Good news, bad news: Oct. 6-Oct. 13, 2011

By macleans.ca - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 8:10 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

Yemeni activist Tawakul Karman is this year's Nobel Peace Prize winner. (Ahmed Jadallah/Reuters)

Crisis management

German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy agreed on a “comprehensive response” to Europe’s debt crisis that will ensure the continent’s banks have adequate capital. With the crisis claiming its first casualty, Belgium’s Dexia bank, the response can’t come soon enough. In another development, the Occupy Wall Street movement, which has been gaining mainstream backing, is set to spread to Toronto this week. Whatever your political views, you have to appreciate a protest movement that is non-violent, well-organized, and, as Naomi Klein told New York protesters last week, “deeply democratic.”

Accounts receivable

Props to the Harper government for sticking the bill to abusers of due process. First it invoiced the owners of the rusting ship the Ocean Lady for the cost of processing the 76 illegal migrants it carried. Now Ottawa is demanding $300,000 from accused Serbian war criminal Branko Rogan—the cost of investigating him and having him stripped of his citizenship. The gestures are symbolic (the feds are now trying to sell the Ocean Lady for lack of an identifiable owner). But they serve to put a price on the all-too-frequent abuse of Canada’s immigration system. Why not try to collect?

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Britain’s futile quest to ban Internet porn

By Peter Nowak - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 8:06 AM - 12 Comments

British Prime Minister David Cameron has embarked on a rather humourous endeavour to try and save the United Kingdom from porn. Earlier this week, it was reported that, at Cameron’s behest, the four largest Internet service providers in the UK would begin an opt-in program where they would automatically block porn websites unless customers explicitly said they wanted them.

No sooner did the ink (real or virtual) dry on that story than those same ISPs—BT, TalkTalk, Sky and Virgin—started talking about how the system would have no effect. The opt-in process, it turns out, will apply only to brand new customers, which means very little because only about 5 per cent of people change service providers in a given quarter.

That’s not exactly the best way to say it will have no effect—after all, at that rate it will only take 10 quarters or two-and-a-half years to block the majority of the country from porn. Still, the ISPs’ chafing at the idea is what makes Cameron’s effort humourous because it’s doomed to fail for a host of reasons.

First, there are the freedom of speech issues. The Australian government’s effort to enact a similar ban has hit all kinds of snags, from coalition partners refusing to support it to several big ISPs refusing to play ball, even with something as universally deplorable as child porn. Things have gotten downright silly Down Under, with the banning efforts extending to erotica that features small-breasted women, which supposedly encourages pedophilia. The resulting joke, of course, is that Australians want their porn stars to have big boobs.

Then there are the logistical problems. How, exactly, does something qualify for the banned list?

Banning porn on the Internet is ultimately a fool’s errand. It’s here to stay and, while laws and technology can try to help, in the end its parents’ responsibility to ensure their kids aren’t getting to where they shouldn’t be.

If a country were to successfully ban online porn, however, it’s a safe bet its Internet traffic would nosedive. While accurate numbers are tough to come by, there are some hints that suggest pornography still makes up a good chunk of traffic. Five of the 100 most-visited websites (that are in English) are porn-related, according to Alexa rankings, while Ogi Ogas – author of A Billion Wicked Thoughts – says about 13% of web searches are for erotic content.

Applying this chain of logic to Canada, if Internet providers here really were worried about congestion on their networks, they wouldn’t be enacting usage-based billing to try and slow consumption with the likes of Netflix. They’d be trying to get porn banned.

Goin’ down the road, again

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Caitlin Cronenberg; Photo Illustration by Lauren Cattermole

Don Shebib never expected much to come of it. He shot Goin’ Down the Road on a shoestring with a crew of three, grabbing scenes on the fly documentary-style with a 16-mm camera. But his 1970 tale of two Cape Breton drifters who drive to Toronto and run their dreams into the ground became a Canadian classic, our own low-rent Midnight Cowboy. “There is scarcely a false touch,” raved The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael. “Shebib is so good at blending actors into locations that at times one forgets that it is an acted film.” The original hoser movie, it also left an indelible beer-glass mark on Canadian comedy, from a priceless SCTV parody—with John Candy and Joe Flaherty chasing “lawyerin’ and doctorin’ jobs” in Toronto—to Bob and Doug McKenzie and the FUBAR boys.

But Goin’ Down the Road was drama, not farce, and the movie’s bold promise—like the dreams of its heroes—did not pan out. Shebib never made another film of such stature. Nor did its stars. Meanwhile, English-Canadian cinema, which took an auteur detour into angst, never regained that raw groove of working-class narrative. But the movie’s ending, which had Pete (Doug McGrath) and Joey (Paul Bradley) driving west, ditching Joey’s pregnant wife, left room for a sequel. And after all these years, Shebib has finally made one—without Bradley, who died in 2003.

Down the Road Again picks up the plot four decades later, casting the three surviving stars in a story built around Joey’s death. McGrath, 73, reprises his role as Pete, now a Vancouver postie on the cusp of retirement. Joey has left Pete his ashes, some cash, and a set of letters that send him on a quest to unravel past secrets. Hauling out the rusted 1960 Impala convertible, Pete heads for Toronto to find Joey’s estranged wife, Betty (Jayne Eastwood)—and their restless daughter, Betty-Jo (Kathleen Robertson), who cons Pete into driving her all the way to Cape Breton.

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Freedom to fail is what made Steve Jobs

By Paul Wells - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 7:50 AM - 20 Comments

David Paul Morris/Getty Images

Having paid Steve Jobs the full measure of our devotion, let us now argue about how to create the next Steve Jobs. Which choices can governments and educators make that will encourage the next miraculous hybrid of gearhead, design genius, marketing whiz and change catalyst?

It’s fair to answer, “Give up. It’s impossible.” The rise of Jobs 1.0 looks more like a happy accident than anything else. He dropped out of a liberal-arts college in Portland and then stuck around to audit the calligraphy course. And yet I’m pretty sure that if everyone in Canada were required to take calligraphy without credit, it wouldn’t spark a new renaissance. To be fair, probably people would send more and nicer thank-you notes.

But still. It’s worth spending a little time to ask what was germane and broadly applicable in Jobs’s life. After all, no matter what governments do, it won’t be long before they’re claiming to be producing a new generation of Jobses.

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How Steve Jobs rescued old media

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 7:40 AM - 4 Comments

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

It seems strange to think of Steve Jobs as the man who saved traditional media. After all, everywhere you look, his products are wreaking havoc on old media formats: people are watching TV shows on their iPads instead of staying home to watch them live; people are reading e-books instead of lugging around paper; bookstores and record stores replace much of their shelf space with iPhone and iPod sections. But never mind the shakeups that are occurring in businesses like music: if it hadn’t been for Jobs and iTunes, there might not be a music business to shake up. Jobs’s fellow corporate tycoon, Viacom’s Sumner Redstone, put it very simply in a 2007 speech at Boston University: iTunes “resurrected the music industry.”

Think back to 2000, before the iPod and iTunes existed. Napster had cut deeply into music sales, and while the service itself was shut down, there was no shutting down the concept of music piracy. The ’80s and ’90s compact disc boom, when people ran out to buy physical albums in little plastic jewel cases, was over, and music companies couldn’t accept that: Michael Geist, a law professor at the University of Ottawa who specializes in technology issues, told Maclean’s that “they sought to sue the MP3 player out of existence. Any sort of innovation that left someone other than the industry with control was something to be feared and stopped.” But no lawsuit could change the fact that people wanted music that they didn’t have to stuff into suitcases and carry from place to place, and they wanted it for free.

Computer Weekly proclaimed in 2000 that “the battle against piracy may be lost completely,” and that “mass copyright infringement over the Internet” would be the future. The music companies countered by trying to create their own music services, which bombed because, as Geist puts it, “They were label-specific, they only played on a limited number of MP3s. It was just so consumer-unfriendly.” Jobs realized that no one was going to sign up and pay for only the music that Sony or Universal was willing to give them. “People don’t want to buy music as a subscription,” he told Rolling Stone in 2003. “They want to own their music.”

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Steve Jobs and Apple: somewhere between bohemia and business

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 7:40 AM - 18 Comments

Ian Waldie/Getty Images

When I was growing up, the world was in the grip of what was then called the Computer Age. Computers, everyone knew, were where things were going. And so we were all given training in computer science to prepare us for the Jobs of Tomorrow, which as everyone knew were in computer programming.

To program a computer meant poking little holes in punch cards, stacks and stacks and stacks of them, which you then handed in to the computer lab. When your turn came in the queue, they would feed your stack of cards into the computer; you would get your homework back the next day in the form of a printout. If, as often happened, you had made some small mistake—somewhere—and the computer, baffled, had responded with a string of hysterical gibberish, you simply repeated the whole fiddling, nitpicking exercise.

And for most of us, that was that. The premise, that we were all going to be computer programmers, was false, and we knew it. Computers were for geeks, science fiction enthusiasts and others even further beyond the pale. Though in some ways my own mildly obsessive-compulsive nature made me a natural for it, my teenage identity was even then coalescing around the idea that I was actually some kind of artsie, or at least destined for the humanities.

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Is Jim Flaherty a hippie?

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 4:50 PM - 17 Comments

First, the Finance Minister quotes Bobby Kennedy and waxes romantic about public service and “working together” for the “public good.” Now, he expresses some sympathy for the Occupy Wall Street protestors.

Jim Flaherty says he can understand the “legitimate frustration” of Occupy Wall Street protesters in light of persistently high youth unemployment … “It really is a Wall Street proposal,” he told reporters prior to flying to France for key G20 meetings on the global economy. “In Canada we have a progressive income tax and it favours people with lower incomes who are vulnerable, quite frankly, in Canadian society. Our tax system is clearly progressive. Having said that I see a point that income distribution is important and that there is a concern that a very, very small group of people have very large incomes.”

While the present circumstance may not be as dramatic, income inequality is reported to be growing at a faster pace in Canada.

Enter the maverick?

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 4:11 PM - 0 Comments

Thomas Mulcair is officially in the NDP leadership race. Website here. Interview with iPolitics here. List of the 33 NDP MPs supporting him here.

Rob Silver tries to read the tea leaves and ends up confused.

Traditional political orthodoxy says that during a U.S. presidential primary or a leadership race in the Canadian context, you spend the internal battle running toward your base and once the general election comes around, you tack toward the political centre.

Well, political orthodoxies don’t apply to Tom Mulcair. Or more accurately (and less snarky), he realizes that if he follows a traditional path in the NDP leadership race – appealing to traditional New Democrat power bases among organized labour, Prairie farmers and other left of centre party activists – he has no chance of winning. So he’s decided to instead run against the people who make up the NDP.

Greg Fingas concurs. Continue…

Do you support the federal government’s move to ban a possible strike at Air Canada?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 3:21 PM - 51 Comments

Warren Buffett reveals tax bill

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 3:12 PM - 29 Comments

In his ongoing campaign to increase taxes on the mega-rich, Warren Buffett revealed he brought in $62,855,038 last year, with $39,814,784 of it qualifying as taxable income. His federal tax bill was $6,938,744, or 17.4 per cent, which Buffett says is too low compared to middle-class earners. His cause was recently taken up by U.S. president Barack Obama, who proposed tax hikes on incomes above $1 million. The tax increase has come to be known as the Buffett tax since Buffett wrote an op-ed for the New York Times this summer in which he argued that, “My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress.” Details of Buffett’s income were included in a letter he sent to Kansas Republican Rep. Tim Huelskamp and obtained by the Associated Press.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/business/2011/10/warren-buffett-reveals-billionaire-friendly-tax-return/

Stephen Harper lectures the world

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 2:50 PM - 13 Comments

The Prime Minister calls on Europe and the G20 to get their respective and collective houses in order.

Events in the summer of 2011 have made it clear that global economic challenges are by no means behind us. What started as a sovereign debt crisis in smaller countries in Europe has now spread, causing extreme stress in the European financial sector and threatening global growth. Unfortunately, this time, the policy response to our shared challenges has not been as strong and co-ordinated as it needs to be. This slow response has resulted in missed opportunities, with each missed opportunity increasing the cost and difficulty of resolving the crisis.

We cannot afford any more missed opportunities.

Last month, Scott Clark and Peter DeVries noted that Mr. Harper was among those leaders calling on “surplus” countries “to increase their expansion of domestic demand” and thus wondered whether the Prime Minister was willing to participate in a global stimulus package (to the tune of $41 billion).

Harper and Flaherty call for urgent action on European debt crisis

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 2:48 PM - 1 Comment

In an open letter published in Thursday’s edition of The Globe and Mail, Prime Minister Stephen Harper urges the world’s leading economies to take “decisive action” to quell market fears about the state of the global economy. Allowed to fester, the sovreign debt crisis in Europe has grown to unwieldy proportions, the PM, but it’s not to late to halt the financial panic. “A slow response to the recent crisis has allowed it to spread, but political will, decisiveness and a clear plan can resolve it, if we act now.”

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty echoed Harper’s concerns about Europe’s response to the debt crisis at news conference ahead of a meeting of G20 finance ministers in Paris. “It is critical that Europe deliver on a comprehensive package of measures that will address their sovereign debt and banking issue,” Flaherty told reporters in Ottawa.

The Globe and Mail

Financial Post

Canada to support royal succession changes

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 1:40 PM - 5 Comments

Prime Minister Stephen Harper says Canada will endorse a plan by David Cameron’s government in Britain to change the royal succession. Under Cameron’s proposal, the first-born child—whether male or female—would be eligible to inherit the throne, meaning the first child born to Prince William and his wife, Catherine, the Duchess of Cambridge, would be in line to be king or queen, regardless of gender. (The privilege is currently limited to the first-born son.) A spokesperson for Harper says the Conservative government, which has recently been keen to show its monarchist colours, has no problem with the idea, provided it doesn’t distract Ottawa from its focus on “creating jobs and growth in the economy.”

The Globe and Mail

Bush, Castro and human rights

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 12:32 PM - 38 Comments

A few weeks after NDP MP Don Davies suggested Dick Cheney should be barred from entering Canada, Amnesty International says Canadian authorities should arrest George W. Bush when he visits next week. It’s not clear that we have the power to do so. Jason Kenney is unimpressed.

“Amnesty International cherrypicks cases to publicize based on ideology. This kind of stunt helps explain why so many respected human rights advocates have abandoned Amnesty International,” Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said.

Kenney noted in an email that in the past, Amnesty had not asked for Canada to bar former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, even though the rights organization itself said he had presided over “arbitrary arrests, detention, and criminal prosecution.”

Castro’s last visit to Canada would seem to have been for Pierre Trudeau’s funeral in October 2000.

Human Rights Watch also wants Canada to take action. Noting Amnesty’s call, Andrew Sullivan lays down a straightforward standard: “Either the Geneva Conventions are the law or they are not.”

France drops complaint against Strauss-Kahn

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 12:30 PM - 0 Comments

Prosecutors in France have dismissed a complaint of attempted rape against former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn after an investigation found there was insufficient evidence to file charges. The allegations stemmed from 2003 incident involving Strauss-Kahn and novelist Tristane Banon. Prosecutors said in a statement there was “facts that could be qualified as sexual assault were admitted,” but that an attempted rape charge could not be substantiated. Under French law, sexual assaults can’t be prosecuted if a complaint is filed more than three years after the incident. For his part, Strauss-Kahn admits he tried to kiss Banon, but says she was allowed to leave peacefully after rejecting his advances.

Agence France-Presse

RIM says BlackBerry service is back to normal

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 12:10 PM - 0 Comments

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion says service to the devices is back to normal after four days of outages. “You should know we are taking immediate and aggressive steps to prevent this from happening again,” co-CEO Mike Lazaridis said in a rare public appearance since the embattled company’s services went down on Monday. “We’re committed to restoring the trust of our loyal BlackBerry customers that we’ve worked hard to earn over the years.” RIM has about 70 million BlackBerry subscribers and this week’s technical problems affected millions around the world.

Canadian Press

Mulcair joins NDP leadership race

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 12:02 PM - 0 Comments

NDP MP Thomas Mulcair will be joining the race for the party leadership. Mulcair made his long-rumoured intentions clear on Thursday, pitching himself as the best candidate “to beat Stephen Harper in the next election.” The MP for Outremont in Montreal joins Brian Topp, Romeo Saganash, Paul Dewar, Nathan Cullen and Martin Singh in launching a bid to replace Jack Layton as leader of the official opposition. Leading up to his announcement, there was speculation Mulcair may decline to run for the leader’s job since NDP supporters in Mulcair’s homebase of Quebec will be vastly outnumbered in the one-member-one-vote election. Quebec is home to fewer than 2,000 NDP members, while B.C. has 30,000 and Ontario has 22,000.

CBC News

No Trudeau

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 11:24 AM - 6 Comments

Justin Trudeau confirms he won’t seek the Liberal leadership in 2013.

“My kids are two and four years old and I barely see them enough as it is,” the eldest son of the late prime minister Pierre Trudeau told a group of about 50 students at Wilfrid Laurier University Wednesday. “I’m not going to run for the leadership this time around.”

The quiet cuts

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 10:48 AM - 4 Comments

The Defence Department is planning to cut 250 jobs. Treasury Board will eliminate 84 jobs.

The latter cuts are apparently part of the 2010 strategic review that Paul repeatedly tried to get the government to explain earlier this year.

No Alternative To the Fall TV Schedule

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 10:41 AM - 0 Comments

Kevin Reilly (an executive who has worked for NBC and now works for Fox) recently made a few headlines at a conference by arguing that the fall schedule system is antiquated, and that the networks need to find a more efficient system than the current one. Of course, network executives have been saying that for years, and nothing really changes. The system the U.S. networks use is very inefficient, no question about it. To have a bunch of shows ready for September, they have to make a bunch of pilots all at once, which means they’re constantly competing for actors, writers and directors; they have to decide rapidly between a lot of pilots, and frequently pick the wrong ones almost on a whim. (There have been fewer flops this season than last, so there aren’t as many “what were they thinking?” moments. But there are a fair number of shows that were picked up for what now seem like obscure reasons.) So every few years, executives announce that they’re going to shake up this system and move to something that makes sense: get away from the fall/midseason splits, phase out the pilot system.

It doesn’t happen. It may happen someday, but it hasn’t happened yet, because there are certain advantages to the current system that other systems can’t replicate. Bringing out most of the new shows at the same time does create a glut, and makes it harder for a new show to stand out. On the other hand, most people know that the new seasons and new shows are coming in or around September. Letting people know that a new season is starting, even with the increasing number of places where networks can put their ads, is still a very inexact science. Most people don’t read articles to find out when all the new shows are coming, and even when online viewing is a bigger chunk of TV viewing, there will still be the same problem of letting people know there’s a new episode. (Not everyone is on Twitter, not everyone is on Facebook, and the U.S. networks have not yet collected all our personal e-mail addresses to send us alerts. Yet.) Switch to a cable-style system where shows can air more or less any time, and you immediately accept one of the challenges of cable, that a lot of people who might like the show aren’t aware that it’s on. Or you get the Canadian system, where shows sneak on the air and tiptoe off without anyone noticing.

So networks still need the fall roll-out, and if they need to have a lot of shows ready for September, they also need to have a lot of pilots ready earlier in the year. And they need to make up their mind about the fall schedule when they know which shows will and won’t be back in the fall. Which kind of limits the time frame in which they can make the pilots and choose which ones they’re picking up.

That doesn’t mean there are no alternatives to the current system. There are some things networks used to do that people have called for them to do again. Like actually letting people see the pilots they didn’t pick up, something that (as with Seinfeld) can identify a pilot with more potential than the executives realized, and make them change their minds. Or instead of bidding frantically on every new pitch, sometimes go back to old pitches or rejected pilots and make them again. (There’s also the frequent suggestion that networks should make more 6 and 13-episode seasons, but as I’ve said in the past, I personally think broadcast shows often have too few episodes a season, not too many.) But the actual concept of the fall season as the foundation of the broadcast TV world – I don’t know if that can change for now.

The other thing network executives have been arguing as long as anyone’s been listening to them is that Nielsen is an antiquated system, and we need to switch to a system that measures exactly who is watching what. Well, it’s true; Nielsen is antiquated, but antiquated polling systems often work about the same as the technologically advanced ones (In politics, polling didn’t really catch up with the cell phone era, but was still pretty accurate for many elections. Although there was talk that the “landline-only bias” would skew the 2010 election polls so much as to be useless, they turned out to be about as accurate as usual. Of course it helps there that the people least likely to have cell phones are among the most likely to vote.) Nielsen deserves all the criticism it gets, but when it comes from executives, it sometimes sounds like an excuse – as if a more accurate system would prove to advertisers that the flops are really hits.

Stan Lee on comics and games

By Peter Nowak - Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 9:48 AM - 3 Comments

It’s not often I become a quivering fanboy while interviewing someone, but it happened a few weeks ago when I got the chance to speak with comics legend Stan Lee. As the man who put Marvel Comics on the map in the 1960s by creating the likes of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, he’s pretty much responsible for much of the joy I experienced as a kid.

My childhood revolved around comic books. I’d bike downtown several times a week to buy them, then spend the rest of the week reading them. I learned to draw by emulating the likes of John Romita Jr., John Byrne and Marc Silvestri, and I’m pretty certain comic books contributed a great deal to my reading ability. And that of course led to writing, which is what I do for a living. In some ways, my entire livelihood can be traced back to Stan the Man. Continue…

Mulcairitude

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 9:34 AM - 2 Comments

Daniel LeBlanc previews Thomas Mulcair’s leadership bid.

Thomas Mulcair is set to enter the NDP leadership race as the candidate who will nudge the party toward the centre and bring decisiveness to a caucus accustomed to Jack Layton’s consensual style. The NDP deputy leader is planning to launch his campaign with a bang on Thursday, casting himself as somewhat of an outsider who is ready to go against the wishes of the party’s establishment to bring New Democrats to power in 2015.

‘A strong mandate’

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 8:45 AM - 9 Comments

Lisa Raitt explains her decision to refer Air Canada’s dispute with its flight attendants to the Industrial Relations Board, thus preventing a planned strike.

“Our government received a strong mandate to protect the Canadian economy and Canadian jobs, so we have been closely following the negotiations between Air Canada and CUPE,” said Minister Raitt. “I have asked the CIRB to review the situation at Air Canada to ensure that the health and safety of the public will not be impacted, and to determine how best to maintain and secure industrial peace and promote conditions that are favourable to the settlement of industrial disputes.” 

The president of CUPE is unimpressed. Meanwhile, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers is challenging June’s back-to-work legislation.

Why you can’t seem to buy winter boots

By Joanne Latimer - Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 8:40 AM - 0 Comments

Robert Niedring/Westend61/Corbis

“It’s an odd form of denial,” says Alexandra Mélançon, creative director at Be Sleek, an image consulting agency in Montreal. “We have a wardrobe bias toward summer clothing in Canada. You don’t need 20 sundresses. You need 20 cashmere sweaters! It’s not like owning more shorts will create a longer summer.” Shame, that. “Those two weeks of perfect weather in July have a psychic grip on our imagination,” adds Caroline Alexander, co-owner of Ludique, a personal shopping service. “We have to talk people into balancing their wardrobes.”

Guilty! Facing a closet stuffed with sundresses, I lament packing them away. Mostly, I resent paying money for clothing that doesn’t fuel the myth of an endless summer. Catyanna Antoniou, a 23-year-old marketing student at York University, couldn’t agree more. “I own about 70 little dresses and 90 pairs of heels,” says the upcoming Toronto contestant on the reality show Princess. “If I have any baggy sweats or turtlenecks, it’s because I’ve stolen them from friends or my boyfriend. Eighty per cent of my wardrobe is for summer, with only about 20 per cent boring warm things.”

As the owner of the knitting store Americo Original, Nicole Sibonney is an unlikely person to exhibit summer shopping bias: “Oh, I have over 25 swimsuits—which I wear with linen pants—and I wear sandals through to the end of September,” she says. “It all creates a little fantasy. Psychologically, summer clothes take up less ‘room.’ ”

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