Blacklock's Reporter

Blacklock’s observes the 158th anniversary of Confederation with a Canadiana Quiz. The questions are deceptively simple. The answers will have you say: “I did not know that!” Happy Canada Day.

1. What did they call the Peace Tower in World War II? (Answer: the Victory Tower)

2. What Canadian capital is named for a queen with 15 children? (Answer: Not Victoria or Regina but Charlottetown, named for the wife of King George III)

3. Only one province has ever gone bankrupt. Which one? (Answer: Alberta. In 1936 the province defaulted on two bond payments after being denied $18 million in federal aid. Alberta bonds were instantly barred from trading on the London Exchange. With the treasury unable to meet its payroll, Premier William Aberhart said: “We cannot go ahead paying the heavy toll placed on us by the money barons without ultimately losing all we have.” Alberta again defaulted on a bond issue in 1938 and was reduced to printing its own scrip. Newfoundland also became insolvent, in 1933, but was not yet a province of Canada)

4. Since 1867 only one federal party leader has been ejected from Parliament for election fraud. Who was it? (Answer: John A. Macdonald. The Father of Confederation was stripped of his Commons seat in 1874 for bribery and ballot-stuffing in Kingston, Ont. He was subsequently re-elected by 17 votes)

5. The U.S. took 11 minutes to recognize the new State of Israel in 1948. How long did Canada take? (Answer: Seven months. Israel was founded May 14, 1948. The Department of Foreign Affairs withheld recognition until Christmas Eve)

6. Everybody knows John F. Kennedy was the first Roman Catholic elected U.S. President. Who was Canada’s first Catholic prime minister? (Answer: Not Wilfrid Laurier but John Thompson of Halifax, in 1892. Thompson converted to marry his wife Annie, fathered nine children and became such a devout Catholic he climbed the 400 steps to the top of St. Peter’s Dome on an 1894 visit to the Vatican and collapsed with chest pains. He never recovered and died two weeks later)

7. What is the minimum time required by Parliament to pass a bill into law? (Answer: There is none. The parliamentary speed record was set June 6, 1919 when a measure to deport leaders of the Winnipeg General Strike passed the Commons and Senate and was signed into law in 90 minutes flat. More recently Parliament on March 13, 2020 took 119 minutes to pass a Covid-era bill granting cabinet wartime spending powers. It was introduced in the Commons at 10:15 am Eastern and passed into law by the Senate at 12:14 pm on complaints few legislators read the bill. “The House agreed to buy a pig in a poke,” Conservative MP Scott Reid (Lanark-Frontenac, Ont.) said later. “The House adopted bills it had not actually seen”)

8. Cabinet once passed an executive order forbidding children from crossing the Atlantic. Why? (Answer: U-boats. The order was enacted in 1917 after Imperial Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare. In a single month, April 1917, enemy subs destroyed 354 ships in the Atlantic)

9. What is Canadian Eastern Hard Red Winter? (Answer: a federal grade of wheat)

10. Who was the first prime minister to record an album? (Answer: Arthur Meighen. In 1936 Meighen delivered a speech to the Canadian Club entitled The Greatest Englishman in History, a tribute to William Shakespeare, that was recorded on 16-inch disc. Two decades later admirers dubbed it to vinyl and distributed copies to every college and university library in Canada)

By Staff  

Thank God It’s Friday

has little to do

with God Almighty.

It’s a polite way

of telling co-workers, managers,

that after being in their company

for the fifth day in a row

you’ve had just about all you can take.

By Shai Ben-Shalom

In 2012 three residents of Huntingdon, Que. complained one of the biggest transport companies on the continent, CSX Corp., was ruining their lives. CSX began shunting freight cars through the town at all hours. Locomotives idled for days at a time. The rumble of diesel engines was so disruptive it rattled windows.  Neighbours could not escape the noise inside their own homes.

One resident, Shirley O’Connor, said she begged CSX to expropriate her house. No one would buy it, and she could not afford to move. In desperation, Mrs. O’Conner filed a formal complaint with the Canadian Transportation Agency – and won. A federal panel ordered the billion-dollar corporation to find another place to switch its freight cars.

This is the poignancy of Unjust By Design, an analysis of the nation’s administrative tribunals like the Transportation Agency. These are the obscure boards that rule over pensions, labour standards, workplace compensation, landlord and tenant disputes and a million other David and Goliath battles that affect ordinary lives.

“What judicial tribunals do really matters – often desperately,” wrote author Ron Ellis. Yet they are held to little independent scrutiny, they are often run by patronage hacks, and many people are indifferent to their function. As Ellis put it, “Hardly anyone cares.”

Ellis was an Osgoode professor and member of the bar for 50 years. Unjust by Design is an unnerving exposé of a system with sweeping powers, like the notorious Ontario Rental Housing Tribunal that evicted more than 150,000 tenants in a five-year period without any judicial scrutiny.

“What judicial tribunal members do is too important for them to be pursuing their own political or ideological goals, or dabbling in public service, or wending their way to a comfortable retirement,” wrote Ellis. “Just like judges, they are engaged in serious business where the consequence of getting things wrong may be the infliction on the parties who appear before them, and on their families, of injustices and hardships of the gravest kind.”

In the U.S. adjudicators have been vetted for competence since 1946. In the U.K. tribunals have been scrutinized by a federal agency since 1958. In Australia the work of panels is similarly reviewed by statute since 1975. In Canada, nothing. Appointments are subject to patronage with little oversight of decisions or checks for competence.

“In many U.S. states, a judge’s position is an elective office, and Canadian lawyers have always been smugly dismissive of the U.S. practice of electing and/or re-electing judges,” Ellis wrote. “Never do we stop and think that, in Canada, thousands of judicial tribunal adjudicators with as much power as elected  U.S. judges to decide rights disputes, inflict injustice, and cause harm are subject to a system of idiosyncratic renewal that is obviously far less principled than even an election-based system.”

Unjust by Design is unsettling. It documents a kind of back-alley justice system that functions without any of the controls we impose on courts. “A train wreck,” Ellis called it. And it does not appear to matter unless you are a tenant, or an injured worker, or a homeowner whose lifetime equity is lost to CSX Corp.

By Holly Doan

Unjust by Design, by Ron Ellis; UBC Press; 388 pages; ISBN 9780-7748-24781; $34.95