Laughing all the way to the end
By Brian Bethune - Thursday, February 19, 2009 - 1 Comment
Grand larceny, a mother’s madcap final months and the bitter truth about aging
You can read Welcome to the Departure Lounge (Doubleday), Meg Federico’s account of caring for her difficult mother, Addie (and her mother’s beyond-difficult new husband, Walter) during Addie’s last 18 months, and laugh all the way through in a there-but-for-the-grace-of-God way. From its opening, when Addie, 81 and unconscious on a hospital gurney, wakes up long enough to yell, “I demand an autopsy,” to 82-year-old Walter’s fascination with mail-order sex aids, the book reads like a geriatric version of a 1930s screwball comedy. Federico is a humour columnist, and her story is skilfully told, but in the end (no pun intended), it’s no laughing matter. Flowing not very far beneath the surface humour, and made palatable by the laughs, are some dead serious issues that, one way or another, most of us will someday face.
Consider Addie’s plan, in one of her more lucid moments, to deal with her husband’s unpredictable lurches into violence as he slid deeper into dementia: “You will be pleased and surprised. My plan is that Walter will have a stroke.” That is funny, but it also allows Federico to say out loud what many in her—and her mother’s—position sometimes think, but almost always keep to themselves. “At this point in my life,” the 53-year-old author says from her Halifax home, “there’s not a lot of thought suppression going on in my mind. The thought, ‘Things will be better when she dies,’ will come to you.”
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Sweet dreams are made of risk
By Elio Iannacci - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 12:10 PM - 2 Comments
If some people aren’t happy with her political activism, says pop star Annie Lennox, too bad
On the morning of Jan. 4, pop star Annie Lennox flipped open her laptop and was completely taken aback. The previous day she had attended a peace rally that urged an end to the Israeli offensive against Hamas militants in Gaza. The U.K.-based march, at which Lennox gave a passionate anti-war speech, was attended by more than 10,000 people and covered by hundreds of media outlets. As the most successful British female recording artist in history—a title earned partly from her tenure as the front woman for the Grammy-winning duo known as Eurythmics—Lennox’s participation in the protest was written about extensively—and positively—by the international press. However, when Lennox logged on to her MySpace account to post a blog about the event, she realized her own 50,000-plus fan count was down significantly.
“I lost 4,000 people,” Lennox admits over the phone from her home in London. “They dropped right off my page after I took part in that demonstration! Even though I very clearly said, ‘This is not an issue of which side you’re on, this is about civilians and innocent people and a need for a peaceful solution’—they still left me.”
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Just like being there
By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 11:58 AM - 12 Comments
Report #1 from the press gallery pool reporter.
U.S. President Barack Obama and Govenor General Michaelle Jean met for a private meeting Thursday.
The two spoke spoke together in front of media for about a minute before the meeting.
They spoke in low voices and appared to be comfortable in each other’s company.
Obama smiled and leant toward Jean as she spoke to him.
The two were seated, flanked by advisors in a room at the Canada Recpetion Centre at Ottawa airport during the brief photo opportunity, moments after Obama arrived on Air Force One.
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Just like being here
By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 11:57 AM - 3 Comments
The Whitehouse blogs the President’s visit.
“Canal Rideau is frozen over, and there are people ice skating on it.”
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Exclusive
By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 11:52 AM - 6 Comments
Standing in the hallway just now, Barack Obama waved in my general direction. I’ll never wash these eyeballs again.
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Shock therapy
By Peter Shawn Taylor - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 11:40 AM - 1 Comment
How the recession is helping fix Canada’s competitiveness woes
Canadians might find it hard to see any silver lining to the current global recession, or the looming $85 billion in deficits Ottawa plans to spend to get the country out of it. But those concerned about Canada’s competitiveness are seeing some good news. The prospect of economic catastrophe appears to have sparked movement on several contentious issues, and if the trend continues, Canada’s economy could actually emerge from the financial rubble in better shape than ever.
“To see the amount of progress that has been made in the last 90 days on competitiveness issues is actually breathtaking,” says Tom Jenkins, executive chairman of the Waterloo, Ont.-based high-tech firm Open Text. Jenkins was a member of the federally appointed Competition Policy Review Panel which reported last summer on how to improve the country’s economy. Despite his worries about the massive increase in federal debt over the next five years, Jenkins is heartened by the sense of urgency shown by Ottawa and the provinces to implement his panel’s recommendations.
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Cannon to meet Clinton, and the post-presidential visit agenda
By John Geddes - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 11:36 AM - 1 Comment
There’s news this morning that Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon plans to meet with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton next week. This casts the story of Barack Obama’s visit to Ottawa ahead, even before the President sets foot on Parliament Hill.
The real impact of Obama’s visit will only begin to be understood when we start to get a sense of what comes next, like Cannon meeting Clinton, and how the Canadian government builds on these opportunities. The obvious starting point for any Canadian strategy would be to assess and exploit the Obama administration’s shift to multilateralism, or what Clinton calls “smart power.”
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A little colour from Centre Block
By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 11:16 AM - 2 Comments
The 40 or so reporters who have been given the appropriate level of accreditation are currently sequestered in a committee room off Centre Block’s main hall. At the front of the room is a projection screen broadcasting the “pool feed”—at the moment we have exclusive access to a shot of the President’s car, parked at the entrance of the Ottawa airport. There are smaller televisions showing network broadcasts to the left and right of the big screen. The volume is not loud enough on either to actually hear what’s being said. Someone has inexplicably piped in classical music. A half dozen Canadian reporters are trying to sort out what two questions the President will be asked at this afternoon’s press conference.
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Now hiring: nursing jobs on the rise
By Cathy Gulli - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 11:10 AM - 2 Comments
Health care is Canada’s fastest growing sector. The pay is up too.
If you’re out of work and considering a career change, think about medicine. Last week, Statistics Canada revealed that in the midst of rising unemployment, there is one bright spot: the number of health care and social assistance jobs rose 5.1 per cent in 2008—the fastest growth seen in any industry over the past year.
Employment in nursing, residential care facilities and hospitals “bucked the trend,” reported StatsCan in its labour force survey, with the number of jobs swelling to 1,970,300, up 31,000. Even health professionals are surprised: “We don’t know if this is just a blip or if it’s going to continue to rise,” says Kaaren Neufeld, president of the Canadian Nurses Association. But “it [represents] the possibility of an encouraging trend.” What’s more, the average hourly wage of health employees rose six per cent over the past year to $25.55. Neufeld says nurses have been in demand, and that as the population ages, “we’re going to need even more.”
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Good golly, Noddy’s back!
By Sarmishta Subramanian - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments
Controversial kids’ author Enid Blyton is in the news again for a new book starring her famous wooden toy
Britain’s librarians must have been frowning last summer when results of a nationwide poll of favourite writers were announced in the press. In top place, beating out Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens, was a children’s author their ilk has gleefully detested for 40 years now, the implausibly prolific and popular Enid Blyton. The author of an astonishing 700-odd books—which still translate to eight million copies a year in sales—Blyton is perhaps the most popular author you’ve never heard of. Her name may mean little to North American readers, but in France, in Germany, in countries as far-flung as Australia, Portugal, Singapore and India, Blyton, who wrote mostly in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, remains not merely the beloved author of such series as Noddy, The Famous Five, The Magic Faraway Tree, and Malory Towers, but a rite of passage, an icon conjuring the magic of childhood.
In the U.K., she’s also a lightning rod for controversy, and after the poll results were announced, there was carping. Anthony Horowitz, writer of the TV drama Foyle’s War, complained in the Daily Telegraph that Britons were “being asked to genuflect in front of a fossil.” The children’s author Philip Pullman compared her stories to “mechanically recovered meat.” They’re only Blyton’s most recent detractors. The aforementioned librarians viewed her as a hack and simpleton who kept kids from serious reading. Progressives got her books banned from libraries on charges of racism, sexism, middle-class-ism; one writer called her work neo-fascist. And she didn’t find much truck with the other side either. The conservative British journalist Colin Welch famously excoriated Noddy, a little wooden fellow who lives with his friend Big Ears in Toyland, as an imbecile, “an unnaturally priggish, sanctimonious . . . witless, spiritless, snivelling, sneaking doll.”
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ITQ's O-Day in pictures – by BerryCam, of course
By kadyomalley - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 10:58 AM - 10 Comments
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- Neither snow nor slush nor increasingly draconian security restrictions will keep them from their appointed tasks…
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- Welcome, American media! Let us take your coats!
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- De-coated American media
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- Shortly before being removed from the premises
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- From the Colleague Wellscam atop the CTV building.
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- The waiting game is afoot!
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- Eeeee!
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- The slightly fuzzified view from the Hot Room balcony
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- It’s like they *knew* ITQ would eventually be there with a datesquare-shaped hole in her stomach.
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- So long, American-style politics!
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Bury the hatchet on Plains battle, natives advise
By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 10:50 AM - 12 Comments
Finally, someone is talking sense about 1759
Finally, someone is talking sense about 1759. Having watched the history buffs slug it out rhetorically with Quebec sovereigntists, the Huron-Wendat First Nation of is offering to perform a hatchet-burying ceremony on the Plains of Abraham, where a federally supported group had planned to re-enact the 18th-century battle that led to the conquest of New France. The re-enactment was cancelled due to nationalist outcry, and tempers have been thin ever since. It’s fun to think of the natives’ offer as mockery: if we can let this kind of thing go, they seem to be saying, why can’t you? But the aboriginals appear serious, saying their ceremony—which would include some sort of treaty—would be modeled on the 1701 Grande Paix de Montréal, between France and 39 First Nations. “A treaty,” says Konrad Sioui, grand chief of the Huron-Wendats, “would be a beautiful way to bring people together.” Kumbaya, chief. Kumbaya.
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More evidence Canada is back on the world stage
By Michael Petrou - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 10:47 AM - 7 Comments
Watching Obama deplaning on CNN:
CNN announcer describes President Obama arriving in Ottawa where he is “greeted by the, uh, contingent there, including the Prime Minister.”
Actually it was Michaëlle Jean, our Governor General. Harper was waiting back on Parliament Hill, some 20 kilometres away.
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Bin Laden's hideaway narrowed down to three buildings
By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 10:45 AM - 0 Comments
UCLA Geography professors identify Bin Laden’s most likely hiding spots
Geography professors at UCLA have placed Osama Bin Laden’s hideaway in one of three buildings in the northwest Pakistan town of Parachinar, in the Kurram region near the border with Afghanistan. The study used satellite imagery, animal distribution theories and Bin Laden’s life history characteristics to predict his hideaway. According to ABC News, the scientists hope that intelligence agencies including FBI, CIA and Pakistani Intelligence services will investigate their predictions. Bin Laden’s last appearance was in January in an Internet audio message confronting President Obama. A CIA official who had not seen the report said only, “take it with a huge grain of salt, huge.”
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Can Harry Potter teach execs how to move their cheese?
By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments
Best leadership movie nominees include Harry Potter and Gandhi
The Washington Post asks business leaders and students for nominations on the best leadership movies of all time and the results run the gamut from Harry Potter to Gandhi. Alan Webber, founding editor of Fast Company, selects Slumdog Millionaire for its “selfless” hero who “draws on his own experiences and lessons learned from the streets to overcome the obstacles that the protectors of the status quo—the villains of power and manipulation—put in his path.” Colonel Charles D. Allen, who teaches at the U.S Army War College, sites the teamwork lesson shown by the soldiers in the 1989 film Glory. And one of Warren Bennis’s students compares Steve Job’s management style with that of Willy Wonka from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
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Israel’s kingmaker makes his move
By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments
Solidifies Israel’s drift to the right
Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the ultranationalist Israel Our Home party, said he will support Binjamin Netanyahu, leader of the right-wing Likud party, as prime minister in a coalition government. Lieberman said he would prefer to see Netanyahu lead a broad national unity government but would also join a narrow right-wing government. Tzipi Livni, head of the centrist Kadima party, which won the most seats in this month’s election, told her party members that she would not join Netanyahu’s coalition. “We weren’t elected to legitimize this extreme right-wing government, and we must represent an alternative of hope and go to the opposition,” she said.
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The Layover of the Century — In Pictures
By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 10:39 AM - 15 Comments
President Obama’s trip to Ottawa
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Who gets Heath Ledger's Oscar, if he wins?
By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 10:37 AM - 0 Comments
Apparently, a compromised has been reached
The potential awarding of a posthumous Oscar to Heath Ledger, the odds-on favourite in the supporting actor category for his role as the Joker in The Dark Knight, has created one of the trickiest situations in the history of the Academy Awards. Typically, in such situations, the Oscar is claimed by an actor’s spouse or child. But the unmarried Ledger was estranged from Michelle Williams, the mother of his only child, Matilda, who is only three and unable to sign the standard contract that stipulates the winner will not resell his or her Oscar without offering it back to the academy for $1. A compromise finally has been reached: should Ledger win, the statuette will be held in trust for his daughter by Williams until she reaches 18 when she can execute an “heir’s agreement” to keep the Oscar or return it. Who will claim the Oscar for Ledger, should he win, remains under wraps, though tradition holds that it be “an artist who was close to the nominee, and who can speak credibly for him or her.” In that regard, our odd-on favourite is Jake Gyllenhaal.
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Gold medal in Yoga?
By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 10:35 AM - 1 Comment
From meditation to competition
Yoga conjures up images of soft-lit candles, chanting, and nonjudgmental good vibes, so the idea of a yoga competition sounds about as ridiculous as the idea of competitive prayer. But who knew? There really is an international yoga championship (this year marked the sixth installment) and if organizers have their way, yoga will be an Olympic sport one day. “The men’s division, for the most part, looked like dudes doing yoga very well. But watching the women, all performing serenely daring stuff, was like staring at water getting poured from a pitcher very slowly. It was lyrical, majestic, composed. Legs folded behind heads, and heads appeared between legs, chin on the floor, after impossible backward bends. Yoginis folded into lotus, balanced on their knees, and shot their legs back while balancing on their arms, smiling all the time. I may have been dreaming but I swear I saw, during the youth competition, one girl draw into a bow, arch back, and place her toes in her mouth.”
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Nicolas Huberdeau 1959-2009
By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments
A dairy farmer who worked from dawn until dusk, he knew each of his ‘girls’ by their spots
Nicolas Huberdeau was born on Dec. 3, 1959, one of nine children—three girls and six boys—born to René and Marguerite, dairy farmers and strong Catholics from St. Lazare, Man. The tightly knit francophone village of 300—an “island” among anglophone communities where the Church remains important, says town councillor Phil Fafard—sits on the eastern edge of the Qu’Appelle Valley, 10 miles from the Saskatchewan border. “We were a poor family,” says Guy, the eldest, “so we made our own fun.” Nic, an “awkward” little boy, was working the fields and milking cows by the time he was seven, says Guy. Using shoebox lids, he’d design “his ideal barn,” figuring “which cow should be in which stall,” says Cam, their younger brother.
There was never any doubt where Nic was headed in life, and at 13 he made it official when he dropped out of École Saint-Lazare. “His passion was farming,” Cam explains. At 24, Nic and Guy took over their parents’ dairy operation. Six years later, at a dance in St. Lazare, Nic met Rebecca Fouillard, a nurse’s aide a decade his junior. He was “the shyest person,” says Rebecca—“the kind who’d go bright red at the drop of a hat.” She loved his gentle manners; they were married within a year, and were later joined by two sons: Shane and Mathiew.
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Stem cell scientists wait—and wait—for Obama’s green light
By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments
No sign yet of Obama lifting Bush’s research ban, and scientists are getting nervous
At the National Institutes of Health and numerous universities, scientists are growing increasing anxious that Barack Obama has not yet fulfilled his campaign promise to lift one of George Bush’s most contentious policies, the federal ban on new human embryonic stem cell research. Proponents expected the new president to lift the restriction in his first week in office, when he issued a flurry of executive orders. “We were surprised and disappointed it wasn’t in there,” said Amy Comstock Rick of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research. Word from top adviser David Axelrod that the president is “considering” an executive order and will act soon, hasn’t helped. “The word the president is ‘considering’ it is too vague for me,” Rick said. “I don’t know entirely what that means. If it means he’s just working out the details, that’s great. But if ‘considering’ means ‘reconsidering’ we would be very upset.”
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Testing the limits
By Ken MacQueen, Jonathon Gatehouse and Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments
Behind the scenes at the test run for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics
Like night and day,” says 25-year-old Canadian mogul queen Jennifer Heil of the change in atmosphere, support—and expectation—since she joined the national freestyle ski team in 2001. Heil nailed her last run at Cypress Mountain in B.C. on the Saturday night of a golden weekend, executing two gorgeous jumps and flowing down the final stretch of moguls so smoothly you could have balanced a glass of water on her helmet. Or make that champagne. Heil and her freestyle compatriots earned Canada near total domination of a World Cup weekend on the West Vancouver mountainside, scoring eight podium finishes in moguls, high-flying aerials and rockin’-sockin’ ski-cross, which makes its Olympic debut next year on this very hill. It was their contribution to the winningest weekend in the history of Canadian winter sports—30 official and unofficial medals at international events staged in B.C., Bulgaria, France and Norway.
The timing, just days shy of a year from the Feb. 12 opening ceremonies of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics, couldn’t have been better scripted. The string of successes, including simultaneous international events staged by the Vancouver Olympic organizing committee (VANOC) on Cypress, the figure skating arena in Vancouver and the sliding centre in Whistler, is welcome good news. It comes as the Olympic host city and province remain burdened by the prospect of rising costs, a global economic downturn, the city’s refinancing of the troubled athletes’ village, and exaggerated fears of a Montreal-style post-Games debt.
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Writer Gay Talese helps re-brand the homeless
By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments
Scribe improves “street clients” with their signs
In an effort to help those worst affected by the economic crisis, author Gay Talese took to the streets to help panhandlers update their sales pitches. He went around distributing dozens of handmade signs featuring language that reflects the current headlines, thus tapping into “the topicality of their plight.” On one such sign was written: “Please Support Pres. Obama’s Stimulus Plan, and begin right here—at the bottom—Thank you.” Following up with one of his “street clients,” he was told “I think I made 10 or 20 dollars more yesterday than before. So maybe the sign is already working.”
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What would you pay for a map with no roads?
By Andrew Potter - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 10 Comments
For $2.2 million, Richard Florida and Roger Martin tell us creativity is a limitless resource
How much would you pay for a map that had all the cities and towns marked, but erased all of the roads and highways that would get you there? I’ll go out on a limb and guess that most of us would spend zero dollars. But that is because most of us are not Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty, whose Liberal government recently dropped 2.2 million taxpayer dollars on a completely useless road map to prosperity.
McGuinty commissioned Roger Martin, dean of the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, and his colleague Richard Florida to take a look at the changing face of the province’s economy and job market and recommend ways of keeping it competitive and prosperous in decades to come. The result is a 36-page report entitled “Ontario in the Creative Age,” which Martin and Florida presented to the province last week.
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Finland’s epidemic of cheap booze
By Susan Mohammad - Thursday, February 19, 2009 at 9:50 AM - 4 Comments
Among working-age Finns, drink is now the leading cause of death
It’s last call for cheap booze in Finland. Doctors are pressing the government to raise the taxes on alcohol to combat an epidemic of out-of-control binge drinking that has made alcohol the country’s number-one killer.
Over the past decade, alcohol consumption has doubled in Finland. Its citizens now out-drink all of their Nordic neighbours, consuming an estimated 10 litres of pure alcohol a year. In 2005, drinking overtook heart disease and cancer as the leading cause of death among people ages 15 to 64, and since then the problem has only continued to grow. According to Statistics Finland, alcohol-related deaths increased by a worrying nine per cent in 2007 alone and more than 2,000 Finns now die of alcohol-related causes each year.
