Au revoir, Mr. Siksay

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, December 17, 2010 at 1:48 PM - 9 Comments

After the House adjourned yesterday, the NDP’s Bill Siksay quietly announced he won’t be seeking reelection.

This does not mean that I am abandoning Bill C389 and the struggle for full and explicit human rights for transsexual and transgender Canadians. I will continue to work hard to get the Bill through the House and off to the Senate before an election … One of the highlights of my time as an MP will always be my work with the transsexual and transgender communities. You’ve taught me so much about our humanity for which I am very thankful.

An astute reader notes below that Mr. Siksay was apparently the first openly gay man elected to the House of Commons as a non-incumbent.

Ontario's appeal court ramps up sentences for convicted terrorists

By macleans.ca - Friday, December 17, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 21 Comments

The Ontario Court of Appeal, the highest court in the province, has restored Canada’s anti-terror law to full strength, signaling that terrorists acting on Canadian soil “will pay a very heavy price” and that Canada should not be viewed as an attractive place from which to pursue terror-related activities. The appeal court released six major decisions in terrorism cases today. The leading judgment related to the case of Ottawa software engineer Momin Khawaja, the first person convicted under Canada’s anti-terrorism legislation. The court dismissed his appeal and increased his sentence from 10.5 years to life in prison. The court also said the Ontario trial judge presiding at Khawaja’s case in 2006 erred in striking down portions of the Criminal Code’s anti-terrorism provision after concluding the legislation could inhibit fundamentalist Muslims from expressing their political or religious beliefs. As well, the court upheld—and, in two instances, increased—prison terms handed to three members of the Toronto 18. Terrorism, Justices David Doherty, Michael Moldaver and Eleanore Kronk said in their decision, “is a crime like no other.” “Once detected, it must be dealt with in the severest of terms.”

Toronto Star

Cast off these copper irons

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, December 17, 2010 at 11:39 AM - 21 Comments

Mike Moffatt explains why we’re better off without the penny and why eliminating it won’t cause the nation to descend into fractional chaos.

Any change naturally comes with costs and benefits. The only significant cost is to retailers who will have to adapt their point-of-sale systems, a small change for a $130-million-a-year benefit. Prices will not rise and charities will not suffer. Let’s follow the lead of so many other countries around the world and eliminate a coin that no longer serves a useful purpose.

Quebec bans religion from public daycares

By macleans.ca - Friday, December 17, 2010 at 11:35 AM - 82 Comments

Beginning next June, Quebec will no longer tolerate expressions of religion in government-subsidized daycares. Under the new rules, daycare administrators will no longer be permitted to make children recite prayers, though they will be able to recite their own, and religious leaders like rabbis, priests and imams will no longer be allowed to visit the centres. The province has in the past allowed religious organizations to run public daycares and government documents show about 20 subsidized daycares currently feature religious instruction as part of their programs.

CBC News

North Korea threatens even 'deadlier' attack on South Korea

By macleans.ca - Friday, December 17, 2010 at 11:09 AM - 4 Comments

The North Korean military is threatening an even “deadlier” attack on South Korea than the one it launched last November 23 if Seoul goes ahead with a planned test of artillery from the island North Korea shelled last month. Four people died when North Korea launched some 170 artillery rounds on Yeonpyeong in November, an island in the Yellow Sea that’s been controlled by South Korea for decades. North Korean officials have long been annoyed at the maritime border between the two countries, which gives South Korea control over the waters around Yeonpyeong and forces North Korean ships to make a longer trek to before they can reach the open sea. The attack against Yeonpyeong, which led most of the island’s 1,400 residents to flee, amounted to a dramatic escalation of Pyongyang’s claims to the water.

Wall Street Journal

Looking back and forward

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, December 17, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 49 Comments

Michael Ignatieff sits for year-end interviews with the Globe, Canadian Press, Star, Sun, Postmedia, CTV and CBC. The most interesting bit might’ve resulted from a question submitted by Globe readers.

A Liberal government would launch federally-funded clinical trials of a controversial new treatment for multiple sclerosis, Michael Ignatieff said Thursday in his year-end interview with The Globe and Mail … “The question is: why can’t Canadians get a shot at getting at something that might have a therapeutic benefit?” he asked. “We say yes to that. Let’s get these trial thoroughly conducted. The federal government should take leadership here.”

Free votes

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, December 17, 2010 at 9:05 AM - 17 Comments

As votes that transcend party lines are rare and social issues are generally the most difficult to navigate, a pair of recent private member’s bills to note.

Bill C-389, introduced by the NDP’s Bill Siksay to address rights for the transgendered, passed last week by a count of 143-131. The yeas included five Conservatives, the nays two Liberals.

Bill C-510, introduced by Conservative Rod Bruinooge to add coercing abortion to the Criminal Code, was defeated this by a count of 178 to 97. The Conservative side was split, while 10 Liberals voted in favour.

Horrifically good movies

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, December 17, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 6 Comments

ILLUSTRATION BY BRADLEY REINHARDT

In True Grit, the Coen brothers’ new remake of the classic 1969 John Wayne western, the heroine—a hard-headed 14-year-old girl on a mission to avenge her father’s murder—tumbles into a collapsed mine shaft, where a snake lurks coiled in the rib cage of a decayed corpse, ready to strike. That’s a fitting image for the kind of year it’s been at the movies. If Hollywood is the Dream Factory, 2010 was the year of dreaming dangerously, a year when horror films had no monopoly on nightmares. Scan the lists of award-pedigree movies, and a striking trend emerges: time and again we’re dropped into a snakepit of fear and loathing, paranoia and paralysis, isolation and loss. Almost all the good movies played like bad dreams.

You have to address the nation with a monumental stutter (The King’s Speech); you’re hit by a tsunami while shopping for trinkets in paradise (Hereafter); you fall for a nice guy who turns out to be the bank robber who held you hostage (The Town); the older brother who’s training you to be a boxing champ is a crack-addict pimp (The Fighter); you’re dancing the lead in Swan Lake and something weird is growing out of your back; or, in the best worst dream of all, you’re trapped by a boulder and have to cut off your arm with a blunt penknife (127 Days). Even children’s fantasy was not immune. In Toy Story 3, a utopian daycare centre turns out to be a prison camp that tortures toys; The Nutcracker in 3-D gave us a Nazi Rat King whose stormtroopers feed toys into industrial ovens that blacken the sky.

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Even if it's broken, don't fix it

By Paul Wells - Friday, December 17, 2010 at 8:40 AM - 35 Comments

Jim Young/Reuters

I had not heard of John Pepall before his book Against Reform landed, with no great thud, on my desk last month. The bio in the book calls him “a writer and political commentator based in Toronto.” Since Against Reform is a political commentary and Pepall wrote it, the bio adds little to our knowledge.

His website features 20 years of political writing, including a review of an Elizabeth May book that was rejected by the Literary Review of Canada for being “mean-spirited.” I like him already. Pepall on May’s critique of Canadian journalism: “What seems to disturb her is not that her interests and ideas are not reflected in the media but that others are. Happily she proposes no remedy.”

Pepall’s book reveals interests and ideas not often reflected in the media. Against Reform is a corker, a funny little rebuttal to just about everything you usually read about our ailing democracy.

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The Commons: They are but humans

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 6:34 PM - 19 Comments

The Scene. It is helpful, if only every so often, to recall that these men and women are but human. At least in the biological sense. If you prick them, they do bleed. If they sing, they do so awkwardly. If they slip on icy sidewalks, they do dislocate their shoulders.

If they sound otherwise like something quite apart from their fellow humans, it is heartening to know that at this time of the year, they do, at least for the sake of the cameras, feel a certain empathy toward their fellow members of mankind.

“Mr. Speaker,” Mr. Harper said this afternoon, having easily dismissed Jack Layton’s last question on this the last day before the House breaks, “while I am on my feet, it may be the last time in 2010, let me just take the opportunity to wish you and all members of the House a Merry Christmas, a Happy New Year, Joyeuses fêtes et bonne année.”

Gleefully, the government side jumped up to applaud their leader’s display of basic humanity.

A moment later, the same members, at least as gleefully, were up to applaud the Public Safety Minister’s contention that a Liberal backbencher was primarily concerned with “how to ensure that criminals can get out on the street as quickly as possible.” And a moment after that they were up again, their glee runneth over, as John Baird saluted a Conservative backbencher as having “acted in a high ethical fashion” in duly firing a member of her staff who leaked confidential parliamentary files to various lobbyists.

Herein would seem to lie something of a disconnect. Continue…

Does your banker's look provide "inner peace"?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 5:50 PM - 2 Comments

Just in time for holiday shopping, the Swiss banking giant UBS has issued a style manual for its employees that rivals anything issued by Esquire or Vogue. “Our style of dress often reflects our mode of action,” declare USB’s fashion mavens. “A flawless appearance can provide an inner peace and a sense of security.” And how exactly to achieve that state of sartorial grace? Start with a classic white shirt, essential for both men and women. For the suit, “anthracite dark colors, black and dark blue symbolize competence, the formality and seriousness.” Not too much leg: “The perfect skirt length is in the middle of the knee and may go down to two inches below the knee (measured from the middle of the knee).” Oh, and underwear: no matter what you’ve seen in hip-hop videos, make sure yours is not visible through the clothing or “overflowing” beyond all that fine tailoring.

Vancouver Sun

More popular in the States, Exhibit A: 'Being Erica'

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 5:48 PM - 15 Comments

And then there are some Canadian shows that seem to be more popular in the U.S. than they are here. Being Erica is probably one of them. The show has struggled here somewhat (granted that their just-completed third season was not too strong, from what I’ve seen, so it may be to blame for some of its own struggles), but it’s done extremely well in the U.S. on the Soapnet channel, leading to today’s announcement that ABC will commission an American remake of the show. It was announced in Variety, but it’s paywall’d; I’ll link to the news when there’s a free version. Update: Here’s a for-free report from Nellie Andreeva at Deadline.com.

According to the Variety report, the new pilot will be written by Maggie Friedman, a former Dawson’s Creek writer-producer who created last season’s flop adaptation of The Witches of Eastwick. The Eastwick pedigree doesn’t fill anyone with much hope, but the idea of doing an American remake seems very sensible: it is a really strong premise, that produced some good episodes. And the style of it — combining fantasy with naturalism, and weekly stories with ongoing mysteries, all from the point of view of a strong but vulnerable woman — is the sort of thing that ABC would love to have on its schedule.

There’s already talk about who should play the all-important title role, assuming they don’t cast Karpluk (and I’d hope they at least consider letting her try out for it, especially if the original version gets canceled). But I just wanted to post the news here as a reminder that popularity deficits can go both ways. Are there any other Canadian shows that had more of an impact in the U.S. than they did here? I might actually suggest SCTV, whose mostly U.S.-centric pop-culture spoofs sometimes made it of more interest to U.S. viewers than Canadians — particularly when they got into some of the more obscure U.S. celebrities or styles of showbiz that they liked to riff on — and whose influence on U.S. comedy has been almost boundless even if you don’t count all the cast members who became stars in the States.

Of course the new version, if it gets picked up, will be a U.S. show, not a Canadian one, so it won’t solve the problem of the lack of Canadian shows on the air. And speaking of which, SyFy has just announced the cancellation of Stargate Universe, which continues the network’s re-branding away from pure science fiction (specialty channels still exist, but more and more of them will have to specialize less, and SyFy is the latest example). This means the end of a very durable franchise of Canada-U.S. co-productions.

Rights and Democracy: Rest in peace, Rémy Beauregard

By Paul Wells - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 5:31 PM - 155 Comments

Eight months ago I began calling for the public release of the Deloitte audit of Rights and Democracy. That was about five weeks after the R&D board announced the forensic audit into the agency’s financial transactions between 2005 and 2009, vaguely alleging financial improprieties under an earlier regime.

The terms of the audit were transparently tailored to make the deceased former president Rémy Beauregard look bad and to whitewash the current board and management of the organization. The audit period stretched from 2005 to 2009, so it would capture mismanagement that had been caught and fixed before Beauregard ever joined the agency in mid-2008. The audit period also ended before Aurel Braun, the current board majority and their appointees consolidated their control of the organization, so it would have nothing to say about the astonishing gusher of taxpayer cash which Braun, Jacques Gauthier, Elliot Tepper, Marco Navarro-Génie and others have uncorked at your expense and mine as they pursue their assorted theories and fascinations.

But Deloitte is a professional organization unlikely to tailor its findings to fit those theories and fascinations, so its audit eventually became the public’s best bet for testing the validity of the Braun claque’s claims. It has been obvious to me for many months that this best explained R&D’s reluctance to release the audit.

Today the audit was released — not through a formal process, but because somebody leaked it to the Globe‘s Daniel Leblanc. You can read it here. (Well, the main narrative of the audit, anyway. Thousands of pages of annexes, including lengthy email correspondences, time sheets and so on, remain unreleased.)

It shows what Beauregard’s defenders have long asserted: that the agency was run without scandal, and without unusually lax management, even before his arrival; that he was taking clear steps to improve its management; and that specific claims against him and his staff from Gauthier and others hold no water. In short, that Rémy Beauregard died while fighting back against an unfounded witch hunt perpetrated by scoundrels who today stand unmasked and humiliated. The government of Canada under Stephen Harper and his minister Lawrence Cannon today continues to support those scoundrels, to its shame and ours as citizens. Continue…

Blake Edwards, the Genius Without Quality Control

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 5:27 PM - 3 Comments

I think Blake Edwards, who just died at the age of 88, was one of the most talented writer-directors of his generation — a guy with a unique point of view, a great eye (particularly when it came to long uninterrupted takes, which he used brilliantly) and an ability to handle comedy, drama and suspense. His talents were similar to Billy Wilder’s, except that he had more visual flair than Wilder and a particular love of music, which is why he worked so closely with Henry Mancini and why some of the best scenes in his films are musical numbers. Edwards was also a relatively early example of a movie writer who figured out how to expand into television — though he had come to movies after a long stint in radio, so it wasn’t that much of a stretch — without hurting his movie career. His most famous TV creation was of course Peter Gunn (with the famous Mancini theme). He wrote and directed this episode here:

If you go through Edwards’ filmography, you find a lot of movies with great or memorable scenes. He made only a few movies that don’t have at least something good in them; his John Ritter vehicle Skin Deep has the famous scene with the glow-in-the-dark condoms, and even a truly hideous, crass, and awful movie like Curse of the Pink Panther has a pretty funny scene with a surprise guest. And that’s not even getting into his good movies, which range from the first two Clouseau films to the depressing TV play adaptation Days of Wine and Roses to the underrated thriller The Tamarind Seed (which has a gorgeous score by John Barry, providing Continue…

Marjorie Anne Heinrichs | 1956-2010

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 5:00 PM - 28 Comments

Illustration by Jack Dylan

MARJORIE ANNE HEINRICHS was born in Morris, Man., on March 2, 1956, the second of six children born to Helen and Sydney Reimer, a financial adviser. Marj, a redhead with a fiery personality and a yen for storytelling, grew up in the prosperous, conservative Mennonite community of Rosenort. She was an opinionated and curious tomboy—not your average Mennonite girl. TV and radio, the church believed, were a sin. Hard work brought you closer to God.

At 14, she met Jim Heinrichs, “the cutest boy in school,” as she described him. Gentle Jim, shy and soft-spoken, was her polar opposite. They married in 1974, after graduating from Rosenort Collegiate, and moved onto a hog farm west of town. At 19, Marj gave birth to Tom. Jen, Katie, Sara and Billy soon followed. Life was merry, but not without bumps. No one worked harder than Jim, who also managed the local lumberyard, but in the ’80s hog prices hit rock-bottom. Interest rates and feed prices were sky-high. In 1986, they had to sell the farm and move into town, where Jim took over G.K. Braun Insurance from father-in-law Sydney. Marj was devastated—she loved that old farm.

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Good thing he didn't spill his coffee

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 4:40 PM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

New Brunswick: Three volunteer firefighters are among five people facing multiple charges of arson in Doaktown, N.B. (pop. 900). The men are accused of torching a number of unoccupied buildings in November 2008 and November 2009. One of the buildings, Billy Bob’s Bar, was set on fire less than one week before last year’s Firefighters’ Breakfast.

Ontario: A 22-year-old man is facing several charges, including possession of cocaine, possession of marijuana, breach of probation, impaired driving, failing to submit to a drug evaluation, and taking a motor vehicle without consent—all after he drove away from a Tim Hortons in Paris, Ont. Staff alerted police after the man went through the drive-through naked.

Manitoba: The same week Saskatchewan Roughriders linebacker Cory Huclack tried unsuccessfully to earn a Grey Cup ring, police were hunting for his father Dan’s stolen gold band—and the guys who stole it. Dan, a former Winnipeg Blue Bomber, had just left the doctor’s office when he felt a gun pressed against his back. Two men demanded money. He gave them $40. Then they kicked him in the groin, knocked him down, and stole the ring he had won when the Bombers beat the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in 1984.

Alberta: A 28-year-old Calgary man was charged with drinking and driving, and avoiding police officers, all while behind the wheel of a snowmobile. The man had sped by the RCMP detachment in Turner Valley twice on his sled before officers decided to pursue him. The cops couldn’t catch him on his third run past the detachment, but he made their job easier when he crashed into some bushes.

British Columbia: A 22-year-old Vancouver man tried to hold up Duffin Donuts with a knife. When police arrived, they found the man, who they say was intoxicated, slumped over with a puncture wound in his abdomen. He apparently passed out on his own knife.

High praise for low-life horse racing

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 4:40 PM - 0 Comments

Jaimy Gordon’s novel, the surprise winner of the National Book Award, makes poetry out of the low life at a seedy racetrack | Jamie Squire/Getty Images

LORD OF MISRULE
Jaimy Gordon

Last month’s National Book Award winner for fiction provoked as much surprise in the American literary world as Joanna Skibsrud’s Giller Prize win for The Sentimentalists. Like Skibsrud’s novel, Gordon’s was published by a small press originally planning a tiny print run. Scant few had actually read the book, published just days before the Awards. But the prize win for Lord of Misrule, a multi-viewpoint narrative of low-level horse racing, was not just well deserved, but a welcome validation of literary fiction’s greatest ambitions.

Gordon’s setting is Indian Mound Downs, a West Virginia racetrack that’s gone to seed in the already grim and economically depressed 1970s. Broken-down, aging horses are raced for scant winnings by jockeys and trainers looking for a quick score rather than for glory and riches. In a more commercially minded writer’s hands, the motivations of characters like horseman Tommy Hansel, groomsman Medicine Ed and menacing trainer Joe Dale Bigg would be mere props for race outcomes and suspense over whether criminal enterprise will pay off or trigger senseless violence.

All of these events happen, more or less, though Gordon seems to wink at standard storytelling conventions. “I can’t be playing around with gangsters,” says Maggie, a horseman’s girlfriend and the novel’s emotional centre. “I keep thinking I’m in a movie and then I realize I could get killed.” Instead, Lord of Misrule makes poetry out of low life through passages of gorgeous, idiosyncratic prose. A female jockey is described as “not ugly but like something born between mud and river water, like something out of a creek swamp.” Faces are “draggyfied” and featherbeds have “sweat-damp canyons.”

“Horse racing is not no science . . . ma’fact it’s more like religion,” says Medicine Ed in pungent country dialect, and as Gordon masterfully renders this world in Lord of Misrule, a prosaic sport becomes a higher power to believe in.
- SARAH WEINMAN

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Insurance orange alert

By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 4:20 PM - 1 Comment

Getty Images

Canada has one of the lowest risks of terrorism in the Western world, according to the recently published 2010 Terrorism Risk Index. Yet this year was also one of the busiest on record for those offering insurance against terrorism, according to Marsh Canada, the country’s largest insurance broker offering terror coverage.

Canada’s terrorism insurance industry dates back to 2001, when the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center cost insurers $40 billion. After that, most insurance companies in the Western world excluded acts of terrorism from their coverage. The U.S. and the U.K. responded by promising to back companies that continued to offer terrorism coverage as part of their regular policies. Canada (with the exception of a temporary reprieve for the airline industry) did not follow their lead. That meant worried companies had to find their own stand-alone insurance. Following Sept. 11, just over a quarter of Marsh’s clients bought the insurance.

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Kenny and Spenny stop fighting

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 18 Comments

On a shoestring budget, a Canadian show about two idiots (Hotz, left, and Rice) who take on crazy challenges became a hit | Showcase

“I don’t think there’s one bad episode, personally,” says Kenny Hotz, co-creator and co-star of Kenny vs. Spenny. “We did 88 episodes and there’s not one dud.” He and his colleague, Spencer Rice, have a reason to sound less than humble: when Showcase airs their show’s one-hour series finale on Dec. 23, they’ll go out after making the kind of international impact that most Canadian shows only dream of, including foreign remakes and a devoted Internet following (Hotz claims it’s “the most downloaded show in the history of Canada”). It’s the end of another paradox for Canadian TV: in an era when our TV shows were improving their production values to compete with the U.S., one of the biggest hits was a shoestring-budget show about two idiots who undertake challenges like “who can wear a dead octopus on their head the longest?”

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Cooking lessons from dancing tweens

By Kate Fillion - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Photography by Andrew Tolson

Very early one Saturday not long ago, Katrina Pacher and Sloane Wilson put on clean aprons and headed into the kitchen at Ritorno restaurant in Oakville, Ont., to make chicken parmigiana. While her father got in position with his video camera, Katrina, 11, adjusted the black scrunchie in her ponytail, and Sloane, 12, got some last-minute coaching from her mom, Donna Wilson: “This time, maybe read out the list of ingredients.” It was the girls’ second video of the day for their 18-month-old website. “But,” Wilson observed wryly, “now, they look awake.”

After more than 100 videos, the girls, friends since preschool, no longer get nervous before a shoot. Fitforafeast.com started when they learned about the childhood obesity epidemic in health class, and decided to use the Internet to teach kids how to embrace healthy living: they provide tutorials on popular dance steps, receive fitness instruction from experts, and demonstrate how to make kid-friendly meals—with a little help. Katrina’s parents have Web-based jobs, and Wilson used to work in film production; together, they built the site and a YouTube channel, which has had 6.7 million views so far.

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Busting silos and transgressing the boundaries: A call for submissions

By Andrew Potter - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 3:29 PM - 17 Comments

I’m asking your help for a new project I’m working on. I’m looking for examples of claims that the problem with an institution is the vertical or hierarchical nature of its organization. Put colloquially, I’m looking for arguments where the thesis is that the obstacle to more innovation, bigger profits, or better results is that there are too many corporate “silos”, and that the solution is to “bust the silos”.

The classic version of this is the mission statement from the company that used to be called Canwest, which read, in part: “Our people bust the silos to leverage the content, best practices and the tremendous brain power that exists throughout our organization.”

Yet it strikes me that this assumption is endemic in the literature on corporate organization and in management theory. I know that an emphasis on “horizontality” is a part of the neverending attempt at re-imagining the public service in Ottawa. It is also the implicit theory behind the push for “interdisciplinarity” or “collaborative research” in the universities. In every case, the argument is the same: Vertical bad, horizontal good. Rules bad, freedom good. etc.

What I’m asking for are specific examples. Management books, mission statements, position papers, office memos, you name it – please send them on.  If you can think of examples where an organization – university, newsroom, corporation, etc. – has been turned upside-down in the name of busting silos, please tell me your story in the comments, or email Jandrewpotter at gmail.com



Revenge of the birds

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 3:20 PM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

Over the holidays, those looking to vent some frustration away from family might consider hurling an angry bird at a bug-eyed green pig—if they’ve got a smartphone and the hottest mobile game available, Angry Birds. (Evil pigs have stolen these birds’ eggs, the plot goes, and the birds are out for revenge.) A festive new edition, called Angry Birds Seasons, features a wintry landscape, an Advent calendar theme and, of course, pigs and birds in Santa hats.

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Not in my backyard

By Leah McLaren - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 3:20 PM - 7 Comments

Kevin Mackintosh/Getty Images

Sir Beville Stanier, nephew of the Queen’s late crown equerry and owner of an 800-hectare estate in Oxfordshire, was not the first one to notice the public orgies taking place on his property. “My tenants stumbled on the scene after dark and called to let me know,” he explained in an interview. “I’ve been down there myself in the daytime and the ground is littered with used condoms and tissues. It really is quite unpleasant.”

The orgy in question was not a random occurrence, but part of an established British activity known as “dogging,” in which participants meet to have—and observe—sex in parked cars and wooded lots. The phenomenon is hardly new. The BBC reported instances of the dogging “sex craze” back in 2003, with the news that “the Internet and text messaging are fuelling a practice which involves unprotected sex with strangers in public parks.”

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Creating an urban jungle

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 3:20 PM - 2 Comments

Photography Stephanie Lim

Vancouver’s push to become the planet’s greenest city includes a bold new plan to plant 150,000 trees in the next decade, in what might be the largest urban tree-planting campaign in Canadian history. Indeed, it’s one of North America’s “most aggressive targets,” says deputy city manager Sadhu Johnston. Mayor Gregor Robertson snagged the 36-year-old whiz kid from a high-profile gig as Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s environmental czar a year ago; Johnston is also the unofficial point man for Robertson’s “Greenest City” initiative, aimed at turning Vancouver into the world’s environmental pacesetter by 2020.

As for the trees, the interim goal is to get 50,000 more in city-owned spaces within the next five years, before ramping up planting starting in 2015. Vancouver’s Board of Parks and Recreation will have a total cost estimate ready next spring, when council will be asked to okay the program. But things are already rolling. Last month, Falaise Park, in the city’s east end, got 25 fruit trees, the first of three new fruit-bearing orchards going into city parks ahead of the spring.

And businesses, like it or not, will be key to the program’s success. The city will likely ask businesses to put 56,000 trees in the ground, says Johnston. Mandating that new towers, for instance, add an undefined number of trees to their plans is being discussed, he says. The payoff: not only are tree-lined streets great for property values, says Johnston, but trees play a big part in the atmospherics market researchers drool over. A year-old University of Washington study found that consumers spend 12 per cent more in treed shopping districts than in those without.