Wildlife gone wild

By macleans.ca - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 11:39 AM - 0 Comments

When animal reserves warn motorists to stay inside their cars, they aren’t kidding. A convoy of tourists in South Africa’s Kruger National Park recently got as close to the wildlife as they’d like when a lioness attempted to take down a wounded water buffalo on the side of the road. Unfortunately for the female, two nearby lions acted like typical lazy males and wouldn’t help her finish off the prey. No one was hurt in the incident.

Daily Mail

Swine flu fiasco

By Cathy Gulli - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 11:26 AM - 233 Comments

In a few weeks, every adult in Canada will decide if they (and their children) will get the flu vaccine to protect against H1N1. At the best of times, it seems the decision of whether or not to get the seasonal flu shot is tough to make. Only about one-third of Canadians do each year. Now, with the pandemic vaccine arriving in doctor’s offices in November, Canadians are being asked to get a second shot this fall.

But will they? Probably not. A recent poll shows that, as of the first week of October, only one in three Canadians plan on getting the H1N1 vaccine, according to Harris/Decima. That’s down from 45 per cent in late August. Experts say this reflects the public’s growing apathy toward the pandemic in light of seemingly contradictory information about H1N1 (which is commonly referred to as swine flu, even though it’s a combination of flu viruses from pigs, birds and humans). People are being bombarded by “on the one hand” and “on the other hand” studies and recommendations. “There is confusion,” says Dr. Sarah Kredentser, president of the College of Family Physicians of Canada. “And I think it’s warranted confusion, because the messages keep changing.” Continue…

Suffering in silence no more

By Charlie Gillis - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 11:25 AM - 2 Comments

In late 1996, Theoren Fleury and Sheldon Kennedy had a meeting of minds—albeit the sort that takes place over bottles of beer and lines of cocaine. Strung out and miserable, the two NHL players were in the midst of a golfing trip to Phoenix, delving into a shared secret that was about to send tremors through the sport of hockey. Kennedy had recently told police he’d been sexually abused by Graham James, a coach both had played for as juniors in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. Fleury, too, had been abused by James as often as twice a week while playing for the Moose Jaw Warriors of the Western Hockey League. The story had not yet hit the press, but each knew how deeply the other had suffered. For 10 hours that night, they discussed openly experiences they’d never spoken of before.

When the session was over, however, they took separate paths. Kennedy went public, becoming the face of a sporting scandal, while Fleury maintained his silence for a dozen more years—a decision that left him a shell of a man. “Sheldon’s secret was out, so he was able to start dealing with it,” Fleury explains in a new autobiography, Playing with Fire. “Mine was not. Graham still had control of my life.” To forget, the stumpy winger from Russell, Man., threw himself headlong into booze, cocaine, womanizing and gambling. “The direct result of my being abused was that I became a f–king raging, alcoholic lunatic,” he writes. “[James] destroyed my belief system. The most influential adult in my life at the time was telling me that what I thought was wrong was right. I no longer had faith in myself or my own judgment.” Continue…

The Taliban's reign of terror

By Adnan R. Khan - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 11:24 AM - 2 Comments

It was not supposed to be like this: just a few months ago, Pakistan was basking in the glory of a decisive win over Taliban militants in the Swat Valley. The prestige of the beleaguered army had been restored and attacks in other parts of the country had dwindled to near zero. How quickly all of that has changed.

Over an eight-day period, Pakistan was rocked by a series of attacks that have left many wondering if the successes were only a glitch in an otherwise steady rise in violence and bloodshed. The numbers tell the tale: as of Tuesday, 106 dead and 145 injured, the vast majority of them civilians. Prior to the attacks, it was thought that the Taliban were broken and in disarray, unable to cause any serious damage after the death of their leader Baitullah Mehsud at the beginning of August in a U.S. drone strike and the subsequent power struggle to replace him. In hindsight, that now appears a little naive. Continue…

Did he really earn it?

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 11:23 AM - 9 Comments

“Certainly from our standpoint, this gives us a sense of momentum,” said a State Department spokesman of Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize, “when the United States has accolades tossed its way, rather than shoes.” It is true that Obama is more popular abroad than George W. Bush, whom an Iraqi journalist once pelted with his footwear. But what has the new President actually done in a mere 10 months in office to put him in the same league as past laureates such as Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa? And what made him more deserving than other contenders the committee passed up, ranging from Chinese dissidents to the student protesters who risked their lives to stand up to the government in Tehran?

The Nobel committee, a group of five members appointed by the Norwegian parliament, gave four main reasons for their choice in a written citation. They noted Obama’s focus on strengthening international diplomacy and supporting the United Nations, his “work for a world without nuclear weapons,” his attention to climate change, and his improvement of human rights. In each area, Obama has made a start—but in most cases, it has been more symbolic than concrete. Continue…

Warning: Our Product May Do The Opposite Of What We Say

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 11:21 AM - 8 Comments

I saw this commercial yesterday, and while I know it’s not uncommon for medicine ads to have long lists of side effects in voice-over, this one seemed to stand out for me. It’s not all that long a list of side effects by the standards of other commercials, so it might have just caught my attention because the subject interested me personally (I have asthma). But mostly because I just found it such a mind-scramble that a commercial for an asthma medication would warn us that this very product might “increase the risk of asthma-related death.” (The regulatory agency forced them to include this warning due to a study that was published in 2006.) It’s like if Mr. Clean had a voice-over saying “Warning: may actually make your counter-tops dirtier.”

Is there a future for Canadian TV?

By Jason Kirby - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 11:20 AM - 18 Comments

In late August, employees at CHEK-TV in Victoria gathered in the parking lot for one last goodbye. After 53 years on the air, Canwest Global Communications was about to pull the plug on the money-losing television station in a desperate and ultimately futile attempt to stave off collapse. Then, with just hours to go before the final fade to black, general manager John Pollard announced a last-minute reprieve. He’d reached an agreement with Canwest CEO Leonard Asper that would see the station’s 40 employees, along with a handful of Vancouver Island residents, buy CHEK and run it themselves. But if Pollard, now a media proprietor in his own right, is at all nervous about betting his life savings on an industry that just saw one of corporate Canada’s most spectacular flame-outs, he’s not showing it. “We get to call the shots now,” he says. “We’re going to make this work.”

The daring experiment at CHEK is just one example of the way the media landscape is being forever altered. A perfect storm of the recession, new technologies and shifting tastes has threatened the way conventional broadcasters like Canwest, CTV and the CBC have operated for decades. Now, with Canwest’s move to put itself into bankruptcy protection, a wave of speculation has been unleashed about who will buy the Global Television network. More importantly, questions are being asked about how those stations can once again be made viable. Continue…

Fixed-election fraud

By Andrew Potter - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 11:10 AM - 81 Comments

Today would should have been election day in Canada, had the Tories respected their own “fixed election” law. Law prof Adam Dodek has an article  today arguing that the law never did what Conservatives pretended it did, and that’s a good thing. There’s nothing super new in Dodek’s analysis, though he does take the time to spell out the perverse consequences of  a true fixed election date in a parliamentary system:

If election dates were set in stone, we could end up with governments continuing in office without the confidence of the House of Commons, unable to enact legislation. Or we might end up with governments changing hands several times between elections, a sustained replay of the coalition politics that we saw last December and January. The worst scenario would see a government that has lost the confidence of the House prorogue Parliament until the next election.

So what was the real effect of the law? As Dodek puts, it: “At best, what these types of laws do is set scheduled election dates. We all have scheduled appointments that we cancel or defer for a variety of reasons. So too with the scheduled election dates. We set today as an election day, if Parliament was not dissolved before.” (My italics.)

But this is something I’ve never understood: How is this in any way a departure from current practice? It says, right there in the Charter of Rights:

4. (1) No House of Commons and no legislative assembly shall continue for longer than five years from the date fixed for the return of the writs at a general election of its members.

So, election dates are already fixed, by law, five years from the last one, if not before. So how was the fixed-election date law supposed to be anything other than a restatement of the constitutional status quo, simply shortening the period between fixed elections by a year (for no obvious reason other than to mimic American practice)?  More to the point, why did anyone ever think is was anything more than this?

Well, it turns out some people didn’t. Back in January, Sen Lowell Murray introduced a bill to repeal the fixed election date law. Here’s what he said when he introduced the bill:

Therefore, honourable senators, I conclude — and some of us concluded in advance, when Bill C-16 was before us — that the law supposedly establishing fixed election dates in this country is literally “non sense;” it is a nullity. To borrow the memorable words of Mr. Bumble from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist: “The law” — that law — “is an ass.”

You can follow the bill’s progress here.

This week’s travel news

By Bruce Parkinson, Takeoffeh.com - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 10:36 AM - 0 Comments

This Week’s Take offers you a capsule summary of the high and low lights of TakeOffeh.com’s Daily Dispatches from the past seven days.

Behind The Curtain: Economically Priced Business Class
Airlines are dangling business class fares at up to two-thirds off in an attempt to lure back corporate passengers banished beyond the curtain. But as Gary Stoller reports in USA Today, the corporate fish aren’t biting in big numbers, even at slashed fares. It’s amazing how things can change in a few short years: business class seats have traditionally cost four to eight times as much as economy squeezers. That revenue model is what kept economy fares low and opened the skies to a much broader public. Even today, a FareCompare.com survey of economy and business class fares on routes between major U.S. and international city pairs revealed the disparity in class pricing. Delta Air Line’s best economy round-trip fare from New York to London for an October 23 departure was $716, while the cheapest business class seat was $4,634. As FareCompare.com CEO Rick Seaney commented to USA Today: “The real question is: Will business travellers pay substantially more for a more comfy ride as companies move toward increased austerity?” Premium fliers account for up to 30% of revenues for many airlines, and there were 20% fewer of them in the first seven months of this year, according to the International Air Transport Association. Continue…

Information overlord

By John Geddes - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 10:00 AM - 5 Comments

The federal Access to Information Act dates back to 1983. Proposals to put more teeth into the rules for when the government must release documents started with the very first review of the law in 1986, and have kept coming ever since. Countless committee reports and expert studies have proposed ways to force more openness. When the Conservatives won the 2006 election on a platform promising a sweeping access-to-information overhaul, the time for real change seemed finally to have arrived. After settling into power, though, Stephen Harper’s government decided against implementing most of the promised changes in its early batch of accountability reforms. Since then, the Tories have seemed content to let the issue slide down their priorities list to obscurity.

Enter Suzanne Legault, the blunt-talking new interim information commissioner appointed by Harper in June. Legault might have been expected to take up the two-decade-old cry for fundamental changes to the system her office oversees. Instead, she has a surprising message for those hoping for root-and-branch reform: forget about it. “That won’t happen,” she told Maclean’s. “Nothing is going to change, that’s my experience.” And what about all those sincere, detailed blueprints for strengthening the access act that are always floating around Parliament Hill? “They’ve been saying the same things for 25 years,” she said. “So let’s try to tackle it differently.” Continue…

Reasons to stay in Afghanistan #2: spread democracy

By Paul Wells - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 9:37 AM - 27 Comments

Meanwhile, Afghanistan’s lying vote-thief president is getting ready to reject calls for the run-off that would be Afghanistan’s final slim chance for an even minimally legitimate government.

Reasons to stay in Afghanistan #1: Deny al-Qaeda a safe haven

By Paul Wells - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 9:32 AM - 14 Comments

Meanwhile, recruitment of Westerners to the Taliban and al Qaeda is up, with a steady flow of recruits to training camps in Afghanistan and in Pakistan, otherwise known as “the safe haven.”

Hope you like butter, because you're going to keep paying through the nose for it: a tale of Canada-EU trade

By Paul Wells - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 9:21 AM - 41 Comments

Thirty-five — thirty-five! — European trade negotiators were scheduled to arrive in Ottawa over the weekend for the first of five scheduled negotiating sessions with a Canadian trade team, the first formal talks aimed at producing CETA — a Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement. The only news organization in Canada that seems to have noticed is the Globe and Mail. (UPDATE: But that’s only if you missed the editorial in the Citizen and the coverage in Embassy, as I did.) And…well, surprise, surprise:

Europe insists that its dairy industries have full access to Canadian markets without any unfair competition from within Canada. Danish, Irish and French butter can be bought in supermarkets all over Europe, and officials see no reason why that can’t be the case in Canada, too.

And for the most part, Canada’s farmers share that desire: There are beef shortages in European markets, for example, and the beef-cattle industry is lobbying for more open access, along with most other farm sectors, which see Europe’s 500 million people as a highly desirable market for farm products.

But dairy farmers in central Canada, who represent a small share of agriculture, are pushing hard for protection of the government-subsidy program known as supply management.

This is, of course, no surprise at all. “We will still defend supply management,” Jean Charest told me in May. Could that be a deal-breaker? It could: Continue…

This just in: Not much of anything has changed in three years

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 9:15 AM - 10 Comments

Federal election, January 23, 2006. Conservatives 36.3%, Liberals 30.2%.

Federal election, October 14, 2008. Conservatives 37.6%, Liberals 26.3%

Threehundredight.com, current projection. Conservatives 35.2%, Liberals 30.2%

Royal Galipeau Maverick Watch

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 19, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 15 Comments

The Conservative backbencher admits the giant novelty cheques he handed out upset his stomach.

The design of the cheques provided to one area MP to highlight infrastructure spending left him feeling “a bit queasy,” he said. Royal Galipeau, MP for Ottawa-Orléans, said he insisted that the cheques provided to him didn’t have the Conservative party logo but said he still wasn’t happy with the design. ”That didn’t look like a government cheque to me. I would preferred it looked like a government cheque.”

… Galipeau was photographed in March handing over a $21,339 cheque for a francophone seniors program in Ottawa with his name printed at the top and his signature below. He says he still thinks the large cheques are a good way to highlight government work and plans to continue handing them out, but using a design based on a real government cheque.

'Canadians' tax dollars are precious'

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, October 18, 2009 at 4:29 PM - 100 Comments

Jim Flaherty, Nov. 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.

Canadian Press, today. The Harper government spent well over $100,000 staging a one-hour event in June to deliver an update on its efforts to help the recession-ravaged economy. Invoices obtained by The Canadian Press through the Access to Information Act show a nominal bill to taxpayers of $108,000 for the carefully scripted “town hall” meeting in Cambridge, Ont … Some $30,000 was spent on audio visual equipment and staging, another $10,000 was spent buying the rights to use photos and web images and almost $50,000 went toward printing glossy copies of a 234-page Economic Action Plan “report card.” Another $5,700 went to an outside editing service and more than $3,300 was spent on a communications firm. Almost $10,000 was spent on airfare, ground transport and hotels for some 20 individuals who flew in from Ottawa, not including their meal expenses … The invoices don’t cover the cost of the use by Harper and his staff of the government’s Challenger jet to get to Cambridge, about an hour’s flight from Ottawa. In opposition, Harper and other Conservatives repeatedly said the jets cost about $11,000 an hour to operate.

Danielle Smith is the new face of right-wing Alberta

By Shanda Deziel - Sunday, October 18, 2009 at 12:30 PM - 37 Comments

The Wildrose Alliance of Alberta picked a leader this weekend. Three out of every four votes went to Danielle Smith over her opponent, Mark Dyrholm. In a profile earlier this year, she was described in Maclean’s as “a Calgary school board trustee, a national Global TV political commentator and host, a columnist and editorial board member at the Calgary Herald, and, until recently, the provincial director of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. A long-time Tory, she is a fiscal conservative but a moderate on social policy. Articulate, not unattractive, and personable, Smith seems well-equipped to transform what’s been a ragtag party living at the margins into a credible alternative to the governing Tories.” Her first order of business is to build the party, start holding rountables on policy and setting up candidates. And to put some fear into premier Ed Stelmach. To him she announced: “you haven’t begun to imagine what’s about to hit you!”

Canadian Press

Maclean’s

Five Iranian commanders killed

By macleans.ca - Sunday, October 18, 2009 at 11:00 AM - 11 Comments

Five of the top commanders in Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard were killed in two terrorist attack bombings that also killed and injured others early Sunday. The event happened in the Sistan-Baluchistan region—and marked hostility between the Baluchi people, who are one of the country’s ethnic and religious minorities, and the Iranian leadership—after the government put the Revolutionary Guard in control there. The attack happened as the IRG were bringing together leaders from Shiite and Sunni Muslim communities to talk. The U.S. has condemned the bombings and denied any involvement.

New York Times

Sheriff calls Balloon Boy incident a hoax, recommends charges

By macleans.ca - Sunday, October 18, 2009 at 10:46 AM - 5 Comments

UPDATE: Sheriff Jim Alderden will be recommending the following charges against the Heene parents: “conspiracy, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, false reporting to authorities and attempting to influence a public servant.” It could mean a sentence of up to six years in prison and a $500,000 fine.

Police now believe that the Heene family staged the recent event in which their son was said to be aboard a helium balloon that flew away from their backyard. After the six-year-old boy, Falcon, made comments during a television interview that he was hiding in the attic because his father, Richard, said it was “for a show,” the Heene family became a target of suspicion. It’s now come to light that the publicity hungry family, who’ve been featured on Wife Swap, saw this as their way back into reality television.

Fox News

CTV

Hark the haggard angel sings

By macleans.ca - Saturday, October 17, 2009 at 10:25 AM - 0 Comments

Gawker has pulled together the most “nasal, haggard, mumbled” clips of Bob Dylan doing Christmas classics from his recently released holiday CD, Christmas in the Heart, including O Little Town of Bethlehem and O Come All Ye Faithful. The reviewer rightly points out that what every Christmas holiday celebration calls for is the sound of “a drunken interloper who stumbled into choir rehearsal at a prim suburban church”—and Dylan provides.

Gawker

Everything explained

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 16, 2009 at 6:00 PM - 90 Comments

An anonymous Conservative MP helps us understand why his or her side simply had to buy its own giant novelty cheques, and all the money they are saving you in the process.

When we formed govt the crats stopped bringing cheques to announcements & we were FORCED to cough up the $ to buy our own. Specifically, at [a government department I was involved with] the crats used to like to be in the photo ops giving out chqs, as though it was coming from them. They detested Conservatives being photographed handing out chqs, so they stopped bringing the chqs – when they even bothered to show up for announcements. They’ve screwed up dates for announcements so badly (trying to schedule announcements while the House is in session) that we don’t even bother to include them, thereby saving taxpayers thousands of $s in travel claims from the crats.

When I Was a Boy, We Didn't Have Internet. We Had To Post Our Stuff On Every Computer Screen With Our Bare Hands

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 16, 2009 at 5:22 PM - 10 Comments

This has been Python Week, but I’ve sort of reached my quota of Python clips. So I will cheat and post a sketch that most people think is Monty Python, but isn’t. The “Four Yorkshiremen” Sketch eventually became part of the group’s stage repertoire, but it was written for, and first performed on, At Last the 1948 Show, which made stars of John Cleese, Graham Chapman, and Marty Feldman. The fourth guy, Tim Brooke-Taylor, never became as internationally famous as the others, but his co-creation of The Goodies made him a notable figure in TV comedy history.

Sarah Palin's no slave to syntax

By Scott Feschuk - Friday, October 16, 2009 at 4:31 PM - 50 Comments

I wasn’t asked to write the foreword to Sarah Palin’s forthcoming memoir, but that didn’t stop me.

Maverick. Iconoclast. Renegade. These are all words Sarah Palin would have trouble spelling correctly.

The political phenomenon from Wasilla, Alaska, burst onto the national stage in the fall of 2008. She was unlike anything Americans had ever seen before, unless they’d seen Tina Fey, which most of them had. Continue…

Turok the African

By Paul Wells - Friday, October 16, 2009 at 4:26 PM - 11 Comments

As I mentioned earlier, my column about Neil Turok and Perimeter Institute left out substantial chunks of our interview. So here are some of those, er, chunks.

Before he joined Perimeter last year, Turok was known (among physicists; I’d never heard of the guy) for two things:

• an extraordinary intelligence and an iconoclastic spirit which leads him to question some of the fundamental tenets of his field, including, in his cyclic universe model, the very idea of a Big Bang;

• his roots in South Africa, which led him to found and to devote much of his time to the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences. It’s based on a non-intuitive proposition: that on a continent where in many places there is cruelly limited access to food, running water or hospital beds, what’s needed is more theoretical physicists. And yet AIMS has been running for six years, is now operating on two campuses, and as the map on this page suggests, it has now graduated students from (by my count) 27 African countries. That’s barely the beginning of Turok’s ambitions for Perimeter’s distant African cousin.

I’ll pick up this segment of the interview where Turok is saying it’s pointless to try to direct research because the greatest discoveries have a way of appearing out of the blue. “Just as an outsider from Cambridge, if somebody told me 10 years ago that you could create a world-class centre for theoretical physics in Waterloo, I would have thought you were mad. No matter how much you spent. But Perimeter has done it. I think it was precisely because it came from left field. It ignored all the usual rules. And that was a great thing.”

Sensing a segué opportunity, I said: If a guy who wanted to start a physics institute in Waterloo would have been mad, what should I think about a guy who wants to start fifteen of them in Africa? Turok laughed hard at that one.

“He’s also nuts. He’s similarly nuts. Continue…