Cabinet yesterday would not release a statutory cost-benefit report detailing direct costs of a proposed cap on oil and gas emissions. “You owe it to Canadians,” Conservative MP Shannon Stubbs (Lakeland, Alta.) told the Commons natural resources committee: “If Canada did not have contributions from oil and gas right now, Canada would be in a recession.”
MPs yesterday discovered bonuses and severance pay have not been ruled out for managers of a disgraced federal agency disbanded over conflicts of interest. Ziyad Rahme, chief operating officer of Sustainable Development Technology Canada, would not answer the Commons public accounts committee though he was asked seven times: “It’s a yes or no question.”
A $2.14 billion Telesat “Lightspeed” satellite loan announced by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on a promise of universal high speed internet does not require that any specific number of households actually get connected, records show. Trudeau had called it a taxpayers’ investment in “really cool stuff.”
It is “astonishing” to question if politics played any role in forest management prior to a disastrous fire in Jasper National Park, Liberal MP Adam van Koeverden (Milton, Ont.) said yesterday. Van Koeverden, parliamentary secretary for the environment, made no mention of Access To Information memos showing Parks Canada feared “political perception” in managing fire risks.
Immigration Minister Marc Miller’s department in an internal report admits it took no steps to determine if foreign workers took Canadian jobs or kept wages low. “Impacts are not monitored,” said the report: “The program is less aligned with commitments to consider Canadian workers first.”
Cabinet must be forthright in telling Canadians climate programs will be painful, says David Dodge, 81, former governor of the Bank of Canada. “We are all going to pay for it one way or another,” Dodge testified at the Senate energy committee: “I’ll call it pain.”
Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson’s department to date has subsidized about six percent of the charging ports it predicts Canada needs to comply with electric vehicle mandates. Budgeted costs so far are $1.2 billion: “This demand must be met.”
Parks Canada knew of dead pine throughout Alberta’s Jasper National Park prior to a disastrous July 24 fire, Jasper’s mayor testified at the Senate agriculture and forestry committee. Mayor Richard Ireland declined comment when asked if dead trees contributed to the blaze that left 40 percent of townspeople homeless: “I am not a scientist.”
Federal airport rents jumped 30 percent last year to nearly a half billion despite a payment holiday at eight regional airports. New figures confirm the Department of Transport collects five times more in rents than it pays to subsidize airport improvements: “The more expensive we are for aviation in Canada, the more expensive it is for Canadians.”
Someone please figure out
whether the Ottawa shooter
was a terrorist
or merely insane.
A disturbed loner
acting on the whim of the moment
isn’t a terrorist;
we should apologize
for calling him that.
But
if his rampage was carefully planned
– rooted in ideology –
then insane he wasn’t;
just doing the things
terrorists normally do.
By Shai Ben-Shalom
In the days before Facebook, police reporters visited families that suffered sudden, tragic loss to request a photo of their loved one to print in the local newspaper. You’d think families resented the intrusion, but the opposite was more often the case. Grieving parents typically invited the reporter into their home, as if press interest validated the fact their child’s death mattered, that even strangers cared.
This same sentiment must have prompted Mr. and Mrs. Smith of 16 Geneva Avenue to deposit their lost son Charlie’s diary with the Baldwin Collection of Canadiana at the Toronto Reference Library. He was a good boy who died tragically. He mattered. And there his diary sat in a box, year after year, until it was discovered by poet Jonathan Locke Hart and transformed into this beautiful book, Unforgetting Private Charles Smith.
“Smith was not writing to express himself, to record his thoughts, his emotions, his opinions,” writes the author. “He was simply writing down what happened, in telegraphic style.”
Smith, 22, was on leave as an accountant with Webb, Read, Hogan & Callingham Co. Ltd. of Toronto when he was killed at the Battle of Mount Sorrel in Belgium in 1916. In a single surviving photograph, he appears as a skinny youth trying to grow a moustache. Charlie’s penmanship was excellent. Like many 22-year olds he liked girls, and especially food:
And on his last New Year’s, with only months to live:
Author Locke Hart documents Private Smith’s diary in poetic style, stark and sad and funny, from his departure for the Western Front to the last entry on May 31, 1916: “Back at 11 am.” Smith confided he met a girl in Dieppe, marveled at aerial dogfights over the trenches, called the Germans “Fritz”, described the moaning of artillery shells and chirping of skylarks on night patrol, and the tedium of standing at attention for VIP visits:
In April 1916 Smith took his last leave to London where the girls were “bold”, he wrote.
Weeks later Charlie cursed his luck. He was struck by shrapnel but it was “only a bruise”: “I suffered a little from shock; I felt nervous. I am sorry it was not a blighty one” – a wound just serious enough to send a soldier back to Old Blighty, the U.K., and a clean bed in a hospital ward.
In a month he was dead. No photo appeared in the local paper. Smith’s death was dismissed with a single, short paragraph in that day’s Toronto casualty list along with McAllister the mailman, and Probin the realtor, Travers the bank clerk and Private Jones of Ferndale Avenue, who used to teach Baptist Sunday School.
Unforgetting Private Charles Smith is haunting, like the smiling photo of a crime victim in the pages of a newspaper. His death mattered.
By Holly Doan
Unforgetting Private Charles Smith, by Jonathan Locke Hart; Athabasca University Press; 80 pages; ISBN 9781-77199-2534; $19.99
Cabinet aides yesterday confirmed New Democrats and Liberals held closed door meetings to rewrite the Elections Act. One revision guaranteed parliamentary pensions for dozens of MPs: “We attended a meeting where the substance of that proposal was discussed.”
Trade Minister Mary Ng yesterday said she is not a Chinese spy. “I am a loyal Canadian,” Ng told reporters, noting she had cleared all security checks as a member of cabinet: “I think my record of serving Canada stands.”
Parliament must not top up subsidies for the CBC under the guise of promoting ad-free public television, private broadcasters have told the Senate. CBC-TV management for years has proposed that it cancel advertising and have Parliament compensate for lost sales: “They see the CBC starting every year with a $1.4 billion head start.”
Catherine Tait, $497,000-a year CEO of the CBC, has been fined for breach of the Conflict Of Interest Act, the Ethics Commissioner disclosed yesterday. The penalty came only days after Tait complained nobody asked about her accomplishments as chief executive: “I really take objection to being called a liar.”
