How much is that Senate in the window?

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 12:31 PM - 26 Comments

Jim Flaherty, November 27. We cannot ask Canadians to tighten their belts during tougher times without looking in the mirror. Canadians have a right to look to government as an example. We have a responsibility to show restraint and respect for their money. Canadians’ tax dollars are precious. They must not be spent frivolously or without regard to where they came from.

Each new senator is apparently bound to an eight-year term limit. At $132,300 per year, not including mandated annual wage increases, that’s just over a million each. In a release today, the NDP claims the cost of salary, staffing and other expenses for nine more senators will be more than $3-million per year. And surely the Canadian Taxpayers Federation is already doing the calculations on what sort of pension each is likely to walk with.

So who will be the first senator to step forward, renounce his or her pension and volunteer to take a pay cut?

Do you care who gets appointed to the Senate?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 12:23 PM - 49 Comments

Mitchel Raphael on why Ambrose worried about MacKay

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

Life after Parliament Hill for Rahim Jaffer
Former Edmonton Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer says he is now enjoying running his own business. Jaffer is part of GPG Corp., a new company specializing in alternative energy sources. The company will be building a solar farm in Bancroft, Ont. Jaffer says Ontario has a great solar subsidy program and pays people for supplying the power grid. GPG is also looking into a “dragon power system,” which consists of plates on the road that capture kinetic energy from moving vehicles and turn it into electricity. The Chinese, notes Jaffer, are very interested in this because of their huge traffic volumes. He is looking to open an office in China, but that may not sit well with his close friend Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, who has always taken a tough stand on China. “Jason will be mad,” admits Jaffer. “But our government is getting excited about China. Stockwell Day was there. Jim Flaherty was there.” Jaffer and his wife, Helena Guergis, minister of state for the status of women, are looking to buy a house together in the Ottawa area and hope to have children soon. Jaffer says they need a home with large closets. “After all the years I did politics, I have as many clothes as Helena.”

Rona Ambrose coaches hockey
Ontario Tory MP Patrick Brown hosted and played in his second Hockey Night in Barrie charity game at the Barrie Molson Centre. Each team had a mix of players including Conservative MPs such as Gord Brown, Hockey Night in Canada’s Ron MacLean, Olympic medallist goalie Sami Jo Small and former and current NHL players like Brian Little of the Atlanta Thrashers. Also in attendance, but not playing, was former NHLer Eddie Shack. Bringing some comedy to the game with an animal print protective cup was Marc Hickox from the TV show Rent-a-Goalie. Coaches included Labour Minister Rona Ambrose for the white team and Helena Guergis for the blue team. Defence Minister Peter MacKay played for the whites. His arm is still not at 100 per cent after being broken in a rugby match on Parliament Hill. Ambrose told the medic on site to make sure MacKay wasn’t in pain and to get him off the ice if he was. The medic said, “He won’t let me pull him.” Ambrose’s firm response: “I’ll pull him if I have to.” She also asked MacKay’s team members Aaron Johnson of the Chicago Blackhawks and his brother Cory Johnson to keep an eye on their fellow Nova Scotian. The event raised $121,000 for Barrie’s Royal Victoria Hospital. Team Blue won 15-13. Continue…

At Least There's No James Marsters… Yet

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 12:12 PM - 15 Comments

Summer Glau will have a recurring role on season 2 of Dollhouse as someone who “shares a past” with Eliza Dushku’s character. Many people have argued that Glau would have been a better choice for the part, and that she might even have gotten it if she hadn’t been on the same network’s (now-defunct) Sarah Connor Chronicles at the time. I’m not sure about this. Dushku has limited range, but so does Glau. So do most of Whedon’s favourite actors. Even the ones who can actually act, like Alexis Denisof — who, of course, will also be appearing in season 2 of Dollhouse — seem like rather limited personalities, at least when they work with him. And of course he’s been known to fall head over heels for actors with very little personality, like Amy “also on Dollhouse” Acker.

Some showrunners try to build their stock companies out of craggy, average-looking actors with lots of personality and fight with their networks over the casting of people who don’t look perfect. Whedon is like the opposite; he absolutely loves to cast every part with the kind of pretty-looking, slightly bland people that networks also love. He fights to cast the people that other producers have forced on them by network executives. David Milch fell in love with people like Dennis Franz; Joss Whedon’s ideal actor appears to be Nathan Fillion, a cute, non-threatening actor with a limited emotional range. That’s why Dollhouse is the ultimate Whedon show, about pretty people who literally have no personalities at all.

I’m not attacking him for this; people cast the actors they’re comfortable with for the shows they do, and Whedon’s type of show — pitched halfway between dead-seriousness and silliness, and aimed at a young audience — probably requires the kind of beautiful, uncomplicated people who populate the movies/shows in most of the genres he’s riffing on. But I think he got lucky, in Buffy, by casting Sarah Michelle Gellar, who, though cute, had more spunk and more of a prickly, interesting onscreen personality than most of his actors. (She was also good at crying convincingly, which helps give the impression of at least a two-dimensional actor.) He was also lucky in getting Alyson Hannigan as a last-minute replacement; she’s also a more distinctive personality than his usual actor. Even Angel got a little lucky because David Boreanaz grew out of his initial pretty-boy status and became almost tough. Anything resembling genuine toughness has been hard to find in a Whedon character since then; it’s always a bunch of stone-faced ballerinas and Krasinkis playing at being action heroes, entire shows cast with people who could play assistant D.A.s on Law and Order or supporting roles on a late ’90s NBC sitcom.

The Girl Scout cookie skirmish

By Cathy Gulli - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 12:00 PM - 6 Comments

It was three o’clock in the afternoon when Celia V. Harquail, who was having a sugar low, spotted a pile of chocolate cookies on a plastic silver catering tray. She was at a women’s blogging conference in Chicago, which happened a few weeks ago, and was partly sponsored by Wal-Mart. The tempting treats were new, private-label biscuits that the retailer was testing. Harquail grabbed one and bit into it. “I was like, ‘Oh my God, this tastes like a Thin Mint,’ ” she says, referring to the most popular Girl Scouts of the U.S.A. (GSUSA) cookie. On another tray, a stack of confections resembled Tagalongs, the GSUSA peanut butter patties, Harquail’s favourite. One chomp in, she was struck by the similarities—the melty chocolate, the sticky peanut butter, the appearance. Until now, every imitation Harquail had tried had been terrible. But these ones, she says from New Jersey where she lives, were “good, tasty, well-done cookies.”

By that evening, Harquail, whose two daughters are Girl Scouts, was rattled. Wal-Mart, it seemed to her, was about to compete with a non-profit organization by offering a delicious, less expensive version of the coveted GSUSA cookies, which are sold once a year as a fundraiser. (Wal-Mart head office won’t say how much the cookies cost, or how many stores sell them. But one superstore in Williamsville, N.Y., quoted US$2.38 a box. GSUSA cookies cost between US$3 and $4.) So Harquail, a corporate consultant and former prof, vented on her blog, authentic­organizations.com. “Wal-Mart knocks off the Girl Scouts,” her post began. “These cookies are poised to snatch cookie sales right out of the hands of the Girl Scouts.” Continue…

Testosterone levels separate caring fathers from deadbeat dads

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 11:57 AM - 3 Comments

Wondering what kind of father you’ll be? According to a new study, the answer may be in your spit. A team of French and British researchers analyzed the testosterone levels in the saliva of Senegalese villagers, and found that those men with higher levels of the hormone were more likely to cheat of their wives and be involved in marital conflict. A comparison of testosterone levels of polygamous dads, monogamous fathers and unmarried men revealed that those with children had lower levels of the sex hormone than their single counterparts. But those men with multiple wives had higher levels of testosterone than those with only one wife.

New Scientist

Germany gets tough

By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

It’s the “war” that no one calls by name. Instead, the German government refers to its “stabilization mission” in northern Afghanistan. And the more than 4,000 German soldiers stationed there, precluded from using the word “attack,” will be careful only to speak of the “use of appropriate force.” Still, this guarded language—dubbed “an aggravating semantic farce” by a leading German newspaper—is not enough to hide a simple fact: the mission that officials are too abashed to call a war is starting to look like just that.

The German government is officially rewriting its rules of engagement in Afghanistan—allowing Bundeswehr forces to adopt a more offensive combat role. “The major change,” explains Christian Leuprecht, associate professor at the Royal Military College of Canada, “is that Germans no longer have to wait to be fired upon before they can fight back.” Until recently, German forces in Afghanistan could not operate offensively. They could not take pre-emptive measures to prevent assaults, or even pursue fleeing rebels. Effectively, they had to wait until they came under attack. Another change addresses verbal warnings that German troops had to issue before firing on enemies. “United Nations—stop, or I will fire” was the official call: to be used first in English, then Pashtu, and then Dari. Now, those rules have been changed to let soldiers return fire—and give warnings later. Continue…

Health reform with one angry mob

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 11:20 AM - 5 Comments

Americans have a way of achieving the impossible. They unlocked the power of the atom. They put a man on the moon. They convinced the world that Sarah Jessica Parker is attractive. And now they’ve topped themselves: they’ve found a way to take the staid, tedious political town hall meeting and make it interesting. The secret ingredient? Angry, angry people.

Forty years after hippies, peace and Woodstock, the United States is experiencing its Summer of Shove—a debate over health care reform characterized by vitriol, physical confrontation and thoughtful exchanges along the lines of “Up yours” and “No, up yours.” And then everyone calls everyone else a Nazi and goes home. Continue…

Harper's Nine

By kadyomalley - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 11:19 AM - 78 Comments

THE MOST IMPORTANT UPDATE OF ALL: Confirmed, finally — the nine new senators:

• Claude Carignan
• Jacques Demers
• Doug Finley
• Carolyn Stewart-Olsen
• Don Plett
• Judith Seidman
• Linda (Frum) Sokolowski
• Kelvin Ogilvie
• Dennis Patterson

Official PMO bios available here.

So, according to Stephen Taylor’s secret inside sources, the latest round of Senate appointments could be announced as early as 1pm today — although that could just be a cruel prank by a puckish PMO that has no intention of breaking with tradition, and will instead keep us hanging and wondering and pestering an increasingly surly Doug Finley with phone calls until sometime next week. What? I’m just saying there’s a reason why that 4:57-p.m-on-the-Friday-before-a-long-weekend timeslot is such a cliché.

This is, alas, one of those waiting games that really doesn’t lend itself terribly well to ITQ’s style of breaking news coverage, what with there being no formal ceremony — it’s not like the lucky nine have to head over to Rideau Hall to be sworn in by the Governor General — but that’s not going to stop her from liveblogging the latest developments in this post, which the rest of y’all can feel free to use as an open thread.

To get you started, a few links to the coverage so far:

CanWest News: Harper poised to make 8 Senate appointments
The Globe and Mail: Harper to appoint close Tory backers to Senate
The Canadian Press: Published reports say Harper ready to fill up to nine Senate vacancies
CBC.ca: Harper Senate appointments coming: sources
Winnipeg Free Press: He united the right, now he’s in the Senate

Unlike cabinet shuffle speculation — a guilty pleasure in which we haven’t gotten a chance to indulge in far too long, incidentally — everyone seem to be hearing the same three names from their respective sources: Doug Finley, Don Plett, Carolyn Stewart-Olsen. CanWest’s David Akin – who, ITQ should point out, was first out of the gate with the leaked names — reports that Bob Runciman is likely to get the second Ontario spot — after Finley, of course — and also lists  as defeated Conservative premier Rodney MacDonald as the favourite for the Nova Scotia seat, and Conservative organizer Judith Seidman for one of the two Quebec slots.

That’s all for now, but be sure to check back for updates throughout the day.

12:01 PM

Okay, now ITQ is nonplussed — via twitter, Taylor now says that the announcement could come as early as, well, now-ish, since the PM has an event in Quebec. Which sort of makes her go “Huh?” since prime ministers very rarely announce senate appointments at an event, especially before a media availability, but whatever. Also, he’s up against Manitoba premier Gary Doer possibly announcing his resignation, and wow, this day is totally getting interesting, isn’t it?

Continue…

The trouble with communes

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 11:03 AM - 2 Comments

Here’s a question: when you contribute money to create a utopian society in the remote mountains of B.C., are you buying a share of something? Or are you investing in the greater good of the community? A B.C. judge had to grapple with that question after the denizens of a 220-hectare commune in the East Kootenays wound up in court, having launched their society “to support the concept of humanity as one family.” Alas, the founding members of the community differed over how to do that; some demanded that the $2.5-million property be sold so they could recoup their money. With no written agreement among the founding members to go by, the judge only partly obliged them, saying they could get some but not all of their investments back. The amounts depended on their contributions. A former optometrst St. Jean, Que., gets $324,000 of his original $408,000, but a Toronto man who claimed money based solely on work he’d performed at the site got nothing. All in all, a clear case of “idealist beware.”

Vancouver Sun

Deadly clashes between armed Kurdish groups and Revolutionary Guards in northwest Iran

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 10:52 AM - 0 Comments

From the Tehran Times. 

From the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan.

Gomery blasts the Tories

By macleans.ca - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 10:31 AM - 4 Comments

John Gomery’s searing report on the sponsorship scandal may have ultimately helped to bring down the beleaguered Martin Liberals. But according to the retired Superior Court judge, despite having campaigned on a platform of “integrity, accountability and transparency,” so far, the Harper government’s performance on that front has been a disappointment. “On the transparency issue, its promises have simply not been fulfilled,” he told a Fredericton audience of public administrators earlier this week, as reported by the Telegraph Journal. Speaking with reporters afterwards, he denounced the track record of the current government as “very bad,” adding that, in his view, “frankly, the government needs to be criticized for that.” Among his biggest regrets, he said, was not including a “specific recommendation to overhaul the Access to Information Act” in his final report. “I believed, I guess a little naively, that a revised law was in the works and would see the light of day eventually. More than three years later, we are still waiting.”

Telegraph

Do you notice anything shrivelling?

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 305 Comments

The other day CTV reported the astonishing statistic that in the whole of Canada there are just 33 sperm donors. That seems awfully low for a nation of 30 million people. Three sperm donors per province plus one per territory? Surely we can do better than that. All hands on deck!

Ah, but it’s not as simple as that. Apparently, the 2004 Assisted Human Reproduction Act makes it illegal to pay donors for sperm. I mean, it wasn’t even the usual Canadian Wheat Board-type racket whereby you’d only be able to sell your seed to the Canadian Sperm Board at a price agreed upon by representatives of the federal-provincial Semen Commissions. Instead, they just nixed the whole deal, and, once Johnny Canuck found out he wasn’t going to be remunerated, virtually the entire supply dried up. Continue…

Who do you think you’re kidding?

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Who could have predicted that in naming its new restaurant critic two weeks ago the New York Times was also administering “the death blow to critical ‘anonymity’ ”? So said popular food blog Feedbag to the news that Sam Sifton, the paper’s cultural editor, would replace Frank Bruni in the fall. Unlike his under-the-radar predecessors, who seemed to have a Hutterite-like aversion to the camera, Sifton is a known quantity visually: within seconds of the announcement, his photo from the Times website went viral, likely ending up on the wall of every restaurant kitchen in the city.

Feedbag viewed the development happily, noting that a restaurant critic’s anonymity, long viewed as sacrosanct in the food world, “is a sham anyway.” Others were less sanguine: “Unless Sifton does something major to alter his appearance, every restaurateur in New York City is going to know exactly who he is,” Bill Daley lamented on the Chicago Tribune’s food blog The Stew. “Frankly, that saddens me.” Clearly, Daley’s a fan of artfully disguised restaurant critics, tales of whom invariably burnish the teller’s self-importance. In her book Garlic and Sapphires, Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl writes of rivalling Mata Hari in elaborate ruses when she was the New York Times restaurant critic in the 1990s. Joanne Kates, the Globe and Mail’s restaurant reviewer for 34 years, also makes a production of going incognito: she wears hats and masks to professional events and tries to blend in with the crowd when reviewing, a practice she calls “protective mimicry.” Like most reviewers, she never makes the reservation in her name and uses credit cards under aliases. Continue…

Tiers of Academe

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 9:41 AM - 14 Comments

There’s been a lot of free-floating hand-wringing in the wake of a proposal to have Canada concentrate its research spending in a relatively few universities. Most of the complaints have been about the dangers of “elitism” — as if university was about something else. Canada already has a de facto two-tiered university system, and within each university, there is a two- if not three-tiered hierarchy of instructors. The solecism the five schools seem to have made is a) pointing it out, and b) suggesting that we might as well acknowledge the hierarchy and make our funding formulae reflect it.

Except not so fast, Alex Usher argues. The real problem, he says, is that “almost nobody in this country has a real idea what works and what doesn’t in terms of research and innovation policy.”

The fact that faculty with stronger research records would migrate to the big five while everyone else would have to sit tight, make do with less research money and, you know, actually teach some undergraduates might be massively inconvenient for all those second-tier universities trying to raise their research profiles, but it might be quite efficient from the point of view of public expenditure.

Or not. Despite the billions spent every year, we just don’t know.

UPDATED: EKOS Weekly: Wait, you're saying we're not supposed to watch the pot boil? That's just crazy talk.

By kadyomalley - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 9:29 AM - 22 Comments

Look! Movement! Microscropic movement so far within the margin of error that it should probably have its own metananomargin of error, unless that would plunge us into an Escheresque nightmare of ever diminishing circles and possibly shred the very fabric of the space-time-weekly-tracking-poll continuum, yes, but still:

Conservatives – 32.6 (-0.2)
Liberals – 30.9 (+0.7)
NDP – 15.7 (-1.4)
Green – 11.3 (+0.3)
BQ – 9.5 (+0.8) (37.1) (+2.1)
Undecided – 15.1 (-0.7)

Let’s all give a warm macleans.ca welcome back from vacation to EKOS vice-president Paul Adams, who is apparently filling in for the still footloose and fancy free Frank Graves this week:

“All summer the race between the two major parties has been very close – at times within the margin of error,” said EKOS Executive Director, Paul Adams. “In recent weeks, however, the Conservatives have eked out a small numerical lead on the national numbers, based in part on an improvement in their fortunes in Ontario. Ontario was the key to the Liberals’ success in the Chrétien years and it is the key to the party’s future as well. The Liberals now appear to have given up the advantage they held in Ontario through most of the spring and early summer.”

The Liberals have also given up a larger lead to the BQ in Quebec than they usually have in recent
months.

Typically, Canadians – and the media – pay relatively little attention to politics during the summer months, which may account for the relative stability of public opinion since Parliament rose for its summer recess in June.

“None of the parties has had a breakout summer,” said Adams. “However, as the media has begun to rev up for the political season, many commentators have focused criticism on the Liberal leader, Michael Ignatieff. Because he is relatively less well known to the public than the Prime Minister, he may be more vulnerable to negative commentary.”

Full regional breakdowns, but none of the good stuff that ITQ was totally hoping would become a regular feature HINT HINT EKOS/CBC, available — oh, huh. It’s not up on the EKOS site yet. Well, as soon as it is, I’ll update this post. Feel free to chat amongst yourselves while ITQ inflicts her mercurial math skill on the rest of the numbers.

UPDATE: Regional variations ahoy after the jump:

Continue…

Our big chance

By Jason Kirby - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 27 Comments

Fifteen years ago Caleb Howard could have been a poster boy for Canada’s brain drain epidemic. In 1993 the University of Waterloo-trained mathematician and computer animator visited Los Angeles and was stunned by what he saw. Movie studios were clamouring for workers with his skills, and they were willing to pay three times more than companies in Toronto. So Howard joined thousands of other highly skilled Canadians who flocked to the U.S. in the 1990s. He went on to design special effects for video games and blockbuster movies—he’s particularly proud of the fire and smoke he fashioned for the rocket-launch scene in Apollo 13—and built a prosperous life with his Canadian wife and their two children in Santa Monica. From time to time, the topic of returning to Canada came up. But California’s unbridled energy and sense of opportunity made it difficult to leave.

Early last year, all that began to change. Signs of the coming economic crisis were everywhere. House prices were plunging, and so too were the couple’s retirement savings. Soon even their well-educated friends were struggling to find work. As the energy fizzled and jobs dried up, the couple sold their home. Then, just like 14 years earlier, they packed up and headed to where the opportunities looked most promising: only this time, that meant Canada. “It was with an acute awareness of the decline of the American economic situation that we came back,” says Howard, now a computer graphics supervisor at Electronic Arts in Burnaby, B.C. “We couldn’t have picked a better place to return to.” Continue…

Bestsellers

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of August 25th, 2009)

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

The race for the perfect battery

By Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 8:40 AM - 23 Comments

Imagine your daily commute in the age of the electric car: on Monday, you charge your car in minutes by plugging it into your garage outlet. The total cost comes to about $8. The charge lasts the whole week, and still handles a 200-km drive to the cottage on the weekend. You’ve long forgotten about the frustration of soaring gas prices, and the kicker is, your car was the one of the cheapest on the market.

That’s the promise, at least, being held out by a new array of super-batteries for cars. Thanks to a sudden surge in research funds—including US$2.4 billion in stimulus grants for the electric vehicle industry just announced by U.S. President Barack Obama, and a $16.7-million investment in battery research announced by Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty—new developments are happening at a heady pace. This has lead to a spate of amazing new battery claims from a handful of bleeding-edge start-ups. But are they credible? Venture capitalists familiar with the field say a little skepticism may be wise. Continue…

Alberta's wild card

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 8:20 AM - 49 Comments

Within a few years of arriving in Calgary from Lebanon three decades ago, Said Abdulbaki was working with Stampede Wrestling managing such names as Gama Singh, the widely reviled Indian heel, and Jonathan “Bee Gee” Holliday. Before crowds, Abdulbaki, in a white, Saudi-style headdress, assumed the name “The Sheik” and, from the sidelines, shook his fist at his fighters’ opponents. Bruce Hart, part of the wrestling dynasty that includes his brother Bret “The Hitman” Hart, swung medicine balls into Abdulbaki’s stomach in the family’s basement, readying him for his own occasional hits in the ring.

Now Abdulbaki uses his Pizza Time restaurant, in Calgary’s gritty Forest Lawn neighbourhood, as the unofficial headquarters of the Calgary-Montrose Wildrose Alliance constituency association, of which he is president. Once a Tory, Abdulbaki left that party in disgust last year to run in the provincial election for the Wildrose Alliance, an upstart right-of-centre party that may now be shedding its hayseed reputation to become the great hope of disaffected Progressive Conservatives. “When I was doing the door-knocking some people, they say, ‘You’re a redneck,’ ” says Abdulbaki, who captured over 10 per cent of the vote. “I said, ‘No, I’m not redneck.’ ” Continue…

Let's go to the Ex, with Bill Clinton

By Philippe Gohier - Thursday, August 27, 2009 at 12:00 AM - 3 Comments

The build-up to Bill Clinton’s appearance at Toronto’s CNE featured none of the hype its organizers had presumably hoped for. Just a day before the event, only 7,000 tickets had been sold, prompting organizers to dramatically scale back the number of tickets available from 25,000 to 10,000. By Saturday, CNE officials were selling tickets to those already inside the fairgrounds for a mere five bucks.

Given the event’s vague, banal title—“Embracing Our Common Humanity”—it was never entirely clear what topics Clinton was planning to touch upon. However, to the 12,000 who did end up at Toronto’s BMO field on this sunny Saturday afternoon, that didn’t seem to matter. Clinton was greeted with a standing ovation before he’d uttered a single word.

The hoarse-voiced and tired-looking former President generously repaid the favour, beginning his speech with a tribute to the CNE. He noted the Ex’s history-making displays of electricity, telephones, radio and other contemporary gadgetry, celebrating its role in bridging the technological divide between urban and rural areas. In fact, the need to better equip those living in the world’s rural areas was a point Clinton would revisit often. “We live in a time,” he said, “where it’s very important to merge values.” Clinton said modern societies are crippled by the “uneven” economic and social conditions that separate their urban and rural dwellers.

An anecdote about his foundation’s work to build medical facilities in Ethiopia that are accessible to the country’s 80 million citizens provided Clinton with a segue into the afternoon’s most compelling subject: the ongoing debate over health care in the U.S. In a sharp departure from the rest of his speech, Clinton showed that he has lost little of his partisan political instincts. The U.S., he said, is “saddled with the wrong kind of [health care] system,” musing that the debate over Barack Obama’s proposed reforms must appear absurd to Canadians. “You must wonder what in the world are my friends to the south thinking? Why don’t they just pass some bill? How could it be worse?” In his only direct reference to his time in office, Clinton said those who oppose reforms share a trait with those who opposed his own health care proposals in the early ’90s—they are, he said, “full of fear.”

Unfortunately, the former President reverted back to the formless, fuzzy vernacular that made up the first part of his half-hour speech. The U.S. and Canada, he said, are increasingly defined by a “common humanity”; there is a need for world leaders to balance environmental policy with “good economics”; and good government, ethical business leaders, and effective philanthropy are essential to change.

Aside from a question about the best decision U.S. political leaders can make to improve the world—“to radically change the way we produce and consume energy,” according to Clinton—the CNE’s Greg Bednar, who moderated a brief question-and-answer session with Clinton following the speech, did little to sharpen the discussion. Bednar used his final question to toss the former President a softball, asking him what he loved most about Toronto. It’s a “city of the future,” Clinton replied to applause, one that’s “friendly” and comfortable with its traditions. “There are a lot of people,” he added, “who would kill to live in an environment like this.”

It was, in its own way, a fitting end. Though Clinton’s speech was peppered with references to his foundation’s work, it was marked by a consistent retreat to the parochial—references to his visits to Canada, the Canadian health care system, the history of the CNE. Our “common humanity,” at least that shared by those in attendance, appears to be anchored by a love of two things: ourselves and Bill Clinton.

Lawrence Cannon meets Iranian counterpart, awkward pauses in the conversation ensue

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 9:11 PM - 9 Comments

Here’s his take on the meeting, via the CBC. 

And here’s Iran’s, via Press TV, with a nauseating explanation of Zahra Kazemi’s murder and the ongoing detention of Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari. 

Press TV’s Canadian correspondent, Zahra Jamal, incidentally, continues to churn them out.

'A better democracy'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 7:02 PM - 81 Comments

Conservative election platform, 2006. Canada is a democracy, yet our democratic system has not kept pace with the needs of a changing society. Paul Martin used to talk about a democratic deficit, but his actions as Prime Minister have deepened it. A new Conservative government will be committed to significant democratic reform of our Parliamentary and electoral institutions.

Canwest News Service, tonight. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is preparing to reward some of his longest-serving and most loyal political operatives with Senate appointments that could come as early as this week, Canwest News Service has learned. Doug Finley, who has been the political master strategist for the Conservative party in its first four general elections, will lead a pack of eight Senate appointees that includes Carolyn Stewart-Olsen, who was Harper’s second-longest serving aide before her retirement this summer, and Don Plett, who will have to resign as president of the Conservative Party of Canada if he accepts the $132,000-a-year job as senator.

I even cooked in my Mad Men days

By Barbara Amiel - Wednesday, August 26, 2009 at 6:04 PM - 8 Comments

Last weekend was a nostalgia rush and all things considered I prefer yesterday’s madness to today’s. More challenge, more style. First, I took in Julie & Julia, the film biopic of the great American TV cook Julia Child set in the sixties. The lobster scene brought back my own ghastly attempts at being a murderess. “You can keep live lobsters in the refrigerator at around 37 degrees for a day or two,” Mrs. Child advised us all on PBS—now there’s a thought—and after the kill, “locate the stomach sac with your fingers, twist out and discard . . .”

Something of a shame, I thought, as Meryl Streep’s Julia Child plunges her knife into the writhing lobster, that she and Martha Stewart couldn’t have met, two splendid women wielding cleavers—probably on one another as they wrestled for camera position. On Sunday came the premiere of Mad Men’s third season about advertising men in the early sixties, when everyone smoked, wore uptight clothes and political correctness was being on the right rather than the left. Continue…