Imprisoned with 'A Prophet'

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, May 17, 2009 at 6:44 PM - 1 Comment

So much for feel-good movies. The soft, sensual vibes of Jane Campion’s Bright Star and Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock already seem like a distant mirage, the competition in Cannes is yanked back to the extreme sport of brutalizing us with art. Yesterday morning we saw A Prophet, a visceral prison movie from French director Jacques Audiard, and it has emerged as an early favorite among critics. It’s about an illiterate 19-year-old Arab named Malik (Tahar Rahim) who has landed a six-year jail term without knowing what he’s done wrong. He falls prey to the prison’s ruling Corsican mafia, who initiate him by forcing him to kill inmate then make him their Arab slave. And as we track his incarcerated coming-of-age, he learns to survive by his wits, and inevitably prevail.

From the boy’s gruesome initiation,—in which a fountain of blood arcs from neck of a man he kills with a razor blade hidden in his mouth—I had trouble warming to the film. A matter of taste. Though I can’t dispute that A Prophet is a strong piece of work; it’s this year’s answer to Gomorrah. And Rahim’s performance is superb. But prison movies seem too easy. Like submarine movies, they exploit the claustrophobia of a captive audience. Which I guess is why they tend to be long This one is two-and-a-half hours. The idea, I suppose, is that by the time you leave the cinema, you feel you’ve served hard time, and in this case you’ve also tested intelligence in an attempt to keep up with the Byzantine plot.

There’s a scene in the final act where Malik is on day parole, doing Mafia business, and pays a quick visit to a Mediterranean beach. Dazzled by the sun and waves, he lets the sand sift through his fingers. At the end of the movie, when I stepped out of the darkness and was blinded by the noonday sun, I squinted out over that same Mediterranean, and began to appreciate what I’d just seen. And although it wasn’t much fun at the time, it sits well. You learn things in prison.

No one, however, makes you suffer for your art quite like Lars Von Trier, whose new movie I just saw a couple of hours ago. More on that in a few minutes . . .

Upfronts, Infronts, All-Around-Fronts

By Jaime Weinman - Sunday, May 17, 2009 at 5:38 PM - 1 Comment

This weekend has been full of news about the upcoming U.S. network seasons; it’s traditional for networks to leak news about the shows they will be picking up, renewing and canceling, but this year — thanks to Twitter and other forms of instant communication — the news comes out even quicker and faster. By the time the networks make their official announcements on Monday, they’ll have very little left to announce.

This Sitcoms Online blog post does a good job of summing up which shows (not just sitcoms) are now considered certain to be on the network schedules, which ones are not, and which ones are still up in the proverbial air.

You’ve probably heard that Dollhouse will be renewed for 13 more episodes, at a severely reduced budget. From Fox’s point of view, this decision makes sense despite the show’s poor ratings. Fox never has much success in the first half of the season, before American Idol comes on, so if Dollhouse continues to do badly, it won’t hurt the network that much (and they’ll get good coverage for not canceling it, plus their DVD division will make more money off the second season), and if its ratings improve, then so much the better. The other big fan-favourite bubble show, Chuck, is a likely renewal as well, also with a whopping budget cut.

The only network that seems to be changing its strategies significantly going into 2009-10 is ABC. Recently the network was riding high on a combination of serialized dramas and light dramedies, but with Lost ending next year, and only Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy holding on as big attractions among its scripted shows (I’ve got to respect both shows: despite all their creative ups and downs and absurd storylines and behind-the-scenes problems, they consistently do well), ABC is trying to move toward a more CBS-ish lineup. In particular it’s moving away from a lineup dominated by hour-long shows and going all-out for comedy, even to the point of picking up shows like Scrubs and Better off Ted. (As mentioned in a previous post, Scrubs and Samantha Who may switch to a CBS-influenced multi-camera format.) You’d think the dismal NBC would be the most desperate to change its strategies, but its lineup doesn’t look like it will be all that different; I guess the network is just praying that a hit will turn everything around.

Unluckiest person in TV is Mitch Hurwitz; after Sit Down, Shut Up bombed, he had two pilots rejected by two networks: Fox passed on the Absolutely Fabulous U.S. pilot he produced, and NBC rejected a pilot he co-created with Arrested Development (and Boy Meets World) writer Barbie Feldman Adler. Arrested Development does seem almost like a fluke at this point.

Tamil Tigers defeated, leader allegedly killed

By macleans.ca - Sunday, May 17, 2009 at 5:09 PM - 4 Comments

The Sri Lankan army proclaimed an end to the 25 years of civil war after defeating the remaining Tamil Tiger rebels and killing their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran. It remains unclear whether there are any civilians remaining in the war zone. This brings to a close the Tigers fight for a separate state, in a war which saw 70,000 lives lost. Around the world, including Toronto, Tamil communities are protesting and holding vigils, asking for international attention and humanitarian aid to the area.

CBC

CTV

BBC

The new Newsweek

By Paul Wells - Sunday, May 17, 2009 at 1:51 PM - 7 Comments

Jon Meacham, who’s won a Pulitzer for his Andrew Jackson biography and who is, grumble grumble, younger than me, relaunches Newsweek. It’ll be on newsstands tomorrow, or as we say in Canada, “Thursday.”

I’m damned curious to see the thing. Both of the big U.S. newsmagazines have been struggling, to use a gentle term, and they’re trying to be more audacious and surprising, but especially in Time‘s case it’s really not in their DNA. Their recent “100 Most Influential People” was a stultifying exercise in mass hagiography, complete with so many blandly gorgeous posed studio photos of the subjects I had an almost physical reaction. People don’t look like this! Stop telling me people look like this!

Meacham has about him some of the liberty of desperation: his magazine can’t survive as a mass-market newsweekly. So he’s trying to retrench, which I’ve long considered an interesting strategy (one I’d recommend for, for instance, the Ottawa Citizen): stop trying to be all things to all people, at the risk of being not much to anybody. Pull back to a publication that offers a richer, more valuable experience to a smaller but potentially more loyal (and affluent) readership. It’s a high-risk proposition. (It’s also different from what the boss has been trying to do here at Maclean’s, with considerable success: hang on to the broad audience while providing a richer experience in a few subject areas. That takes resources, and my pet theory is that we were lucky to be able to relaunch Maclean’s while the economy was still strong.)

I’ll be really happy if Newsweek can change its game. Frankly a cover interview with Barack Obama doesn’t strike me as a particularly dashing first step. But it’s good to see somebody in this business trying something.

Taking, and retaking, Woodstock

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, May 17, 2009 at 1:02 PM - 1 Comment

Dimintri Martin (centre) stars as Elliot Tiber in 'Taking Woodstock'

Ang Lee’s ‘Taking Woodstock’ was one of the most anticipated films in competition in Cannes, for obvious reasons—the stature of both the director and event he has attempted to recreate. But the reaction to the movie has been mixed. And even those who enjoyed it, myself included, have to admit that seemed surprisingly lightweight coming from the director who gave us the high tragedy of Brokeback Mountain and Lust, Caution. At yesterday’s Cannes press conference for the film, he explained that the project came about as a happy accident, when he met Eliot Tiber backstage in 2007 at TV talk show in San Francisco. Lee was promoting Lust, Caution; Tiber was flogging his book, Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, a Concert, and a Life. The author, who comes across as an adept salesman in the movie, gave him a three-minute pitch. Lee, who was longing to direct some lighter fare after making six tragedies in a row, was intrigued. Having already made The Ice Storm, which he saw as a ’70s movie about the post-Woodstock hangover, he saw an opportunity to complete the cycle. “I was yearning to do a comedy-slash-drama again without cynicism,” said Lee. “It took me a long way to get there. I thought after 13 years, I sort of earned the right to do it, just be relaxed, be happy and at peace with myself and everybody else.”

But for many people, Lee was blithely venturing onto holy ground. The 1969 Woodstock festival is a cultural landmark, the apotheosis of the Sixties dream of peace ‘n’ love before the party turned into a bad trip. And it has meant a lot of things to a lot of people, whether or not they claim to have been among the half million people who fought the traffic to spend three days blissing out in music and mud. Also, the event already has a substantial legacy. It has been famously enshrined in Woodstock, Michael Wadleight’s three-hour, Oscar-winning documentary, which sets the bar high for any filmmaker trying to pull off a dramatic simulation—much less a filmmaker like Lee, who had never tackled large-scale epics. Continue…

"Commit to the LORD whatever you do, and your plans will succeed"

By Paul Wells - Sunday, May 17, 2009 at 12:31 PM - 51 Comments

A long article about Donald Rumsfeld in GQ reveals the peculiar juxtaposition of Biblical texts on the cover of daily top-secret war briefings for President Bush, prepared by Pentagon staff and often hand-delivered by Rumsfeld. The article is written by Robert Draper, who interviewed Bush six times, as well as most of his senior cabinet secretaries, for his book Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush.

This article will be getting a lot of attention.

Here’s the cover-sheet slide show.

Schoolyard tripe! Poisonous! Demeaning! Anti-American!

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, May 17, 2009 at 12:07 PM - 93 Comments

The critics are raving. Continue…

Pakistan: Drone attacks and a clumsy army, or, This is no way to run a counterinsurgency

By Paul Wells - Sunday, May 17, 2009 at 12:03 PM - 9 Comments

Let’s connect two dots in ways I haven’t seen connected, although the link is so clear it must have been made before. First, in today’s New York Times, David Kilcullen and Andrew Exum deplore the overuse of remote drone aircraft to bomb targets in Pakistan:

Imagine, for example, that burglars move into a neighborhood. If the police were to start blowing up people’s houses from the air, would this convince homeowners to rise up against the burglars? Wouldn’t it be more likely to turn the whole population against the police? And if their neighbors wanted to turn the burglars in, how would they do that, exactly? Yet this is the same basic logic underlying the drone war.

The drone strategy is similar to French aerial bombardment in rural Algeria in the 1950s, and to the “air control” methods employed by the British in what are now the Pakistani tribal areas in the 1920s. The historical resonance of the British effort encourages people in the tribal areas to see the drone attacks as a continuation of colonial-era policies.

Second, in today’s issue of Dawn, the latest bland account of mass chaos inflicted on the population of Swat by a Pakistani army that, to its credit, is finally taking Taliban insurgents seriously — but whose WWII-era tactics are frightening and infuriating to hundreds of thousands of displaced innocents: Continue…

Mulroney: I know who BRITAN was!

By Andrew Coyne - Sunday, May 17, 2009 at 1:45 AM - 18 Comments

What Mathias seems to know is mostly false. It is a much larger story. The money came to BRITAN. This money was not for me. I know who BRITAN was. Now there is a big story for you. For the moment it is not relevant to my role, but I know I wasn’t BRITAN, and I know who BRITAN was…

I will tell you at an appropriate time about BRITAN. It is not immediately germane to the thing we are talking about but I can tell you that [it] is mind-boggling. It is f***ing mind-boggling.

— Brian Mulroney, interviewed by William Kaplan on October 4, 2003, entered in evidence in support of Kaplan’s testimony to the Oliphant inquiry. Mulroney was trying to convince him not to report on his dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber, prior to the story’s eventual publication in the Globe and Mail on November 10, 2003. “Mathias” is the reporter Phil Mathias, from whom Kaplan had first learned of the cash payments in March of ’01.

POSTSCRIPT: As it turned out, BRITAN was Mulroney — or at least, the Navigant team of forensic accountants believe it is highly likely it was. Their report to the Oliphant inquiry said the evidence supports a “strong inference” that the money in the BRITAN account was (mostly) Airbus money. And while it’s impossible to state with certainty where the cash Mulroney was paid came from, the report notes the withdrawal dates match closely with the dates the three payments were made, as do the amounts (in Schreiber’s version). Which, of course, doesn’t prove Mulroney knew anything etc.

But maybe the forensics have it wrong. If so — and if Mulroney knows who BRITAN was really for — wouldn’t now be the “appropriate time” to tell us?

What good are Canadian $1000 bills in the US?

By Andrew Coyne - Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 8:16 PM - 33 Comments

From a commenter on a previous post:

One question Wolson missed to ask yesterday, is in what currency did Mulroney receive his third payment in New York? It seems to me that if it were in Canadian dollars, then it would [make] no sense to put them in a SDP in New York, since he or his family could hardly use them as such in the U.S.

If he started to convert all these $1000 Canadian bills into US currency, the bank would probably ask him questions as required under US law when large sums of cash are deposited or converted. If he did not convert the Canadian money to US currency, then how did he bring it to Canada? I understand that if one brings more than $10,000 cash to Canada, one must declare it to the customs officer.

Well, that’s easily answered: Mulroney has testifed that he left the money in the US. In his ethics committee appearance, he said he “integrated those funds over a period of time in [his] own requirements in the United States.” I believe he told the Oliphant inquiry they were dispersed among family members there. On the other hand,

if he received this last payment in U.S. currency, then how much exactly did he get? Was the exchange rate considered at the time of making the payment?

Good question. Was it $75,000 Canadian, or $75,000 American? Did that last wad of $1000 bills bear a picture of the Queen, or Grover Cleveland?

INSTADATE: But wait a minute: it says here that the US stopped issuing bills in denominations of $500 or more in 1969. Banks are supposed to immediately remove from circulation any discontinued bills they receive, and destroy them.

So they must have been Canadian, no? Canada only stopped issuing $1000 bills in 2000, “in an effort to fight organized crime and money laundering.” (UPDATE: The forensic accountants’ report to the Oliphant inquiry confirms what the fifth estate had already reported years ago — and I had forgotten: that Schreiber’s withdrawals from the Britan account were in round numbers of Canadian dollars: $100,000, $100,000, and two withdrawals of $50,000 each.)

So it’s a question that really needs asking: How on earth did Mulroney dispose of his Canadian $1000 bills in the US without somebody noticing?

Apropos of nothing (IV)

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 6:40 PM - 88 Comments

So we’ve touched on Doug Finley’s life outside Canada, the variety of Conservative MPs who’ve spent time beyond on our borders, the formative years of our most well-travelled prime minister, and the details of what Michael Ignatieff did with those 34 years. And we’ve clarified that no citizen should have his or her commitment to this country questioned on the primary basis of time spent living or working abroad.

Some questions for further discussion. Continue…

Apropos of nothing (III)

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 6:00 PM - 44 Comments

A very rough—and not entirely chronological—sketch of Michael Ignatieff’s time abroad.
Continue…

Brian's Song: Day Four

By Andrew Coyne - Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 5:32 PM - 13 Comments

Is it possible Brian Mulroney is just making it up as he goes along? I know we were all told how well prepared he was for cross-examination, but the more he fleshes out the details under questioning, the more bizarre his already fantastic story becomes.

Yesterday he told the Oliphant inquiry three extraordinary things we hadn’t heard before.

One: The reason he agreed to be paid in cash, despite his initial “hesitation,” after Schreiber explained that he was “an international businessman,” was because he knew that’s the way they did things in Europe. North America, people paid by cheque. Europe, they “had different approaches.” No European businessman he’d ever personally dealt with, mind you. But, you know, he was “generally aware” of the practice.

What he was not at all aware of, however, was the reason they did things that way. Only years later, after he had joined the boards of several international companies, did he learn that these European businessmen were actually using the cash to pay bribes to politicians. Why, do you know, in Germany they could even write it off on their taxes?

But as of 1994, when he accepted the last of three cash payments from Karlheinz Schreiber, he was not aware that European defence and aerospace industry representatives were in the habit of bribing politicians with cash — still less that Schreiber was in any way acquainted with this art. The RCMP’s 1995 allegation that Schreiber had been doing just that on behalf of Airbus did nothing to shake his belief in Schreiber’s integrity.

Not until 1996 or 1997, he says, did he start to understand what European businesses did with their cash, and not until Schreiber’s 1999 arrest in Toronto on fraud and tax evasion charges did he at last realize what kind of man he was dealing with. At which point he decided to declare all the cash Schreiber had paid him on his taxes, without claiming any expenses.

Two: The other reason he did not demand to be paid by cheque was because, at the start of his post-political career, he did not have any support staff. He had not yet begun work at the Montreal law firm of Oglivy Renault, and was living north of Montreal. Had he an office, and staff, and had he met with Schreiber in the more businesslike setting of his office, rather than in hotel rooms, he might have suggested that a cheque would be more appropriate.

But that still doesn’t explain why he left in in cash. On that subject, he had less to offer. Typical was this, verbatim exchange:

Q. Why didn’t you put the money in the bank?
A. Well, I brought it home and I left it there.

Or:

Q. Why did you not put the money in Cansult [his consultancy business] or in a bank, to create transparency?
A. I simply wasn’t thinking that way at the time. I’d begun the process like that and maintained it like that.

Perfect. Why did you do it? Well, you see, it’s what I did.

Continue…

Authenticity Watch: Street cred version

By Andrew Potter - Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 3:20 PM - 2 Comments

 Aspiring Florida rapper Steven Gilmore felt he needed a bit of OG cred to kickstart his singing career. So he robbed a restaurant, then tried to stick up a convenience store with a BB gun. But the store clerk fought back and took a BB in the forehead. Gilmore took off empty handed, making his getaway on a moped driven by a 16 year-old accomplice. 

Gilmore is now in jail facing multiple felony charges. Mission accomplished, it would seem. 

via TSG.

How rational are voters? A study in contrasts

By Andrew Potter - Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 2:53 PM - 24 Comments

Economists will tell you that the harmonized tax is sound policy, by replacing the regressive PST with a single, more efficient value-added tax. The consensus on this by informed, unbiased observers; the opposition that does exsist tends to come from the ignorant or the self-interested.

  But what happens when most people are ignorant? Yesterday, Nanos released a poll showing that the vast majority of Ontarians, and a large plurality of Canadians,  think Ontario’s move to harmonize the GST and PST is bad for them personally, and bad for the economy. 

What are we to do about this, given that we live in a democracy? One Bryan Caplanesque solution might be to shrug and say, so much the worse for democracy. In the extreme, we might want to disenfranchise the ignorant.  A more hopeful suggestion might be for people to write more popular and accessible books on economics. 

A further thought that I’ll throw out to the crowd: Assume that many of the  Ontarians who are opposed to the HST are so opposed simply because they don’t grasp the somewhat complex nature of how a VAT works and why it is more economically beneficial. What happens if we substitute the acronym STV for HST? Does the Nanos poll tell us something about the lack of support for STV in the recent BC election, and the general lack of support for electoral reform in Canada? 

Or is this a case of apples and oranges?

'A Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term' (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 2:36 PM - 4 Comments

Glen Pearson reports from the foreign affairs committee.

Canadians have some serious things to consider. We have a well-deserved international reputation for being the country that got itself dirty working in the hardest regions on earth, fighting for human rights, buildings schools and promoting public health. We even got a Nobel Peace Prize for the effort. Anyone who has traveled extensively knows exactly what I’m talking about. But we’re in the process of disappearing. We are receding into the fringes of the world’s consciousness. Our greatness isn’t so much misplaced as it is being forgotten. CIDA will have to do better than this. The Canadian government will have to engage the world more effectively. We’ll all have to do better as citizens before our presence is removed from the memory of the world’s most desolate places.

'A Northern European welfare state in the worst sense of the term' (I)

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 2:33 PM - 8 Comments

Doug Saunders reports from Europe.

For three years, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has had his diplomats and ministers sell the idea of a “new, muscular Canada” to Europe – a forward-leaning image of a wealthy, militarily strong, export-oriented country that is more than just another middle power.

After all the planning and diplomacy, Europeans and their leaders were left with two images of Canada: a man clubbing a seal, and a prime minister missing a photo opportunity because, the European media kept reporting, he was on the toilet. Absolutely nothing else registered: In the public eye and in many official circles, Canada failed to arrive.

World o' commenters who are glad they posted anonymously

By Paul Wells - Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 1:12 PM - 39 Comments

“There has been so much talk about these negative ads that the conservatives are apparently going to unleash. Any day now. Really. Keep holding your breath ‘cuz here they come and boy, don’t you look good in blue.

“So, where are they? We’ve been hearing about these ads for weeks, if not months. Does anyone really have any proof or is it just speculation. Are we running on the notion that it’s “the conservative way therefore…”

“Negative ads work so they will happen during elections but we won’t be having an election any time soon so why all the paranoia from the left?”

— Inkless commenter “Kat,” three weeks ago

On negative ads

By Paul Wells - Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 12:48 PM - 50 Comments

Here’s the first NDP ad of the 2008 campaign in Quebec. Note the line “It’s a pro-war vote that makes us slaves of the oilmen” and the child’s exploding head.

Michael Ignatieff's pronoun problem

By Paul Wells - Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 10:14 AM - 255 Comments

Rex Murphy is sure the Conservative ads about Michael Ignatieff will fail because “Canadians don’t like mean.” Chantal Hébert hopes they will fail because If Harper had wanted to do the Bloc’s bidding at Conservative expense, he would not have proceeded otherwise.”

I am less certain, and here’s why. Here’s my column from the Maclean’s print edition of Sept. 6, 2006. Here’s part of the argument:

There’s been grumbling in Liberal ranks about what some call Ignatieff’s “pronoun problem” ever since he moved to Toronto in 2005. His pronoun problem is his tendency to use the first person plural — we, our — when discussing a country that isn’t Canada. He makes sure not to do it anymore, but he used to.

I’m trying to decide how much this bothers me. I can tell you it bothers a lot of Liberals. At their recent Vancouver caucus meeting, those who aren’t supporting Ignatieff often mentioned the more than 30 years during which his principal residence was in England or the United States.(He left Canada in 1969 and returned for less than two years in 1978.)”He’s not a Liberal,” a few said. “He’s not Canadian,” one or two said. But when I got to Toronto and reported this to Maclean’s colleagues, one or two rolled their eyes theatrically. “God,” one said. “How parochial.”

Really? Continue…

Romantics on the Riviera

By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 9:04 AM - 0 Comments

Ben Whishaw stars as poet John Keats in a cinematic déjeuner sur l'herbe

A day of  movies about mad love, from the poetic romance of John Keats in Bright Star to the hippie reverie of Taking Woodstock, with a  detour into a teenage girl’s reckless infatuation with her mother’s boyfriend in Fish Tank. And they were all quite druggy and intoxicating, with different effects—like a triple bill of opium, weed, and crystal meth respectively. Yet each film is devoted to an ideal of youthful innocence—and to  truth and beauty

The first competition screening always starts at 8:30 a.m. It can be a brutal way to start the day after just a few hours sleep. But yesterday it was painless, almost as sweet as going back to bed and sinking back into a better dreamland. The lights went down in the vast Lumiere theatre, and we were were plunged  into the deep-flowered meadows of early 18th-century England. Bright Star conjures Keats  through the eyes of the woman who becomes infatuated with him, only to see him die of consumption at 25. The love and and the death both unfold at an exquisite pace, as a poetic courtship—a deflowering of innocent genius.

This is  Jane Campion’s first feature in six years, and her best since The Piano, which won the Palme D’Or in Cannes in 1993.  Her previous movie, In the Cut, was an  intimate contemporary thriller about sex, death and poetry; Bright Star is an intimate  period romance about love, death and poetry. Big difference. Although I was among the minority that appreciated In the Cut, it was too clever by half.  Bright Star is  deceptively simple, and radiant. It should leave audiences  swooning, though I suspect women will like it more than men. Continue…

'Suggesting otherwise is offensive'

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 2:37 AM - 29 Comments

Three political strategists discuss what comes next. Leslie Campbell takes the opportunity to wax philosophic.

The Conservative Ignatieff.me campaign is unfortunate because it brings politics into further disrepute, as if things weren’t bad enough already. Don’t get me wrong — Michael Ignatieff”s background, qualifications, opinions and previous policy statements are all fair game. But saying that “he’s in it for himself” is unfair and calls into question the motivation of all politicians. Everyone has their failings, and some politicians are manifestly unqualified, but most Canadians enter public life because they believe they have something to contribute to the country. Suggesting otherwise is offensive.

The Conservatives are soiling their own nest. If Mr. Ignatieff’s motivations are selfish, what does that say about other party leaders and other members of Parliament? Why does ridicule and childishness have to be the modus operandi of political debate? Why not weave the salient portions of Mr. Ignatieff’s biography into a more substantial form of discussion? The same points could be made, but without resort to personal attacks.

Apropos of nothing (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, May 16, 2009 at 2:26 AM - 16 Comments

A rough sketch of Lester B. Pearson’s life between the ages of 18 and 51. All dates approximate, cobbled together from various sources. Pearson biographers are invited to forward any corrections or additions. Continue…

Hey, look: A richer, smarter Canada

By Paul Wells - Friday, May 15, 2009 at 6:34 PM - 29 Comments

My print column this week will perhaps not draw the big crowds I get when I make fun of a politician chosen at random, but if nothing else it’s an unusually important column to me. The key is in this sentence: “Our university labs aren’t what’s broken.”

Some of you may have noticed I’ve spent a half decade writing about university research. I regard pure research as one of the really important public goods a society can pursue, and to me it’s quite clear that over the long term new ideas are a potent driver of both economic and social progress. But the two new studies I cite in my column, and especially the extraordinary work of Peter Nicholson and his crew at the Council of Canadian Academies, finally succeeded in pounding an important idea into my thick skull: it’s not a lack of new ideas that is hindering productivity gains in Canada. Nor are Canadian entrepreneurs at a loss because the ideas floating around are maddeningly esoteric and inapplicable to business problems.

The problem isn’t at the front end of the idea pipeline at all. The problem is not one of supply but of demand. And while it’s still very important for advocates of science research to keep a wary eye on government policy in that area, Canada’s not going to make great productivity gains by doing spectacularly more science. What’s needed is for Canadian business to start making far more frequent use of new ideas. And what’s needed to on that front isn’t more “help” from government so much as a push, because what’s been holding our private sector back isn’t obstacles so much as a stubborn complacency.

Anyway I lay all the thinking out in the print column, linked above. I’ll be returning to these themes in days to come.