MPs yesterday ordered yet more records delving into business practices of an ArriveCan contractor involved in an earlier app, the failed Covid Alert program. GC Strategies Inc. of Woodlawn, Ont. was paid more than a million for “professional services” under a 2020 contract only recently disclosed: "How can people who are merely consultants get in on these contracts?"
Attorney General Arif Virani yesterday reintroduced a cabinet bill to curb “harmful content” on social media. The bill stopped short of unprecedented censorship powers detailed in a failed 2021 bill that lapsed in the last Parliament: "I have listened."
Customs officers may only seize six stolen cars at a time at the Port of Montréal due to lack of waterfront parking, the president of the Customs and Immigration Union yesterday told MPs. Mark Weber also testified the Port had to borrow a large X-ray scanner from Windsor, Ont. after its single machine went out of service: "Once we find six stolen vehicles we sometimes have to wait days for somebody to come and take the vehicles away before we can inspect anymore."
The Canadian Human Rights Commission faces international naming and shaming after mistreating Black employees. A coalition of unions and human rights groups yesterday petitioned a United Nations agency to investigate misconduct by managers: "It has to start at the top."
Cabinet confidentially polled Canadians on whether they’d stop eating meat for the sake of climate change, Access To Information records show. The suggestion was unpopular: "How frequently or infrequently have you made efforts to eat a more plant-based diet?"
The Commons public safety committee today opens hearings on auto theft following complaints of poor policing at Canadian ports by the Border Services Agency. One MP counted only a handful of inspectors at the Port of Montréal: "The X-ray scanner used for the containers only works about half the time."
Canada is short about 90,000 doctors, nurses and other front line health care workers, says a Department of Health memo. The document for the Deputy Minister warned of a “health worker crisis.”
Parliament must end all subsidies earmarked for “diversity," says People’s Party leader Maxime Bernier. Campaigning in an Ontario byelection, Bernier said his Party would “abolish all federal diversity, equity and inclusion programs and policies in the public service and federal institutions such as the Armed Forces.”
Tobacco smuggling is now worth $2.5 billion a year in lost tax revenue, the highest estimate to date, says one of Canada’s largest cigarette makers. Imperial Tobacco Canada in a submission to senators said smuggled cigarettes are worth nearly 40 percent of the market in some provinces: 'Organized crime groups use it as a cash cow.'
Poet Shai Ben-Shalom writes: “Police officer stops a city councilor who had slowed down his vehicle in an area known for prostitutes…”
In the village of Authie, France, population 1,500, it’s still possible to score a $56 hotel room with a nearby McDonald’s rated “catastrophique” on TripAdvisor. There is also a Rue des Canadiens “where the bodies of two murdered soldiers were placed on the street so that a tank could repeatedly run over them,” explains Canadian Battlefields Of The Second World War. In Authie in 1944 “wildly excited Hitler Youth began murdering Canadians while the battle still raged and continued killing prisoners systematically after the fighting ceased.” Murder victims numbered 37.
Authors Terry Copp and Matt Baker lead readers on an intriguing tour of the Normandy countryside that witnessed gallantry and atrocity. Take a drive down Highway D170, “one of the prettiest roads you will explore in Normandy,” they write. “This is one of the roads the Regina Rifles used in their advance inland on D-Day.” Names of the dead are immortalized in a village church.
Final costs of the ArriveCan program were ten times the original budget, two former managers yesterday told the Commons government operations committee. “I delivered a detailed costing of $6.3 million,” testified Cameron MacDonald (pictured right), former director general with the Canada Border Services Agency: "We are not responsible for the $60 million."
A majority of Canadians are confused and anxious about climate change while 20 percent are uninterested, says in-house Privy Council “behavioural science research.” The federal study obtained through Access To Information showed worriers and skeptics alike were found in all regions and walks of life: "Canadians are a diverse group."
Costs of federal employee salaries and benefits topped $67 billion last year, a record, Budget Officer Yves Giroux said yesterday. Giroux earlier described growth in payroll expenses as “worrisome.”
Justice Marie-Josée Hogue yesterday pleaded with immigrant groups to testify without fear of retaliation at the Commission on Federal Interference. Hogue promised extraordinary precautions for anyone with evidence against foreign agents: "They fear reprisals if they provide information."
