Canada’s largest public sector union is petitioning MPs to repeal federal corporate tax cuts by former finance minister Jim Flaherty. Repeal is worth billions a year, said the 715,000-member Canadian Union of Public Employees: "These cuts have left a huge hole in federal budgets."
Cabinet yesterday ordered an Indian diplomat out of the country over allegations of official ties to the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Surrey, B.C. activist. The claim “if proven true” was grave, said cabinet: "We will seek the truth."
The newspaper lobby is demanding its $595 million “temporary” bailout be extended with double the federal subsidies. “Address this,” lobbyist Paul Deegan, CEO of News Media Canada, wrote MPs: "The financial situation for most news publishers is extremely challenging."
Cabinet is hiking Employment Insurance premiums by $1.4 billion despite a promise by Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland that rates would be “holding steady.” Freeland in her March 28 budget promised “more money in Canadians’ pockets after a hard day’s work.”
Parliament must “require home prices to stall” since inflation mainly benefits longtime homeowners over 55, a CMHC-sponsored group wrote MPs. The Prime Minister last Wednesday said “house pricing cannot continue to go up” but stopped short of advocating price controls: "It's not fair."
About 15 percent of Canadians, as many as six million people, are conspiracy theorists, says a federally-subsidized media monitor. The Canadian Anti-Hate Network says it requires more subsidies to counter those who would “do away with our liberal democracy.”
Anti-China slavery groups have lost a legal challenge to force federal agents to seize products made by forced labour. The Federal Court of Appeal said human rights advocates could not sue on principle, alone: "Our enforcement to this point has been terrible."
Poet Shai Ben-Shalom writes: “U.S., Cuba restore ties. Canada claims credit. We were the host, the facilitator, the neutral ground. Let no one think the former foes could have done it without us…”
In Canada’s tortured postwar history of “reconciliation” with Indigenous people not a single deputy minister has been called to the witness stand. That’s odd. There have been twenty of them since 1953, yet blame for repeated failures was pinned on churches, social workers, Indian Residential School superintendents, the police or Canadian society as a whole. When everybody is to blame, nobody is to blame.
Professor Jim Miller of the University of Saskatchewan pulls back the curtain on the historical blame game. Residential Schools And Reconciliation documents Ottawa’s handling of Indigenous issues. This is not ancient history. It just happened.
Methodically, step by step in infuriating detail, Miller recounts the costly failures, a “pettifogging” dispute resolution system and bureaucratic cross-piling of sawdust that left Canadians with a process that satisfied no one.
Governor General Mary Simon logged thousands of kilometres by government jet to live in Nova Scotia rather than the 175-room Rideau Hall mansion in Ottawa. Simon yesterday disclosed she decided to make Nova Scotia her home "during the pandemic."
Cabinet yesterday issued a public safety order suspending the experimental decriminalization of cocaine and other narcotics in British Columbia schoolyards, airports and other targeted locations. B.C. saw blanket decriminalization of simple possession of drugs provincewide last January 31: "My son’s daycare had to be shut down."
Repeal of the GST on new apartment construction will cost about a third of a billion a year, according to the Parliamentary Budget Office. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau yesterday revived a 2015 campaign promise for a sales tax holiday on new, purpose-built apartments: "How many new buildings?"
Conservatives will compel Parliament to vote on a mandate that municipalities issue 15 percent more home building permits annually or lose federal subsidies, Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre said yesterday. “More home building, more money,” he said. “Less home building, less money.”
A CBC story that made gratuitous reference to criminal suspects as white and angry failed to meet the network's own journalism code, an ombudsman ruled yesterday. The story suggested violent criminals in B.C. were young, Caucasian and "disgruntled."
Cabinet yesterday for a second time extended a repayment deadline on $49.2 billion worth of interest-free pandemic loans for small business. Loans originally due December 31: "The government has failed to address the most critical issue."
