Marleau, mon petit

By Paul Wells - Saturday, May 31, 2008 at 3:46 PM - 5 Comments

(click to embiggen)

Here’s a table from Information Commissioner Robert Marleau’s new report. Note the second section, for “commissioner-initiated systemic investigations.” That’s fancy talk for “the commissioner takes matters into his own hands and tries to figure out how the government handles inquiries in general.” Note that Marleau’s predecessor, John Reid, initiated almost 400 of those in his last year as commissioner. Note also that Marleau has launched zero during his first. Continue…

Venezuela's road to serfdom

By Andrew Potter - Saturday, May 31, 2008 at 1:53 PM - 0 Comments

Today’s FT reports on the ongoing traffic chaos in Caracas. Some Venezuelans are upset at the failure of a plan whereby Venezuela would provide subsidized fuel to the city of London, in exchange for transport and planning advice.

How does one even begin to analyze the levels of stupidity involved here? Let’s start with what Ken Livingstone, the former London mayor who signed the deal, should have said to Chavez as his first piece of advice: DON’T SUBSIDIZE FUEL.

Boris Johnson, to his credit, has cancelled the agreement, but Caracas remains a disaster. Funny, no one involved seems to think that the “deep structural problems” in the city have anything to do with this chart. (Scroll to the veeerryy bottom).

Authenticity Watch: Kingsely Amis

By Andrew Potter - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 10:49 PM - 0 Comments

The deafness that we have to our own aesthetic prejudices and biases is closely analogous to our deafness to our own accent. Just as each person thinks the way he speaks is perfectly natural — it’s other people who have funny accents — we all believe that our own judgments about what is ugly or beautiful, delicious or disgusting, reflects real properties in the world. It is other people whose tastes are so obviously conditioned by their culture or their social class.

That’s from my column in the print edition of this week’s Maclean’s…

Remembering Bobby Kennedy

By John Parisella - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 6:51 PM - 0 Comments

The following article is my way of remembering the passing away of Robert F. Kennedy 40 years ago:

He was not a great speaker and he occasionally stammered in public, yet he moved millions with his words. His record as Attorney General of the United States during the Kennedy Administration was considered mixed, yet he is remembered for his courage and his integrity. As Senator from the state of New York, he had few achievements, yet he towered over his colleagues as a beacon of hope and the keeper of JFK flame of idealism. Forty years later, a man who lost his life in his quest for the US presidency is remembered as the last great authentic politician of his time. Some would venture to add, no one has since matched his promise and his inspiration.

Soon after his assassination, a special publication of Life magazine presented a look at his life and times. On the back cover, the authors mused as to whether one could justify his candidacy and the ‘larger than life’ portrayal of his life, had he not been the brother of President John F. Kennedy. They concluded that Bobby Kennedy’s candidacy was justified in its own right. It is significant that we recall why and why he is so often referred to in this current presidential election year. Continue…

A double shot of At Issue

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 6:26 PM - 0 Comments

May 27	May 29

Trial of the century year week

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 5:13 PM - 0 Comments

Update: Click here for the liveblog.

Just a head’s-up: I’ll be live blogging the case of Mohamed Elmasry vs. Mark Steyn/Maclean’s before (sigh) the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal, direct from kangaroo-courtroom 105 of the Robson Square Provincial Court building in Vancouver, starting sometime after 9:30 Pacific/12:30 Eastern Monday morning and going on for, I don’t know, days.

All the dense legalese, with twice the politically correct jargon!

My province is bigger than yours

By Jason Kirby - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 4:28 PM - 0 Comments

Who does more for Canada? Ontario, the traditional economic engine of the country, or Alberta, the energy dynamo credited with keeping Canada out of the current economic dog house? Both, if you listen to the finance ministers for the two provinces.

Yesterday Alberta’s Iris Evans was in Toronto making her pitch for why Canadians should feel all warm and cuddly towards Oilberta. “When Alberta gains $634 billion a year from GDP of these oilsands,” she told the Economic Club of Toronto, “Ontario gains $110 billion a year.” All told, she said, Ontario and the federal government receive half the taxes collected from the oilsands.

Not one to have his province’s financial fortitude questioned, Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan issued a statement today just to remind everyone who wears the pants around here.

Continue…

Here's a thought: why don't we just pick the best people for the job?

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 3:56 PM - 0 Comments

In the wake of the Bernier debacle, talk has turned to the inevitable cabinet shuffle. It’s billed as a chance, not just to replace Bernier at Foreign Affairs, but to relaunch the government after the serial embarrassments of recent weeks – the NAFTA memo, RCMP raiding Conservative headquarters, etc. etc. It would, however, be the third such relaunch in a little over two years in office; if all that is achieved is to move the same familiar faces a few feet this way or that around the cabinet table, it may succeed only in reminding people of how thin the Tory ranks really are. What’s needed is not so much a shuffle as new cards, drafting in some of the brighter members of caucus who have been left to languish on the back benches or in junior ministerial posts. That can’t happen so long as the choice of ministers is left to the spoils system – racial, sexual, and especially regional – that cabinet government has become in this country.

In few other democratic countries is such a rigid system of quotas imposed, calculated down to the last decimal point — what percentage of cabinet goes to Quebec, how many women, and so on. The press is as much to blame as anyone. Cabinets are scrutinized not, as in other countries, for what they reveal about the governing party’s ideological direction, or for what this or that appointment might mean for a particular department. Why should they be? Parties don’t stand for anything, and the prime minister makes all the important decisions anyway. So instead it’s all fun with figures.

Cabinet posts in this country are not, as they are elsewhere, opportunities for able people to serve their country. They are gifts to be offered up to this or that region or interest group to buy their votes. The perverse consequence: the fewer MPs a region elects, the more cabinet ministers it is awarded. Quebec may have relatively few Conservative MPs, but they are nearly all guaranteed a cabinet post at some point. Whereas MPs from BC and Alberta, where the party is hip-deep in talent, can pretty much buy a lottery ticket for all the chance they have of being picked. 

It’s exactly this kind of process that resulted in Maxime Bernier being installed at Foreign Affairs: a process that, so long as it remains, only sets us up for the next hasty shuffle. Perhaps it’s time we started fishing at the deep end of the talent pool. 

Weekend Viewing: "Mary Midwife"

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 3:37 PM - 0 Comments

Here’s an episode from one of those seasons of The Mary Tyler Moore Show that isn’t on DVD and which the Oprah audience therefore won’t get to see: the season 7 premiere, “Mary Midwife,” written by the show’s best and most prolific writer, David Lloyd , where Georgette goes into labour with Ted’s baby. Of course she goes into labour at Mary’s apartment; does anybody ever have a baby at the hospital?

Lloyd specialized in the long exchanges between Mary and Lou in Lou’s office; nobody wrote those scenes better than he did. These scenes were the heart of the entire show, ever since the first episode (the “you’ve got spunk” scene), and as the years went on they got longer and funnier. They’re a good example of how the longer running times of yesteryear were a benefit to sitcoms, at least the ones that knew how to take advantage of them: today, a scene like this would never be able to last four minutes, and it would be cut down to be just long enough to make its point. That’s not what makes it good. What makes it good is that Lou, as always, keeps the discussion going long after the point has been made. That’s funny.

Mariah Carey, ace starter

By Charlie Gillis - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 3:27 PM - 0 Comments

Wow. There’s really nothing I can add to this.

Give Lost Some Space

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 3:23 PM - 0 Comments

I’ll admit it: I have trouble understanding what happened on Lost last night, even after it’s explained to me and recapped in detail. That’s the pact Lost makes with the viewers: if you follow us throughout the season, we will deliver some big thrills in the finale (and big ratings, though less big than they used to be) but if you don’t watch regularly, and just tune in not entirely sure of who’s doing what and where and when and why, then you will be confused. That’s not actually true of all serialized shows. 24 is a serial, but if you drift in and out during the season, it will still sort of make sense, because while it has a lot of twists, the actual plot is not that complicated and the episodes will usually find some way to remind us of what the basic conflicts are. The situations are clear. Lost is a serialized show where the situations are not supposed to be clear, where we’re supposed to argue about what’s going on.

In a way the impact of Lost is more comparable to reality shows than most other serialized scripted shows. (Which makes sense, because Lost was in part an attempt to bring some of the techniques of reality TV to scripted television.) The way people talk about Lost in comment threads like the one linked above is similar to the way they talk about the people on their favourite reality shows: every episode is less about the plot (or the tasks that reality-show contestants have to do) than questions about individual motivations, hidden agendas, alliances and allegiances. The reason reality TV threatened to eclipse scripted TV is that it put people before plot; because these were real people we were seeing, we focused on them instead of the tired storytelling mechanics of television. And Lost has done something similar: adventure dramas had a tendency to emphasize plot over character, but Lost has grabbed a devoted fan base that isn’t so much concerned with plot per se (what’s going to happen) as its effect on the characters (what are they going to do to each other, and what are they hiding?). It’s an odd type of show because it depends so heavily on gimmicks, and the characters aren’t exactly fully-developed people — there are too many of them, for one thing, and their lives are too mysterious for us to really understand them, for another thing — but it’s really the audience’s interest in the people that keeps it going.

BTC: As the minister goes…

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 3:22 PM - 0 Comments

Following-up on the Star’s report this morning that Maxime Bernier’s former chief of staff and senior policy advisor have been relieved of their respective duties, this will apparently be the last day for Bernier’s former director of communications, one Neil Hrab.

For whatever it’s worth, I’m led to believe the move has most to do with eliminating redundancy between David Emerson’s staff and those who remain from the Bernier Era.

Aboot those LCBO bags

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 3:12 PM - 0 Comments

My favourite (non-political) blogger Dooce recently visited Vancouver, loved it, and then made an “aboot” joke on her blog, and all heck broke loose in her comments section. My favourite comment:

Not a Dum-Dum

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 2:54 PM - 0 Comments

Harvey Korman’s death at age 81 is another of the many great losses the TV world has had recently. Korman was an extremely funny man; by far the best thing in Blazing Saddles (who can forget the way he says “evil?”) and a great voice actor, too: his voicing of the infamous Great Gazoo on The Flintstones almost made that character — probably the worst “let’s add a new character late in the run” moment in prime-time TV history — almost tolerable.

The odd thing is that The Carol Burnett Show, for which he is best known, is not one of my favourite things that he did. And it’s not because of him (though he and Tim Conway really should have kept it together; their laughing jags are no more tolerable than Jimmy Fallon’s), and indeed not because of anybody who was on the show: I love Korman, love Carol Burnett, like Tim Conway despite his inability to keep a straight face, even like Vicki Lawrence despite the whole Mama’s Family spinoff thing. But not only is The Carol Burnett Show a show I don’t particularly care for, I can’t remember a time when I liked it very much. Even as a kid, when I basically liked any sketch comedy with funny costumes. Maybe it would come off better if we had complete DVDs of the original episodes to look at — music rights have prevented any kind of comprehensive DVD release so far.

But every time I see it, it just comes off as an uncomfortable mid-point between two schools of comedy-variety shows: the goofier, broader sketch comedy shows that dominated in the ’60s and early ’70s (Dean Martin, Flip Wilson) and the deadpan style, influenced by Second City and National Lampoon, that we’d see with Saturday Night Live and SCTV. The Carol Burnett Show‘s style was always smack in the middle: it was not as corny as other sketch shows, but it was doing types of sketches that really needed more corny/broad humour to work. It had, and still has, a reputation as a “classy” show and I think it deserves that reputation, but I find it more classy than funny. That’s just me, though.

Oh those Democrats

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 2:50 PM - 0 Comments

The DNC Rules and Bylaws committee meets this weekend at a Washington hotel to decide what the heck to do about the Florida and Michigan delegations. It’s seems too late to change the race, but certainly has the potential to cause havoc if not resolved properly. Clinton supporters are planned big protests outside. Good thing my former (excellent) yoga place is across the street. If things get too tense, they can drop in for a down-dog.

For the obsessed.

Oh, those Republicans

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 2:41 PM - 0 Comments

My first thought about the Scott McLellan memoir as cash-ploy was :” How come it was published by Public Affairs?” They have a reputation for modest book advances — even the publisher Peter Osnos admits it:

Continue…

All Your Base Are Belong to T

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 1:59 PM - 0 Comments

Ah, I’ve been waiting for someone to put this back online: “Mr T. vs. Cats,” made in that glorious time when the only things people cared about were “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” and Mr. T webcomics.

Yes, that’s right, I just talked nostalgically about the years 2001-2. And yes, that is kind of sad when you think about it.

Megapundit: Being Sharon Stone

By selley - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 1:24 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: John Robson, Don Martin and Susan Riley on the leave-behind affair; Rosie DiManno on journalist casualties in Afghanistan.

The Bernier-Couillard Affair, Day 104
Or maybe it just feels that way…

“The only fruitful line of inquiry” for a Commons committee investigation, the Ottawa Citizen‘s Susan Riley opines, “would involve Couillard’s role, if any, in helping her former biker pals apply for a security contract at Montreal airport in 2005, presumably to facilitate their drug trafficking.” As for the whole leave-behind affair itself, she can’t imagine what Couillard could have done with the information to threaten national security. “Sell it to the Taliban? Pass it to her geo-politically astute former biker pals?” And besides, Riley quite trenchantly notes, we’ll never know what those documents contained anyway—either because the information really was that sensitive or, more likely, “because it would give rise to awkward questions about why they were declared confidential in the first place” and imperil the “‘national security’ dodge” that keeps so much in Ottawa needlessly under wraps.

John Robson, writing in the Citizen, “shed[s] no tears for Mr. Bernier,” and if Couillard is “a babe in the woods,” he says “the bears better look out.” His goal today is simply to expose the hypocrisy of Canadian politicians to “maximum ridicule.” By saying the matter has nothing to do with “the minister’s private life,” he argues, Stephen Harper is suggesting the same fracas would have erupted had he “been married to her for 15 years”—which is laughable. The claim that Bernier only found out about the bikers when the press got wind of it is “as useless as it is implausible because it tacitly admits he would have worried if he had known.” And Michael Ignatieff, meanwhile, says it’s all about the possible “link between organized crime and airport security in Montreal” and that he doesn’t care about Couillard’s past. “But the possible link with organized crime is her ‘past,’ ” Robson counters.

Continue…

BTC: PVL After Dark

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 1:11 PM - 0 Comments

Peter Van Loan took another 22 questions in Question Period today. And not just on matters of Maxime Bernier and unrelated scandal—he also took queries on economic development in northern Ontario and mining.

This after taking fully 20 questions during the previous evening’s committee of the whole on Foreign Affairs (dutifully live-blogged by our Kady). Indeed, this week the government House leader has obfuscated morning, afternoon and night.

Herein, some of the highlights of his prime time performance last night. The last one is damn near profound. Continue…

Professor Black

By Andrew Potter - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 12:48 PM - 0 Comments

I hope to god that someone is recording the history lectures Conrad Black is giving to the prisoners at Coleman. They should be making a documentary about this — “The Prison Lectures of Lord Black” would be a massive, massive, hit. Going to jail could turn out to be the greatest business venture of his life.

Seriously.

Sour Grapes snubs Crosby

By Charlie Gillis - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 12:48 PM - 0 Comments

Click here for an interesting riff on the chill between Sidney Crosby and Hockey Night in Canada, which refers to the the post-game segment above.

You may find, as I did, the crew doesn’t snub Crosby quite as scandalously as William Houston, the Globe’s designated couch potato, suggests. Still, the distrust between Crosby’s camp and HNIC is real, and a lot of it percolates on the other side. After Cherry quite stupidly slammed Sid a few years ago for a bit of teenage hotdogging, Crosby stood his ground. Ever since, he’s been restrained yet icy in his responses to Cherry’s repeated slights (like his beef about Crosby wearing the ‘A’ in his rookie year). Moreover, he doesn’t seem star-struck by the HNIC aura, which seems to have galled the CBC gang further.

Last year, Sid’s keeper with the Pens, Frank Buonomo, failed to deliver the Kid for an on-air appearance with Cherry during a Pens game in Toronto, sending Grapes into a rage on Coach’s Corner. I was in the press box that night, and talked to the Pen’s chief flack, Tom McMillan, who did a nice job professing befuddlement. Crosby had done a pre-taped segment with the CBC already, he pointed out. How much did CBC want? 

Anyway, it’s kind of fun to watch. Without intending to, Crosby is showing HNIC’s stuffed shirts—especially Cherry—they don’t have the suction they used to. Through the NHL Network, TSN, RDS, YouTube and various other enterprises, he flies over their heads to reach his Canadian fan base. More evidence that shoving Bob Cole onto an ice floe won’t be enough to drag the Mother Corp’s broadcast into the 21st century. 

Lou Dobbs Has a New Favourite Show

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 12:40 PM - 0 Comments

It’s like Cops except they’re beating up more foreigners!

A new ABC unscripted series will take an unprecedented look behind the scenes at the government’s fight against terrorism.

The network has ordered 11 hours of “Border Security USA” from executive producer Arnold Shapiro (“Big Brother”). Shot on location throughout the United States, the series will focus on the efforts of border protection agencies to halt illegal smuggling and immigration.

A typical episode might jump from a border patrol in Texas to security screeners at a New York airport to a Coast Guard boat off Puerto Rico.

“Border” is billed as the first multiepisode television series to be shot in cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security, as well as several other government agencies.

This show has the same title as CBC’s  non-reality show, but the description in the article makes it sound less like a show about counter-terrorism and border security and more like an attempt to exploit every possible kind of border-related fear. The producer admits that they haven’t actually seen any terrorists getting caught, but “we’ve seen a few people not admitted because they’re on watch lists. Nobody wants to be the officer who lets in the next terrorist.” In other words, you won’t see terrorism foiled, but you will see some hard-core profiling of people with foreign-sounding names.

I am going to take a guess that if this thing works out, it will have to put less emphasis on the terrorism stuff and more on the other aspects of border security, like illegal immigration and smuggling. Open exploitation of terrorism fears is very 2003; even 24 has had to back off from that a little bit. Large segments of today’s audience are not going to be very pleased to see people turned back for, in the words of the article, having “relatives with ties to a terrorist organization.” It will need to be more like Cops, where the audience gets to cheer for the arrest and beating-up of people who are actually breaking the law.

Clueless Pete Rose

By Michael Friscolanti - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Joe Jackson’s baseball career can be summed up in four sentences: His nickname was “Shoeless” (he once played a game in his socks because his new cleats gave him blisters). He boasted a .356 career batting average, the third-highest in Major League history. He and seven other Chicago White Sox were banned from baseball for purposely losing the 1919 World Series at the behest of some high-rolling gamblers. And he was dumb.

Really, really dumb. It’s often said that “Clueless” would have been a more appropriate nickname than “Shoeless.”

But it’s now official: Pete Rose is dumber. Continue…

Ding

By Paul Wells - Friday, May 30, 2008 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

If you’re in Britain and angry at Gordon Brown, the phone’s for you.