Who’s suing whom

By Alex Ballingall - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

British Columbia: A former foster mom is suing the B.C. government for neglecting to inform her that a teenage girl she took in had hepatitis C. On her first night in the house, the girl had a heroin overdose. The foster mom, who rushed downstairs when she heard thrashing and screaming, pulled out a needle from her arm; somehow, it became stuck in her leg. Months later, she learned she had contracted hepatitis C.

Alberta: Calgarians living near a Lilydale chicken processing plant are suing the company for $250,000, claiming the plant is unbearably noisy and smelly. Pigeons, they say, routinely pick through improperly discarded chicken entrails, dropping dismembered feet throughout the neighbourhood.

Manitoba: A Winnipeg police officer is suing two members of his own force, saying they botched an investigation that led to his being wrongfully convicted of assault and stripped of his badge. A police investigation found him guilty of breaking a woman’s arm during an arrest in 2007. As a result, he claims to have suffered depression. Shortly afterwards, however, the officer was exonerated.

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Canadian Tire’s baffling strategy to sell you everything

By Chris Sorensen - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 34 Comments

Colin O'Connor/Maclean's

The Canadian Tire store on Yonge Street at Davenport Road in downtown Toronto—a few blocks from where brothers John and Alfred Billes opened their first store in 1922, and the location that became the main Canadian Tire store in 1937 (complete with roller-skating stock boys)—is not a very welcoming place these days. Prospective shoppers are greeted by a queue of frazzled-looking customers clutching humidifiers and extension cords at the service counter. They must then negotiate a pair of waist-high turnstiles before browsing aisle after cluttered aisle of merchandise as varied as Canada’s seasons: kitchen utensils, vacuum cleaners, caulking guns, drill bits and sprinkler attachments. Upstairs there’s hockey gear, camp stoves, some toys and cans of tennis balls. Downstairs, auto parts, oil-slicked service bays and, finally, a wall of all-season tires.

Newer stores, located in towns and cities across the country, are brighter and more airy, but largely house the same eclectic inventory—none of it particularly cheap and none of it terribly aspirational either. Customer service, meanwhile, varies wildly from store to store, the result of the company’s independent—and bureaucratic—dealer ownership model.

It all seems like a recipe for retail disaster, particularly as an army of well-oiled U.S. big box chains—Wal-Mart, Home Depot and soon Target—continue their relentless march north of the border. Yet somehow, Canadian Tire remains standing, earning profits of $453 million on $10.3 billion in retail sales last year, which was up three per cent from a year earlier (Canadian Tire Corporation Ltd. also makes money through a banking operation, Canadian Tire Financial Services). “People have been calling for Canadian Tire to fold under the pressure of new competitors for 20 years, and it hasn’t happened yet,” says Jim Danahy, the chief executive of CustomerLAB, a retail consulting firm. “They seem to have a unique relationship with their customers.”

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You can’t mandate marriage, even if it’s good for society

By the editors - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 1 Comment

Chris Wattie/CP

Marriage may not matter as much as it once did to young couples. But it matters a lot to society at large.

Married couples are a foundation of the economy. They earn, save and spend more than their unmarried counterparts. They are happier. And a mountain of evidence shows stable two-parent families are good for kids. Children who grow up in a married family are far more likely to succeed in school, find employment and avoid problems later in life than those raised in other situations, however loving.

But despite all this, the future of marriage as a continuing social institution often looks quite grim. This week saw the release of a sobering international report detailing the decline in significance and prevalence of marriage, and the impact this is having on fertility rates, social cohesion and economic growth worldwide.

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Is real change on the horizon in Burma?

By Richard Warnica - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Lai Seng Sin/AP

In Burma, rumours of reform are best taken with a pinch, or more, of salt. Hints of liberalization tend to trickle out of the closed-off nation every few years. But in nearly 50 years of military rule, little changed in the country sometimes known as Myanmar. Today, a nominally civilian government reigns in Rangoon, but the military remains dominant, if not all-powerful.

There are increasing signs, however, that real change may be in the offing. Public outcry recently forced President Thein Sein to put a temporary halt to a massive dam project on the Irrawaddy River. The development would have flooded a huge expanse of sensitive wetlands and forced thousands of villagers from their homes. In the past, none of that likely would have mattered. But this time, for whatever reason, it did. Whether the dam decision triggers deeper democratic change, however, remains to be seen. As democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi told the BBC: “I think I’d like to see a few more turns before I decide whether or not the wheels are moving along.”

Bullying 2.0 is more like a drama class

By Emma Teitel - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 4 Comments

Chris Whitehead/Getty Images

What is likely the only thing Lady Gaga and Conservative MP Mike Allen have in common? Both believe that bullying should be a criminal offence. Following the suicide of 14-year-old Jamey Rodemeyer in Buffalo, N.Y., last month (the teen was bullied mercilessly for being gay), Lady Gaga expressed via Twitter that “Bullying must become illegal,” and underscored her position by pressing President Barack Obama about bullying while towering in heels (Obama has since described the encounter at a fundraiser as “intimidating”). New Brunswick’s Mike Allen, for his part, has been working with BullyingCanada.ca to make bullying an illegal act. Despite their efforts, however, neither the pop star nor the politician has been successful. While various behaviours that fall under the bullying umbrella—assault, uttering threats, harassment, unauthorized use of a computer—are included in the Criminal Code of Canada, the term bullying itself is not. The young offender who last year allegedly attacked Mitchell Wilson—the 11-year-old Pickering, Ont., boy who recently committed suicide after being bullied relentlessly for his muscular dystrophy symptoms—was charged with assault, not bullying. And maybe that’s a good thing; because the divergent languages of bullying—what adults call it and what its younger victims do—may be more problematic than its pending legal status.

Recent research confirms what I—someone not far removed from adolescence—have suspected for awhile. “Bullying” may be the accepted term for kid-on-kid brutality, but it’s seldom used among kids themselves. “They view the term as adult-driven,” says Wendy Craig, a Queen’s University psychology professor and researcher at the Bully Lab. “Teens especially don’t generally refer to the term.” Craig echoes recent research by Danah Boyd and Alice Marwick, whose innovative paper on bullying in the United States found that young people don’t use the word “bullying” in the same way and/or nearly as frequently as parents and educators do; not only is the term practically unused, it’s considered painfully passé. In fact, when most teens hear about bullying they automatically assume a “grade school problem” that doesn’t apply. On GritTV last year, actor John Fugelsang argued that the verb bullying should be retired for good. “Bullying is a flaccid, outdated, archaic, Archie comic term,” he said. “It’s quaint, it’s useless, it’s toothless.”

So how, then, do young people label the humiliating and infuriating abuse of power adults call bullying? In classic teenager style, ironically and maybe even more insidiously, they call it “drama.” Why drama? “The emic use of ‘drama,’ ” wrote Boyd and Marwick, “allows teens to distance themselves from practices which adults may conceptualize as bullying. As such, they can retain agency—and save face—rather than positioning themselves in a victim narrative.”

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The next big things

By Kate Lunau, Richard Warnica, Alex Ballingall and Nicholas Kohler - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Brian Howell

Each year, the Ernest C. Manning Awards Foundation recognizes four Canadians who are developing and successfully marketing homegrown, breakthrough innovations.

For this year’s winners, the awards recognize decades of hard work. Philip Hill started testing green diesel engines in the 1980s; today, he is collaborating with some of the world’s top engine-makers on a design that could revolutionize the transport industry. The Manning Awards also recognize that great ideas don’t just come from the lab. Two of the prizes (the Innovation Awards) go to those who haven’t had access to research facilities or advanced education in their fields. After designing a hands-free device to help a disabled friend better communicate, Randy Marsden, for instance, started a company that is now marketing a keyboard that will make hospitals cleaner and safer. Whether the winners worked doggedly in a lab or the garage, their ideas are having an impact today, not just in Canada but around the world.

Heavy trucks, light on emissions

Most people think of diesel engines as smelly, dirty and loud—but Philip Hill, a mechanical engineer and retired professor at the University of British Columbia, has spent decades trying to make them cleaner. In the early 1980s, Hill started working on an engine fuelled by natural gas, cutting back on smog and soot; today, vehicles across North America are using natural gas-powered diesel engines developed from his original design.

The transportation industry accounted for 24 per cent of the increase in Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 to 2008. Diesel engines are “the engine of choice for heavy-duty applications,” like pulling large highway trucks, Hill says. Some improvements have been made in the last decade, but the engines still tend to spew nitrogen oxides (a component of smog) and soot particles. “Keeping the engine and changing the fuel became the emphasis,” Hill says. But early efforts at alternative fuels for heavy-duty trucks struggled to meet demand for durability, power, affordability and low emissions.

Working with a team of grad students and one single-cylinder test engine, Hill designed his own equipment. Research engineer Bruce Hodgins joined the project, and the team created a means to inject first a small amount of diesel fuel to start combustion, and then the natural gas. This concept, called high pressure direct injection (HPDI), was so successful that, in 1995, a company was launched to commercialize it—Westport Innovations Inc., in Vancouver. “Sometimes it’s easy, in pure research, to just look at the science,” says CEO David Demers, “but Phil was looking at how to do this practically, for society.” Hill serves as a Westport consultant today.

It took five years before Westport’s first dollar of revenue came in, but success quickly followed as the company developed a series of other technologies to fuel engines with natural gas. The technology originally designed by Hill is now operating in everything from bus fleets to garbage trucks and UPS heavy-duty trucks in North America and Australia. Westport collaborates with three of the four biggest diesel engine manufacturers in the world, Hill says, working on natural gas usage in transport engines. The company recently announced a deal with Shell to market liquefied natural gas-powered vehicles across North America.

Focusing on diesel made sense from a commercial perspective, says Demers. “We’re focused on people who use a lot of fuel, because that’s where the economic incentive is highest to switch to a cheaper fuel, like natural gas.” It makes sense from an environmental perspective, too, something Hill recognized decades ago. Back when the company was launched, “he spoke very eloquently about this, and he’s right,” Demers says. “We desperately need a way to move people and goods around efficiently—and we have to do it without oil.”

Using babies to fight bullying

In the opening chapter of her 2005 book Roots of Empathy: Changing the World, Child by Child, Mary Gordon describes the effects of a classroom visit by a mother and her six-month-old baby on a tough-looking boy named Darren, who was bounced between foster homes all his life and enrolled in Grade 8 for the second time. Gordon writes of how, to everyone’s surprise, Darren volunteers to cradle the baby. After a few moments of gentle rocking with the child, Darren looks up and asks: “If nobody has ever loved you, do you think you could still be a good father?”

Gordon has been sending parents and their newborn babies into classrooms across Canada and six other countries for more than a decade. The goal of her organization, Roots of Empathy, is to teach “emotional literacy” by demonstrating the quintessence of love and understanding that exists between a parent and child. The power of this relationship, says Gordon, influences children to become more caring, thoughtful, upstanding adults—in short, to be empathetic. “What Roots of Empathy does is give every child in the classroom the picture of what love looks like,” says Gordon. “It has a huge impact.”

By the end of 2012, more than 450,000 children are expected to have experienced the program. Gordon has been widely recognized for the work, receiving interest from the European Union and the WHO.

Gordon’s program caters to children in kindergarten through Grade 8. A parent and baby visit a classroom nine times during a school year, while a Roots of Empathy instructor drops in separately before and after each visit. Throughout these sessions, children are asked open-ended questions, like: “Do you remember a time when you felt frustrated like baby Carter?” The “bridge to empathy” is crossed when children understand that they share the same capacity for feeling as others, and then care about what those feelings are, Gordon explains.

Roots of Empathy has been called Canada’s best anti-bullying program, something Gordon credits with how the program teaches children to emotionally identify with their peers, and to stand up for them when they’re getting picked on. “That’s what empathy is. They jump in when there’s an injustice, and they jump in when they can make something better,” she says.

Photograph by Kayla Soomer

Prepping the hospital computer

Keyboards are the toilets of the cubicle. They gather bacteria and, with their little notches and tiny gaps, rarely let it go. In the office, that can be a hassle—you might catch a flu from your keyboard. But in a hospital, where antibiotic-resistant germs hover in the air, it can be deadly.

Which is where Randy Marsden comes in. Four years ago, Marsden’s Edmonton company developed a touch-screen keyboard designed for easy cleaning. The Cleankeys board has a single, easy-to-wipe surface. In a trial performed by the University of Alberta, it proved 100 times cleaner than a traditional keyboard after a simple scrub. Cleankeys is already popular with dentists, especially in Europe. Now Marsden is hoping hospitals adopt the technology, too. Right now, a Calgary hospital is studying Cleankeys on a special unit.

Marsden came to his current vocation by accident. Twenty-two years ago, as a student at the University of Alberta, he designed a hands-free device to help a paralyzed friend better communicate. The product essentially transformed a computer into a speech aid. After graduation, Marsden founded a company to market it. And for more than two decades, as president and CEO of Edmonton’s Madentec Ltd., he has developed new technology products that help the disabled.

A few years ago, Marsden made an unlikely pivot. One of his products is a head-tracking camera that allows disabled users to move a cursor across a computer screen. It became, quite accidentally, popular with another customer: a dentist. The dentist had a digital X-ray system in his office. But every time he wanted to use the mouse, he had to take his gloves off. The Madentec camera allowed him to skip that step and avoid any risk of contamination. At first, Marsden was “happy to have another market,” he says. But, eventually, he started thinking about what problem, exactly, the camera was solving.

To find out, Marsden convened a focus group of dentists and discovered they were going through all kinds of hoops to keep their computers clean. They “were stuffing [the keyboards] in plastic bags, wrapping them in Saran Wrap,” Marsden says. He figured there had to be a better way.

Marsden debuted the first Cleankeys prototype at a dental conference in 2007. He sold 4,000 units right away. With a new model now in mass production, Marsden is hoping to see orders come in from all over the world. “One of the most contaminated surfaces in the hospital is the keyboard,” he says. With Cleankeys, that might change.

Seeing clearly through the spray

Sometimes inventions spring not from sleek and sterile labs in the big city but from a garage in northern Ontario. Very frequently, these gizmos have troubled beginnings—such are the travails of the small-time inventor. Consider the tale of the Morins, Albert and Mark, an intergenerational affair. Their story begins one rainy day in the mid-1980s, when Albert and his wife, Muriel, left Toronto and headed north for Sudbury, Ont., where they lived.

Albert, a construction worker with a Grade 8 education, was also an inventor who tinkered in the garage with reams of patents to his name. After a frustrating business meeting involving a revolutionary snow-melting machine Albert had designed, he and Muriel found themselves caught in the heavy spray of the trucks lumbering north through a storm. “I’d duck every time we’d pass one,” says Muriel, who remembers turning to him and suggesting he invent “something simple”—a thingamajig to cut down on all that horrible spray. “That’s all it took,” she says.

He didn’t sleep much that night. Drawings progressed to cardboard cut-outs, which became a plastic prototype. Soon Albert had invited Muriel to the garage and, with a spray bottle full of water and her hair dryer, demonstrated how it worked. The idea used louvres to create a pocket of negative air—a vortex—that would suck water off the tires.

Mark, Muriel’s son from a previous marriage, saw the new invention and was transfixed. “I wanted to be a part of it,” he remembers. Albert patented his new invention and then, at age 59, died. His mud flap probably would have died too—except that, 10 years ago, Mark lost his job at Union Gas. He’d long been thinking about his brilliant step-father’s mud flaps. “We just felt it was a door that was being opened,” says Shelley, his wife.

She and Mark, who live in Restoule, Ont., near North Bay, launched Vortex Splash Guards in 2001, persuading Engineered Plastics Inc., a U.S. firm, to manufacture the device. “It suppressed about 80 per cent of the spray coming off big trucks,” says Denny Scalise of Engineered Plastics. The newfangled mud flap started strong, with Volvo Trucks including it on a futuristic truck-of-tomorrow it was exhibiting. But there were setbacks: an opportunity to sell to the U.S. Department of Defense went nowhere after the Morins got a bad batch from the manufacturer, causing a failure during a crucial test. And they could be a hard sell—at US$32 for a set of two, compared to US$20 for traditional flaps. “Everyone who sees it loves it,” says Scalise. “Then when they go to stroke a cheque, it just never happens.”

Mark took matters into his own hands, designing a version for recreational vehicles and licensing it to a Kansas firm. And he got Canadian Tire interested in the same design—though a homemade variety. The Morins assembled manufacturing parties out in their garage, inviting family to cut semi-truck mud flaps shipped from Pennsylvania into sizes suitable for pickups and RVs. Canadian Tire dropped the product. “We’ve definitely had our ups and downs—the financial strain and everything,” says Shelley, who has two adult sons with Mark. “We’ve just basically invested our lives into it.”

Still, Mark hasn’t given up and says tests show the Vortex reduces drag and generates significant fuel-consumption savings for a smaller carbon footprint: “It’s enough to change the face of mud flaps as we know them!” He’s unflappable, a salesman so entranced by Albert’s design he can’t stop selling. “He’s my hero,” says Shelley. “Honestly.”

Econowatch: October 2011

By Colin Campbell - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 1 Comment

Mike Blake/Reuters

The TSX is down 20 per cent from its April high. It’s official, the bear market is back. The financial news is so bleak that even viral videos, which normally feature cute animals and footballs hitting groins, seem to have lost their sense of humour. Last week, one of the most talked-about Web videos was of a stock trader telling a BBC interviewer how the economic crisis is a cancer. “If you just wait and wait hoping it is going to go away, just like a cancer it is going to grow and it will be too late,” said Alessio Rastani, who argued that “the stock market is finished” and that people should hedge against an inevitable crash, like hedge funds are now doing.

Bloggers and business publications were quick to question Rastani’s bona fides. He’s self-employed, has modest holdings and is, in short, just an average guy. Which maybe explains why his message touched a nerve among average investors trying to make sense of the market chaos as their savings evaporate.

More importantly, it speaks to the extent that the economic crisis is one of confidence. Consumer confidence surveys show optimism has gone AWOL, even despite recent data showing there are silver linings. In the past months, companies have continued to go about their business—factories are humming in Canada and the service sector is growing. In the U.S., economists are predicting GDP will grow in the third quarter. Troubles still loom large. Employment is stalled and the eurozone is teetering. But tune out the markets for a moment, watch the likes of Rastani with all the seriousness you would a kitten slipping off a windowsill, and things aren’t so bad. Or at least, they could still be a lot worse.

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Damn Yankees are trying to steal our victory in 1812

By Peter Shawn Taylor - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 136 Comments

Fanshawe Pioneer Village, London, Ont. (Colin O'Connor/Maclean's)

Meet Col. Joel Stone, Canada’s newest hero of the War of 1812.

Born in Connecticut in 1749, Stone moved to Upper Canada during the tumult of the American Revolution and settled at Gananoque, in eastern Ontario along the St. Lawrence River, where he opened a sawmill and got himself appointed to a variety of government posts, including commander of the local militia. But his quiet life as a gentleman settler ended when the United States declared war in June 1812. Suddenly Col. Stone and his small community found themselves in the midst of the fight for Canada.

The St. Lawrence was the British army’s sole supply route to Upper Canada and the Great Lakes. If the American military cut river access, the whole province, from Kingston to what is now Windsor, would inevitably fall to the invaders. If Canada was to exist as an independent country, Col. Stone and the Gananoque militia had to keep their part of this vital supply route open.

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The Harper government versus organized labour

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 10:36 AM - 37 Comments

The government once again threatens back-to-work legislation and this time the Labour Minister muses vaguely of amending the Canadian Labour Code.

There’s something wrong in this case, and does that mean there’s something wrong in the code?” she said. “And if there is, what do we do about it? But the beginning part is analyzing the facts at hand to see if it’s a one-off … or is it a case where the code, which is 100 years old, has to be taken a look at.” Raitt said there are no changes planned, but that she is starting a process to see whether adjustments might be needed in the future.

“If we do have a problem and maybe it is a flaw in the system, we should discover it now and if we need to make changes we can make changes,” the minister said.

See previously: The right to strike

Starting… now

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 9:32 AM - 66 Comments

Stephen Harper, August 2. Harper didn’t stop there, putting in a campaign plug for Ontario’s provincial Conservatives in this fall’s election. ”We started cleaning up the left-wing mess federally in this area. Rob’s doing it municipally. And now we’ve got to complete the hat trick and do it provincially as well.”

Stephen Harper, last Friday. You know I don’t analyse elections, and I don’t get involved in provincial elections. Obviously we congratulate Premier McGuinty on his win. Our governments have worked well during the challenges of the past two or three years, and I look forward to continuing to work with Premier McGuinty’s government.

Compelling evidence

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 8:45 AM - 3 Comments

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan has released a report into the treatment of detainees by Afghan authorities.

UNAMA’s detention observation found compelling evidence that 125 detainees (46 percent) of the 273 detainees interviewed who had been in NDS detention experienced interrogation techniques at the hands of NDS officials that constituted torture, and that torture is practiced systematically in a number of NDS detention facilities throughout Afghanistan … More than one third of the 117 conflict-related detainees UNAMA interviewed who had been in ANP detention experienced treatment that amounted to torture or to other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment…

UNAMA’s detention observation included interviews with 89 detainees who reported the involvement of international military forces either alone or together with Afghan forces in their capture and transfer to NDS or ANP custody. UNAMA found compelling evidence that 19 of these 89 detainees were tortured in NDS custody and three in ANP custody.

The full report is here. As the Globe notes, one detainee, interviewed in March, claims a separate process for those transferred by Canadian forces. Continue…

Breaking Bad and the villainous anti-hero

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, October 10, 2011 at 9:28 PM - 11 Comments

A few thoughts (spoilers undoubtedly included) on last night’s fourth season finale of Breaking Bad:

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The many tests for Mitt Romney

By John Parisella - Monday, October 10, 2011 at 3:44 PM - 2 Comments

At the Values Voter Summit this weekend, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney was confronted with one of the many tests he will have to pass on his way to the GOP nomination and perhaps the presidency in November 2012. A supporter of Texas Governor Rick Perry, Pastor Robert Jeffress, referred to Romney as a moral man, but not a true Christian because of his Mormon faith. He went on to characterize Mormonism as a cult and not a genuine Christian religion.

Perry, to his credit, did not endorse the incendiary statements of his supporter, but the battlelines were drawn for the primary battles to come in Iowa and South Carolina, where social conservatives will play a major role in determining who will be President Obama’s opponent next year.

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Harper swings and misses on Insite

By Paul Wells - Monday, October 10, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 86 Comments

Andy Clark/Reuters

The limits of Stephen Harper’s power are becoming as interesting as the extent of it. Most days, life looks pretty good. His MPs form a comfortable majority in the Commons. Three of the caucuses he faces have no leader. The leader of the fourth, Elizabeth May, has no caucus. He inherited and did not ruin a well-performing economy. Even Americans envy Canada’s fortune.

But there is a clinic in Vancouver the Prime Minister cannot shut down by the hair of his chinny chin chin. The clinic is called Insite, and every morning drug addicts line up waiting for it to open. They keep it full until evening, injecting their veins full of heroin and other drugs. This just seems wrong to the Prime Minister. Three times he has sent federal government lawyers to court to say so. Each time they come up snake eyes.

Last week it was the Supreme Court of Canada. Two justices Harper named joined the unanimous decision against his lawyers’ arguments. Insite will stay open. Other supervised-injection sites may follow. (That last part isn’t clear. We’ll walk you through it in a minute.)

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So what does Jim Flaherty do now about the economy?

By John Geddes - Monday, October 10, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 2 Comments

Chris Wattie/Reuters

Economic necessity made Jim Flaherty a big-spending finance minister, but he takes pains not to talk like one. Back in August—with the Greek debt crisis escalating and U.S. political gridlock on budget policy frightening investors everywhere—Flaherty was pressed by NDP finance critic Peggy Nash to consider pumping some federal cash into the vulnerable Canadian economy. “That actually is the problem—too much spending,” he told her at the House finance committee. “It’s exactly what we should not do.”

A few weeks later, heading to Marseille, France, for an anxious meeting of the G7 finance ministers, Flaherty was again asked about proposals for governments to ease off on deficit reduction. In the face of a deteriorating global economic outlook, the classic policy response would be an injection of stimulus. But Flaherty recoiled at the notion. “We want to stay the course,” he said.

The steady-as-she-goes message, though, didn’t stop unease from deepening. That prompted Flaherty, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney to hold a rare photo op meeting to show they were on the case. And Flaherty noticeably softened his previously hard-edged anti-stimulus, pro-deficit-cutting rhetoric. “If we get a shock from outside our country,” he told reporters recently, “we’ll have to be responsive, and we’ll be flexible and pragmatic.” The substantial wiggle room implicit in those words served as a reminder of how abruptly Flaherty shifted, in late 2008 and early 2009, from predicting no recession and no deficits, to having to acknowledge a punishing recession and preside over unprecedented deficit spending to combat it.

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War on Wall Street

By Claire Ward and Nicholas Köhler - Monday, October 10, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 29 Comments

Andrew Holbrooke/Corbis

Last Sunday, just before 7 a.m., as the sun cast its first light on Manhattan, cold, damp Zuccotti Park, just south of Ground Zero and north of Wall Street—those twin poles of a shattered American psyche—looked like little more than a junkyard. Shopping carts, blankets, garbage bags, sodden pizza boxes, piles of cardboard protest signs. Most of the two or three hundred anti-Wall Street protesters camping out there were wrapped in sleeping bags and under tarps, the pigeons pecking about their heads. A couple snuggled together on an air mattress. An elderly man in combat fatigues, his grey hair tied back in a bandana, slept against a concrete wall, a German shepherd at his side. Such were the moments of first light, before the makeshift village in Zuccotti Park came to life.

When the people awoke they gathered in groups to discuss ideas: corporate control, securitization, debt and credit, the environment, the Federal Reserve. There was heated debate and a lot of hugging. “I see it as a mathematical improbability to have a growth-based system based on finite resources,” said Tim, a 57-year-old bassist from New Haven, Conn., with long grey dreadlocks. “It’s kind of depressing, to be honest with you. I think the bottom is going to have to fall out of the economy.” When a protester approached asking for rolling papers, Tim promptly produced some from his pocket. “The solution is money,” said Rick DeVoe, 54, an environmental activist from East Hampton, Mass. “If the dollar doesn’t work for us, let’s create something that does.”

Over by the info booth a mousy girl in her 20s handed out a newspaper—The Occupied Wall Street Journal, a deliciously tongue-in-cheek jab at Rupert Murdoch’s business broadsheet. On a nearby table, various pamphlets lay strewn beside a Macdonald’s coffee cup and a well-thumbed copy of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground. A white-haired soccer mom on vacation from Tennessee, all smiles and glasses, asked if there was a petition to sign. Volunteers distributed food from the kitchen—concrete benches laden with donated bagels, coffee, juice. At the media centre, marked off with caution tape, youths sat on cement benches glued to MacBooks, spreading the word on various social media networks. @OccupyWallStNYC, one Twitter handle among many here, had some 39,000 followers as of Tuesday.

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REVIEW: Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend

By Marni Jackson - Monday, October 10, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 1 Comment

New Yorker writer Orlean has pulled off a small miracle in her first book since The Orchid Thief. She turns the story of the most famous movie dog in history, Rin Tin Tin (although, like the Dalai Lama, there are many iterations of the original Rinty), into a book that wanders off-leash in all sorts of rewarding ways. She explores the role of dogs in war (Germany had 16,000 in military service); the evolution of Hollywood heroes; the nature of our attachment to our pets; and the American faith in the qualities Orlean believes Rin Tin Tin embodied—“strength, loyalty, devotion and truth.”

Sometimes Orlean tries to balance too many ideas on Rin Tin Tin’s shapely nose. But just as his trainer, Lee Duncan, devoted himself to the German shepherd puppy he rescued from a bombed-out kennel on a battlefield in France, Orlean stubbornly, daringly, puts her faith in the dog’s ability to stir modern readers. Fortunately, she hit research gold when she came across Duncan’s papers, including his memoirs, in a neglected storage unit. A fatherless child who spent years in an orphanage, Duncan wrote that the dog “crept right into a lonesome place in my life and had become a part of me.”

The star-making of Rin Tin Tin took over Duncan’s life (even his daughter was jealous). By 1927, the dog was named the most popular performer in the U.S., and his films were seen in 70 countries around the world. In 1954, having survived the shift from silent films to talkies and finally television, The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin was second only to the Walt Disney show in ratings. Rin Tin Tin received 10,000 fan letters a week, out-drawing the more bucolic (and fluffier) Lassie.

Orlean spent almost 10 years researching and writing the book, visiting dog cemeteries in Paris and poring over the detritus of Duncan’s sad, admirable life. It’s the sort of authorial feat—like Rin Tin Tin’s famous 12-foot leaps over walls—that only a writer passionately devoted to her subject could achieve.

REVIEW: What it’s Like to Go to War

By Brian Bethune - Monday, October 10, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Given the human record, it’s not likely the need for soldiers will disappear any time soon. Marlantes wants both to set down his own wartime experiences and to help those entering “the sacrificial fire called war” understand what is being asked of them. The physical risks are obvious for soldiers and families alike, but the real issue for the author is the killing the young men inflict. Warriors suffer from their violations of their cultures’ moral norms, and again from the fact modern society usually ignores that side of war.

The bulk of the book consists of Marlantes’s scarifying accounts of his time as a Marine lieutenant in Vietnam. (One story he tells, about an enlisted man from B.C., prompts an intriguing footnote: “I’ve often wondered how Canadian veterans have handled their return to a nation that already projects so much of its own darker sides onto the U.S.”) His Vietnam memories—the basis of Marlantes’s justly praised 2010 novel, Matterhorn—gave him the profound belief that combat is a potentially sacred experience, incorporating the four common components of mystical experiences: preternatural awareness of one’s own mortality, complete focus on the present instant, valuing others’ lives over one’s own, feeling part of a larger community. If soldiers can bring meaning to such moments, Marlantes believes, then their sanity will be better preserved, they will be less inclined to do more harm than they need to (that is, commit atrocities) and they will reintegrate more easily into society.

But how to assimilate these experiences? In the past, warriors were prepared for their psyche-altering role by ritual and literature (Marlantes has read the Iliad more than once). Today they need those aids as much as ever. Victors in battle should play a role in the respectful burial of enemy bodies, thanking the dead on both sides “for their fully played-out part in this mysterious drama” and asking for forgiveness if “we killed in anger or hatred.” From someone who hasn’t been where Marlantes has, physically and spiritually, this could sound absurd. From him it sounds like wisdom.

Rallying against Russia

By Erica Alini - Monday, October 10, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Janek Skarzynski/AFP/Getty Images

Since his brother, Polish president Lech Kaczynski, died last year, Jaroslaw Kaczynski has been trying to translate that personal and national tragedy into political victory. Last year, the former prime minister and current leader of Poland’s nationalist Law and Justice Party ran to fill the post left empty by his twin, who died with 95 others when a military airplane he was travelling on crashed in Russia on April 10, 2010. Jaroslaw tried to ride the spirit of national unity that had seized Poland by toning down his polarizing views and populist rants, but lost.

Now he’s aiming to reconquer the PM title—with the exact opposite strategy. Ahead of an Oct. 9 parliamentary election, the conservative leader has been rallying Poles against Russia, which he accuses of being involved in his brother’s death. He has also recruited several family members of the victims of the crash, all of them political neophytes, to run for Law and Justice. It’s unclear how well the volte-face is faring with the public, as different polls put voter support for his party as low as 20 and as high as 32 per cent, a mere four percentage points behind the leading Civic Platform party. Moscow must surely be watching closely.

Alberta’s old boys’ club elects a new premier

By Colby Cosh - Monday, October 10, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 4 Comments

Chris Schwarz

Alison Redford, who has captured the leadership of the Alberta Progressive Conservatives and will soon be sworn in as the province’s 14th premier, was the preferred candidate of those who wanted to blow up the “old boys’ network.” One of the ways she sought to establish her probity/transparency bona fides was to release a complete list of her major donors. This proved deft: the list won her brownie points, but few noticed that it is practically an index of highly connected, politically conscious Alberta money men.

Redford got five-figure donations from Maclab Enterprises, the property-rental giant co-founded by philanthropist Sandy Mactaggart; Ed McNally’s Big Rock Brewery, longtime provider of social lubricant for conservative events; Irv Kipnes, who spun Tory booze-retail privatization into gold as CEO of the Liquor Stores Income Fund. Name an elite Calgary clan and you’re almost certain to find its handle in Team Redford’s accounts: McCaig, Southern, Haskayne, Markin, Hotchkiss—builders whose names are physically all over the city, chiselled into the stones of schools and clinics.

These forces backed the “outsider” whose victory in the Oct. 1 PC leadership showdown sent ripples of surprise across the country. The original heir apparent had been Gary Mar, a Klein-era health and education minister who left the province to become its official agent in Washington in 2007. Mar, a Chinese-Canadian who could count on a strong ethnic ground game, started strong but watched inherent weaknesses transmute into fatal flaws.

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Don’t let the depression get you down

By Scott Feschuk - Monday, October 10, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 3 Comments

Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

During a recent lecture in Ottawa, a prominent British commentator offered his assessment of the global economy. Martin Wolf referenced debt loads, bailout funds and all that—but permit me to distill his message to its essence: EVERYBODY RUN FOR YOUR LIVES!!

Indeed, by the time Wolf was done speaking of likely default in Europe and a potential worldwide depression, it felt as though nomadic Huns were poised to smash through the walls and make off with our animal skins and womenfolk. His vision of the future made The Road sound like a buddy comedy.

Wolf is by no means alone. These are prosperous times for pessimism. Pretty much every day now we wake up to news that the Hang Seng is down three per cent, which is a bummer because hearing “Hang Seng” used to be so much fun, in that it sounded like a bounty hunter from Star Wars. When it comes to retirement, many of us have given up on the dream of Freedom 55 and now grudgingly accept the reality of Freedom Andy Rooney, wherein we position ourselves behind a desk and keep working until we’re 92.

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Björk is crazy, like a fox

By Elio Iannacci - Monday, October 10, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 1 Comment

Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin

Many have tried—and failed—to figure out the thinking behind singer-songwriter Björk Guðmundsdóttir’s sometimes magical, sometimes questionable career moves. In 1994, for instance, Madonna asked the Icelandic talent to collaborate on the pop queen’s sixth studio album. Björk repeatedly declined Her Madgesty’s requests but, as a consolation, sent Madonna one song—which ended up becoming the most obscure hit of her career: Bedtime Story.

Six years later, after a critically praised performance in the movie Dancer in the Dark, for which she won the best actress prize at Cannes, Björk announced that she would never act again. Most confounding of all is her walk on the red carpet at the 2001 Oscars: she managed to stupefy Hollywood by wearing a dress that resembled a stuffed swan. Joan Rivers demanded Björk be “put into an asylum.” (Ellen DeGeneres further mocked the singer by wearing a version of the frock when hosting the Emmys later that year.)

Her latest disc, Biophilia, to be released Oct. 11, maintains Björk’s status as the weirdest—and craftiest—kid at the school of pop. “I feel technology has finally caught up with humans,” explains the 45-year-old via phone from New York. “That’s why I got this guy in Iceland who makes instruments to make me a small pipe organ that I could connect directly into an iPad touch screen. He reworked my old celesta [a keyboard that resembles a glockenspiel in sound] this way—which made composing much more tactile and impulsive.”

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Australia: more than just a nanny state

By Alex Ballingall - Monday, October 10, 2011 at 10:05 AM - 2 Comments

Who says parents know best when it comes to raising their children? Apparently not the Australian judicial system. Joe Harman, magistrate at a federal court in Sydney, recently placed a 16-year-old girl on Australia’s airport watch list to prevent her parents from sending her to Lebanon for an arranged marriage.

According to Australia’s The Age, the girl had only met her arranged husband once. She desperately wanted to avoid being shipped off to marry him. In what Harman called “a great act of bravery,” the girl approached the court for help. Harman decided to place her on the PACE Alert system. That way, the government will know if her parents try to force her out of the country to be married.

Since the girl expressed fears over her mother’s reaction to how she had taken her cause to the courts, the magistrate ordered her parents not to question, threaten or harass her. “It is not the right of any parent to cause their child to be married against their will, whether in accordance with Australian law or otherwise,” Harman said. Sometimes the parenthood of the state trumps the parenthood of the parent.

This is the week that was

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, October 9, 2011 at 2:21 PM - 1 Comment

Paul Dewar, a man of faith, launched his bid for the NDP leadership. Martin Singh joined the race too. Peter Julian decided to stay out. Brian Topp stated his cases for supporting the arts and taxing the rich. Team Mulcair and Team Topp took shape.

Peter MacKay wasn’t involved in the decision to launch an independent review of the Afghan mission. The NDP questioned the Prime Minister’s control and the government insisted on a separation of public and private business. David Johnston celebrated one year at Rideau. PEI, Manitoba and Ontario voted for their incumbents. The Harper government worked towards an office of religious freedom. The Liberals called for a national strategy on suicide prevention and the House came together to consider the challenge.

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