The Conservative-NDP coalition

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 4:22 PM - 35 Comments

A note just sent out from the NDP press office.

New Democrat leader Jack Layton is currently meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper to discuss our expectations for the federal budget. The meeting is at the request of the Prime Minister.

… And now the post-meeting statement from Mr. Layton. Continue…

Harper travel fee comments 'shrewd': Boston Globe

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 4:05 PM - 16 Comments

At the Boston Globe’s blog, The Angle, Alan Wirzbicki makes a good point about Stephen Harper’s comments on the proposed $5.50 travel fee on visitors to the US from Canada who arrive by air and sea:

Reading between the lines, though, Harper’s statements seem to reflect a shrewd understanding of American politics after the Republican takeover of the House of Representatives. Rather than just opposing the plan, he characterized it as a new tax.

And, as Harper probably knows, that is the magic word du jour, since Republicans have renounced taxes on principle — even, Harper must be hoping, taxes on Canadians.

Harper’s comments, as quoted by PostMedia News:

While he called America’s trillion-dollar-a-year deficit a “horrendous” budgetary situation, Harper noted travel levies run counter to economic recovery efforts.

“We want to ensure trade and travel between our two countries is easier, not more difficult, and we don’t need additional taxes on that kind of economic activity,” he said. “And that’s one of the reasons why this government has been very clear that it’s not raising taxes in the upcoming federal budget.”

After all, Congress controls the purse strings – not Obama.

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You can follow me on Twitter at luizachsavage

More ado about Oda

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 3:51 PM - 172 Comments

Colleague Cosh has written perhaps the best defense possible of Bev Oda’s actions in the “Oda ado” (history’s first palindromic scandal?). He acquits her, by my estimate, of two-and-a-half of the three charges against her:

- that she lied to Parliament, when she said the decision to defund Kairos was CIDA’s, or at least on CIDA’s advice, rather than, as we later learned, in contradiction of it;

- that she altered the document in which CIDA officials recommended continuing funding to make it appear as if they had recommended it be discontinued — or rather, since she now admits to having altered it, that such alteration of a signed legal document was improper at best, a forgery at worst;

- and that she lied to the Commons foreign affairs committee when she claimed she did not alter it, or know who did.

Some thoughts on his thoughts, taking the charges in reverse order.

1. Did she mislead the foreign affairs committee? Yes, of course she did: at least, if you think she’s telling the truth now. Tory members of the committee are attempting to maintain that although the minister told the commitee she did not alter the document, this was not inconsistent with her later statement that she directed that it be altered. Not even Colby is buying that. It is simply nonsense to pretend that, when she told them she did not alter the document, they should have understood her to mean she did tell someone else to do it — or that when she said she did not know who did it, that should have been understood to mean that she told someone to do it, but does not know who actually carried out her order. (Colby says he does not find it remarkable “at all” that Oda would be unable to say who wrote the “not.” That’s not the point. The point is not whether she was lying in suggesting she did not know who it was; the point is what her listeners would reasonably read into that statement, in the context in which it was made.) Any reasonable person, hearing her testimony, would have understood her to mean she had nothing to do with it, period.

2. Is the document a forgery? Not exactly. Or not as we usually understand it. A forgery is usually intended to look like what it is not, to pass one thing off as another. Had the “not” been inserted in such a way as to conceal the addition, that is in the same typescript as the original, that would be a forgery: the amended document passing as the original, and the signatures affixed conveying a very different meaning than had been intended by those who put them there. But there is no way that anyone looking at that hand-scrawled addition would think it was part of the original document, and no way that any would-be forger could imagine they would.

Still: the document must have been altered for some reason. Colby finds it “at least possible” that this reason was perfectly innocent: that Oda’s signature was to the amended document, the other signatures were to the unamended document, and everyone should just be able to tell what each signature meant, at the time it was affixed. Possible, maybe. But I do not find it plausible.

Oda’s explanation, that she ordered the insertion of the word “not” in the document in order that she could then reject its recommendation by signing it, makes no earthly sense. If she had wanted to reject the recommendation, all she had to do was refuse to sign it. The fact that the document does bear her signature suggests she signed it before the document was altered: that is, that she initially accepted the recommendation, approved the funding, then changed her mind — or had it changed for her.

But even then: why add the ‘not’? No, it was not a conventional forgery – but whoever did id might still have had deception in mind: namely, to suggest that not only was the minister okay with the document as amended, but so were the bureaucrats. The document, in this scenario, would have been altered not after they had signed it, but before, ie with their approval. Perhaps the word “not” was inadvertently left out, and the handwritten addition was meant to correct it. Oops. In other words, we would be led to understand, the bureaucrats really had meant to recommend eliminating Kairos’s funding, as the minister’s public statements had suggested, not continuing it. The alteration was meant not to twist their views into conformity with the minister’s, but to make the document conform to theirs.

Except that’s not true. The document, those same bureaucrats have testified, was altered after their signed, not before. If the point of the alteration was to suggest the bureaucrats had knowingly signed off on the document as amended, it was as much a forgery as if the alternation had been concealed from us altogether.

Perhaps you think that’s a stretch. But supposing I’m right, and the minister was prevailed upon to revoke her earlier decision, and discontinue funding. The story the government wants told at the time is that “it was CIDA’s decision.” But you’ve got a document on your hands with her signature on it, along with those of the CIDA officials, urging continued funding. Sooner or later that document is going to come to light, exposing the government’s story as a lie. Destroying the document is out of the question, as is out-and-out forgery: that way prison lies. But marking up the document in this way does just enough to muddy the waters, and make it hard to pin down just who signed what when.

And even if there were no such fraudulent intent: it’s a hell of a way to carry on. You simply don’t alter signed documents in this way. Or if you do, you have the parties initial the changes, to show they approved of them. Colby sets great stock in the public testimony of the CIDA president, at the same foreign affairs committee hearing as her boss, that the alteration of the document after she had signed it, without her initials, was “normal.” No other civil servant that I am aware of, past or present, has offered the same view: that it is “normal” for a minister to reject a recommendation by adding a “not” to it. Or perhaps she meant it was “normal” for this minister. Very well: if the minister has any other documents she has altered in this way, let’s see them.

3. Did the minister misrepresent her bureaucrats’ advice prior to this, in statements in Parliament? Yes. And not only her. For months after the November 2009 decision to eliminate Kairos’s funding, every statement out of the Harper government — save one, the Jason Kenney indiscretion — carried the same clear, consistent message: that the decision was CIDA’s. Here are three commonly cited examples:

Jean-Luc Benoit, the minister’s spokesman, Dec 3, 2009: “After completing due diligence, it was detemined that the organization’s project does not meet CIDA’s current priorities.”

Jim Abbott, the minister’s Parliamentary Secretary, in the Commons, March 12, 2010: “CIDA thoroughly analyzed Kairos’s program proposal, and determined, with regreat, that it did not meet the agency’s current priorities.” (Abbott has since apologized to the House for this statement, conceding it was false but insisting he did not intend to mislead.)

Oda herself, in answer to an order paper question, April 23, 2010: “The CIDA decision not to continue funding Kairos was based on the overall assessment of the proposal, not on any single criterion.”

Now, it’s true, as Colby says, that she “didn’t come right out and say that CIDA staff had no problem with Kairos’s application.” And it’s true, as Colby says, in a “narrow technical sense,” that “a minister’s final word becomes a ‘CIDA decision’ as soon as it is made.” It would be one thing, as Colby says, if “this slippery answer” had been given in response to a direct question, say, did you overrule your officials, in which  casse “she would certainly be guilty of deceit.” But as it was “I cannot feel that it is a clear-cut case of contempt of Parliament” — even if this seems a “crabbed, narrowly technical defence.” One senses a certain embarrassment by now at the many layers of qualification and apology that were necessary to get this far.

Let’s clear away the clutter. It is certainly possible, with a thesaurus, a slide rule, and a cryptographer, to find a set of facts with which the minister’s statement was in conformity. But the sense that any reasonable listener would take away from the words “CIDA’s decision” was that it was CIDA’s decision, especially in the context of everything else the government had been saying about it.  Indeed, that was the sense that her listeners took away from it: that’s why the Embassy magazine story later that year, again quoting Colby, “that the Kairos funding decision was taken against agency advice,” landed with such force. Else what was there to report?

It depends how you define truth, honesty and accountability

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 3:42 PM - 5 Comments

After John McKay, Paul Dewar and Pierre Paquette rose on points of privilege yesterday, several more points were made after QP today, including the government’s response via Tom Lukiwski, the parliamentary secretary to the Government House leader.

As in the Foreign Affairs committee’s report, the government’s claim is that Ms. Oda was unaware of precisely who added the “not” and as she was asked “who” (and not, say, “how”), she did not mislead the House.

After the jump, some of today’s discussion. Continue…

Just what does Quebec's official answer to multiculturalism entail?

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 3:34 PM - 107 Comments

Fred Chartrand/Cp;

The Sikh religion forbids religious face covering on the grounds that it subjugates the wearer. Still, religious freedom is an article of faith for Sikhs, so the four-member contingent from the World Sikh Organization of Canada saw nothing wrong in defending the right to veil one’s face in Quebec, where the province is in the midst of passing a bill that would ban face coverings of any kind when providing or receiving government services. Invited to the national assembly, the four planned to speak in favour of Bill 94′s unspoken target: the handful of Muslim women in Quebec who wear the niqab. They were stymied by their kirpans, the six-inch knives that baptized Sikhs must wear at all times. Ceremonial or not, the National Assembly’s security guards said they amounted to just that: knives. “They told us if we weren’t satisfied with their decision, there are people who you can talk to,” says Harminder Kaur, one of two Montrealers who made the trip.

Instead, the quartet walked out the front door and into what has become the latest flashpoint in the battle over the place of religious customs and practices, as well as Canadian multiculturalism, in Quebec society. In the days following the thwarted visit, the national assembly unanimously voted in favour of a Parti Québécois motion commending the security team’s actions—not for being good security guards, but because in denying the Sikhs’ entry they “upheld the principle of the state’s neutrality.”

Continue…

German defence minister accused of plagiarism

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 2:36 PM - 10 Comments

Following accusations of plagiarism, German Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has temporarily renounced his doctorate. German media and political opponents allege that the minister lifted several passages of his 2006 thesis from other people’s work. He has strongly denied the claims, but said that he will “temporarily” give up his doctoral title, while helping his former university investigate the claims. The charismatic 39-year-old minister is seen as a possible successor to Angela Merkel.

BBC News

Elections spending up, voter turnout down

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 2:29 PM - 22 Comments

In the last decade, spending at Elections Canada has more than quadrupled—from $32 million in 1998-1999 to an expected $138.6 million this year. At $30.9 million, the portion of that total sum that goes toward programs—such as enforcing party financing rules, public education and redrawing electoral boundaries—is ten times what is was in the 1990s ($2.6 million in ’98-’99). Ironically, as the Ottawa Citizen points out, the agency’s spending has grown despite lagging voter turnout.

Ottawa Citizen

Bright idea: Money for nothing

By Colin Campbell - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 1:29 PM - 2 Comments

Ryan McVay/Getty Images

A federal task force on financial literacy released its report last week, and along with typical industry warnings about the need for better financial planning and education was some simpler advice on how to get more money: just ask for it. According to the report, there are billions of dollars in government benefits that Canadians are entitled to but aren’t taking. Roughly 160,000 seniors, for instance, aren’t receiving social security benefits worth almost $1 billion. Only 40 per cent of eligible families have taken advantage of grants the federal government makes to registered education savings plans. And there are 55,000 Canadians who aren’t receiving their Canada Pension Plan benefits.

In Quebec, however, the number of people missing out on their provincial pension plan is almost zero, notes the report. The province uses computer databases to identify eligible seniors, who are phoned or even visited in person to make sure they receive what they’re entitled to.

Why the not?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 1:07 PM - 60 Comments

Keith Beardsley, a former member of Stephen Harper’s PMO, sorts through the Oda Affair.

If the minister instructed someone to insert the “not” then she was probably under pressure to do so as a last minute attempt to stop the funding from going forward. Oda has been a minister long enough to know that simply refusing to sign the letter stops the funding process.

Oops! You're not a child pornographer after all.

By Jesse Brown - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 12:59 PM - 12 Comments

Homeland Security done goofed.

Beware of moral absolutes. For example: there’s not much room for debate in the war on child porn; we all agree that the stuff is atrocious and must be snuffed out. So we hand over extraordinary powers to those who would fight it. But righteousness and competence are two different things.

Case in point:

Last week the U.S. Department of Homeland Security proudly announced that they had “seized” thousands of child porn websites. Visitors to the sites now found stern government message screens reading “SEIZED” and warning that “Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution” (link).

It was later revealed that the DHS had goofed—84,000 of these sites were seized by accident, and had nothing whatsoever to do with child porn. Given the special place in hell we reserve for child pornographers, one wonders what the innocent owners of those websites thought about being publicly associated with kiddie porn on their own homepages.

It’s not the first blunder (or questionable outcome) in the global crusade against child porn. Here are a few others:

• Parents charged with child porn for taking bathtub pics of their own kids. Walmart turned them in when they went to have the shots developed, and their kids were taken from them by Child Protective Services. The parents have since sued (link).

• Minors charged with child porn for texting nude pictures of themselves. It’s happened a bunch of times. (link) (link) (link).

• Australia’s national Internet filter was sold to citizens as a safeguard against child porn. But the “blacklist” of censored sites got leaked, and was shown to include many errors, including a dog kennel and a dentist. Also on the list were political enemies of the government, and Wikileaks. Not to mention the problem that a leaked index of child porn sites is a handy resource for none other than child pornographers. (link)

While many innocents can have their lives and reputations ruined by over-zealous law enforcement, actual for-profit child pornographers have had plenty of success evading authorities and Internet filters. The FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin reports that savvy criminals use a combination of proxy servers, encryption, and foreign computer servers to place themselves out of the reach of the law. Facing a tangle of technological and bureaucratic hurdles (extradition, etc.) police often skip the big bad guys and focus on low-hanging fruit (link).

A cautionary tale

By Chris Sorensen - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 12:52 PM - 2 Comments

Luke MacGregor/Reuters

For many in the industry, cellphone giant Nokia Oyj’s recent announcement that it will use Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system on its high-end devices was viewed as a sign of desperation. Despite being the world’s biggest cellphone maker, Nokia has been steadily losing ground in the smartphone wars to Apple’s iPhone and devices that run Google’s Android operating system, while Microsoft, the world’s biggest software maker, has been unable to gain any real traction with its mobile OS. And it’s far from clear that combining forces will do much to staunch the bleeding. “Two turkeys don’t make an eagle,” tweeted Google VP of engineering Vic Gundotra about the announcement.

It’s a stark reminder of how quickly fortunes can change in the tech business—and it should act as a cautionary tale for Canada’s Research In Motion Ltd., which makes the popular BlackBerry. RIM’s global market share has also been slipping (to 16 per cent from nearly 20 per cent last year) as consumers pass over the company’s clunky touchscreen efforts—Storm and Torch—for the latest iPhone or Android-powered device. Ken Dulaney, an analyst at Gartner Research, argues that both RIM and Nokia stumbled as they tried to adapt their existing keyboard-oriented operating systems to touchscreen hardware, instead of building new software from scratch.

Continue…

How the Rideau Canal got its best ice ever

By John Geddes - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 12:51 PM - 1 Comment

By 9:59 p.m., the throngs on the frozen Rideau Canal have thinned out, but diehard skaters linger long after nightfall. A half-dozen boys criss-cross in and out of pools of lamplight, cutting each other off by the narrowest margins. They don’t put the grey-haired couple who glide elegantly out from under the arches of the Bank Street Bridge off their stride. The last of the day’s tourists snap cellphone pictures commemorating their visit to the world’s largest skating rink.

Few of the skaters realize, though, that a celebrity of sorts is being prepared at that moment to join them for its nightly tour of the canal. The “Froster,” a new ice resurfacer introduced to acclaim this winter, is being pumped full of water from a hole drilled in Dows Lake, the southern tip of Ottawa’s famous 7.8-km “skateway.” The machine looks like an outsized version of the familiar Zamboni, except the Froster features retractable wings that spread out at ice level on each side, allowing it to distribute water evenly across a span of nearly 20 m.
It was designed by Robert Taillefer, of nearby Gatineau, Que., who won the canal ice-maintenance contract with the National Capital Commission five years ago. The skateway, which the NCC says attracts 20,000 skaters on an average winter’s day, had always been kept up by flooding it with hoses overnight, using water drawn by portable pumps from some 250 holes drilled along the canal’s length. For four winters, Taillefer did it that way, spending many dark, bitter hours gripping an icy firehose. “When I was flooding at night, 30 degrees below, it was just inhuman,” he says. “I thought, there has to be a better way.”

Continue…

Public Works officials were warned about Parliament contractor

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 12:41 PM - 8 Comments

Documents show the federal government received warning before handing a $9 million contract to renovate the West Block of Parliament Hill to a Montreal construction firm that was previously owned by the Hell’s Angels. L.M. Sauvé, described the Montreal architect managing the project as “one of the worst contractors [she] has dealt with,” won the contract after paying more than $100,000 to Tory lobbyist Gilles Varin. Varin then set up a meeting between contractor Paul Sauvé and a senior official inside the Public Works Ministry. Public Works officials were repeatedly warned to stay away from Sauvé while performing reference and background checks on the company. The RCMP is now investigating Varin’s lobbying activities. L.M. Sauve was awarded the contract in May 2008, but the company was ordered off the site in April 2009 after repeated problems, with the renovations now two years behind schedule.

The Chronicle Herald

Chart of the week: The right stuff

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 12:36 PM - 0 Comments

chart source: UBS FINANCIAL SERVICES

The United States may be the land of opportunity, but Canada is more entrepreneurial, driven by its increasingly skilled workforce.

Martyr video bloopers and other jihad hijinks

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 12:10 PM - 2 Comments

Eonefilms

You don’t have to be Salman Rushdie to know that mixing satire and Islam can be a perilous business. Even Tina Fey felt obliged to add a disclaimer as she made a sensitive crack about Allah in her recent New Yorker piece on the controversy around working moms: “It is less dangerous,” she wrote, “to draw a cartoon of Allah French-kissing Uncle Sam—which, let me make it very clear, I have not done­—than it is to speak honestly about this topic.” So to see a film like Four Lions—a brilliant farce about a London cell of inept Islamic terrorists—comes as a shock. It’s hard to believe such a nervy comedy even exists, never mind that it’s so wickedly entertaining.

Four Lions, which opens in Toronto next week, marks the feature debut of British writer-director Chris Morris, best known for his satirical work in television and radio. As Morris has taken pains to point out, his film does not mock Islam, just terrorists. The official synopsis boasts that it does for jihad “what This Is Spinal Tap did for heavy metal and Dr. Strangelove [did for] the Cold War.” Which is a fair assessment.

This hilarious satire is the story of a gang that can’t shoot straight, a quartet of bumbling terrorists who are like the Four Stooges of jihad. They quarrel like a puerile garage band over their martyr videos, shake their heads to blur surveillance photos, and eat their cellphone SIM cards like communion wafers so the police can’t track them. Their ringleader is Omar (Riz Ahmed), who is dying to blow up something—anything—along with himself. He has a loving wife and young son who are both warmly supportive as he shows them his martyr video bloopers.

Continue…

Scientists create the first “antilaser”

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 11:58 AM - 9 Comments

The laser was invented in 1960, and it’s used today in everything from CDs to laser pointers. But now US scientists have created the first “antilaser,” which can trap and cancel out a laser’s beam. This device works “like running a laser backwards,” Yale University’s A. Douglas Stone told Reuters, although it could be converted into electrical energy. The device will probably be used in next generation, high performance computers powered by light and electrical energy, he said. The antilaser could not be used as a potential laser shield, he noted. His findings appear in the journal Science.

Reuters

Canada to build new military support centres

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 11:21 AM - 36 Comments

The Canadian government will build a series of support centres at military bases across the country, Defence Minister Peter MacKay announced at CFB Trenton on Friday. Five new centres where military personnel and their families can receive a range of services from medical support to employment counselling will be opened in Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec. Currently, nineteen such centres operate across the country. The government will spend $6.9-million in infrastructure costs over three years and $4-million in annual operating costs, with the aim that the centres will be open in two years. “By consolidating and coordinating these many services, we have taken a giant step forward in improving the care that our Canadian Forces receive and deserve,” said MacKay. MacKay also acknowledged the trauma suffered by personnel at CFB Trenton following the crimes committed by former colonel Russell Williams.

CBC News

Anger mounts as Bahrainis bury dead

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 11:16 AM - 0 Comments

Four people were killed on Thursday after civil unrest rocked the Bahraini capital of Manama, where thousands of protesters took to the streets to voice their displeasure with the ruling royal family. “We used to demand for the prime minister to step down, but now our demand is for the ruling family to get out,” said Ahmed Makki Abu Taki, the brother of one of the victims. Pro-government supporters held their own rally, protected by security forces, after Friday prayers at Manama’s Grand Mosque. While a Sunni Muslim elite rules Bahrain, the majority of the population is Shia. France has already suspended exports of security equipment to Bahrain and Libya, where hundreds of anti-Gaddafi protestors gathered in the city of Benghazi.

BBC News

There will be an election this May: conventional wisdom

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 11:12 AM - 10 Comments

Speculation about a possible spring election is coalescing around May 2 or 9 as the probable dates Canadians could get called to the polls. The timeline is premised on Finance Minister Jim Flaherty delivering a federal budget March 22, and confidence vote on that budget taking place on March 24. The opposition parties would then, of course, have to vote down the Conservative budget, and force the dissolution of the government before launching an election campaign. Should everything happen according to the above plan, the current Conservative minority government will have lasted 2.5 years in power.

Ottawa Citizen

The House

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 11:09 AM - 21 Comments

If you hang around the House of Commons long enough, people start to look at you funny. At the end of business one Thursday evening last December I found myself locked in: the security guards apparently not used to having to account for anyone in the gallery after 3pm. I had to catch the attention of a page on the House floor and ask to be let out.

A couple weeks ago, an MP looked up at me in the gallery and appeared startled by my presence. A security guard came by later and complimented my endurance in having been there all day (I assured him I had stepped out briefly for lunch). When the House adjourned that night, Conservative MP Mike Lake looked up at me in the gallery and asked me what I was doing there.

What I was doing there was trying to answer a complicated question: Does the House of Commons still matter? I spent some time watching what goes on there all day. I talked to some of the people who work there. And then I tried to sort out my own thinking about the institution. The result is here, a 5,200-word attempt to answer that question.

Continue…

Why Fake Documentaries Work

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 11:06 AM - 1 Comment

Community‘s latest experiment was a more old-school type of experiment: doing an entire episode as a fake documentary. This was an opportunity to take  a couple of shots at shows that are all done that way, and how they use the format to provide quick exposition and wrap shows up quickly, but it was also a throwback to the many sitcoms that have chosen to do one episode as a documentary or reality show.

One thing that stood out is that director Joe Russo (interviewed with his director brother Anthony in the link above) did a really effective job of making the documentary format seem jarring again. We’re sort of used to shaky cameras and awkward angles by now, and the shows that do this every week try to make these things seem as smooth and un-noticeable as possible. That wouldn’t have worked for a change-of-pace episode, so in “Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking” the camera was wobblier, the angles weirder. It was meant to make a familiar form seem unfamiliar and strange again.

The other thing the episode pointed up — apart from the ability of the mock-doc to bring us closer to the characters in a weird way — is that, even though it may help fuel a growing backlash against fake documentaries (I’ve noticed people turning against it, anyway), the gimmick “works” as Abed said near the end. One thing that a mock-documentary can do that most other sitcoms can’t is to cut directly from one funny bit to another without any setup, and without compromising the forward motion of the story.

Shows like 30 Rock do lots of cutaways, but nearly always to the past. A show that uses purely linear scenes, whether it’s Community or Big Bang Theory, has to find some way to get into a scene and then get out of it; most of the funny bits have to be set up to some extent. What the Office format can do is cut away to the future: cut from the event to someone commenting on it a few minutes later, then back to the event. And thus we got the best bit in the episode, Troy meeting LeVar Burton, followed by a cut to Troy freaking out about blowing it, and then back to Troy’s reaction to meeting his hero.

That’s similar to reality TV, of course — reality shows, and writer-producers trying to do some of what they do, are largely the reason the mock-doc caught on. One insult Abed could have used but didn’t is that the documentary is perfect for limited attention spans: if the viewer may get bored following a scene, just throw in something else.

This next thing isn’t particularly related to the Community episode, but I might as well mention it here: another thing about the phony documentary format is that it may be the ideal format for the era of short running times. A sitcom with only 20 minutes per episode will always have to do a lot of cutting. When the show deals in complete, long scenes, that’s murder; it can be done, and is, but cutting without losing the shape of a scene can be extremely hard.

With the documentary/reality approach, there are more ways to edit down a scene. They’ll cover an internal cut with a talking head or insert; they can take a little snippet of a deleted scene and use it with a voice-over. And because the viewer subconsciously expects the scenes to be choppy, the  producers don’t have to worry about it. Not all mock-docs do this just because they can — Parks & Recreation seems to have come to depend more on complete scenes, because it’s developed a style that’s a bit more traditional sitcom than The Office and requires some set-pieces to play out longer. But it does have the ability to use the basics of the documentary format to help with the editing and storytelling.

Back to Community, one thing the episode and the Russo Brothers interview touches on is the emergence of Pierce (Chevy Chase) as an out-and-out villain. Jace Lacob, the Televisionary, argues that this could be read as a meta-commentary on Chevy Chase himself. I tend to read it more as a show having boxed itself into a corner with a character and finding new things to do with him. The “old guy who says crazy or insensitive things” bit is familiar, and somewhat overplayed, and as a show that’s neither written by nor watched by older people, the show seemed to have trouble making him a convincing character, as opposed to the guy who sits around saying stuff.

Chang (Ken Jeong) didn’t really work out in the villain role they appeared to be testing him for earlier in the season, so sliding Pierce into the full-fledged Frank Burns role, the genuinely bad person, finally gives him something to do. You’ll notice people are talking about him as a character a lot more than they used to, when almost everybody seemed to be breaking out except the best-known performer in the cast. It may not work, or last, since redemptive endings are baked into this particular show. But then again the Russo Brothers suggested in their interview that this episode was meant to redeem him a little bit, and it really didn’t at all. If they just go with it and make him the antagonist, that doesn’t bother me; it’ll just mean that after a year and a half of trying to figure out who this guy is, they finally hit on what works: he’s just a rich jerk.

Canadians drinking more wine than ever

By macleans.ca - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 17 Comments

New research shows the amount of wine consumed by Canadians grew by 22.5 per cent between 2005 and 2009, to a total of 40.4 million cases. And that’s just the start: wine consumption in Canada is expected to grow another 19 per cent by 2014. Among wine importers, Canada’s now ranks fifth in the world by volume, and could trail just China and the U.S. in three years.

Montreal Gazette

Cronenberg casts 'Twilight' hearthrob as Wall Street vampire

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 10:46 AM - 12 Comments

Robert Pattinson is about to enter a new kind of Twilight Zone, courtesy of David Cronenberg. It was announced today that the Canadian filmmaker has cast the vampire heartthrob as a bloodsucker of a different colour—a multi-billionaire hedge fund manager in Manhattan who squanders his fortune betting against the survival of the world economy. The movie is Cosmopolis, a Canada-France coproduction based on the 2003 nouvella of the same name by award-winning American writer Don Delillo.  Pattinson is set to co-star with Paul Giamatti (Barney’s Version), Juliette Binoche (The English Patient), and Matheu Amalric (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly).

Cronenberg appears to be on a roll. After the success of The History of Violence (2005) and Eastern Promises (2007), two Oscar-nominated hits, he has been creeping ever closer to mainstream acceptance, without compromising his singular vision. He recently completed A Dangerous Method, a German co-production about Freud and Jung, starring (in his third role with director) Viggo Mortensen—it will likely open next fall after a festival premiere in Cannes, Venice or TIFF.  It’s always a good sign when a filmmaker has another movie on the go before his last one has hit the screen.

Landing a Cronenberg role is a savvy move for Pattinson, who needs to make the leap from the matinee idol ghetto of Twilight to more mature roles. His is  not unlike the dilemma faced by an aging child star. In his previous non-vampire outing, the romance Remember Me, Pattinson showed the promise of a serious actor, but the film was a dud. Cronenberg is always a class act, and (despite his image as a horrormeister) he’s very much an actor’s director. Colin Farrell had originally been tapped for the Pattinson role, until he opted to star in a remake of Total Recall. And earlier candidates attached to the role of  the female lead included Marion Cotillard and Keira Knightley, who stars in A Dangerous Method.

Cronenberg wrote the script for Cosmopolis, which is described as a “thriller.” In the director’s previous adaptations of fiction—notably Naked Lunch, Dead Ringers and Crash—he has played fast and loose with the source material, bending it to his own vision, so don’t expect Delillo’s work to be transposed too literally. I haven’t read the book. But it appears to have some classic Cronenberg elements, including  some glimmers of Crash.  Here’s how Wikipedia summarizes the plot:

“Cosmopolis is the story of Eric Packer, a 28 year old multi-billionaire asset manager who makes an odyssey across midtown Manhattan in order to get a haircut. The stretch limo which adorns the cover of the book is richly described as highly technical and very luxurious, filled with television screens and computer monitors, bulletproofed and floored with Carrara marble. It is also cork lined to eliminate (though unsuccessfully, as Packer notes) the intrusion of street noise.

“Like James Joyce‘s Ulysses, Cosmopolis covers roughly one day of time and includes highly sexed women and the theme of father-son separation. Packer’s voyage is obstructed by various traffic jams caused by a presidential visit to the city, a funeral procession for a Sufi rap star and a full-fledged riot. Along the way, the hero has several chance meetings with his wife, seeing her in a taxi, a bookstore, and lying naked in the street, taking part in a movie as an extra. Meanwhile, Packer is stalked by two men, a comical “pastry assassin” and an unstable “credible threat“. Through the course of the day, the protagonist loses incredible amounts of money for his clients by betting against the rise of the yen, a loss that parallels his own fall. Packer seems to relish being unburdened by the loss of so much money, even stopping to make sure he loses his wife’s fortune as well, to ensure his ruin is inevitable.”

The Oda ado: overblown?

By Colby Cosh - Friday, February 18, 2011 at 10:01 AM - 241 Comments

No doubt I’ll be called a Conservative lapdog for saying so, but I find myself balking at the elite consensus that Bev Oda deserves hanging for having deceived the people’s House. In the spirit of devil’s advocacy (or the presumption of innocence), let me lay out the defence case. You can consider, if you like, that it is here to serve as a target. We’ll start from Michael Ignatieff’s version of the indictment: “We have a Prime Minister who lets a minister deceive the House of Commons, falsify a document, and instead of reprimanding or dismissing her, gets up in this House and actually applauds her.” [Cries of "Shame, shame"] Continue…