That's a no

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 26, 2010 at 3:16 PM - 130 Comments

The government having previously said that its maternal health initiative had nothing to do with capital punishment nor gay marriage, that it did not want to reopen the debate on abortion, but that it was not closing the door on any possibilities, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for International Cooperation did stand in his place this afternoon and announce that “Canada’s contribution will not include funding abortion.”

And so, nearly three months after the fact, Michael Ignatieff has an answer to his question.

Official transcript from QP after the jump. Continue…

This Weeks Travel News: Porter’s IPO Prospectus Reveals Not-So-Rosy Picture

By Bruce Parkinson, Takeoffeh.com - Monday, April 26, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

Porter’s IPO Prospectus Reveals Not-So-Rosy Picture
Privately-owned airlines don’t have to reveal their financial situation, so we’ve always had to take Porter Airlines founder Robert Deluce at his word when he claimed the carrier was profitable, even in a fiercely competitive market. But Porter is looking for new funding — $120 million of it – through an initial public offering, so it had to take the wraps off its finances. What was revealed was what most industry insiders have believed for a long time: while Porter has found a willing audience for its high-service, high-convenience offering from Toronto’s Island Airport, it isn’t making a profit. In 2009, Porter lost $4.6 million on revenues of $151.2 million. That number can be added to the $23 million the airline lost between its launch in October 2006 and Dec. 31, 2008. Porter’s initial launch was backed by $125 million in equity financing from shareholders. It started out with just two Bombardier Q400 turboprops – by the end of this month it will own 20 of them. Unlike Air Canada and WestJet, Porter has never had to reveal its load factor either – the percentage of seats sold on flights. Opponents of Porter’s Island Airport expansion have used spotters to estimate loads, and they have maintained that most flights are less than half full. Turns out they were right: in the first quarter of this year load factor hit 47%, up from 41% in the same quarter in 2009. As Brent Jang reported in the Globe and Mail, much of Porter’s competitive edge, particularly in the Toronto/Montreal/Ottawa triangle, can be attributed to its monopoly on the island. That may change later this year, with Air Canada Jazz making plans to move back in. Will Porter’s prospectus picture impact its ability to raise funds? Quite possibly not: the carrier’s P&L numbers aren’t really that bad in comparison with the rest of the industry, and there are plenty of government and Bay Street high flyers loath to lose their leather seats and Porter lounge espressos.

Making A Mountain Out Of A Volcano? Experts Don’t Think So
In April 1982, British Airways Flight 009 heading to Auckland from London flew into a cloud of dust and ash produced by an Indonesian volcano, causing all four engines to fail. Happily, the pilots were able to glide the Boeing 747-200 out of the ash cloud and restart three of the engines, allowing the crippled flight to land safely. At the time it was hailed as the longest glide in a non-purpose-built aircraft. In December 1989, KLM Flight 867 en route to Anchorage from Amsterdam flew into a normal looking cloud, which turned out to be filled with volcanic ash. Again, all four engines on the Boeing 747-400 failed. The crew eventually managed to restart the engines and land safely, but post-flight inspection revealed extensive damage to the windshields, internal aircraft systems, avionics and electronics. For most air passengers, these anecdotes from a CNN story explaining the dangers of volcanic ash clouds would be enough to quell any complaints about being ‘stranded’ in Venice for a few days. Volcanic ash contains particles with a melting point below that of an engine’s internal temperature. If they enter an engine during flight they will immediately melt, then rapidly cool as they travel through the turbine, sticking on the vanes and potentially stalling the engine. According to aircraft manufacturer Airbus, costly damage can also occur to aircraft surfaces, windshields and power plants, while ventilation, hydraulic, electronic and air data systems can also be contaminated. Want more? Airbus says sucking in volcanic ash can cause serious deterioration of engine performance due to erosion of moving parts and partial or complete blocking of fuel nozzles. Another danger of ash clouds is that they can’t easily be distinguished from regular clouds. As weather radar is not effective in detecting volcanic ash clouds, pilots rely on accurate forecasts of volcanic eruptions generated by a series of Volcanic Ash Advisory Centers located around the world. Millions of people fly safely over volcanic regions each year, which is just one more reason why it makes sense to err on the side of caution when scientists wave the red flag.

Come Insured Or Not, Says Cuba
The official position of the Cuban government is that as of May 1, any foreign visitor to Cuba who does not have a travel medical insurance policy from an insurer in their home country will be required to buy coverage from Cuban companies upon arrival. The Cuban announcement states that visitors will have to produce on demand “a policy, insurance certificate or travelling assistance card valid for the time span they will stay in Cuba.” However, according to Sunwing’s Stephen Hunter, this is not accurate. A Sunwing press release issued April 22nd indicates that, after meetings with senior Cuban officials, it has been established that a provincial health card is sufficient proof of health coverage for Canadians. Still, travel health insurance is a wise investment no matter what the destination.

Best Of A Bad Lot: U.S. Airlines Rated
There was some good news in the annual ranking of U.S. airlines, dubbed the Airline Quality Rating. As Aviation News reported, of the 17 carriers rated in both 2008 and 2009, all but one improved on its 2008 rating. The exception was Alaska Airlines, which plummeted from 5th to 11th. Four major categories make up the AQR: on-time performance, baggage handling, customer complaints and denied boarding. The top four carriers are: Hawaiian Airlines, AirTran, JetBlue and Northwest. American Airlines placed 9^th, United 11^th and Delta 13^th.

By: Bruce Parkinson
Bruce Parkinson is a travel industry journalist and regular contributor to Takeoffeh.com as well as sister company, OpenJaw.com

Photo Credits: flyporter.com, warrengoldswain, gocuba.ca, wikimedia.org



Should Supreme Court judges have to be perfectly bilingual?

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 26, 2010 at 2:44 PM - 55 Comments

Stealth Pilots, Bombing

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, April 26, 2010 at 2:42 PM - 4 Comments

At the AV Club, Todd VanDerWerff and Noel Murray have an “inventory” on a subject that is near and dear to my heart: failed backdoor pilots (or as I prefer to call them, “stealth pilots”) from successful shows.

You know the kind of episode they mean; a show presents an episode that is mostly about characters we’ve never seen before, because this episode is going to be shown to the network as a pilot for a proposed series. When the series gets picked up, it’s still mildly weird to find an episode of All in the Family where Archie disappears early on, and we spend the rest of the episode getting to know the Jeffersons’ new neighbours. But it becomes a truly surreal and confusing experience when the pilot was rejected, as most pilots are. That’s probably one reason why the practice became less common as time went on. The reason for making a backdoor pilot is that it defrays the cost: instead of needing to raise the money to make a separate pilot, it’s covered by the budget of the existing series, and if the pilot fails, its costs are recouped in syndication. But “who the hell are these people?” episodes can hurt the show’s value in syndication, which loses the production company much of what it gained, financially, from the backdoor-pilot process.

One thing you’ll notice if you look at the episode guides for these shows is that the backdoor pilots were usually made toward the very end of the season. Sometimes, as with “His Two Right Arms” from Mary Tyler Moore, it was actually the last episode of the season. Remember, the concept of the “season finale” as a special event didn’t really exist until recently; combine that with the natural tendency of shows to have weaker episodes later in the production cycle (because everybody’s so tired), and it made some sense to have a backdoor pilot late in the season: it gives the regular actors some rest at a point when they’re tired out, and it also allows the burned-out staff writers to regroup or move on to something else. (In the case of “His Two Right Arms,” the backdoor pilot was actually done by writers who had no connection with the parent show. Other times it’s written by a creator who isn’t normally writing scripts for the show.) There’s another reason why this kind of pilot is harder to do now: the end of the season is no longer a creative/ratings dead spot, so prime-time real estate is too valuable to waste on a bunch of unknown characters.

The comments on the article also mention lots of other failed backdoors; for example, the next-to-last episode of Green Acres was a bad backdoor pilot, but so was the last episode, a bad pilot for a proposed series about Elaine Joyce as a wacky secretary and Richard Deacon as her long-suffering boss. There are a surprising number of shows where the very last episode is not a finale but an attempted pilot — because the series finale wasn’t a big deal either, and it was more important for the producers to beg the network to keep them all employed.

Liberals want a new food policy

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 26, 2010 at 2:20 PM - 8 Comments

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff is promising to put a new food policy on the table if elected as Prime Minister. The plan, announced at Holland Marsh, an agricultural area north of Toronto, is meant to beef up food safety while helping farmers and getting more healthy local food into Canadian stomachs. It calls for $50 million for food inspections, $80 million to promote farmers markets and $40 million to give low-income children access to health food. The scheme would be paid for by freezing corporate income taxes, saving the government up to $6 billion a year.

CBC News

The World of Travel in 1970

By Takeoffeh.com - Monday, April 26, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

40 years after he founded Goway Travel, Bruce Hodge takes us back to 1970, when the travel world was a very different place. Here is an excerpt from the 40th Anniversary edition of Goway Travel’s Globetrotting magazine.

By 1970, travel had changed dramatically. Airlines surpassed shipping lines as the dominant trans-ocean people movers following the introduction of jetliners early in the 60’s. Within continents, bus travel (e.g. Greyhound) replaced train journeys as the major form of mass transport.

Because of how travel was sold, travel agencies were necessary businesses in large communities. Usually street level, many still had models of ocean liners up to 5 feet long in their windows. International Air Transport Association (IATA) would only appoint one travel agency in an area with the authority to sell their member airlines. Individual airlines would provide appointed agencies with their ‘plate’ so they could issue handwritten paper tickets. These chosen agents reported sales monthly and they then had 30 days to pay airlines.

Most agencies were financially successful because they had this sales exclusivity. Some also had exclusivity over sales of tickets for ocean liners. So, in 1970 if you wanted to travel, you had no choice but to go to a travel agent.

For a number of years package holidays (air and hotel included) had been operating in Europe, particularly from Britain to southern Spain. But this concept was very new to North America at that time.

No one was travelling to Asia. The Vietnam War was raging. China was still under Mao Zedong. A visit to Hong Kong was an unusual adventure.

In Europe, the Iron Curtain separated the USSR and its Eastern Block European satellites, including East Germany, from Western Europe. Tours into Eastern Europe and Russia had begun, but tourists had to go through a strict visa process and an official guide had to accompany tourists.

At that time, the Middle East was relatively peaceful and safe overland journeys by bus or truck were available from Europe through Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, India to Nepal. Some even travelled via Israel. Kathmandu was the world mecca for travelling hippies.

Apart from a few 4WD jeep and truck expeditions across Africa, tourists were not going to southern Africa. Most overland journeys, if they got through, began or finished in Nairobi.

South America in 1970 was very stable politically when compared to Asia, Africa and Eastern Europe. Because of stereotype stigma however, only ‘real’ travellers ventured there.

Apart from Europe and North America there was generally no real international tourism infrastructure in the rest of the world. In Australia for instance, American G.I.s taking R & R leave from the Vietnam War are credited with helping to launch that country’s tourism business.

As always, the winds of change kept blowing and things continued to evolve. Airlines, historically the pride of their respective countries, were usually government owned and propped up by tax payers. Some of the privileges (like exclusivity on some routes) were starting to end by 1970. Charter flights had arrived. Rules at the time were that planes could only be chartered by affinity clubs. Most of these clubs had some sort of ethnic connection that developed out of the millions of immigrants that had come to North America after WWII. They were still coming and many wanted to go back to see their families.

A new breed of travel agent was also evolving and the establishment referred to them as ‘bucket shops’. These did not

have the ‘rights’ to sell national airlines or the respected shipping lines but they learned how to sell charter flights and inclusive tour charters (I.T.C.’s or air and land packages, first to Florida and Hawaii and then the Caribbean and Mexico, were beginning to catch on in a big way).

The authorities had great trouble policing the rules of charter flights as more and more people began to travel. Unprofessional and unscrupulous entrants to the travel industry would lead to many airline and bucket shop failures. Governments eventually had to intervene and in 1974 regulations were put in place. In Ontario, where Goway is headquartered, all travel sellers are required to be licensed and conform to strict financial requirements (Ontario is probably the most strict in the world). Taming the Wild West of travel had begun.

By: Bruce Hodge, Goway Travel

Photo Credits: mr_sailor, theinvisibleagent.files.wordpress.com, mevans

Spoken like a true Conservative

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, April 26, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 40 Comments

Jacques Boissinot/ CP

Let’s just pause for a moment to consider what an extraordinary thing Maxime Bernier is attempting. The former minister in the Harper government is widely said to be preparing the ground for a future leadership bid. How has he been going about it? Since January, Bernier has been methodically laying explosives beneath the government and detonating them at regular intervals, in speeches and writings that, while not overtly criticizing Conservative policy, point in precisely the opposite direction to that on which the government happens to be embarked.

In a January speech to Calgary Conservatives, Bernier called for a policy of “zero budget growth,” an absolute cap on government spending—as distinct from, say, the seven per cent per annum growth track of which the government often boasts. As Bernier noted, such a policy would require that “every new government program, or increase in an existing program, has to be balanced by a decrease somewhere else.” Indeed, it would imply a diminishing government share of the economy over time. Conservatives, he said, “have to convince people that we’re not simply aiming to be better managers of a bigger government; we are aiming to be better managers of a smaller government.” The implied rebuke was made explicit in his penultimate line: “If we want conservative principles to win the battle, we have to defend them openly, with passion and with conviction.” As opposed to stealthily, with furtiveness and deception.

Continue…

How to eat like a (French) lady

By Jessica Allen - Monday, April 26, 2010 at 1:15 PM - 5 Comments

Mireille Guiliano, New York Times best-selling author and former CEO of Clicquot Inc., talks with Maclean’s about her new book, the French Women Don’t Get Fat Cookbook, and dishes on Julia, Oprah, and her magic breakfast recipe that she swears will change your life.

Q: The first recipe in your new cookbook is something you call Magical Breakfast Cream. Do you really believe that it will transform people?

A: Yes, yes I do. I’m surprised that TV shows haven’t picked up on it—maybe they don’t have time to read the book—because this is so important, especially now because we’re approaching bathing suit season and everyone wants to lose a quick five pounds. I’ve had so many converts—the first was my editor. He’s not overweight but he’s a tall guy, very “New York” in fashion and conscience. One day I came to see him and he looked different. He said, “I couldn’t wear this suit for the last ten years and I hate the gyms and thanks to you I’ve just melted away five pounds in no time and I feel so great.” And I said, “Was it the MBC?” And it was of course. It’s what I call a complete breakfast because it has carbs, fat and protein. So many people don’t eat carbs in New York. But our bodies need carbs.

Q: People are terrified of bread here too, and carbs in general. Do you eat bread everyday?

A: Everyday, yes.

Q: So is it just a matter of, and your cookbook really drives this home, moderation and balance?

A: Yes, because bread, especially now with all these wonderful breads available to us, they’re good for you! They have fibres. But you just don’t eat a loaf of it. But a piece, yes. I see people looking at me during breakfast, lunch and dinner [eating bread] but they won’t have any. It’s like guilt or something. But I eat my bread. It’s like a small glass of wine—it’s an element of the meal. And it’s important to wipe your sauce.
Continue…

Thai "red shirts" ditching the red

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 26, 2010 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

Fearing a government crackdown, “red shirt” protesters in Thailand have been told to find other clothes. Anti-government protest leaders want supporters to blend in with ordinary Thais in case security forces descend upon their occupation in central Bangkok to clear them out. Government supporters (or “yellow shirts”) have become increasingly vocal in their calls for authorities to clear out protesters from a key part of the capital, implying they might do it themselves if the government isn’t up to the task. While there was no violence in the central Bangkok shopping area where protesters remained camped for a 24th day, an explosion injured eight people late Sunday near the home of former Prime Minister Banharn Silapa-archa, who is allied to the ruling coalition.

Toronto Star

UK envoy escapes suicide bombing in Yemen

By macleans.ca - Monday, April 26, 2010 at 12:10 PM - 0 Comments

A suicide bomber in Sanaa, Yemen, today attacked a convoy of vehicles carrying the British ambassador, Tim Torlot, who escaped unscathed. No group has claimed responsibility, but British officials suspect al-Qaeda. The terrorist group has been increasingly active in the country. Two Yemeni security officials and a bystander were wounded. The bomber, a young man wearing a school uniform, died in the explosion.

BBC News

The end is nigh, or not

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 26, 2010 at 11:25 AM - 23 Comments

Canwest previews the impending, or at least inevitable, ruling of the Speaker on Parliament’s right to access Afghan detainee documents. Nelson Wiseman talks to CBC radio’s The House (scroll down) about what might happen. Kady O’Malley predicts something is coming this week, perhaps even tomorrow. (I’m reasonably assured nothing’s happening today.)

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 26, 2010 at 10:31 AM - 94 Comments

Michael Ignatieff pitches a national food policy. Details here.

Great moments in sock puppetry

By Colby Cosh - Monday, April 26, 2010 at 8:35 AM - 16 Comments

Orlando Figes, the renowned Sovietologist of London’s Birkbeck College, discharged a double-barrelled shotgun into his reputation this past week, becoming the latest scholar to get caught using an online alter ego—or “sock puppet,” in the technical parlance—to wage war on rivals and settle old scores. The chief investigator was Rachel Polonsky, a Russian-lit specialist who once printed a scathing review of one of Figes’ books and had heard through the academic grapevine that the notoriously belligerent historian didn’t take it well.

On April 12 Polonsky noticed that her latest work had attracted a curiously slanted one-star review on Amazon.com from a commenter nicknamed “Historian”. She knew immediately who was behind it. To borrow from her narrative of Figes’s rumbling:

“This is the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever written,” Historian began. “Polonsky, it turns out, is not an academic, as claimed in the blurb, but the wife of a foreign lawyer.” …I clicked on the “See all my reviews” link beside Historian’s name, and read all ten. As well as trashing my book, Historian had trashed three books by [rival Soviet historian] Bob Service, and the book by Kate Summerscale that beat Figes and The Whisperers to the lucrative Samuel Johnson Prize in 2008.  “It is better to go to Figes’s The Whisperers,” Historian told Amazon readers in his hatchet-job on Service’s Stalin.

All it took was one click on Historian’s profile to link to the incriminating nickname ‘orlando-birkbeck’. How could he have been so careless, I marvelled. The nickname was generated when Figes set up his Amazon account to buy books. When he created Historian’s profile on the same account in 2008 and began to publish online reviews, he doubtless did not inspect the details of this profile—never pressed the link on his own name that led straight to the incriminating nickname.

This hilarious ineptitude might have remained nothing more than a subject of dinner-table snickering in ivory-tower circles, but friends of Polonsky who had been told what had happened rushed to Amazon to point out that Figes was rubbishing competitors and praising himself while in transparent mufti. A salvo of libel threats from Figes’s lawyer followed. Fortunately, Service was able to able to obtain evidence unambiguously linking the “orlando-birkbeck” identity to Figes and his office address.

Confronted with this material, the cornered Figes passed up the chance to do the smart thing and confess all. Instead, he threw his wife under the bus, having his lawyer tell reporters on the evening of Apr. 16 that “My client’s wife wrote the reviews. My client has only just found out about this, this evening.” Figes’ wife is a law professor, and the historian’s face-saving claim that she had been spraying anonymous venom online seems to have been universally regarded as an untenable fairy tale. And so it proved on Apr. 24, when Figes finally came clean, let his poor missus off the hook, apologized twice to all and sundry and then some, and shuffled off on sick leave.

It is a fascinating case study full of warnings for anyone who relies on his reputation enough to be tempted by anonymity at all. (Good rule of thumb: if you want to say something anonymously, stop and ask yourself why the hell you can’t sign it.) Sure, Figes’s use of his wife as a human shield is a standard-setting feat, a Beamonesque leap in sheer son-of-a-bitchery. The sock puppetry is easier to understand. It is a plunge off a short pier that it is too easy to imagine blundering down. No one seems sure just what employment consequences Figes might face; creating an imaginary friend to say of oneself “I hope he writes forever” isn’t punishable behaviour, just contemptible and creepy.

Meanwhile, the case for English libel reform has found a fresh justification—one so perfect that the parties to the dispute might almost be suspected of staging the whole thing. But while Figes’s rabid, threatening behaviour might border on the literally incredible, it is all too common. People in the news business aren’t well-placed to point this out, but if you construct any reasonable list of history’s ten most famous libel cases, the number in which some legitimate interest in truth was actually at stake will probably not be more than two. Oscar Wilde and Liberace sued over suggestions about their personal proclivities that are now known, without much doubt, to have been accurate. Whistler and Ruskin fought idiotically to mutual exhaustion over a review that, by contemporary British standards, would be considered rather soft. The tormentors of old John Peter Zenger technically didn’t even argue that the seditious material in his newspaper was untrue. Of the well-known libel cases from the past that I can name off the top of my head, given five minutes and a stick of gum, about the only one in which definite consequential inaccuracies are known to have been perpetrated is Times v. Sullivan. As a very general rule, it’s not outright lies that make people angry enough to call a lawyer.

[Mindblowing bonus link for hardcore fans of Soviet history: turns out there really was a Hotel Bristol, sort of!]

[Bonus link for fans of the unrelated Canadian poet Robert W. Service: health advice from his forgotten nonfiction book Why Not Grow Young?]

The volcano that choked a continent

By Charlie Gillis and Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, April 26, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Arctic-Images

Catherine Hickson knew this day was coming. Of the hundreds of thousands of people left stranded last week on foreign soil—hostages to an ash-spewing hell vent whose name only Icelanders could pronounce—the B.C. volcanologist might have been best equipped to rationalize her frustration. Back in the late 1980s, Hickson had helped spearhead efforts to create a warning system to keep jet aircraft from flying into the sort of engine-seizing ash cast up by Eyjafjallajökull, the low-lying volcano whose plume all but shut down North Atlantic air traffic. Then a young scientist working for the federal government, she’d been assigned the task following a near-miss incident involving a KLM Boeing 747, which had flown into an ash cloud over Alaska and lost all power before pilots were able to restart the engines. Ottawa wanted to reassure passengers that steps were being taken to avoid such crises in the future. So did other countries.

Twenty years later, the system was working all too well: Hickson found herself marooned in Rome among the numberless travellers watching departure boards across Europe turn red with cancellations, their travel plans dashed by the whims of nature and transport authorities who told them it was too dangerous to fly. Her flight home to Vancouver had been scratched because it connected through Frankfurt, an aviation super-hub shuttered because of the overhanging haze. Hickson, who works for a private geothermal energy company, acknowledged the irony of being grounded by the very regime she helped create. She seemed no more certain than anyone how long the interruption would last. But with her intimate knowledge of volcanic ash, and a good idea of what it does to jet engines, she was sure of one thing: “I wouldn’t want to get on a plane right now.”

Continue…

Now try calling her a shlumpadinka

By Claire Ward - Monday, April 26, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images/ Bloomimage

Shlumpadinkas. They’re everywhere—in your supermarket, at the mall, in your kid’s elementary school parking lot. You’ve seen them. They’re the ladies in sweats, the pyjama mamas, the “flannel jammy faction” (as one Twitter post called them)—and the latest demographic targeted by the Vermont-based PajamaGram company with its new product, PajamaJeans, a snuggly garment billed as “pajamas you live in, jeans you sleep in.”

“We were noticing that people were wearing their pyjamas on airplanes and in grocery stores. But a lot of people have mixed feelings about it because they think it’s inappropriate and sloppy,” Stacey Buonanno, PajamaGram’s merchandising manager, told the blog Style List. “We thought, why don’t we develop something you’re comfortable hanging around the house in or sleeping in, but that looks acceptable when you go out?”

Washed in a deep indigo, the stretchy, boot-cut trouser is made of a mixture of cotton and spandex—a proprietary blend called Dormisoft—that apparently doesn’t stretch out with wear, unlike the knees and seat of your favourite jeans. The PajamaJean has a soft, jersey lining, complete with bright-yellow topstitch seams, pockets and rivets, an ambitious design intended to deceive the eye. The New York Daily News calls it the “fashion must-have for any woman looking to indulge her inner couch potato.”

Continue…

Outsourcing how to ride a bike

By Rebecca Eckler - Monday, April 26, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 13 Comments

Josef Scaylea/ Corbis

One of the oldest rites of passage for parents may be going the way of the dinosaur. Thanks to Claudia Sjöberg, the founder of Pedalheads Bike Camps, parents can now pay someone else to teach their children how to ride a bike. The week-long camps, which started 15 years ago in Vancouver and then expanded to Victoria, Calgary and Edmonton, have been such a hit that this summer, Pedalheads is opening four locations in the Toronto area. The camps, which operate at eight levels, take children as young as two (the child must turn three by December) for an hour-long program called “Trikes ’n Trainers.” At age four, kids can enrol in half-day or full-day programs.

There are many reasons, Sjöberg explains, why parents are no longer interested in teaching their children to ride. “A lot of the time parents are older. Or they work a lot, so don’t have the time.” Parents also want their kids riding bikes at an earlier age, she says. “I don’t know about you, but I learned to ride a bike when I was nine. Most parents now want their children riding, without training wheels, by age four.” Safety may also be a concern. At Pedalheads, staff cover topics like trail riding, street riding and bike maintenance. “A lot of the safety rules are complicated and we want to ensure the kids know them.”

For Toronto parent Dana Fields, who runs the PR firm Fields Communications, the idea of being able to get someone else to teach her two children, ages four and six, has her giddy with relief. “Teaching them to ride is something I’ve been dreading. Especially because [my daughter] cries if the wind blows the wrong way. I can’t even figure out how to teach my son to move the pedals. I’ve already joked with one of my neighbours if they would do it for me, that’s how much I’m dreading it.”

Sjöberg understands. “Getting an expert to do it brings peace of mind.” But does she feel like she’s taking away a bonding moment for parents? “There are plenty of other valuable lessons and things you are teaching your children every day,” she says with a laugh, “so I don’t think I’m taking anything away.”
At Pedalheads, most four-year-olds, she says, will be off their training wheels within the week, if not on the first day of camp. “We call it the ‘Pedalheads moment,’ when we push them and they can ride on their own. It’s such a big deal for them.”

Debbie Chatzispiros, who works in the financial industry in Vancouver, watched her son have his Pedalheads moment after she signed him up when he was five. On his second day of camp, “I came to pick him up and he was like, ‘Mom! Look what I can do!’ First, he rode his bike down the stairs! Once I picked my heart off the floor, it was an amazing moment. I never would have thought to teach him to ride his bike down stairs, but there he was,” she says. Before signing her children up, she had attempted to teach them in a back lane on concrete. “I couldn’t bear the thought of them falling. The camp teaches beginners on grass and they also teach them how to fall properly. I don’t know many parents who want to watch their children fall,” says Chatzispiros.

She brings up another point in favour of hiring someone. “You know, not only was I nervous, which may have rubbed off on them, but they also didn’t listen to me. They tend to listen to people who aren’t their parents.” With two working parents, the kids also didn’t have the time to practise more than once a week. “It’s like swimming. If you go to a swim class just once a week, it’s going to take a long time for your children to learn to swim. But if they’re doing it every day for a week or two in a row, they learn much more quickly,” explains Sjöberg. And with other children around, children are more likely to get back up on their bikes if they fall.

Pedalheads offers private lessons, too. “Sometimes a child is 10 and hasn’t learned to ride yet,” says Sjöberg. “They’re too embarrassed to be learning with kids who are so much younger—or they have an unusual fear of riding.”
The younger kids who come to the camps are adorable, she says. “They show up with their little bikes and their baskets and bells. Some parents are very funny. They’ll pull out a bike from their garage for their child that looks like it’s from 1977. We’ll have to suggest that maybe it’s time to get a new bike. And it’s not like they can’t afford it.”

At the end of the day, says Sjöberg, parents are just “so grateful for our staff to teach their children. I mean, do you know any parents who still want to teach their teenagers how to drive a car?”

Brief South Park Update

By Jaime Weinman - Sunday, April 25, 2010 at 9:11 PM - 21 Comments

Just a quick update: the version of South Park episode # 201 currently airing on the Comedy Network is (as expected) the same as the one that aired on Comedy Central, with the same bleeps, including bleeps of four-letter words. For the last couple of years TCN has aired the unbleeped versions of most South Park episodes (though with some odd exceptions, like the f-words in the whale/dolphin episode), but Comedy Central has not made any unbleeped version of this episode available yet.

There still continues to be surprising silence about the controversy from the network (which has said nothing except to confirm that it was responsible for the bleeps) and even Parker and Stone, who haven’t made any statements since the one they released the day after the episode aired. Since there’s no ban on talking about it at the network — Jon Stewart did a whole segment on it — I wonder what exactly is behind this, or if any of it will be addressed in the next episode.

The Great Epistemic Closure Debate of 2010

By Jaime Weinman - Sunday, April 25, 2010 at 3:14 PM - 74 Comments

There’s been a surprising amount of online commentary in the last few weeks that prominently uses the term “epistemic closure,” a term I’d never actually heard used in casual conversation before this year. It started with some posts by libertarian blogger Julian Sanchez, who was writing about the excommunication of David Frum from the conservative think tank AEI. Sanchez argued that this was part of a conservative move toward “epistemic closure,” meaning being unreceptive to facts that don’t fit into the pre-approved worldview:

One of the more striking features of the contemporary conservative movement is the extent to which it has been moving toward epistemic closure. Reality is defined by a multimedia array of interconnected and cross promoting conservative blogs, radio programs, magazines, and of course, Fox News. Whatever conflicts with that reality can be dismissed out of hand because it comes from the liberal media, and is therefore ipso facto not to be trusted. (How do you know they’re liberal? Well, they disagree with the conservative media!)  This epistemic closure can be a source of solidarity and energy, but it also renders the conservative media ecosystem fragile.

This argument was taken up both by heterodox conservatives and by liberals, who agree with the claim that Frum and Bruce Bartlett and other conservative apostates have been making: that in the era of Fox News, conservatives have effectively created their own reality which cannot be violated by outside facts.

There’s arguably a certain sour grapes quality to this, since some of it comes from conservatives who used to have think tank sinecures and got rewarded when they were willing to push the party line. Frum is the most famous example here, because during the run-up to the Iraq war, he wrote a famous article called “Unpatriotic Conservatives” about conservatives who were against the war — that is, he did exactly what is now being done to him, trying to excommunicate people from the conservative movement for trying to argue things that, in some cases, were true. And no one is immune from epistemic closure. After President Bush launched his “surge” in Iraq, there was resistance to the idea that conditions in Iraq were improving (relative to 2006, anyway), even as the statistics demonstrated that they were.

But I think it is true that the modern conservative movement often depends heavily on creating its own reality, or, maybe more accurately, its own mythology. Much of Fox News and talk radio depends on a litany of myths and legends that are sometimes incomprehensible outside of the conservative movement. For example, it’s accepted within the conservative movement that Saul Alinsky is the key to everything that Obama does. And when Republican Senate candidate Sue Lowden made her infamous comments about how people should barter chickens for health care, she was simply re-stating what was commonly accepted in conservative circles throughout the health care debate: that the health care problem could be solved if more people paid out of pocket (and, by extension, that people can afford to pay out of pocket or make deals with doctors like they did in the olden days). The ex-conservative, now-liberal blogger John Cole has a longish list of tenets of modern conservative mythology.

Now, the conservative riposte to this is that it’s not conservatives who are closed-minded, it’s liberals. That’s the argument with regard to global warming (or “AGW” as conservative mythology now requires it to be termed), that liberals refuse to accept any facts that demonstrate that the science isn’t settled, while conservatives are open-minded about alternative explanations. Though the National Review‘s Jim Manzi — a conservative who frequently argues against government solutions to global warming — looked at the global-warming chapter in a book by talk-radio hero Mark Levin and found plenty of “closure” on his own side. (And Manzi was instantly attacked by his National Review colleagues for daring to criticize Levin, who is on the good side and therefore presumed to be right about everything.)

But in any case, what’s obvious is that the two sides are not disagreeing about the interpretations of known facts. They are disagreeing about what the facts are. That’s a much more problematic thing, and it demonstrates why Continue…

The Backbench Top Ten

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, April 25, 2010 at 12:44 PM - 30 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…

Former top spy says anti-terror bill unnecessary

By macleans.ca - Sunday, April 25, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 3 Comments

Reid Morden, the former director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, says the Conservative government should re-think its plans to re-introduce controversial anti-terrorism measures initially adopted in the wake of 9/11. Justice Minister Rob Nicholson said Friday that Ottawa was looking at reviving extraordinary powers that would allow police to arrest people as a preventive measure and force suspects to show up at secret hearings to testify about possibly pending criminal acts. “Speaking strictly of those two particular provisions, I confess I never thought that they should have been introduced in the first place and that they slipped in, in the kind of scrambling around that the government did after 9/11,” Morden said. ”It seemed to me that it turned our judicial system somewhat on its head.” The initial provisions expired in 2007 and a Conservative move to revive them was defeated by Parliament that same year. Neither power was ever used in its original five-year lifespan.

CBC News

Memo from British Foreign Office mocks Catholic Church

By macleans.ca - Sunday, April 25, 2010 at 11:48 AM - 35 Comments

An ill-advised memo by Britain’s Foreign Office about Pope Benedict XVI has left officials in the country red-faced and contrite. A document detailing a brainstorming session by a committee called the Government’s Papal Visit Team included suggestions that mocked the Church’s teachings. Among the proposals were to have the Pope open an abortion ward, preside over a gay marriage, and launch a range of “Benedict” condoms. Scottish Secretary Jim Murphy, who’s been playing a leading role in the planning of the visit, called the document “despicable” and said, “on behalf of the whole of the United Kingdom, we’d want to apologise to his Holiness the Pope.”

The Telegraph

BBC News

Jean Charest's last stand

By Martin Patriquin - Sunday, April 25, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 4 Comments

Jacques Boissinot/ CP

If by some chance you arrived at the Quebec Liberal party convention last weekend after having lived under a rock for several weeks, you’d be forgiven for thinking things were peachy for the provincial party. The mere mention of Premier Jean Charest’s name evoked whistles and cheers from the 600 or so partisans. Wearing a perpetual half-smirk, Charest studded both of his boisterous, campaign-style speeches with cheery statistics: roads built, jobs created, money saved, dollars spent. For one weekend, at least, the Hôtel des Seigneurs in St. Hyacinthe, a town better known for the quality of its chocolate than its support of anything remotely federalist, gleamed Quebec Liberal red-and-blue.

Yet it is quite a different story beyond the partisan fold. Less than 18 months after securing a third term, Charest and the Liberals are more unpopular than they’ve ever been. A recent poll suggested 77 per cent of Quebecers are unsatisfied with the government, while a mere 17 per cent believe Charest is fit to lead the province. The poll, which came out shortly after a budget replete with tax, tuition and electricity rate hikes, not to mention the introduction of user fees for health care, represents a dubious honour for Charest: he is even less popular now than he was in 2004, the previous benchmark for unpopularity in modern Quebec politics—and, not coincidentally, the last time Charest attempted major changes to Quebec’s traditional social democratic model. In response to the more recent changes, some 50,000 Quebecers took to the streets (on a Sunday, no less) to protest the tax hikes, christening Quebec’s own version of the Tea Party movement. “It’s unprecedented,” pollster Christian Bourque told Le Devoir recently.

Continue…

This weekend in Guergis (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, April 24, 2010 at 11:40 PM - 11 Comments

However much Ms. Guergis wants to come back and however much her riding association wants her there, an unnamed Conservative tells CTV that the party is looking for a new candidate in Simcoe-Grey.

’orserace, innit?

By Andrew Coyne - Saturday, April 24, 2010 at 9:33 PM - 15 Comments

Want a quick read on where the parties stand in the British election? This dynamic graph tracks all the major polls, plus seat projections, plus bookmakers odds.