The Commons: Democracy and testicles

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 8:47 PM - 48 Comments

The Scene. Time, once again, to yell about the Canadian Wheat Board.

The first sign that this afternoon would not pass without shouting was the Prime Minister’s right fist, bobbing up and down in front of him as he asserted that “Western Canadian farmers have long been looking for the freedom to market their grain, just like farmers in Quebec and other parts of eastern Canada have, and we are going to give them that freedom.”

This was but the end of his first answer and already he was gesturing forcefully. Usually, at this point, he is all shrugs and up-turned palms. But there would be no conciliatory hand movements this day.

Nycole Turmel stood here and insisted on reading what is written on some piece of paper somewhere. Continue…

Week in pictures: October 17-23, 2011

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 6:13 PM - 1 Comment

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Week in pictures: October 17-23, 2011

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Ostriches graze at "Artestruz" ostrich farm

Ostriches graze at "Artestruz" ostrich farm outside the village of Campos in the Spanish Balearic island of Mallorca October 16, 2011. The farm breeds ostriches for meat, leather and eggs and also offer visitors a chance to ride the animals. (Enrique Calvo/Reuters)

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Prospect Porn: Leafs v. Colorado

By Dave Bidini - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 4:47 PM - 1 Comment

Okay: I like porn. But not just any porn: Prospect Porn. I can’t get enough of it. I spend way too much time tapping on a screen in the dark—actually it’s more mouse-thumbing then tapping; screen over screen over screen—staring at young men from distant places; gifted young men; lithe, goofy-looking with sculpted arms and stats to drool over. Thirty year olds with long careers are one thing, but give me the hairless fulsome buck who has emerged as if from a fine mist. Give me his promise. Untested, pure. Maybe a little overbitten and acne’d. A prospect.

To this end, the Leafs have done nothing to satisfy my urges, which is why I’ve had to look elsewhere: Colorado, Long Island, and Edmonton. For this reason, I couldn’t wait ‘til (last) Tuesday, which promised a visit by the Avalanche, the league’s youngest and Prospect Porniest team. Not only that, but the Leafs—young, too, I suppose, only not so Prospecty—were hop-skipping along on a three-game unbeaten streak, so my interests were two-fold. I poofed the throw pillows on the couch and prepared popcorn and beer. I sent the kids to bed. Actually, I did not. My kids are baseball brats and they don’t love hockey. Between the two of them, they’ve lived through exactly one Leaf post-season. In 2009, I prepared a chocolate milk chart in honour of the year: two Leaf wins in a row got them gumdrops, three wins got them Twizzlers and four wins got them— yup—chocolate milk. “You’re teaching them about disappointment, aren’t you?” asked my wife, approvingly. But I wasn’t. This is the sad and torturous environment in which they’ve been raised. Continue…

TV Drama Passes the Millennium

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 4:29 PM - 2 Comments

The flip side of the comeback of comedy on the U.S. networks is, as Michael Schneider reports, the weak performance of drama. Not everywhere, of course. The Walking Dead is an even bigger smash in its second season than its first, easily surpassing many broadcast shows in both total viewers and the Coveted Demographic. (Which means that AMC’s decreased critical goodwill – over airing stuff like The Killing and slashing the budgets of its shows – doesn’t really matter any more. Networks need critical goodwill when they don’t have a huge hit, or when they need to woo subscribers. The Walking Dead is not up to AMC’s best shows, but it is a big hit.) And there are a few dramas that have a shot to come back for another season, like Revenge, which is a lot of fun. Still, the networks invested a lot of money in some high-profile dramas that viewers don’t seem to be very interested in, like Pan Am and Prime Suspect. We’re in one of those periods when networks don’t exactly know what makes a big drama hit, and testing can’t tell them.

Next year, or maybe even midseason, there might be some more drama hits and then the whole thing will suddenly turn around again. Nevertheless, I do feel like an era of TV drama has ended; not the era of quality TV drama (there are always those, even before 1999, and quality dramas there will always be), just a particular world that was defined by two shows, premiering around the end of the 20th century. One was The Sopranos, in 1999. The other was CSI, in 2000. Neither show was without precedent, but both of them felt very new and fresh; more than that, both of them were able to spawn hugely successful imitators. Many hit shows can’t really be imitated successfully – Lost, famously, was a one-off, a great show and a great success whose imitators were mostly failures. There are lots of one-off hits, including some of the biggest hits. What often shapes TV history is a hit that can influence other hits, the way Dallas did.

The Sopranos defined the style of a successful serious cable drama, the type of characters and stories at the centre of Continue…

John Turner’s lawn is full of useless MPs

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 3:25 PM - 5 Comments

The former prime minister is generally unimpressed.

“There was more respect in the House of Commons, and as a result those of us in the House in the ’60s and ’70s across party lines worked more collaboratively and more friendly. We had meals and drinks together and the mood was good. It was not as caustic as it is today.”

The effect on Canadians, watching from the outside, has been alarming. “It turns them off. It discourages young men and women from running for Parliament. ”Who wants to be a member of Parliament when the job isn’t worth anything any more?” said Turner, insisting that the time for wholesale change is now.

See previously: Get off John Turner’s lawn and The ‘Get Off My Lawn’ Tour continues

Let’s all have a good laugh about parliamentary accountability

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 1:10 PM - 13 Comments

Unable to get via Twitter to his question about Tony Clement’s promised committee appearance, John McCallum tried the Question Period yesterday. John Baird promptly stood on Mr. Clement’s behalf and assured the House that Mr. Clement would be taking questions from a parliamentary committee at some point.

This segued nicely into a lively exchange between Charlie Angus and Mr. Clement.

Greece shut down by 48-hour strike

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 12:46 PM - 2 Comments

Greek police clashed with demonstrators outside parliament Wednesday as politicians gathered to vote on a new round of austerity measures, Reuters reports. A 48-hour strike shut down government offices, shops and other services across the country, as 100,000 people took to the streets. Unlike in previous anti-austerity protests, private sector workers walked out along with public sector employees, causing banks, shops, cafés and supermarkets, which normally stay open during strikes, to remain closed, according to the Financial Times. The most recent round of belt-tightening, which Greece must turn into legislation before it can access the next $11 billion tranche of its current bail-out package, includes tax hikes, wage cuts and layoffs. It sparked widespread outrage and concern these measures would only further hurt the economy. Greece is in its third year of a severe recession; its public debt now equals 162 per cent of gross domestic product.

Reuters
Financial Times

Think you’re not on Facebook? Think again.

By Jesse Brown - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 11:52 AM - 8 Comments

Just because you ignore Facebook doesn’t mean Facebook is ignoring you. The group Europe vs Facebook has filed a complaint to the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, alleging that Facebook is breaking privacy laws by building “Shadow Profiles” of individuals who have never signed up with the social networking site.

It’s certainly true that Facebook collects information about non-users; whenever you use the site to invite off-site friends to join up, or when you invite them to events through email invites, Facebook, by necessity, is storing those addresses, at least long enough to send your pals an email. And whenever you sync your phone contacts or email address book to Facebook, the names, phone numbers, and email addresses of any non-FBing friends you may have are delivered to Facebook’s servers.

What we don’t know is what Facebook is doing with this info. Are they storing it indefinitely or destroying it? Are they compiling and aggregating it—matching an email address you typed in last year with a phone number you synced yesterday to a name you mentioned in today’s status update? Is Facebook mapping these individuals in a hidden social graph? Are they building an alleged network of “Shadow Profiles”? If so, why?

Facebook isn’t saying. The company provides no information on how it handles the non-member data it collects. Perhaps it’s time they cleared the matter up. After all, if you don’t have a Facbook profile by now, it’s probably because you made an active decision *not* to—it’s not like you’ve never heard of the the site. It’s just that you didn’t want them to hear about you.

Jesse Brown is the host of TVO.org’s Search Engine podcast. He is on Twitter @jessebrown

Picking sides in 18th century fights

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 11:44 AM - 10 Comments

In case you were wondering, Veterans Affairs Minister Steven Blaney kind of wishes the French had won the battle of the Plains of Abraham.

At an event Tuesday honouring those who fought and died in Canada’s name, Blaney told a group of school children he was “a little bit” on the side of French General the Marquis Louis-Joseph de Montcalm. ”I was not there, yet,” Blaney told the kids with a chuckle, “but I was a little bit leaning for the French, at that time. And still, today.”

Obdulio Mateo Manalon Mineque

By Cynthia Reynolds - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

Illustration By Team Macho

Obdulio Mateo Manalon Mineque was born in Quezon City, Philippines, on Sept. 21, 1950, to Obdulio Sr. and Lourdes; he was the third of six children. His father, a lawyer, worked as the postmaster general and his mother was a school principal.

When he was little, his mother called him “Chico,” Spanish for “small boy.” The nickname stuck. Growing up, Chico was heavily into sports. He liked martial arts, but excelled at baseball; as a teenager, he made the Philippine junior national team. He was good with his hands and taught himself to play piano and guitar, which he taught to his younger sister Wyn.

While studying architecture at the University of Santo Tomas in Manila during the civil unrest of the late ’60s and early ’70s, Chico became increasingly involved in student activism, joining the protests and revolts against the Ferdinand Marcos military regime. In 1974, he was detained and tortured. After his release, his family urged him to flee. With a bag full of dirty clothes, Chico landed in Toronto where his older brother Placido lived. He never believed he would stay—despite the predictions of a fortune teller who had once told him he would move to a foreign land and marry there.

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On Homer, fine-tuning ‘The Iliad’ and being the rock star of translators

By Jessica Allen - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Stephaine Noritz

He Knows Greek, Latin, Hebrew, French, German, Italian and Danish. And his progressive translations include Gilgamesh and The Gospel According to Jesus. Now Stephen Mitchell takes on Homer’s The Iliad—and he cuts about 1,100 lines along the way.

Q: Although there hasn’t been a major new translation of The Iliad in 15 years, there are about 200 in existence—six alone in the previous decade. Did you think the time was right for a new one?

A: Well, it was the right time for me. I didn’t think of anybody else. I just wanted to spend a few years with the vast mind of Homer. I never think of that sort of thing when I begin a project: I have a sense that something is right and I just plunge into it. And I was lucky enough to have had that sense after the very great M.L. West edition was published [in Greek], so I had an advantage over previous translators who were working from the 1902 Greek Oxford Classical Texts. It’s a very defective edition in many ways.

Continue…

South Sudan makes it onto Google maps

By Richard Warnica - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Sudan, once Africa’s largest country, gained independence in 1956. It has been breaking apart, in one way or another, almost every day since. This summer, the two largest parts of the country finally split for good. After decades of bloody civil war, South Sudan became its own nation on July 9. Recognition for the fledgling oil giant was swift, at least in some circles. The United Nations and the African Union accepted South Sudan’s membership without delay. But another, arguably equally powerful body, lagged a little behind. For months after independence, South Sudan remained a non-entity on Google Maps. Other online cartographers, including Yahoo and Bing, also ignored the new state.

Those slights didn’t sit well with John Tanza Mabusu, a South Sudanese native who works as a journalist in Washington. This summer, Mabusu started an online petition to try to pressure the digital firms into recognizing his homeland. “My people of South Sudan have endured 50 years of bitter conflict,” Mabusu wrote. Google, for one, responded swiftly. By late September, South Sudan was appearing on its eponymous site. The other tech giants, though, have yet to recognize the change. But after waiting decades for a country, one imagines the people of South Sudan can live with a little online lag.

REVIEW: The death-ray

By Nicholas Köhler - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 11:15 AM - 0 Comments

Mere weeks after the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 comes The Death-Ray, the famed graphic novelist’s oblique reaction to that horror. The superhero fantasy uses the conventions of the genre—a masked hero, inhuman strength and sci-fi gadgetry—to explore the toxic effect of power. It amounts to a devastating portrait of American decline.

Luxuriously drawn and gloriously printed in Day-Glo colour, it presents a tale, set during a beautifully realized 1970s, of Andy and Louie, teen castoffs from troubled homes. When Andy, an orphan whose father was a scientist, smokes a cigarette for the first time—a fabulously mundane trigger—it unlocks superhuman strength. “I thought about Lon Chaney, Jr. and that horrible, haunted look Larry Talbot got when the moon was full,” he says. “Was I going to kill someone and forget about it by tomorrow?”

Evidently Andy’s mysterious father has treated him with a hormone designed to unleash terrific strength upon exposure to nicotine: Andy uncovers notebooks full of his father’s explanations, as well as instructions that lead the boys to another comic-book staple—a ray gun that makes things disappear. Its power and Andy’s cigarette-fuelled strength make him formidable; Andy keeps smoking and accepts it all. Soon Louie persuades him to get rid of a threatening character in Louie’s life. It’s a dramatic moment, yet Andy is unfazed—so much so that Louie is revolted by his lack of doubt and resolves to limit Andy’s power.

Best known for Ghost World, later made into a film, Clowes is associated with the slacker chic of the ’90s. This is the first time The Death-Ray, published as a pamphlet in 2004, has received appropriate treatment—a handsome edition by Montreal’s Drawn and Quarterly, issued in advance of a film now under development by Jack Black. It’s not for the squeamish—it begins with a middle-aged Andy and a defecating dog; in the next panel, Andy is cleaning up. “I don’t smoke anymore,” he says, though he’s “fallen off the wagon a few times.” Louie’s gone, and Andy is still too full of certainty.

Canadian Wheat Board likely up for grabs

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 11:14 AM - 19 Comments

The Tories’ plan to end the Canadian Wheat Board’s monopoly on the sale of grains would dismantle the board within five years. The government would appoint five corporate directors in charge of restructuring and selling off various arms of the organization within that time frame. In the near term, the board would continue to operate as a voluntary organization, as it sets up a plan for privatization. After the five years, operations that couldn’t be sold would be wound down. If the legislation is passed, farmers will be able to sell their grain to whomever they choose starting Aug. 1, 2012.

Wall Street Journal

Putin’s unhappy Russia

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 15 Comments

Alexey Druzhinin/AFP/Getty Images

In most official democracies, citizens must wait until an election is held to find out who will be running their country. Russia is different.

Last month, Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s president and its supposed head of state, told a congress of the ruling United Russia party that Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin would run for president in March, returning to a job he held from 2000 to 2008. At the same conference, Putin proposed that Medvedev lead the United Russia party list in parliamentary elections, and assume the position of prime minister.

The announcements confirmed what many had long suspected: Putin, forbidden by Russia’s constitution from running for a third consecutive term, had simply appointed Medvedev to keep his seat warm for four years until he, Putin, could return to power. Despite claiming earlier this year that he would like to continue as president, Medvedev admitted the two had cooked up the deal “several years ago.” Putin is now clear to hold the presidency until 2024.

Someone will run against Putin, for appearances’ sake. But the election results are not in question. Putin is far and away the most liked politician in Russia. “If there were a genuinely free and fair election—which there won’t be—then Putin would win it. You can’t get around that,” says James Nixey, a research fellow at Chatham House, a British think tank. “The fact that they rig it anyway is a source of continual amazement for me.”

Putin’s popularity owes something to timing and to luck. His presidency coincided with a steep rise in global energy prices that benefited Russia and allowed it to reassert itself in the former Soviet sphere, using oil and gas as a weapon to bully countries like Ukraine and Georgia that sought closer ties to the West.

Continue…

REVIEW: Maple Leaf Empire: Canada, Britain, and Two World Wars

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 1 Comment

At first glance, it seems a familiar story: Canada, as a loyal child of the British Empire, punches above its weight in two world conflicts while chafing under imperial condescension, develops a sense of nationalism and disengages from the motherland. Yes, but . . . as Vance compellingly argues, Canada’s wartime loyalty was due more to common allegiance to ideals (democracy, the rule of law) that the British Empire was held to represent than to unthinking obedience. And moreover, this nation brought its own influence to the Old Country: close to a million Canadians arrived there during the wars, the founders of our own maple leaf empire.

In the First World War, Canadian barracks—our first “colonies”—sprouted around Britain, although not to the extent they would in the next war when Allied troops were shut out of Northern Europe for four years. Nor were the colonists all men—by 1917 there were 30,000 soldiers’ wives, sisters and mothers present, an influx that merited its own special London club and provided support staff for 40 Canadian hospitals.

Mutual—if at times, wary—regard between hosts and guests usually prevailed, Vance notes, but it wasn’t all, as the British would have said then, beer and skittles. There were riots over postwar delays in getting home, a fair share of crime (one soldier went on a shooting spree, killing two British policemen), and bad blood between Canadians and shopkeepers suspected—often rightly—of price-gouging. On the British side, many a war bride was often justifiably less than enamoured with her new home—one didn’t learn until she arrived in Saskatchewan that the “ancestral home” in the photo her husband showed her was actually the Moose Jaw public library.

Throughout, Canadian nationalism grew in tandem with the Canadian army, from nebulous idea to formidable fighting machine, without impacting the nation’s regard for its British connection. The prevailing metaphor—Mother England and her far-flung children—evolved to a concept of a union of siblings, an evolution reflected in Canadians’ abiding regard for the Commonwealth.

House of Commons seat plan update penalizes Ontario, B.C.

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 10:55 AM - 10 Comments

Ontario and B.C. will get fewer new seats than the Harper government originally promised, according to the Conservatives’ latest plan to redraw regional representation in the House of Commons. The move, meant to address growing populations in B.C., Ontario, Quebec and Alberta, adds seats in all of those provinces. Compared to an earlier plan, though, B.C will receive five rather than seven new seats, while Ontario will get 13, down from the 18 it was originally promised. The Tory stronghold of Alberta will receive six new seats, and two more will go to Quebec, which had argued its representation was disproportionately low compared to English Canada in the Conservative’s original redesign. All new ridings will be drawn up by independent commissions. However, the Globe and Mail noted on Wednesday that the Conservatives stand to gain the most based on voter tendencies in the largest ridings of those four provinces. The plan has also drawn criticism from Green Party Leader Elizabeth May, who accused the government on Tuesday of “gerrymandering” her B.C. riding of Saanich-Gulf Islands.

The Globe and Mail
The Globe and Mail
Vancouver Sun

Dewar live

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 10:42 AM - 2 Comments

From the Paul Dewar campaign, video of his town hall in Winnipeg.

How to talk out of both sides of your mouth (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 9:36 AM - 3 Comments

Glen McGregor notes that, while Dean Del Mastro thinks “a lot of Canadians would be really troubled to know that we are spending an awful lot of taxpayers’ money on a court case where in fact they’re funding both sides of it” so far as it concerns the CBC, two federal departments are also fighting the information commissioner in court.

But both the Department of Justice and Public Safety Canada are currently locked in their own complex litigation against Legault over other documents … And just as CBC wants to exercise exemptions from releasing records because they pertain to journalistic, programming or creative activities, the government is claiming its own exemptions from the open-records law. It contends solicitor-client privilege trumps the requirement to release the documents.

How to speak out of both sides of your mouth

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at 8:25 AM - 11 Comments

Yesterday, during committee hearings, a Conservative MP termed the director of the John Howard Society an “advocate for criminals.”

Here is the Harper government providing a total of $604,217 to John Howard Society projects in Belleville, Brandon and Hamilton in 2006. Here is the Harper government providing a total of $200,000 to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto in 2008 so that it could “work with the John Howard Society to provide short-term supportive housing for participants involved in the Toronto Drug Treatment Court program.” Here is the Harper government providing a total of $507,610 to John Howard Society projects in Winnipeg and Ottawa in 2009. Here is the Harper government providing a total of $550,031 to John Howard Society projects in Alberta and New Brunswick in 2010.

Earlier this month, a Conservative MP criticized the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies.

Here is the Harper government providing the Elizabeth Fry Society of Manitoba with $300,000 to help fight gangs in 2007. Here is the Harper government providing the Central Okanagan Elizabeth Fry Society with $4,490 through the Victims Fund as part of National Victims of Crime Awareness Week in 2008.

Motorola’s path forward looks easier than RIM’s

By Peter Nowak - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 5:58 PM - 5 Comments

The new Razr: super-thin and very light.

As many had speculated, Motorola has indeed dusted off the old Razr name for its new smartphone, unveiled here in New York Tuesday. In the U.S., where the handset maker has licensing rights with the Star Wars folks, the phone actually combines two of Motorola’s most successful brands—it’s called the Droid Razr. For the rest of the world, including Canada, it’s just the Razr.

If you’re into specification porn, Mobile Syrup has you covered. For our purposes here, suffice it to say that the phone is ridiculously light and thin, yet still sturdy, fast and powerful. I played with one briefly and was amazed at how light it felt in my hand. It’s got a steel core and Kevlar on the outside though, so it’s made not to break. Sadly, as a Motorola representative told me, it’s not strong enough to stop bullets (vests apparently have many layers of Kevlar while the phone only has one).

What I found most interesting during Motorola chief executive Sanjay Jha’s presentation was the mention of how the Razr will be aimed at corporate customers as well as the every-day consumer. The device can accommodate secure enterprise email systems and has remote wipe capabilities, which means it’ll probably pass muster with many businesses’ IT departments. Continue…

The Commons: Life under occupation

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 5:55 PM - 30 Comments

Simon Hayter/Maclean's

The Scene. These are awkward times. Various people are marching in the streets and camping in the parks, shouting various things about various concerns. No one is quite sure what it means or if it means anything except to say that some people are somehow unhappy about something. And that they may have some cause to be somehow disenchanted.

Our elected leaders are thus put in variously awkward positions. And so increases the likelihood that they will say awkward things.

Witness Ted Menzies, affable-seeming minister of state for finance. Yesterday he was presented with the spectre of said protests and the suggestion that perhaps said protestors were on to something.

“Mr. Speaker, it is fortunate that all Canadians have the right to peacefully express their views,” he said, as if this were some kind of profound observation.

“Canada does not, by the way,” he continued, “have the degree of economic inequality that we are seeing in other countries that have perhaps started this movement.”

Two sentences in, Mr. Menzies had already gone wobbly. For while we can indeed boast a level of inequality less crushing than that of the United States, our gini coefficient is still on par with that of riotous Greece. Which is to say that the sea of troubles is lapping from inside the house. Continue…

Occupy Wall St. hits Times Square

By Zoran Milich - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 4:11 PM - 0 Comments

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Occupy Wall St. hits Times Square

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Zuccatti Park

Scene from the Occupy Wall Street demonstration in Zuccatti Park in New York City. (Zoran Milich)

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House of Commons math

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 18, 2011 at 3:48 PM - 40 Comments

If the Star’s sources are correct, the Harper government’s plan to rebalance the House of Commons will see 13 seats added in Ontario, six in Alberta, five to British Columbia and two to Quebec.

The NDP has tabled its own bill on seat distribution which generally uses a formula based on the results of the 2011 census. On the question of Quebec, it would ensure that Quebec maintain the same proportion of seats as it had on Nov. 27, 2006: the day the House adopted the Prime Minister’s motion that the Quebecois form a nation within a united Canada.

At that point, Quebec had 75 of 308 seats, or 24.35%.

Under the government’s changes, Quebec would have 77 of 334 seats, or 23.05%.

Update 4:03pm. Using the government’s seat numbers, you would have to give Quebec a total of eight more seats (83 of 340) to get to 24.41%. Seven more seats, or 82 of 339, equals 24.19%.