Federal subsidies have turned national media into a government-paid press reliant on the Prime Minister’s Office, Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre yesterday told reporters. Any future Conservative cabinet will end direct federal subsidies to newsrooms, he said: "We believe media should be driven by readership, viewership and listenership."
The Commons yesterday by a 173 to 150 vote demanded cabinet revise current record immigration quotas within 100 days. All but Liberal MPs supported the Bloc Québécois motion: "This used to be a Québec thing."
More than 120,000 small and medium sized businesses vanished with Covid lockdowns, new federal data show. The Department of Industry said nationwide there are now fewer small businesses in Canada than in 2020: "Insolvency is a lagging indicator."
Catherine Tait, $497,000-a year CEO of the CBC, ran up more than $119,000 in expenses at the same time the network complained of “immense pressure” on its finances, Access To Information records show. Charges included business class junkets from Prague to Hollywood: "The public broadcaster faces chronic underfunding."
Canada Student Loan defaults referred to tax collectors total nearly $3 billion, new records show. Figures follow a warning from the Budget Office that write-offs are expected to rise year over year: "The value of unpaid student loans will continue to grow."
Historical tributes to Samuel de Champlain are now under review as too "colonial," says the Historic Sites and Monuments Board. Federal authorities as late as 2015 praised Champlain for promoting “friendly relations” with Indigenous people: "This essentially says that Indigenous history started when Champlain showed up."
The post office is hiking rates an average eight percent effective May 6. Canada Post management in a legal notice Saturday said the $23.8 million increase, the first in four years, was unavoidable due to inflation: "Each year there are fewer letters to deliver to more addresses."
The Department of Industry last year bought more than $1.5 million worth of American-made electric Ford pickups at $96,000 apiece, records show. “We’re in the big leagues,” Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne earlier told reporters.
Poet Shai Ben-Shalom writes: “Elections are over. It is time to show generosity…”Members of Parliament may earn $194,600 a year – within the top five percent of Canadians earners – and many are walking away with $90,000 severance, but…”
Canada west of the Great Lakes was for centuries a blank space on the map, as dark and foreboding as the heart of Africa. Canadians have only anecdotal records of the era of vast buffalo herds, passenger pigeons that blocked out the sun, and volcanoes that leveled Nisga’a settlements in British Columbia.
We don’t even know what ancient Canada looked like, writes historian Jennifer Brown. The remotest districts today have been forever altered by settlement, industrial farming and hydroelectric dams.
Brown is a former Chicagoan who taught for decades at the University of Winnipeg’s Department of History. She rated herself lucky; the Hudson’s Bay Company archives were just down the street. In An Ethnohistorian In Rupert’s Land, Brown chronicles her attempts to piece together a glimpse of early Canada. Brown’s enthusiasm is infectious.
The federal anti-trust Competition Bureau yesterday promised MPs it was “relentlessly” committed to fighting mergers in the grocery trade. Members of the Commons agriculture committee ridiculed the claim, noting the Bureau approved 30 years’ worth of mergers: "What were you doing in the 1990s, the 2000s?"
Federal marketers will turn seal meat into a seafood delicacy like lobster, Fisheries Minister Diane Lebouthillier said yesterday. “When properly prepared it is delicious,” she said: "Making it a consumer product is a priority."
Canada Revenue Agency data confirm a “significant drop” in the number of audits targeting wealthy tax filers, Conservative MP Adam Chambers (Simcoe North, Ont.) yesterday told the Commons finance committee. New figures follow longstanding criticism that auditors target small business and other “low hanging fruit.”
A landmark $310,000 award to a federal employee victimized by malicious workplace gossip has been upheld by the Federal Court of Appeal. The employee was subjected to years of “reprehensible, deliberate and shameful” slander, a labour board ruled in the case: 'It was highly offensive.'
Small business has yet to see billions in promised carbon tax rebates, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business said yesterday. The finance department in 2019 said it was “developing the specifics” for payouts: "There is no mechanism in place to return a dime to small business."
