New Democrat MPs yesterday served notice they seek first-ever parliamentary hearings on the troubled Canada Infrastructure Bank. The chair and CEO abruptly resigned last April. Infrastructure Minister Catherine McKenna has promised to “get shovel-ready projects built quickly” though none have been completed since the Bank was established three years ago: “Well, that’s unacceptable.”
A Liberal MP who apologized for vulgar tweets about Indigenous women, Chinese-Canadians and others yesterday invoked Nelson Mandela in decrying racism. MP Jaimie Battiste (Sydney-Victoria, N.S.) told the Commons Indigenous affairs committee he was upset by intolerance in Canada: “Why do I assume every skinny aboriginal girl is on crystal meth?”
Parliamentary investigations of federal contracting with We Charity and others are “petty politics”, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau yesterday told reporters. The Commons ethics committee will try again Thursday to obtain records on more than $758,000 in payments to the Trudeau family by We Charity and others: “That is their choice.”
You can’t sell marijuana near a schoolhouse, Ontario Superior Court has ruled. Judges dismissed complaints a no-cannabis zone around schools was miscalculated “as the crow flies”.
Costs of federal regulations fall heaviest on small business, says a Department of Industry study. Researchers said businesses with fewer than five employees or as little as $30,000 in yearly revenue faced a “heavy regulatory burden”.
A cabinet filibuster to block disclosure of corporate sponsorship fees paid to the Prime Minister’s family is now in its second week. Liberal MPs on the Commons ethics committee have delayed a vote to release records detailing hundreds of thousands paid to Trudeaus: “We’re not talking about $1 or $200, we’re talking about a lot.”
Second-wave subsidies for small business come too late for thousands driven to insolvency by pandemic shutdown orders, say MPs. Cabinet pledged $13 billion in new aid under old programs so complex they were undersubscribed: “People have put their sweat and tears into their business.”
Electric car rebates are the costliest federal climate change program, according to Department of Transport figures. The department estimated cuts to greenhouse gas emissions as a direct result of cash rebates cost taxpayers nearly $900 per tonne in the first year of the program: “An audit has not yet been completed.”
Cabinet is serving legal notice it will blacklist plastic as toxic under the same federal law that regulates asbestos and mercury. The Department of Environment acknowledged industry complaints the listing “could lead to the stigmatization of plastics”.
A federal agency launched in 2015 to “create a public service that is more agile” spent most of its budget on salaries and benefits for employees assigned to hold “armchair meetings”, say auditors. Staff complained they were underfunded: ‘Innovation has been slow.’
They say the carpet in the House of Commons is green to symbolize the meeting grounds of Old England where farmers and townspeople gathered to solve numerous and vexing problems. The Commons today is populated by professional politicians skilled in contrariness, accomodation and dissent. It works.
Author Peter MacKinnon writes of the other commons found at university campuses, populated by political amateurs skilled in histrionics and entitlement. It is not a flattering exposé. MacKinnon is provocative: “Members of the general public who hear of these controversies might well ask, ‘What on earth is going on in our universities?’”
University Commons Divided pulls no punches. It is frank and unapologetic. MacKinnon, president emeritus of the University of Saskatchewan, depicts a post-secondary culture that is shrill, disapproving and overly bureaucratic. Canada Post has 6 board members; General Motors has 11. The University of British Columbia has 19. The effect is stupefying.
“These are stories of division, not differences, and they undermine university values: a commons in which freedom of expression is the paramount value; a commons that privileges conclusions founded on evidence and reason; a commons that is well governed and one free from discrimination; a commons in which civility is valued and practiced; and one that discharges its social responsibility without presuming to pursue social justice,” writes MacKinnon. “If we have strayed from these values, we have not yet strayed so far that we cannot recover them. We may need some help along the way, but it is a goal worthy of pursuit by all of us.”
University Commons Divided is rich in anecdotes. MacKinnon recalls the Carleton biology professor whose service on the University board consisted of publishing blog entries describing his fellow directors as idiots. An attempt at censure drew protest from the Canadian Association of University Teachers as an assault on academic freedoms. “Troubling,” writes MacKinnon.
Then there was the director of Ryerson University’s School of Social Work who resigned after students accused him of an “act of anti-Blackness”: The man left an anti-racism meeting while speeches were ongoing. The Black Liberation Collective concluded he was cruelly indifferent to “anti-Black racism scholarship, Black women, Black educators or education, Black experiences, Black life and ultimately Black students.” Or maybe he left to take a phone call, writes MacKinnon.
Conclusion: “Freedom of expression is under attack in our universities – not a deliberate, organized attack, but an accumulation of episodes that diminish its significance in comparison to other considerations,” writes MacKinnon. “Second, the concept of universities as intellectual spaces is also under attack as a result of intellectual laziness accompanied by ideology and anger. The result, too often, is not a contest of ideas; it is a struggle for power.”
University Commons Divided recounts similar noise over Halloween costumes at Queen’s, pro-life protests at Calgary, profanity at Laurentian and an unhappy episode at the University of Ottawa, where a yoga class led by a Caucasian instructor was shut down as cultural misappropriation that smacked of “colonialism and western supremacy”.
The rule in the Big Commons is never make enemies needlessly, and try not to appear ridiculous. The Little Commons could use MacKinnon’s primer.
By Holly Doan
University Commons Divided: Exploring Debate & Dissent on Campus, by Peter MacKinnon; University of Toronto Press; 144 pages; ISBN 9781-48752-2827; $24.95
The federal carbon tax must increase fivefold, up to $289 per tonne or 69¢ per litre of gasoline, if cabinet is to meet emissions targets, the Parliamentary Budget Office said yesterday. The report confirmed a secret 2015 memo the Department of Environment earlier dismissed as hypothetical: “So, the question is — ?”
Liberal MPs yesterday expressed alarm that talent fees privately paid to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his family will become public. The Commons ethics committee has sought records from the Trudeaus’ talent agent since July 22: “Once it is out electronically, it’s out.”
Cabinet faces a Commons vote that would force disclosure of uncensored records on its dealings with the now-disbanded We Charity. Staff blacked out whole pages of emails and memos in breach of a finance committee order, according to the Commons Law Clerk: “We have the right to see those documents.”
Parliament must impose a surtax on excess corporate profits, New Democrat leader Jagmeet Singh yesterday told reporters. Singh stopped short of threatening to withhold twenty-four NDP votes from any minority Liberal budget bill: “This is fundamental.”
