Yoshihiko Noda to become next PM of Japan

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 11:35 AM - 0 Comments

Japan’s next prime minister is expected to officially take office by Tuesday at the earliest. Yoshihiko Noda, 54, won a televised leadership vote of the governing Democratic Party of Japan on Monday night. The vote came after Naoto Kan stepped down just 14 months into his tenure as prime minister. Kan’s public support tanked in the wake of the 11.0 magnitude earthquake and ensuing tsunami that left an estimated 20,000 people dead and massive stretches of Japanese coastline in ruins. His support slipped further in the fallout of the ongoing nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi reactors. Noda will take the helm of the Japanese government at a time when the world’s largest economy is hampered by massive public debt and political dysfunction. Noda will be the sixth prime minister since 2006. The reputed fiscal conservative is expected to focus on reducing Japan’s debt, partly by doubling the country-wide sales tax to 10 per cent. Noda is also rumoured to support the notion of an emergency governing coalition with opposition parties in the nation’s legislature. “There are no sides now,” said Noda after winning Monday’s leadership contest. “Let us sweat together for the sake of the people.”

The Globe and Mail

Irene leaves path of destruction as it enters eastern Canada

By macleans.ca - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 11:14 AM - 0 Comments

After tropical storm Irene lashed the eastern seaboard of the United States with heavy wind and rains over the weekend, millions of people remain without power and others are stranded or homeless due to extensive flooding in many areas. So far, 21 deaths have been attributed to Irene. “The impacts of this storm will be felt for some time, and the recovery effort will last for weeks or longer,” said U.S. President Barack Obama in an address Sunday night. Flooding has washed out roads in several states, and many homes have been lifted clear off their foundations. In Vermont, at least four bridges have been destroyed and one woman killed in the worst flooding the state as seen in more than 80 years. The storm was designated as post-tropical on Monday as it moved over eastern Quebec and the Maritimes. A semblance of regularity also resumed in New York City, as the area’s three major airports reopened, subway service resumed and the stock exchange opened on schedule Monday morning.

CNN

Put an End To All Derisions

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 11:09 AM - 0 Comments

Due to a delay in putting together another post, here’s a clip I circulated on Twitter (after being tipped off to it by the Warner Archive, which I think may have found it on Mark Evanier’s blog). It’s from 1969 on the ABC show Hollywood Palace, and seems to sum up everything about
a) Why we shouldn’t be too anxious for variety shows to come back and
b) How the Establishment managed to co-opt the hippie free love stuff and turn it into old-school entertainment.

In fact, depending on what year Matt Weiner wants to end the show, this could be a deeply symbolic ending for Mad Men.

Don’t underestimate Apple’s contributions

By Peter Nowak - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 11:07 AM - 4 Comments

Photo by Tony…/Flickr

I’m back from my short vacation and what’s the first thing I see? A character assassination attempt by my fellow blogger Jesse Brown.

Just kidding. I have nothing but respect for Jesse and love his stuff (his interview a few years back with Jim Prentice, where the industry minister hung up on him, is one of my all-time favourites). He messaged me while I was gone to ask if I was okay with him rebutting my blog post the other day about Steve Jobs and Apple’s importance to technology over the past decade. Of course I was, so he had at it.

To summarize, Jesse challenged my assertions that Apple changed everything with a slew of products that included the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone and the iPad. He went on to say that Google has been the far more important technology company over the past 10 years. Continue…

A baking test with stone-milled flour

By Jacob Richler - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 2 Comments

Photographs by Andrew Tolson

Some weeks back, a friend of mine returned from a lamb-eating expedition to Charlevoix, on the north shore of the St. Lawrence, with the thoughtful and intriguing gift of a bag of flour from an old Quebec mill. A very old Quebec mill called Laterrière at Les Éboulements, which was built around 1790 and functions today precisely as it did then, via the combined forces of water power, grindstones, and a miller named Tremblay (Jean-Guy, the current meunier, is a descendant of the original owner, Jean-François).

What’s more, the flour in the bag is made exclusively from wheat grown on those same nearby fields that were once part of the seigneury that the mill was built to service.

Pretty nifty, it seemed to me. A nice one-kilo bag of culinary history to keep on my desk. But what I really wanted to know was what it tasted like, as bread.

Continue…

And that’s the kind of life it’s been

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 2 Comments

CTV; The Toronto Star; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

It was two decades ago that the media first started asking Lloyd Robertson when he was finally going to retire. We’re talking 1991, the year of Bush the elder’s Iraq war, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Brian Mulroney was prime minister and the GST came into effect. Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and that Coke can were a hot topic. A time so distant that a Kevin Costner movie won the Best Picture Oscar. Nirvana, then the world’s hottest band, is now played on “oldie” stations.

Robertson, CTV’s éminence orange, was just 57, but had already been anchoring the network’s national news for 15 years, and before that had been a CBC fixture for another 22. “I always thought I’d be out of there by now, that someone would come along and tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, you’re getting long in the tooth—get out,’ ” he told the Montreal Gazette. Absent the push, the trick, said the anchor, was to “pick a time that’s obvious to you and your audience.” He mused about the big 6-0. It’s possible that some people even believed him.

Should all go according to plan, Robertson will actually step down this Sept. 1. Now 77, and with a combined 41 years behind the anchor’s desk at CBC and CTV, he is the longest-serving national anchor in North American TV history. Not exactly a retirement, since Robertson plans to continue on in his other job co-hosting the current affairs show W5, and will appear for some special event coverage. But it brings an end to his nightly television presence, and an era in Canadian broadcasting.

Continue…

Panic on the playground

By Cynthia Reynolds - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 20 Comments

Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images

When it comes to playground safety, New York isn’t taking any chances. In June, police ticketed two women eating doughnuts on a bench inside one of the city’s public playgrounds; another doughnut-eating pair on a nearby bench also received tickets. The quartet, who had bought their snacks from a cramped doughnut shop across the street, had broken the same municipal law as a group of seven men who were ticketed last winter while playing chess at another playground. They disobeyed a sign posted at the entrance, forbidding adults from entering—part of the city’s measures to safeguard kids. “It’s pedophile panic,” says New York writer Lenore Skenazy, author of Free-Range Kids and host of new reality show Bubble Wrap Kids, which will debut this winter. “We think everyone is a pedophile until proven otherwise.”

While the doughnut eaters will have to appear in court this summer to learn their punishment, other U.S. cities, including Miami Beach and San Francisco, also have measures in place banning adults from entering public playgrounds unless they are accompanied by a child. Though Pocatello, Idaho, doesn’t have such measures, it shares in the spirit: in July, after witnessing an older man snapping pictures at a playground, a mother angrily confronted him and chased him away. The police were alerted along with the local news, which issued a detailed description of a “suspicious man spotted taking pictures of children,” driving a “tan/brown van.” Shortly after, the man in question called the police and identified himself. He had been photographing his grandson; the only reason he left, he added, was because a woman was yelling at him.

Continue…

Hit me again, Mr. Smith

By Alex Ballingall - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 10:45 AM - 0 Comments

Marco De Swart/AFP/Getty Images

Down a nearly deserted back alley in Toronto’s east end, behind an unmarked blue door, Ilia Danef is going through his regular morning routine. He changes out of his dress pants into a pair of athletic shorts, then drops to the floor and starts doing push-ups on a mat. Next he gets up, wraps his hands in red cloth and pops a rubber mouthguard over his teeth. Minutes later, Danef is getting punched in the face.

This isn’t how most 40-year-old corporate lawyers start their mornings—but then, Danef isn’t your typical suit. He’s a practising Muay Thai fighter with a brown belt in karate, and part of a growing trend: more and more otherwise regular people are spending much of their spare time training in martial arts gyms across the country. They aren’t just doing it to lose weight or get fit. People like Danef—with families, gruelling workweeks and other responsibilities—train to fight.

“It’s a completely different lifestyle than I’m used to,” admits Danef, a partner at Heenan Blaikie, one of Canada’s largest law firms. He’s a mild-mannered and approachable man who, despite being officially “over the hill,” looks decidedly youthful.

Continue…

The demise of the HST

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 10:44 AM - 30 Comments

Stephen Gordon considers British Columbia’s rejection of the HST.

For an economics professor who has spent much of the past six years trying to bridge the wide — and apparently broadening — gap between what is known to economists and the talking points that are the stuff of politics, the B.C. HST referendum is an unsurprising disappointment.

Who cares about libraries?

By John Geddes - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 13 Comments

Andrew Tolson

To hear the uproar in Toronto, an avid book borrower might be forgiven for imagining that Canadian libraries are coming under financial siege. The administration of the city’s right-leaning, populist mayor, Rob Ford, is taking a hard look at closing branches of the Toronto Public Library to cut costs. That prospect has drawn fire from novelist Margaret Atwood and director Norman Jewison, and sparked petitions and angry public meetings. The debate will continue as the city’s budget deliberations stretch into the fall. News from abroad gives Toronto library enthusiasts ample reason to be worried—state and local spending squeezes have led to closures or curtailed hours in the U.S., and British libraries are also struggling.

Yet top Canadian librarians do not see the Toronto scrap as a sign that the international malaise has arrived here. They point to upbeat developments in other Canadian cities. Just when Atwood was launching her Twitter war with Ford in late July, Calgary’s city council voted to earmark $135 million for a new central library, along with $40 million it had already set aside for the ambitious project. The oil field capital will have to build a spectacular temple to books to outshine Surrey, B.C., which is slated to open its curvaceous, Bing Thom-designed, $36-million City Centre Library later this month, or Halifax, which is spending $55 million on a European-inspired, architecturally adventurous downtown library, slated to open in early 2014.

These and other gleaming new libraries are only the most obvious indicators of seemingly solid political support for free reading. “The economic situation in the U.S. has seen some serious library casualties,” says Karen Adams, president of the Canadian Library Association and the University of Manitoba’s director of libraries. “But Canada has been spared most of those kinds of stresses.” One reason is the comparative health of public finances in Canada, where government deficits are generally less crushing than in other rich countries. As well, aversion among Canadian politicians to taxation to fund services is far less fervid than in the U.S.

Continue…

No smoking, please

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 1 Comment

ABC

You can show anything on network television these days—except lighted cigarettes. The producers of ABC’s new show Pan Am, about stewardesses in the 1960s, have announced that the network will not allow them to show the characters smoking. Producer Thomas Schlamme told Entertainment Weekly that this is “the one revisionist cheat” in a show that will otherwise try to get period detail right. Though TV characters on shows like Two and a Half Men are sometimes shown smoking cigars, cigarettes have become taboo on broadcast television due to what Schlamme calls the “impressionable element,” the fear of influencing viewers. (It doesn’t help that, unlike liquor, cigarettes can’t be advertised on TV, so the networks can’t make money plugging the products.) But shows on cable have no such fear of bad influence: the characters on Mad Men light up all the time. Of course, it helps that hardly anyone is watching.

Sweet Micky’s sour start in Haiti

By Richard Warnica - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 9:45 AM - 0 Comments

Thony Belizaire/AFP/Getty Images

Haitian President Michel Martelly rode to power on a wave of popular sentiment last spring. But three months after his inauguration, “Sweet Micky,” as the former pop star is known, is finding government a bit tougher than showbiz.
Continue…

Back to work

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 17 Comments

Olivia Chow politely brushes aside questions. Gary Doer’s friends and associates say he likely won’t seek the NDP leadership. Brian Topp acknowledges he is considering a run. The race is now on.

“The leadership race effectively begins Monday morning, I would say,” Mr. Martin said. “It won’t be a divisive race, it will be a uniting experience and respectful experience,” Mr. Martin said. “That’s the tone Jack has set; he’s raised the bar for civility in political discourse in this country, and the first demonstration is going to be a very interesting but respectful leadership race.”

Greg Fingas reviews some of the potential contenders.

Hockey Night in Barrie: NHL meets MPs

By Mitchel Raphael - Sunday, August 28, 2011 at 6:14 PM - 2 Comments

Ontario Conservative MP Patrick Brown’s annual Hockey Night in Barrie continues to grow. Each year the charity fundraiser for the Royal Victoria Hospital has MPs and NHL players sharing the ice for a game.

Continue…

This is the week that was

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, August 28, 2011 at 1:10 PM - 0 Comments

Final thoughts

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, August 27, 2011 at 10:48 PM - 2 Comments

Thoughts on this weekend and this week from Marcus Gee, John Ibbitson, Sandra Martin and Chris Selley.

I only met Layton once, in his final and finest office on Parliament Hill. Judging by the stories and anecdotes I saw this week, in print and in voice and in chalk, two million or so Canadians knew him better, and believed he was genuinely interested in their lives — “a man of the people who made everyone feel special,” as Shawn Atleo said. Love him or hate him, this is pretty much what politics is supposed to be.

Mike Layton’s eulogy is here. Sarah Campbell’s eulogy is here. The prepared text of Karl Belanger’s eulogy is below. Continue…

Photo gallery: Jack Layton’s state funeral in Toronto

By macleans.ca - Saturday, August 27, 2011 at 10:15 PM - 0 Comments

Brent Hawkes’ eulogy

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, August 27, 2011 at 9:21 PM - 7 Comments

The eulogy delivered by Reverend Brent Hawkes.

Goodbye Jack

By macleans.ca - Saturday, August 27, 2011 at 8:06 PM - 4 Comments

Thousands gathered in Toronto on Saturday to say a final farewell to Jack Layton, whose life was commemorated in a moving ceremony at Roy Thomson Hall. The state funeral followed a procession through downtown, in which Layton’s wife, NDP MP Olivia Chow, and children, Mike and Sarah, followed the hearse on foot. Stephen Lewis eulogized the late NDP leader, calling Layton’s final letter, written just before his death, a “manifesto for social democracy.” Mike, a Toronto city councilor, and Sarah, who works at the Stephen Lewis Foundation, both gave moving tributes to their father in French and English. Musical tributes included a rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” by Steven Page of the Barenaked Ladies, and Lorraine Segato of The Parachute Club, who performed ”Rise Up,” the group’s 1983 hit and an NDP anthem. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, his wife Laureen, Governor General David Johnston, and some 1,700 other invited guests were in attendance. Layton died of cancer on August 22, 2011, at the age of 61. The national outpouring of grief for a politician who has never led a government or sat in cabinet is without precedent.

‘Let’s not look behind us, let’s look forward’

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, August 27, 2011 at 7:53 PM - 0 Comments

The video shown during the service for Jack Layton this afternoon.

Stephen Lewis’ eulogy

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, August 27, 2011 at 5:17 PM - 35 Comments

The prepared text of Stephen Lewis’ eulogy for Jack Layton.

Never, in our collective lifetime, have we seen such an outpouring, so much emotional intensity, from every corner of this country. There have been occasions, historically, when we’ve seen respect and admiration, but never so much love, never such a shocked sense of personal loss.

Jack was so alive, so much fun, so engaged in daily life with so much gusto, so unpretentious, that it was hard, while he lived, to focus on how incredibly important he was to us —until he was so suddenly gone. Cruelly gone. At the pinnacle of his career.

To hear so many Canadians speak open-heartedly of love, to see young and old take chalk in hand to write, without embarrassment, of hope, or hang banners from overpasses to express their grief and loss…. It’s astonishing. Somehow Jack connected with Canadians in a way that vanquished the cynicism that corrodes our political culture … he connected whether you knew him or you didn’t know him; whether you were with him or against him.

Continue…

The Commons: A life lived

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, August 27, 2011 at 4:31 PM - 7 Comments

Jack Layton didn’t want a funeral. He wanted a “celebration of life.” And so that’s what it was. Not just a celebration of a life—though it certainly was that—but a celebration of life.

As the Reverend Brent Hawkes—our guide for this afternoon—said at the outset: we would cry together, but we would laugh together. And so everyone, together, did just that. They cried and they laughed. But not just that: they also cheered and they sang. They prayed and they mourned. They stood and they applauded.

“Jack was so alive,” said Stephen Lewis, the first of four to eulogize the man.

And so was the celebration that brought an end to this remarkable week. Continue…

In memoriam

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, August 27, 2011 at 2:00 PM - 5 Comments

The official program for this afternoon’s service can be downloaded here.

‘He said he believed in them’

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, August 27, 2011 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

A Torontonian remembers her time with Jack Layton.

Not only did Layton accept, but he spent two hours that summer afternoon on a walking tour of the neighbourhood, listening to them talk about problems with community housing, schools, a lack of recreational facilities and, ultimately, a lack of jobs.

“No one was doing anything for them,” Davis said, “but he did. He told them they had to get involved in order to change their lives and that they were as good and intelligent as anybody else. He said he believed in them and that they could improve their lives if they would believe in themselves.”