Week in Pictures: September 12th – 18th 2011

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 11:32 AM - 0 Comments

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Week in Pictures: September 12th – 18th 2011

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Kenya pipeline explosion

Joseph Mwangi, 34, sits in a state of shock after discovering the charred remains of two of his children, one aged 6 the other of unknown age, at the scene of a fuel explosion in Nairobi, Kenya, on Sept. 12, 2011. A leaking gasoline pipeline in Kenya's capital exploded on Monday, turning part of a slum into an inferno in which scores of people were killed and more than 100 hurt. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

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Libyan forces attack remaining Gadhafi strongholds

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 11:07 AM - 0 Comments

Militant forces belonging to Libya’s new government are pushing into two of the remaining Gadhafi loyalist strongholds, sending hundreds of troops and tanks into the cities of Sirte and Bani Walid. Reuters reported on Friday that government forces have seized a key valley leading into Bani Walid, which is located 180 km south of Tripoli. A commander told the BBC that his forces are advancing into “the heart of Bani Walid” and that they hope to hold Friday prayers in the city after vanquishing the Gadhafi loyalists. In Sirte, Gadhafi’s birthplace on the Mediterranean coast, government forces have also reported making advances, although there remains heavy resistance from pro-Gadhafi fighters. According to the BBC, at least four government troops have been killed there so far.

BBC News

REVIEW: In my time

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 10:57 AM - 6 Comments

Cheney’s unapologetic memoir, which stretches from a modest childhood in Nebraska and Wyoming to his rise as the most powerful vice-president in history, saves its emotional energy for settling scores, especially against fellow members of the administration of George W. Bush. (One of the few tidbits he does reveal: the secure “undisclosed location” to which he was so often consigned after 9/11 was not some cave bunker but often his own home or the woodsy presidential retreat of Camp David.) On policy, Cheney has few regrets. “One of the most significant accomplishments” of Bush’s presidency, he writes, was “the liberation of Iraq and the establishment of a true democracy in the Arab world.”

The book describes Cheney’s outsized influence in the first Bush term and increasing marginalization in the second. While he successfully pushed for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, by the summer of 2007 he could not persuade Bush to bomb a Syrian nuclear reactor. “After I finished, the president asked, ‘Does anyone here agree with the vice president?’ Not a single hand went up around the room.” Cheney saves his harshest words for Bush’s two secretaries of state. He accuses Condoleezza Rice of misleading Bush while fumbling disarmament talks with North Korea (“We were promising rewards for their duplicity”) and naively seeking diplomatic engagement with villains. “In meeting after meeting, it seemed we had to argue against yet another misguided approach from the State Department.” And Colin Powell is painted as a disloyal colleague who criticizes Bush’s policies to others but not to the president’s face.

The world according to Cheney is dangerous and needs American power. When defence secretary Robert Gates tells the Saudis in late 2007 that Bush would be impeached if he took military action against Iran’s nuclear program, Cheney is livid: Gates “removed a key element of our leverage.” But Cheney’s will not be the last word. Rice’s political memoir is due out Nov. 1.

NHL prepared for Lokomotiv-like catastrophe

By Colby Cosh - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Alexey Nikolsky/AFP/Getty Images

The catastrophe that annihilated Russian hockey team Lokomotiv Yaroslavl last week was terrible—but not unthinkable. Every top athlete with any significant service time has air-charter horror stories, and while the major North American pro sports have been spared, it is by the narrowest of margins.

In 2009, litigation surrounding the bankruptcy and aborted sale of the Phoenix Coyotes led to the NHL’s hitherto closely guarded bylaws being put on the public record. Those bylaws include an “Emergency Rehabilitation Plan” (ERP) that activates if an NHL club loses five or more players to death or disability in a single incident. Each team is required under the bylaw to carry a catastrophe-insurance policy of $1 million per lost player. The plan foresees an initial, voluntary effort to bring the affected team back up to playing strength, with the insurance money being used to bid for players in outright sale.

Remaining roster holes would be filled in an “ERP draft,” with the other teams protecting one goalie and 10 skaters. Only one player per contributing team could be sold or claimed, and the drafting club would be allowed to replace its losses only on a position-by-position basis. It’s a fascinating exercise for hockey fans to imagine—and one they hope never to see performed.

Who ya got?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 10:35 AM - 2 Comments

NDP MPs Robert Aubin, Francois Lapointe, Jamie Nicholls, Marie-Claude Morin, Alexandrine Latendresse, Pierre Nantel and Claude Patry pledge their support for Thomas Mulcair’s as-yet-undeclared NDP leadership bid.

Rathika Sitsabaiesan and Brian Masse side with Peter Julian.

And later today, Romeo Saganash will announce his support for Brian Topp.

Juliette Lewis liked my purse!

By Jessica Allen - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Jeff Vespa/Getty Images

A novice navigating Toronto International Film Festival nightlife on the opening Friday and Saturday eves of the festival—the only nights, the pros will tell you, that guarantee spotting gaggles of A-list celebrities—is a comedy of errors. Mistakes are inevitable, like leaving George Strombolopolous’s party at ONE restaurant uptown on Friday night in order to get downtown to Soho House—a pop-up club sponsored by Grey Goose in an old brick building—because Twitter, the all-knowing oracle of TIFF, which was difficult to consult earlier (because there was dinner with Harvey Weinstein to report on), says that the cast of Ides of March, including George Clooney, Ryan Reynolds and Philip Seymour Hoffman, are there, not to mention Mark Wahlberg, who has got behind the bar to make cocktails for himself and his entourage, and Tilda Swinton, who is at this very moment eating dinner. Of course, upon arrival, the stars have left and Swinton is out of sight.

And then at 2:30 a.m., after getting home empty-handed from Goodnight, a back-alley bar that was last year’s hot spot for Toronto elites and Hollywood A-listers, Twitter professes that Jon Hamm, Gerard Butler, Bono and others ended up at ONE, where the night began.

Still, even novices have some successes: at the Vanity Fair-Belvedere-Fox Searchlight party at Scarpetta on Saturday night, where Clooney and Bono enjoyed dinner, Kirsten Dunst sits in a corner, fresh-faced and pretty in a polka-dot blouse and floor-length breezy skirt, sipping on a cocktail and attending to her BlackBerry. A tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed gent in a sharp suit tries to get her attention. But Dunst acknowledges his presence only after finishing her cellular task. “Oh, hey Alex,” she smiles coyly. That would be Alexander Skarsgård, who stars with Dunst in Lars Von Trier’s Melancholia. Tonight he’s all smiles and happily obliges fans who politely ask for cellphone photo ops. As a woman passes her BlackBerry to her husband, the Swedish True Blood star grins, wraps one arm around her waist while holding a pint of beer behind his back and contorts his face into a smouldering frown replete with puckered lips and a singular raised eyebrow. He’s become his vampire character, Eric. And then it’s the novice’s turn: Juliette Lewis, who is far less severe-looking in person than she is in photos, grabs hold of her vintage sparkly purse and turns it over for inspection. “I like this.”

Continue…

Good news, bad news: Sept. 8-15

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

Libyans celebrate Moammar Gadhafi's ouster in Martyrs' Square (Anis Mili/Reuters)

Together now

On the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 last weekend, Americans grieved and nerves were frayed over warnings of potential repeat attacks, but the occasion passed peacefully. And with ceremonies, remembrances and rousing displays of patriotism at packed football and baseball stadiums, it perhaps even drew Americans closer at a time when the nation is badly divided politically and its economic future looks bleak. The event offered a reminder that there’s hope even in the darkest periods.

A step forward

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird announced this week that Canada will reopen its embassy in Libya. Diplomatic officials are already on the ground in Tripoli. Baird also said Ottawa will release $2.2 billion in Libyan assets that had been frozen during the uprising against Moammar Gadhafi. While isolated fighting continues with remaining Gadhafi loyalists, the hunt continues to capture the former strongman. Last week Interpol issued arrest warrants for Gadhafi, one of his sons and his intelligence chief for alleged crimes against humanity.

Continue…

Adventures in Afghanistan’s ‘Nothing Land’

By Emma Teitel - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 1 Comment

Ahmad Masood/Reuters

The BBC’s famous mockumentary The Office has inspired numerous copycats since its inception in 2001. America’s NBC adaptation, which is about to start its eighth season, popularized actor Steve Carell’s socially inept character, Michael Scott, a paper company manager with a penchant for political incorrectness, sexual indiscretions and a fascination with Meryl Streep. More recent contemporaries are no different: most versions of comedian Ricky Gervais’s original Office production, from France’s Le Bureau to Quebec’s La Job, come complete with almost interchangeable office antics. Every version, that is, except one: an Afghan TV station, Tolo, aired its own Office-style series this summer called The Ministry, replacing office politics with real ones.

The eight-episode series (season two is set to air in October) takes place in a fictional country mirroring Afghanistan, called “Hechland” (translation from Dari: “Nothing Land”), and follows the shenanigans of Hechland’s Ministry of Garbage and its narcissistic minister, Dawlat—played by Abdul Qadir Farookh of the The Kite Runner. Farookh is one of the only actors with professional experience on the production—a Kabul apartment flat converted to a studio by the show’s producers. “Everyone on set is in training,” says 31-year-old Abazar Khayami, one of the show’s senior producers. “But we took our disadvantage and made it into an advantage.”

There is no official television rating system in Afghanistan, but Khayami says it’s obvious The Ministry is one of the most popular shows in the country, as its actors are frequently recognized on the streets and invited into politicians’ homes for dinner. The series’ plots range from government corruption and nepotism to gender inequality and suicide bombings. In one episode, Dawlat the minister (a former New York cab driver who earned his job through pure nepotism) pays off the wrong warlord, setting off a string of suicide bombings he was supposed to prevent. “Nothing is taboo,” says Khayami, noting that things would probably be very different if the show made fun of the Afghan government in a direct, rather than veiled way. “When they are alone in their homes,” he says of real-life government officials, “I like to think they watch the show and laugh. But if we had gone that extra inch and called it Afghanistan [instead of Hechland] and poked direct fun at the administration, then it might be a different story. We’ll never know.”

Continue…

Did the police help Randall Hopley get Kienan Hebert home safe?

By Colby Cosh - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 17 Comments

It is impossible not to feel an odd gratitude toward Randall Hopley, the suspect in a child abduction case that captured Canada’s imagination last week. On Sept. 6, Kienan Hebert, a blond, plump-cheeked three-year-old with seven siblings, was tucked into bed in his home in Sparwood, a coal-mining town in B.C.’s southeast corner. When the family awoke, Kienan was gone. Suspicion quickly focused on 46-year-old Hopley, a local handyman with a record of property offences and an apparent unnatural interest in children.

Hopley was described as “borderline retarded” by one of his lawyers, yet he eluded police for days. At around 3 a.m. on Sunday, the boy was somehow returned to the temporarily unoccupied Hebert home without being detected. Kienan, found dozing in an armchair, was unharmed. He played Frisbee on his lawn the next morning.

The Heberts’ house is surrounded by empty lots, and unless “goat trails” count, there is just one road into the subdivision from either direction. It would be difficult to find a domicile more suitable for surveillance, but the police had no explanation for Hopley’s feat. RCMP spokesman Cpl. Dan Moskaluk called it “chilling” at first, but later hinted, “we facilitated [Kienan’s] return.”

Continue…

Nike release limited edition shoes hearkening back to “Back to the Future 2″

By Kate Lunau - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 2 Comments

Nike

Pop culture fans rejoiced on Sept. 9 as Nike announced it was releasing 1,500 pairs of the 2011 Nike MAG shoe, a replica of the futuristic high-tops sported by Marty McFly in Back to the Future 2. With a starting bid of 99 cents on eBay, they were going for $2,000 within 20 minutes. (Proceeds go to the Michael J. Fox Foundation.)

It isn’t the first time Nike’s tapped into this nostalgia. In 2008, it released a limited edition basketball shoe in similar colours to Mcfly’s high-tops; and in 2010, news broke that Nike had patented an “automatic lacing system,” suggesting a release of McFly’s self-lacing sneaker was imminent. (The new MAGs don’t self-lace.) Nike CEO Mark Parker has called it the “greatest shoe never made,” and it will probably stay that way. Instead of releasing it to the masses, Nike can keep doing limited editions—coasting on fans’ goodwill like Marty McFly on a hoverboard.

Too many bureaucrats, not enough troops

By Paul Wells - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 28 Comments

Cpl Bruno Turcotte/DND

Why was a Canadian military with 65,000 men and women on active duty and 25,000 reservists sorely tested by the task of keeping 1,500 soldiers in the field in Afghanistan? Why are Arctic sovereignty patrols a strain on the same military? The way Andrew Leslie sees it, it’s because the Canadian Forces’ tail has grown bigger than its teeth.

“We have the same number, or slightly more people, in Ottawa that we have in the Royal Canadian Navy—20,000,” Leslie was saying the other day. By “Ottawa,” he meant the personnel working in command and support functions at National Defence headquarters, not far from Parliament Hill.

So that’s about as many people riding desks as the Canadian Forces has riding boats. “And we have a lot of coastline,” said Leslie, who until the first week of September was a lieutenant-general in the Canadian Forces. “And we have really busy ships’ crews.”

Continue…

In the shadow of 9/11

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 2 Comments

Photography by Greg Locke

Last week in St. John’s, Maclean’s and CPAC hosted a round-table conversation entitled, “How has 9/11 changed our world?” In this wide-ranging discussion of the emotional, practical, political and cultural fallout in the decade following the attacks, Maclean’s columnists Andrew Coyne and Paul Wells were joined on the stage by David Collenette, Canada’s minister of transport at the time of 9/11 attacks, Sukanya Pillay, director of the national security program for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and Tarek Fatah, political activist, author, broadcaster and founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress. The discussion was moderated by CPAC’s Peter Van Dusen. The following is an edited excerpt.

Andrew Coyne: I don’t know what future historians will make of the grand sweep of September 11 and its place in world history, but there’s no doubt the last 10 years of our lives have been in the shadow of it and very much dominated by it. If there’s one thing that we should certainly remember on this anniversary it is the nature of the threat that al-Qaeda presented and still to some extent presents. It is, I think, unique and new, something new in world history, the combination of the willingness to inflict casualties on just an enormous scale, and the technological capacity married with it. I do think, though, we should, if we’re putting everything in the balance, take stock of the fact that 10 years later we have seriously degraded al-Qaeda’s capacity. We’ll discuss a lot of the pros and cons of how the battle has been fought, but I just want to leave people with the impression that it was a battle worth fighting, and it’s been broadly successful.

Paul Wells: The question before us is how did his happen, and I think it’s a combination of two things, extremism—or, to use a simpler term, evil—on one side, and complacency on the other. The extremism persists, and the complacency is gone, but it’s important to understand what those 19 men in those airplanes were trying to do: they were trying to provoke the West. The nature of asymmetrical warfare is you use the limited means at your disposal to essentially trip up a much larger and more powerful opponent, and to some extent those 19 men have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. We have to keep our vigilance up, we have to keep working. This is not a war that is going to go away just because a zero comes up at the end of the anniversaries. I think we are still in this for a very long time, which is why we have to make sure that, in defending our values, we don’t betray them.

Continue…

Newsmakers: Sept. 8-15

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Geoff Pugh/WPA/Getty

Sacked

Peyton Manning played his first professional football game in 1998. Over the next 13 years, the Indianapolis Colts quarterback didn’t miss a single start, suiting up for 227 consecutive kickoffs. But that gridiron streak—and his team’s hope for a Super Bowl berth—were tackled last week when Manning underwent a second round of neck surgery that is certain to keep him on the sidelines for the rest of the season. (For those fans who won’t recognize him without a jersey, he’ll be the guy wearing a cervical collar.) Who will replace Manning on the line of scrimmage? One name being bandied about is Brett Favre, the legendary quarterback who holds the record for consecutive starts (297). Favre, of course, says he is happily retired. But we’ve heard that before. Twice.

On the ropes

When Arturo “Thunder” Gatti was found dead in a Brazilian vacation home two years ago, local police concluded that the Montreal boxer had committed suicide. But a recent re-examination of the evidence—and some stunning courtroom testimony—have pointed the finger at someone else: Gatti’s widow, Amanda Rodrigues. In a report now being reviewed by the original investigators, a team of U.S. experts says the boxer’s body contained severe head wounds consistent with a beating, and that the official finding (that Gatti hung himself with a purse strap) is “pure, unadulterated fiction.” Meanwhile, during a court battle over Gatti’s $6-million estate, one friend testified that Rodrigues was an abusive wife who threatened her husband, sucker-punched him on numerous occasions, and forced him to rewrite his will just three weeks before his death.

Sino-Canadian relations

If Bob Dechert was smiling on the evening of April 19, 2010, as he stood to vote in the House of Commons, he was apparently not simply delighting in the democratic process. “If you have time, watch on TV or on your computer . . . and I will smile at you,” he wrote to Shi Rong, a journalist with China’s Xinhua News Agency. The parliamentary secretary to the minister of foreign affairs was forced to acknowledge that note and a series of other “flirtatious” emails after his missives were distributed around Ottawa last week. Dechert’s official biography describes him as a married man and he says his relationship with Shi was “innocent,” but security analysts fret that his correspondence with a member of China’s state-run news service raises concerns about national security and espionage. The Prime Minister’s Office says it has no information to indicate Dechert did anything inappropriate.

Continue…

Can Stephen Harper save hockey?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 9 Comments

The editors of this magazine raise the possibility that the Prime Minister might have a role to play in reforming hockey.

“Football is on trial,” Roosevelt told the coaches. “Because I believe in the game, I want to do all I can to save it.” While Roosevelt took no effort to dictate what changes ought to be made, with his encouragement the sport completely reinvented itself. The forward pass became legal. First downs required 10 yards, rather than five, which helped open up the game. Plays that put players’ heads and necks at risk were explicitly prohibited. A game characterized by massive pileups, broken necks and eye gouging went on to become the most popular spectator sport in the U.S. today.

Politicians obviously have no business micromanaging sport, but our Prime Minister could use his stature to encourage hockey to abandon its violent status quo in favour of something new and better, as Roosevelt did. 

Back in the USSR . . . on LSD

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, September 16, 2011 at 1:24 AM - 2 Comments

A scene from 'Generation P'

As journalists at TIFF, we spend most of our time chasing Important Movies and bagging celebrity interviews. As a result, we don’t have time to enjoy the most exclusive activity a film festival has to offer: discovering far-flung curiosities of world cinema. So at some point during TIFF, I like to go off-road and see something wild. A few days ago, I found that opportunity, utterly by chance. After seeing the Neil Young documentary with my wife and son—a rare festival family outing—we were looking for a drink in the Lightbox and got dragged into a party for visiting filmmakers. I ended up sitting beside a genial director named Victor Ginzburg, who was born in Russia and emigrated to the U.S. in his teens. After our conversation, I was intrigued enough that I had to see his film.

He’s directed a feature in TIFF’s Vanguard program called Generation P, a hallucinogenic satire set in Moscow after the fall of the Soviet Union. It may well be one of the wildest films at the festival. It mixes the Chechen mafia, a dancing Boris Yeltsin, spin doctors fronting a Babylonian cult, computer-generated virtual polticians, Marshall McLuhan, magic mushrooms, LSD, and vast whorls of cocaine forming a mandala on a Persian rug.  Generation P—the P stands for Pepsi—has the freaky fizz of Terry Gilliam‘s Brazil, infused with the kind of barking-mad post-Soviet surrealism practiced by Dusan Makavejev and Emir Kusturica. Continue…

Diefenbaker, Jr.?

By Charlie Gillis - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 8:40 PM - 2 Comments

Andrew Tolson/Maclean's

A Toronto man who believes he is John Diefenbaker’s biological son will get a chance to prove his lineage after all.

The Diefenbaker Canada Centre in Saskatoon, Sask., agreed today to grant access to personal artifacts in its collection to help George Dryden obtain a DNA sample and determine whether the late prime minister is his father.

“As previously indicated, we have sympathy for Mr. Dryden’s situation and are willing to help where possible,” wrote Michael Atkinson, the director of the centre, in a letter to Dryden’s lawyer Stephen Edell, and obtained by Macleans.ca. Continue…

Fight promotion

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 5:12 PM - 4 Comments

The NDP is touting its readiness to fight the government’s “lawful access” legislation.

“What we have been hearing from experts and citizen is that this new law gives the government and police way too much power to snoop into our lives,” said New Democrat Privacy and Digital Affairs Critic Charlie Angus (Timmins—James Bay). “Canadians are right to feel that the Conservatives are not protecting their privacy and that we need to curb this bill.”

Over the summer Angus has been putting in place a team of MPs to work with civil society groups, stakeholders and citizens to fight against lawful access legislation both in and out of parliament.

“Spearheading” the fight at the justice committee will be Charmaine Borg, one of the NDP’s undergrads.

Michael Shannon on his turn in ‘Take Shelter’

By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 4:41 PM - 0 Comments

CSIS and the NDS

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 4:38 PM - 7 Comments

The Security Intelligence Review Committee has released its review of how CSIS handled Afghan detainees and its relationship with Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security.

The Service’s relationship with the NDS consisted of [REDCATED] exchanges of information, [REDACTED].

Notwithstanding this productive working relationship, CSIS’s assessment of the NDS was both cautious and measured. [REDACTED] CSIS continued to stress that most allegations of human rights abuses were unconfirmed, [REDACTED].

In the course of this review, SIRC found no indication that in the period during which they conducted detainee interviews, CSIS officers posted to Afghanistan ever had firsthand knowledge of abuse, mistreatment or torture of detainees by Afghan authorities.

Dirty jokes abound at amFAR Cinema Against AIDS gala

By Jessica Allen - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 4:27 PM - 1 Comment

Courtesy of amFAR

I’ve been told that last year’s amFAR Cinema Against AIDS Gala at The Carlu was one of the most dazzling attractions at TIFF. (No wonder, considering tickets start at $1,000 and tables go for $25,000.) This year, more than 500 guests, mostly dressed in black ties and really fancy floor-length gowns, saddled up to eat dinner (more on that later), watch host Kathy Griffin swear like a f–king trucker, listen to amFAR chairman Kenneth Cole give a fantastic speech on recent advances in AIDS research, try to get a photo with amFAR chair Kim Cattrall and watch a pro (Lydia Fenet of Christie’s) conduct a spirited live auction on Sunday night. By the time it was over, $800,000 was raised for AIDS research. Not too shabby.

Courtesy of amFAR

Leading up to the ballroom on the Carlu’s 7th floor is a long, dimly-lit corridor outfitted in black and purple with touches of old Hollywood glam, like plushy black round settees and pretty ladies dresed like movie confectionary girls from the 1930s. There were plenty of recognizable sorts there, like Suzanne Rogers, dressed in a Kelly Green floor-length gown with a bejewelled neck, and actor Brian Cox, who I watched like a creep in the shadows for ten minutes. Continue…

The quiet cuts

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 3:53 PM - 18 Comments

Among various cuts at Environment Canada, the government is apparently about to eliminate an ozone monitoring program.

The British journal Nature says scientists and research institutes around the world have been informally told the Canadian network will be shut down as early as this winter, putting an end to continuous ozone measurements that go back 45 years.

“People are gobsmacked by this decision,” Thomas Duck, an atmospheric researcher at Dalhousie University, said in an interview with Postmedia News. He and his international colleagues say they’ve been told the network and a related data archive will be closed down as part of the Harper government’s deep cuts at Environment Canada, where hundreds of jobs are being are eliminated.

See previously here, here, here, here and here.

Corruption and Quebec, a slight refrain

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 3:53 PM - 16 Comments

This afternoon a Quebec City radio guy named Stéphane Gasse essentially asked me if, in the wake of a leaked report detailing widespread, long-standing and deeply rooted corruption within Quebec construction industry, I felt like doing a touchdown dance on the heads of all the critics who lined up to pillory the magazine last year for our cover story on the subject. The report, written by former Montreal police commish Jacques Duchesneau, details what La Presse’s Tommy Chouinard describes as a “the existence of clandestine funding of political parties by engineering and construction firms.” Radio-Canada got its paws on it yesterday.

Not at all, I said. Zen is a wonderful thing, and anyway the fact that the province of my birth has a political culture that allows such a thing to fester for so long is nothing to be happy about. One thing, though: I wonder whether Parliament will express its similarly profound sadness at a situation Le Journal de Montréal pithily dubbed “Corrupt To The Bone” this morning, as it did when we dared write about it almost a year ago?

Border agreement may be all loss, no gain for Canadians

By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 2:43 PM - 5 Comments

A proposed trade and security agreement between Canada and the United States could force the Canadian government to violate the privacy of millions of its citizens without doing anything to guarantee a more open border, a new report suggests. “There can be little expectation that Canadian needs for less controls and constraints on trans-border traffic will be met,” wrote Gar Pardy, a former diplomat, in a report for the Rideau Institute. “A more likely scenario would be Canadian concessions on security and privacy matters and only American promises for an easier border regime.”

Postmedia

Quebec construction industry rife with corruption: Report

By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 2:41 PM - 1 Comment

A report prepared by Quebec’s anti-corruption squad claims to have found chronic overcharging and possible political payoffs in the province’s construction industry. The interim report, obtained by Radio-Canada, says private firms routinely inflate costs and often overbill the government for work. Some of those profits then allegedly make their way back to political parties through donations.

CBC News