One reference to Canada in new Rumsfeld memoir

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Tuesday, February 8, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 4 Comments

It’s on page 374 of his book, Known and Unknown: A Memoir:

The Northern Alliance was not to be our only support in this campaign. In a matter of weeks, President Bush and the Departments of State and Defense had brought together a coalition of dozens of supportive nations. At CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa, Franks assembled a “coalition village,” where representatives from partner nations provided input. Britain, Canada, Germany, and Australia offered infantry, aircraft, naval units, and special operations forces. Japan was prepared to send refueling ships, destroyers, and transport aircraft. France and Italy each offered to deploy an aircraft carrier battle group. In all, more than sixty-nine nations would eventually contribute to the coalition effort in Afghanistan.

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I am now on Twitter under luizachsavage

Stephen Harper and Canada, a love story (III)

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, February 8, 2011 at 10:13 AM - 46 Comments

From Paul and John’s consideration of the Harper Era, insight into the place of patriotism in the new Conservative party.

“We didn’t have a competing narrative,” one of them says now. “What are the symbols people talk about when they talk about Canada? Health care. The Charter. Peacekeeping. The United Nations. The CBC. Almost every single example was a Liberal achievement or a Liberal policy. We had gotten to a point in Canada where the conservative side of politics had been marginalized—where we weren’t even recognized as legitimately Canadian.”

… Harper had to carve out a patriotic vocabulary that was different from the Liberals’. “We didn’t have any illusions about displacing the Liberal vision and the Liberal narrative of Canada,” the strategist says. “But we needed to give the conservative side something to rally around.” So almost from the beginning, Harper started building a distinct right-of-centre, patriotic new vocabulary. “It’s the Arctic,” this strategist said. “It’s the military. It’s the RCMP. It’s the embrace of hockey and lacrosse and curling.” In policy terms, it included the child care cheques and the accompanying rhetoric of families able to make their own choices.

See previously here and here.

New year, new fight

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, February 8, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 9 Comments

Ten months after the Speaker’s ruling on documents related to the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan, the House is presented with a new confrontation.

The Commons finance committee in November was denied the right to see government projections of corporate profits before taxes, and was refused a look at studies on the cost of Conservative changes to the criminal justice system. Both are being withheld on the grounds they are cabinet confidences.

“Mr. Speaker, withholding the requested information from the committee does not serve the public interest,” Liberal finance critic Scott Brison said Monday in the Commons on a motion of privilege. ”In fact, withholding this information impedes Parliament’s ability to fulfil its duty to scrutinize the estimates and hold the government to account.”

America's out-of-control spending problem

By Jason Kirby - Tuesday, February 8, 2011 at 9:11 AM - 63 Comments

Pablo Martinez Monsivias/EPA/Keystone press

Standing before Congress and 43 million TV viewers last week for his state of the union address, President Barack Obama reached half a century into the past to convey the challenges facing his country in the future. “This,” he said, “is our generation’s Sputnik moment.” But if the space race, kicked off by Sputnik’s launch in 1957, was the signature challenge of a generation, it’s the rebuilding of American economic might that is the challenge now. And the enemy isn’t the Soviets, it’s the country’s towering mountain of debt: US$14 trillion and counting.

Whether Obama’s speech writers realized it or not, something else quite remarkable happened in 1957 that, while long forgotten, is far more relevant to the debt debate today. That year America balanced its books for the second year in a row. It would mark the last time the U.S. would post back-to-back budget surpluses. Instead, the U.S. has sunk deeper into debt with every passing year, save two rare exceptions: 1961 and 2001, when the dot-com bubble artificially boosted tax revenue that year.

For half a century America has lived far beyond its means. In the same way overextended households, which recklessly used the equity in their homes as ATM machines, finally collapsed under the weight of their mortgages and triggered the Great Recession, the U.S. has mortgaged its future to pay for wars, lavish health care and social security programs, government employee pensions and ever lower taxes. But many economists believe there’s a limit to how long Washington can go on borrowing before it faces a sovereign debt crisis of its own, plunging markets into chaos and triggering a crisis that will make the Great Recession look like a minor stumble. We’re already seeing several heavily indebted U.S. states like Illinois, California and New Jersey pushed to the brink—New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie has talked openly about the state going “bankrupt.”

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Copycat titles based on bestsellers and other books we could do without

By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, February 8, 2011 at 9:11 AM - 4 Comments

Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Dear everyone: Please stop writing memoirs.

That’s the gist of a recent piece in the New York Times, which argued that most autobiographies being penned these days are boring books by boring people about boring, boring lives.

Agreed. But why stop there? There are many other books we can do without.

Copycats. I get it—you’re bummed that you didn’t think of Sh*t My Dad Says, the Twitter feed that some guy has parlayed into a sitcom, a bestselling book, a Happy Meal and a Nobel Prize (I assume). Your frustration does not give you the right to burden us with Sh*t My Kids Ruined or Crazy Sh*t Old People Say, both of which are actual books. Do you have any idea how many variations on Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother we’re about to be inundated with? Battle Hymn of the Kitten Father. Power Ballad of the Heavy Metal Momma. And those are just the two that I’m writing.

Sequels and spinoffs. Congratulations—you just wrote a bestseller. We now look forward to you exploiting and ultimately betraying our goodwill with your future efforts. Consider What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which has become a bible for pregnant women, even though its relentless hectoring promotes self-loathing and fills every mother-to-be with the urge to slam the authors’ faces onto the business end of a waffle iron. What to Expect has spawned no fewer than 11 sequels, including What to Expect: The Toddler Years, What to Expect Before You’re Expecting and What to Expect When Despite All This Folic Acid Your Kid Grows Up to Be A Massive Disappointment, only one of which I made up.

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How the Conservatives plan to turn a minority into a majority

By John Geddes - Tuesday, February 8, 2011 at 8:37 AM - 92 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

From his second-floor office in Parliament’s East Block—once John A. Macdonald’s lair and still appointed with some of his furniture—Sen. Doug Finley has a direct sightline across Wellington Street to Stephen Harper’s office in the Langevin Block. He points out the Prime Minister’s window for a visitor. Asked if they ever wave to one another, Finley deadpans, “Not much.” Neither man is known for his playful gestures.

What they are known for is partnering to reshape the federal political landscape. But that relationship is now changing. Finley, 64, is undergoing chemotherapy for colorectal cancer, and is stepping down as Harper’s campaign director. He’ll remain, though, a key adviser to the Tory machine, which he largely assembled and kept oiled for eight years. He recently summed up his role this way: “I’m not the world’s greatest strategist, or the world’s greatest pollster, or the world’s greatest advertising man, but somebody has to pull these bits together.”

That’s a deceptively chipper job description for a notoriously hard-driving party boss. Finley’s few moments in the public spotlight solidified his reputation as a tough customer. He was once ushered out of a House committee room by security, after he showed up at hearings demanding to testify according to his own timetable, refusing to wait to be called. He banished would-be Tory candidates who didn’t meet with his approval. He lashed out at the CBC in a fundraising letter to Conservative supporters.

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MPs in kilts

By Mitchel Raphael - Tuesday, February 8, 2011 at 8:30 AM - 7 Comments

Speaker Peter Milliken’s held  his 10th annual Robbie Burns dinner. Below, Defense Minister Peter Mackay (left) and NDP MP Pat Martin bring in the haggis.

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Ontario Conservative MP Ed Holder

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Bloody Bradley Bird

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, February 7, 2011 at 6:29 PM - 1 Comment

I don’t want to turn this blog into a clip aggregator (more than it already is, I mean), but I had to spotlight this one: Brad Bird received the Annie Awards’ Winsor McCay award for lifetime achievement in animation, and his acceptance speech, starting at 4:30, is a rare case of a speech that is actually better because the winner couldn’t deliver it in person. You’ll see what I mean if you watch to the end.

The first part of the video is good too, since it includes highlights from Bird’s career, and confirms that he’s perhaps the most important figure in modern commercial, for-profit animation — almost everything he does turns out good, for one thing. For another thing he’s repeatedly found a way to bring the values of classic animation to media that didn’t always seem to have time for them: first he helped The Simpsons do characterful animation and visually-interesting storytelling on a TV budget, also animating many of Krusty the Klown’s scenes himself because he loved the character so much. Then he helped get rid of a lot of the stiffness that plagued (and to some extent still plagues, if he’s not directing) Pixar’s animation of humans. And he was in control of his three features to an almost unprecedented extent: big-studio animated features are usually committee things where the personality of the studio is clearer than the personality of the director, but Bird’s movies are Brad Bird films as much as those of any live-action writer-director.

He can joke about it, but one reason a lot of people are disappointed in his decision to switch to live action is the fear that if he doesn’t come back to animation, there’s no one quite as good to take his place. Hopefully he’ll come back eventually.

The Commons: Lawrence Cannon sees what's going on here

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, February 7, 2011 at 6:23 PM - 46 Comments

The Scene. From the vantage point of the press gallery, perched several feet over the Speaker’s right shoulder, it is impossible to see whether Ralph Goodale actually underlines the words he wishes to emphasize when he writes out his questions for QP, or whether he improvises on the spot as the mood strikes him. Lecturing the House in his particular way, an affected baritone rising up out of a broad-chested, square-shouldered man, he lands with a certain thud on just about every fifth word, drawing our various pronouns, adverbs and adjectives so as to be sure he has our attention. Here one hears a man who has spent some time thinking about how he will be heard.

His particular concern this day was the government’s late admission of negotiations with the United States toward reimagining the 49th parallel.

“We need to ask,” Mr. Goodale asked, “what is the Prime Minister prepared to bargain away? For example, with respect to the admissibility of visitors, immigrants and refugees, will Canada apply its own standards, which many Canadians believe are better than American standards, or will a Republican Tea Party congress make the rules?”

For sure, if we owe the Americans anything in these discussions, it is surely for the endless number of cartoonish villains they have supplied for the sake of our fear and ridicule these many years. For the sake of Michele Bachmann alone we should perhaps consider sending them Don Cherry and a few cartons of Cold-FX.

So challenged, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon was apparently compelled to acknowledge that for which the government had previously pleaded ignorance. Continue…

Five dead at ancient temple on Cambodia-Thailand border

By macleans.ca - Monday, February 7, 2011 at 4:57 PM - 13 Comments

Cambodia’s prime minister, Han Sen, is calling on the UN to provide troops for a “buffer zone” after violence flared on the border with Thailand near the eleventh-century Preah Vihear, a Hindu temple and UNESCO World Heritage Site. At least five people have been killed, another 45 were injured, and 6,000 have fled the local area in Thailand due to the violence. Three of those killed were soldiers and the other two were civilians, one from each side. Cambodia says that Thailand shot first and damaged the temple. Thai officials deny they caused any damage and say they only shot in self-defense. UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon says he is “deeply concerned.” Thailand and Cambodia both claim ownership of the temple, which the International Court of Justice awarded to Cambodia in 1962.

The Telegraph

BBC News

Maclean's test drives the Nissan Leaf electric car

By macleans.ca - Monday, February 7, 2011 at 4:31 PM - 6 Comments

Read Chris’ article on electric cars vs. hybrids in the Feb. 22 issue of Maclean’s

Detained and transferred

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, February 7, 2011 at 3:49 PM - 3 Comments

On Friday, the Defence Department released statistics on the number of individuals detained and transferred during operations in Afghanistan in 2009. The year set a new high mark for the number of those detained, but only 40% of those individuals were transferred.

In 2009, the CF detained 225 individuals. One (1) individual detained in 2008 remained in custody into 2009, bringing the total of detained individuals in 2009 to 226. Of the 226, 126 were released by the CF, while 92 were transferred. One (1) individual died of wounds as a result of injuries suffered on the battlefield. The individual passed away at the Role 3 hospital while receiving medical care. Seven (7) individuals were detained near the close of 2009 but remained in CF custody until 2010.

Ikea vs. Jysk: Is ‘Danny’ the poor man’s ‘Billy’?

By macleans.ca - Monday, February 7, 2011 at 3:11 PM - 2 Comments

Read Jason’s article ‘Jysk: the poor man’s Ikea,’ in the February 14 issue of Maclean’s

Jysk: the poor man's Ikea

By Jason Kirby - Monday, February 7, 2011 at 2:53 PM - 5 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

The iconic Billy bookcase from Ikea helped transform the Swedish retailer into a global giant, cemented its reputation as the go-to source for stylish, inexpensive knock-down furniture, and made Ikea’s Scandinavian founder Ingvar Kamprad a billionaire.

Billy, meet Danny. In the Jysk Bed Bath Home store in Surrey, B.C., the Danny bookcase stands amid oddly familiar looking futons, desks and chairs. Never heard of Jysk (pronounced Yisk)? It’s a Danish retailer that’s emerged as a global giant, is known for inexpensive knock-down furniture, and has made its Scandinavian founder Lars Larsen a billionaire. Oh, and with the exact same dimensions and style as Billy, Danny just happens to be 15 per cent cheaper, too.

Jysk: the poor man’s Ikea.

Over the past 15 years, Jysk has plotted one of the stealthiest, albeit quirky, retail invasions in Canada. From its Canadian head office near Vancouver, the discount chain operates 40 stores from coast to coast, yet has almost no national brand recognition. Now, while the retail world is abuzz over Target’s impending arrival from the U.S. in 2013, the Danes are plotting a hyper-expansion of their own here. Jysk is set to open at least 20 new stores a year over the next three years in a bid to make Jysk a household name. “We’ve survived and thrived for 15 years by offering Canadians quality for the lowest price,” says Ludvik Kristjansson, the CEO of Jysk’s Canadian operations. “I see no limit to how much we can grow.”

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Taliban seek distance from al Qaeda: report

By macleans.ca - Monday, February 7, 2011 at 2:32 PM - 1 Comment

The U.S. has committed an “intelligence failure” in its effort to reach a separate peace with the Taliban that would keep al-Qaeda out of Afghanistan, according to a report by New York University’s Afghanistan Regional Project. In investigating the bonds between the two groups, Kandahar-based researchers Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn found that the U.S. missed some key clues from the Taliban that the Afghan group may want to loosen ties with al Qaeda. “In our analysis, there is interest among the Taliban,” van Linschoten wrote in an email to Wired. “A call on them to make the first step, however, when the U.S. and other stakeholders lack any significant initiative, seems unlikely to produce results.” The report details the “complicated” relationship between the two groups, going back to the Taliban’s discomfort with al Qaeda’s agenda pre-9/11.

Wired

VANOC feared lugers would get “badly injured or worse”

By macleans.ca - Monday, February 7, 2011 at 1:35 PM - 11 Comments

Almost one year ago today, Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili, 21, died on a training run just hours before the Vancouver Games’ opening ceremonies. Today, documents obtained by The Globe and Mail show that VANOC chief John Furlong expressed concern that an athlete could get “badly injured or worse” on the controversial sliding track in Whistler almost a year before the Games began. In March 2009, Furlong received a copy of a letter sent to the luge track’s designer from the president of the International Luge Federation, Josef Fendt. Fendt expressed worry about the track’s speeds and the potentially unreasonable demand on the athletes. Following this, Furlong wrote to VANOC officials that echoed Fendt’s concern. “Imbedded in this note [cryptic as it may be] is a warning that the track is, in their view, too fast and someone could get badly hurt. An athlete gets badly injured or worse, and I think the case could be made that we were warned and did nothing. That said, I’m not sure where the way out is on this. Our legal guys should review at least.” The response from Tim Gayda, vice-president for sport, was: “I don’t believe there is anything to do.”

The Globe and Mail

The view from afar

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, February 7, 2011 at 1:34 PM - 169 Comments

Alex Massie, who resides on that far off foreign island where Michael Ignatieff used to live, notes the Conservative party’s latest attack ads.

The only problem with this? It risks making the Conservatives seem provincial and oddly jealous of anyone who dares leave Canada and succeed somewhere else. Wrapping yourself in the Maple Leaf is fine and dandy but it can make you seem small too. Even when your target is Michael Ignatieff…

Canada-EU trade deal will increase drug costs for Canadians

By macleans.ca - Monday, February 7, 2011 at 1:04 PM - 20 Comments

A new trade deal between Canada and the EU could add about $2.8-billion in annual costs to Canadian drug plans, according to a report commissioned by the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association. The EU has asked for significant changes to patent laws for generic drugs, which regulate the amount of time before a generic drug company can reproduce a patented brand name drug. Patented drugs are generally more expensive than their generic counterparts. The changes include extending patent protection by up to 5 years, lengthening data exclusivity, and strengthening notice of compliance regulations. Aiden Hollis, professor of economics at the University of Calgary and the co-author of the report, said “the reasonable inference is that these changes are designed to allow innovating pharmaceutical firms to charge monopoly prices for a longer period.” Brand name drugs manufactured in the EU are a leading export to Canada, with $5.3-billion in pharmaceutical products imported by Canada from the EU in 2009.

The Globe and Mail

They Can Do Anything With Computers Now

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, February 7, 2011 at 12:44 PM - 4 Comments

The other Super-Bowl-Ad-related video I’d like to direct your attention to is this side-by-side comparison of a promotional ad with the original clips it’s taken from. The promo assembled a bunch of scenes from popular TV comedies and digitally altered most of them to include football jerseys and other logos and paraphernalia. As we’ve already seen with the famous video about digitally-created backgrounds in TV shows, digital technology is advanced enough so that they can do this kind of thing almost seamlessly. They can also change the look of a show: a non-comedy, The Sopranos, has the lighting and colour scheme changed so it looks more like a comedy.

Of course it probably takes a fair amount of money to do it well. When How I Met Your Mother put all those numbers into the background of the “countdown” episode, it was often pretty obvious that they had been digitally added in post. But HIMYM may not have had the kind of money to make the digital additions blend in perfectly.

(Found via The HeldenFiles.)

The lack of money may well be the only thing stopping colourization and other digital alterations from really coming back in full force; there probably is the technology now to do computer colourization better than it was done in Ted Turner’s heyday, but it would take a larger investment than most studios are willing to make. Still, I would not be at all surprised if, eventually, the studios start undertaking a program of alterations to their movie and TV catalogues. I don’t want to give them ideas, but it is now possible to add product placement to their old shows and make extra money on the reruns. Scary but true.

When sex doesn't sell

By Chris Sorensen - Monday, February 7, 2011 at 12:43 PM - 2 Comments

Just before Christmas, online classified service Craigslist pulled the plug on its controversial erotic services category in Canada in response to growing political pressure from Ottawa and several provinces. The move followed a similar decision in the United States after 39 state attorneys general wrote to CEO Jim Buckmaster requesting the category, nestled innocently between more mundane sounding services like “automotive” and “farm + garden,” be banned because of growing public concern that “ads for prostitution—including ads trafficking children—are rampant” on the website.

Of course, Craigslist is not the only place offering ads for erotic services. Pick up a Yellow Pages or any one of several weekly papers in major cities and there’s plenty of adult-oriented entertainment to choose from, including pages of ads for “erotic massage” and escort services—several of which no doubt intend to telegraph sex for sale. Go elsewhere on the Internet and the sky’s the limit.

But while Craigslist grabbed attention after its ads were connected to a grisly murder, dubbed the “Craigslist Killer” by media, it’s far from the first time a company has been singled out—some say unfairly—for dabbling in adult content. “It’s very difficult to predict social attitudes and mores around sex,” says Alan Middleton, a marketing professor at York University’s Schulich School of Business in Toronto. “Some of it is purely time and place and the way companies purport themselves.” In other words, when it comes to selling sex, executives walk a razor-thin line between profit and morality, or at least the public’s current conception of it.

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Gino Vannelli: Just visiting

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, February 7, 2011 at 12:11 PM - 15 Comments

Rick Mercer launches his campaign against the 80s soul singer.

A stylish little gas guzzler

By Chris Sorensen - Monday, February 7, 2011 at 12:10 PM - 1 Comment

The tiny, stylish Fiat 500 is tasked with filling a gaping hole in Chrysler’s lineup when it comes to small fuel-efficient vehicles. (Known for its big, throaty cars and trucks, the troubled American automaker was forced into a merger with the Italian Fiat as a condition of its taxpayer bailout.) But if the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ratings are any indication, North Americans shouldn’t be expecting huge fuel savings over the competition when the 500 arrives in dealerships this year.

The EPA gave the automatic transmission version of the 500 a 27/34 mpg rating, referring to city and highway mileage (a manual transmission version does better at 30/38 mpg). That’s not bad, but writers on Auto­blog were quick to point out that larger compact cars like Ford’s Focus and the Chevrolet Cruze are both capable of attaining 40 mpg, depending on transmissions and option packages.

Of course, a quick glimpse of Fiat’s Canadian website, with its thumping music and glitzy flash video, suggests Chrysler intends to sell this small car based on attributes other than just its performance at the pump—a pitch Chrysler should have down to a science, given its muscle-car history.

William and Kate, while supplies last

By Patricia Treble - Monday, February 7, 2011 at 12:06 PM - 2 Comments

A plate inscribed with “Will 4 Kate 4 Eva” might not be granny’s idea of a suitably respectful royal wedding souvenir, but it has proved a surprisingly popular hit for one London design firm. After bemoaning the “very old-fashioned” flood of merchandise that appeared on the market after the wedding was announced, Dave Bell, creative partner of K.K. Outlet, gave his designers a simple brief: “Make royal wedding memorabilia for the Facebook generation.”
The results are pure cheek. Plates with “Thanks for the free day off” acknowledge the public holiday on April 29, while another inscribed with “It should have been me” captures the sentiment of many young women after a commoner bagged herself a prince. Initially, Bell expected to sell a couple hundred of the plates. Now, after thousands of  pre-orders, he expects to move upwards of 10,000, at $25 each, including some at a special sale on the big day itself at the Victoria & Albert Museum.

Ever since Queen Victoria’s reign, British manufacturers have been churning out royal commemorative products (everything from stamps to tea cozies) to mark royal weddings, jubilees and even deaths. Most sell in such numbers that their value never increases. The souvenirs are like Christmas cake; few admit to buying them, yet enormous quantities are consumed.

Still, with the world struggling economically, and a more cynical attitude toward the royal family, virtually everyone was caught off guard by the demand for souvenirs after Prince William and Kate Middleton announced their engagement. “It has been manic since Nov. 16,” says a relieved Stephen Church, general manager of his family’s 153-year-old retail china firm in Northampton. “The big difference with this wedding is that it’s the first in the Internet era. Now everyone can join the party.” Online orders account for around 90 per cent of his commemorative sales, including replica engagement rings for $60 and Caithness glass paperweights for $315. Fully three-quarters are from overseas buyers, especially Americans, who “have a more rose-tinted view of royalty. They believe the fairy tale,”

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AOL buys the 'Huffington Post'

By macleans.ca - Monday, February 7, 2011 at 11:53 AM - 3 Comments

AOL announced on Monday it will acquire The Huffington Post, the popular progressive online news aggregator, for $315 million. The immediate benefit for AOL, whose market share has declined since separating from Time Warner in 2009, is that it will be able to expand its newsgathering service and original content creation. Meanwhile, Arianna Huffington will essentially become the public face of AOL, as she now will oversee the company’s national, local and financial news operations, as well as the company’s other media acquisitions such as MapQuest and Moviefone. She will also become the editor-in-chief of the new Huffington Post Media Group, which controls AOL’s editorial content. The Huffington Post, with was founded in 2005 by Arianna Huffington and Kenneth Lerer in 2005 with a meager $1-million dollar investment, is expected to generate $60-million in revenue this year.

New York Times

Huffington Post