#michael ferguson

Doctor Who: The Ambassadors of Death (7.3, BBC, 1970)

"And what do you think they should do?"

"Arm every available missile with atomic warheads and blast that thing out of our sky!"

"Isn't that a bit extreme?"

"It's our moral duty."

"I think the General's a bit overwrought."

Michael Ferguson, Canada's auditor general, has died, his office confirmed to CBC News on Saturday. He was 60.

"Mr. Ferguson had been undergoing treatment for cancer since last November," the Office of the Auditor General of Canada said in a statement. "Unfortunately, the treatment was unsuccessful. He passed away surrounded by his family in Ottawa."

"Much appreciated by his staff and respected by parliamentarians and government officials alike, Mr. Ferguson will be remembered by all those who had the pleasure of knowing him as a humble, compassionate and thoughtful man," the statement continued.

The federal government should publish its full review of fossil fuel subsidies as it works toward phasing them out, says an Ottawa-based corporate watchdog.

Environment and Climate Change Canada is currently poring over all federal non-tax measures that support the oil and gas industry, as it prepares to deliver on a climate-friendly G20 promise to eliminate the "inefficient" ones by 2025.

Earlier this week, the department said it would decide later how much of that review would be made public, but after a line of questioning from National Observer, a spokeswoman clarified that the full document is "expected to be made public."

The spotlight on Environment Canada's publishing question comes after a series of criticisms of Canada's progress on the promise to kick inefficient fossil fuel support to the curb.

Last year, a scathing auditor general report found that Ottawa had not yet developed a strategy to phase out the inefficient subsidies by 2025, despite making the initial promise in 2009, placing it in the mandate letters of both the environment and finance ministers in 2015, and reaffirming it again in 2016.

The auditor general, Michael Ferguson, also noted that the Finance Department had refused to share information about how the government was keeping its promise to phase out the subsidies.

A few months later, in October, federal MPs held a secret meeting about fossil fuel subsidies, prompting an environmentalist, Annie Bérubé from Équiterre, to accuse Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's Liberals of trying to prevent politicians from studying the issue.

Last year Auditor General Michael Ferguson called out the lack of transparency surrounding fossil fuel subsidies in Canada and the extremely slow progress towards phasing out these subsidies, but little has changed since then.

Out of the Unknown: The Yellow Pill (3.12, BBC, 1969)

"The year is 1969. This is 1969, this is the year in which you claim to have been born."

"You really are gone, aren't you, old boy?"

"Look, Connor, if I were to show you a calendar, or a newspaper, which clearly shows today's date is June the fourth, 1969, will you believe me then?"

"No."

"Why not?"

Temporary foreign workers continue to be hired in place of Canadians despite federal assurances that the Canada’s beleaguered foreign worker program is meant to be a last resort, the auditor general said Tuesday.

Michael Ferguson’s office reviewed 136 applications for temporary foreign workers submitted by Canadian employers. It found that 88 per cent of the requests were approved – despite indicators in some cases that more information should have been sought to ensure employers had tried to hire Canadians first.