And best wishes for the future
By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, July 22, 2010 - 0 Comments
As a small parting gift on the occasion of his leaving the civil service after 34 years, Munir Sheikh was given his very own talking point.
“Our approach is about finding a better balance between collecting necessary data and protecting the privacy rights of Canadians,” the Tory “info-alert” said. “It is unfortunate that Mr. Sheikh did not share these objectives.”
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How to really fuel discontent
By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments
Tempers flare as the government moves to curb the country’s massive gas subsidies
Amit Dave/Reuters
India’s fuel subsidies have long been considered too hot to touch. To tweak them is to invite public fury. So it came as a bit of a shock last month when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, hardly the political bruiser needed for the task, announced major reductions just ahead of Toronto’s G20 summit. The bold move, sure to hurt the poor who rely on kerosene to cook, will also sting politically. Massive strikes in response last week grounded planes, stopped trains and closed schools and businesses across India for a day. Goods were stranded at port when truckers joined in, using their parked rigs to gum up traffic. In places, violence flared, leading to thousands of arrests.
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A love whose month is ever May
By Andrew Potter - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments
“I find now that I can more or less acquit myself on any charge…
“I find now that I can more or less acquit myself on any charge of having desired Martin carnally. (My looks by then had in any case declined to the point where only women would go to bed with me.) What eventuated instead was the most heterosexual relationship that one young man could conceivably have with another.” — Hitch-22
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Is Conrad Black headed back to Toronto?
By macleans.ca - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 11:07 AM - 0 Comments
Former media baron reportedly facing eviction in Palm Beach
Conrad Black is out of prison and back in the rented Palm Beach estate where his wife Barbara Amiel was waiting. And if all goes according to plan, the former media baron could be back in his native Canada sooner than later. Black is currently confined to the continental United States under bail conditions set by federal district court Judge Amy St. Eve. But Black’s lawyers are expected to use a hearing scheduled for Friday to argue their client should be allowed to return to Canada. Sources tell the Financial Post Black’s financial situation is dire and he is facing eviction from his Palm Beach mansion. Prosecutors have so far objected to his request to return to Toronto, but it’s believed his diminished financial state could be used to convince the court he is not a flight risk.
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How a team loses actually matters
By Stephen Marche - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments
Unlike the French, the Germans and the Italians owned up to their loses. They’ll be champions again one day.
Alessandra Tarantino/AP
Winning isn’t everything. It’s not the only thing, either, as Vince Lombardi would have us believe. It is, in fact, a rare thing. (Just ask the Dutch, who have now flubbed out of a record three World Cup finals. Their loss was rough and they took it badly, whining about the referee without cause.) The World Cup in South Africa 2010 produced one winner and 31 losers, many more if you include all the teams that never made it to the tournament. And while Spain will go down in history, the rest will all be forgotten. Which is a shame. The losers, after all, make up the bulk of the competitors and the way they lose is so much more revealing than the way they win, each defeat a minor insight into national characteristics. To steal from Tolstoy: all victories are alike; every defeat is miserable in its own way.
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Your boss won’t know you’re a pothead!
By Joanne Latimer - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments
A portable herb vaporizer that offers ‘smokeless freedom’ is flying off the shelves
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW TOLSON
“It’s a no-brainer,” deadpanned Robin Ellins, owner of Friendly Stranger, a cannabis culture shop in Toronto. Ellins was referring to the runaway success of the Iolite portable herb vaporizer. It’s the hottest new drug paraphernalia to hit the market since . . . since . . . nobody can remember.
Stoners are smitten by this handy little unit that resembles a walkie-talkie. “It’s actually manufactured in Ireland as an aromatherapy device,” clarified Manitoba-based Robert Ritchot, a Canadian distributor of the device. Sure, Robert, whatever your lawyers say.
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Why we don't watch soccer
By Colin Campbell - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 20 Comments
Amateur participation is sky-high, so why is the Beautiful Game such a commerical flop in Canada?
Getty Images
In 1988 the United States won the right to host the 1994 World Cup. For soccer fans, this was to be the beginning of the end of their sport’s struggle for relevance in North America. But nearly 25 years later, little has changed. Aside from the once-every-four-years hoopla surrounding the World Cup, soccer remains a third-rank pro sport in the U.S. and Canada.
America’s World Cup playoff match against Ghana last month drew 19.4 million viewers in the U.S. Significant, but far less than the 27.6 million who watched the U.S.-Canada Olympic hockey final. In Canada, the World Cup was the most watched program in the last week of June, with about two million viewers—about the same number who watched Global TV’s police drama Rookie Blue. Neither the arrival of Major League Soccer in 1996 nor its luring of stars like David Beckham stateside have been able to propel the game into the big leagues of North American pro sport.
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Paying for spare body parts
By Colby Cosh - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments
For $5,500 in expense money, will more living donors give up a kidney?
Contrasto/Redux
For the roughly 35,000 Canadians who suffer from end-stage kidney disease, the logic is simple and cruel. In order for them to get a transplant, one of two things has to happen. Someone has to die in a way that leaves at least one kidney available for transplantation, or someone who matches up with them genetically has to be persuaded to give them a spare. There’s no third choice.
The bad news for patients is that there are fewer “cadaveric donors” every year; according to the Canadian Organ Replacement Register, there were 15.3 donors per million population in 2000, and 14.7 in 2008. Continual small improvements to trauma care, automobile and highway engineering, and treatment for strokes and brain aneurysms all mean that kidney patients have to spend a little longer on dialysis. Nationwide, transplants were performed at a rate of eight per 100 patient-years of kidney dialysis in 2000; in 2008 the figure was just six.
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The stats behind date-rape drug detectors
By Colby Cosh - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 10:32 AM - 0 Comments
A detection kit for the most common date rape drugs is going on sale throughout Canada shortly, according to the Montreal Gazette. The Gazette did not have to look far to find someone to denounce the ethical premise of such apparatuses: a spokesman for a Vancouver women’s shelter said “This is a cynical attempt to make some money and shame on the company for feeding off the fear that women, reasonably, have of being raped.”
I suppose most of us would respond with something very like Adam Smith’s classic formulation: we are not to look to a “lack of cynicism” for the answers to our social problems, any more than we look to the fellow-feeling of the butcher and the baker to provide us with sustenance. If something like the Drink Detective—which consists of a pipette and three pieces of treated paper—enabled us to end drug-facilitated rape tomorrow, that would be a very good thing indeed.
Unfortunately, almost 100% of barroom beverages contain a highly effective substance that diminishes inhibitions and impairs memory. More to the point, it is odd that a test for “date rape drugs” other than ethanol should be criticized on the premise of its effectiveness without any attempt at an inquiry into that effectiveness. The Drink Detective website, by itself, doesn’t encourage confidence. It features a supposedly independent, but thinly sourced, “technical report” into the accuracy of the kit. One press release on the site, perhaps in a ham-handed attempt to double the market for the product, recycles the urban legend that “In some countries, it is even possible to be drugged and incapacitated so that organs, such as kidneys, can be surgically removed and sold.”
You are probably wondering whether there have been any peer-reviewed studies of the Drink Detective, and why, if there are, they aren’t mentioned on the “Science” page of the product’s website. The answer to your first question is “Yes”. And you probably already have a potential answer to the second if you’ve studied statistics.
An team of public health researchers in Liverpool published a study of the Drink Detective in the journal Addiction in 2006. They found that the Drink Detective was significantly superior to a rival product, and as a technical feat of fast, cheap detection of complex molecules, the kit deserves not just praise but wonder. But is it really of much use? The authors found that the overall sensitivity of the kit was about 69.0% and its specificity was 87.9%. In plainer English, this means that for every 100 samples of adulterated booze, the test will, on average, miss (100-69), or 31; and for 100 non-drugged drinks, the test will give (100-87.9), call it 12, false positives.
Women who are hyper-conscious of the possibility of drug-assisted rape will not be happy to hear that the Drink Detective gives a clean bill of health to almost one-third of drink-tampering sociopaths. But the false positives are a concern too: it would be easy to design a test that “caught” every single spiked drink if you didn’t care about specificity as well as sensitivity. (A heuristic of “Run straight home if a napkin becomes moistened when you dip it in your glass” would have 100% sensitivity.) In situations where the real odds of getting a spiked drink were as high as 1 in 100, a test with 88% specificity would still finger 12 innocents as toxic creeps for every 1 guilty man it identified. Even at a reasonable-sounding price per kit of $5.99, test fatigue seems likely under realistic circumstances.
The Drink Detective’s manufacturers had some specific gripes about the Liverpool test—complaining, for instance, that the testers’ use of pharmaceutical-grade GHB was inappropriate—but they had received the benefit of the doubt in at least one large, obvious way: the kit was put through its paces, not in a dimly-lit pub toilet by experimenters half-wrecked on Cosmos, but by sober scientists working in a laboratory. It is hard to disagree with the conclusion that “Use of drug detector kits by the public in the night-time environment…may create a false sense of security (false negatives) and undue concern (false positives) among kit users.” And the same could be said—to her credit, Daisy Kler of the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter does say it—about the overall focus on drug-facilitated sexual assault by strangers. No one is certain how often this really happens, and the best guess is “not very”.
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An artful scheme
By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments
One firm’s pitch to help people use a tax shelter by buying and then donating old photos is raising eyebrows in the art world and words of caution from experts
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW TOLSON
It’s shortly after 6 p.m. and one of the banquet halls at the Old Mill Inn & Spa, a rustic building in the west end of Toronto, is beginning to fill with people. Tonight’s event is billed as “An evening with Rick Mercer,” but the comedian’s routine is a teaser for a sales pitch called the VIA (Vintage Iconic Archives) Project: a tax-shelter scheme that involves buying and donating old photographs to an unnamed Canadian university.
It’s a relatively new twist on an old ploy to reap financial advantages from the country’s generous tax incentives for charitable and cultural donations. There have been dozens of different approaches over the years, most of which attempt to generate a big tax receipt in exchange for a relatively small up-front investment. The schemes frequently test the boundaries of tax laws and have drawn the ire of the Canada Revenue Agency, leading to an avalanche of reassessments, tax penalties and lengthy court battles.
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Obama’s immigration law gamble
By Luiza Ch. Savage - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments
How badly will the lawsuit against Arizona hurt the Democrats?
Mark Wilson/Getty Images
Facing November mid-term elections in which they could lose control of the House, if not the Senate, Democrats had a plan for this summer: take to the campaign trail talking about jobs. Republicans had planned to keep fanning the flames against President Barack Obama’s health-care reform and mounting government debt. But the administration scrambled those plans last week by launching a lawsuit against the state of Arizona.
At issue: its tough new immigration law which, as of July 29 unless a court intervenes, will make it a crime to fail to carry immigration documents in Arizona. (Until now, being in the country illegally was a federal civil offence.) Most controversially, the law requires police to check the immigration status of people they stop for other offences if they “reasonably suspect” them of being in the country illegally.
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On your port side, cookies
By Julia Belluz - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments
Nestlé is sailing the Amazon with a floating grocery store to try to reach a lucrative, untapped market
Marie Hippenmeyer
For the month of July, Nestlé Brasil has unleashed a floating supermarket barge on the tributaries that thread deep into the Amazon region in an attempt to reach some 800,000 Brazilians living in isolated, riverside communities. “We are going to pick up the customer where he is,” announced Ivan Zurita, the CEO of Nestlé Brasil, in a statement. “This will be a service to the population of the Amazon, which has streets and avenues in the form of rivers.”
Wherever the boat docks, locals can come aboard and wade through 1,000 sq. feet of supermarket space packed with more than 300 products, including chocolate, cookies, yogourt and ice cream. To meet the needs of poorer customers, Nestlé will sell smaller, more affordable packages of their branded foods and enrich them with nutrients to address deficiencies in local populations.
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Manila: scales of justice
By Claire Ward - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments
Murderers and thieves perform in a prison orchestra and chorale, but are they really being rehabilitated?
Aaron Favila/AP
When you think of music in prisons, you might think of inmates playing harmonicas or strumming guitars alone in their cells—not top hats, a brass section, and a lively rendition of Everything’s Coming Up Roses. But that’s what journalists got when they visited New Bilibid prison in Manila in June to observe the inaugural performance of a 100-member Bureau of Corrections Grand Orchestra and Chorale—made up of convicted thieves, kidnappers, and murderers.
The room was decked out almost like a dinner theatre, with tables and refreshments for visiting families and prison staff, a stage skirted with ruffled curtains, and a smoke machine. Fidel Rana, who is serving two life terms for double murder, played his father’s old trombone. “Before this we used to sit around inside with our thoughts,” he told Al Jazeera. “Now we practise, and the days go by quicker.”
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‘We are living in hell’—Haiti six months later
By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments
Can a 10-year, $10-billion rebuilding plan turn this country around?
Martin Chamberland/La Presse
The domes of Haiti’s presidential palace once soared over the Champs de Mars park, a green space dominated by a four-metre sculpture of Haitian revolutionary leader Toussaint L’Ouverture—“a place,” as professor Mario-Jacques Scott, who teaches in the area, puts it, “to breathe and take a break.”
Today, the camp that now occupies the park sits in front of a collapsed palace that, reminiscent as it is of a man on his knees, has become an enduring symbol of a broken Haiti. In the wake of the Jan. 12 earthquake, the park is a teeming, chaotic labyrinth of tents, shacks and lean-tos. The odours of life—exhaust, sewage, charcoal smoke—fill the air; women and their children wash themselves behind L’Ouverture’s back. Crowding 3,800 desperate people into the equivalent of six city blocks has had its miseries: on a recent Sunday night, residents say, a young girl was gang-raped by 17 boys.
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'Failing the tests'
By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments
The Globe editorial board condemns it all.
As with so many political scandals, big and small, the aftermath has obscured the original decision and its rationale. The rationale proved to be groundless, while the aftermath has thrown a vital public institution, Statistics Canada, into turmoil.
But the original decision remains: As a result, the foundational, authoritative data that underlies most public opinion and public policy analysis research in Canada is gone.
Good government is about leadership – focusing the population on the important challenges of the future, not distracting them with sideshows – and management: inspiring an organization to do the best work of which it is capable.
On this matter, the government is failing the tests of both strong leadership and good management.
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Bestsellers
By Brian Bethune - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments
Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of July 19th, 2010)
Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of July 19th, 2010)
Fiction
1 THE GIRL WHO KICKED OVER THE HORNET’S NEST
by Stieg Larsson1 (9) 2 The THOUSAND AUTUMS OF JACOB DE ZOET
by David Mitchell2 (3) 3 THE HELP by Kathryn Stockett 7 (21) 4 THE PASSAGE
by Justin Cronin4 (3) 5 THE DOUBLE COMFORT SAFARI CLUB
by Alexander McCall Smith6 (12) 6 BEATRICE & VIRGIL
by Yann Martel10 (15) 7 AS HUSBANDS GO
by Susan Isaacs(1) 8 THE IMPERFECTIONISTS
by Tom Rachman5 (7) 9 THE SEARCH
by Nora Roberts(1) 10 CORDUROY MANSIONS
by Alexander McCall Smith3 (2) Non-fiction
1
MEDIUM RAW
by Anthony Bourdain1 (6) 2 THE BOOK OF AWESOME
by Neil Pasricha4 (11) 3 NOMAD
by Ayaan Hirsi Ali2 (8) 4 GCHQ
by Richard Aldrich(1) 5 OPERATION MINCEMEAT
by Ben Macintyre3 (5) 6 THE BIRD DETECTIVE
by Bridget Stuchbury10 (3) 7 HITCH-22
by Christopher Hitchens7 (7) 8 THE GLOBAL FOREST
by Diana Beresford-Kroeger(1) 9 HIGH FINANCIER
by Niall Ferguson8 (2) 10 WAR
by Sebastian Junger9 (8) LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)
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The 'Superjuez' under fire
By Katie Engelhart - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments
Crusading judge Baltasar Garzón faces charges for opening the wounds of the Fascist past
JACQUES BRINON/AP
He’s inspired tens of thousands of Spaniards to protest on his behalf—and support his efforts to uncover the crimes of Spain’s Fascist past. In 2008, Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón opened the historical floodgates, announcing an official investigation into 114,000 disappearances during Spain’s bloody 1936-1939 civil war, and the subsequent years of Gen. Francisco Franco’s rule. And he did more than strike against the unofficial pacto del olvido, or pact of silence, that has existed since the dictatorship ended in 1975. He charged Franco and his associates with crimes against humanity, for the first time, and vowed to exhume Franco-era mass graves.
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Cup of tea and a cat, please
By Jane Switzer - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments
At the cat café
MICHAEL CARONNA/REUTERS
In Japan, cat lovers are paying for petting time at the country’s popular cat cafés. For a fee of up to $10 an hour, patrons can enjoy tea, lounge on a comfortable chair and borrow the affection of feline employees.
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Urine big trouble in Saskatoon
By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments
City staff presented a report on the vexing issue of whether it would be possible to fine the owners of pets caught peeing on private property.
ISTOCK
On Saskatoon’s city council agenda on June 28: potholes, sewers, the operating budget—and dog pee. City staff presented a report on the vexing issue of whether it would be possible to fine the owners of pets caught peeing on private property.
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All this for that?
By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 21, 2010 at 11:38 PM - 0 Comments
To the two complaints the privacy commissioner fielded in regards to the 2006 census, you can add 22 expressions of concern received by Statistics Canada.
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Statisticians and the bedrooms of the nation
By John Geddes - Wednesday, July 21, 2010 at 11:12 PM - 0 Comments
Of all the strange elements in the government’s case for eliminating the long-form census, the most absurd has to be the Conservatives’ fixation on the census question about how many bedrooms are in a home.
In his statement this evening acknowledging the resignation of Munir Sheikh, the chief statistician of Canada, Industry Minister Tony Clement once again singled out the supposed invasiveness of this particular query.
“We believe it is not appropriate to compel citizens to divulge how many bedrooms they have in their houses,” Clement says, “or what time they leave for work in the morning.”
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The chief statistician steps aside
By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 21, 2010 at 7:45 PM - 0 Comments
Munir Sheikh has posted a statement on the Statistics Canada website.
I want to take this opportunity to comment on a technical statistical issue which has become the subject of media discussion. This relates to the question of whether a voluntary survey can become a substitute for a mandatory census.
It can not.
Under the circumstances, I have tendered my resignation to the Prime Minister.
Munir Sheikh had been a member of the public service since 1976 and was named chief statistician by Prime Minister Harper in February 2008. A statement from the office of Industry Minister Tony Clement after the jump. Continue…
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Knowledge isn't free
By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 21, 2010 at 6:09 PM - 0 Comments
Stephen Gordon rebuts the notion—expressed here for instance—that the information Statistics Canada collects is freely available to researchers and the like.
If you go looking for data at the Statistics Canada website, you end up looking at a price list. For reasons going back to the Mulroney-era budget cuts, Statistics Canada is expected to generate a significant portion of its revenues. In 2009, some 20% of its $500m budget came from selling access to its data. Private-sector clients are not the only people who pay for StatsCan data: government departments and agencies at all levels must pay for access as well. (A significant chunk of the Parliamentary Budget Office’s budget goes to Statistics Canada.)
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Ontario officials searching for bear with jar on head
By macleans.ca - Wednesday, July 21, 2010 at 5:35 PM - 0 Comments
Plastic jar is preventing bear from eating or drinking
Seven people, including provincial wildlife officials and police officers, have spent the past two days searching for a bear that has a plastic jar stuck on its head. Rob Patterson spotted the bear Tuesday on Lambert Island near Thunder Bay, Ont. and snapped a photo of it which he shared with police. “It’s obviously hungry and thirsty and distressed,” Patterson told the Globe and Mail. The animal is 60 to 80 pounds, according to Ross Johnston of the Ministry of Natural Resources. In 2008, wildlife officials in Minnesota ended up shooting a bear with a similar type of jar on its head.
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Jack Irving dies at 78
By macleans.ca - Wednesday, July 21, 2010 at 5:29 PM - 0 Comments
East coast industrialist suffered brief illness
Jack Irving, the man behind the colossal construction, engineering and steel segment of the Irving family empire has died in his hometown of Saint John, N.B. at the age of 78. Irving is survived by two sons, John and Colin and daughter, Anne. “Jack Irving was truly the builder of the family,” New Brunswick Premier Shawn Graham said in a statement. His brother Arthur continues to run the Irving oil business, while brother J.K. and family run the forestry and shipping businesses. He will be remembered as “a proud New Brunswicker who gave generously to heritage and arts initiatives,” says New Brunswick Progressive Conservative Leader David Alward. His funeral will be held Saturday in Saint John.
