Ever-blooming lilac wars

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 6 Comments

The Bloomerang lilac won’t be available at your local nursery until next spring, but already it’s a sensation among the gardening cognoscenti. True to its cutesy name, the dynamo dwarf shrub upends lilac logic by flowering in early spring, again in summer, then reblooming as the leaves turn—a hybridizing innovation that can be viewed as wondrous or as horrifying. The American plant-breeding behemoth Proven Winners Plants is banking on the public’s desire for lilacs 24/7; it launched the Bloomerang in the spring of 2008 with the sort of fanfare that usually accompanies summer action flicks. Plants were sent out to gardening writers across the continent with the hope they’d produce rave reviews. Spring Meadow Nursery of Grand Haven, Mich., offered the hybrid in limited supply, as did several mail order companies. It sold out immediately, with thwarted prospective buyers clamouring to be put on waiting lists.

The arrival of a reblooming lilac has drawn a fresh line in the soil between the old and the new gardening guard. Those who eagerly await the species’ fragrant flowering as a harbinger of spring find the prospect of lilacs blooming again in September akin to watching a burlesque dancer perform the same act into her dotage—untimely and kind of creepy. Beaverton, Ont.-based horticulturalist Stephen Westcott-Gratton, an editor-at-large at Canadian Gardening, was offered a Bloomerang but turned it down. He acknowledges the species signals a revolution in lilac breeding. But as a serious gardener he embraces “sequence of bloom,” the hard-wired gardening tenet that a good garden is meticulously mapped to evolve with the seasons, no repeats allowed. “The whole point of living in a climate like this is the change of season, and each fraction of the change in season brings new plants,” he says, observing that he has little interest in sniffing lilacs as frost approaches. “I don’t know how I feel about colours like that and fragrance like that in the autumn,” he says. “I don’t even like autumn crocuses.” (Wescott-Gratton even has his issues with the Preston lilac, a variety that blooms a few weeks after the common Syringa. “It seems out of season even at that point in the year,” he explains.) He also isn’t fond of the Bloomerang’s lavender-blue flowers, which he describes as “kind of boring; like the common lilac, but not so deep.” Continue…

Abousfian Abdelrazik speaks out

By kadyomalley - Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 9:45 AM - 64 Comments

10:20:09 AM
Greetings, fans of truth and justice for all, including Canadians moored in dire circumstances abroad! ITQ is on the scene at – sigh, the Charles Lynch Press Theatre, which, for the record, is definitely *our* second choice ballot pick when it comes to Hill media venues. It’s small, and cramped, and there’s no simultaneous interpretation, so unless the speaker du jour brings along a French or English body double, Sheila Weatherill-style.

Anyway, the room is filling up quickly, and there is, of course, a camera crew gauntlet to be run in the hall, but otherwise, nobody really knows exactly how today will unfold. Will we have a series of consecutive/concurrent press conferences in reaction, like with the Weatherill report? Nobody knows. Oh, except we *do* know that the government – or at least Lawrence Cannon – will have no comment to make. They complied with the court order, and that’s all they have to say.

Ooh! He’s here!

Continue…

Why Vancouver works

By The Editors - Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 9:03 AM - 8 Comments

Comparing Vancouver with Toronto hardly seems fair at the best of times. Throw a garbage strike into the mix, and it seems criminal to put Hogtown up against the charms of Grouse Mountain or Stanley Park. Of course there’s a lot more to ranking cities than scenic beauty. But almost any way you measure it, Vancouver still beats its bigger brother.

Maclean’s groundbreaking examination of municipal efficiency and effectiveness, in partnership with the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, has determined Canada’s best- and worst-run cities. The big-city championship clearly belongs to Vancouver. It’s the only one of our three major metropolises to register above average in both efficiency and effectiveness. This alone should be cause for bragging rights. Continue…

Bestsellers

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of July 21st, 2009)

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

30 hopefuls vying for one wild rose

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

Jillian Harris, who is either 29 or 30 depending on the interview, is a Vancouver interior designer born in Peace River, Alta. As demonstrated on the ABC reality television series The Bachelorette, seen in Canada on Citytv, she is also one of the great small-screen emoters. Harris, the show’s first Canadian star, does perfect-pitch longing, heartbreak and indignation, and has made her girlish squeal—whether in greeting a man or responding to subsequent witticisms—into a blues singer’s plaintive cry for love: the Ma Rainey of the YouTube age. “I’m here to find the person I’m going to spend the rest of my life with,” she said last week, an episode in which—four times—she declined invitations to sleep with a suitor in the so-called Fantasy Suite, thereby sealing her bona fides as a chaste Canuck. (Past bachelorettes haven’t delayed such proceedings). Still, like the raunchy Rainey, she excels also at lust.

Appraising California business developer Kiptyn, 31, Harris sparkles: “He’s got that six pack or eight pack or 12 pack, or whatever is going on,” she allows. As a contestant in last year’s The Bachelor (of which The Bachelorette is a gender-reversing spinoff), Harris caused a stir when, slipping into the warm candlelit waters of a New Zealand hot tub with toothy Seattle account executive Jason Mesnick, she parted her legs and straddled the object of her desire while cameras lurked nearby. “One of our producers got so embarrassed watching they had to turn away,” show host Chris Harrison later gushed. Continue…

EKOS Weekly: So, y'all really do want a majority government, huh?

By kadyomalley - Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 8:34 AM - 78 Comments

Once again, ITQ is loath to be the bearer of bad news, but — I mean, seriously, just look at the numbers.

The highlights, courtesy of CBC:

The EKOS poll, commissioned for the CBC and released Thursday, asked which of the following outcomes of the next federal election “would be best”:

• Liberal minority.
• Liberal majority.
• Conservative minority.
• Conservative majority.
• None of the above.

Nationally, 26 per cent of those polled said they wanted a Liberal majority, while 25 per cent called for a Conservative majority. An equal amount — 25 per cent — responded with “none of the above.”

Fifteen per cent of those polled called for a Liberal minority and nine per cent said the best result would be a Conservative minority.

Ekos puts it more starkly:

When asked to choose among the most likely outcomes of the next election – Conservative majority, Conservative minority, Liberal majority or Liberal minority – most say they would like a majority government. The problem is that those people are almost evenly divided between favouring a Conservative majority and those who prefer a Liberal majority. About a quarter of Canadians say they do not like any of these four options. Even fewer opt for either a Liberal or Conservative minority government.

ITQ, however, will be blunter still in her assessment.

Continue…

Hunted to death

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 8:20 AM - 29 Comments

You might think little of the adult Michael Jackson but I defy even the most cynical to remain unmoved by the Oct. 18, 1969, video of the Jackson 5 featuring Michael Jackson on the Diana Ross show belting out I’ll Be There. The pint-sized 11-year-old with the huge Afro and eyes to match, a big sweet voice and a determination to outflank Miss Ross in camera position, was already an experienced performer, though his grown-up moves were slightly off-kilter. He could simulate sexuality as he did a pretend ad lib of “look over your shoulder honey” but he was a kid all the same. “You and I must make a pact / We must bring salvation back / Where there is love / I’ll be there” he sung, but you sort of knew he’d “be there” buying an ice cream cone.

Though the song was subsequently recorded by just about every vocalist, it was always Michael’s. The words drifted in and out of his memorial service. Mariah Carey nearly fell out of her gown singing them. And still, in all the analysis following his death, no one actually mentioned the slightly inconvenient fact that no one was “there” for Michael when he really needed it, when it might have been more onerous than simply going to the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. Continue…

A new meaning to ‘cabin fever’

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, July 23, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 4 Comments

As the airplane pulled up to the gate after a routine flight from Memphis to Dallas, veteran flight attendant Terry Williams saw something strange: a smoky haze, she says, was coming from the ventilation system. The fumes soon dissipated; but for Williams, their impact would be long-lasting. Since that flight two years ago, she says she’s suffered from migraines, asthma, and a tremor in her left arm, as well as vision impairment and memory loss. “I don’t feel I’m the wife my husband married, or the mother I want to be,” says Williams, who has two young sons. “It’s affected me in every possible way.”

Williams, now 40, recently launched a lawsuit against Boeing and its subsidiary, McDonnell Douglas, contending the airplane’s manufacturers “knew or should have known” that tainted fumes could enter the ventilation system, causing serious health effects to those on board. According to Seattle aviation attorney Alisa Brodkowitz, who’s representing Williams, in most Boeing aircraft—including the MD-82 on which Williams was travelling—fresh air is sucked in through the jet engines before being cooled and vented into the cabin (mixed with filtered, recirculated air). Along the way, Brodkowitz says, it can pick up contaminates ranging from engine oil to metals. Continue…

'This just in: no one in the United States dies at all'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 11:54 PM - 15 Comments

An hour before Barack Obama’s primetime press conference, Jack Layton addresses the nation.

The nation, if this “Ed” fellow is any indication, has no time for Mr. Layton’s Tommy Douglas stories. The nation just wants answers.

And now the bad news

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 10:50 PM - 12 Comments

It is the quaint home of history and reverie, the centre of a tourism industry based largely on a girl with red pigtails and freckles, the place where, in 1864, 23 important men bickered, ate oysters and hashed out a plan that would become Canada. Yet Charlottetown, the picturesque capital of the country’s smallest province, has now earned a more dubious honour: it comes in dead last in the first-ever annual Maclean’s Best-Run Cities survey.

First, the good news. According to the survey, conducted for Maclean’s by the Halifax-based think tank AIMS, Charlottetown is the safest city in the country. The city of 32,000 has governance and finance indicators that are near peerless in the country, and it is one of the more environmentally healthy cities among the 31 surveyed. Translation: it’s a great place to live if safety, governance and environment are your thing. Indeed, when it comes to safety and environment, Charlottetown handily beats out its closest neighbours at the bottom of the best-run cities list: Barrie, Ont., Windsor, Ont., Fredericton and Kingston, Ont. Continue…

The best-run city in Canada

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 10:45 PM - 13 Comments

Burnaby Mayor Derek Corrigan presided over a Grade 3 field trip to the city hall council chambers on the second last day of the school year. He worked the room, assigning each child a task. Some were council members, others city staff or reporters. He draped the chain of office on the shoulders of a girl named Nicola, after extracting a promise she wouldn’t run against him next election. “I need someone to look after my money,” Corrigan said, looking to another girl. “Do you have pockets? No? Okay, then, you can be my director of finance.”

Lucky kids. Burnaby, B.C., ranks as the best-run city in Maclean’s first annual survey of municipal governments, conducted by the Halifax-based Atlantic Institute for Market Studies (AIMS), a public policy think tank. AIMS based the ranking on extensive criteria, tracking performance in areas as diverse as socio-economic status, crime, fire services, transportation, road and sewer conditions, economic development, recreation spending, and such indicators of civic engagement as voter turnout and library use. “Generally when you end up first, it means you’re doing well across the board, and that’s pretty much what you find in Burnaby,” says AIMS executive vice-president Charles Cirtwill. Continue…

Our best (and worst) run cities

By Andrew Coyne - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 10:40 PM - 6 Comments

Everyone agrees that cities matter. No, they’re crucial. The Federation of Canadian Municipalities notes on its website, “urban economies are where people live, where jobs are created and where most goods and services are produced and consumed.” The Conference Board of Canada calls them “drivers of national prosperity.” Economists such as Richard Florida have celebrated their vital role in fostering creativity, innovation and trade.

At the same time, there is widespread agreement that city governments lack the funding they need to fulfill their responsibilities. Federal political parties have sought to outbid each other in their commitment to Canada’s cities. Billions of dollars in federal infrastructure funding has been promised, with billions more on the way in the form of a share of the federal gas tax. Continue…

Canada’s best and worst run cities charts

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 10:30 PM - 1 Comment

Click images to enlarge

Return to Canada’s best and worst run cities

Canada spends millions on the court that's prosecuting Charles Taylor-but doesn't want to protect the man who risked his life to bring the tyrant to justice

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 10:16 PM - 1 Comment

From this week’s print magazine. The story, in a nutshell, is this:

Charles Taylor’s brother-in-law, Cindor Reeves, risked his life to help the Special Court for Sierra Leone build a case against Charles Taylor, the former Liberian president who controlled an army of murderous, drug-crazed child soldiers in next door Sierra Leone. Reeves is now a refugee claimant in Canada. Canada appears poised to kick him out.

How they do it in South Korea

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 7:12 PM - 4 Comments

The Associated Press explains why things got so shovey and grabby, and recalls last year’s sledgehammer incident. The Guardian recalls other great moments in parliamentary fisticuffs.

Coincidentally, I was researching something the other day and came across the following incident in a February 1997 dispatch from Canadian Press on a particularly testy day in the Commons. Continue…

UPDATED: Good news, Divers/Cite! It's not because you're gay!

By kadyomalley - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 6:59 PM - 18 Comments

Colleagues Gohier and Wherry have more on the Great MTEP Cash Bonanza Giveaway Thing of Aught Nine.  First up, Deux Maudits Anglais has a summary of what seem to be the official talking points on Divers/Cite’s rejection, as delivered by an unnamed staffer in Industry Minister Tony Clement’s office:

* The program is oversubscribed. It has received many more applications than available funding.

* Just because an application meets the criteria does not mean it will receive funding, because there is not enough funding to go around.

* This is a national program and we need to ensure that it benefits festivals in all parts of Canada. To date, approximately 41% of the funding has flowed to events in Ontario (with approximately 18% of total federal funding going to Toronto) and approximately 42% to Quebec (with approximately 28% or total federal funding going to Montreal).

* This program is a federal program, it is important to have regional balance.

* We strongly encourage all festivals that did not receive funding this year to apply next year.

He’s also got the reaction from the Bloc, so you should really click over and read the whole thing.

Meanwhile, Colleague Wherry has a transcript of this morning’s chat between the minister himself and Calgary talk radio host Dave Rutherford, in which Clement also breaks out the Quebec and Ontario/Montreal and Toronto vs. The Rest Of The Country funding breakdown. He also assures Rutherford that Diane Ablonczy is, in fact, doing a fine job, and has a really big project with the whole national tourism strategy:

Continue…

Meanwhile, in Europe

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 6:02 PM - 9 Comments

In an apparent act of rebellion against the liberalism of their mothers, pretty French girls vacationing on the Riviera are refusing to take their tops off, in what is being called “la nouvelle pudeur”:

“It’s the most eye-catching summer trend: female holiday-makers who go in for topless sunbathing on our beaches are fewer and fewer in number,” said Le Parisien newspaper. “Some have decided to put their tops back on. Others – especially the younger generation – have never dreamed for a minute of trying out the monokini experience.”

Some commentators are concerned though that it is less about modesty than about poor body image:

However many French women fear a return not to la pudeur but to la pudibonderie – or prudishness. They say that the modern-day reluctance for women to show their bodies on the beach or in sports changing-rooms has less to do with “modesty” than with a consumer-rooted obsession not to appear ugly.

Meanwhile, Silvio Berlusconi has more or less admitted that he’s a womanizing cad, but he insists that cheating on his wife with teenage girls can’t possibly be in bad taste: “As long as I’m present, nothing inelegant can happen because I’m a person of good taste, culture and elegance.”

You're doin' a heckuva job, Ablonczy

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 5:27 PM - 17 Comments

Tony Clement did an interview with Dave Rutherford on Calgary’s AM770 this morning and addressed the Divers-Cite situation. Here’s a transcript of that conversation.

Rutherford: This guy gets to hand out checks, even while doing serious business, he gets to hand out checks. Did one in Calgary yesterday. Even gets to hand out checks when he’s not there, one was handed out in Ottawa today on his behalf, 210,000 bucks to the Chamber Fest ’09. It’s all part of this marquee funding tourism events program that Tony Clement’s department is responsible for. Handing out money is a lot of fun, but Tony you’re getting some heat today from the gay community in Montreal because you didn’t give their arts festival any money, but you did give money to the Toronto gay pride parade. What’s the difference? Continue…

No sex parade money for you, Montreal. (You're sexy enough already.)

By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 5:09 PM - 12 Comments

I hope to god Kady’s wrong about this one. The Conservatives can’t possibly be trying to appease the cartoonish anti-”sex parade” fringe by denying funding to Montreal’s Divers/Cité, can they? After all, as Wells points out, it’s not like they’ve otherwise been very selective about how to dole out the cash, so denying Divers/Cité’s application is, well, a little out of character.

I got in touch with Tony Clement’s office to ask about them it. Unfortunately, Clement’s spokesperson wouldn’t comment on whether the fact Divers/Cité is a gay event had anything to with the decision not to fund it. Here’s what she did have to say:

* The program is oversubscribed. It has received many more applications than available funding.

* Just because an application meets the criteria does not mean it will receive funding, because there is not enough funding to go around.

Continue…

The man who brought down a tyrant

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 5:00 PM - 11 Comments

It was June 2002 when Cindor Reeves was first tipped off that his brother-in-law, the president of Liberia, had sent a team of assassins to murder him.

At 30 years of age, Reeves was already a seasoned gunrunner and diamond smuggler. His brother-in-law was Charles Taylor, who in 1989 had launched a long-running civil war with his rebel fighters in the National Patriotic Front of Liberia that killed more than 200,000 but left Taylor in charge of much of the country. (He was elected president during a brief lull in the fighting in 1997.) The Liberian war also spilled over its borders. Taylor had created a proxy army next door in Sierra Leone that called itself the Revolutionary United Front, or RUF. Since 1991, the RUF and its legions of drug-crazed child soldiers had terrorized Sierra Leone, killing and hacking off the limbs of tens of thousands of civilians, and enslaving thousands more to mine for diamonds. Continue…

While we await the Home Chamber Music Festival Tax Credit…

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 3:47 PM - 73 Comments

…there’s strong evidence the Home Renovation Tax Credit introduced in the January budget is having its intended effect. Why, in my own house, we had new carpet installed today. And we’re not alone. Yes, we kept the receipts.

Hey look: A university system that could beat the world

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 3:39 PM - 24 Comments

A few of us from Maclean’s sat down recently, via videoconference, with the presidents of Canada’s five largest universities for an in-depth discussion of the challenges and opportunities facing their institutions and the country. This piece, from the current print edition, sets the stage for that conversation. The next issue starts hitting newsstands tomorrow, and it will contain the results of our conversation. When you get Naylor, Toope, Samarasekera, Munroe-Blum and Vinet in one (virtual) place, it’s a rare summit of academic leaders. We think you’ll find the results provocative and exciting.

The ghost of Tommy Douglas? (III)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 3:34 PM - 2 Comments

Rob Silver wonders if Ujjal Dosanjh, Jack Layton and a Conservative to be named later might be better put to use debating the state of health care on our own airwaves.

We should take some pride that the Canadian health-care model is playing an important, if cartoon-like role in the U.S. debate over the future of their health system.

There’s only one small problem, actually maybe two: 1. The status-quo of the Canadian health-care system is completely unsustainable; and 2. Rather than having a debate in Canada about how to fix our health-care system (since the “generational fix” of five-years ago didn’t quite get us there), we are off bragging about the unsustainable status-quo to other countries, convincing them we have the magic answer to health care.

Granted, this wouldn’t be as much fun without Rick Sanchez.

Eating fish every day keeps dementia away

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, July 22, 2009 at 2:55 PM - 0 Comments

People who eat fish nearly every day were found 20 per cent less likely to develop dementia than those who ate fish a few days a week. In the largest-ever study of its kind conducted in Asia and Latin America, those aged 65 and older showed a decreased risk of dementia with the more fish they ate. The omega-3 fatty acids found in fish reportedly reduce the build-up of harmful plaques in the brain that are responsible for dementia. “Exactly the opposite is true for meat,” says Dr. Emiliano Albanese, senior author of the study. “The more meat you eat, the more likely you are to have dementia.”

The New York Times