A once-in-a-lifetime literary love-in

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 1:20 PM - 0 Comments

“Too Much Happiness” is how organizers are billing next week’s much anticipated on-stage conversation between Alice Munro and the acclaimed British editor and memoirist Diana Athill in Toronto. It’s the obvious choice, being the title of Munro’s new book, a collection of stories her devotees feared they’d never read after she flirted with retiring three years ago at age 75. And felicitous sums up the mood of anyone who scored a $100 ticket for the sold-out show, a PEN benefit that kicks off the International Festival of Authors.

But Life Class, the title of the 92-year-old Athill’s new book, a collected edition of her memoirs, provides the more apt framework for the night. The reference is to Athill taking up life drawing in her 80s, of which she writes: “What you are looking at is precisely life, that inexplicable and astounding cause of our being, to which everything possible in the way of attention is due.” Continue…

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 1:11 PM - 59 Comments

Jack Layton talks pension reform.

NDP Leader Jack Layton is proposing a national pension insurance program to protect workers whose companies go bankrupt and leave retired employees in the lurch. The self-sustaining program would be funded by employer contributions and guarantee pensioners $2,500 per month in the event their plan is wound up.

Layton says other countries, including the United States and the Netherlands, have similar programs that adopt so-called orphaned pension plans. The NDP is also proposing an increase to the Guaranteed Income Supplement for low-income seniors – a measure that would cost the federal treasury about $700 million a year.

Howard Hughes's estate is almost gone

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 1:06 PM - 1 Comment

The final piece of billionaire Howard Hughes’ estate is being sold off, and for his heirs, it will be a disappointing end to a long, strange saga. Hughes died in 1976 with no children or will, but over the years, the number of people claiming a piece of his fortune (from distant family members to lawyers) swelled to over a 1,000. They have been paid about $1.5 billion from the liquidation of his once vast assets, which included 26 companies (from an airline to a casino). Now, one large property remains—7,000 acres of land in Las Vegas once estimated to be worth $2 billion. But the housing collapse in the U.S. and the bankruptcy of a development company that controls the land has reduced the value of the property dramatically. A lawyer who represents the group of heirs calls it a “terrible disappointment”. Hughes’ last legacy could ultimately be reduced to a collection of modest payments, if that.

The Wall Street Journal

Opening Weekend: Carey Mulligan shines in 'An Education'

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 1:03 PM - 4 Comments

The Oscar race, like Christmas, starts way too early. But if there’s one clear contender who has emerged as an early favorite among those who handicap awards, it’s Carey Mulligan, the 24-year-old British actress who stars in An Education. This is Mulligan’s first lead role, and her chief rival at the Academy Awards will likely be Gabourey Sidibey, the 26-year-old African American who makes her screen debut as an abused daughter in Precious. That makes two women playing susceptible teens in the clutches of predatory men. But An Education is by far the easier film to watch. The giddy rite of passage that Mulligan’s character experiences in the arms of an older man is a relatively harmless joyride, especially next to the horrors that Sidibey’s heroine survives in Precious. Here’s an expanded version of what I wrote about An Education when it premiered last month at the Toronto International Film Festival.

In a star-making performance, Carey Mulligan is adorable as Jenny, a smart 16-year-old from a London suburb who has her sights set on Oxford when she’s led astray by a debonair but dodgy suitor.  And Peter Sarsgaard is more likeable than he has any right to be as David (Peter Sarsgaard)—a silver-tongued gent who tempts Jenny with a much racier education than anything she could find in university. Written by Nick Hornby (High Fidelity) and directed by Lone Scherfig, the story is set in 1961, in post-war, pre-Beatles England. And as its impressionable heroine is seduced by art, jazz, nightclubs and everything French, the film captures a world on the cusp of a cultural revolution. Continue…

Alternative rock, or just torture?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 1:02 PM - 2 Comments

The National Security Archive in Washington is an independent non-governmental research institute that publishes declassified documents it obtains through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. As The New York Times’s Dave Itzkoff reports, the archive has filed an FOI request for a coalition that includes the likes of R.E.M., Trent Reznor and Pearl Jam, who are among a group of musicians concerned about how their recordings were used at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay. It’s already been established that Guantánamo prisoners were forced to endure loud music—including AC/DC, Britney Spears and Marilyn Manson—that interrogators believed would soften the inmates up for questioning. “At Guantánamo, the U.S. government turned a jukebox into an instrument of torture,” says one National Security Archive researcher.

The New York Times

Obama admits he didn’t do fair share at home

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 1:01 PM - 0 Comments

Barack Obama admits that tensions arose between him and his wife, Michelle, in the early days of their marriage, over the disproportionate sacrifices she made to raise their family. In an interview with NBC news, the president says before their move to the White House, he and Michelle were “having a lot of negotiations” over her frustration that she was always the one to take time off work for family responsibilities. He tried to learn to be better, he said, but admitted “men are still a little obtuse about this stuff” and “need to be knocked across the head every once in a while” in order to see the imbalances. The president also dismissed recent criticism over him engaging in an all-male basketball game with his staff as “bunk.”

Politico

One more thing for Twitter to Twitter about

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 1:01 PM - 0 Comments

Here’s the news in 140 characters: Twitter signs deal with Microsoft and Google 2 have tweets pop up on Bing & Google srch results almost as soon as they show up on Twitter.

BBC News

How Microsoft got hip

By Colin Campbell - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 1:00 PM - 8 Comments

For the past 18 months, the future of the world’s largest and most powerful computer company has been lugged around in the backpack of a 14-year-old schoolboy in Seattle, Wash. His laptop is loaded with a new piece of software, and he’s been told to use it and abuse it and then give his impressions to one very important person-—his dad, the CEO of Microsoft Corp., Steve Ballmer. Ballmer says his son has been his toughest critic—someone who has been helping find bugs in the company’s new operating system and pointing out the kinds of flaws and errors that made the previous version of the software, Vista, such a monumental failure. A lot is riding on his small shoulders.

The new operating system, called Windows 7, is the one thing that could finally shake the company from a nightmare of embarrassing flops and image problems under Ballmer’s tenure. Vista was not only sluggish and bug-filled, it drove many users to distraction and into the arms of rival computer companies, like Apple. And that was not the company’s only problem. Its MP3 player—the brickish-looking Zune—was a poor copy of the iPod, and its XBox 360 gaming system was plagued with technical problems in its early days-—troubles that cost the company an estimated US$1 billion in warranty repairs. And as consumers began a critical shift to mobile computing, Microsoft missed the boat completely on smart phones, handing the market to Apple and Research In Motion. Having fallen well off technology’s cutting edge, this year the Redmond, Wash.-based company suffered its first drop in revenue since going public in 1986. It also announced it will lay off 5,000 workers, another company first. Continue…

Businessman Peter Pocklington on the politics of envy, legal battles, and why trading Gretzky was the right thing to do

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 12:40 PM - 0 Comments

Peter Pocklington has had enough ups and downs for several lives. The former Edmonton Oilers owner was once among the country’s most successful businessmen, and ran against Brian Mulroney for the leadership of the Progressive Conservatives. But to most Canadians he’ll always be the guy who dealt away Wayne Gretzky. A new book, I’d Trade Him Again: On Gretzky, Politics, and the Pursuit of the Perfect Deal (H.B. Fenn), offers Pocklington’s take on his controversial career. Today, the 67-year-old awaits trial in California on charges of concealing assets in his US$19.6-million 2008 bankruptcy—sparked by a series of lawsuits over failed health-product and golf ventures.

Q: This book’s stated purpose is to show the other side of Peter Pocklington. Do you think you’ve been unfairly portrayed over the years?

A: [Laughs.] Well, I guess if I had read the press that most had written about me, I would have hated me too.

Q: What do you think is behind that?

A: I have no idea, nor do I care. I suppose most of it is associated with the politics of envy in North America. Continue…

Austerity looms for Ontario

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

Things are bad in Ontario. How bad? Dalton McGuinty’s Liberals are about to table an economic statement with a record-shattering $22 billion deficit, and are sounding gloomy warnings of cuts ahead. The Premier won’t even rule out mandatory furloughs for public-sector employees, à la the “bad old” Bob Rae days. Dust off the Nirvana records. It’s time to relive the early 1990s.

Toronto Star

A Canadian uncovers the real Haydn

By David Laster - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

University of Toronto music historian Caryl Clark shocked her audience into silence when she spoke at a conference devoted to the Austrian composer Joseph Haydn in Budapest this past May. “The reaction among my older colleagues was, ‘Oh my God, we don’t talk about such things here.’ And the younger people couldn’t picture the stereotypes I referred to.”

Haydn—inventor of the symphony and string quartet—was perhaps the most influential composer in history. Yet many classical music critics argue that he doesn’t deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Mozart, whom he mentored, and Beethoven, his student—because he lacked their “inner seriousness.” Indeed, Haydn has long been characterized as a pious, naive, conservative, untroubled servant of his noble patrons, given to musical jokes and witticisms. Continue…

Stepping back and looking forward on Afghanistan

By John Geddes - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 11:59 AM - 19 Comments

This morning’s news on Afghanistan should spur the Canadian government to plan and communicate much more clearly about exactly what it plans to do in the troubled country for many years to come. It’s as good a moment as any to take stock.

Let’s not get bogged down, at least for now, in the sporadic debate over the 2011 date for pulling our troops out of Kandahar, the commitment the Harper government and the opposition Liberals agree to last year. Assuming that withdrawal deadline isn’t changed, Canada still needs to much more clearly define its how it sees its role in Afghanistan. Two developments frame that decision:

1) preparations have begun for a Nov. 7 run-off vote to try to settle Afghanistan’s fraud-tainted late-summer presidential election, and;

2) pressure from Washington are mounting for NATO members and other countries to step up their Afghan contributions, as President Obama considers sending many more U.S. troops.
Continue…

Some ridings are more equal than others

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 11:47 AM - 3 Comments

According to research done by The Globe and Mail, Conservative ridings in Ontario have received about 38 per cent more money than opposition ridings from a government infrastructure fund meant to finance things like hockey rinks and playgrounds. The Globe’s analysis of 750 RInC projects found that Tory ridings received an average of $2.1 million; opposition ridings snagged only $1.5 million. “In effect, Mr. Harper is saying that some children who need recreation facilities are worth less than others,” said Liberal infrastructure critic Gerard Kennedy. NDP leader Jack Layton accused the Tories of going “back to the old Chretien-style of infrastructure programs.” Finance Minister Jim Flaherty counters that Tory ridings may fare better in the program because many of them are rural, and thus have more pressing infrastructure needs. He also points out that RInC projects are selected through a joint effort with Ontario’s Liberal government.

The Globe and Mail

Mitchel Raphael on the matchmaker MP

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 11:40 AM - 6 Comments

Intern love story

Each year several interns from Ukraine arrive on Parliament Hill to help out MPs and learn how the Canadian government works. This year, NDP MP Peter Stoffer was begged by the new arrivals to retell the story of a previous intern, about whom Stoffer wrote a poem entitled The Corruption of Yuriy. Stoffer, three-time winner of Maclean’s Most Congenial Parliamentarian of the Year award, is one of the most likeable MPs on the Hill. The famous intern, Yuriy Obriza, would arrive in the office at 7 every morning, stiffly do his work and leave at 4 p.m. Stoffer could never get him to loosen up or go to any social functions until the interns’ final night when he took the group out for a goodbye party. He could see Obriza was interested in another intern, Oleksandra Khaybullina, but wasn’t doing anything about it. When Stoffer asked why, Obriza said he liked the girl, but that she lived on the other side of Ukraine and he was afraid to talk to her. “Yuriy, if you don’t go over there now and kiss her,” Stoffer said, “I will.” Obriza froze. So Stoffer went over and asked permission to kiss her. She agreed and he proceeded with a passionate Gone With the Wind style embrace. “That’s how it’s done,” the MP told Obriza. The young intern finally got up the courage to approach Khaybullina. Within minutes they were having a great time. The next day Obriza rolled into the office late (at noon!) for his last day. Today, Stoffer has a photograph of Obriza and Khaybullina in his office. It’s from their wedding. Continue…

Allegation and refutation of intimidation in the House

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 11:31 AM - 39 Comments

After Question Period yesterday, and after the House had finished celebrating the career of Peter Milliken, Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt rose on the following point of privilege.

Mr. Speaker, earlier this month, the member for Mississauga South rose in the House and accused me of intimidation. I was not in the chamber when he raised the issue so I would like to take a moment now to respond. I want to make it clear that I did not make the gesture alleged by the member opposite, nor did I in any way intimidate the member opposite. Indeed, I am very cognizant of the fact that my two children, who are eight and five, watch question period and I would not make that gesture as a result of that, and not only that but also because I have respect for the House. Accordingly, there is nothing for which I can apologize to the House or its members. I want to thank you, Mr. Speaker, for giving me this opportunity to address the incident. I regret that we have to take the House’s time to respond in this way. We should be debating and facing the real issues of Canadians: crime, criminal sentencing, stimulating the financial recovery of industry, protecting jobs and protecting the environment. Those are the things that actually matter to the people of Canada from coast to coast to coast.

Paul Szabo’s original complaint, with description of the alleged “rude finger gesture” in question, was filed October 2. His colleague Bryon Wilfert rose the following Monday to say that he had witnessed the same “rude gesture.”

Absent other evidence, the Speaker has declared the matter closed.

Profanity in the House

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 11:15 AM - 28 Comments

Jay Hill, government house leader, relates his displeasure yesterday—as recorded by Hansard—with some sort of procedural issue.

That’s bullshit.

He quickly apologized and withdrew the offending word.

High court strikes down Bill 104

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 11:08 AM - 43 Comments

This is not the unequivocal decision opponents of Bill 104 had hoped for. Far from sweeping aside the rationale for the law—which sought to close a loophole allowing greater access to English-language schooling—the Supreme Court of Canada has merely declared the legislation an “excessive” response to the problem. But the decision, written by Justice Louis LeBel, explicitly recognizes “the problem” as the Quebec government sees it, namely, the potential proliferation of privately funded English schools that would erode the primacy of French in the province. The Quebec National Assembly now has a year to amend its law before the SCC decision takes effect, which reduces the likelihood the Charest government will invoke the notwithstanding clause of the Constitution to protect Bill 104.

The Gazette

Montreal mayor afraid for his family

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 10:57 AM - 3 Comments

Gérald Tremblay fears for his life. At least, that’s what the Montreal mayor told Le Devoir in a lengthy article touching on the upcoming municipal election. Locked in a campaign battle largely dominated by political ethics with former péquiste cabinet minister Louise Harel, Tremblay apparently wants to prove his bona fides by saying the mafia wants to harm his family. The awarding of construction contracts to potentially mobbed-up companies has surfaced in the last few weeks. “As mayor of Montreal, I am capable of taking the pressure but I cannot ask my family and my kids to do the same,” he says.

Le Devoir

Strangers yelling at each other

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 10:55 AM - 32 Comments

Speaker Peter Milliken talks to the Globe and considers the House he has presided over longer than anyone else.

Q: How much has the Hill changed, or what’s changed the most?

A: I think the biggest change has been in the increased partisanship in the House. When I was first elected we had morning sittings and a lunch time break, then evening sittings after a dinner break. Members would go up to the restaurant to eat and mix and mingle there. The chances for mixing and mingling these days are much, much less. And so you have members who barely know each other sitting on opposite sides of the House yelling at each other. It makes it much harder, I think, for members to be as friendly and polite, maybe is the word, as when I was first elected here.

Rewarding Europe's favourite American

By The Editors - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 3 Comments

Nineteen times in the past 108 years there was no winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. This includes the First and Second World Wars, when it was obviously impossible to present such an award, as well as other years when no suitable candidate was apparent. This should have been one of those years.

Barack Obama’s 2009 Nobel Peace Prize is hasty, incongruous and an embarrassment to all involved. Its only function appears to be the foisting of hypocritical European ideals onto American politics. As such, we could have done perfectly well without it. Continue…

Eckhart Tolle vs. God

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 58 Comments

Eckhart Tolle—one of the greatest spiritual teachers of our age, or perhaps the anti-Christ in a beige sweater vest—has left the door ajar. He greets you in the foyer of his Vancouver condominium with a quick smile and a soft handshake, and leads you inside. He is trim and compact, and—thanks, he says, to near total absence of stress—he looks younger than his 61 years. With his sandy fringe of beard, and aura of inviting calm, he seems, let’s be frank, as threatening as a garden gnome.

But his spiritual teachings are another matter: they are seismic. He has a global audience numbering in the tens of millions. They read his books, absorb his musings via DVDs and the Internet. They flock by the thousands to his lectures. He sits at the right hand of Oprah. He is a heretic. He is God, if only in his sense that the divine rests in all things. “I don’t believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away,” he will later explain. “But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that,” he says, “I wouldn’t say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It’s an ongoing process.” As for the world’s established religions, he feels they have all lost their way—the purity of their message long since twisted into rigid ideology and buried under edifice, ritual and ego. All he has really done, he says, is rediscover their essence. “I have great respect for the truth that is, one could almost say, hiding, concealed, in the great religions.” Continue…

Wrong man, yet again?

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 9:40 AM - 16 Comments

Frank Ostrowski Sr. and George Dangerfield

Frank Ostrowski Jr. will never forget the night he awoke to find a 12-gauge shotgun pointed at his face. He was 12. Minutes earlier, he and his eight-year-old sister Amber had been asleep in their home in Winnipeg’s middle-class North Kildonan neighbourhood. The man holding the gun was a cop, there to arrest his dad, Frank Sr., for the first-degree murder of Robert Nieman. For Frank Jr.—now a trucker living in Calgary with his wife and two kids—life as he knew it ended then. Within a day, “95 per cent” of his friends were gone. His grades plummeted. Alone, his mom could never make ends meet, and for the rest of his childhood, two to three times a week, he and Amber made the hour-long round trip to Stony Mountain Penitentiary to visit their dad.

Last month, after 23 years behind bars, his father—who always vigorously maintained his innocence—applied for bail. A federal investigation has determined there is a “reasonable basis” to conclude a miscarriage of justice “likely occurred.” Grave allegations have come to light that police and prosecutors concealed the fact that a witness who perjured himself at Ostrowski’s trial was given a deal in return for his testimony. The case has been reopened, and a scathing brief filed by Toronto lawyer James Lockyer further alleges that tainted evidence was used to convict his client. Continue…

Parties in glass houses should not throw stones

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 9:20 AM - 10 Comments

The craziest thing I learned from the coverage last month of the 60th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China was that the People’s Liberation Army still belongs to the Communist party. Six decades after Mao’s victory in Beijing, the army is still under the command of the party, not the state, and the Ministry of National Defence exercises no authority over it.

That’s as sure a sign as any, I figure, that China has a long way to go before it joins the civilized world. After all, here in the multi-party democracy that is Canada, we make a clear distinction between the private interests of a political party and the public interests of the state, especially when a party happens to find itself temporarily in power. Continue…

Bestsellers

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, October 22, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of October 20th, 2009)

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)