Week in Pictures: October 1st – 7th 2010

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 8, 2010 at 11:18 AM - 0 Comments

Peter Robertson vs. Sir Frederick Banting and Charles Best

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 8, 2010 at 10:57 AM - 0 Comments

Peter Robertson

Why he’s famous: He’s the inventor of the Robertson screwdriver—you know, the square-shaped one in your toolbox.

Why he deserves to win: Before Robertson’s invention in 1908, we were stuck with the slip-prone flat bladed driver and slotted-head screw, a combo notorious for causing injuries. Later, when the cross-shaped Phillips screw and driver were invented, Consumer Reports magazine declared the Robertson superior because Phillips’ screws are easily stripped and degrade with wear. As writer Witold Rybcynski put it, “no matter how old, rusty, or painted over, a Robertson screw can always be unscrewed. [It’s] the biggest little invention of the 20th century.”

Sir Frederick Banting and Charles Best

Why they’re famous: Along with Best, a medical student he’d hired, Banting isolated insulin as the hormone which regulates the body’s blood sugar levels.

Why they deserve to win: After reading a paper that suggested diabetes may be caused by a lack of a hormone secreted by islets in the back of the pancreas, he devised a way to isolate the islets by tying off most of the pancreas with ligatures. In 1921, Frederick Banting hired Charles Best and the two removed a dog’s pancreas, which caused blood sugar levels to rise (mimicking diabetics) before injecting the islets back into the dog. The animal lived for several more months, proving they had isolated the blood-sugar regulating hormone insulin. By 1922, the pair were bringing comatose diabetics in Toronto back to life. Diabetics worldwide have lived more normal lives ever since.

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The Falcon and the snowman

By Colby Cosh - Friday, October 8, 2010 at 10:42 AM - 0 Comments

It is exciting to see the octogenarian Roland Huntford fighting back against the three decades of revisionism and carping that followed upon the publication of his 1979 book Scott and Amundsen. The book may be more familiar as The Last Place on Earth, which is the title it was given after a mini-series by that name was produced from it. When Scott and Amundsen was published, in the face of threats from imperial nostalgiacs and family members of Robert Falcon Scott, it was seen as the final nail in the coffin of Scott’s reputation.

It had long been obvious to students of polar-expedition lore that Scott had been, as Huntford was to put it, a “heroic bungler”. The Worst Journey in the World, published in 1922 by Scott expedition officer Apsley Cherry-Garrard, scattered cautious hints about Scott’s quality as a commander—and more or less gave the game away with its title. (It is generally thought to be the best single account written by any member of the Shackleton-Scott-Amundsen South Pole race.) But when Huntford was finished with Scott, even the “heroic” part of his reputation was really no longer tenable.

Huntford’s book was followed by a concerted effort to pry loose that coffin nail he had hammered in so firmly. Scott supporters tried to revive the argument, made in Leonard Huxley’s coyly sanitized 1913 edition of Scott’s diaries, that Scott and his South Pole party had run into unforeseeably horrible weather conditions—conditions confined only to Scott’s route; conditions which, by some terrible magic, failed to impede the nearly contemporaneous, geographically parallel Amundsen journey. Huntford has sometimes been derided in Britain as a vaguely treasonable Norwegian partisan—he speaks and reads the language, which is the sort of intellectual attainment that tends to invite suspicion amongst superpatriots—but if Huntford is a psychic traitor, how fortunate for him that the case against Scott was so easy to make.

Scott made dozens of inexcusable, baffling errors and openly irrational judgments in expedition planning, and much of the time, energy, and expenditure involved was consumed with what can only be called screwing around. The commander messed about with motor sledges and ponies when he should have been seeing to the integrity of his fuel tins and the ski education of his men. Later, when both fared poorly on the trail, he blamed everyone but himself.

Weather may have pushed Scott further and further behind Amundsen, extending the Norwegian’s 11-day head start to 34 days by the time Scott reached the pole. But it can’t really explain why Amundsen’s team, with its efficient “eat the dog teams and dash to the Pole” approach, suffered no casualties while Scott’s sledge-hauling wretches suffered falls, snow blindness, scurvy, and delirium. Cherry-Garrard was aware in the ’20s that Scott’s energy budgeting had been Enron-esque, and came as close to success as it did only through inhuman prodigies of effort. In a time before the discovery of Vitamin C, Amundsen took the possibility of scurvy seriously and used knowledge of Inuit and Viking dietary practices to formulate a completely effective prevention plan. Scott, forced by his financial backers to bring a doctor with Arctic experience along on the expedition, stubbornly ignored evidence-based advice to hunt for and consume as much fresh meat as possible.

When the time came to choose a three-man party to accompany him on the run to the Pole, Scott improvised a new supply arrangement and took four instead. These included the jovial, enormous petty officer Edgar Evans, who felt the effects of poor nutrition most and died first, and the famous Captain Oates, whose Boer War wound left him especially vulnerable to scurvy and fatigue. Oates, as every good Anglo-Saxon child knows, had to commit suicide to give the last three survivors even a miserably slender chance at making it back to camp.

It is hard to see Scott as anything but criminally negligent unless one possesses some prior, arbitrary emotional commitment to his legend. He wrote the story of his own last days, and it is hard to find any reason to admire him that doesn’t depend on blind faith in that account, which was written with reputation foremost in mind. He was a great believer in morale and élan, an inexhaustible lugger of grudges, and a self-promoter unto the last strokes of his pen. It is difficult to imagine that he could have been of much comfort to his disillusioned charges in their final frigid days. Long may his self-appointed vindicators continue to feel Huntford’s coolly apportioned wrath.

Putting things in perspective

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, October 8, 2010 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

The Prime Minister’s Office helpfully assures the country that Pierre Poilievre is not a threat to national security.

“He was in a rush and what he did was wrong but he recognizes that, he apologized for it and we think that’s appropriate,” said Harper’s spokesman Andrew MacDougall. “When they say security breach, it’s not like he smuggled in explosives or something,” he said.

Maclean's 10 most controversial cover stories

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 8, 2010 at 10:34 AM - 0 Comments

Maclean’s 10 most controversial cover stories

Remembering Mario Lagüe

By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, October 8, 2010 at 10:09 AM - 0 Comments

A remembrance night was held last week for Liberal communications director Mario Lagüe, who died in a motorcycle accident in August.

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Liberal MP Stéphane Dion.

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Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff and his wife Zsuzsanna Zsohar.

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Margaret Trudeau's last breakdown

By Anne Kingston - Friday, October 8, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Peter Bregg/CP/ Reuters/ Photograph by Jane Heller

Margaret Trudeau is sitting in the living room of her Montreal apartment, chatting about the Prime Minister and marijuana. No, the former flower-child chatelaine of 24 Sussex isn’t time-travelling back to her days married to prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the ’70s, smoking spliffs under the noses of her Mountie detail. She’s vibrantly in the here and now as conversation veers to the government’s stance on medical marijuana. “I think Mr. Harper has told us we could grow four [plants],” she says. “I’m tempted to grow four.” She’s joking—or seems to be. Trudeau’s pot-smoking days are behind her—mostly.

Now a mental-health advocate, Trudeau is more interested in the role marijuana use played in her bipolar disorder, a condition she made public in 2006. A little grass gave her focus, she says: “some light and joy and delight.” Too much triggered manic episodes. She still indulges—occasionally. “I fall off now and then, but very, very seldom,” she says. “I’m too cautious now.”

“Cautious” was never a word used to describe Margaret Trudeau, who arrived on the national stage in 1971 as the ravishing 22-year-old bride of a debonair 51-year-old PM. Their unlikely union, which produced Justin, Alexandre (known as Sacha) and Michel, ended in 1977 amidst lurid headlines that the PM’s erratic wife had bolted to photograph the Rolling Stones. Margaret filled in the details in Beyond Reason, her 1979 tell-a-lot, which revealed her “long tunnel of darkness” during her marriage and her affair with an unnamed man later identified as senator Edward Kennedy. In 1982, a second memoir, Consequences, detailed dalliances with the likes of Jack Nicholson and Ryan O’Neal as she flitted between continents seeking her own fame.

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Wait, is that Mark Bittman in aisle two?

By Jessica Allen - Friday, October 8, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Sandy Nicholson

Mark Bittman needs a camera. He wants to document the four-litre bags of milk in aisle one at Fiesta Farms, Toronto’s largest independent grocery store. “I’ve never seen this before. Milk in a bag! Only in Canada.”

The long-time New York Times food columnist is in Toronto to promote his newly published recipe collection, The Food Matters Cookbook. In general, he is not a fan of supermarkets—“most supermarkets’ goals are to sell you processed food and junk food, that’s where they make their money”—but this one, he concedes, is “a nice store.” Bittman is a larger-than-life character, tall and curmudgeonly, albeit with avuncular charm, who walks and talks like he just stepped out of a Woody Allen movie.

Readers of his 2009 bestseller Food Matters—which details his plan for eating responsibly, among other things—will know that Bitt­man is no fan of the industrial meat and junk food complex he calls Big Food.

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Ignatieff's shrinking ambition

By Paul Wells - Friday, October 8, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Chris Wattie/Reuters

“Have you seen our home care package? It’s being unveiled as we speak,” a Liberal party guy told me outside a Starbucks in downtown Ottawa. He showed me his BlackBerry, which was displaying something official-looking. “Focus groups are jumping up and down over this.”

That wasn’t hard to believe. That morning in Gatineau, Michael Ignatieff had announced a $1-billion program to help people care for aging relatives at home. More and more of us have aging relatives, so the Liberal plan addresses a real concern. The Liberal plan would use Employment Insurance to give caregivers half a year off work with modest pay. That’s the way parental leave benefits already work. Another element in the program would pay a tax benefit of up to $1,350 a year to people providing home care. That’s how the Canada Child Tax Benefit works.

So: a program designed to address a perceptible need in an aging society. Proven delivery mechanisms. Modest cost. (No, really: on $280 billion in program spending, $1 billion is modest. It cost a lot more than that to hold a summit meeting in Toronto this summer.)

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The Commons: Off we go with no idea where we’re headed

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 6:06 PM - 0 Comments

The Scene. “Everything we’ve learned so far has all the hallmarks of a scandal,” Liberal Geoff Regan was quoted as exclaiming in a party press release this afternoon.

And indeed, on this—the hallmarks, that is—there can be little debate. There is a lucrative government contract. There is an RCMP investigation. There is an individual, unregistered to lobby the federal government, who received payments from the individual who was awarded the lucrative contract. There is the party fundraiser the contract winner hosted that was attended by the cabinet minister whose department oversees such contracts. There is—or at least was—some kind of departmental probe that may or may not be related to all of this.

That there is as yet little sense of what exactly, if anything, this amounts to only heightens the intrigue—the House rarely as excited as when it hasn’t the faintest idea where it’s headed.

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'Once and for all'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 5:25 PM - 0 Comments

Maxime Bernier has released a statement intended to clear up any census-related confusion. It reads as follows.

I would like once and for all to set things straight with regard to the many reports that have appeared recently in the media regarding my position on the census.

First of all, the CBC has obtained some internal correspondence through an access-to-information request saying that Industry Canada and Statistics Canada only received a few hundred emails of complaint related to the census in 2006. Some commentators have concluded that this was proof that I had been lying when I claimed to have received about a thousand a day for a couple of days.

But I had clearly indicated when I made this declaration back in July that these emails had been received at my MP office on the Hill and not at my minister’s office. It was a discussion with my MP office staff that had led us to recall receiving these emails. Contrary to the correspondence received by the ministry, which is kept by civil servants, the email correspondence at my MP office has all been deleted.

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Raymond J. Nelson | 1920-2010

By Julia Belluz - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 5:00 PM - 0 Comments

Illustration by Team Macho

Raymond J. Nelson was born on June 2, 1920, in Frontier, Sask., to Nels and Emma Nelson. The Depression arrived soon after, and for the family of eight, money was scarce, but their faith wasn’t. The Nelsons had been immigrants from Minnesota in 1911 and established their home on a land grant from the railroad. Mom operated a small hotel and café, while dad was a blacksmith. They were disciplined Christians, and believed that on Sundays, no one should work. Frivolous pursuits were also out of the question. But as a boy, Ray liked to play pool, much to the dismay of his dad. When Nels would catch him at a pool hall, he’d yell until Ray ran out the back door. Such stringency caused Ray to take a more moderate approach to religion, but still, says daughter Allyson, “The driving force of his life was his belief.”

Ray attended a local school, and graduated in Grade 12. After, he worked on the family land. One day, while out in the field, a pair of horses pulling harrows ran him over, but somehow he emerged unscathed. He often noted that he could have died; it was the first of several brushes with death.

In 1942, the Second World War beckoned. Ray joined the military but remained stationed in Canada, working as an assistant in the army dental corps. During that time, he dreamed a lot about what to do when he got out, and resolved to make something of himself. When he was discharged in 1946, he joined his brother Austin in Lloydminster, where he was working at Beaver Lumber. Within three years, the pair had founded their own company, Nelson Lumber. By 1952, when he married his wife, Marie, Ray had also set up Nelson Homes, a prefab housing company.

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A Template for the Pepe Le Pew Movie

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 4:28 PM - 0 Comments

What can I say about the news that Mike Myers will voice Pepe Le Pew in a 3D animation/live action hybrid film? These ideas are going to keep coming, and some of them may actually get made, and it’s probably a sound marketing choice in the sense that it will keep these characters’ merchandising alive. Myers probably won’t be as bad a Pepe as Dan Aykroyd is a Yogi Bear, but considering how many flatulence jokes there are in the average “family-friendly” movie (or sitcom, for that matter) it’s scary to think what they will do with a character who is supposed to be blissfully unaware that he smells bad all the time.

This does give me the opportunity to post this cartoon, which I think would be the only one that could serve as a template for a Pepe Le Pew feature. All the other Pepe cartoons have the stalker/attempted rape issue that Dave Chappelle and others have pointed out. But in this 1959 film, the girl cat is actually as interested in Pepe as he is in her. The problem is that they can’t get together because he smells so terrible that it makes her pass out (for which she’s taunted by June Foray as the narrator: “You are not going to let a little thing like breathing stand in your way?!”). It was written by the great Michael Maltese; oddly, the only cartoon that departs from the usual Pepe formula was not directed by the creator, Chuck Jones, but by one of his animators, Abe Levitow — leading many cartoon buffs to wonder if Jones would have accepted this change-of-pace script if he’d been in the director’s chair.

The article also mentions that WB is planning these projects because their cartoon characters don’t make anywhere near the money in merchandising that the Disney characters do. There are a lot of reasons for this, but I will point out something I’ve pointed out elsewhere: Disney, for the most part, allows Mickey and Donald and Goofy cartoons to stay on YouTube. Some of them have been there for years. Meanwhile, Warner Brothers is constantly cracking down on YouTube uploads of Bugs, Daffy and Pepe cartoons. Do they not think Disney cartoons might get some extra merchandising value from the fact that they’re actually there, on the biggest video site in the world, where kids can see them?

A coffee-table book with benefits

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Michael Cullen/ Mick Tsikas/Reuters Jack Bush's 'Thanksgiving.' 1954: The Painters Eleven/ Afghanistan defeats Russia to win

PAINTERS ELEVEN:THE WILD ONES OF CANADIAN ART
Iris Nowell

The Painters Eleven were abstract artists based in Toronto who banded together in 1953 with a goal: to make waves in the tranquil pool of Canadian landscape art. In other words, no more pine trees. The Painters Eleven drafted a statement, of sorts, saying, “there is no jury but time.” The work would speak for itself.
In her new book, Iris Nowell helps the rest of us understand this group of abstract artists who dared to create a footprint unlike the Group of Seven’s. So, who were they? Toronto’s top art teachers, illustrators, commercial artists and art directors. They joined the city’s established art societies, cannily, and tried to bring about change from within. It wasn’t easy, but they revolutionized contemporary art in Toronto and bestowed legitimacy on abstract expressionism after it had gained fame in America and the Automatistes had made inroads in Quebec.

Opening the hefty book, readers are immediately treated to 11 colour reproductions—no titles, no dates, no dimensions, no artist name printed politely at the side. Nowell is saying, “Look at these! The work deserves this lavish treatment.” And she’s right. Nowell has given us a coffee table book with benefits. Examining the members’ artistic development toward abstraction, she peppers the text with chatty anecdotes, biographic details and telling character descriptions. If you thought you’d heard all about artist Tom Hodgson’s carousing in his studio, called the Pit, think again. If abstract art was the group’s unifying force, so was boxing and booze—martinis, to be exact, and Walter Yarwood’s Bloody Murphy. Nowell recounts how socialite Alexandra Luke, one of the two females in the group, had to sell an Emily Carr painting to buy art supplies. Her book is an accessible account that leaves the reader with one burning question: who is the mystery benefactor who partially bankrolled this lush publication?
- JOANNE LATIMER

INVASION OF THE PROSTATE SNATCHERS
Mark Scholz and Ralph Blum

The humble prostate is man’s great unknown. Buried somewhere in our nether regions, it is a walnut-sized enigma that (I’m told) is crucial to the reproduction of the species and is accessible only via an almost comically uncomfortable process involving a finger, a rubber glove and a hospital gown. But is what usually follows as necessary as the medical establishment claims?

Not entirely, according to authors Ralph Blum and Mark Scholz, who paired up for what might be subtitled Conversations With and About My Cancerous Prostate. Blum has had prostate cancer for 20 years, and he uses his experience as an example of the near-uselessness of biopsies and resulting surgery—one alarming statistic reveals that roughly 80 per cent of prostate surgeries are unnecessary. Prostate cancer is the whale shark of the cancer world: slow-moving and benign. He and co-author Scholz, himself a doctor specializing in prostate cancer, talk about why men almost always opt for surgery: straight-up fear, the insistence of surgery-mad urologists who run “the prostate cancer world,” the human male’s tendency to want to cut the damn thing out and be done with it. Rather than have surgery, Blum embarked on self-treatment and active surveillance—closely monitoring cancer markers and trying a series of often out-there experimental therapies, some more successful than others. (Spirit-channelling shaman? Silver-infused water? Blum tried them all.) His methods are scattershot, and that’s just the point. By staying positive (and keeping an eye on the markers) there are hundreds of possible treatments for this particular cancer. A breezy and effortless writer, Blum writes endearingly about the emasculating travails of at once losing one’s libido and ability to perform, a side effect of testosterone blocking therapy, while Scholz gives a welcome wariness to the practices of much of the medical establishment. A worthy read for anyone about to assume the position.
- MARTIN PATRIQUIN

HOME AND AWAY:THE SEARCH FOR DREAMS AT THE HOMELESS WORLD CUP OF SOCCER
Dave Bidini

The singer-songwriter from the beloved (and now defunct) Canadian band the Rheostatics is known for writing about games that are played in unlikely places—baseball in Italy, hockey in Hong Kong. Dave Bidini’s latest quirky sport story is a mix of familiar and foreign, as he follows the Canadian homeless soccer team to Melbourne, Australia, for the 2008 Homeless World Cup Tournament.

Bidini does a fine job portraying the Canadian team: Krystal, an 18-year-old black woman who never fit in with her adopted family; Billy, the Greek, who played soccer professionally and then ran his family’s business until becoming hooked on narcotics; sane, sober Jerry, whose multiple failed business ventures left him destitute. Bidini affectionately recounts some of their signature plays on the pitch (street soccer, a four-on-four game with two seven-minute halves, is played on a smaller field to accommodate players’ fitness and health levels)—like the way Jerry would hold the ball underfoot like a man resting his foot on a curbside. And their awkward social forays. Billy suggested that the team adopt “Souvlaki” as its anthem.

“That’s a song?” asked the coach. “A song, a food. Whatever,” was Billy’s reply.

Bidini also aptly covers the range of homeless experiences represented by the 54 nations who competed at Melbourne, including the all-female Cameroon team who left their street babies back home. Bidini holds a “long-standing belief in the redemptive properties of sport,” and to some extent, his book reflects this ideal. After returning to Canada, Billy reconciled with his parents and Krystal started playing soccer semi-professionally. But Bidini also hints at the fact that homelessness is too complex a problem to be solved by a soccer ball. He mentions players getting high before games and going AWOL for days at a time. He asked a young, strung-out Australian woman what the tournament meant to her. “I don’t get very mushy about things,” she replied. “That’s my life, you know, and that’s how I f–ked it up.”
- DAFNA IZENBERG

THE LAMPSHADE
Mark Jacobson

In early 2006, just months after hurricane Katrina, Skip Henderson was prowling the melancholy streets of New Orleans when he came upon a junkie selling storm-ravaged items. Among them was a small lamp.

Henderson’s collector’s eye recognized the metal frame as a central European, mid-20th-century work. But the shade . . . What is this made of? he asked. “The skin of Jews.” Henderson had no reason to believe it, but sent the shade to a journalist friend, Jacobson, who passed it along to a genetic lab. The verdict arrived 118 years to the day after Hitler’s birth: human origin.

With that, Jacobson’s utterly engrossing and profoundly disquieting search for answers is off and running. He re-examines the postwar stories that the Nazis didn’t just murder Jews by the millions but rendered their body fat into soap and their skin into leather. Ilse Koch, the so-called Bitch of Buchenwald—immortalized in the B movie Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS—reportedly ordered such lampshades made, once as a birthday present for her husband, the camp commander. Buchenwald’s American liberators displayed a table of horrors that included a purportedly human-skin lampshade. But that lampshade disappeared, no others surfaced and no charges were ever entered in war-crimes trials. Most scholars long ago dismissed the beliefs as myths that captured the essence of a genocide both diabolical and prosaically industrial.

Even the shade’s drug addict seller, who had stolen it from an abandoned home, had no real reason to think it was a Holocaust artifact. He was just one of the many people Jacobson encounters—all of them of an age to remember the old stories—who somehow instinctively recognize the shade for what it is. In the end, its stubbornly murky origins matter less to Jacobson than a single question: what on Earth should he do with it? No Holocaust museum would accept it, leaving Jacobson, as he leaves the reader, with a hard choice: bury the shade—and all hope of further discovery—or keep both in the land of the living.
- BRIAN BETHUNE

GREAT HOUSE
Nicole Krauss

As she did in The History of Love, the American writer weaves seemingly disparate stories around a singular object—this time, a massive desk—and only at the novel’s conclusion do all the interconnections become clear. There’s a solitary novelist in New York who borrowed the desk from a passionate young poet, subsequently tortured and killed in Pinochet’s Chile. In Israel, a widower struggles to make sense of his antagonism toward his adult son. In London, a waifish pair of siblings rattle around an antique-filled house while their father combs the Earth to find the furniture the Nazis stole from his parents before killing them. Nearby, a professor of literature stumbles across a secret that his wife, a supremely self-contained woman now suffering from dementia, has kept all her life.

Each story takes the form of a confession, and each is, in itself, deeply compelling, both because the characters’ voices are so distinct and because their situations are so richly imagined. Here’s the New York novelist explaining a lover’s reasons for dumping her: “The gist was that he had a secret self, a cowardly, despicable self he could never show me, and that he needed to go away like a sick animal until he could improve this self and bring it up to a standard he judged deserving of company.” And here’s the widower, berating his son for renting a BMW: “You’re such a big shot that you can’t accept a Hyundai like everyone else? You have to specially pay extra for a car made by the sons of Nazis?”

As in her previous two novels, there’s a lot about the writing life—many of the characters are writers, or would like to be—but Krauss no longer seems to be angling for an A from the postmodern tricksters who have influenced her style. Here, narrative is the point. She doesn’t quite tie everything together convincingly in Great House, but the characters feel so real, and the sense of loss they share is so powerfully distilled, it’s easy to forgive minor construction flaws.
- KATE FILLION

GOD AND SEX: WHAT THE BIBLE REALLY SAYS
Michael Coogan

A serious scholar (editor of  the New Oxford Annotated Bible) with a sense of humour, Harvard lecturer Coogan has long been bemused by the way all sides in various debates, from abortion to same-sex marriage, reference the Bible without knowing much about what it really says. The language of sex and of beauty is culturally specific, he points out, and while the male speaker in the Song of Songs clearly means high praise for his lover when he compares her hair to “a flock of goats streaming down from Mount Gilead,” a modern beau would be ill-advised to say as much to his beloved. Likewise, sexual euphemisms, which range from the familiar carnal overtones of “knowing” to the less often recognized use of “feet” for genitalia: the Israelite heroine Jael was able to drive a tent peg into an enemy commander’s skull because “between her feet he knelt down, there he fell, wasted” (Judges 5:27).

The meat of the book, though, lies in Coogan’s discussion of what Scripture says about current hot-button issues. Almost all sexual transgressions involving women, from adultery to incest and rape, are treated as property crimes, because they usurp another male’s rights to a woman or diminish her financial value. Abortion is not mentioned, and the few references to fetuses are not clear about their status as human persons.

As for homosexuality, the last of the New Testament’s three condemnations (Romans 1:26-27) speaks of homoerotic relations as divinely imposed, a concept, Coogan notes, “not very far from the modern view that sexual orientation is innate,” not chosen. The Old Testament’s two explicit references are found with other instances of Israelite rejection of what scholars call “category confusion”: crossbreeding animals, planting different crops in the same field, wearing clothing woven from different kinds of yarn. Needless to say, these are prohibitions long ignored. And just as we no longer scan the Bible for agricultural advice, Coogan concludes, we ought to be at least as wary about its social policy prescriptions.
- BRIAN BETHUNE

Should you stay or should you go?

By Julia McKinnell - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute"Moving out": "If you always make more money than he does and you are carrying the financial burden, do you think you will respect him?"

If it feels like you’ve “outgrown” your husband, you may be wondering if you should stay or leave. Advice columnist Kimberly Ventus-Dark wants to help you with that. In a new book, she offers up various scenarios.
Women who make more money than their husband and carry the majority of responsibilities at home and are unhappy with the situation would be better off leaving, she writes in When You Have Outgrown Him: Whether to Stay or Go. And if your husband makes some money but “completely dismisses his financial responsibilities to the household,” again, you’ll be happier if you go, she writes. “Women often mention to me that when they do bring home enough income to pay the bills and support the family, some men feel that their own paycheques should be kept for their own personal pleasures or building financial worth. Unless this problem is rectified, it is nearly impossible for the couple to maintain a meaningful relationship.”

In another situation, Ventus-Darks describes the marriage of Mark, a mechanic, and Maria, a nurse. “Maria wants to pursue a master’s degree but is confused because, recently, Mark has started to accuse Maria of thinking she is better than him. Mark doesn’t understand why Maria has changed so much since their marriage. Neither one of them had a degree before the marriage, and Mark doesn’t understand why Maria seems to have become so much of a snob or why she has to get a degree.”

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'Abandoned' in Africa; Bike-lane backlash

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Jean-Marc Luneau/ Getty Images

British Columbia: A middle-aged Victoria woman is suing two denture product companies, claiming their goods caused her to experience tremors, pain and difficulty walking. Both PoliGrip and Fixodent contained zinc, though her lawyer claims their instructions didn’t tell users how much to use. Excessive zinc consumption can interfere with the absorption of copper, and a copper deficiency can cause neurodegeneration. After taking medical leave from her job, the woman is now working reduced hours. In February, PoliGrip’s maker announced it would reformulate the product without zinc.

Alberta: An Edmonton man is suing the German airline Lufthansa for $86,000, claiming that, after booking a flight to Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo, he was flown instead to Gabon’s capital Libreville and “abandoned.” Without an entry visa, he was detained by police, the statement of claim states. Three days later he was able to leave for Kinshasa but says that his luggage didn’t make the trip. No statement of defence has been filed by the air carrier.

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Col. Russell Williams faces life behind bars

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 3:57 PM - 0 Comments

Col. Russell Williams—the senior Canadian air force officer who led a twisted double life as a serial predator—will almost certainly spend the rest of his life behind bars after agreeing this morning to plead guilty to a long list of heinous crimes that rocked the military and shocked the public.

Appearing in open court for the first time since his arrest eight months ago, the former commander of CFB Trenton sat quietly in a bulletproof prisoners’ box as his lawyer, Michael Edelson, told a Belleville, Ont., judge that his client admits to every charge he faces: two first-degree murders, two home invasion sexual assaults, and dozens of bizarre break-and-enters that targeted women’s lingerie. The 47-year-old will formally enter his guilty plea at a sentencing hearing Oct. 18, Edelson said.

Dressed in a dark suit, a white shirt and brown shoes, the disgraced colonel did not utter a single word during his brief appearance. As his lawyer spoke, he remained hunched over with his eyes focused on the floor, not once turning to look at the packed courtroom behind him—which included some of his victims’ grieving relatives. When the proceedings finished, Williams was handcuffed and whisked away by heavily armed police officers.

The colonel’s confirmed guilty plea marks the end of a stunning case that, even now, seems unbelievable.

A gifted pilot and respected leader, Williams was a rising star in the Canadian air force, a man who ferried prime ministers and the Queen and was later appointed the top man at Trenton, the country’s largest and most strategically vital airbase. But in between the grueling demands of his high-profile job, the soft-spoken officer was busy feeding a perverted obsession that would eventually lead to the murders of two innocent women: Cpl. Marie-France Comeau, a 38-year-old corporal stationed at his base, and Jessica Lloyd, a 27-year-old Belleville woman.

Lloyd’s mother, Roxanne, was among those in the gallery Thursday morning, clutching a photo of her dead daughter. Jessica’s brother, Andy, said although it was difficult to finally lay eyes on the man who killed his sister, he and his mom are pleased with the guilty plea. “It is a definitely a good thing,” he told reporters. “Anything that is going to wrap it up quickly for us is a good thing.”

“Obviously, everybody would like to hear him explain what happened,” he continued. “I’m not looking for an apology; it’s not going to hold its weight in anything. But we would like to hear the truth about what happened…Why? Why her?”

It is a question that continues to baffle everyone who crossed paths with Col. Williams, both in and out of uniform. By all accounts, he was the model military man: intelligent, observant, ultra-organized, and always quick to compliment his subordinates. He was an avid golfer, loved to fish, and appeared to be happily married to an equally successful woman: Mary-Elizabeth Harriman, the associate executive director of the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada. On the surface, at least, his seemed like a perfect life.

But three years ago, in the fall of 2007, something snapped. Williams began breaking into homes within walking distance of his house in the Ottawa suburb of Orléans and his lakefront cottage in Tweed, Ont., stealing what would soon become a massive collection of women’s bras, underwear, bathing suits and dresses. He broke into one particular house nine times.

In the early morning hours of Sept. 17, 2009, the break-ins took a suddenly violent turn. A 21-year-old woman, whose name is protected by a publication ban, awoke to find a man—now identified as Williams—inside her home. As her eight-week-old baby slept in a nearby room, the woman was blindfolded, tied up, stripped naked, photographed and sexually assaulted. In the days after the attack, Williams snuck back into her house two more times.

He struck again on Sept. 30, this time breaking into a house just three doors down from his cottage. Laurie Massicotte, who was home alone at the time, was also blindfolded and stripped naked with a knife. In a recent interview with Maclean’s—her first since the assault—Massicotte said she was ordered to pose for dozens of unthinkable photographs, and when she tried to refuse, Williams’ threat was always the same: “Don’t make me make you.”

The next morning, the colonel was back on duty, presenting a service medal to a fellow airman and meeting with subordinates about ongoing construction at the base.

Williams continued burglarizing homes in October and November, but for reasons that remain unexplained, his crime spree would soon turn deadly.

Cpl. Comeau was killed in late November, asphyxiated in her home in Brighton, Ont. Days later, when an underling emailed Williams to say that Comeau’s military funeral was conducted “with the utmost professionalism,” he wrote back: “I’m pleased to hear that the service went as well as could be expected, given the very sad circumstances.” At the time, no one had any reason to suspect that the base commander was responsible.

Jessica Lloyd was next. She was last heard from on the evening of Jan. 28, after sending a late-night text message to a friend. The following morning, Williams called in sick—but it would be a few more days before police discovered the real reason he skipped work. On Feb. 4, during a roadside check of every vehicle driving along the rural highway that connects Tweed with the airbase, an officer noticed that Williams’ tires matched a unique set of treads found near Lloyd’s home on the night she vanished.

Three days later, during a lengthy interrogation, Williams confessed to everything. He led detectives to Lloyd’s body, and a further search of his homes uncovered the stash of stolen lingerie, neatly catalogued by date and location.

“It just goes to show you, you never know where that carton’s gonna come from with the bad eggs,” Andy Lloyd said. “It could be police or firefighter or military or anybody who is supposed to be there to protect people—and they are doing the very opposite.”

Williams’ sentencing hearing is expected to last a few days and will include numerous victim impact statements. He faces an automatic punishment of life behind bars with no chance of parole for 25 years.

RELATED STORIES:

• Col. Russell Williams to plead guilty—Accused killer and former base commander will plead guilty to all counts, says lawyer (October 7, 2010)
• Colonel Williams’ wife, under attack—An accused killer’s spouse struggles to rebuild her shattered life (July 27, 2010)
• Col. Russell Williams, accused sex killer, makes brief court appearance—Murder victim’s brother among those in attendance (July 22, 2010)
• Williams faces additional charges—Former CFB Trenton commander linked to 82 more crimes around Ottawa, Belleville and Tweed (April 29, 2010)
• Colonel accused of double murder tries to kill himself—Russell Williams used mustard to write his suicide note (April 5, 2010)
• I feel pity for Colonel Williams if he’s guilty—Barbara Amiel on the blessing and the curse of human sexuality (February 23, 2010)
• Col. Russell Williams, a timeline (PHOTOS)—The busy schedule of an accused killer (February 18, 2010)
• The secret life of Colonel Russell Williams—If police are correct, he was a cold-blooded planner who in hours could transform from commander to monster (February 16, 2010)
• The two faces of Col. Russell Williams (VIDEO)—Portrait of an accused predator (February 10, 2010)
• Round up: Investigating Col. Russ Williams—Tire tracks led police to Williams; investigators look into unsolved crimes (February 9, 2010)
• Col. Russell Williams’ double life?—Top officer facing murder charges commanded Canada’s largest air base, flew top diplomats (February 8, 2010)

All is war

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 3:44 PM - 0 Comments

The government takes its campaign against the Liberal leader to the international community.

“We’re getting close to the vote and they are clearly feeling the heat. The speech was designed to cover their backs so, if they don’t win, they can blame Ignatieff,” one person who had been in the room told Reuters on Thursday.

NFL Picks Week 5: The Unbearable Misery of Bills' Tailgating

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 3:21 PM - 0 Comments

Scott Feschuk Last week: 6-8 Season: 31-27-4

Scott Reid Last week: 7-7 Season: 29-29-4

•••

St. Louis (plus 3) at Detroit

Reid: At 2-2, the Surging Rams (dibs on that name if ever we form a pro-wrestling tag team) are the class of the NFC West thanks to my can’t-win-no-how 49ers. And yet, against the 0-4 Lions, they will get points. Does that seem fair? Sure, Detroit put Green Bay through their paces. Sure Shaun Hill (who couldn’t complete a sentence in San Francisco) played well last week. And sure, Ndamukong Suh was named Dr. Bruce Banner until he was caught in that gamma radiation blast. But the Rams are rolling and playing confident football. Statistically, they’re better than the Lions in every major category – including coaches with unexpected vowels. This could be a hard-fought matchup between two improving losers. Not unlike us. Pick: St. Louis.

Feschuk: I’m buying into the Lions. I realize that’s an almost indefensible position to take, so let me distract you from my remark with this bold prediction: Miami coach Tony Sparano will be Continue…

Catching a lift to class

By Claire Ward - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

Ron Niebrugge/Alamy/Getstock

Simon Fraser University students may be getting a new way to hitch a ride to school. In response to growing demand for more sustainable, reliable transit service to the mountaintop campus, Translink, B.C.’s transit authority, is taking proposals to determine the feasibility of a 30-person gondola linking Production Way SkyTrain Station in Burnaby to SFU. The proposed 2.6-km sky lift would cost an estimated $70 million, and effectively replace the need for Translink’s fleet of 60-foot diesel buses to travel up and down the mountain’s steep, icy slopes each winter—a route that is closed between 10 and 15 days a year due to heavy snowfall, often causing class cancellations. The new service, say proponents, could also be responsible for removing some 50,000 hours of bus service from the mountain.

“It would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by about 1,870 tonnes in the first year alone,” says Gordon Harris, president and CEO of SFU Community Trust, which initially raised the idea with Translink. SFU Community Trust’s initial feasibility study estimated that a gondola could save Translink $1.6 million a year in operating costs.

Modelled after the Peak 2 Peak Gondola, which connects Whistler and Blackcomb mountains, the new route could potentially move up to 3,000 people an hour in roughly half the regular transit time—about eight minutes. But despite community enthusiasm for the project, Translink must prioritize. “We do not, at this point, have money for expansion,” says Translink spokesman Ken Hardie. The money to get this project off the ground, he suggests, may have to come from some sort of public-private partnership.

Breach of veteran’s privacy "was alarming"

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 2:34 PM - 0 Comments

Canada’s privacy watchdog, Jennifer Stoddart, has slammed government officials for sharing personal and sensitive information about Sean Bruyea. “What we found in this case was alarming,” Stoddart said. Bruyea has been a vocal critic of the way the government handles veterans’ issues for several years. A veteran himself, Bruyea eventually found out 850 Veterans Affairs employees had accessed his medical and financial records, and that the information found its way into briefing notes provided to high-level bureaucrats and cabinet ministers. Bruyea says he’ll be seeking damages from the federal government, and has asked for Prime Minister Stephen Harper as well as past Veteran’s Affairs ministers to apologize.

Toronto Star

Hookers, hacks, and Himel

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 2:20 PM - 0 Comments

The Citizen‘s Dan Gardner is impatient with the columnists cawing against Justice Susan Himel’s prostitution ruling. This morning he exasperatedly tweeted at them that “You don’t have to agree. You do have to read”—that is, read what Himel wrote. I’m on Dan’s side in this debate, but, hey, isn’t he being a little unfair and obnoxious? Surely respectable writers like Daphne Bramham wouldn’t denounce the Himel decision in such strong terms without examining the evidence:

If prostitution were a job freely chosen, as the pro-legalization forces would have us believe, it’s unlikely that the average age of entry into that workforce would be 14.

Damn, I guess Dan was right after all. This soundbite is a poor choice for an opening salvo against Himel, since it came up specifically in her hearing of the evidence from supporters of the existing law [emphasis mine]:

I find that Drs. Raymond and Poulin were more like advocates than experts offering independent opinions to the court. At times, they made bold, sweeping statements that were not reflected in their research. For example, some of Dr. Raymond’s statements on prostitutes were based on her research on trafficked women. As well, during cross-examination, it was revealed that some of Dr. Poulin’s citations for his claim that the average age of recruitment into prostitution is 14 years old were misleading or incorrect. In his affidavit, Dr. Poulin suggested that there have been instances of serial killers targeting prostitutes who worked at indoor locations; however, his sources do not appear to support his assertion. I found it troubling that Dr. Poulin stated during cross-examination that it is not important for scholars to present information that contradicts their own findings (or findings which they support).

Himel’s judgment gives the impression that she carefully scrutinized and weighted the massive body of evidence before her; Bramham, by contrast, uses cherry-picked stats in a way that recalls the old proverb about the drunk and the lamppost. Indeed, her column is such an impossibly confused piece of argument that one is tempted to think the drunkenness literal.

Like other critics of Himel, Bramham sneers at the idea that selling sex can possibly constitute an exercise of “choice”; you know this, she suggests, because you wouldn’t want your sister to be a prostitute. Well, I sure as hell wouldn’t want my sister to be a columnist at a Postmedia newspaper; I did that job, and, given my sister’s other options, the uncertainty and meagre pay certainly wouldn’t maximize her happiness or her income. It’s nonsensical to criticize someone’s means of earning a living from the standpoint that she could just presumably go be a master mariner or an accountant tomorrow if she didn’t have an imaginary gun to her head.

We are all trying to get by within a context of skills, credentials, abilities, and tastes, and these things are limited by our life experiences (particularly the horrible ones) and our inherent endowments. This is not the prostitute’s condition; it is the human condition. Sneering comments about the meaning and value of choice don’t reflect well on any commentator’s realism.

They’re especially odious when realism is precisely what those commentators claim to be advocating. Bramham writes: “Selling sex is dehumanizing and soul-destroying to most of the people who do it. That’s not a moral judgment. It’s fact.” This couldn’t be more embarrassing if she’d shouted “SCIENCE!” instead, could it? Has this soul-destruction been quantified by a graduate student? Is there an SI unit of dehumanization? Or is the columnist simply reluctant to admit that there might, in fact, be some irrational prejudices and scolding Methodist ghosts swirling around in her hindbrain?

Oh, not possible: Bramham eventually comes around to advocating the progressive, presumptively sex-positive “Nordic model” of prostitution—having either forgotten or never realized that the crux of the Nordic model is decriminalization of the supply side of the sex trade. It’s the pre-Himel law that’s inconsistent with the Nordic model! As Himel’s decision points out!

In Sweden, where prostitution is approached as an aspect of male violence against women and children, buying sex and pimping are illegal, but the seller of sexual services is seen as a victim and not criminalized. Public education campaigns targeting buyers of sexual services have reduced demand. Intensive police training has led to a 300 per cent increase in arrests and a reduction of complaints that the law is too difficult to enforce.

This evidence suggests to me that Canada’s prohibition of all public communications for the purpose of prostitution is no longer in step with changing international responses. These legal regimes demonstrate that legislatures around the world are turning their minds to the protection of prostitutes, as well as preventing social nuisance. The communicating provision impairs the ability of prostitutes to communicate in order to minimize their risk of harm and, as such, does not constitute a minimal impairment of their rights.

I don’t mean to pick on Daphne Bramham in particular; she’s just the latest target to pop up, and the faults in her rhetoric, enormous and fatal though they are, don’t descend to the level of Barbara Kay, who is sure that legalizing prostitution today means she’ll be clapped in irons for being agin it tomorrow. Still, at least my friend Barbara is upfront about not giving a fig about any harm done to prostitutes by the law. I was criticized a little bit last week for suggesting that opponents of the Himel ruling, people who don’t like to entertain arguments about “harm”, should logically regard serial killers as Dexter-esque defenders—perhaps distasteful but in a sense admirable—of the social order they value so highly. I’m afraid this implication is hardly even disguised by Mrs. Kay: in her first column on Himel she brings up Robert Pickton explicitly, mentions in a flat, neutral way that his murder spree “seem to have been a strong motivation for [Himel's] decision”, and goes on to dismiss the question of “harm” willy-nilly. You’re left to infer her feelings about Pickton: she doesn’t take an explicit position. I think I know that she would oppose his particular species of social activism, but given her arguments against harm reduction, I can’t really account for why she would.

Espousal of the Nordic model of supply-side decriminalization is probably more reasonable, and Bramham should be given credit for that, even if the idea collides with absolutely everything else she apparently believes. For myself, I’d prefer it if we could just get past our superstitions about power imbalance in technically victimless exchanges. Our law, in practice, now pretty much treats pot growers as Satan and pot smokers as delusional, lazy unfortunates; suppliers bad, demanders OK. When it comes to prostitution we take the opposite tack: suppliers victims, demanders monsters—though at other times, for no better reason, the reverse approach has prevailed. I’m content to let the Nordic model be judged on a close, unbiased study of its practical effects (and I certainly do believe that policy surrounding prostitution should facilitate, even encourage exit from it), but at root, do all these just-so stories make sense?

My ideology is that it takes two to tango and that people should be allowed to tango. Nobody wants to argue for a man’s right to buy commoditized sex, just as he buys commoditized brainpower (in theory) when he buys the Vancouver Sun or the commoditized sweat of Mexicans when he buys garlic and oranges from California. The anti-prostitution regiment, though it may appear in our minds arrayed in the black bonnets and hoop skirts of our Victorian foremothers, seem to me like nothing more than degraded Marxists or hippies carping about alienation, or about how we don’t deal with each other as real human beings, maaaan. We commoditize each other and are commoditized; that’s where everything that lifts us above the miseries of subsistence farming comes from.

And that’s really pretty OK. Unless you’ve breathed in too much nonsense borrowed from nitwit German philosophizing about “the I and the thou”, you know that capitalist alienation doesn’t prevent civilized persons from forming genuine connections, or acting with decency and kindness, within a client-servant framework. As prostitutes will be the first to tell you. My argument here would probably seem stronger if I had some good, obvious objects of pathos to parade—if, for instance, ex-johns wrote as many blogs and books and news articles as ex-hookers do. But that’s the price of monsterizing the john: people can blather on about how “prostitution is violence” without even having seen or heard of the widowers, the social castoffs, and the deformed and disabled who make up part of pretty much every whore’s clientele. (Whether that whore is male or female.)

This is not to say that a lot of johns aren’t woman-haters: the only question, absolutely the only question, is how best to protect the women. Which brings us back to Bramham. She cites a case, and it is a fantastically rare case, in which a Vancouver “incall” prostitute was murdered by a client in an apartment being used as a massage parlour. (OMG! Another “Craigslist killing”!) But as Bramham presumably understands, many women are killed every year by husbands, boyfriends, and acquaintances under similar circumstances; we probably cannot expect prostitution policy to make sex for pay any safer than sex in general. So how is prostitution relevant to the example at all?

If anything, its relevance would seem to be that there was a record of the man’s internet browsing, a record of the cash transaction, and security-camera images of his arrival at the illicit business. The commercial aspect of his visit is almost certainly the reason he got caught; it’s the only way Bramham is able to give us the exact amount he paid. As an argument that violence against prostitutes can’t be deterred by making indoor security arrangements legal, her anecdatum isn’t just ineffective, it’s self-annihilating.

So, too, is the quote she provides from a UBC law professor who says “says at most the decision might change [prostitution] from ‘an extremely dangerous job to a very dangerous job’.” Here, again, the idea that prostitution should be made safer is just being laughed at. We have a whole universe of occupational health and safety regulations devoted to making extremely dangerous jobs very dangerous, don’t we? Are these rules somehow bad or ridiculous?

A useful exercise in assessing columns about prostitution is to substitute “taxi drivers” for “sex workers” and see how the rhetoric holds up. Driving cab carries the highest risk of violent assault and homicide of any commonly performed lawful profession—higher, easily, than that faced by cops. So imagine Bramham writing “What are the chances, if driving a taxi really were a choice, that so many who choose it are poor, under-educated immigrants or members of minority groups?” Whoa, the demographics check out and everything! Could Bramham find a lawyer to say that it is “naive, disingenuous and dangerous to frame cab driving only in terms of safety, choice and individual autonomy”? I wouldn’t bet against it. A journalist—particularly one who’s a brilliant, tireless reporter—can always find what she has decided to look for.

From e-books to no books

By Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 2:20 PM - 0 Comments

Andre Zelck/laif/Redux

Earlier this month, the University of Texas at San Antonio announced it had built the world’s first bookless library. Its Applied Engineering and Technology Library offers access to 425,000 e-books and 18,000 e-journal subscriptions, and librarians say they’ve yet to hear a complaint from the 350-plus students and faculty who pass through its doors daily. “We’ve gotten no negative feedback,” says Krisellen Maloney, library dean at the University of Texas. “We looked at circulation rates, we looked at electronic resources, we looked at requests, and we decided that having the services was more important than the physical books.” She adds bluntly: “When we prioritized the needs, the books weren’t the priority.”

It used to be that the size of a collection defined a library’s greatness, but now with access to online academic journals and e-books, a large physical collection doesn’t yield the same competitive advantage.

Now the bookless trend is taking hold in Canada, where more and more libraries are expanding their electronic resources. “My own institution has increased its holdings exponentially,” says Ernie Ingles, vice-provost and chief librarian at the University of Alberta and president of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL). “Virtually 90 per cent of our journals are electronic now, without print equivalents, and I believe we have approaching one million e-books in one kind or another.” Ingles says that all the members of CARL, including the University of British Columbia, the University of Ottawa and Dalhousie University, are moving in a similar direction.

Continue…

Gay rights to be included in the next 'Discover Canada' citizenship guide

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 2:01 PM - 0 Comments

The next printing of a guidebook aimed at immigrants applying for Canadian citizenship will contain references to gay rights, including mentions of the legality of gay marriage and prohibitions against discrimination based on sexual orientation. Immigration Minister Jason Kenney had vetoed the inclusion of such information in the current version. But Conservative MP Rick Dykstra said it’s time for a change. “As with everything else, the potential for evolution and improvement is there,” he said. Gay rights were already a part of the “Welcome to Canada” guide for newcomers published this summer, paving the way for the Harper government to take a “very, very good step forward” with the next printing of the “Discover Canada” citizenship guide.

Ottawa Citizen