Toronto doctor charged with smuggling, lying to border police

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 15, 2010 at 2:27 PM - 0 Comments

Toronto doctor Dr. Anthony Galea has been formally indicted on five counts by a federal grand jury in Buffalo, New York after being charged earlier this year. The charges allege that Dr. Galea, a sports medicine specialist, smuggled human growth hormone and other unapproved substances into the U.S., and that he lied to border agents to avoid getting caught, the Toronto Star reports. He is also accused of of illegally treating 20 professional athletes—he is not authorized to work in the United States—between October 2007 to September 2009, and supplying them with free Viagra. While the athletes were not identified by name, Tiger Woods has previously admitted to be being treated by Dr. Galea, while he denies having received performance-enhancing drugs. Dr. Galea, 51, first came under suspicion after a criminal complaint in May, which included similar charges. Dr. Galea also faces several charges in Canada for selling an unapproved drug, conspiring to import and export an unapproved drug, and smuggling goods into the country.

Toronto Star

Maclean’s profile of Dr. Galea

Calling out America, then taking it back

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 15, 2010 at 2:09 PM - 0 Comments

While the U.S. State Department was careful yesterday not to say who the United States voted for at the United Nations, the Foreign Affairs Minister is less diplomatic.

Cannon reiterated what several top government officials have disclosed already this week — that Canada had 135 written assurances of support and 15 verbal ones. ”The United States was among that group,” Cannon said from Brussels, where he was meeting his NATO counterparts.

Cannon made that remark only in French, during a short teleconference with journalists in which he took only three questions. Cannon immediately backtracked from the statement when asked a follow-up question. ”Let me clarify that: I don’t want to indicate that we did or did not get support from the United States. I want to make that clear,” the minister stated. ”I don’t want to go into who supported . . . during the course of that vote. I’ll leave it to the individual countries to indicate their position, vis-a-vis that given that it is a secret vote.”

Duceppe tells U.S. that Quebec independence is inevitable

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 15, 2010 at 1:47 PM - 0 Comments

Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe has gone to Washington, D.C. for a two-day visit in the hopes of selling his dream of an independent Quebec to politicians, business leaders and academics. His message is that Quebec values the United States as an economic partner and that sovereigntists’ desire to achieve Quebec independence from Canada doesn’t mean the U.S. has anything to fear. Quebec does an “enormous” amount of business with the U.S., said Duceppe, with about $51 billion in transactions in 2009. And if Quebec separates, that won’t change according to Duceppe. “Every nation has political interests, but the day Quebec becomes a sovereign country, North America’s geography won’t change, we’ll still be in the same place, and so will they. At that point, we’ll have to find the best way to get along.”

CBC News

Choose your own adventure

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 15, 2010 at 12:47 PM - 0 Comments

The Harper government is talking, isn’t talking and is prepared to talk with the United Arab Emirates, not there’s anything to talk about.

… on Thursday, International Trade Minister Peter Van Loan told Reuters News Agency that Canada hasn’t made a final decision to reject the UAE’s request that more landing slots at airports such as Pearson be given to its two air carriers. The Conservative minister said talks are continuing…

Within hours of Mr. Van Loan’s comments hitting the newswires, another government official denied, on background, that air-negotiation talks were still taking place. And a spokesman for Transport Minister Chuck Strahl said that his department believes the existing air flight agreement with UAE adequately serves market needs…

Asked to clarify his remarks, Mr. Van Loan would only say that Ottawa remains ready to talk.

The Chilean miner’s diet

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 15, 2010 at 12:07 PM - 0 Comments

How did the 33 Chilean miners emerge from 700 metres into the earth looking so healthy? After being discovered underground, their first outside food was a 200 mL serving of a medical, milk-based nutritional supplement called Supportan. Then, when a paramedic determined that the miners were dehydrated, they were supplied with liquid gels with protein and vitamins and told to nearly double the amount of water they drank. Their first real food was cereal with pear and applesauce. They were brought back up to a full menu of food slowly, to avoid refeeding syndrome, a potentially fatal complication of starvation. From then on, the miners were kept on a diet of about 2,300 calories a day and told to exercise for up to an hour a day or more. It was important to make sure they kept fit, so they could fit in the escape module. When they were ready, a typical daily menu consisted of liquid yogurt with toast and jam for breakfast; four protein cookies for a morning snack; a lunch of baked salmon with mashed potatoes and pineapple for dessert, washed down with a bottle of Gatorade; bread and dulce de leche for an afternoon snack; and baked pork with corn for supper with a tangerine for dessert. The miners said only one thing was missing: beer and wine.

Toronto Star

Week in Pictures: October 8th – 14th 2010

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 15, 2010 at 11:49 AM - 0 Comments

Saskatchewan business wants harmonized sales tax

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 15, 2010 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

A sweeping report on how Saskatchewan should reform its tax system, delivered today by business groups led by the Saskatchewan Chamber of Commerce, calls for the province’s sales tax to be harmonized with the
federal Goods and Service Tax, at a combined rate of 12 per cent by 2017. It’s just one proposal in a much larger blueprint, but remarkable as it comes after governments in British Columbia and Ontario continue to see their popularity battered after implementing GST harmonization. The fact that the Saskatchewan report raises the idea again is testimony to the powerful logic behind governments relying on consumption taxes rather than growth-slowing taxation of income and investment. That doesn’t matter much, though, in the world of politics—Saskatchewan Finance Ken Krawetz said all the report’s recommendation would be considered, “other than the recommendations on tax harmonization.”

Star Phoenix

Tony Blair's memoirs up for the 'Bad Sex Award'

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 15, 2010 at 11:32 AM - 0 Comments

The least desired award in writing usually goes to a novelist, but judges for the influential ‘Bad Sex Award’ awarded by Britain’s Literary Review gave a shortlist nod to to former PM Tony Blair’s description—described by the Telegraph as “toe-curling”—of a night of passion with Cherie. “That night she cradled me in her arms and soothed me; told me what I needed to be told; strengthened me,” he writes in A Journey. “On that night of 12 May 1994, I needed that love Cherie gave me, selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength. I was an animal following my instinct….” Blair is in eminent company; his competition includes Martin Amis for The Pregnant Widow, Ian McEwan for Solar and Jonathan Franzen for Freedom. Past winners include Sebastian Faulks and Philip Kerr. The award, a joke to begin with, is starting to have a dampening effect on British literature, at least according to Sir Andrew Motion, former Poet Laureate and chairman of the Man Booker Prize judging panel, who recently blamed it for the lack of sex scenes in this year’s Booker entries. “I was very surprised. I thought it was going to be a panorama of sexual activity but it absolutely wasn’t. The Bad Sex Prize has probably put a lot of people off,” he lamented.

Telegraph

The $16-billion debate

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 15, 2010 at 11:03 AM - 0 Comments

The Liberals yesterday came forward with three questions they want answered about the proposed purchase of those F-35s.

1. What are the defence priorities and the domestic and foreign mission requirements that our new fighter jets must be able to support?

2. What are the roles, capabilities and operational performance requirements that any new fighter must be able to meet in order to support these future domestic and international priorities and missions?

3. What evidence does the government have to demonstrate that their deal gets the right equipment for our Air Force while achieving the following: The lowest cost and best value for taxpayer dollars, with controls to prevent cost escalation; and guaranteed regional benefits with a transfer of intellectual property to grow the Canadian aerospace industry, including in-service support?

By the end of the day, Industry Minister Tony Clement’s office had responded with the following.

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Opening Weekend: Hereafter, RED, Stone, Nowhere Boy

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, October 15, 2010 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

Bryce Dallas Howard and Matt Damon in Clint Eastwood's 'Hereafter'

Hallowe’en is still two weeks away, but there’s a lot of weird stuff going on at the movies this weekend. Matt Damon sees dead people in Hereafter, Helen Mirren fires a machine gun in RED, Robert De Niro goes mano-a-mano with Edward Norton in Stone, and John Lennon discovers his mother in Nowhere Boy. My favorite of these three movies happens to be the smallest—Nowhere Boy, which dramatizes a narrow but crucial slice of John Lennon’s life as troubled teen, just before the formation of the Beatles, when he’s torn between the aunt who raised him and the mother who abandoned him. The other films are loaded with Oscar-pedigree talent, but they’re a mixed bag:

Hereafter is a well-crafted curiosity. In this ruminative drama about life beyond the grave, Clint Eastwood flexes some metaphysical muscle and shows that, at the age of 80, an old dog can still learn some new tricks. The story, scripted by Peter Morgan (The Queen), interweaves stories of three unrelated characters in three countries, whose fates inevitably mesh in the final act—an American psychic trying to hide his powers from the world (Matt Damon), a French anchorwoman who survives a near-death experience in a tsunami (Cécile De France), and an English boy trying to contact his twin brother from beyond the grave. Whether or not this three-ply narrative works is debatable, but the film is highly watchable, luxuriously composed, and (aside from the spectacular scene of the tsunami) distinguished by its subdued tone, which marks a radical departure from the melodramatic torque of Eastwood’s recent movies. Next to RED, which exploits the novelty of geezers kicking ass, the thoughtful modesty of Hereafter, a movie by the granddad of ass-kicking geezers, seems refreshingly mature, if unsatisfying. For more on Eastwood’s movie, go to my story in this week’s magazine: Matt Damon sees dead people.

Helen Mirren in 'Red'

RED

Directed by Robert Schwentke (Flightplan, The Time Traveller’s Wife), Red is an action comedy about an eccentric crew of CIA retirees, and while there’s no question that it “works,” at least on its own terms, it struck me as an extravagant waste of time. Based on a cult graphic novel from DC Comics (is there no end to cult graphic novels?), it’s about a retired group of elite secret agents who are forced out of retirement when their former employer, the CIA, targets them for assassination. Apparently, they know too much. Led by a hard-core operative named Frank (Bruce Willis), they get the band back together, go on the run, and set about exposing a massive conspiracy. Along for the ride is an innocent civilian (Mary Louise Parker), who is taken hostage by the amorous Frank in a screwball scenario that resembles the one in Knight and Day.

For the movie’s troupe of serious actors (Helen Mirren, John Malkovich, Morgan Freeman, Mary Louise Parker, Rebecca Pidgeon) Red‘s blockbuster sandbox seems an excuse to goof off. They appear to be having a blast slumming with Bruce, chewing scenery and brandishing machine guns. Helen Mirren devours her role as an aging Mata Hari with evident relish—when you’re too old to be a Bond girl, Red must seem heaven-sent. And she’s by far the best thing in the movie. But the over-amped conceit of grumpy old spies soon wears thin. Malkovich is especially grating as a bug-eyed paranoiac. After over-acting his way through Secretariat as a preposterous Québécois speaking bogus French, this once lethal actor seems in danger of debasing his currency with compulsive mugging. And although his performance is beyond the pale, he’s emblematic of a syndrome that affects the entire cast. Each actor seems lost in his or her own movie, and they seem to be having more fun than the audience.

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A diplomatic game worth losing

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, October 15, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

TIMOTHY A. CLARY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

The votes have been counted, the coveted “Western Europe and Others” seat on the UN Security Council has been decided, and it’s time to congratulate Portugal on its stunning victory. In a clear endorsement of the foreign policy of Prime Minister José Sócrates and his Socialist Party government, UN member states elected Portugal to a two-year term for only the third time in the republic’s history.

That at any rate is what you would gather from the Portuguese press, where it was celebrated as “a victory for Portuguese diplomacy” and confirmation of the country’s “influence and prestige”—though it rated somewhat less coverage than a 3-1 victory over Iceland in a qualifying round for the 2012 European futebol championships. My knowledge of Portuguese is a little rusty, but my sense is comparatively little credit was given to the failings of Canadian foreign policy.

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Matt Damon sees dead people

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, October 15, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Ken Regan/Warner Bros. Entertainment

As an actor, Clint Eastwood made his name playing an angel of death, the iconic cop and laconic cowboy who would take grim pleasure in blowing the bad guys to kingdom come. But as a director in the twilight of his career, Hollywood’s elder statesman has now levelled his squinting gaze at what lies beyond. Eastwood’s latest film is a contemplative drama about the mystery of the afterlife, but the greater puzzle is the existence of the movie itself. Hereafter marks a bizarre departure for the 80-year-old filmmaker—and also for Matt Damon, who stars as a closet clairvoyant, and screenwriter Peter Morgan, who strays far from the historical fare of The Queen and Frost/Nixon to create fiction that requires us to believe Damon sees dead people.

But Hereafter has little in common with M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. It takes a modest approach to metaphysics, with no mind-bending plot twists, and after some early scenes of harrowing action, it settles into a remarkably understated drama.

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Newsmakers

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 15, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

The prince gets down
Prince Charles, donning a red bindi, charmed locals with a charmingly poor dancing form while visiting the northern Indian city of Jodhpur during India’s Commonwealth Games. After some cajoling, he began to follow the movements of the elderly farmers, and began to smile as he twirled about.

And long may you run
Omemee, Ont., a wide spot on the highway between Lindsay and Peterborough, is the early childhood home of rock icon Neil Young. It’s also the site of Youngtown, a museum packed to the rafters with rock memorabilia of every sort, and a tribute to the Young family, including Neil’s late father, storied sportswriter and author Scott Young. Last week Neil and his older brother, Bob, visited the museum for the first time since it opened in 2008. “The hour-long visit was simply an awesome experience for this writer,” museum founder and collector in chief, Trevor Hosier, wrote on Youngtown’s Facebook page, “and I’m glad to report that we passed the audition.”

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Standing idle on foreign executions: yes we can

By Colby Cosh - Friday, October 15, 2010 at 7:44 AM - 0 Comments

Reasonable people can disagree over whether Canadian murderer Ronald Allen Smith ought to die by poison in the state of Montana’s execution chamber. But can we please get the facts about his situation straight? The Federal Court did not unconditionally order the Canadian government to resume lobbying Montana for clemency on behalf of Smith. It is a very clear matter of law that a court can’t set foreign policy: as Justice Barnes wrote, “Decisions involving pure policy or political choices in the nature of Crown prerogatives are generally not amenable to judicial review because their subject-matter is not suitable to judicial assessment.”

What a court can review is whether there has been procedural fairness in the application of a policy, including an international-relations policy, to an individual. Barnes found that the government seemed to have changed its standing policy concerning clemency advocacy with suspicious, unjustifiable casualness. Ministers had sketched or even improvised an apparent new stance in press interviews, and on the floor of the Commons, but there was no evidence of any actual legislative activity behind the scenes accompanying this—there were, for example, no written directives to the diplomatic corps outlining the “new policy”, and certainly no warnings made to Smith and his lawyers.

Smith, as a Canadian citizen, does not enjoy any inherent permanent right to Canadian government assistance with a clemency application, but he is entitled to the benefit of a written, objective government policy concerning his situation. The government didn’t give him that; the choice it was presented with by the Federal Court was to either resume clemency lobbying or to explicitly frame a new policy and apply it fairly. Canadian governments are still free to behave as they like concerning Canadians facing execution abroad, as long as their behaviour is consistent with some guideline. That guideline now exists, and it implies that the answer to a request for future help may well be “Sorry, no.”

The policy is not being applied retroactively to Smith, who is again receiving consular assistance. But we are no longer a formally “abolitionist” state when it comes to capital punishment abroad. If you care about this issue, or you just have an itch to head south and randomly slaughter a couple of Americans, it’s important for you to understand that judges can’t make the identity of the government irrelevant in this respect. A vote for the Conservatives really is a vote for Conservative foreign policy.

NFL Picks Week 6: Brett Favre has something he'd like to show you

By Scott Feschuk - Friday, October 15, 2010 at 5:32 AM - 0 Comments

It’s his moxie. His moxie!

Scott Feschuk Last week: 7-7 Season: 38-34-4

Scott Reid Last week: 5-9 Season: 34-38-4

•••

San Diego (minus 8.5) at St. Louis

Feschuk: San Diego had two punts blocked last week against Oakland and I know I’m not alone in blaming Michael Ignatieff. Get off your goddamn bus and block a man, eyebrows! The New York Times is calling San Diego “the best 2-3 team you’ll ever see,” and you can understand why: the Chargers are first in the league in offence, second in defence and third behind only Dallas and Minnesota in coaches who during critical late-game moments look as though they’re Continue…

Tonight's 30 Rock Is Laugh Tracked In Front of a Live Studio Audience

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 9:46 PM - 0 Comments

I just watched the live 30 Rock episode; this isn’t shocking news, but it started out very awkward and got better as it went on. I won’t give away much about it for those who haven’t seen it yet. I will be interested to see if the West Coast version — for which the cast is going to perform a completely separate show instead of just broadcasting a tape of the first performance, the way SNL does — has a more confident tone to it, now that they’ve already done it once and have a better idea of what works.

There actually have been a few sitcoms that did live episodes, such as Roc (someone joked that this show should have been titled “30 Roc”), a Fox show that went to a live broadcast format for most of its second season. But there haven’t been many (if any) single-camera sitcoms that did a live episode in front of an audience. That makes tonight’s 30 Rock kind of a test case for how shows are different when they use an audience than when they don’t.

Of course watching a live show is different from watching a taped sitcom with multiple takes. It gives you an appreciation for how hard a job Saturday Night Live has: no, they’re not funny a lot of the time, but that’s because until they get it in front of an audience, they don’t know if it’s funny or not. It’s as if the first preview of a play is being broadcast to the world.

It’s also a reminder that some things can work in one format that don’t always work in another: they tried to carry over the hand-held camera from the regular show into this special live broadcast, but the shaky camera — which we’ve just barely come to accept in film — looks very weird when used live in the studio.

I thought of the performers, it was Jane Krakowski who came off best in the live broadcast. She often seems a bit lost in the regular show, but because she’s a theatre performer — not a sketch performer — she was able to channel the audience energy without losing a sense of character. It’s always good to remember that this is a case where network demands were right: the show has always been better for the fact that NBC replaced Rachel Dratch with Krakowski, even if she hasn’t been one of the best characters on the show.

Alec Baldwin, similarly, uses his theatre training to good effect. The improv guys don’t always seem as comfortable with this format, because there’s not much time to improv, and they actually need to act. Improv comics are often better on single-camera film than they are in a TV show with an audience, because they can do much more actual improv on film (with multiple takes) than they can on something like SNL. It’s why the connection between live-audience TV and live performance isn’t always as clear-cut as we sometimes think. In a theatre performance, you can try something and if it doesn’t work, you don’t do it again at the next performance. That’s similar to a film where you do multiple takes and try different things in each one. But in a live TV episode like tonight’s, what you do is going to be seen by millions of people, and it’s going to be on a DVD and online. So that discourages improvisation and rewards people who are good at replicating their performances (actors, rather than improvisers).

Also, a search on Twitter revealed that, as expected, many people complained that 30 Rock suddenly had a “laugh track” tonight. Another reminder that complaints about “laugh tracks”, always phrased as an example of the speaker’s sophistication (I’m so smart I don’t need people telling me when to laugh), are anything but.

Principles and secret votes

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 6:34 PM - 0 Comments

The Prime Minister makes his first comments on the lost security council vote.

“As I’ve said before, our engagement internationally is based on the principles that this country holds dear,” Harper told reporters at an event in eastern Quebec. “It is not based on popularity.”

The Canadian government, Harper said, takes its positions based on the promotion of “our values — freedom, democracy, human rights and the rule of law, justice, development, humanitarian assistance for those who need it.” ”Those are the things we’re pursuing, and that does not change regardless of what the outcome of secret votes is.”

Pictures of Afghanistan: Tolo TV

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 6:18 PM - 0 Comments

One of the disadvantages of the sort of media tour that I just did in Afghanistan is that you’re a bit of a football — you get moved around from briefing to briefing, and because of security concerns in both Kandahar and Kabul there isn’t much occasion to stop and chat with the locals. As a result, your chief interlocutors tend to be Western military folks, civilian comms personnel, or bureaucrats. The Afghans you meet are usually either interpreters or partners to these Westerners.

That’s why one of the most enjoyable aspects of this tour was a trip we took in Kabul to the offices of Tolo TV, one of the only independent and commercial television stations in Afghanistan. We showed up around three in the afternoon, just as they were getting ready to produce the evening newscast; if you did that at a newspaper or TV station in Canada they’d toss you out, but our Afghan hosts were exceedingly generous is showing us around. They let us ask questions, take photos, and generally troop around sticking our noses into things. They even showed us some awesome citizen journalism: cellphone-shot election-fraud footage they had of some Afghan elders sitting around laughing and filling in a stack of ballots to stuff the box with.

The news director introduced us to his various journalists and hosts, each one of whom was introduced as “the most famous person in Afghanistan”. While it was kinda funny, there’s also an element of truth to it: Because of the high rates of illiteracy over there, television and radio play a much bigger role in the national conversation than it does here, and Tolo TV has excellent ratings.

What was surprising was how young, hip, and normal it all was. I felt a bit stupid, since we’d shown up in armoured vehicles and flack vests. Here are some pics from the newsroom. I feel a bit dumb, I have their names all written down in a notebook that I’ve misplaced. If I find it I’ll add proper captions.

The news director showing us around:

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Where you need to go in this town for a good idea

By Paul Wells - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 5:58 PM - 0 Comments

Science and technology minister Gary Goodyear was at the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto to fulfill a commitment the feds made in their most recent budget: he launched a review of Canada’s policies regarding business R&D. As David Akin points out in his Sun Media column today, the problem is simple enough: Canadian researchers are far better at producing new ideas than Canadian businesses are at implementing them. (Here’s a column I wrote in which John Manley expounds on similar themes.) Far too much effort has gone in recent years into fine-tuning (read “fiddling clumsily with”) the research that goes on in university laboratories. This review attempts to get things right: it looks at the very substantial federal aid on offer to businesses that want to engage in R&D, and asks why so little of that assistance is taken up and why it hasn’t produced a culture of constant innovation.

My very strong hunch is that Canadian industry doesn’t need more help so much as it needs to be made to worry, through a set of policies designed to expose Canada more directly to global competition. So I like this quote from John Manley in David’s column: “Quite frankly, if there is an innovation problem in Canada, that’s the responsibility of the management and boards of directors here in Canada.” I’m really pleased to see that UofT president David Naylor is on Goodyear’s panel; he’s good at the kind of blunt talk that will be needed.

There’s another guy on the panel who will not be familiar to just about anybody, but should be. His name is Arvind Gupta, he runs an organization called MITACS, and I’ve had a story about him ready to run for the past couple of weeks in one of our upcoming university issues. We’ve plucked that story out of our queue so you can read about Gupta now. Here it is after the jump. Continue…

Is Omar Khadr coming back to Canada?

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 5:22 PM - 0 Comments

More than eight years after being shot and captured on an Afghanistan battlefield—at the tender age of 15—Omar Khadr could be on his way back to Canada. Or not. It all depends on which source you believe: the anonymous kind, or the prime minister.

The ever-unreliable Khadr rumour mill started churning again this morning when Al Arabiya, a news channel in Dubai, reported that a settlement has already been reached: in exchange for pleading guilty to terrorism charges, the station said, the Toronto native will be allowed to leave the notorious U.S. prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and serve the remainder of his sentence (whatever it is) in a Canadian jail.

Nathan Whitling, one of Khadr’s Edmonton-based lawyers, would only say “that there is a potential deal in the works” and refused to provide further details. But “unnamed sources” are filling in the blanks. According to the Toronto Star, the deal was proposed by Khadr’s defence team and approved Wednesday night by the convening authority for war crimes tribunals at Gitmo. The National Post goes one step further, saying Khadr will plead guilty to all charges he faces—including murder—and will serve eight more years in prison, seven of them in Canada.

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Brian Raymond Wood | 1977-2010

By Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 5:00 PM - 3 Comments

Illustration by Julia Minamata

Brian Raymond Wood was born on March 3, 1977, in Denver to Edward and Janice Wood. For the first couple of weeks, newborn Brian always had a frown on his face. “We called him grumplet,” laughs Ed. But after six weeks his frown turned upside down, and he became a smiling, easygoing tot.

Brian was an imaginative child, and when he was able to read he took to fantasy stories. In middle school he began playing Dungeons and Dragons, a fantasy role-playing game, and Atari, an early video game console. “Eventually, of course, he ended up with a Game Boy,” says Ed. He also liked real-life adventures. Brian was in Indian Guides, became a Cub Scout, and then graduated to a Boy Scout troop, often taking part in “high-adventure” treks. But it was in high school that he really came into his own. After trying out for the football team and not liking it—he said it was “too rough,” says Ed—Brian decided to audition for a school play. He discovered his singing voice, and would go on to act in high school musical productions like 42nd Street, Time Out for Ginger, and The Pajama Game. “We were hiking on the 55-mile trek in New Mexico, and here Brian was leading the group along, singing The Sound of Music,” laughs Ed. He also took up fencing, which he did competitively for a while.

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Harper's face: lit from below by flashlight since 2006

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 4:53 PM - 0 Comments

Now up on the website: my column from last week’s mag – on Harper, fear and hobnobbing hoity-toits.

Introducing Michael Ignatieff

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 4:41 PM - 0 Comments

A new video from the Liberal party.

En francais apres le jump. Continue…

We have everything to fear but fear itself

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 4:20 PM - 0 Comments

CP/GETTY IMAGES/ISTOCK/ PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRADLEY REINHARDT

Some leaders rule with an iron fist inside a velvet glove. Stephen Harper rules with the mask from the Scream movies.

Like many Canadians, I love being terrified of people and issues—it’s way easier than making the effort to understand them. But Harper wants us to be afraid of so much stuff that it can be hard to keep track. Here’s a useful primer of things the PM wants us to fear:

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