The military is hiring forensic archaeologists in anticipation of recovering more remains of Canadians killed in action overseas. The Department of National Defence said urban sprawl and new farming techniques are uncovering more skeletal remains of soldiers and air crew: “We will never forget.”
A song by Nina Simone
envisioned a world awaiting the
young, gifted and black.
Some 50 years later and
America is on a different course.
Its dominant voices
are far from young,
far from black,
and far from gifted.
(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, examines current events in the Blacklock’s tradition each and every Sunday)
Industry Canada in 1995 published a landmark report on the internet. It envisioned a road of pencil-thin cable – they actually called it an “information superhighway” – with traffic cops and off-ramps, and even a toll plaza. One cabinet minister proposed a tax on all internet transactions.
Wrong again. No one anticipated an unregulated global web so extensive a faraway terrorist group named ISIS would use electronic propaganda to enlist Canadian mercenaries.
“The pleasure centre of the brain that’s stimulated by the internet is the same as the one stimulated by drugs,” writes Mark Bourrie in The Killing Game; “We have developed the greatest communication systems the world has ever seen and hooked almost everyone in the world to them.”
Bourrie is an accomplished author. The Killing Game explores the mentality of ISIS volunteers, and the seductiveness and intimacy of the internet that connects conspiracy theorists. “People of all ages now live in a media matrix that engulfs and entraps them,” Bourrie writes.
“For many of us, backing away from computer-transmitted messaging is simply too difficult. New media provides an addictive level of brain stimulus. It kills time for the bored. It makes the unimportant seem important and connects individuals into communities that are very real.”
Bourrie correctly notes the internet does not make terrorists any more than The Daily Worker made a murderer of Lee Harvey Oswald; nor can the medium be regulated; nor is it so hypnotic it transforms well-adjusted teenagers into a social menace. Bourrie counts 150 Canadian ISIS volunteers, tops. By comparison 13,000 people signed an electronic Commons petition to ban the sale of cat fur.
And yet –
“This is the first generation of young people to be raised with computers and smart phones integrated into their lives and minds,” says The Killing Game. “They have been given control over devices that can instantaneously bring them information, pornography, companionship, laughter and fantasy.”
“So much of ISIS’s war-porn propaganda is directed at the same people targeted by the Canadian army: bored young people who aren’t engaged by the consumer ethos of their own society and who feel that adventure is passing them by,” Bourrie writes. “They want to step into the video games that have become so important to them and be the heroes that they play on the small screen. As Abu Sumayyah al-Britany, a British fighter with ISIS, posted on Twitter, war is the ultimate in virtual reality.”
Bourrie profiles perhaps the best-known Canadian mercenary, John Maguire of Kemptville, Ont., an unhappy son of divorced parents. A “startling number” of ISIS volunteers suffered family break-up, he writes.
Maguire quit the University of Ottawa to become a terrorist. “Evil is very prominent in Canadian culture,” Maguire wrote on his Facebook page. “Homosexuality, fornication and adultery are generally accepted; drugs and alcohol are easily accessible and widely accepted as being ‘normal’; women and men are often not properly covered; music is widespread in public places.”
Maguire was reportedly killed in a gunfight in 2015. “One of the striking similarities between Westerners who have gone to fight for ISIS is the shortness of their lifespan in combat,” Bourrie observes.
The Killing Game is a captivating examination not merely of the weak-minded among us who are drawn to violence, but the electronic tools that get them there. After decades with the internet, Canada still struggles with its potential “to upgrade the education system,” as playwright John Gray wrote in 1994; “to streamline medical services; overcome geographic isolation; rejuvenate the electoral system; eliminate bureaucratic duplication and waste.”
“Imagine the world’s first electronic country – an innovative middle power where education spans a lifetime, where it is possible to develop and to communicate an original thought, any time, at the speed of light,” wrote Gray, an original member of the Information Superhighway Advisory Council. “Sounds tantalizing, implausible. Utopian. So did the railroad.”
By Holly Doan
The Killing Game: Martyrdom, Murder and the Lure of ISIS, by Mark Bourrie; Harper Collins Canada; 288 pages; ISBN 9781-4434-47010; $32.99
Cabinet will oppose passage of a Senate bill mandating prompt payment to trades and subcontractors on public works, says a parliamentary secretary. The government’s record on payments is near perfect, said MP Steven MacKinnon: “We’re very sensitive.”
Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin says the 1982 Charter of Rights expresses the nation’s identity despite any controversy or disappointments. McLachlin spoke yesterday at a Canada 150 symposium in the Senate: “It has neither led to chaos, nor can we claim it has produced a rights utopia.”
Legal marijuana should result in a net reduction in medicare and court costs despite higher expenses for actual law enforcement, says the parliamentary secretary for justice. The remarks follow data that 27 percent of Canadians admit to driving under the influence of cannabis: “There are savings, significant savings.”
A federal agency has cancelled a six-figure speechwriting contract that breached Treasury Board transparency rules. The Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions declined comment on the reversal prompted by an April 28 Blacklock’s story: “What can I tell you?”
Small businesses are appealing to cabinet to delay an obscure anti-spam regulation to take effect in six weeks. Effective July 1, consumers can sue retailers and marketers for $200 over unwanted emails. An Industry Canada memo obtained through Access To Information cited a “deluge of litigation”.
Prescription medicines cost public drug plans 12 percent more last year to $8.4 billion, says a federal regulator. The Patented Medicine Prices Review Board said out-of-pocket expenses for Canadians without adequate insurance could not be calculated: “We do see these cost pressures.”
A federal labour board has upheld the firing of a government shipping clerk accused of poisoning co-workers’ drinking water with Javex bleach. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency employee was acquitted at trial: “People in the basement don’t really like each other.”
Tax Court has ruled litigants have no automatic right to privacy even if case details are personally embarrassing. A judge dismissed a claim by one taxpayer who feared publication made him look like an incompetent businessman: “The right of the public to access the courts is considered one of necessity rather than convenience.”
An Ottawa lawyer is attempting to certify a federal class action lawsuit over government pension errors. An estimated 250,000 employees and retirees, mainly women, are affected by mistakes in calculating benefits, according to a Federal Court application.
“The government screwed up the records for women who went on maternity leave dating from the 1990s,” said lawyer Eric Letts of Letts Law. “We’re fairly confident it’s global and, if it’s not all women, it’s most of them.”
Letts in a Court application alleges the public works department responsible for pension benefits credited employees with pensionable earnings they never had, then provided retirees with misleading estimates of expected benefits. “I’ve been on this file for a year-and-a-half, and through Access To Information we found out they knew about the mistake but just said, ‘Screw it, we’ll figure it out later,’” said Letts.
Letts estimated damages of $15,000 to $50,000 for a quarter-million federal employees and retirees. “This never could happen in the private sector,” said Letts. “The government has made these errors on the records of people on maternity leave in the 1990s and they don’t have a system to fix it.”
Laura Prevost, an Ottawa retiree and lead plaintiff in the case, worked as a federal employee from 1986 to 2015. In a Court application, Prevost explained that supervisors credited her for pension payments she never made while on maternity leave and other absences from work.
“Unknown to her at the time, the government had a practice of reporting pension contributions to the Canada Revenue Agency as if she, and other women, had contributed to their pensions all year despite the fact they did not make such contributions,” Prevost’s lawyer wrote the Court.
Prevost said she even requested an audit in 2003 after suspecting her pension contributions “seemed incorrect”, but was assured no accounting error occurred. Only on retirement did Prevost learn her actual benefits were lower than promised.
“There is no recourse,” said Attorney Letts. “You have to sue them or just put up with it.”
Court documents include staff emails obtained by Letts through Access To Information in which officials admitted to errors. “It is best not to discuss any of this with the plan member for the moment,” said a 2016 email. “A complete review is required.”
Letts seeks to certify a class action lawsuit on behalf of “all current or former female employees” from the 1990s who took leave without pay to have children, care for relatives or relocate with a spouse. “These women suffer damages from relying on the misinformation respecting their pension information when they are making decisions for common life events such as divorce and retirement,” Letts wrote the Court.
Letts noted women employees who took unpaid leave typically opted out of pension payments temporarily “based on the ethos of the times, that women were more likely to remain off work to attend to child care; a woman’s income was secondary to her husband’s income; and other such gender-based assumptions.”
The public works department does not comment on pending litigation.
By Jason Unrau
Nearly two-thirds of Canadians, 63 percent, skipped Veterans’ Week observances despite millions spent on a federal ad campaign, new data show. A bill awaiting a Third Reading vote in the Commons would designate November 11 a legal holiday: “Why?”
Federal Court for the second time in two months has cited the Department of Employment for poor enforcement of migrant labour rules. The latest judgment follows a critical audit that complained of weak management of the Temporary Foreign Worker Program: “The most basic requirements were not met in this case.”
Saskatchewan’s Court of Appeal has struck down a contract that saw a First Nation billed $450 an hour with bonuses for negotiating a federal land claim. Courts will “not tolerate any sharp practice” by attorneys, a judge wrote: “A client should not need to verify the truth of what their lawyer is telling them.”
