An expected Commons vote today will see MPs attempt to take control of an investigation into suspected election fraud. Opposition parties yesterday said Parliament, not the Prime Minister, must direct next steps in determining whether the Chinese Communist Party interfered in the 2019 and 2021 campaigns: "The Prime Minister must be hiding something really big."
Federal managers set easy performance targets that only seem difficult to achieve, Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux said yesterday. Executives were skilled in pretending to be ambitious, he said: "I speak of my own experience of having been in the public service for more than two decades."
Cabinet approved millions in executives' back pay and bonuses last year even as Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland warned taxpayers to brace for a recession, records show. Almost every executive at every department and agency, 98 percent, received a bonus: "Times feel tough."
Food is so costly a third of users at Toronto food banks have a full time job, the Commons agriculture committee was told last night. “Things are upside down,” said the CEO of the Daily Bread Food Bank, the nation’s largest: "It does not make sense."
Consumer groups yesterday endorsed a private New Democrat bill to tighten compensation for air passengers including a tenfold increase in fines on carriers. “This bill is about setting our expectations,” said MP Taylor Bachrach (Skeena-Bulkley Valley, B.C.), sponsor of the bill: "We need to see a much stronger enforcement approach."
Elections Canada this year will introduce first-ever electronic voting lists, says Stéphane Perrault, chief electoral officer. Perrault in a report to Parliament said he also intended to store more information on foreign computer servers but detailed no new security measures to counter election fraud: "Considering the status of cybersecurity, your entire election could be hacked."
Compensation for federal employees shortchanged by bungled payroll software has cost taxpayers more than two-thirds of a billion so far, records show. Cabinet is still calculating the total cost of the 2016 Phoenix Pay System failure: "We saw how that didn’t work."
A federal paid holiday in memory of Indian Residential School children draws “mixed feelings” among First Nations, says in-house research by the Privy Council Office. Indigenous people said they were more concerned about crime and clean drinking water: "Very few believed the Government of Canada had made much in the way of tangible progress towards addressing the most pressing concerns."
The Department of Transport is demanding advanced reports on more than 100 million air cargo shipments a year into Canada. The mandate is not for tax collection but security, regulators said in a legal notice Saturday: "Half of all cargo that is transported by air travels on passenger flights."
Sledding is a riskier winter pastime than snowboarding, new Public Health Agency data show. A federal review of six years’ worth of emergency room admissions documented a higher accident rate involving sledding and tobogganing: "Risks highlight the importance of personal safety."
Poet Shai Ben-Shalom writes: “The Commissioner of the Canadian Football League sees no evidence to connect game-time head injuries with long-term neurological disorder…”
Forty years after the Titanic sank, newspaperman Walter Lord tracked down survivors to ask what they took as they headed for the lifeboats. Lord recited the grab bag of mementos in his 1955 bestseller A Night To Remember. One brought a Bible, another a pistol. There were pocketfuls of cigars or cookies, fur coats, a sapphire necklace and a music box that played the Portuguese tango. One Toronto passenger retrieved three oranges but left behind a tin box containing $200,000 in bonds.
Author Therese Greenwood calls this “telescoping,” a phenomenon experienced by people under stress when their vision tunnels to objects literally in front of them. Greenwood’s What You Take With You explores this intriguing theme in the million-acre Fort McMurray fire, a near-disaster of Titanic proportions.
A Liberal-appointed Senator yesterday told reporters it was “deeply insulting” to ask if he had contacts with Beijing. “I don’t like getting these attacks,” said Senator Yuen Pau Woo (B.C.): "People are claiming that I am some kind of a foreign agent."
Cabinet is rejecting a proposal to extend early Canada Pension Plan benefits to aging coal miners facing unwanted retirement due to climate regulations. Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson in a letter to MPs said the proposal “would create inequities.”
VIA Rail breached the Canada Labour Code in firing a locomotive engineer over his vaccination status, a federal arbitrator has ruled. Cabinet to date has not disclosed how many Crown employees were fired or suspended without pay for declining to show proof they took a Covid shot: "The policy was unreasonable."
