Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland is “too busy” to mind her budget bill, say MPs. Opposition members of the Commons finance committee submitted a rewritten bill with dozens of amendments: "We have suggested to delete, delete, delete."
Federal agencies are warehousing millions of rapid Covid test kits only weeks after Parliament voted to spend billions more with suppliers. Total spending on rapid tests is more than $4 billion to date including millions of kits the government could not give away: "We are just actually in the midst of loading up."
Federal candidates in Prairie provinces and Ontario were most likely to campaign door to door in the nation’s first pandemic election, new data show. An Elections Canada survey also found winning candidates were more likely to have asked for votes in person: 'Despite the need for pandemic precautions 7 in 10 candidates interacted with electors by going door to door.'
Poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, writes for Blacklock’s each and every Sunday: “A recent poll in the United Kingdom asked people who is best suited to reign after Queen Elizabeth II…”
It’s unfashionable today to recall the settlement of the West as a romantic era. Yet not every sodbuster was an agent of genocide, and very many sincere people dedicated their lives to building up a young country with genuine affection for the land and its people. When Sam Steele lay on his deathbed in England in 1919, he asked that they bury him in Winnipeg where he started his career as a $1.25-a day constable with the North-West Mounted Police.
Well into the 1950s, generations of Canadian schoolchildren remembered Sam Steele as the most famous policeman in the country. He was renowned not for any extraordinary crime-busting exploit but as an honest lawman in an era of hornswogglers. Steele was famous enough that he published his 1914 memoirs Forty Years In Canada, and his son Harwood in 1956 recounted Steele’s life in The Morning Call, “a truly wretched book” filled with many factual errors, writes historian Rod Macleod, professor emeritus at the University of Alberta.
A third law enforcement executive, former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly, yesterday denied advising cabinet to use emergency powers against the Freedom Convoy. Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino claimed February 28, “We had to invoke the Emergencies Act and we did so on the basis of non-partisan professional advice from law enforcement.”
Cabinet is concealing the true cost of a landmark bill that would extend official bilingualism to the private sector, the Parliamentary Budget Office said yesterday. Actual costs were more than a quarter billion, said analysts: 'Departments have not announced details and refused to provide these details.'
A shortage of oil and gas workers is a big problem, says Labour Minister Seamus O’Regan. His remarks follow a report that cabinet's climate change plan threatens 170,000 energy jobs, by federal estimate: "Are you spinning us here? Are you serious?"
Federal Covid vaccine mandates would be unlawful under a private bill tabled yesterday in the Commons. “These mandates have been nothing more than a cruel attempt to demonize a small minority and they are absolutely unnecessary and without any scientific basis,” said Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre (Carleton, Ont.), sponsor of the bill: "End this discrimination."
Canada Revenue Agency whistleblowers must be shielded from management reprisals, Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien yesterday told the Commons ethics committee. Therrien’s remarks followed the naming of Agency staff who alleged corrupt practices in the treatment of offshore corporate accounts: "Obviously a whistleblower should be protected."
Thefts and losses at federal departments and agencies total more than $1.2 million, records show. Incidents detailed by cabinet ranged from stolen wine at the Department of Foreign Affairs to rampant misuse of credit cards at Parks Canada: "Public servants shall act at all times in a manner that will bear the closet public scrutiny."
Former transport minister Marc Garneau and 13 other Liberal MPs yesterday joined New Democrats in attempting to decriminalize heroin. An opposition bill failed on Second Reading but not without support from senior Liberals including three committee chairs and a former provincial finance minister: "Its time has come."
A hasty stock sale cost a federal agency more than $3.7 million, records show. The Canadian Race Relations Foundation disclosed losses stemming from a single decision by panicked directors to dump shares at the outbreak of the pandemic: "We can’t pay the going rate for people who are knowledgeable on the inside workings of investments."
A cabinet bill permitting cellphone searches by border guards is so vague it is certain be fought in court, the Senate national security committee was told yesterday. Civil rights groups opposed the measure: "A personal digital device is analogous to crossing the border with almost every piece of mail a person has ever received or sent."
Attorney General David Lametti yesterday would not define the scope of a new crime of “downplaying” the Holocaust. “I don’t have to define it,” Lametti testified at the Senate legal and constitutional affairs committee reviewing his bill: "I mean, the word has a plain language meaning in English."
