Blacklock's Reporter

Few authors possess the skill to take an everyday image and turn it just slightly, in Twilight Zone fashion, to reveal a startling and intriguing truth. Professor Joan Sangster of Trent University does just that in The Iconic North. To read Sangster’s account is to question every common media depiction of the Arctic. “The North has been rendered exotic, romantic, terrifying, sublime, enigmatic, otherworldly and intrinsically Canadian, and some of these adjectives are equated not just with the landscape but with the original inhabitants of the North,” Sangster writes. This is not ancient history. Parks Canada spent more than $21.5 million looking for an English shipwreck, "a salient reminder that we need an ongoing critical analysis of a romanticized North ‘discovered’ by white explorers,” says Sangster. The Franklin Expedition was a famous failure of no scientific or exploratory value whatsoever. Media’s fascination with the sailors' deaths is striking. READ MORE

Canada Post paid bonuses last year while losing a record $1.57 billion, CEO Doug Ettinger yesterday disclosed. Payments were made even as cabinet told the post office to “cut the fat.” READ MORE

MPs yesterday demanded Public Works Minister Joel Lightbound release a confidential report on postal service cuts. Cabinet has withheld the 2025 document for months: "Parliamentarians, municipalities, workers, citizens still do not have a detailed plan of what is going to happen." READ MORE

The Canada Border Services Agency yesterday said it will likely investigate whether imported China-made battery electric cars are assembled with slave-made parts. Conservative MP Michael Kram (Regina-Wascana) questioned why cabinet didn’t first check before approving the import of more than a quarter million Chinese vehicles: "Would you say it’s more than a little bit irresponsible?" READ MORE

The Senate yesterday by a 58 to 4 vote passed into law a cryptocurrency ban in election financing. The bill is the first of its kind that prohibits use of bitcoin in ordinary transactions where traceable money is accepted: "Changes to prevent anonymous and hard-to-trace funding channels are welcome." READ MORE

Environmental groups opposed to coal mining may petition cabinet to blacklist the rock as toxic, the Department of Health said yesterday. The remarks came in response to a Commons petition sponsored by the Green Party: "Regulate the mining, use, export and import of thermal coal in Canada." READ MORE

Cabinet in a confidential order granted its Chief Science Advisor “blanket authority” to travel worldwide even as other federal managers were ordered to cut expenses, Access To Information records show. Dr. Mona Nemer, a University of Ottawa biochemist, was told to charge expenses “where a personal benefit exists or may appear to exist.” READ MORE