A cabinet bill to create a rail disaster compensation fund would cap relief at $250 million, a fraction of costs from the 2013 Lac-Mégantic wreck. Transport Minister Lisa Raitt said cabinet would reclaim extra money from industry in case of another costly disaster: “It is the taxpayers who have to pay”.
Canadian business lacks the gumption to profit from trade pacts signed by cabinet, says Canada’s chief trade commissioner. Of 1.1 million small and medium-sized employers in Canada only 11,000 are exporting to markets other than the U.S.: “Canadian entrepreneurs may lack that level of ambition”.
European trademarks including champagne, port and Chablis will be protected under federal law in compliance with a tentative Canada-E.U. trade pact. Wine labeling is already proprietary, meaning champagne must come from the French province of Champagne, as compared to “sparkling wine” produced by Canadian vintners: ‘It’s culturally important’.
Closure of a single General Motors plant would cost 33,000 jobs and billions in government revenues, warns a Unifor study. GM is mulling closure of a Camaro assembly plant in Oshawa, Ont. and transferring production to the U.S. by 2016: “The numbers are staggering”.
Parliament is being urged to stop meddlesome amendments to complex federal laws by piecemeal private members’ bills. It follows disclosures a private Conservative bill on rail safety will be repealed by cabinet amendments to the same law: “I’m questioning why we’re discussing it”.
Canada Post is quietly shelving a consulting report that forecast staggering losses for the Crown corporation. The post office reported a surprise $194 million profit last year after raising stamp prices 35%: “There are projections, and then there’s what occurs”.
The fisheries department for the first time is withholding information on the Atlantic seal hunt, claiming “privacy” concerns. The press gag comes as the Senate takes up a Conservative bill that would ban photographers and animal rights activists from observing the hunt under threat of arrest: ‘This is information that was publicly available on a government website’.
Bitcoin should “go through the roof” as a money-making investment, the Senate banking committee has been told. The forecast came despite volatile trading in the pseudo-currency that has seen its value cut in half in the past year: “I’m not suggesting that you buy now, but it’s not a bad idea”.
Growers stung by Ontario restrictions on bee-killing pesticides are appealing to MPs for a standardized policy on farm chemicals. Health Canada’s own review will not be completed till 2018: “What does this result in?”
Street Sex Work appears calculated to rattle Middle Canada. It is provocative and edgy. It dives into the deep end on morality, race and prostitution. The result is wantonly shocking.
“The street sex trade has come increasingly to be represented as a particularly urban menace,” writes Prof. Shawna Ferris, of the University of Manitoba; even the term “prostitution” carries “pejorative and morally inflected connotations”.
Ferris prefers the term “sex worker”, similar to “transit worker” or “bakery worker”. One provides bread to strangers, another public transportation to strangers, the other sex to strangers: same thing, Ferris implies. Morality is irrelevant. Street Sex Work even badgers Vancouver tourism managers for “trite rhetorical euphemisms” in telling visitors which neighbourhoods to avoid; Gastown makes a nice “daytime stroll” (emphasis added) while streets in Chinatown are “partially located in a more graphic part of the city”.
“In the name of urban safety and orderliness, increased police budgets are sold to the public in cities like Toronto, Vancouver and Winnipeg; and the drug-addicted, the poor, the homeless, those who work in the survival sex industry, and others who our society has failed through systemic racism, inadequate health care, and an increasingly ragged social safety net are further criminalized and victimized as police move them off city streets and into court,” says Street Sex Work; “More and more street-involved sex workers of all races are being harassed, bullied or otherwise targeted by police as well as private citizen groups and violent criminals.”
The book casts guilt on all of us for the very presence of prostitution, though most Canadians have nothing to do with the trade. It shames those who’d express moral qualms, though everyday discourse judges people who wear fur or drive Cadillacs or read the Sun.
Then, just as readers are agitated, Professor Ferris makes a compelling point.
Why did the murder of 14 white, educated women at École Polytechnique in 1989 inspire parliamentary outrage and a legislative response from the Department of Justice, while the “disappearance” of 65 poor, mainly Aboriginal women in Vancouver was treated as a police matter? “The fourteen women in Montreal got massacred and that’s horrifying,” Street Sex Work quotes one social worker; “We don’t have Canada-wide coverage of all the women that die right here in the Downtown Eastside. Why is that? We’re not university students. We’re not across the country. We’re right here. We’re dying every day.”
Canada tolerates no capital punishment but has been oddly indifferent to the death penalty meted out to “missing” women, Ferris writes. They are Canadians, too. Street Sex Work concedes urban neighbours may have a right to complain over the sex trade, but with a subtle observation: “I acknowledge neighbourhood complaints about the traffic, noise, littering of city streets with condoms and needles, and the sexual harassment of non-sex workers by cruising johns that seem inevitably to accompany street-involved sex work as legitimate concerns. Unfortunately, however, too often residents take such concerns to politicians and police without discussing them with those who are arguably most directly able to address them: their neighbourhood sex workers.”
Street Sex Work shocks. It is also insightful and dark and worthwhile for any reader who is not afraid to dive in the deep end.
By Holly Doan
Street Sex Work And Canadian Cities: Resisting A Dangerous Order, by Shawna Ferris; University of Alberta Press; 288 pages; ISBN 9781-7721-20059; $21.90
Senators may hold as little as two days’ worth of pre-election hearings on union bill C-377, says the chair of the Senate legal affairs committee. The contentious Conservative measure would force disclosure of confidential union data: “It’s not a sure thing”.
Cash-strapped VIA Rail faces millions in costs from a 2012 wreck that killed three locomotive engineers and injured scores of passengers. Class action attorneys claim more than $600,000 in fees alone, records show: “You don’t survive a train wreck and just walk away”.
Federal investigators are launching a mammoth tax audit of Ontario bars, lounges and restaurants in a bid to track unreported sales. Canada Revenue Agency has asked a federal judge to order the Liquor Control Board to surrender three years’ worth of sales records: “We’ve asked them to show us what it is they’re looking for”.
Food processors are in crisis due to restricted hiring of migrant labour, the Senate agriculture committee has been told. Members of a trade council said they cannot find Canadians to work regardless of immediate hiring or pay up to 60 percent better than the minimum wage: “Anyone who wants or is able to work is already working”.
A long-promised balanced budget bill has been introduced in the Commons, but not the version promised by cabinet two years ago. The treasury would be forbidden from running a deficit except in war or extraordinary circumstances, and required to use at least half of future surpluses to pay down the national debt under a private bill: “There’s still plenty of time to correct this fiscal ship”.
