This day and age

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at 11:28 AM - 0 Comments

Five weeks after his government’s decision was announced, the Prime Minister explains the move to a voluntary long-form census.

“This has detailed personal information that is being sought by the government,” he said. “I know some Canadians will have some reluctance to provide that and I know some people think the appropriate way to deal with that is through prosecuting those individuals with fines and jail terms. This government will not do that. In this day and age, that is not an appropriate way to get the public’s co-operation.”

It does though still remain an appropriate way to get the public’s co-operation on the short-form census (here, for reference, is the 2006 version) and the census of agriculture (here, for reference, is the 2006 version), both of which still carry the threat of prosecution.

Richard Dawkins compares burqa to garbage bag

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at 11:19 AM - 0 Comments

The world’s most famous atheist and author of The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins, compared the Islamic burqa to a “full bin-liner thing” in an interview with magazine Radio Times magazine. He was discussing his distaste for faith-based schools. In a later interview with the Daily Mail, Dawkins stood by his comment, saying, “I do feel visceral revulsion at the burqa because for me it is a symbol of the oppression of women.” Some Muslims condemned the remark as ignorant and Islamophobic. “It’s a woman’s choice is she wishes to wear a burqa, a niqab or not,” said Seyyed Ferjani of The Muslim Association of Britain.

The Australian

Police raid Google Korea office

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at 11:07 AM - 0 Comments

Google Korea’s offices were raided on Tuesday by South Korean police as part of an investigation into whether the company illegally collected and stored personal wireless data. From late last year until May, Google Korea dispatched cars topped with cameras to cruise around South Korea to photograph neighborhoods ahead of the planned launch of Street View service in this country this year. The Cyber Terror Response Center of the Korean National Police Agency said in a statement police suspect those cars may have illegally captured and stored personal data from wireless networks while they were mapping streets. Google is already facing investigations and lawsuits in several countries in connection with private wireless data collected by its Street View cars.

New York Times

John Lennon’s killer seeks parole for the sixth time

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments

John Lennon’s killer is up for parole for the sixth time just months before the 30th anniversary of Lennon’s death. Mark David Chapman is scheduled to be interviewed by two members of the parole board as early as Tuesday. Chapman’s last bid for parole in 2008 was denied “due to concern for the public safety and welfare.” Chapman is serving a sentence of 20 years to life in prison for the shooting death of Lennon outside Lennon’s New York City apartment on December 8, 1980. He has served 29 years of his sentence at the maximum-security Attica Correctional Facility, where he has not had an infraction since 1994. In previous years, Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono has submitted a letter requesting that parole be denied. Lennon would have turned 70 this October.

CNN

Lillooet, B.C. to ban “unauthorized meetings”

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

A councilor in Lillooet, BC, population 2,300, has introduced a bylaw that would ban unauthorized performances, marches, meetings and formal gatherings in public places without permits. The town’s mayor, Dennis Bontron, says the law would prevent vandalism committed by groups overnight. At least one resident says the law would infringe on his constitutional right to freedom of assembly. “We meet on the street and talk,” Ernie Anderson told CBC News. The B.C. Civil Liberties Association says the law is unlikely to be approved because of the likelihood it would be knocked down in a court challenge.

CBC News

This is your flight attendant speaking: take this job and shove it

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at 10:54 AM - 0 Comments

A fed-up flight attendant made a dramatic exit from a JetBlue plane—and presumably his job—on Monday after a passenger accidentally hit him with luggage and refused to apologize. Steven Slater is alleged to have gotten on the plane’s PA system and cursed out the passengers aboard, adding the insults were especially meant for the passenger who’d struck him. According to reports, Slater then grabbed two beers from the attendants’ galley, pulled the emergency chute, and slid his way out of the plane. Slater was subsequently arrested at his home in New York and is facing charges of reckless endangerment and criminal mischief.

Wall Street Journal

Outraged moms, trashy daughters

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Bennett Raglin/ Getty Images/ Cole Garside

A few weeks ago, when she was chatting with her teenage daughter, Olivia, Leanne Foster mentioned the word “feminist.” “She just wrinkled her nose,” Foster recalls. “It was ‘Eww, yuck.’ ” Olivia, an articulate 15-year-old who’s about to enter Grade 10 at a Toronto private girls’ school, thinks feminists are about as relevant to her life as a rotary-dial phone. “When I hear the word I think of the hippie-ish generation where they’re all ‘girl-power,’ ” she says. And not in a sexy Spice Girls “girl power” way, more in a humourless, style-less way: “They refuse to wear perfume because they don’t want to be seen as sex objects,” she says dismissively.

Like many other teenage girls, Olivia regards the fight for female equality as over. “In the Western world, we’re pretty equal,” she says.

Continue…

The Devils, hell, and the NHL

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at 6:08 AM - 0 Comments

“The grievance is denied.” That’s the concluding sentence of arbitrator Richard Bloch’s Monday ruling on the 17-year $102-million contract Ilya Kovalchuk signed with the NHL’s New Jersey Devils last month. When the NHL deregistered the contract, whose terms would have seen New Jersey pay Kovalchuk 97% of the total amount in the first 11 years of the deal, the Players’ Association naturally objected.

Sure, the NHLPA argued, there were years tacked onto the far end of the deal that neither Kovalchuk nor New Jersey expect the player to be in the NHL for. Those years are priced below the likely league minimum, and are obviously in the contract for the sole purpose of lowering Kovalchuk’s average salary-cap hit in the present. But what of it? Nothing in the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the league and the PA specifically forbids this behaviour, and several similar “backdive” deals, though less extreme in every respect, have already been registered by the NHL and played under.

Bloch rejected this argument, granting a clear outright win to the league. The CBA contains a general “anti-circumvention” provision, but the guidance offered by that provision was less than clear:

No Club or Player shall enter into any Player Contract, Offer Sheet or other agreement that includes any terms which are designed to serve the purpose of defeating or circumventing the intention of the parties as reflected by the provisions of this Agreement, including without limitation, provisions with respect to the Entry Level System or Restricted Free Agency. However, any conduct permitted by this Agreement shall not be considered to be a violation of this provision.

Now that’s an odd paragraph, wouldn’t you say? Because there is no rule in the CBA that would in itself forbid the Kovalchuk deal, the NHLPA leaned on that last sentence, which basically says “anything permitted by this agreement is permitted by this agreement” and seems, in its plainest reading, to deprive the first sentence of all its potential force. Well, hell, no arbitrator’s going to go along with that—i.e., to read a paragraph completely out of a contract prepared and vetted by professionals representing both parties, as if he were physically Liquid Paper-ing it out of the document.

Bloch had little choice but to conclude that there must be some reason for a general anti-circumvention rule—and that reason, he concluded, was to allow the league to block contracts like Kovalchuk’s, which violate the spirit of the CBA rather than its letter. Nothing specific about Kovalchuk’s contract—the amount, the end date, the degree of frontloading—is forbidden by the agreement, Bloch conceded. Perhaps no single factor is even unique to it. But, taken together, the components have a vague tendency to offend the “no circumvention” concept. Supposedly.

Bloch’s decision includes an observation that is, after all, very hard to disagree with: “A contract term covering a Player’s NHL services to age 70…is not expressly prohibited by the CBA. But the parties to that SPC may not reasonably be found to be seriously anticipating its fulfillment.” Bloch would have created a serious problem for the NHL if he had found the anti-circumvention sections of the CBA to be meaningless. If he had ruled in favour of the NHLPA, you can bet your last nickel that someone would have been signing one of those age-70 contracts in July 2011. Or even sooner.

But Bloch has created a serious problem, too: as a consequence of his ruling in defence of the CBA’s spirit, it is no longer clear exactly which frontloaded contracts are kosher and which are treyf. Kovalchuk and the Devils returned to the negotiating table Monday night in an attempt to save the contract by tinkering with the math. What principles ought to guide them? What changes must they make to render the contract acceptable in the eyes of another arbitrator—one who wouldn’t even be Richard Bloch? (The NHL and the Players hire arbitrators for the duration of only one grievance; experience in the sporting world has shown that owners will inevitably and instantly fire any “permanent” arbiter who rules against them.)

Bloch hasn’t really said what kind of deal meets the no-circumvention test. He didn’t even give the parties the reassurance that existing frontloaded contracts are definitely legal and could be safely imitated. In fact, he specifically said the opposite. Which puts the league under no apparent obligation to even treat like contracts equally, or two different teams consistently. All that the Devils and Kovalchuk can really do here is to seek Commissioner Bettman’s advice in advance of signing, or make another deal and cross their fingers that either the Commissioner will like it or the next arbitrator will uphold it.

The Collective Bargaining Agreement doesn’t appear to offer the team and the player any freedom to sign a contract without some degree of league interference—which raises the question, what good is the CBA at all if we’re going to have a “Bettman decides everything” system? (And, more particularly, how did the Players’ Association get manoeuvred into signing an agreement that doesn’t protect its rights very effectively?)

Parizeau at 80

By Paul Wells - Monday, August 9, 2010 at 11:30 PM - 0 Comments

Jacques Parizeau turned 80 years old on Monday. He is still such a polarizing figure that there may be no point trying to say anything about him.

The speech he gave on referendum night in 1995 (“Never forget that three-fifths of who we are voted Yes,” a line I always liked even less than the bit about money and ethnics) has made it easy ever since to dismiss him without further consideration.

But lately when I think of him it’s with a measure of fondness, and I didn’t even want him to succeed. It’s no wonder sovereignists, especially young ones who want politics to be about action and not just attitude, often adore him. The first magazine article I wrote in 1994, for Saturday Night‘s young new editor Ken Whyte, argued that Parizeau, not Lucien Bouchard, was the sovereignty movement’s most formidable leader. I’ve never seen reason to doubt that thesis. Continue…

Looney Buyer Beware

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, August 9, 2010 at 7:35 PM - 0 Comments

I read on TVShowsondvd.com that some of the cartoons on the new Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck DVDs — the first non-recycled discs of classic cartoons that Warner Brothers has released since ending the Golden Collection sets — are cropped for widescreen TVs. I traced the news to this post, that explains that all the cartoons on these discs are in widescreen format except the ones that were made before 1954. The news is not quite a deal-breaker, but it does mean I’m not going to buy these discs unless I can get them cheap.

To explain what’s going on here: starting in 1954, most movie theatres switched to the modern 1.85:1 aspect ratio for films that weren’t in anamorphic widescreen. Many films, including all of Warner Brothers’ cartoons, continued to be made in the traditional 1.33:1 format, but they had to be prepared in such a way that they could be “matted” to a wider format: in other words, theatres could mask the top and bottom and project them in 1.85:1. There were few major changes in the way the cartoons looked, but the directors had to make sure not to put anything important at the top and bottom (in 1953′s “Bully For Bugs,” Bugs’ rabbit hole is right at the very bottom of the screen; if the film had been made a year later, it would have been higher). And the Looney Tunes logo and credits font were changed so they could be bunched together in the middle of the screen. Here’s an example of a 1954 cartoon (in an early ’60s reissue print) where you could cut off the top and bottom and not lose the credits. You’ll notice, though, that there are a couple of signs that would be cut off if the film were matted, suggesting that the filmmakers weren’t completely accustomed to leaving the top and bottom “blank.”

Because these films can be shown in either aspect ratio, it’s not possible to say that one or the other is the “authentic” aspect ratio. (Similarly, a movie like Psycho, which was shot in 1.33 and matted to 1.85, is arguably as authentic in either format — and many movie fans argue that Touch of Evil looks much better in 1.33.) Which is why I say it’s not an absolute deal-breaker. But it’s still annoying, because it’s so obvious that this was done not out of authenticity, still less out of a concern for how these films look best — for the record, I think most of them look better in the 1.33 ratio — but due to a desire to show off widescreen TVs. We’re getting closer every day to a future where older films and TV shows will be panned n’ scanned for widescreen televisions, just as widescreen films used to be panned n’ scanned for the old sets.

I’m still getting the discs, but mostly for the smattering of pre-1954 cartoons. These may be the last we get on DVD, considering that Warners doesn’t seem to want to release much non-widescreen material. I suppose we were lucky we got as many volumes of the Golden Collection as we did.

How do you feel about the Conservatives’ focus on law and order issues?

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 9, 2010 at 6:32 PM - 0 Comments

Tony Judt on Michael Ignatieff and nationalism

By John Geddes - Monday, August 9, 2010 at 5:08 PM - 0 Comments

The death of Tony Judt last Friday, at just 62, of complications from Lou Gehrig’s disease, is sad news for legions of readers who read his books to understand 20^th century Europe and his articles in the New York Review of Books, and elsewhere, to sharpen their perspective on the what’s happening out there in the world.

One could point with enthusiasm to almost anything he wrote. But of recent pieces, I found “Ill Fares the Land,” his indictment of materialism and inequality, especially in the U.S. and UK, a pulse-speeding read. He didn’t address Canada specifically, not surprisingly, but the questions he raised should trouble citizens in any rich Western nation.

Continue…

Write if you get work

By Paul Wells - Monday, August 9, 2010 at 4:45 PM - 0 Comments

From La Presse comes news that Jean-Marc Fournier, who put in a year and a half as Michael Ignatieff’s senior Quebec advisor, is returning to Quebec politics to run as the Liberal candidate to replace Jacques Dupuis.

Dupuis has been Jean Charest’s house leader and public-security minister. His departure leaves a large hole in a beleaguered government front bench. The size of the hole Fournier leaves in Ottawa is open to genuine debate. Fournier, an amiable sort, has frequently been seen wandering around Ottawa looking a little bewildered. It’s possible to be a Quebec City person and an Ottawa person, but most people only ever really master one. But he was well regarded in OLO circles, precisely because he’s wired a little differently from the federal-politics lifers. No word yet on his replacement; until now, there was no word on his departure.

It’s Trudeaumania, without the Trudeau

By Scott Feschuk - Monday, August 9, 2010 at 4:19 PM - 0 Comments

Bloomberg/ Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Michael Ignatieff, accustomed to summering abroad in style, is spending his July and August travelling across Canada on a bus. For this, we must give him Points for Trying. As any campaign veteran will attest, travel by political bus ranks in comfort and charm somewhere behind travel by air, train, car, flatulent burro and car with John Baird in it.

Week after week of Timbits, barbecued wieners and awkward photo ops in which the Liberal leader has felt inspired to move his limbs in a series of gestures that could charitably be described as “dancing”—clearly, Ignatieff has officially entered the I’ll Try Anything phase of his political leadership. Maybe next he’ll grow a moustache or wrestle a bear. With the support of just 28 per cent of Canadians, he has nothing left to lose but his pride, his dignity and, the way things have been going, the support of 28 per cent of Canadians.

Continue…

Khadr's pretrial hearing underway at Guantanamo Bay

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 9, 2010 at 3:51 PM - 0 Comments

At a pretrial hearing at Guantanamo Bay, Omar Khadr’s military-appointed lawyer told a U.S. military court that an interrogator’s threat of gang rape and death should render Khadr’s confessions unreliable. Lt.-Col. Jon Jackson made the argument at Khadr’s military tribunal hearing, at which Khadr pleaded not guilty, in an attempt to have Khadr’s statements deemed inadmissible. A ruling on the evidence is expected later on Monday. Jackson cited the fact an interrogator—the former U.S. army sergeant Joshua Claus—admitted telling Khadr another young inmate in American custody at Bagram prison in Afghanistan had been raped by other inmates, possibly to death. “Once he said those words, the well is poisoned,” Jackson said. “The government can’t cleanse the well.” Claus was later convicted of detainee abuse. These are the final pretrial motions and the trial is expected to begin on Wednesday.

UPDATE: Military judge Patrick Parrish has denied the defence’s request to throw out the alleged confessions made by Khadr, which Khadr’s lawyers had argued were made under duress.

CBC News

AFP

An Old-Fashioned Retool

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, August 9, 2010 at 2:36 PM - 0 Comments

Since The Good Guys is a deliberately old-fashioned show, it figures that the network would give it an old-fashioned retool, bringing it back this fall with new regulars and a mandate to include more romance and comedy relief:

I hear the focus will be on attracting more female viewers. The show is adding a new recurring female character, a young CSI, that could potentially become a regular. There also will be more emphasis on romantic relationships, with the new character part of that effort. Additionally, RonReaco Lee, who guest starred in the pilot and appeared in 2 more episodes this summer as bumbling criminal Julius, is expected to heavily recur in the fall.

My own view on this kind of show has always been that it needs fewer regulars, not more; if a show is about two cops — Starsky and Hutch, Mulder and Scully — then a large cast just gets in the way of sending those two cops out to participate in that week’s case. You either get sub-plots focusing on the other regulars, or the minor regulars take time away from developing the guest characters who drive the story of the week. And in an episodic mystery show, the guest characters are extremely important: they’re the only ones who can really change, they’re the only ones who have high stakes (because they can die, they can undergo huge changes in their lives even if they don’t die). Adding more romance and more regulars may theoretically make the show more interesting, but in a 41-minute episode, every minute spent on a peripheral regular character is a minute they don’t devote to creating memorable guests or substantial stories or big action sequences. You know, the stuff that would actually make a show like this into a hit.

Still, if they’re going for ’80s nostalgia, it’s oddly fitting for the show to get worked over in-between seasons just like an ’80s show would have been. But along with the network’s reluctance to let Dollhouse experiment with different TV genres, and the decision to try and rework Human Target by adding more pop songs, it’s another sign that Fox wants to get back to that kind of light action show but doesn’t really know how to do it (which I guess leaves them one up over NBC, which has proven with Chuck that it doesn’t even want to try).

For some girls, puberty keeps coming sooner and sooner

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 9, 2010 at 2:16 PM - 0 Comments

More than ten years ago, a study found American girls were beginning puberty as early as age 7. A new study in the journal Pediatrics suggests the average age at which puberty begins may still be falling for white and Latina girls: almost 15 per cent of Latina girls have reached a stage of breast development marking the onset of puberty by age 7, as have more than 10 per cent of white girls and 25 per cent of African American girls. These percentages are higher than those in the landmark 1997 study, which reported that girls were beginning puberty at earlier ages than in the mid-20th century. Compared with the 1997 data, the age at which puberty begins did not fall for African American girls, although they still mature at younger ages than white or Latina girls. Causes for the diminishing age of puberty include an increase in average body weight among children, which is thought to increase the blood levels of estrogens that promote breast development; diets that are increasingly high in sugar and fat, along with declining physical activity and exposure to endocrine disrupters; and the increased presence of environmental chemicals that affect hormones.

Los Angeles Times

Netanyahu testifies at inquiry on flotilla raid

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 9, 2010 at 2:12 PM - 0 Comments

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was the first witness to testify at a state-appointed inquiry Monday into the Israeli military’s raid of an aid flotilla bound for Gaza, which left nine Turkish pro-Palestinian activists dead. Netanyahu said Turkey had ignored warnings and appeals “at the highest level” many days before the fatal clash. “Beginning on May 14, my office held contacts with the highest levels of the Turkish government,” Netanyahu said. “Despite our continuous diplomatic efforts, ultimately the Turkish government did not prevent the attempt by the Marmara to violate the naval blockade… It appears that (Turkey) did not see in the prospect of a clash between Turkish activists and Israel something that clashed with its interests.” This has been the Prime Minister’s most explicit public comment of the diplomatic efforts that failed to avert the clash.

New York Times

Up to $500 million in stimulus funds may never get out the door

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 9, 2010 at 1:13 PM - 0 Comments

A new report by Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page says up to $500 million of Ottawa’s $4 billion stimulus fund could be orphaned as nearly 2,000 projects are at risk of missing a March 31, 2011 deadline. That’s the worst case scenario, according to the PBO, but even in a middle case scenrio, some 936 projects may not be completed on time, leaving $293 million on the table. Infrastructure Canada has estimated that only about two per cent of the 4,000 projects on the go are at “high risk” of missing the deadline, while 17 per cent are more than a month behind schedule. Some 58 per cent of projects are, however, estimated to be ahead of schedule.

Montreal Gazette

Playing nice, to no avail

By Michael Petrou - Monday, August 9, 2010 at 1:08 PM - 0 Comments

Michael Stuparyk/ TORONTO STAR

Hossein Derakhshan, the Iranian Canadian who helped launch a blogging revolution in Iran, is on trial in Tehran, almost two years after he was arrested. According to the government-linked Fars News Agency, charges against him include working with hostile governments, spreading propaganda against the Islamic regime, and launching and managing obscene websites. The trial opened on June 23 and is expected to end shortly.

Derakhshan moved to Canada in 2001 and soon created a blog that was widely read in Iran, and among Iranian exiles. The tech-savvy Derakhshan also posted an online guide that allowed other Iranians to start their own Persian-language blogs. Thousands did. “Hoder changed everything,” says Arash Azizi, an Iranian journalist who knew Derakhshan in Tehran and recently moved to Toronto, referring to him by his nickname.

Continue…

One dead, one injured at sauna world championship

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 9, 2010 at 12:10 PM - 0 Comments

Finland’s annual world sauna championship has been called off for good following the death of a Russian competitor after he spent six minutes enduring a temperature of 110°C. Vladimir Ladyzhenskiy was pronounced dead after being dragged out of the sauna by judges. Police are investigating the cause of death. Finn competitor Timo Kaukonen was also pulled out and is being treated in hospital for burns. Ladyzhenskiy and Kaukonen beat out 130 other competitors to make it to the final, where the sauna is heated to 110°C and water is added every 30 seconds. The last person to remain in the sauna wins. Ossi Arvela, head of the championships, said all first aid rules were followed at the event, but the event will be suspended as police investigate.

The Guardian

Toronto woman launches G20 class-action lawsuit

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 9, 2010 at 12:08 PM - 0 Comments

Toronto office administrator Sherry Good is now the face of a G20 class-action lawsuit filed Thursday against the Toronto Police Services Board and the federal attorney general, who represents the RCMP. The lawsuit seeks $45 million in damages for all those wrongfully arrested, detained, imprisoned or otherwise held by police during the G20 summit at locations across the city. Good’s lawyers say the Ontario Provincial Police may also be named at a later date. Good said she was walking home from work on the evening of June 27 when she decided to join an informal demonstration. She was caught by a police technique known as “kettling” when about 250 people were encircled by a wall of police officers at the intersection of Queen St. W. and Spadina Ave. Good was released without charge, but said she suffered from stress and panic attacks as a result of the incident. The next step involves the court’s approval of the class-action lawsuit, which could take more than a year.

Toronto Star

Hamburg shuts down mosque frequented by 9/11 hijackers

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 9, 2010 at 11:57 AM - 0 Comments

Citing evidence that the Taiba Mosque is still acting as a jihadist recruitment centre, police in the northern German city of Hamburg have shut it down indefinitely. The mosque was frequented by three of the September 11 hijackers, including ringleader Mohammed Atta. Twenty police officers searched the mosque early Tuesday morning while other officers recovered money from the bank accounts of certain members. A group of 10 men from the 45-member mosque are alleged to have traveled to Pakistan or Afghanistan last year to attend jihadist training camps, say German security officials. One member recently appeared in a German-language propaganda video encouraging Muslims to enlist in jihad. In March, four Islamic militants, including two ethnic-German converts, were jailed for planning a terrorist attack in Germany.

The Local

Conservative ridings got more stimulus money in Quebec

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 9, 2010 at 11:47 AM - 0 Comments

Four of the 10 Quebec ridings that received the most stimulus money from Ottawa’s Community Adjustment Fund are currently held by Conservatives, despite the fact that the party holds only 11 of 75 of the province’s seats. The riding that got the most funding—$8 million in total—was Montmagny-L’Islet-Kamouraska-Rivière-du-Loup, a key battleground the Conservatives won in a 2009 by-election. The second-most money went to Roberval-Lac-Saint-Jean, another hotly-contested Conservative riding. The third most went to Shefford, which is held by the Bloc Quebecois. Conservative Natural Resource Minister Christian Paradis’s riding, Megantic-L’Érable, ranked fourth. “Projects are evaluated based on merit,” Sophie Legendre, interim director of operations for the Economic Development Agency of Canada for the Regions of Quebec, said, denying there was favoritism involved. The findings, collected by Canadian Press, echo those of a 2009 study that showed Conservative ridings received, on average, more stimulus funding that those held by opposition MPs in almost every province.

Canadian Press