Food as a weapon of war

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 6 Comments

Henry Guttmann/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Death by starvation is appallingly quiet, historian Lizzie Collingham notes in her massive study, The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food. But from an enemy’s point of view, it’s just as effective as by any other means. In a book densely stuffed with statistics, two stand out starkly: 20 million starved to death overall (more than the 10 million plus civilians who died from deliberate atrocity or collateral damage, more even than the 19.5 million military casualties) and the mere 56 Chinese POWs in Japanese hands who survived until 1945. The Japanese high command was fanatical enough to believe its army could win a war on the basis of fighting spirit alone—to the extent that 60 per cent of Japan’s 1.7 million military deaths were due to starvation—and it is not hard to imagine what befell thousands of their prisoners.

The conventional view of the last world war has always been that it was a war of the big battalions, a titanic struggle determined by how many ships, bombers and fresh cannon fodder could be poured into the fight. But food, The Taste of War makes clear, was absolutely central to the Second World War: as a cause, as a chief preoccupation of the combatant nations, and as a weapon. Japan and Germany went to war over it, at least in part—the lebensraum of Nazi dreams was a vast agricultural breadbasket, an eastern European recreation of the American Midwest. Hitler also obsessed over keeping the home front as well-fed as the armed forces, because he believed Germany’s collapse in the previous war was directly tied to the hunger brought by the Allied blockade.

Continue…

Modigliani: A Life

By Joanne Latimer - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

A handsome artist is ruined by booze and drugs, living in bohemian squalour, leaving behind a trail of suicidal mistresses and illegitimate children—including a half-Canadian born to Simone Thiroux. That’s the popular myth of artist Amedeo Modigliani (b. 1884), whose life story is given a sympathetic revision in Secrest’s evocative new biography. Her book floats an unexpected hypothesis to explain away some of the artist’s loutish behaviour. According to Secrest, Modigliani’s predilection for alcohol and hash was a cover for his illness, tubercular meningitis. “He feigned an addiction he did not have, at least at first, in order to conceal a disease,” says Secrest. It seems like an apologist’s desperate gambit to reclaim her hero’s reputation, but Secrest backs up her theory with compelling research and builds credibility with every page.

Modigliani was well educated though raised in poverty in Italy, where he survived bouts of TB as a child. At 22, he moved to Paris to rebrand himself as a charming bohemian. He moved in café circles with Picasso, Brancusi and all the big-name artists in Montparnasse in the early 1900s. Yet, Modi, as he was known, refused to make art that belonged to anyone else’s “ism,” such as cubism. At the time, people with TB were socially shunned, so Modi kept his malingering illness to himself. As his health deteriorated, he abandoned sculpture for painting and spent his last days feverishly making portraits to secure his position in art history. He died on the cusp of stardom, 35 years old, leaving behind a two-year-old daughter named after her mother, Jeanne Hébuterne, who was eight months pregnant with her second child when she committed suicide soon after Modi’s death.

Secrest received legal threats from Hébuterne’s family, so she had to cull sections from the book on Modi’s last relationship. Still, it does not disappoint. The book ends with a riveting chapter on the daughter, Jeanne, a Second World War Resistance fighter, feminist and Communist in France. She died in 1984, an alcoholic.

On polygamy, child brides and why the stakes in B.C. are so high

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 20 Comments

Carolyn Jessop, 43, was born in the U.S. into a radical polygamist cult, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (FLDS). At 18, she became the fourth wife of a 50-year-old man and bore eight children. She recounts the abuses she endured and her harrowing flight in a book, Escape. She recently testified before the Supreme Court of British Columbia, which is considering whether polygamy laws violate religious freedom under the Charter and whether they can be used to prosecute FLDS leaders in Bountiful, B.C.

Q: Critics of anti-polygamy laws say that the state should not interfere with the religious beliefs or lifestyle decisions of consenting adults. Do you agree?
A: This is not about consenting adults. My position is it is sexual slavery. I was never asked. I was told what I was going to do. My husband Merril never asked me to marry him. The purpose of marriage is not to fall in love but to provide righteous children. They say it’s a victimless crime. I have not seen a polygamous situation that is not abusive to someone in the relationship.

Q: Ironically, you describe your husband, who had more than a dozen wives and 54 children, as emotionally monogamous.
A: If a man gets many wives, he’ll find one he has chemistry with. Once they fall in love, things get difficult for the other women. If he’s not having sex with you, your status in the family goes down. When he shuts you out, they know you are just a prime target for whatever abuse they want to throw at you because he won’t protect you or your kids.

Q: Did you witness child abuse?
A: Systematic abuse. There is a lot of violence toward kids. Merril did a lot of water torture on his babies.

Q: What is water torture?
A: The concept is that you have to break a child’s will before the age of 2. If you don’t, you’ll never be able to control them at the level that their salvation depends on. A baby may be crying because it is hungry. They would take the baby and spank it to really get it going. Then they hold the baby face-up under cold running water for 30 seconds, and as soon as it gets its breath and starts crying, they’d spank it again. A session like that could last an hour until the baby quits fighting from fatigue. That can happen frequently until the parent feels the baby is sufficiently broken.

Continue…

What to expect when she's not expecting

By Julia McKinnell - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 4 Comments

Andrew Tolson; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Lauren Cattermole

For six years, L.A. comedy writer Mark Sedaka and his wife, Samantha, tried to have a baby. ” ‘Unexplained infertility’ is all we were ever told,” he writes in a new book for men called What He Can Expect When She’s Not Expecting: How to Support Your Wife, Save Your Marriage and Conquer Infertility. “More often than not,” he explains,”we poor schlubs are left to fend for ourselves—not quite sure when to chime in, when to keep quiet, when to take action, and when to lay low.”

As for what to expect first, he warns men about “a little thing called procreation sex. In other words, the planned mandatory acts of copulation that will be required as your wife charts her monthly cycle.” Expect all spontaneity to disappear from your sex life, he writes. “You’re pretty much going to know a day in advance that you will be having sex tomorrow. Not might be. Will be. It’s gonna sound pretty much like when she asks you to take out the garbage for the umpteenth time.” All you can do, he tells men, is to calmly explain to her that “you don’t mind being told when you’re going to have sex as much as you mind being told 30 times.”

Ask her not to lie about it, either, he writes: “Now that you’ve made her self-conscious about the whole procreation sex thing, she’ll probably avoid the subject altogether and opt instead for the old, ‘I’m so horny tonight’ routine. Do they think we’re that dumb?”

Continue…

The end: Khammone 'Kham' Phommavong | 1950-2011

By Julia Belluz - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

Illustration by Julia Minamata

Khammone “Kham” Phommavong was born on May 24, 1950, in Vientiane, the capital of Laos. His parents, Khay and Khamdy, were rice farmers. As the fourth of nine children, Kham was put to work at an early age, and took pride in farming. When he was 12, though, his father died of unknown causes and the boy was sent to a Buddhist temple to live and study.

In 1975, the Communist Pathet Lao ended a six-century-old monarchy by imposing a socialist regime. At the time, Kham worked at a pharmacy run by an older brother. There, he met a nursing student named Oune. “The Communists took over,” says Oune, “and they were taking students away from their homes. My parents were afraid I was going to be taken away. They wanted someone to look after me.” Kham took on that role, and they married on May 14. “He was very nice, kind, and very happy,” Oune says. “Everywhere he went, he made people happy, made people laugh.”

Their first son, Todd, was born in 1976. By 1979, Oune was pregnant again with a second baby, David. The transition to Communism had been brutal, and Kham decided his family had to leave Laos. He hatched a plan to swim across the Mekong River to freedom in Thailand. He put his pregnant wife and son in a tractor tire inner tube, attached it to his waist with a rope, and used a bamboo shoot to breathe underwater while swimming his family across overnight. Boats were being targeted with machine guns, Oune says, and Kham thought the tire would look like just another piece of debris floating in the Mekong. Still, it was a dangerous crossing. “We had to hide from the Communists in our country,” Oune says, “and from the Thai soldiers who were sending people back.”

Continue…

Return of the Crocs

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 3 Comments

Jenna Marie Wakani

Remember Crocs? The maker of stubby foam sandals is bouncing back from the fashion abyss. To investors, Crocs’ recent climb from penny-stock territory, where it dipped in 2008, to the roughly $16 a share it trades at today, is a true miracle resurrection. To fashionistas, on the other hand, the revamp of Crocs—after the fad for its plastic sandals finally died out 3½ years ago­—probably sounds like the footwear equivalent of a zombie attack.

It was only five years ago that the company’s famous clogs could be spotted virtually anywhere, from suburban shopping malls through Hollywood circles to the White House, as even then-president George W. Bush was seen donning the ultimate fashion aberration: Crocs with socks. Crocs debuted as a public company in 2006, raising US$223 million, at about $14 a share. By mid-2007, it hit US$75 a share. But that was the peak—and then came the crash.

By 2009 the obituaries were being penned. The fad had faded; the stock plummeted to a low of US$0.79 a share, and the company was drowning in high inventories and debt. There was talk of bankruptcy, and investors wrote off Crocs as another one-hit wonder, like mood rings and those children’s shoes with built-in wheels.

A couple of years later, though, the shoemaker has not only survived, it is thriving. “This is not the same business that was out there in 2007,” says Brian Sozzi, an analyst at Wall Street Strategies, a stock market research company. Key to the rebirth, says Sozzi, was diversification. The company is going strong in both Europe and Asia, which now account for 36 per cent of revenues. Crocs has also stepped up direct sales to consumers, shifting the focus from mall kiosks to online sales and stand-alone stores. And, crucially, it has moved beyond the clogs.

“Crocs at one point was synonymous with one specific style of shoe,” says Doug Hayes, vice-president and general manager of Americas at Crocs. It now boasts over 250 new styles, from sneakers to winter boots and even women’s flats. That has also allowed the company to broaden its pricing range, says Hayes—Crocs boat shoes, for example, sell for US$89.99 on the Internet, compared to US$29.99 for a pair of classic Crocs.

The non-clog models still incorporate the company’s trademark material: Croslite, a proprietary resin that absorbs odours and adapts to the shape of feet. The rubber was patented by Foam Creations, a Quebec company that Crocs bought in 2004. The difference now is that Crocs shoes are “a little bit more fashion-centric rather than eccentric,” says Marshal Cohen, chief industry analyst at NPD, a retail market research group. It’s part of a three-pronged approach, he explains. The Colorado-based shoemaker, he says, is using its new styles to offer more variety to Crocs fans, and woo the holdouts who shunned it at first. But Crocs will also continue to rely on its traditional sandals, which are popular among kids, and professionals like chefs and nurses who spend the day on their feet. The plastic sandals market, says Hayes, remains “very, very healthy.” Despite the new look, it seems, there will never be a Crocs without clogs.

Chart of the week: Slow food

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 11:54 AM - 2 Comments

Source: International Monetary Fund

Food prices have been rising sharply—a trend that’s expected to continue. Still, they remain low compared to prices over the past century.

Video from Ignatieff's campaign

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 11:53 AM - 4 Comments

When I wasn’t tweeting, blogging, preparing my article for the next issue or arming for battle with Colleague Coyne, I shot some video on Monday and Tuesday from the Ignatieff tour. Here are some highlights. I’ll try to bring you more video as the campaign progresses.

A lot can change in seven years

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 11:49 AM - 18 Comments

Joan Bryden compares the Stephen Harper of today with the Stephen Harper of 2004.

A reporter asked whether Canadians might not “get the impression that you’re trying to run the government here even though you’ve lost the election.”Harper responded: “It is the Parliament that’s supposed to run the country, not just the largest party and the single leader of that party. I guess that’s a criticism that I’ve had and that we’ve had and that most Canadians have had for a long, long time.”

Separately, Mike De Souza finds that future Conservative senator Mike Duffy reported government-forming musings among Conservatives at the time. Continue…

The Bull Meter: Stephen Harper on the risk elections pose to the economy

By Alex Derry - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 11:41 AM - 44 Comments

"Against this backdrop of growing economic risk, and against our advice, the opposition parties have chosen to force an election the country doesn’t want; an election the economy doesn’t need."

- Stephen Harper
March 26, 2011

When looking at the Canadian stock market index and the performance of the loonie over the past 20 years, election campaigns appear to have virtually no effect on the Canadian economy. Sure, Canada’s stock market tanked around the time voters last went to the polls in 2008, but we’re pretty sure the collapse of the global economy had a bit more to do with it than the prorogation of Parliament. Data collected by the Bank of Canada shows that the Canadian dollar’s average fluctuation in the 35 days prior to an election was about US$0.03, with the biggest change—US$0.05—occurring during the 2004 election.

Indeed, few economists would defend the the idea that an election is a “risk” to Canada’s stable economy. With all the part-time jobs involved and party spending, an election may even give Canada’s economy a stimulating jolt.

Heard something that doesn’t sound quite right? Send quotes from the campaign trail to macbullmeter@gmail.com and we’ll tell you just how much bull they contain.

Source:

Trading Economics

Bank of Canada

Bureaucracy now!

By Josh Dehaas - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 11:36 AM - 2 Comments

Photograph By Andrew Tolson

It can be lonely for recruiters manning the booths for big banks or retailers at Ryerson University’s student job fairs. “The government agencies get a lot more attention,” says Ian Ingles, the organizer of the Toronto events.

That’s no surprise, considering the statistics. In a recent survey for Studentawards.com, 30 per cent of university students picked the government of Canada as their employer of choice. Then came Health Canada. Provincial governments did well too, beating out all of the banks and the video game developers. Even the trendiest private sector companies, Apple and Google, couldn’t beat the federal agencies.The results echo another recent survey of nearly 10,000 Canadian students by research firm Universum. In it, arts graduates, for example, gave the government of Canada, the provincial governments and Health Canada gold, silver and bronze respectively.

The recession explains some of the zeal for the civil service. During the rough days of 2009, students got the message that private companies were shedding employees while government workers were relatively unaffected: there was a record-setting 4,000 applications for 106 Ontario government internships in early 2009.

But how to explain the post-recession jump in applications for the same internship program? Last March, even with many private sector employers hiring graduates again, applications to the annual program grew by more than 20 per cent to just over 5,000 for 76 spots.

Demographics—and the altruistic goals of new graduates—best explain the march toward public service, says Sandra Botha, a campus recruiter for the government of British Columbia. Modern immigrants to Canada are proud to work for the government, she says. “Many students perceive a government job as having a lot of prestige, because it did in their parents’ country of origin,” she explains. “We have many more Chinese-Canadians applying in B.C., and if you come from China, working for the government is considered the job.”

Continue…

My wife didn't make that quilt. I did.

By Josh Dehaas - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 11:14 AM - 36 Comments

Photograph By Chris Bolin

Al Heslop spent his life travelling to far-away places taking measurements from oil wells and then analyzing the data using the computer programs he wrote. As he watched the violence in Libya unfold on television, the retired petro-physicist from Airdrie, Alta., was able to spot a few of “his old stomping grounds.” It was an adventurous career.

That’s why it seems strange that the 76-year-old’s new avocation involves carefully matching his fabrics to his threads and then meticulously piecing them together with needles and a Singer. Al Heslop is a proud quilter. And no, it was not his wife’s idea.

It was the other way around. Heslop dragged his spouse to the quilt shop to pick out their very first patterns, one day about five years ago. When he got home and opened up that first set of instructions he realized he’d chosen an advanced quilt by mistake. But the pattern that might have taken an advanced hobbyist months to finish was ready to hang two weeks later—just in time for him to enter it at the county fair where his daughter lives, in Kennewick, Wash.

Continue…

Good times that went sour

By Mike Doherty - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 11:14 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Roman Cho/Getty Images; Wanda and Leah Hawkins

On a postage stamp to be issued this June, Robbie Robertson peers into the distance with narrowed eyes. Depending on how you look at him, he’s either contemplative or suspicious. The dichotomy is fitting: the copious literature about his former group, the Band, depicts him alternately as visionary or cool, even a cold, careerist cat.

It’s hard to argue about his artistic vision: even as a teenager playing underage in Yonge Street clubs in the late ’50s and early ’60s, he revolutionized the music of a generation of Canadians with his fierce guitar sound. Soon after, he was instrumental in Bob Dylan’s going electric; with the Band, he blended soul, rock, folk and country in new and influential ways; and more recently he has helped bring mainstream attention to Aboriginal music. On the other hand, his former Band-mates have decried his taking writing credits for most of their songs (drummer Levon Helm still holds a grudge, 35 years after their last recordings), and his solo albums have tended to be heavy on guest stars but short on soul; Band biographer Barney Hoskyns has called him “a yuppie rock ‘n’ roller who’d been in L.A. so long that he’d completely lost touch with his rock ‘n’ roll roots.”

But despite the contemporary production on his about-to-be-released new album, How to Become Clairvoyant, and the requisite small army of guests (among them Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, and Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello), the songs recover some of the intimacy and emotional heft of his Band days, revealing a vulnerable side he isn’t usually keen to reveal.

Over the phone from L.A., the 67-year-old Robertson is engaging and upbeat. The album, his first since 1998, had its genesis “several years ago,” he says, when he and Clapton “were just hanging out and playing a little music and telling stories.” They recorded demos which weren’t fleshed out until 2008, when Robertson visited Clapton in London.The chance to “breathe” between sessions, Robertson says, allowed him to explore “a different kind of storytelling.”

Continue…

The Outward Bound school of acting

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 11:14 AM - 0 Comments

Leanne Pedersen/Alliance Atlantis

Adrien Brody won an Oscar for his role in The Pianist (2002), as a musician clinging to life in the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto. But the rigours of playing a Holocaust survivor for Roman Polanski seem to pale next to what he endured shooting Wrecked in the forests of Vancouver Island for Montreal director Michael Greenspan. Cast as a man who wakes up in a car wreck at the bottom of a ravine with a broken leg and no memory of how he got there, this method actor took his role to heart. Though it was February, Brody performed dangerous stunts in frigid whitewater. He ate ants. He fished a drowning worm from a pool, and chewed it. To get into character, he even slept outside one night, with just a flashlight and Werner Herzog’s biography.

Welcome to the new age of screen acting as an extreme sport—Survivor: The Solo Challenge. These days it seems the ultimate test for a male thespian is to shoot a movie alone in some wilderness, enduring physical hardship, without a soul to talk to. We’ve seen it before. As a plane-crash survivor in Cast Away, Tom Hanks grew a beard and co-starred with a volleyball. And as an escaped prisoner of war, Christian Bale spent most of Herzog’s Rescue Dawn alone, thrashing his way through the jungle. But the trend seems to be growing. Last year Ryan Reynolds spent all of Buried trapped in a coffin, armed with a lighter and a cellphone, literally trying to act his way out of the box. And James Franco spent the better part of 127 Hours pinned by a boulder in a desert canyon, before amputating his arm with a penknife—a performance that landed him an Academy Award nomination, though he proved less intrepid in braving his ordeal as an Oscar host.

Continue…

Do you take cellphone?

By Colin Campbell - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 11:13 AM - 0 Comments

Noah Berger/The New York Times

PayPal, the online payment-processing system made popular by eBay, its corporate parent, is betting that its future may not be online, but in the real world. PayPal is planning a push into retail stores with a system that would involve swiping cellphones at registers to make payments, rather than using credit or debit cards. The company, which has 95 million users online, estimates expanding into physical stores could double its revenues to $7 billion within two years.

PayPal isn’t the only firm anxiously eyeing this market. Google and Apple are now reportedly working on cellphone payment systems—using a technology called near-field communications—as are cellphone makers like Research In Motion and Nokia. The systems could be useful for consumers who always have a smartphone in hand. But for cellphone companies looking to be the next Visa, it’s a market potentially worth tens of billions of dollars.

Cola war revival

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 11:13 AM - 0 Comments

Mike Segar/Reuters

The decades-old cola war that has seen Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo Inc. square off in supermarket aisles, restaurants and corner stores around the world saw a historic twist last week. Diet Coke overtook Pepsi as the second-most widely sold carbonated soft drink in the U.S. market, just behind regular Coke, according to industry figures. Diet Coke and Pepsi have each accounted for almost 10 per cent of U.S. sales (compared to 17 per cent for Coke), but in 2010 Pepsi-Cola sales slid back nearly five per cent, propelling Diet Coke up to the coveted second place, according to Beverage Digest, a trade publication.

The historic shift comes at a difficult time for the cola industry. In North America, sales of soda have been declining since the mid 2000s. Pepsi and Coca-Cola have long been retooling their arsenals, loading up on products that appeal to a health-conscious public like teas, energy drinks, and bottled water. Pepsi has invested heavily in Gatorade, while Coke owns numerous non-carbonated brands, including Vitaminwater and Minute Maid.

But neither side is giving up on cola just yet. Coke has been marketing heavily on television shows like American Idol and with commercials during the Super Bowl. And its efforts earned it an endorsement from long-time investor Warren Buffett, who told stockholders that dividends from the Atlanta-based company could “double within 10 years”—a rare prediction from the chairman of Berkshire Hathaway.

Pepsi, meanwhile, has been focusing on a hard-nosed marketing makeover of its cola brand. Last year, the company devoted the $20 million it usually spends for advertising on the Super Bowl to set up an online charitable initiative—a noble move, but one that analysts suggest didn’t help sell soda. This year, the brand that once counted Michael Jackson as a pitchman plans to spend 30 per cent more on television ads in the U.S., including $59 million to sponsor the television talent show The X Factor, reports the Wall Street Journal.

Coke may have won the latest battle, but the cola war is far from over.

Policy alert

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 10:58 AM - 16 Comments

Jack Layton promises lower taxes for small businesses, higher taxes for big businesses.

Layton would push the corporate tax rate back up to the 19.5 per cent of 2008, instead of the 16.5 per cent under recent cuts by the Tory government … the NDP would cut the small-business tax rate to nine per cent from 11. It would also set up a job-creation tax credit that would give employers up to $4,500 for each new hire. And it would extend the accelerated capital cost allowance for four more years.

The stump

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 8:58 AM - 22 Comments

Herein a small collection of videos, as posted by the respective campaigns, of the various leaders on their various stumps making their various appeals in these early days of the 41st general election.

First, Stephen Harper, who has decided to go without a podium or tie, but still uses a teleprompter.

Next, Michael Ignatieff, who is going without podium, tie or readily available script. Continue…

Against leaders debates

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 at 11:22 PM - 108 Comments

Here we go again. Just like last time, the “consortium” has made a decision not to invite Elizabeth May to the leaders’ debates.  And just like last time, after initial protestations that the decision is entirely up to the consortium, the party leaders are caving to some sort of perceived public pressure and suggesting that, oh, well, they would certainly be open to having the leader of the Green Party there after all.

I’m genuinely agnostic on the question of whether May should be there; I think there are defensible arguments to be made for both sides. But the question over whether to include her or not contains a tacit assumption, viz., that the leaders’ debates—as currently run—are themselves worthy democratic exercises. I think they are not. Continue…

Duelling War Rooms: Ignatieff's RESP thing redux

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 at 11:16 PM - 131 Comments

The Conservative and Liberal war rooms both signed up for a second round of the debate that kicked off below. Here they go again. What follows is in the two parties’ words, verbatim as they sent them, not my arguments:

The Conservative Reply:

The evolution of Ignatieff’s education policy scramble:

9:00 am – Michael Ignatieff announces what he and senior Liberals call “a game changer”

11:15 am – Michael Ignatieff’s war room says the Liberal platform announcement needs “tweaking” after reporters raise questions about whether CEGEP students, who pay less in tuition than Ignatieff’s proposed program, would make a profit off Ignatieff’s Liberal program.

1:29 pm – Michael Ignatieff’s war room makes another policy amendment on the fly when it becomes clear his policy would, if implemented, make many students ineligible for Canada Student Loans or Canada Student Grants. They announce that the “value of the passport is excluded for the purpose of calculating a STUDENT’S ASSETS” for grants and loans.

3:25 PM – Yet another Michael Ignatieff policy scramble as the Liberals announce the “passport would not count against FAMILY INCOME for student loan calculations.” Still no word on what guarantees they can provide that provinces and territories will make the same changes to their student loan and grant programs, or whether Ignatieff’s program will make students involuntarily ineligible for means-tested scholarship programs. Nor has Ignatieff explained how the low-income portion of his policy will be delivered through RESPs, which currently don’t require banks to obtain information on family income for the purposes of administering them.

The Ignatieff Liberals are clearly making up policy on the fly to cover his many oversights. There are several other questions that must be answered in this Ignatieff policy mess: Continue…

No need to RSVP

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 at 7:40 PM - 78 Comments

The networks have decided not to invite Elizabeth May to the leaders’ debates.

Ms. May was similarly not invited in 2008. At the time it was explained that three parties were prepared to boycott the debates if she was included, but Stephane Dion subsequently advocated on her behalf and the Bloc Quebecois said Gilles Duceppe would not avoid the debates if May was present. Jack Layton folded in short order and the Conservatives followed Mr. Layton. With none of the participants threatening to boycott proceedings, Ms. May was thus allowed to participate.

In this case, the broadcasters are said to have ”unanimously decided they wanted to invite the four parties that have representation in the House.”

Update 9:08pm... Michael Ignatieff says she belongs in the debates. The NDP says it has no objection to her inclusion. The Conservatives and Bloc say they’ll abide by the consortium’s decision.

The Bull Meter: Michael Ignatieff on his family’s flight from Russia

By Julia Belluz - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 at 6:35 PM - 63 Comments

"My family lost everything in the Russian revolution. They started over again in Canada. They came here with nothing."

- Michael Ignatieff
March 20, 2011

In his family memoir, The Russian Album, Ignatieff describes his relatives as a group of privileged, well educated, and well-heeled Russians, who seemed to recover quickly from a tumultuous decade of resettlement following the Bolshevik Revolution. Paul, his grandfather, served as the last Minister of Education in the last Cabinet of the Tsar Nicholas II, and was friends with the likes of Vladimir Nabokov. Paul’s father was a Russian diplomat. Paul’s wife (Ignatieff’s grandmother) was born Princess Natasha Mestchersky on an estate, and travelled to Paris to learn the “rudiments of cooking” at Le Cordon Bleu.

According to the memoirs of Ignatieff’s late father George, The Making of a Peacemonger, when the family fled Russia as the revolution was unfolding, they ended up in London in 1919 with £25,000 in the bank. After living on a country estate for almost a decade, they moved to a rented farm in Montreal, with much of their wealth depleted. But by the time George reached high school, the Ignatieffs had the financial wherewithal to send him to the prestigious prep school, Lower Canada College. They also had connections: a contact of prime minister Mackenzie King fast tracked the family’s citizenship so George could go off to Oxford University on the Rhodes Scholarship in 1936. As Michael Ignatieff notes in The Russian Album, “[My father] presented himself to the world throughout my childhood as the model of an assimilated Canadian professional.”

Alas, it’s a stretch for Ignatieff to say his family came to Canada with “nothing.” To their credit, they made a seemingly successful transition to Canadian life, and rose quickly up the social ladder here.

Heard something that doesn’t sound quite right? Send quotes from the campaign trail to macbullmeter@gmail.com and we’ll tell you just how much bull they contain.

Sources:

Michael Ignatieff on CTV’s Question Period

The Russian Album by Michael Ignatieff

The Making of a Peacemonger by George Ignatieff

Bell toots an extinguisher on UBB, Netflix pours gasoline

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 at 6:26 PM - 60 Comments

Netflix's new killer feature: crappy compression for Canadians

Until yesterday, Bell Canada’s message to the 470,000 Canadians who stand in opposition to Usage Based Billing could be summarized as follows: You are confused. Go home.

In interview after interview, Bell spokesman Mirko Bibic sought to educate the angry horde—they simply didn’t understand that the CRTC’s pro-UBB decision would only impact the small minority of users who subscribe to independent Internet providers. If you were with any of the big telcos, this wasn’t your fight. He was technically right: mainstream subscribers are already being billed outrageously for bandwidth “overages” and the CRTC isn’t even thinking of stepping in.

Somehow, this message failed to resonate.

Yesterday, Bibic took another tack. “Wholesale UBB is now gone,” he announced.  ”It will not be implemented.”  The indie ISPs will still be able to offer unlimited service, and the rest of us can declare victory and go back to paying up to $5 a gig from providers like Bell.

Bibic still doesn’t get it.  The half million Canadians who signed the Stop the Meter petition didn’t do so because they were ignorant of the distinctions between wholesale and retail or because they are strangely concerned with the pricing models of a bunch of tiny ISPs who collectively comprise 6% of the market. They signed the petition because they are not stupid. They see that Canada’s big ISPs are attempting to cap the amount of data transferred by all Canadians, regardless of which ISP they are with, and that is what they oppose.

Netflix gets it. Yesterday they announced that they would deal with mainstream ISP UBB by allowing customers to drastically compress the quality of the video they watch. Yes, that’s innovation in Canada: new players can indeed compete, by grossly degrading their product to a level beneath anything they’d dare offer to Americans. True, it may be a publicity stunt on Netflix’s part, a calculated move to embarrass Canada into getting with the times. If so, it’s a brilliant one.

But will it be effective? Only if the half million angry Canadians stay that way and make UBB an election issue.

The Bull Meter: John Baird on the bills that died because of the election

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 at 6:06 PM - 28 Comments

"The opposition has helped pass a number of bills through the House in the last six weeks. That’s a good deal of progress. An election now would kill that progress. It would kill several important pieces of legislation."

- John Baird
March 23, 2011

When parliament is prorogued or dissolved for an election, discussion on any government bill that hasn’t yet been passed must start from scratch when the chambers reconvene. When speaking with reporters last week, Baird lamented the fate of three particular bills: Bill C-49, a law to crack down on human smuggling; Bill S-10, to fight organized drug crime; and Bill C-60, to give citizen arrest powers to victims of crime. While Bill C-49 and C-60 were introduced in the last session of Parliament, Bill S-10 has been around, in various incarnations, for over three years.

Justice minister Rob Nicholson used the same occasion to reiterate Baird’s point, mentioning two other bills: Bill C-54, which provides for tougher penalties for sexual predators who commit sexual offences against children; and Bill C-16, which would further restrict conditional sentences including house arrest for serious violent crime. Again, while Bill C-54 is new, Bill C-16 used to be called C-42, and has been around since 2009.

The bottom line is this: It’s true the government’s defeat means work on some bills will be cut short. Still, Conservatives have had plenty of time to pass some of the other legislation that will be killed because of the election. So blaming the dissolution of parliament for the death of legislation is mostly truthful, but a bit of an exaggeration.

Heard something that doesn’t sound quite right? Send quotes from the campaign trail to macbullmeter@gmail.com and we’ll tell you just how much bull they contain.

Sources:

Bill C-49

Bill S-10

Bill C-60

Bill C-54

Bill C-16