CUPW supporters protest in Toronto

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 22, 2011 at 1:32 PM - 0 Comments

Labour activists rallied in downtown Toronto on Wednesday to protest the federal government’s move to legislate an end to the dispute between Canada Post and its locked-out workers. Hundreds of people have gathered at the intersection of Yonge and Dundas, one of the busiest in the city. Meanwhile, negotiations continue between Canada Post and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers after going late into the night on Tuesday. Parliamentarians are expected to vote on the Conservative back-to-work bill this Thursday. The legislation would force the union to accept a deal that’s worse than the one currently on offer from Canada Post management.

CBC News

UBC student blinded, maimed in brutal attack

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 22, 2011 at 1:16 PM - 35 Comments

A University of British Columbia graduate student was horribly injured and blinded in a vicious attack that occurred while she was visiting her family in the Bangladeshi city of Dhaka. Images from the local media show Rumana Manzur lying in a hospital bed with bandages on her nose and what appear to be heavily bruised eyes. Her husband, Hasan Sayeed Sumon, reportedly confessed to attacking Manzur after police arrested him. Sumon and Manzur have a five-year-old daughter. “He has made my world dark. I can’t see my daughter,” Manzur told reporters in Bangladesh. Manzur has been studying political science at UBC and is an assistant professor at Dhaka University’s international relations department.

CTV News

Harper facing mounting opposition on Senate reform

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 22, 2011 at 1:11 PM - 0 Comments

The Ontario government is speaking out against Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Senate reform agenda, opening the door for a constitutional challenge of the newly tabled legislation. “We do believe it requires provincial consent to move forward,” Ontario Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Monique Smith told the Toronto Star on Tuesday. Québec has already served notice that it will issue a legal challenge of the reform bill, echoing Ontario in arguing that the provinces must be consulted in order for Senate reform to be legitimate. The federal NDP, as well as the governments of Ontario, Nova Scotia and Manitoba, feel the Senate should simply be abolished. Reports have also emerged that some Conservatives senators are opposing the reforms. Harper’s legislation would impose nine-year term limits on all senators appointed after 2008, and would create a voluntary framework for provinces to elect potential Senate appointees.

Toronto Star

Strategic Review: a sort of answer

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, June 22, 2011 at 12:56 PM - 0 Comments

Progress! When last I checked with Public Works, they couldn’t tell me anything about their Strategic Review cuts for the current year and the next two years “until we communicate these plans to stakeholders and employees.” On Monday they communicated some of their plans to employees. One of the plans is that there will be fewer employees. The employees’ union told the Globe, and it became a story. So I thought I’d ask for what they couldn’t tell me earlier.

I got an answer. That very evening, in fact; the delay in posting our correspondence is my delay, not PWGSC’s. Here’s their answer, verbatim: Continue…

Idea alert

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 22, 2011 at 12:03 PM - 0 Comments

The NDP’s Pat Martin wants to defund the Senate.

In the midst of a growing debate about the effectiveness of Canada’s Senate, New Democrat MP Pat Martin has moved that the nearly $60,000,000 in Senate program spending included in the budget’s Main Estimates to be voted on tonight be rejected. … “We might not be able to abolish the Senate without a constitutional amendment, but we can cut off its blood supply,” said Martin. “I’m sure Canadians would agree that this $59,490,350 could be put to better use than to offset the limited value of an unaccountable, unnecessary Senate.”

Glee, Now With Writers

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, June 22, 2011 at 11:49 AM - 0 Comments

I’m late on this, but I wanted to add my fifty-two cents (inflation-adjusted from two cents) on the long-awaited announcement that Glee will hire a writing staff for its third season. Though the three creators wrote every episode for the first two seasons, the outside writers are necessary because Ryan Murphy is working on the new show “American Horror Story” for FX and doesn’t have as much time to devote to Glee.

Also, the third season will be a transitional year, since it’s graduation year, meaning they’ll have to start planning in advance for the fourth season – coming up with some new characters at the school, figuring out which regulars will continue on the show and how. Since they’re going to have to shake up the formula that got them through the first two seasons, it makes sense for the creators to call in some new people for the task of retooling the series.

Does this mean the show is going to get better in the third season? I’m not the best person to answer Continue…

Canadian man fears for his sister jailed in Tehran

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, June 22, 2011 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

A Canadian man who has already lost five siblings and a brother-in-law to the Islamic regime in Iran now fears for the life of his sister, Mansoureh Bekhish, arrested earlier this month and currently held in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison.

Jafar Behkish immigrated to Canada almost a decade ago. During the 1980s, six members of his family, all communists, died violently. One was killed in a shootout with government security forces; one was assassinated; four were jailed, tortured, and executed.

Jafar’s sister, Zahra Behkish, took a cyanide tablet when she was arrested. But Jafar, who was detained at the time, learned that she had been seen alive in prison. She was reportedly revived, and then tortured and killed. Continue…

The reform party

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 22, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 35 Comments

Through Tim Harper, Progressive Consevative senator Lowell Murray explains his concerns with the current style of Senate reform.

Many otherwise productive senators of a certain age would likely do what he might have done, turn down a job that has only a nine-year lifespan, meaning he or she would have to search new work in their 50s. There would be the obvious tension of elected members working alongside appointed members, and, he says, the Senate becomes the elite body.

An Ontario senator would be elected province-wide and he or she would have a stronger mandate from more voters for a longer period of time than an MP from the province. Such province-wide votes would also be biased against northern and rural representatives and would favour candidates from large urban centres home to large media. It could also lead to U.S.-style gridlock.

Meanwhile, the Ontario government is thinking about joining a legal challenge.

‘The miracle is in the original asbestos fibre’

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 22, 2011 at 9:32 AM - 7 Comments

Randy Boswell digs into the history of asbestos mining in Quebec and finds Jack Layton’s father.

The late Robert Layton, a Quebec MP in the 1980s who served as federal mines minister in Brian Mulroney’s Progressive Conservative government, played a high-profile role in championing Canada’s asbestos industry at a time when the world had just come to recognize the serious health risks posed by handling the fibrous, fire-resistant mineral. Robert Layton, in fact, was probably best known during his two-year term as Mulroney’s mines minister for promoting asbestos as a “good product” in the face of growing international opposition to the mining and export of the cancer-causing material.

That Senate reform bill: alive in the water

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, June 22, 2011 at 5:25 AM - 0 Comments

In a recent dead-tree Maclean’s I gave a little preview of the constitutional issues that the government’s piecemeal Senate reform effort, now launched, will raise if it is brought before a court. Readers may not be aware that the nature of Senate elections was discussed very recently in the Senate itself—in March, when a Senatorial Selection Act (S-8) was briefly debated there. The provisions of that bill have now been incorporated into a schedule to House of Commons Bill C-7.

Today’s Star has a piece from Susan Delacourt in which scholarly all-rounder Ned Franks calls Senate elections “dead in the water” and “sure to get shot down by the Supreme Court”. I don’t want to call this a misrepresentation of the expert consensus, nor to challenge the stature of Ned Franks, but it seems to me that few other opponents of Senate elections are as confident as these quotes suggest. As I wrote, it is not clear exactly how much change Parliament is free to make to constitutional arrangements by statute alone. The Constitution Act text says that the 7/50 amending formula has to be followed before “the powers of the Senate and the method of selecting Senators” are changed. But under C-7, Senators are explicitly still appointed by the Governor-General as before. (“Senators to be appointed for a province or territory should be chosen from a list of Senate nominees submitted by the government of the province or territory.”)

Indeed, the flow of moral force through the text of the bill shows amusing evidence of judiciary-proofing. Look at section 2 of C-7:

2. The framework in the schedule sets out a basis for the selection of Senate nominees.

Key phrase, for the purpose of a future court test: “Senate nominees”, as opposed to Senators. The message to the courts is that we are not creating a formally elected Senate, but merely a means of bringing “nominees” to the attention of the Prime Minister. It’s an important distinction, also observed in s.3 of the bill:

3. If a province or territory has enacted legislation that is substantially in accordance with the framework set out in the schedule, the Prime Minister, in recommending Senate nominees to the Governor General, must consider names from the most current list of Senate nominees selected for that province or territory.

Key phrase: “must consider”, as opposed to “must accept” or “must recommend”. The bill is carefully keeping its toes within the boundaries set out by Peter Hogg in a discussion of a still earlier, failed Conservative reform bill:

…right now the Prime Minister could, if he wished, commission an informal poll as to the wishes of the electorate with respect to an appointment from a particular province. The Prime Minister could right now, and in fact has done, respect the choice of the electorate expressed in a provincial election, as we know has been done in respect of appointments from Alberta, where those elections have been held.

So all Bill C-20 does is make a formal consultation process available to the Prime Minister, should he choose to take advantage of it. As you will know, the Prime Minister does not need to take advantage of the consultation process if he doesn’t want to; the bill leaves that as a matter of discretion in the Governor in Council. If the Prime Minister does order the formal consultation process to take place, he does not have to respect the results in making recommendations for appointments.

I fully recognize… obviously a court would recognize that after Parliament has established the complicated process proposed by Bill C-20, no Prime Minister is likely to continue to make appointments in the old way. But I say that is a truth of politics, not a truth of law.

As crafty as those concluding words sound, I do not see how Hogg’s logic is assailable. I’m not an advocate of Senate elections per se. But Franks-style constitutional opposition to Senate reform requires acceptance of an absurdity: that otherwise qualified candidates for the upper house somehow become morally ineligible if they happen to have won a vote. The Constitution can and does stop people from entering the Senate solely by virtue of election. I don’t see how it can thwart a scheme for holding advisory elections that are binding only by virtue of the common regard in which we hold procedurally fair expressions of democratic sentiment.

The case for Marlene Jennings’ concern

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 at 8:24 PM - 0 Comments

When Marlene Jennings wrote to the director of public prosecutions in April—the letter is available here—she laid out her case as follows.

I base this concern on a possible misappropriation of funds granted to the Crown by the House of Commons through Appropriation Act No. 2, 2009-2010 and Appropriation Act No. 4, 2009-2010. Based on the accompanying Estimates tabled in Parliament by the Government, Parliament approved the use of funds for the Border Infrastructure Fund. However, recent revelations make it clear that the monies approved by Parliament for that specific purpose were instead used to subsidize infrastructure projects in the Muskoka region that have no bearing on international border services. I believe that the stated intent presented to Parliament for the use of these funds cannot be reconciled with their actual use, and may constitute an intentional subversion of Parliament’s authority for the appropriation of public funds. If so, this appears on its face to be a potential violation of s. 26 of the Financial Administration Act, and therefore a willful contravention of an Act of Parliament.

Section 26 of the Financial Administration Act states that “Subject to the Constitution Acts, 1867 to 1982, no payments shall be made out of the Consolidated Revenue Fund without the authority of Parliament.” And on that note, Ms. Jennings points to Section 126 (1) of the Criminal Code. Continue…

Inside the PQ, independence starts at home

By Philippe Gohier - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 at 6:47 PM - 0 Comments

Leave it to the Parti Québécois to find a way to make a bad situation worse. On Tuesday, the PQ’s Benoit Charette became the fifth MNA this month to quit the party. PQ leader Pauline Marois also expelled René Gauvreau from caucus over allegations an aide was helping himself to party funds, but let’s focus on Charette for now, if only because my brain can’t process how bad a month Marois is having. Continue…

The Commons: Philosophical riddles

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 at 6:35 PM - 12 Comments

The Scene. Bob Rae called it deception. The government, he said, had promised during the election campaign to achieve necessary public service savings through employee attrition. Now, he noted, they were dismissing civil servants by the hundred.

“Why,” he asked, “did the government deceive the people of Canada before the election?”

Here the Prime Minister, like the Public Works Minister the day before, declined the opportunity to loudly champion his recent achievement in the pursuit of proudly held principles.

“Mr. Speaker, the Government of Canada employs hundreds of thousands of people,” he said. “When it is necessary to make adjustments to ensure that taxpayers’ dollars are well spent, we always make sure, wherever possible, that we do that through attrition or reassignment.”

It is in this case an odd quirk of the system —a philosophical riddle—that ensuring taxpayers’ dollars are well spent involves eliminating a department—Audit Services Canada—that was created for the expressed purpose of ensuring taxpayers’ dollars are well spent. Continue…

Do hackers need to just grow up?

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 at 5:51 PM - 0 Comments

Aaron Crayford was a high school hacker who attacked the Pentagon’s computers, got caught by the FBI, and wasn’t allowed to touch a computer for a decade. His digital exile ended a few years ago, and now he makes a chat app called Mighty. Last week he offered some advice on TechCrunch to the new generation of hackers, those high-profile no-goodniks of Anonymous and LulzSec. His message: don’t hack ‘em, join ‘em. In his words:

“What Lulzsec and Anonymous don’t realize is these companies aren’t their enemies…there is a much more difficult system to hack…becoming the guy at the head of the board. So when you’re the 40-something-year-old CEO who hears that some kid, some guy in his garage, is tearing your product apart and doing amazing things with it that is hitting your top line revenue…go find that guy, pay him and let’s see what he can do…That’s a real hack worth touting and it ends with you sleeping in a king-sized bed in a mansion on the hill and few can claim it’s been done before.”

I guess that’s also advice for the brass at Sony (and the CIA and PBS and the CPC). But you get the idea: change the system from within and get rich doing it. It’s not the most original idea—hackers have been switching sides and trading black hats for white for years. It’s got a certain poetry to it and is a genuine win-win; for companies, who better to employ than the geeks who would otherwise destroy them? And for the hackers, well, at some point most will take a paycheque over lulz.

But there’s more to it than that. In the case of LulzSec, their tweets and taunts describe something of a manifesto. To summarize, they hack for two reasons: (1) Lulz (duh). And (2) to teach us a lesson about entrusting private companies with our information. LulzSec sez:

“Do you feel safe with your Facebook accounts, your Google Mail accounts, your Skype accounts? What makes you think a hacker isn’t silently sitting inside all of these right now, sniping out individual people, or perhaps selling them off? You are a peon to these people.”

As “grey hat” hackers, Lulzsec, I have argued, provide a public service. They infiltrate systems for fun, not profit, and then they brag about it. Sometimes they publicly dump the data they’ve scraped, just to prove that they have it.  In doing so, they hope to humiliate companies into fixing vulnerabilities, and to teach the public a lesson about  protecting personal data. The first part is working. The second part isn’t.

After years of breathless, fear-mongering news coverage about the scourge of hackers, the public still doesn’t give a whit about Internet security. No one is really afraid of getting hacked, because so few have paid a tangible price for it. Yes, hacks happen all the time. They’ve happened to me—I had a few thousand dollars mysteriously disappear from my bank account. Did I destroy my bank cards, leave all my social networks and line my hat with tinfoil? No, I called my bank and they reimbursed the cash in 24 hours.

It’s true that no computer system is 100% secure, but neither is any bank. The credit card industry, the insurance industry—both suffer billions of dollars of fraud every year. But all the above make enough profit to absorb these losses easily, and the public continues to use their services. So goes Internet security. The lesson hackers keep trying to teach the public will never be learned.

So what will the real outcome of this new wave of hacking be on the public? An erosion of their digital rights. We can expect more government surveillance of the Internet and harsher penalties for “cyber-crimes.”

Mounties launch probe into G8 spending

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 at 3:48 PM - 19 Comments

The RCMP has launched an investigation into the federal government’s questionable spending decisions ahead of last year’s G8 summit in Muskoka. The government’s use of $50 million from a border infrastructure fund to sprinkle “beautification projects” around Tony Clement’s riding of Parry Sound-Muskoka was lambasted in a recent report by Canada’s auditor general, which said the decision-making process surrounding the spending lacked transparency. The RCMP’s decision to investigate further was prompted by a complaint from former Liberal MP Marlene Jennings, who was defeated in the May 2 election.

Canadian Press

‘My sense is that they’re taking it very seriously’

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 at 3:47 PM - 2 Comments

The RCMP has conducted at least one interview towards some kind of investigation of the G8 Legacy Fund.

The RCMP is looking into allegations that the Harper government misappropriated funds in order to lavish $50 million on a cabinet minister’s riding prior to last year’s G8 summit. The probe comes on the heels of an auditor general’s report earlier this month, which concluded the government “did not clearly or transparently” explain how the money was going to be spent when it sought Parliament’s approval for a G8 legacy fund for Tony Clement’s riding.

The Mounties’ involvement was prompted by a complaint from former Liberal MP Marlene Jennings. She was interviewed for an hour last week by three RCMP officers. ”My sense is that they’re taking it very seriously,” Jennings said in an interview Tuesday. ”My sense is that they’re looking at this to see if there are any elements of proof that there may have been wilful intention to mislead Parliament.”

'My sense is that they're taking it very seriously'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 at 3:47 PM - 18 Comments

The RCMP has conducted at least one interview towards some kind of investigation of the G8 Legacy Fund.

The RCMP is looking into allegations that the Harper government misappropriated funds in order to lavish $50 million on a cabinet minister’s riding prior to last year’s G8 summit. The probe comes on the heels of an auditor general’s report earlier this month, which concluded the government “did not clearly or transparently” explain how the money was going to be spent when it sought Parliament’s approval for a G8 legacy fund for Tony Clement’s riding.

The Mounties’ involvement was prompted by a complaint from former Liberal MP Marlene Jennings. She was interviewed for an hour last week by three RCMP officers. ”My sense is that they’re taking it very seriously,” Jennings said in an interview Tuesday. ”My sense is that they’re looking at this to see if there are any elements of proof that there may have been wilful intention to mislead Parliament.”

Harper tables Senate Reform Act

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 at 3:36 PM - 4 Comments

The Conservative government has introduced its Senate reform legislation in the House of Commons, calling for nine-year term limits and detailing an optional election framework for the provinces. Under the Senate Reform Act, Senators appointed before 2008 will not be subject to the nine-year term limit. Instead, they will be able to remain in their seats until they turn 75. The bill includes a “voluntary framework,” where provinces can choose to elect senators when a vacancy is available. Prime Minister Stephen Harper reportedly wants to avoid a constitutional debate with the introduction of this legislation. Due to grumblings from the appointees in the red chamber, Harper compromised on his original proposal of an eight-year term limit, opting instead nine years.

The Globe and Mail

Why it sucks to be PQ leader, part CCXXXIV

By Martin Patriquin - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 at 3:23 PM - 2 Comments

Thank you, Gary Larson

A few weeks ago, five PQ MNAs resigned. One of the main reasons: Pauline Marois didn’t talk about sovereignty enough.

Today, PQ MNA Benoît Charette resigned. The reason? Pauline Marois talked about sovereignty too much.

Rock, meet hard place.

William and Kate’s royal tour plans announced

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 at 2:23 PM - 0 Comments

The details of William and Kate’s nine-day tour of Canada were unveiled on Tuesday. Highlights of the trip include a citizenship ceremony at the Museum of Civilization on Canada Day in Ottawa, and an appearance on Parliament Hill for Canada Day celebrations. In Montreal, the pair will visit a facility for young cancer patients, and in Charlottetown will be shown around by Anne of Green Gables. William and Kate will also meet aboriginal leaders and head a youth parliament event in Yellowknife before they finish the trip in Calgary, where they will kick off the Calgary Stampede parade. Along with the couple’s seven-person entourage, 1,300 international media members will be travelling to seven cities in five provinces.

Source: CBC News
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2011/06/21/royal-tour.html

The relevance of the individual

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 at 1:56 PM - 11 Comments

Jeff Jedras argues against a proposed ban on floor crossing.

While many may think we vote for a Prime Minister, in fact we don’t. And we don’t vote for a party either. We vote for a Member of Parliament to represent us in Ottawa. We send 308 Members of Parliament to Ottawa and, from their ranks, the governor general calls on one to form a government and test the confidence of the House of Commons.

Whatever people may base their voting decision on, the fact is we’re electing a person to represent us. If they change parties, or do something else that we disagree with, then we can defeat them when and if they run for re-election. But taking away their legitimate right to change party affiliations only serves to further re-enforce this fundamental misunderstanding of our political system and further dilute the role and responsibility of individual MPs.

Oceans in grave danger, scientists report

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 at 1:47 PM - 2 Comments

Climate warming, sea-water acidification, chemical pollution, and overfishing are just a few of the environmental stresses devastating our oceans, The Independent reports. A recent study conducted by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean confirms that the earth’s oceans face threats not present since pre-historic times. According to one of the organization’s leading marine scientists, extinctions of up to 450 million years ago, one of which eviscerated the dinosaurs, are similar to the extinction of large fish and small corals threatening our oceans today.

The Independent

Nearly 60 per cent of G20-related charges withdrawn

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 at 12:54 PM - 3 Comments

Of the more than 1,100 people arrested during last year’s G20 summit in Toronto, just 317 were ever charged with any summit-related offences. Charges were eventually withdrawn against 187 of those, and only 24 have pleaded guilty. The rate at which police have dropped charges against G20 defendants is more than double the normal rate of about 30 per cent, according to University of Toronto law professor Kent Roach, raising questions about whether police were too heavy-handed during the summit. Toronto police deny they were reckless in laying charges against G20 protesters.

Toronto Star

Republican congresswoman wrong about Canada’s stimulus spending

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, June 21, 2011 at 12:51 PM - 6 Comments

Republican congresswoman Michele Bachmann and GOP presidential candidate, has erroneously pointed to Canada as a country that weathered the economic recession without a stimulus package. The outspoken critic of U.S. President Barack Obama’s stimulus spending program made the claim on Monday through her Twitter account, stating: “Lesson in economic recovery: Consider Canada. No stimulus plus unemployment is 20 per cent lower than U.S.” Although Canada’s unemployment rate is lower than that of the U.S., the Canadian government implemented a $40 billion stimulus package during the recession, which was targeted at improving infrastructure and helping Canadians endure the pitfalls of the economic downturn.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer