Steve Nash announces separation

By macleans.ca - Monday, November 15, 2010 at 11:26 AM - 2 Comments

Canadian basketball star and 2010 Olympics torchbearer Steve Nash announced he would be separating from his wife this weekend, the same day he announced the birth to his new son Matteo. “I am very thankful and excited that we have a new son, Matteo Nash. Alejandra and the baby are doing fine,” Nash said in a statement in a Life & Style Weekly. “But this is a bittersweet moment for my wife and I; after five years, we are now in the process of dissolving our marriage.” Nash, 36, and his wife Alejandra Amarilla dated for four years before marrying in 2005. They have twin daughters, Lola and Bella, who were born in 2004.

Vancouver Province

Equalization favours Maritimes and Manitoba

By macleans.ca - Monday, November 15, 2010 at 11:23 AM - 5 Comments

A new report by Winnipeg’s Frontier Centre for Public Policy has found the federal equalization program unduly favours the Maritimes and Manitoba at other provinces’ expense by increasing the number of federal government employees in those provinces. This leads to the Maritimes and Manitoba having overly large bureaucracies, writes author Ben Eisen in the 24-page report, Stealth Equalization: How Federal Government Employment Acts as a Regional Economic Subsidy in Canada. For example, PEI has the highest concentration of federal bureaucrats of any province at 3,675 for every 100,000 residents; Alberta, by contrast, has the lowest rate of federal public servants, at just 936 per 100,000.

Toronto Star

U.S. knowingly granted entry to Nazis after WWII: report

By macleans.ca - Monday, November 15, 2010 at 11:16 AM - 5 Comments

In 1979, a team of lawyers, historians and investigators at the U.S. Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations were tasked with deporting Nazis from the United States. Today, a 600-page report detailing their activities is under scrutiny—despite the government’s efforts to keep it secret. The most jarring revelation is that American intelligence officials appeared to create a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II. While previous reports have acknowledged the C.I.A.’s use of Nazis to collect postwar intelligence, this new document says “the government’s collaboration with persecutors” went so far as knowingly granting entry to former Nazis. The report also details new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases over the last three decades.

New York Times

Five Canadians killed in explosion in Mexico

By macleans.ca - Monday, November 15, 2010 at 11:16 AM - 8 Comments

Seven people, including two Canadians, were killed and another eight Canadians were injured in a natural gas explosion at a Mexican resort on Sunday. The explosion happened at the Grand Riviera Princess Hotel in Playa del Carmen, just south of Cancun. The attorney general for the state of Quintana Roo said the explosion may have been caused by a buildup of natural gas from the swamp. Sixty mroe Canadians were staying at the hotel, a popular holiday destination, said a Westjet representative.

CTV News

Terriers: Is The Title Really a Problem?

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, November 15, 2010 at 10:48 AM - 16 Comments

As we wait and see if Terriers will get a surprise renewal (many people online are emailing FX, having been informed that the network pays more attention than usual to emails — the address is user@fxnetworks.com, by the way), I was thinking a bit more about whether my favourite new show of the season has really been hurt by its title. The star, Donal Logue, is one of many people who claims that the show would have been more successful if it had had a better title. And it’s hard to argue that it’s a good title, since no one would hear it and know what the show’s about or even what it’s like.

But does a title really hurt a television series that much? I’m not sure. Remember a show called The Sopranos. It’s hard to realize this because we’re all used to it, but that is a truly terrible title by those same standards. If you heard about a show called “The Sopranos” and had no idea what it was about, you would think that a) It was about singers and b) It was about women. Calling it “Tony Soprano” would have been a more traditional and conventionally effective way of titling it.

Of course few people heard the title “The Sopranos” without having some idea what it was about, because the network launched a splendid promotional campaign, including a logo that made the title look threatening, and an instant-classic poster that conveyed the subject and theme of the show even without words. So they didn’t need the title to tell us exactly what the show was. And once we do know the show, the title isn’t so bad at all; in fact, for those in the know, it’s pretty good, because the incongruity of the name is part of the joke. (Having a hero who is constantly worried about the decline of traditional masculinity, and giving him the most “feminized” last name possible, is one of the many little jokes the show is built on.) If the show had failed, the title might have been blamed, but it probably wouldn’t deserve the blame. It’s clear that it didn’t turn anybody off.

There may be a difference between that and Terriers, because “The Sopranos” at least sounds arresting and unusual, while “Terriers” does not. But a title that sounds a little commonplace or bland can still intrigue people — if it’s accompanied by promotional images that also pique the audience’s attention. Which brings us back to the subject matter of the show, as revealed in the posters and promos. It’s about two scruffy, down-on-their-luck guys, and I suspect, unfortunately, that that turned more people away than the title. But FX exacerbated the problem with a promotional campaign that actually used the titular dog in many of the posters. Not only did this make for some incredibly ugly posters (the two guys aren’t that bad-looking, but the dogs certainly were), but it killed the chance for the posters to really get us psyched to see the characters, the way the Sopranos posters did. I don’t think any show’s failure can be blamed entirely on bad marketing, but I think this was not a well-marketed show and that the marketing has more to do with it than the title.

I would add that a TV show doesn’t necessarily need a great title the way movies or books often (not always) do. A really spectacular title can sometimes seem too gimmicky; worse, it can become irrelevant as the series develops. That’s why so many of the biggest hit TV series have literal titles that simply tell us who the star is, or where it takes place, without trying to do anything special. “The [fill in name of star] Show.” “Friends.” “ER.” “CSI.” “The West Wing.” “Laverne and Shirley.” “Lassie.” Because the decision to watch a TV show is much more casual than the decision to see a movie or buy a book, the titles themselves don’t need to put as much pressure on us to watch: they can promise comfort and simplicity, rather than something epic.

There are shows with gimmicky titles that do very well, of course. “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Desperate Housewives” and “Modern Family” are all examples of current hits (on one network, yet) where the title is sort of gimmicky: the first is a play on words, the second is self-parody, and the third is a big pronouncement about the show’s ambition to teach us all how a family ought to be in this day and age. But an elaborate title is probably more likely to blow up in a show’s face. The choice of “Arrested Development” as a title was probably a mistake: not only was it hard to promote (because of the two long words that don’t quite flow together when you say them — the clash of “d” sounds, I think, creates the problem) but the elaborate double meanings of the title — it’s a play on the different meanings of the word “Arrested” and the word “Development” — instantly hinted that this was going to be a show in love with its own cleverness, and that couldn’t have helped it much in trying to find an audience.

“Terriers” at least is a title that’s short and easy to remember, and that probably is more important than a title that’s inherently memorable or even descriptive. You don’t have to find ways to shorten it in the promos, and it’s not hard for an announcer to say clearly. If the promotional campaign had been more effective, and more importantly if the show had been more popular (as popular as it deserved to be, let’s say), I don’t think anyone would be talking about the weakness of the title.

Did the stimulus fund help?

By macleans.ca - Monday, November 15, 2010 at 10:21 AM - 21 Comments

One of biggest claims made by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government is that their swift, massive response to the 2009 recession helped shorten and soften its impact. Yet new figures reported here show that the lion’s share of the stimulus fund set up in the Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s deficit-heavy 2009 budget wasn’t spent in the 2009-10 fiscal year. That means the recession was long over before the money was out the door. Flaherty allocated $2 billion for the key Infrastructure Stimulus Fund, but less than $500 million was spent in 2009-10. Of $200 million allotted to the so-called Green Infrastructure Fund, Ottawa spent just $5.7 million in that first year. But the Tories point out that any money not spent in 2009-10 was pushed ahead to be available in the current fical year. That cash, however, must be spent by next March 31.

Ottawa Citizen

To vote or not to vote on whatever it is our soldiers will be doing

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 15, 2010 at 10:01 AM - 47 Comments

The Prime Minister says when a military mission is “technical or training” in nature, a vote in parliament is not necessary and Michael Ignatieff hypothetically agrees.

“If – please note the word if – the mission is a genuinely non-combat role, then you could imagine proceeding without a parliamentary resolution,” Mr. Ignatieff said. “But we’re not there yet. We’ve got to define what the mission that the government proposes actually is.”

On that note, Liberal Senator Colin Kenny says it’s impossible to properly train Afghan soldiers behind the wire and Andrew Mayeda says there are important distinctions to be clarified.

The most dangerous job in the province

By Ken MacQueen - Monday, November 15, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 8 Comments

Jonathan Hayward/CP

It was just over a decade ago that New Democrat Dan Miller, who served a six-month blip as interim premier of British Columbia, described the lofty office as the most dangerous job in the province. It was fair comment back in an era when a tub of cottage cheese had a longer shelf life than most premiers; a time when the main prerequisites were a thick skin, an exit strategy, and a good lawyer.

Miller succeeded Glen Clark, who succeeded Mike Harcourt, who succeeded Rita Johnston, who took over the smoking ruin that was Bill Vander Zalm’s Social Credit government. Miller, in turn, handed the job to Ujjal Dosanjh, who lost it to Gordon Campbell and his Liberals. All this between 1991 and 2001, and don’t let the revolving door smack you on the way out.

Now it’s Gordon Campbell’s turn to declare moral victory, paste on a smile and walk the plank. There’s a certain symmetry to his decision—made, more or less, on Halloween eve as he took his grandson trick or treating. By then even the stubborn Campbell knew he was the walking dead, and that a chief architect of his demise was the eerily ageless Vander Zalm, a political ghost, reborn as the province’s most effective crusader against Campbell’s harmonized sales tax (HST).

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Facebook's best friend

By Chris Sorensen - Monday, November 15, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 3 Comments

PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW TOLSON

Sheryl Sandberg has an impressive knowledge of Canadiana for someone who had never set foot in the country until last week. The chief operating officer of Facebook may have been gripping a grande-sized beverage from Starbucks, but that didn’t stop her from casually dropping in references to Tim Hortons coffee and donuts during an interview with Maclean’s last week, as though it was the local coffee shop in Palo Alto, Calif., where Facebook is headquartered.

But while Sandberg, who grew up in Miami, may have never tasted a Timbit, she does know off the top of her head that 1.2 million Facebook users have said they “like” Tim Hortons’ Facebook page. She has a similar barrage of statistics at the ready for other Canadian brands, including Molson, Indigo and, for some reason, Veterans Affairs Canada. Because it’s close to Remembrance Day? “I follow the business really carefully,” she says with a smirk.

No kidding. While Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s 26-year-old CEO and co-founder, has been in the spotlight lately thanks to the box office success of The Social Network, an unflattering film about Facebook’s early days, it’s the 41-year-old Sandberg who is now leading the charge to transform the Internet phenomenon, with more than 500 million global users, into a money-making colossus.

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The watchdogs who never bite

By John Geddes - Monday, November 15, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 12 Comments

Clockwise from left: Legault, Ouimet, Dawson and Page | Photography Blair Gable, Patrick Doyle/CP, Chris Wattie/Reuters, Fred Chartrand/CP

With her surprise resignation last month  from her post as the federal government’s first public sector integrity commissioner, Christiane Ouimet left a swirl of questions in her wake. Why quit less than four years into a seven-year term? What caused the unusually high turnover among her staff? Auditor general Sheila Fraser is auditing the commissioner’s operations, and answers will likely have to wait for her report. But the biggest puzzle of all looks less particular to Ouimet than symptomatic of a wider pattern: she fielded about 170 complaints in her stint as integrity watchdog, but found not a single case of wrongdoing by a public official.

Appointed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2007, Ouimet was charged with enforcing his government’s new Public Servants Disclosure Protection Act. The Conservatives touted the law as a long-overdue guarantee that whistleblowers on the federal payroll could confidentially expose bad behaviour by their superiors without fear of repercussions. The revelation that Ouimet had looked into so many whistleblowers’ allegations, and yet never found anything to act on, prompted an outcry. But the watchdogs she might be benchmarked against, especially those charged with enforcing the lobbying and conflict of interest rules, have also failed to bring to light any revelations of serious wrongdoing.

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Politics all the way down

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, November 15, 2010 at 6:00 AM - 169 Comments

Pawel Dwulit/CP

The story is told of the farmer who had an axe: a fine, handsome axe, of which he was very fond. Why, it had been in his family for generations. Mind you, over the years they’d had to replace the head twice and the handle three times, but to the farmer it was still the same axe his grandad split logs with.

The reaction to the Conservatives’ now extensive history of replacing their principles with something more convenient strikes me as similar. After each abrupt reversal of field, each casual discarding of the principles of a lifetime, the discussion centres on how hard this decision must have been for the Tories, how it “went against their principles.”

Yes, there’s nothing quite as hard as expediency, is there? Someday, historians will write about those Tory ministers who, under pressure, had the courage to do the wrong thing. Still, after so many such examples, it might occur to someone that these are their principles: not the ones they are presumed to have, based on past statements, but the ones they actually practice.

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The Backbench Top Ten

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, November 14, 2010 at 4:29 PM - 4 Comments

Our weekly, and wholly arbitrary, ranking of the ten most worthy, or at least entertaining, MPs, excluding the Prime Minister, cabinet members and party leaders. A celebration of all that is great and ridiculous about the House of Commons. Last week’s rankings appear in parentheses. Continue…

The lonely life of the watch widow

By Rebecca Eckler - Sunday, November 14, 2010 at 4:20 PM - 2 Comments

Clive Brunskill/ Getty Images

Hockey widows now have company. Make room for the watch widow. On Oct. 28 at a luxury car dealership in Toronto, noted watch dealer Louis Kostopoulos, president of Louis Black, is hosting a very exclusive event for serious watch enthusiasts in honour of one of the world’s top haute horologists, François-Paul Journe. Kostopoulos describes the night as “an orgasmic event for the true watch lover.” Sixty men (and it’s only men) will sit down at an invite-only, security-guard-accompanied dinner with Journe to look at and talk about F.P. Journe watches, leaving a lot of wives at home shaking their heads.

Like most high-end watch enthusiasts and collectors, these men value their privacy. It makes sense. F.P. Journe’s watches sell for a minimum of $30,000, up to more than $650,000, and fewer than 900 are produced a year. It is the only company in the world to craft all their calibres (movements) in solid 18k gold.

“I’m definitely a watch widow,” moans one wealthy woman, who doesn’t want her name used. “My husband owns numerous watches and I just don’t get it. I used to talk about buying watches with him, but it just got completely out of hand. He would talk more about watches than anything else, including his job and our children. I was so painfully bored. So now I just leave it to him. Last week he came home with another watch and I pretended I didn’t even see it.”

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When Gemini Meets Gemini

By Jaime Weinman - Saturday, November 13, 2010 at 10:34 PM - 6 Comments

TV, Eh? has the press release listing the Gemini Award winners announced at tonight’s gala.

Apart from Elvis Costello and Robert Carlyle winning (well, if Brits and Scots can win Emmys, they can win Geminis too), winners include Less Than Kind for best Comedy, best comedy writing (creators Marvin Kaye and Chris Sheasgreen) and best individual Comedy performance (Benjamin Arthur), the nominally Canadian The Tudors for best drama, Flashpoint for best directing in a drama (David Frazee), and the This Hour Has 22 Minutes cast for best comedic ensemble.

Brian Williams (our Brian Williams, not the U.S.’s) won for his Vancouver Olympics coverage, while in another vaguely sports-related victory, Jared Keeso won for playing Don Cherry. The winner for best miniseries was the CBC/Global co-production The Summit, whose actual airdate is surprisingly hard to find online, but which qualified for the award because it aired in the summer of 2009. Speaking of shows that aired a while back, Catherine Disher won best supporting actress in a drama for The Border, which got canceled at the end of last season.

For a blow-by-blow account of the evening, here’s a live-blog of the Gemini awards show by C. Archer, who argues among other things that the “rightful winner” for best drama was Durham County: “At least it’s Canadian, and not a co-pro with minor Canadian participation.” The blogger is also displeased that the best show of the last 25 years as chosen by the viewers was the Degrassi franchise, but while it’s not the best (that would be Slings & Arrows, I would say offhand) it’s kind of an inevitable choice if you put it up to a popular vote.

Music: No, Mother, do not weep

By Paul Wells - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 6:18 PM - 4 Comments

It does no disservice to Henryk Gorecki’s other work to call the Polish composer, who died today at 76, one of the 20th century’s great one-hit wonders. He had a productive career and was highly regarded both within Poland and in the tiny microcosm of people everywhere who keep an eye on 20th- and 21st-century composers for orchestra, chamber ensemble and voice. Tim Rutherford-Johnson surveys his career here.

But Gorecki’s death is mourned around the world today because of one work, his Third Symphony (there would, in the end, be no Fourth), “Symfonia piesni zalosnych,” Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. He completed it in 1976. It was highly regarded in Poland and widely mocked within the tiny microcosm, and made no further waves until Elektra Nonesuch released a new recording in 1992 and Peter Weir used part of it in the soundtrack for the climactic plane-crash scene in his odd, lovely 1993 film Fearless.

Radio stations started playing it. It wound up selling a million copies. There’s a tale, perhaps apocryphal, of traffic jams in Los Angeles because drivers heard it on their car radio, started to weep and had to pull over. Continue…

Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi may be released

By macleans.ca - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 5:25 PM - 0 Comments

Rumours are spreading that Burmese pro-democracy leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi may be released from house arrest. Aung San Suu Kyi, 65, has been detained from the past 15 of the last 21 years, and her most recent term of detention is set to end tomorrow. “My sources tell me that the release order has been signed,” said Tin Oo, vice chairman of Mrs. Aung San Suu Kyi’s party. Reports about her release surfaced after last Sunday’s parliamentary elections in Myanmar, the first such vote in 20 years.

New York Times

No vote needed to extend Afghan mission: Harper

By macleans.ca - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 5:22 PM - 14 Comments

At a post-G20 news conference in Seoul, Stephen Harper said he doesn’t need Parliament’s approval to extend Canada’s military mission in Afghanistan to 2014. “My position is, if you are going to put troops into combat, into a war situation, I do think, for the sake of legitimacy. . . the government does require the support of Parliament,” Harper said. “But when we’re talking simply about technical or training missions, I think that is something the executive can do on its own.”

Toronto Star

Know your history

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 5:18 PM - 37 Comments

I’m only a chapter into it, but I’m going to go ahead and provisionally recommend Dynasties and Interludes, the new study of Canadian electoral history. If nothing else, by page 33 you will have come across at least one paragraph that contains more or less all the political analysis you will ever need.

To wit. Continue…

It doesn't matter, but it does

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 3:54 PM - 37 Comments

Ryan D. Enos and Anthony Fowler argue we vote for reasons beyond a belief that our vote will make an identifiable difference.

“I always vote.” “It’s a civic duty.” “Many have fought for our right to vote.” “Voting gives you the right to complain.” These were the types of answers we received. Most voters made no mention of issues, candidates, or policies. When asked about whether their vote would change the election results, most acknowledged that the chances were low. Nonetheless, many held out hope saying, “You never know” or “The election could be close.” It appeared that most voters had never even thought of the chances that their vote would matter until we asked them, and some admitted so. This observation tells us a lot about why people vote. If forced to think about it, most voters know that they won’t change an election result; but they don’t care.

Medvedev knew double-agent behind summer's busted spy ring

By macleans.ca - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 3:53 PM - 2 Comments

Dmitry Medvedev has confirmed that he knew about the double-agent within Russia’s foreign intelligence service who told the FBI about the Russian spy ring operating in the U.S. The admission, which is embarrassing for Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service, came as experts said that more Russian spies were likely to still be operating in the United States undetected. At the G20 summit in South Korea, Medvedev said he knew Colonel Scherbakov had betrayed the ten Russian spies. The ten spies were exchanged in July for four men Russia was holding as Western agents in the biggest spy swap since the Cold War. Medvedev said Russia needs to learn lessons from the fiasco and that an investigation was under way. However, he said he would no sack the head of Russia’s foreign intelligence service, Mikhail Fradkov, who has been the subject of dismissal talk.

The Telegraph

Conservative senators mail attack ads about Liberals using tax dollars

By macleans.ca - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 3:48 PM - 26 Comments

Conservative senators have been using taxpayer-funded literature to target Liberal ridings with a partisan message in advance of the next election, according to the Toronto Star. At least one (Bob Runciman in Ontario) sent the mailers out at the direction of the Conservative Party of Canada’s national campaign office. It is not clear whether Senator Don Plett (Manitoba), who distributed similar material, did so on behalf of the party. The tactic—senators using their office budgets to throw negative light on the Liberal MPs in their own ridings—is unprecedented and an affront to the Senate’s role as a chamber of sober second thought, Liberal Senator Jim Munson said. The two Senators mailed some 6,000 brochures to the ridings of Liberal MPs Anita Neville (Winnipeg South Centre) and David McGuinty (Ottawa South) in September, asking constituents to join them in demanding stiffer sentences for young offenders while suggesting Liberals were soft on crime. “It’s the politics of fear paid for by taxpayers’ money and I find it disgusting,” Munson said. “It’s unethical and they should be ashamed of themselves.” The Senators have been unapologetic taxpayers’ dollars, saying they are informing Canadians about the Harper government’s plans to crack down on youth crime. By using the Senators to send out this kind of literature, the Conservative Party gets around the prohibition on MPs using tax dollars to send partisan messages to other ridings, which the House of Commons agreed must stop.

Toronto Star

Oldest known dino embryos found

By macleans.ca - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 3:40 PM - 0 Comments

A team led by Robert Reisz of the University of Toronto-Mississauga have identified the oldest-known dinosaur embryos, which belonged to a species that lived 190 million years ago, the BBC reports. The eggs of Massospondylus, an ancestor of giant sauropods like Brontosaurus, were dug up in South Africa in 1976, and contain well-preserved embryos. Using these embryos, they reconstructed what dinosaur babies might have looked like when alive. These dinosaurs belong to a group known prosauropods, big, four-legged dinosaurs with long necks. The 20-cm long skeletons inside the eggs were going to hatch, but never had the chance. They would have had long front legs, so they would have walked on all fours, rather than two legs, like adults. Their heads were also disproportionately big. They’re the oldest embryos ever found of a land-dwelling vertebrate.

BBC News

The way we were, and more or less still are

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 3:34 PM - 7 Comments

The sketches that appear here most weekdays when the House is in session have now been neatly filed to appear in one place at this link.

The collection stretches back to the spring of 2008—The Commons claimed a seat in the press gallery in the fall of 2007, but owing to a system change the records are bit less than comprehensive—and presently includes something like 238 vignettes of this time in and around Ottawa. That’s probably something like 200,000 words (I will be wildly satisfied if something near 10% of those words remain worth reading) and I will take this opportunity to thank all who have read any of them.

Samcam comes to Downing

By Leah McLaren - Friday, November 12, 2010 at 3:00 PM - 1 Comment

Steve Back/Rex Features/CP, Lefteris Pitarakis/AP

Samantha Cameron might just be the perfect political wife. Serene, stylish, shrewd and hard-working, during the Conservative campaign last spring she was unveiled as “the Tories’ secret weapon,” and has been described by party insiders as “Dave’s best look.” The fact that she was luminously pregnant at the time with the couple’s fourth child (a girl, Florence, born three weeks premature a few months after her husband David’s Tories took power) only added to her photo-op appeal.

But Samantha’s easy smiles and effortless style conceal hidden depths of character. Those who know her say she is unflappable, impeccably mannered and also genuinely warm—a woman of “famously even temperament,” according to a recent profile in the Sunday Times. It’s a quality that has held her in good stead in the last year and half, an exceedingly turbulent period that’s included the death of her oldest child, the birth of another, the death of her father-in-law and the not insignificant matter of her husband becoming Prime Minister. Oh yeah, she works for a living, too.

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