The next election will see fewer MPs in Toronto and northern Ontario and more in the Okanagan and suburban Alberta. Historic changes under the Electoral Boundaries Readjustment Act take effect April 22, 2024, according to a legal notice: "It is necessary."
The CBC should rethink news coverage that disparages cabinet critics as extreme or disreputable, warns the network Ombudsman. The advisory follows a 2021 attempt by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to act as a political fact checker: "When they do so they had better be right."
We are grateful this holiday to friends and subscribers as Blacklock's embarks on a 12th great year of independent, all-original Canadian journalism. On behalf of all our contributors, please accept our thanks. We're back tomorrow -- The Editor.
Poet S.M.G. Dupel writes: “A gun-metal sky hangs over the lake, which is oil-black and loud as it folds into itself again and again until it reaches the shore and my boots. Behind, town lights blink on…”
For Canadians who recall when the U.S. won its wars and paid its bills, it’s now popular to consider America as a wheezing empire in decline, to which Professor Tanner Mirrlees replies, ha! Mirrlees’ Hearts and Mines is a bird’s-eye view of a U.S. cultural industrial complex so vast its reach is taken for granted. It is a very sad Third World village that has never heard of Mickey Mouse or Marlboro cigarettes.
“The United States’ cultural reach is unparalleled,” writes Mirrlees, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology. “The U.S. culture industry’s global economic power and the near omnipresence of American cultural commodities – news programs, motion pictures, TV shows, video games and interactive digital content – are facts.”
Cries of “fascists” yesterday rang out in the Commons as MPs pressed for release of a secret federal blacklist of 20 Nazi fugitives in Canada. Demands for disclosure of the 1985 list came as the Liberal chair of Parliament’s Canada-Ukraine Friendship Group expressed unease with disclosure: "I prefer not to speak to that."
Budget Officer Yves Giroux yesterday defended research indicating cabinet misled taxpayers on the recovery of green technology subsidies. “I don’t have a vested interest,” Giroux told the Commons industry committee: "As soon as we publish a report that sets the record straight there are accusations we have not understood the problem or have a bone to pick."
Federal financing for energy refits of a luxury Toronto hotel is “grotesque,” says Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis (Haldimand-Norfolk, Ont.). The MP challenged the Minister of Housing to justify the funding when “Canadians are sleeping in garages.”
Parliament must curb deficit spending now or “pick up the pieces” later, former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge yesterday told the Senate banking committee. Canadians had no choice but to confront an “unpleasant” future, he said: "I mean, Canadians are pretty realistic."
Animal rights advocates yesterday opposed a bill threatening jail and six-figure fines for trespassing on farms. Camille Labchuk, executive director of Animal Justice, called it an “ag gag law” to conceal cruel farm practices: "This includes things like keeping pregnant pigs in gestation crates which are metal cages so small the mothers can’t even turn around."
There is no excuse to delay release of a decades-old blacklist of 20 suspected Nazi fugitives in Canada, Immigration Minister Marc Miller said yesterday. Miller said he had not seen the confidential list but questioned if any suspects were still alive: "There’s no excuse for delay."
More than 800 depositors have been “de-banked” nationwide in the past five years at bankers' discretion, say Access To Information Records. Federal law does not allow banks to cancel accounts except in cases of suspected criminality: 'How many depositors have been de-banked in Canada for reasons other than substantiated terrorism or money laundering?'
Governor General Mary Simon must economize in her $24.7 million annual budget, the Commons government operations committee said yesterday. MPs protested spending was so lavish that Rideau Hall did not tell the whole truth when questioned about the cost of overseas junkets: "You got caught red-handed."
The Public Health Agency has censored thousands of pages of data on cellphone users it collected in the name of pandemic lockdown enforcement. The Agency invoked commercial confidentiality in refusing to disclose weekly reports drawn from cell tower tracking data on millions of mobile customers: "We have developed internal policies to limit access to these data."
The Commons ethics committee last evening targeted an investigation of alleged "green-washing" by a federal foundation suspected of sweetheart subsidies for environmental technology firms. Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne suspended funding for Sustainable Development Technology Canada over “allegations of mismanagement.”
