Social Insurance Numbers are assigned for life, says a federal judge. The ruling came in the case of a tax protester who petitioned to have his number deleted from a federal database that stores every SIN card issued since 1964: “Information is updated as required.”
Employers who hire migrant labour will be required to provide workers private health insurance, according to a cabinet proposal. Changes to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program would also mandate that employers post labour regulations in the migrants’ own language: ‘They have the same rights as Canadians.’
Newfoundland & Labrador has per capita the greatest literary output of any province, producing a stream of wonderful novels and non-fiction accounts of island life. There were only 22 members in Premier Joey Smallwood’s 1949 Liberal caucus, but two of them – Herbert Pottle and Harold Horwood – wrote memoirs that rate among the most candid, insightful and intelligent depictions of Canadian political life.
With fame comes caricature. Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are long accustomed to being depicted as quaint, funny, hard-drinking bumpkins. In Most Of What Follows Is True, poet Michael Crummey of St. John’s laments the literary misrepresentation of his home province. Crummey has the self-awareness to note this has the ring of the Congolese bushman who protests National Geographic expropriated part of his soul when it took a picture, but the complaint stands nonetheless. His target is a certain U.S. novel that “caused me to foam at the mouth,” says Crummey.
First, the fame. “It’s hard now to remember what things were like for writers before Newfoundlanders began regularly appearing on major literary prize and best-of-the-year and bestseller lists,” writes Crummey. He credits the breakthrough to the 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Shipping News by Annie Proulx.
“For the first time in Newfoundland’s history, local stories are being read and celebrated by ourselves and by strangers abroad,” he writes. “And being seen and acknowledged in this way makes Newfoundland and my life within it feel more substantial, more solid. That this place is in a book!”
Now, the caricature: “I was at a literary festival reception somewhere in the United States almost twenty years ago. I was talking to a festival-goer who had no idea who I was, which is generally my experience at literary events in the U.S. I mentioned I was from Newfoundland and was expecting the usual blank stare, but her face lit up. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I know all about Newfoundland.’ ‘You do?’ I said, and I’m sure my face registered my surprise. ‘Yes, absolutely,’ she insisted. ‘I just read The Bird Artist. Do you know it?’ ‘I do know it,’ I told her. ‘And I hate to break it to you, but you know nothing about Newfoundland.’”
The Bird Artist was published in 1994 by America novelist Howard Norman of Washington, D.C. It tells of a schoolboy painter, Fabian, in WWI-era Witless Bay. “I started the book years ago but wasn’t able to finish it,” writes Crummey: “From start to finish, it is complete and utter bullshit.”
Characters have Greek names like Odeon (unlikely); they encounter raccoons (there are none in Newfoundland); they eat scones for breakfast (!) and sea bass, lettuce and tomatoes for supper. “No such supper was eaten in Newfoundland at the turn of the 20th century,” says Crummey. There are no sea bass on the Grand Banks.
The novel is “Codco satire,” he laments: “It is impossible for me, and I think for anyone with even the vaguest sense of the realities of life in Newfoundland, not to feel insulted by the book’s cavalier use of the place for its own ends. I know from my parents’ stories what people endured simply to keep body and soul together in those communities. And it’s exasperating to see the world appropriated by someone with so little regard for the most basic truths of those lives.”
Such is the price of fame.
By Holly Doan
Most of What Follows is True, by Michael Crummey; University of Alberta Press; 72 pages; ISBN 9781-77212-4578; $11.99
The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board holds millions’ worth of stock in Chinese propaganda film studios even after the Commons censured China for genocide, accounts show. The Board five years ago had claimed to make human rights a “focus area of concern” when investing Canadians’ money: “This is our great homeland.”
A federally-subsidized history society in a published commentary says British Columbia should be renamed to purge its colonial past. “It’s not British; it never was,” Canada’s National History Society wrote in the August issue of its taxpayer-funded periodical: “These names direct us to a history of bloodshed and violence.”
Candidates in an expected Covid election must campaign with masks on, Canada’s chief public health officer said yesterday. Dr. Theresa Tam said even candidates who are fully vaccinated should be masked in the company of strangers: “Is it safe to do this right now?”
Liberal MP Will Amos (Pontiac, Que.) says he consulted a psychotherapist after being censured by the Commons June 7 for misconduct. “The assessments from my health team suggest I don’t have any mental health disorder,” Amos told local Québec reporters in a videoconference from his constituency office: “My new wellness plan specifically addresses stress.”
Most Canadians looking at federal rebates to buy an electric car have six-figure incomes and university degrees, says in-house research by the Privy Council Office. The Commons environment committee in a report on the plug-in auto market acknowledged zero emission vehicles remain out of reach for many: “Tesla has received the most subsidies from this program.”
Federal agencies pumped millions worth of subsidies into a failing Covid contractor even as the company was headed for bankruptcy court, accounts show. Spartan Bioscience Inc. of Ottawa received the aid after “good meetings” with aides in the Prime Minister’s Office: “We are in good shape.”
Few Canadians, only four percent, are aware Canada is still sending foreign aid to China, according to a Department of Foreign Affairs survey. Millions in aid last year included money for local Chinese projects on “empowerment” and “environmental justice.”
Kristina Namiesniowski, the former Public Health Agency president abruptly reassigned following the outbreak of the pandemic, has been formally reprimanded for late ethics filings. Cabinet transferred Namiesniowski to another $273,700-a year post as associate deputy minister in the Department of Employment: “I need a break.”
Labour Minister Filomena Tassi yesterday set the clock on enforcement of pay equity for federally-regulated private sector employers. Companies have until August 31, 2024 to draft equity plans, and up to five additional years to adjust wages for women: “I would love to have seen this corrected overnight.”
Too many professional people filing for bankruptcy consider ordinary labour “beneath them,” says a Nova Scotia adjudicator. The Court quoted Ayn Rand: “There is no such thing as a lousy job, only lousy men who don’t care to do it.”
One in six Canadians do not trust government news, says in-house research by the Privy Council Office. Skeptics numbered one in three in Alberta. The survey preceded a Department of Heritage directive to enforce federal standards on news reporting: “To what extent do you trust Government of Canada information?”
Library and Archives Canada yesterday defended erasing a longstanding web resource on John A. Macdonald as “outdated.” The First Among Equals feature originally unveiled by five prime ministers had praised the Father of Confederation as a good-humoured visionary who forged a nation: ‘It no longer reflects current understanding of history.’
