But Then I Thought About the Game, The Game, The Game

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 5:44 PM - 1 Comment

The return of The Game on BET, years after being canceled when the CW divested itself of African-American sitcoms, did better than almost anyone expected: 7.7 million viewers for its first episode back. That’s something like three times as many viewers as it got on the CW network.

The Game, a spinoff from Girlfriends, followed an interesting path even before it was canceled and resurrected. Originally a regular three-camera sitcom, it got more and more dramatic, becoming a half-hour fusion of sitcom and straightforward soapy drama of the kind that hadn’t been seen since at least the ’90s. Part of this might have been due to the recognition that comedy was on its way out at the CW; the creator tried to save it by arguing that it should be retooled as a one-hour drama. It also dropped the studio audience at some point, and is now about as close as U.S. TV gets to the old form of single-camera-with-laugh-track. At a Television Critics’ Association panel, the producer even proudly admitted they’re using a laugh track to reinforce the sitcom elements of the show in the midst of the drama.

As Erin Copple Smith points out, the show’s revival on BET is both good news and bad news: good news, because it shows that BET can be a home for new episodes of sitcoms; bad news, because it will increase the perception that shows with African-American leads are not mainstream network shows.

Of course, since the CW gets fewer viewers for its show than a good cable network, it raises the whole question of what a “mainstream” network is and whether the CW is one. If this show had the potential to get a lot of viewers — and viewers who mainly fall into the young female demographic that the CW claims to be aiming at — then why couldn’t the network get those viewers? Is it about promotion, or targeting, or just that the show’s cancellation (and the save-our-show campaign connected with it) actually built its audience? It does seem like the CW decided that its African-American comedies were niche shows, only to replace them with shows that are even more “niche.”

Anyway, this is another example of what James Poniewozik calls “a big market for basic cable in making shows that broadcast networks could make, but for some reason don’t.” The thing I’m wondering about is if someday one of these basic-cable comedies could turn out to be really good. TV Land, for example. Hot in Cleveland is not a show I’m very impressed by — the actresses are pros and so are the writers, but everything is a bit standard and predictable — but TV Land is still new at this, and as they continue to draw on the large pool of talent neglected by the networks (older sitcom actors and writers) they could eventually come up with a first-rate show. Same with BET and ABC Family and other networks that are getting into the half-hour comedy game. It’s not guaranteed that their shows will get better — Nickelodeon and Disney fans frequently argue that those networks’ comedies used to be better than their later, more popular entries. But you never know: one network might find the right combination with one new show.

Brisbane spared worst-case scenario flood

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 5:26 PM - 0 Comments

Brisbane River has spared its namesake the worst case scenario flood, capping at 4.46 metres at around 5:15 on Wednesday. That’s more than a metre below the level many feared—at 5.4 metres, the river devastated the city in 1974. However, forecaster Brett Harrison said, “We still expect it to be above major flood levels until sometime during Friday and remain high over the weekend.” Brisbane is reeling from damage caused by a huge concrete walkway that broke off and was carried away with the river, “smashing everything in its path,” according to an eyewitness. Mayor Campbell Newman has announced revised predictions of the flood’s damage—modeling showed that at a peak of 4.6 metres, roughly 11,9000 properties would be fully flooded and 14,7000 partially flooded.The death toll from the floods thus far is 13, with many people still unaccounted for.

AFP

Conservative-Bloc Coalition Watch

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 4:25 PM - 91 Comments

The Conservatives might be ready to cut a deal with Quebec, which might be enough to pass the 2011 budget with the support of the Bloc Quebecois, with whose support the government was able to pass the last implementation bill of the 2010 budget.

All of which would, at the very least, appease Conservative concerns about a “needless” election.

Maxime Bernier Chessmaster Watch

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 3:25 PM - 11 Comments

The maverick backbencher manages the neat trick of stating his opposition to the government’s plans for a national securities regulator, while preemptively blaming the Quebec government if such a thing is allowed to proceed by the Supreme Court.

It was thus with full knowledge of the facts that they gave provinces jurisdiction over that sector. Nothing has changed fundamentally since then that would justify transferring this jurisdiction to the federal government.

In its arguments to the Court of appeal, Quebec’s attorney general offers no reply to his federal counterpart on any of these points. He provides none of the arguments that would be necessary to win this cause, and so risks losing it.

If that were to happen, nobody will be able to say this time that Quebec’s powers were weakened by another illegal assault from Ottawa, since our government did everything it could to follow constitutional due process. It will entirely be Quebec’s fault.

It's getting hot in here

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 2:59 PM - 53 Comments

According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), land temperatures around the world hit a record high in 2010 as heat waves led to droughts. Land-surface temperatures averaged 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) above the 20th-century average, the NOAA said in a report. The average land temperature from 1901 to 2000 was 47.3 degrees Fahrenheit, it shows. Ocean-surface temperatures were the third-highest ever at 0.88 degree Fahrenheit above the 1901-2000 average. These high temperatures led to droughts in Russia, China and South America, and hot weather caused thousands of deaths. “Several exceptional heat waves occurred during 2010, bringing record-high temperatures and affecting tens of millions of people,” the NOAA said. “The massive heat wave brought Russia its warmest summer (June-August) on record. At least 15,000 deaths in Russia were attributed to the heat.”

Bloomberg

Poll: Political vitriol not to blame for Arizona shooting

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 2:57 PM - 36 Comments

Though much of the discourse around the assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has centered on whether inflammatory political language by a certain political party is to blame for the crime, a new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll shows that most Americans disagree that heated rhetoric is to blame. Of those surveyed, a 53 per cent majority dismissed the idea as an attempt to denigrate conservatives, while 35 per cent agreed there is a legitimate point to be made about how dangerous language can be. Stricter gun control laws didn’t find much support, either, with 72 per cent saying tighter controls wouldn’t have prevented the tragedy. Most of those surveyed see inflammatory language being used by both Republicans and Democrats. And the Tea Party movement gets slightly less blame than the two major parties, although the difference is too small to be statistically significant.

Daily Mail

China to buy Canadian seal products

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 2:25 PM - 26 Comments

Federal fisheries minister Gail Shea announced from Beijing that China has agreed to buy Canada’s seal products. In a deal to be signed on January 13, 2011, China will purchase seal meat, as well as pelts and oil, providing much-needed relief to sealers following the European Union’s ban on all seal products in 2009. “The population is so high in China that if everybody buys some pelt or product from seal, we won’t have to trade anymore with Europe,” says Denis Longuépée of the Magdalen Islands Sealers’ Association. “So it’s good news for us.” Meanwhile, Canada is protesting the EU ban, advocated by international animal rights groups, to the World Trade Organization. The Fisheries Department estimates the harp seal population in Atlantic Canada to be between eight and nine million.

CBC News

Archie Bunker Turns 40

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 1:59 PM - 11 Comments

40 years ago tonight, CBS aired the pilot episode of All in the Family. It was actually the third pilot (or fourth if you count the one for the English series the show was based on), on another network than the one Norman Lear originally sold it to. ABC’s decision to turn down the second pilot — which had the same script as the final version, the same two leads, and even the same theme song — has to rank as one of the great network blunders. Though to be fair, when network executives turn down a show on the belief that they can’t make it a hit, they’re probably right.

Lear’s Till Death Us Do Part project wasn’t really right for ABC, but it was right for CBS because it was a network in the middle of overhauling its entire identity, with many shows either canceled or targeted for cancellation. Fred Silverman correctly identified All in the Family as a show around which the network could build its new identity. Few executives have been better than Silverman at figuring out what a network should concentrate on; he created completely different brands for CBS and ABC in the years he was there, and even his much-criticized tenure at NBC helped to push the network toward the comedies and workplace dramas that would become its bread and butter in the ’80s. And at CBS. he adopted a new comedy strategy that involved not only changing the look and intended audience — dumping rural single-camera shows and replacing them with urban, young-skewing live-audience sitcoms — but the content.

In particular, the early ’70s CBS strategy was to do “ripped from the headlines” comedy, based on broad social trends that viewers might have read about in the papers or seen on the news. When ’60s comedies did episodes about current trends, and they did, it was a lot like the way many of today’s comedies approach topical humour: from the outside, in a cartoonish or caricatured way. (30 Rock‘s topical jokes are often hilarious, but they’re the equivalent of the Beverly Hillbillies meeting up with hippies.) The CBS comedies of the early ’70s tried to take topical issues and approach them from the inside, creating people who weren’t just observing trends, but living them. It’s the difference between just dealing with an issue and looking at how it affects people from day to day, and it’s what sets AITF apart from the “very special episode” type of comedy. A “very special episode” is about an issue that intrudes into people’s lives for that one half-hour. Most All in the Family episodes were about characters who live with these issues every day and will never resolve them, just like in life.

The best writing on the show is in the first five seasons, under Don Nicholl, Bernie West and Mickey Ross (all of whom are dead now, unfortunately), and they really knew how to integrate the political stuff into the regular everyday feel of the show. This argument between Archie and Maude, in her first appearance, is famous because it’s not dated; the things Archie and Maude are arguing about are still being argued about today, in almost the same terms. But Ross and West, who wrote the script, make it more than just a political argument. There’s a dramatic purpose to everything that happens in the scene, because Archie is trying to get Maude out of his beloved chair. He starts the argument to get her out of the chair, and the argument finishes when he gets his chair back. That’s good dramatic writing, creating a physical component for a scene that would otherwise be all talk.

Matt Zoller Seitz has a very fine piece on “Why All in the Family Still Matters.” I have only a couple of quibbles with it. One is factual: the director of the first four seasons was not Paul Bogart but John Rich (The Dick Van Dyke Show) and it was Rich who set the style for the show. Bogart, a director of mostly single-camera television, took over in the sixth season, and steered the show towards a more cinematic look — more extreme Continue…

Bloc threatens to vote against budget

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 1:56 PM - 11 Comments

Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe says he is prepared to tell his troops to vote against the federal budget if the Conservatives don’t accede to Quebec’s demands for $2 billion in compensation for harmonizing the PST and GST. Unlike B.C. and Ontario, both of which received multi-billion dollar payments from Ottawa in exchange for harmonizing provincial and federal sales taxes, Quebec was never compensated for doing the same thing in 1992. Recent reports have suggested provincial and federal negotiators are closing in on a deal with respect to harmonization, though Duceppe described those talks as having stalled. Duceppe added that the inclusion of a payment to the province doesn’t guarantee the Bloc will vote for the budget after all.

CTV News

New Year brings drop in Conservative support

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 1:38 PM - 18 Comments

A new survey conducted by Vision Critical and Angus Reid shows support for the Conservative government has dropped slightly to 34 percent, while Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s approval rating is now tied with Jack Layton’s at 26 per cent. The NDP, meanwhile, dropped 1 point to 17 per cent. The Liberals, now at 28 per cent, gained slightly among the 1,008 Canadian adults polled, but Michael Ignatieff, now at 12 per cent, has seen a 20-point drop in public approval. Canadians are most upset with the House of Commons, which earned a 47 per cent disapproval rate. The poll concludes that “the start of 2011 did not provide a boost to the Conservative Party, with a noticeable drop across the country and in Ontario—the key battle ground for the next federal election.” The Bloc and the Greens each gained one point and now sit at 11 and eight per cent, respectively.

Vision Critical/Angus Reid

Lebanese government collapses after Hezbollah members quit coalition

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 1:17 PM - 5 Comments

Lebanon’s governing coalition is no more after 11 ministers representing the powerful Hezbollah movement and its political allies resigned and called on President Michel Suleiman to form a new government. The wave of resignations was enough to bring down Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, the son of slain leader Rafiq Hariri. The standoff between Hariri and his Hezbollah ministers centres around an ongoing investigation by the UN-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) into the elder Hariri’s assassination. Hezbollah wants Saad al-Hariri to disavow the STL as part of a U.S.-Israeli plot. The resignations come amidst unconfirmed reports the STL is set to indict senior Hezbollah members in connection with the 2005 assassination.

AFP

Grandma, Uncle Frank and Peter Mansbridge

By Scott Feschuk - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 12:40 PM - 4 Comments

KEYSTONE PRESS; ISTOCK; PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW TOLSON; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY BRADLEY REINHARDT

Who needs polling and pundits? To see what Canadians really think, just turn over CBC’s popular At Issue panel to my relatives during a big family dinner.

Peter Mansbridge With MPs away from Ottawa, we have time to look back and look ahead. Joining us to do so: our panel. Uncle Frank. Mike, the new boyfriend of cousin Audrey who we’re all meeting for the first time. And Grandma.

Grandma Thanks Peter, and I just want to say: is the roast chicken supposed to be this dry? Not that I’m criticizing.

Peter Talk about what 2010 meant for Stephen Harper.

Continue…

Five years ago

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 12:30 PM - 72 Comments

In addition to the launch of Michael Ignatieff’s winter tour, the Liberals have released their own review of Stephen Harper’s five years in office. The gist, from Mr. Ignatieff’s meeting with reporters this morning.

“I think Canadians are entitled to ask, are you better off than you were better off five years ago, “ Mr. Ignatieff said, surrounded by his candidates from the Ottawa area. “Is the economy stronger and is Canada more respected in the world? And I think the answers to all of those questions is no.”

The trouble with 'double genocide'

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 22 Comments

AKG-images/Newscom

A recent decision by the European Union has evoked the ghosts of horrors past. Last month, the European Commission rejected calls by countries in Eastern Europe to criminalize the denial of crimes perpetrated not only by Nazi but also Communist regimes, reviving a highly contentious debate over whether Soviet atrocities can be equated to the Holocaust. Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic argued that Soviet crimes “should be treated according to the same standards” as the Holocaust. But due to a lack of consensus, the proposal was rejected, though it remains under review.

The idea of a so-called “double genocide” law that links Nazi and Communist crimes concerns some Jewish commentators and Western countries. Critics paint Eastern Europe’s lobbying efforts as an attempt to rewrite history by focusing attention on its role as a victim of the Soviets rather than as a collaborator in the extermination of Jewish minorities during the Nazi occupation. Anti-Semitism, critics say, is alive and well in Eastern Europe. Lithuania, for instance, has shied away from trying some suspected Nazi war criminals, and waged a controversial campaign to investigate alleged crimes committed by Jewish partisans during the Second World War.

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A magic calorie ride

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 1 Comment

Overeating, scientists say, may make people behave more impulsively | Gabriele Galimberti/Anzenberger; Hector Vivas/Getty Images

Bob, an office supervisor in Toronto, considers himself an addict. But the substance he’s prone to abusing isn’t drugs or alcohol—it’s food. “I would gorge on Raisinets, pizza, anything that I could get in quantity,” says Bob, 60, who asked that his last name not be used. He ran up a $4,000 Visa bill, almost all of it on food. Eating as a stress release, “I averaged about 15,000 calories a day.” He weighed 336 lb. at his heaviest. “I’m no scientist, but I think it’s an addiction,” he says. “When I read about how a drug addict behaves, my response is the same to food.”

The term “food addiction” is controversial, but recent studies have shown that high-calorie foods engage the same regions of the brain as drugs like heroin and cocaine. Over time, scientists say, a high-fat diet can impair the brain’s pleasure centres like those drugs do, encouraging ever-larger binges and making it harder to quit. Remarkably, a mother’s diet might even hard-wire her baby for obesity later on in life. “It’s too early to call it food addiction,” says Teresa Reyes of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, who studies how the brain adapts to changes in diet. “But there is absolutely increasing evidence showing that the brain responds to high-sucrose, high-fat diets in a very similar way that it responds to drugs of abuse.”

Continue…

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 11:02 AM - 16 Comments

Windsor city council is voting by email.

Maghnieh said he took umbrage with the latest council matter to land in his inbox: a request to change a sign at Applebee’s on Division Road. He said it wasn’t urgent enough to warrant what he said should be a vote used only in emergencies. But city CAO Helga Reidel said that’s effectively what they’re used for anyway. She said she made the call to poll by email because the December request came in a month with no council meetings scheduled.

“It was important to that small business owner,” she said. ”It’s the 21st century. Email makes it easier to get in touch with councillors, and I think we should take advantage of it.” Reidel said the email votes are a rarity – there were about half a dozen in 2010, more in 2009 during the prolonged CUPE strike – and tend to come up only when the issue is urgent. Holding one or not is usually a judgment call.

Patrick Chan's comeback

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 2 Comments

Photography Chris Bolin; Dmitry Korotayev/Epsilon/Getty Images

A furious Patrick Chan is hard to imagine. Downcast, maybe. Buffeted enough by a bad performance, or the vagaries of figure skating judging, to temporarily lose that wide grin. But the 20-year-old throwing a foot-stomping tantrum, complete with screams and curses, is a mental image about as difficult to reconcile as a fuzzy bunny with a machine gun. It simply doesn’t compute.

Still, the affable four-time Canadian figure skating champion (once as a junior, and for the past three years running, the senior men’s winner) swears it happened, out of public view, at the Vancouver Games, last Feb. 16. On the biggest stage of his career, in front of a hyped-up home crowd and an expectant nation, Chan had bombed in the short program. He bobbled the landing on his opening triple axel, stumbled during a step sequence—usually his bread-and-butter—and even received a penalty for finishing his routine after the music, a mistake he had never before made in competition. The score of 81.12 was good enough for seventh place, but a death blow to his Olympic medal hopes. So Chan smiled, waved, threw some kisses to the fans and cameras, then slipped behind the curtains and erupted. “My coaches had never seen me so mad,” he says. “I just said to myself, that’s not the way it was supposed to turn out.” Thirteen years of skating, building toward one ultimate dream, only to see it dashed in just under three minutes. You’d drop a couple of f-bombs, too.

Continue…

Easy money men

By Chris Sorensen - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 43 Comments

Carney (below) slashed interest rates and kept Canadians spending—but helped fuel debt—while Flaherty tightened mortgage rules | Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images

When Mark Carney took over as governor of the Bank of Canada in early 2008, he had relatively little central banking experience under his belt. As fate would have it, the former Goldman Sachs managing director got plenty of opportunity to test his mettle later that year when the U.S. financial crisis erupted. He responded, perhaps predictably, by slashing already low interest rates until, by April 2009, they stood near zero. But he also took the unusual step of telling Canadians that rates would likely stay there until mid-2010.

It was a departure from the style of central banking popularized by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who was once dubbed “maestro” for his seeming ability to orchestrate economic growth (critics would say “bubbles”) through the 1990s and early 2000s. Greenspan’s speeches and statements were often masterworks of ambiguity, forcing investors to parse their true meaning and lending the man behind them an Oz-like aura.

Continue…

Do we take our own words seriously?

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 8:57 AM - 179 Comments

Conor Friedersdorf, writing about the rhetoric of Palin & Co., gets at what I think I was trying to get at the other day.

They’re in a tough spot these days partly because it’s impossible for them to mount the defense of their rhetoric that is true: “I am a frivolous person, and I don’t choose my words based on their meaning. Rather, I behave like the worst caricature of a politician. If you think my rhetoric logically implies that people should behave violently, you’re mistaken – neither my audience nor my peers in the conservative movement are engaged in a logical enterprise, and it’s unfair of you to imply that people take what I say so seriously that I can be blamed for a real world event. Don’t you see that this is all a big game? This is how politics works. Stop pretending you’re not in on the joke.”

Though the specifics and subjects are different, that sense of “humour” feels familiar. Read those last three sentences and consider how often they could be applied as a post script to what’s said here.

More from Chris Selley, Heather MacDonald, Matt Taibbi, and Keith Olbermann.

Law & Order Los Angeles Is Finally Interesting

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, January 12, 2011 at 1:18 AM - 5 Comments

Not for anything that’s happening on the show, mind you. The interesting part is that several cast members have been let go, including the lead, Skeet Ulrich. This is the fun side of Dick Wolf and his status as one of the oldest successful showrunners in U.S. television (well, he’s only 65 this year, but that’s old in the TV world, where 50 is considered over the hill for writers as well as viewers). You might, once in a while, get a very old-school way of shaking up a struggling show: no subtle changes, no fancy arcs to create a re-tool without making it look like one. Instead, three major characters just get kicked out in mid-season and the show keeps going, not even bothering to shut down production while it looks for new people.

This is a bit different from the many cast changes that transformed the original Law & Order into one of TV’s great franchises. For one thing, that show wasn’t in the same amount of trouble. For another thing, the show’s cast shakeups were mostly due to people quitting rather than being dumped, and when actors were fired it was after the show had been on for several seasons. (When the show outright fired people for the first time, at least the first time that’s been reported, it was because the network was demanding they be replaced with more female regulars — and that was a reasonable demand. Warren Littlefield improved the fortunes of at least two shows, L&O and Seinfeld, by demanding that at least one woman be added to the cast.) This is not what shows do when they’re tinkering or adjusting to unexpected reversals; this is what shows do when not much is working and they don’t midn mind admitting it.

But that’s the fun of watching one of these old-school shows operate: it doesn’t feel a need to pretend that it is working. It just lets everybody go and starts again. I hope they continue the old-school theme by letting the characters disappear without more than a line’s acknowledgement of their departure: audiences won’t care, since they have no reason to feel attached to any of these characters.

Canadian government pledges $93-million for Haiti

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 11, 2011 at 7:10 PM - 11 Comments

It’s been one year since the quake in Haiti, and the Canadian government has announced a pledge of more than $93-million for eight new initiatives to improve children’s health, education, and agriculture in the island nation. Bev Oda, the International Cooperation Minister, announced the Canadian support, which will come from the $400-million reconstruction fund that Ottawa committed last year. Programs include Canadian backing for a Pan-American Health Organization project to provide free health care for three million women and young children, backing for the building of 10 maternity clinics, a hospital maternity ward in Gonaives, and funds for a project to build 35 schools. It also backed programs to aid farmers and provide food for rural families. Despite these efforts, the federal government and other Western nations that donated money are facing criticism over not having done enough in the last 12 months.

Globe and Mail

Giffords breathing on her own

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 11, 2011 at 7:05 PM - 0 Comments

Gabrielle Giffords is reportedly breathing on her own and is under less sedation after being shot in the head, although her doctors have kept her hooked to a breathing tube. Dr. Michael LeMole has expressed surprise and optimism at her progress, saying, “she has no right to look this good, and she does.” The news comes as the Arizona state legislature voted to ban a planned protest outside the funerals for the slain victims of the Tucson shootings by the controversial Westboro Baptist Church.

CBC

Winklevoss brothers aren't finished with Zuckerberg

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 11, 2011 at 6:43 PM - 1 Comment

Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and their business partner, Divya Narendra, are working to eradicate a 2008 settlement with Facebook, arguing that the company didn’t give an accurate valuation of its shares, the LA Times reports. The $65 million settlement followed their dispute with founder Mark Zuckerberg, who they claimed stole their idea for the social networking website. Lawyers representing the brothers took their request to a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Tuesday.

LA Times

The keeper of the flame

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, January 11, 2011 at 5:22 PM - 93 Comments

Given Larry Miller’s exalted status within the Conservative government, it is almost always worth noting his comments and concerns.

“The only good coyote is a dead coyote,” Bruce-Grey Owen Sound MP Larry Miller told about 150 people during sheep day at the 45th annual Grey Bruce Farmers Week … Miller used the debate to again state his opposition to the national gun registry. He said farmers, like himself, who once a carried a couple rifles in the truck are “afraid to bring out their guns and travel around like they used to.”

“What the MNR needs to do when it comes to unregistered guns and what have you, they’ve got to start turning their heads the same way as they do with commercial fishermen that break the law,” Miller told the meeting. “Let the farmers out there that have guns do a lot of this control.”