#ohnocanada

[planb-is-in-effect]

And the white cats replace the black cats as rulers of mouseland.

[planb-is-in-effect]

Cabinet OKs Midnight Raises

Blacklock's Reporter

Cabinet has quietly awarded election-year pay hikes and retroactive pension top-ups to senior civil servants. Raises newly-approved by the Prime Minister include 19 percent for a federal board chairman. 

The adjustments appeared to short-cut a recent Treasury Board order capping increases at 0.5%.

The Privy Council Office yesterday declined to explain the range of increases, signed by the Prime Minister last Thursday. A total of 92 cabinet appointees received retroactive hikes that ranged from modest inflationary increases of $2,000 or less per year, to tens of thousands more.

The Treasury Board in a July 31 order capped pay hikes for “senior leaders” at half a percent — “the same increase before unionized employees,” wrote Treasury Board president Tony Clement. However cabinet on

October 8 awarded a select group of appointees large retroactive payments before topping up their pay by 0.5 percent.

Ian McPhail of Toronto, chair of the RCMP Public Complaints Commission, was paid a per diem in the range of $600 to $800 a day as late as 2011. Cabinet gave McPhail a 25 percent increase retroactive bonus to $1,025 a day.

Julie Dickson of Ottawa, former Superintendent of Financial Institutions, originally appointed at a top salary of $305,000 a year, was awarded a $57,200 raise retroactive to 2014 – a 19 percent increase. In other adjustments:

 • Bernard Grenier of Montréal, special advisor for the Criminal Conviction Review Group at the Department of Justice, paid a per diem in the range of $680 to $800 a day in 2011, was given a 25% increase to $1,000 retroactive to 2012, and $1,025 a day effective April 1, 2015. The department had no comment;

 • Brian Saunders of Ottawa, Director of Public Prosecutions, paid in the range of $212,200 to $248,700 in 2013, was awarded a 9 percent raise to $270,500 including retroactive payments to 2014;

 • Jim Smolik of Winnipeg, assistant chief commissioner of the Canadian Grain Commission, paid a top salary of $148,500 as recently as 2013, was given retroactive pay to a top rate of $168,000 –a 13 percent increase.

Under disclosure rules only broad salary ranges are detailed for cabinet appointees. Cabinet in 2014 rejected a private bill C-461 An Act To Amend The Access To Information Act that sought disclosure of actual salaries paid to any appointee making more than $188,600 a year. “I have a difficult time understanding how a fiscal conservative could not support salary disclosure,” MP Brent Rathgeber (Edmonton-St. Albert), sponsor of the bill, said in an earlier interview.

Rathgeber resigned the Conservative caucus in protest. He is currently seeking re-election as an independent.

[proudlyhopelesslyoptimistic]

In Italy, an asbestos industrialist has recently been sentenced to 18 years in prison for causing a public health catastrophe of asbestos deaths. Yet the Harper government promotes the deadly deception that asbestos can be “safely used.”

Kathleen Ruff, "Canada’s continuing asbestos scandal: science denied, workers exposed to harm," The Hill Times, 7 August 2014.

[proudlyhopelesslyoptimistic]

Justice J. V. Clyne neatly summarized the general racialized language of black primitivism in his comments on Matthews' general character. 'He is obviously an emotional, undisciplined youth of twenty years of age,' Clyne wrote, 'and in my opinion is not very far removed from the jungle . . . I think that he is a primitive who became so furious by being deprived of what he wanted that he committed a very brutal murder and was careless of the consequences.' These sentiments reflected not only one judge's candour, but also the general tone of expert opinion.

Dummitt, The Manly Modern, 119.

From the 1953 murder case of Charles Matthews, an American boxer living in Vancouver.

[proudlyhopelesslyoptimistic]

Perhaps the alarm raised over Aboriginal carriers of venereal disease draws both on this theme of disappearance and on more obvious fears of miscegenation and racial slippage. For if venereal disease can remain hidden, undetected, undiagnosed, and unreported among the First Nations, then it can act as a hidden enemy within a cross-cultural community where the sexual exploitation of Aboriginal women was not uncommon. The covert enemy of disease, concealed within Aboriginal women, had particular resonances during war time. This fear, unjustified even by the statistics of medical surveillance, led to the harassment of Aboriginal women in Prince Rupert during the Second World War, when those believed to be infected with venereal disease were routinely hunted down and forcibly confined so that they would not spread the disease to locally stationed troops.

Kelm, Colonizing Bodies, 15-16.

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While they did not quite become wild animal tamers, the wardens at Banff did install slat licks along the Banff-Windermere road in 1922 so that game would be drawn there in full view of the motoring public. The possibility that they might be luring the animals to their deaths was not, it seems, discussed.

Loo, States of Nature, 29.

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To facilitate the company's planning, [BC minister of lands and forests] Kenney pledged to place reserves on the possible sites of interest to Alcan in order to exclude the intervention of competitors. He also offered the lowest possible water rental fees allowed under the law and concluded with this remarkable concession: 'If after such surveys and investigations have been made, and your engineering studies demonstrate that our existing laws would not economically permit further development, I shall be very glad to discuss ways and means with my colleagues, having in mind the amendment of such laws whereby such a project might be economically pursued to the mutual advantage of both our Government and your Company.' Alcan would later call for changes to provincial law and taxation policies in order to facilitate its building program and settlement scheme at minimal cost.

Evenden, Fish versus Power, 156-57.

Depressing, but is anyone really all that surprised?

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It was not until well into the 1960s that the province's labour unions abandoned their rhetoric of the 'natural order' that relegated women to the home, and it was not until 1964 that married women achieved the right to act in a legal capacity independently of their husbands. For all its revolutionary rhetoric, Parti Pris formed a part of this gendered world.

Mills, Empire Within, 53.