Cabinet is accused of thwarting a union drive within the RCMP despite a Supreme Court deadline that first-ever collective bargaining be introduced by January 16, 2016. An association attempting to organize police says it continues to be denied access: “We’re still facing a huge uphill battle”.
Tax evasion remains “socially acceptable” despite enforcement efforts, says a confidential Canada Revenue Agency report. However the Agency appeared to drop a proposal to fingerprint taxpayers who fail audits: “Sustained efforts over a number of years will be needed”.
Federal regulators are refusing to explain why they failed to ensure compensation for customers of failed airline SkyGreece. The Canadian Transportation Agency yesterday declined comment on why it waited weeks to protect passengers who lost hundreds of thousands of dollars on cancelled flights and prepaid tickets: “They seem to be washing their hands of this”.
Canada’s power grid is more disaster-proof than it was at the time of an epic 2003 blackout but remains susceptible to extreme weather and cyber attack, says a federal report. The blackout cut power to 50 million customers in Canada and the U.S.: “We are approaching design limits”.
Porter Airlines Inc. is suing Transport Canada to block release of a confidential safety audit of the carrier. The lawsuit follows a 2014 Federal Court ruling that the public may use the Access To Information Act to obtain regulators’ opinions on company Safety Management Systems: “This is confidential information”.
The Canadian Food Inspection Agency is so dysfunctional employee grievances number in the thousands. Evidence submitted at a federal tribunal indicated hearings on employee complaints take two to three years on average, as long as Federal Court cases: “Some have taken as long as 15 years”.
A landmark environmental lawsuit on offshore liability is bound for a Canadian hearing on go-ahead from the Supreme Court. Claims against a subsidiary of Chevron Corp. represent a test of corporate liability, said advocates: “It recognizes the legitimacy of other courts”.
The Canadian Coast Guard is charging shippers more than $30 million a year in navigation and icebreaking fees, accounts show. It follows a 2013 plan to recover “full cost” on service to mariners: “The real question is what these costs should be”.
Planners will see how Canada rates in ensuring adequate housing for a greying population. The federal insurer Canada Mortgage & Housing Corp. is commissioning a $75,000 study of foreign strategies to prevent seniors from “inundating” care facilities, it said: “There is a huge national crisis”.
Blacklock’s Reporter pauses today to observe the 121st Labour Day in tribute to workers nationwide. We will be back tomorrow — The Editor
With so much accumulated
under the bus of the Conservative Party,
the wheels appear to no longer touch the road
on certain key issues.
Like, military procurement;
Senate reform;
Aboriginal women;
Veterans’ Affairs…
Little wonder
it’s the first party
to use an airplane
this election campaign.
(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, examines current events in the Blacklock’s tradition each and every Sunday)
Unravelling Encounters peels the vinyl siding off Middle Canada. It is a riveting account of suburban smugness. I challenge any book club to read and discuss it. I don’t think they have the guts.
Authors recount our affluent nation’s “imaginary past”. They interview one social worker who describes the 1960s as magic – the word is actually used, “magic” – “The music, and growing your hair, and bucking authority, and going against the establishment,” she says: “We really pushed the boundaries.”
By comparison interviewees curse the present as a bleak era of mean-spirited program cuts. “As I listened to social workers talk about recent changes to their work, my attention was drawn to the recurring presence of highly nostalgic memories about the past, especially on the part of research participants who identified as white and female,” writes co-editor Kristin Smith, associate professor of social work at Ryerson University.
Problem, writes Smith: the magical past that gave us pensions and hospital insurance also produced Indian Residential Schools, forced adoption and race-based immigration quotas. “It becomes apparent that mourning over social welfare, especially on the part of white social workers, constitutes a form of historical amnesia obscuring the history of violent colonization and racism in Canadian social welfare policies.”
Unravelling Encounters documents White Canada, a subject so painful it rates among our country’s greatest taboos. “An emotional response is unleashed when the ‘goodness of whiteness’ and the innocence of white people in this racialized settler/colonial nation is called into question,” writes Dr. Carol Schick of the University of Regina.
Canadian views on race and history are skewed by over-exposure to the dramatic American experience of slavery and Jim Crow. It is a handy escape. It voids the need for any awkward self-analysis.
An example: when the Senate suspended Patrick Brazeau in 2013 then-Government leader Senator Marjory LeBreton called it an “experiment gone wrong”. Other senators were suspended too, but none were former chiefs of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples. LeBreton presumably felt comfortable in blurting out exactly what was on her mind – you know, those kind of people. She was not fired.
Chapter by chapter, Unravelling Encounters challenges readers to peer a little closer. The analysis is crisp, the findings provocative. Nirmala Bains of Vanier College interviews young Canadians who apply to teach English in South Korea. They are typically jobless, bored Caucasians, 23 or 24, who studied humanities or political science: “There are not a lot of engineering students around here,” one says. None are qualified to teach in Canada.
They are quite literally temporary foreign workers, Bains writes, yet all dismiss the fact as unimaginable: “A migrant worker to me is a construction worker or restaurant worker,” says one: “I feel like I was asked to come here because I have something they want. It is more of a prestige thing. I have English, and they want English”; “I definitely feel that I am on a higher level ‘cause I make more money than Koreans and I am invited here from a Western country.”
No book club will take up Unravelling Encounters. Too bad. It would be a discussion they’d never forget.
By Holly Doan
Unravelling Encounters: Ethics, Knowledge & Resistance Under Neoliberalism; edited by Caitlin Janzen, Donna Jeffery and Kristin Smith; Wilfrid Laurier University Press; 300 pages; ISBN 9781-7711-21255; $29.24
The cash-strapped Canada Border Services Agency was reduced to YouTube videos and Twitter as “outreach” following budget cuts, records show. Files released through Access To Information also confirmed cutbacks were to blame for long delays in adopting electronic truck cargo checks 12 years after the U.S.: “The clerks have already left”.
Attorneys for Telus have lost a six-figure court ruling that forces the telecom company to collect GST on customers’ calls in the U.S. The company had argued wireless roaming airtime services were exempt from the federal sales tax since they were routed through American cell towers: “Common sense is my starting point”.
The Supreme Court is agreeing to hear a landmark appeal of a tax assessment by a company that complained of “hijacking” by city assessors. An Alberta mall claimed it was threatened with a 44 percent increase if it appealed an original assessment from the City of Edmonton: “It’s an interesting case”.
