'A fundamental change is needed'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 1:14 PM - 10 Comments

Heather Scoffield considers the Auditor General’s findings on Aboriginal welfare.

Education, adequate housing, clean drinking water and child welfare are all in an “unacceptable” state, despite a large stack of government recommendations, initiatives and money over the years, a 10-year examination of First Nations policy concludes.

“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,” Fraser wrote. ”After 10 years in this job, it has become clear to me that if First Nations communities on reserves are going to see meaningful progress in their well-being, a fundamental change is needed.”

Unemployment hits lowest level in two years

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 12:42 PM - 0 Comments

Canada’s unemployment rate hit its lowest level in two years last month, falling to 7.4 per cent, down 0.2 points from April. The news wasn’t all good, however—since the economy added a modest 22,300 jobs, the decline in unemployment was mostly attributed to fewer people looking for work. Still, employment has grown by 273,000 jobs over the past year and job growth has averaged 32,700 a month so far this year.

The Globe and Mail

U.S. Defense Secretary warns NATO of looming irrelevance

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 12:41 PM - 8 Comments

NATO is facing “the very real possibility of collective military irrelevance,” outgoing U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned in his farewell speech to the NATO Council on Friday. Gates specifically called out those countries “who enjoy the benefits of NATO membership… but don’t want to share the risks and costs.” Only five of the 28 members of the alliance spend the agreed-upon target of two per cent of GDP on defence, Gates pointed out, and missions like those in Afghanistan and Libya have exposed a shortage of resources.

CNN

Vous êtes pas tannés de mourir, bande de caves?

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 12:31 PM - 4 Comments

Former PQ president Jonathan Valois recently had a pretty epic rant agains the four PQ MPs who left the party in a huff this week. (Maclean’s take on the whole affair is here.) Anyway, Valois is hellishly eloquent—especially, it seems, when he gets that whiff of self-righteousness in his nostrils. Noting how Marois had cleaned up the party’s finances, brought the party back into Official Opposition in 2008 and scored a 93 per cent leadership approval rating just last April, Valois went off on Curzi, Beaudoin, Lapointe and Aussant. “It’s like certain people said, ‘Thanks for the cleanup, Ms. Marois, but you aren’t the woman for the situation now.’ They’ve treated her like a cleaning lady. [...] Now, after all this unity we are breaking apart because their egos were more important than the party itself.”

It’s great listening, in large part because Valois has a point. The four who left the party did so ostensibly over Bill 204—the bill sponsored by PQ MNA Agnès Maltais that would effectively shield the City of Quebec from lawsuits over its hockey arena deal with Quebecor. But from three of the four of those who bolted—Beaudoin excepted—there was another expressed reason: Marois wasn’t doing enough for the cause of sovereignty. “I leave also because I have the sad impression that [the PQ] is moving away from sovereignty and even the power that seemed so close,” said MNA Lisette Lapointe. Jean-Martin Aussant was even more direct: “I don’t think Ms. Marois is the woman that people want to follow as we build a country,” he said, before inviting her to step down.

It’s an old PQ trick: denounce the leader for his or her lack of sovereignist sang froid. Except this time it seems particularly egregious, because since she became PQ leader Ms. Marois has done little but talk about sovereignty. Whether it was her goal to institute a series of mini-referendums to chisel away powers from Ottawa—in order to “provoke a crisis,” as Jacques Parizeau happily noted—or the (somewhat bizarre, but whatever) “ABCD de la souveraineté” cross-province speaking and activity tour in 2009, the word ‘sovereignty’ has never been far from her lips for the last three years. “We want to offer our children a free country, a sovereignist country!” she said in her opening speech in April—in which she invoked ‘sovereignty’ nine times in 15 minutes. The next night she gave a closing speech in the same vein: “We are sovereignists and as a result, we propose to Quebecers to get rid of the biggest waste of all: Ottawa bureaucracy!”

And so forth.

Marois’ critics would say she is but paying lip service to something she knows she’ll never achieve. Perhaps. But here’s the thing: the PQ is in opposition. She hasn’t even had a chance to screw up yet. What the hell else besides formulating strategy, working to defeat Charest and talking the issue to death is Marois supposed to do?

Poet Claude Péloquin had a great line that translates (badly) to “Aren’t you tired dying, you bunch of morons?”

So, I put the question to the four PQ deserters: Vous êtes pas tannés de mourir, bande de caves?

Men Men Men Men Manly Men Men Men

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 11:57 AM - 2 Comments

Many of us have been wondering why so many of the U.S. networks’ upcoming comedies (single and multi-camera alike) are obsessed with masculinity, or with the theme of a man in a world of women. Both ABC and NBC are starting new comedy blocks with shows about the changing roles of men in this unmanly world: ABC has Last Man Standing and Man Up!, while NBC is doing it a bit more subtly with a combination of Up All Night (where Will Arnett will adjust to staying home and raise the kids while Christina Applegate works an oh-so-relatable job at a PR firm) and Free Agents, whose producer describes the premise as “Manliness is under assault.”

I theorized that when a whole bunch of identical shows appear at once, the reason is that somebody somewhere has read a magazine article. The Wall Street Journal‘s Amy Chozick has a piece on all these new man-coms, and guess what – one of her sources mentions that a lot of the comedy pitches seemed to be inspired by a magazine article:

Many of the ideas for shows executives fielded sounded the same theme: Writers talk about how men are taking a more active role in child rearing, with more women serving as the primary breadwinners. One CBS executive said that about 20 producers cited, in pitches, an article titled “The End of Men” about “the unprecedented role reversal now under way” published in the Atlantic magazine last year.

There are several reasons why it’s easy to mock all these executives and producers for their obsession with this theme. One is that they’re selling it as something new, but it’s the same stereotypes TV sitcoms have been peddling nonstop since at least the ’90s: men are overgrown children; women are sensible but control-freakish; certain types of behaviour are not “manly” and met will get all tied up in knots about whether they’re acting Continue…

Sprouts caused European E. coli outbreak: investigators

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 11:37 AM - 0 Comments

Investigators have concluded that vegetable sprouts grown in Germany are responsible for the E. coli outbreak in Europe that has killed 31 people and made more than 3,000 sick. The head of Germany’s national disease control centre, Reinhard Burger, said investigators tracked the bacteria from patients in hospital beds all the way to a farm in the Lower Saxony region, where sprouts tested positive for E. coli. The investigative team determined that separate groups of sick patients were linked to 26 restaurants and cafeterias that had received produce from the farm. Health experts warned that there may still be tainted sprouts in the food system and that people could still be infected with E. coli.

CBC News

Controversial proposal exposes internal rift in CPC

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 11:35 AM - 10 Comments

Those most closely aligned with Prime Minister Stephen Harper are throwing their weight behind the controversial initiative to change the Conservative Party’s leadership selection process. According to The Hill Times, key MPs and Senators like Don Plett, John Baird and Jason Kenney will support a motion at the party’s ongoing convention that would create a one-member-one-vote method of choosing a leader. Currently, under the rules agreed upon when the Progressive Conservative Party and the Canadian Alliance combined their efforts in 2003, each riding association is given equal weight when it comes to voting for a new leader. Those opposing the initiative include former Progressive Conservative leader and current defence minister Peter MacKay. Under the current system, ridings with lower membership have the same influence as larger associations. The Hill Times reports that an internal rift is emerging around the issue, with those representing ridings in Western Canada and Ontario supporting the proposed change, and those from the Atlantic region opposing it.

The Hill Times

Read Tony's lips

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 11:32 AM - 13 Comments

On Wednesday, Tony Clement raised the option of user fees in a speech to members of the public service. Yesterday, in QP, Mr. Clement seemed to disavow the option entirely.

Indeed, Canadians gave us a strong mandate to keep taxes low, to balance the budget by 2014-15 and over the next year we are going to get the waste out of government and conduct a strategic and operating review of all programs. The purpose of this exercise is not to look at new user fees. In fact, we will find savings so we can pay down the debt and invest in the priorities of Canadians.

Week in Pictures: June 6th – June 12th 2011

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

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Week in Pictures: June 6th – June 12th 2011

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Sedin leaps over Thomas

Vancouver Canucks left wing Daniel Sedin, Sweden leaps on a shot attempt as Boston Bruins goalie Tim Thomas makes a save in the third period during Game 1 of the NHL hockey Stanley Cup Finals on June 1, 2011, in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Canucks won 1-0. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

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Hey look: Turns out a bad month for the sovereignty movement is a bad month for the sovereignty movement

By Paul Wells - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 10:55 AM - 0 Comments

From the magazine, my column fails completely to find a silver lining for Pauline Marois.

Thousands flee Jisr al-Shughour as Syrian army advances

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 10:55 AM - 0 Comments

Tanks and soldiers descended upon the Syrian town of Jisr al-Shughour on Friday, as thousands of residents fled over the nearby Turkish border. The expected army crackdown comes after 120 security forces were allegedly killed in the town. The government blames “armed gangs” for the violence while Syrian state television is reporting that civilians are greeting the troops as liberators. But Syrians who have fled into Turkey say Syrian police turned their guns and each other and that soldiers in the town took off their uniforms after refusing to fire on civilians protesting the rule of President Bashar Assad. Due to Syrian restrictions on media access, it has been impossible to independently verify these claims.

The Globe and Mail

Strategic Review: Save a half a billion dollars by not cutting things!

By Paul Wells - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 15 Comments

Now it is Human Resources and Skills Development Canada’s turn. This arrived yesterday from Phil Harwood at Minister Diane Finley’s office:

HRSDC’s strategic review did not include transfers to individuals such as Old Age Security/Guaranteed Income Supplement, Canada Pension Plan, Employment Insurance or the Universal Child Care Benefit. Nor will the review affect front-line services to Canadians.

The purpose of HRSDC’s strategic review was to identify ways in which the Department could focus on its core tasks, continue to modernize services to Canadians, and operate more efficiently.

Our Government is committed to ensuring that taxpayer dollars are used effectively, responsibly and provide concrete results. Canadians work hard for their money and they expect their government to use it wisely. At a time when Canadians are concerned about balancing their own pocketbooks, they want to know government is doing the same.

My reply:

Hi Phil. Thanks for this. It’ll be useful.

I have to ask, though: the Canadians I talk to aren’t just interested in knowing THAT the government is balancing its books, they’d like to know HOW. You’ve identified a bunch of stuff you WON’T be doing to save more than half a billion dollars over three years. What are you doing? What’s being cut? I did not think it was a difficult question.

Thanks pw

Breaking away from the Parti Québécois

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Clement Allard/CP

The Parti Québécois, Quebec’s leading sovereignist party, which has twice taken the province to the brink of leaving Canada, is no stranger to bouts of self-destruction. Save for a fellow named Jacques Parizeau, every PQ leader has either been pushed out or resigned under duress brought on by restive party members. At the best of times, leading this party of strong minds and ample egos is like herding cats. When things are bad—say, when the leader appears to be wavering on matters of sovereignty or language—it can be a bloodbath. These purges have spared no one, not even Quebec’s secular saint René Lévesque, who left the party he co-founded thoroughly demoralized in 1985.

On the face of it, then, there is little surprise that the party, which hasn’t had a decent psychodrama since then-leader André Boisclair resigned in 2007, should see four of its prominent MNAs publicly bolt from the party over a matter of principle. No surprise, that is, until you consider the principle in question isn’t one of independence or tongue, but a Quebec City hockey arena that hasn’t even been built yet.

The city, long starved of a professional hockey team, is pining for a return of the NHL. Last month, Quebec City area MNA Agnès Maltais introduced a private member’s bill that would prevent legal action over a deal with Quebecor Inc., which would see the media giant operate a hockey arena built with public funds. (The bill is necessary because the deal may contravene the province’s municipal charter, which states that municipal government cannot subsidize private companies.) PQ Leader Pauline Marois supported the bill—and made it clear that her charges must do the same before the end of the current parliamentary session.

Continue…

How Syria is redefining the concept of brutality

By Erica Alini - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 10:05 AM - 11 Comments

Hussein Malla/AP

Amjad Baiazy’s brother caught only a few frantic sentences from that cellphone call, which was to be the last thing anyone would hear from his sibling. Baiazy had been stopped at Damascus International Airport by the Syrian security forces; as he spoke, they were dragging him to some detention facility–he didn’t know which one. Over three weeks after his arrest on May 12, family and friends know nothing more of the fate of the 30-year-old who was boarding a plane from the Syrian capital, where he was visiting relatives, back to London, where he had been studying and living for the past four years. He is now officially “disappeared,” one of the thousands of Syrians who have been detained, often incommunicado, by the country’s nefariously famous Mukhabarat, the intelligence service.

Outside Syria, a host of cosmopolitan young people with a past in London is struggling to understand what just happened to their friend. “My first reaction was shock and disbelief,” says Nada Bouari, 30, a Lebanese-American, now living in Jordan, who befriended Baiazy while studying in London. “What on Earth could be the reason for somebody like Amjad to be arrested?” asks Munir Nuseibah, a 29-year-old Palestinian and a Ph.D. candidate at London’s Westminster University. Among his pals, Baiazy, a freelance consultant, is known for his passion for Arab literature, for organizing memorable poetry and movie nights at the prestigious Goodenough College, a residence for postgraduate students that is his current home address, and for his activism on gender and environmental issues, including in his native Syria. But not for his political advocacy. According to Bouari, “He is the last person who could be considered a threat for Syria.”

But to a Syrian regime that has been battling anti-government protests for over 2½ months, it doesn’t seem to matter whether one is apolitical and not even living in the country. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad knows full well that the popular movement that is demanding his exit is a mass uprising spread across the country, says Ammar Abdulhamid, a long-time Syrian activist who now lives in the U.S. Becoming a leader of this revolution takes maybe a bit of charisma and basic knowledge of how to operate a laptop or smartphone to coordinate the protests, he says—expendable skills that can quickly be replaced. And that’s why the regime has given up trying to target the heads of the movement, and opted for terrifying the entire population by jailing anyone who even remotely arouses its suspicions, says Abdulhamid. All over the country, detention facilities are overflowing, and makeshift jails are being set up in schools, playgrounds, hospitals and even animal farms, human rights group Amnesty International told Maclean’s.

Continue…

Some advice for the Weiners of this world

By Scott Feschuk - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 21 Comments

Getty Images; Panos Pictures; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

A timely word of advice to American politicians: don’t. Whatever you’re thinking of doing tonight, just don’t.

Don’t take a photograph of yourself—bare-chested and flexing the guns—and email it to a woman you just met through Craigslist.¹ Don’t make use of high-priced hookers.² Don’t make use of low-priced hookers.³ Don’t try to score in the stall of an airport men’s room because, wow, that is not very sanitary, sir.⁴

Don’t exchange 14,000 sexually explicit messages with your chief of staff.⁵ Don’t divorce your first wife while she’s in hospital recovering from surgery to remove a tumour.⁶ And don’t cheat on your second wife with your future third wife. One can support family values without having the most families.

Continue…

Is flogging less cruel than jail time?

By Brian Bethune - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 23 Comments

Popperfoto/Getty Images

Peter Moskos is an American criminologist whose experiences and research, first as a Baltimore beat cop and later as a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, have shown him just how immorally counterproductive, ruinously expensive and profoundly stupid his country’s prison system is. He’s also discovered that he can tell his fellow Americans this, and even convince many, but it doesn’t really matter: they just want criminals punished. Very well, Moskos decided, consider this, meaning the startling suggestion in the title of his elegant polemic, In Defense of Flogging. Like 18th-century satirist Jonathan Swift, whose Modest Proposal offered a tidy if savage solution to chronic hunger in Ireland—have the rich eat the starving children of the poor—Moskos aimed “to shake up people,” as he says in an interview, “alter their thinking.” With one key difference: Swift never really thought eating babies was a good idea, but by the end of In Defense of Flogging, Moskos had convinced himself of the benefits of flogging.

His argument has two pillars. The first is how awful the current punishment regime is, mostly as a result of the abject failure of the war on drugs: “These 2.3 million prisoners we have, more than one per cent of the adult population, more prisoners than soldiers, more prisoners than China, seven times the incarceration rate of Canada? Somehow we’ve convinced ourselves this is normal and rational.” (References to Canada pepper his book as well, with Moskos pointing northward to what he considers a land of rational incarceration policies. He is discouraged, to put it mildly, to hear that Canada now seems set to take some steps, at least, down the American penal road, embarking on an expensive prison expansion program and increasing mandatory minimum sentences.)

Moskos, no bleeding heart, has no quarrel at all with his countrymen’s demand that criminals be punished—he merely despises the way the U.S. currently goes about it.

Continue…

Opening Weekend: boyhood wonder in Tree of Life, Super 8 and Submarine

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 9:54 AM - 0 Comments

What a strange cosmic convergence we have in the Hollywood heavens this weekend: two wildly different period films set in small-town America that pit boyhood innocence against the mystery of the universe. From the cathedral ceiling of the art house comes Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, which conjures nostalgia for a Paradise Lost of growing up in early 60s while contemplating all of Creation with such ambition it could be dubbed 2011: A Space Odyssey. From Hollywood’s sci-fi clubhouse comes J.J. Abrams Super 8, set in the late 1970s, about a gang of young boys who have a close encounter with an alien monster in their own backyard while shooting a homemade zombie movie. Oh, then there’s Submarine, about a teenage boy grappling with the mysteries of sex in ’80s England. It’s a batty Brit Rushmore, an idiosyncratic tonic to all this American heaviosity—but (spooky coincidence!) it, too, has super 8 footage, a home movie the precocious hero imagines he would shoot of his love affair with a classmate.

Submarine is a tiny perfect gem, and utterly charming. Vastly more ambitious, The Tree of Life and Super 8 revel in different kinds of rhapsodic excess. Super 8, which plays like an explosive homage to early Spielberg (its producer), bombards us with the heavy metal thunder of old-time alien invasion. In the Tree of Life, which won the Palme d’Or in Cannes, Malick transcends his usual transcendentalism and gets positively religious, revealing himself as a kind of spiritual pornographer (but in a good way) panning for raw divinity in rays of sunlight. Addicted to magic hour, the man never met a dust mote he didn’t like. Continue…

Time to send a message to Canada's postal workers

By the editors - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 909 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

Rain or snow or sleet or hail can’t disrupt the mail. But what rhymes with seven weeks of annual paid vacation, out-of-whack pay scales or infinitely bankable sick days?

While the rotating strike by workers at Canada Post has proven to be a hardship for many Canadian businesses, it is also shining necessary light on the massive disparity between postal employees and workers in the private sector. Outside of bureaucrats in France, it is hard to imagine a more coddled, out-of-touch and overcompensated group than postal workers.

Canada Post’s efforts to bring labour costs in line with common sense, modern technology and market rates should be supported regardless of the strike’s immediate implications. A successful conclusion to this strike might even spark a broader rationalization across all Crown corporations and government operations.

Continue…

The ego behind the exits at the PQ

By Paul Wells - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 97 Comments

Clement Allard/CP

Consider the curious case of Pauline Marois: intelligent, dedicated, elegant, prone to losing. In 1985, she ran for the Parti Québécois leadership and lost to Pierre-Marc Johnson, who would not last two years in the job. In 2005, she ran again and lost to André Boisclair, who would not last two years in the job. In 2007, she ran again, unopposed this time, and did not lose. She has kept the job for nearly four years. Her leadership even survived an election loss at the end of 2008. So that’s something.

In April, she won the most resounding vote of confidence of any leader in her party’s history, over 93 per cent. By that shaky measure she’s more popular among Péquistes than René Lévesque or Lucien Bouchard ever were. Most polls suggest she’ll beat the desperately unpopular Jean Charest in the next provincial election. And yet Marois’s PQ is falling apart.

On Monday, three members of her caucus resigned to sit as Independents. On Tuesday morning a fourth joined them. Each said she’s a great lady, while admitting she leads a party they can no longer support. Marois scrambled to contain the damage, or indeed simply to comprehend it. Well she might: no wily opponent brought her this low. It was all an accident. She was side-swiped by two of the biggest egos in the history of Quebec politics.

Continue…

On flogging, chain gangs, and minimum prison sentences

By Brian Bethune - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 2 Comments

Peter Moskos, a former Baltimore beat cop who is now a criminologist at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, found himself telling his fellow Americans how immorally dysfunctional, ruinously expensive and profoundly stupid their country’s prison system is, and even convincing some of such, but finding they didn’t much care: they just want criminals punished. Hence, the suggestion in the title of Moskos’s elegant and Swiftian polemic, In Defense of Flogging. In it he asks if you, dear reader, were ever convicted of a non-violent felony and were offered the chance of accepting—instead of a jail term—two flesh-lacerating, Singapore-style strokes of the cane for each year of your sentence, wouldn’t you take the flogging option? And if you would, how can you deny it to others? Moskos spoke with Maclean’s Senior Writer Brian Bethune.

Q: Your book is very Modest Proposal-ish; what was your aim in writing it? Continue…

Canada's best prime ministers

By Norman Hillmer and Stephen Azzi - Friday, June 10, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 62 Comments

CP; Chuck Mitchell/CP

Stephen Harper has his majority government. The Liberal party is in tatters, and the Bloc Québécois is devastated. The NDP, inexperienced in the limelight and leaning to the left, is a reliable target. No one now doubts the Prime Minister’s capacity for raw politics, or his staying power.

Harper is one of a select few Canadian leaders to have won three consecutive federal elections. When his current term ends, he will have been in office longer than many past titans, including Brian Mulroney, John Diefenbaker, and Lester Pearson.

All that remains, and it is a great deal, is to discover what Harper will make of his new lease on parliamentary life, and what history will make of him. To set a benchmark, we’ve undertaken Maclean’s second rankings survey on Canadian prime ministers, to determine the greats, near greats, and also-rans, as well as the ingredients of success and the reasons for failure.

Continue…

The Commons: Tony Clement's bike racks, streetlights and boulevards

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 6:41 PM - 126 Comments

The Scene. By Thomas Mulcair’s reckoning this was a scandal—”Sponsorship scandal 2.0,” he dubbed it, perhaps hopefully.

The Prime Minister moved quickly to correct the NDP deputy. The Auditor General, Mr. Harper explained, had merely “suggested several recommendations to improve the process in the future.”

Mr. Mulcair was unpersuaded. “No accountability, no transparency, no justification of decisions,” he cried, reviewing the charges.

The Prime Minister stuck to his story. “As I said before,” he recounted, “the Auditor General suggested several recommendations to improve the approval process in the future and we will accept its recommendations.”

Mr. Mulcair fumed for a third time—Parliament kept in the dark, funds redirected, a restored steamboat, etc—but Mr. Harper only barely budged. “The Auditor General has suggested changes in the estimates process to improve transparency,” the Prime Minister allowed.

For sure, that is one way of putting it. Less charitably, one might say that Tony Clement stands accused of not only using public funds to spread trinkets around his riding, but of drawing those funds from an account approved by Parliament for the purposes of “border infrastructure” and of constructing a selection process that involved only Mr. Clement and several small town mayors and that left no paper trail. Continue…

Sudbury mine claims two workers

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 3:28 PM - 0 Comments

Two miners were killed in Sudbury on Wednesday night at a Vale SA mine specializing in nickel, copper, and precious metals. Cory McPhee, vice-president of corporate affairs at Vale—the world’s second largest mining and metal company—believes the workers were killed by loose rock material. The company’s general manager in Ontario, Jon Treen, says the incident is a devastating loss and all efforts are being made to support grieving family members and employees. Vale SA is Sudbury’s largest employer, with 4,000 workers in the city. The mine will remain closed until Friday at the earliest.

The National Post

Sportsnet to launch sports magazine

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 3:13 PM - 0 Comments

Rogers Media has announced on Wednesday that it will launch Canada’s first national bi-weekly sports magazine, which will leverage Rogers Sportsnet. Sportsnet magazine, which will build upon Sportsnet’s existing TV and radio platforms, will feature content produced by leading Canadian sports writers and commentators. “There’s a unique audience experience that only magazines can provide and when you combine that experience with the unmatched reach and power of Sportsnet’s broadcast and digital platforms, you get a winner for both the fans and the advertisers.” said Ken Whyte, Executive Vice-President of Consumer Publishing at Rogers Publishing Limited. Launching in the fall of 2011 with a circulation of 100,000 copies, Sportsnet magazine will be published 26 times a year.

Sportsnet