonial past. “It’s not British; it never was,” Canada’s National History Society wrote in the August issue of its taxpayer-funded periodical: “These names direct us to a history of bloodshed and violence.”
Candidates in an expected Covid election must campaign with masks on, Canada’s chief public health officer said yesterday. Dr. Theresa Tam said even candidates who are fully vaccinated should be masked in the company of strangers: “Is it safe to do this right now?”
Liberal MP Will Amos (Pontiac, Que.) says he consulted a psychotherapist after being censured by the Commons June 7 for misconduct. “The assessments from my health team suggest I don’t have any mental health disorder,” Amos told local Québec reporters in a videoconference from his constituency office: “My new wellness plan specifically addresses stress.”
Most Canadians looking at federal rebates to buy an electric car have six-figure incomes and university degrees, says in-house research by the Privy Council Office. The Commons environment committee in a report on the plug-in auto market acknowledged zero emission vehicles remain out of reach for many: “Tesla has received the most subsidies from this program.”
Federal agencies pumped millions worth of subsidies into a failing Covid contractor even as the company was headed for bankruptcy court, accounts show. Spartan Bioscience Inc. of Ottawa received the aid after “good meetings” with aides in the Prime Minister’s Office: “We are in good shape.”
