Blacklock's Reporter

Poet James Frazer writes: “For 22 years he ruled Parliament Hill, now he’ll stare you down from the $50 bill. It’s always been hard to know what exactly he stood for, our steward through the Great Depression and the 2nd World War…”

To read this delightful account of wartime eating is to comprehend for the first time our mothers’ fascination with liver. Livestock organs have today vanished from many supermarkets including items that butchers once creatively marketed as “variety meats”: calves’ brains, tongue, tripe and kidneys. None blighted so many childhoods as liver: liver loaf, minced liver, liver sauté, and fried liver and onions, a dense, grey, mealy dish that could only be choked down with ketchup.

“Eat liver frequently,” decreed the 1944 Official Food Rules. An entire generation of homemakers took the admonishment to heart long after victory was ours.

Food Will Win The War is a fresh and lively account of the Canadian dinner plate. It peers into the corners of the historical cupboard to uncover the most intriguing details of the home front experience. Researchers rarely delve into diet in documenting the past, though the results are always revealing. Who is not wiser on learning Lester Pearson’s favourite lunch was a poached egg? Or that Britain’s Ministry of Food decreed rice soup with haddock as Christmas Day supper in 1917?

Dr. Mona Nemer, cabinet’s Chief Science Advisor, was caught trying to bill taxpayers for a personal holiday in Paris, Access To Information records showed yesterday. Her staff withdrew thousands in expenses after the Department of Industry challenged the charge: "We have a situation."

The Mounties last year disciplined 45 civilian employees for wrongdoing from illegal drug use to “being dishonest,” says a new report. Commissioner Michael Duheme said the public deserved better: "Canadians expect the highest standards from us."

Cabinet says the Bank of Canada didn’t mean to act unlawfully when it hired replacement workers in breach of the Canada Labour Code. “The Bank respects the law,” cabinet wrote in response to a Commons petition censuring management for misconduct in a lengthy strike with the Public Service Alliance of Canada.

A million Canadians a year are now using free clinics to file their annual tax returns, according to Revenue Agency figures. The latest data follow remarks by a former Minister of Revenue that most taxpayers were functionally illiterate: "When these people receive documents, they are not able to understand what is written there."

The Department of Transport yesterday commissioned a $100,000 study on anticipated benefits and job losses resulting from widespread use of robot cars. In-house research earlier showed Canadians are typically wary of automated vehicles and don’t trust the software: "Canadians are considerably more likely to be apprehensive about these technologies than to be welcoming of them."

Cabinet withheld public disclosure of a damning audit of the Canadian Soccer Association until after FIFA World Men’s Cup matches in Vancouver and Toronto, records show. Independent auditors faulted soccer managers for high salaries and sloppy bookkeeping after receiving millions in taxpayer grants: "We made history."

Cabinet is extending the annual April 30 tax deadline by two weeks to save time and money spent by tax filers in submitting late receipts and tax slips, says Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne. It marks the first change in the federal  deadline since the Second World War: "In terms of tax simplification, I am just getting started."

The RCMP says 130 years after the Mounties were made famous by policing the Klondike Gold Rush, the force is no longer able to attract enough recruits to serve in the North. Inflation was to blame in part, said an internal report: "Everyday expenses such as groceries, fuel, utilities and basic household goods are substantially higher in remote communities."

Parliament should decriminalize heroin, cocaine and another illegal drugs nationwide, the Canadian Association of Social Workers has told MPs. The group’s submission to the Commons health committee followed a British Columbia court ruling that prosecution breached drug users’ Charter rights: "Criminalization can deepen stigma."

A bill granting cabinet unprecedented powers to quash legal strikes hits at “fundamental protection for workers under the Charter,” says Liberal-appointed Senator Hassan Yussuff (Ont.). The former Canadian Labour Congress president did not reply to reporters' questions on what measures he proposed to prevent passage of Bill C-39: "It's political."

Blacklock's Reporter today pauses for Remembrance Day observances with gratitude to all who honoured our country. Thank you for your service -- The Editor.

The Commons yesterday placed an order for 6,000 bottles of fine wine to “maintain expected standards of hospitality” in the Parliamentary Dining Room. The stocking of the wine cellar came four days after Prime Minister Mark Carney’s budget lamented the plight of “hardworking Canadians struggling to get by.”

Newly-declassified records show the RCMP from the close of the Second World War spied on the Royal Canadian Legion in a hunt for Communists. The Mounties in one confidential 1947 memo named dozens of Legion members as subversive: "The menace of Communist infiltration and disruption was brought to the attention of the Dominion President."