Cleaning up Britain's privacy laws

By Leah McLaren - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 5 Comments

Yui Mok/PA Photos/Keystone Press

No one can whip up a scandal quite like the British press. In a country in which the kiss ’n’ tell splash is both a lucrative and time-honoured tradition, many publications here view it as their right—in some cases raison d’être—to be able to publish the raunchiest details of a celebrity’s sexual indiscretions with impunity.

But the British courts don’t always agree. For several years now, British judges have been granting anonymizing court orders, commonly known as “super-injunctions,” which prevent U.K. media outlets (usually tabloid newspapers) from publishing stories that may be damaging to the parties involved. In some cases, the orders prevent the claimants themselves from being named, and in the most “super” of super-injunctions (a slang—not legal—term), the injunction itself is also banned from public mention. The injunctions cost between $30,000 and $80,000 on average to take out, prompting widespread criticism that they are an option open to only the already rich and famous.

If there is only one thing the British press like less than being scooped, it’s being muzzled. While super-injunctions have long been an irritant to the scandal sheets, they have only lately boiled over into front-page news, after the Wikipedia entries of four protected public figures were rewritten with lurid details inserted. In response, a number of others jumped at the opportunity to speak out against these gag orders, which some see as both hopeless in the digital era, as well as a dangerous infringement on freedom of the press.

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It doesn't get worse than this

By Michael Barclay - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 9:35 AM - 0 Comments

Jeon Heonkyun/EPA/Keystone Press

North Korea is being battered by an outbreak of paratyphoid fever, a disease that is aggravated by malnutrition—a given in a country that has suffered from food shortages for years, whose totalitarian leadership refuses outside aid as a point of pride, and diverts most of its resources to the military. On top of that, the country suffered a terrible winter harvest that yielded half its usual quantity. There are reports of citizens eating grass, leaves and tree bark.

And yet, even North Korea’s sick and hungry can be thankful that they’re not one of the 200,000 people cooped up in prison camps, according to a report released last week by Amnesty International. Satellite images show the camps are much larger than previously believed, and interviews with 30 people who managed to escape tell stories of 16-hour workdays, being forced to witness executions, “ideology education,” and hungry inmates resorting to collecting kernels of corn from animal feces. Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Asia Pacific director, said conditions were “some of the worst circumstances we’ve documented in the last 50 years.”

Amnesty speculates that the camps are expanding as part of a crackdown on dissidents, timed to quell uncertainty as Kim Jong Il is expected to hand power over to his son, Kim Jong Un.

Retail Activist

By Mike Doherty - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

Photographs by Zoe Norfolk

The signs on the doors of Selfridges’ flagship department store on Oxford Street in London promote giving “the gift of self-indulgence.” Having sold an £85 sandwich, a £1,000 Swarovski-encrusted water bottle, an £1,800 Spanish ham, and a £10,000 children’s electric car, Selfridges is not exactly known for preaching restraint. And yet, in launching Project Ocean, its creative director, Alannah Weston, is doing just that.

“Just because you sell beautiful things doesn’t mean you shouldn’t do the right thing,” says Weston, perched over a cup of tea in the downstairs restaurant of the 650,000-sq.-foot store owned by her father, billionaire Galen Weston. Project Ocean, which she has organized with Jonathan Baillie (a childhood friend, and director of conservation for the Zoological Society of London), promises nothing less than “retail activism”: it’s a multi-pronged attempt to save the world’s fisheries from collapse, starting by providing only sustainably sourced fish at Selfridges.

It’s also a transformation of the store itself, with commissioned artwork both madcap and meditative, a sea-themed fashion exhibit including Lady Gaga’s silver lobster hat, well-known chefs in the food hall teaching customers how to cook unpopular seafood, frogmen marching around the aisles, and cheeky but stark messages in the store’s iconic window displays about the depletion of fish stocks.

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Where it's God's way or the highway

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 9:25 AM - 21 Comments

The town of Morinville, Alta., population 6,775, cannot offer Donna Hunter’s children the secular, non-denominational education most Canadian parents expect as a matter of course. She is leaving for nearby north Edmonton and taking her three young children. And her sister. And her sister’s two kids. And her retired parents. Mrs. Hunter led the family’s march to Morinville in 1999; not yet a mother, she didn’t realize that all of the town’s public schools are, because of an anomaly in Alberta’s constitutional development, formally Catholic. The school board’s stated mission: “ensuring that Catholic values permeate all school activities.”

Morinville belongs to the Greater St. Albert “Catholic Public” school district—a historically French-Canadian area that declared itself Catholic for education purposes under territorial law in 1884. For generations, non-Catholic parents accepted the status quo, but Morinville schools have grown more strident about their identity even as the town becomes more diverse. Hunter leads a group of Morinville parents demanding a non-religious option, but the Catholic board will not provide one, and apparently can’t be forced to despite its officially public status. The province’s education minister acknowledges the problem but, say critics, has been slow to address it.

As Hunter leaves Morinville, her group is enjoying some progress. The Catholic board is surveying town residents to test the appetite for secular education, perhaps provided within Morinville under the auspices of a neighbouring district. “But the survey won’t count people who already left because of the Catholic monopoly, or those who never move here,” notes Hunter. “Every year that passes while we await a solution, more Morinville parents will face my choice. Stay? Leave? Wait? How long?”

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Some Lions in Winter

By Andrew Potter - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 10:33 PM - 31 Comments

I was digging through an old hard drive this evening and came across some pictures I shot on Parliament Hill a while ago. I’m not sure how old these are, but I think I took them in the winter of 2007-08.  I’m a lousy photographer, but I like the one of Pearson.

'The Tree of Life', aka 2011: A Space Odyssey

By Brian D. Johnson - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 8:27 PM - 0 Comments

Brad Pitt at 'The Tree of Life' press conference in Cannes / photo by Brian D. Johnson

I hardly know where to begin to talk about The Tree of Life, Terrence Malick’s epic trip into spiritual rapture and boyhood nostalgia. Saw the film yesterday morning, felt duly blown away, then attended the press conference immediately after. The notoriously reclusive director was absent. His excuse: shyness. Which even the moderator found preposterous. This is Cannes, after all, the auteur festival; directors rank higher here than stars. Sean Penn was also absent, on his way back from Haiti and trying to hit the red carpet for the premiere. But his role is a minor one, just a framing device for the story.

Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain, plus some of the production team, were left to hold the fort, struggling to explain the mystery of Malick. Pitt and Chastain co-star as an overbearing dad and a beatific mom in this tale of three sons growing up in a ’50s suburb of Waco, Texas. We know it’s Waco, because we see the sign on a DDT truck spraying white clouds of insecticide that the boys scamper through as if it’s just another lawn sprinkler.

Pitt, who was unusually articulate, defended Malick’s absence. “He sees himself as building a house. I don’t know why people who make things are expected to sell them.” (Though Pitt seems to have accepted that’s part of his job description as a superstar.) The actor went on to explain the logistics of the shoot. For his main location, Malick “started by renting the entire block and dressing it as the 60s.” The cast could roam around and let things happen, while the crew shot with natural light. Pitt said Malick would get up every morning and write for an hour, delivering several pages of script, single spaced to the actors. The child never saw any script. Sometimes Malick would just be “torpedoed” into a scene.

Jessica Chastain / photo by BDJ

Describing the director’s method, Pitt said, “he was like the guy standing there with a butterfly net, ready for that moment of truth to go by. The best moments were not preconceived. They were happy accidents.” In fact, there’s a moment when a large monarch butterfly lands on Chastain’s hand. Usually when that occurs in a movie, there’s a butterfly wrangler. Chastain said it was just one those things that happened.

The Tree of Life‘s narrative is minimal. It’s another Malick landscape movie that goes where no Malick movie has gone before, from a suburban backyard to the outer limits of the cosmos. There are rhapsodic images of boyhood nostalgia and of Creation— stellar cataclysms, erupting volcanoes, churning seas, even dinosaurs.

These are some of Malick’s favorite things: sparklers, sprinklers, rocks thrown through windows, fireflies, a frog tied to a firecracker, curtains billowing over a heating vent, bedtime stories, climbing trees, rolling through tall grass, transparent jellyfish. . . I could go on.

For the record, I loved the movie as an rhapsodic experience, though I’m not sure what  it amounts to. The ending is layered with so many wedding-caked amens that I thought we’d never reach the heavenly afterlife of the closing credits. But if the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, Terence Malick is trafficking in some serious enlightenment. His unfashionable lack of irony and cynicism is astounding, along with his apparent faith that it’s actually possible to achieve a cinematic state of grace—to glimpse the eye of God on camera. Whether or not you’re a believer, it’s a staggering vision.

Brad works the room / photo by BDJ

Auditing the future

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 4:51 PM - 47 Comments

Sheila Fraser is concerned.

“The public must be aware of the challenges ahead,” Ms. Fraser says in an interview with The Globe and Mail and L’Actualité. “Canada is a country where people, as a whole, are relatively prudent on financial matters. Let’s not forget the 1990s when the government reduced spending, increased taxes and was re-elected with a larger majority. There aren’t many other countries where that happened.”

Pointing to billions in upcoming spending on bridges, the Parliament Hill precinct and computer systems, Ms. Fraser laments the fact Canada doesn’t publish long-term projections like the United States, which looks 75 years down the road. She adds that in her view, Canadians don’t want to hand down a huge debt to future generations. “There is the deficit, issues linked to the aging population and questions of climate change. How will we deal with these, in addition to all of the other spending demands on the government?”

Cut it in half and no one would notice

By Erica Alini - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 4:49 PM - 106 Comments

As we wait for Stephen Harper to appoint a new cabinet, it is worth recalling a point I’ve made before: we have, and will continue to have unless he does something surprising, the largest cabinet in the democratic world. Or at least among the major developed democracies: apparently Nigeria is threatening to beat us.

Harper’s last cabinet had 38 members: 27 ministers, plus 11 ministers of state. (In Canada these are considered full members of Cabinet: there is no longer any effective difference between Cabinet and the ministry. It was indeed Harper who erased the distinction in October 2008, when he converted what were previously secretaries of state to ministers of state.)

The US Cabinet currently contains 16 members, including the Vice-President. There are, in addition, six “cabinet-level officers,” none of whom has executive responsibility for any department.

The British Cabinet consists of 23 ministers (one of whom is unpaid), including the Prime Minister. Five other officials “attend cabinet meetings,” but are not considered full members of cabinet. Neither is the Attorney General, although he sometimes attends.

Some other cabinets of note:

Germany : 16 ministers, including the Chancellor.

Japan : 17 ministers, including the Prime Minister.

France : 16 full ministers, including the Prime Minister, plus 7 “ministres auprès d’un ministre” and 8 secretaries of state.

Italy : 25 ministers, including the Prime Minister. 13 have departmental responsibility; 11 are ministers without portfolio.

Australia : 20 ministers, including the Prime Minister.

New Zealand : 20 ministers, including the Prime Minister, plus 8 ministers outside cabinet, some from supporting parties in the coalition.

CODA: Harper does not preside, however, over the largest cabinet in Canadian history. That honour goes to Brian Mulroney, by a whisker: at its largest, his was 39. That’s more than Macdonald (15 at the most), Laurier (17), King (20) Diefenbaker (24), Pearson (28), or even Trudeau (37 by the end, but fewer than 30 for most of his time in office) somehow struggled by on.

SPECIAL BONUS PAK: Here’s what a slimmed-down cabinet could look like (revised from earlier version):

• Prime Minister
• Justice/ Attorney General
• Public Safety/Solicitor General
• Defence (inc Veterans)
• Foreign Affairs & Trade
• Intergovernmental Affairs
• Aboriginal Affairs
• Immigration
• Finance (inc. Revenue, Treasury Board, Financial Services)
• Industry
• Resources (inc. Energy, Mining, Forestry, Fisheries, Agriculture)
• Infrastructure (inc Transportation, Telecoms, Public Works)
• Environment & Public Health
• Work & Incomes (inc Labour, Training, Unemployment Insurance, Income Assistance, Pensions)

There’s also:

• Government House Leader
• Senate Leader

but strictly speaking these aren’t supposed to be cabinet posts. But even if they were, you’d still come in well under 20. And even if you split up the Resources and Infrastructure portfolios into two or three departments each, you’re barely at it.

BUT WAIT THERE”S MORE: I notice that Australia combines “Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry” in one post, “Resources and Energy” in another. Japan also combines Farming, Fishing & Forests under one minister, while France does the first two.

'All options are back on the table'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 4:17 PM - 5 Comments

According to a leaked cable from the U.S. embassy in Ottawa, the Harper government was considering its options in Afghanistan as far back as March 2009.

At a cabinet meeting in March, ministers “agreed that ‘all options are back on the table’ with respect to Canada’s military role in Afghanistan after 2011,” the March 17 cable marked secret says. The cable — among a batch of Canada-related U.S. diplomatic cables released to CBC News from whistleblower website WikiLeaks — quotes extensively from conversations held with a senior adviser from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade.

“It will take time for the government’s public rhetoric to catch up to this ‘new reality,’ however, requiring some ‘patience’ on the part of allies,” the senior adviser apparently told U.S. officials on March 16.

See previously: ‘The government would look at the possibility’

The kids are perfectly normal

By Erica Alini - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 2:55 PM - 28 Comments

Arash Azizi makes the case for Her Majesty’s youthful opposition.

Far from being “one of us,” Members of Parliament often are lawyers, businesspeople, journalists or experts of one kind or other. Even when they are not, they often adopt lifestyles so widely different from the rest of us that too often they lose their common touch. In short, perhaps to the dismay of Adams, legislatures in Canada, as in other liberal democracies, are in no way an “exact portrait . . . of the people at large.”

That the New Democratic Party has fought to challenge this status quo should come as no surprise. After all, when Tommy Douglas founded its predecessor, the CCF, the political fable of “Mouseland” was his guiding principle. He thought mice should stop electing “a government made up of big, fat cats” and fight for a government of themselves, by themselves, for themselves. His was to be the party of “mice,” the party of the common folk. The battle Douglas began has just reached a whole new stage. For the first time, the party of common folk has emerged as the official opposition. Why then should it come as a surprise that a large part of its new caucus is comprised not of political players but of youth, students, waitresses and single parents?

Trump drops out

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 1:39 PM - 6 Comments

Donald Trump, the reality show star and businessman who was Republican voters’ top choice for the U.S. presidential nomination, announced today that he has decided not to run for President of the United States. He explained that he is doing this out of the goodness of his heart, due to the pleadings of network executives who can’t bear to see him leave The Apprentice: “After getting so many calls from NBC executives, I’ve decided that I will continue onward with The Apprentice. I will not be running for president, as much as I wanted to.”  Trump, who built his newfound popularity as a candidate on his embrace of the “birther” issue, has seen his standing plummet since President Obama released his birth certificate.

Deadline.com

U.S. hits $14.3 trillion debt ceiling

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 12:34 PM - 4 Comments

Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner says the U.S. government will begin borrowing from the pension funds of federal workers on Monday in a bid to avoid defaulting on some of its obligations. The move comes as Washington is set to hit the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling, but it isn’t expected to buy the Obama administration more than a few months’ time. Geithner has repeatedly warned that Congress must agree to raise the debt limit before August 2 to avoid defaults that would send shockwaves through the global economy, but Congressional Republicans are demanding the increase be contingent on spending cuts. The White House has instead proposed a mix of spending cuts and tax increases to curb the federal debt.

Washington Post

Swiss voters oppose ban on assisted suicide

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 1 Comment

Assisted suicide and “suicide tourism” have been upheld in Zurich, Switzerland, were 85 per cent of 278,000 votes cast opposed a ban on assisted suicide, and 78 per cent opposed outlawing it for foreigners, the BBC reports. About 200 people commit suicide each year in Zurich, and many of them are foreign visitors. The only assistance allowed is the passive kind, such as providing drugs, but actively assisting a suicide, such as administering a product, is forbidden. The practice has been legal in Switzerland since 1941 if it is performed by a non-physician with no vested interest in the death.

BBC News

Endeavour leaves Cape Canaveral on final flight

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 12:12 PM - 0 Comments

The space shuttle Endeavour left the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla. at 8:56 a.m. ET Monday morning for what will be its final trip to the International Space Station. The 16-day flight is the second-last for NASA’s shuttles; this July, Atlantis will make NASA’s last shuttle flight before the entire fleet is retired. About 500,000 people gathered to watch the launch from nearby towns and roads, while millions were expected to tune in to a live broadcast online. Endeavour will deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS), a particle physics detector that scientists hope will help lead to the understanding of the origin of the universe. The shuttle will also deliver spare parts, including some specifically for Dextre, a Canadian Space Agency robot that rides on the end of the space station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm.

CBC News

Canada offered secret support for Iraq invasion

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 12:06 PM - 9 Comments

At the same time as it was publicly refusing to join the U.S.-led effort of Iraq, the Canadian government was secretly promising American officials clandestine military support for the controversial invasion, a U.S. diplomatic cable obtained by CBC News from WikiLeaks reveals. On March 17, 2003, two days before U.S. warplanes started their raids on Baghdad, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien told the House of Commons that Canadian forces would stay out of what the Americans had dubbed the “coalition of the willing.” The statement was widely held as a rare assertion of foreign policy independence. But the classified U.S. cable shows that a high-ranking Canadian official was privately reassuring American and British counterparts that Canadian naval and air forces could be “discreetly” put to use during the pending U.S.-led assault on Iraq and its aftermath.

CBC News

Over-thinking it

By Erica Alini - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 11:37 AM - 21 Comments

Alice Funke takes apart the strategic voting movement.

I think it’s time to say that these projects are not politically sophisticated enough to get their calls correct, and while they get a lot of people engaged in our democracy, which I can’t ever be opposed to, they do so under false pretenses: namely that you can know the outcome in a riding ahead of time, and game the system to your own ends.

The record of the two main strategic voting campaigns in 2011 proves that you cannot.

Wildfires consume Slave Lake

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 11:14 AM - 0 Comments

Out-of-control wildfires enveloping the town of Slave Lake, Alberta, located 250 kilometres north of Edmonton, are forcing thousands of residents to flee their homes. The fire, which broke out on Saturday, was most likely fuelled by the dry weather and high winds that have triggered about 70 other ongoing wildfires throughout the province. Wind gusts of up to 100 kilometres an hour have so far prevented about 200 firefighters from curbing the flames that have engulfed over half of the town, including the town hall, police station and radio station. Slave Lake authorities have issued a mandatory evacuation order, and police are allegedly arresting anyone who does not comply.

CTV News

Is the federal government right to be trying to shut down Vancouver's safe injection site?

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 11:12 AM - 24 Comments

IMF chief accused of second sexual assault

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 11:04 AM - 0 Comments

A second woman has accused International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault, claiming the event occurred nine years ago and she now wants to file a legal complaint against him. Strauss-Kahn was charged on Sunday with a criminal sexual act, unlawful imprisonment and attempted rape after being accused of trying to rape a hotel maid. He will plead not guilty in a New York court on Monday. The second woman, identified as Tristane Banon, decided to come forward because she feels she will now be taken seriously, according to her lawyer, who says Banon faced pressure not to come forward initially. Strauss-Kahn’s wife, Anne Sinclair, has defended him, saying she has “no doubt his innocence will be established.” John Lipsky, the IMF’s first managing director, is expected to lead the organization while Strauss-Kahn deals with the charges.

CBC News

Fox Is Soft On Crime

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 10:39 AM - 0 Comments

The Fox network had one more cancellation to announce: America’s Most Wanted! They said it was “no longer profitable,” but I don’t see them releasing any figures so I have to assume, until told otherwise, that they simply knuckled under to the powerful crime lobby and pushed John Walsh out the door because he was catching too many crooks. I eagerly await Fox News’s report on the liberal network that is making America safe for scumbags.

In seriousness, just when you thought Saturday night couldn’t be more of a graveyard on network TV – and remember, this is the night where big hits like All In the Family used to air – Fox goes and cancels one of the last long-running Saturday night shows, and its stated reason for doing so is that it wants to use the hour for reruns of shows from earlier in the week. The loneliest night of the week, indeed.

The rest of the Fox schedule seems pretty sensible; it’s one of two networks (the other being CBS) whose scheduling moves usually give the impression of making sense. (They don’t always work, but you can explain them. ABC has a combination of explicable and inexplicable moves; NBC has no idea what it’s doing.) Even the risks are risks that make sense: putting Terra Nova on Monday where House used to be is a risk, but since this is House‘s last season, the network needs to try and establish a new beachhead on Monday. So it’ll put give Terra Nova a 13-episode season in fall, then put House back in its usual spot for the end of its run.

The scheduling of comedies also makes sense, which is not to say it will work. Fox picked up one single-camera comedy (The New Girl) and one multi-camera comedy (I Hate My Teenage Daughter). The “obvious” thing to do would be to schedule Teenage Daughter with Raising Hope, because both are family comedies and because Teenage Daughter‘s star, Jaime Pressly, just guest-starred on Hope. Instead they seem to have realized what NBC didn’t – single-camera goes with single-camera, multi-camera with multi-camera, and never the twain shall meet – and put The New Girl after Glee and before Raising Hope, and the multi-cam show after The X Factor (not a sitcom, but a performance show with a live audience). Both new comedies will have good and compatible time slots and will succeed or bomb on their merits, but at least the network isn’t stacking the deck against either of them the way NBC stacked the deck against several of its comedies.

Of course Fox’s individual scheduling decisions don’t matter a hell of a lot; all that matters is The X Factor. If it’s a hit, then the network will essentially have American Idol all the year round, giving the competition no escape on Wednesdays and Thursdays. The competition is hoping that Factor doesn’t make it or that it finally reduces viewer interest in American Idol: this could be the equivalent of ABC’s infamous decision to schedule too many hours of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, killing the show. I’m not sure I’d bet on it happening this time, because X Factor has been a huge hit all around the world, and because song competition shows really are the last gasp of true mass entertainment on broadcast TV. (Well, song competition shows and NCIS.) The success of The Voice on NBC might create a glut but it’s more likely that all these musical competitions can co-exist, because it is the most popular form of television.

In animation, Fox has shifted The Cleveland Show over to 7:30, the slot that’s frequently pre-empted or pushed by football; it’s the slot a Fox cartoon gets when it’s doing well enough to be renewed but not so well that Fox wants to give it any prime real estate. The network has also scheduled two different new cartoons for two different halves of the season. (The first season of a prime-time cartoon is always 13 episodes – it takes so long to produce one that it wouldn’t be possible to order 9 more episodes to fill out the rest of the season.) The network is very aggressively trying to develop new cartoons that aren’t by Seth MacFarlane; Bob’s Burgers, which has turned out to be a very good show, was their first attempt, and here are two more.

The power imbalance

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 10:16 AM - 7 Comments

Peter Milliken repeats his concerns about the state of Parliament.

“And if your views aren’t in accordance with the leader’s position on an issue, you will not be speaking on that issue in the House and you won’t be asking questions on that issue in the House,” Milliken said, in the interview broadcast Saturday on CBC Radio’s The House.

He proposed giving party caucuses more say in such matters and more say in choosing party leaders. He also said that parties should not be so fixated on unity, and that it’s OK if differing opinions are made public.

Armed and libellous?

By Stephanie Findlay - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 14 Comments

An international spat between Greece and Germany was sparked when Venus de Milo, a Greek marble statue of Aphrodite—arguably the most famous armless goddess in the world—made a controversial appearance on the cover of the German magazine Focus. The problem? Her right arm was intact and she was flipping readers the bird. The magazine’s cover story—“Swindlers in the euro family”—explored German concerns regarding the bailing out of debt-stricken Greece, and outlined the nation’s supposed “2,000 years of decline,” including tax fraud and failed construction projects.

The cover was condemned by the Greek president shortly after it hit newsstands in February 2010. And now, more than a year later, six Greek citizens are taking legal action against Focus—alleging the cover was defamatory, libellous, and responsible for the denigration of Greek national symbols. Along with nine other employees of Focus, Helmut Markwort, the magazine’s founder, is due to appear in an Athens court on June 29. Despite facing two years in prison if found guilty, Markwort is unfazed: “I’m not on the run, and I’m also not afraid that I will have to go to prison.” He says he has a “clean conscience” and that he was simply doing his “journalistic duty.”

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The NDP's union-made caucus

By John Geddes - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 9:45 AM - 36 Comments

Andrew Vaughan/CP

After all the drama and tension of a landmark election, Canadians probably needed a little comic interlude. The NDP provided one, although quite unintentionally. They served up the whimsical story of Pierre-Luc Dusseault, 19, whose upset victory in Sherbrooke, Que., made him the youngest MP ever, and meant he’d have to forgo his summer job on a golf course. Then there were the three McGill University students who will have to suspend their studies after surprising even themselves by capturing Quebec seats. And, of course, there was Ruth Ellen Brosseau, the assistant pub manager at Ottawa’s Carleton University, who hadn’t even visited the Quebec riding of Berthier-Maskinongé before winning it handily. Just as well, since Brosseau’s French isn’t so good and most of her constituents don’t speak English.

Jack Layton spent much of his first post-election news conference fending off questions about the scant experience of these and other rookies in his much enlarged Quebec contingent. With the collapse of the Bloc Québécois, an astonishing 58 NDP MPs from the province were elected on May 2, up from just one, Montreal’s Thomas Mulcair, before the election. But if all the attention on Layton’s youth brigade suggested an NDP caucus characterized by dewy-eyed campus idealism, that’s a misleading impression. In fact, the front benches of the second party in the House—traditionally seen as a government-in-waiting—will feature many tough-minded former union leaders. “We have some pretty major labour folks,” says veteran Vancouver NDP MP Libby Davies. “That’s a connection to a very solid base of activism, an understanding of politics and how it works.”

Davies herself came to federal politics by way of a position with the Hospital Employees’ Union, along with five terms on Vancouver’s city council. Among MPs expected to be assigned high-profile jobs by Layton, organized labour credentials are predominant. Take, for instance, just those who have been teachers’ union officials. Paul Dewar, who was NDP foreign affairs critic in the last Parliament, and is sometimes mentioned as a possible successor to Layton, is one. Irene Mathyssen, the London, Ont., MP who chaired the NDP’s key women’s caucus before the election, is another. They will be joined by rookie B.C. MP Jinny Sims, who was president of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation during the 2005 strike, when it was fined for contempt of court for ignoring a return-to-work order.

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How Bernard Trottier upset Michael Ignatieff

By Erica Alini - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 25 Comments

Photograph by Blair Gable

The Longest Yard Restaurant & Bar on Bloor St. West in Toronto is a little unusual; you can tell because its website has a “politics” section. The pub is particularly famous for two things: its chili, and its political dinner debates. About a year ago, it hosted a discussion of Senate reform led by Liberal Sen. Art Eggleton and Conservative Sen. Hugh Segal. Part of the fun (if this is your idea of fun) was a long quiz on the rules and lore of the Senate. No one was too surprised when a familiar 46-year-old local businessman and political trivia enthusiast scored 100 per cent and walked off with the honours.

The pub is in the riding of Etobicoke-Lakeshore, and shortly before the May 2 election, the management made a surprising prediction in a press release: its pub-quiz winner would become its MP. Conservative Bernard Trottier, a business consultant for IBM Global Services, stunned the country by following through and defeating the incumbent, Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. It is the first personal defeat for a Liberal leader in a general election since 1945, when late-arriving CCF soldier ballots in Prince Albert, Sask., added a small blot of humiliation to prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s resounding national victory.

Trottier, for all his love of parliamentary minutiae, did not originally set out to kill the giant with his own hands. As president of the Conservative riding association, he spent much of 2009 seeking prominent local citizens willing to enter a race against a glamorous Opposition leader who was having fireside chats with Barack Obama. “A lot of these people pointed the finger at me and said I should run,” says Trottier, a father of two who grew up in a French-speaking home in St. Paul, Alta., and hasn’t quite been able to abandon his beloved Edmonton Oilers. “As someone with a young family, I wasn’t that keen to do it. For a while, in my career, I’d been on a plane every week travelling to some part of the world, but I’d finally developed a base of local clients and achieved a nice work-life balance.”

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