The Commons: Her Majesty goes to the museum

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 5:37 PM - 22 Comments

A girl gives Queen Elizabeth some flowers as she walks by well-wishers after visiting the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, Wednesday June 30, 2010. (THE CANADIAN PRESS/Fred Chartrand)

One person—the lone identifiable protester, though his exact cause seemed a bit obscure—wore a bear suit. Some ladies arrived in dresses. One young man wore a suit. Another young man wore a Wendel Clark jersey. Many clutched flowers. Several adults carried children. Someone had brought along a corgi, hoping maybe to have the canine autographed or blessed or formally adopted.

All here, lining the metal barricades on either side of the Museum of Nature’s ornate entrance, waited happily on this unseasonably cold and windy June day to see Elizabeth II, daughter of King George VI, Her Royal Highness and Queen of the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Belize, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Kitts and Nevis, and Canada.

Shortly after noon, a band of bagpipers came down McLeod Street. Then, as if from thin air, appeared a group of dancers, young women in red skirts who proceeded to high step for the amusement of the assembled subjects. Her Majesty was due at precisely 12:25pm, but that came and passed without sight of her. Indeed, not until 12:30pm did the first of her 13-car motorcade, flanked by a couple dozen officers on motorcycles, appear from the west.

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One Montreal borough's war on the car

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 5:27 PM - 28 Comments

The Montreal borough of Plateau Mont-Royal is many things to many people: a formerly bohemian yuppie respite; a congenial melting pot of English, French and many other backgrounds; a trendy, boozy hotspot for tourists and university students. However, the eight square kilometers of this central Montreal burg is fast becoming known as something else: the scourge of the suburban driver.

Starting this fall, the Plateau will be home to what its administration calls “traffic calming initiatives” that will make driving through the neighbourhood a wee bit trickier. They include reversing the direction of certain streets, narrowing others, widening sidewalks, and installing a bevy of bicycle paths throughout.

The changes will make room for what Plateau mayor Luc Ferrandez describes as “secure, pleasant and user-friendly streets,” though these will come at the expense of convenience for commuters. That’s because the Plateau is a major thoroughfare for the vast (and ever-growing) suburbs on the north shore of Montreal—something Ferrandez, an avid cyclist, has watched for years with pursed lips.

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Pregnancy blood test could find Down’s syndrome

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 4:54 PM - 0 Comments

Women at high risk for having babies with Down’s syndrome are currently given an amniocentesis test, which carries a risk of miscarriage; but in the future, that could be replaced with a blood test during pregnancy, researchers say. A Dutch team is looking for a way of testing a mother’s blood for chromosome disorders in the fetus, the BBC reports, based on “probes” that attach to specific points of a chromosome. It’s the same technique used to find problems in fetal DNA from samples taken from the womb’s amniotic fluid, but a blood test would be fast, non-invasive, and would pose no risk to the fetus. So far, the team has identified the male or Y chromosome from the fetus in the mother’s blood, which shows their technique works, and can be used as early as six to eight weeks. They’re now looking for probes to find the extra chromosome present in Down’s syndrome.

BBC News

Jamie Oliver is wrong: British health minister

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 4:49 PM - 8 Comments

The new British health minister, Andrew Lansley, has criticized the former Labour government’s attempt to curb childhood obesity by serving better quality food at state-funded schools, a move promoted by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. He says the coalition government’s health policy will be based on what actually works, showing a less interventionist approach, Reuters reports. The Jamie Oliver experiment actually led to fewer children eating school meals, said Lansley, a Conservative party member of the coalition, sparking a growing chain of attempts to control what kids eat. Instead, the government should encourage people to take control of their own health, he said. One in six kids in England were obese in 2008, while only 20 per cent ate the recommended five fruits and veggies per day.

Reuters

Did University of Ottawa president almost invite Ann Coulter back?

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 4:45 PM - 11 Comments

Allan Rock, the president of the University of Ottawa, consulted with a PR firm about whether to invite polarizing commentator Ann Coulter back to campus one day after protesters shut down her appearance. Mr. Rock said in an e-mail that he was considering the invite in order to demonstrate the school’s “unqualified commitment to freedom of expression.” The consultants cautioned against it, saying it would become an uncontrollable media circus. The controversy started when Coulter was warned by the university’s vice-president academic to review Canada’s hate speech law before speaking at the university in March. Rock is apparently not a fan of Coulter, having called her “a mean-spirited, small-minded, foul-mouthed poltroon,” in a recent e-mail. Coulter is known to stir the pot, having suggested that Muslim countries should be conquered and Christianized. On the day after the Ottawa speech was cancelled, she told a Muslim student at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ont. that if she didn’t have a magic carpet, she could “take a camel.”

Winnipeg Free Press

Missouri hospital may have infected veterans with HIV, hepatitis

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 4:39 PM - 0 Comments

A Missouri Veterans Administration hospital may have exposed more than 1,800 veterans to life-threatening diseases such as hepatitis and HIV. Rep. Russ Carnahan John said Cochran VA Medical Center in St. Louis recently mailed letters to 1,812 veterans telling them they could contract hepatitis B, hepatitis C and HIV after visiting the medical center for dental work. Carnahan said he is calling for an investigation into the matter and has sent a letter to President Barack Obama about the issue. Dr. Gina Michael, the association chief of staff at the hospital, said the issue stems from a failure to clean dental instruments properly. She said some dental technicians broke protocol by hand washing tools before putting them in cleaning machines when the instruments were supposed to only be put in the cleaning machines. The hand washing started in February 2009 and continued to March of this year. The hospital has set up a special clinic and education centers to help patients who may have been infected, but Carnahan said he feels more should be done and those responsible should be disciplined.

CNN

Canadian identity useful for spies

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 4:28 PM - 0 Comments

The Canadian identity card has become a preferred commodity in the shadowy world of international espionage, the Toronto Star reports. The arrest of Christopher Metsos, a purported Canadian citizen, at a Cyprus airport Tuesday brought an end to the initial police sweep of an alleged Russian spy ring busted Sunday in suburban America. Eleven people are now in custody facing what Moscow calls “baseless” American charges. The affidavit from an FBI officer charges that four of the 11 claim Canadian birth or citizenship, including one who allegedly took the identity of a Montreal infant who died in 1963. All are charged with spying, for a decade or longer, on the U.S. for Russia’s foreign intelligence agency while posing as average suburban couples in New York, New Jersey, Seattle and Virginia. The incident confirms how easy it can be to claim to be Canadian if you want to slip under the radar. It’s also a tactic that’s been used in the past by other countries. Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, tried to pass off two of its spies as Canadian tourists in 1997 while on a mission to kill a Hamas official in revenge for a suicide bombing in Israel. Another known incident occurred in 1973, when Mossad agents with Canadian papers killed a man in Lillehammer, Norway who they mistakenly believed was involved in the attack on the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 Games in Munich. Although opposition party MPs called for the government to try to dissuade countries that maintain stables of overseas spies from using posing as Canadians, experts say there’s little chance of that happening. Tracing every last lost or stolen passport, birth certificate and driver’s license would require a massive bureaucratic effort.

Toronto Star

Security theatre

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 2:40 PM - 53 Comments

Turns out the “weapons” “display” was about as straightforward as the “secret” “new” “law.”

The NDP’s Don Davies has now formally requested a recall of the public safety committee to study the security practices around the G8 and G20 summits.

Minor TV-Historical Note

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 1:36 PM - 7 Comments

In my Steve Carell post before, Dennis F wonders why Happy Days’ ratings went up after Ron Howard left. I get the impression that the show had become so bad in the Jump The Shark seasons that it lost a lot of its audience once the Fonzie craze died down. During Ron Howard’s last year, Lowell Ganz (who had run the show in its third season) came back to run it, bringing along writers like his former partner Mark Rothman and his future partner “Babaloo” Mandel, and helped re-orient the show away from little kids and older viewers, and toward teenagers and twentysomethings. When Howard left, the writers put even more of the focus on teenage characters (Scott Baio, mostly) and helped to build up the teen following that the show had probably lost.

Whether that has any lessons for The Office, I don’t know. I assume NBC will try to use Carell’s replacement to court a young demographic, but networks are always using everything as an excuse to court a young demographic. That precedent does sort of suggest that a show can survive if the producers identify a character who can tap into a new segment of the audience — that is, bring people who weren’t watching the show before (teens really loved Joanie and Chachi, believe it or not, and that’s what Scott Baio was talking about on Arrested Development when he said he “skewed younger” than Fonzie) to replace the ones who stopped watching when the star left. It’s hard to know who The Office could build up to court a new audience, though; they’ve gotten all the mileage they can out of Jim and Pam. Maybe they should give Creed a bigger part and have him sing every week.

And, since I mentioned Jumping The Shark, one thing I’ve always found somewhat funny (unintentionally) is that when Happy Days did one of their clip shows a year later, they very prominently featured Jumping The Shark as a highlight of Fonzie’s career. The actors apparently knew that there was something wrong with that moment, but I guess the writers didn’t. Or at least they thought the audience didn’t.

Unravelling Canada's crazy quilt

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 12:55 PM - 7 Comments

Kate LeBlanc/TORONTO STAR

Two years ago, our annual Canada Day special report compared Canada with its bête noire and sibling to the south, and we liked, and were sometimes surprised, by what we found. Last year, we tested Canada against the wider world and again performed impressively. In this edition, we turn inward, using the same evolving array of studies, surveys, and census information to compare the provinces to each other on various economic, social, and medical metrics.

The differences, in many cases, are jarring. We have grown accustomed to startling economic disparities among the provinces: the survey confirms, for example, that Alberta has the country’s highest labour-force participation and its highest weekly wage, though it serves to add the valuable caveats that Albertans spend the second most amount of time at work and are the least likely of all Canadians to have a pension plan. What’s perhaps more interesting is the subtler ways in which the basic texture of life differs between provinces (and the territories, by no means forgotten, but left aside from our charts, with regret, because their small populations and unique socio-economic structures produce volatile, extreme data).

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'Hatemonger' circumvents Ottawa to speak at Islamic conference

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 12:26 PM - 67 Comments

Dr. Zakir Naik, an Indian Muslim televangelist who was recently banned from Canada for his inflammatory statements about Jews, gays, women, and the West, will host an Islamic conference in Toronto this weekend via video satellite. More than 10,000 attendees will hear Dr. Naik speak at the Journey of Faith Conference, which is said to be North America’s largest Islamic conference. First Naik was denied a visa to enter Canada because
comments such as “every Muslim should be a terrorist,” Jews are “our staunchest enemy,” and “If [Osama bin Laden] is fighting the enemies of Islam, I am for him.” But technology now allows people to circumvent immigration restrictions. For example, the British anti-war MP George Galloway, who was banned from speaking in Canada last year because of his support of Gaza’s Hamas government, was still able to deliver a speech to hundreds of supporters in a downtown Toronto church via live-feed.

National Post

Painting a regal picture

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 11:48 AM - 1 Comment

“Wherever Queen Elizabeth goes, she makes waves. But rarely as she did on Tuesday, when she sailed into Halifax Harbour to review an international fleet gathered to celebrate her and the Canadian navy’s centennial.” That was the lede from Christopher Hume’s article about Tuesday’s fleet review by the Queen. While it’s a bit of a mystery as to why the Toronto Star‘s architecture critic is covering the royals in Halifax, Hume can paint a scene like the best in the biz. “Dressed in a white collarless coat and navy blue hat, Her Majesty looked, well, majestic. As she struggled out of her limousine, looking momentarily frail, it was clear she still has the ability, if not the power, to reduce a large crowd of sailors, politicians and even grizzled reporters to silence. Such is the mystique of royalty. Perhaps the affecting aspect of the day’s events was that it could not be seen from a distance; in other words, there was no audience on hand to witness the cheering of the sailors or see them standing at attention for what seemed hours on end. And yet, therein lay the meaning of the proceedings. The whole question of protocol and who has precedence over whom generally leaves us either amused or contemptuous. But for institutions such as the navy, they are of paramount importance. Without them, military organization wouldn’t work.”

Toronto Star

Toronto Star (2)

Montreal Mafia clan under siege

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 11:20 AM - 3 Comments

For years, the Rizzuto clan in Montreal ruled the country’s criminal underworld. But a changing of the guard is clearly underway. Vito Rizzuto—the reputed godfather of the crime organization—is serving a 10-year prison sentence in the United States for racketeering. His son, Nick, was murdered in December, and his brother-in-law, Paolo Renda, remains missing after being abducted near his home in May. And yesterday, outside a food-distribution company in St. Leonard, long-time Rizzuto associate Agostino Cuntrera was shot dead in a drive-by hit. (Another man, reportedly Cuntrera’s bodyguard, was also killed). Cuntrera was sentenced in 1978 to five years in prison for his role in a conspiracy to murder Calbrian Mafia don Paulo Violi, which allowed the Sicilian clan led by the Rizzutos to gain control of Montreal. Before yesterday’s shooting, Cuntrera had reportedly assumed more of a leadership role in the organization. “He was known in the community, you know,” said one person lingering near the crime scene. “He was known as a good guy.”

Montreal Gazette

Larry King finally calls it quits

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 11:18 AM - 5 Comments

Larry King tweeted his planned retirement from CNN on Tuesday. In an interview with the LA Times, he said the requirement that he cover celebrity news and crime stories made it a “tough” daily grind. “You’ve got to do tabloid shows,” he said. “You’ve got to do the girl that’s missing in Aruba. It’s hard to make the case that that is major news, but that’s what’s news today.” King, who started in radio in 1957 has interviewed more than 40,000 people on air. He will still work on specials for CNN, which he joined in 1985 when the network was only 5 years old.

LA Times

Economy stalls in April

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 11:05 AM - 3 Comments

A new report from Statistics Canada concluded that in April, Canada’s economy slowed after seven straight monthly increases. Retail fell 1.7 per cent in April almost nullifying March’s 1.9 percent increase. For the
first time since August 2009, manufacturing fell 0.3 percent. And production of non-durable goods fell 1.2 per cent on pharmaceuticals, printing and food. Other indicators of economic stagnation included slow inflation and unemployment growth. The declining retails were offset by an increase in mining, oil and gas extraction. “We’ve had a pretty strong run of growth and April will be one of those payback months,” said Michael Gregory, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets in Toronto, to Bloomberg. “It will get everyone a little bit more worried about the near term prospects.”

Bloomberg

The dirty River Jordan

By Claire Ward - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Darren Whiteside/Reuters

One of the world’s most sacred rivers has become an unholy mess, and could cease to exist by 2011, according to Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME), a joint Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian environmental NGO. The lower Jordan River, immortalized in the holy books of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, was once a rapid, swelling waterway filled with fish and flanked by willow and poplar trees, flowing south from the Sea of Galilee into the Dead Sea.

Today, a brownish, foul-smelling stream trickles along where 1.3 billion cubic metres used to annually gush. “No one can say this is holy water,” Gidon Brom­berg, FoEME’s Israeli co-director, recently told a group of reporters visiting the site. The Jordan River, along with the Dead Sea and Mountain Aquifer, are at the top of FoEME’s political agenda. Speaking quite literally, Bromberg added, “The Jordan River has become holy s–t.”

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Killing Captain Kirk

By Jaime J. Weinman - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 13 Comments

Photograph by Doug Hyun

On June 16, the last day of the Banff World Television Festival, William Shatner was the subject of the feature interview. You could tell Shatner was in the building because of the line, stretching back and forth across the hotel, to see the Canadian actor and Price­line.com pitchman. And for the people who got in, he provided the equivalent of a one-man comedy show: getting laughs and applause every few seconds, telling anecdotes about his economics degree at McGill and his work in live theatre, and making fun of the long questions asked by the moderator, Big Bang Theory creator Bill Prady. He asked the video cameras, recording the event, to do a close-up of him so he could re-enact his famous terrified expression from an episode of The Twilight Zone. He delighted the audience with his awareness of a write-in campaign to make him governor general of Canada, saying that a governor general “needs to be old, distinguished and wealthy, and I’m none of those things.”

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Taliban attack Afghanistan NATO base

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 10:45 AM - 0 Comments

Taliban insurgents set off a car bomb and fired rocket-propelled grenades at NATO forces in eastern Afghanistan on Wednesday. Two NATO soldiers were wounded and several attackers were killed outside Jalalabad, a base close to the border with Pakistan. A NATO spokesman said the perimeter of the base was not breached. Just a day before, U.S. General David Petraeus had warned of an “industrial strength insurgency” in the country. Six Taliban suicide attackers took part in the attack, and eight insurgents died in the ensuing gun battle.

BBC News

'Explosive stuff'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 10:37 AM - 127 Comments

The parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Foreign Affairs has rebuked the CSIS chief over those allegations of foreign interference in Canadian politics and Mr. Fadden is now due to appear before the public safety committee next Monday. Wesley Wark, meanwhile, demands a mea culpa

This is explosive stuff, and it has now blown up in Fadden’s face. The CSIS director should never have gone public with this story in the first place.

To do so endangers the reputation of CSIS, and risks the politicization of the service. No intelligence agency in a democracy can be allowed to be used to make accusations about politicians in office. If such accusations have to be made, they have to be based on credible evidence, exhaustively reviewed, and they have to be made by government ministers or the prime minister.

Flunking math in Nova Scotia

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 10:21 AM - 6 Comments

Nova Scotia’s provincial math test for Grade 12 students is proving more than most of them can handle: only 45 per cent passed last year, down from 51 per cent in 2008. It’s just as bad in the province’s French-language schools, where, again, 45 per cent of students passed mathematiques. Are the kids to blame? The teachers? The provincial education department blames, at least in part, the curriculum—saying too many math concepts are presented in Grade 12 for the classroom time available. A new curriculum will be rolled out starting next year.

Chronicle Herald

The best universities to work at

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 10:17 AM - 5 Comments

The Scientist magazine polled more than 2,000 researchers and academics with permanent jobs at academic institutions, hospitals, government bodies, or research organizations, to find out the best places to work. Two Canadian schools cracked their Top 10 list for universities outside the U.S.—and both might come as something of a surprise. The most prestigious schools—Montreal’s McGill, University of Toronto, University of British
Columbia—didn’t make it. Instead, Edmonton’s University of Alberta holds down sixth place and Halifax’s Dalhousie University ranked tenth. The survey was paid close attention to the sorts of things that scientists, rather than say, their students, care most about—job satisfaction, research resources and pay were among the factors probed in the survey.

The Scientist

48 hours of hindsight

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 86 Comments

With more than 1,000 people arrested, the G20 is seemingly the largest mass arrest in Canadian history. The Toronto police are happy to showcase the seized weapons and condiments, but now concede the “secret” “new” “law” never really existed. The mayor is displeased. The Star gets a look at the infamous detention facility. Two Post photographers talk about their time there. A Globe reporter writes about her experience at Queen & Spadina. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association says police action was, at times, “disproportionate, arbitrary and excessive.” Amnesty International wants an independent review. Mark Holland demands answers. The NDP has questions too.

Roland Paris weighs the cost. Tim Powers justifies the trouble. Brian Topp condemns the riot. James Morton defends the police. The Economist considers. Jon Stewart mocks. Steve Paikin laments.

'Twilight' eclipsed by the rules of engagement

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, June 30, 2010 at 12:58 AM - 12 Comments

Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart in 'The Twilight Saga: Eclipse.'

Going to see a Twilight movie is not like seeing a regular movie. But this is the third time around, and I’m getting to know the drill. Last night I attended a preview of The Twilight Saga: Eclipse. It was neither a press screening nor a gala premiere nor a public promo event. It was billed as “a VIP screening.” The theatre was packed with hundreds of “VIPs”, and we were  welcomed by distribution executive Bryan Gliserman of E1 Entertainment, who told us we were all “very special.” Whatever that means. Judging by the screams, this hand-picked crowd included more than a few Twihards. But I’ve learned that Twilight fans have a weird relationship to the series. They’re a discerning bunch. Many are so devoted to Stephanie Meyer’s books that they regard the movies as a curious facsimile, no matter how faithful they try to be. And given that Meyer regulates the franchise with an iron hand, the films are  faithful to a fault. The problem is, the audience still seems torn on where to drawn the line between high romance and high camp. I still can’t figure out where the comedy is intentional and where it’s not. For example, laughter broke the mood during the most serious romantic moment of this latest episode—ahem, if you haven’t read the books, but still care enough about the series that you don’t want me to spoil the plot, skip this next bit —and I’m talking about the moment where Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart) and her vampire beau, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson) finally become engaged. That’s funny? There’s a strange disassociation that seems to have infected the series. It’s as if the actors, consigned to the template of their predestined fate, keep their characters at an ironic distance, and so does the audience—as if everyone intimately involved with Twilight feels they’re superior to the movie.

So how is the movie? Well, I was bored for the first half. The pace seemed utterly leaden. But once the narrative finally gets in gear, there’s more narrative payoff in this third installment than in the two previous films. Bella is about to graduate from high school and  is forced to choose between Edward and his werewolf rival, Jacob (Taylor Lautner), who becomes increasingly aggressive in courting her. The plot hinges on a brewing war between the Cullen clan—the virtuous vampires—and a voracious pack of “newborn” bloodsuckers who are wreaking homicidal havoc in Seattle. They are a punk gang led by a leering nihilist named Riley, who looks like he got lost on his way to the set of A Clockwork Orange. Riley, whose latest recruit is a young teen named Bree (Canadian Jodelle Ferland), is being played as an unwitting pawn of the vengeful Victoria (Bryce Dallas Howard). And along the way, the narrative takes a number of back-story detours, which may prove utterly mystifying for anyone just tuning in. But basic conflict is classic stuff. As the Cullens prepare to battle the army of bloodthirsty newborns, they make an unholy alliance with the wolves. And it’s against this backdrop that the torrid love triangle involving Bella, Edward and Jacob gets torqued to the breaking point. Continue…

Larry King abdicates

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, June 29, 2010 at 10:14 PM - 5 Comments

As soon as Larry King announced that he’s ending Larry King Live, I had to fight the urge to say nothing but nice things about him. You know how it is: you spend years being annoyed by someone’s questioning style and his influence… and then when he leaves, all you can think about is how he wasn’t as bad as some of the people who followed him. Also, how the basically light-entertainment style of the show was a bit easier to take than the cable news shows that try to pretend there’s something huge, world-shaking, incredibly important, in every single interview.

And I’ll say this: King at his hackiest was never as hacky as the comedians making jokes about his age. I mean, we get it: he’s over 70, and apparently old people don’t belong on TV or something.

Anyway, here’s the best-known (or at least most-Youtub’d) interview from King’s first year on CNN, with Frank Zappa.

Now the “who will replace Steve Carell” talk will coexist with “who will replace Larry King” talk, and it’s possible the two will get confused. So maybe we should just have one person replace both of them. Preferably not Ryan Seacrest, though.