Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge in a regulatory surprise says enforcement of the Online News Act will begin by year’s end, scrubbing months of public consultation. St-Onge in a legal notice Saturday acknowledged the timing was “aggressive” and “accelerated.”
Young Canadians, women and British Columbians and Ontarians are the biggest climate change worriers, says in-house research by the Department of Environment. The findings follow an earlier federal report that most young people feel frightened, sad and helpless about global warming: 'How worried are you?'
Canadian banks use “customer stickiness” techniques to prevent clients from comparison shopping, says a Competition Bureau report. The practice makes it difficult for any new rival to challenge the nation’s Big Five banks, it said: "There are frequently direct costs associated with customer switching."
Blacklock's Reporter pauses today for the 129th observance of Labour Day in tribute to Canadian workers nationwide. We will be back tomorrow -- The Editor
Poet Shai Ben-Shalom writes: “Welcome aboard Federal Government Airlines. Our flight will be two hours longer than usual as we’re still looking to repair the left engine, following last year’s inspection…”
Dr. Peter Edmund Jones is the most interesting Canadian you never heard of. His accomplishments were many, yet he died in poverty. He left a mark in science and public affairs, yet stumbled in drunkenness and despair.
The son of a Mississauga chief and English mother, Jones was the first Status Indian to graduate from a Canadian medical school, Queen’s University in 1866. His thesis was “The Indian Medicine Man.” Jones was the first to publish an Indigenous newspaper in Canada, The Indian, in 1886. He was a chess master, an archaeological advisor to the Smithsonian Institute, a political organizer for John A. Macdonald, a federal Indian agent.
“Jones appears to have been a romantic who felt his early success would carry him onwards,” writes biographer Allan Sherwin. Of course this could only end badly. To read Bridging Two Peoples is to sense the creep of petty humiliation and raw bigotry that crushed this Victorian romantic in the end.
Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault's department yesterday praised China for environmental leadership without mentioning its use of slave labour to make solar panels. A member of Guilbeault's own caucus earlier noted China used slaves to export renewable energy products: "41.7 percent of polysilicon used to produce solar panels, for all the environmentalists in the House, comes from Xinjiang."
Federal conflict investigations yesterday resumed with the appointment of Interim Ethics Commissioner Konrad von Finckenstein, 78, a retired federal judge. A vacancy had forced a four-month halt to ethics probes: 'Our hands were tied until there was a new Commissioner.'
A Freedom Convoy sympathizer yesterday won an Ontario Court of Justice dismissal of a mischief charge over his Facebook posts. Other protesters also faced police charges targeting social media messages: 'They peacefully exercised their Charter rights.'
Capitalism is to blame for the August wildfire season, the Communist Party of Canada said yesterday. A Party periodical People’s Voice said trees planted by capitalist forestry companies were more susceptible to fire than other trees: 'The trees are pinnacles of so-called capitalist efficiency.'
Federal regulators polled Canadians on support for tighter controls on pesticides, records show. “Most Canadians continue to hold negative associations with pesticides,” said an in-house report: "What is needed? Is it when a large group of people die?"
The Department of Public Safety acknowledges stiff resistance to its national buyback of prohibited firearms as costly and pointless. An in-house report confirmed fewer than half of owners would voluntarily surrender their firearms and 12 percent will never comply: "I am a responsible owner."
Federal curators at the Canadian Aviation and Space Museum yesterday confirmed they are “deaccessioning” a century-old flying boat that survived a National Geographic expedition to the Amazon rainforest. The Museum said it has no room for the mahogany artifact: "It has been decided."
So many federal employees now work from home that more than a third of the government’s desk phones are “not being used,” according to records. Fully 15 percent have been permanently disconnected: 'We define ‘dormant’ phone lines as lines that have been assigned and activated but are not being used.'
A federal arbitrator yesterday cited the rising cost of living in awarding VIA Rail engineers a combined 10.5 percent wage increase over three years, more than the railway offered. Inflation was a fact of life for the first time in generations, said Canada Labour Code arbitrator William Kaplan: "It is fair to say that interest arbitrators have not had to contend with significant inflation since the early 1980s."
