Found: First World War battle site

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 5:40 PM - 0 Comments

It is the kind of epic battle that begs to be commemorated. And so the London Scottish Regiment does just that—gathering each year on Halloween Eve to pay homage to those who fought 95 years ago in the battle of the Windmill of Messines. The details of the barrage in Belgium—part of the First World War’s First Battle of Ypres—are rehashed by veterans of the London Scottish over food and drink. A memorial bagpipe tune may even be played: “At muster call at closing light, the men were filled with dread / At so many comrades wounded and so many lying dead / They had no hero soldier’s grave, indeed they never will / Their headstone—just the ghost of the burned-out mill.”

But for Pipe Major John Spoore—a 23-year veteran of the regiment—one thing always seemed to mute his enjoyment of the occasion: for all the years of celebration, nobody even knew for sure just where that pivotal windmill was located. So when Spoore heard about McMaster University’s Peace and War in the 20th Century website—a database which, unlike many others, allows open online access to its historical material—he hoped that archivists there could help him locate the mill, and finally put “his old grey head at ease.” Continue…

Week in Pictures: August 8th – August 13th, 2009

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 5:36 PM - 0 Comments

The Dutch abortion ship sails no more

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 5:20 PM - 5 Comments

Dutch physician Rebecca Gomperts once dreamt of a fleet of floating clinics that would sail the high seas, providing abortions to women in need from the safety of international waters. In 1999, Gomperts launched an “abortion boat”—and an ancillary organization, Women on Waves (WOW)—to help realize her global vision. But after a decade of sailing, the controversial vessel will return to port. The move was forced by a change in Dutch law, which Gomperts says reflects “a growing tendency toward restriction and intolerance” in her country.

Previously, Dutch law allowed women to obtain abortion pills—which can induce miscarriage in the first weeks of pregnancy—from their doctors. That allowed Gomperts to provide them on her ship.“Our legal system states that what is allowed under Dutch law is also allowed in international waters,” Gomperts explained. “So women boarding our ship did not have to fear prosecution.” But that changed when the Dutch government passed a law that limited the distribution of abortion pills to approved clinics, of which the “abortion boat” is not one. “Now [women] risk prosecution in their own country if the Dutch health inspectorate rules that we are working outside Dutch law. That’s a risk we couldn’t take.” Gomperts has called off her campaign, and cancelled future trips. Continue…

If airlines are in trouble, why are planes so full?

By Chris Rivers, Takeoffeh.com - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 5:12 PM - 5 Comments

As passengers shove their way onto planes these days, you can practically hear the grumbling thought: in these recessionary times, shouldn’t everyone be staying home and giving me some leg room? High end restaurants and stores are empty, why aren’t the planes?

In fact, airlines are operating with record high load factors – averaging in the mid eighty to ninety percent range. Blame that middle seat you’re stuck in on the highly sophisticated management systems that are now employed by most airlines. There have been a lot of questionable decisions in the last decade, but one thing the airlines have excelled at is refining revenue and capacity management systems that are the envy of many other industries. Just our luck. Continue…

Paying for the Bloc

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 5:09 PM - 110 Comments

Even Chantal Hébert gets the odd thing wrong. Here she falls into a common trap on the subject of the per-vote subsidy and the Bloc Québécois:

According to federal Democratic Reform Minister Steven Fletcher, many Canadians are frustrated with the notion that their taxes are funding a sovereignist party. Given that the subsidy is based on a per-vote formula, that is a bogus argument, unworthy of Fletcher’s ministerial title.

The Quebecers who support the Bloc are taxpayers, with no less right to have the $1.95 subsidy tied to their vote channelled to the party of their choice.

The last part  is right. But the implication in the first — that  taxpayers at large are not funding the Bloc, because Bloc supporters are taxpayers and the subsidy is “per vote” — is flat wrong. The Quebecers who vote Bloc do indeed “channel” the subsidy to the party of their choice. But they don’t pay it. The money doesn’t come from them. It comes from general revenues.

These revenues come, disproportionately, from people with incomes above the national average. Quebecers’ incomes are, on average, below the national average, and if I’m not mistaken Bloc voters’ incomes are, on average, lower still. Which means, yes, there is an element of redistribution in the subsidy: taxpayers across Canada  are paying, disproportionately, to fund a party dedicated to the country’s destruction.

Wow, This Will Totally Make Me Love "Family Guy"

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 5:01 PM - 18 Comments

I never liked Family Guy, but now that they’re doing an episode with such delightful people as Rush Limbaugh and Karl Rove, I’m clearly on board.

In an episode being produced for next season, the Griffins’ liberal dog, Brian, gets bored and frustrated because he feels he no longer has anything to complain about with Barack Obama in the White House. So Brian becomes a Republican and starts listening to Rush Limbaugh (who, apparently, also sings a song).

Limbaugh has actually been on the show once before, so the novelty isn’t huge, and Rove, of course, is well on his way to converting himself into a media personality who is beloved by all in the TV news industry. (The fact that he has no intellectual integrity is not a problem in an industry that also likes Newt Gingrich and James Carville.) Part of that strategy is getting a reputation for being a “good sport,” which explains why a Family Guy appearance will help his career.

More interesting than the guest stars is the irony of the plot summary: it’s being announced at a time when it’s clear that liberals have plenty to complain about with Obama in the White House and that (as with Clinton) they may spend the next four to eight years fighting a rearguard action against conservatives (including conservative Democrats), no matter who has the power.

But I admit that’s not Family Guy‘s fault; animated shows can’t stay on top of the headlines, except for South Park, and even that show isn’t as current as it used to be. Maybe by the time the episode airs, the headlines will have changed again and it will once again seem timely. But sometimes it’s better for a cartoon, with its long lead time, to ignore current headlines altogether. The picture to the left is from The Simpsons‘ episode “Sideshow Bob Roberts,” first written in early 1994 when Democrats controlled everything, health-care reform seemed likely to pass, and conservatives like Limbaugh and Sideshow Bob were being written off as marginal figures. By the time the episode aired, health-care reform was dead and the Republicans were on track to take back Congress (which they did, not long after the episode aired), and the show had become timely by refusing to be tied to specific ripped-from-the-headlines news items. Just another reason why season 6 The Simpsons is better than Family Guy.

The controversial opera cities love

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 4:40 PM - 1 Comment

No arts community can be taken seriously without Richard Wagner. The Canadian Opera Company already chose his Ring cycle (the four-opera marathon that created the stereotype of the fat soprano in armour) to inaugurate its new opera house, and in 2010, Los Angeles will celebrate its first production of the complete Ring with a city-wide promotion called “Ring Festival L.A.” This plan got some unwanted publicity when Mike Antonovich, an L.A. County supervisor, protested the decision to honour the operas that “inspired Hitler and became the de facto soundtrack for the Holocaust.” The objection was voted down, but another supervisor, Zev Yaroslavsky, told Maclean’s that the festival will “delve deeply into Wagner’s anti-Semitism” and “focus on him in the totality of his life and times—for better and for worse.” Nobody can produce Wagner without acknowledging his racism; even the Bayreuth Festival, which Wagner himself founded, has announced that it will produce a report and exhibit on how associated the festival was with Hitler and Nazism. But though nobody seems to like Wagner the man, everybody wants to produce his work.

Even casual music fans are often aware that Wagner’s non-musical writings are full of what Linda Hutcheon, a professor at the University of Toronto, calls “articulate and verbally vehement” expressions of dislike for Jews and Jewish composers. But at this point, casual fans may actually know more about his racism than his work, because except for isolated excerpts like the bits that Bugs Bunny parodied in What’s Opera, Doc?, Wagner’s operas are more talked about than seen. They were good box office in the 1930s, but today, only one (his early effort The Flying Dutchman) appears on a list of the most popular operas in North America. The operas are also tremendously long and expensive to stage, and they make huge demands on singers for little gain: the Ring contains no arias or applause breaks. Why then do cities court controversy by devoting a major chunk of arts funding to Wagner instead of composers whose operas are more profitable (or at least less unprofitable) than his? Continue…

Cheney to Bush: You big softy!

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 4:35 PM - 3 Comments

Somewhere in a Washington D.C. suburb, in an office above his garage, former vice president Dick Cheney is tap, tap, taping away at his memoirs. Though the workshop may be Leave it to Beaver, his forthcoming book’s conclusions are unadulterated, neat–no water, no ice–realpolitik: In his second term in office, Cheney witnessed George W. Bush go soft. That’s his assessment, according to an unnamed source familiar with Cheney’s evolving account, who spoke to the Washington Post. Buch, “showed an independence that Cheney didn’t see coming,” says the source. “It was clear that Cheney’s doctrine was cast-iron strength at all times–never apologise, never explain–and Bush moved toward the conciliatory.” That meant no more waterboarding, the closure of secret CIA prisons, more congressional approval for surveillance, and more effort to solve the Iran and North Korea challenges through diplomacy. Soft, Cheney calls it. More than anything, however, his souring on Bush hinges on the treatment of his infamous chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, ultimately surrendered to the Valerie Plame affair. “I have strong feelings about what happened,” his authorized biographer, Stephen Hayes, has quoted Cheney saying. “And I don’t have any reason not to forthrightly express those views.”

The Guardian

Transsexual killer to B.C. government: Pay for my penectomy

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 4:32 PM - 0 Comments

In court documents recently filed in the Federal Court of Canada she is Katherine Anne Johnson, 61, a woman serving a life sentence in a Fraser Valley men’s prison for beating Horace Stevens, her former roommate, to death with a baseball bat. In Correctional Service of Canada reports, he is “Ms. Johnson,” an inmate properly held at a men’s prison because “his” penis remains intact. It’s a circumstance Johnson wants changed through a procedure called a “penectomy,” the medical amputation of a penis, at taxpayers’ expense. Johnson has tried the procedure before, at home. After having her testicles surgically removed in 1979, she attempted to sever her penis with a razor blade (it was later reattached after she lost consciousness due to blood loss). Johnson’s application to the Federal Court argues the surgery, which would permit her to move to a women’s prison, has been unreasonably delayed by Correctional Service of Canada. Johnson says she lives in fear at the men’s prison, where for years she has exchanged sex with other inmates for protection.

Calgary Herald

Watch My Show, I Hate Other Shows Like It

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 4:09 PM - 4 Comments

I frequently hear quotes like this one, from Glee co-creator Brad Falchuk, but I’m never sure why they’re supposed to help (this version of the quote was compiled from two different transcripts, one at the previous link, the other one here) : “I’m not a big musical fan. I don’t like musicals and I didn’t want to make a musical. The idea was to attract me and other categories of people.… I hope we’re so good that people can’t not watch.” Falchuk also said that “This is not really a musical; it is a comedy with music and dancing.” I always thought the name for a comedy with music and dancing was… a musical. (You can argue that in a technical sense, Glee is not a musical because the singing all takes place in the “real” world of performance, rather than characters spontaneously bursting into song. But that definition of a musical would eliminate many, many musicals from the category.)

I know that the point of such statements is to tell people: don’t worry if you have a bias against shows where people sing n’ dance; we share your bias and we like the show anyway, so you will too. But it always comes off sounding insecure. Glee is a show with a lot of singing and dancing. As the producers point out, the portion of the budget that another show would spend on explosions and car crashes is going to license a huge number of songs for performance in every episode. (The fact that this will give the show a short shelf life — I’m sure they’re negotiating the licenses for the DVD versions too, but there are still going to be music-rights nightmares someday if the show ever makes it into reruns — is understandably something they don’t want to talk about at the moment.) It’s not like High School Musical or Mamma Mia!, but it is a show for a public that has made those and other musicals extremely popular. If the audience ever gets the impression that the show is ashamed of all the singing and dancing, or of its links with the musical form, it’ll have problems that go way beyond those posed by simple resistance to musicals; people can accept singing n’ dancing, but not if the show doesn’t seem fully invested in the belief that these things are worth seeing.

It would be a bit like a producer of a science-fiction show saying he doesn’t like science fiction, and this show was made for people like him who are suspicious of the format. Which does happen. But it doesn’t usually attract a bigger audience than shows that embrace their genres.

To be fair, executive producer Ryan Murphy (who wasn’t able to be at the TCA) does call the show a musical, though he emphasizes that it’s different from High School Musical because “people don’t just burst into song.” PR-wise, that’s the best way to describe it.

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.3189358&w=560&h=340&fv=%26rel%3D0%26border%3D0%26]

We can’t talk about immigration

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 4:00 PM - 180 Comments

Christopher Caldwell’s new book is called Reflections on the Revolution in Europe. And, if you don’t quite get the Burkean allusion, his subtitle spells out his real concerns: “Immigration, Islam and the West.” Given my own obsessions in recent years, you’d expect me to be favourably disposed to it. And I am, my enthusiasm only slightly tempered by the instant conventional wisdom that, if you’re only going to buy one Islamophobic Euro-doom-mongering diatribe this summer, Caldwell’s is the sober and respectable one, in striking contrast to certain others we could mention. “Unlike [Oriana] Fallaci and Mark Steyn, Caldwell does not rant or sneer,” writes Matt Carr of Britain’s Institute of Race Relations. Caldwell, says The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan, is not a “Steynian hysteric.” Oh, dear. I think I prefer the droll Irish commentator “P O’Neill”: “Someone has to say it,” he smirked. “Caldwell is the thinking man’s Mark Steyn.”

But enough about me. On to the book . . . actually, hold on a minute. One more thing about me. Let us put Islam aside for the moment, as my views have been well aired in these pages, and consider the author’s other theme. As it happens, for all his non-ranting, non-hysterical sobriety, Mr. Caldwell is somewhat more “extreme” than I am on immigration. For a notorious blowhard, I can go a bit cryptic or (according to taste) wimpy when invited to confront that particular subject head on. On the CBC last year, I was tap dancing around various socio-cultural generalities when the host, George Stroumboulopoulos, leaned in in that way he has and cut to the chase: “You mean [pause and knowing glance to camera] immigration?” Continue…

Eternal sunshine of the Globe and Mail mind (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 3:56 PM - 22 Comments

My friend Adam sounds heartbroken.

With even more urgency than usual, the Prime Minister dashes hope expressed in our editorial column that he’ll spend a little more time on the high road.

UPDATED: What happened to you, NDP? You used to be cool.

By kadyomalley - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 3:43 PM - 40 Comments

She may not be heading to Halifax, but that hasn’t stopped ITQ from following, with equal parts bemusement and amusement, the fracas surrounding once-and-not-likely-future NDP candidate Dana Larsen, who was — at least, according to his tweeted version of events –unceremoniously banned from attending the convention — or even hanging around the building — earlier today.

Apparently, the party was distinctly unimpressed with his efforts to get out the vote on a pro-pot legalization resolution that may well not even make it to the floor, and revoked his credentials on the spot. In fairness to the party, it turns out that NDP national director Brad Lavigne gave him a heads up via email earlier this week that he would not be welcome on the voyage due to his alleged offers of “financial inducements to other delegates” which are “contrary to the democratic principles of the [party]“.  Did I mention this is an NDP policy convention? Just checking.

Continue…

What does the NDP need to do to grow its support base?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 3:40 PM - 14 Comments

Nice voice—for a glove

By Peter Shawn Taylor - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 3:40 PM - 0 Comments

It’s the day before the first performance. And amid the bustle of one final rehearsal, soloist Marguerite Witvoet is warming up her voice. Her other voice.

Rather than trilling through the scales, she raises and lowers her gloved right hand in steps. As she does, each movement produces a vowel sound from the computer she wears on her back. She spends a few moments perfecting a soft “e.” Then she works on her consonants, flicking the fingers of her left hand against her thumb to create “p” and “t.” Continue…

Mohamud's return is "first priority"

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 3:00 PM - 19 Comments

The exile of Suaad Hagi Mohamud is nearing an end and Stephen Harper says her safe return is his government’s “first priority.” Commenting for the first time on Mohamud’s troubles in Kenya, the Prime Minister also said that a “full accounting” will be demanded of Canadian officials. “In the case of the Canadian Border Service Agency,” he said, “I know that [Public Safety Minister Peter] Van Loan is asking that organization for a full accounting of their actions in this case and we’ll obviously review those.” Mohamud, a Canadian citizen, has been stuck in Kenya for nearly three months since being accused of passport fraud.

Toronto Star

Outward Bound . . . in urban ravines?

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 3:00 PM - 14 Comments

Launching deep woods expeditions from remote wilderness bases has been the core of Outward Bound Canada’s (OB) program for 40 years. But shifting demographics, busier work schedules and rising costs have hit the non-profit hard. Kids are happier online than in the woods, professionals don’t have time for weeks of wilderness travel, and the $500 to $2,800 trips are pricey in a bad economy. So change is coming to Outward Bound. “As time has passed, the risk of becoming irrelevant increases for any organization,” says Dave Wolfenden, OB’s executive director. “If we stayed as a purely wilderness tripping organization, we wouldn’t have survived.”

In a twist, Outward Bound is hitting the cities. A new community centre is under construction in Toronto—it’ll be a launching point for trips and a place where people can receive wilderness education right in the city. There are plans to lead hikes through Toronto’s ravines, for sailing on Lake Ontario, and for community service in the city’s hospices. There are also plans to build a second centre in Vancouver. But while OB tries to reach out to all Canadians, its main mission has always been teaching youth adaptability, leadership and life skills. So OB is also concentrating on meeting kids in the classroom. “The program shifts from bringing the students to Outward Bound to Outward Bound bringing itself to the schools,” says Wolfenden. Continue…

He can change. Really.

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 2:44 PM - 43 Comments

Stephen Harper once again redeems the Globe’s faith in him.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper defended his government’s handling of the case of Suaad Haji Mohamud on Thursday, saying officials have made it a priority to ensure the Canadian woman, who has been stranded in Kenya for 2 1/2 months, returns home.

But rather than directly responding to Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s criticism of the federal government’s conduct, the prime minister hit back at the premier by urging the province to deal with the ongoing scandal at its electronic health records agency.

See previously: “I have taken the view, as the federal prime minister very different than some of my predecessors as I don’t lecture the provinces publically on how they should be running their health care systems.”

David Christopher Pundyk 1983-2009

By Rachel Mendleson - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 2:40 PM - 1 Comment

David Christopher Pundyk was born on Dec. 23, 1983, two and a half weeks late. His parents, John and Brenda, were both teachers on the Fisher River Cree Nation, 200 km north of Winnipeg, but David’s apparent unwillingness to emerge brought them to the city for his birth. Upon arrival, David, whose mother was Cree, had a shock of black hair that resembled Ronald Reagan’s pompadour, earning him the nickname “Little Ronnie.” A shy boy, he was “attached to his mummy’s side,” says John, which older brother Mike teased him about.

Dave, as he was often called, grew up spending summers at the family cottage. Located on the Winnipeg River near the town of Minaki, Ont.,, it wasn’t accessible by road. The family motored across the water in a fishing boat to get there. As soon as he could hold the tiller, Dave sat in John’s lap and learned to steer. Fishing was “part of them,” says John of the boys, who particularly enjoyed catching colourful pumpkinseed fish. Dave and friend Dan Polakoff, whose family had a cottage nearby, would attach a small motor to their canoe. “We probably could paddle faster, but we liked being the big kids in the boat,” says Dan. Unbeknownst to their parents, they would often have double suppers, convincing one family to eat early, and arriving for the second meal “just as the table was being set,” says Dan. Continue…

The life of the party

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 2:30 PM - 8 Comments

The penultimate day of business for the House of Commons this spring would have passed without incident were it not for 10 words from Justice Minister Rob Nicholson. “Mr. Speaker,” he said, “the government will comply with the court order.”

With that sentence, the government signalled its intent to relent and allow Abousfian Abdelrazik to return home from exile in Sudan. It was the NDP’s Paul Dewar who had first raised Abdelrazik’s plight in the House, more than a year earlier. But it was Liberal Irwin Cotler, asking that the government accede to a federal court ruling that the Canadian be granted safe passage, who was honoured with an answer. When Dewar attempted to follow up, he was unceremoniously rebuffed. “The one place we will not get advice from on this,” Nicholson huffed, “is the NDP.” Continue…

Les Paul, "Father of Modern Music," Dies

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 2:02 PM - 0 Comments

Les Paul, the guitarist whose innovations in the development of the electric guitar and modern sound recording led him to be dubbed “the father of modern music,” has died at the age of 94. Paul designed one of the early “solid-body” electric guitars, and his innovations helped to improve the sound of the instruments and gain them wider acceptance in pop music. In his recordings with his wife, Mary Ford, Paul pioneered many new techniques in recording, including early versions of multi-track recording, allowing different parts to be recorded separately and then mixed together. One of their most famous singles, “The World Is Waiting For the Sunrise,” had both his guitar and Ford’s voice recorded twice and re-mixed so that they were harmonizing with themselves; he also specialized in recording voices and instruments much closer to the mike than previously thought possible. Many rock n’ roll musicians and producers learned from Paul, who helped re-define what could be done with an electric guitar and the idea that a recording could accomplish things that can’t be done in a live performance.

CBC News

You buy a book but don’t own it?

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 2:00 PM - 1 Comment

On July 17, when the online book retailer Amazon removed some e-books from its Kindle electronic reading device, the first media reports concentrated on the irony—cheap but delicious—that two of those disappeared titles were by George Orwell: Animal Farm and 1984. “Big Brother in the digital age” and “Orwell down the memory hole” were typical headlines placed over brief, written-to-amuse items about Amazon’s embarrassment when it realized that it didn’t have the legal right to sell those Kindle offerings. But it didn’t take long for more profound implications to sink in, or for the angry backlash to explode.

Amazon hadn’t merely stopped selling those e-books, it had reached right into owners’ Kindles—via the same Whispernet wireless network it had used to load the readers with 1984—and removed copies the firm had already sold. While Amazon did refund the purchase price, its actions were, as more than one furious customer complained, equivalent to bookstore employees creeping into customers’ homes at night, culling their bookshelves and leaving a cheque behind. And the less tech-savvy the Kindle owner, the more astonished and angry the response. As Charles Slater, a Philadelphia executive, expostulated to the New York Times, “I never imagined that Amazon actually had the right, the authority or even the ability to delete something that I had already purchased.” Continue…

Pollster John Wright on Quebecers as lovers, Manitoba’s dropping military support and our needless panic over the economy

By Kate Fillion - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 1:40 PM - 2 Comments

John Wright is a senior vice-president of Ipsos Reid, the largest market research company in Canada, and co-author (with Darrell Bricker) of We Know What You’re Thinking, to be published later this month, which reveals Canadians’ views on topics ranging from foreign ownership to sleeping in the nude.

Q: How do you know you can trust the people you poll, especially when you’re asking them about, say, their sex lives, where there’s an incentive to lie?

A: It’s a matter of consistency. For instance, one in 10 Canadians who are married say they would cheat on their partner. Over 20 years we’ve asked that same question and got the same result again and again, so I like to think people are telling the truth.

Q: I guess there are some things people are actually more likely to admit in an anonymous poll. For instance, you found that even among Canadians with post-secondary degrees, 20 per cent agree that “Canada should let in more white immigrants but fewer visible minorities.” Did that surprise you?

A: The only people who seem to be surprised about anything nowadays are economists, and I think it undermines their credibility. If you could take all the times economists have said over the past year that they’re surprised about the way the public has reacted on housing or spending or whatever, and stack all those quotes on top of each other, you’d get to the moon and back. Pollsters don’t pretend to foresee the future but to measure the current and provide context. I’m never surprised by anything I’ve done work on—I’m not supposed to be, I’m supposed to consider the question analytically. And the fact is that we don’t live in a homogenous society where everybody agrees on everything. You’re often going to find about one-quarter of the population harbouring very strong views against something, another quarter who are supporting something, and 50 per cent in the middle saying, “It depends.” They move back and forth depending on the situation, which is quite different than Americans, who often define their views only in terms of Republican or Democrat and have tended toward 50-50 splits since the Civil War. Here we have a plethora of parties and a plethora of views. Continue…

Pressure rises to protect our pensions

By Julien Russell Brunet - Thursday, August 13, 2009 at 1:20 PM - 11 Comments

At long last, there is a ray of hope for workers whose employers have filed for bankruptcy. Currently pensioners, the disabled, and employees owed severance pay are treated the same way as banks and other sophisticated creditors: when a company goes under, they have to get in line to fight for a piece of what’s left with everyone else.

But a group of former Nortel employees is looking to change that. They have asked the federal government to make an emergency amendment to the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act to give preferred status to the claims of pensioners, the disabled and severed employees—essentially putting workers at the front of the line. Continue…