Nabokov redux

By macleans.ca - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 2:18 PM - 1 Comment

As his death from bronchitis approached in 1977, Vladimir Nabokov worked furiously on a short text with the working title of “Tool,” but finally realized it would never be finished to his perfectionist satisfaction. He instructed his wife Vera that, after his death, it should be destroyed forthwith. The 138 index cards of “Tool” were placed in a safe deposit box in the vault of a Swiss bank while Vera wrestled with her late husband’s injunction. From time to time, she enlisted sympathetic outsiders for advice. Brian Boyd, Nabokov’s distinguished biographer, was given a taste of the manuscript amid conditions of great secrecy during the mid-80s and advised against publication, an opinion he later rescinded. “People shouldn’t expect to be swept away,” he has said, tactfully. “It’s the kind of writing that induces admiration and awe but not engagement.” Those for whom Nabokov is, in the words of Martin Amis, “the laureate of cruelty”, see his deathbed decree as peculiarly vexing. But it was not unique. Virgil instructed his heirs to destroy The Aeneid, and was defied by the emperor Augustus. Kafka asked his friend Max Brod to burn all his papers, which included the novels we know as The Trial and The Castle. “Fortunately,” said Nabokov in his own lecture on Kafka, “Brod did not comply with his friend’s wishes.” And now Nabokov’s family has not complied with his.

The Guardian

Then they built Evan's set. And it was HUGE

By Paul Wells - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 1:44 PM - 65 Comments

The new CBC politics web portal has at least one familiar face, and a lot of zippy features, including a time-lapse look at the construction of the Museum of Human Rights in Winnipeg the Beijing Olympics facilities Evan Solomon’s new set in Ottawa.

Turnabout, fair play, etc.

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 12:06 PM - 11 Comments

Peter MacKay, responding to opposition questions, October 19. I will note that when it comes to Bloc members, I wish they would spend just as much time standing up and protecting the interests of Canadian soldiers as they do for the vigour they seem to have for Taliban prisoners … The member has now asked, I believe, nine or ten questions on the Military Police Complaints Commission. I only wish he would bring that type of enthusiasm to support the men and women of the Canadian Forces.

Winnipeg Free Press, yesterday. A former member of Canada’s military says if Prime Minister Stephen Harper truly supports his troops, he’d change his government’s stance on a private member’s bill to improve the pension plans of the military and RCMP. Fred Newton, a 20-year veteran of the military in the communications branch, is one of hundreds of former military and RCMP officers pushing the Conservatives to help pass Bill C-201, a private member’s bill from NDP MP Peter Stoffer … ”You see Prime Minister Harper all the time saying we’ve got to support our troops and then (the Conservatives) go and turn around and vote against this,” said Newton. “It’s hypocritical.”

(Lack of) money changes everything

By macleans.ca - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 11:26 AM - 4 Comments

It’s no secret Canwest is drowning in debt. But to whom, exactly, does the one-time media behemoth owe money? Just about everyone, according to a list of creditors that was posted online over the weekend. Canwest’s nearly 1,000 outstanding debts include millions owed to production studios, courier companies, and telecommunications providers. But perhaps the most interesting debts are those worth less than $100‹$25.74 owed to the New Style Barber Shop; $96.05 owed to Shaver’s Flowers; $3.47 owed to Scotiabank‹which provides a glimpse at just how tight the company’s finances had become in the lead-up to its restructuring under creditor protection.

The Canadian Press

FTI Consulting

H1N1 puts HPV vaccine on the shelf

By Kate Lunau - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 11:18 AM - 1 Comment

As New Brunswick prepares to inoculate residents against swine flu, another public health program is falling by the wayside. Hundreds of health care workers, from nursing students to retirees, are being recruited to administer the H1N1 vaccine—meaning the HPV vaccine must be put on hold. This year, about 2,500 Grade 7 girls will not receive a shot to protect them from the human papilloma virus, which can cause genital warts and cervical cancer.

According to the “Canadian Cancer Statistics” report, about seven Canadians per 100,000 were diagnosed with cervical cancer in 2005, the most recent year for which data is available. Thanks to the HPV vaccine, “it’s the first genital cancer that’s preventable,” says Dr. André Lalonde, executive vice-president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada. As such, he notes, “it’s a major breakthrough in health.” Continue…

They're drinking what?

By Alex Shimo - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 11:17 AM - 45 Comments

The best way to drink hand sanitizer is straight, like whisky, and down it “like a shot,” explains Tyler, a Grade 10 student who lives in Toronto. Undiluted, the alcohol-based liquid tastes a little like “vodka and bug spray,” he adds.

The alarming comment from the 15-year-old mirrors a growing number of news reports about teenagers and children drinking the antiseptic hand-cleaning products. Most hand sanitizers have an alcoholic content between 60 and 90 per cent, which means that even small amounts have led to a number of cases of alcohol poisoning in younger children. That percentage is much higher than even that of most hard liquors, giving it an appeal to kids looking for a quick high, explains Jane Wells, a drama teacher at Toronto’s after-school Care Program. Wells has come to know a lot about this subject: she discovered that a group of eight- and nine-year-olds drank hand sanitizer at school just before she took them on a school walk. When she noticed them acting strange and giggling, they first told her they had been drinking alcohol, but after some probing, confessed it was really the hand cleaner. They told her they’d been enticed by the promise of alcohol “right on the bottle,” she says. Continue…

These days the devil recycles Prada

By Anne Kingston - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 11:16 AM - 0 Comments

Before The September Issue, Anna Wintour was an enigma wrapped in Chanel or Dior or, of course, Prada. Her froideur won her the nickname Nuclear Wintour; her boss-from-hell rep was cemented by The Devil Wears Prada, the roman à clef about an imperious, terrifying fashion editor written by a former assistant.

Now R.J. Cutler’s riveting documentary, which opens in Canada this week, puts a closer lens on the 59-year-old who, in her 21 years as Vogue’s editor-in-chief, has transformed the magazine into the fashion bible. She famously made celebrities into models and herself the kingmaker of the $300-billion global fashion industry. Some of the revelations won’t be new to fashion-watchers: Wintour loves colour, has stratospheric standards, a sharp tongue, and inspires far more fear than her fictional doppelgänger ever did. In one delicious scene, an underwhelmed Wintour surveys Yves Saint Laurent’s Paris showroom before turning to designer Stefano Pilati. “What, no colour in this collection, Stefano?” she asks dryly in her posh British accent, as a despairing Pilati looks ready to slit his wrists to offer some. Continue…

Horror undead

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 11:15 AM - 3 Comments

“The horror! The horror!” In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad liked the word so much he wrote it twice. More than a century later, Hollywood still has the same approach. Any horror movie worth making once is worth making again. And again and again. If you want to rent a scary movie for Halloween, it’s no simple matter. Will it be the 1978 Halloween or the 2007 Halloween? Or one of their eight-sequel brood? Do you rent Hitchcock’s Psycho or Gus Van Sant’s eerily embalmed shot-for-shot remake with Vince Vaughn? Just how dead do you want your Night of the Living Dead? George Romero’s black-and-white classic, or the 1990 colour version? Should the zombies in Dawn of the Dead terrorize a ’70s mall or a 21st-century food court? Which Body Snatchers would you prefer to be invaded by? There are four, and a fifth is in the works.

And if you want to be absolutely sure to see a movie that’s unoriginal this Halloween, go to the multiplex. There you can pick between the hard-core torture porn of Saw VI, the latest bloodbath from history’s most lucrative horror franchise, or the soft-core suspense of The Stepfather, a toothless remake of a 1987 cult movie about a man who never joined a family he didn’t want to murder. Continue…

Downsized dreams

By Jason Kirby - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 10:57 AM - 20 Comments

Like most young men growing up in Thunder Bay, Ont., in the 1970s, or anywhere on the planet for that matter, Alex Cryderman was too focused on the next weekend to give much thought to his golden years. So, at 21, when he followed his father and brother into a job at the Abitibi paper mill, and learned that part of his paycheque would be held back to fund his pension, he was more annoyed than anything. That feeling changed over time, of course. And as the months turned into years and the years to decades, Cryderman, now 50, came to rely heavily on his pension savings for the retirement plan taking shape in his head. “I was going to be out of here in five years with a pretty good pension,” he says. “I was going to spend time on my boat, fish, travel with my wife, really live the good life like they say in the ads.”

Then one morning earlier this year, Cryderman awoke to frightening news—Abitibi-Bowater had filed for bankruptcy protection. Suddenly, his pension, along with those of 8,000 other employees at the company, was at serious risk. With the stock market collapse and the company no longer paying into the pension fund, the plan has become dangerously underfunded. Now Cryderman can only wait, and regret—wait to learn how much of his retirement savings he’ll be able to salvage, and regret not putting more money away on the side over the years. “If you’d have known what was coming down the pipe, you’d have lived your life differently,” he says. “We never thought this day would ever come.” Continue…

Pierre & Maggie: The untold story

By John Geddes - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 10:56 AM - 34 Comments

There’s something dark, almost to the point of the occult, in the way Pierre Trudeau is often remembered. Scan across the shelf of books about him: titles refer to his “shadow,” the notion he remains “hidden,” and one even calls him a “magus.” The most famous biographical quote about him claims “he haunts us still.”

Perhaps it’s all this gloom that makes the story of his courtship and marriage such welcome leavening in the tale. The dancing entrance of Margaret Sinclair, quintessential flower child, brings to the story a tie-dyed splash of contrast, occasionally sheer silliness—not to mention doomed romance, rare beauty and rock-star celebrity. No wage and price controls or constitutional amendments in this chapter. Continue…

MPs, they're just like us

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 10:29 AM - 29 Comments

In a Globe and Mail survey, only 49% of Canadians say they’ll get the H1N1 vaccine shot.

In a Hill Times survey, only 21 of 32 MPs say they’ll get the H1N1 vaccine shot.

This week’s travel news

By Bruce Parkinson, Takeoffeh.com - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 10:23 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.

Car Rental Crunch Sends Prices Skyward
It seems counter-intuitive: car manufacturers can’t seem to give away their vehicles, but car rental companies can’t get enough vehicles to meet demand. Bill McNeice, president of the Associated Canadian Car Rental Operators told the Globe and Mail this week that the past summer was particularly challenging. “A lot of markets in Canada (were) sold out; you couldn’t get a car. That’s a new phenomenon.” McNeice says something else that’s new is rental cars with 30-, 40- or even 50,000 kilometres on the clock. You just wouldn’t see that in the past, especially from the major rental companies. This sea change in the industry is a complex but fascinating story. When the market for both new and used vehicles was hot, car rental companies were the carmakers’ largest customers, purchasing over 100,000 vehicles per year in Canada alone. The rental companies kept the vehicles for six months or so and then sold them back at depreciated prices to the manufacturers, which sold them on again as low-mileage used cars. But when demand softened, carmakers started increasing depreciation rates, making big rental fleets too expensive. Today, most rental cars are purchased outright by rental companies and then rented for much longer than the previous norm. With rental car demand in Canada being highly seasonal, smaller fleets mean higher prices year-round, coupled with restricted availability at peak times. Looking into the future, McNeice sees little hope of a return to big fleets and low rental prices. His advice: “Book early and pay more.”

Don’t Swing The Cat
If you’re not familiar with cruising, inside cabins are usually the cheapest accommodations on the ship. Therefore, when you see a low advertised price for a cruise, nine times out of ten it’s for an inside cabin. The traditional definition is a cabin without a window, porthole or balcony, but that’s changing, with some inside cabins now featuring windows – they just look towards the inside of the ship rather than out. But as UPS reported this week, Norwegian Cruise Line is aiming to make a splash with a new concept in inside cabins with the 2010 launch of Epic, its largest-ever ship. Norwegian is calling a group of inside cabins ‘studios,’ and at 100 square feet, they’re small even by inside cabin standards. 128 of the tiny cabins, many of them connecting, will be grouped around a two-storey, 1,000 square foot ‘living room,’ featuring a bar, big-screen TV, room service and a concierge. Inside the cabins themselves, cruisers will find a king-size bed that doubles as lounging space, a 32-inch flat-screen TV, adjustable mood lighting and a big round window looking on to an interior corridor. There’s also a shower, toilet and a sink that slips behind a sliding door. NCL is aiming its studio cabins at first-time cruisers, especially young people and large family groups. It’s a bit like the ‘micro-hotel’ concept, just on the water. The cabins will be priced for budget travellers, who will also have access to the rest of Epic’s facilities and entertainment including daily shows by the Blue Man Group.

WestJet Website Woes
When you see a news story about a major company about to undergo a computer system upgrade, migration or cutover, it’s not hard to guess what will happen next: a news story about the series of glitches following the changes. It happened again this week with WestJet as the Calgary Herald reported. The airline’s website went down for a few hours after the cutover on Friday, October 16, and it crashed again the following Monday for about three hours. This time the culprit was the web component of the Sabre-Sonic Customer Sales and Service Solution, WestJet’s new online home. With the site down, prospective customers were forced to let their fingers do the walking. But that’s not easy these days, as call centres aren’t staffed the way they used to be, and lines were quickly jammed. There were struggles at airports on the weekend too, as gremlins invaded some baggage tag printers and some advance seat selection records disappeared. However, with problems fully expected in a move of this size — close to a million records were transferred from one system to another — it was a pretty successful transition. Now comes the good part: for WestJet and its guests, the much-anticipated new reservations system will open up major opportunities for cooperation with other airlines.

There Goes The Neighbourhood
There have been several well-publicized incidents of bad behaviour on cruise ships lately, or in the high-profile case of a group of Americans in Antigua, on shore excursions from cruise ships. With cruise prices at record lows, some pundits have speculated that ‘the wrong crowd’ can now afford to take to the water. To their credit, cruise executives are rejecting this classist assumption. Carnival Corp. CEO Micky Arison, for example, told the BBC: “Fighting isn’t just something that happens to people on low incomes. Whether you earn 10p or £100,000 a week, it often comes down to how much beer you’ve drunk or the circumstances you’re in.” Cruise passengers, however, aren’t convinced. A poll with over 500 responses on cruise website CruiseCritic saw nearly half of respondents agree that “low fares are definitely attracting different or untraditional types of travellers to cruising.” That said, nearly 45% agreed that “most outlandish conduct is the result of excessive drinking or carrying on.” Others simply put the blame on media hype or the growth of the industry. With more people choosing to spend their vacations cruising; the odds increase for more troublemakers aboard. In the comments posted on CruiseCritic, a recurring theme is that civility and manners are on the decline throughout society, so there’s no surprise that it’s happening on cruise ships too. With a seemingly endless media preoccupation with what happens on cruise ships, you can expect to hear a lot more on this issue, especially with more massive megaships launching over the next year

Make Way For Oasis
Nearly as long as the Empire State Building is tall — and 18 decks high to boot — the soon-to-be-launched 5,400-passenger cruise ship Oasis of the Seas brings with it a long list of superlatives and firsts. As Royal Caribbean International CEO Adam Goldstein told Forbes Magazine: “It’s in the DNA of our company, about every 10 years, to take more or less a fresh sheet of paper and create the greatest cruise ship in the world.” Not a humble statement perhaps, but it’s hard to be humble when you’ve just spent $1.4 billion on a marvel of modern marine engineering. Unfortunately, that $1.4 billion is just slightly more than the year-over-year decline in revenue experienced by RCI as the global recession took a huge bite out of cruise revenues. Of course, the economic downturn was not foreseen years ago, when plans for Oasis began to take shape. It’s not just Royal Caribbean that is gambling on the success of this floating behemoth. The ports that will welcome Oasis have invested millions too. Jamaica, for example, is spending $121 million on a new port at Falmouth, built specifically for Oasis and upcoming sister vessel Allure of the Seas. The Oasis homeport at Port Everglades, Florida has spent $75 million on a state-of-the-art terminal, while other ports in Mexico and the Eastern and Western Caribbean have also spent millions on pier lengthening or dredging projects to accommodate the ship. Each of the ports is hoping that the publicity around the ship and the economic impact of the weekly arrival of thousands of passengers and crew will justify the investment.

Photo Credits: ncl.com, westjet.com, ncl.com

Paul Haggis quits Scientology

By macleans.ca - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 10:13 AM - 2 Comments

Paul Haggis, the Canadian writer-director (Crash) who has become one of Hollywood’s most sought-after writers, has made a public break with the Church of Scientology. According to Scientology official spokesman Tommy Davis, he gave two reasons for leaving the movement. One was the support of their San Diego chapter for Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative that banned gay marriage, as well as the refusal of the Church’s leadership to denounce the chapter’s stance. Haggis wrote that he “could not, in good conscience, be a member of an organization where gay-bashing was tolerated.” Haggis’s other objection was to Scientology ordering him and his wife to have no further contact with her parents “because of something absolutely trivial they supposedly did twenty-five years ago when they resigned from the church.” His wife stopped seeing her parents for a year and a half. Upset at this “policy of disconnection” and Davis’s denial that it exists, Haggis ended the letter with the words “I hereby resign my membership in the Church of Scientology,” making him one of the few celebrity Scientologists to publicly break with the organization.

Showbiz411.com

The cheques aren't the real scandal

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 8:40 AM - 37 Comments

It was as predictable as the tides. Could anyone have imagined otherwise—that billions of dollars could be pushed out the door in such fantastic haste, to no plan or purpose, without being turned into a politicized slush fund? Can anyone really claim to be surprised? When did any government, given control of a honey pot of this size, not abuse it?

We should be precise about just what is the scandal here. The scandal is not that Conservative MPs attached the party logo to the giant novelty cheques that have become the standard prop in government spending announcements. Though it is surely scandalous to pretend the public’s money is the party’s (the reverse is more nearly true), the logo only serves to make explicit what is implicit in all such exercises: that the flow of public funds to a given riding, province, industry or cause is owing entirely to the personal munificence of local MPs, who salute themselves for their generosity and compassion in the hope that their beneficiaries will be moved to do the same. That would have been the message even had there been no Conservative logos on the cheques, or no such cheques to bear them. Continue…

David Akin, bane of Canadian Liberalism

By Paul Wells - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 8:38 AM - 56 Comments

The Canwest reporter (ah-ha!) finds one federal infrastructure program that disproportionately benefits NDP and Liberal ridings and writes up a poll that extends a few familiar trendlines. It gets worse: the other night at a prominent Ottawa restaurant, I saw David sitting with Conservatives! This proves everything you always suspected about him. Or me. Or something.

Politics as high school, high school as politics

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 8:28 AM - 2 Comments

With kids standing in for Harper, Ignatieff, Layton, Duceppe and May, a high school social sciences class reenacts the federal political debate.

Parts two and three after the jump. Continue…

Is it possible to get a fair hearing?

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 12:56 AM - 62 Comments

Last week our Andrew Coyne argued that now is the time for Michael Ignatieff to deal honestly and directly with the deficit and the state of government finances going forward. In response, Glen Pearson wonders if the press gallery is ready to do likewise.

Let’s be honest: No political leader in their right mind dares to be as truthful as Coyne challenges because it would be the media itself that couldn’t withhold its skepticism long enough to truly investigate the merits of that leader’s case. Opposition parties would immediately pounce and all manner of bloggers, pundits and columnists would discuss the scary ramifications of such a daredevil proposition. I recall when Ignatieff came to London following a visit to Cambridge, in which he stated no leader would be worthy of the name if he or she didn’t place the possibility of raising taxes on a long list of future considerations if a deficit couldn’t be brought under control. Political staffers mulled around, worried that it would be taken out of context, which it inevitably was … The very next day in the House, Conservative members used every possible occasion to ridicule Ignatieff, calling him just another “tax and spend” Liberal. The media ate it up.

How Canada's seen: I try not to think about it, but fail.

By John Geddes - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 12:06 AM - 27 Comments

Fretting about how Canada is seen by Americans is a mostly pointless and entirely maddening pastime and I try, I honestly try, not to indulge in it. But it’s hard sometimes. The Nov. 5, 2009 issue of the New York Review of Books broke my discipline. It contains a review of Margaret Atwood’s new novel, The Year of the Flood, which offers in passing a ridiculous picture of Canada, one I can only hope most of the NYR’s readers skip over. I wasn’t able to.

The reviewer, the novelist Diane Johnson, casts an eye on Canada by way of trying to get at what makes Atwood tick. Johnson makes two observations in one weird paragraph. She says Ontario seriously looked at “instituting sharia law,” and cites this episode as evidence Canada has outdone the U.S. “in the matter of reflexive multiculturalism.” And she says that even though Canada “virtuously” resisted the Iraq war, it has “pretty much collaborated with most U.S. programs,” even fighting in Afghanistan, something “few would have predicted.”

It’s not often you see Canada sketched as both bizarrely left-wing and militaristically right-wing in such a brief passage. Of course Johnson is way off on both points.
Continue…

Thinkers' conference

By Paul Wells - Sunday, October 25, 2009 at 10:13 PM - 40 Comments

At a time when we may be witnessing a key moment in the reworking of the global higher education and research landscape, now would be a good time for some national leadership on Canada’s place in the competitive global knowledge economy. Unfortunately, some people are preoccupied with what a bunch of country lawyers wrote in a constitution 36 years before the Wright Brothers’ first flight. (UPDATE: That’s badly phrased. It should have said, “Unfortunately, some people want to duck their responsibilities based on a culpably sloppy misreading of a constitution a bunch of country lawyers wrote 36 years before the Wright Brothers’ first flight.” Fun exercise: Find the paragraph in the constitution that would ever limit the federal government’s role in science, research, commercialization, promoting entrepreneurship, marketing Canadian educational products abroad, promoting greater use of information and communications technology, and so on. Cite jurisprudence.) So it falls to the good folks at Perimeter Institute to provide the national leadership with what promises to be an ambitious conference on all this stuff — in spring, 2011. From the news release:

The global gathering will see international researchers, business leaders and public policy decision-makers help identify actions in the science and technology arena that must be taken in order to seize opportunities in the decades ahead and monitor progress against those actions.

The WGSI will focus on the role that science and technology can play in addressing the world’s most fundamental social, environmental and economic challenges.  The conference will provide leading thinkers with a forum in which to view the long term and identify clear actions.  Areas of provincial, national and global concern may include energy, quantum information and water resources.

There are such attempts to get a handle on the policy choices that would best help Canada thrive in the 21st century. One of the most prominent — and laudable because it was the brainchild of a few young researchers who’ve managed to draw a blue-chip guest list for their event — is this conference in Toronto later this week (I’ll be moderating a panel discussion at that one, but I’m thinking of real blue chips like the presidents of major universities). Perimeter’s project has the ring of something more authoritative, though, given its long lead time, broad ambit, emphasis on scientific practitioners, and the clout Perimeter already has as a place where serious work gets done.

Different numbers

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, October 25, 2009 at 6:24 PM - 39 Comments

The government releases a partial accounting of stimulus spending to support its particular case, laments that the official opposition has done likewise.

In charts provided to The Canadian Press, government officials note in particular that the major infrastructure component of the Building Canada program has allocated $1.4 billion to large projects in opposition ridings in Ontario, and just $436 million to Conservative ridings.

“This particular fund supports major projects, typically in major municipalities that tend to be represented by opposition members,” said Chris Day, spokesman for Transport Minister John Baird.

“We have different funds for different purposes. It’s wrong to highlight one fund, as the opposition has been doing, and carry that trend.”

Meanwhile, Canwest analyzes another program entirely, finds evidence that it favours opposition ridings, but concedes that its data is incomplete.

If only there existed some sort of independent officer of Parliament—call it, maybe, the Parliamentary Budget Officer—to whom the government could turn over all its data for a full accounting of what has been spent, where it has been directed and whether it’ll all amount to anything. If only.

Ignatieff on Ignatieff

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, October 25, 2009 at 2:53 PM - 61 Comments

As mentioned, here is more of last Saturday’s conversation at Stornoway.

Continue…

MPs and Mental Health Awards

By Mitchel Raphael - Saturday, October 24, 2009 at 11:29 AM - 7 Comments

The seventh annual Champions of Mental Health Awards were held at the Fairmont Château Laurier ballroom. Margaret Trudeau, seen below with son Justin, got an award for being open about suffering from bipolar disorder.

Also on the awards list were Defense Minister Peter MacKay (left) and General Walter Natynczyk, Canada’s Chief of Defense Staff, for their work launching the “Be the Difference” mental health campaign in the Canadian Forces.

Continue…

The Fox and Cheney sideshows

By John Parisella - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 7:01 PM - 102 Comments

The Obama White House recently decided that Fox News is biased and that it should be called out for its distortions and mistruths. White House strategists have apparently concluded that the Beck-Hannity-O’Reilly crowd is getting traction. Even though recent polls put Obama’s approval ratings over the 50% mark—the latest CNN poll put his popularity at 55%—the White House is growing increasingly concerned about the impact his opponents will have on major upcoming legislative proposals like health care, cap-and-trade, and the consumer protection agency. As a result, Obama will still do interviews on Fox, but his staff has clearly labeled the network media non grata.

Meanwhile, former vice-president Dick Cheney is continuing his crusade against Obama’s foreign policy, going so far as to label the president a “ditherer.” Cheney’s statements get wide media coverage, if only because they stand in such contrast with the reserve shown by former President George W. Bush. Again, the White House has reacted and taken to reminding voters about Cheney’s role in the last administration. Given Cheney left with a popularity index of less than 25%, the Obama people have taken to portraying him as the face of the Republican party. Since the inauguration, Obama strategists have been blessed to have Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and, once again, Dick Cheney as embodiments of the Republican party. Going after them seems to be working, too, as voter identification with the party is at 20%, its lowest point in 26 years. So far, their attacks have paid off. But is it the best approach in the long run?

Continue…

Rebagliati enters politics

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 5:52 PM - 21 Comments

Ross Rebagliati, the Canadian Olympic snowboarder best known for briefly losing and subsequently regaining his gold medal after drug tests revealed traces of marijuana in his system, is entering politics. The former Olympian announced Friday he would seek the Liberal nomination in the Okanagan-Coquihalla riding in central B.C. Should he win the right to campaign under the Liberal banner—so far, no one is running against him—Rebagliati will face a formidable opponent in an upcoming election: International Trade Minister Stockwell Day. Rebagliati cited pretty much every issue under the sun as motivating his entry into politics—jobs, healthcare, childcare, sports, a healthy lifestyle, native issues, homelessness, the environment—but knows his past association with pot is likely to come up in a campaign. “I think the issue has been dealt with,” he says, “and I feel like I’ve been able to prove my character over the years.”

Vancouver Sun