Canadians bored with Facebook?

By macleans.ca - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 12:34 PM - 5 Comments

The number of Canadian users of Facebook plummeted in May, with around 10 per cent of Canadians saying sayonara to the social networking site. According to Inside Facebook, a site that tracks such data, 16.6 million Canadians used the site at the end of the month, down 1.52 million from the beginning of May. We weren’t alone. The United States, Britain, Norway and Russia all posted declines. And those statistics helped drag down the overall number of users joining Facebook. Whereas last year around 20 million people hopped on board each month, now that number has been cut almost in half. The slow down couldn’t come at a worse time. Wall Street is abuzz with speculation that Facebook will launch its much-anticipated IPO next year.

The Guardian

Is our politicians learning?

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 11:52 AM - 77 Comments

From the print edition—part of a series of stories on innovation—an attempt to tie together various threads on the matter of political leadership.

“Can you imagine a doctor saying, ‘Well, I never thought of becoming a doctor before’?” asks Alison Loat, co-founder of Samara, a charitable organization dedicated to the study of Canadian democracy. Indeed, one would probably not entrust their health to a brain surgeon who claimed to have come to the profession quite by accident, made it through a confusing and mysterious nomination process, and shown up for the first day of work feeling mostly unprepared for the surgeries they were expected to perform. And yet, we expect little more of our parliamentarians.

For sure, politics is a pursuit neither easily explained, nor particularly well-regarded. The job of elected office itself is subject to wide interpretation and powerful competing pressures. But if the political process is to be improved upon, it may require dealing with these issues of confusion and ill repute, up to and including how we might build a better politician.

NPH Sings Stuff

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 11:49 AM - 0 Comments

Here’s Neil Patrick Harris’s opening number from last night’s Tony Awards. I particularly like the bit where he starts listing all the groups that are known to be theatre fans, exploding the stereotype in the middle of the song.

And here’s his now-obligatory closing wrap-up number, this time written by In the Heights creator Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Prostitution laws go back before the courts

By macleans.ca - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 11:44 AM - 6 Comments

The federal and Ontario governments’ appeal of an Ontario Superior Court decision last fall which struck down several key prostitution laws, began on Monday. Last year, Ontario Justice Susan Himel overturned three anti-prostitution laws that were ruled to endanger sex workers—keeping a common bawdy house, communicating for the purposes of prostitution, and living on the avails of the trade. Alan Young, a York University law professor who represent sex trade workers, argues that making communication for the purposes of prostitution illegal prevents sex workers from being able to “screen” their potential clients or take necessary safety precautions. Terri-Jean Bedford, an outspoken advocate for the legalization of prostitution and a practicing dominatrix, and two other sex workers, Valerie Scott and Amy Lebovitch, are the three litigants who have maintained that the existing laws expose them to violence on the streets. The Crown is appealing Judge Himel’s ruling on the basis that prostitution is a degrading criminal pursuit that should not be encouraged under relaxed laws, which themselves do little to protect sex workers from violence. Young says he expects that regardless of the outcome of the appeal, the case will most likely be argued at the Supreme Court of Canada.

CBC News

Throne For a Loop

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 2 Comments

Spoiler for last night’s Game of Thrones (which sometimes seems like – and this is a compliment – HBO’s answer to Downton Abbey, with even fewer contractions but more beheadings) after the jump:

Continue…

Canada’s foreign policy, in black and white and orange

By Andrew Potter - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 11:17 AM - 0 Comments

Further proof of the Americanization of our politics: the journalistic elevation of the drunkard’s walk known as Stephen Harper’s foreign policy to the level of a “doctrine.” Continue…

Canada's foreign policy, in black and white and orange

By Andrew Potter - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 11:17 AM - 46 Comments

Further proof of the Americanization of our politics: the journalistic elevation of the drunkard’s walk known as Stephen Harper’s foreign policy to the level of a “doctrine.” Continue…

Senate reform goes centre stage

By Colby Cosh - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 10:35 AM - 12 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

Last week’s Throne Speech was expected to be bereft of surprises. As it happened, a cranky Senate page with a handmade sign ensured that the event wasn’t a complete bore. But there was another, subtler eyebrow-raiser in the works. Despite prior reports of Conservative caucus dissension over Senate reform, Governor General David Johnston’s scripted words expressed the Prime Minister’s determination to act fast on it. Reform “remains a priority for our government,” Johnston reported, promising to reintroduce legislation—thwarted by weighty Oppositions in the past—“to limit term lengths and to encourage provinces and territories to hold elections for Senate nominees.”

The Conservative plan to tweak the Senate without opening up a politically unthinkable Constitution-amending process seems about to take its long-awaited first step. And that implies a reignition of the debate over whether a prime minister can actually get away with such a thing. Quebec’s government is already threatening to haul the feds before the Supreme Court to block term-limit and Senate-election legislation. “If they try that, the Court is literally going to laugh at them,” says a confident Sen. Bert Brown, the Conservative reform advocate elected as an Alberta “senator-in-waiting” in 2004 and appointed to the upper house in 2007.

Constitutional scholars are unsure whether Brown is right. The government’s theory is that there is no “manifest conflict”—to use the phrase of Simon Fraser University political scientist Andrew Heard—between Senate elections and the text of the Constitution. The Constitution merely says that the governor general will “summon qualified persons to the Senate”; it does not say Parliament cannot invent new methods of making candidates available for his consideration.

Continue…

Let's show a little fiscal restraint here

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 59 Comments

Dave Chan/Reuters

The first signs of what was to come appeared in the Globe the previous week. “Public sector layoffs may be the tip of the iceberg,” teased the headline, leaving the story to convey the grim news: “The federal government’s bid to curb spending amid a multi-billion-dollar fiscal shortfall has delivered some of its first job casualties of the year.” Brace yourself, it gets worse. “Five curators at the country’s pre-eminent art gallery have been given layoff notices, while about 50 Environment Canada term employees, including scientists and scientific support staff, have been told they’ll no longer have jobs by the end of the month.”

OH MY GOD, they’ve—wait, what? Five curators? Fifty Environment Canada employees? Nobody likes to see anybody lose their job, but how exactly is this evidence of a bid to curb anything? Some perspective: the federal public service, not counting uniformed military or police, employs more than 280,000 people. That’s an increase of about 33,000 since the Tories took power in 2006. Those unfortunate gallery curators and weather forecasters make up about one-sixth of one per cent of the extra employees the government has taken on over the last five years. If this is the “tip of the iceberg,” and if, as every schoolboy knows, four-fifths of an iceberg is below the surface, then we can look forward to reductions in the public service roughly equivalent to about two weeks’ worth of new hires.

Nevertheless, when at last it was “revealed” that the federal government would, as it said it would in its first attempt back in March, and as it repeated it would every day of the election campaign, cut $4 billion out of federal spending by fiscal 2015, well, you could knock us over with a feather. “Budget on the table, public service on the chopping block,” the Globe told readers the next day, while the Star screamed: “Cuts loom as Harper vows to slay deficit.” It would be, the Globe story said, “the most aggressive period of government restraint since the mid-1990s.” Which is fair enough, since it would be the only period of government restraint in that time: since 2000, spending has more than doubled.

Continue…

On memories of Iggy and a Tory fashion showdown

By Mitchel Raphael - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

They’re back: Jack Layton with bartender Julie McCarthy

Rae encourages May

On the first day back, Green Leader Elizabeth May found herself in the last seat of the House. Seat 308 is where NDP MP Peter Stoffer used to sit. Liberal Leader Bob Rae turned around to May and told her that when he was first an MP decades ago it was his seat and that “in 32 years you can be where I am.” Last week also saw MPs busy moving offices. NDP deputy leader Libby Davies is getting a bigger office and is taking her desk with her. It once belonged to former prime minister Joe Clark and has a secret drawer. “I’ll drag it down the corridor myself if I have to,” said the Vancouver MP. Some parliamentarians were still being sworn in the day before the House resumed. One of them was Bloc MP Maria Mourani, who saw her party reduced to four seats. She jokes that at least she can say that 25 per cent of her party is female and a visible minority. (Mourani is Lebanese.) She feels the Bloc is now like cartoon characters Astérix and Obélix, two Gauls in a small village battling the Roman Empire. The day of his swearing in, the daughter of NDP MP Malcolm Allen went into labour. That meant his wife and family stayed with daughter Gillian Sheldrick and all Allen had for a supportive audience was a lone staffer. Keegan Sheldrick is Allen’s first grandchild.

NDP needs a bigger bar

Continue…

'Not serving Canadians well'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 10:15 AM - 20 Comments

Former Liberal MP Michelle Simson apparently has some concerns she will be airing in a book form.

“It was a bit of shock to me, to see exactly the lines that are drawn along partisan lines,” she said.“A lot of times I was extremely uncomfortable, because I don’t believe that . . . just because I say I’m a Liberal, I agree with (the party about) absolutely everything, or that my constituents do. There should be a little bit more freedom (and) a lot more free votes.”

… Simson is also concerned that MPs are ignoring their responsibility and not giving bills proper study — especially relating to costs associated with particular pieces of legislation. “It was like, ‘Doesn’t matter! Doesn’t matter! Doesn’t matter. You’re either for it or against it.” “People are just not being heard or taken seriously,” she said.

Review: Kit Carson: The Life of an American Border Man

By Peter Shawn Taylor - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 10:05 AM - 0 Comments

American frontiersman Kit Carson remains a controversial figure. There is, however, one thing historians agree on: it was a bad idea to steal his horse.

During the early years of the American West, nothing was more precious than a good horse, and horse thievery was no trifling matter. Working as a guide in Colorado in 1833, Carson once tracked an Indian who had stolen six horses for 130 miles. “I was under the necessity of killing him,” is how Carson himself explained what happened once he caught up to the miscreant. Carson’s cold-blooded efficiency in administering frontier justice—as well as his participation in various U.S. government actions against native tribes, such as the subjugation of the Navajo in 1864—has brought stern condemnation from many modern historians. The mountain man was a “natural born killer…with a hit man’s sense of aesthetics,” is how one recent biographer put it. Such a grim characterization is a massive change from early perspectives on Carson. In his own lifetime, he was celebrated as the first true hero of the American West in dime novels and equally fictitious press accounts. “Some of those newspaper fellows know a damn sight more about my affairs than I do,” Carson once remarked.

Remly looks to balance the polarity of views. While acknowledging the truth in many of the grisly charges, he argues that Carson must properly be seen as a “border man” living in an unstable region between American and native civilizations. Violence was a matter of survival. Remley convincingly demonstrates Carson was no outlaw. He showed great loyalty to his friends, both native and white, and married an Arapaho woman. And as an Indian agent for the government, he took his duty very seriously, demonstrating a refined sense of morality and fairness. Carson may have killed horse thieves, but he was much more than a killer.

Continue…

Death comes to a funeral

By Erica Alini - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 10:05 AM - 0 Comments

The Iranian regime’s characteristically awkward brutality recently handed the country’s opposition Green Movement its second female icon since protests began two years ago over allegedly rigged elections. The first one, in 2009, was Neda Agha Soltan, a 26-year-old whose death at the hands of Iran’s security forces was caught on camera, and broadcast on YouTube. Two years later it’s Haleh Sahabi, 54, a civil liberties activist and the daughter of late Iranian dissident Ezzatollah Sahabi.

She was serving a two-year prison term for participating in the 2009 protests, but was temporarily released to attend her father’s funeral on June 1. However, the regime is wary of funerals tied to dissidents and their families, fearing they might turn into anti-government gatherings after it banned the opposition from holding official rallies. And according to eyewitness accounts that the government disputes, when Haleh Sahabi set out to attend the mourning ceremony, she was attacked by plainclothes security agents who tried to stop the procession. In the scuffle, Sahabi suffered a fatal cardiac arrest. Her death has triggered an outpouring of sympathy and outrage from Iranians at home and abroad. She has already been dubbed Iran’s Antigone, after the Greek heroine who was killed for burying her brother.

How to fix our politics

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 5 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

“Can you imagine a doctor saying, ‘Well, I never thought of becoming a doctor before’?” asks Alison Loat, co-founder of Samara, a charitable organization dedicated to the study of Canadian democracy. Indeed, one would probably not entrust their health to a brain surgeon who claimed to have come to the profession quite by accident, made it through a confusing and mysterious nomination process, and shown up for the first day of work feeling mostly unprepared for the surgeries they were expected to perform. And yet, we expect little more of our parliamentarians.

For sure, politics is a pursuit neither easily explained, nor particularly well-regarded. The job of elected office itself is subject to wide interpretation and powerful competing pressures. But if the political process is to be improved upon, it may require dealing with these issues of confusion and ill repute, up to and including how we might build a better politician.

Two years ago, Loat and her team set out to conduct exit interviews with recently defeated or retired members of Parliament. In a series of reports based on those conversations, Samara has raised a number of questions about the political experience: from the nomination process to the power of political parties and the competing views on what exactly the job of an MP is supposed to be. First and foremost among these concerns is how many former MPs claimed to have come to elected politics quite inadvertently. To Loat, this goes to the very nature of how we talk about politics as something one might—or, rather, should not—aspire to. “We don’t encourage people to consider public life as a way to spend their time or something to consider in their careers,” she says.

Continue…

Review: Machiavelli: A Biography

By Brian Bethune - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 0 Comments

The man whose 1513 work The Prince stands as the foundational document of Western political science has ever since been excoriated for his worship of raw power or praised for his grasp of realpolitik. Mostly the former, of course: as an adjective, “Machiavellian” is always a pejorative. That’s a reputation Unger sets out to demolish in his lively recap of the Florentine thinker and his tumultuous times. He only partially succeeds—Niccolò Machiavelli did possess the intellectual’s fatal attraction to men of action—but the attempt still offers an intriguing portrait of a man marked more by his fervent love for his artistically dazzling city-state than by his political cynicism.

Born in 1469, Machiavelli learned by doing. As a senior civil servant for the Florentine republic between 1498 and 1512, he went on high-level diplomatic missions, oversaw the city’s militia, and watched with fascination the rise and fall of empire-building Cesare Borgia. When, as an envoy from the republic, Machiavelli met the great man in 1502, his admiration for Borgia came through in his dispatches home. “This Lord is of such splendid and magnificent bearing…he never rests, nor does he know weariness or fear.”

Borgia conquered and ruled cruelly, but effectively. In an era of constant war and failed states, the Borgia territories were spared the random killings, rapes and pillage that racked so many other Italian regions. The republic of Florence, on the other hand, often seemed to its exasperated servant to specialize in half-measures, harsh and, worse, unpredictable enough to enrage subjects and allies, but not harsh enough to keep them in line. Machiavelli soon developed a preference for order over anarchy, however it was achieved. In the end his patriotism outweighed his republican sympathies. Feeling forced to choose between Florence’s twin freedoms—the rudimentary rights a republic offered its citizens, and the city’s own liberty from foreign control—Machiavelli opted for Florence above the Florentines.

Continue…

The other war we're in

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 13, 2011 at 9:09 AM - 27 Comments

Ahead of Tuesday’s debate, Campbell Clark reviews the state of the mission in Libya.

This was not the mission Canadian MPs agreed to join when they unanimously voted to back a deployment this spring. Then, the goal was to erect a no-fly zone, shielding Libyan civilians from attacks by Moammar Gadhafi’s air force. Canada would provide a frigate, six fighters, and surveillance and refuelling planes. But in three months, the NATO effort has escalated into a fierce bombing campaign that have left Tripoli buildings in rubble and centred on ousting the country’s long-time ruler…

While the NATO assault has elicited criticism in other countries, politicians in Canada have yet to grapple in public debate with the fundamental questions about the mission’s shifting goals, and the options for achieving them: Should we be in a war of bombing Libya into regime change? And how will it end if NATO’s air war doesn’t drive Col. Gadhafi from power?

The Prime Minister first announced the mission on March 18. The House debated the mission a few days later and the motion that was unanimously adopted afterwards read as follows. Continue…

The Commons: Humble brag

By Erica Alini - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 11:14 PM - 18 Comments

Across the street and behind a metal barricade, a young man in a bike helmet, holding a pink sign that read “contempt,” was yelling at Conservative delegates as they filed into the giant glass orb that is the Ottawa convention centre. He yelled about the G8 and the $50 million. He yelled about Bev Oda. He yelled about the defeated candidates now in the Senate. He yelled the word “mockery” more than a few times. Most of the delegates ignored him. Some smiled and laughed and waved.

The man in the bike helmet was eventually joined by about 300 others waving various signs for various reasons. “Beat Back The Tory Attack On Reproductive Justice,” read one. “Whither Joe Clark,” read another. The noisy gathering eventually settled on a simple enough chant: “Hey Har-per! You! Suck!” Later there was something about no one being illegal or some such sentiment. Somewhere in the middle of it all was apparently the rogue Senate page.

Inside the orb, the proceedings were running rather late. Eventually, about a half hour behind schedule, Veterans Affairs Minister Steven Blaney and Senator Pamela Wallin turned up to play host. After throwing to “floor reporters” Mike Duffy and Jacques Demers from interviews with various members of the crowd, Mr. Blaney and Ms. Wallin got around to expounding on how fondly they regarded Stephen Harper. Continue…

Attack of the Bimbots

By Jesse Brown - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 5:15 PM - 10 Comments

Have you ever been suckered into sharing personal information with an attractive stranger who turns out to be not quite….human? If so, you’re not alone.

Over at BlogAds, Henry Copeland has done some online sleuthing into the identity of one Nicole Bally, a friendly Facebook fox who probably does not exist. Nicole, it seems, is a “bimbot,” a fake account assembled with generic photographs and automated status updates, let loose on social networks to lure unsuspecting dupes into handing over access to their valuable social graphs.

Bimbots are common on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere, and I’ve always been confident in my ability to distinguish them from my many fleshy human admirers. But perhaps I shouldn’t be so cocky. After all, Nicole Bally’s list of conquests includes some of the savviest people on the Internet. She’s successfully friended Sean Parker of Napster and Facebook, Chris Anderson of Wired, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia, and Arianna Huffington of Arianna Huffington. She’s even friended Vint Cerf himself—the father of the Internet!

The more impressive Nicole’s friend list gets, the more convincing she becomes to new suckers.  The first thing I look at when considering a friend request from a stranger is whether or not we have friends in common. The second thing I look at is whether their friends are people I’d like to have in common.

Heck, at a certain point, who cares if she’s human? Any robot with friends like that is a friend of mine.

Funding without borders?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 4:28 PM - 8 Comments

The interim auditor general is asked about the Prime Minister’s comment yesterday that the Border Infrastructure Fund is “frequently used for projects that are not in border communities.”

“If monies earmarked for border infrastructure are being used for other purposes in addition to the G8 legacy fund I would have the same concern that I had with respect to using that fund for the G8 as well. If that’s happening, I don’t think it should be,” he told CBC News.

To explain Mr. Harper’s remark, the Prime Minister’s Office points to the funding, in 2003, of road improvements in Vancouver. Those improvements were linked to easing congestion around two border crossings. And that project is just one of 12 noted on the fund’s webpage. Here is a handy map of where those projects are located.

And here are the “funding and investment criteria” set out by Infrastructure Canada for the Border Infrastructure Fund. Continue…

Alabama adopts tough new immigration law

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 4:15 PM - 24 Comments

Alabama passed the toughest immigration legislation in the U.S. on Thursday, after Republican Governor Robert Bentley signed into law a bill that will require public schools, police departments and small businesses to crack down on illegal immigrants. “We have a real problem with illegal immigration in this country,” said Gov. Bentley. “I campaigned for the toughest immigration laws and I’m proud of the Legislature for working tirelessly to create the strongest immigration bill in the country.” The new law requires public schools to determine students’ citizenship and police to detain people they suspect of being illegal. It will also be a crime for citizens to “knowingly transport or harbor” an illegal immigrant, while businesses are required to use a new database to verify the citizenship of their employees. Immigration rights groups have called the new legislation draconian and will challenge it in court. “This law is an outrageous throw-back to the pre-Civil Rights era,” said Cecillia Wang, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.

Reuters

AG report slams governments handling of First Nations

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 3:44 PM - 12 Comments

Former auditor general Sheila Fraser blasted the federal government’s handling of First Nations communities in a new report. Tabled by interim AG John Wiersema on Friday, the report reveals the basic quality of life for First Nations communities is deteriorating—education, child welfare, drinking water and housing are deemed “dramatically substandard,” the CBC reports, and reveal an significant disparity. “I am profoundly disappointed to note…that despite federal action in response to our recommendations over the years, a disproportionate number of First Nations people still lack the most basic services that other Canadians take for granted,” said Fraser. The auditor general’s office examined 16 audits over the last 10 years to see if any improvements had been made or previous commitments met, and found that little had been done to implement changes. Fraser identified a lack of legislation defining what services the government is responsible for as the chief culprit. As a result, First Nations communities are uncertain about receiving federal funding and lack the proper administrative bodies for educational and health.

CBC News

Rights and democracy

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 3:33 PM - 41 Comments

Speaking at this weekend’s Conservative convention, Jason Kenney explains the Conservative ethos.

“We don’t depend on the bloated bureaucracies of the nanny state; we thrive on our freedom and are upheld by the law,” he said. “We don’t assume that history began in the Summer of Love; we honour a tradition reaching back to the Magna Carta … Our adversaries were focused on the obsessions of the chattering classes – like Taliban prisoners – rather than the practical bread-and-butter concerns of hard-working families.”

Though neither are as old as the Magna Carta (established in 1215), both the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (adopted in 1948) and the Geneva Conventions (agreed to in 1949) predate the Summer of Love (1967).

Article 39 of the Magna Carta is translated as follows. Continue…

Trojan horses

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 2:28 PM - 0 Comments

On the occasion of her first question in the House, Elizabeth May took the opportunity to press the government on the practice of omnibus legislation.

Mr. Speaker, my question is for the Prime Minister and has to do with the 2011 budget implementation bill. The budgets of 2009 and 2010 in the Budget Implementation Acts, as we all know, became omnibus bills in which unrelated measures were included. I would be very grateful if the Prime Minister could stand today and assure this House that there will be no hidden Trojan Horse efforts to undermine other legislation when we see the budget implementation bill next week.

Jim Flaherty took this opportunity to make a joke about Gary Lunn’s height.

This pot's for melting: Geert Wilders, Muslims, and Assimilation

By Andrew Potter - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 1:55 PM - 231 Comments

Some of you might have caught wind of self-described Islam-hater Geert Wilders’ little jaunt through Ontario last month, during which the controversial Dutchman performed his usual routine, viz., warning of increasing Islamicisation of Europe thanks to the failure of European multiculturalism to assimilate immigrants from muslim countries.  He also warned Canadians that our own multicultural model was similarly doomed to fail:

Wilders, noting that Canadians recently elected a majority Conservative government, said that if Canadians want to conserve their way of life, they need to pressure the Tories to adopt certain policies: curbing immigration from Islamic countries, expelling immigrants who turn to crime, stopping the construction of mosques and closing Islamic schools, where, he said, hatred against western values is promulgated.

That is from a disappointingly credulous report from my old colleague at the Ottawa Citizen, Robert Sibley.  However accurate Wilders’ views may be of Holland, and perhaps of Europe in general, when it comes to Canada (and the United States as well), they appear to be considerably at odds with the facts. Continue…