Peter Goldring Maverick Watch

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 14, 2009 at 10:27 AM - 9 Comments

The Conservative MP seems vaguely uncomfortable with the tone of recent ten-percenters.

… he believes rules governing the flyers should be amended to moderate the overtly political tone and content that has creeped in over the past few years, including recent NDP flyers he said he believes are targeting him for electoral purposes.

“I get an awful lot of Ten Percenters from the other parties, and particularly from the NDP in Edmonton East, they’re kind of targeting,” said Mr. Goldring. “I do believe that we could have it in a little more moderation, but the rules allow it that way. I would not have a problem with rules tightening up a bit.”

A facial for your, um, “other cheeks”

By Rebecca Eckler - Monday, December 14, 2009 at 9:27 AM - 4 Comments

The body area we talk about the most (“Is it getting bigger?”), worry about the most (“It’s getting bigger”) and also use the most (at work, at home, while moaning “I need to get off my . . .”) is also the area we neglect the most. I was made aware of this on a recent visit to the Ritz-Carlton in South Beach, where, apparently, the thong bikini never goes out of style, and they offer a spa treatment called the “Divine Derriere,” which, the spa notes, “will leave your derriere to be envied by all at the pool and beach.”

So what does one do when she learns of a facial for her, um, “other cheeks”? Well, of course, she immediately inquires about it and books an appointment, while trying to keep a straight face.

“You’re here for a massage and the Divine Derriere treatment?” a spa employee asks, when I check in. Uh-huh. That’s right. Please don’t announce this out loud, I think.
Though I shouldn’t be embarrassed. In warmer climates throughout North America, facials for your bum—also sometimes called fanny facials—are just another spa treatment. According to Liliana Dominguez-Grajales, the spa director at the Ritz-Carlton, pampering your bum has become the new Brazilian bikini wax. “Out here, just like everyone does the Brazilian, it’s more shocking if you don’t do it! When the snowbirds come down, we get so many requests for the Divine Derriere. In South Beach, all inhibitions go out the door. People want to expose everything,” she explains.

Continue…

Tales of over-the-top Christmas

By Brian Bethune - Monday, December 14, 2009 at 9:26 AM - 4 Comments

Christmas. No other day on the Western calendar is so pregnant with meaning and emotion. Through a long and winding road, our society’s dominant religion, our deepest and also most ambivalent feelings about our families, the instinctive way we demonstrate (and accept) love in a commercial culture, and the ancient rhythms of the year, have all became bound up in one shiny wrapped package. The family-Christmas tie, relentlessly reinforced by everything from advertising to sermons, means that Christmas and excess—in food and drink, in decoration and, above all, in gift-giving—go together like eggnog and rum.

More and better is the day’s unspoken motto, moan as we do—for a good century and a half now—about its frenzied and ever-accelerating consumerism. Christmas’s cultural sway cuts right across Western society. The handful of us who strive to avoid its weirdly compelling blend of faith, traditions (faux and real) and appalling expense—a mix of devout Christians seeking a more austere celebration of their saviour’s birth in a stable, those stressed beyond endurance by combustible forced intimacy with their families, and all-around Scrooges—find it near impossible to escape. Even the website antichristmas.org, which fulminates against “plastic Santa Clauses, cardboard reindeers and other trashy decorations,” nonetheless carries ads for Christmas cards and lights.

Continue…

Just doing my bit for eating locally

By Jacob Richler - Monday, December 14, 2009 at 9:18 AM - 6 Comments

Just a tick after 9 a.m. Tuesday last I succeeded first time out at something my dog Bonko has been working at with unavailing passion for the greater part of his adult life: I sank my teeth angrily into the succulent hind leg of a common squirrel. All right, all right—to be fair to the dog, I should concede that unlike his dream rodent, mine was not dancing in the branches above, its demeanour mocking—rather it was inert. Okay, it was deceased, skinned, drawn, quartered and cooked à point.

My squirrel breakfast actually consisted of only a single hind leg, perched in a come-hither pose on top of a slice of boudin noir and another of seared foie gras. Beneath that there was a disc of intensely flavoured, butter-drenched gingerbread adrift in a pool of puréed persimmon. A second slice of boudin capped the pretty tower, a little diced braised pork belly had been scattered about, and for the final flourish, a generous drizzle of rich duck jus infused with wild winter green tea.

There are no doubt those purists who prefer their squirrels presented with less culinary fuss. But for me its accompanying acts were not a distraction but a laudable enhancement. For starters the flavours all fit together beautifully; just as important, take note that the squirrel leg in question tipped the scales (if you can call it that) at just 11 grams. Continue…

What happened in the Aughts? Technology and Culture 2.0

By Andrew Potter - Monday, December 14, 2009 at 9:11 AM - 6 Comments

Over at the Ottawa Citizen, our opinions page deputy editor David Watson has put together a series looking back at the Aughts, asking various writers  to “assess human progress in a variety of fields over the last 10 years: economics, science and technology, culture, poverty alleviation, nuclear disarmament and more.”

The first installment was “The Future Disappoints,” from Robert Sawyer. It’s a fun piece in the “where’s my moving sidewalk and jetpack?” genre, looking at how scientific progress stalled over the last decade. My contribution is in today’s paper, it’s about Web 2.0 and the democratization of culture. Not sure what Dave has lined up next, but I’m looking forward to it.

Datebook

By Paul Wells - Monday, December 14, 2009 at 8:26 AM - 9 Comments

François Fillon will be attending the Sting concert tomorrow night at the Salle Pleyel.

The good news is, we can definitely keep the "The"

By Colby Cosh - Monday, December 14, 2009 at 7:47 AM - 19 Comments

I think we have a runaway winner in the 2009 “Brand That Had The Most Difficult Month” sweepstakes. (Some interesting background from the Financial Times.)

Warnings then and now

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 14, 2009 at 1:12 AM - 44 Comments

Canadian Press delves deeper into what Canada did, or didn’t, do about Asadullah Khalid, a notorious Afghan governor. The former chair of the Military Police Complaints Commission reiterates his concerns about government secrecy. The Foreign Affairs Minister concedes that tracking detainees remains a “challenge.”

“The May, 2007, arrangement states that the government of Canada will be notified prior to the release of a Canadian-transferred detainee by Afghan authorities. However, notification has been a challenge,” Mr. Cannon conceded in a written and little-noticed answer delivered to Parliament’s order paper last week, weeks after ministers had first faced and deflected questions on the subject at committee hearings.

… military sources have admitted that at least some detainees have been captured multiple times. The impact on morale of capturing Taliban fighters, transferring them to Afghan custody and then facing them again in combat is severe, according to Canada’s top diplomat in Kabul. The “release of detainees is having a profound and demoralizing affect on our soldiers,” Ambassador William Crosbie wrote in a Sept. 19 memo.

Oh boy. Here we go.

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, December 13, 2009 at 12:00 PM - 119 Comments

My profile for dead-tree Maclean’s of Steve McIntyre, Canada’s amateur critic of mainstream climate science, has hit the web at a moment when the temperature outside my door is -36°C. I am firmly resisting the temptation to see any providential message in this. The piece was written and edited with the intention that it would be of interest to readers no matter what their beliefs about man-made climate change. It contains a short argument for McIntyre’s importance, but if you are convinced he’s a charlatan or a bungler, think of it as a sincere effort to tell you what kind of charlatan or bungler he is. As far as I am aware, it is the first profile of McIntyre, of even medium length, that anyone in Canada has ventured to write.

Hipsters do "Feed the World"

By Andrew Potter - Sunday, December 13, 2009 at 10:25 AM - 2 Comments

This is for charity. It’s pretty good, esp if you crank it up:

What colour is your Christmas?

By Andrew Potter - Sunday, December 13, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 4 Comments

This is the season of lists. And, thanks to Kottke,  of lists of lists. There are so many lists on offer that it’s hard to make a list that gets above the fray, stands out from the crowd.  So maybe it is understandable, in that narrowest of ways, that the New York Times saw fit to publish of list of Christmas gifts by, and for, people of colour:

Somali fashion, do-it-yourself henna kits, children’s books that draw inspiration from the lives of Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor: it’s not hard to find gifts created for and by people of color this holiday season…

Not to mention a book called ‘The Mocha Manual to Military Life: A Savvy Guide for Wives, Girlfriends and Female Service Members’, hair de-kinking products, and a makeup guide for “Asian Faces”. Mediate calls it “borderline racist”; I suspect it is more an unfortunate combination of runaway competition in the the world of list-making combined with excessive Obama-era self-consciousness about race.

Arrests in Copenhagen

By macleans.ca - Sunday, December 13, 2009 at 10:08 AM - 3 Comments

On Saturday, over 100,000 demonstrators marched in Copenhagen protesting their dissatisfaction with the climate change talks. It was a mostly peaceful protest until youths clad in black began throwing bricks and smashing windows. Police ended up arresting 968 protesters, including close to 400 members of European militant group Black Blocs. Most were released by the next day. Indoors,  delegates spent the weekend working towards an agreement, after a draft blue-print that was put forward on Friday was widely criticized by many of the countries involved.

National Post

Tiger takes break from golf, sponsors take break from him

By macleans.ca - Sunday, December 13, 2009 at 9:42 AM - 3 Comments

After announcing on his website that he will be taking an indefinite hiatus from playing professional golf to work on his marriage, Tiger Woods is now seeing his $100 million-a-year endorsement deals falling apart. Gillette announced it will phase Woods from its new year marketing campaign, cleverly claiming that the company is supporting his request for privacy. Meanwhile, AT&T made a statement that it is currently evaluating its relationship with the tarnished mega-star and there is no sign of Woods on the website of Accenture, an international consulting firm. Only Nike and Electronic Arts seem to be keeping the faith.

Boston Herald

Top 10 Canadian albums of the decade

By macleans.ca - Sunday, December 13, 2009 at 9:07 AM - 41 Comments

10. Feist – The Reminder (2007)
For all the excitement and self-congratulation that defined the decade in Canadian music, these 10 years may ultimately be remembered for two records (Arcade Fire’s Funeral and Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It In People) and one star (Feist). The potential for stardom was clearly there when Leslie Feist emerged with Let It Die. But she surpassed all imagination with The Reminder, a seductive pop record that was at once charming and eccentric, of the iPod moment and timeless. (Aaron Wherry)

9. The Constantines – Shine A Light (2003)
With a burst of frantic, jagged guitar on opening stomper “National Hum,” The Constantines leave no doubt they’re intent on making a racket. And what a glorious racket it turns out to be. Shine A Light is that exceptional album that’s as smart as it is intense. From the brooding menace of “Nightime/Anytime (It’s Alright)” to the rumbling, Springsteen-esque “On to You,” there’s a rare depth to the urgency of their music. It’s soulful rock ‘n roll that proves loud doesn’t have to mean dumb. (Philippe Gohier)

8. Sam Roberts – The Inhuman Condition (2002)
Sam Roberts kick-started the summer of 2002 with the bongo-heavy single “Brother Down.” Soon after, Roberts was shuttled into the studio with major label money—and it’s been a jam-band, epic, psychedelic, anthemic rock party ever since. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But the first EP, featuring six straight-ahead infectious pop-laced rock ditties, heralded one of the most exciting—and unabashedly Canadian—new voices of the decade. (Shanda Deziel)

7. Tangiers – Hot New Spirits (2003)
For awhile there, Toronto was a pretty weird place to live: SARS, a garbage-strewn civic strike, the final days of Mel Lastman, a blackout that became an excuse to party. All the while, the city’s music was starting to reassert itself. Hot New Spirits is the lost gem of that time—an anxious, nervy, joyous announcement to the world. Other bands would come to define the scene and the decade, but this is what it sounded like before we knew where we were going. (Aaron Wherry)

6. Sarah Harmer – You Were Here (2000)
Sarah Harmer’s “Lodestar” is like a Tom Thomson painting set to music, a gorgeous portrait of a “great black night” and a fateful canoe trip. For that alone, You Were Here deserves to be one of the best Canadian albums of at least the last decade. But Harmer also proved that both her singing and songwriting shine through no matter the subject or genre, whether it’s jaunty pop, swinging jazz, guitar rock or bluegrass. She’s likely the only performer who’s covered both the Beastie Boys and Dolly Parton in her live set, and she deserves an MVP award for her generous spirit with artists both greater and smaller than herself. You Were Here shows off all her good sides; it’s hard to imagine there’s anything else. (Michael Barclay)

5. Wolf Parade – Apologies To The Queen Mary (2005)
This Montreal band’s debut album revealed an obsession with ghosts and a penchant for danceable indie rock. The two songwriters, guitarist Dan Boeckner and keyboardist Spencer Krug, laid themselves bare, whether on the daddy-issues track, “You Are a Runner and I Am My Father’s Son,” or the ecstatic closer “This Heart’s on Fire.” Four years later, all 12 tracks sound just as poignant and powerful as the first time you heard them. (Shanda Deziel)

4. New Pornographers – Mass Romantic (2000)
The word ‘supergroup’ usually conjures up images of Crobsy, Stills, Nash and Young, or for the truly-depraved, Asia. Yet this Vancouver octet—pieced together from local scenesters including Dan Bejar (Destroyer) Carl (A.C.) Newman and Neko Case—definitely qualifies. Their 2000 debut, Mass Romantic, blends power pop, Beach Boys-style harmonies, and some wickedly catchy tunes. Bonus points: The Fubar-themed video for “My Slow Descent in Alcoholism.”  (Jonathon Gatehouse)

3. Black Mountain – Black Mountain (2005)
It’s entirely possible the members of Black Mountain have never heeded Bob Dylan’s clarion call from “Rainy Day Women” (“Everybody must get stoned!”), but you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise based on their self-titled debut. That said, unlike all too many of their psychedelic, stoner-rock brethren, what makes Black Mountain stand out is their willingness to exercise restraint. The album is heavy and heady, but never gets weighed down by its proggy leanings. Standouts “Modern Music,” with its catchy “1-2-3, another pop explosion” chorus, “No Satisfaction,” with its blissed-out campfire vibe, and the swaggering, bluesy “Druganaut” show a band with impressive range—and the good sense not to overindulge it. (Philippe Gohier)

2. Broken Social Scene – You Forgot It In People (2002)
This is family values. This is it all coming together. The result is a seminal indie rock record. And in that achievement it became clear just how much was possible, launching a mid-decade renaissance for the Canadian music scene. The sight and sound of these friends and lovers crowding on stage together to make music defined the messy rush of wonderment that followed. (Aaron Wherry)

Centre of the storm

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, December 13, 2009 at 8:56 AM - 302 Comments

The private emails and logs leaked last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia can’t tell us whether industrial activity is really heating the earth’s atmosphere and endangering civilization. But they have settled the identity of the Great Satan of climate science. Torontonian Stephen McIntyre, a gentle, persistent amateur who had no credentials in applied science before stepping into the global warming debate in 2003, is mentioned more than 100 times.

In the emails, leading climate researchers dismiss him as a capitalist hireling or a hapless “bozo,” and argue about the relative merits of ignoring him versus counterattacking him, even as others acknowledge that his criticisms have merit and imitate his use of the Web as a venue for hyper-detailed scientific discussion. At one point in 2005, CRU director Phil Jones, now under suspension, ponders the possibility that McIntyre might use U.K. freedom-of-information laws to obtain raw weather-station data compiled by the CRU. He grumbles: “I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.” The overall impression is that of 100 elephants stampeding in confusion and panic around a mouse.

The political stakes are now so high when it comes to the “Climategate” scandal, and motives are being questioned so loudly on both sides, that few are noticing the remarkable story at the heart of it all: a 62-year-old mining executive and squash enthusiast has, for better or worse, found his way into the centre of a major scientific melée—almost by accident—and been able to make legitimate contributions. Continue…

We had something real, Tiger and I

By Scott Feschuk - Sunday, December 13, 2009 at 8:55 AM - 9 Comments

Thank you all for coming. Please, take a seat.

I have a confession to make. It’s painful for me to reveal, but I’m a person of integrity and the truth must come out: I, Scott Feschuk, humble magazine columnist, was one of Tiger Woods’s mistresses.

With all we’ve learned these past couple of weeks, it’s demeaning to admit this. I feel so cheap and dirty when I read the tabloids, scan the Internet or use these Ken and Barbie dolls to depict for you the precise mechanics of our lovemaking.

Hang on, I need to bend Barbie all the way back to—there we go.

[A thud is heard near the back of the room.]

Could someone please tend to Mr. Blitzer? I believe he’s fainted.

Continue…

Monday Caption Challenge No. 3

By Scott Feschuk - Sunday, December 13, 2009 at 6:27 AM - 75 Comments

For logistics-based reasons, I’m posting the Monday challenge on Sunday. As you read this, please be advised that it is NOT Monday – unless you are reading this on Monday, in which case please be advised that Couples Retreat is NOT a good movie.

The challenge, as always: To regard the assigned photograph – of famed Olympian Barbara Ann Scott having the cheek to spark up a Cheech-grade doobie smack in the middle of the House of Commons, and boy doesn’t Jim Flaherty in particular look delighted at this unexpected turn of events – and devise within your mind a caption of such astonishing insight and/or hilarity that grown men the world over have no choice but to tip their fedoras in your general direction and say something along the lines of “Indeed!” or “Very much so!”

Finalists will be announced Continue…

Grandpa, what did it mean to "take a picture"?

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, December 12, 2009 at 12:11 PM - 23 Comments

Among the most convincing “What will 2009 be remembered for?” ideas I’ve seen is Jason Kottke’s notion that this is the year we heard the death knell of traditional still photography. Esquire magazine broke new ground in May by capturing a high-definition cover image of Megan Fox without using a still camera at all: instead of having her cavort en maillot while a photographer activated a motor drive a couple thousand times, they shot the whole sequence with a high-definition video camera and selected the most appealing compositions from the resulting footage. When you imagine the editing process, you realize that there’s no clear qualitative distinction between taking two frames a second and taking 24. We’ve stepped forward into a world where “video” is capable of image quality as good as “still photography” was just a few years ago—allowing photographers to capture the crucial moment at leisure, after the shoot, instead of with their fingers in real time.

Of course, saying it “allows” them to do things a certain way doesn’t mean they’ll like it, because it “allows” everyone else to do it that way too. Ask a newspaper columnist how he much has enjoyed having his medium demoticized; it drives down the price something awful. The new “moving photography”, as it becomes available to the consumer, will be seen to de-privilege the mystical gift of perfect timing that was once perceived to distinguish a Cartier-Bresson or a Winogrand from the herd. (Though that argument becomes hard to sustain when you find out just how many exposures Winogrand, for one, took–more than he had time to scrutinize editorially, and maybe more than anyone ever will have time for. It seems likely that he regarded the shutter of his Leica as a mechanical impediment he would have been happy to see superseded.)

In short, cheap hi-def video seems poised to make editorial judgment (and being in the right place at the right time) scarce relative to content-generation, which is exactly what the web did to nonfiction writers. On the other hand, cameras aren’t totally Moorean. The price of chips and memory will continue to approach zero; glass, not so much.

Planet Snoop

By Andrew Potter - Saturday, December 12, 2009 at 10:59 AM - 7 Comments

Snoop was on Conan the other day. They talked about his desire to be the male Oprah, ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange, and showed off the new Snoop Dogg GPS. Good god Conan is annoying though.

'I haven't followed it'

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, December 12, 2009 at 10:13 AM - 111 Comments

Rick Hillier declines to comment on this week’s events.

Rick Hillier, formerly Canada’s top soldier, isn’t commenting about the recent revelations that Canadian-captured prisoners transferred to Afghan authorities were later tortured.

“I haven’t followed it,” Mr. Hillier said Friday in Halifax. ”I’m really not even in the mood or the ability to comment upon it, at this point, because I have not followed it in detail.”

Meanwhile, Defence Minister Peter MacKay and General Walter Natynczyk have been called to appear again before the special committee on Afghanistan. The chair of the Military Police Complaints Commission offers a warning as he departs. In a letter to the Citizen, the former ambassador to Venezuela urges everyone to move on. In a separate letter to the paper, the former ambassador to Brazil explains why he chose not to sign on with other former diplomats in support of Richard Colvin.

Meanwhile, over in Afghanistan

By Andrew Potter - Saturday, December 12, 2009 at 10:08 AM - 7 Comments

On Thursday, the government vewy vewy quietly tabled its quarterly report on how things are going over there. The short answer: Not Good. On all three axes — combat, development, and nation-building — things are looking very grim, with the bright spots few and far between.

The report was obviously written before Obama announced his surge, but that actually only serves to focus the question we should all be talking about: Given that Canada is far behind its benchmarks for progress, on what grounds can we justify our decision to end the combat mission in 2011? On CTV last week, Wesley Wark said it was pretty clear that Canada would have to extend its mission, given the surge. The host, unfortunately, didn’t see fit to push him on the point.

Top 10 Canadian movies of the decade

By Brian D. Johnson - Saturday, December 12, 2009 at 10:05 AM - 48 Comments

Using the Genie Awards criteria, I’ve confined the list to Canadian productions or co-productions. Not eligible are movies merely directed by Canadians, such as A History of Violence, Eastern Promises, Juno, Up in the Air and Avatar.

10. Manufactured Landscapes (2007)
Travelling to China, director Jennifer Baichwal looked over the shoulder of photographer Edward Burtynsky as he found haunting beauty in epic landscapes of industrial ruin and mass production. The film is a portrait of the artist, a magnification of his already larger-than-life art, and an exercise in perspective that shows us the moving picture outside his frame. Cinematographer Peter Mettler, whose Gambling, Gods and LSD almost made this list, holds his own with Burtynsky in composing visual poetry. Another film about manufactured landscapes that’s equally deserving is Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze (2008), a documentary on China’s Three Gorges Dam.

9. Polytechnique (2009)
Dramatizing the 1989 Montreal Massacre at École Polytechnique might appear to be impossible and unadvisable. But Quebec filmmaker Denis Villeneuve—whose Maelström and La turbulence des fluides narrowly missed ending up on this list—pulled it off with a stark, contemplative film that explores the horror without exploiting it. Filming in black-and-white, but mostly shades of wintry grey, largely ignoring the killer, Villeneuve focuses on two composite students. My colleague Mark Steyn suggested the film was an apology for the passivity of the men, concluding “you can’t make art out of such a world.” But like Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, Villeneuve’s art succeeds precisely because, unlike Steyn, he doesn’t mine the tragedy to draw a moral lesson.

8. Water (2005)
Following Fire and Earth, Deepa Mehta’s gorgeous period romance finessed a complex trilogy about women’s oppression in India, and it’s her finest film. Although it’s an unabashed romantic melodrama, it’s composed with an elegant eye and subtle, well-grounded performances. Water also performed a rare feat—a subtitled Hindi-language film became a box-office success in this country, then went on to get an Oscar nod, reminding us that popular Canadian cinema doesn’t have to be in English or French, or even shot in this country.

7. Spider (2002)
It’s the last film David Cronenberg shot before making a more mainstream breakthrough with A History of Violence and Eastern Promises. It’s relentlessly bleak, and it’s no surprise that virtually no one saw it. But Spider, starring a gnarly Ralph Fiennes as a schizophrenic who arrives at a halfway house after 20 years in institutions, is a brilliant psychological drama. With its chilling tableaus of industrial landscape, it’s also a fine-tuned portrait of the repressed desire and quiet desperation that are embedded like mildewed wallpaper into the English psyche.

6. Dying At Grace (2003)
Allan King, who died last year, was one of the world’s great vérité documentary filmmakers, making his name with excoriating portraits of raw psychology, such as Warrendale and Scenes of a Marriage. With Dying at Grace, like an explorer plumbing the outer limits of human experience, he takes the camera to a place it’s never been, as he films patients breathing their last breath in a palliative care ward. The film is not easy to watch, but there’s not a whiff of voyeurism. King, a director who makes a virtue of his own invisibility, gives us a work of pure cinema and captures the dying of the light.

5. C.R.A.Z.Y. (2005)
Quebec director Jean-Marc Vallée achieved a rare combination of wild artistic ambition and box-office success with this ’60s story about a young man growing up in working-class Montreal, infatuated with David Bowie, and struggling with his sexual identity. In the tradition of Léolo, it’s a poetic coming-of-age story set in the cultural vortex of Quebec’s not-so-Quiet Revolution, where Catholicism and psychedelia combine like nitroglycerin. Vallée took a huge gamble by building a major scene set in a church on Sympathy for Devil, then paid the Stones a small fortune for the rights—which still did not include America, thus thwarting U.S. distribution. Pity. Showing remarkable versatility, Vallée went on to direct a very different period film about a troubled adolescent, The Young Victoria.

4. My Winnipeg (2008)
Unfolding as an Oedipal fever dream, Guy Maddin’s love-hate portrait of his hometown mixes surreal memoir, faux documentary and actual documentary. With such seamless trompe l’oeil, it’s downright impossible to know, or care, which is which. That “archival” shot of horses frozen in the ice of the Red River looks so convincing. All of Maddin’s work is witty, virtuosic, and teeming with ideas, but this is his one masterpiece that is also utterly accessible, deeply moving, and laugh-out-loud funny.

3.  Barbarian Invasions (2003)
Reuniting actors from The Decline of The American Empire, it’s Denys Arcand’s finest work. Sometimes, Arcand lets intellectual ambition upstage emotion, but this symphonic ensemble piece moves gracefully from sweeping social satire to tender tragedy. The terminally-ill woman who seeks to end her life in the company of her friends, Marie Josée Croze, is a revelation.

2. Away From Her (2007)
Such an unlikely feat. While still in her 20s, Sarah Polley made her feature directing debut with an intimate tale of elder romance that drew pitch-perfect, career-capping performances from Gordon Pinsent and Julie Christie. Adapting and expanding on Alice Munro’s story, it’s one of those rare CanLit adaptations that works. Unlike most of the other titles on this list, it’s a conventional, unadorned narrative. But with its oddly uplifting story of a woman suffering from Alzheimer’s who forgets she has a husband, it is more exotic than it sounds. Polley locates a core of indelible romance in the heart of a vanishing marriage.

Up the Docs: Call for proposals

By Andrew Potter - Saturday, December 12, 2009 at 9:52 AM - 162 Comments

I spent the last few days  wandering around the Hill chatting with some of the few MPs who hadn’t made a beeline for the airport on Thursday night,  asking them about what the opposition’s endgame on the detainees documents issue was.  So Parliament has commanded the government to produce the documents. What next?  One NDP MP said to me on Thursday that the government would hand the documents over, no question. I asked him what would happen if the government refused. He said it couldn’t happen because “parliament is supreme”. End of story.

Well, yesterday the government said, effectively, “come and get them.” So again, opposition, what next? A Liberal MP, fresh from doing a TV hit about the detainee issue, told me she actually had no idea what the next step was. Does the Speaker put Peter MacKay in stocks? Does he send the Commons police or RCMP to break down doors and confiscate documents? Or does it – as Norman Spector suggests – end up in the courts, with the judiciary ruling on parliamentary privilege?

Another complication is that the House of Commons isn’t sitting for another five weeks. The special committee on Afghanistan is still sitting next week, but as our their Kady tells me, they can meet,  they can pass a motion to get a Speaker’s warrant, but after that, it’s all unprecedented. Besides, who would be summoned to the Bar, since Ministers can’t be compelled?

The opposition needs to be very, very careful how they play this. First of all, it isn’t clear how far the public is willing to let the opposition push this. The Tories looked bad in Parliament these past weeks, lobbing ridiculous accusations at the opposition and acting as if they had plenty to hide. But it isn’t clear how far public toleration will extend if it comes to the forced production to the Commons of secret documents. The government will yell and scream about the opposition helping our enemies and harming our soldiers and undermining our allies, and a lot of people will find it a reasonable line of complaint.

More worrisome still is that, based on a dim Walter Bagehot-era reading of the constitution and a jumped-up sense of the Commons as the supreme court of the land, the opposition seems bent on pushing Parliament into another crisis not dissimilar to last fall’s. There are not a lot of useful precedents for any of this, and a compromise seems in order. It is what the Speaker clearly wants, and what both sides should be working toward behind the scenes.

So here’s a proposal: When Canada joined the first Gulf War, Brian Mulroney appointed Audrey McLaughlin of the NDP to the privy council (Chretien was already a member). That way, they could both receive Cabinet-level briefings and have access to otherwise secret documents. This was very smart, politically: It gave the Opposition leaders access, at the price of not being able to disclose the information.

So one possibility would be for the government to offer to appoint three opposition members of the Afghan Committee to the privy council, and let them see all the relevant documents? Dosanjh and Rae are both already members. So why not add Paul Dewar of the NDP, and someone from the Bloc. That last suggestion is obviously a problem for federalists, but it also a problem for separatists. Who would be co-opting whom?

But as Spector and Kady both remind me, the problem with this proposal is that these new privy councilors couldn’t make use of this info on the committee, so it might not get them too far.

(UPDATE: Also, the more I think about this — and the more feedback I get from people smarter than I — the less plausible this seems. The Gulf War analogy doesn’t really work since the the point of the swearing in was prospective, not retrospective, while the Afghan committee has a political, not judicial, agenda.)

So if anyone has any other  suggestions for a compromise that might be struck here, let’s hear it.

The Globe and Blatchford, suite et fin

By Paul Wells - Saturday, December 12, 2009 at 8:34 AM - 0 Comments

The paper’s columnist responds to the assorted tormentors of herself and, as she sees it, of the Canadian Forces. I’m content to let her have the last word, so I’m closing comments on this thread and will close comments on any thread that readers try to turn into a let’s-talk-about-Christie thread. Let’s use our keyboards or bums, as the case may be, to move on to other issues, or to get back to the substance of the detainee story.