Chinese businessman to be deported by Canada

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 1:26 PM - 6 Comments

Han Lin Zeng, a multimillionaire businessman who has sought refugee status in Canada since 2004, fears he will face execution if he is sent home. A Federal Court ruled on Wednesday that Zeng should be deported to China. Zeng faces fraud charges in his home country, and while Chinese authorities and the Crown prosecutor have played down the possibility of the death penalty, the Chinese judicial and prison systems are notorious for torture and execution. Federal Court Judge Richard Boivin said that there was no evidence that Chinese authorities would sentence him with the death penalty, and called Zeng’s arguments “speculative as there is no evidence that the death penalty or torture can reasonably be anticipated in this case.” Zeng is accused of carrying out $8-million in stock fraud, and arrived in Canada illegally in 2004, living underground until he was discovered by immigration authorities in 2008.

The Globe and Mail

Detention of Tamil migrants costs $18-million

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 1:24 PM - 5 Comments

The Canada Border Services Agency says that the detention of the more than 300 Tamil migrants that arrived on the coast of B.C. last August has so far cost $18-million. In all, 107 Tamil migrants remain in custody, and only five have been indirectly linked to the Tamil Tiger fighters, classified as a terrorist group under Canadian law. Canada Border Services said that the total cost of detention per person is about $190 per day.

The Hill Times

'The real challenge is that we have a lack of transparency'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 12:53 PM - 43 Comments

Kenyon Wallace talks to KAIROS.

KAIROS is a faith-based ecumenical joint venture of 11 Canadian churches and organizations that promotes democratic human development and ecological sustainability in some of the world’s poorest countries … Other partners affected by the funding cut include Héritiers de la Justice, a women’s legal clinic in the Congo; the Commission for Disappearances and Victims of Violence, an Indonesian human rights group that pressures the government to investigate past military abuses and compensates victims; and Organizacion Femenina Popular, a grassroots women’s organization in Colombia that promotes community development, education and health and legal services.

Justin Bieber says you get raped for a reason, ladies (until he didn't exactly say that)

By Scott Feschuk - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 11:53 AM - 298 Comments

UPDATE (Thursday, 3 p.m. ET). From a bit just published at the AV Club: “Rolling Stone has now come forward to say that, due to an ‘editing error,’ the [Bieber] quote [about rape and abortion] was incomplete, omitting a sentence that could serve to abate the outcry somewhat. Here is Bieber’s full statement on whether abortion is justified in cases of rape, with the revised section in bold: ‘Well, I think that’s really sad, but everything happens for a reason. I don’t know how that would be a reason. I guess I haven’t been in that position, so I wouldn’t be able to judge that.’ Note that it doesn’t exactly change his feelings on the matter—abortion is still definitely not swag—but it does lessen the idea that Bieber thinks rape happens for a reason, which is a pretty big omission on Rolling Stone‘s part, don’t you think?”

•••

From the Dept. of That Interview Went Well:

“I really don’t believe in abortion,” Bieber tells Rolling Stone. “It’s like killing a baby?” (The question mark was put there by the magazine, so I guess we can assume his voice went up at the end like this? Or maybe he was asking for clarification.)

Okay, how about abortion in cases of rape? “Um. Well, I think that’s Continue…

Great Philosophers Who Failed At Love

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 11:52 AM - 0 Comments

As is only fitting for any philosophical tome, Shaffer’s amusing essay in highbrow schadenfreude offers plenty to quibble over. The author’s definition of failure, for one. Thirtysomething Peter Abelard may have begun a long-lasting love affair with Héloïse, his 17-year-old pupil, and was then castrated by a thug in the hire of her enraged uncle, but it’s difficult to say he failed at love—at modern standards of appropriate teacher-student relationships, yes, and certainly in elementary prudence. But love? And how does the fact that Thomas Aquinas, burning with zeal to join the Dominican order, turned down a prostitute’s overture represent failure on his part? Ah well, leave the definitions to the philosophers—most of his 35 guys (and two women), Shaffer has dead to rights.

Consider French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser, who strangled his wife in 1980, or Auguste Comte, who threw knives at his wife when he was in deranged mode, and blamed her for slowing down his work pace when he was sane. (As one of Comte’s biographers noted, the pioneer of social studies—who coined the word “sociology”—was only able to love humanity in the aggregate.) Diogenes the Cynic, who waged a lifelong battle against the social customs of ancient Greece—urinating, defecating and masturbating in public—believed love was for men “with nothing to do,” a convenient credo for someone who would probably have had trouble attracting a partner. The repulsive Jean-Jacques Rousseau personally delivered each of the five children he had with his seamstress lover to a foundling hospital.

But most of the philosophers, giant throbbing intellects and all, simply screwed up like the rest of us. They became infatuated with women who wanted nothing to do with them (Nietzsche), led lives of serial divorce (Bertrand Russell), or cheated on their spouses (Martin Heidegger and too many others to list). So what do the lives, as opposed to the teaching, of the great thinkers have to offer this Valentine’s Day? Only this: you can tell a disgruntled spouse that things could be worse—he or she might have married a philosopher.

J.D. Salinger: A Life

By Nicholas Köhler - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 11:52 AM - 0 Comments

For those of us raised on the perfection of Salinger’s prose, a tour through the foibles of his character, the mess of his past—”all that David Copperfield kind of crap,” as he famously put it in The Catcher in the Rye—catches one short.

That’s likely because Salinger offered few glimpses of the hard substance that lay behind his brilliant, ethereal, chatty stories and novellas, from A Perfect Day for Bananafish and beyond. Yet it was his own narrative—as a staff sergeant in the Second World War, he helped liberate Dachau—that formed the basis for both his best fiction and those notorious decades hidden, Howard Hughes-style, in a New Hampshire cottage. Holden Caulfield, his most enduring creation, was Salinger’s constant companion on the German front, where “his pockets burned with pages of The Catcher in the Rye, with their scenes of children ice-skating and little girls in soft blue dresses,” as Slawenski writes in his readable, comprehensive and only occasionally too reverent biography. Negotiating the war’s aftermath (Salinger suffered post-traumatic stress disorder) also led to the mysticism that infused the lives of his later characters.

Slawenski’s Salinger, cocky and ambitious in his youth, is all too human. He lost his first love, Oona O’Neill, to the much older Charlie Chaplin, and compared notes with Hemingway during the war. He sometimes approached women for dates claiming to be a goalie for the Montreal Canadiens. Yet the overriding trait that emerges is Salinger’s capacity for hard work (often at the expense of his relationships). His stories were rebuffed for years, particularly by the New Yorker; still, he continued writing furiously. In the end it was help from New Yorker editor William Shawn, with whom he holed up for months to produce his final novellas, that brought him closest to his goal—a fusion of fiction and prayer. Slawenski sheds no light on his output after 1965, though legend describes a vault full of unpublished fiction; what’s made achingly clear is how lonely that legend had left Salinger by the time he died last year.

Behind The Dream: The Making Of The Speech That Transformed A Nation

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 11:46 AM - 0 Comments

“The ‘Dream’ was not an ethereal idea,” Clarence Jones writes, “it was grounded.” As Martin Luther King, Jr.’s lawyer and speech writer, Jones would seem well-positioned to make that judgment. The book, written with Stuart Connelly, serves to recall just how grounded King’s words were.

The speech that punctuated 1963′s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom is regarded as one of the finest and most important speeches in the history of American rhetoric—a transcendent sermon from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that still inspires a nation half a century later. But here, Jones recounts the practical details—the logistics, politics, egos, personalities and realities of that day and that moment, up to and including the process and paperwork necessary to copyright King’s eternal words to prevent others from profiting from them. Some of Jones and Connelly’s story, notably, is reconstructed from FBI memos drawn up to record the surveillance King and others were subject to.

Jones helped draft much of what King said that day, but the crescendo—from “I have a dream” to “free at last”—was improvised, inspired on the spot by a cry from the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson watching nearby. Even that was grounded in a desire for something real. “The ‘I Have a Dream’ speech is really a call to action,” Jones writes. “It was designed, even in improvisation, to make people take a hands-on approach to transforming its vision into daily reality.”
On that note, Jones moves to consider the election of Barack Obama, the reality of race and wealth in America, and whether Martin Luther King’s dream has been fulfilled. The lesson in Behind the Dream is that greatness demands preparation and detail. And it is demonstrated not in eloquence, but in action.

Connect the dots

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 11:44 AM - 14 Comments

Jennifer Ditchburn lays out a web of political coincidence.

Both Housakos and Pentefountas worked within the Action Democratique du Quebec — Pentefountas was party president while Housakos oversaw the financing wing … Another ADQ associate, former St-Eustache, Que. mayor Claude Carignan, was named to the Senate less than a year after Housakos reached the red chamber himself … former Montreal city councillor Marcel Tremblay was named a citizenship judge in 2010. Housakos delivered the farewell speech when Tremblay left municipal office last summer. Housakos and Soudas were advisers to Tremblay’s brother, Montreal mayor Gerald Tremblay, a decade ago …

Housakos’ former business partner Nicholas Katalifos, a Montreal-area school principal, was named a chairperson on the Employment Insurance Board of Referees in 2009 …  friend and business associate, Montreal lawyer Jean-Martin Masse, was appointed to the board of Via Rail after Housakos left the same post and was named to the Senate in late 2008 … Former Mulroney-era cabinet minister Gerry Weiner, for whom Housakos worked as a young political staffer, was named by the government to the board of the Old Port of Montreal Corp. last summer.

Patriot Hearts: Inside The Olympics That Changed A Country

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 11:41 AM - 0 Comments

It was 3 a.m. in yet another hotel room and John Furlong awoke scared and disoriented. He was in the midst of a two-million-kilometre slog selling the conclave of the International Olympic Committee on Vancouver’s virtues as an Olympic bid city. This night he had no clue where he was. He wandered outside in pyjamas, cold, dazed, in bare feet, peering in shop windows until he learned he was in St. Moritz. He ran back to his hotel, praying no one had seen the addled state of Canada’s chief Olympic salesman. It wasn’t the first time the Games almost went off the rails.

One year after the opening ceremonies, Furlong, the Irish immigrant who rose from a cog in a long-shot bid to the CEO of one of the most successful mass celebrations in Canadian history, reveals the backstage drama. Patriot Hearts is a gossipy gallop across the emotional arc of the Games, from heroics on and off the snow and ice to jaw-dropping examples of petty intrigues, jealousies and tragedy. He settles some scores, admitting he shut Canada’s senior IOC member Dick Pound out of the bid process, fearing the hyper-opinionated Pound had amassed too many enemies. Furlong reveals an all-too-Canadian drama behind the opening ceremonies. A key segment of the show was built around the iconic Quebec song Mon Pays, by chansonnier Gilles Vigneault. As the event approached, Vigneault, an ardent nationalist, refused to allow his song to be used anywhere a Maple Leaf was displayed or in “any kind of setting that effectively promoted Canada as a country that included Quebec.” The segment died, and a fuming Furlong was roasted for insufficient French-language content. Score one for the nationalists.

Above all, this is a story of teamwork and leadership, how a shy, sports-obsessed introvert used boyhood lessons from the playing fields of Ireland to navigate the murky world of the IOC. It’s something to think about as you watch the kids from the edge of soccer pitches and hockey rinks. “Sports changed my life,” he says, and maybe Canada, too.

Big Mike vs. the hairstylists

By Nicholas Köhler - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 18 Comments

Photograph by Mitchel Raphael

To hear New Brunswick barbers tell it, they are members of a persecuted race whose very existence is threatened by the province’s hairstylists. As Mike Doucet, of Big Mike’s Barber Shop in Grand Bay and head of the New Brunswick Registered Barbers’ Association, puts it: “There’s a history of barbers and hairstylists here feuding.”

Now the barbers, who number just a few hundred province-wide—there are 7,800 stylists—are seeking to settle another score: they want a law regulating who can use the classic barber’s pole, preventing stylists from appropriating the pole and bringing the province in line with the 40 or so U.S. states that restrict it to licensed barbers. The barbers hope the idea will be tabled next month in the legislature as a private member’s bill; it’s believed it would be the first law of its kind in Canada.

Continue…

A Michel Tremblay classic gets an Anglo touch

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 10:45 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Cole Garside; John Mahoney/Montreal Gazette

Michel Tremblay’s Sainte Carmen de la Main, even more than his other plays, is rooted in time, place and language. So you’d think that changing any of the three would rob the play of its meaning. The time could only be Quebec in the mid-’70s, when the preponderance of big (and necessarily English) business had long dulled premier Jean Lesage’s rallying cry of “Maîtres chez nous.” Place: Montreal’s St-Laurent Street, the Main, particularly the scuffed and dirty stretch between Dorchester Boulevard and Sainte-Catherine Street. Language: French, more spat than spoken, as scuffed and dirty as the Main itself.

A bit odd, then, that the National Arts Centre has translated the play and plunked it onto a stage in downtown Toronto, complete with a Pakistani-Canadian lead and Icelandic throat singing. Re-baptized Saint Carmen of the Main, the play will show in Toronto from Feb. 7 to March 5, then move to Ottawa between March 16 and 31. It tells the story of Carmen, a country and western singer, and her return to the Main, where she dreams of singing her own songs instead of yodelling old country standards. She convinces the marginal types who populate her life that they, like her, are beautiful and have every right to be heard. Carmen’s cri de coeur is as dangerous as it is empowering, and she is beaten down mentally—and ultimately physically—by the powers that be. The allegory is as easy as it is prescient: Quebecers elected the Parti Québécois with a flourish mere months after Carmen opened. The win marked René Lévesque’s biggest triumph before his ultimate failure: the 1980 referendum.

Continue…

Where Netflix Will Take Us

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 10:44 AM - 7 Comments

Actually, I have no idea where Netflix will take us. But since the streaming service is rapidly taking over an entire continent, I thought it was interesting to read that while online streaming is growing by leaps and bounds, the number of online streamers (at least in the U.S.) isn’t growing nearly as fast:

Overall, Nielsen reported that time spent watching online video rose 45% from a year ago, although the number of viewers increased only 3.1%. Viewers streamed 28% more video and spent 45% more time watching video online.

So a similar number of people are watching almost half again as much online video. If it keeps up at this rate, there will still be a lot of people who prefer not to watch Netflix (or can’t afford it, since a paid site plus the cost of high-speed internet could make the whole thing something of an elite pastime), but the ones who do will be watching so much of it every year that we will have to undergo detox. And that means the “TV addiction” jokes that proliferated in the ’50s can be brought back in the form of “Netflix addiction” jokes.

Q & A: Gordon Campbell

By Nancy Macdonald - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 10:29 AM - 11 Comments

Later this month, three-term B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell—a three-term Vancouver mayor before that—will retire from public life. In 2010, he introduced the widely despised Harmonized Sales Tax. In November, after months of vicious public debate over the new tax, Canada’s longest-serving premier announced that he was stepping down.

Q: When you were first elected premier back in 2001, your peers included Mike Harris in Ontario and Bernard Landry in Quebec. Those seem like names from a bygone era. Does it feel like a long time to you?

A: Things change a lot less in 10 years than you’d think. It seems like a long time ago when I think about the things that were taking place. We came in with a major personal income tax cut, then we were confronted with a tech meltdown; 9/11; Afghanistan in October; SARS in November; there was a war in Iraq the next year; floods. All that stuff really grabs you right at the time you’re trying to work through a whole bunch of other things—we’d said we were going to balance our budget by 2003. So, it’s a very intense experience. But does it seem like a long time ago? Not really.

Continue…

Games on the go

By Chris Sorensen - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 10:12 AM - 0 Comments

Sony Ericsson;

The iPhone’s success hasn’t just rattled rival cellphone companies—it’s also sounded alarms among video game console makers, who fear cute, addictive mini-games like Angry Birds (the most downloaded application from Apple Inc.’s App Store) are rapidly positioning the iPhone as a gaming platform. Now Sony, which makes the PlayStation console, is fighting back with a new Xperia Play phone, which features a slide-out controller and is “PlayStation-certified.” The device is made by Sony Ericsson (partner in the joint venture) and runs Google’s popular Android operating system. A recent Super Bowl ad left little doubt that Sony is indeed targeting gamers, not your average smartphone user. The spot shows a couple of thugs, inside a dirty warehouse, stitching a pair of human thumbs on the green, cylindrical arms of the Android robot mascot—not unlike something you might run into while playing Resident Evil.

The reviews are in

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 60 Comments

The Post, Star and Citizen editorial boards say it’s time for Ms. Oda’s exit from cabinet. The Globe wants an explanation.

She now says – in Parliament – that it was she who ordered the “not” be put in. That comment cannot be squared with her testimony at the committee. There is an onus on those who appear before committees to tell the whole truth. Stephen Harper campaigned on making the committees more effective in their work. The committees are an important vehicle for holding government to account … Ms. Oda needs to sit down again with the Foreign Affairs committee and shed some light on that “not,” and on her explanations.

After millennia, bison roam Siberia again

By Nicholas Köhler - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 9:52 AM - 2 Comments

Photo by Andrey Mukhoplev

In the spring of 2006, wildlife biologists with the Canadian government loaded 30 wood bison calves, 15 males and 15 females, into three modified horse trailers and drove them from Elk Island National Park, in Alberta, to Edmonton International Airport an hour away. There they watched as a crane extended from the bowels of an Ilyushin Il-76, the Russian counterpart to the Lockheed Hercules, and collected the trailers one by one from the tarmac. During the 15-hour flight that followed, the Il-76 was kept a cool 10° C; wood bison grow uncomfortable in heat.

When they reached Yakutsk, capital of the Republic of Sakha—located in northeast Siberia and also called Yakutia—then-president Vyacheslav Shtyrov greeted the wood bison with a retinue of ministers. Alongside him, a crowd of some 200 Yakutians, many in traditional garb, performed dances and serenaded the herd with toyuk—a blessing song. To the visiting Canadians they offered raw horse liver and wood goblets filled with kumis, an alcoholic beverage made from fermented mare’s milk. Sakha newspapers later delighted in running photographs of one Canadian, mid-sip, visibly distressed by the taste of the milk.

Despite the pomp, few in Sakha had ever seen bison, which haven’t lived in Siberia since the steppe bison, an animal twice the wood bison’s size, died out 10,000 years ago. If the Yakutians celebrated the herd’s arrival, Parks Canada employees simply fretted over the transfer. Wood bison, at upwards of 900 kg, are the largest land mammal in North America, and are classified as a threatened species. Yet, five years on, their foray into Siberia has proven a success: the animals, who live on a wildlife preserve, began reproducing a year after their arrival, earlier than expected, and have grown larger than their Alberta cousins thanks, it’s thought, to the Sakha cold.

Continue…

How did NASA find 1200 new planets anyway?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, February 15, 2011 at 7:24 PM - 3 Comments

Shot and edited by Kerrin McNamara
Produced by Claire Ward

Read Kate’s article ‘The biggest story in the universe’ in the February 21 issue of Maclean’s

The Commons: 'She could not be clearer'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, February 15, 2011 at 6:39 PM - 180 Comments

The Scene. The Speaker called for oral questions and Michael Ignatieff stood, rubbing his hands together. This likely had something to with the temperature, it being frightfully cold in the capital today.

But if it was a gesture—albeit a rather cartoonish gesture—of glee, it would not be without warrant. Here the opposition was once more presented with a minister of exceeding clumsiness. The Liberal leader had not so much to formulate an interrogation than relay the official record of events and then throw his hands up in the air.

“Mr. Speaker, the Minister of International Cooperation cut funding to a reputable church organization, then doctored a document from her officials to make it look as if they agreed with her judgment when they did not and then she misled the House,” he recalled.

“This is conduct unworthy of a minister,” he ventured. ”The question to the Prime Minister is, what consequence will the minister face for misleading the House and the Canadian people?”

Here the Prime Minister stood to impose his authority upon the situation. “On the contrary, Mr. Speaker,” he said.

Indeed. A senior government official with some insight into Mr. Harper’s soul told the evening news last night that Ms. Oda maintained the full confidence of the Prime Minister. And no doubt that is true. How could it not be? If making a spectacle of oneself were a fireable offence, Mr. Harper would be without much of his cabinet. Indeed, a quick review of the frontbench would seem to indicate that by doing so so spectacularly, Ms. Oda might be in line for a promotion. If she’d somehow worked a pirate metaphor into yesterday’s explanation, she might already be Finance Minister. Continue…

Lara Logan assaulted in Egypt

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, February 15, 2011 at 5:38 PM - 33 Comments

Lara Logan, a correspondent for CBS news, was covering the celebration in Egypt the day Hosni Mubarak resigned. In the midst of their coverage of the events in Tahrir Square, she and her team were surrounded by a mob of 200 people. Logan was separated from her crew and “suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating” before a group of Egyptian women and soldiers came to her rescue. She returned to the United States where she is in the hospital recovering. Logan and CBS are refusing further comment at this time.

CBS News

David Keene on the 2012 GOP race, oil sands, border security and Donald Trump

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Tuesday, February 15, 2011 at 4:14 PM - 8 Comments

On the heels of the massive Conservative Political Action Conference, that just took place in Washington, I’ll have an interview with David Keene, outgoing chairman of the American Conservative Union, on tonight’s PrimeTime Politics show on CPAC. We’ll talk about the state of the US conservative movement, the 2012 GOP presidential field, the fallout from his decision to let in a gay rights group into the conference, and other topics including oil sands and border security.

The paper trail (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, February 15, 2011 at 4:05 PM - 107 Comments

In the prosecution of their case that Bev Oda misled the House, the Liberals have distributed a brief that points to Bev Oda’s committee testimony of December 9, an answer she gave during QP on October 28 and a written response to an order paper question filed last March that reads as follows (emphasis theirs).

Question: With regard to KAIROS, which has lost its funding from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) as of November 30, 2009 due to KAIROS no longer fitting CIDA priorities: (a) what are the CIDA priorities that did not fit well with the priorities of KAIROS; (b) what sort of criteria does CIDA examine to determine whether or not a non-governmental organization will receive funding; and (c) what specific criteria did KAIROS not meet to have their funding cut by CIDA?

Answer. (a) The CIDA decision not to continue funding KAIROS was based on the overall assessment of the proposal, not on any single criterion. (b) Non-government organizations’ proposals to CIDA are assessed on a variety of criteria, which are described on CIDA’s website www.acdi-cida.gc.ca. (c) CIDA receives more proposals than it has the resources to fund, so that even some proposals that meet the Agency’s basic criteria must be turned down.

Menu calorie counts don’t inspire kids to eat healthier

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, February 15, 2011 at 3:50 PM - 4 Comments

Children and adolescents have taken notice of the calorie counts that New York City’s fast food restaurants are required to post, but it hasn’t inspired them to cut the number of calories they’re consuming, according to U.S. researchers. A new study published in the International Journal of Obesity suggests that calorie labelling might not actually impact the buying behaviour of teens, or of parents who buy food for their kids. President Barack Obama’s new health care law aims to reduce rates of obesity by measures like mandating calorie countes on restaurant menus, and New York was the first U.S. city to do so, in 2008. But a New York University team surveyed 427 parents and teens at fast food restaurants, before and after the labelling became mandatory, and found that after labelling, 57 per cent of teens had noticed the information and 9 said it had influenced their choices. But they didn’t see any changes in the number of calories.

Reuters

The fight for fairness in foreign lands

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, February 15, 2011 at 3:26 PM - 13 Comments

Retired British war veterans living in Canada have threatened to publicly return their medals to the U.K. government if it doesn’t agree to enrich their pensions. Unlike pensioners living in Britain, retirees living in Canada don’t have their pensions indexed to the cost of living—some in Canada are receiving just 40 per cent of what they would get if they hadn’t emigrated. The Canadian Alliance of British Pensioners (CABP), which represents over 158,000 retired Britons in this country, has been fighting against the status quo for years. Britain does not index pension benefits for emigrés in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada, which don’t have reciprocal agreements with London, leaving it up to those governments to supplement the income of its impoverished pensioners. That’s costing Canada around $330 million a year, and Ottawa has long been eager to resolve the issue, but London always turned a deaf ear, according to Brian Lechem, CABP’s chair.

The International Consortium of British Pensioners, of which CABP is part, initially brought the battle to the courts, but after losing appeals in both the U.K.’s supreme court and the European Court of Human Rights, it’s now turning the fight political. While the former Labour government never paid much attention to the issue, Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats and deputy prime minister in the Conservative-led government of David Cameron, has traditionally been a supporter of the cause. With a friendlier government in charge, “we’re pushing like mad,” says Lechem. That also included leaving a book at 10 Downing St. about war veterans with non-indexed pensions. But with London on a financial austerity crusade, the odds may once again be against Canada’s British seniors.

PBO projects $10-billion structural deficit

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, February 15, 2011 at 3:19 PM - 17 Comments

The Parliamentary Budget Office projects that Canada will have a structural deficit of about $10-billion by 2015, the same year the government’s expects to have balanced the budget. In order to avoid significant debt accumulation, Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page says Canada will need to implement sustained measures that also take into account an aging population and stagnant growth. While the projected deficit has fallen from $56 billion in the 2009-2010 fiscal year to $45 billion in 2011-2012, Page says any reduction in the deficit is a result of “cyclical improvement,” meaning a structural deficit exists even when the economy is in a period of growth. The federal Conservatives have projected a $2.6-billion surplus in 2015-2016.

Montreal Gazette