First Reading is a daily newsletter keeping you posted on the travails of Canadian politicos, all curated by the National Post’s own Tristin Hopper. To get an early version sent directly to your inbox every Monday to Thursday at 6:30 p.m. ET (and 9:30 a.m. on Saturdays), sign up here.
TOP STORY
Lately, one of Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre’s favourite slogans is that Canada is “broken.” And according to a February poll commissioned by the National Post, 67 per cent of Canadians would agree with him.
While there’s been no shortage of recent scandals in the federal cabinet, the brokenness has also manifested itself in a steady pattern of incompetence or neglect among the everyday departments of the Government of Canada.
Some examples from just the last few months …
- Passport Canada stumbled into the worst backlog in its history, despite ample prior warning of that exact scenario.
- Mayors, premiers and police departments across the country are begging the Department of Justice to stop releasing violent recidivist offenders on bail.
- Veteran Affairs Canada was caught recommending assisted suicide to combat veterans seeking psychiatric help.
- The Canada Revenue Agency was slammed by the Auditor General for refusing to chase down up to $32 billion in misappropriated pandemic benefits.
- The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has been found allowing critical nuclear equipment to operate well beyond its regulated lifetime.
- Transport Canada just finished overseeing the worst airport delays in Canadian history, and they’re disastrously backlogged on pilot certifications.
- The Department of Defence is facing record-low recruitment and a string of sexual harassment scandals.
- The Canada Border Services Agency somehow spent $54 million on ArriveCan.
- Even the normally uncontroversial National Research Council of Canada is raising eyebrows after it somehow managed to rack up 13 per cent of its budget on credit cards.
But the federal government is a big place, and there remain a few scattered corners of the civil service that aren’t yet a flaming disaster.
Below, in the interest of injecting some cheerfulness into our usual coverage of bad news, here is your First Reading guide to the federal departments that are quietly doing a great job (so far as we know).
THE CANADIAN SPACE AGENCY
You’d be forgiven if you thought the Canadian Space Agency was mostly a glorified travel agency paying millions of dollars to Russia whenever it wanted to send another Canadian up to the International Space Station.
But the CSA has been leaning hard into lunar exploration of late. An all-Canadian lunar rover is already under construction. A Canadian is set to be onboard Artemis II, the first crewed mission to the moon since the Apollo era. And, of course, we’re building a robotic arm for the Lunar Gateway, a space station in lunar orbit designed to act as a waypoint for astronauts travelling to the moon’s surface.
The agency even has a new logo!
STATISTICS CANADA
There’s a good chance that Statistics Canada data underlies a lot of your perceptions on the current state of Canada. They’re the ones who crunched the numbers on the extent of the doctor shortage. They maintain the Consumer Price Index, and as such are the reason we know that inflation is currently at generational highs. It’s Statistics Canada’s Crime Severity Index which has confirmed a marked rise in violent crime over the past few years. And back in September, headlines were dominated by new Statistics Canada projections showing that Canada would have 50 million people by 2041, half of whom would be members of immigrant families.
THE NATIONAL BATTLEFIELDS COMMISSION
There’s admittedly not much for the National Battlefields Commission to screw up, for the precise reason that Canada doesn’t have all that many battlefields. In fact, the NBC only takes care of one: The Plains of Abraham in Quebec City. While there are other battlefields (such as a handful of War of 1812 battle sites on the Niagara Peninsula) all of those are in the custody of Parks Canada.
And the Commission is doing just fine running their one battlefield, thank you very much. In January, they even opened a new and improved network of cross-country ski trails.
CANADIAN FOOD INSPECTION AGENCY
Although Canada’s food keeps getting more expensive, at least it’s not causing any mass poisonings. It’s the Canadian Food Inspection Agency that’s been chasing down an “unprecedented” outbreak of avian flu. In February, they caught traces of listeria in a batch of artisanal fondue, and again in a shipment of PC brand cheddar cheese. And CFIA inspectors keep busting “food fraudsters”; manufacturers who cut their product with cheap filler. It’s a particularly troublesome problem with high-end cooking oils. According to CFIA testing, as much as a third of premium oils feature severe adulteration.
THE ROYAL CANADIAN MINT
Canadians may not be aware that their pockets jangle with some of the world’s most advanced coinage. The Royal Canadian Mint is routinely pioneering new methods of coin manufacture that just don’t exist anywhere else. They figured out how to mass-produce full-colour coins. They were the first to churn out coins featuring multifaceted high-relief designs. And Royal Canadian Mint coins are some of the hardest in the world to counterfeit.
It’s for these reasons that the Mint is utterly raking in foreign contracts; more than 80 countries have at least a few Canadian-made coins in circulation. Tack on the fact that the Mint sells truckloads of memorabilia to coin collectors each year, and the whole operation earns the Government of Canada a rather tidy annual profit.
ENVIRONMENT CANADA (THE WEATHER FORECASTING PART)
This is the department headed by former Greenpeace activist Steven “Phase Out the Oil Sands” Guilbeault, and it’s the one singularly responsible for the fact that you can’t get a decent straw anymore.
However, Environment Canada is also the agency tasked with providing 24-hour weather forecasts across the world’s second largest land mass – and they do it relatively well. Next-day forecasts are almost always correct, and even the agency’s seven-day forecasts are right about 70 per cent of the time.
To do this, the agency’s meteorologists maintain thousands of monitoring stations (some of which are incredibly remote), they launch 62 weather balloons a day and they’ve built the world’s most powerful weather computer.
ELECTIONS CANADA
Even as Ottawa is embroiled in scandal over allegations of Chinese electoral interference, it’s notable that nobody is questioning the integrity of the basic mechanics of the Canadian electoral process. The gist is that China used hinky means to influence Canadians’ votes, but that the actual casting of ballots was all above board.
This is mainly because Elections Canada is pretty consistent at delivering electoral results promptly and without too many suspicious anomalies such as missing ballot boxes or malfunctioning voting machines (the agency resolutely refuses to move away from paper ballots for this precise reason).
IN OTHER NEWS
Although it’s been 61 years since Canada last executed someone, the citizenry has never really lost its enthusiasm for killing criminals. A recent Research Co. survey became just the latest poll to show that a majority of Canadians (54 per cent) wouldn’t mind a return to capital punishment for the crime of murder. In fact, the sentiment is trending upwards: A year ago, only 51 per cent of respondents favoured state executions. As has been shown in prior Canadian surveys on capital punishment, this is a rather predictable public reaction to the fact that vanishingly few Canadian murderers ever stay behind bars for more than about 20 years. In just the last few years, the Department of Justice has granted release to cannibals, serial killers, cop killers and even child murderers.
One of the weirder things surrounding the ongoing hubbub about alleged Chinese electoral interference is thatit’s not really based on any new information. It’s been known since 2016 that Chinese businessmen were throwing money at the Trudeau Foundation in an apparent attempt to influence-peddle the prime minister. And for the last 12 months there’s been no shortage of reports showing that Liberal campaigns in the 2021 election were receiving in-kind support with uncomfortably close ties to the Chinese consulate. But the reason the allegations are suddenly hitting hard this time around is due to a series of leaks from CSIS reporting that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was repeatedly briefed on Chinese interference operations, but didn’t do anything about it.
On Friday, one of those CSIS leakers broke their silence, although they’re still not revealing their name due to the risk that they could face criminal prosecution. In an op-ed for the Globe and Mail credited to a “national security official,” the leaker said they went public only after years of frustration at seeing “evidence of senior public officials ignoring interference.” The official also urged Canadians to calm down about what it all means. “I do not believe that foreign interference dictated the present composition of our federal government. Nor do I believe that any of our elected leaders is a traitor to our country,” they wrote.
As we’ve mentioned, the Supreme Court of Canada is down a judge after Russell Brown was allegedly caught up in a series of drunken shenanigans at an Arizona resort. This is bad news if you like pipelines. The Supreme Court is soon set to consider a Government of Alberta challenge to Bill C-69, a piece of 2019 legislation that broadens the criteria by which a resource project (such as a pipeline) can be rejected. It was already a long shot that Alberta could get C-69 quashed by the Supreme Court, but it’s now extra unlikely given that Brown was considered to be one of the court’s more reliably pro-Alberta votes.
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