About time we started using our heads

By Sarah Elton - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 1:20 PM - 5 Comments

Photograph by Liz Sullivan

Like gold, you can judge the value of garlic by its weight. Rest a bulb harvested from local soil in one hand and an imported bulb in the other and you will feel that Canadian garlic weighs about double. Devotees will tell you it also tastes twice as good. But try to purchase the local stuff and you are in for a hunt. It’s garlic season but already farmers are just about sold out. Demand is high, as more and more fans search out the juicy, firm cloves with a sweet smell that clings to your fingers hours after you’ve chopped it. Compare this to those dry, shrunken cloves with little flavour or taste, and you may understand the passion. “No one will have garlic for the winter,” said Daniel Hoffmann, who grows heritage varieties of garlic from around the world on his farm in Brampton, Ont. Already the 16,000 bulbs he grew to sell are just about done.

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Japan rejects Kyoto extension

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 1:05 PM - 22 Comments

In a surprisingly brazen move, Japan has categorically refused to extend the Kyoto protocol, the treaty that committed the world’s richest nations to lower greenhouse gas emissions by 5 per cent of 1990 levels by 2012. Jun Amira, a Japanese government official, made the announcement at an open session of global climate change talks in Cancun. “Japan will not inscribe its target under the Kyoto protocol on any conditions or under any circumstances,” Amira said. The statement came as a surprise to other delegates and has prompted speculation the treaty may not be extended past 2012.

The Guardian

A man apart

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 1:01 PM - 13 Comments

Stobo Sniderman spends a day with Michael Chong.

To this day, Chong has expressed no regret about his resignation. “Canada cannot survive as a jumble of nations. The role of the state is to focus on the qualities that hold us together,” he told me. He does not deny the existence of a Québécois nation, but he thinks the role of the Canadian Parliament is to create a multicultural future, not recognize historical facts. The question is not so much who we were, or even who we are. “The real question is what do we want to be.” Canada grows ever more multicultural and moves ever further from its three founding peoples…

“The nation motion reinforced otherness, increased divides,” he said. “I don’t see it bringing people together. These things have consequences decades down the line.”

Don't be sabotaged by a selfish partner

By Julia McKinnell - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

GETTY IMAGES; ISTOCK; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY TAYLOR SHUTE

Selfishness pervades every romantic relationship, according to Jane Greer. It creeps in “as you grow more comfortable with your partner and worry less about pleasing them.” A couple starts out “picture-perfect but grow ugly to each other over time,” writes the psychotherapist in a new book, What About Me?: Stop Selfishness from Ruining Your Relationship.

But lately, Greer has been seeing more and more young couples who are “constantly squabbling, jockeying for position, searching for ways to get their needs met.” She blames advancements in technology and a new kind of self-centredness that has reached epidemic proportions. “Never before has the lament ‘You’re not listening to me’ rung so true. In fact, people are listening to and paying attention to everyone and everything except their partner and their relationship,” she writes. “Porn is a click away, old flames are waiting on Facebook.” The new selfishness is changing even the way people think about their relationships: “When it comes down to giving time to your partner, it can feel like a loss of your personal needs rather than an expression of love,” writes Greer.

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Martin questions G20 attendance

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 12:53 PM - 18 Comments

Former prime minister Paul Martin said yesterday that the number of officials at Toronto’s G20 summit last summer was “absolutely absurd.” Martin was responding to Gordon Smith, a former Canadian ambassador, who said the large number of officials reduces the chances of having a productive set of meetings. An estimated 10,000 G20 delegates, officials, and media attended last June’s summit in Toronto. “I don’t know what all those people do,” Martin told the National Post.

National Post

Touche

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 12:26 PM - 26 Comments

Glen Pearson questions the reliability of the narrator.

Following Jim Prentice’s retirement, I recall reading some articles about how certain MPs stay on too long and it’s best for them to step aside because they are too set in their partisan opinions. I found myself wondering today if that might not also be true of some pundits.

One nut-cracked ballerina

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 12:20 PM - 1 Comment

A young ballerina (played by Natalie Portman) is pushed by a diabolical director to express a dark side she has never explored | 20th Century Fox

Hollywood has not been kind to ballet. If we believe what we see in the movies, classical dance is a world of sadistic directors, tortured ingenues, back-stabbing divas and overbearing stage mothers. Cinema’s most revered ballet film, The Red Shoes (1948), climaxes with its heroine fleeing her dressing room and falling from a window into the path of a train that runs over her feet. The most memorable scene in The Turning Point (1977) is an alfresco cat fight between Anne Bancroft and Shirley MacLaine, as washed-up ballerinas in evening gowns who clobber each other with their purses.

No wonder director Darren Aronofsky considers his new dance movie, Black Swan, a companion piece to The Wrestler. The high art of ballet may seem far removed from the trashy spectacle of a staged brawl. And Black Swan’s delicate Natalie Portman could not be more unlike The Wrestler’s brutish Mickey Rourke. But wrestling and ballet are both insular worlds full of arcane ritual and physical torture. And as actors, Portman and Rourke were not content to simulate athletic technique; they submitted to gruelling regimes, incurring injuries in the name of art.

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Lawsuit could be launched over military’s former gay policy

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 12:15 PM - 4 Comments

A high-profile Halifax lawyer says the federal government should have to pay for the rampant discrimination targeted at homosexuals in the military through the 1980s and 1990s. Until 1992 it was policy for Canadian Forces investigators to root out homosexuals and have them fired as potential security risks. John McKiggan, the lawyer who helped launched lawsuits for the victims of Native residential schools and orchestrated the $13 million sexual abuse settlement from the Roman Catholic diocese of Nova Scotia, says the ten year period between the adoption of the charter in 1982 and the cancellation of the policy provides a window of legal responsibility that is ripe for class-action. “When issues like this come up that have been ignored for a very long time, the first inclination is to ignore it,” he said. “But now that it’s been outed, so to speak, the Canadian government is going to be forced to address the decisions that were made by the military, and come up with an appropriate response.”

CBC News

Three volunteer firefighters charged with arson

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 12:08 PM - 2 Comments

Three volunteer fire fighters are among five people arrested in Doaktown, N.B. in connection with a series of arsons of unoccupied buildings—three of which occurred in 2009, just prior to the annual fire equipment fundraisers breakfast. Two of those arrested are veterans of the 18-member volunteer department in the town of 900. The buildings they are charged with setting fire to include a vacant historic house and the building that housed Bill Bob’s Bar.

National Post

American Diplomats Analyze Canadian TV

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 11:57 AM - 25 Comments

One of the most instantly-famous of the Wiki-leaked cables was this analyis of the CBC’s The Border and Little Mosque on the Prairie and more in terms of Canadian “anti-Americanism.” The breezy tone of the cable kind of suggests someone who was assigned to write about this show but doesn’t exactly take it seriously. At the very least, the writer has a future as a television blogger if he ever wants to go in for that sort of thing, with memorable, pithy descriptions of episodes and characters: “the arrival of an arrogant, albeit stunningly attractive female DHS officer, sort of a cross between Salma Hayek and CruellaDe Vil.”

But what the cable mostly suggests is someone who is using these TV examples to back up the point he really wants to make, which is that the U.S. should be shoveling more money into his department so they can combat the anti-American tide. At the end of the cable it pushes back against people “who may rate the need for USG public-diplomacy programs as less vital in Canada than in other nations because our societies are so much alike.” In other words, it’s a fundraising pitch: give us as much money as you give our embassies in countries where anti-Americanism is seen as a bigger threat. So it barely matters whether the writer seriously believes that The Border was more ferociously anti-American than 24, where high authority figures turned out to be evil every year. Criticizing portrayals of America in American shows is not going to get more dough for his department or their projects. And that’s what it’s all about.

(And imagine: someone getting paid to watch TV shows and write about them! I don’t know about you, but that sounds strange to me.)

The strangest response I’ve seen to the leak is from John Doyle in the Globe and Mail, who spends much of his column arguing that the “anti-American” messages in The Border come from Denis McGrath (though he was only one of several writers) and that because he’s originally American it means that “an American was stoking the anti-Americanism of The Border.” That doesn’t really address the point of the cable, to the extent that there is a point, and it’s a weird perspective in any case. Do U.S. critics write that the Australian showrunner of the NCIS franchise is bringing in insidious foreign messages?

Speaking of Denis McGrath, I want to thank him for pointing me to the Youtub’d version of the cult classic mid-’80s TV movie The Canadian Conspiracy, an HBO/CBC co-production where we learn about the “conspiracy of Canadian entertainers working in America.” That’s what the embassy people should be writing cables about — or maybe they are, and it’ll come out in the next Wikileaks dump.

Vladimir Putin responds to critical WikiLeaks cables

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 11:54 AM - 2 Comments

Russia’s prime minister Vladimir Putin shot back at the United States after WikiLeaks documents showed defense secretary Robert Gates called his government “an oligarchy run by the security services.” Another cable said “Russian democracy had disappeared” and yet another implied that President Dmitri Medvedev is “playing Robin to Putin’s Batman.” Putin told Larry King that the latter comment “aimed to slander one of us.” As the New York Times points out, Putin likely chose Larry King Live to offer the response because King is known for avoiding tough questions. For example, he did not ask about the limits Russia places on free speech. Mr. Putin also warned America that his country would deploy new nuclear weapons if the U.S. did not accept its proposals to integrate Russian and European missile defense forces, echoing a speech made by Medvedev earlier in the week. Mr. Putin also asked Americans to stop interfering in Russia’s internal affairs.

New York Times

Spending—a sterling idea

By Leah McLaren - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 11:40 AM - 1 Comment

Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Gayle MacKay knows what it’s like to live beyond her means. The 32-year-old public relations professional has spent most of the last decade scraping by on a salary of under $30,000 a year while living in one of the most expensive cities in the world: London, England. Like millions of other Britons, MacKay has lived either at home with her parents or in shared accommodation, and despite steady employment, found herself barely able to make ends meet. She’s recently relocated to Barcelona, where, she jokes, “it’s the done thing to be impoverished,” but in London the pressure to spend money she didn’t have was relentless. “Every month by the time payday rolled around I would literally be right down to my last penny—and when I say last penny I mean I was up to my big overdraft limit. It was scary.”

MacKay is part of a new generation of Britons who, despite the high cost of living and low wages, have eschewed frugality—once a time-honoured tradition in a nation that finally ended food rationing in 1954.

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America's company

By Jason Kirby - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 11:20 AM - 5 Comments

GM CEO Dan Akerson sits in a 2011 Chevy Camaro outside the New York Stock Exchange last week; GM’s collapse last year fit squarely with the narrative of America in decline | Rebecca Cook/Reuters; Mark Lennihan/AP

When Robert Mulcahy, a financial adviser in the Detroit suburb of Wyandotte, first learned General Motors planned to take itself public again, he was sure it would end badly. Many of his clients had once worked for GM or owned shares in the company before its spectacular bankruptcy and bailout last year, and even if they didn’t, their fortunes were inextricably linked to the automaker since it dominated every aspect of the region’s shattered economy. GM’s collapse, and its subsequent incarnation as “Government Motors,” spawned bitterness and resentment, leaving Mulcahy convinced local investors would never go near GM again.

Then, as GM’s stock market revival approached, all that changed. “It was absolutely the opposite of what I expected,” he says. “Most of my clients may not have bought on the IPO but they’re all sniffing it out, ready to get back in. There’s a sense of pride and excitement here that has not existed for quite a while.”

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A bunch of bad (stock) tippers

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

A U.S. investigation into illegal insider trading continues to gather steam amid reports this week that the FBI raided the offices of three hedge funds, one of which has links to an ongoing probe of Galleon Group, described as the largest hedge fund insider trading case ever. In Canada, meanwhile, the Ontario Securities Commission levelled its own stock- tipping allegations against Mitchell Finkelstein, a lawyer formerly at Davies Ward Phillips & Vineberg LLP, as well as several traders and brokers who allegedly profited from inside information about corporate deals.

But while white-collar crime investigations in the U.S. have often led to criminal charges, experts say that, if past history is any indication, the Canadian case is unlikely to result in jail time. Richard Powers, associate dean of the Rotman School of Management, says proving stock tipping in the criminal courts is extremely difficult in Canada, and that the OSC may be inclined to seek administrative penalties such as fines and trading sanctions because they require a much lower burden of proof. “My sense is that’s what is happening here—lots of phone calls, innuendo and timing points to tipping, but does it meet the criminal standard required for more severe penalties? Only the OSC knows at this point.”

What kind of cities do we really want?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Aiming to dissect Paul McCartney, the author of a new book interviewed some 220 people who know him | Manfred Linke/Laif/Redux

MAKESHIFT METROPOLIS: IDEAS ABOUT CITIES
Witold Rybczynski

Few have written as perceptively, or as gracefully, about how the North American landscape—city and country—has come to look the way it does as Rybczynski, a Canadian-American architect and urbanist. Along the way, he has developed a reputation for crafting elegant little books on small topics, like the history of the screwdriver. This time, though, he’s written an elegant little book on a very large subject: the future of our cities. “Cities don’t grow in a vacuum” is Rybczynski’s motto, as he succinctly parses influential concepts from the past. He considers their critics, too, including Jane Jacobs, with whom he at times disagrees—mildly but bravely, considering she approaches the status of sainthood among urbanists, nowhere more so than in her adopted home of Toronto. Most importantly, Rybczynski contrasts the kind of cities North Americans seem to want and the kind our environmental crises suggest we need, “which turn out to be not at all the same.”

He heaps praise on the City Beautiful movement that flourished before the Great War and was later slammed by Jacobs for the top-down nature of its planning and its imposing public structures. Yet take those buildings away, the author points out, and our cities would be vastly diminished. The best of them—the New York Public Library, for one—consistently top polls as North America’s favourite buildings. Jacobs didn’t like Garden Cities either, although the self-contained enclaves are highly energy-efficient, because she believed in a laissez-faire model for complex metropolises.

In Rybczynski’s opinion, Jacobs was quite right in arguing that government planning on the kind of Stalinesque scale that marked the 1950s and ’60s was destructive to American cities, but he also believes that without some planning, nothing lasting would ever get built. And good, livable results will never be one-size-fits-all. North Americans love low-density (i.e. suburban) living, but environmental logic (i.e. rising fuel prices) will exert densification pressure. The future city will play out this tension between our needs and wants.
- Brian Bethune

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Pitchmen gone wild

By Colin Campbell - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 10:40 AM - 1 Comment

Lori Moffett/Bloomberg/Getty Images

The scandals that hit athletes Tiger Woods and more recently Wayne Rooney sent a loud warning to companies that pay millions of dollars for big-name endorsements: no pitchman is immune to embarrassing and costly meltdowns. For many firms anxious to avoid a marketing black eye, the answer is “disgrace insurance.” Insurance brokers say in the past few years there has been a marked rise in the number of firms seeking to guard against losses stemming from misbehaving spokespeople, reports the Independent.

Disgrace insurance can cover lost sales and lost ad campaign expenses (Rooney was dumped from Coca-Cola ads this year following reports that he cheated on his pregnant wife with a prostitute). It can also cover crisis management fees incurred from the fallout of Woods-like marketing messes. The policies cost as much as one per cent of the amount being insured. But with tens of millions of dollars on the line, firms are finding there is such a thing as bad publicity.

Leave our MPs to bicker in peace

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 10:20 AM - 12 Comments

Why shouldn't our politicians advance their beliefs with passion and vigour? If they lose their tempers, so be it. | CP; Getty Images; Illustration by Taylor Shute

Forget global warming, the robot apocalypse and the fact that Ron Weasley looks 35 years old in the new Harry Potter movie: we’ve got bigger problems. People have noticed the lack of civility in the House of Commons and are actually trying to do something about it. Are they out of their minds? The heckling and seething rage are the best parts. Let’s not even get started on the untold damage that a new spirit of collegiality would do to my office pool on when John Baird’s forehead will explode.

Making noise about making nice is all the rage in Ottawa. Press gallery members are writing deep thoughts about the shallow behaviour of MPs. Politicians are declaring that Something Must Be Done. There’s even a private member’s bill that seeks to return question period to the thoughtful forum it apparently once was, back before the invention of electricity and the middle finger.

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Look mom, no hands!

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Ted S. Warren/AP

Microsoft has sometimes been called a one-trick pony, albeit a very successful one. Its Windows operating system is used on 90 per cent of the world’s computers. But nothing lasts forever, which is why the Redmond, Wash.-based company has been desperately trying to come up with a repeat hit.

Yet despite rolling out an avalanche of new products over the years—Zune media players, Windows Mobile and its Bing search engine, among others—only Microsoft’s Xbox video game console has been an unqualified success. And now, just in time for the holiday shopping season, Microsoft has upped the ante with an optical motion control system called Kinect that leapfrogs the motion sensing controllers of rivals Nintendo and Sony. That’s because it doesn’t require a controller at all. Instead, it’s an optical sensor that is placed atop your TV set to follow your physical movements. Microsoft says it sold one million of the devices in the first 10 days and is on track to sell five million by year’s end.

While Kinect is certain to give the Xbox a sales boost, Microsoft has its eyes on a much bigger prize: the entire living room. Both Microsoft and Sony in particular are keen to make their consoles all-in-one entertainment systems, playing movies and offering content from the Web, including streaming video. Dennis Durkin, the chief operating and financial officer of Microsoft’s Interactive Entertainment Business, recently said that 40 per cent of Xbox Live members in the U.S. use their consoles for activities other than gaming, including streaming movies on Netflix, listening to music or following friends on Facebook.

Kinect promises to help further this trend by shedding the Xbox’s image as a platform solely for hard-core gamers, while also solving the problem of comfortably using your television set to access the Web. Suddenly, the need for a cumbersome keyboard or remote controls festooned with buttons—needed for Google TV and other rival products—is a thing of the past.

Joy division

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 9:46 AM - 54 Comments

When someone asks you “How ya doin’?”, do you answer “3.5, thanks”? If you do, you may be impressed by that new Centre for the Study of Living Standards paper claiming to have measured happiness in various parts of Canada and inferred the social and economic factors that determine it. The study features a great deal of impressive mathematics, but at heart it’s predicated on the idea that “3.5″ makes complete sense as an answer to “How ya doin’?”. The dataset pretty much consists of the results of asking that question 70,000 times in various places and calling the answer “happiness”, rotating and manipulating the resulting numbers as though they were interstellar distances or commute times.

There is a great deal of excitement nowadays, among the gormless, about “happiness” research of this nature. I’ve mentioned before that I think “food miles”/”locavorism” represents one trendy, naïve attempt to create a modern-day alterna-Marxism and establish a quasi-religious standard of value not founded in economic exchange. “Gross national happiness”, which is popular with greens and Europeans looking for alternatives to odious “Anglo-Saxon” neoliberalism, is surely an analogous phenomenon. The correct public policies, you see, are really the ones that create the most net happiness, as opposed to necessarily being those that create GDP growth; so isn’t it the most natural thing in the world to just ask people how happy they are and use regression techniques to sniff out the underlying factors?

This is, after all, more or less how we find out what foods are healthy or what child-rearing practices are proper. The problem, of course, is that there are objective measurable proxies for public health or for economic well-being; there aren’t any for “happiness”, or if there are, they would involve expensive neurological exams. “Happiness” is defined in the CSLS study as “life satisfaction”, and even that semantic move is really a Evel Knievel-grade canyon leap.

The Centre found out in what parts of Canada people gave the highest average numerical answer to a life-satisfaction question on a 1-5 marketing-type hedonic scale, where “1″ represented “very dissatisfied” and “5″ was “very satisfied”. So how do we know the study isn’t simply measuring the relative strength of the word “very” in various regions of Canada? We don’t. (And, in fact, French speakers were presumably presented, not with “very”, but with “très”.) How do we know people are capable of reporting their subjective happiness correctly? We don’t, although we can check such reports for statistical validity and reliability. The differences between communities in the CSLS study are remarkably small: how do we know there weren’t transitory local confounders that weren’t corrected for (good weather, Habs on a win streak, etc.)? We don’t. Isn’t it true that people may report high happiness largely because of cultural predispositions to optimism or stoicism? It is. Could regions accurately reporting high temporary happiness be like Ireland—pursuing policies that promote welfare in the present at the cost of a terrible socio-economic shock later on? They could be. (Alberta-haters note: we did very well in the study.)

There is something sneakily attractive about cutting through all these philosophical questions and saying “OK, but it can’t hurt to just go out and ask people about their happiness, surely? You might find something interesting or surprising.” And you might, but you have to be responsible about it. Happiness research of this kind tends to confirm the intuition that higher incomes make “us” (i.e., many or most of us) happier only up to a surprisingly low point at which diminishing returns kick in. This is thought to be a powerful argument for the redistribution of wealth, but one must remember that when the authors of these studies mention the happiness yield from higher income, they are talking only about the yield that’s left when other factors positively correlated with income, like health and education, are factored out.

Money won’t make you happy, they say—but they’re not really referring to the whole package of benefits of having money; they’re talking about an artificially isolated, Unca-Scrooge’s-vault kind of enjoyment of money for its own sake. And guess what: money actually still turns out to be pretty damn good at making people happier, even when you do your best to reduce it to nothing but the sight of chains of zeroes in a bankbook or the ability to purchase a nice stereo.

If you don’t think money really makes people happier, try offering five-dollar bills on the street, and see whether your wallet runs out before folks stop taking the cash. The gross-national-happiness proponents will be tempted to reply that the results of such an “experiment” may reflect a delusional, unhealthy, socially cultivated preoccupation with money; in other words, they’re willing to accept self-reports of people saying “I feel about a 2 today”, but totally unwilling to accept the gold standard of revealed preference. This is economics upside-down, all right: as along as it yields the political result you want, real-world human behaviour can be dismissed as socially constructed, but frivolous questionnaires must be deemed to represent truths as objective as the temperature of the sun. (I don’t want to think about what fraction of the world’s social-science research I just summarized in that sentence.)

Even on its own terms, the CSLS study is a pretty flat draught. The Centre’s report says that two of the three most powerful factors influencing “satisfaction” with one’s life are self-reported mental health and self-reported lack of stress. Has someone alerted the Ministry of Duh? These terms are perilously close to synonymous with “satisfaction”; their presence in the study amounts almost to a finding that being happier makes you happier. Leaving aside the profoundly insane, most of whom can’t report accurately on interior states of consciousness anyhow, do we really have an objective standard of mental health that doesn’t implicitly incorporate happiness or the lack thereof as an endpoint? Mental health conditions pretty much come in two flavours: ones that in themselves consist of relatively intractable unhappiness, and ones that impair the reason and judgment and end up leading to unhappiness for the sufferer in the end.

It’s the same with “stress”. Sidney Crosby is under inconceivable “stress” when he’s slashing through the defence and attacking the net in a close game, but that’s not the kind of “stress” that will show up in a survey like this. Practically, only stress-leading-to-unhappiness is counted: surprise! It’s correlated with unhappiness! Where’s your neolib messiah now?

Why Florida loves Canada

By Cameron Ainsworth-Vincze - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 1 Comment

Getty Images

Every year thousands of Canadians travel to Florida for a little fun under the sun. Yet with the U.S. housing market still sputtering from the fallout of the mortgage crisis, and the loonie at near parity with the greenback, more and more Canadians aren’t simply heading south for a holiday: they’re going to buy cheap property.

“The deals right now are phenomenal,” says Brian Ellis, vice-president of Florida Home Finders of Canada. “There is lots of stuff under $100,000 that used to be selling in the high $200,000 range.” Some 54,000 foreclosed homes are currently up for sale in the state, along with thousands of condominiums, and Canadians—the largest group of foreigners buying U.S. properties—are ideal clients for real estate firms. “They love the Canadian market as we have a stable economy, the best banks in the world, and we’re paying cash,” notes Ellis.

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Losing Civic pride

By Colin Campbell - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 1 Comment

Vijay Mathur/Reuters

In 1972, Honda Motor Co. launched the Civic, a small, rust-prone hatchback that would eventually help define the company and launch it into the ranks of major global automakers. But after more than three decades that saw millions of Civics put on the road, Honda will stop selling the sedan in its home market this month as demand for the iconic car has all but dried up in Japan.

In the mid-1970s, the Civic accounted for over 70 per cent of all Honda sales in Japan, or over 175,000 vehicles annually. Last year, the company sold just 9,000 Civics as Japanese buyers turned to smaller vehicles. Despite plummeting sales in its home market, however, North American sales of the Civic—a car that now resembles more of a beefy, mid-size sedan than the original three-door econobox—remain strong. The car is still built in 13 factories around the world.

Disclosure, discretion and distrust

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 9:02 AM - 165 Comments

Scott Gilmore, a former Canadian diplomat, explains the importance of diplomatic discretion.

When we sent the reporting cables back to the Department of Foreign Affairs, they were secret for a reason. If they were published in The Globe and Mail instead, I would have been thrown out of the country in 24 hours and the Indonesian officials would not have permitted a replacement. The local politicians would have hired a rent-a-mob to stone the Canadian embassy. Their leaders would have told the Jakarta media I was a liar and would have blamed the Timorese for feeding me calumny. And the police would have arrested and killed the young teacher before the week was out.

Jack Shafer applauded Wikileaks this week for restoring our distrust in powerful institutions. Matthew Yglesias questions this thesis. Meanwhile, the Canadian ambassador to Afghanistan has told his superiors he may have to be replaced if some of his reporting on Hamid Karzai becomes the focus of public attention.

Bestsellers

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of November 29th, 2010)

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

Dangerous dancing and an impatient thief

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

British Columbia: An Aboriginal activist is suing the federal government claiming that it discriminates against Aboriginal women. The activist takes umbrage with the Indian Act, which denies descendents of unmarried Indian women eligibility to register as a status Indian—unlike the children of unmarried Indian men, who are eligible.

Alberta: A woman is taking a Calgary nightclub to court claiming that, by encouraging “physically attractive” patrons to use the dance floor in order to boost its liquor sales, the club created an atmosphere that caused her to fall and break her arm two years ago on Halloween. The suit alleges that alcohol was served in such great quantities that it allowed the patrons to become unlawfully intoxicated. The woman is seeking $500,000 in damages for her broken arm as well as “permanent personal injuries” and “situational depression.”

Manitoba: Parents of a 12-year-old boy are suing the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority, alleging that after a tonsillectomy their son was left in a “persistent vegetative state.” Five days following his operation in late November, the boy had trouble breathing and began coughing up blood, and was admitted to the emergency room. The lawsuit names a number of doctors and nurses, and claims the boy’s injuries were avoidable and caused by negligence.

Ontario: A Canadian convicted of a series of bank heists in the U.S. is suing the federal government claiming it breached his constitutional right to a timely transfer home. In 1989, when he was serving a 55-year sentence for armed robbery in the U.S., he applied for a transfer to Canada. Though it was approved in 1991, he wasn’t moved until 2000. In the lawsuit, the bank robber claims he was emotionally and physically abused by prison staff while he was serving time in California, Colorado, Indiana and Illinois.