Review: The Sisters Brothers

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

There never was a more engaging pair of psychopaths than Charlie and Eli Sisters, two brothers who kill for hire—and for necessity, and sometimes for the pure, amusing hell of it. The novel opens in 1851 and, if the Sisters are crazy, so is the entire West Coast of America, caught up in a fever of gold lust and violence. Working for a mysterious tycoon known as the Commodore, the brothers set out from Oregon to kill Hermann Kermit Warm at his San Francisco-area mining claim. Warm has stolen something from the Commodore, or so older brother Charlie—who really couldn’t care less—tells narrator Eli, who desperately needs his victims to be guilty of something.

On their meandering and blood-soaked journey south, Eli spends a lot of time pondering matters of guilt and innocence, and memories of the Sisters’ abusive childhoods. But he’s also concerned with whether he might be able to find true love if only he could lose some weight, and about the virtues of the newfangled teeth-cleaning powder a dentist gives him. (Eli’s overwhelming desire to be clean in every way is one of the most endearing things about him.) Eventually, the brothers discover Warm and why the Commodore wants him dead, and nothing thereafter is the same for them.

So subtle is DeWitt’s prose, so slyly note-perfect his rendition of Eli’s voice in all its earnestly charming 19th-century syntax, and so compulsively readable his bleakly funny western noir story, that readers will stick by Eli even as he grinds his heel into the shattered skull of an already dead prospector. The man had been poking Eli with a rifle; that, and the fact Charlie killed him before his brother had a chance to, put Eli into a rage. The prospector had been acting like a bully, “and this is the one thing,” Eli explains, “that makes me unreasonable.” By that point in the story, enmeshed as we are in the Sisters’ deranged world, Eli sounds entirely reasonable.

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U.S. to decrease military presence in Pakistan

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 11:27 AM - 2 Comments

The U.S. military has begun pulling its troops out of Pakistan. Earlier this month, Islamabad asked the U.S. to scale back its military presence, following rising tensions between the two countries after the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Pentagon spokesman Dave Lapan did not say how many troops would be removed.

Al Jazeera English

Review: The Chimps of Fauna Sanctuary

By Marni Jackson - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 11:25 AM - 2 Comments

The author, who has trained as a primatologist in the South American rainforest, spent several months as a volunteer caregiver for 13 chimpanzees living in a Quebec sanctuary. Director Gloria Grow had rescued the animals from biomedical research labs in the U.S.—the last country to still use primates this way. Although the chimps were still behind bars, the ingeniously designed sanctuary offered privacy, social contact with each other, human kindness, and access to the outdoors. For some, it was the first time they had ever walked on grass.

Westoll’s book tells a strong, simple story well. His job involved a great deal of poop-scraping, an occasional spitball in the face, and the constant low hum of danger; despite the fact that we like to put cowboy outfits on baby chimps and treat them as pets, adult chimpanzees have five to seven times the strength of a human male, and, like some badass humans, they can be mean. “Smoothie Boy,” as Westoll was known to his co-workers, delivered trolleys of hot tea and vegetable smoothies to 13 very distinctive characters, from the Bronx-cheering Binky to Sue Ellen, a fashionista with a thing for bearded men.

Slowly, the author develops a bond with several of them, especially Tom, a placid elder with old-soul eyes and a long history of war wounds. It’s the affecting individuality of his charges that makes the strongest argument that “the moral boundary we draw between us and them is indefensible.” For over a century, Westoll points out, we’ve shot chimpanzees into space, implanted electrodes into their brains, and injected them with the HIV virus, all the while maintaining that a “chimpanzee in a biomedical lab is somehow less ‘endangered’ than its wild compatriots.” But that attitude is changing. In this experiment in empathy, the author’s goal was to learn from the chimps, do no harm, and to pass that revolutionary connection on to us.

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The re-southification of American Idol

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 11:18 AM - 1 Comment

When it came to the demographics of this year’s American Idol contestants, much of the attention went to the fact that women were getting eliminated at an even higher rate than usual. And sure enough, the winner was a man yet again; we’re a long way from the Kelly Clarkson days. But in another way, things have circled back to the beginning of the series: after a couple of years where Southerners didn’t dominate the show as much as in the past, both finalists were from the U.S. South, and the producers seem to have wanted it that way:

Yes, it’s a country music year for “Idol” — just what producer Nigel Lythgoe wanted when he tagged Alaina early on as this season’s Chosen One. (The show’s producers have also pushed McCreery, who is now likely to win, since the beginning; he’s had a signature song — Josh Turner’s “Your Man” — ever since his audition.) With Carrie Underwood now the official top-earning “Idol” alum and Nashville holding up better than any other corner of the conventional recording industry, no one can be surprised that “Idol” has found new life, in part, by assertively reconnecting with this heartland.

Singers like Alaina and McCreery have certain advantages on a show like this, apart from the obvious (these shows are very popular in the Heartland). Ever since rock n’ roll exploded in the ’50s, shattering the music industry into fragments and giving every generation its own particular brand of music, television has had to cope with the problem that there isn’t much pop music that has enormous mass appeal. That’s why most talk shows leave the musical acts for the end of the show, because some segment of the audience is going to hate the type of music. Successful Idol performers avoid this by cultivating a sort of all-purpose eclecticism, with a hint of a basic baseline style but not enough of a specific style to turn off large portions of the audience. This is what Elvis Presley often did, and Elvis is the patron saint of many Idol contestants, particularly his fellow Southerners.

Chinese prisoners forced to play online games

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 10:56 AM - 3 Comments

Hundreds of prisoners at the Jixi labour camp in China were forced to play online games, former inmate Liu Dali told The Guardian. The forced gaming, which would often last 12 hours at a time, was aimed at building credits for prison guards, Dali explains, which they would then trade for real money. “Prison bosses made more money forcing inmates to play games than they do forcing people to do manual labour,” he said. “I heard them say they could earn 5,000-6,000rmb [approximately $750-$900] a day. We didn’t see any of the money. The computers were never turned off.” Guards punished inmates physically if they did not complete their work quotas. “They would make me stand with my hands raised in the air and after I returned to my dormitory they would beat me with plastic pipes. We kept playing until we could barely see things,” he said.

The Guardian

Ratko Mladic captured in Serbia

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 10:46 AM - 0 Comments

Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb army chief accused of coordinating the slaughter of 7,500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica in 1995, has been arrested in the Serbian village of Lazarevo, about 80 km north of Belgrade. Serbian prosecutors have already started extradition procedures to have that will see Mladic prosecuted in the Hague, where he was indicted by the UN war crimes tribunal in 1995. Mladic nevertheless lived freely in in Belgrade until 2001, when he disappeared after the arrest of former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic. His capture is expected to facilitate Serbia’s bid to join the European Union.

BBC News

Starbucks takes on Tim Hortons

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 10:45 AM - 7 Comments

Photograph by Jenna Marie Wakani

In the 1991 comedy L.A. Story, Steve Martin’s character, Harris, memorably poked fun at the coffee house culture Starbucks was introducing to Americans: “I’ll have a half double decaffeinated half-caf, with a twist of lemon.” At the time, Starbucks had just 116 stores in the United States. Two decades later, it has ballooned to nearly 17,000 stores in 50 countries. But there still remains a sizable chunk of the coffee-drinking population that’s wary of buying their coffee from the Seattle-based giant, either because it’s too expensive, too fussy or too inconvenient (believe it or not, some coffee drinkers still find it easier to brew a pot at home).

So, with growth opportunities for its flagship brand in North America waning, Starbucks decided last year to overhaul the Seattle’s Best Coffee brand it acquired in the U.S. eight years ago (three years ago in Canada) for less than US$100 million, and signed deals to sell brewed coffee in Subway restaurants, Burger Kings, AMC movie theatres and just about anywhere else it’s often difficult to find a decent cup. Starbucks’ CEO has set a lofty annual revenue goal of $1 billion for the division.

In Canada, Starbucks is now going a step further with a pilot project that has put Seattle’s Best branded “coffee bars” inside four Wal-Mart Supercentres, with another four to be opened over the next year. The idea is to provide a slightly cheaper Starbucks-type beverage, such as lattes and mochas, to people who don’t associate coffee with overstuffed furniture and faux jazz. “It’s a new concept for us. They’re coffee bars with a walk-up window on one side and a bar to linger at on the other,” says Jenny McCabe, a Starbucks spokesperson. “We think we can simplify premium coffee and make it really accessible. Wal-Mart is not a place that most people would have thought to look for premium coffee.”

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Doubling down on diabetes

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Identical twins Daniel and Shawn Winer first started working together as babies, appearing in commercials for products like Wet Ones and Spic and Span. (Identical twins make the best baby actors, Shawn says, because “if one cries, you can swap the other one in.”) Now they’re both medical doctors based at the Toronto General Hospital, and colleagues still mix them up today. “We’ll play tricks on people sometimes. It’s fun,” Dr. Shawn Winer says. “The only time it gets annoying is I do get called Daniel. It’s happened so often, I’ll just answer to it.” Dr. Daniel Winer calls himself and Shawn “big science geeks.”

Two high-achieving identical twins like the Winer brothers are unusual enough, but what’s even more remarkable is the actual work they’re doing. For a few years now, they’ve been collaborating on a big question: Why do so many overweight people develop type 2 diabetes? (Type 2, which tends to appear in adulthood, represents 90 per cent of all cases.) With obesity rates skyrocketing, diabetes is now one of the most common chronic conditions in Canada, and leads to everything from kidney problems and blindness to heart disease. About 3.7 million Canadians are living with all types of diabetes, but the Winers’ work could very well change our understanding of the condition—and maybe one day pave the way for a vaccine.

As a person gains extra weight, “their tissues stop responding as well to insulin, the hormone that keeps blood sugars in check,” Daniel says. To compensate for insulin resistance, the pancreas starts pumping out more insulin, but it eventually can’t make enough, burning out the system. The end result is type 2 diabetes. (In type 1 diabetes, which is more typically diagnosed in kids, the body’s immune system attacks and kills insulin-producing cells in the pancreas.) “We know obesity contributes to insulin resistance,” Daniel says, “but we don’t know how or why.” He and his brother are exploring an entirely new theory that suggests type 2 diabetes might not only be a metabolic disease, but something closer to type 1.

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Congolese women are being raped at a rate of one almost every minute

By Jenn Cutts - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images

Statistics coming out of Congo are rarely uplifting, but a new study on sexual violence reveals a nearly inconceivable situation: Congolese women are being raped at a rate of one almost every minute.

The study, led by U.S. researchers and published in The American Journal of Public Health, estimates that at least 400,000 women in the East African country were victimized over a 12-month period in 2006-07. That’s more than 1,000 a day, or four every five minutes. (Findings were extrapolated from a 2007 survey of 3,436 women between the ages of 15 and 49.) In Congo’s long-standing conflict between rebel groups and the government, rape is commonly used as a tactic to force allegiance from local populations.

More shocking still: researchers believe these numbers do not give a full account of the problem, as they don’t include rapes of young girls and older women, those that go unreported, and those of men and boys. “Our findings suggest that future policies and programs should focus on…eliminat[ing] the acceptance of and impunity surrounding sexual violence nationwide while also maintaining and enhancing efforts to stop militias from perpetrating rape.”

Space police

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

U.S. Air Force/Reuters

An orbiting weapons platform, a spy plane, or a decade-old, billion-dollar money pit. The U.S. Air Force’s X-37B space planes are a cloak-and-dagger project, but their secret orbits are known, and that discovery was made, in part, by Canadians. They’re part of an international organization of volunteer skywatchers who’ve been tracking secret government satellites for over 30 years.

The purpose of the planes is now a closely guarded secret, but they started as an open NASA project before being moved to the air force, so some information about them is known. The first X-37B is on the ground following its initial mission, which lasted from April to December 2010, and its sister is currently in orbit. They look like miniature versions of the space shuttle, with stubby wings for gliding at high altitudes, a solar panel array that keeps them powered in space, and a cargo bay about the size of a standard pickup truck’s bed. They’re also fully robotic, and their launches led to speculation, especially from the Chinese and Russian governments, that the U.S. was attempting to weaponize space.

But well before the rocket boosters ignited, members of SeeSat-L, a mailing-list-based international organization of skywatchers, were already working to crack the secret of the crafts’ orbit. “There’s this question of secrecy, and how much should the public know about what’s going on in space,” says Ted Molczan, 58, a Toronto-based lifelong skywatcher and director of SeeSat’s online newsgroup. “If it’s in an orbit that isn’t published, then it’s of interest to us.”

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You can't do that in San Francisco

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 10:15 AM - 7 Comments

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

It’s one of those conversations where the interviewer starts to think, Whoa, dude, too much info. Jonathon Conte is 29, an employee in San Francisco’s service industry, and an ardent defender of the foreskin. He was circumcised as a baby, as many boys are, and now years later he keenly feels the loss. “There are a lot of complicated emotions around it,” he says. “To admit this is a harmful practice, a lot of men would have to come to terms with the fact that they may be sexually compromised, and that’s not easy to accept or verbalize or even think about.” He notes in detail the protective and sexual functions of the foreskin. “We’re talking in an adult male it’s about 15 square inches of erogenous tissue,” he says, “which is a lot of skin to be removing. A lot.”

The issue of circumcision, like the part of the anatomy in question, is front and centre in San Francisco at the moment, but it’s a crowded field. Conte is a member of the Bay Area Intactivists, part of a grassroots collective seeking to outlaw in San Francisco the circumcision of males under age 18. In late April, organizers submitted more than 12,000 signatures of support to the city’s elections department. Assuming at least 7,168 of those are verified, they’ll meet the threshold to put the issue on the city ballot in November. Then the citizens will have their say. It’s a long shot, but this being San Francisco, you never know.

A ban on circumcision—those doing the deed would face a fine of up to $1,000 and a year in jail—would be unique in North America, though this is hardly the first time the city has been accused of overreaching its mandate to deliver such mundanities as sewers, water, roads, and the like. A daunting number of proclamations and prohibitions emanate from “Ban Francisco,” some already in force, others waiting to pounce from left field. Or right field. The government here is either the last redoubt of the flower child, or a neo-fascist cabal, depending on whose ox is being gored on any given day.

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Idling bans are the devil's playthings

By the editors - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 2 Comments

Geoff Howe/CP

“Ban” Francisco comes by its nickname honestly. As Maclean’s Ken MacQueen explains in this story, California’s city by the bay has banned, among other things, plastic bags, bottled water, Happy Meal toys, cat declawing, city business with Arizona, the USS Iowa and dealings with anyone using tropical hardwood or virgin redwood wood products. From afar, it seems a darkly comic list of intrusive government gone wild.

And yet Canada is not immune to this tendency among municipal politicians to encroach onto areas where they are irrelevant and unwelcome. Bans on plastic bags and bottled water are commonplace here as well. And last week, Edmonton city councillors again contemplated an anti-idling bylaw. Such a plan was previously rejected by city council in 2009 but, like a bad penny, it keeps coming back.

Edmonton will not be alone if it does impose a ban on vehicle idling. Many other Canadian cities have already enacted such laws: Toronto, Vancouver, Victoria, Yellowknife, Jasper, Alta., Guelph, Ont., Waterloo, Ont., and Kentville, N.S., to name a few, as well as New York City, Minneapolis, and, of course, the entire state of California.

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Can't stop, won't stop

By Erica Alini - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 10:05 AM - 12 Comments

Brian Topp welcomes the establishment’s scorn.

… this text reminds us of the truth of the old mantra: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Canada’s New Democrats have vaulted over Parliament’s separatists and over its reserve conservative party to capture the Official Opposition bench. So our friends (the folks used to running things) are going to stop ignoring us. They will shortly stop laughing. And then they’re going to fight. New Democrats should welcome this – it is how Canada’s entitled are going to inadvertently communicate to the people of Canada that the NDP is close to victory.

The high price of growing cucumbers

By Michael Barclay - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

British Columbia: The B.C. Civil Liberties Association has filed a class-action lawsuit against the district of Mission over a bylaw that allowed homes using more than the average amount of electricity to be inspected for signs of a grow op. Residents who were growing cucumbers or had incorrect wiring—with no marijuana to be found—were nonetheless fined up to $5,300, and in one case had trouble entering the U.S. The bylaw has since been suspended pending review.

Alberta: A man is suing the Calgary police, claiming he was wrongfully beaten up and arrested for trying to pick up a prostitute. According to the plaintiff, he was simply the passenger in his friend’s van when the driver allegedly tried to buy sex from an undercover police officer. A police vehicle then approached the van, and the plaintiff says he was pulled out and punched and kicked by two officers before being questioned and searched.

Saskatchewan: Regina’s CTV News anchor Manfred Joehnck is suing the local alternative weekly, Prairie Dog, for a blog post he claims misinterpreted on-air remarks he made comparing k.d. lang’s physical appearance to Charlie Sheen: “The older she gets, the more she looks like Charlie Sheen,” Joehnck joked, before qualifying: “Charlie on a good day, not his web page days.” The blogger took umbrage to what he perceived as a slur against lang’s appearance, and by extension her sexual orientation. Although Joehnck has apologized, his lawsuit claims the post and the reader comments are harmful to his reputation.

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Sheila Fraser's straight talk express

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 9:07 AM - 7 Comments

The Auditor General bids adieu.

“We all know Canada’s population is getting older, but we are still grappling with its implications — fewer people in the labour force, less economic growth and less tax revenue,” Fraser said in a speech. “At the same time, we can expect people will need more health-care services and will be drawing on public pensions. Obviously, balancing these fiscal pressures will be a major challenge.”

At a later news conference, she expanded on why Canadians need to know more about potentially significant costs looming down the road. ”There may be some very hard choices that have to be made. And unless Canadians can understand the pressures that are coming and that government has to deal with, I think it will be very difficult for them to accept, perhaps, decisions that the government will have to make.”

More here, here and here. Ms. Fraser has also released a final report looking back on her decade in office.

Secretaries day

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 5:16 PM - 5 Comments

The Harper government has released the list of 28 parliamentary secretary appointments. I count eight new MPs: Eve Adams, Chris Alexander (who replaces Laurie Hawn at defence), Kerry-Lynne Findlay, Robert Goguen, Kellie Leitch, Chungsen Leung, Michelle Rempel and Susan Truppe.

Obama affirms importance of U.S. and European leadership

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 3:53 PM - 0 Comments

U.S. President Barack Obama appeared before the British Parliament Wednesday, telling U.K. politicians that now is the time for American and European leadership. But he also said that leaders must be ready to “change with the times,” a reference to the rising power of new players on the global scene. Still, Obama emphasized that U.S. and British influence remains “indispensable” in international politics. Obama delivered his speech in front of a packed house at Westminster Hall, with former British prime ministers Sir John Major, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown in attendance. He is the first U.S. president to address MPs in the British house of parliament.

BBC News

Departing AG leaving her post at the end of May

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 3:48 PM - 5 Comments

In her last public address as Canada’s auditor general, Sheila Fraser told reporters on Wednesday the federal government has several pressing issues it must address in the coming years. The most pressing include Canada’s aging population, the disintegration of infrastructure, climate change, and the plight of aboriginals. “We cannot simply continue to do the same things in the same way,” Fraser said of living conditions on First Nations reserves. “There needs to be a serious review of programs and services to First Nations. “We need to identify what services should be provided and by whom, as well as the funding required and the expected results.” After 10 years on the job, Fraser will leave the post that put her at the centre of some of the most compelling stories in Canadian politics on May 30.

National Post

British Columbia: Now with less tax and more tax

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 3:28 PM - 117 Comments

We are now in a moment in Canadian politics where tax policy is based mostly on how people feel about different taxes. B.C. premier Christy Clark is now at the cutting edge of feeling-based tax policy, thanks to her decision today to cut the HST, hike the provincial corporate tax rate, and distribute cheques to some of her fellow British Columbians. Economists find every part of this notion vexing. On Twitter, Stephen Gordon linked to this old blog post explaining why Canada needs a lot more HST-ish taxing and a lot less corporate-tax-rate-ish taxing.

This is pretty nearly conventional wisdom among the wise. Colleague Coyne will surely be gallumphing along any moment to explain that the only way Clark could make British Columbians’ lives any worse would be to make them wear bicycle helmets all the time. But no matter. Clark has inherited an unpopular HST policy from her predecessor Gordon Campbell. Defeat in a referendum on the tax could blow a hole in Clark’s premiership before it really gets started. So she must be seen to be Doing Something. Cutting the HST, which looks to consumers like a tax on everything, looks popular. Hiking corporate taxes, which look to consumers like a magical kind of tax that no real person pays, looks painless.

I’m not sure it’ll help as much as Clark needs it to help. BC voters’ referendum options now come down to a choice between less HST and none at all. I think it just became easier to vote for “none at all,” because “as much tax as we’ve been paying” suddenly has no champion.

For your consideration: Bruce Stanton

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 3:27 PM - 6 Comments

Ahead of the election of a new Speaker on June 2, I’ve sent each of the candidates a set of questions about the job and promised to post here all responses in their entirety. First up, this morning, was Lee Richardson. Here now is Bruce Stanton, the MP for Simcoe North. Continue…

The Integrity of the Smurfs Has Been Smurfed

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 3:14 PM - 9 Comments

Watching the trailer for the Smurfs movie. Okay, so I grew up with the cartoon series, and therefore I know that the show (like all Hanna-Barbera shows, as I mentioned below) has no artistic integrity to betray. I watched as they added new, politically-correct Smurfs like the environmentalist “Natural Smurf,” and then literally turned some of those Smurfs into little baby Smurfs in the hope of attracting a younger demographic. I saw them add Jonathan Winters as Grandpa Smurf, because… I don’t know, Papa Smurf wasn’t old enough? (It was probably the last time in TV history when shows were actually under pressure to add older characters to the cast in mid-run. It was kind of nice, in a way.) So I’m aware that doing a live-action/3D animation hybrid where the Smurfs wind up in the modern-day big city and harass Barney Stinson is something Hanna-Barbera would gladly have done themselves.

And yet a part of me can’t help wishing that there had been some other approach chosen – this particular “zap them from a magical land to the present day” has been done as far back as the Masters of the Universe movie, and I strongly suspect it’s less about making it more contemporary than making it cheaper to do. Hearing Jonathan Winters’ voice come out of Papa Smurf just feels wrong, for reasons stated above. Also, where’s the classical music? That was the big selling point of the original. Well, maybe not, but I was actually introduced to a lot of classical music by that show, and it will feel distinctly un-Smurfy without a lot of Schubert and Grieg.

Finally, I didn’t see Brainy Smurf get violently thrown out by the people who are supposedly his friends. That… well, okay, that’s probably an improvement.

[vodpod id=Video.9550846&w=600&h=400&fv=clip%3D3547%26amp%3Bfeed%3Dhttp%253A%2F%2Fwww.sonypictures.com%2Fpreviews%2Fmovies%2Fthesmurfs.xml]

I just hope the inevitable Snorks movie treats the material with more respect.

This is why we can't have conspiratorial things

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 2:57 PM - 10 Comments

Jonathan Kay explains why we don’t have any good conspiracy theories.

In recent months, conspiracy theories have dominated the political discourse in the United States: Millions of Republican “birthers” believe Obama is a foreign-born, communist Muslim, or that his health-care plan is a plot to send grandma before a “death panel.” In such a climate, it is impossible to have anything approaching a rational political discourse, which is why the U.S. is so gridlocked over how to reduce its massive debt.

The Canadian political climate is far healthier, and less overheated. In Canada’s recent election campaign, we fretted about how “shrill” things got. But, by American standards, the conflict here was mild: Sure, the Tories made a big deal about how long then Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff had lived outside of the country. But they never once accused him of forging his birth certificate.

PM Harper heading to France for G-8 meeting

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 1:41 PM - 0 Comments

Prime Minister Stephen Harper departs on Wednesday for Deauville, France, where he will meet leaders from other G-8 countries. It is Harper’s first foreign trip since he was elected to lead a majority government on May 2. The agenda is anticipated to focus mainly on economic issues, as well as ongoing unrest in the Middle East and North Africa. Specifically, the leaders are expected to discuss the NATO involvement in Libya, since several of the member countries, including Canada, are contributing to the mission. The ongoing plight of G-8 member country Japan, which is struggling to rebuild after the devastating earthquake and tsunami on March 11, is also expected to be discussed.

CBC News

The (brief) Bob Rae Era begins

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 1:19 PM - 25 Comments

The Liberals have picked Bob Rae as their new interim leader.

It appeared Mr. Rae wanted to run for the permanent leadership, but his decision to seek the interim post took him out of that race. Was he disappointed? “This is a job that needs to be done now,” he told reporters before the caucus meeting. “This is my chance.

“… I think there will be a broader chance for renewal and the search for a new leader in a year and a half and two years. I think it’s important for the party to look very much to a new generation of leadership.”

Here is my slightly overtaken piece from last week’s magazine on Mr. Rae’s situation.