What happened

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 4:52 PM - 5 Comments

And if you’re still interested after all that, here is the magazine story in question, now online in its entirety.

Much of what Mr. Ignatieff had to say last Saturday morning at Stornoway ended up in the finished piece. But I’ll probably post a more fulsome abundant accounting this weekend.

Hey look: a column, and a debate about what it says, if anything

By Paul Wells - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 4:44 PM - 39 Comments

From the print edition, this week’s column, which is about Stephen Harper’s surprise reference to the Supreme Court of Canada on a national securities regulator. An excellent bonus is the debate that then breaks out in the comments board, over whether I’m a threat or just a menace. All sides use direct quotations from the column to prove a bewildering succession of contradictory points of view. That wasn’t the effect I was seeking, but it remains kind of entertaining.

Deleted scenes (V)

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 3:16 PM - 18 Comments

This is referenced briefly in the print edition, but here’s a more expansive take.

One could argue that the defining characteristic of Liberal leaders over the last half century is recovery. Pearson, Trudeau and Chretien struggled and recovered. Turner, Martin and Dion struggled and did not. Pearson wins the leadership in 1958 and promptly leads the party to what was then its worst ever defeat. Trudeau nearly loses to Bob Stanfield in 1972 and loses outright to Joe Clark in 1979, and comes back both times to revive his fortunes and win majority governments. And then there’s Chretien. Continue…

Leonard Cohen to get Chelsea Hotel plaque

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 2:45 PM - 3 Comments

Did the legend of the Chelsea Hotel, Manhattan’s premier bohemian inn, ever need cementing? Dylan Thomas, the great Welsh poet and professional drinker, died there in 1953, of alcohol poisoning. Twenty-five years later, Sid killed Nancy there. But for many, the admission by Leonard Cohen, on stage and perhaps not altogether sober, that the woman giving him “head on the unmade bed, while the limousines wait in the street” in the song Chelsea Hotel #2 was none other than Janis Joplin solidified the Chelsea’s place in the popular imagination. Now, the Chelsea is giving back, with a plaque commemorating Cohen’s contribution to the atmosphere. That puts him in the same league as Thomas, Thomas Wolfe and Arthur Miller, and makes the Chelsea into New York’s own Poet’s Corner, just this side of Westminster Abbey.

New York Times

CBC? Not for me!

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 2:30 PM - 42 Comments

You might assume that Prime Minister Stephen Harper would be one of Canada’s most devoted news watchers. But you’d be wrong. Speaking in front of a Toronto business audience on Wednesday, Harper admitted that he prefers American news broadcasts to Canadian ones. “I tend to watch mainly American news,” the prime minister said, “because I don’t like to watch Canadian news and hear what Allan [Gregg, a pollster and CBC pundit who was in the audience] and everybody else is saying about me.” Unsurprisingly, NDP Leader Jack Layton was quick to contend that “Canadians ought to be concerned” that their leader “likes Fox News better than Canadian news.” Liberal MP Bob Rae also chimed in, calling the report “quite shocking,” because Harper has “an obligation to know what’s going on.” Industry Minister Tony Clement, on the other hand, thinks Harper may have been “exaggerating.” “We’re all news junkies, all of us are,” he said. “Come on. You know what we’re all about.”

Toronto Star

Deleted scenes (IV)

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 1:30 PM - 51 Comments

The assessment and advice of a Conservative strategist that didn’t make it into the final version of the story.

Ignatieff and his team started off the wrong way; they drove up expectations about their man and his abilities. That was a recipe Paul Martin tried and failed with. If they keep it up I suspect he will harvest the same result.

Use this dip in the polls to your advantage. Moderate your language and work hard without playing to the “I am better than everyone” stereotype. Be guided by the old Chretien mantra – under promise and over deliver.

Come to understand that the way you feel about the PM is not the way the country feels about him. They don’t get their opponent and his relationship with the public. Until they figure that out they will continue to be bested by him.

Stop putting yourself in ridiculous situations. Don’t draw a line in the sand where the soil has already eroded and therefore look way out of your league.

Hire some people who can bust the leaders balls and be respected for it. Sychophants sink ships. Ask Paul Martin the ex-marine magnate about that.

Deleted scenes (III)

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 1:24 PM - 3 Comments

A bit of this is in the story itself, but here’s an extended version of Ken Dryden’s assessment.

I think the current situation is basically the same it was six months and probably pretty much the same as it was the last few years. The public has been saying to us for some time that we want to know what you’re about. we want to know how you see the country and what a Liberla government would do.

That’s what the public is waiting for and we haven’t given them that answer yet. The other day, when Michael gave his speech on the day of the non-confidence motion, I thought he laid out a really strong case for an absence of confidence in this government. What has to happen next is to lay out a strong case as to why the public should have confidence in us. I think that’s yet to be done…

I think in the last number of years we’ve been too tactical. What are those things that we believe in? What are those things that make us proud? What are those things that matter to Canadians?

I only saw this research paper after the story had been written, but the exit poll data and demographics therein—and the discussion of Liberal electoral fortunes this decade—are probably quite relevant.

A Good Rant Against TV Executives

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 1:17 PM - 0 Comments

Kurt Sutter, creator of the “biker family drama” Sons of Anarchy (which has become a big hit for FX, often beating network shows in the so-called key demographics), unleashes a nice diatribe against executive-driven network TV and the way the networks have driven away not only most of the creators who supplied their big ’90s hits, but the executives who were good at encouraging creativity.

Now, I have a natural suspicion of any statement that executive interference is worse than it used to be, because the selection bias is obvious: TV history is mostly told from the point of view of the people who made it (the executives mostly get fired after a few years, even the good ones; creators have more longevity in the business). And in the retelling, any good decisions are the creator’s alone, usually in opposition to the executives, while any bad decisions are the result of executive meddling. The narrative that all good television results from executives “leaving the creative people alone” is one that has a lot of truth in it; most cliches do. But it obviously leaves out something, which Sutter himself touches on when he says that FX execs “were completely up my ass during the pilot, pilot reshoot and the first four or five episodes.” Network executives have to meddle, particularly early on; part of their job is to make the creator fix stuff that isn’t working. (And if they get these things fixed early, they can afford to back off for the rest of the season, because the mechanisms are in place to make good episodes.) This is another thing that came up in my interview with HBO’s Richard Plepler, when I asked him, as delicately as possible, how the network goes about giving notes and telling creators to fix things that aren’t working:

When you create a partnership with an auteur, you are entering into a kind of unspoken understanding that you want to try and bring out the best creative voice that you can. Hopefully implicit in that, the creator wants the input of the people who believed in him in the first place. It’s how you do it. Mutual respect has to inform the relationship from the start. And while we don’t want to be looking over the shoulder of an artist, we also have a responsibility to make sure that the vision he’s executing is the vision that we all agreed on.

So on cable, executives say: “You’re a genius, fix this.” On networks, they say “You’re a hack, fix this.” But they all have to fix stuff.

The big problem, of course, is not so much the existence of executive interference as the fact that there are so many executives with so many different jobs, and conflicting points of view, that either a) Nothing gets done, or b) The creative decisions made have to be the blandest ones possible, because they’re the only ones that a group of executives can agree on. The system that creators were most comfortable with at the networks, which has existed on and off, is to have basically one executive in charge of a particular show. Most of the quirky or groundbreaking network shows were under the protection of a particular exec who liked the show, fought for it at the network, and had the ear of the creator, who would change stuff in consultation with that one person.

You can still argue very plausibly that the dumbing-down of shows by executive fiat is no worse, and a lot better really, than it has been at many other times in TV history. (You think today’s exec-dominated environment is bad; what about ABC in the ’70s, when nearly-unknown executives like Michael Eisner rose to positions of incredible power, and had major input into the development of shows by creators who barely even knew them?) But the current environment certainly has a “too many cooks” quality about it.

Obamamania officially over

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 1:08 PM - 11 Comments

President Barack Obama’s daily approval rating of 53 per cent reflects the steepest decline in popularity of any first-term U.S. president in 50 years, the Telegraph reports. Gallup recorded an average daily approval rating of 53 per cent for Obama for the third quarter of the year, a sharp drop from the 62 per cent he recorded from April. His current approval rating is “hovering just above the level that would make re-election an uphill struggle” and “is close to the bottom for newly elected presidents,” the paper reports. The bad polling news comes as the president returns to the campaign trail to prevent his Democratic party from losing two governorships next month in states in which he defeated Senator John McCain in last November’s election. On the hustings, Obama delivered a plea that seemed almost as much for himself as the local candidate: “I’m here today to urge you to cast aside the cynics and the sceptics, and prove to all Americans that leaders who do what’s right and who do what’s hard will be rewarded and not rejected.”

Daily Telegraph

Just another Christian reconciliation

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 12:51 PM - 8 Comments

A recent article in L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper, had kind words for the founder of Communism, the same man who called religion “the opium of the people.” Georg Sans, a German-born professor of the history of contemporary philosophy at the pontifical Gregorian University, wrote that Marx’s early critiques of capitalism had highlighted the “social alienation” felt by the “large part of humanity” that remained excluded, even now, from economic and political decision-making. Marx’s work, he argued, is especially relevant today as mankind is seeking “a new harmony” between its needs and the natural environment. Marx’s thought and intellectual legacy was marred by the misappropriation of his work by the communist regimes of the 20th century. “It is no exaggeration to say that nothing has damaged the interests of Marx the philosopher more than Marxism,” Sans wrote. In its own way, the change is less momentous for the Church than its July praise for Oscar Wilde, the gay playwright, as “a man who behind a mask of amorality asked himself what was just and what was mistaken.” The Roman Church may be ferociously anti-Communist, but it has never been much impressed with capitalism either. Pope Benedict XVI’s latest encyclical, Charity in Truth, offers a direct response to the recession, arguing that global capitalism has lost its way and that Church teachings can help to restore economic health by focusing on justice for the weak and closer regulation of the market.

London Times

Deleted scenes (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 12:46 PM - 21 Comments

Several Liberal MPs spoke on the record and quite candidly about how they view their current conundrum. Rob Oliphant, the Liberal MP for Don Valley West, a United Church minister and a friend to Mr. Ignatieff, had several observations, a couple of which made it into the piece. This one did not.

He’s not a natural opposition leader, mind you very few people are … To me, in opposition you have to be angry, all the time. Michael is not an angry person. That’s not his personality. He doesn’t enjoy that. That’s very hard for him. It’s not a natural thing.

This is an interesting argument for probably a few reasons, but consider one way of looking at this: You could make the argument that Mr. Ignatieff is the only of the four current major party leaders who is not currently defined, or was not once primarily motivated, by a sense of anger or indignation. Messrs Harper, Layton and Duceppe all have that in their stories. The closest Mr. Ignatieff comes to that is the notion that “we can do better.”

A bit more from Mr. Oliphant, some of which appears slightly abridged in the print edition. Continue…

So much for cheap camel meat

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 12:40 PM - 0 Comments

The global economic meltdown has reached the camel market. In Egypt, the price for camel meat—what poor families traditionally turn to when beef or mutton is too expensive—has climbed, pushed up by hurting herdsmen in Sudan and Somalia. In the last year, the going rate has gone from $1.80 a pound to as much as $2.90 a pound. And the traders and butchers are turning their anger on the Egyptian government.

L.A. Times

Venezuela's hard-luck orchestra

By Katie Engelhart - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 12:27 PM - 1 Comment

What can Canada learn from a program a classical music program based in the slums of Venezuela? A lot, as far as the Toronto-based Glenn Gould Foundation is concerned.

Next week, the organization named after one of Canada’s most celebrated musical legends will present Dr. José Antonio Abreu of Venezuela with its triennial Glenn Gould Prize, given to an individual for his or her contributions to music and communication. Accompanying Dr. Abreu to Toronto will be the Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra, a 250-member ensemble that was recently recognized by the Times of London as among the best in the world. But its prestigious reputation belies its humble roots. All 250 musicians are between the ages of 16 and 22, and all come from Venezuela’s most impoverished communities—a seemingly unlikely breeding ground for top-tier classical musicians.

Over 30 years ago, Dr. Abreu, an economist and conductor, founded El Sistema, a national program promoting free music education in Venezuela. His hope was to use music to reach out to the country’s most at-risk children. When Abreu first started, says Glenn Morley, chair of the Glenn Gould Foundation, “people would say, ‘Why wouldn’t you have sports programs?’ Sports programs are fine and they have their purposes. But they’re also competitive and they have winners and losers. And one thing you don’t want to have is winners and loser in competitions when people have guns in their hands.”

Since then, the program has grown exponentially. It now boasts 126 music centres in Venezuela, each of which caters to an average of 2,000 students. That’s why Venezuela has “probably the highest per capita ratio of young, outstanding classical musicians of anywhere in the world,” says Morley. Indeed, the program is far more than a casual extracurricular pursuit. From the age of about 4, Venezuela’s poverty-stricken youth are eligible for the free afterschool program. They, in turn, must commit themselves to serious study: four hour practices, six days a week.

Among El Sistema’s graduates is Gustavo Dudamel, the newest conductor of the L.A Philharmonic. Only 28 years old, Dudamel made Time magazine’s 2009 list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Dudamel will be in Toronto to accompany the group’s kick-off concert on Monday night.

Morley stresses that the point of the program is not focused on creating better musicians, but better citizens. Though Dudamel stands out as an example of Venezeula’s nascent ability, El Sistema’s boosters are just as likely to tout the fact that while Venezuela’s school drop-out rate for teens 14 and over is 26.4 per cent, that figure drops to just 6.9 per cent for El Sistema participants.

The power of music will be the topic of conversation on Wednesday, when Dr. Abreu joins educators from across Canada in a symposium on music education. The week’s other events include visits to Toronto schools and community centers, in addition to a concert for 14,000 high school students at the Rogers Centre on Thursday. The hope, says the Glenn Gould Foundation’s Beth Sulman, is that Canada will adopt some variation of El Sistema here. Similar programs have already been set up in 20 countries, including the United States and Great Britain. But in Ontario, music education “has just dropped of the radar,” says Sulman. “The Ontario Minister of Education is going to be [at Wednesday’s symposium], so there’s hope.”

Already, programs based on El Sistema have been started in Ottawa and New Brunswick, but they are in very early stages.

Morley hopes his organization can help accelerate this trend, by transforming an award which has long recognized musical talent—that of Yo-yo Ma, and André Previn, for instance—to one that honors perhaps lesser-known social transformers. In particular, Morley wants to turn his prize into a kind of Nobel Prize for the arts, of which there is currently none.

“Now the vision has been so expanded,” says the Glenn Gould chair, “that almost anything is possible.”

Gen. Rick Hillier on his biggest strategic error, the Taliban, and Canada's future in Afghanistan

By Kate Fillion - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 12:00 PM - 8 Comments

Gen. Rick Hillier was chief of defence staff from February 2005 to July 2008. As he explains in A Soldier First: Bullets, Bureaucrats and the Politics of War, the Canadian Forces have long been underfunded, under-trained, underappreciated and overextended. The most visible and outspoken CDS in recent history, Hillier sought to reverse those trends while fighting a war in Afghanistan—and, as it turned out, Ottawa.

Q:In A Soldier First, you write that most Canadians do not know what the rationale behind the Afghanistan mission is. What’s the biggest misperception?

A: That everything is dark and gloomy. What Canadians hear about the mission is that Canadian soldiers have been killed, and they hear about improvised explosive devices and corruption in the government. There are some very bright spots, from the reconstruction and development of Afghanistan, to the development of the Afghan national army, to the fact that two-thirds of the country now essentially runs as normal. Canadians hear not a single thing about any of that.

Q: Whose fault is that?

A: I start with average Canadians. They should demand that kind of information from their government when they’ve got their sons and daughters participating in a war. Secondly, the Afghanistan task force has a strategic communications policy, but I wonder where the communications is being done because hundreds of thousands of Canadians don’t know what’s happening. Thirdly, our media have not done a very good job. Very few journalists have actually been outside the wire, because their editors are very concerned about the risks and their insurance policies almost always prohibit them from going out.

Q: Why did we first send troops to Afghanistan, in your opinion?

A: We were going somewhere in 2003, just as a way to relieve the pressure of saying no to the Americans on Iraq, and it ended up being Afghanistan. But I think now we view the world through a more strategic lens: we have to bring stability to places where there’s chaos, to help those areas develop.

Q: Does Canada have a coherent strategic plan for what’s going to happen post-July 2011, when our troops are scheduled to pull out of Afghanistan?

A: That’s very difficult to say. I think Canadians have heard very little about it and are therefore reasonably asking, “What is the plan and what is our strategy there?” When I was chief of defence staff, our view of what we were doing was to try to help Afghans determine, with some assistance, just what it was they wanted as a country and how they wanted to live their lives. We were very, very clear on that. As President [Hamid] Karzai told me the first time I met him, “The number one threat to Afghanistan is our lack of capacity to govern ourselves, to provide jobs for the people and provide for their basic needs, and to provide for their security. The sooner we can be helped to provide those capacities, the sooner we can get going on our own.”

Q: How can you help Afghans do all that after 2011 without troops?

A: You cannot, so the troops, if they’re not Canadian, will have to come from somewhere else. Make no doubt about it: the security mission and therefore the need for forces will not be finished in southern Afghanistan in 2011. You can come up with all kinds of schemes to hide away in a camp and train people for the Afghan army or police, but they lack credibility. If you try to help train and develop the Afghan army or police in southern Afghanistan, you are going to be in combat.

Q: Should our troops stay in Afghanistan after July 2011?

A: Whether they should stay or not will be a decision the government of Canada will make. What I would actually like to see is a strategic discussion, not just about what we do in Afghanistan but about Canada’s place in the world. But in this constant minority government, always in election campaign mode, with a very vitriolic Parliament, it’s impossible to have that sort of strategic discussion. Do I think that if Canadian troops stayed on the ground we could help foster a more stable Afghanistan that would in turn be a stabilizing force in Southwest Asia and help reduce terrorists’ ability to hide? Yes I do.

Q: Do you agree with de Gaulle, that “genius sometimes consists of knowing when to stop”?

A: I teach that as one of my leadership points. But also, you don’t achieve anything by stopping at the first sign of difficulty. If we’d stopped after Dieppe in World War II, where would we be right now as a nation? If we’d stopped before Vimy Ridge, we wouldn’t have been a nation at all. So yes, you’ve got to know when to say “stop” as a leader, you sure do, but you’ve also got to know when to push for the final thing that’s going to give you the full benefit.

Q: You write that when you were chief of defence staff, some of the toughest battles were fought not in Kandahar but against the bureaucracy in Ottawa.

A: I liken it to a boa constrictor. We were at war in Afghanistan, with young men and women laying their lives on the line on a daily basis, and we were trying to move at lightning speed to give them the capabilities to reduce risks and ensure they were set up for success. What we did not see, from the vast majority of the bureaucracy back in Ottawa, was the same sense of urgency. Everything became difficult, really moved slowly, projects were often parcelled into very little bits and pieces. We had to fight a war in Ottawa to get things done, from getting the tanks upgraded to getting helicopters. We should’ve had those things from the time the need was identified, in weeks if not days. It took months, and in several cases years.

Q: You once said, famously, that the Taliban are “detestable murderers and scumbags.” Do you still believe that?

A: Absolutely. I spoke about people who were trying to kill Canadians’ sons and daughters. I would also challenge people to come up with any other description for those who, as part of their policy, want to murder defenceless Afghan men and women.

Another Manitoba conviction overturned

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 11:42 AM - 3 Comments

Kyle Unger is a free man after Manitoba justice officials withdrew murder charges against him in the 1990 killing of a teenage girl, admitting they don’t have enough evidence to retry him. Unger, 38, had spent 14 years in prison for the killing of 16-year-old Brigitte Grenier. Today, the province’s deputy attorney general told a court that DNA testing shows no trace of Unger on any of the exhibits and does not link him to the crime scene. The acquittal will add to already intense scrutiny of the record of George Dangerfield, the Crown who won the conviction against Unger. Once legendary in provincial legal circles, Dangerfield has now seen three of his high profile convictions overturned— Thomas Sophonow and James Driskell and Unger. A fourth man, Frank Ostrowski Sr., has been granted bail after serving 23 years for the murder of a suspected police informant named Robert Nieman. A federal investigation of that case concluded that a miscarriage of justice had “likely occurred.”

CBC News

Maclean’s

What happened, Michael?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 11:40 AM - 103 Comments

“Would you like some soup, sir?”

Maybe this is tawdry, just another offering to the morning papers and evening news. Or maybe this is public service. Maybe it’s exactly what he should be doing, helping his fellow man, setting an example. Either way, this is politics.

“Would you like a little soup, sir?”

It’s 11:20 on the morning of Thanksgiving Sunday. Michael Ignatieff, in a white apron, is standing behind the counter at the Shepherds of Good Hope mission in Ottawa, a 20-minute walk from Parliament Hill. Men and women of various ages and in varying states file past. Behind them, three photographers click away. Ignatieff is ladling tomato and squash soup into small bowls. To his right, his wife, the exuberant former publicist Zsuzsanna Zsohar, scoops vegetables. Continue…

Week in Pictures: October 16th – October 22nd, 2009

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 11:17 AM - 0 Comments

Why are they remaking these movies?

By Tom Henheffer - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 11:03 AM - 6 Comments

Deleted scenes

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 11:03 AM - 26 Comments

There are some 2,800 words about Michael Ignatieff’s current situation under this byline in the current print edition. Unfortunately, there are also some bits that couldn’t be included, lest the piece double in length. So I’ll post a few of those today.

Here, for instance, is an observation from former White House advisor David Gergen (offered in the foreword to this book), the idea of which essentially guided my piece.

Our presidents not only wear the two traditional hats of head-of-state and head-of-government, they also give us voice as a people. Every speaker must come to know his or her own voice, but power comes when a speaker’s authentic voice is also the voice of the people being addressed. Our best presidents have known that instinctively, and they have helped to define who we are, what we are experiencing, and how our experience fits into our great national experiment.

Polygamy is still illegal, right?

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 10:52 AM - 9 Comments

B.C Attorney-General Mike de Jong wants to quash any “lingering doubts” about whether polygamy is indeed illegal in Canada. On Thursday, de Jong called on the Supreme Court to help him do so. By asking the highest court to rule on the legality of a ban on polygamy, de Jong says he he hopes to “put a human face” on the debate. Tensions ran high last month, as the province was making its case against Winston Blackmore and James Oler for having multiple wives. The Supreme Court put an end to the case, ruling that the province’s prosecution was unfair. But de Jong remains adamant that “polygamy is against the law” and that its prohibition is in line with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Soupy Sales Dies At Age 83

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 10:37 AM - 3 Comments

The year of celebrity deaths continues with the death of kids’ TV favourite Soupy Sales. His shows were before my time, and yet even as a kid, I’d heard of him. He was sort of a combination of two typical TV types: the kid-friendly comedian who does silly sketches and takes pies in the face, and the all-powerful host and authority figure, like Arthur Godfrey. The combination of adult and kids’ TV styles became a template for a lot of children’s TV (like The Muppet Show, another combination of kiddie-show slapstick with the insincere adult variety show format), and also became the inspiration for a lot of parodies; a lot of Krusty the Klown bits are Sales-inspired. In a way he was the David Letterman of kiddie-show hosts, sort of making fun of his own format and trying to loosen it up a bit.

CBC Watch

By Andrew Potter - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 10:35 AM - 143 Comments

Yesterday, the CBC had an early-morning presentation (I wouldn’t call it a party, given how sleepy everyone was) of what’s coming next Monday on the news front. Among the changes: CBC Newsworld becomes CBC News Network; the new branding for CBC news (complete with black and red Mad Men colours and fonts) is Know Now; there’s a new politics portal starring KO’M; some personnel changes in local tv and radio, and other stuff.

Colleague Geddes and I both agreed that the most interesting tidbit was the new 6pm version of the National, that will be ten minutes long and be streamed online. Even more radical: A four-minute version of the National available, also at 6pm, on your Blackberry and iPhone. No one from the CBC could answer any questions about the nature of the application that would run this broadcast, which was bad planning. They should have had an techie present to show it off.

UPDATE:

This is how the CBC NN lineup is going to look all day:

Heather Hiscox, followed by

Anna Marie Mediwake, followed by

Suhana Meharchand, followed by

Carole MacNeil, then

Evan Solomon, then

Mark Kelly, then

Peter Mansbridge

Bickering pilots forget to land

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 10:28 AM - 5 Comments

Fasten your seatbelts, passengers. It seems those soothing messages from the captain mask an all-too human reality of short fuses among crew members during crowded domestic flights. In the case of Northwest Airlines Flight 188 from San Diego, a “heated discussion” in the cockpit caused the Airbus A320 to fly for more than 240 km past its Minneapolis destination on Wednesday, airline officials confirmed. More alarming still for ground-based controllers, the jetliner was in radio silence for more than an hour, raising concerns of a hijacking. The plane ended up turning around and landing safely, but the U.S. transportation safety board says it is investigating. So-called “fatigue issues” may be a factor, it says.

BBC News

Canada in Afghanistan: What should happen after 2011?

By Michael Petrou - Friday, October 23, 2009 at 10:21 AM - 3 Comments

The University of British Columbia’s Liu Institute for Global Issue is hosting a panel discussion today about Canada’s post-2011 role in Afghanistan. Here’s a written summary of my remarks: 

Canada’s mission in Afghanistan after 2011 deserves more clarity and focus than it has so far been given. I believe three basic questions will help us frame that debate: What do we want to accomplish? What can we accomplish? How do we do achieve our goals?

I see three broad answers to the first question about what our goals should be, all of which will differently shape Canada’s involvement in Afghanistan: defence against terrorism; counter-insurgency; and nation-building.

If our goals are only to deny Afghanistan as a safe haven for terrorists with international reach, and to destroy any such terrorists that are in Afghanistan, an argument can and has been made that we can afford a much lighter footprint. If our enemy is al Qaeda and affiliated groups that might directly threaten Canada, it shouldn’t matter to us how much territory the Taliban take over, or what abuses they inflict on local populations, unless territory under their control is used to shelter and support terrorist groups with global reach.

The degree of cooperation between the Taliban and al Qaeda is debatable. I recently spoke with a knowledgeable Western diplomat who said al Qaeda’s involvement in the Afghan insurgency is minimal. On the other hand, analysts such as Ahmed Rashid point with justification to past cooperation between the Taliban and al Qaeda as a sign of what might if Afghanistan were ceded to the Taliban, and there is evidence of interaction between local Taliban and international jihadists in Waziristan, Pakistan. It may be that targeting al Qaeda cannot be separated from targeting the Taliban. But we should clearly define our objective. Continue…