Federal regulators yesterday said they are “working to establish digital credentials” for the public without parliamentary go-ahead. MPs have repeatedly rejected introduction of any electronic national ID system as expensive and risky: “The committee was warned many times about the prospect of the police being able to stop people on the street and demand proof of their identity.”
A “significant number” of Canadians would resist any attempt to introduce a federal version of bitcoin, the Bank of Canada said yesterday. Skeptics included citizens suspicious of government overreach: “A significant number would reject it.”
Manitoba’s representative in the federal cabinet yesterday said he stands by his criticism of Winnipeg radio commentator Charles Adler’s appointment to the Senate. “I stand by it today,” Northern Affairs Minister Dan Vandal told the Commons Indigenous affairs committee: “There are many eminently qualified Manitobans who are better suited to represent our province than Charles Adler.”
Any future Conservative cabinet will repeal the GST on new home construction under $1 million, Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre said yesterday. Poilievre said inflation-driven “bracket creep” now sees virtually all homebuyers taxed at five percent: “This is insane.”
ArriveCan emails were destroyed by the Canada Border Services Agency only days after they were sought under the Access To Information Act, records show. The Act forbids deliberate destruction of records under a maximum penalty of two years in jail: “Please do a search.”
Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault’s department is targeting household cats as an ecological peril. The department in a report complained tens of thousands of pet cats were roaming Canadian cities hunting birds: “Did you know there could be up to 48,000 cats roaming in Gatineau, Que.?”
A federal agency proposes to write its own news stories for subsidized publishers at an undisclosed cost to taxpayers. Stories would be reviewed and fact-checked by federal employees before they’re published on “trusted media platforms.”
A federal Court Challenges Program has cost $24.9 million since cabinet revived subsidies for Charter challenges in 2017, says a Department of Canadian Heritage report. The department would not say which lawsuits were subsidized or why: “No one is able to tell me who got the money.”
Most Black Canadians were born abroad with a majority arriving here after 1971, new Statistics Canada data show. The figures contradict federal claims a legacy of Canadian “slavery and exploitation” is to blame for income disparities: “Slavery and exploitation were part of Canadian society for over 200 years.”
In the storm,
The grandmother worried about her people.
The road crew worried about the storm.
The explorers worried about the beer.
In the town,
The residents worried about the supplies.
The Mounties worried about the unknown.
The explorers worried about the wind.
On the Road,
The explorers worried about the daylight.
The grandmother worried about her children.
The Mountains worried about neither.
By W.N. Branson
In 1997, returning home one evening from a cruise on the St. Lawrence River, criminologist Patrice Corriveau witnessed an assault. Five men were tormenting a sixth.
“A gang of arrogant roughnecks, bursting with testosterone, decided to taunt him; they deem his attire too effeminate and conclude he must be a ‘faggot,’ a ‘queer,’” writes Corriveau. “With unbelievable violence, these brave souls shove the young man around as a crowd watches without reacting or intervening in any way.”
Upset by what he’d seen, Professor Corriveau of the University of Ottawa devoted his doctoral studies to the persecution of gays in French culture, typically men “used as scapegoats by a society disturbed by sexuality,” he writes. The result, La Répression des Homosexuels au Québec et en France, is adapted to English by UBC Press.
Sodomy was punishable by death in Canada until 1869 and decriminalized a century later. Between these two legal milestones Corriveau chronicles the repression of gays not merely for what they did, but for who they were.
Quebec was the first province to outlaw discrimination over sexual orientation in 1977. It followed centuries of arrests of homosexuals as deviant or depraved, culminating in ever-increasing convictions past the Victorian era.
“Homoerotic acts were rarely criminalized in New France,” writes Corriveau; he identifies only five indictments in the 17th century, including a soldier convicted of “unnatural acts” in 1648 and given a suspended death sentence.
earliest Criminal Code in 1892 made sodomy punishable by life imprisonment. The maximum for incest was 14 years. The penalty remained in force until 1954. Yet cases were rare until postwar years. Between 1931 and 1954 the number of sodomy convictions in Quebec grew tenfold, to 212 a year.
What happened? “As long as the image of the homosexual remained that of effeminacy, which was easily identifiable, society had nothing to fear,” writes Corriveau. “With the masculinization of gay culture, homosexuals became difficult to distinguish; in fact, a good number of homosexuals sought to act virile in order to lose themselves in the crowd. Their invisibility made them more frightening.”
Judging Homosexuals has no happy ending. True, restrictive laws were repealed and same-sex unions were legalized. Yet Corriveau remains “haunted,” he writes. In the most liberal province in Canada, decades after discrimination was outlawed, he saw a man beaten before a watchful crowd for the crime of dressing as he pleased.
By Holly Doan
Judging Homosexuals: A History of Gay Persecution in Quebec and France by Patrice Corriveau; UBC Press; 244 pages; ISBN 978-077-4817-219; $29.95
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau improperly disclosed classified information and ignored suspicious activities by Chinese agents in Canada because it was to the advantage of the Liberal Party, opposition lawyers yesterday told the Commission on Foreign Interference. The comments came on the last day of hearings: “Party before country.”
Liberal MPs have saved Catherine McKenna from a summons for questioning over forestry management at Jasper National Park. The Commons environment committee was told residents for years warned then-Environment Minister McKenna and Park managers that Jasper was a “tinder box” of dead pine following a beetle infestation: “McKenna has refused to testify.”
Cabinet will not meet a Bloc Québécois ultimatum to pass two bills into law by Tuesday or risk collapse of the 44th Parliament. Bloc leader Yves-François Blanchet had set a deadline of 11:59 pm Eastern on October 29: “There will be plenty of non-confidence votes between now and Christmas.”
New quotas lower the number of foreigners to be allowed in Canada next year by 218,000 landed immigrants, migrant workers and foreign students, about 11 percent from 2023 levels, figures show. It follows record-high quotas the Department of Immigration blamed for fueling a “housing crisis.”
