Canadians under 35 are wealthier than any previous generation with a net worth of almost $93,000, says the Department of Finance. A confidential memo cautioned the other shoe will drop as millennials face longer, costlier retirements later in life: “The 2008 recession did not seem to affect much”.
A federal agency has drafted plans for research on payday lending, the first study of its kind since Parliament delegated enforcement of usury laws to the provinces in 2007. The Financial Consumer Agency described borrowers as “fairly transient” and the working poor: “People are borrowing out of desperation, not convenience”.
Health Canada must not restrict the sale of electronic cigarettes as a nicotine substitute for smokers, says a legal scholar. The Canadian Medical Association has advocated a ban on nicotine vaping, and MPs have proposed first-ever regulations of the product: “As e-cigarettes have become more popular smoking rates have gone down”.
A British Columbia contractor faces a conditional jail sentence and six-figure fine for tax evasion, one of the largest penalties to date since federal auditors launched a 2013 probe of local building permits: “Permits prove to be an excellent source of information”.
The Department of Northern Affairs is commissioning another risk assessment, the sixth so far, on cleanup of one of the nation’s most toxic mine sites. Federal scientists seek data on human exposure to arsenic at the abandoned Giant Mine in Yellowknife: “It’s all paperwork”.
The federal mortgage insurer has completed a long-awaited survey on foreign ownership in the Canadian condo market, the first of its kind. It follows a million-condo survey to gauge the extent of speculative investment and proxy ownership in the nation’s busiest real estate markets: “We realize there is an information gap”.
A Crown corporation lost nearly a million dollars in the stock market over a nine-month period last year, new accounts show. The Canadian Race Relations Foundation earlier appealed for market-wise guidance after taking a $5 million loss in the 2008 financial panic: ‘We can’t pay the going rate for knowledgeable people’.
A federal employee is entitled to full pay for time spent shoveling the driveway, a labour board has ruled. The decision came in the case of an immigration department staffer who blamed winter snowfall for arriving three hours’ late for work: ‘The snow was so high it was impossible to get the car out’.
Health Canada will wait till as late as 2018 in deciding whether to halt the sale of pesticides linked to bee deaths. Chemicals currently used by Canadian growers are restricted in the European Union: “2018 is entirely unacceptable”.
A federal financial watchdog warns of a real estate bubble in Canada’s most expensive city due in part to undisclosed millions in foreign investment from China and the U.S. The 2015 staff memo to the Superintendent of Financial Institutions was obtained through Access To Information: “Prices and average incomes are seemingly untethered”.
Lawmakers are protesting the expiry of a little-known pact that promised to lower interprovincial trade barriers. Consumers Council of Canada research earlier showed few people, only 1 in 10, had heard of the Agreement On Internal Trade: “This thing has passed by like a ship in the night”.
A federal scheme to merge all government websites into a single super site has met a backlash from taxpayers, according to Access To Information memos. The Treasury Board is attempting to collapse some 1,500 current websites into a standard Canada.ca site by year’s end: “Feedback so far has been universally negative”.
Health Canada proposes more study of electronic cigarettes a year after a Commons committee urged marketing bans and restrictions on sales. The Canadian Medical Association protested the delay in any regulations, not expected now till 2017 at the earliest: “E-cigarettes containing nicotine should not be authorized for sale”.
Parliament should replace its complaints-based pay equity system with legal mandates, MPs have been told. The advice from the former chair of a Pay Equity Task Force is the same recommended by the panel in 2004: “Everyone agreed this could not go on”.
Abandoned mine sites represent opportunities in reclamation, says a mining executive. More than 70 percent of some 10,000 contaminated sites logged in a federal registry are old mines: “They have a lot of value”.
