Canada should honour volunteers who served in the 1990 Persian Gulf conflict as legitimate wartime veterans, the Commons veterans affairs committee says in its final report to the 44th Parliament. The “legal semantics” of whether veterans were at war or not meant reduced disability benefits for 4,458 Canadians who served in Operation Desert Shield and Desert Storm: “Wrong answer.”
Nine years of reconciliation have not led to “any tangible improvements in the qualify of life for Indigenous people,” says a Privy Council report. In-house focus group research found First Nations, Inuit and Métis questioned the point of cabinet’s friendship when many communities had undrinkable tap water: “Most did not feel the prioritization of this issue had led to any tangible improvements.”
Automakers yesterday forecast trouble ahead with a signature climate change program after cabinet confirmed the abrupt phaseout of $5,000 federal rebates for electric car buyers. Cabinet had mandated that all Canadian may only buy an electric by 2035: “Sales targets are increasingly unrealistic.”
Cabinet aides in pre-election polling asked Arab Canadians how the government could “promote the rights and safety of members of the Arab diaspora,” says a Privy Council report. No corresponding focus groups were held with Jewish Canadians: “Most felt the Government of Canada was on the wrong track.”
The Liberal Party must run a leadership contest free of foreign interference, say MPs. A change in Party voting rules follows evidence a busload of Chinese foreign students helped nominate MP Han Dong (Don Valley North, Ont.) in 2019: “Listen, there’s foreign interference concerns.”
Electric car dealers say they are stunned by cabinet’s abrupt wind-up of a $5,000 rebate program for new buyers. The Department of Transport announced Friday it will suspend rebates by the end of March or “until program funds are exhausted.”
Taxpayers lost millions through defaults on federal loans to Québec businesses, records show. The federal agency that approved the loans, Canada Economic Development for Québec Regions, boasted in a briefing note it was “prepared to support riskier projects.”
A federal subsidy program for Canadian musicians went 80 percent over budget due to pandemic lockdowns and collapsing album sales, says a Department of Canadian Heritage report. Musicians have complained they are reduced to collecting pennies in royalties from streaming services: “The current economic context does not allow the majority of artists to make a living.”
Google wants to verify my identity.
It presents weird-looking letters, numbers,
asks me to type them
into a text box.
Somewhere in Iowa, Georgia, or North Carolina,
servers will run algorithms,
analyse my response,
determine if I’m human –
or one of them.
(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, writes for Blacklock’s each and every Sunday)
Michael Maclear was the only Western TV correspondent in North Vietnam the day Ho Chi Minh died in 1969. Half a million mourners clad in white queued for hours to see Ho laying in state, his head resting on a soft pillow. It was “a great river of people,” Maclear recalls. The temperature hit 107° and kept climbing: “Every few seconds in the intense heat, even among the ranks of soldiers, someone would faint.”
Reading Guerrilla Nation is like opening a drawer to find a lapsed passport or faded yearbook. In an instant you are in a time and place once very important and now utterly forgotten, “the strangest of journeys in the most divisive of times, when ‘Nam confounded us all,’” writes Maclear.
Travel was expensive. Asia seemed distant. And a CBC-TV foreign correspondent like Maclear was assured fame and a mass audience. One of Maclear’s newsroom colleagues, Knowlton Nash, went into management and self-appointment as network anchor. Another, Roméo LeBlanc, became Governor General. Maclear remained a working reporter, still writing in his 84th year. He died in 2019.
Most indelible are Maclear’s vignettes: the memory of old men wheezing as they freighted 100-kilogram loads on bicycles through the Vietnamese countryside. Or the 12-year old boys press-ganged into a road repair crew. Or a Red propaganda officer who shook his fist at Maclear, “Capitalist swine – you are here to exploit us.”
And, there is controversy. Maclear recounts a dubious scoop, a 1970 incident in which he was invited to take a camera into a North Vietnamese camp and “interview” two imprisoned Americans. Maclear agreed to submit four questions in advance: Name and rank? How often can you write home? Can you describe your daily routine? And, what are your feelings on the war?
“The war is wrong,” one POW remarked as his guards stood nearby. “The answer is that the war must be ended.”
It was a propaganda shoot. The U.S. government called Maclear’s story a “carefully staged production.” U.S. Senator John McCain, himself a victim of torture in Vietnamese custody, later cursed Maclear’s interview subjects as “two camp rats” who collaborated with the enemy.
Maclear could nurse a grudge, too. He remembers an American who called his coverage “pinko crap” and the CBC managers who ultimately suspended him on trumped up complaints over coverage “with my own network echoing, ‘Were you duped?’”
This all happened decades ago, yet Maclear writes: “Time has not erased the memories, nor should it, for the network by its actions not least betrayed the public.” To read Guerrilla Nation is to recall in a flash this angry era, and then marvel at how it is so completely forgotten.
By Holly Doan
Guerrilla Nation: My Wars In and Out of Vietnam, by Michael Maclear; Dundurn; 216 pages; ISBN 9781-45970-9409; $19.99
A “fact-checking” program launched in 2019 by then-Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould paid researchers nearly $370,000 to discourage media and the public from questioning authority, Access To Information records show. Researchers stressed the importance of invoking Canadian values to avoid being seen as Liberal partisans: “Dissenting voices, in some cases even just one, can weaken the power of a normative belief.”
Parliament should prosecute scrap metal thieves as saboteurs, says Rogers Communications. The telecom firm in a petition to senators complained theft of copper wiring was costing Rogers millions: ‘It is threatening public safety nationwide.’
Canadians should honour John A. Macdonald as a national hero and be “unapologetic for our history,” Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre yesterday told reporters. Saturday marks the 210th anniversary of Macdonald’s birth: “We need to live out the dream that started with John A. Macdonald. Yes, I said John A. Macdonald.”
The federal Historic Sites and Monuments Board has cited eight Catholic charities as being complicit in “cultural genocide.” All eight were previously honoured for nationally significant works including aid to the poor: “It did not include a critical consideration of their relationship with Indigenous peoples.”
Many Canadian parents remain wary of Covid and flu shots for children despite ongoing immunization campaigns, says in-house Public Health Agency research. Pandemic mandates did not improve compliance rates, data show: “Have you ever been hesitant to vaccinate your child against Covid?”
