A&W Restaurant franchisees in Québec say they face closure without migrant labour. Owners in a petition to the Commons human resources committee said they could find no Québecers willing to work in fast food: ‘They are currently the only labour force truly available to fill positions that Québec workers refuse.’
A new $20 banknote will include unprecedented security features to combat counterfeiting, Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem said yesterday. “You’ll have to wait for the unveiling,” he said.
The Alberta Court of Appeal yesterday struck down a 1912 law that required new lawyers to swear allegiance to the King. Most other provinces had already repealed the requirement: “‘I will be faithful and bear true allegiance’ are not the words of an ordinary undertaking.”
The Budget Office yesterday challenged Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne to explain why he seeks a 20 percent hike in the national debt ceiling. The increase would take permitted borrowing to a record $2.54 trillion: “This is more than required.”
The Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations is sealing all reports filed by a Kamloops, B.C. First Nation that was paid to exhume the purported graves of 215 children at an Indian Residential School. “Confidential information,” the department wrote in denying an Access To Information request for the records: “None of these sites have been investigated further.”
Anti-Semitic slurs are now commonplace among medical students, Jewish interns and health care practitioners in three provinces have told the Senate human rights committee. Doctors in Alberta, Manitoba and Québec said bigotry was part of everyday life on campus: “For a profession whose core principles include impartiality, evidence and care for all patients, this is profoundly corrosive.”
CBC and Al Jazeera viewers consider themselves uniquely informed, says an Elections Canada report. The two TV networks were named by self-described “informed” voters when asked where they got their news: ‘They tended to rely on certain media outlets.’
The Canada Revenue Agency has a duty to explain itself when rejecting taxpayers’ appeals, says a federal judge. “Trust us” was insufficient, ruled the Federal Court of Appeals: “This is no small thing.”
Housing department staff in an Access To Information memo to Minister Gregor Robertson complained of the trouble and expense in opening a new office in Toronto or Vancouver. Rents were too high, they said: “There is a 3 to 4 year wait time.”
The Canadian Armed Forces spent tens of thousands on a “gender equity” analysis of housing while failing a federal audit as a bad landlord, records show. The hiring of a “social inclusion advisor” was among contracts approved by the military’s Housing Agency: “Are you a business or organization looking to build your awareness on equity?”
Canada has a 160-year supply of natural gas that will be worth a fortune in a tightening global market, says the Department of Natural Resources. The forecast came as senators were urged to endorse a clause in cabinet’s omnibus budget bill that would permit 50-year liquefied gas export permits: “The 1,100,000,000,000,000 cubic feet is just representative of what is in the West.”
Taxpayers out of pocket for bad advice from the Canada Revenue Agency should file a complaint under the Taxpayer Bill Of Rights, say managers. Federal judges previously ruled the document is not a bill and does not convey any rights: “It would probably be better if the document were given a different name.”
Parks Canada spent more than $131 million renovating Charlottetown’s Province House, records show. The home of the Prince Edward Island legislature has been closed for 10 years: “It’s like everything else in life. They left the big repairs until they needed doing.”
We would love to take credit for the fact we all share but then we wouldn’t, now would we? We would love to take credit for the indelible likeness of Marilyn Monroe and be to blame for all bad things. We would love to say sorry; be absolved.
We would love to say sorry and mean it, in the phone bill and the army telegram. We would love to bestow contentment unto yawl and a resign drawl shawled o’er each command. We would love to say sorry; be absolved.
We would love to release almost all our agents, and eventually the rest. We would love to whisper sorry in the ears of babes, render horrors pastoral; the chicken’s neck clean to the blade. We would love to say sorry; be forgave.
By Jeff Blackman
In the days before television, newsreel producers each year assigned cameras to film three visually rich, set-piece spectacles that represented Canada to theatre audiences nationwide: the opening of Parliament, the Calgary Stampede and the Eaton’s Santa Claus parade. One of these is gone.
A Mile Of Make Believe recounts with warmth and nostalgia the Christmas extravaganza sponsored by a family-owned corporation once the largest retailer in the country. This is not a dry municipal history. Eaton’s in its heyday sponsored Santa parades from Edmonton to Montréal. Author Steve Penfold, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, has crafted a smart and funny account of a lost piece of Canadiana.
Nobody did more than Eaton’s to take the Christ out of Christmas. “The Santa Claus parade was a spectacle of capitalist non-realism,” writes Penfold. Organizers specifically excluded religious imagery. If the 1920 parade featured Noah’s Ark, the star of the float was a monkey smoking a pipe. Penfold recounts an incident at the 1968 event when an elderly protester shouted, “This is not a parade for God, this is a parade for the devil.” One mother replied: “For crying out loud, will you shut up.”
Eaton’s did not invent the Santa parade. A Mile Of Make-Believe traces the roots of the retail observance to a local department store sponsorship in Peoria, Illinois in 1888. Yet none eclipsed Eaton’s in scale or scope. It was “an assault on the eyes and ears,” writes Penfold. One Toronto parade featured a Mother Goose float that filled half a city block. The Montréal parade was fronted by the military band for the Black Watch pounding out Jingle Bells.
“The company expended stunning resources on the events,” says Penfold. “By the 1950s, the parade ate up more than half the company’s public relations budget,” the equivalent of $1.3 million at its peak.
“As a corporate spectacle that experienced its golden years in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the Eaton’s Santa Claus was one example of a powerful new form of commercial life and culture holiday – the Christmas pageant,” the author notes.
The producer of the longest-running Toronto spectacle was Jack Brockie. He joined Eaton’s in 1914 and for decades ran a year-round team of carpenters and seamstresses preparing for the Christmas wonder. Brockie was the “man in the grey flannel suit with an eye for colour” and a love of children. “Every year I go along University Avenue and look at the expressions on their faces – white faces, black faces, yellow faces, along together for their Santa,” Brockie wrote a friend.
A Mile Of Make-Believe is also an affectionate tribute to a corporate giant. In 1969 the company had 48 stores and a payroll of 50,000 employees, the fourth-largest employer in Canada. Eaton’s ran purchasing offices in London, Paris, New York, Yokohama and Kobe. As late as 1975 it remained the largest retailer in Canada, eclipsed only by Hudson’s Bay the following year.
It ended pathetically. Eaton’s dropped its parade sponsorship as an austerity measure in 1982 and collapsed in bankruptcy in 1999. We are left with memories and newsreel images of blaring bands and a fifty-foot alligator slithering down University Avenue.
By Holly Doan
A Mile of Make-Believe: A History of the Eaton’s Santa Claus Parade, by Steve Penfold; University of Toronto Press; 256 pages; ISBN 9781-4426-29240; $27.95
