Russian prepares to issue claim over Arctic territory to UN

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 15, 2011 at 10:42 AM - 1 Comment

Russia is expected to submit a claim to the UN within a year in the hopes of annexing a massive swath of the Arctic that is currently under international control. The area, which covers nearly one million square kilometres, would see an estimated 25 per cent of the world’s untapped hydrocarbon reserves as part of Russian territory. The scramble for claims over the Arctic has largely been waged between Canada, Russia, the United States, Denmark and Norway. In July, Russia sent a nuclear-powered ice-breaker and a ship to map the bottom of the ocean in order to support their contention that the Siberian continental shelf is connected to the sea-bottom beneath the Arctic ice. The country has also announced the creation of an Arctic military force, and a US$33-billion port on its Arctic coast. For its part, Canada will hold a military exercise called Operation Nanook in the region this month, and is also preparing a territorial claim of its own.

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The backlash against ‘Glee’

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, August 15, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Fox; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Sarah Mackinnon; Everett Collection

The producers of Glee: The 3D Concert Movie, which arrived in theatres on Aug. 12, were hoping it would be part of a celebration of the TV show’s success. Instead, it’s turning up at a time when Glee is facing almost as much backlash as 3D movies. The most recent season, the show’s second, got mixed reviews and seven fewer Emmy nominations than the first; much of the backlash is directed at co-creator Ryan Murphy, responsible for such shows as Popular and Nip/Tuck. When it comes to bizarre stories and over-the-top preaching, Murphy is the writer who, as TV critic Myles McNutt puts it, “has become synonymous with the cultural excess of Glee.” And now he’s known as the man who caused some of the show’s actors to mistakenly think they were fired.

As the most-interviewed member of the Glee crew, Murphy has said some controversial things; when Guns N’ Roses rocker Slash criticized the show, Murphy denounced his comments as “uneducated and quite stupid.” But last month he seemed to go too far when he announced that actors Lea Michele, Cory Monteith and Chris Colfer would be leaving the show after their characters graduate in the upcoming season. He told the Hollywood Reporter that he wanted them “to have an open and closed experience for them to go out while they were on top.” The actors thought they had been booted off the show—“I looked on my Twitter replies and that’s how I found out,” Colfer told Entertainment Weekly. “I was like, oh, oh, okay, I guess they announced something.” Fans were livid. Murphy’s co-creator Brad Falchuk had to step in and announce that Murphy had it wrong: “Just because they’re graduating doesn’t mean they’re leaving the show.”
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No ordinary dummy

By Emma Teitel - Monday, August 15, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Kevin Moloney/The New York Times

Disney stores in the United States have implemented a new marketing ploy to attract shoppers, and children in particular—hyper-realistic mannequins. According to Jeff Zimmerman, Disney’s regional store manager in Southern California, the dolls, which are developed by the Colorado mannequin-making company Fusion, are the perfect spending trigger for prepubescent consumers because they’re “aspirational.”

In other words, if kids see clothes on fake kids who look real, they’re more likely to want to buy the merchandise. It may sound far-fetched but apparently it works: 32 Disney stores that have adopted the mannequins reported a sales increase in clothing modelled on the dolls. The trend has captivated other U.S. retailers like Athleta and Dick’s Sporting Goods, who have all ordered their own sets.

The $25,000 cow

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, August 15, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 109 Comments

Don Mason/ GETTY IMAGES

What I have in mind is some sort of scheme whereby the government would restrict the supply of opinion in magazines and newspapers to some fixed number of column inches per year, with a view to propping up—er, stabilizing—salaries at a target rate. Naturally I am sensitive to the concerns of magazine readers, not to mention magazine owners, but I don’t imagine it would raise the cover price of magazines by more than about 200 per cent or so.

No? Foolish? Extortionary? Outrageous? Then allow me to introduce you to the world of supply management: an actual policy pursued by the governments of Canada and the provinces for the past 40 years. Only I’m not talking about comparative fripperies like magazines (we have our own indefensible support programs, though not, ahem, on the same scale). I’m talking about basic foodstuffs, the kind the typical Canadian family eats every day: dairy products (milk, cheese and butter), eggs, and poultry (chicken and turkey), whose prices are maintained, by means of a strict regime of production quotas, at two and three times their market levels.

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‘Reminding the minister’

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 15, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 24 Comments

Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin seconds the Canadian Bar Association’s February criticism of Jason Kenney.

“I was certainly — and I think all judges were — very pleased when an issue arose earlier this year when a Minister of the Crown seemed to suggest that some judges were insufficiently solicitous to government policy. We were very, very gratified to see your president writing a powerful public letter to the minister in question, reminding the minister of the importance of public confidence in an impartial judiciary, that bases its decisions on the law and not on government policy.”

This may get ugly

By Jason Kirby and Chris Sorensen - Monday, August 15, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 16 Comments

Where banks are still hiring

By Erica Alini - Monday, August 15, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 0 Comments

Many of the big banks are on a layoff spree. Barclays Capital is axing 3,000 jobs; Credit Suisse, 2,000; meanwhile, UBS, Bank of America and Goldman Sachs are trimming payrolls as well. The cutbacks come amidst tougher financial regulations and the spreading sovereign debt crisis, but also seem to reflect the West’s shrinking weight in global finance. Last week, for example, HSBC said it plans to eliminate 30,000 jobs, but also announced that it will add 3,000 to 4,000 employees a year in emerging markets. The hiring is supposed to kick off with 200 new jobs in the fast-growing Asia-Pacific region. Earlier this year, Goldman announced plans to increase its Brazil workforce by 20 per cent, and Credit Suisse said it would boost the ranks of its investment bankers there. Brazil’s economy grew at a record 7.5 per cent last year, and expanded almost three times faster than that of the U.S. in the first quarter of this year.

This shift toward emerging markets is hardly surprising. Citi­group, the third-largest bank in the U.S., made more than half of its profits in developing countries last year, and revenue from there helped HSBC cushion Europe’s flat performance in the first half of 2011. At least some of the jobs, it seems, are going where the money is.

The lawsuit is in the mail

By Michael Friscolanti - Monday, August 15, 2011 at 9:44 AM - 1 Comment

Andrew Vaughan/CP

Next to soldiers, few on the federal payroll suffer more wounds at work than mail carriers. According to the latest stats, nearly 2,300 Canada Post employees trip and fall on the job every year, twisting ankles and breaking legs and triggering millions of dollars’ worth of compensation claims. On Valentine’s Day 2007, Beverly Collins joined that long list of casualties, slipping on a snow-covered walkway and shattering her wrist. “I knew there was something seriously wrong,” she later testified. “You could see the bone sticking out of my hand.”

Collins applied for, and received, undisclosed benefits under the Government Employees Compensation Act. Later that summer, a federal bureaucrat mailed a letter to the owners of that icy Ottawa property—demanding reimbursement. “I’ve been doing this for 11 years, and I’d never seen any case like this,” says Jaye Hooper, the owners’ lawyer. “My clients were a little taken aback.”

For most Canadians, the reaction would be something closer to “going postal.” Yet as surprising as it may sound, the federal government quietly targets thousands of homeowners a year in an attempt to recoup the hefty costs of mailman mishaps. “From a public policy perspective, it is a balancing act,” says John Norton, an insurance lawyer in London, Ont. “Certainly it does appear like the big, bad government is going after this little homeowner. But if the homeowners did do something wrong—and it was a significant injury that cost the government a lot of money—taxpayers might expect the government to go after the at-fault party because if they don’t, it’s taxpayers who foot the bill.”
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Denying both famine and aid

By Alex Derry - Monday, August 15, 2011 at 9:38 AM - 0 Comments

Prakash Singh/AFP/Getty Images

Even with evidence that 29,000 children have died in the last three months, al-Shabaab, the al-Qaeda-linked Islamist militant group controlling much of Somalia, continues to deny there is any famine in the region at all. In fact, they had responded to the famine by banning international aid groups—whom they accuse of overblowing the scale of the disaster—from entering the worst-afflicted regions, and are actively preventing refugees from trying to reach relief centres. They are, however, using hunger to recruit desperate Somalis into their fold.

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James and the Giant Poo

By Scott Feschuk - Monday, August 15, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 11 Comments

Getstock; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Many kids are currently off at summer camp, away from the lure of electronic devices and the strictures of personal hygiene—and far away from their parents, who yearn for correspondence from their children when not secretly delighting in their absence.

What follows in italics is an actual letter home from Algonquin Park from our 12-year-old son James. It is presented with its original spelling and grammatical errors. Commentary and analysis are provided for your edification. It begins:

One of the many things I am looking forward once I get home is a tolet that doesn’t get clogged so easily and when it gets clogged people don’t keep pooing in it until there is poo two inches over the water level.

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REVIEW: The Submission

By Joanne Latimer - Monday, August 15, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 0 Comments

Two years after 9/11, a jury of art experts gathers to select a winning design for a memorial to the victims of the attack. To combat charges of elitism, the jury includes a widow representing the victims’ families and the competition is blind—entries are anonymous before the jurors. That explains how they managed to select an American-Muslim architect named Mohammed “Mo” Khan. Would Khan’s winning submission be built? This is the central question in The Submission, Amy Waldman’s steely novel about the shifting nature of bigotry, grief and ambition.

When the winner’s name is leaked to the press, the country convulses. We meet rabid talk radio hosts, slick Muslim activists, a haughty artist, a journalist with no moral compass and Claire, the widow who lobbied for Khan’s submission. The winner of the competition needs to be approved by the governor, an opportunist who sees the issue as her springboard to the White House. When Khan’s submission is further scrutinized, alarm is raised over the possibility that his garden design contains an Islamic martyr’s paradise. Maybe yes, maybe no. Mo isn’t talking. He refuses to “reassure his own compatriots that he wasn’t to be feared.” He’s an urban artsy, after all, with no interest in religion, but America isn’t convinced. Should the jury demand clarification?

Waldman is especially talented at capturing the internal politics of the jury and the angling of interest groups, airing every opposing opinion. The back and forth is interesting until the three-quarter mark, when it gets a bit laborious. Yet the central question of The Submission keeps readers invested to the last page. Waldman’s book earns its place on the bookshelf beside other notable 9/11 fiction, like Don DeLillo’s Falling Man and Ken Kalfus’s A Disorder Peculiar to the Country. It brings to the category a cool-headedness that comes with distance and hindsight. Some readers may question Waldman’s decision to make Mo so unlikeable, but nobody comes across well in this book—not even the widow. That took guts.

Burger shacks reignite land-claim tensions in Caledonia

By Tom Henheffer - Monday, August 15, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

Have a hankering for a burger, but sick of inflated prices brought on by the decadent frills of electricity, health inspections and operating permits? Then Caledonia, Ont., has an unlicensed, hastily constructed hamburger stand for you. The business, which doesn’t have a phone and isn’t connected to hydro, recently popped up next to an unlicensed smoke shack on provincial land off of Highway 6 and has become the latest flashpoint in a long-standing fight over a Six Nations land claim. “It smacks in the face of a community subject to stagnant growth for a number of years,” says Haldimand County Mayor Ken Hewitt. He says the federal government denied the land claim years ago but the province is still refusing to shut down the businesses—its owners claim the land is theirs—and several other unlicensed smoke shacks in the area. Hewitt says this is undercutting local vendors, and driving away developers. “We’re killing the local economy.”

Residents staged protests outside the burger stop and the mayor’s residence, with little success. Members of the Six Nations council did not return calls from Maclean’s, but Paul Gerard, the Ministry of Infrastructure’s spokesperson, says the province is aware of the businesses and is in talks with all involved to resolve the situation. Hewitt says the government is wasting time. “The province is weak-kneed, afraid of backlash,” he says.

But Chris Leosis, owner of the Oasis drive-in, a Caledonia landmark that has been in operation for more than 80 years, says the owners of the shacks are working alone and don’t represent the Six Nations as a whole. He expects the government or the band council to step in and resolve the dispute soon. Regardless, he isn’t all that worried about his own sales. “People can eat anywhere,” says Leosis. “Who wants to be in a place that has no inspections?”

REVIEW: Finding Everett Ruess: The Life and Unsolved Disappearance of a Legendary Wilderness Explorer

By Brian Bethune - Monday, August 15, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

The story of Ruess, who disappeared in 1934 at the age of 20 while on a solo trek through the red-rock canyon country of southern Utah, is a textbook case on the origins of a romantic mythology. Intrepid, a precocious writer and painter, dazzled by natural beauty and deeply romantic in a way scarcely seen since Percy Shelley was going on about the sublime, Ruess had been tramping the American West since he was 16. Bit by bit, his writings became familiar to other wilderness devotees. Passages of exuberant joy (“Once more I am roaring drunk with the lust of life and adventure and unbearable beauty”), contrasting with youthful premonitions of doom (“Bitter pain is in store for me . . . death may await me; with vitality, impetuosity and confidence I will combat it”), won him posthumous admiration for his ability to express what others felt. Fuelled by endless speculation about his end—Ruess was murdered by cattle rustlers, fell while climbing a cliff, killed himself, married a Navajo and went native—and by books and documentaries, his cult steadily expanded. And then, in 2008, it went supernova.

A dying Navajo woman told her brother what their grandfather had once told her: in the 1930s he had witnessed three Utes rob and kill a young white man. The Navajo buried the body in a rock crevice that his grandson now easily found. Through a combination of desperately hoping it was true, tunnel vision and—above all—a faulty DNA analysis, Roberts (who was deeply involved), National Geographic and a posse of scientists became convinced the bones inside were Ruess’s. Interest in his story spiked sharply. And when a later and more accurate DNA analysis destroyed that conclusion—the bones belonged to a Navajo man—far from dying back, the cult of Ruess exploded yet again. As Roberts points out in his scrupulously honest and absorbing life of a youth who might—or might not—have become a great artist, the mystery is all.

Did they hand out surveys in Salem?

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 15, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 4 Comments

The Toronto Star attempts to survey the NDP’s Quebec caucus.

They were also asked if they had ever held a membership in another political party at the provincial or federal level, how they voted in the Quebec referendums, whether they ever cast a ballot for the Bloc Québécois and whether they considered themselves federalists, sovereigntists or believed another term would best describe their beliefs. The Star asked them to explain their choices and noted the goal of the questionnaire was to learn more about their perspectives in the hope of sparking a greater discussion on these issues outside Quebec.

One week later, not a single NDP MP from Quebec had agreed to participate. Someone did forward the questionnaire to Manon Cornellier, an Ottawa-based columnist for Le Devoir newspaper in Montreal, who then wrote about it Wednesday as evidence of a “witch hunt” among English-speaking media, noting the survey was not translated into French.

Mrs. Harper’s run-in with some hoary marmots

By Mitchel Raphael - Monday, August 15, 2011 at 8:59 AM - 5 Comments

Mitchel Raphael

Wild kingdom

Laureen Harper has gone on an annual summer hike for a few years now. It started off as a solo venture, plus the mandatory RCMP detachment, but soon blossomed into a group event that includes women such as Minister of Public Works Rona Ambrose. This year the group went to the Yukon, for a trek through Tombstone Territorial Park. Mrs. Harper noted, “It never got dark so we could hike until 11:00 at night.” Last year the group had to scare off bears. No bears this year, but Mrs. Harper says there was other company. “We did run into lots of hoary marmots [large ground squirrels]. The valley bottom was very boggy so we had to walk up on the mountain ridges, and the marmots would hike along with us for a while.”
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‘The best politician of my generation’

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, August 14, 2011 at 7:30 PM - 18 Comments

Former foreign affairs minister Lawrence Cannon commends Quebec Premier Jean Charest.

Defeated in the May 2 federal election in the West Quebec riding of Pontiac, Cannon strode into a meeting of the Liberal’s youth wing Saturday to take part in a panel discussion. Cannon was invited to the event by the Liberals but few people knew he was attending until he walked in. But his arrival got tongues wagging about a possible return to politics for Cannon or even a run, one day, for the leader’s job should Premier Jean Charest leave.

The veteran politician immediately moved to quash the speculation. “There’s no race in the Liberal Party of Quebec,” Cannon said. “Jean Charest is an exceptional man, probably the best politician of my generation at least. I am convinced Mr. Charest will be there to direct the troops in a future electoral victory.”

It’s perhaps mildly curious that Mr. Cannon didn’t mention Stephen Harper here and it’s unclear what he means by “my generation,” but it’s not unreasonable to say Jean Charest might be the “best” politician of what might be called the Post-Chretien Era.

For the sake of argument, we’ll generally limit this to Canadian politics since 2003 and those who’ve had their greatest successes in the last eight years. And we’ll also separate the politician (whose primary job is to win votes) from the premier or prime minister (whose primary job, at least in theory, is to effectively govern the province or country). If a politician’s primary task is to get elected and a party leader’s primary task is to lead his party to victory and if we generally accept that party leaders dominate our politics, there are probably a half dozen politicians in this conversation—Mr. Charest, Mr. Harper, Dalton McGuinty, Danny Williams, Gary Doer and Gordon Campbell*. Continue…

Dance of the Stanley Cup rioters

By Emma Teitel - Sunday, August 14, 2011 at 6:52 PM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Brian Howell; Photo Illustration by Sarah Mackinnon

Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring was, famously, a dance that started a riot, but until now, no one has seen the process reversed. Enter 41-year-old Edmond Kilpatrick—a Vancouver modern dance choreographer and fierce Canucks fan (though not the cruiser-toppling, Bay-looting kind of fierce) who was so disturbed by Vancouver’s Stanley Cup riot in June, he decided to dance about it. “The riot stole the entire hockey experience from me,” he says, “and the piece is a comment about what happened that night.”

The piece Kilpatrick is referring to is Party Boys, a three-man modern dance re-enacting the June 15 riot that followed the Vancouver Canucks’ 4-0 loss to the Boston Bruins in Game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals. “I thought we could congregate downtown and watch the game together,” Kilpatrick says, in reference to the throngs of Vancouverites who filled Georgia Street to watch the showdown on an enormous screen, “but obviously we couldn’t be trusted.” It’s hard to disagree with him. When hockey fans—and a few opportunistic anarchists—realized that their beloved Canucks would not be hoisting the Cup on home ice, storefronts were demolished, cars were vandalized and set on fire, and pictures of young men emerging from burning buildings clutching miscellaneous retail items—their Canucks jerseys pulled up to mask their faces—were more common than pictures of the Stanley Cup itself. Kilpatrick wants his piece—which runs August 10-12 on a 10-by-13-foot stage (the show is part of a larger production called Dances for a Small Stage at Vancouver’s Legion on the Drive)—to answer two questions: “Who were those guys and why did this happen?”
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Syria: not just another Arab revolt

By Michael Petrou - Sunday, August 14, 2011 at 6:40 PM - 0 Comments

Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images

Six months ago, before anything and everything seemed possible in the Middle East, Syria was not an obvious candidate for regime change. Bashar al-Assad had ruled for a decade, and before him, his father Hafez had been in charge for three. The army appeared loyal to the Assad dictatorship, the secret police were everywhere, and Iran propped up the whole apparatus.

Crucially, Syrian security forces had demonstrated a lack of qualms about using deadly force against their fellow citizens. As many as 20,000 Syrians were killed in the city of Hama in 1982 when Hafez al-Assad crushed a Muslim Brotherhood revolt, levelling much of the town in the process. There was little reason to believe the army would hold its fire the next time around.

And so the Syrian revolution began slowly. The first demonstrations, early this year, were ostensibly in support of uprisings elsewhere in the region. Two hundred demonstrators, carrying placards calling for freedom and denouncing “traitors” who beat their own people, staged a peaceful sit-in outside the Libyan Embassy in Damascus in February. They were beaten and dispersed by uniformed and plainclothes police.

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London’s long, hot summer

By Leah McLaren and Patricia Treble - Sunday, August 14, 2011 at 6:30 PM - 4 Comments

Reuters/Luke MacGregor

What began as a peaceful public vigil outside a north London police station last Saturday rapidly morphed into several days of rampaging protests—a frightening flashpoint in a season of increasing unrest in the British capital. By midday Monday, more than 200 protesters had been arrested in skirmishes that left scores of officers injured and several down-at-heel neighbourhoods severely damaged by fire and theft. And there was no end in sight. By Monday evening, riot police were busy in Oxford Circus, and BBC commentators were advising Londoners to stay indoors—meanwhile, violence had erupted in Birmingham, Liverpool and other large cities.

How did it all start? The initial protest in Tottenham, a socio-economically depressed and ethnically mixed district in the city’s north end, was organized in response to the shooting earlier last week of Mark Duggan. The local man lived in a nearby housing project and was, depending on which sources you believe, either a peace-loving family man or an active gang member. There are reports that he was carrying a weapon, allegedly a starter’s pistol converted to fire live ammunition; Duggan’s death came after a minicab he was in was stopped during a pre-planned police operation.

What’s inarguable is that police were involved in the shooting, though it’s still not known who actually killed Duggan. Why the protest turned violent is similarly murky: at least one witness claimed it all began when a 16-year-old girl was viciously attacked after throwing a champagne bottle at officers, yet others blamed unsubstantiated rumours circulated on Twitter and BlackBerry Messenger claiming that Duggan was murdered in an unprovoked, execution-style shooting.

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This is the week that was

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, August 13, 2011 at 7:51 PM - 4 Comments

Stephane Dion had questions for Nycole Turmel. Denis Lebel admitted a dalliance with the Bloc Quebecois. Pat Martin compared the hunt for sovereignists to the red-baiting days of yore. Canadians seemed mostly unmoved.

The Internet wouldn’t let Stephen Harper disappear and Brazil’s foreign minister reassured everyone that Mr. Harper’s visit to the bathroom was for “regular reasons.” Lt.-Gen. Charles Bouchard said Libya hadn’t reached stalemate, while the NDP signalled an end to its support for a military mission. Vic Toews mused of expanding the most-wanted list. Jason Kenney mused vaguely of terrorism and exchanged letters with Amnesty International (and invoked Stephane Dion as his inspiration). The Prime Minister’s Office warned Conservative MPs to be discreet. The Prime Minister attacked critics of free trade with Colombia and made a deal with Honduras.

Bruce Anderson consider the possibilities of economic hardship. Mike Crowley considered the past and future of the Liberal party. Andrew Steele championed door-knocking. Greg Fingas commended direct democracy. Jordan Michael Smith pondered the meaning of Michael Ignatieff. Alexander Ly and Andrew Webb explained the trouble with “lawful access” legislation. And Scott Clark and Peter DeVries explained why we don’t know how much the government is planning to spend.

The road to Spyhill

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, August 13, 2011 at 4:15 AM - 33 Comments

Economists have a sort of half-joke, inspired by Yale’s Joel Waldfogel, about the “deadweight loss of Christmas”. Every year we humans race around, spending, collectively, billions of dollars trying to find noncash items that other people in our lives will like. But we are less than perfect at intuiting the preferences of others, and it is the rare recipient who will value what he receives from everybody as much as he would what he could buy himself with the cash equivalent. The total worth of the gifts exchanged at Christmas thus inevitably ends up being smaller than the amount spent. Viewed this way—and it’s obviously not an unreasonable way—Christmas is a giant global potlatch, an orgy of value destruction.

The case for Christmas, of course, is as obvious and easy to make as the one for inefficiency/imbecility of Christmas. This 2001 Economist piece on Waldfogel’s idea offers several points in defence of the potlatch, making them in that charmingly autistic way economists are known for. Gift recipients aren’t perfectly conscious of their own potential preferences; some gifts may be items a person can’t obtain for himself at any price; and gifts—stop me if this sounds crazy—sometimes do have a sentimental value beyond the cash paid for the item itself.

But I couldn’t help thinking about Waldfogel’s Christmas when I encountered this engrossing local press item about a mislaid package of goods collected for fire-ravaged Slave Lake, Alberta:

A local man was surprised to find boxes of new clothes and donations that were slated for Slave Lake in the [Calgary] city landfill.

…Nielsen says there were dozens of sealed and neatly packed boxes in the trash.

Some of the items were brand new and still had the tags on them.

Nielsen says it was obvious someone had gone to a lot of work to try to help people who had lost everything.

“I opened the box and it was like a knife through my heart. I’ve seen lots of horror and this just shattered me. The box was full of children’s clothing. Someone had gone to a store, bought children’s clothing, and had the foresight to throw something in for the mother too,” said Nielsen.

One worries that Mr. Nielsen might have been slightly less horrified if the box had contained an actual child. The containers were labelled with the name of energy company Total E&P, whose employees had gathered clothing and toys for the victims of the fire. “Employees had held a month-long drive to collect donations for Slave Lake victims,” notes the CBC. “They carefully packed up the collection and addressed it to the Red Cross, and called their internal courier to take it away. The Red Cross, though, does not accept items for donation, only cash…”.

So while the packing was “careful”, the research…? Not so much. Someone located another Calgarian with good intentions, Melissa Gunning, who was gathering material to be sent to Slave Lake fire victims. Unfortunately, by that time, the brave people of Slave Lake were already becoming overburdened with donor goods.

Emergency workers in Edmonton soon told her to donate some of what was collected to local charities, which she tried to do. “We still had all this stuff left in storage. Nobody would come and pick it up and unfortunately we couldn’t get anybody else to drive it,” said Gunning.

This past weekend, swamped by the donations from the campaign, Gunning hired some help. A junk removal company was hired to go through the remaining storage bins and sort what was good to a local charity and take the rest to the dump.

Unfortunately, the “Just Junk” removal firm seems to have treated the entire load as, well, just junk. And since salvage is strictly forbidden at the Spyhill dump, the good work of Total’s employees has gone for naught. I am, of course, using the phrase “good work” to refer to work that has good intentions, not work that accomplishes anything good. Total E&P is a subsidiary of a publicly traded company; the employees have access to a share-ownership plan. Literally ten seconds’ research would have revealed that the Red Cross is happy to take gifts of stocks and mutual funds. But that kind of thing isn’t in the Christmas spirit, is it?

I fear Paul Nielsen, the appalled discoverer of the items in the landfill, unwittingly saw straight to the heart of the matter. Someone went to a clothing store, bought a bunch of cute outfits for somebody’s else’s children, and “had the foresight to throw something in for the mother”, without the much less impressive foresight required to ask “Hey, will the Red Cross actually take this crap?” This is a “someone” who probably thought herself very clever in finding a absolutely bulletproof excuse for a shopping excursion, perhaps even on company time. The value of her “aid” turned out to be significantly less than zero, but that was surely beside the point to begin with. If it weren’t, the incessant entreaties of professional charitable organizations everywhere—“Please stop showing up with bundles of blankets and cans, and just give us cash already”—would actually have had some effect by now. And we would have fewer grotesque comedies like this one from Okotoks.

I suspect the diversion of the Total donations to the landfill is an example of something that happens a lot more often than we dare imagine. There is a thin worldwide layer of iridium that marks the extinction of the dinosaurs. Perhaps future geologists delving down into the leavings of our time will find an equally pervasive stratum of useless goods, purchased on incoherent charitable impulse by the fabled “middle class” after pictures of calamity have been shown on television. Teddy bears, soccer balls, Playstations, soap-on-a-rope: will the Cuviers and Lyells of tomorrow be able to infer the meaning of it all?

It is about time, anyway, that some cynic observed that responding to a natural disaster is not like Christmas gift-giving. At Christmas, you’re guessing at a loved one’s potential preferences. In essence, you are playing a game. Analogous behaviour in the face of a disaster—guessing at what people need, when you could give cash immediately for experienced responders to spend on life-or-death logistical priorities—is crass and arrogant, literally the opposite of charitableness. But of course, the impersonal gift of a cheque in an envelope doesn’t give you the chance to show off to co-workers or other relevant audiences what a lovely and decent person you are.

Sun News: in bed with separatists and radical lefties

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, August 12, 2011 at 5:09 PM - 179 Comments

You know what’s great about Sun News Network? No, it’s not the seamless marriage of perpetual fury and Wayne’s World-esque production values. It’s not even the daily five o’clock cutoff, where all the female talent goes ‘poof!’ and the Sun set becomes a soapbox for hours of spitty white male outrage. The best thing about the folks who bring you “Hard News, Straight Talk” is their utter lack of consistency. Or, since we’re all we’re straight talking here, let’s call it what it really is: hypocrisy.

Just over a week ago, the Sun News people grabbed hold of the story about interim NDP leader Nycole Turmel having been a member of the Bloc Québécois… and, well, hasn’t really let go since. Just yesterday the network fronted a story touting Turmel’s membership in the BQ as well as the “radically separatist” Québec Solidaire. ‘Byline‘ host (and, in the spirit of SNN’s trademark hyperbole, the network’s in-house right-wing commie-baiter) Brian Lilley took to his blog to decry Turmel’s separatist past and supposed radically communist leanings. “Quebec Solidiare is no mild-mannered left-wing political party or your grandfather’s labour movement political action group, they are full on commies,” Brian wrote.

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Did Mad Men Take All AMC’s Money?

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, August 12, 2011 at 5:00 PM - 2 Comments

One more thing about the AMC budget flap: it’s been argued in several places, starting with some of the sources for this L.A. Times article, that the budget cuts to Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead have something to do with the huge deal Mad Men got: once Matt Weiner had his big contract, there was less money to go around and AMC had to economize ruthlessly with its other shows. I don’t think this makes a great deal of sense to me, though. Maybe Mad Men was lucky because it was the first show to make a deal, and maybe AMC was even more determined to slash budgets after it failed to cut very much from Mad Men (though you’ll recall it did win the right to make some cuts in running time). But the idea that Mad Men took more than its share of the pie implies that the budget of one project has an absolute, causal relationship to the budget of another project, which seems dubious.

Besides, all signs have been that AMC wants to make a big display of cutting budgets where it can; apart from the reasons discussed in earlier posts, the fact that it recently went public seems to be a factor. (It would take someone with more business knowledge than I to really explain how exactly it factors in, though. Maybe they just need to prove to potential shareholders that they take a hard line on budgets. I don’t really know.) Which means the negotiations with Sony over Breaking Bad, and with Frank Darabont over The Walking Dead, would have been rough no matter what Mad Men‘s deal was.

Finally, of course, it seems a bit unfair to imply that Weiner and Jon Hamm and other Mad Men people who got big contracts are somehow taking the money away from other shows on the network. The talent is supposed to demand the best deal it can get. The network is supposed to know how much it can afford to give. It’s Weiner’s job to keep Mad Men on-budget, but it is not his job to keep AMC within its budget. If the network told Weiner that the contract he was demanding would cause their other shows to suffer massive budget cuts, he’d have no reason to think that was anything other than a standard negotiating ploy. Pleading poverty, and trying to make the talent feel guilty about his or her demands, are not exactly new tactics in entertainment, sports, or many other fields.

Not the best estimates

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, August 12, 2011 at 4:35 PM - 3 Comments

In lavish detail, Scott Clark and Peter DeVries explain what’s wrong with federal budget reporting to Parliament.

The reality is that Parliamentarians and Canadians in general are in the dark about what the Government is planning to spend this year. Even worse, the Government is making no effort to clear up the confusion and provide greater transparency and ultimately greater accountability.