Ch-ch-changes

By Philippe Gohier - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 12:11 PM - 247 Comments

We’re a restless bunch over here at Macleans.ca. To prove it, we’ve been working on some tweaks here and there, the most noticeable of which will go live today.

Some time in the next few hours, we’ll be switching our comment system over to Disqus. What that means for you, dear reader/commenter, is mainly three things: Continue…

Her royal hotness

By Leah McLaren - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 12:10 PM - 0 Comments

Toby Melville/Reuters

They don’t call her Perfect Pippa for nothing.

When Kate Middleton arrived at Westminster Abbey on the morning of her wedding, there was a collective gasp around the globe. The bride was radiant, to be sure, but so was the maid of honour, trailing her sister in a slinky frock that slipped and sizzled in contrast to the bride’s demure lace sheath.

In one moment, Philippa Charlotte Middleton stole the show with her now much-replayed bend at the waist to straighten her sister’s nine-foot train. It was an act of sisterly love and bridal attendance to be sure, but one that also inspired a torrent of lust from red-blooded men the world over.

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The twittering classes

By Stephanie Findlay - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 4 Comments

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images; National News/KEYSTONE PRESS; Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Image

When Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles got married in 2005, Facebook had just extended its membership eligibility to high school students, YouTube was in its nascency, Twitter didn’t exist, and no one really knew how to live-stream video. Fast-forward six years, to a brave new world. Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding set online viewership records, dominated social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and created instant Internet stars.

The big winner? Live-streaming video providers. Livestream, which provided online video for the Associated Press and CBS, said the royal wedding was its most popular stream ever, with 300,000 concurrent viewers. Yahoo also saw big gains: its royal video stream exceeded the record set by Michael Jackson’s funeral by 21 per cent. “Consuming video on the Internet is an increasingly complementary choice to broadcast TV, even when the event is available on TV,” according to Jennifer Donovan, spokesperson for Akamai, another Web streaming service. (The official royal channel provider, YouTube, expected an unprecedented 400 million viewers, though the numbers aren’t yet in.)

Major television networks, too, are finally leveraging social media to their advantage. Indeed, being on every platform—namely Facebook and Twitter—is becoming a necessity: “It’s about providing people with information they want in the format they want it,” says Wendy Rozeluk, a Google representative in Toronto. “One of the advantages is the ongoing commentary that people can make, as well as the participation people can have with an event.”

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Looking north

By Philippe Gohier - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 11:49 AM - 26 Comments

Fourteen years after describing the American conservative movement as “a light and an inspiration to people in this country and across the world,” Stephen Harper becomes a beacon of hope for American conservatives.

Perhaps the most central aspect of Harper’s success has been his focus on economic issues over cultural issues. Throughout his campaign, Harper kept referring to his “low-tax plan for jobs and economic growth” and his “low-tax plan for families.” In a typical Harper stump speech, the phrase “low-tax” was used dozens of times, to hilarious effect. Yet there was no mystery as to what Harper intended to deliver: low taxes. The beauty of Harper’s approach, however, is that he has carefully balanced tax cuts with planned spending reductions, to avoid mounting debt levels.

At last night’s Republican presidential debate, the candidates spent a great deal of time lambasting President Obama and demonstrating their conservative bona fides. They spent very little time explaining how they would defend the interest of the middle class, or how they intended to make inroads with the Latino and Asian voters who are so crucial to victory in 2012 and beyond. They need to give Stephen Harper a call. 

Obama on Osama

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 11:38 AM - 4 Comments

In his first interview since the death of Osama bin Laden, U.S. President Barack Obama described the historic event as “one of the most satisfying weeks, not only for my presidency, but I think for the United States.” Obama told reporter Steve Kroft that he was “profoundly grateful” to be part of bringing the architect of 9/11 to justice, but that the decision to make the raid was extremely difficult, especially because he couldn’t be sure that bin Laden was in the compound. “We didn’t have a photograph of bin Laden in that building, there was no direct evidence,” he said, “but I felt that the risks were outweighed by the potential benefit of us finally getting our man.”

CBS News

No bangers and mash?

By Jessica Allen - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 11:35 AM - 0 Comments

Nick Ansell/Reuters

Bubble and squeak, smoked-haddock fish cakes, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding sounds more like dinner with Jaime Oliver than with the newly minted duke and duchess of Cambridge. But in keeping with the overarching narrative of this royal wedding, where everything from Kate’s dress to the ceremony has been steeped in tradition, British patriotism reigned supreme at the afternoon reception that immediately followed the newlyweds’ two pecks. At the reception, hosted by the Queen, at least 10,000 canapés in 24 varieties—prepared for the 650 guests by 21 chefs led by royal chef Mark Flanagan—were topped with ingredients showcasing the bounty of Britain’s produce. That’s 16 canapés per guest, for those keeping score.

The bubble and squeak (a hash made from leftovers of a roast-beef dinner) was topped with confit of lamb shoulder, the lamb raised at the Queen’s own Windsor estate; the goat cheese stuffed into the roulades was sourced from Britain-based cheesemonger Paxton and Whitfield; and the smoked haddock for the fish cakes, crowned with pea guacamole, arrived from the east coast of Scotland. Even the organic celery salt dusting the quail eggs was made in Wales. In fact, nearly all the canapés’ ingredients were sourced from the royal realm, including English asparagus, rhubarb and crayfish, duck from Gressingham, langoustines from the northwest coast of Scotland and pork from the Cotswolds.

To wash it down, only French bubbly, of course, would do, specifically Pol Roger reserve. For those who didn’t fancy champagne—including both Prince Charles and his father Philip—a selection of other soft and alcoholic drinks were available. The guests sashayed through 19 state rooms echoing with music by Claire Jones, the official harpist, and nibbled on the canapés buffet-style. After all, even the Queen doesn’t own a table fit for 650.

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Taliban releases video of Canadian hostage

By macleans.ca - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 11:25 AM - 1 Comment

The Taliban has released a video threatening to put a captured Canadian on trial if Canada’s government fails to accept undisclosed demands. Earlier this year, Colin Rutherford, 26, was captured by the Taliban in Ghazni, a city in central Afghanistan, and accused of collecting secret information. “He entered Afghanistan for spying purposes and was an active agent, gathering intelligence on the Taliban,” said Zabihullah Mujahid, Taliban spokesperson, CTV News reports. A spokesperson for the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs says the Canadian government is working with the Afghanistan government to release Rutherford, who denies working as a spy, and cautions tourists against traveling to Afghanistan.

CTV News

What's Wrong With This Picture (Literally)?

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 20 Comments

Via Jewish Week (and originally noticed last week by the blog Failed Messiah), the iconic photo of President Obama’s team getting an update on the Bin Laden raid has received a photoshop job that may become almost as iconic. Someone at the Haredi newspaper Der Zeitung, a Brooklyn-based publication which “will not intentionally include any images of women in the paper because it could be considered sexually suggestive,” decided that there was too much Hillary Clinton in the photo, so:

This isn’t the first time something like this has come up, nor the first country. In 2009 a couple of Israeli Orthodox newspapers doctored a photo of Netanyahu’s new cabinet to remove the female members.

'We are all judged by it'

By Philippe Gohier - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 10:35 AM - 43 Comments

Glen Pearson eulogizes the 40th Parliament and wishes better for its successor.

For those entering … make this different, make it count. Put aside the rank partisanship and seek a third option, a way of not only compromise but reconciliation. Don’t say that politics demands indignities because your families, your constituents, your country and perhaps your God demand better. Be servants with a past tense, people who can say as you exit, “I was a respectful Member of Parliament. I worked across the aisle. I found commonalities whenever I could. I behaved as though the House was like a place of faith and I kept my pact.” You have a past – use it for the betterment of our people and our world.

The life and times of Osama bin Laden

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 12 Comments

AFP/Getty Images

The compound was neither a mansion, nor a fortress; it was a prison. For months, maybe even years, the planet’s most-wanted man hid behind its high, razor-wire topped walls, trying to obscure his presence from spies, satellites and drones. The house had no phone or Internet connections. Garbage was burned in the courtyard. And afraid of being recognized simply by his tall, skinny frame, he could not even venture outdoors.

In the end, the first real contact Osama bin Laden had with the outside world since he fled Afghanistan in December 2001 came when a team of U.S. Navy Seals touched down at his Abbottabad, Pakistan, hiding spot Sunday. Forty minutes later, he was dead—shot through the head in a bedroom, his blood spreading across a shabby oriental carpet.

The 54-year-old’s death came as he had often predicted, from the barrel of an American gun. Perhaps he even welcomed it. “I’m fighting so I can die a martyr and go to heaven to meet God,” bin Laden once told Al-Quds Al-Arabi, a British-based Arabic language newspaper. “We love death. The U.S. loves life. That is the difference between us two,” he proclaimed on another occasion. And few, in the West at least, will term it anything but justice. Author of deadly bombings in East Africa and Yemen, the Saudi-born scion of a multi-millionaire construction magnate had been at the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list since 1998. Then on Sept. 11, 2001, he dispatched teams of hijackers to fly passenger jets into the World Trade Center and Pentagon, murdering 2,933 people. (Forty more died when a fourth plane was brought down in a Pennsylvania field, short of another presumed Washington target.) The fires set that day still burn across the globe.

For a decade now, Osama bin Laden has been the object of our fascination and the repository of our fears. Academics and the press have parsed his hidey-hole communiqués looking for an ideology or explanation. Booksellers’ shelves are crammed with dozens of biographies and oral histories, purporting to deliver the “inside” story of his and al-Qaeda’s rise. Yet the motives, life and now death of a figure destined to go down as one of history’s greatest villains remain muddled.

Some accounts of the bedroom firefight say a woman tried to shield bin Laden with her body. The Americans think it was his wife, although which one, or even how many he had (some sources suggest four, others five) is a mystery. The same for a son reportedly left dead in the compound—one of his 13, or 19, or maybe 23 children. The fate of the terrorist leader’s body, spirited away and said to have been buried at sea, is already the subject of conspiracy theories. Osama’s violent demise may offer “sober satisfaction,” as Stephen Harper put it, but it won’t end the questions. Killing the myth may prove even harder than killing the man.

The date and place of Osama’s birth—March 10, 1957, in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia—are clear. But not so much the circumstances. As one of the 52, or maybe 54, offspring that Muhammad bin-Awad bin Laden sired with his 22 wives, perhaps that’s understandable. The elder bin Laden emigrated to the kingdom around 1930. A porter in his native Yemen, he found a new calling in construction, building a palace on the cheap for King Abdel Aziz ibn Saud and securing a lifelong patron. Lucrative contracts for roads and bridges followed, as well as prestigious commissions to renovate Islam’s holiest sites in Medina and Mecca. By the time of Osama’s birth, Muhammad was among the country’s wealthiest men. But he remained renowned for his piety—praying at three different mosques each day, never having more than four wives at one time in accordance with religious law, and renovating the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem at cost. He was also a fierce believer in the prevailing Arab cause. In the wake of the 1967 Six Day War with Israel, Osama once told an interviewer, Muhammad tried to have his company’s 200 bulldozers converted to tanks so he could launch his own invasion.

He had met Osama’s mother, Alia, during a visit to Syria in the mid-1950s. The marriage—his 10th—lasted only a few years and produced just the one child. By some family accounts, Alia was more of a concubine than wife. In others, she was a headstrong and sophisticated woman who demanded a divorce and adopted Western dress when outside the country. What is certain is that Osama adored her. “First comes God and then his mother,” Osama’s half-brother Ahmad Muhammad al-Attas told journalists in the months after 9/11. During his years of exile in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, bin Laden made a point of calling her frequently, even though security officials at home and in the U.S. were surely monitoring the calls.

Osama’s relationship with Muhammad, who died in a September 1967 plane crash, was not as close. One friend claims bin Laden only met his father five times. But he was accepted by his many half-siblings, and given an inheritance—shares in the family firm that were worth somewhere between US$8 million and $250 million, according to widely divergent accounts. Whatever the amount, he didn’t do much with it. Compatriots remember him as a quiet kid, who enjoyed picnics and soccer games, and had one notable passion—horseback riding.

While many of his brothers and sisters travelled and studied abroad, Osama preferred to stay in Saudi Arabia. There have been reports that he once travelled to Sweden as a teen, and Chicago as a young adult, but the only confirmed voyages were annual visits to Syria to see his mother’s family. As a student at the prestigious al-Thager Model School in Jeddah—where the royal family educates its boys—he was considered passably bright. In 1978, he entered King Abdul Aziz University to study economics, management and business administration. Already married and the father of two boys—he had wed his 14-year-old first cousin, Najwa, when he was 17—he didn’t stick at school for long, and was soon back working for the family firm. But what bin Laden did discover during his brief post-secondary career was his first spiritual mentor, a Palestinian firebrand named Abdullah Azzam. A follower of the Muslim Brotherhood, Azzam was a deep believer in the concept of jihad. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the religious scholar issued his own fatwa, declaring it every Muslim’s duty to join the struggle.

Soon after, Azzam left Saudi Arabia for the border regions of Pakistan to minister to the mujahedeen. Bin Laden followed. Some sources suggest the two men worked together raising money and setting up training camps for the fighters. Others like Michael Scheur, in his recent biography of the terrorist leader, claim Osama spent five years doing the bidding of Saudi intelligence, using his family’s equipment to build hospitals and cut roads through the border mountains to ease arms deliveries. By the time they officially set up a joint operation in 1984—the Maktab al-Khadamat (services office)—to welcome foreign fighters, bin Laden had become a recognized force in his own right, possessed with the kind of confidence that made men follow. “He was a natural leader,” Khalid al-Batarfi, a friend, told Peter Bergen, the author of The Osama I Know. “He leads by example and by hints more than direct orders. He just sets an example and then expects you to follow and somehow you follow even if you are not 100 per cent convinced.”

In 1986, bin Laden set up al-Masadah (the Lion’s Den), his own training camp for Arab recruits in the mountains. But the man who was teaching others to fight had yet to see action. In the spring of 1987, the base—garrisoned by 50 or so fighters—came under attack from a much larger Soviet force. According to some accounts, the mujahedeen held out for a great victory. In others, they suffered heavy losses and retreated in disarray. For years afterwards, Osama was always pictured holding a Kalashnikov rifle he claimed to have taken away from a Russian he killed in hand-to-hand combat that week. As reports of the battle spread, his prestige grew. In the following weeks, he and other foreign commanders met to form a loose alliance of jihadis, which would ultimately morph into al-Qaeda. It was the beginning of bin Laden’s legend.

The FBI’s wanted poster is scant on details. “Usama” bin Laden is listed as between six foot four and six foot six and “approximately” 160 lb. His languages are Arabic and “probably” Pashtu. (What is not noted is that he also studied English in high school.) There are no known scars and marks. He is left-handed, walks with a cane, and has used the aliases the Sheik, the Prince, the Emir and the Director. But as of the morning of May 2, one hard fact had been added: the label “deceased” under his picture.

The emerging narrative of his death suggests the $25 million reward the United States government has been dangling for his “apprehension or conviction” played no role in the Abbottabad raid. So too the Pakistani authorities, who managed not to respond to a helicopter assault and lengthy gun battle at a compound located just a kilometre away from their chief officer-training school, the Kakul military academy, and nearby several other bases.

Official links to bin Laden have always been a touchy subject. In addition to Saudi support during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, it has long been reported he and his men also received training and arms from the CIA. Certainly he was once—and given his final location, almost assuredly still— friendly with elements of the Pakistani intelligence service.

In 1989, when the 32-year-old returned home to Jeddah after the Russian withdrawal, he was considered a hero. There were talks with Prince Turki Al Faisal, the head of Saudi intelligence, about overthrowing the Communists in Yemen—although the prince ultimately decided that such a war would be a little too close to home. In August 1990, when Iraq invaded neighbouring Kuwait, bin Laden offered his services and followers to defend the kingdom in the event that Saddam pushed on. He was turned down.

Osama’s rift with the West is often attributed to his anger over the garrisoning of hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia in preparation for the first Gulf War, a supposed “desecration” of Islam’s holiest sites. But he had already begun formulating a vision of global jihadism back in Afghanistan, working closely with a new mentor, the Egyptian radical Ayman al-Zawahiri. In 1991, his anti-government proclamations became too much for the Saudis and he was asked to leave the country. He made his way to Sudan, where a hardline Islamic regime had seized power in 1989. Still, in those days he was hardly considered a global threat. In Khartoum, he operated in the open as a businessman, building roads for the government and importing medical equipment and supplies. It was Zawahiri and his continued attacks on Egyptian targets that drew the most attention. His friend bin Laden was considered to be a sympathizer, and perhaps financier.

At the behest of the Saudi government, friends and family continued to visit Osama in Sudan, trying to convince him to sever ties with his former Afghan comrades. At one point he supposedly mused about resigning from al-Qaeda to pursue life as a watermelon and peanut farmer. But in 1994, the bin Laden family found it necessary to take out advertisements in Saudi newspapers officially disowning Osama. (Although money continued to flow his way, and relatives travelled to see him in Afghanistan as late as January 2001 for the wedding of his son, Mohammed.) The Saudi government stripped him of his citizenship and he replied with an open letter calling for the royal family’s violent overthrow.

It was the actions of Zawahiri’s followers, including a 1995 suicide bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, which killed 17, that eventually got the pair expelled from Sudan. In May 1996, bin Laden chartered a private jet and flew to Kandahar, where he was greeted with open arms by the Taliban and its leader, Mullah Omar.

Al-Qaeda’s early Afghan days were idyllic, according to some. Followers, including Toronto’s Khadr family, congregated at a rough compound near Jalalabad. In their retelling, Osama was more like a sitcom dad than the father of a global terrorist movement. “He’s a normal human being,” Abdurahman Khadr told the CBC in 2004. “He has issues with his wife and his kids. Financial issues, you know. The kids aren’t listening. The kids aren’t doing this and that.” His sister Zaynab recalled a man who loved horseback riding, playing volleyball, and target shooting with the kids. Although he seemed a little strict, even by radical fundamentalist standards. The female bin Ladens “have lots of restrictions, where they go, when they go, where they come, when they come, who visits them and how long they can stay in their house and all that,” Zaynab explained.

Osama also harboured some prejudices against creature comforts, forbidding his family from having running water, electricity, or even using ice. “He is against drinking cold water,” said Abdurahman. “He didn’t want them in any way to be spoiled.” Conspicuous non-consumption was a bit of an obsession for the rich Saudi. In the stifling heat of Khartoum, he refused to install air conditioning. “We want a simple life,” was one of his mantras.

What bin Laden didn’t seem to shy away from was publicity. In the late 1990s, as his fame as a terrorist grew, he gave regular interviews to foreign journalists, and even held a press conference with Zawahiri in 1998 to announce the formation of the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Crusaders and Jews. A few months later, al-Qaeda staged its first major operation, bombing the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, killing 224. President Bill Clinton responded by firing more than 100 cruise missiles at bin Laden’s Afghan camps, but al-Qaeda’s leadership escaped unscathed. The Taliban, already internationally isolated, resisted UN sanctions and blandishments like a $5-million reward, and refused to hand the Saudi over. But they didn’t necessarily enjoy the grandstanding. Even long-time bin Laden deputies like Abu Musab al-Suri (captured in 2005 and sent to a secret Syrian prison) found it all a bit much. “I think our brother has caught the disease of screens, flashes, fans and applause,” he wrote in 1999.

It took a good long while for the Americans to figure out that they had missed their chance to kill bin Laden in the caves of Tora Bora in December 2001. The ferocious assault by Afghan tribal militias, backed by U.S. and British war planes, killed more than 100 al-Qaeda fighters, including 18 commanders. Foreign troops, Canadians among them, returned to the scene several times over the following months, looking in vain for the corpses of Osama and Zawahiri. Eventually the CIA obtained a videotape of Osama hiking through the mountains into Pakistan and realized just how close they had come. It showed a U.S. plane dropping a bomb on the caves. “We were there last night,” remarks bin Laden.

Audio tapes from the al-Qaeda leader would surface occasionally. (By 2010 there were more than 40 authenticated messages.) In October 2004, he appeared in a video, looking disturbingly robust and well-groomed. After George W. Bush won re-election, nothing was heard from bin Laden for more than three years. Many speculated that he had been killed in a drone attack, or died from a medical condition, like his supposed kidney diseases. All the time, the hunt—and the wars that flowed out of it—went on.

The secret U.S. commando organization responsible for the terrorist’s assassination, the Joint Special Operations Command, has a budget of more than $1 billion a year. But that’s a drop in the bucket compared to an Afghan campaign that has cost more than $450 billion since 2001, and a loosely related invasion and occupation of Iraq that is closing in on $800 billion. Still, in the afterglow of bin Laden’s killing, which sent euphoric crowds into the streets of Washington, New York and other cities, many will say the expense and effort were worth it.

However, eliminating the face of terror doesn’t rid any of us of the problem. Footage of the Abbottabad compound show a large satellite dish which surely enabled bin Laden to follow the deadly exploits of his followers, clones and imitators around the world.

One can only hope that he found channel surfing much less pleasurable in his final months, as Arabs throughout the Middle East took to the streets to rise up against their dictators. Not in violent jihad, as bin Laden has envisioned, but in largely peaceful protests demanding rights, reform and democracy.

History will record that when revolution finally came to the region it was inspired by a simple Tunisian fruit-seller, Mohammed Bouazizi, who set himself ablaze to protest government corruption and indifference—an unwanted man who may end up having far more influence than the world’s foremost fugitive.

'The only punk band ever reunited in the House of Commons'

By Philippe Gohier - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 9:45 AM - 4 Comments

Jim Rankin profiles Andrew Cash, the new NDP MP for Davenport and the former frontman of L’Etranger.

He’s promising to speak up for the riding and the city, and stand up for the worker, the underdog and the downtrodden — something, really, that he has done through music ever since he was a teenager growing up in Scarborough. 

Cash, 48, was in an ’80s Toronto punk band called L’Etranger, a group of Catholic boys who worshipped at the church of Joe Strummer and The Clash and belted out songs of protest over social injustices of the day. Know who else was in that band? Charlie “Chuck” Angus, newly re-elected NDP MP for Timmins-James Bay. Yeah, the band’s about to get back together — on the floor of the House of Commons.

Here, via Julie Penner, is the 1983 interview with two-thirds of L’Etranger. Continue…

REVIEW: A Covert Affair: Julia Child and Paul Child in the OSS

By Anne Kingston - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Such is the interest in Julia Child and her devoted husband, Paul, sparked by Nora Ephron’s film Julie & Julia, that a prequel to the couple’s boeuf bourguignon days was inevitable. Now it’s here, sort of, with A Covert Affair, Jennet Conant’s fascinating chronicle of life inside the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the Second World War and the anti-Communist hysteria that followed. Drawing upon previously unpublished letters and recently unclassified documents, Conant creates a vivid portrait of the era that often reads like fiction.

Later in her life, Julia Child liked to say, “The war made me.” This book explains why. Julia McWilliams was an inexperienced 30-year-old when she joined the OSS in 1942. Her first assignment, assisting with an ambitious plan to develop a secret intelligence network across Southeast Asia, transported her to exotic locales, gave her lifelong friendships and, most significantly, put her in the orbit of the older, more worldly Paul Child, an artist who built war rooms. Julia was smitten from the get-go, but it took Paul time to see the unsophisticated late bloomer as a worthy soulmate. He detailed his doubts in often snotty letters home to his brother. Still, he played the friendly Svengali when they were stationed in China, introducing her to sex and Asian cuisine. By 1946, he’d come to his senses and they wed.

Though charmingly rendered, the Childs are secondary characters here, dangled as a lure, which makes A Covert Affair and its misleading subtitle something of a covert operation itself. Conant’s real mission is to tell the tale of the Childs’ OSS friend Jane Foster, a flamboyant American artist charged with being a Soviet spy in the 1950s, allegations that were never resolved and put Paul under investigation. Conant is clearly sympathetic to Foster’s plight, using it to place a lens on the dark days of McCarthyism. Yet by book’s end the reader will nod in agreement with Julia’s sage assessment of Foster as a “fascinating and amusing girl…who turned out to be a Russian agent,” and wish Conant had provided a lot less Jane and a lot more Julia.

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REVIEW: The Guilty Plea

By Brian Bethune - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 9:35 AM - 0 Comments

A Toronto lawyer turned crime writer, Roten­berg won a lot of fans with his first novel, Old City Hall (2009), in which his city and especially the former civic headquarters that is now the nerve centre of Toronto’s criminal justice system were leading characters. Rotenberg’s second effort picks up where he left off—new lawyers take centre stage, to be sure, and there’s a stronger role for plot over atmosphere—but there’s the same appealing lead cop and the same sort of open-and-shut situation that turns out to be anything but.

In Rotenberg’s first novel, it was a matter of a prominent radio host, his girlfriend dead in a bathtub behind him, who opens his door and tells a caller, “I killed her.” In Guilty Plea, the plot kicks off with a rich man stabbed to death on the morning his highly publicized divorce case was to begin; soon after, the victim’s wife shows up at her lawyer’s office with a bloody knife. Once again, naturally, things are not as they seem, and once again nicely etched characters and the multicultural city take centre stage. (And in a realistic manner too, except for Rotenberg’s one fantasy point: in his first novel the Maple Leafs win the Stanley Cup; in his second, even as a reader half-expects the city to awaken from its collective hallucination, Torontonians are still basking in the wake of that triumph.)

But in the end it’s not the motive and details, nor the loving portrayal of Roten­berg’s hometown, that turns Guilty Plea into a compulsive page-turner, nor even the backstage legal machinations, good as they are: if you ever need to get a key piece of evidence to a Crown prosecutor, without the authorities knowing it came from you, then Rotenberg’s your guide. No, it’s the author’s defence counsel sensibility that powers his novels, his insistence that every story is intensely personal (and almost never completely revealed), the way in which his humanizing of seemingly obvious killers raises doubts in the reader at the same pace as it does for the jury. As one character, clearly speaking for Rotenberg, notes, humans have not two but three sides: “We all have a public life and a private life—and a secret life.”

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How in God’s name do you explain?

By Rick Mercer - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 9:25 AM - 111 Comments

Rick Mercer

Having led the Conservative party to a majority government, with the Liberal party lying bloodied and dying at his feet, Stephen Harper saw the breadth of his domain and wept, for he had no more worlds to conquer.

Twenty-four hours before Canada went to the polls, I went on BBC Radio International to explain to a very pleasant radio personality with excellent diction why Canada was having yet another election.

Now it’s one thing to go on the radio and blather about politics in Canada—the audience knows the cast of characters and it’s safe to assume they are somewhat familiar with our recent history. But when you go on BBC International, the audience is in the tens of millions worldwide and you have to bear in mind that the average listener is likely tuning in from a shantytown in Nigeria or a loft in Oslo.

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The untold story of the 2011 election: Chapter 6

By Paul Wells - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 59 Comments

Jonathan Hayward/CP

Introduction: Politics turned over
How Harper got what he’s always wanted, Layton took centre stage, and Ignatieff and Duceppe were done in

Chapter 1: The first mistake
The seeds of Michael Ignatieff’s troubles were planted last fall, and by the Liberals themselves

Chapter 2: Not feeling the love
Harper was tightly controlled, Ignatieff loose and freewheeling. Layton? Just a guy most Canadians would rather have a beer with

Chapter 3: The velocity of indignation
The PM had problems: the auditor general kerfuffle, Bruce Carson, the folks kicked out of rallies. The Liberals railed, but the NDP stepped up.

Chapter 4: Turning up the heat
The leaders clashed predictably in the TV debates, but the election would soon turn unexpectedly on two key speeches: one by Ignatieff, one by Duceppe

Chapter 5: The orange wave rises
Years of quiet preparation in Quebec begin paying off for the NDP—Layton’s rivals wake up to a new reality

Chapter 6: The morning after, the years ahead
What do Harper and Layton have in common? An understanding of what works in Canadian politics in the Twitter age­—patience and determination.

To read the entire article now, pick up the latest issue of Maclean’s at your favourite newsstand.

*****

Chapter 6: The morning after, the years ahead

In the end, Stephen Harper’s party won 167 seats and 39.62 per cent of the popular vote. The players in the Conservative war room betting pool guessed low. But then conservatism is sometimes associated, even by conservatives themselves, with pessimism: it holds that human nature is not perfectible on this Earth, and that it rarely does any good to sit around hoping for the best. Harper marked his victory by receiving congratulatory calls from Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron. The laconic accounts of these calls from Harper’s spokesman mentioned that the current shooting wars in Afghanistan and Libya, where Canada still has soldiers risking their lives, were among the subjects of conversation. Silver linings always come tucked into clouds.

At its worst, Harper’s pessimism about human nature hurts the country and discourages his own government’s political staff. They believe they are doing good work for Canadians. They would like to say so. The layers of threat and secrecy Harper has relied upon feel silly to them. Harper has pursued free trade with Europe without talking about the merits of trade with Europe. He wants to redefine Canada’s border relationship with the United States a lot more than he wants to explain what that would entail.

The budget he will now use his majority to pass listed, but did not describe, more than $2 billion in cuts to government spending. On many days during this campaign, a bored reporter could amuse himself by seeking an explanation for those very considerable cuts from incumbent Conservative cabinet ministers or senior staffers. Not a peep. Now we will all find out. The two drafts of Sheila Fraser’s G8 audit that leaked during the campaign were not the final draft. Now we will get to see the final draft. What the French call “l’usure du pouvoir”—the wear of power—will continue.

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Sun News Network's big mouths, small-town look

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 24 Comments

Getty Images; Photo illustration by Taylor Shute

Sun News Network expected to be attacked for its politics—not its professionalism. But the reviews of the conservative-leaning news channel have pointed out that it looks amateurish: “The sets and lighting are Spartan,” wrote Brad Oswald of the Winnipeg Free Press; Globe and Mail critic John Doyle called it “cheap, cheesy, terrible television.” That’s not a charge often levelled at Sun’s U.S. model, Fox News, whose high production values are acknowledged even by people who hate it. If Sun has trouble looking classy, it has nothing to do with the rather modest short skirts and sleeveless dresses; it may be because of the unexciting scenes behind them.

The hyper-patriotic Sun turned to the Toronto-based AKA Creative Group to design the sets. Andrew Kinsella, AKA’s president, feels they created “a style that Canadians have never seen before,” but adds that it would be “a lot more expensive to work with the big-name [design] competitors south of the border.” But on screen, the American competitors sometimes look more spectacular. Ezra Levant’s The Source is modelled on Glenn Beck’s soon-to-be-cancelled Fox show; it has the host do wacky conservative things like destroy a bush to show his contempt for Earth Day. But Beck’s program has an elaborate set and there’s creative use of camera angles and lighting. Levant’s set, dominated by two fairly small TV screens with his name on them, looks much more low-tech. And like many of the Sun shows, the backgrounds are often monolithically blue, which can give news shows a feeling of sameness: U.S. set designer Jim Fenhagen, who designed shows like ABC World News Tonight, hasn’t seen Sun but told Maclean’s that as a general rule, “doing blue sets is pretty old-fashioned now.”

While some Sun programs make good use of space—Kinsella is proud of the main news hub, with a “retractable rear-projection screen as well as flexibility for the host to move freely from one area to another”—others don’t look much more big-budget than the average local newscast. Some of the daytime shows feature the familiar sight of announcers at a desk with a drab-looking newsroom in the background, the kind of thing Fenhagen tried to avoid when he created the newsroom set for ABC: “Usually the main shot is all the people back there and you can’t get rid of them, which I think is a mistake.” Conservative TV host Michael Coren, who has appeared as a guest on Sun, considers the overall look “sharp and modern” but added that “because of the number of linked interviews with guests around the country, there is always going to be a certain limitation to the overall look.” But those limitations may mean the Sun hosts can’t compete with a Fox personality like Megyn Kelly, the network’s aggressively blond daytime star, who yells at guests against a stylish background of glass, metal and flickering screens.

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Why did it take so long to get Osama?

By Michael Friscolanti - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Darren McCollester/New York Times/Getty Images

In the end, Osama bin Laden was hardly the righteous martyr he claimed to be. The same terrorist mastermind who murdered thousands of people in a single morning—and urged his followers to “kill Americans wherever they are found,” even if that meant their own demise—was not exactly toughing out the jihad in a dusty cave or secluded mud hut. He was holed up in a Pakistani mansion, in a third-floor bedroom with a king-size mattress, red-and-yellow curtains, and a closet.

John Brennan, the White House’s counterterrorism adviser, summed it up best: “Here is Osama, living in a million-dollar compound,” he told reporters. “It speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years.”

Snippets continue to emerge about the top-secret mission that finally claimed al-Qaeda’s elusive leader, 10 long years after the 9/11 attacks. The tips from Guantánamo Bay. Months and months of tedious surveillance. The dangerous midnight raid, carried out by an elite unit of Navy Seals—and relayed, blow by blow, to nervous officials back in the White House situation room, including President Barack Obama.

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Our new live-in boyfriend

By Philippe Gohier - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 8:57 AM - 23 Comments

Tabatha Southey reviews the election.

Sometimes it feels as if Stephen Harper is like the guy you date for four years and then, one day, you look up and say, “Good god, I guess that makes him my boyfriend!” There was even a moment during the debates when he brought up the whole four-year thing and the majority and I thought, “Wow, did Stephen Harper just ask us to move in with him?” Well, that’s what Canada did.

Hello, New Jersey!

By Andrew Potter - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 8:20 AM - 38 Comments

Mike Moffatt hops onto the pile-on regarding the incoherence of the Liberal branding strategy:

The Liberals convinced me they had completely lost their minds when the back half of their campaign was based on a song quote from Bruce Springsteen.  That’s Born in the USA Bruce Springsteen.  They might as well had Ignatieff come out to Hulk Hogan’s Real American.

The untold story of the 2011 election: Chapter 5

By Paul Wells - Sunday, May 8, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 38 Comments

Photograph by Jenna Marie Wakani

Introduction: Politics turned over
How Harper got what he’s always wanted, Layton took centre stage, and Ignatieff and Duceppe were done in

Chapter 1: The first mistake
The seeds of Michael Ignatieff’s troubles were planted last fall, and by the Liberals themselves

Chapter 2: Not feeling the love
Harper was tightly controlled, Ignatieff loose and freewheeling. Layton? Just a guy most Canadians would rather have a beer with

Chapter 3: The velocity of indignation
The PM had problems: the auditor general kerfuffle, Bruce Carson, the folks kicked out of rallies. The Liberals railed, but the NDP stepped up.

Chapter 4: Turning up the heat
The leaders clashed predictably in the TV debates, but the election would soon turn unexpectedly on two key speeches: one by Ignatieff, one by Duceppe

Chapter 5: The orange wave rises
Years of quiet preparation in Quebec begin paying off for the NDP—Layton’s rivals wake up to a new reality

Chapter 6: The morning after, the years ahead
What do Harper and Layton have in common? An understanding of what works in Canadian politics in the Twitter age­—patience and determination.

To read the entire article now, pick up the latest issue of Maclean’s at your favourite newsstand.

*****

Chapter 5: The orange wave rises

“It’s whether we elect parliamentarians to bicker or build that will be the defining issue of our time,” Jack Layton said at the Toronto convention where he became NDP leader on Jan. 26, 2003. “And we say, let’s build.”

Kudos for prescience, then. (The same weekend, Layton also said, “Canadians must rise up.” Spooky.) But when the building finally paid off and the rising began, it was in Quebec. There are reasons for that. Neither the weakness of the Bloc Québécois nor the NDP’s ability to capitalize on it came out of nowhere. Indeed, the NDP’s attempt to reach out to Quebec francophones is as old as the party itself.

Since the 1930s, the party’s predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation, had support only among Quebec’s anglophone Montrealers. Francophones saw it as a creature of English Canada. The archbishop of Montreal warned Roman Catholics not to support this socialist menace. So at the NDP’s founding convention in 1961, organizers were so happy to see a few francophone nationalists show up that they basically let them write the party’s constitutional policy. The results included very Quebec-friendly language on “co-operative federalism, equality of rights for the French and English languages, the right of a province to opt out of joint federal-provincial programs within provincial jurisdiction without financial penalty, and the recognition of French Canada as a nation,’’ Michael Oliver and Charles Taylor wrote in a 1991 book, Our Canada. The party’s first president, associate president and vice-president were Quebec francophones.

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'It was just symbolic'

By Philippe Gohier - Saturday, May 7, 2011 at 4:44 PM - 99 Comments

NDP MP Ruth Ellen Brosseau gives her first interview.

Initially, she said, she put her name on the ballot as a favour to the party she has long-supported. ”It was just symbolic,” she said. “I was approached to put my name on a ballot but I was a supporter of the NDP for many years.”

Watching Monday’s results at the NDP headquarters in Ottawa, Brosseau said she was surprised to see she had handily beat the Bloc incumbent. There was some speculation when Brosseau failed to surface this week that she didn’t want the job, but she said that “never crossed my mind.” ”Once I set my mind to something I always stick to it,” she said.

The search for simple answers

By Philippe Gohier - Saturday, May 7, 2011 at 2:30 PM - 54 Comments

Having taken a full four days to think it over, various Liberals have settled on two explanations for their party’s losses: their leader and their leader’s answer to one criticism levelled during the English language leader’s debate.

Veteran Toronto MP Jim Karygiannis groaned along with Liberals across the country. Apparently, Ignatieff didn’t understand the pivot. Karygiannis (Scarborough-Agincourt), who easily spends more time in his riding than in Parliament, was practically screaming answers at the TV screen: “Look, you’re a professional pol, Jack. You stay in Ottawa. I’m out working hard and talking to real Canadians, listening to them and working with them. That’s … what I’m doing.”

Extensive Star interviews with campaign insiders and politicians show a large slice of the loss must be attributed to the arrogance of the Liberal leader. In the end, a central Conservative criticism against Ignatieff — that he was arrogant — turned out to be true. It wasn’t the demeanour of a man deliberately trying to be haughty. Rather, as a Liberal communications expert noted: “Any political party is like a Masonic Lodge. You’ve got to know the secret handshake — and he didn’t know what he didn’t know.”

Hey look: In which the appeal to Quebecers' sovereigntist instincts doesn't work

By Paul Wells - Saturday, May 7, 2011 at 1:02 PM - 5 Comments

From the magazine, Chapter 4 of our account of the 2011 campaign. Featuring such other dispatches from the Dept. of It Looked Like a Good Idea at the Time as Ignatieff’s “Rise Up!” video.

'Get a better messenger'

By Philippe Gohier - Saturday, May 7, 2011 at 12:28 PM - 24 Comments

Michael Ignatieff offers his parting words to the Globe.

I think we opened up the breach in a way against Harper and against what he stands for, and someone else surged through and benefited, and at that point maybe the attack ads had an impact on my capacity to capitalize on a longing for change. There was a longing for change that I think we played an honourable part in creating, but we couldn’t benefit because someone else surged through. Good luck to him. And then what happened, of course, is, as the NDP surged through, the blue tide began to rise in counterbalance and we got squeezed in between.

I’m conscious, I’m always conscious, that a leader has to take responsibility. And I take responsibility fully for anything we failed to do. But I think it was a pretty complicated story and I don’t actually think this election was a referendum on me.