A holy man with an eye for connections

By John Geddes - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Cole Garside/ Mike Cassese/Reuters

Of two notable speeches from very different Muslim leaders scheduled this month for influential audiences in Canada, only one was delivered. In Ottawa, Zijad Delic, executive director of the Canadian Islamic Congress, had been asked to speak at National Defence headquarters, but that invitation was revoked by Defence Minister Peter MacKay over charges that the congress’s leaders have taken extremist positions in the past (even though Delic is widely seen as a moderate). There was never any doubt, however, that the second speech would go off without a hitch. The Aga Khan, hereditary leader of the world’s 15 million Ismaili Muslims, gave the Institute for Canadian Citizenship’s annual LaFontaine-Baldwin lecture in Toronto with his customary cosmopolitan suavity.

The contrast in the tale of the two speeches is not one that the diplomatic Aga Khan, or his expanding network in Canada, might want to highlight. Yet his ability to present himself, and Ismailis in general, as a constructive, non-threatening face of Islam is a striking achievement in an era when other Muslim groups often struggle even to be heard. It’s nothing new. For five decades, His Highness Prince Karim Aga Khan has championed pluralism, and Ismailis have earned a reputation as quick adapters in societies that welcome diversity, including Canada. “I am impressed by the fact that some 44 per cent of Canadians today are of neither French nor British descent,” he said in Toronto, praising the Canadian example as “an asset of enormous global value.”

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On Khadr's guilty plea

By John Geddes - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 9:46 AM - 0 Comments

To anyone tempted to imagine that Omar Khadr’s acceptance of a plea bargain somehow means everything the U.S. government has done to him, and the Canadian government’s refusal to intervene on his behalf, is just fine after all, I recommend a close reading of Dan Garnder’s column from today’s Ottawa Citizen.

Nordic style obsession

By Anne Kingston - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Patrick Kovarik/AFP/Getty Images/ Phaidon/ Erik Refner/The New York Times

Last weekend, René Redzepi, the handsome 32-year-old frontman for the new Nordic chic, charmed a packed audience in Toronto with stories from Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant he co-founded in 2004 that catapulted to the top of the culinary pantheon this year when it knocked Spain’s El Bulli from its No. 1 position on S. Pellegrino’s “World’s 50 Best Restaurants” list.

Now there’s a three-month wait for one of its 12 tables in a serene room in a converted warehouse. There, diners sup on Redzepi’s wildly inventive compositions fashioned from ingredients sourced in the harsh Nordic landscape—bulrushes, birch sap, hay, puffin eggs, pig’s blood, weeds. Noma is heralded for reframing “gourmet” by taking local, sustainable fare from the bottom of the food chain and elevating it to the top, while conveying a sense of “place.” The restaurant is itself a contained ecosystem focused on the authentic and handmade: all food served is smoked, pickled, dried, grilled, salted, and baked in-house, down to vinegar and spirits. Explaining his mission, Redzepi sounds like a philosopher-poet: “The challenge for me is to telegraph the actual flavour of the field and sea, the narrative of the dish in your mouth,” he told Maclean’s.

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The guilty plea

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 9:37 AM - 0 Comments

Andrew Sullivan considers the fate of Omar Khadr.

I don’t know how anyone who cares about the integrity and moral standing of the United States can absorb the full details of this case and not be profoundly ashamed.

Not wanted in Quebec

By Tom Henheffer - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

Shale gas is fuelling a political firestorm in Quebec, where a recent Léger Marketing poll found that three-quarters of residents want a moratorium on drilling. But neither Ottawa nor the province have any plans to curtail the industry. “Minister [Pierre] Arcand and Premier [Jean] Charest have taken the necessary steps to commence a process of exploration in shale gas. We support that process,” said federal Environment Minister Jim Prentice.

Still, the vocal majority, who’ve been vehemently protesting—and once forced an energy executive to flee a town hall meeting out of fear for his own safety—have earned a few small victories. The government is starting public hearings into the environmental impact of shale gas, and is scrambling to write industry regulations. Meanwhile, two of the biggest energy players in the province, Questerre Energy Corp. and Talisman Energy Inc., are pushing back a major exploration project by six months. They blame the public backlash, low natural gas prices and the high costs of importing workers and infrastructure.

But with some of Canada’s richest reserves and an industry expected to generate up to 19,000 jobs and $1 billion annually in tax revenue for Quebec, drilling is all but an inevitability, regardless of how many executives are sent running.

What grieving people need from you

By Julia McKinnell - Wednesday, October 27, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

SuperStock/Getty Images

When a friend’s son commits suicide or a co-worker’s sister dies, it’s hard to know what to say and do. Often, people worry they’re not a “huggy” enough person to be of comfort. But just reliably showing up is the first place to start, writes author Val Walker in a new book called The Art of Comforting: What To Say and Do For People In Distress.

Walker, who trains counsellors to help people deal with grief and loss, writes, “I’ve heard grieving and distraught people lament how others didn’t follow through with their promises, which hurt them more than anyone’s lack of affection or warmth. Their friendly, sunny friends who promised to ‘be there’ for them dropped off the face of the Earth after they dropped off their casseroles during the first week of the tragedy.”

A distressed person will be comforted if you tell them, “I can call you Monday night,” but then make sure you call. “People in distress suffer more when they are left in the dark about when contact will be made. No one wants to appear needy by having to call out for help.”

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The Commons: Leave it to MacKay

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 6:45 PM - 0 Comments

The Scene. Demonstrating fine posture, Siobhan Coady stood straight, if not tall, along the back row of the opposition side and, in a tone of disbelief, reported the day’s findings of the auditor general.

“Mr. Speaker, today the Auditor General has revealed that the Conservatives caused an avalanche of problems, delays and cost overruns in acquiring 15 Chinook helicopters,” she lamented. “They essentially sole-sourced the deal without telling Public Works why. They identified the operational requirements only after announcing the procurement. They provided a cost estimate to the Treasury Board that they know was too low. As a result the Auditor General is warning of a billion dollar operating budget crunch at DND. The Conservatives broke every rule in the book.”

Ms. Coady then concluded with the most damning of open-ended questions—”Why?” Continue…

The Auditor General's report and Canada's curious F-35 deal

By John Geddes - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 6:44 PM - 0 Comments

Auditor General Sheila Fraser’s coruscating report on the slippery way the Department of National Defence handled its recent multi-billion-dollar helicopter purchases is setting off alarm bells about how DND might be managing its even more costly jet fighter buy.

Fraser’s findings from her audit of the $11-billion helicopter deals couldn’t be more disturbing. She said DND officials held back crucial information about the likely escalation in the cost of 28 Cyclone and 15 Chinook choppers, which led to Treasury Board approving the purchases based on off-the-shelf cost estimates that were ridiculously optimistic.

And Fraser drew a rough parallel between the helicopter fiasco and the planned procurement, announced last June July, of 65 F-35 fighter jets for an estimated $9 billion, plus another perhaps $7 billion in maintenance costs. “I hope no one is assessing [the F-35 procurement] as low risk,” she said today.

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Freedom from tyranny

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 4:04 PM - 0 Comments

Conservative backbencher Stephen Woodworth has a question.

Re long census,regardless of assurances of privacy, should we really force people to tell us whether they’re gay?

Mr. Woodworth is perhaps referring to a question on the 2006 long-form census that asks respondents to acknowledge a “same-sex common law partner” relationship. The long-form census has, of course, since been converted to a voluntary survey. But the short-form census remains mandatory. And among the questions approved by Mr. Woodworth’s government for that mandatory short-form census is one that asks respondents to indicate whether individuals within a given household include a “same-sex married spouse” or “same-sex common law partner.”

Islamists, Iran, and the RCMP's "cultural diversity"

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 3:06 PM - 0 Comments

An RCMP “ethnic liaison officer” is urging his colleagues to attend a conference on a “Just and Sustainable Peace” that was organized in part by a Green Party of Canada candidate who believes the 9/11 attacks were an “inside job,” and whose participants include the director general of an NGO that endorses hate-filled stereotypes about Jews. Three academics from Iran are flying in for the event.

Among speakers scheduled to speak at the conference, which will take place in Ottawa on Oct. 28, is Davood Ameri, director general of the Iran-based “Islamic World Peace Forum,” an organization whose website includes cartoons of Israeli soldiers murdering babies, and one of a hook-nosed Jew wearing a top hat full of tiny skulls. Continue…

Every Election Summed Up In Two Lines

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 2:02 PM - 0 Comments

I mentioned the musical Fiorello! in my post on Tom Bosley, but I didn’t mention a couplet from one of the songs that always seems appropriate after (or before) an election, and one of the few quotes that genuinely applies sometimes no matter which side you’re on. It’s from the song “The Bum Won,” where political power brokers react in shock to Fiorello LaGuardia’s victory in a Congressional election (he only got the nomination because they needed somebody to run and lose). One member of the ensemble sings these lines, by lyricist Sheldon Harnick:

Who’d ever guess that the people would go to the polls and elect a fanatic?
People can do what they want to, but I got a feeling it ain’t democratic.

I think we can at least agree that we all feel that way after some elections.

Speaking of musicals, the writer Joseph Stein died recently at the age of 98. His name isn’t well-known — book writers, the guys who get all the blame and little of the credit in musical theatre, rarely are well-known — but he wrote the book for Fiddler On the Roof and many other musicals, including Zorbá, Take Me Along (which won a Tony award for Jackie Gleason), Plain and Fancy (the first hit musical about the Amish), Juno, the cult musical adaptation of Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, Stephen Schwartz’s out-of-town cult flop The Baker’s Wife, as well as Enter Laughing, the successful nonmusical play based on the book by Carl Reiner. Obviously Fiddler is his most important and enduring credit, a beautiful job of adaptation that stitches together Aleichem’s stories, the Chagall painting that inspired the title character, and many old Borscht-Belt Jewish jokes into one of the ultimate examples of the Serious Musical Comedy, a show that deals with serious topics in a non-frivolous way while still being funny nearly all the way through.

When your dinner guests are out to get you

By Jacob Richler - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

‘You take wildly different people who would never meet and put them in a room and see what happens,’ says a show insider | W NETWORK

Deep in Mississauga, Ont., on a balmy September evening, a two-camera television production crew, four dinner guests, a handful of producers, PR flacks and other interested observers (well, me) sat huddled in virtual silence in a cramped basement apartment, while over in the kitchenette, a vivacious, blond woman named Cathy struggled to assert control over some defeatingly bouncy scallops.

When she at last wrestled them onto her square black dishes, she looked up at the nearest camera in triumph—but only briefly—for as she did so she caught sight of a neglected bottle sitting on top of the fridge. An overlooked ingredient? No, it was just the badly needed wine, which Cathy had evidently been keeping all to herself, while over at the dinner table her guests struggled with conversation unassisted. Even baseball wasn’t working (“Alex Rodriguez . . . he plays for the Blue Jays, right?”). So Cathy materialized to nervously splash some lubricating red plonk into four, thoughtfully chilled stemmed water glasses. Yes, into the frozen water glasses. But this was not a mistake on which to dwell. It was time to serve her appetizer—“the salty sea,” crusted scallops served with cucumber salad—and, according to my watch anyway, they were already stone cold and then some.

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The loneliest campaign

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 1:55 PM - 0 Comments

As he has been for more than a decade now—here he is saying so in 1999 and again in 2000 and again last year and again last month—Keith Martin continues to plead for health care reform.

Martin writes that instead of “tinkering” with the system, governments must “modernize” the Canada Health Act to allow patients to “pay for care if they wish, in entirely separate facilities funded solely by the private sector.”

Under such a system, writes Martin, Canadians could go to these centres and pay for the medically necessary treatment out of their own pocket or through private insurance they have purchased. ”By leaving the public system, they will be shortening the queues for those who are waiting. People using private facilities from time to time would also be free to access the public system that their taxes are paying for. Private facilities would act as a release valve and would in effect be subsidizing the public system. Physicians and other medical personnel would work in both systems.”

Iran begins fueling nuclear power plant

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 1:10 PM - 0 Comments

Iran has begun loading fuel into the nation’s first nuclear power plant in the southwestern city of Bushehr, part of a nuclear program that has been subject to four rounds of UN sanctions. The 1,000-MW plant was built with the help of Russia, who will run the facility by supplying its nuclear fuel and taking away the nuclear waste. Western powers fear that this is part of a programme aimed at developing nuclear weapons, but Tehran insists the nuclear development is for peaceful purposes only. The plant is expected to begin generating by early next year.

Al Jazeera English

National Post

'A price solution for an income problem'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 1:08 PM - 0 Comments

Stephen Gordon questions the NDP call for a tax break on home-heating costs.

If we’re concerned about the income problems associated with home heating costs – the affordability issue – the proper remedy is an income solution: give more money to low-income households. If we’re concerned about whatever price problems there may be, the proper remedy involves increasing the cost of GHG-emitting home heating. And if we’re concerned with both, we can implement both remedies simultaneously: increase the cost of home heating and give more money to low-income households.

Flight grounded in Newfoundland after drunken fight on-board: police

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 12:29 PM - 0 Comments

A Boeing 747 flying from Orlando, Florida to Manchester in the UK was forced to make an emergency landing in Gander, Newfoundland after a British passenger allegedly had an altercation with his wife and father-in-law, the Daily Mail reports. Virgin Atlantic confirmed that the flight was diverted “owing to a passenger behaving in a drunken manner on board,” and the passenger, who was reportedly drunk, was arrested and charged. Canadian police met the plane, which was carrying 451 passengers and 17 crew, and arrested Roy Anthony Heaps, age 44.

Daily Mail

Khadr "felt happy" when his grenade killed U.S. medic

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 12:22 PM - 0 Comments

A summary of facts read in court at the war-crimes tribunal of Omar Khadr reveals new details about the five war crimes to which the Guantanamo Bay prisoner has confessed. The summary states: “During an interview in October 2002, Khadr stated he felt happy when he heard that he had killed an American. Khadr indicated that when he would get “pissed off” with the guards at Bagram, he would recall his killing of the U.S. soldier and it would make him feel good.” Khadr also confirmed that he was a member of al-Qaeda and that the “happiest moment of his life” was when he built and planted roadside bombs aimed at killing Americans and other ‘unbelievers’ who were then in Afghanistan. The summary also describes Khadr’s father Ahmad, who was killed in raid in 2003, as a “trusted senior member of al-Qaida” who “helped raise funds and provided the funds in support of al-Qaida operations.” It also confirmed that Khadr does not fit the definition of prisoner of war under the Geneva conventions.

Montreal Gazette

Globe and Mail

Now is the time for new words

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 11:56 AM - 0 Comments

Former Liberal MP Joe Fontana is the new mayor of London, Ontario. His signature promise: taxication.

Joe Fontana coined a new phrase in his Mayoral race tonight and for those tired of London’s ever climbing tax rates, Fontana`s “Taxication” sounded like music to their ears. When elected Mayor, Mr. Fontana declared he would put before the new Council, his plan to take London on a four year tax vacation.

“It will be Taxication in London”, he said, speaking to a crowd of about 250 supporters. “London must get its spending in check and it must give some relief to overburdened taxpayers. Assessment growth in London averages only 1.5% each year, and we need to do better. City revenues will have to go up by growing our economy, to cover increasing costs, but individual tax rates will be held down, to give London homeowner’s amuch needed respite and to bring commercial and industrial taxes into a more competitive place with other municipalities in the 401/402 corridor.”

FIFA widens corruption investigation

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 11:19 AM - 0 Comments

FIFA is investigating alleged corruption in the contest for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups after a former senior official said countries were trading votes. Undercover reporters from the Sunday Times of London allegedly caught Michel Zen-Ruffinen, former FIFA general secretary, saying that Spain had colluded to exchange votes with Qatar. The FIFA executive committee will finalize the rules governing the vote on Dec. 2, which currently has nine bidders. “FIFA has immediately requested to receive all the documents and potential evidence that the newspaper has in relation to this matter, and will in any case analyze the material available,” read FIFA’s statement, reported the Wall Street Journal.

Wall Street Journal

Randy Quaid and wife still in Vancouver jail

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 10:52 AM - 0 Comments

Actor Randy Quaid and his wife Evi are still in custody in Vancouver. They were cleared for release on $10,000 bail last Friday, but they have not been released; Canada Border Services Agency representatives refused to comment on why they continue to be detained. Quaid has been blackballed from acting in the U.S. ever since his union banned him for misconduct, and he and his wife recently fled the U.S. to escape charges for illegally living in a house they used to own; they were arrested in Vancouver due to the U.S. warrants that were issued for them. The Quaids are asking for refugee status, claiming that they face retaliation from the “Hollywood star-whackers” who killed Quaid’s ‘Brokeback Mountain’ co-star Heath Ledger.

Vancouver Sun

Saddam Hussein's former deputy sentenced to death

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 10:42 AM - 0 Comments

Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam Hussein’s most powerful deputies, has been sentenced to death Tuesday by an Iraqi court for being involved in killing members of Shia Islamic parties after the first Gulf war. Aziz, 74, was condemned along with four other men. He had been handed over to U.S. authorities early this year and was number 25 on George Bush’s most wanted list. Previously, Aziz had been sentenced to prison for 15 years for being involved in the deaths of 42 merchants that he had accused of manipulating food prices. Aziz maintains that he has not personally committed any crimes. “All decisions were taken by president Saddam Hussein. I held a political position, I did not participate in any of the crimes that were raised against me personally. Out of hundreds of complaints, nobody has mentioned me in person,” said Aziz to the Guardian in August.

Guardian

Rob Ford elected Toronto mayor in landslide

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 10:25 AM - 0 Comments

Less than 10 minutes after polls closed at 8:00 p.m. in Toronto, the local TV stations in Toronto were already declaring Rob Ford the new mayor. Ford, the 41-year-old lone wolf candidate who campaigned on fiscal responsibility, took home 47 per cent of the vote, leaving former Ontario cabinet minister George Smitherman a distant second with 36 per cent of votes. Joe Pantalone, the left-wing deputy mayor, received less than 12 per cent. A record number of voters—more than 52 per cent—turned out to vote after pre-election polls put the two front-runners within a few points of each other. Toronto’s last two civic elections have drawn fewer than 40 per cent of eligible voters. Rob Ford spoke in front of a crowd in suburban Etobicoke shortly after 9 p.m., declaring an end to “the gravy train at city hall.” Ford also vowed to quash the unpopular $60 vehicle registration fee imposed by outgoing mayor David Miller. In his short speech, he also said he would end the city’s fair-wage clause, which prevents the city from tendering contracts to companies that pay less than the city’s unionized employees. Ford will take over the mayoral duties in December.

CTV News

Ben Johnson: from Seoul to Soul

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Ron Kuntz/AFP/Getty Images/ Christopher Wahl/ Romeo Gacad/AFP/Getty Images

Ben Johnson knows exactly when his troubles started. Not, as one might expect, on that day in Seoul in September 1988, when his “A” sample tested positive, setting off a chain reaction that saw him stripped of his 100-m Olympic gold, and transformed from World’s Fastest Man to global poster boy for cheating. Nor was it the time, seven years earlier, when his coach Charlie Francis first took his bone-rack 19-year-old protege aside to explain the concept of making a better living through chemistry. No, Johnson confides as he sits in the suburban Toronto office of his new spiritual adviser, his downfall began far earlier than that—7,000 years ago in Ancient Egypt, to be precise.

“I know I’ve always really, really loved the Egyptian monuments and drawings. I’m fascinated by them,” says the 48-year-old, but still buff, former sprinter. “So when he told me certain things, I said that makes sense.”

Sprawled on a leather couch, enormous, bare feet poking out from his dress pants, Bryan Farnum takes up the story. “My gift allows me to go within the matrix to other galaxies, other universes. We’re just part of this huge pathway of experiences. And the actual shape of the matrix, believe it or not, is the shape of the pyramids, and this is Ben’s connection.”

“Don’t say too much,” Johnson warns, and then laughs. “When you read the book, you’ll understand the link, and everything.”

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The Rhodes and the big ask

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, October 26, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Canadians who won the Rhodes include Yves Fortier, David Naylor, and Bob Rae; Norm Betts/Bloomberg/Getty Images/ Dick Loek/Toronto Star/ Sean Kilpatrick/CP

After spending a lifetime amassing a fortune with questionable means, Cecil Rhodes, a diamond magnate in colonial Africa, left one unquestionably good thing after he died in 1902: a bequest of over £3 million, roughly equivalent to half a billion in today’s dollars, for students from abroad to study at his alma mater, Oxford University. Over 100 years and 7,000 Rhodes Scholars later, though, that money is down to about $186 million. The bequest, reads an April online note by the Rhodes Trust, which administers the scholarship, “needs to be supplemented to secure [our emphasis] and improve the Rhodes Scholarships for the future.” Gifts of the magnitude of $1 million per individual donor were “warmly encouraged.”

The turn to fundraising represents a major shift for the trust, which has traditionally relied on investment to preserve and supplement its capital. Benefactions from the illustrious community of Rhodes alumni, which includes Bill Clinton, Canada’s former governor general Roland Michener, and former PM John Turner, are not new, but shrill calls for donations came only after the trust lost nearly $70 million in the 2008-2009 financial crisis, a drop of around 27 per cent in the net value of its assets.

“We’re drawing money from the principal,” says director of advancement Krista Slade, who is helping to engineer the trust’s fundraising campaign. Though there are no plans to resize the scholarship program, she says, the trust needs to at least double the size of its endowment by the end of the decade to “be competitive.” That means raising a minimum of $160 million by 2020.

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