The fisheries department is failing to comply with its own regulations in saving a rare trout species threatened by Rocky Mountain industry, says an advocacy group. The dispute had prompted a 2015 lawsuit by environmentalists: “They don’t know what they’re doing”.
Municipalities stand to gain millions in tax assessments with a court ruling on airport lands. Nav Canada, the Crown corporation that manages traffic control towers, had fought for tax assessments of as little as $20 on property valued in seven figures: “It’s an important decision in assessment”.
Canadians fear another recession for the third time in eight years, according to Department of Finance research. One-third of people in focus group interviews said they were anxious that “they or someone in their household” will lose their job this year.
Canada Post faces a federal lawsuit after allegedly twice misplacing registered letters containing crucial documents. A Vancouver pensioner filed the Federal Court claim, noting the post office would not even refund his money: “It’s like a black hole”.
A Québec firm threatened with the largest federal anti-spam fine in Canadian history has now been cited for breaching privacy laws. The company compiled a database of nearly half-a-million email addresses to pitch its executive training courses: “They acted as if privacy was a luxury”.
Future Supreme Court appointees must have oral and written French-language skills though the requirement is not sanctioned in law, says Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould. Parliament since 2008 has rejected two bills mandating a language test at the nation’s highest court: “Is there going to be a test?”
A start-up firm with a single director received six figures in federal grants within weeks of incorporating, according to Access To Information records. The National Research Council said justification for the taxpayers’ funding was confidential: “I’m just not going to answer any of these questions”.
Nearly a third of First Nations have now subscribed to a federal program allowing them to collect property tax and issue municipal bonds. The program remains a piecemeal reform that benefits a minority of Indigenous peoples, said a former federal treaty negotiator: ‘This bumps you up to executive-class administration while living in Third World conditions’.
Nearly 2 million Americans drove to Canada last month, by federal estimate. Tourism gains from U.S. visitors are the strongest in two decades, said an analyst: “The effect is immediate”.
The group Mothers Against Drunk Driving has lost a bid to ban the issue of irreverent vanity license plates. The New Brunswick Court of Appeal upheld a defence lawyer’s right to use the plates DUI DR: ‘Our legal system rejects trial by public opinion’.
The foreign affairs department has budgeted $100,000 a year for individual appointees acting as part-time goodwill hosts in U.S. cities. Annual expenses for one honorary consul ran to US$99,334 including receipts for wine, cake and “brainstorming” lunches. The department took three years to release the accounts under Access To Information: “Does this fit the bill?”
The military faces a federal lawsuit on whether disciplined soldiers, sailors and air crew have a right to legal counsel. Attorneys filed the claim on behalf of a Nova Scotia air force technician punished for going AWOL: “This sounds like a horror story”.
Petitioners are urging Parliament to repeal an obscure federal law that makes blasphemous libel an indictable offence. Prosecutors last used the Criminal Code provision to charge distributors of a Monty Python film in 1979: “They should get this arcane law off the books”.
The fisheries department for a second year is concealing the size of Canada’s Atlantic seal hunt. Official claims of confidentiality follow disclosures the cost of monitoring the annual hunt is worth five times the export value of seal products.
“They are continuously subsidizing this thing,” said Andreas Krebs, spokesperson for the International Fund for Animal Welfare. “If we don’t have access to the data, then Canadians can’t make a decision on whether or not they want to support this with their tax dollars.”
The department censored figures in a 2016 Seal Quota Report requested by the Fund through Access To Information. A similar 2015 report was also redacted.
“We had a good relationship with the Department of Fisheries for decades in terms of them providing information to us,” Krebs said. “There seems to be a tightening of information the department is making available to stakeholders. Until 2014 most of this information was freely available on the internet, and then they stopped publishing it.”
The IFAW had requested details of the landed value of the 2016 Atlantic hunt; the quantity and value of seal meat and pelts; and the number of licensed sealers who joined the hunt. The department withheld data under a confidentiality clause of the Access To Information Act exempting release of public records “which could reasonably be expected to result in material financial loss or gain” to a third party.
The fisheries department confirmed it will not release the records. “Since there are only a small number of participants and buyers in the seal hunt, this makes it possible to extract confidential business information from landing and value statistics,” said Carole Saindon, spokesperson; “This measure is to protect the privacy and economic interests of participants in the seal fishery, where there are a very small number of them.”
Access records have indicated the fisheries department and Canadian Coast Guard spend $2.5 million a year monitoring the Atlantic hunt, though the export value to 2014 was worth less than $500,000. “The Government of Canada spends a fortune,” said one staff memo; “These costs are beyond the capacity to absorb from traditional budgets.”
Surveillance expenses totaling $975,000 in 2007 more than doubled to $2.5 million a year by 2009 including $1 million for a Coast Guard icebreaker; $475,000 in helicopter rentals; $400,000 for high definition long-range cameras “capable of identifying a person at one mile”; and $375,000 in staff overtime. Costs for the RCMP were not tabulated.
Seal exports that peaked at $34.3 million in 2006 collapsed under a 2009 European Union ban on Canadian products. The World Trade Organization three years ago upheld the ban that saw the price of seal pelts fall from $100 apiece to as little as $20.
By Dale Smith 
Canada Post has lost a key court decision in a decades-old pay equity dispute. A federal judge ruled that lengthy delays in a Canadian Human Rights Act investigation of the post office were an “unfortunate example” of a failed pay equity process: “After more than twenty years the substantive aspects of the complaints have not been addressed”.
