Blacklock's Reporter

Poet W.N. Branson writes: “A town grew around the store, Families grew around the store as a country emerged from the land and a people found their voice in the wilderness. Maps drawn, track laid and roads cut, The citizens working together, became a Nation…”

How do you destroy a centuries-old industry? We managed. Ottawa for decades tried and failed to save the Atlantic northern cod fishery from European poachers. There were fishing limits and quotas, scientific panels and studies, diplomatic protests and many, many transatlantic meetings. “There are no gunboat solutions,” Joe Clark once remarked. As an old German philosopher put it, pacifism is no virtue in the toothless. The results are still cursed in Newfoundland & Labrador as the biggest layoff in Canadian history.

The cod fishery was a heritage industry that thrived for 400 years and helped build the federation. As late as the 1980s the fishery accounted for one-tenth of Newfoundland’s economy.

Its decline is one of the nation’s great commercial collapses, more devastating than the Avro Arrow or wind-up of the Hudson’s Bay fur trade. “Canada was preoccupied with rebuilding fish stocks; the European Union was preoccupied with finding outlets for its fishing capacity,” authors note. “The stage was set for confrontation.”

Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam and dozens of other pandemic managers were required to sign a secret oath promising never to divulge information that “may result in embarrassment” for cabinet, Access To Information records show. “Quite a few” were required to sign the pledge, said a newly-released federal memo: "It makes me wonder, what is so damaging?"

The health department in its last memo to then-Addictions Minister Ya’ara Saks cautioned that “changing laws alone is not sufficient” to reduce drug overdose deaths. The December 17 memo came nearly two years after cabinet changed federal law to decriminalize personal possession of narcotics in British Columbia: "If pressed on national decriminalization, there is no plan for national decriminalization."

There is no obvious public interest in Alberta’s proposed withdrawal from the Canada Pension Plan, Premier Danielle Smith said yesterday. The federal cabinet had opposed divvying up the $699.6 billion fund: "I am not seeing there is an appetite to put it to the people."

The national poverty rate is up again for a fourth consecutive year to 10.2 percent, Statistics Canada said yesterday. The rate was even higher, as much as 10.9 percent, using new calculations to be introduced this year: "Four million Canadians lived below the poverty line."

A public utility attempted a 70 percent excess charge for release of records on its handling of a 2023 strike, Ontario’s Office of the Information Commissioner has ruled. Hydro Ottawa tried to bill more than a half million dollars for what it claimed were thousands of hours needed to review and censor documents sought by Blacklock’s: 'The fee is excessive and not reasonable.'

CBC News for the second time in six weeks faces demands that it submit to the same independent scrutiny as all other television and radio stations. It is the only broadcaster in Canada permitted to deal with audience complaints in-house: 'It misrepresented facts, laundered disinformation from Hamas-controlled sources and contributed to the normalization of anti-Semitic narratives.'

Canada’s economy has fallen into what the Canadian Chamber of Commerce yesterday called a “worst case forecast.” Cabinet in its last Economic Statement had claimed the nation would be a G7 leader in growth this year: "The economy took a dive."

Asking Customs officers to cross the U.S. border does not qualify as foreign service work, a labour board has ruled. Canada Border Services Agency officers claimed "foreign assignment" benefits each time they drove ten kilometres to Blaine, Washington: "There are thousands of employees who commute across the Canada-U.S. border every day."

The co-leader of the federal Green Party yesterday resigned after polling fifth in a five-candidate contest for a seat in Parliament. Jonathan Pedneault, former Amnesty International organizer, said election results overall were “deeply disappointing.”

Abusive remarks about religion or race are an offence against “all of Canada,” says an Ontario Provincial Court judge. The observation came in sentencing of a Black man for hectoring two Muslim teenagers aboard a transit bus: "His threats were cruel."

The Liberal Party deliberately stoked fears of American annexation in a cynical play for votes, Bloc Québécois leader Yves-François Blanchet said yesterday. “The Liberals are not where they expected to be,” Blanchet told reporters: "Nobody should already look at the numbers saying, ‘OK, we can send everybody to hell because we can make a deal with the NDP.'"

New Democrat leader Jagmeet Singh was among a half-dozen MPs to finish third in their ridings Monday night, according to updated returns. The loss of all but seven seats in the Commons was the NDP's worst showing since its forerunner the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation under then-leader James Woodsworth was held to seven seats in 1935: "People are right to be angry."

Newly-elected Conservative MP Steven Bonk led the nation in Monday’s election with the biggest majority of any candidate. Bonk won almost 84 percent of votes cast in Souris-Moose Mountain, a sprawling Saskatchewan riding the size of Austria where the second language is not French but German: "Thank you."