Prime Minister Mark Carney has signaled an imminent election call with a gasoline price cut of 18¢ per litre. In a reversal of its signature climate plan, cabinet eliminated the consumer carbon tax effective April 1 after concluding it “created economic distortions.” READ MORE
Prime Minister Mark Carney will not disclose stocks and other assets he and his wife hold with corporations on two continents including federal contractors. Carney told reporters he found it odd that anyone would ask: "That’s an odd question." READ MORE
RCMP are preparing for a “large number of demonstrators” at a G7 summit in June, according to a briefing note. The Mounties initially budgeted more than $46 million for security at the two-day meeting, a sum expected to be a small fraction of the final cost: "The RCMP will be prepared to deal with a large number of demonstrators." READ MORE
Prime Minister Mark Carney fired or demoted two cabinet members who opposed him for the Liberal leadership. Carney praised former Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland as an “exceptional minister, exceptional public servant” but demoted her to Minister of Transport, the 11th position in cabinet's order of precedence: "We have new ministers with new ideas." READ MORE
Canadian book publishers face hard times without ongoing federal aid, says a Department of Canadian Heritage report. The industry is short of money for long term investments despite 46 years of subsidies, it said: "Costs reduced profit margins, forcing booksellers to offer free or discounted shipping to compete with major e-commerce players like Amazon.” READ MORE
Poet Shai Ben-Shalom writes: "Cartoonists taking aim at the White House are making progress. They figured out the tailored suits, facial expressions, hair style..." READ MORE
On the job at the CBC, producer John Scully recalls a supervisor once reprimanded him for doing a crossword puzzle on company time. Scully ducked out for lunch with his wife and began to sob: “Not just a few drops, but waterfalls of howling public pain,” he writes. “People looked away in embarrassment, but I didn’t care where I was. I was grieving, grieving so passionately for the loss of my skills and the lack of understanding from my bosses. The crying lasted half an hour.” The product of Scully’s torment is Am I Sane Yet? Clinically depressed for years – he consulted 40 doctors – Scully is also a skilled journalist with the concise eloquence you’d expect of someone who served 50 years in the newsroom. He is able to do what many other mentally ill Canadians cannot, document his own descent into self-agony. There was the time he was speaking at a book launch when a lone heckler rattled him and Scully could barely finish his remarks: “Zip, I suddenly had a depression crash. The stress was too much. ‘Is that it? Is that all there is?’" READ MORE
There had been discrimination against Catholics and Jews and Blacks and Indigenous and Ukrainians and the Irish and it was wrong. Yet if you were homosexual you could be fired, you could be denied an apartment, you could be prohibited from marrying. In those days, in the 1970s and 80s, the prevailing sense among the public – and even those who were homosexual – was not to discuss it. We’d all been brought up with this being a very deep social taboo. The word was so difficult to say. Many people choked on it. Even media preferred not to publish any stories about homosexuals. They didn’t like to use the word. And politicians never wanted to expend any political capital legislating equality for an unpopular minority.
