The Department of Finance will order banks to disclose how much they pocket in non-sufficient funds fees on chequing accounts -- it could be as high as a half billion a year, said the department -- with a new cap on NSF charges. Service fees overall may account for more than a tenth of earnings by Canada’s largest banks, said a federal report: "There is very limited information published by banks." READ MORE
Twenty-five New Democrat MPs oppose any cabinet intervention in rotating postal strikes, says Party leader Jagmeet Singh. The last mail strike six years ago ended with back-to-work legislation after five weeks: "Stay out of this." READ MORE
Parliament owes Canada an apology for the housing crisis, says a Commons petition sponsored by a former Government House Leader. Liberal MP Bardish Chagger (Waterloo, Ont.) did not comment: "There must be accountability and a public apology." READ MORE
The Canada Revenue Agency continues to make thousands of errors in assessing taxes, records show. The latest figures follow a 2016 audit that found taxpayers had a 6 in 10 chance of successfully appealing an assessment: 'Taxpayers have a right.' READ MORE
Drug addicts should be called patients instead, says the Federal Housing Advocate. Marie-Josée Houle in a report to Parliament said the noun “addicts” was insensitive and judgmental: "Words we use matter." READ MORE
Poet Shai Ben-Shalom writes: "My hairdresser pressed his fingers against my scalp; my teller had her eyes in my transactions; my plumber had his tools in my bathtub..." READ MORE
It was a horrific year, 1917: conscription and coal rationing in Canada, carnage in France, revolution in Russia, unrestricted submarine warfare on the Atlantic. Steamships were torpedoed at the rate of ten a day. One British liner bound for Halifax, the Rappahannock, vanished without a trace. This was the moment French Foreign Minister René Viviani spoke to Parliament. “Every speech is a freeze-frame of history in the making,” writes J. Patrick Boyer in Foreign Voices In The House; “When Réne Viviani spoke in 1917, his vibrant voice had to fill the entire chamber because no amplifying speakers delivered his words to the audience.” Boyer captures the event, May 12, 1917. Canadian casualties were 13,000 a month. Twenty-seven MPs were in uniform. One had been killed in action, another won the Victoria Cross. The MP for Beauce, Que., Henri Béland, could not attend the Commons that day. He was held in a German prison camp. READ MORE
My dad never owned a credit card. If you didn’t have it, you didn’t spend it. I remember him in his later years going to Eaton’s with my mother to buy a new set of appliances, and taking the money from the bank first and walking in there with over a thousand dollars in cash. Excessive borrowing doesn’t work and excessive debt usually results in people having to suffer. I went throughout the province, up and down every corner, and I listened at people’s kitchen tables, town halls – wherever I was, I found a consistent message: Why can’t government live the way we do? Why can’t they live within their means?
