"Grave health outcomes"

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 11:32 AM - 0 Comments

According to Dr. Abraham Sokhaya Nkomo, the South African High Commissioner to Canada, Saskatchewan’s doctor recruitment strategy is causing “grave health outcomes” in South Africa. In some areas there are only three doctors for every 100,000 patients. Meanwhile, Saskatchewan is aggressively drawing South African physicians with promises of lucrative perks and high salaries—there are already 277 practicing in the province. Nkomo says the province’s recruitment contributes to the poor health infrastructure in his country, which still hasn’t fully recovered from the days of apartheid. He admits his government can’t stop doctors from emigrating, but says a formal agreement with Canada aimed at slowing aggressive recruitment can benefit both countries without completely undercutting South African health care.

Leader-Post

Swine flu prompts "social distancing" campaign at Dalhousie

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

If Dalhousie University has its way, frosh week just won’t be the same this fall. Concern about swine flu is prompting school officials to tell students to keep their distance from one another. To keep H1N1, which has been to shown to strike young adults in particular, at bay, Dal is advising students to avoid shaking hands, hugging and kissing, and to hold meetings over the phone. Students however, remain skeptical that the “social distancing” campaign will keep them from hanging out with their friends.

CBC News

In good times and in bad? Not so much.

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 11:28 AM - 0 Comments

Not only were their pocketbooks among the worst hit by the global economic downturn, but Americans’ love lives appear to have also taken a beating. An international poll found that just under 30 per cent of Americans say the recession had added stress to, and sometimes even ruined, their relationship. Canadians fared only slightly better, with 23 per cent claiming the slump had taken a toll on their relationship. Americans also said the recession would likely keep them away from their spouses for longer than they expected—they expect to have to work an extra ten years in order to make up for economic ground they lost.

Reuters

Is Harry Potter a lush?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 11:04 AM - 4 Comments

In the latest Harry Potter film, Neville serves drinks, Hermione gets tipsy and Hagrid passes out after one too many. It’s got critics saying the movie promotes alcohol to teens. Studies suggest that teens are influenced by drinking in films: a 2007 study of about 5,600 German teens found that, even accounting for variables like friends’ drinking habits, those with high exposure to alcohol in American movies were almost three times more likely to binge drink. “In scene after scene, the young wizards and their adult professors are seen sipping, gulping and pouring various forms of alcohol to calm their nerves, fortify their courage or comfort their sorrows,” Tara Parker-Pope writes on her New York Times blog. In one scene, for example. Hermione gets a frothy moustache after drinking butterbeer, then throws her arms around her male companions. “Hermione is such a tightly wound young lady, but she’s liberated by some butterbeer,” mother Liz Perle, the editor in chief of Common Sense Media, told Parker-Pope. “The message is that it gives you liquid courage to put your arms around the guy you really like but are afraid to.” Warner Bros., which released the movie, said the scenes are open to “different interpretations,” and said the Harry Potter universe “should not be held to the same standards as the real world.”

The New York Times

Rift in Anglican Church over the question of gay clergy and same-sex marriages

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 10:55 AM - 1 Comment

Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said fundamental differences among the world’s 77 million Anglicans over gay clergy and same-sex marriages could divide the Anglican church into a two-tier model. In a message published Monday on his website, the archbishop said “we are faced with the possibility rather of a ‘two-track’ model, two ways of witnessing to the Anglican heritage.” According to Archbishop Williams, the “two-track model” yields “two styles of being Anglican.” The model could avoid a formal rift between liberals and conservatives but put pressure on the relationship between the global Anglican Communion and American Episcopalians who decided this month to ordain openly gay bishops and to start the process of developing ceremony for same-sex unions. In his message, Archbishop Williams also restated his view that “a blessing for a same-sex union cannot have the authority” of the full Anglican Communion, any more than a blessing for a heterosexual couple living outside marriage would have. The archbishop’s message drew a mixed response from both liberals and conservatives in the United States.

The Archbishop of Canterbury

The New York Times

The most interesting thing I've read today

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 10:29 AM - 6 Comments

Francis Fukuyama on Iran and the rule of law:

The legal scholar Noah Feldman has argued that the widespread demand for a return to Shariah in many Muslim countries does not necessarily reflect a desire to impose harsh, Taliban-style punishments and oppress women. Rather, it reflects a nostalgia for a dimly remembered historical time when Muslim rulers were not all-powerful autocrats, but respected Islamic rules of justice—Islamic rule of law.

link

Did THE BACHELORETTE End Satisfyingly Or Not?

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 10:16 AM - 4 Comments

I wasn’t fully following The Bachelorette despite the Canadian Content (in the moderately pleasing but not very interesting form of Albertan Jillian Harris), so I honestly am not sure whether the ending of the season was satisfying or not. It was certainly a dramatic, twisty episode, to the point that folks are once again wondering how much of these shows’ stories are created by the producers. Probably quite a bit, but it doesn’t require out-and-out rigging, just careful and selective editing and re-structuring of the timeline, plus properly timing the big events like the “surprise” return of Reid to the show. Plus the contestants, who presumably care more about making a good impression on the show than whatever happens after (they don’t have to marry, after all), want to do whatever will raise their profile and make for good TV. But I don’t really know whether the selection of Ed, the workaholic, counts as a culturally-fulfilling ending or an anger-making ending. Both types of endings work in their own way — that is, reality shows can make you happy about who won, or angry about who won, and both are equally good; the only type of ending that fails is the one that leaves you indifferent. But while my impression from comments online is that Ed is generally considered a work-obsessed, self-absorbed loser, that might actually be a satisfying ending at this particular cultural moment — no more artists or cool guys or snowboarding instructors. In hard times, practicality is what’s called for.

Of course the post-wrap-up episode might bring in some other wacky twist that will undo everything that’s been seen up to now.

Newspaper says sorry to PM—and its own reporters

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 10:07 AM - 4 Comments

It’s not the mother of all mea culpas; that prize goes to the Kentucky paper that neglected to cover the 1960s civil rights movement. But New Brunswick’s Telegraph-Journal has issued a dandy today. Not only has the Saint John, N.B.-based daily apologized to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, it has admitted it let down its own reporters by inserting unfounded claims into their story about the PM’s alleged failure to eat the communion wafer during the funeral of former Governor-General Roméo LeBlanc. The story had stated as fact that Harper had pocketed the wafer and that a senior Catholic cleric had called him on it. Not only was there “no credible support for these statements of fact,” the paper admits on its front page, but the TJ’s own reporters never wrote it. “In the editing process, these statements were added without the knowledge of the reporters and without any credible support for them,” the apology reads. Wow. That’s some aggressive editing.

Telegraph Journal

The original piece:
Telegraph Journal

Advice from the Mother of Parliament's hall monitor

By kadyomalley - Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 18 Comments

ITQ is heading to the University of Ottawa today for the final public hearing of Oliphant Commission, which will include roundtable discussions with two witnesses: Sue Gray, the director of the propriety and ethics team for the UK Cabinet Office and Conflict of Interest and Ethics Commissioner Mary Dawson. The show gets underway at 9:30 sharp, so be sure to tune in for full liveblogging coverage.

Trivia note: The last time ITQ darkened the doors of Ottawa U, it was to write what turned out to be a faintly — okay, not so faintly — damning review of the cafeteria food, so she’ll be keeping a watchful eye out for revenge-minded sandwich assemblers during today’s visit.

9:09:24 AM
Greetings, Oliphantasticalists! Are you ready for some down and dirty tales of sordid parliamentary excess, courtesy of the woman in charge of keeping the UK’s elected officials in line? I hope not, because due to the somewhat limited mandate of the commission, those sorts of questions will likely be deemed too far afield for today’s session with Sue Gray.

We’re in a new venue today — the Gowlings Moot Court at Ottawa U, to be specific, and it definitely gives the entire procedure a much more official feel. So far, nobody has demanded that I remove the sunglasses from atop my head, so it isn’t quite like the O’Brien trial *yet*, but I’ll keep y’all posted.

9:29:25 AM
Oh, there’s the judge — looking especially judicial today, presiding, as he is, over a real(ish) court room.

> Continue…

Review: 'Empire of Illusion' by Chris Hedges

By Brian Bethune - Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 12 Comments

Like Christopher Hitchens, in so many ways his opposite number, Chris Hedges occupies an isolated and occasionally lonely spot on the ideological spectrum, angering progressives as much as conservatives. He may be a socialist and the author of American Fascists (2007), the title of which pretty much sums up what he thinks of the Christian right in his country. But he’s also a religion-friendly guy—the son of a Presbyterian minister, and the possessor of both a master’s degree in theology and a firm belief that spiritual seeking is hard-wired in humans—a stance that provokes many on the militant atheist left. In fact, Hedges is as much a throwback as a revolutionary: an old-fashioned, passionate, moralist America-Firster. And none of that is meant as criticism.

Hedges is not likely to win a lot of new friends with his latest work, Empire of Illusion (Knopf). The “illusion” part of the title is made clear in Hedges’ savage assault on celebrity/pop culture that focuses on two soft, but richly deserving targets, pro wrestling and the porn industry. Wrestling he uses to symbolize the vacuity of celebrity culture, how Americans (and, increasingly, the rest of the world) are “bombarded with cant and spectacle” that robs them of “the intellectual and linguistic tools to separate illusion from truth.” Celebrity culture is one of images and sound bites, he writes, one that both drives and is enabled by, functional illiteracy. (He cites studies estimating the illiterate and semi-literate proportion of the U.S. and Canadian populations to be about 42 per cent.) If the Lincoln and Douglas debates of 1858 were carried on at a high-school graduate level, George W. Bush was down to Grade 6 vocabulary in 2000, and Al Gore, his supposedly pointy-headed intellectual opponent, debated at a seventh-grade level. And, like porn—which Hedges convincingly shows to be a far more vicious, victim-rich industry than liberal thought likes to imagine—celebrity culture provides new gods to distract us. (Remember Hedges’ conviction about our intrinsic natures.)

But distract us from what? Ranting against pop culture is generally the territory of the political right, but Hedges does not deliver his polemic in order to call Americans back to a faux Rockwell-esque world of unquestioning faith and jingoism, as many Christian conservative commentators do. For him, high-flying televangelists are part of celebrity culture, not an antidote to it. No, the “illusion” serves the other half of his title, the “empire,” the corporate and military forces that he believes profit from the impoverishment, moral and financial, of his countrymen. It prevents Americans from seeing what is done in their name or even what is done to them. What seems to truly drive Hedges’ rage is his conviction that no republic has ever survived the acquisition of empire, and that his own will be no exception. The U.S. is in a death spiral, he believes, inextricably trapped in other nation’s lives and in “a culture of illusion that is, at its core, a culture of death—it will die and leave little of value behind.” Remarkable, bracing and highly moral, Empire of Illusion is Hedges’ lament for his nation.

Our universities can be smarter

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, July 28, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 109 Comments

Perhaps we are not putting too many words into the mouths of the presidents of Canada’s largest universities when we say something is nagging at them. A sense that things have become skewed in Canada’s higher education system, and more broadly in the way Canada’s economy and society face an uncertain future.

How else to explain the decision by these five top university presidents to approach Maclean’s for an interview? And how else to explain that—after their aides and helpers took care to assure us that the five presidents had “no specific ask” when they offered to talk—they showed up with an agenda for major change in their own institutions and in Canadian society at large? Continue…

No ideas please, we're Canadian

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, July 27, 2009 at 8:28 PM - 8 Comments

Chris Selley sees hope—or at least something completely different—in David Cameron’s Britain.

“Reticent” isn’t a word that comes to mind. What comes to my mind instead is that if either Michael Ignatieff or Stephen Harper had given that interview, Canadian politics-watchers would still be picking themselves up off the floor, and the appropriate war room would be tearing into the other guy like a pack of half-starved wolverines…

Anyone who reads a newspaper knows lean times are coming to Canada too, one way or the other—tax hikes, spending cuts, or some combination of the two. The difference between Ottawa and London is that in London, they’re actually talking about it. Indeed, to hear Cameron talk, he actually thinks he’s telling the British people what they want to hear.

Harry Potter’s Skele-Grow may soon have a real-life counterpart

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 27, 2009 at 5:04 PM - 0 Comments

Scientists have successfully grown small nodules of bone-like material in laboratories from different types of bone cells and stem cells. The goal is for future bone regeneration and growth, which has important applications for patients with fractured, diseased or damaged bones. The scientists from Imperial College London found that certain bone cells taken from mouse skulls and bone marrow are able to replicate many features of real bone, although the quality of the bone-like material wasn’t exactly the same. “Our study provides an important insight into how different cell sources can really influence the quality of bone that we can produce,” says Molly Stephens, a professor at the Department of Materials and the Institute of Biomedical Engineering at Imperial College London.

Science Daily

Couple's wedding entrance dance becomes Internet sensation

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 27, 2009 at 4:51 PM - 0 Comments

Posted only one week ago, the video clip shows Kevin Heinz and Jill Peterson as they dance down the  aisle towards the altar to the tune of Chris Brown’s Forever. Joined by their ushers, bridesmaids and groomsmen, the couples’ dance lasts five minutes and shocks most of the people in attendance. With over 6 million YouTube hits, the video has brought the couple considerable attention in the U.S. On Saturday, the wedding party recreated the routine on the Today Show, wearing matching sunglasses and outfits.

YouTube

Democracy runneth over

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, July 27, 2009 at 4:46 PM - 7 Comments

Preston Manning sees hope—or the possibility thereof—in David Cameron’s Britain.

… here in Canada, will any political party be willing to experiment with the “open primary” to attract more Canadians into the process of putting candidates’ names on the ballot and thereby, one hopes, increasing public interest in the campaign and election to follow?

In North America, it is the United States that has made greatest use of the primary system, which is why Canadian liberals and social democrats – pathologically averse to adopting U.S. political practices – are unlikely to embrace it.

But what about Canadian conservatives? If the British Conservative Party – far older and tradition-bound than any Canadian counterpart – can experiment with such democratic innovations, why can’t Canadian conservatives?

CNN's Ali Velshi recommends Annie Proulx's 'Accordion Crimes'

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 27, 2009 at 3:35 PM - 1 Comment

“I’m spending part of my summer vacation this year in Paris, where I constantly encounter accordionists on the subways. I have always loved the accordion which, incidentally, is the instrument of love. I also enjoy Annie Proulx, and so I’m reading Proulx’s Accordion Crimes about an accordion maker from Sicily who follows his dreams to America (or “La Merica”, as he calls it). While his future doesn’t work out so well, the accordion outlives him and its bellows tell the story of many more immigrants, as it changes hands over the course of 100 years. Great read; especially in Paris.”

Ali Velshi is CNN’s chief business correspondent

How do you feel about the European Union's ban on seal product imports?

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 27, 2009 at 3:29 PM - 21 Comments

"A Virtual Carbon Copy"

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, July 27, 2009 at 3:23 PM - 1 Comment

This clip/promo from Psych, where the characters make fun of the obvious similarity of The Mentalist to their own show, has pleased a lot of viewers:

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.3053811&w=425&h=350&fv=]

It isn’t that often that shows tweak other shows for ripping them off (in part because almost every show is at least partly a copy of something else, and the writers have guilty consciences). The Simpsons did it to Family Guy and, much more effectively, to Dinosaurs: “It’s like they taped our lives and put it right up on the screen!”

Canada to file a protest in response to EU's ban on seal products

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 27, 2009 at 3:11 PM - 3 Comments

Canada will file a formal protest with the World Trade Organization in response to the European Union’s adoption of a ban on seal products. The announcement was made by ministers Stockwell Day and Gail Shea, who called the ban irresponsible and said it violates WTO guidelines. Day said despite the use of clubs and rifles in the hunt, experts confirm it is both humane and environmentally friendly, and the criticism from Europeans is unfounded. That argument has fallen on deaf ears in Europe, and the impact on some Canadians could be severe. The government estimates that many sealers will lose about 35 per cent of their income with a shutdown of the European market, even though most demand for seal products comes from China, Russia and the Canadian north. The ban stipulates that seal products obtained during traditional Inuit hunts can still be imported, but only on a “not-for-profit basis.”

CTV News

Obama’s beer diplomacy

By John Parisella - Monday, July 27, 2009 at 3:06 PM - 24 Comments

An African-American president and a high-profile case involving allegations of racial profiling certainly make for a powerful mix. The arrest of Henry Louis Gates  should have been a regrettable one-day news story. But Barack Obama’s intervention at last week’s press conference helped escalate it into a matter only a meeting between the parties at the White House over beer—with the president himself as conciliator—could be expected to resolve. Talk about over-dramatization!

Obama was right to meet the national press on Friday afternoon to bring the temperature down and correct the trajectory of his earlier remarks. After all, his comment rendering a judgment on the Cambridge police actions (“[they] acted stupidly”), prefaced by an admission that “he did not have all the facts” was sure to send shockwaves. Conservative commentators, led by Rush Limbaugh, quickly pounced and condemned Obama’s remarks, while the local police union adding that an apology would be appropriate in the circumstances. The so-called bully pulpit evidently has its advantages, but it also comes with constraints.

Continue…

"We could, in addition to the previous line, perhaps add a line such as…"

By Paul Wells - Monday, July 27, 2009 at 2:07 PM - 20 Comments

Colleague Petrou asked the Department of Foreign Affairs for information. This set squadrons of bureaucrats into many rounds of frantic consultation about how to give him the smallest possible amount of information. Read all about it here. It would be hilarious if it weren’t perfectly appalling.

I’ll note only that this obsession with saying as little as possible and mattering as little as possible did not begin with the Harper government, though it has been refined to self-satirizing perfection over the past three years. In 2002 I attended a summit of La Francophonie in Beirut at which the only usable information Canadian reporters received came, not from Jean Chrétien’s entourage, but from reading the Beirut newspapers and eavesdropping on the French government’s briefings of its own reporters. Every reporter who uses the Access to Information Act has no end of horror stories of duplicitous foot-dragging.

But it has all been getting worse. And Robert Marleau, the departing Information Commissioner, let it go on for years before announcing his snap retirement. Much of the coverage of that decision was given over to wondering why Marleau was leaving so early. I wonder, since he was bound to do so little to fight the attitudes Petrou chronicles, why he bothered hanging around so long.

Will someone leak something from the Conservative Party campaign training conference already?

By kadyomalley - Monday, July 27, 2009 at 1:53 PM - 32 Comments

What? It never hurts to ask, right?

Heck, we – the few, the brave, the increasingly desperate for news journalists still on Hill duty during the soggiest dog days of the summer – have tried to get more information on what’s on the agenda using conventional methods, but so far, we’re not getting much beyond vague generalities:

From today’s Globe and Mail:

[...]Monday’s meetings are mostly for campaign volunteers and staff, although candidates and current caucus members are also invited to attend. Those in attendance will learn how to deal with social media, fundraising, journalists and direct-mail. The party’s campaign co-ordinator, Doug Finley, is expected to speak, as are other officials. [...]

From the Hill Times:

Conservatives were tight-lipped last week and declined to discuss any details about their caucus meeting or training conference.  [...] Dan Hilton, the Conservative Party’s executive director, who in an email declined to offer any details on the party’s training conference, said it’s closed to the media and referred The Hill Times to the party’s website for further information.
Caucus members, candidates and campaign workers on Monday will be trained about the social media, voter contact methods, fundraising, and dealing with the media. On Tuesday, the training sessions will focus on how to effectively use direct mail, community outreach and Get Out the Vote operations. The training conference is $299 per person.

Since this is purely party business, they’re under no obligation to provide any details on what’s going down behind closed doors, of course — but that’s not going to stop us from trying to find out, of course. So far, though, there’s precious little dribdrabbing out of the Marriott, other than a persistent — and reasonably plausible — rumour that the prime minister either has, or is slated to speak to the crowd at some point, and Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt’s lament over the long line at the Starbucks.

Anyway, at the moment, ITQ isn’t quite ready to stake out the lobby in hopes of buttonholing unwary participants– although that may well change by this afternoon, so they should probably govern themselves accordingly.  And if anyone out there wants to share any gossip from the various workshops, feel free to drop her a line — or leave a note in the comments. Give the opposition parties a taste of why they should be shaking in their collective and respective shoes over the prospect of going up against the most terrifyingly well-prepared political machine on the federal landscape, why don’t you?

Earl Jones arrested in Montreal

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 27, 2009 at 1:52 PM - 0 Comments

Earl Jones, the disgraced investment adviser suspected of bilking dozens of clients out of as much as $50 million, has been arrested at his lawyer’s office in Montreal by police. Jones was reportedly taken to a local detention centre and is expected to be arraigned on Tuesday on theft and fraud charges.

The Gazette

Canadian astronaut sees "human destruction"

By macleans.ca - Monday, July 27, 2009 at 1:38 PM - 2 Comments

Speaking from space, Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk urged Canada to consider the future of space exploration and shared his own insight gleaned from orbit. “Most of the time when I look out the window I’m in awe,” he says. “But there are some effects of the human destruction of the Earth as well.” Thirsk was last in space in 1996 and says changes to Earth’s geography since then are seemingly apparent. “This is probably just a perception, but I just have the feeling that the glaciers are melting, the snow capping the mountains is less than it was 12 years ago when I saw it last time,” he says. “That saddens me a little bit.”

National Post