The housing department in a briefing note to Minister Gregor Robertson acknowledged for the first time that cabinet’s housing target will not be met this decade. Immigration was to blame in part, said the note made public yesterday: "One of the drivers of the housing shortage has been the strong growth in housing demand driven by immigration."
Labour Minister Patty Hajdu would gain “ambiguous and dangerous” powers to quash legal strikes under cabinet’s bill C-39, union executives said yesterday. The bill would codify strike bans by executive order, a measure used by cabinet 10 times in two years: "This concept is ambiguous and dangerous."
The Commons yesterday by a 298 to 23 vote rejected a Bloc Québécois motion to reinstate a 15 percent fee on Netflix and other video streaming services. Cabinet suspended the tax under threat of U.S. retaliation: "This kind of flip-flopping and back-and-forth is absolutely pointless."
Environment Minister Julie Dabrusin in a letter to MPs would not fix any deadline for introduction of a long-promised national flood insurance program. The proposal has been under review since 2020: "Our members are frustrated that we are not yet over the finish line."
Cabinet’s decision to grant Chinese electric vehicle makers a 278,989-car import quota over five years marked “a new path,” says an internal Department of Foreign Affairs memo. The censored eight-page document made no mention of slave-made parts: "If we concede that electric vehicles required forced labour in their supply chain, will you put them on the list of products banned in Canada?"
Widespread promotion of online gambling is a “serious mental health concern,” the Canadian Psychological Association is warning MPs. The group urged passage of a private bill to regulate sports betting advertising: "Expansion and promotion of online gambling have become matters of serious mental health concern."
Canadians can no longer file private complaints with the Competition Tribunal over false environmental claims in corporate advertising, says the Competition Bureau. No reason was given, though the directive Friday followed one MP’s complaint of misleading claims by the Government of Canada: "The Bureau reviewed its existing guidance."
Newly-disclosed records show cabinet was upset by the 1996 resignation of Québec’s lieutenant governor over his participation in an anti-Jewish street riot in his student days. Jean-Louis Roux's resignation was “a difficult precedent,” cabinet was told.
Opposition parties in a rare joint protest accuse cabinet of manipulating a Commons committee into conducting an investigation solely to boost a Liberal MP’s re-election. A spokesperson for first-term MP Alana Hirtle (Cumberland-Colchester, N.S.) denied the allegation: "It was a personal, local initiative of the MP."
Poet Shai Ben-Shalom writes: “Veterans Affairs struggles to handle thousands of phone calls from current and former military personnel. Staff shortages, technical glitches, and budget cuts are blamed…”
Author Wendy Dobson calls China’s system “authoritarian state capitalism.” Analysts similarly called pre-war Italy a “corporate state.” Like the Beijing Politburo of 2026, Mussolini in 1934 mesmerized outsiders with showboat statistics. Italian GDP appeared to defy Depression-era gravity, growing year over year from 1929 to 1939 while the Canadian economy shrank five percent overall.
“Everything looks well ‘on the surface’,” wrote economist Henry Schultz of the University of Chicago on a 1934 Italian tour. “No debating, no complaints.” The UK Saturday Review in 1934 put Mussolini on its cover and enthused: “He dragged Italy out of the mire of socialism and in a few years has made it the most successful and prosperous country in Europe.”
Interestingly, both pre-war Italy and contemporary China adopted the identical economic tools: over-valued currency, state management of the economy, price controls, abolition of independent trade unions, abolition of dissent, abolition of a free press, restrictions on mobility rights, property rights and rule of law, voodoo statistics and disastrous state spending. In fascist Italy one in five workers was a government employee.
Liberal MPs yesterday rejected a motion to recover $34 million in federal grants wrongfully paid to ineligible applicants by a scandal-ridden federal agency. Industry Minister Mélanie Joly earlier told Parliament it was “not in the public interest.”
The Budget Office that has already warned of 25 percent cost overruns on cabinet’s regional high-speed rail venture yesterday said it is investigating ridership claims. Promoters predicted 24 million Canadians a year would take the train: "There are 40 million people in Canada."
A fifth of food bank users in Toronto spend 100 percent of their income on rent, the Commons agriculture committee was told yesterday. Others have disposable income of less than $9 a day after paying for shelter and utilities, said the CEO of the Daily Bread Food Bank: "Here is the math."
Providing safe drinking water to First Nations by a fixed deadline “is not a yes or no question,” Indigenous Services Minister Mandy Gull-Masty said yesterday. Cabinet earlier skipped its 2021 deadline to eliminate all boiled water advisories despite spending $3.6 billion: "It’s not a yes or no question."
