Senators are demanding Air Canada disclose how much it saved by illegally outsourcing jobs to Duluth, Minnesota. The call yesterday came as cabinet appealed for quick passage of a bill shielding the airline from liability for breaching its 1988 terms of privatization: “Are unions more costly here than in Duluth?”
The Senate last night expressed support to broaden bargaining powers for a first-ever RCMP union. A government representative cautioned the bill may lead to costly concessions to other federal employees: “The precedent would be set”.
Federal managers in a five-month period spent more than $400,000 on executive getaways and corporate retreats, records show. Expenses included thousands paid for luxury meeting rooms a short walk from managers’ own offices in downtown Ottawa: “Breakfast is too expensive so we went somewhere else”.
Canadian police spend millions a year not on crime fighting but bylaw enforcement and traffic checks, says a Department of Public Safety study. New research shows one of the largest police departments in the country devotes 48 percent of its budget to traffic matters: “Investigative costs of crime may not comprise as much of police expenditures as first believed”.
The nation’s underground economy has grown to a record $45.6 billion a year, estimates Statistics Canada. The new data follow a Canada Revenue Agency complaint that tax avoidance is socially acceptable: “Small dollars multiplied by a lot of people add up”.
Finance Minister Bill Morneau and staff have had thousands of dollars in expense claims returned by department bookkeepers for “arithmetic errors” and other mishaps, records show. Nearly $26,000 in claims were sent back to the Minister’s office: “There’s more than a little irony”.
A Health Canada proposal to legalize the sale of radiation-treated hamburger to kill bacteria and parasites should go to public hearings, says a cattle industry critic. The department served notice it’s prepared to approve irradiated beef by request of the Canadian Cattlemen’s Association: “Cattle live in their own excrement in feedlots”.
Senators and MPs complain even a parliamentary committee can’t get straight answers from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency over regulations. Lawmakers counted 9 unanswered letters and 38 unresolved issues dating over decades: “Do you ever pick up the phone?”
Transport Canada is delaying a contentious report on mandating recording equipment in all railway locomotives. Union executives have opposed the measure as a company tool for round-the-clock surveillance of train crews: “We’re dealing with companies that fire people for not having their boot laces correctly tied”.
The health department is beginning to draft regulations under a drug recall bill feared to put a “chill” on industry. Parliament in 2014 passed the bill dubbed Vanessa’s Law for the teenage daughter of an MP who died after taking Johnson & Johnson medication for a digestive disorder: “No Big Pharma executive has ever gone to jail”.
A change towards gender equality
may be coming to O Canada.
Indeed, it has been on the masculine side for too long:
“The True North strong and free!”
Time has come for a feminine touch.
Let the True North be “pretty and free!”
Because it’s 2016.
(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, examines current events in the Blacklock’s tradition each and every Sunday)
Few authors possess the skill to take an everyday image and turn it just slightly, in Twilight Zone fashion, to reveal a startling and intriguing truth. Professor Joan Sangster of Trent University does just that in The Iconic North. To read Sangster’s account is to question every common media depiction of the Arctic.
“The North has been rendered exotic, romantic, terrifying, sublime, enigmatic, otherworldly and intrinsically Canadian, and some of these adjectives are equated not just with the landscape but with the original inhabitants of the North,” Sangster writes.
This is not ancient history. Parks Canada’s fetishism with English exploration in the Arctic has cost taxpayers more than $21.5 million to date. “Recent politically orchestrated announcements and attendant media hoopla concerning the discovery of Sir John Franklin’s shipwreck in the Arctic are a salient reminder that we need an ongoing critical analysis of a romanticized North ‘discovered’ by white explorers,” says Sangster.
The Franklin Expedition was a famous failure of no scientific or exploratory value whatsoever. Media’s fascination with the pointless deaths of European sailors is striking. Millennia-old culture of Inuit is not documentary material in itself; it’s the fact 129 Englishmen froze to death that justified CBC-TV specials secretly subsidized with a $98,000 Parks Canada grant. “Fantastic media coverage,” the agency enthused.
Iconic North challenges the narrative. Implicit in Arctic imagery in most TV documentaries, newspaper features and school textbooks is the suggestion history began with inhabitants’ contact with whites. Sangster calls it a “European ‘obsession’ with the romanticized image of stoic but happy Inuit facing environmental adversity with unending cheerfulness.” The propaganda is not harmless. “These images thus helped to sustain Canada’s distinctive brand of internal colonialism,” she notes.
Iconic North is meticulously researched. Sangster has a matter-of-fact writing style. In 400 devastating pages she makes the case our popularized conceptions of the Arctic are Eurocentric, condescending and inaccurate, “constantly invoked in the mainstream media as Canada’s last frontier – one where settlers and Indigenous peoples were engaged in constructing new relationships in contrast to the old, tattered antagonism of southern Indian and white.”
Sangster examines RCMP, a short-lived 1959 CBC cop drama that depicted the exploits of Jacques Gagnier, a “paternal and benevolent” Mountie in the fictional town of Schamattawa “bringing insight, law and justice to bear on Indigenous peoples and their problems.” In one episode Constable Gagnier saves a whole village of children from gun-toting hostage takers “while their Aboriginal parents stand by, cowed into fearful acquiescence”. Producers and viewers alike took it for granted that Indigenous parents were too weak or inept to care for their own children
Sangster also recounts I Was No Lady: I Followed The Call Of The Wild published by Ryerson Press, the 1959 memoirs of Jean Godsell, Scottish-born wife of a Hudson’s Bay manager. Godsell has trouble with an Inuit houseboy she calls Johnny, and recalls “sage advice” from her husband: “‘He’s just trying you out,’ he remarked, ‘he wants to see how far he can go with you. It’s a typical Indian trick. Give him hell,’ he reiterated, ‘if you don’t master him now, you never will.’ Never will I forget the look of stupefaction on John’s face when I finally sailed into him…From then on, on my husband’s advice, I gave him what-for on an average of once a month. Often I had to make an excuse for doing so. At first this seemed rather mean but I soon learned, as everyone does who handles Indians, that it was the only way to keep him in line.”
No Mississippi planter ever put it more succinctly.
By Holly Doan
The Iconic North: Cultural Constructions of Aboriginal Life in Postwar Canada, by Joan Sangster; University of British Columbia Press; 400 pages; ISBN 9780-7748-31840; $34.95
Canada faces the death of commercial passenger rail service or mammoth deficits without structural reforms at VIA Rail, says the Crown corporation’s CEO: “A future government will have to make the decision to eliminate VIA Rail or do something else”.
MPs last night rejected a Criminal Code amendment to legalize single sports betting. Provincial gaming regulators had petitioned for the bill, forecasting millions in revenues. A senior Liberal MP said governments are no match for black market bookies: “Illegal bookmakers have lower overhead costs”.
Statistics Canada for the first time in its 99-year history is proposing to pay people to fill out surveys. The agency said it’s considering use of incentives like cheques or debit cards, typically worth $20 to $100 according to practices by other national statistics bureaus: “People will think if they do a government survey they should get paid for it”.
