Food and drug labels would be smartphone-readable under a private Conservative bill introduced in the Commons. The bill’s sponsor said amendments to the Food & Drugs Act would eliminate guesswork over fine print: “It makes what’s mandatory, more readable.”
The number of philanthropic foundations in Canada has nearly doubled since 1992, says a University of Regina study. Public and private foundations hold $61.5 billion in assets, by official estimate, a sum equal to one-fifth the federal budget: “Donors are looking to foundations to make informed giving decisions.”
The Federal Court is investigating the use of an internal computer to edit Blacklock’s Wikipedia page, says a chief administrator. An unidentified Court staffer made the entry the same day a federal judge ordered Blacklock’s to pay $65,000 in costs in a copyright lawsuit against the Department of Finance.
“Please rest assured that we are actively investigating this matter,” wrote Daniel Gosselin, chief of the Courts Administration Service. “CAS takes the impartiality of the Courts very seriously.”
An unnamed person used a Courts Administration Service computer to edit the Wikipedia page on December 21 at 7:34 pm, Gosselin said. The entry came hours after the Department of Justice leaked the unpublished $65,000 cost award to a blogger and a Globe & Mail columnist.
“Please note the Courts Administration Service has not authorized any of its employees to edit the Blacklock’s Reporter Wikipedia page,” wrote Gosselin; “This is an internal matter and, accordingly, will be dealt with internally.”
Andrew Baumberg, counsel for the Federal Court, earlier confirmed the administration’s computer firewall does not block staff from editing plaintiffs’ Wikipedia pages. Baumberg said the single IP address used to post comments on Blacklock’s could have been accessed by any one of 620 employees and members of four Federal Courts.
“I had nothing to do with the edits to the Wikipedia page nor do I know who is responsible,” said Baumberg, who acts as the Court’s communications officer.
Justice Robert Barnes that same day issued the cost award after Blacklock’s unsuccessfully sued the finance department for knowingly copying paywalled stories without payment or permission. Finance staff in 2013 distributed emails containing cut-and-paste stories on sugar tariffs. The unauthorized distribution was lawful under the Copyright Act, Justice Barnes ruled.
The Attorney General’s department acknowledged that, on receiving the unpublished decision in a courthouse email at 1:33 pm that day, staff forwarded it to Globe & Mail columnist James Bradshaw and an Ottawa blogger, Howard Knopf.
The Globe did not write the story. The blogger published a 3:51 pm commentary illustrated with a cartoon of a brick of coal with a Santa hat.
Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould in a 2015 Ministerial Mandate letter committed to “openness and transparency”, and pledged to “avoid escalating conflicts unnecessarily”.
“It is important that we acknowledge mistakes when we make them,” said the Mandate letter. “Canadians do not expect us to be perfect; they expect us to be honest, open and sincere in our efforts to serve the public interest.”
“Members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery, indeed all journalists in Canada and abroad, are professionals who, by asking necessary questions, contribute in an important way to the democratic process,” the Mandate letter continued. “Your professionalism and engagement with them is essential.”
Blacklock’s has requested the name of the Court staffer responsible for the Wikipedia edits.
By Staff 
A federal agency dubbed a toothless watchdog for bank customers has issued its first decision in 18 months. The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada cited an unnamed bank for illegally failing to disclose credit card fees, but levied no penalty: “It’s too cozy.”
Canadians have been slow to embrace electronic petitions after the Commons broke with 147 years of tradition in permitting internet signatures. Only 85 e-petitions have been tabled in the House to date, compared to 995 traditional paper versions: “We’re getting quality over quantity.”
A human rights tribunal has dismissed a complaint alleging Christmas decorations discriminate against non-Christians. The dispute involved a holiday display at a credit union in Parksville, British Columbia: ‘There is nothing particularly novel about this complaint.’
Colonial Extractions is an uncomfortable book – the best kind! Unique among 150-year old democracies, Canada prides itself for a clean past on foreign colonialism. Even the Pope has apologized for the great crime of empire-building: “There was sin and it was plentiful,” he said.
Not us. No gunboat diplomacy, no Opium Treaties, no rubber plantations. Then along comes Paula Butler of Trent University with this excruciating account of Canadian mining operations in Africa, and that sound you hear is the reader quietly dismounting from our high horse.
In a decade Canadian mining investment in Africa has grown tenfold, to some $24 billion. Canada is the largest offshore investor in African mines from Ghana to Madagascar. “Is Canada engaged today in colonialist resource appropriation?” Butler asks. In seeking answers, she interviews Canadian mining executives. Butler is white, her interview subjects are white; everybody relaxes. The result is striking. Butler hears “vintage colonial discourse characterized by a racialized world view. At one level, the narrative was cruder and starker than I had expected it to be.”
Miners are not social workers. The Prospectors & Developers Association still awards a Skookum Jim Award to “an Indigenous person who has made outstanding contributions to mining in Canada.” The Indian Joe prize is named for a Yukon Tagish First Nation prospector whose real name was K’eish. In his 1972 book Klondike Pierre Burton wrote, “Jim longed to be a white man – in other words, a prospector. He differed from the others in his tribe in that he displayed the white man’s kind of ambition.”
In Africa, Colonial Extractions introduces executives who explain they’ve ghostwritten industry-friendly mining codes for legislatures in Tanzania and Zimbabwe. “We’ve been one of the bigger helpers,” says an executive who co-authored a code on mineral royalties. Another explains that mining companies merely made “suggestions”. It’s not like Africans can do this: “People living with pigs in mud huts is not culture,” says a third.
Of course the point is to make money, a motive Butler does not disparage in any way. Colonial Extractions is not a Marxist treatise. More interestingly, it notes the plain economics of Third World mining are dressed up in parochialism and a casting of roles. One executive actually boasts of giving away 50 kilogram bags of sugar as a Christmas bonus. An unidentified manager grows angry in recounting the ingratitude of a local authority: “She said we are not employing enough Black nationals. I almost walked out. I’ve invested $25 million in this country. I don’t need this crap.”
Colonial Extractions explains, “Colonialism may be principally about acquiring land, resources, ‘cheap labour’ and markets, but it requires a massive program of popular consent”; “The mythology of the Good Canadian via corporate social responsibility discourse, the mining industry and the Canadian state are drawing Canadians into widespread and largely uninformed and therefore uncritical support for publicly-subsidized African resource appropriation.”
Colonial Extractions is fresh, provocative and unsettling. Butler leaves readers with a lingering image of one mine manager who explains how to get along with the villagers: “Just like now in Canada, we have to do this with Aboriginal groups,” he says: “Once or twice a year we’ll buy stuff for them; we’ll buy a radio that the whole village can use.”
By Holly Doan
Colonial Extractions: Race and Canadian Mining in Contemporary Africa, by Paula Butler; University of Toronto Press; 400 pages; ISBN 9781-4426l-9968; $52.95
Cabinet spent more than $112,000 testing focus group reaction to marketing slogans for its national carbon tax, data show. Comparing the fuel charge to cigarette taxes polled well. Likening a carbon tax to snow tires was more confusing, researchers said: “It takes a bit of work.”
Cabinet faces a federal lawsuit over fees it charges employers to apply for migrant labour. The $1,000 fee per application is an unconstitutional tax that exceeds the actual cost of processing permits, said a former Toronto lawyer: “They haven’t done anything.”
Environment Canada is studying the impact of landfill emissions on climate change targets. The department for the second time in two years will examine whether methane-producing waste can be converted to energy: “It doesn’t go away.”
A pilot has been denied Transport Canada security clearance over anger issues. A federal judge ruled the department was within its rights in citing a history of traffic incidents and a beer tent brawl as grounds for refusal: ‘This will have significant negative consequences for the dream of a career in Canadian aviation.’
Few Canadians know of federal planning for the 150th anniversary of Confederation though the Department of Canadian Heritage has been working on it since 2011, data show. Government research indicates 1 in 4 people surveyed couldn’t be bothered watching festivities on TV: “I’m too busy.”
Nearly 17 years after schoolchildren drowned in a tour boat disaster, Transport Canada is complying with promised regulatory changes to operators’ liability. The deaths were “the watershed event” that prompted amendments under the Marine Liability Act, an official said: “It has taken some time.”
Fewer than 2 percent of Canadian voters have completed a free federal survey on electoral reform, MyDemocracy.ca. One researcher yesterday described the exercise as scientifically pointless: ‘It is not a survey or a poll.’
Transport Canada is hiring researchers to gauge the impact of in-car video displays on driver distraction. The findings of the $200,000 research are expected by March 31: “This is an important piece of work.”
