Canada’s National Holocaust Memorial will see “wide-ranging” changes to the exhibit by 2026, says a Department of Canadian Heritage briefing note. The review follows complaints after the Ottawa monument opened in 2017 with a dedication plaque that made no mention of Jews: “Requests for revisions have come from descendants of Holocaust survivors.”
Young professionals from pharmacists to teachers who relocate to rural Canada will qualify for thousands in student loan forgiveness under proposed regulations. The Department of Employment on Saturday said new rules would take effect November 1: “Help support increased access to health care and social services in these communities.”
Ottawa to provide Kiev
with satellite images
of the conflict zone.
These might show the Ukrainians
their country is smaller than they ever thought.
But there is good news.
Our military trainers
will quickly teach them
how to reclaim their land.
After all,
who stopped Russia
from invading the True North
all these years?
By Shai Ben-Shalom
The inside story of the federal Green Party remains untold. It must have its share of intrigue and score-settling. What little that has been said touches on apocalyptic themes. Annamie Paul, the Party’s only Black Jewish leader, likened her tenure to crawling over broken glass. “It has been extremely painful,” she told reporters in 2021. “It has been the worst period of my life.”
The Party was first registered in 1984. Once fresh and new, it has faded with time and now has the persona of the Raging Grannies, a 1980s troupe that appeared on the periphery of street protests wearing CBC buttons and foretelling doom over Cruise Missile tests.
The bookshelf of Green Party literature remains thin. David Chernushenko, former deputy leader, once self-published a science fiction novel Burning Souls. It predicted by 2025 Canadian civilization would be reduced to Cascadia, an armed colony in southern British Columbia besieged by four million Latin American famine refugees: “Could Cascadia possibly hold off such a torrent? Or would something else kill those wretched folks first? Pity anyone on the open road.”
Now it is Jo-Ann Roberts’ turn. The former CBC Radio host was one of four women to lead the Party in three years. “Readers don’t have to agree with everything in this book,” she writes.
Storm The Ballot Box is part memoir. Roberts is the daughter of a United Church minister from York County, New Brunswick, where political division was sharply drawn. “There was a time when deciding how to vote was as simple as knowing one’s family preference for the Liberals or the Conservatives,” she writes.
Roberts’ people were Liberals. She recalls at age 12 being taken by her father to a Pierre Trudeau campaign rally in Charlottetown. “The very sexy Trudeau shook my hand,” she recalls. “The rest of the world may have had the Rolling Stones or the Beatles but the Stones didn’t come to sleepy little Charlottetown. Pierre Elliot Trudeau was my rock star. Politics was exciting.”
Storm The Ballot Box tries to account for the Party’s 40 years of futility. In all that time it elected four Members of Parliament. “Why aren’t there more Greens in the House of Commons and in our provincial legislatures?” asks Roberts. “The answer seemed simple. Our electoral system was created for a two-party system and that needs to change. My next question for myself was, so why doesn’t it change?”
Here is the point of Roberts’ work, a lively summary of Green Party reforms to the electoral system. Not every suggestion is sound or even constitutional, but Roberts is passionate. “I am writing this book for my grandchildren,” she explains. “I want them to know that democracy is worth fighting for and I want my experience to have some value.”
Proposals include federal regulation of pollsters and news media – “We have a very uneven playing field right now,” says Roberts – lowering the voting age to 16, granting Elections Canada new powers to prohibit “untrue, deceptive or destructive campaign narratives” and restoring the $1.75 per vote subsidy abolished by Parliament in 2015.
Roberts proposes mandatory civics education in public schools, “a tax credit for voting” and mandatory runoffs that would require any successful candidate to obtain a minimum 50 percent of the popular vote. Louisiana has elected its legislature this way since 1975. “At the very least this would give political parties a vested interest in increasing voter turnout,” writes Roberts.
Yet apocalypse is never far off. Storm The Ballot Box predicts the implosion of democracy itself if Canadians fail to embrace Green policies. “We must find a way to get people out to the polls again before voter turnout drops to a point where the results are not longer legitimate and our democracy becomes vulnerable to authoritarian forms of government,” writes Roberts.
It is the drumbeat of cataclysm that runs through the Green Party. Storm The Ballot is Cascadia, non-fiction.
By Holly Doan
Storm The Ballot Box: An Insider’s Guide to A Voting Revolution by Jo-Ann Roberts; Nimbus Publishing; 232 pages; ISBN 9781-7747-14355; $21.95
Cabinet’s Google tax appears doubtful after U.S. President Donald Trump yesterday called it an anti-American trade barrier. First payments under the multi-billion dollar tax were due this summer: “Only America should be allowed to tax American firms.”
A taxpayer-funded Court Challenges Program subsidized liberal causes 96 percent of the time, an Ottawa think tank said yesterday. The Macdonald-Laurier Institute said its analysis, the first of its kind, could not find a single instance where the Program financed Charter challenges on conservative themes like property rights: “Time to shut it down.”
Federal observance of Canada Day is evolving to “adapt to emerging needs and social expectations,” says a Department of Canadian Heritage report. Managers of a program that awards grants to community projects noted with approval that some communities cancelled traditional July 1 activities to reflect “the history of colonialism in Canada.”
Most young Canadians rate the internet a happy, informative and entertaining pastime, says a Department of Public Safety report. The data contradicted claims by Attorney General Arif Virani of “unchecked dangers and horrific content” that justified censorship of lawful speech: “Youth continue to report mostly positive experiences with online social activities.”
Federal regulators yesterday fined an Ontario securities dealer $66,000 for paperwork errors in complying with the Proceeds Of Crime And Terrorist Financing Act. The agency in past years was cited in Federal Court for issuing arbitrary penalties in cases of minor technical breaches of the law: “Why? We have no idea.”
A former Canadian Human Rights Commission appointee in a crowdfunding appeal says he will end “bullying” by critics. “I need your help to hold them accountable,” wrote Birju Dattani of Toronto Metropolitan University: “Every little bit helps!”
Parks Canada yesterday designated the Kamloops, B.C. Indian Residential School a national historic site but omitted all reference to alleged graves in a nearby orchard. Claims in 2021 by the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation that it discovered 215 children’s graves on the schoolgrounds prompted an international outcry. No remains were ever recovered: “The possibility of unmarked burials is not a determining factor for designation.”
Managers at Manitoba’s International Peace Garden say they have received angry emails from Canadians threatening boycotts over cross-border politics. Hurtful comments were “hard to read,” said the North Dakota-based CEO of the Garden dedicated 93 years ago to eternal friendship: “I have never seen anything quite like this.”
Cabinet yesterday granted border agents new powers to cancel temporary visas for suspicious foreigners considered likely to remain in Canada illegally. It follows a 2024 admission by the Department of Immigration that it had lost track of as many as half a million foreigners here: “Travelers may be turned back at the airport.”
Employees who suffer layoffs due to “climate” disasters like wildfires will qualify for improved jobless benefits under a pilot project detailed yesterday by the federal Employment Insurance Commission. The three-year experiment will cost $4.3 million: “With climate change, natural disasters are expected to become a new reality.”
Finance Minister Dominic LeBlanc yesterday in an ethics filing promised to avoid all discussions benefiting J.D. Irving Ltd., one of the largest private employers in his home province and operator of the biggest oil refinery in the country. Federal judges have ruled so-called “conflict of interest screens” are legal: “The Ethics Commissioner and I have agreed.”
