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
Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday named a third of Liberal backbenchers as parliamentary secretaries. The appointments pay a $20,200-a year bonus: ‘It’s a mandate for change.’
Conservative MPs yesterday challenged cabinet to detail legal analysis of a landmark bill that would allow police to search the mail. “This is something I know I am going to get mail about,” said MP Frank Caputo (Kamloops-Thompson, B.C.), a former Crown prosecutor: “Tell Canadians what its experts have said about whether this legislation is Charter compliant.”
The Commons yesterday by unanimous vote passed a Bloc Québécois bill protecting dairy quotas in all future trade talks. An identical bill was gutted in the Senate last year: “From aluminum to forest products, from shrimp to beef and other food products, from services to technology, all of these other Canadian exports are potentially hampered by this bill.”
The federal Competition Bureau yesterday cautioned businesses claiming to be “green” to check their facts. The advisory follows Parliament’s 2024 passage of a bill outlawing fake claims that products are environmentally friendly: “The Bureau’s advice is clear: When in doubt, spell it out.”
All major banks have signed on to a federal program to offer basic $4 per month accounts effective December 1, the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada said yesterday. It follows estimates that leading banks pocket billions a year in service fees: “All Canadians are eligible.”
Opposition parties last evening granted Prime Minister Mark Carney a reprieve on a confidence vote 82 days into his term. MPs mustered enough votes to topple the Liberals but acknowledged Canadians “don’t want an election right now,” said one party leader.
Interest costs on the national debt will hit $70 billion by 2029, the Budget Office warned yesterday. It compares to a pre-pandemic debt servicing charge of $24.4 billion annually: “Debt charges will reach $69.9 billion by 2029.”
Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem yesterday expressed worry over creeping unemployment. Statistics Canada is due to release its latest Labour Force Survey tomorrow: “Businesses are generally telling us they plan to scale back hiring.”
Tens of thousands of Canadians have unpaid federal fines that run to the millions, says the Public Prosecution Service. At current rates of collection it would take about six years to recover the money that is owed, according to figures detailed in a prosecutors’ memo: “It’s as if justice exists only on paper.”
Attorney General Sean Fraser yesterday apologized after saying First Nations don’t hold a veto over pipeline projects. Cabinet earlier defended Indigenous pipeline blockades as a democratic right: “Who asked you to apologize?”
