Blacklock's Reporter

Bank of Canada managers yesterday denied running a press enemies’ list though staff openly discussed it in a recorded Zoom call. Bank Governor Tiff Macklem’s director of communications Paul Badertscher in an email denied blacklisting Blacklock’s despite telling a deputy governor in an audio tape: “I do not want to be in a situation where we are allowing Blacklock’s to be asking us. So, yes, that’s where we’re at.”

Statistics Canada yesterday said it had no estimate of the impact of a federal home equity tax. A CMCH-commissioned study issued January 6 claimed tax revenues worth up to $6 billion a year could be used to finance affordable housing: "Stop commissioning studies on how to tax home ownership."

Six cities saw house price gains averaging at or near six figures last year, Canadian Real Estate Association data showed yesterday. Members of the Commons finance committee reviewed the figures with Canada’s chief statistician: "Housing inflation is homegrown."

More than a million Afghans have asked to settle in Canada, Immigration Minister Sean Fraser yesterday told reporters. Canada has accepted 6750 to date, said Fraser: "I use the point to illustrate the pressures the system is facing."

Covid is real, a federal judge has ruled. The Federal Court dismissed out of hand a claim by a Montréal stock trader who likened himself to Galileo in questioning conventional wisdom: "The comparison is unfair to the great Italian scholar."

Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem’s staff disclosed the agency runs a press enemies’ list in contravention of cabinet orders. Macklem’s director of communications said blacklisted media outlets like Blacklock’s were prohibited from questioning bankers while friendly reporters may call for tips on how to cover the news: “Oh, is this on the record?”

Covid infection rates nationwide are much higher than the Public Health Agency expected, admits Dr. Theresa Tam, chief public health officer. The Agency for the first time acknowledged the entire basis of its pandemic planning, that fewer than one in ten Canadians would become infected, was wrong: "That’s a fact."

People are “going nuts” over Covid, exasperated MPs told the Commons health committee. Legislators summoned Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos for questioning this week on pandemic relief, lockdowns and quarantine measures: "It goes on and on."

Carbon taxes may slow economic growth for decades, says a Bank of Canada report. The outlook follows a Budget Office forecast that taxing fuel to lower emissions would cut workers’ net income: 'Canada has unique needs as a vast northern country for heating and transportation.'

Teamsters Canada has lost a challenge of a workplace vaccination order. The union appealed on behalf of an employee at the Toronto Maple Leafs’ home arena who was suspended without pay after declining to reveal his medical status: 'Personal medical information should not be the subject of disclosure.'

Poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, writes for Blacklock’s each and every Sunday: “Inside the building, signs in English and French direct me to First Aid stations, fire extinguishers, defibrillators…”

Canada’s last military conscription was popular. Resisters were scorned as weaklings who failed the tests of manhood and citizenship. Perceptions of the draft today are coloured by unpopular American wars – even deserters are treated as heroes – but facts are facts. Our conscription experience is a uniquely Canadian story, and Professor Daniel Byers of Laurentian University tells it well.

“The impacts of conscription and the National Resources Mobilization Act were largely forgotten in almost every way after the Second World War,” writes Byers. “For almost five full years the country had been mobilized to an extent that Canadians had not experienced before, nor have they since. Dozens of training centres and military camps stretched across the country. More than a million men and women served in the armed forces, over 150,000 of them as conscripts.”

Canadians homeowners could be forced to buy climate change insurance, says a federal report to Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair. “We welcome and support the core findings,” Blair said yesterday in a statement: "There’s important work to be done."

The Commons ethics committee yesterday voted 10-0 to examine federal monitoring of 33 million Canadian cellphone users in the name of lockdown enforcement. Conservative MP John Brassard (Barrie-Innisfil, Ont.) accused cabinet of using Covid as cover for “massive overreach.”

A British Columbia labour adjudicator has rejected firefighters' appeal to suspend a mandatory vaccination order. A firefighters' union local in Richmond, B.C. challenged the program as intrusive and heavy-handed: 'They must choose between getting a vaccine they do not want or giving up on their careers as firefighters.'