A federal agency yesterday declined comment on a project manager who publicly boasted of joining counter protests against the Freedom Convoy and called truckers anti-Trudeau roughnecks. Federal guides state employees must be politically neutral: 'As a sturdily built white male I could blend in.'
Military spending will increase in Thursday’s budget, Defence Minister Anita Anand yesterday told the Senate national security committee. The pledge came despite a cabinet promise to cut billions from the deficit: "We are increasing our defence spending."
Cabinet must stop deficit spending, the Commons finance committee yesterday wrote in a report. MPs recommended cabinet “present as soon as possible a plan to return to a balanced budget” as the first of 222 recommendations on finances: "What are we looking at as a country?"
The image of policing is so poor applications to the RCMP have plummeted, the Commons human resources committee was told yesterday. Almost a third of those who do apply and are accepted never bother to finish training, said the National Police Federation: "Policing is no longer considered as attractive a career as it used to be."
Hurried Covid contracting and outright theft of Public Health Agency supplies cost taxpayers more than $106 million, records show. The Agency said it did its best: "We are moving as quickly as possible to wire transfer money now."
The Canadian Journalism Foundation is nominating for an “excellence award” disputed accounts of an anti-pipeline protest. A federal memo contradicts media versions of the 2021 arrest of a reporter for The Narwhal, a subsidized environmental advocacy website: "My arrest actually makes me a big part of a national reckoning with press freedoms."
A majority of Canadians support cuts to the number of mail delivery days to three a week if it saves money at the post office, says in-house Privy Council Office research. Cabinet in the past six years has spent $4.5 million polling questions about Canada Post, records show: "We were not aware of the polling."
The Department of Canadian Heritage denies contract splitting in a case of $42,000 divvied into 22 separate payments to a favoured supplier. The limit on contracts that may be issued without public notice is $40,000: "The vendor submitted individual invoices per days worked."
The Department of Industry acknowledges higher risks of default under a proposal to issue taxpayer-guaranteed lines of credit for small business. “Lines of credit are assumed to have a higher loss rate than term loans,” about 50 percent higher, the department said: "Small businesses have evolved."
Trail, B.C. produced the 1939 World Ice Hockey Champion Smoke Eaters, longtime Canadian Labour Congress president Ken Georgetti, NHL All Star Ray Ferraro and historian Ron Verzuh, a smelter worker’s son who clocked hours at the Cominco mill in its heyday and became a gifted chronicler of the nation’s labour history. “If there was ever a workplace that would persuade me to return to school it was the lead furnaces,” writes Verzuh.
Smelter Wars through meticulous research and a warm narrative documents tensions between managers in a company town and the Communist-led Local 480 of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. It is also more than that.
Verzuh recaptures an era when home for most Canadians meant a thriving place far from the big cities. It’s not that Trail was off the beaten path; there was no path. The Trans-Canada Highway was not complete until 1962. Years later when Brian Mulroney famously campaigned on the slogan that Canada was a land of “small towns and big dreams” it touched a nostalgic chord with many voters.
Cabinet conducted pre-election polling on vaccine mandates that found they were most divisive in regions where Liberals held few seats. The confidential polling was finalized only days before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau called a snap election, records show: 'Atlantic Canada indicated unanimous support for requiring proof of vaccination for domestic flights; Alberta and Saskatchewan were unanimous in opposing this idea.'
Inflation is likely to remain high and climb even higher, Statistics Canada yesterday told the Commons finance committee. Analysts said they will change methods used to account for some price gains that explain the difference between Canadian and U.S. rates: "Thirty years I’ve worked at Statistics Canada and I can tell you we haven’t been through an economic period like this."
The Senate yesterday took 50 minutes flat to pass $88.7 billion in new spending amid complaints Parliament now gives only cursory scrutiny to budget bills. Spending included $13,209,519,773 to cover last-minute expenses before the fiscal year expired at midnight last night: "It does feel like party time."
Customs agents must show “reasonable general concern” prior to searching travelers’ cellphones and laptops under a cabinet bill yesterday introduced in the Senate. It follows an Alberta Court of Appeal ruling that struck down random searches as unconstitutional: "Electronic devices contain very sensitive personal information."
Crime does not pay, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday. The comments came in a unanimous decision upholding a steep fine against a ringleader of the biggest maple syrup heist in Canadian history: "Although this case involves maple syrup the hierarchy among the various accomplices is not unlike that of a drug ring."
