Keeping Denmark's door shut

By Cathy Gulli - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 5 Comments

Marc Mueller/EPA/Keystone Press

A recent Danish report has provoked an uncomfortable debate about the economics of immigration. The report, based on data from five Danish ministries, indicates that the country saved $9.5 billion in housing and social assistance over the last decade by restricting immigrants from non-Western nations. By contrast, immigrants from Western countries were found to have contributed to the economy.

Denmark’s right-wing government and its allied parties have seized on the new information as validation of their anti-immigration agendas. Some politicians have suggested that the savings are, in fact, greater, once health and police expenditures are taken into account. And there are even calls to further clamp down on newcomers who “one can suspect will be a burden on Denmark,” as Søren Pind, the centre-right liberal integration minister, put it in a Danish newspaper.

But the country’s opposition parties see it differently: they say that the six per cent of Denmark’s population who are immigrants from outside the EU (totalling approximately 320,000 people) are being used as the “whipping boys” for Denmark’s $8.7-billion deficit. Marianne Jelved, spokesperson for the centre-left Social-Liberal Party, has called classifying people “depending on their value to the economy” nothing short of “degrading” and undemocratic.

In conversation: Peter Toohey

By Kate Fillion - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 0 Comments

Photographs by Richard Cannon/Getty Images

Peter Toohey is a professor of classics at the University of Calgary. In Boredom: A Lively History, he argues that boredom is an essential aspect of human experience.

Q: Do you agree with social theorists who say boredom is a symptom of modernity?

A: No. Boredom has a long history, there’s no question of that. There’s a late third-century inscription in the Italian city of Benevento thanking a public official who “rescued the population from endless boredom.” Even earlier, in Pompeii, there’s wall graffiti about boredom. I suspect people have experienced boredom from time immemorial.

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This one's for the birds

By Stephanie Findlay - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Aaron Vincent Elkaim

Bill Malis describes the sound as a “a thud. And it’s a gross thud.” The Telus call-centre employee is recalling the first time he heard a bird crash into the Scarborough, Ont., office tower where he works. It was the spring of 2005, and Malis, who had recently started a new job at Consilium Place, an office complex consisting of three mirrored high-rises, was outside on a smoke break. “I dropped my cigarette and was like, what just happened? I picked the poor little guy up—luckily it was okay—and ran across the street to let him loose in the field.”

Malis, who has the manic energy of Jim Carrey but is five foot nine and favours rockabilly-style shirts and pants, started making his rescue missions a habit. Almost every day since, before his shift begins at 7:30 a.m., Malis has patrolled the grounds around the office towers rescuing stunned birds. He makes Consilium Place sound like a zombie adaptation of Hitchcock’s The Birds. “It’s happened, birds falling into people’s meals,” says Malis, who usually finds “beaks, legs, heads, everywhere on the property over the summer from all the hawks and seagulls ripping the birds apart.”

Now, six years since his first rescue mission, Malis, 42, is a key witness in what could be a precedent-setting case against Menkes Developments, the owners of Consilium Place. On March 4, Ontario Nature and Ecojustice, two independent environment organizations, launched a private prosecution against Menkes, which could lead to big fines for using reflective windows that they allege has caused the death or injury of some 800 migratory birds over a nine-month stretch between 2008 and 2009.

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All men on deck—in drag?

By Emma Teitel - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 3 Comments

Darryl Dyck/CP

When Nova Scotia’s Samuel Cunard founded his iconic ocean liner company in 1840, he had no idea that his massive ships would, in the period following the Second World War, become home to elaborate drag shows and some of the first gay weddings. The little-known history of homosexual stewards on commercial ocean liners—many passed through ports in Halifax, Quebec City and Montreal from the 1950s to 1980s—is revealed in Hello Sailor!: Gay Life on the Ocean Wave, which makes its North American debut at Halifax’s Maritime Museum of the Atlantic this month.

The exhibit, on display until Nov. 27, includes photographs from cruise ships in the postwar period (when Cunard was the dominant transatlantic cruise company) of vintage drag shows, and recorded oral histories of gay sailors from across Canada and the U.K. who sought refuge at sea. There’s also a replica cabin of a 1950s steward, complete with an official uniform turned drag costume.

One of the more surprising revelations is evidence of early gay marriage. According to Dan Conlin, curator of the Halifax museum, same-sex marriage was performed at sea long before it was performed on land. “Oftentimes, two stewards would form long-lasting relationships,” he says. “And crew members would recognize the union officially in a ceremony on-board the ship. They would exchange vows and rings and even move into the same cabin.” That this evolution of gay culture took place on the high seas is no accident. “Economic factors drove these companies to hire large numbers of gay men,” says Conlin. “Passengers enjoyed their witty banter and music shows. [The companies] would gladly turn a blind eye to sexual preference, for profit’s sake.”

It's their parties

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 11 Comments

Alison Loat talks to Steve Paikin about Samara’s latest report.

Surprise: We're not flying kites

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 9:13 AM - 22 Comments

Dave Pugliese reports that Canada has ordered 1300 bombs at $100k apiece  for our war against Libya. Opines one analyst:

What kind of war did Canada think it was going to fight? Did they think this war was going to be over quickly or that the Americans would drop all the bombs?”

Kassandra Marie Kaulius

By Kate Lunau - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 3 Comments

Illustration by Julia Minamata

Kassandra Marie Kaulius was born on June 27, 1988, in North Vancouver, to Victor, who worked for a local bakery, and Markita, a recreation centre employee. The family, who lived in nearby Surrey, already had two children, Miranda and Nicholas; because of earlier complications, Markita “wasn’t supposed to have any more children,” Victor says. “Kassandra was a bit of a miracle.”

From the moment she was born, Kassandra was a joyful child who loved playing with her brother and sister—especially, Markita says, “anything to do with sports.” When she was just two, her mom says, “she’d run out to the garage in her pyjamas, get her brother’s lacrosse stick and put his hockey helmet on, and say, ‘Come play, Come play!’ ” That year, she asked for a basketball. By age 3, she was in the backyard, swinging a baseball bat, Victor says, yelling, “I’m hitting a home run!” Kassandra and Nick would recruit their dad to be “ringmaster” for their wrestling matches, or they’d play ninja and He-Man. At the same time, Miranda says, “She could be a really girlie-girl.” By age 5, Kassandra was playing T-ball, and she loved football, hockey, swimming—anything that got her moving. “It’s not that she was the world’s best athlete,” Victor says. “She just loved playing sports.” And did she like school? Her entire family chuckles. Victor says, “She liked P.E.”

In high school, Kassandra competed on the volleyball and basketball teams, but softball—and especially pitching—became her passion. Her team won the provincial championships, and went on to win a national silver medal in 2004. “Kassandra would help out the younger girls,” says her cousin Darren Kaulius, 42, a coach with the Surrey Storm fast-pitch softball league, where Kassandra played (and eventually coached, too). “My daughters are close in age to her, and the reason they play ball is because of her,” Darren says. “They saw how much fun it could be, and how great you can look in a uniform.”

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The wit and wisdom of Ted Rogers

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 8:30 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Peter Bregg

Fifty years ago, most television programming made its way to people’s TV sets via rabbit ears. The newest mass communication technology—frequency modulation (FM) radio—was still struggling to catch on. And in Canada, the broadcasting business was dominated by the CBC. But in a few months in 1960 and 1961, a young lawyer, Ted Rogers, arrived on the scene and for the next five decades would radically shake up the media landscape, laying the groundwork for what would eventually become one of the world’s biggest communications companies.

In 1960, while still a law school student, Rogers and his then partner, media personality Joel Aldred, paid $85,000 to buy CHFI-FM, the first FM radio station in Canada. It was a bold venture, coming at a time when only five per cent of homes had FM radios. He also ventured into television broadcasting with a cold call from a law office library to media tycoon John Bassett. After wrangling a meeting for the next morning, the pair was soon pitching the Board of Broadcast governors (a precursor to the CRTC) for a licence to start the first private TV station in Toronto. In 1961, CFTO-TV hit the air, with Rogers as a minority owner. Those early forays into radio and television—marked by equal parts hard work, attitude and vision (and a little luck, of course)—would come to define the next several decades for the company, which has been celebrating its 50th anniversary over the past several months. “We were always trying to do the impossible,” Rogers wrote about the period in his book, Relentless.

Rogers credited his driving ambition to the ghost of his father, who died when he was just six years old. Edward Samuel Rogers invented the plug-in radio at a time when most radios were powered by cumbersome, messy batteries. He also started the CFRB radio station in Toronto to help increase demand for the radio sets he manufactured. But his life was cut short when he died at age 38 of an aneurysm. The business would later be dismantled, with young Ted determined to regain what had been taken from the family.

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Meet the new Flintstones, same as…

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 9:55 PM - 10 Comments

I was trying to think of something to say about the news that Seth MacFarlane will be reviving The Flintstones. I think the most obvious point to make is that with Hanna-Barbera cartoons, there is no artistic integrity to violate. That doesn’t mean they never made good shows. And they certainly made lots of beloved shows, as well as shows that were influential: their early TV work, including the early Flintstones, was a huge influence on Ren & Stimpy. But virtually every H-B TV cartoon is a copy of something else that was successful.

MacFarlane has sort of learned from this in that most of his TV cartoons have their premises stitched together from various other things; one of the best characters on any of his shows is an alien who talks and acts like Paul Lynde, which is the H-B philosophy of how to create a cartoon character (not just theirs, obviously, but they did it the most), make your character as close to a famous performer as you can without getting sued. Maybe it’s no wonder MacFarlane wants to revive H-B’s second most-famous property; he didn’t only start at Hanna-Barbera, he’s sort of their successor.

Reviving The Flintstones is a bit different from reviving the classic cartoon characters, and probably easier. Easier because they are a sitcom already – literally, the first animated prime-time sitcom – so there’s no need to figure out what their new format should be. And because they’re sitcom characters, they don’t depend on an older, less TV-friendly type of story like Bugs Bunny does. They don’t actually need to be “rebooted,” they just need to be revived. I could see it working for that reason — there’s not a whole lot the new version would need to change, other than the nature of the jokes themselves (which would need to be raunchier and more pop-culture-aware to get with the times). The writers could just do what they always do, add prehistoric jokes, and the result is the revival of a cartoon franchise and merchandising bonanza. It’s a bit cynical, but so was the original.

Or they could go another way and genuinely “reboot,” changing the format and the characters, but the reports seem to give the impression that Time-Warner wouldn’t have given Fox/MacFarlane the license if they were going to do that. Anyway, here’s an example of what an actual Flintstones reboot might look like, from the show that rebooted every Hanna-Barbera character it could get its hands on, my favourite Adult Swim show, “Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law.”

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 5:49 PM - 68 Comments

The NDP pitches tax reform for artists.

The NDP called on the federal government to implement income averaging, an income tax policy they say would benefit artists. It would allow artists who have a good year financially one year, followed by some bad years, to average their earnings over a prescribed period so they are not always in a higher tax bracket.

The popular mandate

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 3:42 PM - 38 Comments

I ran these sorts of numbers a few years ago, so, for the sake of argument, here are this year’s election results as a measure not of votes cast, but of total possible votes (based on the preliminary result of 61.4% turnout).

Conservatives 24.3%
NDP 18.8%
Liberals 11.6% 

That would give the new government the fourth-smallest mandate in history. Or, put more positively, that gives the new government a larger mandate than the governments elected in 2004, 2006 and 2008.

The mandate won by Robert Borden in 1917—42.8% of all possible votes—remains the undisputed champion of this academic exercise.

John Tobin pleads guilty to impaired driving causing death

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 2:07 PM - 0 Comments

John “Jack” Tobin, the son of former Newfoundland premier Brian Tobin pleaded guilty on Tuesday to impaired driving causing death in connection with an accident that killed his friend Alex Zolpis. He will be sentenced—to what the prosecuting attorney hopes is a “substantial jail term”—in the late summer. According to court documents, the accident on the roof of a downtown Ottawa parking garage closed out what had been a alcohol-soaked Christmas party among friends. Tobin, along with Zolpis and five others, had spent the evening drinking in two local pubs before the group opted to go drink whiskey in Tobin’s rented pick-up truck. Zolpis died when he got caught underneath the truck while Tobin was doing “donuts” on the roof of the parking garage. It is unclear how Zolpis, as well as another friend who wasn’t injured in the incident, ended up stuck underneath the vehicle.

Ottawa Citizen

Rwandan ex-paramilitary officers convicted of genocide

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 1:50 PM - 0 Comments

The UN’s International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has convicted four ex-Rwandan army officers for their roles in the country’s 1994 genocide. The heaviest sentence was handed out to former army chief Augustin Bizimungu – a man who referred to the country’s ethnic Tutsi people as cockroaches. He faces 30 years in prison. Ex-Rwandan paramilitary chief Augustin Ndindiliyimana was also convicted, but was released after sentencing because he has already spent 11 years in jail. Two other senior generals were given 20-year prison sentences after being found guilty of crimes against humanity. The UN tribunal was set up in neighbouring Tanzania to try those behind the genocide of 800,000 people – mostly Tutsis and moderate Hutus – who were killed during Rwanda’s 100 days of violence.

BBC News

The first test of the new Parliament

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 1:41 PM - 14 Comments

After announcing yesterday that Parliament will resume business on June 2, John Baird was asked about the state of the Afghan detainee document review. He responded as follows.

There’s a good number that, I understand, should be able to be tabled in short order. That should proceed. Obviously the agreement that we had in place was with the Bloc Quebecois and the Liberal party. Obviously the two Bloc members were defeated and there’s only one of the Liberals so that’ll be something that, as government House leader, working with the Minister of Justice, we’ll have to discuss.

See previously: The detained documents

A nation divisible

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 1:00 PM - 91 Comments

The Vancouver Sun publishes some of the demographic findings of an election day poll conducted by Ipsos Reid.

Attended church/temple at least weekly
Conservative 50% 
NDP 24%
Liberal 18%

Attended church/temple monthly or less
NDP 37%
Conservative 35%
Liberal 16% 

Schwarzenegger fathered love child

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 12:27 PM - 5 Comments

Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Terminator and Governor of California, split with his wife Maria Shriver earlier this month, and today he revealed why: Schwarzenegger admitted to fathering a child with one of their household workers. The staffer, who had worked for the Schwarzeneggers for the last 20 years, had the actor and bodybuilder’s baby “more than a decade ago,” before he ran for office. He provided financial support for the woman and her child, but kept the paternity a secret, managing to conceal the story throughout his entire gubernatorial campaign and two terms in office. Schwarzenegger’s campaign was plagued with many stories about women he had allegedly groped, allegations he at first denied and then apologized for. But somehow the biggest scandal of all managed to remain a secret until now.

Los Angeles Times

Iran says missing Canadian journalist violated passport rules

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 12:05 PM - 9 Comments

Iran’s foreign ministry said on Tuesday that missing Canadian journalist Dorothy Parvaz, violated passport rules as she entered Syria to cover domestic unrest. Parvaz disappeared on April 29 after leaving Qatar to report on the political violence in Syria for Al Jazeera’s English news channel. Iranian official Ramin Mehmanparast said Iranian-born Parvaz was travelling with several passports, including an expired Iranian one. He said his country does not recognize Iranians having multiple nationalities. Although Al Jazeera said it was told by Syrian officials that Parvaz was sent to Iran after being detained in Damascus, Mehmanparast did not confirm this. Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department said in a statement that it is “pressing for information” from Syrian and Iranian authorities about Parvaz’s whereabouts. The 39-year-old journalist was born in Iran but moved to Vancouver as a teenager before graduating from the University of British Columbia. She holds Canadian, American and Iranian citizenship.

CBC News

Bomb scare precedes royal visit to Ireland

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 11:53 AM - 0 Comments

The Irish Army has confirmed that an improvised explosive device was found on a bus outside Dublin the night before Queen Elizabeth II’s historic visit. The bomb was discovered late Monday night at a bus stop on the outskirts of Maynooth, about 30 kilometres west of Dublin. According to an Irish military spokesman, a controlled detonation was carried out early Tuesday morning and the area was declared safe by 1:55 a.m. GMT. While Irish president Mary McAleese calls the Queen’s visit “a phenomenal sign of the peace process” with neighbouring Great Britain, there is also strong anti-monarchist opposition. Earlier on Monday, Irish republican dissidents reportedly made a bomb threat, disrupting traffic in the capital city. The visit to Ireland carries a security price tag of over $40 million, with land, air and sea patrols in place to protect the Queen and her husband, Prince Phillip. This is the first time a British monarch has visited the independent Republic of Ireland, a milestone many see as a positive step forward in the relationship of the two countries.

The Guardian

Place your bets

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 11:37 AM - 29 Comments

The Canadian Press widens the current field to replace Peter Milliken as Speaker to six MPs, all of them Conservatives.

Ever-cheerful Saskatchewan MP Andrew Scheer, who has worked alongside Peter Milliken as deputy speaker and assistant deputy speaker, is again trying his luck. He’s also the only functionally bilingual candidate among the Conservative MPs in the running. The NDP has said it believes the Speaker should be bilingual. ”I think back in 2004 I was quite the heckler, quite the partisan guy, and spending so many years in the chair has really taught me the importance of impartiality for the chair occupants but also a better personal understanding of what motivates other members of other parties,” said Scheer, who turns 31 on the weekend. ”(It’s) the idea that while you certainly might believe that your ideas and your policies are the best for Canada, not to take anything away from the opposition MPs who truly do want the same thing that you want — for Canada to be the best country in the world.”

Exoplanet may harbour life, scientists say

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 11:33 AM - 0 Comments

A new study in Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests the atmosphere of planet Gliese 581d, which orbits a red dwarf star 20 light years away, could keep the planet warm enough for water, the BBC reports. The planet is at the outer edge of the “Goldilocks zone,” where liquid water could be sustained, and was discovered in 2007. That planet and another one in its solar system, Gliese 581g, have both been considered potentially habitable, although the existence of Gliese 581g has since been called into question. Planet 581d has a mass about six times that of Earth, and is about twice its size. It was originally thought to be too cold for liquid water, but French researchers ran computer simulations of its atmosphere—which they believe has a high concentration of carbon dioxide—and they believe it could host oceans of liquid water, clouds and rainfall.

BBC News

Byron Sonne gets bail. Finally.

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 59 Comments

Yesterday, Byron Sonne, the only person still being held on G20-related charges, was finally granted bail after spending almost a year in jail. The Crown is prosecuting Sonne aggressively, and will characterize him at trial (to begin no sooner than this fall) as a dangerous radical as they attempt to prove explosives charges against the Forest Hill computer security expert.

Sonne, with whom I’ve corresponded throughout his time in prison, sees himself as a civil libertarian who tested the billion dollar “security theatre” protecting the G20. Sonne says he wanted to see if and how it worked, and to see if any citizen’s rights would be violated in the process.

Details of the courtroom proceedings in Sonne’s case are subject to a publication ban. As such, coverage of his case has been limited. Toronto Life published a cover story giving many details of Sonne’s life and activities leading up to his arrest. But once the ban is lifted, the real questions won’t be about what Sonne did—they’ll be about how the police and the Crown have behaved in this extraordinary case.

B.C. woman accused of keeping a slave

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 11:13 AM - 7 Comments

A West Vancouver woman has been accused of keeping a slave, the CBC reports, after a report emerged from a 21-year-old female who was allegedly recruited from Africa with the promise of a job in a hair salon. Once the woman arrived in Vancouver, she was made to work up to 18 hours a day, seven days a week in a private home and wasn’t paid, say police. Meanwhile, the homeowner allegedly kept the woman’s identity papers and passport. After one year, the young woman left and went to a women’s shelter while the RCMP human trafficking team investigated. West Vancouver resident Mumtaz Ladha, 55, has been charged with one count of human trafficking and one count of human smuggling, only the second time such charges have been laid in B.C.

CBC News

The dangers of being a writer in Putin’s Russia

By Anna Porter - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 9 Comments

Dominique Faget/AFP/Getty Images

The London Book Fair, which ran from April 16 to 18, hardly seemed like the best place for an enthusiastic endorsement of Joseph Stalin’s star-studded achievements. Nevertheless, Russian literary firebrand Mikhail Elizarov told a crowd at a seminar called “Beyond the Headlines: Writing About Russia Today” that Winston Churchill’s murders far outweighed those of Stalin, and furthermore, were it not for Stalin we would all be speaking German. Elizarov, whose novels include Pasternak and The Librarian, was part of the Russian delegation, jointly funded by the British Council and the Academia Rossica. In answer to the question whether journalism in Russia today was a dangerous choice of professions, Elizarov scoffed: “No more so than in the United States.”

While it’s a safe bet that Elizarov belongs to Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s new patriotic intelligentsia, it is hard to believe that he would imagine the U.S. is as deadly for journalists as is Putin’s Russia. The International Federation of Journalists has documented over 300 deaths among journalists in Russia, plus hundreds of abductions, disappearances and severe beatings. The 2006 brutal murder of crusading journalist Anna Politkovskaya, and the worldwide protests that followed, have neither slowed the mayhem, nor have there been signs that the authorities are prepared to arrest and prosecute those responsible. Several of her colleagues at Novaya Gazeta have been beaten, threatened or gunned down. In November 2010, investigative journalist Oleg Kashin suffered a fractured skull, broken leg and shattered jaw. There have been no arrests.

While writing about life in Putin’s Russia is dangerous, writing sympathetically about Chechnya must surely be suicidal. The death toll in the Second Chechen War is estimated to be between 25,000 and 50,000. It was her writings about atrocities there that likely killed Politkovskaya. And if journalism is a life-threatening profession for Russians, it must be doubly so for Chechens (two months before the London Book Fair, a Chechen warlord claimed credit for the bomb that killed 37 people at Moscow’s Domodedovo airport).

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Is democratic reform dying out?

By Charlie Gillis - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 10:05 AM - 25 Comments

Mark Blinch/Reuters

For would-be reformers of the mother of all parliaments, it was a brief and ill-fated courtship—ending with a door-slam to the face. One year ago, nearly six out of 10 Britons were telling pollsters they’d gladly dump the familiar first-past-the post electoral system (FPTP) in favour of a method that better reflected their democratic will. But when given their say in a referendum last week, voters dispatched the alternative with extreme prejudice: nearly 68 per cent opted to retain the old method of electing MPs, soundly rejecting the proposed system of preferential balloting known as the alternative vote (AV).

Advocates for change were quick to marshal explanations. The rejection spoke less to disapproval of AV than to dissatisfaction with its chief proponent, Liberal-Democrat Leader Nick Clegg, they said. Some complained voters had been hoodwinked by hysterical-sounding advertisements suggesting that a costly overhaul of the electoral system would suck money from, among other vital services, intensive care for infants.

None seemed to consider the possibility that FPTP might have its own inherent appeal. “It’s simple, and it normally produces parliamentary majorities,” says Louis Massicotte, a Université Laval political scientist who has studied electoral reform initiatives around the world. “The ambiguities of minority parliaments may fascinate intellectuals. But for the average folk in the street, a clear outcome is always better than a murky one.”

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