December, 2010

The voting age: should it be raised to 50?

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, December 16, 2010 - 70 Comments

Does B.C. Liberal leadership candidate Mike de Jong think you should take Drano for heartburn? Does he think the Canucks would win more often if the Sedins were traded for magic beans? Anything’s possible. Literally anything.

B.C. teenagers should be able to vote in provincial elections when they are old enough to drive, Liberal leadership candidate Mike de Jong said Wednesday.

De Jong said if elected premier he would introduce legislation to lower the voting age to 16 from 18 in an attempt to interest teenagers in the democratic process before they graduate high school.

“What happens now is Grade 12 students leave and the vast majority of them never vote, or if they do, they are 40 or 50 by the time they get around to it,” he said.

Lowering the voting age could also help boost low voter turnout, he said. Only 51 per cent of 3.24 million eligible voters cast ballots in the 2009 B.C. election, down from 58 per cent in 2005 and 55 per cent in 2001.

The most natural next sentence, you’d think, would mention that the figure was a miserable 27% with the youngest voters, those aged 18-24. Numbers from the last couple of federal elections suggest that even within that 18-24 cohort, younger voters are less interested in voting; in the ’06 election, eligible voters aged 18-19½ (many still in high school) turned out less than voters aged 19½-21½, and those voters, in turn, were less likely to show up than voters aged 21½-24.

You’ll notice that those figures are irreconcilable with de Jong’s just-so story of eager schoolchildren instantly losing interest in voting when we open the gates and turn them loose for the last time. But who’d buy that anyway? Kids who leave high school either take up post-secondary education, and enter the most politically engaged space they’re likely to occupy in their entire lives, or they start earning paycheques—a moment at which government policy becomes frighteningly real, as if a monster in a children’s book had suddenly leapt off the page and started devouring the furniture.

De Jong is proposing a “solution” that helped cause the problem he is addressing: the Western world already essentially made a collective decision to sacrifice voter turnout on the altar of youth when it lowered voting ages to 18. It’s not clear why higher turnout ought to be considered a virtue in itself, but if it is, then that’s the dumbest move we could possibly have made. As André Blais observed in 2006, it’s hard to pin down the variables that influence turnout, but the effect of adding young voters in the ’60s and ’70s is pretty much the most unambiguous factor of all:

It is a well-established fact that the propensity to vote increases with age (Wolfinger & Rosenstone 1980, Blais 2000), and so we would expect turnout to be lower when the voting age is 18 instead of 21. Research that examines turnout in contemporary advanced democracies does not incorporate that variable for the simple reason that the voting age is now 18 almost everywhere (Massicotte et al. 2004), and there is thus no variation.

Blais & Dobrzynska (1998), whose sample of elections starts in the 1970s, do include a voting age variable and they find a relatively strong effect; their results suggest that lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 reduces turnout by five points. Voting age is also a key factor in Franklin’s (2004) study of turnout dynamics. He estimates that the lowering of the voting age in most democracies has produced a turnout decline of about three percentage points.

Leaving aside the Mike de Jong-bashing for a moment, what hardly anybody ever asks when discussing turnout is whether it might be rational for young people not to vote. An economist, after all, would start with the presumption that since they don’t, it must in some sense be rational for them not to. Political reporters and columnists, unless their names rhyme with Bandrew Boyne, do not tend to take an economist’s attitude toward social questions; but I would argue that these people have the strongest reasons of all to suspect that young people are right to re-enter the voting pool one toe at a time.

I was first put on a political beat at the age of 24 or 25. I had an education and plenty of information, but I was still at sea nine-tenths of the time, simply because I had only followed electoral politics for about seven or eight years (since the federal election of 1988, really). I didn’t know the personalities; I hadn’t amassed a store of anecdotes, tall tales, and gossip; I had no personal memory of what had been tried and untried, what policies and political strategies had a tendency to work or not to work, what promises are almost certain to be broken. I hadn’t been surprised a hundred times and just plain gotten things wrong another hundred.

There is no substitute for living through history. The older I get, the more I notice how much of my wisdom comes from simply having hung around a while and watching old friends climb the ladders of power and wealth. And the older I get, the less qualified I feel to have secure opinions about horserace politics, even though my profession requires me to feign omniscience. I defy you to find any political journalist who doesn’t feel the same way.

In this case, what’s true of an occasional political feuilletonist must surely be true of the ordinary citizen, who is (presumably) absorbing practical political knowledge even more passively, slowly, and intuitively. And if the vote is important primarily as a sign of humanity, or of being bound by the social contract, then there can be no argument for any voting-age limits; let’s have Fisher-Price design a ballot interface for infants. How could de Jong possibly object? What could he possibly say, even now, to some other thumbsucking pseudo-innovator who made the argument that the limit really ought to be 15?

All that for what?

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 10:47 AM - 23 Comments

Our web team helpfully translates Le Devoir’s review of the legislative year.

Of the 61 pieces of legislation the Conservatives introduced in the House over the last 12 months, 33 were recycled from the previous session of Parliament; and as of right now, 18 of those 33 bills are either at the same stage or further away from being made law than they were before prorogation … Counting the three bills that are set to be granted royal assent Wednesday afternoon, the Conservatives will have passed a meagre 11 bills through Parliament over the past 12 months.
When the sea goes silent

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 10:40 AM - 8 Comments

New research suggests a possible cause of dolphin and whale strandings: severe to profound hearing loss

45 dolphins beached themselves in shallow water off the coast of Australia | Reuters

When weakened by disease, starvation or injury, dolphins succumb to an instinctual fear of drowning. Seized with panic, they swim to shallower and shallower water to keep breathing, and often wind up stranded on a beach, where the sun, sand and wind quickly end their lives.

Now, thanks to new research from the University of Southern Florida (USF), scientists have discovered one of the elusive root contributors to whale and dolphin strandings—deafness.

“Whales and dolphins are acoustic animals. They use sound to feed, they use sound to breed, they use sound to fulfill every biologically important goal of their existence,” says Michael Jasney, an ocean-noise expert with the National Resources Defense Council, an international environmental group. “If you take away their ability to hear, you take away their link to the world.”

Continue…
It's life, but not as we know it

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 10:20 AM - 4 Comments

An unusual microbe shows how little we may still know about life on our own planet, let alone elsewhere

Wolfe-Simon takes samples from the shore of Mono Lake | Henry Bortman

Last week, NASA scientists gathered to reveal a discovery they promised would “impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.” The public’s expectations couldn’t have been higher: widely read blogger Jason Kottke mused the space agency might even have found signs of life on another planet. But when NASA finally lifted the curtain on its finding—which turned out to be not a real-life alien, but a lowly microbe here on Earth—there was a collective yawn.

Even so, it’s not every day NASA says our biology textbooks should be rewritten. Life is thought to require six basic building blocks to exist: carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur. This bacteria, dug up from the salty, arsenic-rich mud of Mono Lake in eastern California, defies that expectation. As astrobiologist Felisa Wolfe-Simon and her team found, the microbe, called GFAJ-1, seems to swap arsenic for some of its phosphorus, incorporating the toxin into its DNA, proteins and cell membranes. (University of British Columbia professor Rosie Redfield slammed the research, which was published in the peer-reviewed journal Science, calling it “flim-flam” on her blog.)

Continue…
Welcome to your new life, Mr. Fantino

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 10:03 AM - 34 Comments

Shortly after formally joining the House of Commons as the duly elected representative of the people of Vaughan, Julian Fantino was sent up to read the following into the official record.

Mr. Speaker, earlier this week the Senate passed our bill to eliminate pension entitlements for prisoners. Our Conservative government stands beside victims and law-abiding Canadians in supporting this important reform, but we know much more needs to be done. We have introduced legislation to get tough on crime, but thanks to the Liberal-led coalition, victims continue to wait. Can the Minister of Public Safety update the House on the proposed pardon reforms that would put the rights of victims over the rights of criminals?
The reich's labour shortage

By Cameron Ainsworth-Vincze - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 4 Comments

Removing a statue of Marx in Berlin; Germany lacks 400,000 skilled workers

Tobias Schwarz/Reuters

Despite having an economy that is one of the strongest in Europe, Germany is facing a major economic dilemma. For decades, experts have warned that the country’s declining birth rate, accompanied by an exodus of highly trained workers to other parts of the world, would create a labour shortage. That forecast is now becoming a reality. According to the German Chamber of Industry and Commerce, the country lacks 400,000 skilled workers—and the region with the greatest shortage is eastern Germany. Since 1990, the eastern states have seen 1.5 million workers move westward, either to other parts of the country or abroad. If the trend continues, the population between the ages of 15 and 64 in the east could be cut in half by 2050.

Interior Minister Thomas de Maiziere has rejected proposals to help skilled foreigners get their credentials more easily recognized. But the pressure to make changes will only intensify—economists estimate the shortage is costing the economy upwards of 20 billion euros a year.
Mitchel Raphael on the Tory who helped Helena Guergis

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 1 Comment

Ignatieff on his eyebrows
A fire alarm during question period had MPs rushing out of the Commons. Conservative MP James Lunney helped a very pregnant former Conservative-now-Independent MP Helena Guergis (due date: Dec. 15) down the stairs and out of the building as they talked about contractions. Lunney is a chiropractor trained to deliver babies. Once outside, MPs kept dry from the rain under the wood shelters attached to the building (thank goodness for smokers, one MP joked). Liberal MP Martha Hall Findlay took the opportunity to thank her leader, Michael Ignatieff, for not growing a moustache as part of the Movember prostate cancer awareness campaign. “I thought you were growing your eyebrows,” Scott Brison piped in. Ignatieff laughed and joked, “No. I shave those every day.”

Continue…
'Keep out of my fridge'

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 12 Comments

An Ottawa man is fighting for the right to slaughter and process meat for his friends

David Gonczol/Ottawa Citizen

Four squad cars squealed into Mark Tijssen’s yard with their lights blazing, just after dark on a cold November night last year. Tijssen, who was having dinner with his nine-year-old son at the time, politely showed the officers around his Ottawa property before being charged with several crimes under the Ontario Food Quality and Safety Act (OFQSA), including killing uninspected animals and distributing meat without a licence. It was all because he had slaughtered a pig and given a friend some of the meat. “I didn’t set out to be an activist or a revolutionary—I grew up on a farm,” says Tijssen, 48, a Canadian Forces major. “There was no need for this.”

Tijssen is now fighting the Ontario government for the right to slaughter and process meat for his friends and neighbours (the law allows him to process it for personal use), a practice he claims was legal before the OFQSA was quietly brought into force in 2005. His trial begins Feb. 14, and could result in $100,000 in penalties. He had the chance to settle the case for a $1,000 fine, but refused.

Continue…
Building with balloons

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

A 300-m-tall skyscraper will soon be constructed in the Taiwanese city of Taichung

The Taiwan Tower

A 300-m-tall skyscraper complete with eight propeller-powered, Zeppelin-like elevators that spiral around its exterior will soon be constructed in the Taiwanese city of Taichung. Dubbed the Taiwan Tower, the behemoth is supported by eight spires with individual glass and concrete “pods” sprinkled between them for living and office space. It’s meant to look like a gigantic tree, a design inspired by the shape of the Taiwanese island itself, while the bizarre elevators are supposed to resemble floating platforms in video games, which have become an integral part of Taiwanese culture.

The tower, set to begin construction in 2012, was designed by Dorin Stefan, a Romanian architect. He included a geothermal plant, natural ventilation, solar cells, wind turbines and a rainwater collection system in the blueprints to make the building environmentally friendly, as well as space for offices, apartments, and a museum. Taiwan’s government, which is funding the project, hopes the concept will be a draw for tourists, who can view Taiwan’s third largest city from observation decks built into the bottom of the balloon elevators.
When Wall Street turned to Canada

By Jason Kirby - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

How a Royal Bank executive is helping rewrite U.S. finance law

Jin Lee/Bloomberg/Getty Images

In August, Washington passed the Dodd-Frank Act, the most ambitious overhaul of financial regulation in decades. Turns out that was the easy part. Now regulators must grapple with how to put the mammoth new law into effect, and as Wall Street ramps up its lobbying effort to soften the impact of the reforms, Canada’s biggest bank has claimed a seat at the table.

In mid-November, John Taft, CEO of Royal Bank’s U.S. wealth-management division, took the helm as chairman of one of Wall Street’s most powerful industry groups, the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association (SIFMA). It’s the first time a representative from any of Canada’s banks has held the spot, and in the lead-up to his one-year appointment, he’s made the rounds on business news channels like CNBC and Bloomberg—always with the yellow RBC lion prominently displayed over his shoulder—to argue that unless the new rules governing Wall Street are properly thought out, the end result could be over-regulation that hurts the economy. “Priority number one is to make sure regulatory reform proposals are implemented in the right way that makes the system safer, sounder, more secure without inhibiting the ability of financial institutions to promote economic growth,” he told Maclean’s.

Continue…

Bestsellers

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of December 13th, 2010)

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of December 13th, 2010)

Fiction

1	ROOM by Emma Donoghue	3 (15)
2	OUR KIND OF TRAITOR by John le Carré	1 (9)
3	FALL OF GIANTS by Ken Follett	2 (11)
4	FREEDOM by Jonathan Franzen	10 (16)
5	THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNETS’ NEST by Stieg Larsson	5 (30)
6	TOWERS OF MIDNIGHT by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson	6 (3)
7	THE CONFESSION by John Grisham	9 (5)
8	LUKA AND THE FIRE OF LIFE by Salman Rushdie	7 (4)
9	SANCTUARY LINE by Jane Urquhart	4 (3)
10	APE HOUSE by Sara Gruen	8 (2)

Non-fiction

1	PAPER GARDEN by Molly Peacock	3 (2)
2	LIFE by Keith Richards	1 (7)
3	CLEOPATRA by Stacy Schiff	(1)
4	ATLANTIC by Simon Winchester	6 (3)
5	WAIT FOR ME by Deborah Mitford	7 (3)
6	FINISHING THE HAT by Stephen Sondheim	(1)
7	GOLD DIGGERS by Charlotte Gray	8 (12)
8	MUST YOU GO? by Antonia Fraser	5 (5)
9	THE TIGER by John Vaillant	4 (2)
10	MORDECAI by Charles Foran	9 (7)

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

You can bank on it

By Erica Alini - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 8:40 AM - 3 Comments

The territory has seen nearly double-digit growth this year and has become a hot spot for foreign investment

Political reforms have created a fertile environment for investment | Mohamad Torokman/Reuters

After 10 years in the doldrums, the West Bank is back in business. A five-star Mövenpick hotel opened in Ramallah last month, restaurants and bars in the city are crowded, and construction is booming. Even smaller cities have seen an uptick in activity of late.

These are all palpable signs of an economic revival that started in 2007, and has continued thanks to three consecutive years of relative peace and an economy that was spared by the global financial crisis due to its relative isolation. Things have picked up in the Gaza Strip as well. There, the economy has registered an eye-popping 16 per cent growth in the first half of this year. But economists warn that those figures merely indicate that growth is starting from a very low base, and that a third of the population in Gaza still lives in poverty. In the more developed West Bank, by contrast, nine per cent growth in the first six months of 2010 is fattening wallets, brightening moods, and attracting investors.

Continue…
Something in Parliament just doesn't add up

By the editors - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 8:40 AM - 52 Comments

Why isn’t Ottawa employing representation by population?

Chris Wattie/Reuters

Representation by population is a simple enough idea in theory. Why is it taking Ottawa so long to put it into practice?
That citizens anywhere in the country ought to have an equal say in voting for their government is a foundational fact of Canada. And yet the weight of an individual’s vote varies considerably from province to province. A single vote cast in P.E.I., where ridings comprise approximately 33,000 people, carries far more heft than a ballot from Ontario, Alberta or British Columbia, where many ridings exceed 130,000.

In a report earlier this year, the Mowat Centre for Policy Innovation at the University of Toronto pointed out that among major federal nations, Canada has the worst record for allocating political representation with respect to equity and fairness. By one measure, the deviation between ridings in Canada is three times that between Swiss cantons and 10 times the gap between United States congressional districts. Ontario in particular was judged to have the greatest level of federal under-representation among 113 provinces, states and cantons in the five countries studied.

Continue…
Zapatero zapped

By Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

The economic crisis and a regional election drubbing leaves the beleaguered PM battered

81 per cent say Zapatero inspires little or no confidence | Andrea Comas/Reuters

This could be the beginning of the end for Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero. The local branch of his Socialist party was beaten by the conservative and nationalistic Catalan party Convergència i Unió (CiU) in regional elections in Catalonia late last month, dealing a major blow to Zapatero’s government as he attempts to tackle the country’s floundering economy and sky-high levels of unemployment. The CiU won 38 per cent of the vote, clobbering the Socialists who took just 18 per cent, although the CiU failed to get a majority in the regional government.

Continue…
Where did all the oil go?

By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 8:20 AM - 1 Comment

The NPRA was thought to contain 10.6 billion barrels

Getty Images

The National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, a chunk of the state about twice the size of Nova Scotia, has less than one-tenth of the oil than it was previously thought to have. The NPRA, created by president Warren Harding in 1923, was thought to contain 10.6 billion barrels of liquid gold when it was last studied in 2002. However, recent surveys with new 3-D technology revealed that the deposit is more like 896 million barrels, says the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). (Estimates of natural gas deposits in the NPRA are also down 13 per cent.) The much lower figure was a surprise for Philip Weiss, a senior energy analyst with Argus Research in New York. “Estimates change from time to time,” he says. “That one seemed a little extreme.”

It isn’t the first time 3-D seismology has caused such a surprise. In 2008, the USGS announced that the Bakken shale formation (which runs through North Dakota, Montana and Saskatchewan) may contain 25 times more than was estimated in 1995. In Alaska’s case, though, less is bad news for almost all of the state’s 700,000 residents. Each Alaskan receives an annual “dividend” payout funded by royalties charged on oil, gas and minerals (it’s been as much as $3,000; in 2010, it’s $1,281 each). Now that the NPRA is smaller, future cheques could shrink, too.
How the US gov't hopes to get Assange

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 at 9:58 PM - 11 Comments

Prosecuting Julian Assange under the outdated World War I-era Espionage Act would be difficult. To prosecute him or WikiLeaks for receiving and disseminating copies leaked documents runs into First Amendment protections for press freedom. The alternative is to try to prove that he conspired with the original source to leak the information in the first place. Then the government doesn’t have to explain why they are prosecuting Assange and not other media outlets who published the same information.

And the NYT reports that there may be evidence that Assange worked with the alleged leaker, Private Bradley Manning, to get the information out:

“Among materials prosecutors are studying is an online chat log in which Private Manning is said to claim that he had been directly communicating with Mr. Assange using an encrypted Internet conferencing service as the soldier was downloading government files. Private Manning is also said to have claimed that Mr. Assange gave him access to a dedicated server for uploading some of them to WikiLeaks.

Adrian Lamo, an ex-hacker in whom Private Manning confided and who eventually turned him in, said Private Manning detailed those interactions in instant-message conversations with him.

He said the special server’s purpose was to allow Private Manning’s submissions to “be bumped to the top of the queue for review.” By Mr. Lamo’s account, Private Manning bragged about this “as evidence of his status as the high-profile source for WikiLeaks.”

Wired magazine has published excerpts from logs of online chats between Mr. Lamo and Private Manning. But the sections in which Private Manning is said to detail contacts with Mr. Assange are not among them. Mr. Lamo described them from memory in an interview with The Times, but he said he could not provide the full chat transcript because the F.B.I had taken his hard drive, on which it was saved.”

Of course, a judge could decide that such online chats are inadmissible hearsay evidence.
The Commons: One thing he can say for sure

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 at 7:49 PM - 46 Comments

The Scene. After the Prime Minister had escorted into the House the two newest additions to the government side, after the government side had delighted in the arrivals, and after the two MPs—Robert Sopuck of Dauphin and Julian Fantino of Vaughan—had officially surrendered their free will and taken their respective seats in the far southwest corner of the room, Mr. Harper returned to his own chair and awaited the first complaint of the leader of Her Majesty’s Official Opposition.

Michael Ignatieff’s lament this afternoon would be for those left waiting hours in emergency rooms across the country. By Mr. Ignatieff’s reckoning, the government had neglected to act sufficiently these last five years and, furthermore, the Prime Minister himself was not adequately supportive of the Canada Health Act. How, Mr. Ignatieff thus wondered, could the government be trusted to protect the public health system?

Mr. Harper stood and dispatched with this perfunctorily, lamenting for cuts to provincial transfers made by Liberal governments during the 1990s and boasting of how many billions his government has dutifully handed over in more recent years.

Having heard this version of events before, the Liberal leader was quick to respond that whatever Mr. Harper’s government had managed to transfer had been budgeted for by a Liberal government in 2004. Switching to English, he shook his fist in the Prime Minister’s direction and reviewed both the premise and the indictment. “The federal-provincial accords run out in 2014. The government has no record on public health. There has been no federal leadership on this issue for five years,” he declared. “The Prime Minister is heard to muse about how he would like to get rid of the Canada Health Act and he says that any plan to bring help to families to look after their loved ones at home is reckless. How can Canadians trust the government to defend public health?”

Mr. Harper stood and repeated his previous points, his right index finger emerging to wag and point variously. But here then the Prime Minister was apparently compelled to punctuate this fall sitting with a statement of great definitiveness. Continue…
Cliché-Busters That Became Clichés

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 at 4:38 PM - 2 Comments

I mentioned this in passing the other day, and then saw someone else mention it (also in passing), so I figured I’d better turn it into a post. I’ve talked before about “clams,” or jokes that aren’t jokes — standard lines that are inserted into scripts in lieu of original jokes. You know the kind: “That went well,” “Who are you and what have you done with [name of character who's acting strangely].” But what I haven’t mentioned much is that at least some of these clams were developed as replacements for, or even subversions of, other clams. Then they became more hackneyed than the jokes they were intended to replace.

The ultimate example of this is a line you all have heard in at least one TV show, “he’s standing right behind me, isn’t he?” (Or “she.”) Through much of the ’90s and ’00s this may have been the single worst cliché in TV comedy writing, given that not only did writers use the same joke, but the literal exact same phrase. It was infuriating because you knew these were professional writers who could come up with a different way of saying it if they wanted to, but they didn’t want to. And the fact that it happened on good and bad shows alike — it’s been on Red Dwarf and Dr. Who and other shows that can’t be dismissed as hack work — was even more frustrating; you couldn’t escape it even on good shows.

But that line was actually a reaction against a comedy writing cliché. Sitcom episodes will often call for a scene where someone is talking smack about another character, not realizing that that character is in the room. Eventually, the audience learned to expect that whenever a character started criticizing someone who wasn’t there, the criticize-ee would pick that moment to enter and stand behind the criticize-er. So, at some point, writers started thinking it would be a fun twist to have the character realize — without turning around or hearing the other person speak — that “he’s standing right behind me.” It was different from the old punchlines (like having the person sarcastically comment on what’s just been said about him, or just saying “hello” and making the criticizer jump), and it had a slight hint of meta-humour in it because the character almost seemed to realize that this is destined to happen when he starts saying bad things about a co-star.

Then, of course, everybody used it so often that viewers started groaning when they heard it, and it fell into the category of easy jokes that aren’t really funny (and that can’t convey character because virtually every kind of TV character has said it at one time or another). So shows have recently started moving back toward older ways of handing the gag, like bringing back sarcastic comments or nervous gestures from the person being talked to. But some shows still do it, and I don’t think we’ll ever get rid of this one completely; like “I said good day!” it’s part of the Clam lexicon.

Are there any other jokes that started out as avoidance of cliché, and wound up becoming even bigger clichés than the ones they tried to supplant?
Consumers are cautiously optimistic

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 at 4:08 PM - 1 Comment

Survey finds nearly nine in 10 Canadians think their finances will either improve or stay the same

A new survey shows that about 27 per cent of Canadians believe that 2011 will bring better economic times, while 12 per cent are fear the future and 61 per cent believe it will stay the same. Overall, Canadians are more optimistic about their financial prospects than they were at this time last year. The survey also showed 2010 was a difficult year for consumers, with 23 per cent of respondents saying they’re worse off now than a year ago compared to 16 per cent who said they were better off.

CBC News
How many does it take to get a minister fired?

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 at 4:07 PM - 30 Comments

If the doctrine of ministerial accountability was still recognized by this government, it would be tempting right about now to ask how many members of a minister’s staff have to be implicated in wrongdoing before a minister is held accountable.

In October, Paradis adviser Sebastien Togneri resigned after it was revealed he had meddled in at least three different access-to-information requests while with the Public Works Department. Those incidents are the subject of an investigation by the information commissioner.

But two more policy advisers within Paradis’ office were also involved in dealing with records destined for public release under access-to-information legislation. Documents obtained by The Canadian Press show that Marc Toupin and Jillian Andrews both argued against the release of material on sensitive subjects.
Coyotes staying in Phoenix

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 at 4:04 PM - 1 Comment

City of Glendale shells out nearly $200 million to keep struggling NHL club

If the Winnipeg Jets or the Quebec Nordiques ever spring back to life, it likely won’t be due to the disappearance of the Phoenix Coyotes. The much-maligned NHL club looks set to remain in Arizona after the city of Glendale approved a new arena lease for the team that will cost local taxpayers $197 million over six years. The move is expected to clear the way for the sale of the Coyotes to Chicago businessman Matt Hulsizer.

Associated Press
Two cheers for Oiler eye candy

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 at 2:33 PM - 51 Comments

My hard-to-love Edmonton Oilers debuted their new cheerleading squad, the first ever assembled by a Canadian NHL team, in last night’s 4-1 home loss to the Maple Leafs. Some would have you believe this was a black day for hockey, for one of two reasons. I think we can dispense pretty quickly with the sexism argument; deprecating sexism has led to tremendous social and economic progress in the spheres of activity that matter, but the one thing that anti-sexism has never been able to defeat outright is actual sex. Attractive people still earn more money than unattractive ones, officemates still clamber greedily onto each other occasionally, and televised entertainment businesses still find excuses to put male and female crumpet in front of the camera. To complain about this is roughly as sensible as lamenting Copernicanism.

The more difficult argument is that cheerleaders are an otiose, tacky distraction in a setting where hockey is properly venerated. This argument, I think, is much more dangerous than the tendency to which it is opposed. We’ve seen Americans learn to treat baseball like an Orthodox icon—a field of dreams, a holy temple wherein the national genius finds perfect expression. The overall result for baseball of this kid-glove handling by poets has been a catastrophic loss of actual pre-eminence, as gridiron football, a violent game that accommodates gambling, has emerged as the real national pastime. Baseball struggles on, a sport too conservative and tradition-bound to apply the most rudimentary entertainment standards to itself.

Hockey should never fall into the trap of declaring itself a solved entertainment problem and deciding that marketing is henceforth unnecessary until the end of time. That’s why I like the shootout, in its place, and why I praised the NHL’s research-and-development efforts (in an article that was almost certainly the most influential one I wrote this year). As somebody who didn’t have colour TV at home until I was 8 or cable until age 11, I have a deep respect for the need to appeal to people with faster-paced nervous systems than mine, people who are hungrier for stimulus and who squirm during TV time-outs.

I’m thus the psychic equivalent of four or five information revolutions, each with its own moral consequences, removed from the undergraduates of 2010. The issue might not be whether hockey games should have cheerleaders but whether those cheerleaders should be wearing clothes. The admission of a few extra tarts to the hundreds who already underdress for hockey games should definitely bother us less than the cheesy contortions thought necessary to justify their presence—and I’m not talking about their dance moves, I’m talking about the social-Darwinist nods to “fitness” and the corny insistence on the girls’ “pride” in winning a beauty contest.

What I really find amusing, and in a way frustrating, is that cheerleaders are coming to Canadian hockey so late in history, nearly thirty years after the founding of the Laker Girls. The Oilers franchise has had its hand thrust out into the taxpayer’s puss for thirty years, on the grounds that Edmonton is a “small market” where a professional hockey team needs public dollars to survive. When this claim is put into its true logical form—”Edmonton is a small market FOR HOCKEY”—you would have to be a thunderstruck triple-idiot to believe it. Northern Alberta isn’t a small market for automobile block heaters, it isn’t a small market for snow shovels, and it isn’t a small market for hockey. For hockey, metro Edmonton is a significantly larger market than New York City or Philadelphia.

What makes the failure to accept this elemental fact doubly annoying is that Oiler hockey is marketed pretty casually by those proclaiming the impossibility of profit; really, the fans are left to do most of the work themselves. So even a minor, tentative Veeckian step like hiring cheerleaders is an encouraging sign of something less than total intertia. I think Veeck would say that it is best to either be the first to try a marketing gimmick or the last to hold out against it. Good for the Oilers for going first.
Your parliamentary sketch

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 at 1:47 PM - 26 Comments

Liberal MPs Ralph Goodale, Judy Foote and David McGuinty address reporters, and one easily distracted columnist armed with an iPad and the ArtStudio app, over the lunch hour.
Austerity regime met with protests in Greece

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 at 1:41 PM - 10 Comments

Cars smashed, buildings firebombed in violent clashes

Rioting in Greece has reached a fever pitch in the worst clashes between protesters and police since the start of Greece’s financial crisis. Hundreds of protesters took to the streets and clashed with riot police across central Athens, smashing cars and sidewalks, hurling gasoline bombs into buildings, and burning cars during a nationwide labour protest against the government’s latest austerity measures. Police fired tear gas and flash grenades as the violence escalated. But that failed to stop people wearing black masks and ski goggles, who used sledgehammers to smash paving stones and hurled the rubble at police. The protest was provoked by a vote in parliament on new labour reforms that include deeper pay cuts, salary caps and involuntary staff transfers at state companies. The new law also reduces unions’ collective bargaining power in the private sector, allowing employers to substantially cut salaries.

CBC News
Poor women more likely to be obese, but not men

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 at 1:36 PM - 7 Comments

Finding contradicts common perceptions

According to U.S. government researchers, income doesn’t greatly affect whether a man becomes obese, although poor women are more likely to become obese. Meanwhile, education levels seems to affect both genders. Two-thirds of Americans are overweight or obese, which has been linked in past studies to income and education. But in a national study of 5,000 people, done every year, they found that 41 per cent of obese adults live in well-off homes, bringing in at least $77,000 a year for a family of four. Meanwhile, 29 per cent of women in well-to-do homes were obese, but 42 per cent of women living below the poverty level were. Over 27 per cent of men with a college degree were obese, but 23 per cent of women with a college degree were.

Reuters