Elections Canada charges Conservative officials with campaign violations

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 25, 2011 at 10:45 AM - 99 Comments

Elections Canada has charged four high-ranking members of the Conservative party, including two senators, with violating campaign spending rules. The four are Senator Doug Finley, Senator Irving Gerstein, Michael Donison, and Susan Kehoe. The charges are regulatory in nature—not criminal—and related to the Conservatives’ use of a controversial “in-and-out” tactic in 2006 to move money between the national and local campaigns. Elections Canada alleges the strategy allowed the party to exceed spending limits on national campaigns.

CBC News

This week: Good news, bad news

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 25, 2011 at 10:41 AM - 1 Comment

Chinese researchers in costume move a cub being reintroduced to the wild

Facing the music

Justice Richard Boivin of the Federal Court got it right when he ruled that multi-millionaire Han Lin Zeng must answer non-capital charges of fraud back in China—notwithstanding claims he might face other indictments punishable by death. Canada’s policy against deporting people who face execution is proper, but Ottawa is hardly in a position to assess potential future cases against an accused. And as Maclean’s recent piece on the convicted Bangladeshi assassin Nur Chowdhury illustrates, this country is playing host to more than its share of miscreants and murderers ducking punishment in their homelands. Han Lin Zeng must go.

Madame premier

Something about provincial politics is drawing women back toward public life. In Alberta, Progressive Conservative Alison Redford and veteran Liberal Laurie Blakeman are seeking their parties’ respective leadership nominations—and the chance to take on Danielle Smith of the upstart Wildrose Alliance. In B.C., Christy Clark is considered the front-runner to replace Gordon Campbell, while all three party leaders in Newfoundland are women. Canada could soon witness a first ministers’ conference featuring a trio of female premiers. It won’t come a moment too soon.

A better way

It wasn’t the new provincial party media predicted, but the launch of a conservative-leaning political movement in Quebec offers a beacon to those who reject visions of the place as a sovereignist, taxpayer-funded utopia. The Coalition for the Future of Quebec wants to bring probity to a province it says is crippled from endless debates over secession and rife with public sector graft—to wit, the latest round of corruption allegations within Montreal city council. If Quebecers can’t vote for the “CFQ” now, they might soon want to.

Waste not, want not

India has found a solution to soaring food prices: simpler weddings. The government says 15 per cent of all grains and vegetables are tossed in the trash after “extravagant and luxurious” receptions, and is proposing a new law that will “curb profligacy” and ensure extra food stocks for the poor. We propose a toast.

Americans Phyllis Macay and Bob Riggle were killed by Somali pirates

Buy now, pay later

Canadian families are swimming in debt—and the pool is getting deeper and deeper. Not only has the average household deficit surpassed $100,000 for the first time, but debt-to-income ratio has also reached a record high (150 per cent, which means that for every $1,000 in after-tax income, families owe $1,500). At the same time, annual savings have plummeted, from 13 per cent in 1990 to just 4.2 per cent last year. With so many unpaid bills piling up, it’s no wonder Canadians are flocking to booze like never before. According to a separate report, our wine consumption over the past decade has grown six times faster than the rest of the world.

Still trust your doctor?

If you’re reading this magazine while sitting in a physician’s waiting room, beware. In British Columbia, a radiologist with three decades of experience is under investigation after misreading seven CT scans in one weekend. In Montreal, a lung specialist was suspended and fined for using a hidden camera to film more than a dozen naked patients. And in Toronto, two doctors are behind bars after allegedly drugging and sexually assaulting a woman at a downtown hotel.

Assumed risk

It was another fatal week for folks who strayed from the beaten path while enjoying the mountains. Three snowmobilers died in the backcountry near Golden, B.C.—buried by an avalanche they likely triggered—while a skier was killed after he went out of bounds at Lake Louise, Alta. We understand that danger is all part of the thrill, but there are endless warnings about the risk of going outside the ropes. When will the fun-seekers take them to heart?

Sick with anticipation

The royal wedding invitations are in the mail—and if the early reports are any indication, the guest list is not exactly majestic. In are David Beckham, Posh Spice, and the owner of Kate Middleton’s favourite pub. Out are Barack Obama, the first lady, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Said a royal aide: “Prince William has led a fairly ordinary life in the military and the couple’s guests reflect this.” Those “sick” over not making the cut can always purchase the latest in royal wedding souvenirs: William and Kate barf bags.

The House: 'When politicians speak to us'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 25, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 9 Comments

Rather than simply lament for how little attention is paid to the institution, I thought I’d ask some smart people if they had anything to say in response to my piece about the state of the House of Commons. Over the next little while, those responses will appear here. First up, Nick Taylor-Vaisey.

Does Canada’s House of Commons matter? Well, it can matter. But that all depends on what our MPs are talking about and how they’re approaching the conversation.

Remember that debate about the gun registry? Civil it might not have been, but was it popular? You bet. People paid attention because they cared about what was at stake. It helped that Ottawa’s politicians had just returned from a summer break, and news media around town were looking for a juicy story. But people everywhere were talking about the gun registry. The House of Commons mattered. Continue…

The charges

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 25, 2011 at 9:38 AM - 32 Comments

Elections Canada has now issued a short statement, including the official charges.

The charges were officially laid by the Commissioner of Canada Elections William Corbett. More on previous sentences and compliance agreements here.

What Canada can do about Libya

By Paul Wells - Friday, February 25, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 29 Comments

Max Rossi/Reuters

The West supplements a shaky knowledge of the Middle East’s history with a determination to forget its own. There’s a reason why Moammar Gadhafi turns up next to so many Western leaders—Tony Blair, Jacques Chirac, Paul Martin, Nicolas Sarkozy, Portugal’s José Socrates—in photographs from a few years ago. The insane Libyan was the poster boy for a certain model of international relations. Now is a good time to understand that model, why it is dying, and what countries like Canada can do next.

In October 2001, a month after the terrorist attacks on Washington and Lower Manhattan, Pentagon adviser Richard Perle sat down with Linda Frum for an interview that was published in the National Post. “After we have destroyed the Taliban,” he said, “the message to the Syrians, the Iraqis, the Iranians, the Yemenis, the Sudanese and others should simply be, ‘You’re next.’ It may be necessary to destroy two of these regimes before the others understand that we’re serious.”

This was the dominant model for Western relations with the Middle East and North Africa after 9/11. The United States, in concert with willing allies, would go around the region shooting until dictators started to get in line. I don’t want to make too much fun of the notion. There was urgent peril. Soon London and Madrid were attacked too. There didn’t seem to be a lot of alternatives. But once the Americans had destroyed two nasty regimes, in Afghanistan and Iraq, it became urgent to start collecting trophies, however tarnished.

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Gadhafi's last stand

By Michael Petrou - Friday, February 25, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 5 Comments

Asmaa Waguih/Reuters;

In December 2004, then-Canadian prime minister Paul Martin visited Moammar Gadhafi in the oversized Disney World-style tent the Libyan dictator used to entertain guests, and declared him to be a “philosophical man with a sense of history.”

Martin was angling to land a billion-dollar contract for the Montreal firm SNC-Lavalin, which perhaps discouraged him from more accurately describing Gadhafi as malicious, cruel and almost certainly insane. But then, Gadhafi’s idiosyncrasies have always been more interesting to those outside the country than details about how he ruled Libya. Journalists accompanying Martin in 2004 got a lot of mileage out of two camels mating outside the tent while Martin and Gadhafi chatted inside. So did Martin—he included the anecdote in his 2008 autobiography, Hell or High Water.

Gadhafi, the man who is now fighting to hang on to power, and who has unleashed a wave of brutality against his own people, has long been a seemingly endless source of similar colour. There is his insistence on setting up that climate-controlled tent in foreign capitals; his all-female bodyguard unit; his strange fashion sense; the Ukrainian nurse with whom he travels—”a voluptuous blond” according to a U.S. diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks. All this distracts from decades of international terrorism, skulduggery and crushing repression at home.

Continue…

Charges laid

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 10:41 PM - 145 Comments

An anonymous Conservative official tells the CBC, Postmedia, CTV and the Star, that four party officials have been charged by Elections Canada in connection with in-and-out campaign financing: Doug Finley, Irving Gerstein, Michael Donison and Susan Kehoe.

More background from Pundits Guide here and here. Kady O’Malley has the official Conservative talking points on this “long-running accounting dispute.”

They should replace Charlie Sheen with Randy Quaid

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 9:30 PM - 15 Comments

Okay, so here’s a brief run-down on what happened with the very run-down Charlie Sheen today:

- In an interview with crazy radio host Alex Jones, the crazy actor said crazy things, but for the first time, ripped into the show’s creator, Chuck Lorre, calling him by his original Jewish name as an apparent slur (“Chaim Levine” — one wonders what Sheen would think when people use his real name to imply that his ethnicity is something to be ashamed of) and calling him a “charlatan.”

- Reached by TMZ and given an opportunity to clarify his statement about his boss, Sheen doubled or maybe tripled down, saying “I violently hate Chaim Levine” and going on a rant that ended with him saying “you can tell [Chuck Lorre] one thing: I own him.”

- CBS and Warner Brothers had been planning to re-start production on Two and a Half Men on Monday, albeit in a very precarious way. (There were reports that they were planning to do the show without an audience because they can’t depend on Sheen to work for an entire evening in front of hundreds of outsiders.) Shortly after the second TMZ interview, they announced that the show would be shutting down production for the rest of the season, with only 16 episodes filmed and no more in the can.

- Sheen responds to the shutdown with an open letter calling Lorre a “contaminated little maggot [who] can’t handle my power and can’t handle the truth.”

To the extent that you can make any sense out of Sheen’s rage against his boss (who defended him pretty consistently until recently when the show’s ability to stay in production was seriously threatened), it seems like he’s enraged at a) The fact that he was forced to go into what is laughingly termed “rehab” and give up a few paychecks this season, and b) The fact that the creator finally used his vanity cards to take a few shots at him.

It does seem like Sheen was almost deliberately trying to provoke something like this. Crazy isn’t the same thing as stupid, and his comments seem calculated to make it impossible for the show to re-start as planned — it’s either him or Lorre, and since he has two other shows that are set for long runs, CBS needs Lorre more than it needs Sheen. That’s why this is turning out differently than Lorre’s Grace Under Fire and Cybill, on both of which the star turned against him and got him fired.

Why Lorre attracts crazy stars is something I’m not even going to try to figure out, except to note the irony: he’s spent years being bitter about his treatment by diva female stars (Roseanne, Cybill, Brett), even writing it into a CSI episode with Katey Sagal as a sitcom star who gets murdered. So he turned to guy-centric shows and now has found out — or should have found out, anyway — that Charlie Sheen is worse than three Cybill Shepherds.

The worrisome thing about CBS’s decision to cancel the season (losing lots of money and depriving the crew of one-third of the money they were counting on) is that it suggests that they’re hoping Sheen will eventually come back. Think about it: if they were just going to get rid of Sheen, they wouldn’t cancel the season, they’d just order the writers Continue…

Coyne v. Wells on the uprising in Libya

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 7:24 PM - 8 Comments

RELATED: Read Paul’s column—‘What Canada can do about Libya’—in the March 7 issue of Maclean’s

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Your tax dollars at work (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 5:11 PM - 24 Comments

Kady O’Malley has the most comprehensive round-up of today’s parade. Some select highlights.

Did you know Ponoka has an aquaplex? Well, now you do – and it has new tiles, and all sorts of other fancies, thanks to the CEA!P … A return appearance at the Mirror Jolly Seniors Social Club that was the backdrop for a previous CEA!P appreciation event by Calkins! … Given the dearth of alternate scenarios, this appears to be a ministerial tour of the CEA!P-renovated locker rooms at the Crowfoot YMCA … Almost certainly a “celebration” of the Horseshoe Bay Underpass resurfacing.

SparMail: so Jean Charest and Francois Legault don't walk into a bar…

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 4:25 PM - 6 Comments

MARTIN PATRIQUIN Oh, hi Phil. How’s the weather in Toronto? Here, it’s sunny with promises, gusty with hubris and there’s a pretty damn good chance of rhetoric. Speaking of, did you hear/read/smell Charest’s speech yesterday? He’s back, baby! rising like a phoenix from the ashes of, uh, his own government! It’s amazing to watch: he prorogues parliament, takes a few hours off from sweating out the go-back-to-work-now business with the province’s prosecutors, and all of a sudden it’s Charest 3.0.

This is the narrative the Liberals sold, anyway, and apparently people like us have bought it whole hog. From Le Journal de Montréal/Québec’s “He’s Still Got Some Breath In Him” to CP’s “Charest hits the reset button on legislature” to the Globe’s “The Survivor of Quebec” to The Gazette’s “Charest paints broad picture for Quebec”, it seems selling Charest’s Don’t Call It A Comeback is easy as pie for the narrative-obsessed headline writers of this country. Continue…

Photo gallery: The Oscars take over Grand Central Terminal

By Zoran Milich - Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 4:15 PM - 2 Comments

Driving in L.A. with Oscar-nominated director Denis Villeneuve

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Read Brian’s article about spending three days in L.A. with Villeneuve—‘Just watch him’—in the March 7 issue of Maclean’s

The Death of the Miniseries, In Emmy Form

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 3:56 PM - 2 Comments

After two straight years in which there had been only two nominees for Best Miniseries, the TV Academy’s rules gave it the right to eliminate that category, and that’s what it’s done, by merging it with Best TV Movie. This is in line with the way other awards do it, but it’s still a sad reminder of the decline of the full-fledged limited-run miniseries. It’s understandable why they’ve declined; there’s usually a preference for making something a continuing series. There are shows today that could have been, and possibly would have been, miniseries in another era; you could see The Walking Dead as a miniseries with a possible sequel to come if it catches on, rather than a six-episode first season with many more seasons to come. Not everything should be an open-ended series, but most things are going to be — an obvious exception being Trudeau or John Adams type of stories about historical figures, which have to end but are too big to fit into one movie.

Another rule change that reflects how TV has changed is the award for Best Cinematography. Once split into half-hour and hour categories, it’s now been changed to multi-camera and single-camera categories. This makes sense, since the two types of cinematography are so very different. It’ll be interesting to see, though, how comedies do in the single-camera category; they’re shot faster than dramas and with less ostentatiously spectacular photographic effects, so just as comedies rarely get their due in movie cinematography awards, single-camera comedies might have trouble competing with dramas.

Update: As pointed out in comments, the cinematography award is just a return to the way things were for most of the ’00s. Meaning the hour/half-hour distinction was more of a failed experiment, possibly meant to give single-camera comedies more of a chance to compete for the cinematography award (since few of them got nominated in the straightforward single-camera category). Unless they have separate categories for multi-camera comedy, single-camera comedy and drama, something’s always going to get left out.

Crossing The Heart Of Africa

By Patricia Dawn Robertson - Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 3:33 PM - 0 Comments

Where have all the heroic men gone? U.S. travel journalist Julian Smith may have unearthed a compelling subject in Ewart “the Leopard” Grogan, a 19th-century British adventurer, yet it leaves one longing for a contemporary equivalent.

Grogan’s epic walk from Cape Town to Cairo to win the hand of his true love, Gertrude, is a heroic odyssey. The recently engaged Smith embarks on a solo trip through Burundi, the Congo, Rwanda and Sudan to combine Grogan’s 1898 trek with his own take on Africa and romantic courtship. Smith opts to navigate contemporary Africa in just two months by bus, plane, motorbike and boat. En route, he pauses in urban locales to respond to emails from Laura, his anxious fiancée. In contrast, Grogan was incommunicado with Gertrude for over two years.

This bisected narrative begs comparison between the two men: Grogan’s bold personality eclipses his timid stalker, Smith, who is afraid to leave his passport with a government clerk. When Grogan was at Cambridge, “he refused to run with either the intellectual ‘smugs’ or the sporty ‘pigs.’ When the Fabian Society invited him to join, he told them he wanted nothing to do with such a ‘very unwholesome gang of chinless men and bosomless women.’ ” Grogan experimented with art school, scaled mountain ranges and signed up to protect the British colony of Rhodesia. In Africa, the die was cast.

The vicarious nature of Smith’s narrative leaves one curious to seek out Grogan’s From Cape to Cairo: The First Traverse of Africa From South to North. Smith’s only insurmountable obstacle—pre-wedding jitters—is more akin to the anxious Vince Vaughn sizing up the nearest exit in Wedding Crashers than the unwavering Grogan facing down a bull elephant, battling cannibals or white-knuckling it with malaria.

The postmodern tendency to retrace the steps of bolder, braver and more iconoclastic characters reflects a serious crisis in contemporary masculinity. Smith’s urge to resist a compatible marriage may be the only territory left for this declawed male to conquer.

The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, And The Race To Discover The Rest Of Reality

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 3:30 PM - 0 Comments

It’s remarkable enough that our bodies, our planet, and even the stars in the sky are made up of the same sorts of matter. What’s even more mind-bending, though, is that only four per cent of the entire universe consists of stuff we know—the other 96 per cent is a complete mystery. “Get rid of us and of everything else we’ve ever thought of as the universe,” Panek writes, “and very little would change.”

The vast majority of the universe is made up of so-called “dark” matter, which accounts for about 23 per cent of it, and “dark” energy, an even weirder something or other that makes up the other 73 per cent. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, on-the-scene reporting and emails between collaborators, Panek charts 50 years’ worth of efforts to answer one of the biggest questions in the history of science: what is the universe made of?

An experienced science writer, Panek has his work cut out for him, because this isn’t an easy story to tell. The writing can get a little technical, but even those without a science background will be able to grasp his meaning. Panek’s enthusiasm for the topic, and the colourful scientists and researchers who populate this book—men and women who aren’t above indulging in a good jealous rivalry or two—add juice to the narrative when it threatens to get a little bit dry.

If 96 per cent of everything is made up of stuff we don’t understand, it’s easy to feel irrelevant: “We’re just a bit of pollution,” one theorist says. But Panek dishes out his insights so cheerfully, and with so much optimism, that it’s impossible not to get excited by how much we’ve yet to learn.

Just don't call it a truck

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 3:17 PM - 2 Comments

Mark Thompson/Getty Images

Say the phrase “F-150″ and chances are an image of Ford Motor Co.’s burly pickup truck comes to mind. So when Italian carmaker Ferrari recently announced that its new Formula 1 race car would also be called the F150, the Detroit automaker’s lawyers were quick to claim trademark infringement.

Ferrari later backed off by pledging to use only the racer’s full name, the Ferrari F150th Italia (it’s Italy’s 150th anniversary this year). Besides, Ferrari said in a statement last week, “there can be no way to confuse the one-seater for the next F1 championship with any other vehicle.” But Ford refuses to budge and is pursuing its lawsuit, which likely has something to do with the F-150′s title as the bestselling pickup in the U.S. for three decades running. It’s a different sort of race, and, given Detroit’s suffering over the past few years, one Ford simply can’t afford to lose.

On a scale of 1 to 5, how much do you worry about the economy?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 2:46 PM - 12 Comments

What was Stephen Harper thinking in 1997?

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 2:44 PM - 153 Comments

Near the end of his TVO interview in 1997, Stephen Harper was asked who he thought would win the next election. You can advance to the ten-minute mark to see for yourself, but here is a transcript of his answer.

Well, it would really surprise me at the moment if the Liberals didn’t get the most seats. I mean, judging from all the, not just the polling data, but the fact they have such a wide coalition. The way the Liberals, I think, are eventually going to lose office, whether it’s in this election or the next one, is they’re going to fail to win a majority. They’ve basically lost Quebec and without Quebec the Liberal party has never been a majority party in this country. And that’s where I think you’re going to face, someday, a minority parliament, with the Liberals maybe having the largest number of seats, and what will be the test is whether there’s then any party in opposition that’s able to form a coalition or working alliance with the others. And I think we have a political system that’s going to continue to have three or four different parties, or five different parties, and so I think parties that want to form government are going to eventually have to learn to work together.

See previously: The guardian of our democracy, How late is too late? and What was Stephen Harper thinking in 2004?

Cute Dog! Cute Hug!

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 2:44 PM - 4 Comments

I don’t know why I didn’t see this when it was originally posted, but as a conoisseur of cheesy Miller-Boyett opening title sequences, I heartily approve of this video, which hits every single trademark of the M-B family, including (obviously) the characters grinning as their actors’ names are flashed on the screen, the bike-riding, football-throwing and other wholesome family sports, the picnics and/or couch gatherings, and the aerial shots that open and close the segment. The singer doesn’t quite sound like Jesse Frederick, but he sounds raspy and fake-Rod-Stewart enough to make it work. Really, I feel like HBO and Showtime, the only networks that still have ultra-long title sequences, are missing an opportunity by not hiring these guys as consultants. Enough with the symbolic openings; more football and kids dancing.

If the embed doesn’t work, it’s also at this un-embeddable YouTube link.

[vodpod id=Video.1739666&w=640&h=350&fv=]

In fairness, one of the reasons we remember these guys’ title sequences is that they really took them seriously. Most shows just throw together some clips, or (particularly in shorter sequences) pick one image or set of images that will stand for the whole show. The M-B method was to make the opening like a silent mini-movie about the glorious wonderfulness of the alternative families featured in the series: in mostly newly-shot Continue…

MPs get bookish – Politics & the Pen

By Mitchel Raphael - Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 2:36 PM - 3 Comments

At this year’s Politics & the Pen gala, Anna Porter took home the $25 000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for political writing for her book The Ghosts of Europe: Journeys Through Central Europe’s Troubled Past and Uncertain Future. Below, Porter with House Leader John Baird.

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Belinda Stronach and Peter Mansbridge.

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Ottawa will force CRTC to change stance on UBB

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 1:23 PM - 22 Comments

Industry Minister Tony Clement reiterated on Wednesday that Ottawa will compel the CRTC to overturn any decision that imposes usage-based billing on small Internet service providers. “You can’t have competition and choice if you allow a major carrier to force its business model onto an independent service provider,” Clement said at a student forum at the University of Alberta. Clement also spoke about the cellphone market, expressing confidence that the government will win its appeal of a court decision that will lock Wind Mobile out of the Canadian mobile market because of foreign ownership laws.

Ottawa Citizen

The end: Taylor Bruce | 1992-2011

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 1:15 PM - 5 Comments

Illustration by Juliana Neufeld

Taylor Bruce was born on Dec. 15, 1992, at Ottawa’s Grace Hospital. He was the first son of Gene Bruce and Peggy White, two country musicians who met on tour, got married, and decided to retire their road-weary F150 and have kids. Taylor was fearless, constantly smiling, and hated being confined. Every morning Peggy and Gene would find him rattling the bars of his crib in their Nepean home for attention. That stopped within a few months, once he learned how to flip himself over the edge to freedom. “One of his uncles said to me, ‘Taylor does everything he knows all at once, every somersault, every skip.’ He was an extremely physical boy,” says Gene.

He also had his parents’ ear for music, but nothing excited him more than the roar of a revving engine. “As a tiny guy, he could draw every imaginable type of machine, whether it was a crane or a bulldozer, always from memory,” says Gene. “He could identify individual vehicles just from the sound of them—or tell me the year by the shape of a headlight.”

Despite his talents, Taylor had a hard time at school—he had verbal and physical tics, got into fights, and was constantly teased. At the start of Grade 2 he was diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome. He’d fly into rages at home and had a hard time making friends, but that all started to change when, at seven, his parents bought him a cheap Canadian Tire bike. “He went flying down the hill—he was trying to get the bike to jump. I said, ‘Okay buddy, you’ve got to look for cars,’ ” says Peggy. “He’d say, ‘yeah, mom,’ then take off and go off the sidewalk.” Once Taylor went mountain biking with some of Peggy’s friends. The group loved his determination so much they scraped together extra parts to make his bicycle a viable mountain bike so he could tag along again. “That bike was his saving grace,” says Peggy. “He loved the adrenalin—the rush of going fast.”

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The way he was

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 24, 2011 at 1:08 PM - 24 Comments

Among other curiosities in TVO’s new archive—for instance, a teenage Tony Clement discussing drugs in 1982—there are four vintage clips of Stephen Harper.

From 2006, an interview aboard his campaign bus.

From 2002, an interview with the new opposition leader.

From 2000, a discussion of citizen referendums and direct democracy.

And from 1997, an interview on the occasion of his exit from the Reform Party and the future of Canadian conservatism.