Senate finance committee wants to kill penny

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 12:07 PM - 17 Comments

The Senate finance committee is expected to recommend on Tuesday that Ottawa abandon the penny. According to the Canadian Press’ sources inside the committee, it’s been agreed that a century of inflation has made the coin useless. (Since 1908, the coin has lost 95 per cent of its purchasing power, reports the Bank of Canada). Moreover, it now costs more to produce the penny—1.5 cents each—than it’s worth. The Bank of Canada’s research shows eliminating the penny would have a negligible impact on the economy. “On some transactions, the merchant loses and the consumer wins; on some, the merchant wins and the consumer loses,” Pierre Duguay, the bank’s deputy governor, told the Senate finance committee last spring. “However, on balance it evens out.”

Toronto Star

Winter Management

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 12:06 PM - 11 Comments

The NYT’s Natalie Angier is one of my favourite popular science writers. Her stuff is always interesting and she has a really fun writing style. Today she profiles the muskox, and its particular genius for survival:

With their stubby legs, musk oxen are not migratory like caribou or great dashers like reindeer. Their basic approach to winter management is: Don’t just do something — stand there. “You’ll see them in a big storm, drifted over, covered with snow,” said Dr. Lawler. “They’re almost part of the scenery.”

Meanwhile, here’s an old HWW profile:

Berlusconi survives confidence vote

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 11:59 AM - 2 Comments

By a narrow margin, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has survived two confidence votes avoiding the collapse of his conservative government. Berlusconi won by three votes in the lower house, with 314 in favor, 311 against and two abstentions. He also won a confidence motion in the Senate. But he still lacks a clear parliamentary majority, and Italian citizens were not happy with Berlusconi’s victory: protestors clashed violently with police, who fired tear gas, and tens of thousands of people marched through Rome calling for the PM to step down. Although his tenure will end in 2013, it seems he no longer has the margin to govern, and analysts believe he might call early elections in the coming weeks. And while political chaos has become the norm in Italy, the stakes seem higher now given that the markets are intensely focused on Italy’s economic slow growth and high debt.

New York Times

Here Be Golden Globe Nominees

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 11:46 AM - 0 Comments

The fine organization that honoured Pia Zadora for her breakout performance in Butterfly has announced its latest round of nominations in both film and TV.

Some of the film nominations are a bit crazy if not quite up to the Zadora tradition — with both Alice in Wonderland and Burlesque up for “best motion picture – comedy or musical” and multiple The Tourist nominations — but the TV nominations are more standard, even depressingly reasonable. Katey Sagal getting a nomination for Sons of Anarchy is good news; like her long-suffering colleague Ed O’Neill, she’s never been nominated for an Emmy, and I welcome anything that might finally shame the Academy into noticing she exists. (Though she and O’Neill repeatedly got Golden Globe nominations in the ’90s and it didn’t seem to make the Emmy people wake up.)

Also, the people who nominate these things seem to really love Showtime, handign out nominations not only to Dexter and Nurse Jackie but The Big C. Someday award nominators are going to notice that Showtime is not what it was when Robert Greenblatt was there, but for now they’ve got a nice little operation going, where they get all the award attention of a prestige network even though they don’t necessarily do much to earn it. Oddly, Weeds, which had a good comeback season, got shut out, but I probably shouldn’t try too hard to think of these nominations in terms of which show had the best season, as opposed to which show the network was pushing hardest and which ones the voters had heard of. This also explains why 30 Rock was the only NBC comedy that got a nomination.

Toward 2014

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 11:35 AM - 82 Comments

In a series of speeches today from Caroyln Bennett, Hedy Fry and Ujjal Dosanjh, the Liberals are laying out the parameters of their health care agenda.

All of this will require federal leadership and partnership between governments, which is what Canadians expect. We want our governments to fight for Medicare, not over Medicare. We expect the social contract that Medicare represents to be honoured, not abandoned.

The federal government has the jurisdiction, the role, and the responsibility to defend the national interest and our shared objectives: to ensure that Medicare survives and thrives, to ensure the principles of Medicare are respected by enforcing the Canada Health Act, and to share in the cost of the system by providing funding to the provinces and territories.

Wikileaks: the Canadian files

By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 11:20 AM - 15 Comments

Included in the treasure trove is John Baird’s personal diary, filled mostly with self-help affirmations and drawings of himself | CP; Getty Images; Redux; Illustration by Taylor Shute

So far, WikiLeaks has focused primarily on exposing secrets of the United States. But what if . . .

OTTAWA: The Harper government has been broadsided by the release of thousands of confidential documents, including sensitive diplomatic cables, secret internal emails and the only known reproduction of Peter MacKay’s little black book.

Reaction was swift. “Three stars?” Belinda Stronach asked.

Continue…

Julian Assange granted bail

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 11:07 AM - 21 Comments

Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, appeared in a London court today, where he was granted bail—to cheers from inside and outside the court. His conditional release comes a week since his first court appearance after Sweden requested his arrest over allegations that he sexually assaulted two women. Judge Howard Riddle released Assange, but ordered him to surrender his passport, obey a curfew, and wear an electronic tag until his next hearing on Jan. 11. Assange has denied any wrongdoing and his lawyers claim that the Swedish warrant is part of a plot to have him extradited to the U.S. in the event that charges related to his document-leaking activities are leveled at him.

Digital Journal

The Guardian

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 10:36 AM - 28 Comments

In the midst of ruminating on a number of fronts, Conrad Black proposes prison reform.

Having recently inexplicably spent 29 months in one of the kindest and gentlest of American federal prisons, I must emphasize that imprisonment is an insane, archaic and self-defeating treatment of non-violent offenders (especially when many other convicted people are in fact, by the nature of the system, as innocent as I). Apart from those with a propensity to violence, and those who have committed other crimes on a Madoff-scale, felons should receive a government insurance bond for their employers, and contribute work to society pro bono but with, where their circumstances require it, basic non-custodial shelter and meal vouchers, and treatment for substance abuse. Recidivists would have to be confined, but in prison or workshop facilities. Disused prison facilities could then be spruced up and reconfigured as housing for the indigent.

Canada's doctors ask for public input, but that can't be an end in itself

By John Geddes - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 10:22 AM - 26 Comments

I have to admit to being a bit skeptical at the outset about the Canadian Medical Association’s announcement yesterday that it’s launching an elaborate consultation with the general public about the future of health care. My first thought was that it’s properly the government’s job to try to engage citizens in a debate; what we need from the doctors’ lobby are clear proposals on the hard issues and then vigorous arguments in favour of them.

With that in mind, I asked Dr. Jeff Turnbull, the CMA’s president, if physicians don’t know enough already to present a set of precise recommendations. And don’t the docs cumulatively understand the system far better than the average folks they’re proposing to consult with anyway? Turnbull framed the CMA’s outreach plan as a way of building a coalition, or, as he put it, a consortium. “Once we get a consortium of individuals,” he said, “other allied health professionals, doctors, patients, community members, then we’ll actually have clout, then we’ll have our decision-makers listening.”

Continue…

Persistence precedes essence (II)

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 10:13 AM - 15 Comments

Tony Clement, to James Cowan, a few months ago:

“I have never, so far, found a case where I have been in such disagreement with the eventual outcome that I’ve posed the existential question about whether I will continue with the ministry or not.”

After the pounding he took from @acoyne on twitter last night, it is increasingly clear that there is no compromising of his much-flaunted conservative principles that would lead Tony Clement to pose that existential question. Which, of course, raises the deeper question as to the actual existence of those principles.

I'd rather be Parisian

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 9 Comments

Julia Roberts shopped the world in the film adaptation of Gilbert’s book | Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

Geography is destiny, the old chestnut goes. Now, however, geography is also identity—as well as the latest determinant of personal happiness. The idea that place influences self has insinuated itself into the culture, from popular Facebook memes “What continent are you?” and “What country should you REALLY be living in?” to a barrage of self-seeking travel memoirs, most notably the 2006 blockbuster, Eat Pray Love. In it, American author Elizabeth Gilbert shopped the world as if it were a supermarket—travelling to Italy for gastro-epiphanies, to India for a spiritual tune-up, then on to Bali for transcendental scenery and sex.

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When ministers of the crown tweet

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 9:28 AM - 41 Comments

With the government announcing new funding for Pratt & Whitney yesterday, Greg Weston posted a series of questions and concerns last night about the loans involved and the jobs promised.

The government announcement also claims the deal will “create and maintain an average of more than 700 highly skilled jobs during the project work phase, and more than 2,000 jobs during the 15-year benefits phase.” The company later explained that it hopes to hire about 200 new staff for the research and development project, expected to take about five years. At $300 million from taxpayers, that works out to $300,000 a year per job.

As for the rest of the jobs, Clement’s press secretary, Lynn Meahan, explained that “hypothetically, without the project, the workforce would have shrunk.” She said the promised 2,000 long-term jobs would come from manufacturing the new engines yet to be developed, and it is not clear how many of those positions, if any, would be new.

Economist Stephen Gordon and our own Andrew Coyne duly tweeted their criticisms. And it was soon thereafter, perhaps inevitably, that Industry Minister Tony Clement attempted again, 140 precious characters at a time, to explain and defend himself.

To wit. Continue…

Richard Holbrooke: "I have never seen anything remotely resembling the mess we have inherited"

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 9:25 AM - 8 Comments

In February, 2009, Richard Holbrooke was the Obama administration’s brand-new envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. At the Munich Security Conference, he delivered a bracingly frank assessment of the job he’d taken on. I wrote about those remarks here.

Holbrooke died leaving his work unfinished. That happens a lot in Afghanistan. I read a lot of lucid critiques of his manner and work, but I admired his willingness to plunge into the most intractable messes of American foreign policy, again and again over half a century, and try to set them right.

Making Iran pay for abusing human rights

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, December 14, 2010 at 6:00 AM - 68 Comments

In September, U.S. President Barack Obama signed an executive order imposing sanctions on Iranian officials determined to be responsible for serious human rights violations.

The idea that individual Iranians must be targeted for such violations, rather than exclusively because of involvement in Iran’s nuclear program, has long been advocated by McGill University international law professor, and co-founder of the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, Payam Akhavan. Maclean’s understand the State Department consulted IHRDC while compiling its list of blacklisted individuals.

Obama’s order is significant because until recently most sanctions imposed on Iran have focused on the nuclear file. That this might be misguided is something I explored in an article last year. Challenging Iran over its nuclear program allows the regime to play to nationalist sentiments. Challenging Iran over human rights does not. Moreover, focusing on nuclear and other weapons suggests that should the Iranians involved cooperate, sanctions will be lifted and they will not suffer long-term consequences. But targeted sanctions based on human rights violations, says Akhavan, are an intermediate step before prosecution. They send a message that, one day, you will be held to account.

“The question is what are you incentivizing,” said Akhavan in an interview with Maclean’s. “Are you incentivizing cooperation on the nuclear program, or atrocities?”

This summer Canada imposed sanctions on 42 Iranians and 279 corporations. All individuals were singled out because of suspected involvement in Iran’s nuclear or other weapons programs, or because of membership in or affiliation with the senior ranks of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. This results in some overlap with the American list. But Akhavan says the fact that those Iranians blacklisted by Canada have not been targeted specifically because human rights violations is a crucial flaw. It is notable that former Tehran prosecutor-general Saeed Mortazavi, whom Ottawa accuses of responsibility in the murder of Iranian-Canadian photographer Zahra Kazemi, is blacklisted by the United States but not Canada.

“The point is not just declaring these people inadmissible, but setting them up for eventual prosecution,” says Akhavan. “There’s no sense [in the Canadian case] that what is being incentivized is better compliance with human rights regulations. It may seem academic, but it’s not.”

Akhavan says it is particularly important for Canada to target Iranian officials guilty of abusing human rights, because many of them are putting down roots in Canada.

“Canada is probably one of the biggest money laundering centres for the Islamic Republic,” he says.

“The rhetoric of the [Canadian] government is very strong, but very little concrete action is taken to make Canada inaccessible to those who are responsible for crimes against humanity. Many of their families are here. They send their children to schools here. They have investments here. The themselves have contingency plans for when there is a democratic change in Iran. Where are they likely to escape to? Well, they are likely to come to countries like Canada. So they set up an alternative life here. And one of the messages the international community has to send is that you will have nowhere to hide, because you’re blacklisted. Only then are they going to take seriously the use of human rights violations as a political instrument — when they realize that they are individually going to have to pay a price for it.”

Poll shows Canadians are split on Afghan training mission

By macleans.ca - Monday, December 13, 2010 at 6:56 PM - 9 Comments

Canadians are nearly evenly split when it comes to Ottawa’s decision to extend the Canadian Forces’ stay in Afghanistan for a training mission. According to poll by Angus Reid, 48 per cent of respondents agree with the government’s decision, while 44 per cent are opposed. As for the current combat mission, 56 per cent of Canadians say they oppose it, while 36 per cent support it.

The Globe and Mail

The Commons: Would you let this man fly your plane?

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 13, 2010 at 6:42 PM - 83 Comments

The Scene. So maybe here was a potentially telling anecdote for those who wish to better understand the mind of this Defence Minister, courtesy of course of Tony Clement’s tweets.

Last week Peter MacKay and Mr. Clement were dispatched to Texas, apparently for the purposes of the multi-billion-dollar purchase of new warplanes their government presently vows to pursue. As a result of Mr. Clement’s breathless dispatches, we know that at one point the ministers were invited to try out a flight simulator in Dallas. There, apparently, Mr. MacKay proved himself to be somewhat less than qualified to fly one of the planes he now desires. Later, “laughing maniacally,” he apparently decided to see if he could successfully fly underneath the Brooklyn Bridge.

What, if anything, to make of this?

The uptight amongst us might suggest this betrays a certain lack of seriousness. But rather perhaps it is that Mr. MacKay takes his job so seriously that he wouldn’t think of committing billions in public money toward new warplanes without testing himself whether one of the flying contraptions was capable of such a manoeuvre. Perhaps this amounts to due diligence.

Or perhaps—at the risk of psychoanalyzing a man on the basis of 140 characters—it speaks to a certain fearlessness in Mr. MacKay, an enduring faith in his own abilities and an unending bravery in the face of risk. This would, at the very least, explain the minister’s consistently undaunted appearance in Question Period.

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Julian Assange: The man who exposed the world

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Monday, December 13, 2010 at 5:20 PM - 69 Comments

Assange calls himself the ‘editor-in-chief’ of WikiLeaks, and says his group has created ‘scientific’ journalism; WikiLeaks’ confidential files are stored in a Cold War bunker in Stockholm | Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images; Banhof AB/Polaris

When Julian Assange was finally arrested in London on Dec. 7, it was on allegations of having had unwelcome, unprotected intercourse with two Swedish women, and not for convulsing global diplomacy with his slow, controversial leak of diplomatic cables that infuriated allies, embarrassed kings and princes, were condemned by Washington for endangering lives, and dismissed by Tehran as a CIA plot. In a story worthy of a bestseller by Stieg Larsson, with its mix of state secrets, sex, and self-righteous computer geeks, it could come to pass that the man at the helm of WikiLeaks, who could not be pinned down by the U.S. Espionage Act, is vulnerable to a Swedish law against “sex by surprise.”

Assange, with his pale Warholian looks, is now a world hyper-celebrity or international super-villain, out of hiding and in custody, but still defiant. The Swedes may be the first to get him, but many more governments would like to get their hands on him. It has been a remarkable journey for someone who started out as a teenage hacker in his native Australia but became one of the most notorious men in the world—an individual who may have drastically altered the rules both in the world of diplomacy and the business of journalism. It is a story that has left people wondering about his motives, and pondering the question: what drives Julian Assange?

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Aboriginal groups says census changes are unconstitutional

By macleans.ca - Monday, December 13, 2010 at 4:23 PM - 17 Comments

A coalition of Atlantic aboriginals is challenging the federal government’s decision to scrap the long form census before the Federal Court. Alex Smith, the lawyer representing the group, told the Court the change is unconstitutional, since it will compromise the government’s ability to carry out its constitutional duties to aboriginal people by skewing the data. “It’s not a representative survey if it’s not mandatory,” Smith said. The aboriginal groups hope the court will issue an injunction that would stop the new voluntary survey and reinstate the long-form census.

Toronto Star

'The crisis is not over': Carney

By macleans.ca - Monday, December 13, 2010 at 4:18 PM - 23 Comments

Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney warned Canadians on Monday they could feel the pinch when interest rates start rising again, especially those whose debt loads will no longer be affordable. Interest rate hikes will be based on inflation, Carney said, but the Bank of Canada hasn’t ruled out raising them to discourage people from taking on too much debt. “While the bar for further changes remains high,” he said, “the bank has the responsibility to draw the appropriate lessons from the experience of others who, in an environment of price stability, reaped financial disaster.” Debt, Carney argued, represents one of the most daunting challenges to the economic recovery. “The crisis is not over, but has merely entered a new phase,” he said. “In a world awash with debt, repairing the balance sheets of banks, households and countries will take years. As a consequence, the pace, pattern and viability of global economic growth is changing, and Canada must adapt.”

CBC News

Alleged suicide bomber led insular life

By macleans.ca - Monday, December 13, 2010 at 3:10 PM - 5 Comments

Taimour Abdulwahab al Abdaly, the Iraqi-born Swede who allegedly set off a car bomb, killing himself in the act, in Stockholm on Saturday, had a profile on Muslim dating website Muslima. “I want to get married again, and would like to have a big family. My wife agreed to this,” wrote 29-year-old al Abdaly, who listed that he was married in 2004 and had two young girls. He appeared to be looking for a practicing Sunni Muslim to become his second wife. His profile stated that he was financially “OK” and gave extra money to the needy. It is believed that al Abdaly lived in in Luton, which has a large Muslim community, for eight years, but generally kept to himself. Other reports state that he lived in a three-bedroom property with his wife, their two daughters, and a baby son.

Sky News

EU stops short of recognizing Palestinian state

By macleans.ca - Monday, December 13, 2010 at 3:08 PM - 4 Comments

The EU stopped just short of fully recognizing a Palestinian state at a foreign ministers meeting on Monday, saying doing so could hamper Middle East peace talks. Still, the EU emphasized it remains hopeful for a two-state solution. ”[The council] reiterates its readiness, when appropriate, to recognize a Palestinian state,” it said in the statement, adding that “urgent progress is needed towards a two state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We want to see the State of Israel and a sovereign, independent, democratic, contiguous and viable State of Palestine living side by side in peace and security.” Earlier this month, the governments of Brazil and Argentina formally recognized a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders.

Haaretz

Canadians owe government $25 billion

By macleans.ca - Monday, December 13, 2010 at 3:06 PM - 20 Comments

For those individuals and businesses who still owe taxes to the government, the total sum now owed is $25 billion—a figure which could cut the national deficit in half if collected. That amount represents an increase of more than 35 per cent over the total owing five years ago, the Ottawa Citizen reports. A spokesperson for the Canada Revenue Agency emphasized that the sum is a “snapshot” that reflects debt accumulated over several years.

Ottawa Citizen

Tax agency employee assaulted

By macleans.ca - Monday, December 13, 2010 at 2:24 PM - 3 Comments

According to a Radio-Canada report, a Canada Revenue Agency employee was assaulted Friday night outside a Montreal restaurant where employees were having a Christmas party. The male victim works in the agency’s investigations department, where he was assigned by the government in a bid to clean up the Montreal office after it was rattled by by allegations some employees were involved in a tax fraud ring involving Quebec construction companies. Earlier on Friday, Radio-Canada revealed that nine current and former employees at the Montreal offices of the CRA are currently under investigation for tax evasion, and that six of those employees have been fired in the past year and a half.

Radio-Canada

The End of TV Writer Cults

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, December 13, 2010 at 1:52 PM - 14 Comments

Here’s something I’ve noticed about discussions of TV shows online: you don’t hear nearly as much about individual episode writers as you normally used to. The Christmas episode of Community was the first episode Dan Harmon has taken a writing credit on since the first two episodes of the series (he co-write it with legendary comedy veteran Dino Stamatopoulos), but — at least on the blogs and other discussions I read — the other episodes are usually held up as examples of his work, too. I rarely hear people singling out individual credited writers. Same with most other comedies and dramas on the air: the episodes of Boardwalk Empire are mostly discussed in terms of Terence Winter; How I Met Your Mother is considered primarily a Bays-Thomas joint; and so on. There’s a bit more of an individual-writer focus with science fiction shows, which have always had writer cults (and anti-cults, in the case of the Star Treks and Battlestar Galactica), but the showrunner usually plays a central role in online discussion of each episode.

The individual writing credits are a big deal in discussion of Glee, namely when it comes to Todd VanDerWerff’s “Three Glees” theory — but that’s mostly because the show has no writing staff. With each of the three creator-showrunners writing a third of the scripts, there’s actually a reason to think the script credits matter, but also, when we talk about the scriptwriter we’re also talking about a showrunner. There’s no separation between the two jobs. When there is a separation, fans these days usually talk about the showrunner first and foremost.

I should add that this is a pretty accurate and fair way of talking about television shows, especially U.S. television shows. Writing credits don’t tell the whole story or even part of the story, and some shows assign writing credits almost arbitrarily. Comedies tend to rewrite scripts line by line, and even drama scripts are pretty heavily shaped at every stage by the showrunner. So whether the showrunner wrote the first draft or not, it makes more sense to talk about the episode as if it’s his; we don’t know who contributed which lines, but we know who’s in charge.

So this isn’t a bad trend, but it’s just a bit of a change from the way TV discussion used to be. When I started to talk about TV on the internet in the ’90s, mostly on usenet, indvidual episode discussion focused much more on scriptwriters, and not just for science-fiction shows. Even though The Simpsons had a distinctive pair of showrunners at the time — Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, whose approach to the show was a bit of a break with the previous few seasons — alt.tv.simpsons threads frequently wouldn’t mention Oakley and Weinstein and what they might be trying to do with the show. Instead it was all about writers: Jon Vitti had an online cult based on his track record with Simpsons scripts, John Swartzwelder was already legendary, and people wondered why George Meyer was no longer writing scripts. They later discovered that it was because he was heavily involved in the rewriting of almost every episode, leaving him no time for the comparatively unimportant job of writing first drafts. But we didn’t know that at the time. Jennifer Crittenden, the show’s first full-time woman writer, got a fan hate cult for reasons I was never fully been able to figure out, except that fans blamed her for the rampant continuity errors in the first episode she wrote.

The most famous TV writer cult of the ’90s was for Darin Morgan, the X-Files writer who was only there for a couple of years, never rose beyond the rank of story editor, and didn’t have much say over the shape of the show as a whole; he was a cult figure because of the unique and crazy scripts he wrote. In that case, people on the show agreed, and told the world, that he was an original and that his scripts had a style all their own. But more common was the writer cult that developed around Buffy writer Drew Goddard during the show’s final season (in 2002-3), based largely on one good episode plus one other episode where a lot of fans Continue…