Citigroup latest firm to suffer hacking breach

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 2:07 PM - 3 Comments

Hackers exposed the names and account numbers of 210, 000 Citibank account holders last month, the BBC reports. The bank is facing severe criticism for its failure to inform customers about the breach sooner. A Citi spokesman told Reuters news agency that the company is contacting customers whose accounts were leaked, while working hard to prevent another breach from occurring. Citi officials encouraged customers to be on “high alert” for future scams. The identity of the hackers and how they managed to infiltrate Citibank’s system remains unknown.  

BBC News

Postal Workers to deliver only three days a week

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 1:46 PM - 25 Comments

Beginning on June 13, Canada Post will deliver mail in urban areas only 3 days a week (Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays) as negotiations between the Crown corporation and union members remain deadlocked. Only urban dwellers, whose letters are delivered by carriers on foot, will be affected by the cutback, as rural Canadians usually drive their own cars to collect mail. According to Canada Post spokesman Jon Hamilton, mail volumes have decreased by half since the rotating strikes began last week, and customer confidence is dwindling as well. The corporation has made further concessions, offering the union a $7 maximum wage increase, more vacation time, and a defined benefit pension by age 60. The union—still displeased with the company’s allegedly dangerous modernization project—will continue its strike until further notice. 13 small communities in nine provinces were the latest to be affected by walkouts since the strike began last Thursday.

CBC News

Top 50 socially responsible corporations

By Jantzi-Sustainalytics - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 1:45 PM - 25 Comments

Ashton Worthington/HP

3M

• The company’s “cool roofing granules” are four times more reflective than conventional granules, helping to decrease overall heat retention and cooling costs.
• Since 1990, it has cut its worldwide greenhouse gas emissions by 77 per cent and has reduced total volatile organic air emissions by 96 per cent.
• Earlier this year, and for the seventh time, 3M was named a winner of the Energy Star Sustained Excellence Award for its global energy conservation efforts.

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'A troubling and serious matter'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 1:45 PM - 39 Comments

The interim auditor general comments on the G8 Legacy Fund.

Speaking in a news conference later, he said it was “a troubling and serious matter.” Public servants weren’t involved in the process, which he said was “very unusual.” ”There is no paper trail behind the selection of the 32 projects,” Wiersema said. “I personally in my career in auditing have not encountered a situation like that where there is absolutely no paper trail behind this. It is an unusual situation. I find it quite troubling.”

The report also criticized the way the G8 Legacy Infrastructure Fund was established, noting the government sought parliament’s approval for the spending under a separate fund for investments in infrastructure to reduce border congestion. ”In our view, by presenting the request for funding in the Supplementary Estimates in this way, the government was not being transparent about its purpose,” it said.

Canada the good?

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 1:40 PM - 4 Comments

Steve White/CP

For the third year in a row, Maclean’s has partnered with Jantzi-Sustainalytics, a global leader in sustainability analysis, to present the Top 50 Socially Responsible Corporations. The companies’ efforts vary—Merck has donated 1.3 million doses of its rotavirus vaccine to babies in Nicaragua, for instance, and Sony Corp. has diverted 205,000 kg of old electronics from landfills since 2008. But they all provide lessons (starting on page 46) on how to be better corporate citizens—lessons that, based on how Canadian companies generally compare to others on this measure, are worth taking note of.

Canadian oil sands companies were caught blinking in the international spotlight when world leaders met at the 2009 climate change summit in Copenhagen. In the run-up to the meetings, foreign activists and newspaper columnists dubbed the industry “dirty” and hell-bent on transforming a large swath of northern Alberta’s boreal forest into a barren moonscape. Ottawa, meanwhile, was accused of being one of the biggest stumbling blocks to global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Getting branded as the world’s environmental villain was an unfamiliar and uncomfortable experience for Canadians, many of whom were eager to dismiss foreign criticisms as the rantings of a handful of fringe groups. But anti-oil-sands sentiment has only grown louder in Europe over the past few years and, increasingly, it’s being echoed in some quarters of the United States, the biggest importer of our oil sands crude. Granted, resource extraction has never been a warm and fuzzy business, but many Canadians have been left wondering whether the industry could do a better job insulating itself from such criticism.

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When Senate pages attack

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 1:08 PM - 130 Comments

From his scrum after QP yesterday, Bob Rae suggests we not overreact—ANTHRAX!—to Brigette DePape’s breach of decorum.

No, I mean I think – let’s not get paranoid about this. Let’s recognize that you know, we are a country where people are free to speak. There was no security threat represented by Brigette Depape. She just expressed her point of view. You can say it was inappropriate to do it in a particular way, but the notion that somehow this is – poses some kind of a security risk is – is a gross exaggeration and I don’t think we need to go there at all. I think we need to make sure that people are protected, but I don’t think we want to prevent people from being able to express themselves.

We’ve come undone

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 1:05 PM - 0 Comments

Richard Wahlstrom/Getty Images; iStock; Photo illustration by Stephen Gregory

As a councillor for Montreal’s Mile End, a district both celebrated and derided for its post-bohemian plethora of ragged duplexes, coffee shops and handsomely disaffected residents, Alex Norris has fought some righteous battles. Yet few of Norris’s fiercely progressive measures garnered as much attention as showing up for work without a tie.

It turns out that Montreal, as louche and freewheeling as it may be, is the only major Canadian city to enforce a dress code, and last spring then-council president Claude Dauphin threatened to expel Norris when he turned up without the required strip of fabric knotted around his neck. Norris borrowed a tie, but didn’t back down: the 49-year-old father of two again showed up tie-less for the following council meeting.

It didn’t go over well. “You’re a juvenile delinquent,” roared Coun. Marvin Rotrand. “This is an affront to the institution, the president and council,” bellowed his colleague Lionel Perez. “Your provocative behaviour caused council members to lose 20 precious minutes,” Dauphin wrote in a subsequent formal letter reprimanding Norris’s conduct.

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Newsmakers: June 2-9, 2011

By Nicholas Kohler and Cathy Gulli - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Ken McKay/TalkbackThames/Rex Features/CP

Happy birthday, Mr. President

Turning 80 usually warrants a birthday party. But Cuban President Raúl Castro was hardly celebrated at all. It seems his advanced age is an uncomfortable reminder to many Cubans that their country’s leaders are old—and old-guard. With no young successors in place (the next in line for the job are 79 and 80), Cubans worry that economic reforms now under way will be jeopardized if either Castro or his brother Fidel, 84, take ill. Still, Castro was positively spry on his birthday, asking female reporters: “How do I look, ladies, how do I look at 80? How many old men of 60 are there who aren’t in my shape?”

Mother Fox

Three decades after losing her son Terry to cancer, Betty Fox is fighting to stay alive. The Fox family, in the spotlight ever since Terry’s Marathon of Hope across Canada in 1980, released a statement that the matriarch is “seriously ill,” but stressed she does not have cancer. Though details are scarce, she reportedly spent time at a hospice in Chilliwack, B.C. Her last major public appearance was carrying the Olympic flag during the opening ceremonies in Vancouver last year.

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Donald Rayworth Crandall

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 12:55 PM - 0 Comments

Illustration by Juliana Neufeld

Donald Rayworth Crandall was born on Oct. 19, 1926, in Moncton, N.B., to Milton and Mary Crandall, the youngest of three boys. The family loved to sail, and Milton, an automobile parts dealer, built several sailboats. When Donald was 14, a three-masted schooner came into Moncton with a load of lumber. “The captain had engine troubles and approached dad for help,” says Bud Crandall, Donald’s brother. “They became fast friends,” and Donald befriended the man’s young son. At the end of his stay, the captain suggested that Donald sail back to Turks and Caicos with them—and his parents agreed. The three months Donald worked as a deckhand in the Caribbean turned out to be one of his most memorable adventures.

Donald served in the navy during the Second World War, and then attended Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B. In 1949, he took a job with Air Canada, working in market research and training. The position suited his outgoing personality and love of travel, since it sent him across Canada and to the Caribbean. In 1950, he married Frances, a kindred spirit: like Donald, she’d grown up in Moncton, served in the navy, and attended Mount Allison. After their children Louise and Hugh were born, the family settled in Montreal. Donald and Frances were “absolutely devoted” to each other, says daughter Louise.

When Frances was in her fifties, she started developing symptoms of Alzheimer’s. At 57, Donald retired from his job at Air Canada, “largely to look after her,” says Louise. They sold the house in Montreal and moved back to Moncton, but the couple didn’t like to talk about Frances’s health; Donald carried the burden of her care largely by himself. “He never complained that it was hard, and never asked for help,” Louise says.

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Good news, bad news: June 2-9, 2011

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 12:40 PM - 1 Comment

Good News

Wrongfully convicted in her son's death, Tammy Marquardt is freed. (Lucas Leniuk/Toronto Star)

Boots on the ground

Canada’s combat tour in Afghanistan is entering its final few weeks, but the military is already preparing for its next deployment—wherever it may be. Months after being forced out of their secret staging base in Dubai because of a diplomatic spat, the Canadian Forces have reportedly reached deals to open new bases in Germany and Jamaica, and are in talks with Senegal, South Korea, Kenya and Singapore. As Defence Minister Peter MacKay said, Canada has become a “go-to nation” when it comes to responding to natural disasters and other NATO missions—requiring a much bigger bootprint on foreign soil.

A revamped battle plan

Forty years after Richard Nixon declared a “war on drugs,” a new report has confirmed what police, prosecutors—and traffickers—have long known: we’re losing. Released by a consortium of world leaders, including Kofi Annan, the former UN secretary-general, the report says it’s time to start treating drug abuse as a public health problem, not a criminal one, and consider legalizing certain substances to undercut criminal gangs. The war on drugs has cost billions of dollars and countless lives. But, to borrow a phrase, admitting the old strategy is broken is the first step to recovery.

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Free food fight

By Jason Kirby - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 12:25 PM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Cole Garside

By 8 a.m. Tuesday morning, the breakfast sandwich assembly line at the Subway restaurant on Granville St. in downtown Vancouver was in overdrive—English muffin, pre-cooked egg, sliced ham and cheese, then into the oven. Brush away crumbs. Repeat. Despite the frantic pace, the lineup spilled out the door and down the street, drawn by that siren call of the tired and hungry morning consumer—a free breakfast and coffee.

There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but when it comes to breakfast, fast-food chains are doling out meals and coffee to anyone who’ll take them. Last November, Burger King Canada gave away free coffees every Friday, having earlier handed out complimentary breakfast sandwiches. Subway’s one-day breakfast and coffee giveaway was its second in 10 months. Meanwhile, McDonald’s has blitzed the morning crowd with free coffees five times since 2009, with each event lasting between one to two weeks.

The goal is invariably the same each time—to get as many new people as possible to try their offerings with the hope that some moochers come back for more as paying regulars.

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Vaccinating the poor could save millions of lives

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 12:17 PM - 0 Comments

Making vaccines more widely available in 72 of the world’s poorest countries could save millions of children’s lives, and billions of dollars, Reuters reports. In a series of studies published in the journal Health Affairs and The Lancet, public health experts and scientists say that if 90 per cent of children in those countries were immunized, more than $151 billion in treatment costs and lost productivity could be saved over a decade. This would create economic benefits of $231 billion, and save 6.4 million lives. The World Health Organization notes since the eradication of smallpox in 1979, at a one-time cost of $100 million, has saved the world about $1.35 billion.

Reuters

G8 spending in Clement's riding was undocumented: AG

By macleans.ca - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 11:44 AM - 16 Comments

Canada’s auditor general has released the report into G8 spending that prompted criticism of the Conservatives during the past election campaign. The conclusions of the final version of the report are largely the same as those of the draft report that was leaked during the campaign: Parliament didn’t know it was signing off on $50 million in ‘legacy spending’ on the Muskoka region and the choice of projects was largely undocumented. The legacy funds were in fact drawn from an $83 million pot earmarked for improving the border. And of the 32 projects which received legacy funds, public servants weren’t consulted on any of them. In all, government spending came in much lower than initially projected. Parliament approved a total of $1.1 billion in funding for last summer’s G8/G20 summits, but total costs came in at $664 million.

CBC News

Feelin' Down in South Park

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 11:32 AM - 9 Comments

I can’t say I really loved last night’s South Park episode, the last of the spring-summer season, but it was certainly one of the most interesting shows they’ve done in a while. Partly because it was so downbeat, leaving people arguing over whether it was a parody of sappy dramas. Much like the “Kenny Dies” episode, where the joke was that the running gag of Kenny dying was suddenly being treated very seriously, and they actually left him dead for much of the next season. It remains to be seen whether the ending of this episode will carry on over into the next batch of episodes in quite the same way, before everything goes back to status quo again. South Park usually shakes things up for a while – not only with Kenny, but Mr. Garrison – and then finds a way to reset it all eventually.

The other thing that made the episode resonate with a lot of fans of the show is that it dealt with themes that are close to a lot of people’s hearts. The episode took on the issue of facile cynicism, and how miserable it can be for the person who thinks he sees the flaws in everything. It also took on the idea that it’s not all cynicism, that sometimes things really are bad and that the cynical person (Stan in this case) really sees something wrong. It used Randy Marsh once again as the example of a person determined to keep up with every new trend and never get old and cynical, only to wind up looking like an idiot. And finally, it was about how things that used to work may really be not as good as they used to be, if they’ve been done too often.

That last scene already is creating arguments about whether this is leading up to the end of the show (probably not) and whether this is Trey Parker’s statement about being out of ideas. The last bunch of episodes have not been very good, the show has been on for over 200 episodes, and its cultural relevance is not what it was. (It seemed last season that most of the plots were based on Parker and Stone’s viewing of cable reality TV shows.) I’d be inclined to doubt that Parker and Stone really think they’re out of ideas, and the episode could just as easily be read as a take-that to people who criticize them for being out of ideas: it’s not the show, it’s just that it’s been on too long and we’ve gotten jaded.

I didn’t laugh a whole lot at the episode because of the repetitiveness of the poop jokes, which have never really been the funniest things in South Park. (Remember, the point of the Terrance & Phillip bits was to be a caricature of what people thought South Park was like: badly-drawn characters doing nothing but bodily-function humour. This episode pretty much was that for much of its length.) But it did have something interesting to say, and maybe that’s the key to a revitalized South Park: a more personal, middle-aged angsty point of view to replace the sources of story material that seem played-out. Sort of like how Peanuts spent its last few years making most of the kids act like elderly people.

Review: Feathers: The Evolution of a Natural Miracle

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

For all the place that birds seem to hold in human culture and thought, it’s not really the creatures themselves that grip our imagination, but their plumage. Feathers symbolize flight (in both senses—soaring and fleeing); feathers improve our tools (an arrow’s fletching represents a straight line from flight observed to flight intended); feathers in all their stunning colours have adorned humans from Aztec emperors to Las Vegas showgirls. And, as Hanson’s engaging, anecdote-rich volume makes clear, for more than a century feathers posed one of the knottiest problems in evolutionary theory.

In 1861, the first fossil Archaeopteryx—a 150-million-year-old creature with both dinosaur features and feathers—was found in Germany. Although Archaeopteryx established the fact of some sort of reptile-bird link, the evidence it offered about feather development was enigmatic. The only ones visible in the limestone are fully developed—i.e. modern—flight feathers: meaning an animal at the very beginning of avian evolution bore the same plumage that graces living birds. It was only the discovery in China, in the last 15 years, of feathered dinosaur fossils, that drove home to scientists that feathers evolved independently of birds.

For all the intriguing science, what really livens up Hanson’s passionate discussion of his “natural miracle” are the stories he tells. There’s the way Inca feather-working artisans developed new colours on their captive parrots by rubbing their feathers with secretions from poisonous frogs, or how he was forcefully made aware of why evolution favoured bald-headed vultures. Digging around inside a dead zebra, biologist Hanson had the animal’s cecum—the big pouch that receives waste material from the small intestine—rupture in his face. The gore was hard to remove from human hair and skin; from feathers, it was well-nigh impossible, as Hanson, one dedicated researcher, learned from an experiment involving frog guts and chicken feathers. Just another day on the job for a feather lover.

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Review: State of Wonder

By Anne Kingston - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 11:25 AM - 0 Comments

Sending a protagonist on a soul-searching journey down a river and deep into a jungle suggests Patchett is ready to rumble with the literary big boys—Conrad, Bellow, Marquez, et al. And her spellbinding, gorgeous new novel proves she’s equal to the task. Patchett’s heroine, Marina Singh, a 42-year-old pharmaceutical researcher, is sent to South America to piece together the reported death of a colleague and close friend while he was visiting a company project—an off-the-grid field team led by the formidable Dr. Annick Swenson. The team is investigating an Amazonian tribe whose females remain fertile into old age, a discovery that could yield “the equivalent of Lost Horizon for American ovaries,” a prospect the childless Marina finds “chilling.” She sets off, reluctantly leaving behind her boss, with whom she’s romantically involved.

Marina’s adventures, first in Manaus, Brazil, then in the sweltering jungle, are rendered in nuanced detail—from her attendance at a foreshadowing performance of Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice to a confrontation with a deadly anaconda. Patchett skillfully transports the reader into an exotic, fully articulated universe, then writes passages so breathtaking they demand rereading. Astute observations fill every page, even about seemingly mundane subjects: “Why did airports always have such ridiculously high ceilings?” Marina asks as she’s about to depart. “Was it meant to ease you into the notion of flight?” Weightier matters—scientific ethics, choices made for love, civilization’s exploitation of indigenous people—receive fuller airing.

In finding nothing as she expected, Marina is transformed too, most of all by her relationships with a 12-year-old deaf native boy and Swenson, a remarkable character, who shares a scientist’s credo: “Never be so focused on the thing you are looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.” If one line sums up the wonder of this amazing novel, it’s that.

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Review: Evel: The High-Flying Life of Evel Knievel

By Peter Shawn Taylor - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Like the man himself, this biography of Evel Knievel is loud, out-sized, foul-mouthed and frequently outrageous. It also happens to be riveting entertainment. Few might expect that the motorcycle daredevil, famous for crashing into Idaho’s Snake River Canyon during a 1974 stunt, could sustain a 400-page biography. Yet if you can get past the mock stage tones—the entire book reads like a Monday Night Football voice-over—it proves to be a carefully balanced view of one of the most fascinating characters of the ’70s.

Robert Craig Knievel of Butte, Mont., displayed an unlikely predisposition toward danger at an early age. At five, he deliberately ran into a cupboard door and knocked himself out. Growing up he was a schemer and rip-off artist, albeit with a high degree of physical daring. At 21, Knievel organized a hockey game between his team, the Butte Bombers, and the Czechoslovakian Olympic squad prior to the Squaw Valley Olympics in 1960. It ended, as did most of Knievel’s early ventures, with accusations that other people’s money had gone missing.

The stakes got bigger once Knievel found a way to meld his risk-taking and self-promoting ways with motorcycles. His first major stunt involved a jump over a box of rattlesnakes and two sleepy cougars. He hit the big time in 1967 with a failed—but well-publicized—jump over the fountains at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. By the early 1970s, he was one of the biggest celebrities in the U.S.

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Canada is about to rock Venice

By Sara Angel - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

Steven Shearer, Image of the Artist in the Studio, 2010 by Chris Gergley

Canadian artists have suffered from a sense of inferiority since 1958 when they began exhibiting works in our own underwhelming space at the Venice Biennale, the world’s most prestigious art fair, which opens this week. But thanks to Steven Shearer, 43, the British Columbia-born painter, sculptor and draftsman, this is all about to change.

Shearer’s selection as Canada’s representative to the Biennale sent a thrill through the art world. The antithesis of the cerebral, photo-based Vancouver school of artists— including Jeff Wall, whose works have come to characterize Canadian art over the last decade—Shearer is best known for making majestically beautiful paintings of heavy metal fans. These works, which capture the aggression that is a counterpoint to polite society, have earned him an international audience and a reputation as an artist with an edge.

His Poem for Venice, an installation he created for the Biennale, lives up to expectations. A towering nine-metre billboard of heavy metal-inspired shock talk, the work projects skyward like an outdoor movie screen. With phrases like “triumphant secretions,” “erection of possessed flesh” and “shivering whore of light” set in 30-cm-high raised white capital letters, it is impossible for anyone to walk through the Biennale grounds without noticing Shearer’s modern-day frieze.

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'The funding request was not made in a transparent manner'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 81 Comments

The Auditor General’s Spring and June status reports have now been released. The G8 Legacy Fund is covered in chapter two of the former.

In our view, the manner in which the G8 Legacy Infrastructure Fund was presented did not make clear to Parliament the full nature of the request. By including the request under the item “Funding for the Border Infrastructure Fund relating to investments in infrastructure to reduce border congestion,” the government did not clearly or transparently identify the nature of the request for funding—that is, G8 infrastructure project spending.

We could not conclude on project selection because documentation was not available to show how projects were chosen.

Early reviews are in from the Canadian Press, Globe, Star, Postmedia and CBC.

Read their lips

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 9:57 AM - 44 Comments

Stephen Harper is on record as saying that, so long as he’s Prime Minister, “there will be no new taxes.” Yesterday, Mr. Harper’s Industry Minister suggested there will be some new user fees.

“We are encouraging departments to develop a full range of options in areas such as administrative and program efficiencies, business consolidation and user fees,” he said, according to a prepared text of the speech.

At least one branch of government is already preparing the groundwork for new legislation that would hike user fees in the agriculture sector. The Canadian Grain Commission recently completed consultations that will pave the way for a doubling of user fees to certify the quality, safety and weight of Canadian grain.

What’s the difference between a tax and a user fee? Good question. Take, for instance, the Airport Travellers Security Charge. When John Baird announced an increase to the ATSC in 2010, the Harper government described it as a “user fee.” When the Liberal government reduced the ATSC in 2003, Mr. Harper described it as an “air tax.”

Seriously, Harper’s funny

By Alex Ballingall - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 9:25 AM - 12 Comments

Richard Goodine; Ehren Salazar

During a medical checkup last summer, Sean Devlin received a curious piece of advice from his doctor: stop reading the newspaper. It seemed the daily news cycle—packed with stories of an impending environmental crisis, economic turmoil and government corruption—was getting him down.

But the 27-year-old comedian and social activist didn’t heed the doctor’s advice. With the ultimate goal of getting more disaffected young people like himself interested in politics, Devlin created Truthfool Communications. The modus operandi of the Vancouver-based online marketing agency is to produce funny skits on the Internet that serve as public awareness campaigns about serious issues. So far, clients include the B.C. Poverty Reduction Coalition and Climate Action Network Canada. During last month’s election, Devlin unveiled shitharperdid.ca, a website detailing—in laughably plain parlance—some of the arguably questionable policies and decisions made by the Conservative government. The site features a stencilled drawing of Prime Minister Stephen Harper smiling and holding a fluffy cat. Emblazoned beside him are one-liners like: “Stephen Harper loves handcuffs, but not, you know, the sexy kind.” And each one links to an actual news story that provides the information and context behind the joke—in this case, a Toronto Star article about the security costs and arrests made during last year’s G20 summit in Toronto.

Devlin claims to be tapping into something particular to his generation: a profound appreciation for humour. “A joke is just a way to open the door,” he says. “We try to use humour to get people’s attention, and then we explore the more serious issues.” The strategy has a long tradition in Canada, reaching back to the 1950s with Don Harron’s antics as Charlie Farquharson. More recently, Canadians have seen political knee-slappers come from the Royal Canadian Air Farce and This Hour Has 22 Minutes. But the current generation has grown up in the midst of an acute rise in the effectiveness of political satire, says Megan Boler, a professor of philosophy and media studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. It’s a generation that grew up watching The Mercer Report, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. So, as Boler points out, it shouldn’t be surprising that it was Rick Mercer who issued the call that led to a series of celebratory “vote mobs” during this year’s election campaign.

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Just like the young new NDPers

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 0 Comments

Annabel Reyes/CTV

The producers of Dan for Mayor didn’t think the show’s second season was going to be so topical. June 5 will bring the return of the CTV comedy, about a not very smart guy (Fred Ewanuick, Corner Gas) elevated to the leadership of his hometown. In between production and airing, there was a real election, and a bunch of real people—mostly in Quebec—were elected to political office with little to no experience. Mark Farrell, who created the show with Kevin White and Paul Mather, says that Dan’s venture into politics “reminds me of the ardent kids who ran and won for the NDP.” Ewanuick is glad they’re able to get the season out before “somebody comes out with a series about some small-town hick going into federal politics.”

Of course, like Dan’s political career, the topicality is a bit of a fluke: the entire second season was filmed months ago, and Ewanuick says he originally expected it to air in January. But it still may be hard not to see some parallels with real life. The first season ended with Dan getting elected although, Farrell says, “he just wanted to finish second and beat the joke candidates—he had no intention of winning.” The second season begins with him trying, as Ewanuick puts it, “to prove to himself and to everybody that he’s not this dumb schmuck that happened into it.” The formula for the season has Dan, a political neophyte who doesn’t know exactly what “plebiscite” means, trying to deal with everyday city management issues like how to dispose of garbage; Farrell says it’s about what happens when “a guy who shouldn’t really be mayor—not a bad guy—is mayor.”

Unlike some of the more mocking reports on the real-life political newcomers, Dan for Mayor takes a somewhat favourable view of inexperienced politicians. Though Ewanuick still plays Dan with the befuddled sweetness he displayed on Corner Gas, his character has gotten smarter since the first season. “We didn’t want him to be a stumblebum. We wanted him to have good intentions,” Farrell explains. The season premiere, he says, shows Dan finding out “that the bureaucracy is running the city without him,” and trying to be more hands-on with his new job.

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'Actions like these provide the answer to the Harper government'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 8:29 AM - 42 Comments

Brigette DePape explains herself.

Media and politicians have argued that I tarnished the throne speech, a solemn Canadian tradition. I now believe more in another tradition — the tradition of ordinary people in this country fighting to create a more just and sustainable world, using peaceful direct action and civil disobedience.

On occasion, that tradition has found an inspiring home within Parliament: In 1970, for instance, a group of young women chained themselves to the parliamentary gallery seats to protest the Canadian law that criminalized abortion. Their action won national attention, and helped propel a movement that eventually achieved abortion’s legalization. Was such an action “appropriate”? Not in the conventional sense. But those women were driven by insights known to every social movement in history: that the ending of injustices or the winning of human rights are never gifts from rulers or from parliaments, but the fruit of struggle and of people power in the streets.

Bestsellers – Week of June 6th, 2011

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, June 9, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of June 6th, 2011)

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)