Battle of the Globe and Mail political strategists: Bruce Anderson defends dignity, civility, schoolgirls

By kadyomalley - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 at 1:22 PM - 40 Comments

Take that, Tom Flanagan — the high road, that is:

As a citizen who cares about politics and public life, I hope more political leaders will ignore advice to take the low road, and perhaps not even bother trying to do the political calculus. I’m well aware that proving that the high road leads to more votes is difficult. It’s far easier to show how destroying an opponent works.

Mr. Obama’s victory is an example of how dignity can be rewarded, but it also raises the question of whether turning dignity into a winning political formula requires exceptional communications talents. Stylistically, attack is less demanding.

At the risk of sounding all schoolgirlish, shouldn’t dignity and courtesy be embraced for their inherent rewards, as a better way to live a life? For those in politics, respect should be earned by doing things of real public virtue, and to me that isn’t a test of who has better knife skills.

UPDATE: Commenter Hanging Out demonstrates the awesome perspective-in-putting power of Wordle:

*IMPORTANT UPDATE: Yikes! As Commenter A Reader points out, ITQ mistakenly identified Bruce Anderson as a Conservative strategist, which he isn’t — that would be Brother Rick. Apologies to all and sundry Andersons and readers alike.

Electroshock and Internet addiction

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 at 12:44 PM - 0 Comments

If you’re surfing the web for more than six hours a day, and either fear social contact, have trouble concentrating, or crave being online, you may be an internet addict—according to the Chinese government. Scientists in the country put forth the first ever definition of Internet addiction last year, and ever since the government has been struggling with finding effective treatment for its droves of compulsively-online youth. There are hundreds of Internet-addiction treatment centres across China, and no unified approach to therapy, so their methods have come into question. Many of the centres use electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), the effectiveness and safety of which have never been proven. Finally, the Chinese government has issued a ban on ECT while experts investigate the effects of the treatment and whether the definition of Internet addiction may be too broad.

The Guardian

Why are asthma rates among kids on the rise? Should we still take vitamin D supplements in the summer?

By Dr. Elaine Chin - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 at 12:06 PM - 0 Comments

There seem to be many more children with asthma than ever before. Are asthma rates on the rise, and if so, why?

North American asthma rates in children under the age of five have increased more than 160 per cent from 1980 to 1994. Children between five and 17 years of age missed 12.8 million school days due to asthma in 2003.

Some causes of asthma are known:

Genetics: Approximately 40 per cent of children who have asthmatic parents will develop asthma. The cause of this relationship is somewhat unclear but it may be due to genetic hypersensitivities to environmental chemicals and food.

Environmental: exposure to fumes, gases or dust, are responsible for 11 per cent of asthma cases worldwide.

Food and environmental allergies: About 70 per cent of asthmatics also have allergies. In our clinic, we perform antibody testing in clients with a history of asthma. What we are discovering is many of them have some form of food allergies especially to dairy, wheat and/or eggs. This is consistent with a U.S. study in 2007 that found 29 per cent of children who had a food allergy also had asthma.

As a Mom of a child with asthma, I am an advocate of doing whatever we can to prevent an asthma attack.

Keep a clean breathing environment – have a clean home, install a HEPA air filter, use hypoallergenic pillow cases and a mattress cover
Perform a food allergy test – blood IgG and IgE antibodies. (not a skin scratch test)

It has made a significant difference to my child’s life.

During the summer, we get a lot of sunlight. Should we still take vitamin D supplements?

The short answer is, usually not. Most of our body’s vitamin D is produced by our skin, using ultraviolet rays from the sun and not from food fortified with vitamin D.  For most of us, ensuring adequate production of vitamin D means exposing our faces and arms to moderately strong (midday) sunlight 10 to 15 minutes a day, three to four times a week. This can be easily achieved during the summer months. However, for many Canadians winter means reduced sun exposure. This leads to a reduction of vitamin D production and the depletion of this vitamin’s stored supplies in the body. A genetic problem – the inability of some individuals to manufacture good amounts of vitamin D – may compound this. The best way to decide how much vitamin D you require is to determine your vitamin D blood level. Storage vitamin D (Vit D – 25 OH) levels should be at least 75 nmol/L. Once you know the level you can decide if basking in the sun, eating fortified foods and/or taking a vitamin D supplement is right for you. Because vitamin D has such a strong impact on so many body organs and processes, vitamin D deficiency has been implicated as a causative factor in a variety of diseases. So it’s understandable why so many experts advocate the need to maintain high levels of vitamin D year round to help prevent diseases such as osteoporosis, cancer, depression, coronary disease, lupus, and multiple sclerosis.

Send your questions for Dr. Elaine Chin, chief medical officer of the Scienta Health Group, to macleanshealth@rci.rogers.com

In the meantime, find out how healthy you are by doing this quiz:

The toughest cell phone

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 at 11:53 AM - 0 Comments

Want to dunk your cell phone in a mug of beer? Maybe have a bath with it? Use it to hammer a nail? No problem for a new series of “rugged cell phones” made by wireless giants including Nokia and Samsung. They can be dropped on cement, taken to the hottest and coldest locales and are scratch and dust resistant. This is a riff off uber-durable laptops, which have become increasingly in-demand. Rugged cell phones make sense for construction workers, but anyone who’s a little rough with their mobile would be wise to take advantage of these little wonders. The only catch: they’re pricey.

Wired

Catholic judges?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 at 11:52 AM - 0 Comments

The Wall Street Journal notes that critics who once raised a public uproar over the possible judicial effects of having five Roman Catholic justices on the U.S. Supreme Court—that is, its effect on abortion law—are yawning in the face of Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination. Although she would make for a sixth Catholic out of nine judges—“a higher percentage than almost any Notre Dame starting lineup of the past three decades”—the WSJ argues that any Catholic nominated by liberal Democrats is not likely to be very religious. “More likely, the relatively soft reaction to Ms. Sotomayor’s Catholicism is because of a calculation that when it comes to hot-button issues such as abortion or gay marriage, she doesn’t really believe what her church teaches.”

The Wall Street Journal

"Brüno Lite"planned for the UK

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 at 11:51 AM - 0 Comments

In an unusual move, Universal Pictures Intl. plans to simultaneously release a watered-down version of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Brüno in the U.K. and Ireland that would allow more teenagers to see the comedy, Variety reports. Concern that the movie’s restrictive “18” rating would exclude the audience that made Baron Cohen’s Borat such a hit prompted the studio to snip a minute and a half of footage comprised of three scenes that contained “strong sex and strong sexual references” (one, a montage of exaggerated sexual activity, the second of the character comically miming various sexual acts, and the third features a swingers party) in a bid to obtain a “15” rating which allows anyone over 15 years of age in the theatre.

Variety

Women flogged for wearing pants in Sudan

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 at 11:50 AM - 2 Comments

A female journalist arrested Friday for wearing pants in public, is challenging the charge, which is punishable with up to 40 lashes, the Independent reports. Lubna Hussein was one of 13 women rounded up by police in a raid on a café in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. Ten were flogged publicly for violating Sharia law, which insists women and charged $140. Hussein and two other women have chosen to go to trail. Hussein decided to speak out because flogging is a practice many women endure in silence. She has sent printed invitations to the press and public figures to attend her trial.

The Independent

Al-Qaeda targets China

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 at 11:40 AM - 2 Comments

An Algerian wing of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network, al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), is threatening attacks against Chinese interests and citizens in the Middle East and North Africa. The threats are a response to the deaths of ethnic Muslims living in China’s Xingjian region. According to official figures, at least 45 Uighurs—Muslims making up about half of the population in the northwest region of the province—were killed in clashes with ethnic Han Chinese. Uighurs claim many more of them died in confrontations with the Han and police. There are no known links between al-Qaeda and ethnic Muslims in Xingjian, nor is there any reason to believe the terrorist organization has any plans for attacks within China. The threat by AQIM marks the first time a branch of al-Qaeda has announced plans to strike Chinese targets, though AQIM did attack a convey protecting a group of Chinese engineers three weeks ago in Algeria.

The Guardian

Nuclear energy: "Clean, Reliable, Affordable"?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 at 11:39 AM - 4 Comments

Proponents of nuclear energy promise that it’s cheap—and just as safe as the alternatives. That’s why the Ontario government started drafting serious nuclear power plans in 2007, with the hope of adding two next-generation Candu reactors at Darlington generating station. But those plans were scrapped last month. Today, the Star reports that it was sky-high prices that put a stop to the project. The Ontario Power Authority had initially estimated the new generators would cost $2,900 per kilowatt—$7 billion in total for the expansion. But a bid from Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.—the only “compliant” bid received—put the figure at more than three times that amount: $26 billion. “It’s shockingly high,” said Wesley Stevens, an energy analyst at Toronto’s Navigant Consulting. That amount alone would have wiped out the province’s nuclear-power expansion budget for the next 20 years. And right now, there’s no sign that Prime Minister Harper is prepared to subsidize the province’s purchase. “Paying $26 billion for prototype reactors that may not even work is a huge gamble for the province,” said Shawn-Patrick Stensil, a nuclear researcher at Greenpeace Canada. “This whole renaissance in nuclear was built on the premise of cheap reactors, and that’s what they haven’t been able to deliver.”

Toronto Star

Twitter kills Brüno?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 at 11:36 AM - 1 Comment

Brüno is no Borat, and that includes its take at the box-office. Though Sacha Baron Cohen’s new film was a smash success on Friday, its grosses dropped by 40% between then and Saturday. The movie still won the weekend, but it didn’t live up to the expectations of the studio, Universal, which paid $45 million for the right to distribute it. Some observers think that Twitter may be to blame: reviews of Brüno on the social-networking site were mostly negative, warning other users that it wasn’t as good as Borat and telling them to stay away. It used to be that negative word-of-mouth took a while to spread, allowing a movie to have a great opening weekend before people realized they didn’t like it. Today, a movie can be sunk within 24 hours by something even worse than word-of-mouth: word-of-tweet.

The London Paper

The Great Tradition of Pilot Burnoffs

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 at 10:59 AM - 1 Comment

I’m glad that Canadian networks are obligated to air pilots that they order and then don’t turn into series, as the CBC is doing tomorrow night at 9 Eastern with “Throwing Stones,” a half-hour comedy pilot about curling, with Patty Duke (only one of her, not her identical cousin).

Jill Golick has more, and also here’s an excerpt from a piece in The Curling News about the making of that pilot.

Watching unsold pilots, back when the networks used to burn them off as “Summer Playhouse Theatre” or some other euphemism for “shows we don’t want,” used to be one of the joys of summer; you’d hardly ever see a pilot that really deserved to be a series (there were some, but not too many), but it often provided an interesting window into what the networks thought was popular: the shows that didn’t get picked up were often the most blatant attempts to cash in on trends. I remember one pilot which was about a family obviously ripped off from The Cosby Show, except they were all witches (except the woman who married into the family and had to deal with her new supernatural family), two ’80s trends clumsily rolled into one.

Also, if a pilot isn’t terrible, and Throwing Stones isn’t, it’s interesting to watch it and wonder what separated it from other flawed pilots that did make the cut: maybe it was the subject matter, maybe it was just that it didn’t fit in with the rest of the network’s schedule, maybe it was the budget, maybe it was a mix of all those things and more.

Potter interruptus in a Twilight era

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, July 14, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 4 Comments

For the fans, it was like having a magic carpet pulled out from under them. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth instalment of the most successful franchise in film history, was due to hit theatres last November, unleashing a perfect storm of Potter-mania. The fifth movie, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, had come out the previous summer, the same month author J.K. Rowling published the seventh and final book of her blockbuster saga. After waiting more than a year for a fresh fix, the fans were primed. And toy stores had ordered a glut of movie-related Christmas merchandise. But then Warner Bros. pulled the plug. Because of the screenwriters’ strike, studio executives fretted they wouldn’t have a 2009 summer blockbuster, so they postponed the movie’s release for eight months—to July 15.

The fans felt blindsided. That kind of bald commercial manoeuvre seemed to violate basic notions of trust and loyalty that are embedded in the Potter property. It also upset the tempo by which the movies were being churned out to keep up with the books—which becomes an issue when the actors, and the audience, are aging faster than Rowling’s characters. And during Potter interruptus, some of Harry’s fans (mostly girls) fell under the spell of a sexier, less bookish hero—Edward, the vampire dreamboat in Twilight. The first movie based on Stephenie Meyer’s novels grossed almost US$382 million worldwide, less than half what the last Potter movie made, but it cost a quarter as much. And its star, Robert Pattinson, has become the world’s reigning teenage heartthrob. Continue…

Words, words, words – I'm so sick of words …

By kadyomalley - Monday, July 13, 2009 at 7:20 PM - 65 Comments

… I get words all day through,
First from him, now from you,
Is that all you blighters can do?

It is? Well, fine, then. Consider yourselves Worldled:

Explanatory note:

On top, a Wordle generated from the speech that Michael Ignatieff delivered on July 8th, at the annual Isaiah Berlin Lecture in London; on the bottom, the results from Stephen Harper’s remarks to Conservative supporters at the Calgary Stampede on July 4th, which is, sadly, not yet  available online, but which was very kindly provided to me by a Conservative after I lamented my lack of luck tracking down a similarly raison d’etre-y speech by the prime minister with which to compare Ignatieff ‘s remarks, Wordle-style.

If someone can find a more representative example from either leader, feel free to make your own Wordle. Heck, post the URL in the comments, and I’ll add it.

UPDATE: Oodles more Wordles after the jump:

Continue…

Hanna-Barbera, Unstoppable Killing Machine

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, July 13, 2009 at 6:34 PM - 4 Comments

With the announcement that Family Guy and Futurama producer David Goodman will write a feature film based on Hong Kong Phooey, the question naturally arises: what’s Hanna-Barbera got on the entertainment industry? (It can’t be compromising photos; there aren’t any that TMZ hasn’t already gotten hold of.) Most cartoon franchises, including the good ones, have trouble staying viable in today’s market, but H-B product seems unstoppable. And the worse their product is, the better it does: their somewhat well-regarded early TV work hasn’t sold great on DVD and hasn’t had a lot of interest from the movie industry, but Scooby-Doo and its ripoffs are doing great.

A historical tip for those who want to know which cartoons to avoid: most cartoons directed by Charles A. Nichols (also billed as C. August Nichols to lull us into a false sense of security) are hard to sit through. At Disney in the ’40s and ’50s, he was in charge of directing the series of cartoons featuring Pluto without Mickey, and even granting that it’s hard to make a good cartoon with the only character who’s more boring than Mickey, his cartoons are some of the dullest ever produced by that studio. Then he became Hanna-Barbera’s chief director in the ’70s, possibly the worst era for TV cartoons, and when H-B threatened to improve slightly, he moved over to Ruby-Spears (started by two of H-B’s employees) to direct the “Rambo” cartoon and “Alvin and the Chipmunks.” Oh, and he was a director on Robonic Stooges. An impressively long career, but not a great filmography.

Update: In comments, SeanStok brings up the matter of Grape Ape. Yep, Nichols’ name is on that too.

Update 2: But in fairness I should add that Nichols did the animation of the Coachman in Pinocchio, the most evil Disney villain ever and the only one who gets away with all Continue…

Tim Hortons vs. Dunkin' Donuts

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 13, 2009 at 5:11 PM - 7 Comments

Describing “Canadian mega-chain Tim Hortons” as a “kind of hybrid of Dunkin’ Donuts, McDonald’s and Howard Johnson’s,” New York Times blogger Julia Moskin marks the donut emporium’s first Manhattan location with a little competitive taste-testing. The results, dollars to donuts, rips Tims a new bit. Americans really do know nothing about donuts.

The New York Times

Flanaganism Spin-Off Thread: When, exactly, is enough enough?

By kadyomalley - Monday, July 13, 2009 at 5:11 PM - 73 Comments

So I’ve been thinking about that Tom Flanagan op-ed off and on all day — yes, apparently, I’m far more susceptible to his eerie powers of remote journalistic thought control than I realized — and there’s something I just can’t quite figure out.

To go back to Republicans for Ignatieff for a second — and only a second, I promise; please don’t go into conniptions in the comments — and its promise to spend the next week focusing on the “timely issue” of Ignatieff’s support for “targeted assassinations and coercive interrogation”: Leaving aside, for now, the question of who created it, even if they do have more material to unleash than is contained in that one essay that Ignatieff probably regrets more each day ever having written — is the central theme — This man supports torture and assassination!  -  really going to gain more traction with voters than it would if the same quotes were distributed via  news release,  or a Youtube attack ad?

Continue…

The Queen recently confirmed she would be visiting Canada some time in 2010. How do you feel about the monarchy?

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 13, 2009 at 4:36 PM - 17 Comments

When ‘free’ becomes really expensive

By Andrew Potter - Monday, July 13, 2009 at 4:25 PM - 31 Comments

My iPod is packed with thousands of songs I’ve never listened to, by bands whose names I don’t recognize. The hard drive of my laptop contains dozens of movies I’ve downloaded and never watched, and if all goes according to the pattern, I will soon have a Kindle full of books I’ll never read by authors I don’t appreciate. I’m far from alone in this: in the age of digital reproduction, we treat art as a commodity—cheap, ubiquitous, and disrespected.

There’s been a lot of talk recently about economics in the digital age, thanks to a new book by Wired magazine editor Chris Anderson called Free: The Future of a Radical Price. As Malcolm Gladwell pointed out in his challenging review in The New Yorker, Anderson’s book is little more than an extended riff on the old cyberlibertarian slogan, “information wants to be free.” Gladwell’s review sparked a bit of a free-for-all amongst bloggers, with everyone from branding guru Seth Godin to Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban chiming in with their own opinions on the matter.   Continue…

Magical Washington-Moscow "reset button" resets only the easy stuff

By Paul Wells - Monday, July 13, 2009 at 4:15 PM - 4 Comments

Obama visits Moscow; Medvedev visits Tskhinvali. Obama wants “Georgia’s territorial integrity” respected; Medvedev demonstrates his enduring belief that Abkhazia and South Ossetia have nothing to do with Georgia’s territorial integrity.

I’m not going to pretend I have an easy answer to this little impasse. If you want easy answers, go somewhere else, ahem. But especially  on the heels of Obama’s attempts to portray Medvedev as the Kremlin’s good cop, Medvedev’s own choice of travel destination seems rather pointed.

Autistic licence

By Brian Bethune - Monday, July 13, 2009 at 3:40 PM - 13 Comments

On a 2006 episode of House, Fox’s popular TV drama about the misanthropic medical genius played by Hugh Laurie, Gregory House has to solve the troubling case of an autistic child. Is the 10-year-old boy screaming because he has an untreated physical ailment about which he can’t communicate, or because, well, as most of House’s team believe, that’s what severely autistic children do? House eventually saves the day, of course, but the specific illness of the week was not the real plot point. That turned on the question, now unavoidable to House’s colleagues, on whether their resident savant—sarcastic, brutally blunt, virtually friendless and utterly devoid of social niceties as he is—was himself autistic: specifically, did he have Asperger’s syndrome, the best known of the diagnoses at the high-functioning end of autism spectrum disorders?

The answer to that is left hanging, but were the good doctor to be diagnosed with any ASD, he would be just one of many such characters in recent pop culture—one of many such beloved characters. From the runaway success of Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time with its autistic teen hero Christopher Boone, to Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan and her assistant Zack Addy—two Asperger’s characters on one show—of Fox’s TV drama Bones, to Lisbeth Salander, the electrifying Asperger’s heroine of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, viewers and readers have taken to a series of endearingly offbeat ASD protagonists, if not to the 10-year-old screaming in the corner. It’s all part of autism’s new normal, at least as it’s portrayed in pop culture, variously described by those who approve as evidence of growing social acceptance of “neurological diversity,” and by those less impressed as “our strange fetishization of Asperger’s.” Continue…

'Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music from Hank Snow to The Band,' by Jason Schneider

By Michael Barclay - Monday, July 13, 2009 at 3:35 PM - 2 Comments

For a book about Canadian music, the word “Canada” is conspicuously absent from the title of Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music from Hank Snow to The Band. It’s likely a marketing ploy to attract U.S. readers who would never buy a book with “Canada” in its title. Yet as the book’s invisible thesis would suggest, Canadians were an integral and influential part of ’60s folk rock in all its guises precisely because they were musicians first and Canadians second, for whom borders—both geographical and between genres of music—were meaningless.

In revisiting oft-told stories of The Band, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, Whispering Pines runs the risk of recycling mouldy oldies about boomer icons who have already been duly canonized several times over. But Jason Schneider’s reach is much wider—stretching back to the dawn of recorded music itself, and the role that Emile Berliner of Montreal, owner of the Canadian patent for gramophone technology, played in nurturing a nascent Canadian recording industry, starting with Wilf Carter and Hank Snow. Continue…

When China rules the world

By Charlie Gillis - Monday, July 13, 2009 at 3:30 PM - 60 Comments

As an academic and journalist working throughout East Asia, Martin Jacques has had a front row seat for the past decade on China’s economic and political emergence. The British author’s latest book is titled When China Rules the World.

Q: We in the West spend a great deal of time discussing China’s rise. But we seem to resist the next logical step, which is to consider how things will change around the world when China becomes the world’s pre-eminent economic power. Why is that?

A: I think that the world has been so used to American hegemony, and you had a recent period of American history under Bush which actually postulated exactly the opposite scenario—that we were in fact on the eve of a new American century. So we’re just not versed in the profoundly different thinking China’s pre-eminence will require. More than that, we have failed to understand that we’re not just talking about economic change. The impact of China’s rise is going to be at least as great politically and culturally as it will be in economic terms.

Q: So paint me a picture, in broad strokes. If, as some forecast, China’s GDP surpasses that of the U.S. in the next 20 years, how will China behave on the world stage?

A: Initially, I don’t expect it to behave hugely differently. Even in 2050, when it’s projected that the Chinese economy will be twice as large as that of the United States, China will still be, in terms of GDP per head, a lot poorer than the United States. But history’s very important in the behaviour of nations, and China comes from profoundly different civilizational coordinates than the West; it has a different history from the top dogs than we’re used to over the last 200 years. I think that the West is going to feel extremely disoriented by the world that is in the process of now being made. We’ve so long assumed that the furniture is our furniture, the language is our language, the sports played are our sports, the values are our values, the skin colour is our skin colour. My son’s 10, and his generation is going to grow up in a very, very different kind of world. Continue…

Jackson 5 reality show to be shelved?

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 13, 2009 at 2:06 PM - 0 Comments

The producers of a reality show for A&E about the current incarnation of the Jackson 5 aren’t sure what to do with it in the wake of Michael Jackson’s death. The one-hour special was commissioned by the network several months ago and was intended as a “backdoor pilot” for a potential reality series about the band in its present form, which includes Jackie, Tito, Jermaine, Marlon and Randy Jackson. However, producers finished shooting before Michael’s death and no additional footage has been collected since then, leaving a glaring hole in the show’s narrative arc. A&E says it has “started discussing internally and with the family but have not yet decided what direction to take with the show.”

The Hollywood Reporter

Turbulent Wouters

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 13, 2009 at 2:06 PM - 0 Comments

Here’s a shovel, there’s the pile of cash—now get to work. According to the Hill Times, that’s pretty much what the first day on the job was like for the newly appointed Clerk of the Privy Council, who started his new gig last week and is already facing “pressure” to move more than $35 billion in stimulus money “out the door quickly”—all the while following the Federal Accountability Act in both letter and spirit. Which may be easier said than done, according to University of Ottawa professor Errol Mendes, who served in the PCO in 2005-2006, giving him an inside view of the FAA’s beginnings. “That shows how the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” he tells the Hill Times. “Where you had John Baird being a ‘rah, rah minister’ for the Federal Accountability Act, but now realizing that it’s standing in his way of pumping out the stimulus package.” There’s also much speculation about more shuffling of deputy ministers; not only does Wouters’ former post at Treasury Board have to be filled, but there are rumours that other deputies may be leaving government as well.

The Hill Times