Hockey body checks safe for preteen players: study

By macleans.ca - Monday, March 22, 2010 at 12:10 PM - 5 Comments

Children as young as nine years old can safely use body-checking during ice hockey games, if the rules are strictly enforced, Canadian researchers reported today. The team looked at injury rates before and after a rule change that allowed this technique to be used by nine and 10-year-old players in Ontario, where, until 2002, only those ages 12 and up were permitted to do it. While there were slightly more injuries in 10 and 11-year-olds as a result of checking after the rule change, the overall injury rate for ages seven to 14 fell by about 20 per cent, Reuters reports, and among 12-year-olds, checking injuries were cut in half. Researchers wrote in the journal Pediatrics that such a decline was “unexpected,” noting that there was a major change over the same period to the way referees enforced rules for illegal contact.

Reuters

Virginia to sue over Obamacare

By macleans.ca - Monday, March 22, 2010 at 12:07 PM - 3 Comments

Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia’s attorney general, is planning to issue a legal challenge against the U.S. federal government for the “unconstitutional overreach of its authority” created by President Barack Obama’s health care bill, which passed through the House on Sunday. Cuccinelli says the bill, which is meant to provide coverage to 95 percent of Americans, goes too far because it forces citizens to purchase insurance. The government has claimed authority to regulate health care through its jurisdiction over interstate commerce, but Cuccinelli says that “just being alive is not interstate commerce,” and that his state’s citizens are not subject to a federal mandate. He plans to use a unique Virginia law, which protects citizens from having to buy health insurance, to make the challenge. Similar laws are in various stages in 34 other states, and at least two other attorney generals are also promising to file a legal challenge to the health care bill.

IFA Web News

Daily Press

Duceppe describes Bloc as "resistance"

By macleans.ca - Monday, March 22, 2010 at 11:54 AM - 5 Comments

Speaking to a large crowd of Bloc Québécois supporters in Quebec City on Saturday, Bloc Leader Gilles Duceppe described the party’s faithfuls as “résistants” against Canada’s drive to turn Quebec into a province like any other. The evocation of the resistance terminology associated with opposition to the Nazis in wartime Europe drew fire from the Prime Minister’s Office and Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon. Duceppe stuck with the analogy, though. “Quebec sovereignty is not possible, just as the Liberation was not possible, without the work of resisters,” he explained. As his party prepares to mark 20 years as the separatist faction in the federal House, however, exactly what it’s resisting isn’t always obvious. Not Canadian multiculturalism, apparently: at the same event where Duceppe spoke, former Bloc MP Suzanne Tremblay said that being exposed in Ottawa to Canada’s ethnic diversity prompted the Bloc to open up to Quebecers of varied origins more quickly than the Parti Québécois.

Montreal Gazette

CBC News

The real trouble at Rights and Democracy

By Linda Frum - Monday, March 22, 2010 at 11:52 AM - 64 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Wallace/ Toronto Star

Let’s say I gave you $11 million of Canadian taxpayer money and told you I wanted you to use the money to repair the ills of the world as you perceived them. Let’s say I told you that you could spend the money entirely as you saw fit. No questions asked. Odds are you would have little difficulty identifying your favourite causes in the most deserving regions of the world. Lovely fantasy isn’t it? Spending other people’s money to cure the troubles of the world, as you identify them, exactly the way you deem best? Well, for the senior managers of Rights and Democracy, Canada’s publicly funded human rights organization, this was no fantasy. It was a blissful reality. That is, until a group of pesky governors, burdened by such governance concepts as accountability and responsibility, came along to spoil the party.

If you have been following the controversy surrounding Rights and Democracy, a “short-arm” organization set up by prime minister Brian Mulroney in 1988 to promote human rights in the Third World, you know that the organization is in crisis.

Some claim that the crisis pits a professional management against a partisan board controlled by the Prime Minister’s Office. (That is the view, for example, of this magazine’s otherwise brilliant analyst Paul Wells.) But every key player in this story, on both sides, is a Harper appointee. And, as a short-arm organization, R and D is constitutionally autonomous of government but not independent of it. Each fiscal year, the chair of R and D is required to table a report with both houses of Parliament. In other words, R and D is not an arm’s-length, independent NGO.

To really understand what’s truly at issue here, you must go to the heart of the trouble.

It really heated up in March 2009 when newly appointed board chair, University of Toronto political science professor Aurel Braun, discovered questionable grants made by R and D’s president Remy Beauregard. One such grant was made to a group called Al Haq, based in Ramallah, West Bank. According to the Israeli Supreme Court, Al Haq’s leader is a senior activist of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine terrorist group. The $10,000 grant for Al Haq—distributed from a discretionary fund controlled by Beauregard and his management team—alarmed Braun and the majority of his current board. What other grants, they wondered, might be equally suspect? What about, for example, the $144,000 donated to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, a sponsor of 2009’s scurrilous Durban II conference, which was boycotted by the government of Canada? What exactly was that $144,000 spent on? Or the several hundred thousand dollars that R and D sent to that UN office over the past few years?

Anyone who has ever served on a board knows that such inquiries on the part of a board chair and the audit and finance committee are necessary in order to fulfill the duty of “due diligence.” But to the managers of R and D—unaccustomed to any challenge to their authority and hostile to investigations into their pet projects—the board’s interest was deemed “harassment” and requests for “sensitive” information were rejected or stonewalled. To this day, management refuses to co-operate fully with an audit being conducted by the respected firm of Deloitte & Touche. Instead, they have launched a self-righteous campaign of media sniping and obfuscation—aided by the disappearance of managerial laptops and computer records.

The sudden death in January of Remy Beauregard has injected an element of sorrow to the situation, but it does not alter a public body’s duty to account for public money. By January 2010, even Beauregard finally came to the conclusion that giving money to Al Haq (and like organizations) was wrong and voted to repudiate it. But the staff he left behind remain resentful of the board’s scrutiny.

The R and D staff’s anger at the board’s curiosity suggests that something has gone very wrong at R and D. On March 29, Gerard Latulippe, an experienced administrative law and labour lawyer with professional expertise in promoting democratic accountability in the third world (most recently in Haiti), will take over as Rights and Democracy’s new president. He has the tough task of reforming an agency gone rogue long ago. Yes, some of the staff are complaining anonymously to the press. But the complaints do not prove them right. On the contrary, their complaints prove how very deep the problems go.

Linda Frum is a Conservative member of the Canadian Senate.

Read this response by Paul Wells, published Monday, March 22

What Obama was up against

By macleans.ca - Monday, March 22, 2010 at 11:46 AM - 0 Comments

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the health sector spent $544 million lobbying in Washington last year, an increase of about 12 percent over 2008. The “pharmaceutical and health products” industry put $267 million into lobbying, the most ever spent by a single industry in one year. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a powerful opponent of President Barack Obama’s health reform push, spent $123 million lobbying in 2009, although not all on this one issue. What about Obama’s allies? Unions, for instance, supported him. But the AFL-CIO spent just $2.26 million, and the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, $2.87 million—not much in the scheme of things. More than 3,300 lobbyists were registered to try to influence U.S. policy on health care at one point last year, or six for every member of Congress. So how did Obama beat them in the crucial House of Representatives vote? On the big question, arguably, he didn’t: the health care bill passed was long ago stripped of the so-called “public option,” so even with the new law, no government alternative will be competing with America’s private insurance companies.

New York Review of Books

The trouble with historical analogies

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, March 22, 2010 at 10:29 AM - 56 Comments

After Gilles Duceppe used the term “resistance movement” to describe the cause of Quebec sovereignty, he explained himself to reporters.

Later grilled by journalists, Duceppe denied his comments were a direct comparison to France’s resistance movement, claiming his speech was inspired by prominent Quebec author and unionist Pierre Vadeboncoeur, who died last February. He also reportedly quipped the French resistance didn’t grant news conferences.

But he added that resistance movements—like the one in France during the Second World War—were necessary to establishing sovereignty. “Neither Quebec sovereignty nor the Liberation is possible, or would have been possible, without the work of ‘resistants,’“ Duceppe said.

Here, for the sake of argument, is Wikipedia’s entry for the French resistance.

Play ball! Albeit in an abstract, nerdy form!

By Colby Cosh - Monday, March 22, 2010 at 7:52 AM - 12 Comments

I’ve been remiss in posting here, having made the error of devoting the last few days to activities that don’t lend themselves well to blogging. When not watching basketball, I’ve been working on my fantasy baseball league’s upcoming draft. Last year, I caught bad breaks (that means “made bad choices”) in a tough division, pulled the plug early, and gave up a very high draft pick, Brian Burke-style, as part of a package for elite talent. That means my 2010 draft isn’t going to be much fun, any more than the Leafs’ will. But the Leaf fans get to cheer for Phil Kessel in the meantime, and this baseball season I’ll get to cheer for Albert Pujols, the imperishable Aztec god of hitting.

This is my compensation for suffering the eternal insults all fantasy players share: 1) the league is rigged against me, 2) the scoring system and the rules are self-evidently irrational (since, 2a, I win every single trade I make and still manage to finish around .450 every season), and 3) the guys whose teams keep pounding on mine every year are obviously—since we cannot contemplate the possibility that they are smarter than me—outrageously fortunate dorks with tons of free time and, no doubt, all kinds of illicitly obtained inside information and strategic intelligence. (Needless to say, those who finish behind me are just garden-variety dumdums.)

The women who snicker at fantasy baseball, which is to say all women, would guffaw outright if they knew how much work was really involved. Even if you keep up with the baseball news as a matter of course throughout the offseason, and even if you invest in some gnostic projection system, or in pre-fab cheat sheets off the magazine rack, you still have to calibrate everything to your own league’s scoring methods and put in a certain number of root-canal hours of due diligence in the runup to the draft. Has anybody signed Gary Sheffield yet? (Not yet, though he says he has offers.) Why the hell isn’t Khalil Greene on anybody’s depth chart? (He had a nervous breakdown and his contract was voided when he failed to turn up for training camp.) What’s the Opening Day lineup for the Mets gonna look like? (A vast, soft, silent yellow turd in the sun.)

If you don’t do this work, you run the risk of drafting Nomar Garciaparra in the 20th round and inviting unsurvivable derision from other males. The fact that would no doubt seem especially pathological to women, if any man were foolhardy enough to mention it in public, is that there are no commensurate ego benefits to be derived from success. Unless you play for real money, and we don’t, fantasy baseball is a bet you can only lose. When Lawyer A fleeces Engineer B in a trade, nobody really says, “Well, good job, A, you must have been at the top of your advocacy game that day.” Inevitably, A is despised for an unearned windfall, and B simply loathed. And when C wins the league, it is chalked up to chance and borderline-unethical practice, and his downfall is contemplated with merciless primal glee.

If you invite exactly the right people into your league, all of this hostility and petulance can be accompanied by nitpicking over regulations, power struggles, and whining about technical problems. I wouldn’t give it up for the world. The last time somebody invented a hobby like this, they called it golf.

Obama's health care bill passes

By macleans.ca - Monday, March 22, 2010 at 12:05 AM - 22 Comments

With 219 votes for and 212 against, President Barack Obama’s controversial health care bill—receiving no Republican backing—has been voted into law. The event is being touted as Obama’s most significant victory since his election 16 months ago, extending health coverage to 32 million more Americans. The legislation will also contain measures to prohibit restrictive insurance practices—such as refusing to cover individuals with pre-existing medical conditions—and imposes new taxes on the wealthy. The bill was strongly opposed by Republicans, who felt that the reforms represented a government takeover of the health care industry, in addition to being too costly. The win is in part thanks to Obama’s last-minute lobbying of a bloc of anti-abortion lawmakers, who came over to his side late Sunday after Obama announced that the reform will not change existing restrictions barring federal money from being used for abortion.

BBC News

The U.S. Congress is now a parliament; get used to it

By Jaime Weinman - Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 11:50 PM - 39 Comments

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed the Senate health-care bill, which means (because both houses have passed identical bills) that President Obama can sign it into law.

One thing many people have pointed out is that this is the first time in U.S. history that such a huge piece of legislation has passed with votes from only one party. All the big initiatives of Lyndon Johnson’s Presidency, like civil rights and Medicare, passed with votes from both parties. This bill, on the other hand, received not a single Republican vote in either house.

This has been, and will be, cited as evidence that the bill is a bad one. But I don’t think it says much about it one way or the other, because — and this is also frequently pointed out — the two parties in the U.S. are very different from the way they were. Back when Medicare passed, both parties had their liberal and conservative wings. Similarly, the Civil Rights Act was opposed both by segregationist Democrats from the South and conservative Republicans like Barry Goldwater who felt it violated states’ rights. Today, the parties basically don’t have liberal and conservative wings. The Democrats still have something resembling a conservative wing (as witness the fact that a bunch of their members didn’t vote for this bill), and if the Republicans regain the majority, they’ll elect a few members who are to the left of the party on some issues. But it’s clear that one party is the conservative party and the other is a liberal party, and they are expected to vote more or less on party lines. When a member seems like he or she is going to break with the party, he or she usually falls back into line if the leadership requires it, as Bart Stupak did and as moderate Republicans usually do.

What creates a lot of the weirdness in the U.S. system is that it’s one that evolved in an era of lax party discipline, and the rules have never really adjusted to the current quasi-Parliamentary arrangement. The best-known example is the filibuster. It’s something that grew out of the old system where the “nays” and “ayes” didn’t split evenly along party lines, and Senators of both parties might team up to filibuster. Now, with the more ideologically divided parties, it’s as if there’s a Parliamentary system where the majority has no power to pass anything without the minority party’s consent. This may or may not be desirable, but it certainly creates some weird incentives.

The Republicans have done a very good job of adjusting to the new reality. And not only by using the filibuster (which, until Scott Brown was elected, they couldn’t even use without Democratic defections), but by understanding the effect that party discipline has. As Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell explained recently, he and his House counterpart John Boehner realized they could reduce the popularity of the Democrats’ initiatives by denying them any Republican support:  “Republican unity in the House and Senate,” he said, “has been the major contributing factor to shifting American public opinion.” Though it may operate differently in the U.S., it’s still a dynamic that is familiar in Parliamentary systems. The majority wants to pass something. They have the votes. The minority’s job is to unite in opposition, sour the public on the majority’s ideas and convince the public to put them in charge.

On the other side, one reason Nancy Pelosi has emerged as the star of the Democrats is that she understands this new dynamic. She is famously partisan and disdainful of deals with the opposing party, which means that she has the same attitude as her Republican opposite numbers, and is able to get things done in the new system. So after Scott Brown, some of the more “bipartisan” types wanted the Democrats to go for a scaled-down health care bill that might attract Republican support. As this long article explains, Pelosi said no: she would take nothing less than rounding up the votes for a comprehensive bill, and she convinced President Obama to do it her way.

The reason she was right is that there’s very little likelihood that they could ever have passed the smaller bills. The Republicans and Democrats agree on nothing: they have fundamentally different ideas about the role of government, health care, the environment and almost everything else. Both the Republican leadership and base dislike the idea of giving the Democrats bipartisan cover. Anything important that the Democrats want to do this year (in what might be their last year in the majority) they’ll have to do on party lines, and the same may well apply if the Republicans take back the majority. For better or worse, the U.S. is now becoming more of a Parliamentary government like ours. Well, if they’re going to have Canadian-style Socialized Medicine ™ they might as well have Canadian-style government.

Update: Here’s a link to David Frum’s already much-discussed post, where he argues that the Republicans could have Continue…

The emotion of politics, the politics of emotion

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 3:30 PM - 67 Comments

The Agenda convenes a panel to discuss emotion and public policy.

More from Alison Loat here.

Health care bill expected to pass: top Democrat

By macleans.ca - Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 2:41 PM - 9 Comments

President Barack Obama’s historic health care bill is expected to have enough votes to pass late Sunday, according to U.S. House of Representatives Democratic caucus chair Steny Hoyer. However, Florida Democrat Debbie Wasserman Schultz disagrees, saying that Democrats do not yet have the “hard” 216 votes needed to pass the bill. Republican House Leader John Boehner told NBC’s Meet the Press that Republicans will repeal the reforms, if they pass, if they secure a majority in Congress in November’s mid-term election. Republicans fault the plan with setting the U.S. on track to higher taxes and greater deficits.

Five golds for Canadian paralympian

By macleans.ca - Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 1:52 PM - 4 Comments

Beating out her nearest competitor by twelve seconds, Lauren Woolstencroft, 28, finished the super-giant slalom with a time of two minutes, 22.67 seconds. The stoic paralympian was born with no legs past the knee and no arm past her left elbow. Woolstencroft’s five gold medals are the most by any Canadian at a single Winter Paralympics.

CBC News

Fatal avalanche kills two

By macleans.ca - Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 1:42 PM - 1 Comment

Two French heli-skiers are dead after yet another fatal avalanche in British Columbia. RCMP say the slide occurred in the Wells Gray Provincial Park near MacAndrew Lake, and buried three skiers—killing two men, ages 65 and 19. On Friday, a man was killed in an avalanche while operating a snowmobile on Eagle Pass Mountain, and last weekend, an avalanche on Boulder Mountain killed two men and buried 31 others.

CBC News

Iran pays to train Taliban: commanders

By macleans.ca - Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 1:26 PM - 2 Comments

Hundreds of insurgents have been trained in Iranian camps, the Sunday Times has learned. According to interviews with two Taliban commanders, Iranian officials paid them to attend three-month courses during the winter, where they learned to mount ambushes and use IED bombs to fight NATO troops. “The military is pressuring the Taliban in Pakistan. It is certainly harder to reach places that were once easy to get into. I think more of my fighters will travel to Iran for training this year,” said one commander. Western officials have confirmed the reports as credible.

Times Online

Times Online

Roaring right back

By Jason Kirby - Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 13 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

At the end of 2008, with the global economy crumbling and forecasters trying to out-gloom each other with dire predictions of blood in the streets, Linda Hasenfratz was understandably anxious. As CEO of Linamar Corp., one of Canada’s largest auto-parts suppliers, she watched as GM and Chrysler, two of her biggest customers, careened toward bankruptcy. Meanwhile, analysts were warning investors that Linamar might breach the terms of its loan agreements. Shares of the Guelph, Ont.-based company plunged to $3.50, a depth not seen in nearly two decades. But rather than panic, Hasenfratz did what precious few people seemed capable of at the time. She stepped back and took a deep breath.

The auto sector was in serious trouble, she acknowledged, but car sales had fallen to “drastically, unbelievably unrealistic, totally unsustainable low” levels. And Linamar wasn’t about to go under, even if the Detroit giants went bust. “I knew it wouldn’t kill us,” she says. So in the darkest days of the credit-crunch-cum-financial-crisis-cum-Great Recession, Hasenfratz dipped into her family’s finances and bought a million Linamar shares, a resounding vote of confidence in the business and the economy as a whole.

What Hasenfratz was betting on, and what even the most pessimistic forecasters admitted would one day come, was a recovery. But who could have thought the rebound would be as quick and robust as this. Barely a year after stock markets looked like they were headed for a long-term rout, exchanges in New York and Toronto have leapt roughly 70 per cent. More importantly, most signs point to the recession having ended sometime last fall. In the fourth quarter the Canadian economy grew by five per cent, soundly beating expectations. So while Hasenfratz finds herself still bracing for a tough slog in the auto sector—the crucial American car buyer could take years to fully recover—she’s once again focused on the future and expanding her company into Europe and Asia. As for those Linamar shares she snapped up when the recession looked like it would last forever, “they’re about six times higher now,” she says, “but who’s counting?”

Continue…

Dear John, I’ve really changed

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Everett Collection

Atom Egoyan has a knack for casting actresses on the cusp of adulthood in roles laden with sexual intrigue. In Exotica (1994), a 17-year-old Mia Kirshner skirted taboos as a stripper in a schoolgirl kilt. In The Sweet Hereafter, an 18-year-old Sarah Polley played a girl damaged by a bus accident, and an incestuous relationship with her father. In Felicia’s Journey (1999), Elaine Cassidy starred as a pregnant Irish teen befriended by a sexual predator. And in Where the Truth Lies (2005), as a young journalist unravelling a murder, Alison Lohman joined a steamy ménage à trois with Colin Firth and Kevin Bacon. For all four actresses, these were pivotal roles, and dramatic rites of passage.

But Egoyan has never conjured a performance as electrifying as the one unleashed by Amanda Seyfried in his sleek new erotic thriller, Chloe. Nor has he cast someone whose career has taken off with such velocity before the movie’s release. When Seyfried auditioned for Chloe, in 2007, she had attracted some notice as an airhead in Mean Girls (2004), and for her regular role as a disaffected Mormon daughter in the HBO series Big Love. But she was not widely known. Although she had co-starred with Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia!, that movie wasn’t out yet when Egoyan cast her, and no one knew how huge it would be. Since then, after heating up the screen as the foil to a carnivorous Megan Fox in Jennifer’s Body, and scoring a box-office hit as the heroine of Dear John, Seyfried, 24, has become Hollywood’s new It Girl.

“She told me Chloe was the last role she got on her qualities as an actress rather than being a star,” says Egoyan, who now hopes her celebrity will give his film a boost. “Dear John has a very different pedigree. I don’t know if even half of its audience would go see a movie like Chloe—America’s very weird about sex. But my fingers are crossed.”

Continue…

He's only making the depression worse!

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, March 21, 2010 at 7:23 AM - 200 Comments

An anonymous correspondent at American culture weblog 2 Blowhards broadcasts monstrous untruths about Canada’s federal public service, which I’m sure some of the readers employed therein will wish to go rebut. (On their own time.)

This week has four sketches

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, March 20, 2010 at 10:52 PM - 0 Comments

Our weekly look back at all we saw and heard.

Monday. Wait and see
Tuesday. ‘This is not an easy issue’
Wednesday. A good day spoiled
Thursday. Another 48 hours

Search is on for BC avalanche victims

By macleans.ca - Saturday, March 20, 2010 at 12:52 PM - 0 Comments

Authorities are once again searching for trapped snowmobilers after a Friday afternoon avalanche outside of Revelstoke, BC. One man is confirmed dead. RCMP have said the avalanche was triggered by snowmobilers riding on Eagle Pass Mountain, west of Revelstoke. The slide occurred one week after another avalanche plowed into 200 snowmobilers, leaving two men dead. Revelstoke Mayor David Raven has expressed frustration about the events, saying: “How many times do you have to tell people that it’s an extreme avalanche hazard out there?” RCMP Cpl. Dan Moskaluk has said that the number of people in the area of the avalanche is unclear, but searchers do believe people are buried in the snow.

Vancouver Sun

Globe and Mail

'That the approach of the Government of Canada must be based on scientific evidence'

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, March 20, 2010 at 12:40 PM - 168 Comments

As posted by Carolyn Bennett, here is the text of the motion the Liberals plan to present on Tuesday.

That, in the opinion of the House, the government’s G8 maternal and child health initiative for the world’s poorest regions, must include the full range of family planning, sexual and reproductive health options, including contraception, consistent with the policy of previous Liberal and Conservative governments and all other G8 governments last year in L’Aquila, Italy;

that the approach of the Government of Canada must be based on scientific evidence which proves that education and family planning can prevent as many as one in every three maternal deaths; and

that the Canadian government should refrain from advancing the failed right-wing ideologies previously imposed by the George W. Bush administration in the United States which made humanitarian assistance conditional upon a ‘global gag rule’ that required all non-governmental organizations receiving federal funding to refrain from promoting medically-sound family planning.

Here, for the sake of argument, is the latest post on this subject from Glen Pearson.

British Airways strike affects tens of thousands

By macleans.ca - Saturday, March 20, 2010 at 12:21 PM - 3 Comments

Tens of thousands of British Airways passengers have had their weekend travel plans interrupted due to a three-day cabin crew strike that began on Saturday. Over 1,000 flights were canceled and more disruptions are expected due accommodations that will need to be made for affected passengers. Chief BA executive Willie Walsh aired an apology for the walkout via YouTube, calling it a “terrible day for BA.” A second strike is planned for March 27-30.

CBC News

Saving the bluefin tuna: an expert explains Canada's bind

By John Geddes - Friday, March 19, 2010 at 5:37 PM - 101 Comments

News that Canada sided with Japan in opposing a United Nations ban on exports of bluefin tuna at first sounded like an embarrassing case of Ottawa being on the wrong side on a pressing conservation issue.

The bluefin is an iconic species: big, fast, wide-ranging, dangerously depleted—and incredibly valuable for sushi, which is why Japan took its stand. The Canadian government’s refusal to side with U.S. in supporting ban on the bluefin trade under the UN”s Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, known as CITES, seemed to put the Harper government squarely in the camp of environmental bad actors.

But the situation isn’t quite that clear-cut. Although Canada might indeed be on the wrong side of the CITES debate, this isn’t an extension of irresponsible fisheries policy when it comes to bluefin.

I called marine biologist Mike Stokesbury, senior project manager of Dalhousie University’s Ocean Tracking Network, who co-authored a bluefin population study published in Nature, to try to sort it out. Continue…

Peter Watts convicted

By macleans.ca - Friday, March 19, 2010 at 5:19 PM - 2 Comments

In a shock to Canada’s sci-fi community, Peter  Watts, writer of the deep-sea based science fiction “Rifters Trilogy,” has been convicted of obstructing and resisting a police officer in Michigan. Earlier reports that he was also convicted of assault were incorrect. According to police reports, the Toronto author was returning to Canada when his car was selected for inspection. He stepped out of the vehicle to ask what was going on, was ordered to lay down and didn’t obey fast enough.  Officers then punched, pepper sprayed and restrained him. Watts says he did “nothing to provoke” the border guards, and that he was assaulted for simply asking why he was being searched. Other Canadian writers, such as Cory Doctorow, have spoken out on Watts’ behalf, calling the American government authoritarian and criticizing it for demanding blind obedience at border crossings.  The author’s sentencing is scheduled for April 26th, and he could face up to two years in prison and a $2,000 fine.

Toronto Star

Boing Boing

The Backbench Top Ten

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, March 19, 2010 at 4:53 PM - 13 Comments

Our weekly, and wholly arbitrary, ranking of the ten most worthy, or at least entertaining, MPs, excluding the Prime Minister, cabinet members and party leaders. A celebration of all that is great and ridiculous about the House of Commons. Last week’s rankings appear in parentheses. Continue…