Enlistment is up in the Canadian Armed Forces, according to figures released yesterday by Defence Minister David McGuinty. Recruiters noted it still takes more than four months to process an application to join the Army, Navy or Royal Canadian Air Force: “We’d like to bring that down to 30 days.”
A federal judge yesterday dismissed an attempt by two ArriveCan executives to challenge an internal report on alleged wrongdoing. The two former Canada Border Services Agency managers, Antonio Utano and Cameron MacDonald, were ordered to pay a combined $41,709 in costs.
A Nova Scotia wind farm run by friends of the Liberal Party required $206 million in public financing since no private lender would touch it, says the CEO of the Canada Infrastructure Bank. Ehren Cory said the costly venture was deemed too risky: “Private lenders alone were unwilling to provide the required financing.”
Foreigners in Canada on temporary permits will number more than two million this year even with quota cuts, records show. Prime Minister Mark Carney imposed cuts after complaining the “system isn’t working.”
A total 110,561 electors signed a Commons petition demanding that floor-crossers face byelections. The petition that closed Friday, sponsored by Conservative MP Lianne Rood (Middlesex-London, Ont.), was the first of four targeting defections in Parliament: “End the practice of MPs rejecting the will of the electorate.”
About a quarter of federal managers say they feel pressured to hire favoured candidates, says a biennial survey by the Public Service Commission. Figures showed more managers also resort to inside appointments rather than openly posting vacancies: “They are based on ‘who you know.'”
A federal judge has awarded a Saskatchewan prisoner more than $75,000 in damages and costs after he was pushed into a cell door by a guard. “The Charter is a very important law in Canada,” wrote Justice William Pentney, a former Deputy Minister of Justice: “The use of force violated your right to security of the person.”
If you phone your friends
to tell them about your luxury Alaska cruise,
it makes you look old.
Outdated.
Next time, Instagram.
If you smile
with lettuce stuck between your teeth,
that, too, makes you look old.
Next time, kale.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
What did the 19th century smell like? What was it like to stroll ankle-deep in horse effluent and live by the 25-watt glow of an oily lamp on winter evenings?
Many Canadian historians and documentary filmmakers recall the facts and figures of the past without ever providing a true tactile sense of how our ancestors got by, with one exception. We can still gain a taste of what they ate.
Collecting Culinaria is a tribute to an extraordinary trove of historic cookbooks collected by Linda Distad, a University of Alberta librarian who died in 2012. Distad had a mania for heritage recipes. Her collection ran to more than 3,000 titles including the first English-language cookbook published in Canada, The Cook Not Mad, circa 1830. Consider the recipe for corn beef: “To one hundred pounds of beef. three ounces salt peter, five pints of salt, a small quantity of molasses will improve it, but good without.”
Editors Caroline Lieffers and Merril Distad write that “the social and economic history of food, cooking and dining habits, subjects once mainly the province of anthropologists and sociologists,” are only now are taking their rightful place as archival documents.
What was it like to dine in Canada circa 1913? Here’s a menu from the cookbook Fifty-Two Sunday Dinners: consommé, beef tongue, baked potatoes, creamed celery, plum pudding – a beefy, heavy, tasteless meal for people accustomed to hard physical labour. The tongue had to be simmered in hot water for two hours just to be edible.
Collecting Culinaria celebrates them all including the famed Fannie Farmer Cookbook, first published in 1915 and “credited with popularizing level measurements,” now in its 13th edition, and the Joy Of Cooking introduced in 1931: “With its chatty and familiar tone, the text would become a bestseller and remains popular today.”
“Books might reflect wartime exigency or 1950s abundance, and many titles were little more than quick money makers for enterprising publishers,” Culinaria notes. “Indeed, while at the beginning of the century many households may have owned only one or two cookbooks, families – now less likely to have servants – were also increasingly accumulating small culinary libraries.”
Recipes date from Roman times but Culinaria credits an English homemaker, Isabella Beeton, as author of the “culinary and household management touchstone” that started the whole ball rolling in 1859. Mrs. Beeton’s Book Of Household Management ran to 1,112 pages of recipes, cleaning tips and advice.
When she died in 1865 – she was only 28 – her widowed husband sold the rights to Ward & Lock Publishing and the rest is history. Variations are still in print. “Throughout its many iterations,” Culinaria writes, “the trademark ‘Mrs. Beeton’ has assumed an almost mythological status, representing both the practicality and excess of British cookery over the last hundred and fifty years.”
Collecting Culinaria is spectacularly illustrated with photos and artwork. It will make you want to get cooking.
By Holly Doan
Collecting Culinaria, by Caroline Lieffers & Merrill Distad; University of Alberta Press; ISBN 9781-55195-3243
Thirteen Liberal ridings are among the first in the nation to lose doorstep mail delivery under a target list released yesterday by Canada Post. Constituencies facing service cuts include Carleton, Ont., won by first-term Liberal MP Bruce Fanjoy in an upset over Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre one year ago: “Make difficult decisions, show political courage and move forward.”
Canadians should question self-censorship by subsidized press, a leading economist and commentator yesterday told the House affairs committee. La Presse, the largest daily in Québec, admitted to canceling a regular column by Professor Sylvain Charlebois after he criticized hidden subsidies for daily newspapers: “This raises broader questions about how comfortable we are collectively with challenging prevailing narratives.”
Seven years of federal subsidies have permanently compromised media in Canada, current and former editors yesterday testified at the Commons heritage committee. A 2019 bailout originally promised to be temporary has instead marked the end of independent journalism, MPs were told: “Sooner or later, news media will run out of other people’s money.”
One of the largest unions in Canadian newsrooms yesterday sought federal controls on what people say about media on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Government regulation of lawful but hurtful criticism was supported by “95 percent of media workers,” said the president of the Canadian Media Guild: “The toxicity we face online and in person while doing our jobs is becoming overwhelming.”
Cabinet remains adamant that dairy quotas will never be negotiated in United States trade talks, Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc said yesterday. The U.S. has singled out dairy quotas as unfair: “You confirm you will not touch a hair on the head of supply management?”
Housing Minister Gregor Robertson’s department budgeted $1.2 million for a camera giveaway to homeless people to take photographs for an “arts-based exhibition,” Access To Information records show. The grant was approved under a Veteran Homelessness Program: “With your camera, take pictures of your surroundings.”
