Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre called on his supporters to help him put pressure on Liberal and NDP MPs by writing letters to them, phoning their offices, and even organizing protests to oppose the carbon tax and its scheduled April 1 increase. Do you agree with the tactic? True North’s Andrew Lawton weighs in with Canadian Taxpayers Federation Alberta director Kris Sims.
Also, CBC didn’t have access to the Oscars red carpet but still sent a journalist to cover it – from outside.
Plus, the Liberal government has reversed its announced pause on funding to UNRWA, the United Nations agency whose employees were implicated in Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel. Brian Lee Crowley of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute joins to discuss.
All charges have been dropped against the alleged leader of the Windsor protest that blockaded the Ambassador Bridge during the nationwide Freedom Convoy protests in February 2022.
Plus, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is taking his ‘Axe the Tax’ campaign to the next level by calling for Canadians to protest outside the offices of Liberal and NDP MPs and to bombard them with phone calls and emails.
And True North spoke to Canadians seeking a better life in other countries amid creeping authoritarianism and the cost of living crisis.
Tune into The Daily Brief with Cosmin Dzsurdzsa and Lindsay Shepherd!
Kamloops Indian Residential School Monument (Source: TkemlupsteSecwepemc - Facebook)
The claim that thousands of Indigenous children who attended Canada’s Indian Residential Schools between 1883 and 1996 are buried in “mass graves” across Canada, reputed victims of genocide, is slowly being exposed as a hoax.
Though the missing children and genocide claims have been bandied about for decades, their widespread promotion began May 27, 2021 with a media release from the Chief Kamloops Indian Reserve in British Columbia that was broadcast around the world claiming “confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School.”
But focusing solely on the recent history of both the genocide and mass grave allegations neglects their historical roots and impact, namely that what could be called an Aboriginal-style blood libel seems to have been in the air for at least three decades.
The precise origins of the accusation that the Indian Residential Schools were houses of horrific abuse are still unclear though Kevin Annett, a defrocked United Church of Canada cleric, is named by many as a key promoter.
He has done so by giving countless addresses, producing many videos, and publishing several books, his only vocations since being expelled from the United Church in 1995, five years after his ordination, allegedly for what were considered outrageously libelous rants from the pulpit.
One story widely distributed by Annett, claimed Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip took a group of students from the Kamloops Indian Residential School on a picnic and then abducted them. Fact checking shows that the Royals were nowhere near Kamloops when they travelled to Canada in 1964.
According to the National Post’s Terry Glavin, if you believe Annett, you would have to accept that:
“A team of German doctors arrived at the Kuper Island Indian residential school and began conducting strange medical experiments on the children. Employing large hypodermic needles, they injected some sort of toxin directly into the chests of the school’s young inmates, and several died as a result; in the 1950s and 1960s, Aboriginal children at a Vancouver Island medical research facility were tortured with electrodes implanted in their skulls. At least one child was beaten to death with a whip fitted with razors; at the Hobbema and Saddle Lake Indian residential schools in Alberta, children were incinerated in furnaces; at St. Anne’s Indian residential school in Fort Albany, Ontario, children were executed in an electric chair.”
As political scientist Frances Widdowson has argued, “These stories were given additional momentum in May 2021 and are now firmly ensconced within the Canadian consciousness.”
How firmly ensconced they are was revealed in a recent poll sponsored by the Macdonald-Laurier Institute showing that 60% of Canadians still believe that “215 Indigenous residential school children were buried in a mass grave on school grounds in Kamloops, BC,” with just 15% disagreeing.
In a widely read National Post piece called “The year of the graves,” Terry Glavin argued “it wasn’t the Indigenous people directly involved who made the disturbing claims that ended up in the headlines.” Rather, “From the beginning, the local Indigenous leaders tended to argue for careful, thoughtful and precise language when describing the results of ground penetrating radar studies.”
As an example, he quotes Kamloops Chief Rosanne Casimir stating in response to the first shocking headlines of mass graves, “This is not a mass grave, but rather unmarked burial sites that are, to our knowledge, also undocumented.”
But Glavin has grossly exaggerated the lack of Indigenous culpability in spreading the mass graves and genocide stories.
Including Kamloops, he was only able to offer four examples of Indigenous leaders supporting his assertion. The words of a much larger and far more influential cohort of leaders, past and present, suggests these four are outliers.
Even the Kamloops example needs to be discounted. Casimir moved the following resolution at the Assembly of First Nations annual general meeting in July 2021:
“(The Chiefs-in-Assembly) stand in solidarity with the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc (Kamloops Indian Band) and all survivors of the Residential School System and their families and assert that the mass grave discovered at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School reveals Crown conduct reflecting a pattern of genocide against Indigenous Peoples that must be thoroughly examined and considered in terms of Canada’s potential breaches of international humanitarian and human rights law.” (Emphasis added)
Glavin and others also failed to look for similar resolutions or statements about mass graves that followed one after the other from Indigenous leaders, associations, and media sites, including the Saddle Lake Cree Indian Reserve, the Windspeaker.com online Indigenous newsletter, the statement from Southern Chiefs’ Organization, representing 34 Anishinaabe and Dakota Nations, the Final Resolution of the Union of British Columbian Chiefs, representing over 150 of the province’s Indian Bands, the British Columbia Assembly of First Nations, representing and advocating for the 203 First Nations in British Columbia, and Murray Sinclair, former chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
What can be said with some certainty at this uncertain point in Canadian history is that Indigenous politicians and activists are responsible for inflicted damage on this country that may never be reversed.
Hymie Rubenstein is editor of REAL Indigenous Report and a retired professor of anthropology, the University of Manitoba.
While Canadian comedy legend John Candy died just over 30 years ago, his larger than life persona and work are still so prominent in Canadians’ collective consciousness that it almost feels as if he’s still with us.
Candy was born on Oct. 31, 1950 in Toronto to a Catholic working class family of English and Polish descent.
After some small acting roles in plays, Candy was selected to join the cast of Second City Toronto in 1972. The improv group would later land a television show out of Edmonton called Second City Television, better known as SCTV.
Out of the modest studio at 5325 Allard Way, Candy and cast mates Martin Short, Eugene Levy, Catherine O’Hara, Rick Moranis and Joe Flaherty just to name a few, would create some of the most iconic sketch-comedy in the history of the medium.
Despite starting a year after their American counterpart Saturday Night Live, it was SCTV that was often the more sought after show by performers in New York, for its unique characters and intellectual wit.
Candy would be on and off the show during the early eighties to take on film roles, starring alongside Bill Murray in the 1981 comedy Stripes, before becoming a Hollywood mainstay in late eighties and nineties.
Candy had a run of comedies that cemented his status as a titan of the genre, who could easily star alongside the likes of Mel Brooks, Steve Martin, Richard Pryor, Dan Akroyd and Chevy Chase in movies like Planes, Trains and Automobiles, Spaceballs, The Great Outdoors and Canadian Bacon.
But there was something different about Candy that separated him from his other comedic compatriots, and that was his big heart and contagious warmth. He carried with him an aura of endearing kindness everywhere he went.
He played the lovable everyman, except Candy was playing himself.
Unlike so many other Hollywood household names, as a father of two, he put family first.
“He was the best dad,” Candy’s daughter Jennifer told TODAY.com. “He’d say, ‘Don’t worry what people think about you. Just be your authentic self.'”
“The other thing about my dad is that he was the ultimate family guy,” she continued. “That’s the reason he didn’t want to do ‘Saturday Night Live’. He knew the lifestyle wasn’t going to be healthy for him. He was smart in that way.”
Director Jon Turteltaub worked with Candy on the 1993 comedy Cool Runnings, where Candy played a bobsledding coach to an unlikely Jamaica national bobsleigh team, loosely based on the true story where the actual team did compete in the 1998 Winter Olympics.
“When you were with John, he did something very few brilliantly funny and famous people do: He laughed at other people’s jokes,” Turteltaub said. “That’s actually a big deal. He made people feel welcome. He made people feel wanted.”
He never let his success go to his head, even after he bought the CFL’s Toronto Argonauts with Wayne Greztky and Bruce McNall in 1991. It’s worth mentioning that the Argo’s took home the Grey Cup that same year.
Stories like that make one wistful for a bygone era of Toronto.
Perhaps the most endearing story of what it was like to be in the company of Candy comes from friend Eugene Levy, who in an interview with the Hudson Union Society recanted what a typical dinner was like with the Uncle Buck star.
“In the early years in Toronto, we used to go to John’s for dinner, he would say ‘come over, were gonna have dinner.’” recalled Levy. “We’d get there at seven o’clock and we’d have some cocktails and then chit chat and have some laughs, and then there were more cocktails and then more laughs and more cocktails.”
“It’s now about ten o’clock…and I notice he’d be putting a big turkey in the oven. I said ‘John, how many pounds is that bird?’ He’d say, ‘Oh I don’t know ten, twelve pounds it’s nothing.’ I’d say, ‘Doesn’t it take a while, like forty minutes a pound?’ ‘No, no, no, it’ll be fine.’ We always ate at two in the morning. Always. It always happened, we never ate before midnight, never,” said Levy.
It was Candy’s way of keeping everyone around, laughing with cocktails, in a warm room on a cold Toronto night.
He died of a heart attack March 4, 1994 while shooting a film in Mexico. Candy is buried at the Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre is taking his ‘Axe the Tax’ campaign to the next level by calling for Canadians to protest outside the offices of Liberal and NDP MPs and to bombard them with phone calls and emails.
Poilievre says he’s relying on Canadians to help him in getting the federal government to scrap the carbon tax before the scheduled hike on April Fools’ Day during a rally in Etobicoke, Ont. on Sunday.
Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre announces a “massive pressure campaign” on Liberal and NDP MPs to axe the upcoming carbon tax increase. He’s calling for people to organize protests at MP offices. pic.twitter.com/Qcw7DFxw9v
“Politics is not a spectator sport,” said Polievre to an energized crowd of supporters, following their chanting of ‘axe the tax.’
“It is a participation sport. If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu. So you need to be at the table,” said Poilievre.
The Conservative leader then announced a “massive pressure campaign” to end the carbon tax, once and for all.
“We are going to start a massive pressure campaign in Parliament, but you need to back me up on the ground. How many of you are going to write to your Liberal-NDP members and demand they vote with common sense Conservatives to axe the tax? How many will organize protests out of Liberal constituency offices to pressure them to do the right thing?” asked Poilievre
“How many of you are going to send emails to all of your networks and post on all of your social media so that every one of your neighbours knows about the upcoming April Fools’ Day tax hike?” he added.
Poilievre says the Conservatives are about to unleash a “massive pressure campaign” on the Liberals and NDP to “axe the tax” and “spike the hike,” calling on audience to help him by writing to their MPs and organizing protests at their constituency offices.
“How many of you will bombard Liberal-NDP offices with phone calls to make sure that they understand their constituents cannot afford to pay anymore?” continued Poilievre.
The Trudeau government will be raising the carbon tax an additional 17 cents per litre of gasoline, 21 cents per litre of diesel and 15 cents per cubic metre of natural gas on April 1.
A recent Leger poll revealed that the overwhelming majority of Canadians, seven out of 10, are opposed to the impending increase to the federal carbon tax.
“The poll is clear: the vast majority of Canadians, across every province and all demographics, oppose the upcoming federal carbon tax hike,” said Franco Terrazzano, federal director of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
Several premiers have either asked for an exemption from the carbon tax or have outright refused to collect the money, including Premier Scott Moe in Saskatchewan, who announced he will not be sending any more money to Ottawa in relation to the tax.
After unveiling a new censorship bill early last week, Liberals were quick to go on the defensive, insisting the proposed Online Harms Act was solely about combatting “online harms,” and not about stifling free speech. Canadian Taxpayers Federation Alberta director Kris Sims joined True North’s Andrew Lawton to discuss the potential consequences of allowing the government to determine what can and cannot be said online.
All charges have been dropped against the alleged leader of the Windsor protest that blockaded the Ambassador Bridge during the nationwide Freedom Convoy protests in February 2022.
Protestors linked to the Freedom Convoy blocked access to North America’s busiest bridge on Feb. 7, 2022, for almost one week to protest Covid-19 mandates.
Police managed to disperse demonstrators on Feb. 13, arresting 42 people, the bulk of whom received mischief charges.
The Crown attorney withdrew all criminal charges against William Laframboise on Wednesday, according to a press release from The Democracy Fund, a Canadian charity dedicated to constitutional rights, who represented Laframboise in his case.
The Crown attorney said that while there were triable issues, he believed it was not in the public interest to prosecute Laframboise “given the evidentiary challenges of the Crown’s case and other serious matters that were vying for trial time in a backlogged court system.”
According to defence lawyer Alan Honner, there were large gaps between said legitimate issues and the Crown’s ability to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Honner said it’s likely that the Crown would have proceeded to trial if they believed they had a strong enough case, due to the economic impact of the blockade.
“Mr. Laframboise has always maintained his innocence,” said Honner. “He insisted on his right to trial, and we believe he would have been acquitted had the charges not been dropped.”
Laframboise was arrested almost six months after the blockade ended, unlike the majority of protestors who were arrested on-site.
His arrest was part of an ongoing investigation that sought to identify and prosecute an organizer of the protests.
Laframboise was the final remaining client to be represented by the Democracy Fund in facing trial for their alleged role in the Ambassador Bridge protests.
Around one-third of all persons arrested during those protests were represented by the TDF and their sole conviction currently remains under appeal.
A Halifax couple renting a room in their friend’s house, unable to afford an apartment of their own, feared they would be renters for the rest of their lives.
“That’s a pretty depressing place to be in when you’re in your late 30s,” Ryan, now 40, told True North.
“For eight years we were trying to save and put together a down payment and get into a home and start a family…. As time went on, we were just falling further and further behind. We were making progress, but we could see that the goal was receding over the horizon perpetually.”
On Feb. 14, 2022, amid the debankings of the Freedom Convoy – a movement they were vocally supportive of, Ryan says his and his partner Jessica’s joint bank accounts were frozen.
“At the time, we didn’t know if this was going to last a day or a week or a month. It was very frightening,” Ryan recalled.
Their bank access was restored within a day, but they never received a satisfactory explanation from RBC, and it “left a mark.”
“That was definitely what made the decision for us – we weren’t going to let that happen to us ever again,” Ryan said.
Five months later, in July 2022, the couple sold everything they had, including a piece of land they had bought in Lunenburg, N.S., and settled outside of La Libertad, El Salvador.
Jessica, a graphic designer, and Ryan, a software developer, obtained digital nomad visas through a visa services company called Escape to El Salvador.
Jessica (left) and Ryan (middle) signing their visa paperwork.
What drew them to the nation was bitcoin’s status as legal tender, a move made in 2021 under president Nayib Bukele.
Ryan and Jessica are not only paid in bitcoin through their work – they shop, buy groceries, fill up their gas tank, pay rent, and pay their cell phone and internet bills entirely with bitcoin.
Apart from using U.S. dollars for local drinking water delivery, the couple say they no longer have any use for fiat currency.
The couple have a type of one-year temporary residency permit that can be renewed again for up to three years. After that they can apply for permanent residency, and citizenship two years later.
That is the plan for Ryan and Jessica, who both currently hold only Canadian citizenship.
The move raised eyebrows from those around them, but they insist it was the right call.
“When we told our friends and family that we were moving to El Salvador, everyone thought that we would end up with our heads lopped off and broke and penniless and with malaria within the first six months,” Ryan said.
“But we feel much safer here in El Salvador than we did in Nova Scotia.”
Ryan and Jessica’s backyard with their adopted dog.
According to the couple, their purchasing power has increased 300% in El Salvador, so they aren’t looking to return home anytime soon.
“Neither of us have any interest in returning to Canada,” Ryan said. “A lot of people are expecting (Conservative leader) Pierre Poilievre to restore the nation. I don’t think that that is a task that any one prime minister can achieve. The damage is so great, and so extensive and so entrenched, that it’s difficult to imagine Canada becoming a desirable place for us within the remainder of our lifetimes,” Ryan said.
Corrie Bignell, 46, a former nurse from Kitchener, Ont. now residing north of Chinandega, Nicaragua, also moved to Central America amid COVID-19 restrictions and mandates.
“The pandemic hit and I was a nurse at Grand River Hospital, and I didn’t think much of it until I started seeing kind of weird things, like the news would report that we were so busy with patients, but we didn’t have any patients at all,” Bignell recalled.
“I was living in the rat race, going along to get along and, and once that hit, I began to question a lot of things.”
In early 2021, rumours began to circulate in Bignell’s workplace that COVID-19 vaccine mandates were imminent.
Bignell would meet with her friends during the lockdowns – her pals parking their cars further down the street so that neighbours wouldn’t snitch on the unsanctioned gathering – and discuss their exit plans in case their jobs became jeopardized.
“I said if that happens, then I have to sell my house and I have to leave because I’m not safe here anymore,” Bignell said. “And I am a single mom, and I had a mortgage on my house and it was my forever home. I bought it off my family when my grandmother died. And so that house meant everything to me, but I knew there was something inside of my stomach that was like, you just have to leave if that happens.”
The rumours came to pass in September 2021, with Ontario mandating COVID-19 vaccines for healthcare workers. On Oct. 12, Bignell was placed on unpaid leave for being unvaccinated. And in late November, she left Canada.
Her house sold within a few days of being listed.
She had to race against another vaccine mandate, the one the federal government imposed on air travelers, to get out of the country.
“We had to leave by Nov. 30, because after…we couldn’t travel anymore. So my house closed on the 23rd of November. I literally just finished putting things into storage that morning. And we got on the plane and left with four suitcases and came here.”
Bignell was accompanied by her teenage son, who has since returned to Ontario to live with his father. She conceded there was a “big culture shock” for him.
“It was very hard on him and he didn’t understand at the time exactly what I was doing,” she said. “I think he understands now. He’s getting it now.”
Bignell originally had her sights set on Costa Rica, but one of Bignell’s friends who had gone to a retreat in Nicaragua introduced her to a Canadian couple who had moved to the country in 2020 and were offering a house for rent.
Bignell had never travelled before, and never seen the ocean, but she sent the Canadian couple the rent money and they picked her up at the Managua airport. Now, she owns her home in Nicaragua. Her priorities have changed with her surroundings.
“You kind of feel like in the first world, in Canada, you’re just a consumer and you have so many things that don’t actually really mean that much to you,” she said. “And the only thing that really matters to me now is my health. Getting out in the sun, getting in the ocean, and eating good food.”
For the first two years in Nicaragua, Bignell didn’t have to produce an income.
“I made a lot of money on my house (in Canada). And so it was a good cushion for me to buy a house here. My expenses here are very minimal compared to living in Canada,” she said, also noting she invested in cryptocurrency.
Bignell lists her expenses as $45 USD a year on property taxes, $12 USD a month for water, and only $20 to $30 USD a month for electricity because she installed solar panels. She doesn’t have a vehicle, instead opting to share a car with her neighbours. A fruit truck comes by her residence twice a week.
It’s under $20 USD for a quality steak dinner.
Her house is in an expat community which charges $600 USD a year for security. She pays a part-time gardener $180 USD a month and a housekeeper $48 USD a month.
She explains that she doesn’t need a housekeeper, but the previous homeowners had employed the couple and urged Bignell to keep offering them steady work.
“So those are the only things that I really have to spend money on here. There’s no online shopping, I don’t have a post office here, I don’t have a mailbox, you can’t just order Amazon here.”
Income-wise, Bignell now runs in-person coaching programs for clients who come to Central America, and she has a lower unit in her house that she occasionally rents out on AirBnb.
Bignell explained that upon landing in Nicaragua, Canadian citizens get a 90-day stamp on their passport. If you overstay, the fine is only $3 USD a day.
“What most of us Canadians or Americans do who stay here is we’ll just do a border run to Costa Rica. What I did in December was I took a taxi to the border, went into immigration, went out the door and turned right back around, I didn’t even go into Costa Rica. I turned right back around and they stamped my passport again, for another 90 days.”
She mentioned that it is also fairly inexpensive to fly from Managua to Miami.
The method is working for Bignell, who hasn’t ever been denied additional 90-day stamps.
“You can apply for permanent residency and a few friends of mine do have theirs. The process is very, very lengthy. It costs money. And I’m not sure that I want to do that just yet. So right now this is working out for me.”
In 2022, Bignell met her boyfriend, a firefighter who also had to leave his career over vaccine mandates. He lives in Guelph, so Bignell travels to Ontario in the summers to see him, making her a kind of snowbird in her 40s.
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Andrei Bondar, 47, holds Romanian and Canadian passports, moving from Romania to Montreal with his wife when he was 29.
But during the era of COVID hysteria, he started seriously exploring career options in the US, becoming spooked by the Freedom Convoy debankings.
“I realized at some point that Trudeau is not the only problem. Lots of people around me were thinking like him, thinking that personal liberties should be canceled or diminished for the greater good of the community.”
“This is something that brought back memories from my home country, Romania. I grew up in communism. That was exactly their doctrine: you have no individual rights, everything has to be attributed to the society. Eventually, people hated it. And lots of people died because of that. A lot of people suffered,” he explained.
“I decided it’s time for me to get a way out.”
He found himself drawn to Florida because of Governor Ron DeSantis’ libertarian-minded governance during the pandemic, as well as the hot climate.
He started looking for jobs in the US in December 2021. Once he found a position, the employer petition process with US Immigration took a month and a half, and by May 2022 he was living in Coral Springs, Florida.
Bondar, now a senior manager at Charles Schwab bank, entered the US as a mathematician on a TN visa, a three-year permit for designated Canadian or Mexican professionals. Other professionals eligible for TN visas include engineers, scientists, health professionals, and accountants.
His wife Miki, a business librarian, applied for a job with Nova Southeastern University and was hired within a week. Miki showed up at the US port of entry with an offer letter from her employer and was also granted a TN visa.
TN visas can be renewed indefinitely.
Bondar credits he and his wife’s highly specialized skills and education for their ticket into the US.
“We had a very serious discussion if we’re going to go back to Canada or not. Actually, we kept two properties in Canada,” Bondar noted, listing his construction lot in Hudson, Q.C. and small farm near Cornwall, O.N.
“I’m thinking more and more never to return there, just to liquidate the whole thing.”
“From personal experience, I can tell you that each and every Eastern European that I know has a clear plan to leave Canada. Many of them have left, many of them, just because we have this experience living in communism,” said Bondar.
“I think it’s more like a material situation… If you don’t have the means, you’re not going to leave Canada. If you can afford to do it, probably you will do it.”
A taxpayer advocacy group is questioning the logic behind Governor General Mary Simon’s latest salary hike while Canadians struggle to stay afloat.
Simon’s salary is set to see a significant increase in 2024. The adjustment will boost the annual earnings of the current governor general, Mary Simon, by $11,200, increasing her salary to $362,800.
This increment marks Simon’s third raise since her 2021 appointment, cumulatively amounting to an extra $34,000 per year.
In 2019, the governor general’s salary was $302,800. The salary has increased by $60,000 or 20% since 2019. Conversely, the average salary among full-time workers is less than $70,000 per year, according to Statistics Canada.
The salary adjustments given to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation by the Privy Council Office adhere to the legislative framework established by the Governor General’s Act.
This legislation, which set the base salary at $270,602 over a decade ago, allows for annual increases based on a complex formula tied to the nation’s industrial aggregate, a benchmark of labour force earnings.
With many Canadians grappling with the cost of living, the Canadian Taxpayers Federation questions the justification behind the escalating salary.
“Canadians are struggling to afford a jug of milk or a package of ground beef, so the government shouldn’t be rubber-stamping another raise for the Governor General,” said Franco Terrazzano, Federal Director of the CTF.
He asked whether the government could show Canadians how they’re getting more value because the governor general’s paycheque went up approximately $1,000 a month. The platinum pay and perks for the Governor General should have been reined in years ago, said Terrazzano.
Terrazzano said that the Liberal government should not only cut spending but also provide more transparency.
“A serious government would mandate the governor general’s office be subject to access-to-information requests, cut all international travel except for meetings with the monarchy, end the expense account for former Governors General, reform the pension and scrap the clothing allowance,” he said.
The governor general role also comes with a long list of benefits, including a taxpayer-funded mansion, a platinum pension, a generous retirement allowance, a clothing budget, paid dry cleaning services, and travel expenses, according to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
Governors General have a clothing allowance that permits up to $130,000 in expenses over their five-year mandates. The expenses are limited to $60,000 the first year and drop to $10,000 by year five.
Since 2017, more than $88,000 has been spent on clothing for Simon and her predecessor, Julie Payette, billing taxpayers for over 200 items of clothing, according to the National Post. The type of clothing purchased ranges from ceremonial dresses and evening wear to everyday clothing.
Moreover, in her inaugural year, Simon’s travel expenses were $2.7 million, split between four international visits and 17 trips within Canada.
Simon had previously been criticized by the Canadian Taxpayers Federation for her week-long trip to the Middle East to visit Expo 2020 in Dubai, which cost taxpayers more than $1 million. The expenses included nearly $100,000 on airplane food alone, with a menu including beef wellington, pork tenderloin, and carpaccio.
Following media reports, a parliamentary committee recommended reforms to the governor general’s travel budget, including reviewing the cost-effectiveness of trips, a reduction in the size of delegations, and less spending on snacks and drinks.
The governor general’s salary increased by almost $40,000 during the pandemic.
“Why does the governor general need an extra $40,000 when they can expense taxpayers for as much beef wellington as they can stomach?” asked Terrazzano.
Former governor generals can continue to expense taxpayers for up to $206,000 per year after leaving office, said the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. This perk extends for the entirety of their lives and continues up to six months after they die.
They also receive a $150,000 annual pension irrespective of time served.
Before the pandemic, former governor general Julie Payette spent $3 million in travel expenses, said Blacklock’s Reporter.
Despite only serving for three years, Payette will receive an estimated $4.8 million if she collects her pension until age 90, according to estimates of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation.
The advocacy group estimates that Canada’s five living former governor generals will receive more than $18 million if they continuously collect their pensions until age 90.
During their tenures at Rideau Hall, former governor generals Michaëlle Jean and Adrienne Clarkson incurred overseas travel costs totalling $9.3 million and $8.9 million, respectively.
Almost a million Canadians are now looking to the gig economy as a primary source of income, according to a new report from Statistics Canada.
As defined by the report, gig work is “a form of employment characterized by short-term jobs or tasks which does not guarantee steady work and where the worker must take specific actions to stay employed.”
The latest available data from the fourth quarter of 2022, found that around 871,000 Canadians said that gig work was responsible for the bulk of their income.
Another 1.5 million Canadians reported having done some freelance work and short-term gigs in the year 2022.
According to the report, over 300,000 full-time jobs have vanished in Ontario since July.
“The increase in the number of gig workers in Canada is a symptom of, amongst other things, the various regulatory barriers that make certain jobs much harder to access,” policy analyst for the Montreal Economic Institute Gabriel Giguère told True North.
Another contributing factor to the increasing number of people in the gig sector is the rising amount of immigrants coming into Canada.
Digital services like Uber, Lyft and DoorDash saw their companies grow by 46% in 2023 to around 365,000 workers, up from 250,000 the year before.
Of that additional 165,000 workers, 60% were newcomers to Canada, according to the most recent Statistics Canada labour survey.
“Essentially, one thing we have noticed is that there’s a lot of work to be done for provinces recognizing training and diplomas from other Canadian provinces. If we can’t recognize the training of nurses from out-of-province – as some provinces still do – it is clear we have much less recognition for those trained outside Canada. The same goes with occupational licenses in the construction trades in Quebec for instance, where a painter needs 900 hours of training,” said Giguère.
As a result, many of these people have no choice but to join the gig workforce, who under Ontario labour laws, cannot be considered employees, which prevents them from being entitled to benefits, minimum wage and unemployment insurance.
Statistics Canada noted that in 2022, 588,000 self-employed gig workers, employed through various digital platforms, could not access the full benefits associated with being self-employed.
These benefits include things like choosing their own work hours, setting their own price and hiring paid help when needed, reads the report.
The cohort of Canada’s gig workers was only 5.5% in 2005, but jumped up to 8.2% in 2016 and then to 10% in 2020.
On the positive side of the sector, it can swiftly offer financial relief, without having to sign on for any lengthy period.
“The popularity of gig economy platforms comes not just from the flexibility they provide to workers, but from the ability to start and quit almost instantly,” said Giguère.
