Canadians are too fiscally conservative to buy reverse mortgages, says a finance department memo. Staff in a secret memorandum calculated less than one percent of mortgage-free homeowners over 55 have borrowed against their equity: “Why is the reverse mortgage market so small?”
Airline regulators are being taken to court in a challenge of proposed licensing changes to benefit start-up discount carriers. The Canadian Transportation Agency is accused of breaching its own Act: “They are going out of their way to bend the rules”.
Federal anti-trust investigators are targeting contracts in the billion-dollar commercial waste trade from British Columbia to Québec, court records disclose. The probe follows a letter from an executive of Waste Management of Canada Corp. who told regulators “we have no fear” of competition.
A federal Code of Conduct on credit card companies will be expanded on a promise of new protections for merchants, says the Financial Consumer Agency. Legislators have tried twice in two years to replace the voluntary code with regulations: “This gives more clarity”.
An airline bankrupted when Transport Canada hurriedly pulled its license after a fatal crash has lost a bid for a Supreme Court appeal. Justices declined to hear arguments that regulators breached a duty of care: “It’s clear there was an error”.
A Québec man who complained of rude treatment in Toronto has lost a Human Rights Code complaint of discrimination due to “place of origin”. A tribunal concluded Torontonians were rude, but not illegally so: ‘It was poor customer service’.
Draft regulations that once pit pipeline operators against farmers have been finalized by the National Energy Board. New rules require that landowners seek written permission before digging within 30 metres of any federally-regulated pipeline.
A new pedestrian bridge
stretches across the highway.
Linking the baseball stadium with the
Ottawa train station.
Glass-covered. Heated stairs.
The mayor praised the achievement:
$12 million, on time, within budget.
A year later, the bridge is a clear
success.
I actually saw somebody
using it.
(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, examines current events in the Blacklock’s tradition each and every Sunday)
Security staff armed with sledgehammers caused nearly $100,000 in damage to Parliament Hill heritage fixtures in the panicky aftermath to a 2014 shooting, records show. Newly-released memos disclose police and security guards misplaced keys, then went “smashing through locked doors” after advising terrified Hill staff to barricade their offices.
Memos obtained through Access To Information detail the damage caused by security in the hours after a lone gunman Michael Zehaf-Bibeau stormed the building October 22, 2014. He was shot dead by police within seconds of running into Parliament’s Centre Block with a Winchester hunting rifle.
Commons security staff alerted legislators and Hill employees to lock all doors, then proceeded to use sledgehammers to punch their way into dozens of offices including the cabinet room in a mistaken search for other shooters.
The sledgehammer search was omitted from all official accounts of the shooting by RCMP, Ontario Provincial Police and Commons authorities. In a timeline of the incidents pieced together from memos and a 2015 RCMP After Action Review:
At 9:50 am Zehaf-Bibeau shot and killed a reservist at the National War Memorial. At 9:54 am Zehaf-Bibeau entered Centre Block and was fatally shot 31 times.
At 1:34 pm Commons security emailed all Hill office staff: “ALL BUILDINGS remain in lockdown: Do not leave your current location until you receive instructions from Security Services. THIS MEANS stay in your office with the doors locked and away from any windows. If your door does not lock, find a way to barricade the door if possible. Do not open the door under any circumstances. Security Services has the required keys” (original emphasis).
At approximately 1:40 pm security staff began forcing open doors.Sources said constables could not find keys for Parliament Hill offices and feared other gunmen were loose in the building. Police at the time circulated unconfirmed reports – later proven false – that there were suspects on the Centre Block roof; an “unidentified boat behind the Supreme Court”; and mistaken claims of shootings on two nearby streets and a shopping mall.
Memos indicate from approximately 1:40 pm to 2:10 pm security guards and police went from floor to floor with sledgehammers, smashing 25 office doors with enough force to damage hinges as terrified staffers cowered inside.
“Both exterior envelope windows and interior windows were damaged, some from bullets but the majority from security authorities smashing through locked doors,” read one Department of Public Works memo. “There certainly will be lots of doors to repair,” said another; “These are emergency repairs for various wooden doors damaged by police.”
“This Is Part Of Our History”
At the cabinet room the “whole door was smashed”, said a damage report: “We have four teams of carpenters throughout the building working with House and Senate staff on a priority basis.”
Memos said $82,000 worth of oak doors were damaged, requiring $8,000 in emergency repairs; as well as $5,900 in windows for a total $95,900 repair bill. Replacement of heritage doors was deferred till a pending renovation of Parliament. Security guards also went into a translator’s booth in a Centre Block committee room and had “soundproofing torn off the wall”; no reason was given.
By comparison actual ricochet damage from bullets was minor, a total $9,700 in repairs to windows, marble corridors and a stone sculpture. “It is important to record the damage as a record of this event in our history,” a Public Works official wrote; “The House of Commons presently wants to fill the bullet holes in the woodwork and leave as is in order to prevent deterioration of the holes, and to maintain the ability to see it in order to be able to tell the story.”
Parliament was classified a federal heritage building in 1986 “because of its exceptional significance as a national landmark and because of the ceremonial design and detailing of the building itself,” the department wrote. The Centre Block’s original structure and fixtures date from 1922.
“We would choose to go forward using the House of Commons carpenters to repair doors and preserve as much of the heritage fabric as possible,” said one memo written two weeks after the shooting; “This is the best way to keep the heritage elements in place until the 2018 planned restoration start, and this will all be reviewed again.”
The House of Commons yesterday did not comment.
By Tom Korski
An English sailing ship is costing Canadian taxpayers millions though it sank 170 years ago. Parks Canada reallocated funds to promote its recovery of the Arctic wreck even as it cut other programs, according to Access To Information documents: “Significant resources will need to be reallocated”.
Canada’s tariff policy has become a paperwork burden that does little to protect manufacturers, says a Toronto think tank. Cabinet in 2013 introduced $1.1 billion in tariff hikes over five years: “These tariffs are on items that Canada produces very little of”.
Regulators have broadened the mandate for a little-known federal commissioner assigned to take consumer complaints against telecom companies. The government’s own research shows few Canadians ever contact the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services: “99% of the time they have never heard of the CCTS”.
Cabinet will consider a private Liberal bill to shift Employment Insurance benefits for some working mothers. The bill would allow pregnant claimants to seek benefits seven weeks early if their health is deemed at risk from working conditions: “The substance of the bill is really profound”.
Farm fertilizers can accumulate in soil for up to 30 years or more, according to new University of Waterloo research. Scientists warned of a “biochemical legacy” that sees commercial fertilizers leach into groundwater, lakes and streams.
“You are growing crops and applying fertilizers and the nitrogen is accumulating in the soil,” said Kim Van Meter, a Waterloo doctoral student and co-author of the research Nitrogen Legacy: Emerging Evidence Of Nitrogen Accumulation In Anthropogenic Landscapes. “When you get rain or mineralization of the soil over time, nitrogen begins leaching from fields in the form of nitrates and can move into groundwater, into the rivers, the lakes and coastal areas.”
Van Meter noted Canadian drinking water standards set a safe level of 10 milligrams of nitrogen per litre: There are definitely places in Canada that go beyond that level,” she said. “Everything flows within a watershed.”
Farmers nationwide doubled their use of commercial nitrogen in the period from 1981 to 2011, according to Statistics Canada data, though the number of individual farms fell by half to fewer than 100,000 over the same period. StatsCan attributed the increased usage to gains in seeded acreage. Some 61.5 million acres of farmland are treated with fertilizers each year.
“Our general understanding had been there was some lag time as nitrates are dissolved into groundwater, but this study basically says it is going to be a lot longer than we’d assumed,” said Prof. Nandita Basu of Waterloo’s Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. “It is tough to say how long – we don’t have a good handle of the science yet – but it could be thirty, forty or even fifty years.”
The findings were published in the periodical Environmental Research Letters. “Our study for the first time links multiple lines of evidence to show convincingly that nitrate, like phosphorus, has a bio-geochemical legacy, a legacy that complicates our previous understanding of the fate of this nutrient in anthropogenic landscapes and that must be accounted for in intervention efforts to improve water quality,” Nitrogen Legacy said.
Researchers used more than 2,000 soil samples from farm fields along the U.S. Mississippi River basin. Scientists found trace nitrates in soil to a depth of up to 39 inches.
The Commons environment committee in a 2014 study Great Lakes Water Quality identified farm runoff as a pollution source for the St. Lawrence River and lake waters in southwest Ontario. “What we really need to do is start managing the Great Lakes as ecosystems and manage them more holistically,” Dr. William Taylor, University of Waterloo professor emeritus, earlier told committee hearings; “It really takes a much more complex approach to the problem than just more or less phosphorus than what we are currently allowing.”
By Kaven Baker-Voakes
An insurance policyholder who sued over a bullying claim has lost a bid for a Supreme Court appeal. Justices dismissed the case of contested coverage on a household insurance policy: “Companies are insulating themselves from paying”.
