Stelmach government lambasts Ottawa on oilsands

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 6:00 PM - 5 Comments

The Alberta government has expressed frustration at Ottawa as it steps up efforts to introduce environmental regulations for the oilsands , and has called the Harper Conservatives “hypocrites.” A 2009 diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks a few weeks ago revealed that former environment minister Jim Prentice vowed that the federal government would intervene and regulate the oilsands if the industry and the province failed to address the issue, however U.S. Ambassador David Jacobson believed Ottawa was being “too slow.” Provincial finance minister Lloyd Snelgrove criticized Ottawa for regulating a provincial resource, which would add “multiple layers of government trying to the same thing, [where] nobody wins.” Environment Minister Peter Kent told The Calgary Herald that while the federal government respects the province’s input on oilsands regulation, it has an obligation to take action on environmental regulation of bitumen development. “We value all of the provinces and territories as partners,” said Kent, “but we took to heart a year ago the very strong scientific findings that water monitoring in the Athabasca basin was inadequate.”

The Calgary Herald

'Right now, if Harper wanted to, he could be a complete dictator'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 5:38 PM - 85 Comments

Senator Bert Brown explains why we need a Senate quite unlike the one we have now.

Conservative Sen. Bert Brown, who has been travelling across the country selling provincial premiers on Harper’s reform plans, told Postmedia News he wasn’t pleased by this week’s appointments and knows they have set off a firestorm. “That’s not what I want to see for the next generation, but (Harper) is legally . . . able to do that,” Brown said. “I’ll be honest with you, I think it will stir up the populace to say it’s time we had an elected Senate.”

Brown said abolishing the Senate isn’t a solution because, not only does it require reopening the Constitution, it would also mean that, “somewhere down the line, we could have a prime minister, with a majority government, who would be able to do anything.” “He would have no opposition, he could just pass bills, and how much damage could he do to do the country?” Brown, the only elected senator, asked. That’s why, Brown said, a strong Senate that reflects the will of the provinces is needed. “Right now, if Harper wanted to, he could be a complete dictator, because there is no way to stop a majority government,” he said.

Photo gallery: Obama goes to Europe

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 5:27 PM - 0 Comments

Living With Lions recalls album, returns FACTOR grant

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 5:18 PM - 2 Comments

Vancouver punk band Living With Lions is recalling their latest album, the controversially-titled Holy Sh-t, after the band was criticized for taking a government grant to record it. The band will not only pull the album off store shelves, but will also return the $13,248 grant they received from FACTOR, the government-funded Foundation To Assist Canadian Talent On Records, which came under fire from federal Heritage Minister James Moore last week. At issue is the band’s depiction of Jesus as a turd, among other creative uses of Christian imagery. A statement by the band’s label, Black Box Music, said “the album will be re-released as a non-FACTOR supported project in the coming weeks.”

Chartattack

Blockbuster Canada to close a third of its 400 stores

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 4:18 PM - 3 Comments

BlockBuster Canada could be closing as many as 140 of its 400 stores after it was forced into receivership earlier this month. The chain’s U.S. parent filed for bankruptcy last September after its business was decimated by the arrival of competitors like Netflix, which offers a DVD mail rental service to Americans and streams movies over the Internet to subscribers in both the U.S. and Canada. The parent company has since been sold to U.S. satellite dish company Dish Network. As part of the bankruptcy process, Blockbuster used the more profitable Canadian operations as a guarantee for it’s bigger U.S. business. But Blockbuster Canada failed to make the necessary payments on some $67 million worth of claims from movie distributors and other suppliers. Now the receiver is looking for buyers for Blockbuster Canada’s assets, while the company fights with it’s new U.S. owners about whether it can continue to license the Blockbuster name.

Canadian Press

'Canadians have given each of us an important job to do'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 3:48 PM - 23 Comments

The prepared text of Jack Layton’s speech to the first meeting of the new NDP caucus.

Merci. Thank you.

J’ai participé à plusieurs événements dans cette salle.

Mais je ne me souviens pas de l’avoir vu aussi pleine, de néodémocrates.

Look at how many NDP MPs are here today.

I better keep this short — before they call in the fire marshal.

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IAEA says bombed Syrian building likely a nuclear reactor

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 3:40 PM - 0 Comments

The UN’s nuclear wathdog agency has concluded that a Syrian site bombed by Israeli jets in 2007 was “very likely” a nuclear reactor. The statement comes from a confidential report by the International Atomic Energy Agency that was obtained by the BBC. The IAEA has been investigating claims by the United States that Syria had been building a secret nuclear reactor with the help of North Korea. Since the bombing of the site in September 2007, Syria has maintained that it was an unused military facility that was under construction. But the report says the building was similar in size and shape to a nuclear reactor and that samples taken from the site indicate the presence of nuclear activities. As a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Syria has the obligation to notify the IAEA of any plans to construct a nuclear facility.

BBC News

The House: Considering reform

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 2:00 PM - 12 Comments

Last month, Mark Jarvis wrote here about potential parliamentary reforms as part of our series on the House. Shortly thereafter he asked if I had any thoughts on what he’d written and eventually I got around to writing something down. In the interests of continuing the discussion, here is the email I sent to him last week.

Let me state from the outset that I am not a professional constitutional scholar. Or even an amateur constitutional scholar. I am merely paid to put on a suit most week days and spend inordinate amounts of time watching politicians more closely than is probably advisable.

My woeful inadequacies thus acknowledged from the outset, I will happily offer a few thoughts.

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NATO launches full-scale attack on Gadhafi compound

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 1:59 PM - 4 Comments

NATO troops launched their heaviest bombings so far of Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s compound on Tuesday. According to Libyan officials, three people were killed and 150 wounded in the strike that NATO officials say targeted a military facility used in attacks against civilians. While the mission in Libya has the protection of civilians as its primary goal, critics say its focus has since come to include regime change. Indeed, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told reporters on Monday that Gadhafi’s is now unable “to re-establish control over the country” and the U.S. welcomes the rise of “a new Libya.” Though the civil war between Gadhafi’s troops and anti-government rebels has been deadlocked for weeks, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe told his country’s parliament he doesn’t expect the NATO mission to last longer than “a few months.”

Reuters

Troops double their presence in flood-ravaged Quebec

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 1:47 PM - 0 Comments

The Canadian Forces are doubling their presence in southern Quebec as the region continues to deal with floods. More than 500 troops will help build and reinforce barriers to protect homes from the rapidly rising waters of Lake Champlain and the Richelieu River. The water levels are expected to return to the record highs recorded earlier this month by Tuesday. So far, more than 3,000 homes have been flooded and 1,000 people have been evacuated in the region south of Montreal.

CTV News

DNA tests said to link Strauss-Kahn to alleged sex assault

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 3 Comments

The results from DNA tests on Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund, match his genetic code with material found on the shirt of the hotel maid he allegedly assaulted, according to sources for the Associated Press. The sources were not authorized to speak publicly about the case, and spoke on condition of anonymity. Benjamin Brafman, the lawyer representing Strauss-Kahn, declined to comment Monday. Strauss-Kahn, 62, is now living in a luxury Manhattan high-rise with his wife after being released on bail from prison and put under house arrest on Friday. He is accused of attacking a 32-year-old housekeeper at a New York hotel on May 14. His charges include rape and sexual abuse.

CTV News

Canada among the worst in prosecuting bribery

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 1:24 PM - 3 Comments

When it comes to prosecuting bribery cases, Canada is among the worst of nearly 40 countries, according a report released by Transparency International, a group that monitors corruption worldwide. With “little or no enforcement,” Canada is the only G7 country that has consistently remained at the bottom of the ranking since record-keeping began in 2005, the organization said. Since then, Canada has prosecuted only two corruption cases, compared to over 200 cases pressed against individuals and companies in the U.S. “Canada does not have a great reputation when it comes to the enforcement of white-collar crime. If it’s not taken seriously by government, it won’t be taken seriously by the corporate sector,” Peter Dent, a partner at Deloitte and Touche, LLP who also sits on the board of Transparency International told the Globe and Mail.

The Globe and Mail

Camping blames bad math for failed Judgment Day prediction

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 12:44 PM - 9 Comments

The California preacher who pegged May 21, 2011 as the day the world would end said Monday that he botched his calculations. Now, 89-year-old Harold Camping is predicting that Judgment Day will occur in just under five months, on October 21. When he realized his doomsday prediction was wrong, Camping said he felt so terrible that he and his wife left home and holed themselves up in a motel. His followers have spent millions of dollars advertising the end of the world, an event that was supposed to transport 200 million believers to heaven, leaving the rest of humanity to wallow in fear for months before the earth was to be consumed by a giant fireball. This is the second time Camping has blamed a mathematical error for a failed Judgment Day prediction.

Toronto Star

Volcanic ash forces flight cancellations

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 12:24 PM - 0 Comments

Thousands of passengers in northern Europe have been left in limbo after 500 flights were cancelled due to drifting ash from a volcano in Iceland, which is now being monitored, the BBC reports. Several airports are affected, including Londonderry, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Carlisle. The ash cloud is expected to continue affecting flights from some airports in Scotland and England into Wednesday.

BBC News 

Deadliest tornado in U.S. history strikes Missouri

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 12:21 PM - 0 Comments

The tornado that hit Joplin, Missouri on Sunday left 118 people dead, making it the deadliest single tornado the U.S. has seen since it started modern record-keeping over six decades ago, CNN reports. The number of deaths is expected to rise as more people are found in the rubble. Fortunately, the hospital was one of the few buildings left standing. Joplin’s tornado proved to be deadlier than one that hit Flint, Michigan in 1953, which killed 116 people. Joplin residents are being warned there is a 45 per cent chance of another tornado occurring, most likely to hit on Tuesday.

CNN

The middle

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 12:05 PM - 59 Comments

Doug Saunders considers the decline of centrist parties in the Western world.

The big-tent parties functioned, during their glory years in the postwar decades, as the paternal overlords of protected, closed national economies, engaging in brokerage politics whereby the fruits of growth could be spread out among clients and beneficiaries on the left and right. The big political parties were like family heirlooms, their loyalties kept for life and passed on between generations – badges of personal identity, like Ford and Chevy, Coke and Pepsi, Apple and Microsoft. Membership had its benefits.

But then, in the 2000s, there was what Bruno Cautrès, a political scientist at Paris’s Institute of Political Studies who analyzed dozens of elections, calls a “generational rupture”: Suddenly, he says, voters no longer see parties as badges of loyalty or symbols of lifelong personal identity, but as consumer products, as tools that can be used to address specific concerns.

Importing trouble

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Economic doomsday types who predict a coming era of out-of-control inflation usually point to the sinking U.S. dollar as one of the chief culprits. (A falling dollar means it costs more to buy goods, and purchasing power falls.) But they may be worrying about the wrong problem. According to data from the Federal Reserve, the impact of a weak U.S. dollar on import prices has in fact been steadily declining from the 1980s into the early 2000s. This is in large part because China dominates the U.S. import market, and Beijing keeps the yuan fixed against the dollar. The peg erases the effects of currency fluctuations on imports from China, which is why core inflation didn’t rise much even as the dollar lost value. (The dollar’s weakness, in turn, has guaranteed low price tags for Chinese products across the globe, dampening inflationary effects worldwide.)

Now, though, that lid on prices appears to be coming off, and China may become the real source of inflation in the U.S. and elsewhere. From Jiangsu to Guangdong, the country’s most industrialized provinces are experiencing double-digit wage hikes. When auto workers in southern Guangdong went on strike last year demanding higher pay, local companies and foreign manufacturers got a taste of what’s to come as younger and more outspoken workers enter the labour market. Also, China’s labour force is shrinking. The results of the latest population census, conducted in 2010, show that China’s replacement rate is already below the average of the United States, the United Kingdom and France, and on par with countries such as Italy and Japan. Employers in China are already struggling to find new hires. Rising prices are also the product of Beijing’s attempts to stimulate domestic demand, and diversify the economy away from exports.

All this means that “we have moved from an era of easy deflationary environment to one of inflation,” development economist Jeffrey Sachs told the Wall Street Journal. From sneakers to barbecue sets, there soon may be no more cheap, made-in-China consumer goods to help the West keep inflation in check. Higher prices, then, could indeed be on the horizon for the U.S. (and the rest of the world). But that may be regardless of the dollar’s recent misfortunes.

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A post-Carell world

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 10:27 AM - 6 Comments

After a generally good season finale, I think the prospects for The Office without Steve Carell are brighter than they initially seemed. There’s a lot that could still go wrong without him, and we already saw a textbook example of what could go wrong: this was Will Ferrell’s character, who was awful and didn’t fit with the rest of the cast. But the finale showed that there is new – or at least not completely worn-out – stuff the show can do if it basically forgets Michael Scott existed and goes on as an ensemble comedy about a crazy workplace.

A lot of what the show can do now is simply give more time to the stuff that was in the background before. The biggest difference between the U.S. Office and the original, apart from (and also related to) the number of episodes, is that everyone in the office is a strong character, and everyone gets his or her own stories. The season finale gave much of its running time over to these second-tier characters and their stories, and it felt a bit like a comedic soap opera: a collection of short scenes devoted to ongoing personal problems, rather than one or two big stories that dominate Continue…

Where shock art is still dangerous

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Tobias Hase/dpa/Corbis

One of the defining characteristics of Western culture is our inability to be shocked by art. It has been almost 100 years since Marcel Duchamp submitted a stock urinal to an art exhibition as a work he called Fountain. Ever since, artists have struggled to replicate the effect it had of a grenade exploding in an innocent culture, but with little success. Sure, there are stray ripples of outrage, but whether it is the intimacy and sexuality of Tracey Emin’s My Bed or the theo-scatological juvenilia of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, the public generally just shrugs and goes about its business. As a result, we have become complacent about art, in particular about its capacity to challenge authority and upend the status quo. But for artists looking to transgress the boundaries, they might take a bit of inspiration, and a great deal of caution, from what is going on in China.

In early May, the Chinese performance artist Cheng Li was sentenced to a year of “labour through re-education” and sent to a prison camp for the crime of disturbing the public order. Cheng was arrested after he and a female partner had sex on a balcony in front of a crowd of patrons at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Beijing. Cheng billed the performance piece, entitled Art Whore, as an indictment of the “popular trend of commercializing art.”

In North America, public sex is about as banal as art gets. When a Northwestern University professor staged a live sex-toy demonstration for his human sexuality class last month, the school responded to calls for his dismissal by…cancelling the course next year. As for the idea of art commenting on its own commercialization, that’s one of the oldest (and most lucrative) tricks in the book. The prankumentary Exit Through the Gift Shop by the shadowy British street artist Banksy might have grossed only $5 million or so, but it served as a fantastic advertisement for Banksy’s own works, which sell at auction for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

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The meaning of Harper conservatism

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 9:58 AM - 31 Comments

Mark Shlodice argues for libertarianism as the defining motivation of Stephen Harper’s side.

Although Canadian academics and journalists have devoted some attention to this conservative network, I believe that it has been covered either superficially, or in a manner that has overemphasized its evangelical or fundamentalist Christian basis. For instance, Marci McDonald’s 2010 book, The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada, envisions a crypto-fundamentalist conspiracy at the heart of Canadian conservatism. Instead, empirical evidence suggests that the Canadian conservative organizational network is biased toward libertarianism and free-market economics. An examination of conservative funders, think-tanks, pressure groups, and media outlets shows how far this network has been developed in Canada. Interconnections within the network can be illustrated by those conservative activists who hold leadership positions in various organizations.

Darrell Bricker says Mr. Harper’s coalition is more durable than Brian Mulroney’s. Susan Delacourt says Conservatives aren’t yet winning the ethnic vote.

What happened down on the farm?

By Stephanie Findlay - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 9:35 AM - 0 Comments

The United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), a union that represents food industry workers in Canada and the U.S., filed a complaint to the B.C. Labour Relations Board against the Mexican government and a Mission, B.C.-based farm, for allegedly blocking the return of a seasonal Mexican worker to Canada for his involvement in a union. The UFCW claims it has a Mexican government report blacklisting Victor Robles Velez, who had worked the last four years at Sidhu & Sons Nursery Ltd., for his union involvement. “The Mexican consulate has gone to the farms and injected themselves in the democratic process by telling workers and threatening workers that if they unionize or vote for a union they’ll be sent back to Mexico immediately,” says Wayne Hanley, the UFCW president. The hearing for the complaint, filed last month, is expected to take place in the next couple of weeks.

The Mexican consulate in Vancouver and the owners of the farm categorically deny the charges. “Absolutely not, there is no blacklist,” says a consulate spokesperson, adding the consulate has “absolute respect for the workers’ right to join the unions.”

The B.C. complaint is the latest in a series of controversies relating to the rights of migrant agricultural workers in Canada. Last month, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld a controversial ban on collective bargaining rights for migrant agricultural workers in Ontario, a decision critics say benefits employers and leaves foreign workers vulnerable. Andy Neufeld, a communications director with the UFCW, says that, if proven, the B.C. complaints have national, even international, consequences. “We’re talking about a government’s interference with their citizens’ rights,” says Neufeld, adding, “It would be surprising if somehow we were special out here in B.C. and this was an isolated incident.”

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Closer to independence?

By Alasdair Soussi - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 4 Comments

Andrew Milligan/PA Wire/PA Photos/KEYSTONE Press

Look at the political map of Scotland today and, but for a smattering of red, blue and orange, the land screams nationalist bright yellow. The scale of the Scottish National Party’s victory in the parliamentary elections of May 5 was nothing short of historic. Having secured their first ever parliamentary election triumph in 2007 over their bitter rivals Labour by a narrow 47 seats to 46, the SNP, after a four-year term as a minority government, was handed a stunning 69 seats by the Scottish electorate. That pushed Labour, seen by many as the natural governing party of Scotland, into a distant second place with 37, and gave the nationalists a majority in the 129-seat parliament with which to pursue their much-coveted referendum on independence.

Despite being ahead in the polls for some weeks prior to the election, SNP leader and Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond was himself taken aback by the nationalists’ margin of victory—which has shaken the very foundations of the United Kingdom. “It’s unprecedented, and it’s given the SNP a whole list of opportunities and challenges,” says Gerry Hassan, a Scottish-based writer and commentator. “They’ve got the potential for an independence referendum, and they’ve got an agenda to begin dismantling the Labour apparatchik state in Scotland, which was gatekeeping, stopping things from happening, that was looking after their own.”

On the independence question, analysts like Hassan believe that in building up to a referendum—likely in 2015—the SNP must make clear what independence, currently supported by just under 40 per cent of Scots, really means in a modern context. “The SNP are not going to galvanize Scottish public opinion by talking about border controls,” explains Hassan. “They have to talk about what kind of Scotland we want that fleshes out this concept of independence, which I think will be a very different kind of independence.” This “different kind of independence” will likely be less of a tearing up of the 300-year-old union with England, and more renegotiating the terms of the union—the “united kingdoms rather than the United Kingdom,” as Mike Russell, a SNP minister, told the Times.

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This is your captain sleeping

By Alex Derry - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 0 Comments

Several recent studies reveal that many Danish pilots are falling asleep at the throttle, despite a law requiring they declare themselves unfit to fly if they are fatigued before takeoff. Denmark’s Politiken magazine interviewed 21 pilots from four airlines and found that many routinely break the law due to feeling pressured by employers to take to the skies or risk losing their jobs. “I thought that I should declare myself unfit, but flew nonetheless,” one pilot told Politiken. “During the flight, I made a lot of small mistakes, but luckily nothing happened.” In a separate survey of 61 pilots, conducted by Denmark’s Aviation Medicine Clinic, 80 per cent said they felt pressure to work despite feeling unfit, and 34 per cent had done so more than five times in five years.

And it’s not just pilots in Denmark. In a February poll by public broadcaster NRK, half of the 389 Norwegian pilots who took part admitted to falling asleep in the cockpit. Pilots often work up to 15 hours a day, with 13 hours at the controls. The EU is seeking to reduce the number of working hours to 14 a day, and 12 at night. The European Cockpit Association says there should be an even greater reduction.

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Time for your annual corporatoscopy

By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 6 Comments

Getty Images; Photo illustration by Bradley Reinhardt

New research by a leading HR firm has found that employees dread one thing above all else in the workplace: the performance review.

HR: Come in, take a seat. So you are…

Employee: Oh, I’m a little nervous, I suppose.

No, your name.

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