Newsmakers: May 5-12, 2011

By Nancy Macdonald - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 11:15 AM - 0 Comments

EMPICS Entertainment/Keystone Press

Compassion for bin Laden

Angela Merkel’s remark that she was “glad” Osama bin Laden had been killed sparked a firestorm of controversy in Germany. Hamburg judge Heinz Uthmann even filed a criminal complaint, alleging the German chancellor broke a law barring the “rewarding and approving of crimes”—in this case, bin Laden’s “homicide.” Politicians denounced her, and 64 per cent of Germans agreed: bin Laden’s death was “no reason to rejoice.” In L.A., however, even the Dalai Lama—compassion incarnate—said he had it coming. “If something is serious and it is necessary to take counter-measures, you have to take counter-measures,” said the Tibetan spiritual leader.

Mother’s day miracle

After 49 days alone in a Chevy Astro van on a logging road in remote Nevada, Rita Chretien was found barely conscious, but clinging to life. The 56-year-old Penticton, B.C., native and her husband, Albert, were stranded en route to Las Vegas on March 19; Albert, who left two days later to find help, hasn’t been seen since. Rita’s faith, and a bit of trail mix, was all that kept her going until finally she was spotted by hunters on ATVs. “We were praying for a miracle and, boy, did we get one,” her son Raymond told reporters Sunday.

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Good news, bad news: May 5-12, 2011

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

Frederick Breedon/Getty Images

Some justice at last

It’s been over three years since Robert Dziekanski died at the Vancouver airport after RCMP used Tasers to subdue him. Now B.C.’s attorney general has laid perjury charges against the four officers involved for allegedly giving misleading testimony during the exhaustive Braidwood inquiry. While some, including Dziekanski’s mother, Zofia Cisowski, are disappointed the charges don’t relate to the tasering itself, Cisowski still applauded the move. The wheels of the law may be slow, but they do keep moving, and in this sad case the charges offer at least some measure of justice.

Harnessing hot air

Energy sources such as wind and solar could provide 80 per cent of the world’s power supply within four decades if governments provide the cash and policies to make it happen. That is the landmark conclusion of a UN panel that says it’s not too late to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a “safe” level. In the meantime, farmers are enjoying the heat. According to separate research, Canadian crops have been largely spared from the scourge of climate change—and our historically hard-luck farmers are profiting from increased demand.

Prize catch

When the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded this year’s Peace Prize to imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, it was a blow to China’s human rights record. But the big winner may be Scottish fish farmers. In a fit of pique, China has stopped buying salmon from Norway—its biggest supplier—and signed a deal with Scotland. Perhaps that contributed to the unprecedented majority won by Alex Salmond’s Scottish National Party in the May 5 elections. Good news for nationalist politicians, not so much for fish.

It’s all relative

A NASA study has confirmed two of the “most profound predictions” about Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity: that space and time are both warped and pulled by Earth’s gravity. Astrophysicists say the results, based on data measured by an orbiting space probe, will have implications “beyond our planet.” In other physics news: engineers have developed a golf ball that won’t slice. Now there’s a breakthrough we can relate to.

Bad news

Parivartan Sharma/Reuters

Revolution relapse

In the post-Mubarak era, Egypt is transitioning, but to what? Christians and Muslims clashed in Cairo, leaving 12 dead and two churches in smoldering ruins, amid signs Islamist hard-liners are asserting their power. At the same time, Syria continued its crackdown against anti-government protesters, killing scores of people and injuring hundreds, while in Libya, forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi hammered rebels. Clearly the fight is far from over for the pro-democracy movement across the Middle East.

Retirement blues

Tens of thousands more baby boomers will face retirement without a company pension plan, Statistics Canada reported this week. Since the recession, membership in private sector plans has fallen below that of the public sector for the first time ever. Which is why Canadians should be cheering the Canada Pension Plan’s tripling of its 2009 investment in Internet-calling-company Skype, recently purchased by Microsoft for US$8.5 billion. Unless you work for the civil service or at a university, the CPP may be all the help you will get.

Red carded

Lord Triesman, the chair of England’s failed bid for the 2018 World Cup of soccer, is alleging at least four FIFA members demanded bribes for their votes, including a knighthood for Paraguay’s representative. Trinidad’s football head wanted $2.5 million cash for an “educational centre.” London’s Sunday Times reports two West African delegates were paid $1.5 million to support Qatar’s winning bid. And in France, the national team is embroiled in scandal after it emerged officials considered quotas to limit the number of African and Arab-born players on their development squads. The ugly side to the beautiful game.

Unholy bonds

A good marriage isn’t necessarily built on love or even physical attraction, suggests new research in the Journal of Politics. Among the strongest shared traits between U.S. spouses is their political attitudes, the study found. The political bond forms early in marriages, but it’s not always enough to keep them together. Just ask political power-couple Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver, who separated this week.

'A good working relationship'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 10:58 AM - 33 Comments

Another leaked cable sheds light on our pitched battle with the Russians for the Arctic.

One cable drafted by U.S. diplomats in Ottawa portrays Mr. Harper as dismissing the need for a military response to Russia over the Arctic. It includes an account from a Canadian official of a January, 2010, meeting between Mr. Harper and NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen in which the PM said NATO has no role in the Arctic.

“According to PM Harper, Canada has a good working relationship with Russia with respect to the Arctic, and a NATO presence could backfire by exacerbating tensions,” the cable states. “He commented that there is no likelihood of Arctic states going to war, but that some non-Arctic members favoured a NATO role in the Arctic because it would afford them influence in an area where ‘they don’t belong.’ ”

Rockets and feathers

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 11 Comments

Mike Moffatt explains why another investigation into gas prices isn’t likely to solve anything.

The next Speaker of the House

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 8:55 AM - 2 Comments

Conservative MPs Andrew Scheer (who served as deputy speaker during the last Parliament) and Barry Devolin (who served as an assistant speaker) will apparently seek to replace Peter Milliken as Speaker of the House of Commons. NDP MP Joe Comartin, who sought the Speaker’s chair in 2008, apparently won’t do so this time around.

Mr. Comartin had publicly recommended Michael Chong for the post, but Mr. Chong’s not interested. Via email, he explains as follows. Continue…

Good ideas and familiar faces

By the editors - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 7:50 AM - 18 Comments

Mark Blinch/Reuters

After handily winning the federal election earlier this month, Prime Minister Stephen Harper should have little trouble implementing his not-so-hidden agenda. Between now and 2015 we can thus expect that the deficit will be whittled away, per-vote subsidies for political parties phased out, the long-gun registry eliminated, crime fought and taxes kept low.

But having a winning platform is not the same thing as having a monopoly on good ideas. Four years without an election offers this government the luxury of considering new policies on their own merits. And with this sort of freedom in mind, here are a few ideas the Conservatives might wish to pluck from their opponents’ now-shuttered platforms.

A more effective and civil House of Commons, as promoted by both opposition parties, is clearly a pressing need. The hyper-partisanship of the recent minority governments has pushed Parliament into general disrepute, robbed Canadians of timely and unbiased information on many important subjects and led to the abuse of various parliamentary procedures, including prorogation. “Canadians,” the Liberal platform stated, “want to be proud of our democratic institutions.” The NDP platform promised to set a “new tone in Parliament.” It will be up to all three parties to make this happen, but the government should demonstrate leadership.

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Should investment advisers be allowed to sleep with their clients?

By Michael Friscolanti - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 7:25 AM - 0 Comments

OCEAN/CORBIS

For obvious reasons, doctors are not allowed to sleep with their patients. In Ontario, where the rules are strictest, even a consensual affair will trigger an automatic five-year suspension. The guidelines for lawyers are not quite so specific, but considering that every attorney is duty bound to avoid “conflicts of interest,” it’s hard to imagine a sex-with-client scenario that isn’t out of bounds. Even soldiers have rules to obey when it comes to romance. They are free to fraternize with fellow troops—as long as they’re not deployed together. (Apparently, sex in battle is bad for discipline.)

But what about investment advisers? Should brokers be allowed to pursue more than a client’s portfolio?

That question is now at the heart of a $2.1-million lawsuit that could force Canadian banks and brokerages to impose much tighter controls on what their employees do after hours. Currently, there is no rule that prohibits (or even discourages) investment advisers from sleeping with a customer. “I strongly believe that an investment adviser having a sexual relationship with a client does affect their ability to give independent investment advice,” says Joseph Groia, a long-time securities litigator in Toronto. “There is no reason why the industry wouldn’t be better off by saying: ‘If you want to have a personal relationship with someone who is your client, thou shalt send them to another adviser.’ ”

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What Pakistan would have gained by protecting bin Laden

By Adnan R. Khan - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 7:15 AM - 1 Comment

Vincent Laforet; The New York Times; Redux

In the prologue to his 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Ghost Wars, journalist Steve Coll wrote, “In history’s long inventory of surprise attacks, September 11 is distinguished in part because of the role played by intelligence agencies and informal secret networks in the preceding events. As bin Laden and his aides endorsed the September 11 attacks from their Afghan sanctuary, they were pursued secretly by salaried officers from the CIA. At the same time, bin Laden and his closest allies received protection, via the Taliban, from salaried officers in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. This was a pattern for two decades. Strand after strand of official covert action, unofficial covert action, clandestine terrorism, and clandestine counterterrorism wove one upon the other to create the matrix of undeclared war that burst into plain sight in 2001.”

On May 1, that same “matrix of undeclared war” was evident once again after U.S. Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden at a compound in Abbottabad, a military garrison city 50 km north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. Its military installations, including Pakistan’s top military academy, make it about as sensitive a place as exists in a country ruled by generals. Finding bin Laden there, and not somewhere in an obscure cave, suggests what Coll already made clear in his seminal book: despite repeated denials, elements within the ISI, the intelligence branch of the military, had continued to provide protection for bin Laden.

Pakistani authorities will obviously not admit to that. But retreat into ignorance will not be enough to appease the world this time, especially the U.S., which has poured billions into Pakistan’s military and civilian coffers over the past decade. What Pakistani officials actually knew about bin Laden’s whereabouts has become a topic of intense scrutiny in Washington. Members of Congress are demanding answers, and threatening to cut funding to the country if solid evidence emerges that bin Laden received protection from elements within the security services.

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'A murky, muddy mess'

By Stephanie Findlay - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 7:15 AM - 0 Comments

Roads closed: Bryan Ezako boats home in St. François Xavier, Man.

Hours after the Manitoba government declared a provincial state of emergency this week to deal with “unprecedented and historic” flooding of the Assiniboine River, Steve Ashton, the minister of emergency measures, announced the government’s decision to break Assiniboine dikes and release “controlled” water—an unusual plan that speaks to an increasingly unmanageable situation. The release of 2,000 to 6,000 cubic feet per second of water will affect 150 rural properties. Ashton said it wasn’t an easy decision, but it was a necessary one: an uncontrolled release would put 850 homes at risk.

Since early April, the floods—underestimated by faulty river gauges, and caused by a series of wetter-than-average springs—have displaced about 2,000 people. And the government has estimated that the final bill for damages could be $100 million. (The 2009 flood cost Manitoba $70 million.)

The same day a state of emergency was declared, some 800 members of the Canadian Forces arrived. Their job? Help top up existing dikes, fortify previously unprotected properties, and deploy mobile flood protection equipment to high-risk areas. Brandon, Manitoba’s second-largest city, is one of the high priorities. On May 7, the water level in Brandon measured 1,181 feet, the highest it’s been since 1923. An evacuation order was issued this week for those in about 900 homes and businesses in “the Flats, an area south of the river in Brandon. (Winnipeg, with three major water diversions, remains relatively safe.) “It’s a murky, muddy mess,” says Matt Goerzen, an editor for the Brandon Sun.

Shawn Atleo, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, says First Nations communities are disproportionately hurt by the floods since their poor diking systems are “nowhere near” able to displace the water. He says “major policy issues” must be addressed. But for now, it’s a race against time as the flood-fighters try to mitigate the effects of a rising Assiniboine.

'Thelma & Louise' at 20

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 7:05 AM - 0 Comments

MGM/Everett Collection

This month marks the 20th anniversary of Thelma & Louise, the classic female outlaw road movie. In fact, it seems like the only female outlaw road movie. There hasn’t been a film like it, before or since. Sure, we’ve seen our share of killer women, from Angelina Jolie’s banshee vixens to the gamine cutthroats in Hanna, Kick-Ass and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. But the picture that premiered in Cannes in 1991 wasn’t about some psycho freak. It was about a bored housewife and a snappy waitress, two Arkansas gals who take a vacation from their men and hit a bump in the road that sends them flying. Good girls who come loose in the badlands.

Thelma & Louise became an instant landmark, etched into pop culture by controversy. Over the years, it may have acquired more iconic weight than its soft suspension can bear. But what remains is the power of its iconic moments. It’s a wide-eyed Susan Sarandon hissing “you watch your mouth, buddy,” at the lifeless body of the rapist she’s just shot. It’s a windblown Geena Davis as Thelma, swigging liquor from tiny bottles in a Thunderbird convertible that sends dust plumes into the desert sun to the sound of slide guitar. It’s the cowboy hustler played by an unknown hunk named Brad Pitt, stripped to the waist and bouncing on a motel room bed as he whips a hair dryer out of his pants to re-enact a bank robbery, before having wild sex with Thelma. Most iconically, it’s that aqua ’66 T-bird sailing over the Grand Canyon, the fate of its occupants sealed with a kiss.

On June 7, Sarandon and Davis will reunite to share their memories onstage in “Thelma & Louise: The 20th Anniversary Homecoming,” a show at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall to benefit the Women’s College Hospital Foundation. In recent interviews, they talked to Maclean’s about the film and what it means to them two decades down the road. Both said that, at the time, they had no clue it would become a phenomenon. “I thought we were making a cowboy movie with women and trucks instead of men and horses, and that it would be fun,” said Sarandon. Davis concurred: “It seemed like a small movie. I thought it was unusual there were two incredible female roles, and that people might not like the ending. We had no idea what the reaction was going to be.”

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Finally, time for a real agenda

By Erica Alini - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 132 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

By now the wisdom is well and truly conventional: the Conservatives may have won a majority for the first time in 23 years; they may have control of both houses of Parliament; their enemies may be scattered before them, but God forbid they should actually do anything with the power they now possess.

For that would be “polarizing,” and thus in violation of the First Principle of Political Punditry: Thou Shalt Hug the Middle. And since the middle is, by long-established consensus, wherever we happen to be at the time, this leads very quickly to the Second Principle of Political Punditry: Thou Shalt Not Change Things Much, If At All.

Indeed, it has been so long since any government in Canada attempted anything so ambitious as an agenda that we have almost forgotten what that looks like. The years since the last Chrétien government was elected in 2000 have been something of a lost decade. Whatever sense of direction there might have been was dispelled first in the infighting between the Chrétien and Martin gangs, then in the sponsorship scandal, and at last dissipated utterly in the three minority Parliaments that followed. The notion of planning ahead, taking risks, spending political capital, all the ordinary business of majority governments, must now be relearned.

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Mellissa Fung and her captors

By Anne Kingston - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 3 Comments

Photograph by Jessica Darmanin

“Do you want to see where I was stabbed?” Mellissa Fung asks, pulling aside the strap of her sleeveless pink blouse and pointing to the back of her right shoulder. The CBC reporter is proud of the bruise-like wound: it marks the resistance she put up during her abduction outside of Kabul in 2008.

A similar spirit of refusal animates Under an Afghan Sky, Fung’s memoir of her kidnapping and 28-day captivity in an underground hole the size of a closet. The publicity tour has brought her to a Toronto hotel, where she’s politely, if reluctantly, discussing it. “I’m an old-school journalist,” the 38-year-old says. “I’d rather tell the story than be the story.”

She was a hesitant memoirist, too. “I wanted to move on.” Dredging it up again was “pretty horrible,” she says, but she needed to address “misinformation”—that money or Taliban members were exchanged for her release. A screenplay was rumoured to be in the works. “I wanted my own record, the way I remembered it,” says Fung, a self-described “control freak.”

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The NDP's former Newfoundland separatist

By Richard Foot - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 6:50 AM - 27 Comments

Andrew Vaughan/CP

Forget the NDP’s young Quebec caucus: Jack Layton’s biggest management problem when the House of Commons reconvenes may well be the newly elected MP from St. John’s South-Mount Pearl. After failing to win the suburban Newfoundland riding in 2008, Ryan Cleary astonished himself on election night by unseating Liberal incumbent Siobhan Coady by more than 7,000 votes. Making it all the more surprising is the fact that in his previous life as a journalist, Cleary called the NDP a bunch of “losers,” “a small pocket of aging granolas and artsy-fartsies,” and “a party that wouldn’t win an election if Jackie Layton was given a 100-seat head start.”

As the former editor-in-chief of the Independent, a St. John’s newspaper, and as an open-line radio host on the popular St. John’s station VOCM (Voice of the Common Man), Cleary also carved out a reputation as an unapologetic Newfoundland separatist. “I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but now that we’re rolling in the cash it may be time to consider breaking away from the country of Canada,” he wrote in May 2008, five months before hoisting the federal NDP banner for the first time. “If we’re teetering on the edge of economic independence anyway, why not go all the way?”

Today, Cleary, 44, pauses when asked if he still favours independence. “I do not consider myself a separatist,” he says finally. “There have been points when I was younger, when I was gung-ho in terms of separation. But that’s not what people want, and that’s not what I want.”

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Cherchez la femme—and Angelina, crayoning femme fatale

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 7:46 PM - 3 Comments

Emily Browning at the 'Sleeping Beauty' press conference in Cannes / photo by Brian D. Johnson

Each year we come to Cannes, hoping to be shocked, surprised, possibly blown away—but expecting at the very least to see the values of conventional cinema turned upside down. That usually happens here, up to a point. In Cannes, high art is placed on an Olympian altar, while Hollywood fare provides the tacky floor show, safely sequestered out of competition. But one area where Cannes has too often fallen into lock step with Hollywood is in its deference to the pantheon of Male Genius. Last year there was not a single female director in the main competition. Ah, an oversight, no doubt. This year, as if to shake up the optics, if nothing else, the competition has opened with three movies in a row from female directors—Sleeping Beauty, We Have to Talk About Kevin, and Polisse—each of which throws down a provocative gauntlet to conservative notions of motherhood and sexuality.

And we’re not even counting The Beaver, Saint Jodie Foster’s ritual cleansing of Mel Gibson, which is programmed out of competition. Or Kung Fu Panda 2, which DreamWorks showcased in Cannes this week, even though it’s not even dignified by an out-of-competition slot in the official selection. It, too, is directed by a woman, Jennifer Yu, and marketed by the unparalleled celebrity of Angelina Jolie.

Cherchez la femme. At the end of Day Two, that could be the rallying cry of Cannes. Last night I collared festival director Thierry Frémault at the opening night party at the Majestic Beach for Midnight in Paris. I asked if he was making a statement with this opening fusillade of films by women. It was midnight, and Frémault—in a hurry to get to the VIP area, where Rachel McAdams and Michael Sheen were exchanging fond looks—seemed as if like he was about to brush me off. Then he shrugged, grinned and said, “Oui, un peu!”

The trifecta of women’s films kicking off the festival are attention-getting. Sleeping Beauty, a feature debut by Australian writer Julia Leigh, is an erotic/narcotic, fable that doubles down sexual taboos by exploring a pedo/necrophilia demimonde. An endlessly naked Emily Browning stars as a twentysomething waif who looks 15, in a Story of O/Belle de Jour tale of a university student who is paid to be drugged unconscious and ravished by filthy rich dirty old men. (If a male director, like Atom Egoyan, had made this film, he would have been crucified.) Lynne Ramsay’s We Need to Talk About Kevin, adapts Lionel Shriver’s prize-winning novel about the tormented mother of a demon-seed boy whose idea of high school excellence is mass murder. And Polisse, by French actress-director Maiwenn is about a raucous squad of child services police in Paris who investigate pedophilia while negotiating their own torrid relationships. (I could have done without the lingering shot of the teenage rape victim’s stillborn baby.)

'Sleeping Beauty' director Julia Leigh

At a press conference for Sleeping Beauty, Browning, 22, said she had no problem whatsoever with being naked on screen, as if it barely warranted talking about—although the film has fetish gear to rival Eyes Wide Shut and more arty nude tableaux than anything by Peter Greenaway. I asked director Julia Leigh a question about the the male gaze, and how her film tried to redirect that, which she never quite answered. Midway through, Leigh pointed out that Browning’s mentor, Australian director Jane Campion, was sitting among the journalists. Later she told me that even though this was Leigh’s first film, she’s an ardent cinephile and knows way more about movies than herself.

This morning, I was forced to choose between the Panda 2 press conference and one for We Need to Talk About Kevin, featuring the lethally articulate Tilda Swinton as the mother-in-hell. I thought the latter would be more interesting, but like any self-respecting media slut, I obeyed the summons of Hollywood royalty and headed down to the Carlton Hotel to pay homage to Queen Angelina, who was flanked by competing jokers Jack Black and Dustin Hoffman. Continue…

When presidents and PMs give investment advice: The ultimate insider information

By Jason Kirby - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 6:43 PM - 3 Comments

(AP Photo/The Daily Texan, Tamir Kalifa)

In his daily briefing email this morning, New York investment strategist Edward Yardeni pointed out President Barack Obama not only called the bottom of the stock market in 2009, he forecast the recent collapse in commodity prices, too:

I guess we should pay closer attention to President Barack Obama’s investment advice. On April 19 he called the top in commodity prices, in general, and oil prices, in particular, when he said, “It is true that a lot of what’s driving oil prices up right now is not the lack of supply. There’s enough supply. There’s enough oil out there for world demand,” Obama said. “The problem is…speculators and people make various bets, and they say, you know what, we think that maybe there’s a 20 percent chance that something might happen in the Middle East that might disrupt oil supply, so we’re going to bet that oil is going to go up real high. And that spikes up prices significantly.” Remember that on March 3, 2009, our nation’s Chief Strategist told us to buy stocks: “On the other hand, what you’re now seeing is–is profit and earning ratios are–are starting to get to the point where buying stocks is a potentially good deal if you’ve got a long-term perspective on it.” He is on a roll.

As you’ll no doubt recall, Obama wasn’t the only world leader to slap a “buy” recommendation on markets in those dark days. Prime Minister Stephen Harper took a lot of knocks in October 2008 when he went on CBC and told Canadians the upheaval in the stock market was a time to get in.

Harper: “The stock market will sort itself out. I suspect some good buying opportunities are opening up with some of the panic we’ve seen in the stock market in the last few days.”

Peter Mansbridge: “Do you really want to be heard saying that? Are you suggesting people should be buying?”

Harper: “I think there are some great buying opportunities out there.”

As it turned out, he was right, if a bit early. Markets continued to fall until the following March, but if you took the PM’s advise and bought, say, the S&P/TSX Composite Index, you’d be up roughly 25 per cent today. (I looked, but couldn’t find any recent comments from Harper that related to the current bubble in commodity prices.)

So, should you listen when pols say buy? Obviously politicians will say anything if they think it will make voters happy, and like perma-bulls, they’ll never, ever issue a sell call, no matter what.

Still, there’s value in at least considering their words when it comes to the broad sweeps of the economy. After all, they do have  their hands on the levers of government spending, which they both used to deploy billions of dollars for infrastructure projects, tax cuts and bailouts. Both were no doubt aware of efforts by their respective central bankers to employ considerable monetary stimulus to reboot the economy. In the case of Obama’s sell recommendation for commodities, it came just weeks before the Chicago Mercantile Exchange hiked margin requirements for energy futures traders, a move that regulators and politicians had been pushing for, and which accelerated the commodity sell off.

Whatever your views on government stimulus and intervention in the economy, there’s no denying each leader has the power to influence consumer and investor sentiment with their policies. In other words, Harper and Obama can be seen as the ultimate insiders.

So, Mr. Prime Minister and Mr. President, got any stock tips?

'The government would look at the possibility'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 6:08 PM - 7 Comments

Around the same time Mr. Harper said publicly that the post-2011 mission in Afghanistan would be a “strictly civilian mission” that would not require “any kind of military presence, other than the odd guard guarding an embassy,” he apparently indicated to the NATO secretary general privately that he was open to the possibility of a training mission.

NATO’s secretary general pressed Harper and Defence Minister Peter MacKay in a series of meetings in Ottawa in January 2010 to join its newly established training mission command in Kabul. Anders Fogh Rasmussen “sought Canadian commitment to a post-2011 role in training Afghan security forces as part of the NATO Training Mission in Afghanistan,” said a cable released by WikiLeaks on Thursday. The Jan. 20, 2010, summary of the discussion from the U.S. embassy in Ottawa noted that “Harper promised that the government would look at the possibility.”

Five months later, the Foreign Affairs Minister dismissed any interest in a post-2011 training mission.

Five months after that, the Prime Minister confirmed that Canada would be pursuing a post-2011 training mission.

The Insite case: it should never have ended up in court

By John Geddes - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 5:43 PM - 144 Comments

The case of the Vancouver supervised injection facility called Insite was being heard at the Supreme Court of Canada today, and I’m sure not going to pretend here to offer any instant untangling of the lawyers’ arguments about clashing federal and provincial jurisdictions.

The two levels of government are battling because British Columbia claims the right to keep Insite open to provide a health service to addicts, while Ottawa asserts the right to shut it down to maintain the uniform national application of criminal law.

It will be interesting to see how the court rules. But from what I heard in court this morning, combined with what I knew already about Insite, it seems to me this case should never have ended up in court in the first place.

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Week in Pictures: May 9th – 15th 2011

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 5:21 PM - 0 Comments

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Week in Pictures: May 9th – 15th 2011

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Buddha in the third dimension

Shaven-headed young boys wearing 3-D glasses touch smart phones at SK Telecom Ubiquitous Museum in Seoul, South Korea, on May 9, 2011. A group of children entered the main temple of Korean Buddhism's Chogye Order, to experience a monk's life for a month to celebrate Buddha's birthday on May 10. (AP Photo/ Lee Jin-man)

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Coyne v. Wells on Harper's new government and Layton's new job

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 3:52 PM - 8 Comments

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Clement wants gas companies to explain themselves

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 3:27 PM - 54 Comments

Industry Minister Tony Clement wants the petroleum industry to explain to Canadians how gas prices are set. Clement said Thursday he plans to ask executives from refining, distribution and retailing companies to appear before a parliamentary committee once Ottawa reconvenes. “No one can understand why last year, when oil per barrel was around $140 or $150, we were paying $1.37 per litre, when this year oil is south of $98 a barrel and yet we’re paying more,” Clement says. NDP MP Jack Harris says the federal government should conduct some kind of investigation, led by a federal ombudsman, into whether oil companies are colluding together or if the industry is price gouging. On Tuesday, oil prices rose to 6.5 cents a litre throughout Ontario, in Montreal and in Vancouver, but fell 2.5 cents on Wednesday. A declining U.S. dollar, instability in the Middle East, market speculation, flooding along the Mississippi River, and Ontario’s consumption taxes on gas are all factors that have been identified in contributing to unpredictable price changes.

CBC News

Facebook tried to plant negative stories about Google

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 2:52 PM - 4 Comments

Newly released emails show Facebook has been paying a top public relations firm, Burson-Marsteller, to plant negative stories in major U.S. media about Google’s privacy policies. The smear campaign was brought to light after a blogger posted an email exchange between himself and a Burson-Marsteller employee who had offered to help him to write an anti-Google op-ed. Chris Soghoian, a prominent internet security blogger challenged the company’s assertion that Social Circle, a new Google feature, was a privacy threat and accused them of “making a mountain out of a molehill.”

The Guardian

Leaked emails

Announcing the Great Canadian Faceoff

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 2:27 PM - 9 Comments

Mike Duval from Penetanguishene, Ontario as Red Green (Steve Smith) from the Red Green Show.

Have you ever been mistaken for Shania Twain in the line at Tim Hortons? Does your moustache prompt comparisons with Jack Layton? Could you be the long-lost twin of Sidney Crosby? Or Stephen Harper? If so, Maclean’s wants to hear from you. And we want the photographic evidence.

Maclean’s is launching our Great Canadian Faceoff. We’re searching for the country’s most recognizable faces and biggest celebrities. Our inspiration for this cross-country photo hunt began in April, when Capital Diary’s Mitchel Raphael uncovered New Brunswick insurance company employee Jacques Pinet, who’s a dead ringer for government House leader John Baird. Pinet’s resemblance to Baird is so striking that he’s even fooled security guards at the House of Commons. So can anyone beat that?

Send your submissions to GreatCanadianFaceoff@gmail.com and check macleans.ca/faceoff regularly to see how your fellow Canadians match up against some of your favourite celebrities.

Opposition-measuring contest

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 1:23 PM - 11 Comments

A few notes on your new official opposition.

In yesterday’s speech to the Canadian Labour Congress, Jack Layton boasted that the NDP’s 103 MPs represented the “largest, most united official opposition in 31 years.”

Most counts presently give the NDP a mere 102 seats, but that does not seem to include an apparently narrow, and apparently late-breaking, victory in Montmagny—L’Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup. Assuming that NDP victory holds up to a recount, Layton will be free to continue boasting of 103 MPs. By number, that would, technically, be the largest official opposition since 2006, when the Liberals also won 103 seats. But in that case, David Emerson crossed the floor to the Conservatives before the House could reconvene, so the Liberals more accurately numbered 102.

As a result you do indeed have to go back to Joe Clark’s Progressive Conservatives, who came second in 1980 with 103 MPs, to find the last official opposition of this size.

Considering the last 50 years, by post-election seat count, only two official oppositions have surpassed the 103-mark. Continue…

Osama bin Laden photos viewed by members of Congress

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 1:11 PM - 0 Comments

Several members of Congress are reporting they have personally viewed about 15 photos of Osama bin Laden’s corpse after he was killed by U.S. Navy SEALs at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan on May 1. A debate emerged following the al-Qaeda leader’s death about whether the photos should be released publicly as proof of his death, or whether they should remain under wraps in order to prevent further incitement of bin Laden supporters and to protect national security. Calls for their release have grown louder, especially among Republican lawmakers, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham and Sen. James Inhofe. Even relatives of bin Laden have demanded proof of his death, and are calling for an investigation into his killing. Those members of Congress who have viewed the pictures say they were indeed of bin Laden. “That was him,” Inhofe said Thursday. “He’s gone. He’s history.”

CNN