Day 2, epilogue

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 6:43 PM - 30 Comments

As I was leaving the conference today, Michael Ignatieff was participating in a quick interview with the online audience and, asked for his impressions of the event so far, he ventured an interesting attempt to split the difference between the ideas of big and small government. The segment is not yet online—it will hopefully appear here at some point—but Susan Delacourt has the gist.

“I think the really interesting thing that’s coming out of the conference for me—and I’m still still trying to formulate it—is a different vision of government, that is not command and control,” Ignatieff said in an online interview on Saturday afternoon. “We can’t do it from Ottawa. And an activist government doesn’t mean another big, high-ticket federal program. What it means is getting a network of deciders together to face common problems.”

This was, by his own admission, not yet a fully formed idea. But he is due to deliver remarks to close the conference tomorrow afternoon. And that speech may prove to be an interesting one.

The next great leader

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 1:23 PM - 96 Comments

The Mark convenes a number of political actors and observers to discuss the best leaders of Canadian history and, amid the expected salutes to Macdonald, Pearson, Douglas and the like, pollster Frank Graves speculates on what will define the next great prime minister.

Gen X and Gen Y see little of relevance to them in the federal government. They are less interested in ethics, crime, security, and health care, and more interested in climate change and a post-carbon economy, knowledge and skills, human rights and internationalism. In order to build a federal state that is focused on both the future and the present (and less the past), our next leader should be drawn from the half of Canadians under the median age of 41…

It might also be appropriate to find someone who reflects the growing diversity of Canada, and perhaps it isn’t too much to expect that as over half of Canadians are women we might eventually get around to electing a woman PM.

Ladies and gentlemen, Canada’s next great prime minister.

This week has four sketches

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 12:45 PM - 0 Comments

Our weekly look back at all we saw and heard.

Monday. Weirder still
Tuesday. What we’re not talking about
Wednesday. The latest distraction
Thursday. A little light reading

The country is in agreement

By macleans.ca - Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 9:07 AM - 81 Comments

According to an Angus Reid poll, 95 per cent of Quebecers and three out of four Canadians in the rest of the country support Quebec’s proposed law to force women who wear a niqab or burka to remove it for government services, as well as when receiving care in a hospital or instruction in a school. It is unusual for 80 per cent of Canadians—including both Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and Prime Minister Stephen Harper—to agree on something, let alone an issue as controversial as this one. Support for the bill is higher with men than women, and Alberta and Ontario showed more support than Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

Montreal Gazette

CBC

The Star Phoenix

Searching for the Liberal Party. Day 2.

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 8:30 AM - 58 Comments

Greetings from Montreal, where, for the next three days, we’ll be hanging around the Liberal party’s Canada 150 conference. Herein a running diary of the proceedings. Day 1′s diary is here.

8:29am. Good morning. Montreal is chilly and quiet. In a few moments we will be roused by the dulcet tones of David “The Dodge” Dodge, former governor of the Bank of Canada.

8:36am. For those of you scoring at home, the colour of the lights today is orange. And the subject is Families.

8:45am. This conference was apparently the most tweeted subject in Canada yesterday. The Liberals are immensely proud of this. Continue…

To redact or not to redact

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, March 27, 2010 at 1:19 AM - 17 Comments

The Globe discovers another curiosity of redaction.

But in one instance, a description of rebellious activity by detainees is apparently blacked out in one portion of the 2,600 documents but inadvertently disclosed in another section. It’s presumably the result of diverging censorship decisions by separate officials. The sentences in question describe how detainees began testing and challenging their Canadian captors in early 2008. Prisoners are held in a short-term Forces detention facility before being transferred to Afghan authorities…

Michel Drapeau, a former Forces colonel and a professor of military law, said there’s no justification for withholding this information from Canadians – as one of the censors processing the documents had apparently done.

The CBC, meanwhile, has posted all 2,628 pages of documents tabled in the House this week.

The Grand Unified Theory Of Jack Bauer's Cancellation

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, March 26, 2010 at 7:15 PM - 6 Comments

The rumour is that NBC won’t save 24 (which was its only chance at a ninth season after Fox announced it wouldn’t order one). One of the show’s directors, Jon Cassar, tweeted today that the show has been canceled. If this turns out to be true, the important thing to figure out is this: how do we make a connection between the fact that Health Care Reform passed the same week that America’s greatest conservative hero, Jack Bauer, lost his job? These things aren’t coincidences, after all.

So I am officially starting the rumour that one of the secret provisions in the Health Care bill was that 24 would be canceled, as part of a ban on patriotic shows about he-men who are willing to torture in order to get results. No one noticed this clause, but as soon as the bill was signed into law, the show had to be shut down. Sound ridiculous? Isn’t the truth often ridiculous? Well, isn’t it?

Update: The New York Times confirms the show’s cancellation, and therefore proves that the conspiracy is real.

…And speaking of truth, Chloë Sevigny is already walking back her now-famous statement that the most recent season of Big Love was “awful.” The walkback isn’t really a shock, since she has to mend fences with her bosses and colleagues. What is strange is that she says she was “taken out of context,” when in fact it was printed as part of a long interview, and the “context” is her talking, in detail, about why the season was so disappointing. She even realizes, after she makes the “awful” remark, that she’s done something she probably shouldn’t have, but then goes right on explaining why the season wasn’t good (while making it clear that she still respects the people who produce it). She may now claim she “didn’t mean” what she said, but it seems more likely that this fits Michael Kinsley’s classic definition of a gaffe: it’s when someone accidentally tells the truth. Here’s the response from the interviewer, Sean O’Neal.

It reminds me of nothing so much as that NewsRadio episode where Dave regrets an interview he gave:

[vodpod id=Video.3313428&w=425&h=350&fv=]

The Great Betty White Hope

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, March 26, 2010 at 5:19 PM - 5 Comments

I don’t know quite what to make of the recent outbreak of Betty White-mania, culminating in that huge campaign to get her on Saturday Night Live. I can’t find the link, but I read someone who argued that the campaign was one of those weird, pointless internet things that people get involved in just “because we can.” Update: Thanks to a commentator for reminding me that it was this article.

It’s not that White herself needs to host SNL; it’s not that most of the people petitioning NBC are particular fans of White; it’s just that she’s old, she’s fun, she’s in, everybody likes her, and people like getting involved in online campaigns. It’s a nice, harmless thing to do, but I feel like there’s something almost deliberately ironic about it, as if the campaign is daring us to be wet blankets and lecture them for not using their energies in a more useful way. And it also has its roots in comedy routines where old performers are brought out in front of a young audience that hasn’t really heard of them. Conan O’Brien’s bits with Abe Vigoda (the male Betty White, one might say, though his career isn’t quite as impressive) show us where the Betty White cult is coming from, because part of the joke was that while Conan knew Barney Miller, he also knew perfectly well that many of his viewers didn’t. The Betty White thing is similar; part of the joke is the fact that most of her new fans don’t quite know who she is.

All of which means that I don’t think this Betty White campaign has a great deal to do with Betty White herself, though maybe it’s given extra weight because there are several generations of people who know and love her work.

My own favourite Betty White moment, which unfortunately is not on YouTube except in Spanish, is her brief appearance in Otto Preminger’s Advise and Consent as a feisty female Senator who takes down the crazy evil Senator (George Grizzard) with a few well-chosen quips. She has like three lines and she’s one of the best things in the whole film.

And while we’re on the subject of Betty White, here’s the show she did right after The Mary Tyler Moore Show was canceled. Many of the characters on that show were spun off into their own series, but I guess the network thought that Sue Ann Nivens would be just too much for a spinoff (particularly after Phyllis was canceled; Phyllis was a lot less abrasive than Sue Ann). So the compromise solution was for MTM and CBS to do The Betty White Show, with White playing a character who was kinda like Sue Ann but not as awful. And with Georgia Engel playing virtually the same person as Georgette, under a different name. The premise of the show, created by MTM stalwarts Ed. Weinberger and Stan Daniels and developed by their star writer David Lloyd, was that White was the star of a cop show called Undercover Woman, with her ex-husband (John Hillerman) as director. The show has brought in a younger, bustier woman (Caren Kaye) for ratings, which I guess was to allow the writers to parody the “jiggle” craze while simultaneously obeying the rule that every show had to have a busty blonde.

This is the only episode I could find online, written by Lloyd; I can see why the show flopped, because even with White not actually playing Sue Ann, the show is kind of mean. Actually, I feel like it would have been easier to take if she had played Sue Ann, because we had learned to love that character in spite of her horribleness. We had no such reason to like this person, apart from the fact that everyone likes Betty White.

This was also MTM’s first sitcom shot on videotape, and it really does not suit the style of the show; the sets look harsh and ugly on tape. (The company would manage a less frightening look on videotape by the time they made WKRP in Cincinnati and the first season of Newhart, but it was still a company whose shows were more suited to film.)

Part 1:

Part 2:

Continue…

Who wants to read Afghan detainee docs?

By macleans.ca - Friday, March 26, 2010 at 5:14 PM - 2 Comments

In an ambitious experiment in crowd-sourcing, the CBC is encouraging its readers to “have at ‘er” after publishing 2,628 pages of documents relating to the Afghan detainee abuse scandal. The documents, which arrived in the House of Commons on Thursday, are mostly from the military police, and include emails, field reports, and administrative reports “written for and copied to senior officials inside and outside the Canadian Forces.” The write-up, by Janyce McGregor, also says that they anticipate another “document dump” on or around April 6.

CBC Politics

Some books that have influenced me

By Andrew Potter - Friday, March 26, 2010 at 4:54 PM - 12 Comments

A few weeks ago, Tyler Cowen challenged bloggers to list the books that have influenced them the most. It’s become a hot little blogospheric meme, but like a few others, I’m skeptical of these sorts of exercises as true measures of intellectual influence. One reason is that, like one theory of quantum mechanics I remember reading about once, the very act of consciously trying to make the list has a distorting effect. There’s also a lot of post-facto rationalization going on, interpreting past reading interests in light of current beliefs and dispositions.

But for me, the main obstacle to a decent list is that the “book” category isn’t necessarily the best unit of influence on my intellectual makeup. Sure, I’ve read a lot of great books, but what has shaped my views on most topics are specific arguments, from conversations, a couple of lines in a book, a journal article, etc.  For even the best books I’ve read, the ultimate take-away can usually be summed up in a paragraph or two.

So what I’ll try to do here is list some of the positions I’ve been arrived at, and their book-length sources when appropriate. If I had made this list yesterday it would probably have been quite different; if I were to do the exercise again Monday it would be more different still. Anyway:
Continue…

Martha Stewart's BFF from hell

By Anne Kingston - Friday, March 26, 2010 at 4:51 PM - 14 Comments

Photograph by Peter Morgan/ Reuters

In the ranks of friends to the famous, Mariana Pasternak falls somewhere between Kato Kaelin and Brutus. Pasternak, you might recall, was the Martha Stewart intimate who provided bombshell testimony at her former BFF’s 2004 trial. The elegant, Romanian-born real estate agent sent a shock wave through the U.S. federal courtroom with a revelation that nailed Stewart for insider trading of ImClone, stock of a company owned by her friend Sam Waksal. Pasternak recalled Stewart saying, “Isn’t it nice to have brokers who tell you those things?” during a holiday in early 2002. Under cross-examination, she wavered: “I do not know if Martha said that or it’s me who thought those words,” she admitted, before deciding Stewart did make the damning statement. Stewart’s sentence included five months in prison.

Six years later, Pasternak’s memory has improved sufficiently to record a detailed account of their relationship in The Best of Friends: Martha and Me, published this week. The book forges a new sub-genre: the friendship breakup memoir, alternately filled with joyful reminiscences and passive-aggressive jabs. There are no explosive revelations, just plenty of hand grenades that only women who’ve been confidantes for decades can lob.

The book began as notes jotted down after Stewart went to prison, Pasternak reveals on the phone from her home in Westport, Conn. Their friendship ended before the trial and they haven’t seen one another since, she says, yet the thought of Stewart being in prison filled her with sadness: “A part of me was gone.” Writing down her memories, she says, was a way to relive happier times.

Continue…

Human Rights Commission to shutter some offices

By macleans.ca - Friday, March 26, 2010 at 4:28 PM - 9 Comments

A top official with the Canadian Human Rights Commission says the decision to close offices in Vancouver, Toronto, and Halifax wasn’t politically-motivated. Rather, Karen Mosher, the commission’s secretary general, says the closures were motivated by a desire to cut $500,000 in expenditures. Mosher’s statements came in response to claims by John Gordon, president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, that the federal government was intentionally handicapping initiatives aimed at supporting human rights and women’s groups.

Vancouver Sun

Ignatieff supports Quebec's niqab ban

By macleans.ca - Friday, March 26, 2010 at 3:50 PM - 32 Comments

Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff has come out in favour of Quebec’s newly-announced ban on niqabs, saying the provincial government had “found a good balance.” “The Quebec government is trying to make sure that in civic and public places that freedom of religion is respected but at the same time on the other side citizens come forward and reveal themselves when they are demanding public service,” Ignatieff said. “We watch the Quebec debate with interest.” Ignatieff made the statement as he arrived for the first day of the Liberals’ “Canada at 150″ conference in Montreal, where the party is expected to hash out the ideas and issues that will form the basis for a future political platform.

Globe and Mail

'All allegations have been unfounded'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, March 26, 2010 at 2:59 PM - 12 Comments

From QP this morning, Lawrence Cannon’s response to question about the latest Afghan detainee allegations.

Mr. Speaker, in the case of allegations, senior Canadian Forces leadership immediately ordered investigations into all of this. The Canadian Forces make sure that any allegation put forward is looked into and all of these investigations will determine whether or not the allegations are founded or unfounded, but up to now, all allegations have been unfounded.

Happy 100th to Bones

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, March 26, 2010 at 2:42 PM - 3 Comments

Have a look at Bill Brioux’s piece on the 100th episode of Bones — sort of a more dramatic take on those “before the series started” flashback episodes we used to see on Dick Van Dyke and Everybody Loves Raymond –  which includes an interview with the very nice (and Canadian, if that’s relevant) creator of the series, Hart Hanson.

I was originally planning to say something this week about why Bones has managed to survive and thrive when most lighthearted crime dramas don’t do well on major networks. However, Castle, which is sort of a gender-reversed version of Bones, did well enough after Dancing With the Stars that it, too, might become successful. So bang goes that theory. I do think, though, that Bones has proved very shrewd in its decision to combine the gory procedural drama with the banter-filled, romantic light mystery format.

It’s a strange paradox of network TV that even though producers (and journalists) often assume that mass audiences want escapism, in practice, light escapist shows are usually niche shows or struggling cult favourites (like the featherweight Chuck) while the big hits are heavier, darker and gloomier (like the CSIs). What explains the paradox, in my opinion, is that the broad audience doesn’t tune in to a television show — and particularly an hour-long drama — to forget its problems. The point is to watch people confront our real-life problems and make them better. The blood and guts on these forensic shows helps to convey the impression that these shows are not afraid to engage with the dark realities of life, even as the whole point of the show is to make those realities seem managable. In other words, to survive on a network, a dramatic show needs to have a mix of light and dark; if it’s mostly light, or mostly dark, it probably has a better chance on cable.

The 100th episode was directed, as he notes, by David Boreanaz (who has directed at least one previous episode); along with Bryan Cranston directing the season premiere of Breaking Bad, this gives me an excuse to re-link my post from earlier this year on self-directed episodes. Suffice it to say that none of these guys are likely to direct themselves as often as Scott Baio did, but let’s face it: not everyone can be Scott Baio.

Beta-blockers could stop cancer spread

By macleans.ca - Friday, March 26, 2010 at 2:41 PM - 0 Comments

The drugs used to lower blood pressure known as ‘beta-blockers’ may block hormones that spread the growth of cancer in the body, according to a joint UK and German study. Breast cancer, the BBC notes, is most manageable when affected cells are isolated to the breast only. “We are very encouraged by these first results which have already shown that by using a well-established, safe and cost effective drug, we can take another step on the road towards targeted therapy in breast cancer,” says Dr Des Powe, who collaborated with German Professor Frank Entschladen on the study. Powe warned that because the test group of 466 people is relatively small, the study will need to be built upon with further research.

BBC News

Carla Bruni hopes Sarkozy won’t run for second term in 2012

By macleans.ca - Friday, March 26, 2010 at 1:36 PM - 0 Comments

In an interview with Times Online, Carla Bruni opened up about her concerns for the health of her husband, French President Nicholas Sarkozy. “As a wife, I don’t really want him to [run for re-election]. Perhaps I am afraid he will let his health go. Perhaps I wish to live what time we have left in some peace?” The only recorded evidence of Sarkozy’s poor health, according to Times Online, was when he collapsed after jogging last summer. Bruni also lamented the Internet gossip that suggested she and her husband were unfaithful, and called their marriage  “unique, unhoped-for in terms of tenderness, trust, communication and understanding.”

Times Online

Editor in Chief

By macleans.ca - Friday, March 26, 2010 at 1:34 PM - 0 Comments

Next to Barack Obama, the editors at Maclean’s are pussy cats. Have a look at the kind of line edits the President does to his speech writer’s handiwork. There’s a great close-up photo of his chicken scratches on a health care speech.

hankstuever.com

U.S. military lets some light into the closet

By macleans.ca - Friday, March 26, 2010 at 1:31 PM - 1 Comment

The Pentagon has unveiled new rules aimed at loosening restrictions on gays and lesbians in the U.S. military. Under the changes announced Thursday, the military would no longer investigate anonymous complaints against members suspected of being gay and the authority to open investigations will be limited to high-ranking officers. Defense Secretary Robert Gates says the new restrictions would add “a greater measure of common sense and common decency” to the existing rules and would be effective immediately. In all, over 13,000 people have been kicked out of the military since the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy was implemented in 1993, with 428 of those expulsions happening last year.

Washington Post

Netanyahu in a corner

By macleans.ca - Friday, March 26, 2010 at 1:28 PM - 2 Comments

Benjamin Netanyahu hoped his trip to Washington would ease tense relations between his government and Barack Obama’s administration over building new settlements in occupied East Jerusalem. Instead relations got worse. “Netanyahu was truly stunned by the Obama administration’s unprecedented willingness to criticize Israel over building in the annexed part of Jerusalem,” explained the Washington Post. “Over the past year, Netanyahu ‘pushed the envelope with Obama,’ said Yossi Beilin, a former Israeli peace negotiator, referring to haggling over a full settlement freeze that had precluded a resumption of peace talks. Now that Obama has pushed back, Netanyahu ‘is worried and afraid,’ Beilin said.” Within hardliners in his governing coalition threatening to pull out if any concessions are made to Washington, Netanyahu is in a bind.

Washington Post

'If you know what I mean'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, March 26, 2010 at 1:04 PM - 19 Comments

The CBC finds an account of a 2007 interrogation.

Canadian soldiers were given permission to interrogate detainees captured by Afghan security forces, and at least one soldier followed through, according to documents released Thursday by the federal government.

In at least one case, a soldier assigned to question an Afghan prisoner later expressed concern Afghan forces had abused the detainee before the questioning took place, the documents say.

The revelation is contained in more than 2,500 pages of military detainee documents tabled Thursday by the Conservative government. The documents also show it took almost two years for military police to get around to investigating the soldier’s allegation.

Week in Pictures: March 18th – March 21st 2010

By macleans.ca - Friday, March 26, 2010 at 12:39 PM - 0 Comments

A judgment call

By Colby Cosh - Friday, March 26, 2010 at 12:02 PM - 16 Comments

Photograph by Jack Sullivan/ Getstock

Osgoode Hall law professor James Stribopoulos, currently a visiting scholar at the Melbourne Law School in Australia, is a specialist in criminal procedure. Earlier this month, he accidentally stumbled into an experiment in comparative search-and-seizure law while on his way to tour a penguin habitat with another Canadian colleague. “I was pulled over by the Victoria police during the drive because I had my headlights on (how Canadian of me; they don’t have daytime running lights here),” he writes by email. “Almost immediately, I was required to furnish a breath sample into a roadside Breathalyzer and to provide a saliva sample. The latter is a new test they are deploying here—essentially they scrape some saliva off your tongue and see how it reacts to two chemicals that are supposed to test for cannabis and methamphetamines.” Declared alcohol- and drug-free, and turned loose, Stribopoulos and his passenger naturally wondered: could such a thing ever happen in Canada?

Last year, the House of Commons justice committee recommended that the Criminal Code be amended to permit random police stops of drivers for mandatory roadside Breathalyzer testing. Justice Minister Rob Nicholson favours the idea, and on Feb. 16 the federal Justice Department issued a discussion paper formally inviting public feedback. But the relevant section of the paper makes no explicit mention of an important obstacle to what the Australians call RBT (random breath testing): the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

RBT was relatively simple to introduce in Australia, which had and has no equivalent to the Charter, in the 1980s. (Criminal law is reserved to the states under the Australian constitution. The state of Victoria, where Stribopoulos was stopped, adopted a human rights charter in 2008, but it covers only new laws and provides no avenue of legal action for private citizens.) In Canadian law, random vehicle stops are recognized as a form of Charter-violating arbitrary detention, but the Supreme Court has ruled—most notably in the 1990 Ladouceur decision, which the discussion paper highlights—that such checks are “reasonable limits” to personal freedom under Section 1.

Continue…

What if it doesn’t go as planned?

By John Geddes - Friday, March 26, 2010 at 11:55 AM - 11 Comments

Photograph by Sean Kilpatrick/ CP

Everything in Jim Flaherty’s 2010 budget hinges on his forecasts. The finance minister’s plan to shrink the deficit from a staggering $49.2 billion this year to a pesky $1.8 billion in just five years depends on steady economic growth. He’s often challenged for projecting five consecutive years of growth of around five per cent, including inflation. But Flaherty has a great comeback: he’s using the average of 15 respected private forecasts. He’s been known to rhyme off the forecasters’ names, as he began to in question period last week—“TD Bank, BMO, CIBC, RBC, Scotiabank…”—before the Speaker cut him off.

That roll call, though, may sound weightier than it really is. Of those 15 firms, Flaherty’s department told Maclean’s, six don’t attempt to project as far out as 2013-14 and 2014-15—the crucial years in his deficit-busting narrative. Of the remaining nine, some are less than ringingly confident about the numbers they offer. Take BMO Capital Markets, whose outlook is a touch more optimistic than the forecast average used in the budget. “We generally do not publish our long-range economic forecasts,” said Douglas Porter, BMO’s deputy chief economist, “and I would view these more as ‘assumptions’ than as ‘forecasts.’ ” Don Drummond, the chief economist at TD Bank Financial Group, is somewhat more pessimistic than the forecast average. Still, Drummond isn’t dismissive. “It is not as though they dreamed up a scenario biased to the optimistic,” he said. He views the budget assumptions as “credible,” although “the economy and revenues could certainly underperform.”

Yet Flaherty doesn’t build in any cushion against such potential disappointments. In his 2009 budget, he adjusted the private-sector forecast down just to be prudent—but not in 2010. Gone, too, is the old Liberal practice of setting aside contingency reserves. For Flaherty’s deficit-fighting plan to work, there can be no unpleasant surprises.