Employers subject to new private sector bilingualism rules “may choose to move,” the Budget Office said yesterday. Regulations mandating bilingualism in federally regulated workplaces will apply in select cities from Edmonton to Yarmouth: 'Thirty-seven percent of the banking sector in Ottawa knows French while only 5 percent in Winnipeg does.'
A political appointee in the Department of Canadian Heritage helped Crown lawyers in Toronto prosecute multiple criminal cases, Access To Information show. The disclosure follows the Attorney General’s pledge that prosecutors must at all times “make a decision separate and apart from the political arm of government.”
Parliament should pull millions in aid from Palestine after the territory’s rulers reneged on a key requirement for recognition of statehood, Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre said yesterday. Palestine last year was the single largest recipient of Canadian foreign aid worth more than $217 million: "We should not be giving aid to a government that is breaking its promise."
Indigenous reserves have become lawless and crime-infested, says a First Nations Lands Advisory Board report to the Senate. The Board said new policing powers are needed to save communities “facing an enforcement crisis.”
Taxpayers are spending millions on Atlantic ferries without any legal requirement to do so, says a Department of Transport audit. Subsidies in past years have averaged the equivalent of nearly $400 per vehicle: "Challenges will be critical to sustaining service reliability in the years ahead."
Industry Minister Mélanie Joly’s department in an internal memo claimed the “Buy Canadian” campaign would revive domestic factories even as federal managers wrote loopholes into the policy. Executives in a censored, three-page memo called support for employers here “the ultimate test of Buy Canadian.”
An anti-Israel website has registered with the Office of the Foreign Influence Commissioner after accepting sponsored content from China. Registration is mandatory for any media “acting at the direction of, for the benefit of or in association with a foreign entity.”
Fears of a Y2K computer crash prompted then-Defence Minister Art Eggleton to put 30,000 troops on standby, according to newly-declassified records. Confidential accounts of 1999 meetings show cabinet braced for emergencies from subway shutdowns in Toronto to sub-Arctic power blackouts as date timers in computers marked the changeover to the year 2000: "An inadvertent launch of nuclear missiles is highly unlikely."
Municipal police nationwide will gain new powers to jam cellphones under sweeping amendments to telecom law. Currently the use of devices to block signals between wireless phones and cell towers is forbidden under threat of $25,000 fines with limited exemptions for the RCMP, federal prison service and Department of National Defence: 'For example, the order could support law enforcement agencies at major public events.'
The Department of Employment must pay $5,000 in damages to a Christian employee suspended for refusing a Covid shot, a federal labour board has ruled. An adjudicator said he accepted the clerk's testimony that only God and not cabinet could mandate the vaccine: "How can I as a practicing Christian agree?"
We are grateful this holiday to friends and subscribers as Blacklock's embarks on a 15th great year of independent, all-original Canadian journalism. On behalf of contributors, please accept our thanks. We're back tomorrow -- The Editor.
Poet W.N. Branson writes: “The lessons learned. Close calls and warnings: Brexit, Meech Lake, Quebec 1995. Backrooms and greased consciences. Hushed voices whisper with grave tones…”
Canada, unlike Zimbabwe, has no federal department of education, to which Professor Jennifer Wallner of the University of Ottawa comments: And your point is – ?
Parliament regulates the minutiae of labels on fertilizer bags, the price of mozzarella, the music they play at Radio CJLR in Meadow Lake, Sask. Yet in 159 years legislators have never set any federal standards on basic elementary and secondary education. Critics lament the fact. Professor Wallner argues this does not mean standards don’t exist.
“Provinces can work together,” Wallner writes. “When we compare the provincial education systems to one another, all ten show remarkably strong similarities in investments, achievements and substantive policies.”
Cabinet is headed for “a danger zone” with continued overspending, warns Budget Officer Annette Ryan. Testifying at the Senate national finance committee, Ryan said any federal claim that deficit spending will promote economic growth is “the opposite of prudence.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney in 2025 ethics filings disclosed extensive shareholding in heating and ventilation companies that would benefit from a federal rebate program announced yesterday. “How is that not corrupt?” asked Conservative MP John Brassard (Barrie-South-Innisfil, Ont.), chair of the Commons ethics committee: "The Prime Minister is not even hiding it anymore."
