Jason Kenney is unimpressed

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 5:46 PM - 5 Comments

From his Twitter feed.

I’m always amazed by how many special interest micro-issues the opposition raises during QP, rather than issues of general public concern.

The government has been allowed six of its own questions so far this week. Mike Wallace asked about the government’s position on what an American television personality had said about our military. Steven Blaney ridiculed the Liberal leader and asked to hear what the government has done for Quebec. Rodney Weston asked how the government was supporting seal hunters. Ed Fast asked when the government would begin spending its economic stimulus (giving Vic Toews opportunity to allege opposition obstruction). Kevin Sorenson asked the government to clarify its position on Kashmir. And Bev Shipley asked the Human Resources Minister to repeat her announcement from earlier in the day.

AUDIO: George Galloway's speech at Columbia

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 5:26 PM - 6 Comments

After being banned from speaking in Canada by the Canada Border Services Agency due to his support of Hamas, outspoken anti-war British MP George Galloway headed to Columbia University. There, he spoke to a group of about 100. Here’s the full audio from his speech:

The slow birth of the electric car

By Colin Campbell - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 5:21 PM - 27 Comments

The electric car company, Tesla Motors, plans to unveil a new prototype this week, the Model S. Judging by the early photos leaked on the Internet, it will have all the sleek, sports-car looks the company is known for, but with one very important difference: the price tag. Unlike Tesla’s US$109,000 electric Roadster, the new car will cost less than US$50,000, the company says. That’s still pricier than your typical four-door family car, but cheap enough for Tesla to move beyond selling cars to Hollywood celebrities and start courting the all-important mainstream customer.

So far, Tesla is little more than a fringe player in the auto industry. It has a 1,000 person wait list for its Roadster, but that says as much about how slowly the cars are being built than it does about demand. Since its launch in 2006, Tesla has delivered just 250 Roadsters, which it now makes at a rate of 20 per week. Tesla is also not making money yet, and late last year had to borrow $40 million from investors. It says it could be profitable by later next year.

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Music: It sounds better in the original German

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 4:36 PM - 9 Comments

The Montreal Symphony Orchestra (as we called it at The Gazette; it calls itself the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, even in English) unveiled its 2009-2010 season yesterday, its fourth under Kent Nagano, yesterday.

During his first season, a wise observer said the Nagano method, in its Montreal application, seemed to consist of “serious exploration of the Germanic repertoire; unflagging commitment to 20th-century works and new commissions; and a newcomer’s fascination for Canadiana.” And indeed it continues to be so. Nagano has commissioned noted Canadian-born Hobbit soundtracker Howard Shore to write a new something or other, and Yann Martel, Stephen Harper’s literary advisor, is on deck to put new words to some Beethoven. There are also new compositions of a less populist bent by an assortment of Canadian, European and American composers. Continue…

The case for optimism

By Jason Kirby - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 4:15 PM - 33 Comments

In 2004, Paul Kasriel fired a shot across the bow of American optimism. The soaring housing market had crossed into the danger zone, he warned. Prices were rising far faster than people’s ability to pay, and a collapse was all but inevitable. Others had raised fears about the emerging housing bubble too, but Kasriel, an economist with the Northern Trust Company in Chicago, was one of the few to fully grasp the threat posed to the economy. Banks were heavily exposed to residential mortgages. A plunge in the price of homes would infect the financial system, he predicted, and from there it would spread to the wider economy, sending it spiralling into a deep and punishing recession. As we all know by now, few wanted to hear what he was saying. Officials in Washington clung to the myth, widely held at the time, that U.S. house prices never fall. Pundits scoffed at Kasriel’s dire predictions. “I was the skunk at the garden party,” he says.

Fast forward to today. Everything Paul Kasriel envisioned has come true, and then some. House prices are in free fall the world over. Investor portfolios have been decimated, leaving people suddenly feeling poorer. America’s biggest banks have failed or are wards of the state. GM teeters on the edge of bankruptcy, as do whole countries. Here in Canada we think of ourselves as better off, but our stock market has plunged, commodity prices have dropped and the housing market is suffering. And every month brings another round of brutal job losses on both sides of the border. So what does Kasriel make of this grim situation? “I’m actually feeling cautiously optimistic.”

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Questions without answers

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 4:09 PM - 13 Comments

Fans of Parliamentary procedure take note, the Speaker allowed three questions today (all by the NDP, two having to do with election financing, another about Conservative party involvement with student politics) to go unanswered on account of the queries having nothing to do with government business.

The Conservative side seemed pleased with these rulings.

SnubWatch: What, Mr. Smartypants is too good to share a page with David Warren? Wait, don't answer that

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 3:40 PM - 34 Comments

Barack Obama publishes an op-ed in 31 newspapers and magazines around the world. None are Canadian.

Say goodbye to cold sores—forever?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 1:59 PM - 0 Comments

Those nasty growths that inhabit the corner of our mouths may soon be banished for good. Researchers at Université de Montréal have identified a new way for our immune system to combat cold sores, which occur when cells become infected with herpes: fight fire with fire. “The nuclear membrane of an infected cell can unmask Type 1 herpes simplex and stimulate the immune system to disintegrate the virus,” explains one scientist. The team plans on further studies examining how cellular processes may help battle other diseases. Ideally, the researchers say, this could be a catalyst for therapies to treat much worse illnesses, including HIV.

ScienceDaily

Behind the silly websites, a proper company

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 1:46 PM - 1 Comment

They may rank as among the goofiest websites on the Internet. ‘I Can Has Cheezburger’, for instance, is nothing more than a collection of captioned cat photos. ‘Failblog’ is filled with photos and videos of things gone terrible wrong, and people doing stupid things. But the sites are phenomenally popular and have defied the boom and bust cycle of many Internet trends. Perhaps more amazingly, for the company that owns the sites, Pet Holdings Inc., they actually make money. The Pet Holdings collection of silly sites draws 5.5 million pageviews a day. And the company has a staff of 10 full-time staff developing and designing the sites. Jokes the company’s founder, and former journalist, Ben Huh, people “don’t understand the scale of this. It’s a proper sweatshop.”

Slate

Try the veal

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 1:44 PM - 29 Comments

Mike Duffy, comedian.

Duffy also roasted Federal Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and NDP leader Jack Layton, as well as the Jean Chrétien-era Federal Liberals’ sponsorship scandal — topics that left the audience laughing.

“What kind of work do I think Michael Ignatieff is doing? He works very hard and he is doing the work of three people — Larry, Moe and Curly,” said Duffy in a series of rapid-fire jokes. “What is the difference between a member of the NDP and a Liberal? About $500 of suit material,” went another.

Discordia, la reprise

By Martin Patriquin - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 1:44 PM - 4 Comments

A few years ago, Samir Mallal and Ben Addelman made a film entitled Discordia, a documentary about the outsized Israeli-Palestinian politics playing out in the halls of Concordia University in 2002. It was an entirely sober look at what was effectively a barrel-of-monkey situation, in which the complexities of  Middle East politics were shot through the canon of student politics, with predictable results. (I wrote about the flick here.) The whole incident was a reminder of that old adage noting how “academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low.” You get to try anything, even a stab at being the next Chomsky or Dershowitz, in university; best of all, you get to do so with a giant set of training wheels.

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Forgotten footnotes

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 1:37 PM - 11 Comments

From a profile of Stockwell Day, written for this magazine eight and a half years ago by John Geddes.

He owns a .38 handgun, which he bought to protest Liberal gun-control legislation.

UPDATED: GallowayWatch: We're through the looking glass here, people.

By kadyomalley - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 1:24 PM - 113 Comments

UPDATED AGAIN – Scroll down for the latest.

Okay, let me see if I’ve got this straight. Thanks to a somewhat curiously headlined story in this morning’s Globe, we learn that the initial deeming of George Galloway as inadmissible to Canada may not have been not quite as final as earlier reports may have led us to believe.

It was, it turns out, a “preliminary assessment” to which Galloway was invited to “submit a rebuttal” before a final decision was made – a rather crucial distinction that was oddly absent from the initial announcement of the “ban”, which was – even more oddly – delivered not by CBSA or even by its responsible minister, Peter Van Loan, but by a spokesperson for Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney.

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The gender-specific adjective

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 1:22 PM - 25 Comments

Rob Silver considers the curious case of Karen Stintz.

I can find hundreds of examples of female politicians from Hillary Clinton to Sarah Palin and now Karen Stintz being described as “shrill.” Can you find a single example of a male politician being called shrill? First commenter to post an example gets an autographed Tim Powers sweater vest (in baby blue, needless to say).

A Globe commenter claims to have found one example in Germany.

In general, the male equivalent of shrill might be blustery. Or buffoonish. I would wonder if the difference is merely a matter of what octave the nonsense is delivered in.

The Madness Revisited

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 1:18 PM - 2 Comments

Time to check in on what those useless humanities profs and social scientists are up to.

Oh look: UofT Press has put out an instant book on The Madness — although they’ve given it the extraordinarily dull title Parliamentary Democracy in Crisis (there must be a hundred books with that title). It’s edited by Peter Russell and Lorne Sossin, has a fwd by Adrienne Clarkson, and fourteen essays on the roots of The Madness, the decision to prorogue, the constitution and coalitions, and broader trends in Canadian democratic culture.

It looks like a very useful read, with a full slate of top-notch academics — Ned Franks, Jennifer Smith, Lawrence LeDuc, and a bunch of others. My only complaint, personnel-wise, is that some of the most important voices during the debate itself last fall have been left out (Errol Mendes, Richard Van Loon, Norman Spector, Michael Bliss) and the choice of Michael Valpy as the journalist to set the stage seems a bit predictable. (Yes, fine, I’ll admit I would have preferred to see someone from Blog Central given the conch, but there you go).

Meanwhile, if you’re in Ottawa next week:

William Cross will moderate a roundtable on the implications of coalition governments for Canadian politics featuring Kaare Strom, professor of political science at the University of California in San Diego and a leading expert on coalition governments; David Docherty, dean of arts at Wilfrid Laurier University and author of several books on Canada’s Parliament and seasoned political practitioner and commentator Senator Hugh Segal. The roundtable will be held on March 31 at 7 p.m. in room 618, Robertson Hall. Admission is free.

'Overqualified' by Joey Comeau

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 12:46 PM - 1 Comment

Epistolary works are one of the Western novel’s oldest forms; the first novel ever written in Canada, Frances Brooke’s The History of Emily Montague (1769), is one. Authors still write them now, however ironically, but a story crafted from stringing together a sequence of job application letters—especially suicidal, in career terms, job application letters—still stands out. In fact, Joey Comeau’s collection of real cover letters, Overqualified (ECW Press) is pretty much sui generis. Not to mention sweetly written, bitter and bitterly funny. The quasi-psychotic opening letter to Irving Oil, perhaps every Acadian writer’s natural target, sets the tone (“my assigned mission is to take you down from the inside”). But Comeau best matches style and content to employer with two brilliant applications, one to the New York Times (“I will make a very good editor for your company, whether you hire me or not.”) and another to Hallmark (suggested greeting card: front cover with to-do list, including “Tell my lady that she means the world to me;” inside text: “Apologize for pressuring her into a threesome.”). And if Comeau is not quite as good at integrating his story—the letter writer, distraught because his younger brother, hit by a drunk driver, lies between life and death in a hospital, turns his search for work into a catharsis—across his letters, it’s only because he has set his own bar so high. One of the season’s most remarkable books.

Joey Comeau’s writing can also be found on the website a softer world.

The John Babcock analogy

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 12:42 PM - 0 Comments

Lawyer and Macleans.ca commenter Howard Anglin writes at length in defence of the government’s position on Omar Khadr’s child soldier status.

Understanding Khadr’s legal status does not answer the question of what Canada should do about him. That difficult decision is ultimately a diplomatic and moral problem. But sound decision-making should take account of the law as well as the facts and, in this case, the law is clear. The prime minister’s offhand statement might not have captured the nuances of international law, but his conclusion is bluntly correct: Khadr was not a child soldier.

In other news, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff says only a couple dozen of the 800 men held at Guantanamo are legitimate terrorists.

Woody’s Crustacean Revenge on Bernie

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 12:18 PM - 1 Comment

Imagine if two Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme victims who’d dropped dead after learning they were bankrupt were reincarnated as lobsters and found themselves able to wreak revenge on the swindler in a seafood restaurant on the Upper East Side of New York City.  Woody Allen dusts off his satiric skills and completes the tale in the current New Yorker.  (Spoiler: the lobsters win.)   
 
The New Yorker

British writer finds there may be more money in reading

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 12:16 PM - 0 Comments

Damian Barr will read to you in your home. For about $100 an hour he offers “a story of your choice. I don’t do accents – even and especially not for Proust. A small charge may be made for Dick Francis. All requests considered (except Dan Brown). I won’t tuck you in—not even for Dracula. Couples welcome.” He’s even busier in the places where he first had the idea of a dedicated reader: London’s hotels. “At the Andaz guests ordered me like room service. I appeared at their door in my stripy Paul Smith pyjamas clutching their chosen book. Most readees were, perhaps surprisingly, women around 35 travelling alone. Sadly, not one had been read to since childhood, and maybe not even then. Even more tragically, not one so much as suggested any sort of extra. A few even fell asleep. London’s hit titles were Pride and Prejudice and Hollywood Wives.

The Times

Nicholas Plath, son of Sylvia, kills himself

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 12:14 PM - 2 Comments

One of Plath’s last poems, “Nick and the Candlestick,” was addressed to her baby son: “O love, how did you get here? O embryo … In you, ruby/ The pain you wake to is not yours.” In February 1963, distraught over her broken relationship with Nicholas’s father, future Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, Plath gassed herself in her London flat; she carefully stuffed towels under the door to keep safe one-year-old Nicholas and his sister Frieda, 2. Last week, Nicholas, a former fisheries scientist at the University of Alaska, hanged himself at his Fairbanks home.

Guardian.co.uk

Canada's oil king: He also eats cake

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 12:11 PM - 0 Comments

Rick George, who as the head of Suncor and a chief architect of yesterday’s $18.4-billion Petro-Canada takeover will soon be piloting Canada’s biggest oil company, is a modest guy. “Even though he made $7.5 million in 2008, that the man of the hour would take a $2.50 bus ride from his Mount Royal home to the office down-town speaks volumes,” writes the Calgary Herald’s Valerie Berenyi. He even cares about the environment, getting praise from the likes of Pembina head Marlo Raynolds. But does he floss?

Calgary Herald

Is Chris Bosh a deadbeat dad?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 12:10 PM - 0 Comments

Toronto Raptors all-star Chris Bosh is the subject of a lawsuit that says he is neglecting his former girlfriend and the child she says is his. None of the complaints have been proven in court and Bosh, through his lawyer, denies all allegations. One conclusion that doesn’t have to be tested in a court of law: the filing of the suit coincides with a drop in Bosh’s on-court performance.

The Toronto Star

Women need better access to “morning after” pill, a U.S. court rules

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 11:59 AM - 2 Comments

A U.S. court has ordered the FDA to examine its policy limiting access of the morning after pill (also called Plan B) saying the agency allowed politics to interfere with its decision-making under the Bush administration. The 52-page ruling by the District Court for the Eastern District of New York, also said the FDA should allow 17-year-olds to buy Plan B without a prescription. The FDA had formerly allowed women 18 years or older “easier” access to the medication but asked for a prescription for women 17 and younger despite it being most effective in preventing pregnancy when taken within 24 hours of sexual intercourse. Nancy Northrup, president of Center for Reproductive Rights, which filed suit against the FDA in 2005, said the court “recognized that the FDA favored politics over science, ideology over women’s health, and violated the law in the process.”

Reuters

Where is our GPS?

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 24, 2009 at 11:14 AM - 4 Comments

Glen Pearson goes on the television.

I was pulled out of the Foreign Affairs Committee yesterday to appear on “Politics” with Don Newman. The subject was Rwanda and the recent CIDA cut of humanitarian dollars to that troubled nation. I respect Newman more than most because he’s nobody’s fool, seasoned and incisive. 

But when I got to the Parliamentary Rotunda for the interview, I was told the session would last only four minutes and that I was to be on with Jim Abbott, Parliamentary Secretary for CIDA. I like Abbot well enough but I instantly knew there would be no time to really get to the nub of the issue. And sure enough, that’s exactly what happened. There was only time for three questions – the first and last to Abbot, with my response sandwiched in the middle. Abbott did what he was supposed to do – spout the government line – and at the end of the interview people were more confused than ever.