European banks should “show moderation and responsibility”

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 1:39 PM - 0 Comments

As banks announce their annual bonus pools in coming weeks, Europe’s top regulator urged them to “show moderation and responsibility”—before enumerating the consequences if they don’t. Michel Barnier, the European Union’s internal market commissioner who oversees financial services, said banks needed to act “in a responsible and moderate fashion” and that “banks in Europe would be well advised not to lose sight of the economy and society.” Barnier’s comments echo concerns over bankers’ pay as Wall Street institutions such as JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs set aside billions of dollars for their employees. Barnier pointed to the restrictions on pay agreed to by member states and parliamentarians last year, but did not explicitly threaten any further rule-making on pay. However, he did note that Brussels is still considering the whole area of corporate governance in the financial services sector.

Financial Times

Canadian Forces cleared in killing of Afghan teen

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 1:18 PM - 1 Comment

The independent Canadian Forces National Investigation Service has cleared Canadian soldiers of any wrongdoing in the shooting death of a 17-year-old Afghan. Ahmadshah Malgari, a Canadian-Afghan interpreter testified last April that he read an intelligence report which said an unarmed Afghan teen was shot in the back and that Canadian soldiers “panicked” and rounded up 10 innocent villagers before planting a weapon on the teen. The CFNIS found no evidence Canadian troops acted inappropriately.

Ottawa Citizen

Ted Menzies talks (about wanting your money)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 12:55 PM - 60 Comments

The Conservatives have launched a feature on their website called “Canada Talks.” So far the conversation one might expect from a title like that mostly involves newly minted minister of state Ted Menzies looking off camera and reading a series of exhortations to donate money to the Conservative party, while tinkly music plays in the background.

Why is your government standing in the way of cheaper beer?

By the editors - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 38 Comments

Dario Ayala/THE GAZETTE

Canadians find beer an endlessly interesting topic. We enjoy drinking it, brewing it, watching ads for it and even following the delivery of equipment used to make it. Consider, for example, the daily press coverage of the recent transportation of six massive beer fermenters, each seven metres high and capable of holding one million bottles of beer, to the Molson Coors brewery in Toronto. The $24-million operation required shutting down several highways and lifting 1,600 service wires: it also had its own logo, website and Twitter feed. Despite all this fermented fascination, however, there’s one aspect of beer in Canada that receives far too little attention: the fact that nearly every province mandates minimum prices for the stuff. These policies stifle competition and choice and force all Canadians to pay more than they should for their favourite alcoholic beverage.

The issue of minimum beer prices made a rare appearance in the news last week with reports that the Quebec Brewers Association is lobbying the provincial government for a bigger boost in the floor price of beer. Quebec’s minimum price is reviewed annually and adjusted for inflation. The brewers, however, are arguing beer prices should be hiked by more than the national consumer price index. At current rates, they warn, beer will soon be cheaper than milk. We can only hope.

Every province except Alberta mandates minimum retail prices for beer across a wide variety of categories. (Manitoba only mandates the price for single-serving cans.) Using a case of 24 bottles of light beer as comparator, minimum prices range from $26.55 in Quebec to $38.14 in Newfoundland. (In Alberta, tax hikes in 2009, and the fact of a monopoly distributor, has meant prices aren’t always lower than other provinces’ minimums. Still, retailers are free to put beer on sale, as it was in Calgary this week, where 24 Bowen Island Special Light could be had for $24, plus GST.) Most provinces also regulate the price of beer sold in bars. In Alberta, for example, the lowest legal price for beer in a bar is $2.75, or 16 cents per ounce for draft.

Minimum beer prices, or “social reference prices” as bureaucrats like to call them, are designed to keep Canadians at a distance from our own baser instincts by making beer too expensive to binge on wantonly. Whether such prohibitionist regulations are successful in preventing public drunkenness or excessive private drinking is open to considerable debate. Unfortunately, consumers appear to have no say in this matter. Politicians, lobby groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the big beer companies are all strong supporters of minimum prices.

While the Brewers Association of Canada frequently complains about federal and provincial taxes on beer (at 51 per cent of the average retail price, our beer taxes are among the highest in the world), it has no such qualms about minimum prices. Last year the organization’s president extolled the benefits of Canada’s floor prices to the Scottish legislature.

The brewers’ association claims it supports minimum prices as a damper on excessive drinking. And yet floor prices are also quite handy in preventing bothersome competition. In 2008, following an apparent request from the brewing industry, Ontario quietly moved its minimum price from $24 a case to $25.60, thus shutting down popular “buck a beer” promotions by cheaper brands. This is how beer price wars are avoided.

It is hard to escape the suspicion that increasing revenues is the real motivation behind the brewers’ support for social reference pricing. Consider the influential National Alcohol Strategy report from 2007. This document, assembled with input from government, addiction researchers and the beer industry, has a particular fascination with U-Brew operations. The report recommends that these do-it-yourself outlets be forced to charge the same minimum price per bottle as retail stores, which would amount to an enormous price increase. Raising U-Brew prices would do nothing to prevent spontaneous binge drinking—it takes several weeks to produce a drinkable product—but it would certainly reduce the competition faced by beer companies.

Problem drinking as a social issue already receives considerable government attention. A very high level of taxes boosts the price of beer and provides ample funds for necessary intervention efforts. From this perspective, minimum pricing laws are redundant and unnecessary. It’s impossible to raise beer prices sufficiently to discourage all under-aged drinking without punishing legal-age adults as well. And where there’s an identified problem with specific products, such as high-alcohol single-serving cans, Manitoba’s specific approach seems appropriate. Beyond this, if a beer maker or retailer wants to compete on price, why should the law say no?

Ultimately, minimum pricing punishes the vast majority of Canadians who enjoy their beer in an entirely responsible manner by reducing choice and raising cost. For a nation that loves its suds as much as Canada, that seems warm, flat and stale.

The great health debate: keeping key facts top of mind

By John Geddes - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 11:21 AM - 23 Comments

It’s tempting to overcomplicate the debate over health care. There are so many intriguing aspects of the system to examine, from the usefulness of diagnostic imaging (often overrated) to the necessity of timely psychiatric care (often overlooked).

But these subjects, worthy as they are of close attention, are not the reason Canadians fret about their system. The reason is waiting. If we could find a family doc without months of searching, see a specialist without weeks of worry, and visit an emergency room without the prospect of hours of sitting, we’d be satisfied.

Continue…

Who supports the death penalty?

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 145 Comments

In his interview with the CBC, Mr. Harper acknowledged that he personally supports the death penalty in certain unspecified circumstances. In his support, the Prime Minister is conceivably joined by the Justice Minister, who voted in favour of the reintroduction of capital punishment in 1987.

When Ekos polled on the issue last March, it found that 40% of Canadians supported such reintroduction.

Data from 2000 suggests that opinions on this issue have remained relatively unchanged in 10 years. In June of 2000, 43 per cent disagreed with capital punishment while 44 per cent agreed with it. Those who support the reintroduction of capital punishment tend to be Conservative supporters (53 per cent), residents of Alberta (48 per cent), men (43 per cent), seniors (45 per cent), high school grads (48 per cent) and college grads (46 per cent).

Kirpan Kerfuffle

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 10:51 AM - 228 Comments

So a few Sikhs try to walk into National Assembly…

It’s a terrible joke if only because the punchline is so damned obvious: said Sikhs go through the metal detector, which goes off because of the ceremonial daggers on their waists, one of the fellows holds a press conference as a result, the (anonymous) brain trust at our august national newspaper blames Quebec, Quebec media pushes back and–voila!–a made-in-Canada scandal. And it’s not even noon yet. Why do people even get out of bed?

There are two important thing to remember here: reasonable accommodations, a phrase that has become so catch-all so as to be essentially meaningless, go both ways. That is to say, if a person wearing religious garb sets off a metal detector, there should be some understanding on the part of that person that a) the metal detector is there for a reason; and b) they don’t lose an ounce of their religiosity if they remove that object for the purposes of public safety–especially if they are doing so to testify in the name of religious freedom.

You're leaving already?

By Charlie Gillis - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 10:01 AM - 30 Comments

Robert Estall photo agency/Getstock

When your province’s birth rate is hovering at replacement level, and when nearly a quarter of the population is nearing retirement, language politics tend to take a back seat to more pressing matters—like how to sustain the economy. No surprise, then, that Quebec has assumed a prominent spot on the immigration bandwagon, treating newcomers as a key to its economic future rather than a threat to its identity. By any measure, its efforts have paid off: in the last decade, the province has jacked up its intake of immigrants by more than 50 per cent, welcoming almost 49,500 last year.

The question now is how to keep the most wealthy and productive newcomers from flying the coop. A recent internal report by the federal immigration department suggests more than six out of 10 of the coveted business-class immigrants who declared Quebec as their destination during the early 2000s quickly fled to other provinces, taking their investment dollars and entrepreneurship potential with them. The big winners? Ontario and the two westernmost provinces. B.C. saw a 22 per cent net gain in the number of business-class immigrants who called it home, due to migration from other provinces. Ontario enjoyed a 14.5 per cent bump while Alberta saw a 9.5 per cent increase.

The report, which was obtained under Access to Information by Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland, calls into question the widespread belief in Quebec that newcomers will provide much of the province’s future economic momentum. The theory, promoted in policy circles and at all levels of government, assumes a heavy influx of business immigrants—an umbrella term for investors, entrepreneurs and the self-employed who are admitted to Canada on the basis of the wealth they will generate (investor-class immigrants to Canada must be willing to spend more than $800,000 in this country, and their net worth must exceed $1.6 million; entrepreneurs must have a $300,000 net worth and two years of business experience).

Certainly Quebec’s resident population seems disinclined to take up the flag of entrepreneurial dynamism. According to one study published last year, the province’s rate of business ownership is currently half that in the country as a whole, while the percentage of the population that intends to start a business is among the lowest in the country.

Why the wealthy newbies have itchy feet isn’t yet clear. The report compared the stated destinations of immigrants who arrived between 2000 and 2006 with the location from which they filed tax returns in 2006, but it offered no explanations for trends in migration. Curiously, new arrivals to Quebec in other immigration categories show no such flightiness: the province’s overall retention rate of immigrants stands at 79 per cent, which is far short of Ontario’s 91 per cent, but a whole lot better than Saskatchewan’s 48 per cent, or Atlantic Canada’s 43.

Brahim Boudarbat, an economics professor at the Université de Montreal’s School of Industrial Relations, says the exodus may stem in part from Quebec having its own immigration program, which can offer quicker entry to Canada than the one Ottawa provides for the rest of the country. “I think some investors are using the Quebec system as a pathway to other provinces,” he says, noting that the Constitution guarantees freedom of movement once a person has been admitted to Canada. “They know that once accepted by either of the two programs, they can go wherever they want.” The sizable portion of investor-class immigrants coming from China and Hong Kong might also be playing a role, Boudarbat adds. “We know that many Chinese immigrants settle in British Columbia. It seems like immigrant investors are moving close to their community.”

Whatever the reason, the trend is cause for soul-searching in Quebec, given how heavily the province is banking on external wealth to drive its future economy. “I think the general question would be: is Quebec a friendly place to do business?” says Jennifer Hunt, a McGill University economist who has studied the relationship between economics and immigration. “Answering that may have a broader economic payoff,” she adds, by stimulating non-immigrant commercial enterprises. It would also come at a cost—in business-friendly tax cuts, say, or less red tape for start-ups. But if the alternative is more years of recruiting foreign wealth for western provinces, Quebecers might find reform comes cheap at the price.

The needle and the damage (not) done

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 10:01 AM - 29 Comments

MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

In 1721, after New England Puritan preacher Cotton Mather had started an inoculation program—the ancestor of today’s disease-preventing vaccines—to combat a raging smallpox epidemic that eventually killed 800 Bostonians, someone firebombed his home. “Cotton Mather, you dog, dam [sic] you,” ran a note that accompanied the lit grenade tossed through his window, “I’l [sic] inoculate you with this, with a Pox to you.” There are two good reasons for Seth Mnookin to include the incident in The Panic Virus, his riveting account of the rise of the popular—but scientifically baseless—belief that vaccinations cause autism. Mather’s ordeal demonstrates both the surprisingly ancient pedigree of humanity’s best weapons against its worst enemies (smallpox regularly killed up to 400,000 Europeans a year in the 18th century), and that the counterintuitive idea of deliberately infecting ourselves—or worse, our infant children—with disease has always creeped us out.

That instinctive repulsion is one of the root factors in the long and bitter controversy over the causes of a neurological disorder, usually diagnosed in childhood, that can physically exhaust, financially drain and emotionally devastate families. It is now known that autism and the related conditions grouped together as autism spectrum disorder are physical disorders, meaning that the social impairment aspect—serious language difficulties, avoidance of eye contact and lack of interest in others—is no longer blamed, as it once was, on uncaring “refrigerator parents” who were reaping what they had sown. But what does cause ASD remains unknown, although a genetic “component” is clearly involved. Thus the feeling that ASD is a poisoned chalice parents have brought to their children—”What, after all,” remarks Mnookin in an interview, “is more you, than your genes?”—still provokes guilt, anger and a burning desire to find an outside agent.

No such agent could be more intuitively obvious than vaccines. Beyond their ancient emotional baggage, vaccinations are now given to very young children often within weeks—even days—of the ages at which many autistic kids first display symptoms. And from the1990s onward, both the number of vaccines administered and the incidence of ASD diagnoses have increased. Autism was once thought to affect four or five people in 10,000; today one in 280 girls and one in 70 boys is diagnosed with ASD, for an overall rate of one in 110 children. Intuition is further reinforced by the usual suspects Mnookin fingers: the Internet echo chamber that allows partisans to filter out contrary opinions, and the media’s casual standards of balance, easily satisfied with one source providing evidence-based (if uncertain) science and another offering passionate certainty and compelling stories.

Continue…

The unglorified government

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 19, 2011 at 8:55 AM - 39 Comments

Last night, the CBC aired the second part of Peter Mansbridge’s interview with the Prime Minister, including the following assessment from Mr. Harper of his government’s standing with Canadians.

My own sense is Canadians have gotten comfortable with this government. That doesn’t mean all Canadians agree with this government. Certainly many don’t. But I think most Canadians understand that we’re a government that is – whether they agree with us or not – reasonably confident, focused on real issues, on trying to make the country better, not trying to enrich or glorify ourselves.

Sargent Shriver Dead

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 10:00 PM - 0 Comments

Sargent Shriver, a member of the Kennedy political family and the first director of the Peace Corps, has died at the age of 95. Shriver, who married Joseph Kennedy’s daughter Eunice, worked for John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign and took the lead in creating the Peace Corps. Under the Johnson administration, he was one of the key players in the “War on Poverty,” spearheading many anti-poverty programs. After two years serving as U.S. ambassador to France, he unexpectedly became a vice-presidential candidate when Democratic nominee George McGovern had to replace his original pick. After McGovern’s loss in 1972, and an unsuccessful attempt to get the Presidential nomination in 1976, Shriver retired from politics, but in 1984 he returned to the spotlight as President of the Special Olympics.

New York Times

“Super-parenting or abuse?” How about neither?

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 5:58 PM - 7 Comments

Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother has elicited the sort of fury properly summoned by war crimes. No surprise there. The Yale Law School professor’s memoir about her attempt to raise her two daughters with strict “Chinese parenting” techniques combines two highly charged topics—ethnicity and child-rearing. Combustion was inevitable. As Chua tells it, she was a Type A Mom to the max, obsessive about her two daughters succeeding on her terms, believing that the regimented way she was raised by her immigrant parents gave her the tools to make choices that made her happy later in life. She was Draconian in setting goals for her girls, to whom she was endlessly devoted, refusing to praise results she saw as mediocre. She forced them to practice classical music for hours every day and deprived them of rites of modern childhood—sleepovers, play dates and computer games. Then her younger daughter rebelled and she was forced to recalibrate her approach dramatically.

Since its publication a week ago, both the book and Chua have been obsessively scrutinized—and trashed—in the media and online. The Wall Street Journal’s excerpt, “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior” (the paper’s title, not Chua’s), generated more than 7,000 comments on its website. The New York Times ran two features on Chua on Sunday, one gleefully titled “Retreat of the ‘Tiger Mother’.” Novelist Ayelet Waldman, who coined the term “sanctimommy” years ago to describe the smug judgment privileged mothers lay on one another, wrote a bombastic rebuttal in the WSJ: “In Defense of the Guilty, Ambivalent, Preoccupied Western Mom.”

Maclean’s Q&A with Chua also generated rabid comments and letters to the editor; some went so far as to suggest Chua be prosecuted for child abuse. Chua herself has been deluged with emails—even death threats. Continue…

The new civility

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 4:50 PM - 40 Comments

In post-Tucson America, the President’s health care reforms don’t kill jobs, they merely destroy them.

As evidence of a slight rhetorical shift, House Speaker John Boehner abandoned labeling the current health care law as “job killing,” and instead called it “job crushing” and “job destroying” in a new message posted on his webpage.

“Repealing the job crushing health care law is critical to boosting small business job creation and growing the economy,” Boehner wrote in the post. Boehner also said “job destroying” in his closing remarks at the GOP retreat Saturday.

Jon Stewart notes the obvious flaw in this. Andrew Sullivan is presently wrestling with the parameters of civility.

Report finds relatively high rate of sex abuse in Canada’s military

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 3:24 PM - 10 Comments

A report on criminal charges filed against soldiers and civilians associated with the military conducted by the Canadian Forces Provost Marshall reveals a high rate of sexual assaults against children and child pornography. Following Russell Williams’s arrest, Provost Marshall Colonel Timothy Grubb’s office looked into alleged offences in the defence community between 2003 and 2009, under orders from Defence Minister Peter MacKay. The report found that the “DND community,” which includes more than 110,000 soldiers and civilians, found that “sexual offences, particularly those involving children, seem to enjoy a relatively higher rate of reporting than is sometimes found in the rest of Canadian society.” Twenty-one per cent of these offences occurred at training centers. While the findings are significant and concerning, Col. Grubb suggests that it is easier for military police to detect pornography on DND computers, and that there is tougher regime in the military for sexual offences. Victims of sexual abuse in the defence community are also more willing to report complaints to military officials than in the rest of Canadian society.

The Globe and Mail

Key ministers resign from Tunisia's unity government

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 3:20 PM - 0 Comments

Over the past several weeks, widespread protests over high unemployment and high food prices have pitched demonstrators against Tunisia’s police and military and lead to the ouster of longtime president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Hoping to placate protesters, Tunisian Prime Minister Mohammed Ghannouchi announced on Monday that there would be a government of national unity. But just one day later, four ministers have withdrawn from the national unity government. Three members of the opposition General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT) were joined by Health Minister Mustafa ben Jaafar, a key opposition leader, putting pressure on Ghannouchi to resign as well. Ghannouchi defended the inclusion of members of the old regime in his new government, and said they had “clean hands” and had always acted “to preserve the international interest.” He repeated pledges made on Monday of a new “era of freedom,” which would see political parties free to operate and a free press. He said free and fair elections would be held within six months, controlled by an independent election commission and monitored by international observers. But while some protesters appeared ready to wait and see, others immediately described the new government as a sham. For now, demonstrations continue in Tunis, and new protests were reported in Sfax, Regueb, Kasserine and Sidi Bouzid—where the revolt began in December when a 26-year-old man set himself on fire.

BBC News

Leaks found in shale-gas wells in Quebec

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 3:11 PM - 1 Comment

Natural resources inspectors have discovered 11 incidences of natural gas migrating outside of shale gas wells in Quebec. All of the wells are considered to be in an “acceptable” state, and the inspector’s report says the leaks are normal and located far away from residences. However, the report also expresses concern about the release of greenhouse gas and how the leaks could potentially contaminate aquifers or, under the right conditions, cause explosions. An additional eight wells also had leaks, but they were contained within a protective casing and did not reach the surrounding environment.

Montreal Gazette

The case for a reduced vote subsidy

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 2:15 PM - 90 Comments

Duff Conacher suggests the vote subsidy needn’t be eliminated, merely reduced.

Cutting the subsidy in half (instead of eliminating it as Harper proposes) would give all parties a solid, democratically determined funding base, but still require them to reach out and regularly address the concerns of voters in order to attract their annual donations.

The subsidy should also be reduced even more (for example, cut by 75 per cent) for any party that operates only in one province or region, such as the Bloc Quebecois, because they have lower travel and operating costs than parties with riding associations and candidates across the country.

Meanwhile, Adam Radwanski finds various revelations in the current range of political donations from the public.

Baby Doc leaves hotel under police escort

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 1:08 PM - 0 Comments

Former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier left his hotel in the Haitian capital under police escort on Tuesday, barely 24 hours after he returned to the country he once ruled with an iron fist after years in exile in Paris. It’s not yet clear what the future holds for Duvalier, who met earlier with police officials and a judge at the Hotel Karibe. Haiti’s chief prosecutor was also said to be on site. According to prominent local lawyer Reynold Georges, Duvalier had called him prior to leaving the hotel requesting legal advice. In an interview with a local newspaper, Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said on Monday that were “ongoing judicial processes involving the Haitian state and Mr. Duvalier over money” and that his government was “not comfortable” with the former tyrant’s latest visit.

La Presse

Men die sooner than women due to smoking, study suggests

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 12:54 PM - 3 Comments

According to World Health Organization figures on death rates, tobacco-related illness makes up about 60 per cent of the gender health gap in most countries, the BBC reports. After smoking, alcohol makes up about 20 per cent of the difference, according to the journal Tobacco Control. While some experts have suggested women live longer because of biology, or since they’re more likely to visit doctors than men, this suggests smoking is actually the main factor. Across 30 European countries, deaths from all causes were higher for en than for women, it said.

BBC News

TV Censorship Then And Now

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 12:47 PM - 6 Comments

The only interesting moment of Harry’s Law, otherwise an indication that David E. Kelley has stretched his formula to the breaking point (and I say this as one who liked Boston Legal almost without irony, because of its broad goofiness and willingness to provide opportunities for its performers), was when Kathy Bates calls the straw-man prosecuting attorney an “asshole” and doesn’t get bleeped. This is not, I am informed, the first broadcast network show to use that word. NYPD Blue used it in its famous early seasons; it just didn’t become famous for the language because there was so much controversy over the nudity, and that took up most of the coverage.

It reminds me that censorship on U.S. broadast television is not in a linear decline; as a general rule, restrictions are lifted over time, but sometimes they snap back to where they were. The late ’90s saw a major thaw in the Standards and Practices™ at major networks, especially in terms of language: Kelly’s show Chicago Hope was the first to utter the s-word (yeah, I’m holding myself back from typing it — oh,the irony), and NYPD Blue soon followed, leading to the famous South Park episode parodying the hoopla around the casual use of that one four-letter word. Nudity also became more acceptable, particularly after 10 o’clock, thanks to the influence of Blue.

And then Janet Jackson came along and ruined it for everyone. The networks panicked and clamped down on everything, even ordering the creator of Desperate Housewives to digitally airbrush nipples out of the many scenes where his actresses weren’t wearing bras. (He complained about how different things had become since the ’90s: “I look at Friends and it’s a nipple fest.”) The result was that by the end of the decade U.S. TV was in some ways more heavily self-censored than it was at the end of the previous decade.

Yet at the same time censorship was being amped up in some areas, it was being relaxed in others, as dramas and comedies — particularly on CBS, but other networks followed — started to have more gruesome murders and more frank sex talk. So you had this weird situation where language and nudity and even violence were more restricted, but subject matter was less restricted, and gore (as opposed to gunplay and car crashes) was shown in more detail.

I don’t know how long it will take networks to crawl back to where they were in the late ’90s in terms of language and nudity, or if they’ll have to compensate by censoring more heavily in another area. I do think that ten o’clock shows probably need to get back to that NYPD Blue style of doing things you can’t do earlier in the evening or saying things network shows usually don’t say. It’s so hard to get viewers at that time, and that’s the time when competition from cable is most real and direct; if they can’t at least drop a few naughty words, they’re going to lose everybody to cable and DVR.

And yes, I’m aware that the U.S. free TV is absurdly censored compared to other countries’ — including ours. But that’s the way it has been, and that’s the way it will be. Within the limitations of what the FCC and the advertisers will allow, they probably do need to find new ways (or even the old late ’90s ways) of loosening censorship, just as a practical and commercial matter.

James Cameron plans deep-ocean dive for 'Avatar' sequel

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 12:42 PM - 5 Comments

Canadian film director James Cameron is gathering a team of engineers to build a submersible that can visit the Pacific’s Mariana Trench, the ocean’s deepest point, to gather footage for the sequel to his blockbuster 2009 movie Avatar. Only one other team has ever visited the Mariana Trench: Captain Don Walsh, a US Navy submariner, and Jacques Piccard, a Swiss engineer, who descended for five hours in a steel submersible called the Trieste in January 1960. No one has ever tried to repreat the descent, until now. Cameron’s vessel is reportedly being assembled in Australia and tests on the hull are already completed; a trial dive might occur later this year. Cameron’s engineers are studying the Trieste’s descent, in which—less than an hour into it, at a depth of 4,200 feet—a dribble of water appeared on the wall. Another leak was sprung at 18,000 feet, which sealed itself again, and at 32,400 feet (deeper than Mount Everest is high) there was a crack and the vessel’s cabin shook. But they made it.

The Guardian

Republicans launch effort to repeal ‘Obamacare’

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 12:42 PM - 1 Comment

The House of Representatives is set to begin debating the repeal of President Barack Obama’s landmark health care bill, fulfilling a campaign promise of congressional Republicans. GOP members continue to insist that ‘Obamacare’ hampers economic growth while doing little to control ever-growing medical costs. House Speaker John Boehner has scheduled floor debate for Tuesday and a vote on the measure for Wednesday. He has promised that the debate will be civil, but that doesn’t mean Republicans will refrain from continuing to call the law a “government takeover of healthcare” and employing other strong rhetoric. The measure is expected to pass the Republican-led House, but is believed to have little chance of clearing the Democrat-controlled Senate or surviving a presidential veto. Democrats have noted, among other things, the increased number of Americans covered by the law, and that a repeal of the overhaul would add $230 billion to the federal debt by 2021. Also, on the same day as the debate, the Obama administration released a report that estimates that as many as 129 million Americans under age 65 have preexisting medical conditions that could make it more difficult for them to obtain health coverage.

CNN

L.A. Times

Quebec National Assembly forbids entry to Sikh men wearing kirpans

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 12:36 PM - 28 Comments

Two Sikh men were turned away from Quebec’s National Assembly by security officers on Tuesday after they refused to remove their ceremonial kirpans. The men, both of whom are representatives from the World Sikh Organization, had been scheduled to testify at hearing into Bill 94,  the provincial’s governement controversial bill banning Muslim veils from government offices. According WSO official Balpreet Singh, the group had been in touch with National Assembly security regarding the kirpans ahead of their visit. Evidently, no accomodations could be found.

Montreal Gazette

Saskatchewan gov't tells commissioners they must perform same-sex marriages

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 18, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 10 Comments

The provincial government in Saskatchewan has decided to not appeal a unanimous court decision obliging the province marriage commissioners to perform same-sex marriages no matter their religious objections. Justice Minister Don Morgan says he’d hoped to find a way to accommodate those who oppose gay marriage after the court ruled they could no longer refuse to marry same-sex couples, but concedes his government has “not found any workable options” that would allow for it. “The Court of Appeal has clearly ruled that civil marriage commissioners must perform ceremonies for couples who meet the legal requirements,” Morgan says. “That includes same-sex couples.”

Saskatoon StarPhoenix