Good news, bad news: July 28-August 4

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, August 10, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 2 Comments

Good news

Tom Williams/Roll Call/Getty Images

Declaring war on war criminals

For years, the federal government stubbornly refused to release the names and faces of suspected war criminals hiding in Canada—for fear of violating their privacy. But after renewed pressure from the media, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives finally relented, posting mug shots of 30 wanted war criminals online. The result? Six of those fugitives are behind bars, two have been deported, and the rest are no doubt scrambling for cover. In this country, privacy should never trump justice.

Hard-headed

More than two-thirds of British doctors believe bicycle helmets should not be mandatory, and that forcing riders to wear them may prompt some people to give up biking altogether (and relinquish the obvious health benefits). But that surprising conclusion, contained in the latest issue of the British Medical Journal, doesn’t jibe with the Canadian experience. According to a study conducted here, the number of cyclists suffering serious head injuries is down nearly 30 per cent over the past decade, largely because children are now wearing helmets when they pedal.

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Leaving hope behind in Kandahar

By Adnan R. Khan - Wednesday, August 10, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Adnan R. Khan

Twilight in Kandahar city is not what it used to be. The light, of course, is the same as it was a half-decade ago: as the sun settles behind jagged mountain peaks, the dust kicked up by sweltering desert winds forms a natural filter in the sky, turning sunlight into an ochre-shaded mixture that settles over the city’s streets. But these days, the vermillion hues feel more ominous. Ghulam Nabi feels it: the long-time Maclean’s Kandahar fixer shifts uneasily in the passenger seat of the parked taxi cab, furtively glancing at the thinning crowds on Kandahar’s eastern outskirts. The driver, sitting in the backseat, feels it as well, as he sits unusually still and silent. The man in the driver’s seat, talking animatedly with his torso twisted to face the back, is the only person who seems not to notice the fact that the streets are quickly falling silent, that the wind is picking up force and, most worryingly, that even the police have disappeared.

“The U.S. forces destroyed my village,” the man says in a deep voice, speaking of his home in Sachai, just 35 km west of Kandahar city. “They told us our village was a Taliban stronghold so they ordered all the villagers to leave and levelled the homes; they stripped the land of its gardens and orchards, built roads for their tanks and turned it into a military base. This is what has become of Sachai since the Americans took over control from the Canadians. But what do the Americans think they are doing? The Taliban are everywhere. If the U.S. is going to destroy places where they are, they will have to destroy all of Kandahar. Now the people from Sachai have all come to the city and they hate the Americans. They all support the Taliban.”

As he whips his hand around his head in a sweeping motion, the 32-year-old construction worker suddenly becomes aware of the darkness descending over Kandahar city. His features shift from the intensity of storytelling to thinly veiled panic. “I don’t know about you people,” he says urgently. “You can stay here if you want, but I’m leaving.” With that the interview abruptly ends. The man, who only agreed to speak to Maclean’s on condition of anonymity, gets out of the car and walks quickly down a narrow alleyway and disappears into a maze of mud walls.

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There’s true grit on Jeff Bridges’s new CD

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, August 10, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

Unimedia EMI/Unimediaimages Inc.

From the folksy drawl of the first “Helloooooo,” with a rising lilt on the last syllable, the voice on the phone from Santa Barbara, Calif., is unmistakable. That’s the thing about Jeff Bridges. He always sounds like Jeff Bridges, whether he’s playing the stoner Dude in The Big Lebowski, crooning a broken-heart ballad in Crazy Heart, slurring abuse as a drunken cowboy in True Grit—or doing an earnest voice-over for a Hyundai TV commercial. Some people turn into somebody else as soon as they open their mouth to sing. But one of the joys of listening to Jeff Bridges, the 61-year-old actor’s debut album with a major label, is that he sounds just like the guy onscreen. He’s not acting—playing a singer—he is one.

Unlike a lot of actors who spin off a music career as a hobby, Bridges has been a lifelong musician, ever since he picked up his dad’s Goya guitar at age 12. (Dad being the iconic Lloyd Bridges, star of the TV series Sea Hunt, who ushered Jeff and brother Beau into the family business.) So it’s fitting he finally won the Oscar for Crazy Heart (2009), a film that entwined his twin passions of music and acting. Asked if he feels music is the road not taken, he says, “No, it’s always been with me. Ever since I can remember, it’s been a great buddy.” And it’s a lot like acting, he adds. “They’re both about making yourself vulnerable and creating with other folks. They’ve got more in common than uncommon.”

Inlaid with silky pedal steel, and backing vocals by Rosanne Cash, the pearl-handled production of Bridges’s new album is so polished a casual listener might assume he just dipped into his millions to hire a crack session crew. But the actor has been friends for over 30 years with T Bone Burnett—the ace producer/musician/songwriter whose Grammy-winning hits range from Robert Plant’s duets with Alison Krauss on Raising Sand to soundtracks for O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Crazy Heart. They met on the set of Heaven’s Gate (1980), along with songwriter Stephen Bruton, who was in the movie’s band with Burnett—and who wrote songs for Crazy Heart and the new album. Heaven’s Gate may be etched in American cinema as a landmark flop, but in their off-hours musical cast members like Kris Kristofferson and Ronnie Hawkins were forging another kind of frontier legend. “We used to jam every night,” says Bridges. “They were wild times.” When asked for details, he demurs. “There’s a whole pile of stories. I just don’t know how many I want to tell you.”

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The first recording of William Tell in 20 years

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, August 10, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

EMI; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Rossini’s William Tell starts with one of the most famous pieces of Western music: the overture, ending with what used to be known as the Lone Ranger theme song. But the music that comes after is just as good, and hardly anyone has heard it. A new recording of Rossini’s last opera, by conductor Antonio Pappano, is the first in 20 years, and only the second to use the original French words. The story of the Swiss freedom fighter, and his ability to shoot an apple off his son’s head, is rarely produced because it’s “over four hours long, expensive to cast and to rehearse,” says Canadian bass-baritone Gerald Finley, who sings the title role for Pappano. Their collaboration may go a long way toward proving something even Rossini doubted himself: this piece is long, but worth performing.

Pappano has been on a mission to revive Tell. He explains in the accompanying booklet that its importance “struck me like a thunderbolt,” and he managed to get EMI to record his series of live concerts in Rome (with enthusiastic applause included after some numbers). As the biggest opera Rossini ever wrote, it had a major influence on epic opera and theatre, making it possible to write musical theatre on huge political themes. “This is one of the first examples of grand opera,” Finley says. “A love interest intertwines with historic fact, treachery and successful rebellion.”

If the story is unusually weighty for an opera, the music also comes as a surprise to people who know Rossini from light comedies like The Barber of Seville. Instead of the display pieces that have made Rossini a favourite with singers, Tell has a more serious approach. Finley says that the role of Tell “is different from Rossini’s other lead roles in that it does not have a showy aria,” and instead climaxes in “a brief prayer-like piece directed to his son before the famous arrow-through-the-apple scene.” The most important role in the show is not for the star singers but the chorus, which provides the highlight of the second act as several groups gather to fight against an oppressive government. Almost every composer of operas in the 19th century was influenced by scenes like these; the composer Hector Berlioz, who hated Rossini and his influence, was won over by the “emotion and anguish” in Tell’s aria.
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Turning the pages

By Chris Sorensen - Wednesday, August 10, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 7 Comments

Photograph by Liz Sulivan

Marc Tellier, son of Canadian business legend Paul Tellier, was just 35 when he led Yellow Pages Group Co. (now part of Yellow Media Inc.) through a $1-billion income trust offering in 2003, then the largest deal of its kind. Eager investors were sold on the Bell Canada phone directory publisher’s reputation as a stable, cash-producing business: everyone from local plumbers to law firms bought ads in the thick books, which have been landing on doorsteps with a thud since 1908. An ambitious young CEO and perhaps eager to follow in his father’s footsteps, Tellier suggested to a reporter a few months after the IPO that running the old-media company was “almost too easy,” hinting he may soon be in the market for a bigger challenge.

He didn’t have to look very far. While Canadians continue to let their “fingers do the walking,” these days their digits are increasingly finding their way to computer keyboards and mobile phones. And that’s a big problem for Yellow Media, since 75 per cent of its directory revenue comes from selling ads on tissue-thin pieces of paper. It’s now Tellier’s job to figure out a way to drag the company, with a client base of 365,000 mostly small- and medium-sized businesses, into the digital age—a mission emphasized by last year’s redesign of the Yellow Pages logo, which no longer shows a pair of fingers walking across an open book, but instead leaves them dangling in mid-air.

Which, coincidentally, is how shareholders probably feel. Yellow Media’s stock has plummeted nearly 65 per cent to just over $2 since the beginning of the year (its trust units once traded in the $15 range). Tellier’s transformation plan, meanwhile, is being called into question as directory publishers in other countries wobble on the brink of bankruptcy. “Yellow Pages was once the gatekeeper of information to people’s homes,” says Neeraj Monga, an analyst at Veritas Investment Research, who dropped coverage of the stock two years ago. “But the Internet completely killed that business model.”

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Bradley Jeffrey Prytula

By Alex Ballingall - Wednesday, August 10, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Illustration by Team Macho

Bradly Prytula was born in Winnipeg on July 7, 1994, the second of two boys born to Daryl and Audry. The Prytulas live near Anola, a rural community just east of Winnipeg, where Daryl runs a welding shop named for his sons—Brody and Bradly’s Auto Body and Welding—and Audry is a caretaker with the Sunrise School Division. Their house, as Audry puts it, is “out in the middle of nowhere.” That’s the way Bradly loved it.

When he was a little boy, “you couldn’t tell him what to do,” says Daryl. “You’d tell him to turn right and he’d turn left.” Daryl would often pull Bradly and his older brother Brody on GT Sno Racers—sleds with steering wheels—behind his snowmobile. Bradly was always “the cocky one,” Daryl remembers, often playfully bumping into his big brother as they slid across the snow.

The family often visited Star Lake, Man., where Bradly’s grandfather has a cabin. It was there that Bradly started developing his reputation as a daredevil. “He was like Evel Knievel,” says Daryl. Bradly loved waterskiing, wakeboarding, tubing and, especially, dirt biking. “Nobody could ride a bike better than him,” says Daryl. “Bradly had a knack for it.” One winter, Daryl and Audry lit a big bonfire on the shore of the lake while their two sons roared across the thick prairie ice on the family’s two new snowmobiles. “He was active and happy. And he loved being outside,” says Audry.

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Harper in Brazil: the critics are raving

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 9:18 PM - 171 Comments

And just this once, I mean the title non-ironically. The Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada “applauds” and “is delighted by” Harper’s announcement of increased Canada-Brazil cooperation in higher education and research. And it “welcomes”  a plan to open three new visa centres in Brazil.

Now, Paul Davidson, the AUCC president, is a born diplomat, and he is always careful not to be too critical of a government on which universities depend for much of their funding. But by the same token, he knows how to be non-committal if some government announcement doesn’t really turn his crank. But increased cooperation between Canada and a big neighbour like Brazil really does make more sense than the odd petty rivalry that has sometimes put our countries pointlessly at odds. The visa centres, as Davidson says, “will lead to more Brazilians choosing Canada as their preferred place to conduct research and study.”

But there’s one more reason the AUCC is in a good mood: Governor-General David Johnston will lead an AUCC delegation to a hemispheric conference on international education next spring. This is a really handy change of heart on the part of the Harper government, which has argued for too long that marketing Canadian higher education abroad is the responsibility of the provinces. No other federation makes the same assumption. Provinces alone can’t make the noise they need to attract students in a crowded and competitive global higher-ed market. One suspects it’s Johnston’s personal involvement in these fields — he was University of Waterloo president and he’s said he wants to make a “smarter Canada” a hallmark of his tenure at Rideau Hall — that has helped the Harper government change its mind.

So yeah, some funny stuff may or may not have happened in or near the bathrooms on this trip, but on issues that matter, Harper also seems to have done some useful work.

Trudeau, feathers and beads

By Mitchel Raphael - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 7:05 PM - 1 Comment

Montreal Liberal MP Justin Trudeau at Scotiabank’s Caribbean Carnival held at CTV’s downtown studio parking lot.

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What it takes to get back to AAA

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 5:50 PM - 7 Comments

By cutting the U.S. credit rating on Friday, Standard and Poor’s may well have pushed the world economy closer to a dreaded second dip into recession. Of course, downgrading the world’s largest economy is bound to have serious consequences, but Washington’s humiliation is not a first. Many of today’s AAA-rated countries have less-than-perfect credit histories. In fact, seven of the 15 nations on the AAA list of both S&P’s and Moody’s either lost their top score for a period, or had to work their way up there from lower ranks.

So how does a country climb back to a AAA rating? In one of three ways, it seems–and not all of them involve austerity: Continue…

Meanwhile, in overseas bathroom news

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 5:11 PM - 22 Comments

After some consternation over the meaning and purpose of the Prime Minister’s visit to the Brazilian foreign minister’s bathroom, we have now the following official clarification.

“That’s absolutely incorrect. It never happened,” Carlos de Abreu said. “There was good chemistry between both delegations.” He said Harper went to the bathroom for “regular reasons.” ”It is something that every human being has to do every now and then. Nobody would have negotiated that (whether to have toasts before or after.)”

Jason Kenney to Amnesty International: “Poppycock”

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 4:10 PM - 237 Comments

On an unusually busy August news day, this seems to me the most fascinating thing the Harper government has done today. First, a bit of background.

Jason Kenney and Vic Toews have been asking for Canadians’ help in finding people on the government’s war-crimes “wanted” list.

A week ago Amnesty International sent a letter to Kenney and Toews, expressing “concern about the approach the government has adopted” with these alleged fugitives. The nub of their argument:

“Over the past decade Amnesty International has frequently raised concern about the fact that Canada overwhelmingly resorts to immigration enforcement measures rather than the criminal law, when faced with the attempted entry into or presence in Canada of individuals who are alleged to have committed war crimes, crimes against humanity or torture. We have highlighted that an immigration response is problematic for two key reasons:

• It fails to ensure that such individuals will in fact face justice. An official process of extradition or surrender would ensure that individuals are going to be dealt with under criminal proceedings in another jurisdiction. Deportation does not. All the deportation guarantees is that the person concerned will be removed from Canada. It is entirely possible that the individual, once deported, will not face any further investigation or criminal charges.

• It also fails to adequately safeguard against the possibility that in some cases, the individual concerned might be at risk of serious human rights violations. Canada’s international human rights obligations are clear – no person should be deported if he or she faces a serious risk of such grave human rights violations as torture, extrajudicial execution or enforced disappearance. This extends to individuals who may themselves have been responsible for grave human rights violations. There are no exceptions.”

Now Kenney has sent Amnesty an absolutely extraordinary response:  Continue…

The Dallas ‘Office’

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 4:00 PM - 3 Comments

This is one of the better recent examples of the main title mash-up. (It may have been inspired by the Office subplot that revolved around an old Dallas board game. Just like TV today needs cooler theme songs, it needs more tie-in merchandise that we can find in our closets 20 years later.) It does leave out a few of the cast members, but the decision to go outside the clips from the show and use stock footage of the city – making the whole thing into an epic celebration of a city that has no epic qualities – is what makes it work. Besides, Jerold Immel’s theme works with anything. It has to be one of the most durable of all disco-inspired themes.

Update: As noted by Anthony Strand in comments, an Office board game does exist, so we can expect it to turn up on a show in 2035, and the whole cycle will begin anew.

The Colbert Super PAC Arc

By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 2:40 PM - 10 Comments

This is a very personal reaction, but I find myself tiring of The Colbert Report‘s arc about the Colbert Super PAC. There’s been some good material that came out of it, and the idea behind it is a good Colbert combination of in-depth political satire (Colbert often takes on political topics that are extremely significant but too arcane even for The Daily Show, and campaign finance is one of them) and blurring the lines between reality and fiction. But it’s been going on and on and on, eating up so much of the show’s time, that I almost dread him bringing it up. Maybe it would be different if it were a less complicated subject, but the amount of explanation it requires means that the comedy value is becoming limited.

Also, as Daniel Walters pointed out on Twitter, the complexity of the process may be obscuring the satirical point the arc is supposed to make. The subject is the domination of politics by money in an era when corporations and people can give unlimited donations and not have to disclose them. But the point is a bit obscured by a lot of the material about the formation of the PAC, the donation process, and the individual donors – it comes of as relatively harmless business-as-usual, which may in fact be the way politicians see the fundraising process. By hammering away at the PAC story so often, he gets us used to the very thing he wanted to get us angry about.

Now, I said that’s a personal reaction because the value of dealing with this subject (which, as I said, nobody else deals with in this kind of depth) may outweigh the repetitiveness of it, and anyway, repetitiveness is part of any arc on a talk show, where the host always has to recap things for the benefit of casual viewers. And the PAC story may pay off as Colbert involves himself in more complicated ways with the 2011-12 election season. But right now I feel like I’d be laughing more if he would let up on the subject and try some wackier stuff.

Apple tops the market

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 2:32 PM - 0 Comments

Apple Inc. is currently the world’s most valuable publicly traded company. The tech titan’s market capitalization, valued at US$341.5 billion, surpassed the world’s largest oil company, Exxon Mobil Corp., worth US$341.5 billion, on Tuesday. Exxon’s shares have fallen by 17 per cent since July 22, while Apple’s have increased by 41 per cent, due to both falling oil prices and the surging popularity of Apple’s iPhone and iPad.

Financial Post

North American markets rebound after Monday plunge

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 12:14 PM - 0 Comments

North American markets edged up in early trading Tuesday after record sell-offs a day earlier saw trillions of dollars in value wiped out from global stocks. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, the NASDAQ, the S&P 500 and the TSX Composite were all up between 1 and 3 per cent by 11 a.m. (ET). But overseas markets continued to slide. Stock markets in Japan, Australian, Hong Kong and South Korea all dropped between 4.5 and 8.5 per cent Tuesday. Some of those losses were clawed back in later trading. The drops come amid twin financial crises in the United States and Europe as well as news out of China on Monday that inflation climbed in July to a three-month high.

Globe and Mail

Spermless mosquitoes could reduce malaria outbreaks

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 12:05 PM - 0 Comments

According to scientists at Imperial College London, releasing spermless male mosquitoes into the wild could reduce outbreaks of malaria, Reuters reports. These scientists managed to sterilize male mosquitoes by genetically modifying them to knock out a gene that’s required for sperm production. They found that females couldn’t tell the difference if the males they mated with were fertile or spermless. In the future, they suggest, it could be possible to control the size of the moquito population by introducing this genetic change. According to the World Health Organization, a child dies of malaria in Africa every 45 seconds.

Reuters

10-year-old hacker finds security flaws in FarmVille

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 12:02 PM - 2 Comments

A 10-year-old girl whose name has not been disclosed, discovered security flaws in smartphone games such as the ever popular ‘FarmVille’, and presented her findings at the Defcon Conference in Las Vegas. Under the hacker alias “CyFi”, she found that in order to quickly advance in the game (part of which involves waiting for virtual farm vegetables to grow), she simply had to manually adjust the time on her phone. She also found that in order to cheat without being detected by the game’s computer, she could disconnect the device from WiFi and change the time in small increments. The girl presented her findings in a competition geared toward finding the next generation of computer security experts.

The Telegraph

Relax, Harper tells investors

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 11:55 AM - 3 Comments

The plummeting stock markets are distracting investors from what’s really important, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said at a business conference in Brazil Tuesday. “We put too much emphasis on this stuff,” he said. “You know, it’s way too easy to focus on the trillions that seem to be made or lost from movements on the markets.” Instead, he said policy makers and business leaders should focus on “a clear, long-term strategy to create jobs and wealth.” The prime minister is in Brazil to strengthen ties and boost trade as part of a four-country tour of Latin America.

Winnipeg Free Press

Canada expels last Libyan diplomats

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 11:52 AM - 0 Comments

The Canadian government has given Libya’s diplomats five days to leave the country and has cut off access to the embassy’s bank accounts, Foreign Minister John Baird announced Tuesday. He says the government took the steps in an effort to further delegitimize Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s regime. Canada is one of the lead nations in a NATO-led mission against the Gadhafi regime, which has conducted an aerial bombing campaign since March. Parliament has voted nearly unanimously to extend the Libya mission until September.

Montreal Gazette

Tory Minister Denis Lebel admits separatist past

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 11:46 AM - 5 Comments

Transport Minister Denis Lebel, MP of the traditionally sovereigntist riding of Roberval-Lac-Saint-Jean and a member of Stephen Harper’s cabinet, has confirmed his former membership with the Bloc Québécois. Lebel says he was a member of the separatist party for eight years, from July 23, 1993, to April 28, 2001. Lebel denies ever having been an “active” member of the party, though he does admit donating money to the organization. He says his commitment is to all of Canada, and not only Quebec.

CBC News

16,000 police to be dispatched into London streets

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 11:38 AM - 0 Comments

London’s Metropolitan Police will dispatch around 16,000 police officers into London’s streets following a third night of rioting in the capital, with violence spreading to other cities such as Birmingham and Liverpool on Tuesday. Prime Minister David Cameron returned from holiday to attend a meeting of Cobra, the government’s emergency committee, and recalled Parliament early on Thursday in order to “stand together in condemnation of these crimes and to stand together in determination to rebuild these communities.” The Met Police is drafting support from 30 other police and security forces and is considering the use plastic bullets. Meanwhile, a 26-year-old man died in hospital after being found shot in a car in the borough of Croydon.

BBC News

Son of murdered N.B. businessman hires defence lawyer

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 11:23 AM - 0 Comments

The son of murdered New Brunswick businessman Dick Oland has hired one of the province’s top defence attorneys, Gary Miller. The Fredericton-area lawyer, who used to head the New Brunswick Criminal Defence Lawyers’ Association, provided few details on his involvement with Oland’s 43-year-old son Dennis, aside from saying that he was hired “a while ago.” More than a month has passed since the murder took place, but police have yet to lay any charges. But they have suggested that Dick Oland was killed by someone he knew. The 69-year-old, whose family runs the Moosehead Brewing Company, was found dead on July 7 in a Saint John office building.

National Post

Ottawa has no business plan behind pledge to consolidate IT networks

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 11:14 AM - 1 Comment

The Conservative government doesn’t have any business plan to follow through on last week’s pledge to create an agency that would consolidate federal information technology networks. Cabinet ministers Tony Clement and Rona Ambrose announced the initiative last week, promising that it will cut the government’s IT costs by at least $100 million per year. But Public Works has so far been unable to explain how those savings were calculated. The idea behind the initiative is to manage the government’s information networks as one entity, rather than as a disparate system of independent networks. Sebastian Bois, a spokesman for Public Works, told Postmedia News that, although no business plan exists over how to consolidate these networks, one will be developed “as we move forward with the new organization.” NDP MP Charlie Angus criticized the government for lack of planning, saying the solution to IT difficulties would be to produce a business plan for Parliament to look at.

Postmedia

‘That’s enough of the military equation for Canada’

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 10:55 AM - 16 Comments

The NDP seems unlikely to support an extension of the Libya mission.

“Come the end of the timeline that we’ve set in Parliament, in September, I think it’s time to say that’s enough of the military equation for Canada, and we need to put our focus on the diplomatic side and the political side,” said NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar. “There’s been success in ensuring that the civilian population is protected, but we do not want to be in a conflict that is ongoing, and no end date.”

John Baird has told the remaining Libyan diplomats in Ottawa to pack their bags.