Canada's Best 50 Employers

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Though the Great Recession injected plenty of fear into the workforce, employees still expect a great deal from their employers. In an exclusive survey, conducted by Aon Hewitt, Maclean’s reveals the 50 Canadian organizations that are doing the best job of engaging their staff.

Click here for Canada’s Best 50 Employers
Features
Who’s whistling the loudest while they work? How Canadian organizations stack up against the rest of the world in terms of employee engagement	Quittin’ time As confidence rises, workers will start looking for new jobs. Only top employers will be able to stop the rush.	A friend in high places Thanks to the downturn, bosses feel closer to their employees than ever. But is it good for business?
From the battlefield to the boardroom In his new book, Rick Hillier shares his lessons on leadership	Head of their class Canada’s small- and medium-sized employers	Setting the standard McDonald’s manages to remain current and innovative thanks in part to its approach to fostering leadership
Fair and flexible Some companies offer employees extra time off	Good job, coach Hands-on coaching—as well as a serious commitment to ongoing training is helping companies score well with their employees	Healthy and happy Many of the Best Employers offer on-site fitness centres
It’s tool time Improving efficiency at work can increase engagement	Ones to watch Though they didn’t crack Aon Hewitt’s lists, high marks from their employees positioned these 11 organizations on the cusp

From the battlefield to the boardroom

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Fred Chartrand/CP/ Photograph by Andrew Tolson

As a man who believes that poor leaders have their uses—in the way they make what not to do so blindingly clear—Rick Hillier certainly found a target-rich environment during his career in the Canadian Forces. The former chief of defence staff, Canada’s highest-ranking soldier, Hillier, 55, left the armed forces in 2008, and now, a self-described “failure at retirement,” is fully occupied with philanthropic work, writing, and providing strategic and leadership advice for various companies. But he hasn’t forgotten what he calls the Forces’ dark decades, particularly the budget-squeezing ’90s, and the panicky, money-driven decisions they spawned, like selling the military’s eight Chinook helicopters to the Dutch air force. Years later, “nothing pissed me off more,” Hillier writes in his new book, Leadership: 50 Points of Wisdom for Today’s Leaders, than having to be ferried about in Afghanistan by a Dutch copter with its painted-over maple leaf still visible underneath.

But the most “vivid lessons I remember,” Hillier says over the phone from St. John’s, where he’s chancellor of Memorial University, came from the way some officers responded to the situation. “That senior officer who apologized to his men after his command ended that he’d spent too much time in the office? When I heard him say that, I promised myself I would spend half of every day mixing with the people under me, looking them in the eye and listening to them.”

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Quittin' time

By Jason Kirby - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW TOLSON

Back in August, former JetBlue flight attendant Steven Slater scolded an obnoxious passenger, grabbed a cold beer, and slid down an emergency chute into folk-hero status for disgruntled workers everywhere. Given that the stunt landed Slater in court last week, where he pled guilty to criminal mischief and was fined US$10,000, there are clearly better ways to go about changing jobs. Regardless, 2011 is shaping up to be the year of the Big Quit. And mounting employee restlessness will put all but the best employers in a tough spot as they try to hang on to top talent.

When the recession hit, the job market went into a deep freeze. In Canada, employers that had just months earlier grappled with labour shortages suddenly found themselves with too many workers and not enough for them to do. Aside from outright layoffs, those who kept their jobs faced salary freezes, extended shutdowns and calls for voluntary pay cuts and job-sharing. “There was an understanding between management and staff that this was an emergency and we all had to bear these measures, but someday, when things get better, there would be some redress,” says Greg Leach, a senior vice-president with Ipsos Reid. “Now a lot of people are reading that things are better, yet the emergency measures seem to have become the new norm.”
An Ipsos Reid poll released earlier this month showed just how disgruntled many workers are. It found more than one-quarter of employees are likely to look for a new job in the next six months. Among those who faced wage freezes during the downturn, that figure jumped to 34 per cent. More worrisome still, says Leach, is that one-third of middle managers—those individuals caught between cost-cutting senior executives and angry rank-and-file workers—also plan to leave. If they do, it could lead to chain reactions that cripple organizations.

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The real face of Calgary—young, cosmopolitan, confident

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Stuart Gradon/Calgary Herald/CP

The city elected Naheed Nenshi, a visible-minority Muslim academic, as its new mayor. Elsewhere in the country, Nenshi’s victory has been greeted with a combination of puzzlement and surprise. Not so in town. Calgary has always seen itself as a young, cosmopolitan, confident city attractive to migrants and eager entrepreneurs. And by this standard, Nenshi is just a typical Calgarian who proved smart enough to get himself elected mayor.

Nenshi was a relative unknown when he entered the race to replace long-time mayor David Bronconnier. His profile was largely limited to his work in the volunteer sector and arts community and a regular column he wrote in the Calgary Herald. But his strongest assets proved to be those same attributes that define Calgary: youth, work ethic, intelligence, business acumen and a passion for making life better.

The son of immigrants, Nenshi moved to Calgary when he was one. As an outstanding student he earned a scholarship to Harvard following an undergraduate degree at the University of Calgary. He returned home in 2001 after working for the prestigious Mc­Kinsey & Company. Currently he runs his own consultancy and teaches non-profit management at the Bissett School of Business in Calgary. The 38-year old is a bachelor who looks after his elderly parents at home.

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Where the boys aren't

By Julia Belluz - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

Yadid Levy/Anzenberger/Redux

For women in Latvia, a country of 2.2 million people, dating may have to involve getting on a plane and fleeing. Latvian ladies—better educated, and with longer life expectancies than men—are facing a shortage of eligible partners.

Though more boys than girls are born in the Baltic nation, in adulthood the balance between the sexes tips the other way, resulting in Latvia having about 16 per cent more women than men. Men’s life expectancy stands at only 66, compared to 77 for Latvian women, and there are varied reasons for the grim male outlook. Higher rates of car and workplace accidents have been cited. Some experts even say that women seem to have weathered the shift from Soviet Communist rule to capitalism 20 years ago more successfully than men. A persistent “macho culture” places great pressure on men to succeed financially, difficult at a time when unemployment in Latvia is 22 per cent, and GDP dropped by eight per cent in 2009 because of the global economic collapse. As a result, men tend to take solace in the bottle instead of seeking professional help, and are four times more likely than women to commit suicide.

You're cooking with what?

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

David Goddard/Getty Images

Residents of 200 households in Oxfordshire, U.K., are cooking with their own poop. They’re part of a co-operative project aimed at reducing energy costs by recycling household waste into odourless, clean-burning biomethane. The fuel is created by taking waste sludge from treatment tanks and placing it into special “anaerobic digesters” that are filled with a special mixture of bacteria and heated to produce raw gas. This is then sent to a biogas plant, which produces biomethane that’s piped back into homes for heating and cooking. Since most of the infrastructure exists, implementation is relatively cheap, costing less than an estimated $7 million per 500 houses in some circumstances.

British Gas, Scotia Gas and Thames Water are heading the venture, which is expected to help meet an EU requirement that 15 per cent of Britain’s power come from renewable sources in the next 10 years. It’s estimated that the heating demands of 200,000 homes could be met if the waste from every Briton was treated in a similar way. Other companies are also working on such plans, with 500 Manchester homes set to be literally cooking with their own gas by the end of 2011.

The general tries a comeback

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

Two years after being forced to resign the presidency, Pervez Musharraf wants a second crack at running Pakistan. With the country beset by natural disasters, economic malaise, an increasingly radicalized populace and corruption, Musharraf says the government of President Asif Ali Zardari is incapable of alleviating the “darkness that prevails in Pakistan.” Only he “can lead Pakistan toward light.”

Yet right from the start the former dictator, who originally seized power in a 1999 military coup, showed a lack of political savvy. He unveiled his new civilian political party, the All Pakistan Muslim League, in the gentrified, book-lined National Liberal Club of London, instead of a locale that could reinforce his determination to tackle his nation’s mammoth problems. And after the usual platitudes and boasts of having more than 300,000 Facebook fans, the exiled 67-year-old, who wants to return to his homeland before the 2013 election, revealed few new policies.

In an echo of his old pro-U.S. stance, he did promote a hard line on the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan: no negotiations, no peace. But for all his tough talk, al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban and its allies have operated with impunity out of Pakistan for years, with the government, whether Musharraf’s or Zardari’s, never threatening their bases. And while Musharraf pleads that “people should be patient with Pakistan,” there are signs that its biggest ally, the United States, is getting tired of waiting.

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Spare the rod, spoil the family

By Julia Belluz - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

The definition of what constitutes “beating” one’s family members is now a bit clearer in the United Arab Emirates. According to the country’s Supreme Court, a man has the right to discipline his wife and kids—as long as he does not leave his mark.

The judgment was made in the case of an unnamed man from Sharjah, the third-largest emirate of the U.A.E. He had beaten his daughter and slapped his wife, leaving bruises and minor injuries. (One U.A.E. expert on sharia says a husband can resort to violence as a form of punishment for an action that threatens the unity of his family, only if other options—like admonishments or abstaining from sex with his wife—do not achieve the desired result.) The highest court in the U.A.E. upheld the man’s right to discipline his family, but it decided his use of force was too severe and put him in breach of the law. Also, in the case of his 23-year-old daughter, the court declared that she was too old for such a punishment. “Although the [law] permits the husband to use his right [to discipline],” the ruling said, “he has to abide by the limits of this right.” In other words, the man could beat his wife and daughter—as long as he did so softly and within the legal age limit.

The new debate over race

By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

ROLAND WEIHRAUCH/EPA/KEYSTONE PRESS AGENCY

Germans don’t like talking about race. But lately, anti-immigrant sentiment has been growing. In a recent book, Thilo Sarrazin, the now former member of the board of the Bundesbank, wrote that Germany has become “more stupid” due to its 2.5 million Turks, whom he calls “inbred.” Last week, Horst Seehofer, the premier of Bavaria, ignited further controversy when he said that Turkish and Arab immigration should end because Muslim culture prevents integration. And Chancellor Angela Merkel herself entered the fray on Sunday, declaring that multiculturalism in Germany “has utterly failed.”

Such comments reflect increasing hostility. A new poll found one-third of Germans think foreigners “come to Germany to abuse the welfare state”; 36 per cent said that “in a limited job market, foreigners should be sent home”; 10 per cent long for a “führer,” to “govern with a hard hand.” Meanwhile, in Berlin, a museum broke with tradition by displaying Nazi propaganda, including a poster about “the dangers of interracial breeding.”

Islamists, Iran, and the RCMP: the government responds

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 7:39 AM - 0 Comments

From yesterday’s House of Commons proceedings:

Here is my original post:

Mr. Steven Blaney (Lévis—Bellechasse, CPC):

The spokesperson for the Canadian Islamic Congress claims that all Israelis over 18 are legitimate targets for Palestinians. That organization will be represented at the conference. Those remarks are unacceptable.

Can the Minister of Public Safety comment on the Maclean’s magazine article that reports that the Bloc Québécois member for Gatineau is sponsoring this hateful event? Continue…

The Video That Ruined Charlie Brown?

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 11:19 PM - 0 Comments

Tonight I saw this promo — a real promo, running on real television — for ABC’s broadcast of “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.” I think this promo might have appeared earlier, but this is the first time I’ve seen it. Nothing I could say about it could really do justice to the pain of it, so here it is with no further comment:

Update: ABC has removed the video from its site, but you can still find it here.

Oh, sure, you can argue that this doesn’t hurt any worse than “It’s Flashbeagle, Charlie Brown” or the one where we see the Little Red-Haired girl — and those were actual specials, not promos. Plus whoever wrote the promo at least amused himself by coming up with some decent rhymes (bossy/saucy/posse).

But still, at least “Flashbeagle” embarrassed the Peanuts gang by updating them to the actual time when it appeared. This seems to be updating Charlie Brown all the way up to TV parodies of rap music from the early ’90s. I’m just surprised that the phrase “and I’m here to say” appears nowhere in this video.

The Commons: Stephen Harper lets it all out

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 6:44 PM - 0 Comments

The Scene. The Prime Minister is a busy man and so he cannot always attend to the House. His appearance today, for instance, was his first in a week. And this, it seemed, was long overdue—not so much for us, this place and our democracy, but for him. Indeed, judging from his subsequent behavior he arrived quite pent up, needing very much, from a spiritual perspective, to openly air his concerns and grievances.

This is perhaps the best way to understand the man’s outbursts—as a natural and necessary unburdening, a shouty rebalancing of his chakras. So let us think of this as somehow healthy. If only so that we might say these proceedings serve some purpose.

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Twelve candles

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 6:23 PM - 0 Comments

The National Post, 12 years old on Oct. 27, has now been published under three proprietors. Only a year ago the Post was part of an industry-wide Asper family bankruptcy watch, and the assumption was that bankruptcy would lead to the liquidation of assets, and the obits for the Post that our friends and colleagues began writing before we had ever published a copy would finally come due. Yet the Aspers cashed out and the Post, after a fashion, endures.

This matters. When a newspaper comes out most days, year after year, from one owner to another to yet another, in much (though never all, and lately less) of the country, it starts to look like an institution. Not a juggernaut, not a cultural centrepiece, but simply part of the landscape that lasts, more permanent than the various corporate structures through which it passes. What’s more, it is still a damned good paper in many ways on many days. Its staff, most of whom arrived after the paper launched and have no patience for this corner’s annual bout of nostalgia, is full of brains and creativity. Its arts and living pages are still almost always the best among Toronto-based papers. Its news pages are full of surprises, often the good kind. The columnists can surprise you. George Jonas wrote a humdinger today.

None of this is a guarantee for the future. The Post has never enjoyed the luxury of any guarantees for the future and by now its staff would surely be suspicious of any that were offered. It’s in a daily fight to survive, still, just like old times, and that doesn’t change just because it is joined by the entire industry in that precarious battle.

So with that in mind, and the annual congratulations aside, I think the Post is well due for a rethink, and it would benefit from remembering some of the thinking that went into its creation. Continue…

Could Canada take bids on fighter jets and also keep the F-35 option open?

By John Geddes - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 5:34 PM - 0 Comments

Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff’s vow that as prime minister he would hold an open competition for new jet fighters, rather than proceeding with the F-35 deal that the Conservatives want to pursue, sounds smart enough. All things being equal, open bidding for defence contracts is the way to go.

Yet it’s interesting that Ignatieff doesn’t appear quite ready to leave the controversial F-35 agreement behind in the dust. He seems to tacitly concede that the F-35 scheme has something going for it by asserting that a Liberal government would somehow remain part of that arrangement, while sort of walking away from it.

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Brian Mulroney's frontbench top three

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 5:25 PM - 0 Comments

The former prime minister picks his three stars.

Instead the Mulroney honours go to Government House Leader John Baird, Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae and NDP Leader Jack Layton. He feels they are the three best “performers” in the House.

… Mr. Milnes said Mr. Mulroney gave his assessment in the “context of how important it is for a leader – or any effective politician – to inspire a crowd or the Commons itself.”

Néstor Kirchner dies of heart attack at 60

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 5:18 PM - 0 Comments

Néstor Kirchner, who served as president of Argentina from 2003 to 2007, has died at the age of 60 from a severe heart attack. Kirchner, who oversaw the nation’s economic recovery after a currency collapse, was married to the country’s current president, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. He was also her closest advisor. Kirchner was leader of the left-wing Peronist party and often criticized private business and the International Monetary Fund. Political observers have suggested he handed his wife power temporarily, so that he could continue his rule without breaking term-limit laws. He was expected to run for president again next year.

Guardian

Two appendices to 'The coming Tory majority'

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 5:06 PM - 0 Comments

My story for print Maclean’s on Conservative fortunes in provincial politics is now on the web. As is often the case, I had help with the story from lots of people who didn’t make it into the finished version, and gathered information and had thoughts that didn’t quite fit.

1) A lot could still happen to derail or deplete the in-progress “blue surge”, but the mere possibility does create problems for the folk wisdom that the party in power in Ottawa tends to lose in the provinces. Trudeau’s dynamic personality had completely wiped out the Liberal brand in provincial politics by 1980; the Mulroney years left the Conservatives barely hanging on in the Prairies; Chretien’s brought them back, in ’04 and ’05, to the peak they’re now trying to re-climb. Wouldn’t we expect the Harper government to create costs for Conservatives like David Alward?

The thing is, if you ask a political scientist about this folk wisdom they’ll make an unsweetened-lemonade face. Despite the apparent trends of the last 30 or 40 years, there’s still a sizable controversy about how independent the federal and provincial political scenes are.

A couple of years ago, UBC’s Fred Cutler made a close study of Ontario’s 2003 election and found that the decisions of Ontario voters were dominated by “arena-specific factors”. Cutler’s analysis confirmed what I suppose we all imagine to be true of ourselves: we mostly aren’t blind automatons who adhere to national brands. Knowing a voter’s national-level identification gave you surprisingly little additional information about how he would vote in Ontario in ’03, even though there was a perfect one-to-one mapping between federal and provincial ridings and the same parties were contending in both arenas. Voters chose their party pretty strictly on within-Ontario criteria, especially economically. Their degree of satisfaction with the federal government didn’t affect their Ontario decision.

Cutler has been building and juggling a dataset that contains every provincial and federal election since Confederation, and he has ransacked it for several different types of effect of federal politics on provincial ones. He says you can find evidence for common forces in the background—policy fashions, economic factors—that predispose voters to choose the same party on both levels. At the same time there is also evidence the other way, for the folk wisdom that voters act to “check” the party in power at the top—particularly after three or four years in office. “But electorates,” Cutler told me, “neither check nor balance the federal government when it is a minority. They don’t need to.”

2) There’s a passing mention in my story of new Toronto mayor Rob Ford, Canada’s one-man tea party. I was talking to people a full week before the election, and I had to be careful about presuming a particular result. But the writing was on the wall. Ford’s name came up a lot; he could easily have been the whole story.

Ford terrifies all the right people. How he will perform as mayor, God knows. But his triumph has relevance for provincial and federal politics. Graham Murray, editor of the Inside Queen’s Park newsletter, was the first to talk to me about how a Ford win would affect the prestige of “strategic voting”. We agreed that it is hard to say exactly how.

Some people think Ford’s win is so overwhelming that a concerted push behind one candidate of the left could never have mattered. I wonder what Linda Duncan thinks about that? Ford didn’t win half the vote, and the next two candidates’ combined votes would have beaten him—even though Rocco Rossi dropped out (or was forced out by defecting advisors) so late that his advance voters weren’t available to help anybody. It seems to me, from a very distant vantage point, that Ford couldn’t have arranged the campaign any better to suit himself. In the debates he almost seemed to take on the heroic aspect of a Roman gladiator fending off concerted attacks from a half-dozen smaller animals—ocelots? Weasels?

For many Torontonians, particularly the ones most inclined to think of themselves as representing the spirit of the city, the idea of Ford bedecked in the velvet-lined chain of office may be an ongoing torture. That, in turn, could encourage strategic voting and even overt trade-offs on the polite left—which has always found such affairs distasteful, because its adherents see politics as a means of self-expression and cosmic justice rather than a method of selecting managers and keeping them appropriately off-balance. The idea of voting for the least horrible bastard who can actually win isn’t very romantic. But maybe it has a certain appeal today that it didn’t before?

Glee: Everybody Hates Will

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 3:13 PM - 0 Comments

I don’t have time for much discussion of last night’s Glee, so I’ll outsource to Matt Zoller Seitz, who thinks the show needs to have the courage to be crazier and wilder than it currently is. I agree with this, for the most part: there’s nothing to ground the show any more, but it doesn’t quite have the full-tilt brilliant insanity that would make consistency and grounding irrelevant. If they would create some truly great musical numbers, or whole comedy sequences that match the brilliance of some individual lines from Brittany and Sue, then it would be harder to care that the show doesn’t make sense. I don’t think it needs to make sense, but it does need to blow us away to compensate for not making sense.

Also, Todd VanDerWerff considers it the WGE (Worst Glee Ever) and Myles McNutt’s review goes into more detail on something that has become increasingly clear this season: everybody hates Will. Will is a problematic character, but the show appears to be responding to the problem by writing him as a complete horrible idiot. This is a common issue with Glee, because it’s devoted to giving the audience everything it wants (which I sort of like: at least it’s no worse than Joss Whedon’s preening about giving the audience the opposite of what they think they want). So, having noticed that people find Will annoying, Ryan Murphy has apparently decided to write Will as the most annoying person in the universe. This is one case when cranking everything up to 11 doesn’t really work.

Speaking of Murphy, both his episodes this season — the Britney Spears episode and the Rocky Horror one — have been about the transgressive, dangerous qualities of things that are actually sort of lame. (Britney Spears music as an act of rebellion is a more obvious example of this, but Rocky Horror is not an all-time great musical or anything; the whole point of the film’s cult is that it’s the sort of thing you want to talk back to and make fun of, not to experience directly.) That may be more of his tendency to give us the show in whatever form we prefer: we can take this as an ironic commentary on the works being presented, and maybe even on the show itself, or we can take it all at face value.

Update: See this comment for a counter-argument about the significance of Rocky Horror.

Update 2: Another article deals more with the importance of Rocky Horror as a rite of passage and a place for misfits to feel they fit in. You can see why it dovetails nicely with the theme of Glee. That’s a bit separate from the question of how good Rocky Horror is on its own, but if you want to say I was too dismissive of it in the above paragraph, I won’t argue with you on that point.

Is someone using a cell phone in a 1928 Charlie Chaplin film?

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 2:53 PM - 0 Comments

Filmmaker George Clarke of Belfast has identified a mysterious woman who appears to be talking into a cell phone in the 1928 film, The Circus. In the film, the woman walks into frame in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, holding a black object to her face and talking into it. Clarke has taken an extreme interpretation of the brief and slightly blurry appearance, explaining in a YouTube clip that he believes the woman is a time traveler, and probably not human. After a painstaking frame-by-frame analysis of the black and white clip, and consulting with some 100 people about his theory, Clarke says he has concluded that the woman is from another era. An alternate theory suggests the device is a hearing aid. But, Clarke then wonders: “why is she talking into it?”

Toronto Star

Clarke’s theory on YouTube

Hard-to-read fonts make for better learning, scientists say

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 2:40 PM - 0 Comments

In Princeton University study, paid volunteers were asked to learn fictional information about different types of aliens; those reading harder fonts recalled more when tested 15 minutes later, the BBC reports. The 28 volunteers had 90 seconds to try to memorize a list of seven features from three different types of aliens, an effort to re-create learning that happens in a biology class. One group looked at the lists in 16-point Arial pure black font, thought of as easy to read, while the other looked at it either in 12-point Comic Sans MS 75% greyscale, or 12-point Bodoni MT 75% greyscale. On average, those with the harder-to-read fonts remembered 14% more.

BBC News

Contraceptive gel could be a pill alternative, experts say

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 2:18 PM - 0 Comments

A birth control gel that’s applied to the skin once daily, delivering hormones to prevent pregnancy, could be an alternative to the birth control pill, the BBC reports. The Nestrogene gel has been proven effective and well-tolerated in early studies, and without side effects of “the pill,” like weight gain and acne. It could also be used for women who are breastfeeding, unlike some types of the oral contraceptive, they note. The gel can be applied to abdomen, thighs, arms or shoulders; it’s quickly absorbed and leaves no residue. Researchers said they hope to market it if clinical trial results stay positive.

BBC News

The right way to think about Stephen Harper

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 1:16 PM - 0 Comments

Stephen Harper biographer William Johnson has various issues with Lawrence Martin’s biography of Stephen Harper.

This is not said to challenge the generally-admitted fact that Harper is a control freak. In my own biography, published in 2005 while Harper still led the Opposition, I wrote that he was arrogant, despised journalists, and displayed an over-the-top partisanship. “There is a harshness, a lack of humour, humanity, and moderation, that disregards the traditions of Parliament where all members have a right to be treated as honourable.”

But that’s just one dimension of Harper, namely his modus operandi. The man has more dimensions. When Canadians vote in the next election, they will remember his compulsion to control, but they will ask above all: who is best-equipped to lead the country in peace, security, and prosperity? Who has the best judgment, the best policies? Harperland fails to address these fundamental questions.

Nearer the end, Johnson objects to any use of the term “dictator” to describe Mr. Harper’s time in power. At the risk of splitting hairs, perhaps we should all agree that slur is uncalled for, even if one believes, as Johnson does, that Mr. Harper’s government has, on at least one matter, “subverted Canadian democracy.” If we are to lament for the state of things, we should do so as specifically as possible.

The guilty plea (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 11:45 AM - 0 Comments

Amy Davidson considers the fate of Omar Khadr.

The war crime charges Khadr accepted include working with Al Qaeda, helping to plant roadside bombs, and, in the firefight in which he was captured, in July, 2002, throwing a grenade that killed an American soldier, Sergeant Christopher Speer. Tabitha Speer, Christopher’s widow, was at Guantánamo today; according to Rosenberg, she “wore a black dress to court and sat weeping when the portion about her husband’s death by grenade was mentioned.” One feels a great deal of sympathy for her, and for her loss. But it is hard to see how the Khadr saga has served anyone well.

Interpret according to the political ideology of your choosing

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 10:38 AM - 0 Comments

Statistics Canada releases new figures on homicide.

The latest homicide study released Tuesday by Statistics Canada shows there were 179 firearm-related killings in 2009, 21 fewer than the previous year. Most of them involved handguns which are tightly controlled in Canada … Stabbings (36 per cent) and shootings (30 per cent) were the most common forms of homicide in 2009 and, as in previous years, a “large majority” of victims knew their assailants. That said, the number of people killed by a stranger last year jumped 17 per cent …

Of the 253 firearms used to kill between 2005 and 2009, 69 per cent were found not to be registered, while 31 per cent were — the bulk of them rifles or shotguns, which fall under the controversial long-gun registry.