Blacklock's Reporter

Canadians share “fairly negative views” about foreign aid with a quarter nationwide favouring funding cuts, says in-house research by the Department of Foreign Affairs. Spending on aid abroad costs $6.4 billion a year excluding extraordinary funding for pandemic relief or Ukraine’s war effort: "More than half of Canadians say a lot of international aid from Canada ends up in the pockets of corrupt politicians in the developing world."

The Department of Health issued hundreds of “corrections” to subsidized news media, records show. Subsidized newsrooms are obliged to grant federal agencies a “rebuttal opportunity” as a condition of accepting federal aid: "Lots of people think there are factual errors in the newspaper that are just things they don’t like."

The Commons industry committee last night approved a cabinet bill to mandate disclosure of ownership of federally registered corporations. Police acknowledged the bill would not include 85 percent of Canadian companies that are provincially registered: "Criminals will simply use a province that doesn’t have a registry."

Erin O’Toole in his farewell address to Parliament yesterday urged MPs to avoid the “sinkhole of diversion and division.” O’Toole is resigning as a four-term MP (Durham, Ont.) after accepting blame for the Conservative Party’s 2021 election loss: "I am responsible for that."

Eighty percent of Old Age Security pensioners earn more than $60,000 a year, new data show. Payouts include pensions to retirees with six-figure incomes, according to figures tabled in Parliament: "Many seniors receiving these payments aren’t struggling financially."

Canadians rate cabinet’s climate program incompetent, unfair and lacking in transparency, says in-house Privy Council research. The Access To Information document did not identify Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault by name but found widespread distrust of his policies: "Few Canadians strongly agreed, and only a small minority somewhat agreed, that the federal government demonstrated competence, fairness, openness and care when it comes to climate change."

Conservatives, New Democrats and Bloc Québécois MPs this week will discuss nominees to head a public inquiry into suspected election fraud by foreign agents, Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre said yesterday. An independent judge must “get all the truth on the table” before the next campaign, he said: "We are working on that right now."

The Public Health Agency of Canada in a 2022 memo said families must “assess everyone’s risk” before hugging small, unmasked children. The memo was released through Access To Information: "Hugs are safer if the child wears a mask."

Freedom Convoy protesters were violent bigots who assaulted Asian people with spitting and shoving, says a New Democrat MP. The claims, contradicted by sworn testimony at a judicial inquiry, were raised by MP Alexandre Boulerice (Rosemont-La Petite Patrie, Que.) in Commons debate on a motion condemning anti-Asian racism: "People were spit on, people were shoved because they were of Asian descent."

CBC Radio has won a “free speech” ruling in the Federal Court of Appeal over use of the n-word. Judges quashed a CRTC order condemning a radio show deemed so offensive it breached the Broadcasting Act: "The decision makes no mention of CBC Radio’s freedom of expression."

Poet Shai Ben-Shalom writes: “In Heaven, Moses chats with Christ, Muhammad, and the Buddha. I wonder if they figured out which of their followers got it right…”

Read this book and you’ll never think the same way again in reaching for a roll of kitchen foil to cover your barbecued chicken. Authors in searing detail document aluminum production from open-pit Third World bauxite mines to toxic refineries to the $2.90 kitchen convenience. The supply chain is coldly efficient.

Aluminum Ore is stark and meticulously researched. Authors Robin Gendron of Nipissing University and two faculty members at Norway’s University of Science & Technology tell the very human story of an everyday commodity we only think we know.

Making one ton of aluminum requires 1,380 tons of water, produces 85 tons of industrial waste and 10 tons of greenhouse gas emissions. Its main source, bauxite, can only be refined through heating and cooling with caustic soda in a process that annually produces 120 million tons of toxic discharge the industry calls “red mud.” In Hungary, the 2010 collapse of a red mud reservoir at an alumina plant flooded villages, caused 131 casualties and nearly poisoned the Danube. In India, bauxite labourers are paid $2 a day and hundreds of thousands of villagers have been displaced to make way for strip mines and refiners’ plants.

Vincent Rigby, now-retired national security advisor to the Prime Minister, yesterday testified he never saw a memo warning that Chinese agents targeted a Conservative MP. Rigby told the House affairs committee he read thousands of documents: "There was a pandemic going on."

The chair of the Trudeau Foundation yesterday testified he never knew a portion of the charity's $125 million taxpayer endowment was used to buy shares in Chinese corporations. Edward Johnson said he was unaware of the stock purchases until a member of the board objected: "We told our financial managers to get rid of them."

China is as carefree a travel destination as Belgium, according to risk ratings by the Department of Foreign Affairs. A member of the Senate foreign affairs committee yesterday questioned the claim given hostage takings and arbitrary detention of more than 120 Canadians in China: "I certainly accept at times there will be counterintuitive results."