A weekly scan of the Canada Gazette uncovers overlooked bureaucratic stories: SSHRC's $1.5 billion budget needs a new president, a tariff dispute hinges on whether water dispensers are appliances or refrigerating equipment, and draft rules would require large private employers to offer French-language services in francophone regions.
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I read the Canada Gazette so you don't have to, and here are the secret stories in Canadian bureaucracy that those commies at the Globe and Mail won't tell you. And the last story is kind of nuts. But first, Canada's nerd funding agency needs a new boss. The government's looking for a new president for the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. It's one of the three big federal research funders alongside the health research people and the science and engineering people. Those two get to fund vaccines and rockets. SSHRC gets to fund the guy telling us how to feel about it all. If you have ever wanted to control roughly a billion $1.5 billion of Canadian tax money and decide which university professors get to study the sociology of curling, this is your chance. Applications close Thursday. The government is arguing over another company over definitions. A company that imports water dispensers, you know, the kind you see in offices that go glug, glug, glug. The Canadian Border Services Agency says that these are electrothermic appliances. This company is like, no, they are refrigerating equipment, or maybe just unclassified electrical machine. This is all about what tariff gets applied, and now grown adults in suits will argue for hours about whether a water cooler cooler is more like a fridge or a toaster. Meanwhile, out in Alberta, a company that flies water bombers, the planes that dump water on wildfires, bid on a contract to fight fires for the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre, and they lost. Now they say the agency used secret evaluation criteria and judged the bids out of order. So that'll be a fight. In Prince George, the broadcast regulator just renewed the license for CFUR, the community radio station. I know it's not exactly a scandal, but I kind of like knowing that the CRTC has time to review one small BC campus station the same week it's dealing $5 billion streaming fights. Environment Canada wants to fast-track protection for endangered species habitat on federal land. Right now they protect one species at a time with individual orders, which is, you know, slow. The new plan would automatically protect habitat within 6 months of it being identified, no extra order needed. And finally, the big one: new draft regulations would force federally regulated private businesses like banks and airlines and phone companies to serve you in French, not just in Quebec, but But wherever there are a lot of French speakers, like New Brunswick, and Ottawa, and Yarmouth, and pockets of Manitoba and Alberta, businesses with more than 100 employees would have to offer service for those areas in French. Considering these are mostly big companies, they probably wouldn't have one workforce for French and one for the others, so this could force them to hire a lot more bilingual people. If you want to chat about these stories, check out my new community at community.todmaffin.com. It's like Facebook, but there are no ads and nobody's uncle is ranting about how roundabouts are for communists. And that was the week in Canadian politics. Bureaucracy.
