Potential trouble for Team Canada?

By Scott Feschuk - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 5:54 PM - 6 Comments

Is it just me or has that easy victory over Germany given Roberto Luongo a big head?

Where was Lucien when it mattered?

By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 5:54 PM - 10 Comments

It’s almost as if he’d never been in charge.

First, Lucien Bouchard breaks his years-long silence to say the PQ is hopelessly misguided—on sovereignty, on the economy, on identity. Then he says Quebec is starving its universities by capping tuition. I can’t be the only one waiting for the other shoe to drop. (Jamais deux sans trois, and all that.) But whether or not he completes the trifecta, none of it really matters. Bouchard is hardly the white knight Quebec conservatives would like him to be.

The problem with Bouchard’s criticisms isn’t that they’re hypocritical—they’re not—nor that they’re fundamentally wrong. It’s that they’re anachronistic.

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Clara Hughes takes speed skating bronze in 5,000-metre

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 5:42 PM - 3 Comments

Canada’s Clara Hughes has taken the bronze in the in 5,000-metre race at the Richmond Olympic Oval. The Czech Republic’s Martina Sablikova took the gold and Germany’s Stephanie Beckert won silver. “I skated really well technically… I felt like I had just a good rhythm today,” the breathless medalist told CTV shortly after the event, who posted a respectable time of 6:55.73. The 37-year-old Hughes is the first woman to medal in both the Summer and Winter Games; she won gold in the 5,000 in Turin in 2006 and silver in the team pursuit, bronze in the 5,000 at Salt Lake City in 2002, and two cycling bronze medals in the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta. Ottawa’s Kristina Groves finished sixth with a time of 7:04.57.

Montreal Gazette

Bernier, uncut

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 4:59 PM - 35 Comments

CBC has the unedited version of the letter Maxime Bernier sent to La Presse.

Data from tree rings in the forests even show some cooling; that’s why they were replaced by temperatures considered more accurate from meteorological stations in the IPCC graphs. This is what the famous quote about the trick “to hide the decline” by British researcher Phil Jones, which created such controversy during the “Climategate” episode, refers to.

For whatever it is worth, here is Time magazine’s primer on the so-called Climategate emails.

Coyne v. Wells on the Olympics

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 4:57 PM - 7 Comments

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Bernier questions climate science

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 4:49 PM - 14 Comments

Maxime Bernier may not be in Cabinet, but he’s certainly finding his way back into the headlines. The Beauce MP published an open letter La Presse on Wednesday in which he unreservedly embraces climate change skeptics, arguing that “every week that goes by brings more confirmation of the wisdom of our government’s moderate position.” An unedited version of the letter obtained by the CBC shows Bernier going even further in his criticism of climate science. “Satellite data show less warming than terrestrial stations, which may have been contaminated by heat coming from more extended urban areas,” Bernier asserts. “Data from tree rings in the forests even show some cooling; that’s why they were replaced by temperatures considered more accurate from meteorological stations in the IPCC graphs.” Given that “there is no consensus among scientists” as to the extent of the climate change problem, Bernier concludes the best way to address the issue is to sit back and wait. “It would be irresponsible to spend billions of dollars and to impose unnecessarily stringent regulations to solve a problem whose gravity we still are not certain about,” he writes. “The alarmism that has often characterized this debate is no longer appropriate.”

CBC News

Difficult-to-Access-Information on Rights and Democracy

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 4:41 PM - 14 Comments

There’s little I can add to colleague Paul Wells’ reporting on the mess at Rights and Democracy. He has almost single-handedly driven this story and though mentally exhausted by his efforts should be proud of them.

My own involvement in the story started last year when I got word that trouble was brewing at the organization. No one was willing to go on the record at the time, so I filed several access-to-information requests to the government, including one to the Privy Council Office asking for a copy of a performance evaluation report on the now deceased president of Rights and Democracy, Rémy Beauregard.

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LOST Provides a Catchphrase to Replace "A Wizard Did It"

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 4:37 PM - 2 Comments

This is one of my weirder quirks, but when a show introduces a new object or character purely for plot purposes, I kind of like it when the writers don’t try too hard to explain it. I mean, there are cases where it just feels lazy. But there are also cases where we know and accept that things are being done for the sake of convenience, and it doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of time justifying it. So when Lost had a previously-unseen lighthouse pop up in last night’s episode, the explanation seemed about right to me:

“How come we never saw this before?”

“I guess we weren’t looking for it before.”

It has an overlay of symbolism and semi-profundity (Lost seems to be turning subtext into text more often, letting characters explicitly state the themes or talk about their lives in analytical terms, and that’s not getting into the meta, TV-about-TV aspects of the lighthouse plot). But basically it’s just the equivalent of that line Lucy Lawless said on The Simpsons: “Whenever you notice something like that, a wizard did it.” Whenever Lost conveniently introduces something nobody ever saw before, it’s because “they weren’t looking for it before.”

Brian McKeever's blind determination

By Nicholas Köhler - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 3:56 PM - 4 Comments

Photograph by Chris Bolin

UPDATE: The Canadian cross-country team is not entering Brian McKeever in the 50-kilometre mass-start classic race on Sunday. Coach Inge Braten expressed regret, but stated that they could only put forth four names and the other four members of the team have had strong top-10 finishes during these Games. The coaches asked if they could enter a fifth competitor considering it was their home country but were denied.

Stargardt’s disease, the most common form of inherited juvenile macular degeneration—a form of blindness—started its work early on Bill McKeever. As far back as Grade 1, Bill, who grew up on a farm east of Calgary in the early ’50s, found he could not see the blackboard from one end to the other. Too much chit-chat with a pal in the back of class earned him a spot in the front, a move that did much to improve the view. For a while he tried glasses. “Didn’t do any good,” says Bill. “They just sort of put lenses in front of you and figured maybe you’re stupid because you can’t read farther down the chart.” Stargardt’s, which begins by wiping out the central vision, then erodes the peripheral, remained undiagnosed until he was 15 and a big-city optometrist said he’d get more help from the CNIB than any doctor.

Bill later became a schoolteacher, corralling three decades’ worth of kids despite retaining just 10 per cent of his vision (it’s now closer to six). With his wife, Jean, a school librarian, he had two sons: Robin, then Brian six years later. Both would go on to secure spots on Canadian Olympic cross-country ski teams—Robin at Nagano in 1998, Brian in Vancouver—circumstances all the more miraculous since their legally blind dad taught the pair how to ski and that one of them inherited Bill’s blindness. This year, 30-year-old Brian, with just 10 per cent vision, all of it peripheral—“it’s like seeing the donut, but not the Timbit,” he likes to say—becomes the first winter-sport athlete ever named to both Olympic and Paralympic teams. He’ll likely compete in the men’s 50-km on Feb. 28.

Brian, whose fine, almost elfin features belie an unmistakable confidence, downplays the achievement. “All of us have something that we need to overcome, whether it’s psychological, whether it’s physical,” he said during the unveiling of the cross-country team. No doubt he’s learned a few things from his coaches and teammates. But little compares to the lessons gleaned from the father with whom he shares his disease, and from the older brother who began as his idolized Olympic sibling, morphed into the partner who guided him to four Paralympic gold medals, and who finally became a competitor. “It’s shifted from me being the older brother, the wise old one, the athlete teaching the younger brother,” says Robin, 36. “Now he’s the one who’s all professional with his athletic career. I’m doing whatever I can to keep up.”

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Who’s to Blame?

By Nicholas Kohler with Aaron Wherry and Nancy Macdonald - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 3:55 PM - 7 Comments

Gregory Carigiet, a 22-year-old psychiatric nursing student from the Swiss canton of Grison, is an awfully good luger. Ranked 19th in the world this season, he was well ahead of 21-year-old Nodar Kumaritashvili, the Georgian ranked 44th whose gruesome death during an Olympic training run last Friday focused so much attention on a sport—luge—that remains relatively obscure in North America. Yet the fact that Kumaritashvili made it to the Olympics, where he would have raced on the fastest and therefore arguably the most dangerous track in the world, while Carigiet did not, worries many in the sport. It suggests a deadly flaw in the way athletes are selected to compete on high-performance tracks.

“Georgia was—the irony is—lucky to qualify for the Games,” Wolfgang Staudinger, Canada’s luge coach, told Maclean’s. Thanks to an esoteric wrinkle in Switzerland’s Olympic qualifying process, Carigiet did not make his country’s cut for the men’s event, meant to gather the top 40 international sliders for competition at the Whistler Sliding Centre, which hits racers hard with a vertical drop of 152 m and can catapult them to record speeds of 153 km/h. “They left him at home,” says Staudinger. “That opened a spot in the top-40 field, and whoever was next—41st, 42nd and so on—basically, they moved up.”

Kumaritashvili benefited from a number of such top-40 omissions, permitting him a place in an elite group many believe he had no business competing in. And so, two hours before he was scheduled to board the bus for the opening ceremonies in Vancouver, he was on a training run at speeds exceeding 140 km/h when he made an error exiting turn 15. Slammed by the curve’s massive G-force, he attempted to compensate but flipped over, ricocheted off the track wall, and flew headfirst into a support pillar. It was the first fatal crash in luge competition in 35 years and the first Olympic death since 1992, when Swiss skier Nicolas Bochatay died on a training run in Albertville, France.

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A Mountain of Riches

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 3:39 PM - 0 Comments

West Vancouver’s Cypress Mountain has brutalized Olympic fans since the start of these Games, but it’s been good, very good, to Canada’s athletes. It’s thrown rain, fog and wind at spectators and athletes, and forced harried Vancouver Olympic organizers to cancel 24,000 standing-room tickets, lest fans drown in a sea of mud. But Tuesday afternoon the rain stopped, the fog lifted and local gal Maëlle Ricker tamed her hometown hill. She stormed down the snowboard-cross course to win Canada’s second gold of these Games, and the fourth Canadian medal on the mountain in four days. On Monday, teammate and fellow boarder Mike Robertson took silver off the same course.

Ricker’s first qualifying run was “a disaster,” she said, but she pulled it together on her second and final chance. Teammate Dominique Maltais, a bronze medallist in Turin, fell twice and didn’t advance, a shock that didn’t knock 31-year-old Ricker off stride. Once into the finals, the veteran of three Olympics never looked back. In the start gate, she followed her usual ritual and put a chilling dump of snow down her back. “It gives me a little zip,” she said. Her race strategy was simple enough. “I tried to explode out of the gate,” she said later. The next challenge, she knew from the frequent falls on the rutted, treacherous course, was to stay on her feet. “It was really, really hard today to get a clean run all the way down the course.” Ricker, the “old lady of boarder cross” as she puts it, did that in style. She was so far ahead of second place Deborah Anthonioz of France it seemed she was racing alone.

At the base of the hill, her parents and friends among a crowd of 8,000 went wild. In a classy move, bronze medallist Olivia Nobs of Switzerland used hand signals to whip the crowd into a frenzy before Ricker took the podium. It was a storybook finish and a sweet homecoming for the daughter of a geologist father and a biology teacher mother who grew up on the North Shore boarding on Cypress and its neighbouring mountains. Across the water in Vancouver, the Heritage Horns atop Canada Place blared the first four notes of O Canada in celebration, the sound echoing off the mountains and across the city.

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Back in the Game

By Nancy Macdonald - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 3:35 PM - 2 Comments

Photograph by Brian Howell

Already, veteran sniper Cherie Piper has scored two goals and three assists in Team Canada’s pair of blowout wins in Vancouver. But for the big, strong East York, Ont., native, who plays alongside captain Hayley Wickenheiser, the road to the Games was anything but a cakewalk.

It all started with an ugly injury in a college game between her Dartmouth Big Green and Providence four years ago. When she tore her ACL, she says, everyone at the New Hampshire rink heard the “pop.” It came midway through Piper’s final NCAA season—just nine months after her triumphant return from Turin, where Canada won gold and she finished second on the team in scoring. Following surgery, Piper didn’t get back on the ice for six months, and missed a full year with the national squad.

And just as she was regaining her fitness and timing, her dad Alan died of a heart attack; he’d been Piper’s coach and mentor, had first put her on skates at age eight in a Toronto boys’ league, and ferried her across the city to games for years. “It was tough to finish the season,” says Piper, then with the Mississauga Chiefs of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League. The rink was no longer a refuge; hockey suddenly became a grim reminder of all she’d lost.

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Talking with the Taliban?

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 2:52 PM - 1 Comment

In today’s National Post, Terry Glavin has a short article about how former mujahideen leader Bernahuddin Rabbani is warning against Karzai’s plans to engage in talks with what he (Karzai) has called his “Taliban brothers.” Worth your time is the longer backstory to the piece, which Glavin has on his blog.

Also, for those keen on withdrawing militarily from Afghanistan in order to jump-start talks with the Taliban, the current issue of Commentary has a piece looking at what happened the last time the Americans tried that. “Taking Tea with the Taliban” explores the rather feckless attempts by the Clinton administration to get the Taliban to follow through on its commitment to not allow terrorists to operate out of Afghanistan, and to keep a muzzle on bin Laden.

Dept. of Workin’ Hard

By Scott Feschuk - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 2:40 PM - 4 Comments

There are some subtle differences between the Olympic media centres in Whistler and Vancouver. The biggest difference is size. Let me attempt to give you an illustration of what I mean.

Imagine the Whistler Media Centre to be the size of Gary Coleman. That would, by comparison, make the Vancouver Media Centre the size of a 5,000-foot tall Gary Coleman (* comparison may not be to scale, or useful in any way). Bottom line: It’s enormous.

It has a huge food court, dominated by McDonald’s. It has its own Olympic merchandise shop and bank and postal outlet. But I came upon the biggest and most important difference while wandering around on the second level, up where the press conferences are held.

There, off the beaten path, I came across a sign and a room that Continue…

Owning the podium doesn't necessarily involve owning the podium

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 2:39 PM - 19 Comments

The Heritage Minister clarifies.

Heritage Minister James Moore attended an International Media Centre celebratory event in Vancouver Tuesday with the new ice-dance champions and said the name of the Own the Podium program should not be taken literally. ”It’s not, ‘First place or bust,’ ” said Moore. ”It’s … ‘Go for gold and go for broke and do yourself proud and perform at the best of your ability.’”

A British plea for sensible policy on unscientific remedies

By John Geddes - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 2:34 PM - 26 Comments

A new report from Britain on the ineffectiveness of homeopathic medicine should set off alarm bells in Canada. The MPs on the British House of Commons science and technology committee issued a report this week that says homeopathic remedies don’t work.

Having studied the available research, the committee takes aim at Britain’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency for licensing homeopathic treatments—giving consumers the misleading impression they are somehow comparable to approved drugs backed by science.

Lest Canadians imagine that putting a government seal of approval on imaginary cures is an amusing example of English eccentricity, I’m sorry to have to point out that Health Canada’s Natural Health Products Directorate does the same thing.

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Ottawa eliminates two-for-one custody credit

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 2:25 PM - 16 Comments

The federal government will no longer allow judges to grant double or triple credit to convicts for time served in pre-sentence custody. New rules implemented on Monday mandate a one-to-one ratio in reducing sentences for time already served, though judges can still award pre-sentencing credits using a 1.5-for-one ratio under extenuating circumstances, such as a trial being delayed through no fault of the accused. However, exceeding the one-to-one ratio will require judges to include a reason for doing so in the court record. In an interview with CTV News Channel, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said the previous system “was undermining people’s confidence in the criminal justice system,” and said the new rules have the “unanimous” support of provincial attorneys general.

CTV News

There's Snow in them-thar Hills!

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 2:13 PM - 1 Comment

Thirteen days in spring-like Vancouver made the winter part of the Winter Olympics seem a bit abstract. When people are wearing shorts around town, you feel like a bit of a knob in your fleece and ski jacket. (In my defense, it’s chilly inside the Richmond Oval, and Mom told me to keep warm.)

But here in Whistler—my assignment for the rest of the Games—the day dawned with a fresh blanket of the white stuff. It’s still more late-spring, than winter wonderland (1 degree and a bit goopey) but I’ll take it.

It’s the kind of conditions that the Canadian cross-country skiers have been waiting for. They figure the course will favour their grinding style as the 4×10 km men’s relay gets underway in five minutes.

This is probably Canada’s best hope for a medal. Should be fun.

As to the reality of climate change (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 2:12 PM - 22 Comments

Asked, via e-mail, whether Environment Minister Jim Prentice believes in “anthropogenic (or man-made) global warming,” Mr. Prentice’s press secretary sends along the following response.

“Yes.”

As to the reality of climate change

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 1:39 PM - 46 Comments

The former foreign affairs minister makes the case for skepticism.

Asked, via e-mail, whether the Prime Minister believes in “anthropogenic (or man-made) global warming,” the Prime Minister’s Office passes along the following transcript of an exchange from Mr. Harper’s closing press conference in Copenhagen late last year.

Reporter: Prime Minister your party in the past has talked about… questioned the science of climate change and there was renewed talk of that this week. President Obama gave a really strong statement in favor of the science of climate change. Where do you stand on that now?

Harper: Well we’ve been very clear. The preponderance of scientific evidence and opinion is that climate change is a very real challenge. The science continues to evolve. As you know, we’ve had some controversy recently because the science is not uniform, not every scientist agrees on every detail. But we are guided by the preponderance of the evidence. And that is absolutely clear. But ultimately leaders have to translate the necessity of dealing with the challenge in the science of climate change with the very real impacts that trying to deal with it will have on our economy. And we should not try and kid people on this. I know people… there’ll be people running out there saying targets are not hard enough. But let me assure you what we and others are committed to do over the next decade will have real impacts and real challenges on players and the Canadian economy, but we’ll obviously work with them to ensure that we balance these objectives of environmental protection and progress with economic growth.

Dalton McGuinty to recalibrate in record time

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 1:32 PM - 4 Comments

The Ontario legislature will be prorogued over the first weekend in March, without eliminating a single sitting day.

ABC News announces massive cuts

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 1:31 PM - 4 Comments

Dark days are ahead for the staff of ABC News, as the network has announced plans to cut a quarter of its personnel by the end of 2010. In a memo to staff, ABC News president David Westin gave the broad strokes of what will be a massive restructuring plan, and will begin with buy-out offers in the coming days. Prompted by the recession, and the opportunities afforded by new technology in the digital age (read: the ability to do more with fewer people), Westin says he’s spent the last three months devising how and where to trim staff, which currently total 1,400. “I would not be pursuing this if I thought we would be compromising the news,” he says. The announcement comes as CBS is in the midst of layoffs, and NBC underwent cutbacks two years ago.

CBC News

If the boss won't let him back into cabinet…

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 1:13 PM - 71 Comments

…Max Bernier will just have to run to replace him.

Wendy Mesley come on down

By Sharon Dunn - Wednesday, February 24, 2010 at 1:03 PM - 15 Comments

It was 1976, and I had just been hired as a television news anchor and staff announcer at CBC’s Halifax station. Only 22 years old, I had been put through a complicated audition process beforehand—anchoring both the six and 11 o’clock news, including at-the-board weather and interviews, then turning around the very next day to host early-morning radio at 6 a.m., and the afternoon show at 4 p.m., before racing back to the TV studio to anchor the six and 11 o’clock newscasts all over again. Over a 24-hour period, I was a one-woman band—all a test to see if a woman could keep up to the “rigours of the job,” as management put it, something I suspect a male announcer had never been asked to do. It seemed to be a set-up to ensure I’d fail, but when I refused to be reduced to a withering heap on the floor, the bewildered CBC bosses reluctantly confirmed my position on staff, and my trial period was over. I had made it—the first-ever female CBC staff announcer in the Atlantic provinces. (By that time, Jan Tennant had held the distinction in Toronto for five years.)

I was a pioneer, and pioneering was not to be easy. Criticism abounded from within the ranks: male announcers were aghast, managers were still leery, even some female employees expressed their displeasure (“women shouldn’t be reading the news”; “they aren’t credible”; “their voices are too shrill”). This was a time when the only shows women hosted were afternoon-tea-type programs about flowers and food and arts and crafts—shows I abhorred. The most widely held belief, even among those who begrudgingly accepted my appointment, was that my time in TV would definitely be short-lived—women anchors would surely be out of a job as they aged, well before they reached 40.

Four years later, when I moved to Toronto to anchor CBC’s flagship 6 o’clock TV news, I realized things weren’t much better when one Toronto manager told me that women shouldn’t be anchors because “men become credible as they age and women just get old.”

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