A now-retired judge enrolled in a charity scheme subsequently shut down by the Canada Revenue Agency as a tax shelter, records show. Documents filed in a Tax Court dispute indicate David Crane signed the charity papers in his chambers while a presiding judge at Superior Court in Hamilton, Ont.: "I did business and I was deceived."
Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino’s department censored hundreds of pages of documents sought by MPs reviewing security measures against the Freedom Convoy. “It makes no sense,” said Bloc Québécois MP Rhéal Fortin (Riviere-du-Nord, Que.): "Look at the documents we received here."
The federal spy agency in a secret memo discounted cabinet claims the Freedom Convoy was infiltrated by Nazis. A lone swastika flag spotted outside Parliament was offensive but not representative of protesters who considered themselves “patriotic Canadians standing up for their democratic rights,” said the Canadian Security Intelligence Service: "Only a small, fringe element supports the use of violence or might be willing to engage in it."
Internal Privy Council polling shows most Canadians are weary of federal pandemic management. “Several felt the federal approach at present lacked direction,” cabinet was told: "More participants felt the federal government was performing worse."
Cabinet will not name federal officials that approved funding for an anti-Semite who fantasized on Twitter about shooting Jews. Diversity Minister Ahmed Hussen told the Commons heritage committee he was not personally to blame: "We trusted at that time that adequate vetting had been completed."
A change in immigration rules will see half a million foreign students eligible to work full time in Canada. "It's good for our economy," Immigration Minister Sean Fraser told the Commons: "It is a great day for international students."
We are grateful this holiday to friends and subscribers for your support as Blacklock's embarks on an 11th great year of independent, all-original Canadian journalism. On behalf of all our contributors, please accept our thanks. We're back tomorrow -- The Editor.
Hitler’s publicist once spent the winter in Red Rock, Ont., humming the Horst Wessel Song and cursing his fate. In the carnival of Canadian oddities, none is more curious than The Little Third Reich On Lake Superior. Historian Ernest Zimmerman of Lakehead University chronicles the strange events that saw 1,150 men and boys – Jews and Nazis alike – herded into bunkhouses northeast of Thunder Bay in the winter of 1940.
It was a “third-rate jungle prison,” one inmate recalled. Another complained it was like being kidnapped and dragged into the wilderness. “They deeply resented the treatment,” Zimmerman writes. “They resented being in foreign surroundings, away from home, and being treated as prisoners of war rather than refugees.”
Peter Sloly, former Ottawa police chief, last night said Freedom Convoy demonstrators were told by local law enforcement they could park outside Parliament. Testifying at committee, Sloly said it was only when truckers declined to leave after a few days that the protest became what he called a “national security crisis.”
Inflation in Canada is now home grown, Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem said yesterday. Macklem and others for months had blamed rising costs on global developments: "Increasingly the inflation we’re seeing in Canada reflects what’s going on in Canada."
Big publishers and TV networks including the CBC are up for more than a third of a billion a year under cabinet’s Bill C-18, the Parliamentary Budget Office said yesterday. Independent publishers opposed to the bill have called it another federal subsidy for distrusted media: "We expect news businesses to receive total compensation around $329.2 million per year."
The Department of Fisheries yesterday said it has no plans for an Atlantic seal cull despite repeated appeals from MPs and senators. Legislators from Atlantic Canada have sought a cull over complaints predatory seals eat too many fish: "The department is not looking at a seal population control program at this time."
There is no guarantee a cabinet bill expanding bilingual mandates to the private sector will halt the decline in French, Languages Commissioner Raymond Théberge said yesterday. MPs at the Commons languages committee questioned how the mandate would apply in cities like Regina where francophones are outnumbered 200 to 1: "If we don’t do anything the decline will continue."
Records show the head of the federal public service, then-Privy Council Clerk Ian Shugart, certified a copy of an "April 31" website notice used to mislead a federal judge in a trademarks dispute. The notice included a “date modified” entry of April 31, 2017. April does not have 31 days: "There appears to have been a misunderstanding."
A member of the Commons ethics committee yesterday questioned censorship of records detailing attempts by now-Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino to backdate documents in a Federal Court case. “We don’t know whether it’s obfuscation, whether it’s abdication or whether it’s a cover-up,” Conservative MP James Bezan (Selkirk-Interlake, Man.) told the committee: "The question was about Minister Mendicino’s involvement with the potential falsification of records."
