The Canada Revenue Agency in Federal Court documents admits it spent thirteen years making direct deposit payments to the wrong taxpayer’s account. The long-running error was only discovered when an Alberta mother wrote the Agency to complain she had not received her tax refund: “Credits had been paid into the account since 1997.”
The GST will be charged on top of a new federal luxury tax on six-figure autos, boats and aircraft, the Department of Finance said yesterday. Motor homes, hearses and crop dusters are exempt: “I’ve got an airplane and I’m called the rich guy.”
Cabinet yesterday abruptly reworked plans for an Indigenous funding announcement to avoid using the John A. Macdonald Building across the street from Parliament Hill. One cabinet member earlier said it was “uncomfortable coming into this building” because of a heritage plaque bearing Macdonald’s name: ‘He was complicit in this Residential School system.’
We Charity won a string of sweetheart contracts prior to cabinet’s 2020 approval of a $43.5 million pandemic grant that prompted a public uproar, records show. A year-long investigation by the Procurement Ombudsman yesterday revealed departments typically called We Charity with confidential contract offers, then worked out the price later: ‘It was an unfair advantage.’
An expected September general election must focus on repayment of Covid expenses, New Democrat leader Jagmeet Singh yesterday told reporters. Unprecedented spending raised the federal debt ceiling 56 percent: “Who is going to pay for this? It’s a legitimate question.”
The Department of Public Works hired offshore consultants to check if federal agencies bought slave-made goods from Asian contractors. The $70,531 study by the University of Nottingham was completed in May but not made public: “I take this situation very seriously.”
Canadians are confused by a Department of Finance proposal for “open banking,” do not understand the concept and are skeptical even once it’s explained, says in-house research. The department detailed findings of online focus groups following the release last Thursday of an advisory panel report: “Who are these people?”
The federal Leaders’ Debates Commission will monitor Twitter traffic for real-time voter reaction to televised exchanges as part of a $99,412 research project. Twitter posts will help the Commission understand what voters like and why, it said: “This study will analyze how debates are covered and discussed via social media.”
A legal activist who lamented the “shameful history” of John A. Macdonald and opposed citizenship tests is now a federal judge. Avvy Yao-Yao Go had been director of a Toronto law clinic that criticized Canadians for “anti-China sentiment and white supremacy.”
Opposition MPs propose a federal law endorsed in principle by all parties to ban imports of slave-made goods. Two similar private Liberal bills lapsed in the last Parliament and Senate banking committee: “I’m really shocked.”
The Supreme Court says there was no need for Justice Rosalie Abella to recuse herself from a case in which her husband worked for the appellant. The Canadian Judicial Council cautions all judges should avoid “reasonable suspicion” of conflict: “Judges should be attentive to both actual conflicts between their self-interest and their duty of impartial adjudication.”
Foreign offshore speculators face a first-time federal equity tax of $10,000 to $12,000 a year in Canada’s priciest housing markets. The Department of Finance detailed the tax to take effect January 1: “We don’t want to encourage any sort of speculation on housing.”
The Department of Transport surveyed Canadians on whether they’d take a flying taxi. Most said it was not a good idea. The research cost $61,168: “Some feel the sounds would disturb them, others feel flying taxicabs sound like an accident waiting to happen.”
“We need to help immigrants,”
says Sylvain,
sinking his teeth
into a Double Angus Burger
he gets at Harvey’s.
“Agree,”
says Stephanie,
sipping Iced Mocha Latte
from Tim Hortons.
Anne joins them,
unwrapping the chicken donair,
tabouli, and baba ganoush
she gets at the Lebanese bakery.
(Editor’s note: poet Shai Ben-Shalom, an Israeli-born biologist, writes for Blacklock’s each and every Sunday)
In 1937 Canada had a higher infant mortality rate than South Africa and Ireland. Until 1919 all national medical services were managed by the Department of Agriculture. Child deaths were such an inescapable horror in family life that Prime Minister John Thompson (1892-4) lost four of his nine children in infancy.
Historian Mona Gleason documents the dawn of awareness that Canada’s infants could not be left to sicken and die in an expression of survival of the fittest: “Merely being small and young, in other words, required medical attention.”
Small Matters: Canadian Children in Sickness and Health is a compelling social history that chronicles the country’s struggle towards the light.
Canada’s first children’s hospital ward opened in Montreal in 1822. By 1879 the first course in pediatrics was introduced, at the University of Laval. Yet there was little understanding of infant care beyond folklore. It’s a phenomenon still visible today in the sweep of gravestones depicting little lambs and cherubs that dominate any 19th century Canadian cemetery.
It was as if the small and weak were never meant to live. Gleason cites an 1897 medical text that warned the newborn “is almost certain sooner or later to exhibit tendencies to disease in the direction of the stock from whence it springs…it may receive an inheritance of tuberculosis or epilepsy, or a tendency to gout or rheumatism.”
Where health and hygiene were introduced in the classroom, the treatment leaned to morality and abstinence from sin. An 1896 text Gage’s Health Series for Intermediate Classes cautioned students to beware of wine jelly: “The appetite, becoming uncontrollable, may bring its owner to a drunkard’s grave.”
The result was the appalling infant mortality rate. A century ago approximately 1 in 6 babies Canadian babies died by age three. In the tubercular slums of the bigger cities the death rate was worse, 1 in 3.
“Overall, the high rate of infant mortality was a state of affairs largely accepted as tragic, but not yet a matter of concern,” writes Gleason, of the University of British Columbia.
Small Matters draws on our deepest childhood memories of illness. Who forgets the blight of chicken pox, or the smell of VapoRub in a shuttered bedroom, or soothing cool of vanilla ice cream after a tonsillectomy?
So, the most unforgettable voices in Gleason’s work are oral histories – like Theresa, who recalls being stricken with polio, the scourge that afflicted 50,000 Canadians till 1962: “When I went to Toronto when I was sixteen, they drilled into me that, ‘Your polio is in your mind. You can do anything. Don’t let polio keep you down’…I remember one girl had polio in both legs, and they stood her up against the wall and she walked with these crutches. And they said to her, ‘Come on, Doreen, you got to walk.’ ‘I can’t.’ She’d cry and she would cry.”
The country cried. Then we got better.
By Holly Doan
Small Matters: Canadian Children in Sickness and Health by Mona Gleason; McGill-Queens University Press; 232 Pages; ISBN 9780-7735-41337; $29.95
