Federal managers spent eight months planning a $70,000 Hollywood party at taxpayers’ expense including costs to hire publicists for “red carpet management,” Access To Information records show. The party was cancelled after Blacklock’s reported the expenditure January 17.
Cabinet’s electric car mandate is flexible, says Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin. Federal regulations have mandated a ban on the sale of new gasoline-powered passenger vehicles by 2035: “Is the target mandatory or optional?”
Federal managers may have breached an Act of Parliament in awarding sweetheart contracts to a millionaire ArriveCan supplier, Auditor General Karen Hogan said yesterday. The contractor, GC Strategies Inc. of Woodlawn, Ont., is already under RCMP investigation for alleged fraudulent billing: “At any time we could have been stopped.”
Cabinet is relying on illegal immigrants to leave Canada on their own, Immigration Minister Lena Diab last night told the Commons. Diab would not comment on departmental figures indicating deportees who remain here number up to 500,000 or more: “Does she not understand if you don’t remove people who do not have a legal right to be here, that the system is meaningless?”
Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin last night accused critics of manufacturing controversy over a mandate that new oil and gas projects will only be built with 100 percent consensus. “The most important part is that we work in unity in this moment,” Dabrusin told the Commons.
Cabinet would like to see the “overall cost of housing come down,” Housing Minister Gregor Robertson said yesterday. His remarks followed data showing shelter costs now take up more than half of household incomes on average: “We want to see the overall cost of housing come down.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday promised an immediate 27 percent increase in defence spending. One member of Carney’s caucus said a spring budget was out of the question since “numbers are changing rapidly.”
U.S. based Door Dash Inc. yesterday accused Canadian anti-trust lawyers of “an overly punitive attempt” to challenge its business model. The federal Competition Bureau accused the delivery company of pocketing millions through misleading advertising: “This application is an overly punitive attempt to make an example of an industry leader.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney abruptly cut short a visit with a Muslim group Friday amid protestors’ chants of “Free Palestine.” Carney did not comment on remarks by the chair of the Canadian Muslim Association who accused Jews of genocide: “These are Muslim values. These are Canadian values.”
Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree pleaded inexperience following a Commons grilling in which MPs challenged his unfamiliarity with public safety issues. Anandasangaree is the sixth safety minister in six years: “He doesn’t even know.”
The federal cabinet will decide which energy projects are deemed “nation-building,” says Prime Minister Mark Carney. However cabinet would not override objections from any premier under a bill tabled in the Commons, he told reporters: “Why did you decide to make this a political decision?”
Canadians choose private sector weather forecasts over Environment Canada, says in-house federal research. The finding followed 2022 disclosures the department scooped data on hundreds of thousands of users who downloaded a government weather app: “The most common apps cited included The Weather Network, AccuWeather and ‘the app that comes on my phone.'”
Housing costs will average 52 percent of household income this year, says a federal memo. The figure in 2015 was 38 percent. “Canada is facing a housing crisis,” said the housing department document: “The cost to construct a residential building in Canada has increased by 58 percent since 2020.”
Guns in the U.S.
are getting out of hand.
Stricter regulations must be set, enforced.
Owning high-powered assault rifles
– capable of killing 5 police officers
in Dallas, Texas,
20 children
in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut,
or 49 people
at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida –
should be limited to only those who
graduated elementary school,
able to name at least two American presidents,
and
haven’t been to North Korea in the past 10 years.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
It took an advertising copywriter, Walter Lord, to discover the Titanic in 1955. Of course everyone knew of the big ship that hit an iceberg, but it was Lord who fashioned the story into a narrative he called A Night To Remember. The non-fiction bestseller was a modest 208 pages yet inspired generations of Titanic-themed novels, films and stage plays based on Lord’s simple premise: There is nothing more interesting than interesting people in trouble.
Similarly ex-newspaperman Joe Scanlon and historian Roger Sarty of Wilfrid Laurier University discover the Halifax Explosion and fashion it into a compelling tale of humanity in Catastrophe: Stories And Lessons From The Halifax Explosion. Everyone knows about the 1917 harbour collision of a munitions ship that blew the city sky high. The drama is not in the unsafe transportation of dangerous goods any more than Titanic is illustrative of bad seamanship. It’s the people who make it an indelible story.
At 9:04 am on December 6, 1917, a calm, clear morning, the French munitions ship Mont-Blanc collided with a Norwegian steamer in Halifax harbour. It sparked a fire that quickly spread to the cargo.
Abandoned by her crew, the Mont-Blanc drifted towards the Halifax docks as munitions smoked and sputtered like a box of fireworks, then ignited into a mammoth explosion that flattened the city and killed 1,963 people. It was all over in about twenty minutes.
There was a “blinding sheet of fire about a mile high in the air,” eyewitnesses recalled. The explosion was heard fifty miles out to sea. Others remembered seeing the big funnel from the Mont-Blanc catapulting through the sky.
Captain Aimé Le Médec was on his maiden voyage as skipper of the munitions ship. He briefly considered going down with the Mont-Blanc but instead rowed away, not bothering to hoist a signal flag to alert the city his steamship was packed with 225 tons of TNT. Later he was charged with criminal negligence but never went to trial.
“I saw the Frenchies’ port lifeboat in the water,” an eyewitness remembered. “They were pulling past the stern of their ship and were heading for the other shore. Two men were standing up in the boat shouting. What they were saying I don’t know, because I cannot speak French.”
The explosion flattened the Acadia Sugar Refinery, Hillis Foundry and the Starr Street Synagogue. Twenty-seven of forty children at the Protestant orphanage perished in the flames. A survivor recalled seeing children cut about the neck by flying glass: “It seemed just as if a keen knife-edge had slashed each little throat.”
Annie Chapman, a railwayman’s wife, was at home with her baby when the house collapsed and she awoke to the infant’s cries from the rubble. “I dug like a crazy woman towards where the cry seemed to come,” said Chapman. “I dug and pulled at the beams and boards that had fallen like a pile of kindling wood. I lifted boards I never could have lifted at any other time and then came to the plaster. I got down on my knees and put the whole length of my arm under the plaster and felt the warm little head of my baby.” Both survived.
Deputy Mayor Henry Colwell, a haberdasher, on hearing the explosion sprinted from his store to City Hall, formed the Halifax Relief Commission within 120 minutes and quickly arranged food and coal deliveries for survivors. The city was hit with a blizzard the following day. Colwell’s descendants still mind the store on Water Street.
Catastrophe: Stories And Lessons From The Halifax Explosion is first rate. How unfortunate that author Joe Scanlon, a former Toronto Star reporter on Parliament Hill, did not live to see it published. Scanlon died of a heart attack at 83.
By Holly Doan
Catastrophe: Stories and Lessons from the Halifax Explosion, by T. Joseph Scanlon; Roger Sarty, editor; Wilfrid Laurier University Press; 400 pages; ISBN 9781-7711-23716; $39.99
