Defence Minister David McGuinty included costs of tree-planting in attempting to meet a minimum 2 percent NATO target on military spending, Access To Information records show. The defence department still fell billions short: 'It's for the ongoing planting of approximately 14,450 trees at strategic locations.'
The Department of Transport promises its $90 billion regional high speed rail venture Alto will never go over budget. The department in a report to senators said “challenges are expected,” but did not elaborate: "How will Transport Canada make sure?"
Immigration Minister Lena Diab's office yesterday declined comment over its refusal to speak to independent media. Only newsrooms that meet criteria for government approval will be granted questions, according to a Department of Immigration notice: "The department must be satisfied."
Trade with the United States is compromising Canada’s “moral compass,” a Commons committee chair said yesterday. Liberal MP Salma Zahid (Scarborough Centre-Don Valley East, Ont.) said internal American immigration enforcement raised “serious human rights questions.”
Order of Canada recipients are too old, male and English-speaking, says a Privy Council memo. Cabinet aides in an Access To Information memo said work was underway to “modernize” civil honours: "Nominators are mostly older, male and English speaking and are extremely likely to nominate older male candidates."
Parks Canada would license a deer cull at a “sacred site” under a proposal disclosed Saturday. Parks managers complained deer were a nuisance at Grosse Ile, Que., a historic quarantine station home to mass graves of thousands who fled the Irish famine of 1847: "That island is a sacred site."
After 11 years of reconciliation fewer than half of employees in one major federal department say they have a clear understanding of what it means or how it applies to their work. It follows a 2024 Privy Council survey of Indigenous people that found reconciliation had not resulted in “any tangible improvements in the qualify of life for Indigenous people.”
MPs seek documents regarding millions in subsidies awarded to friends of the Liberal Party for a green energy project in Nova Scotia. One MP likened the windfall to the “green slush fund,” the scandal-ridden Sustainable Development Technology Canada agency disbanded in 2024 over conflicts of interest: "Canadians deserve transparency."
A federal judge has ordered public disclosure of locomotive data recorders for the first time since Parliament mandated use of the contentious surveillance equipment in 2022. The ruling came in the case of electronic data that captured the final, terrifying moments of a fatal derailment in a mountain pass: "Railway companies are statutorily obliged to record this information."
The Department of Natural Resources proposes a fully-automated earthquake warning system that would not only alert the public of impending disaster but slow trains, divert landing aircraft and shut off natural gas mains. No budget was disclosed: "Why have you not taken any steps to protect your property from earthquakes?"
It was a monument to scandal. For 19th century visitors and VIPs, the last stop in Ottawa was Canadian Pacific Railway’s Broad Street station. It had no more frequent visitor than Prime Minister John Abbott, millionaire lawyer and CPR fixer. The station is gone now, the scandal forgotten. And Abbott is recalled only as the great-grandfather of actor Christopher Plummer.
First-hand accounts of horrific childhoods are rare in literature, and compelling: Charlie Chaplin’s My Autobiography, or A Memoir of Robert Blincoe, the recollections of an English workhouse boy that was so stark one U.K. reviewer said it made Oliver Twist look like a holiday camp.
From Athabasca University Press is My Decade at Old Sun, My Lifetime of Hell, the memoirs of an Indian Residential schoolboy. Arthur Bear Chief’s story is so raw it would have gone unpublished 30 years ago. Bear Chief notes with irony the Anglican Church didn’t give him much of an education at the Old Sun Residential School in Gleichen, Alta. His English skills were so poor that later, as a public servant, he had an ex-wife ghostwrite his government reports. The result in My Decade at Old Sun is a plain and riveting narrative stripped of adjectives and ornamental prose. It is vivid and powerful.
Newly-declassified 2004 cabinet minutes show then-Prime Minister Paul Martin agonized over legalization of same-sex marriage. Martin privately complained provincial courts had forced the government’s hand, according to Access To Information records disclosed yesterday: "Many Canadians are struggling with the idea."
The Department of Crown-Indigenous Relations has censored as "confidential" its files on what a Kamloops, B.C. First Nation did with $12.1 million paid to recover alleged graves of Indian Residential School children. The Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation acknowledged February 18 it never exhumed any remains: "The heartbreaking truth about Residential Schools’ unmarked burials continues to be unveiled."
Layoffs due to artificial intelligence are already underway, says one of the country’s largest unions. The Canadian Union of Public Employees in a report to senators itemized jobs that have vanished: "CUPE is already seeing job loss."
