Employment Minister Randy Boissonnault on Saturday approved a pre-election cut in Employment Insurance Premiums. Boissonnault has called Employment Insurance the nation’s most important income support program: “We’re in a good position.”
We are grateful this holiday to friends and subscribers as Blacklock’s embarks on a 13th great year of independent, all-original Canadian journalism. On behalf of our contributors, please accept our thanks. We’re back tomorrow — The Editor.
Budget cuts send duty travel
to the chopping board.
Rima to cancel her study trip to B.C.;
Pierre isn’t going to the conference;
Karla will skip this year’s stakeholders’ meeting.
The Director General
wants these changes processed, signed
by end of day Tuesday,
before he leaves
for China.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
The film classic It’s A Wonderful Life recounts the story of George Bailey, a frustrated everyman trapped in a small town with unfulfilled dreams of travel and adventure. But what if George left Bedford Falls? He’d have become Conrad Kain. It is a story too poignant for filmgoers. Instead it is a compelling title from University of Alberta Press.
Kain is renowned among Canadian mountaineers as a pioneering guide so accomplished they named a British Columbia peak for him, Mount Conrad. He escaped grinding poverty as a miner’s son in rural Austria and travelled the world from Honolulu to Ulaanbaatar.
“As far back as he could remember his ‘chief ambition was to travel,’” notes Letters From A Wandering Guide. “As a boy, despite the constraints of unremitting poverty, he never missed an opportunity to speak with tourists who passed through the alpine valleys near his home. ‘I would ask a great many questions,’ Kain wrote. ‘Where he came from, where intended going, what the place was like where he stopped last.’”
Hired by the CPR as a Rocky Mountain guide for wealthy tourists in 1908, Kain spent his life doing what he loved. On ascending every peak he would cry, “Bergheil!” – an Old Country greeting with no English equivalent, writes editor Zac Robinson: “It loosely translates to ‘salute the mountains.’”
Cue orchestra, roll credits. Hugs and tears all ‘round.
Not even close. Editor Robinson poured through Kain’s correspondence at the archives of the Alpine Club of Canada, a total 144 letters Conrad wrote to an Austrian pen-pal over 27 years. Here the wonderful life goes awry.
From the sunshine of youth Kain in turn becomes cynical, as so often occurs with those who work in the tourist trade, and expresses the bitterness of the new immigrant. Letters takes readers page by page through a man’s life and thoughts. It is a dark and absorbing narrative.
Kain grows resentful of the Americans he guides up and down Banff peaks. They are rich, and he earns $3 a day. He asks them to send souvenir photos and most never bother: “Such little things hurt you as a guide,” Kain writes. “One connects one’s life to the gentleman on the rope, goes first in all dangerous situations, is ready to risk one’s life for the gentleman, and the thank you is to deny you some little favour!”
“The injustice of the world with its money-hungry people makes so much impossible to achieve for most of us poor people,” Kain laments in 1915; “Sometimes I really cannot believe that my life should be a failure!”
Kain bemoans his beloved homeland, an Alpine paradise of pretty girls and “boys in lederhosen, bare-kneed, Tyrolean hats,” now overtaken by Jews, he writes in 1923: “I am sorry that the Jews got such a stranglehold in Austria.”
He dodges wartime military service and heads for the bush: “In the wild forest, I often cried. Tears shed from the eyes of a grown tough man are the most painful…Austria is MY HOME COUNTRY and I LOVE my mountains.”
In the end Kain grows resentful. He might have become a scientist, he grumbles, but instead wound up on a hardscrabble B.C. farm. “For the sick people and the poor, Canada is nothing. It is heartless!” he writes.
Readers discover in the end Kain was only truly happy with a climbing rope around his waist and an icepick in his hand. He died in 1934 and is buried in Cranbrook. His tombstone reads, “A Guide Of Great Spirit.”
And now we know what would have become of George Bailey if he’d ever left Bedford Falls.
By Holly Doan
Conrad Kain: Letters From A Wandering Mountain Guide, 1906-1933; edited by Zac Robinson; University of Alberta Press; ISBN 9781-7721-20042; $34.95
Opposition MPs yesterday pressed Defence Minister Bill Blair to explain why his office waited 54 days to approve a warrant targeting Liberal Party contacts with Toronto’s Chinese Consulate. “The truth will be revealed,” Conservative MP James Bezan (Selkirk-Interlake, Man.) told the Commons defence committee: “A warrant sat around your office.”
A Liberal MP yesterday disrupted a hearing of the Commons public accounts committee with a profane rant against Conservative members. “F—k right off,” said MP Nathaniel Erskine-Smith (Beaches-East York, Ont.): “Come on. Come on. Come on.”
The carbon tax has an “overall negative economic impact” including a net cost to households, the Budget Office said yesterday. Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault disputed the findings: “That’s not what this report says.”
The Senate last evening on a voice vote passed cabinet’s pharmacare bill into law. Advocates called it short of its promise but a necessary first step to public prescription drug insurance: “This is not universality. But it is the first step towards universality.”
Parliament must “clear the air” over allegations of foreign spies on Parliament Hill, former public safety minister Marco Mendicino yesterday testified at the Commission on Foreign Interference. Mendicino complained a damning report by a Liberal-dominated committee could turn Parliament into a “kangaroo court.”
Lawyers at the China inquiry last night suggested a cabinet aide tried to obstruct an investigation of Liberal Party contacts with the Chinese Consulate in Toronto. Zita Astravas, former chief of staff to Defence Minister Bill Blair, could not explain why she shelved a warrant application for weeks despite requests by the Department of Public Safety and Canadian Security Intelligence Service: “You saw it was deeply concerned with the operations of your Party.”
No parliamentarians have committed treason though some MPs have poor judgment, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s national security advisor testified yesterday. Nathalie Drouin’s remarks at the China inquiry contradicted a federal report stating unnamed legislators were in the pay of foreign embassies: “I’ve seen no treason, no traitors.”
CBC-TV advertising revenue fell another 10 percent last year, according to new financial accounts. Management in a report to Parliament said it expected no improvement in years ahead: “Television and radio audiences will continue to erode.”
A Liberal-appointed senator yesterday apologized for censoring a newspaper commentary written by a Conservative opponent. Senator Lucie Moncion (Ont.) invoked her authority as chair of the Senate’s committee on internal economy in rewriting an opinion piece she deemed “incorrect.”
Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre raised some half-million dollars in pre-election Conservative Party donations over 72 hours in Toronto, according to newly released filings. The fundraising coincided with remarks by the Liberals’ campaign co-chair that “this is going to be a tight race.”
Cabinet yesterday gave final approval to install full body scanners at federal prisons. Scanners have been used at federally regulated airports since 2008: “Scanners can detect contraband.”
