A Senate committee meets Thursday to review recommended compensation for ex-staffers who worked for former senator Don Meredith. The committee on internal economy has already apologized to employees who complained they were harassed by Meredith: “Is it too little, too late?”
Imagine a room
full of people.
Perfect venue to meet,
chat,
interact.
You could make friends,
pitch for a job,
find love.
Social media is that place
—without a room,
without people.
(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, examines current events in the Blacklock’s tradition each and every Sunday)
Canada’s Second World War began with a good sleep. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, staff in Prime Minister Mackenzie King’s office first heard the news from a reporter who called for comment. Aides hesitated to wake King. The bulletin waited till breakfast.
Mobilize! is the title of this account of unpreparedness. Journalist Larry Rose might have renamed it The Long Nap. It is a lively narrative chronicling the nation’s sleepwalk through the age of dictators.
At the outbreak of war the cash-starved navy kept its headquarters above a delicatessen on Queen Street in Ottawa. The artillery had fewer men than the Montréal Police Department. Camp Borden’s Armoured Fighting Vehicles School had no tanks but a single truck nicknamed Old Faithful. The air force still flew a standard light bomber, the 1918 Wapiti biplane, with an air speed of 210 km/hr. It “glided like a brick”, one pilot recalled. Air crews called it What-A-Pity.
What accounted for the shocking state of military preparedness? Québec, argues Rose. French Canada was 29 percent of the population: “Our own domestic situation must be considered first, and what will serve to keep Canada united,” King explained.
The conscription crisis of WWI nearly destroyed King’s Liberal Party in 1917 and still evoked bitter comment in Québec. King himself skipped the First War draft by working as a corporate consultant in the U.S., and was so uninterested in the military he was known to confuse ranks.
“So what?” writes Rose. “So what if Canada’s army was unprepared? So what if William Lyon Mackenzie King’s military program amounted to armament lite? Did it really matter that it was ill-trained, poorly led and equipped in 1939?”
It did, Rose concludes. The price was paid in casualties at Hong Kong in 1941 and Dieppe in 1942, and soldiers’ suspicions that King was a political schemer who did not care for their fate. When the Prime Minister lost his own seat in the 1945 election, it was the soldier vote that tipped the balance.
Mobilize! is vivid and wonderfully researched. Author Larry Rose has a TV producer’s eye for the indelible detail. We learn one of the first Canadian casualties of the Second World War was a 10-year old schoolgirl, Margaret Hayworth, drowned in the U-boat sinking of the liner Athenia on the first day of war. And that Hitler’s nephew observed the outbreak of war with a Canadian lecture tour in which he described his infamous uncle as “crackers”. And that 26,614 landlocked Prairie boys joined the Royal Canadian Navy. The Pacific horizon still looks a lot like sunset on the plains.
By Holly Doan
Mobilize! Why Canada Was Unprepared For The Second World War by Larry Rose; Dundurn Press; 336 pages; ISBN 9781-4597-10641; $28.99
Most Canadians consider cheating on the GST a lesser offence than stealing from their employer or parking illegally in a disabled spot, says Canada Revenue Agency research. Paying cash to avoid the federal sales tax is “excused because it is seen as ‘the little guy’ trying to save a little money,” said an Agency study.
The idea that “Chinese people are oppressed” is laughable and patronizing, says an executive with a federally-funded foundation. The Asia Pacific Foundation of Vancouver yesterday had no comment: “China has risen.”
Internal emails show federal agencies used the pandemic to shut down Access To Information disclosures even as cabinet boasted of openness and transparency. Advocates rate Canada worse than Bulgaria in concealing documents from the public: “Access To Information processing is NOT a critical service.”
The number of insolvencies in Canada has declined compared to last year, says a federal report. The Superintendent of Bankruptcy warned of a delayed wave of financial failures once normal court proceedings resume: “There will be an increase, but I don’t think it will be sudden.”
Cabinet must table a federal budget as soon as possible, says a Liberal appointee on the Senate national finance committee. Cabinet has yet to detail spending and borrowing plans six months into the fiscal year: “We certainly need to come up with a positive, clear, realistic picture of where this is going.”
More than four in ten Canadians tell federal researchers immigration quotas must be cut. The Department of Immigration this fall is expected to lower quotas that would see 341,000 people let into Canada this year, the highest number in more than a century: “Canada should focus on helping unemployed Canadians.”
A newspaper that spearheaded the campaign for federal subsidies says direct taxpayers’ aid now comprises more than a third of its revenues. The publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press had predicted the company was in trouble two years before the pandemic: “This is the most serious crisis we have faced in our history.”
The Department of Health yesterday said it is hiring federal consultants to monitor as many as ten pilot projects involving free distribution of medication to drug users. The department did not comment on whether it proposed to federalize safe injection sites: “Treat people who use drugs with compassion and give them the support they need.”
A national broadcast regulator has quietly dismissed scores of complaints against a Vancouver radio host who criticized pro-democracy protestors in Hong Kong. The Canada Broadcast Standards Council would not explain its decision: ‘China is an open-minded country.’
National railways will spend nearly $79 million installing locomotive video and voice recorders, the Department of Transport said yesterday. Parliament has mandated installation of high-grade recorders in all cabs within two years: “This is an egregious violation of workers’ rights.”
RCMP laid nearly 10,000 pandemic-related charges in four months including breach of the Quarantine Act, Statistics Canada said yesterday. The Canadian Police Association had complained of a hodgepodge of Covid-19 regulations that saw police ticket Canadians for everyday activities: ‘The last thing we need is more conflict between the public and police.’
New Democrats yesterday said Commons committees must expand investigations of alleged favouritism in the awarding of federal contracts. The party’s ethics critic named former Liberal MP Frank Baylis whose medical supply company received a six-figure contract weeks after Baylis left Parliament: “How did that contract happen?”
