Complex and controversial financial tools weighed in eurozone rescue

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 9:51 AM - 0 Comments

The prospect of a fully fledged plan to solve Europe’s debt crisis emerging at Wednesday euro-zone summit is fading. But what is becoming clear is that any solution will be far more complex than the fiscally stable European countries putting enough cash in a fund to save whatever debt-burdened countries falter. Instead, the approximately $600 billion envisaged for the so-called European Financial Security Facility would be used to lure foreign sovereign and private investors, mainly Chinese and Middle Eastern, to buy bonds of troubled euro zone countries. European presidents and prime minsters, though, haven’t yet figured out exactly how. One model would provide first-loss guarantees on sovereign bonds issued by troubled euro-zone members. So if a country became insolvent and couldn’t pay 50 percent of what it owed, the loss to investors might be just 30 percent instead of the entire 50 percent—the EFSF would cover the other 20 per cent. But would that partial cushion be enough to attract outside investment? Some observers doubt it. The German magazine Der Spiegel’s online English edition surveys the complicated arrangements being contemplated, and suggests they are similar to the use of repackaged subprime mortgages and other weird investment products before the 2008 global market meltdown—the investment smoke and mirrors that amounted to “finance tricks to transform questionable debt into sure-fire investments.”

Der Spiegel

Reuters

Elbows up

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

Thomas Mulcair touts himself as Stephen Harper’s fiscally responsible nightmare.

Some of the criticism of Mulcair’s federalist credentials has come from Conservatives, although he has not departed from official NDP policy or said anything markedly different than his rival leadership contenders on issues involving Quebec. Mulcair takes that as a sign he’s the leadership contender most feared by Prime Minister Stephen Harper. “The last person the Conservatives want facing Stephen Harper in the House is me and so, for them to be singling me out and trying to attack me on that, showed that I make them nervous.”

By his own estimation, Mulcair believes he’s best equipped to take on Harper. An avid hockey player and Nordiques fan, his approach to the game sounds like it could be his political calling card: “Let’s just say I’ve never been shy about going into the corners and I usually come out with the puck.”

Valerie Plame on juggling romance, babies, identities

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 7:50 AM - 0 Comments

Francois Guillot/AFP/Getty Images

“I have long been disappointed in the portrayals in the popular culture of female CIA operatives. They are always such cartoon characters, aren’t they? They are hyper-sexualized, hyper-physical, always good with guns . . . ” So says former spy Valerie Plame Wilson. She is sitting in a quiet corner of a hotel resort in Santa Fe, an artistic enclave in the New Mexico desert, far removed from the political circus of Washington that ended her career as a covert CIA operative.

Her life’s work in nuclear non-proliferation—chasing and protecting nuclear weaponry, the details and duration of which remain classified—was cut short in 2003 when Bush administration officials leaked her identity to the press after her husband, former diplomat Joe Wilson, accused the White House of lying about a key piece of intelligence it used to make the case for invading Iraq.

The Wilsons moved to New Mexico and penned memoirs that were turned into a movie, Fair Game, starring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. If her career wasn’t already the stuff of fiction, it now will be. Plame is at work on a novel about a female spy due out next year from Blue Rider Press, an imprint of Penguin. She is working with co-author Sarah Lovett, a mystery writer. “I thought there was room for a character who is a little more realistic,” says Plame.

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REVIEW: The Virgin Cure

By Jessica Allen - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 7:30 AM - 0 Comments

Fans of McKay’s bestselling novel The Birth House are going to love The Virgin Cure, her second story about an unusual girl living in a precise time and place. This time it’s 12-year-old Moth, the daughter of a heartless gypsy fortune teller, navigating the mean streets of Manhattan’s Lower East Side around the Bowery in 1871—that’s before galleries, boutique hotels and a Daniel Boulud restaurant moved in.

Moth is introduced to readers by Dr. Sadie, a female physician who tends to prostitutes and the poor (and is based on the author’s great-great-grandmother); she explains in a letter that the proceeding story is Moth’s own and in her words. And that world is seething with evil women: the unlucky child is sold by her “slum house mystic” mother to wealthy Mrs. Wentworth, who’s so wicked she makes Mommy Dearest look like a fairy godmother. Moth escapes from her, only to end up in Miss Everett’s “Infant School,” a chilling brothel that certifies its girls as virgo intacto to gentlemen with the deepest pockets and highest bids.

McKay inserts curious sidebars and illustrations, like pages from Dr. Sadie’s journal, old apothecary ads and excerpts from newspapers that foreshadow and elucidate the narrative. For example, the book’s title is explained via an interview with Miss Everett in the Evening Standard: “None of my girls has ever been hurt, or stolen away, or used as a virgin cure. [That’s] the notion that a man can be cured of French pox or any other disease by laying with a virgin.”

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The fine art of foreign espionage

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 7:30 AM - 0 Comments

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

Spies, when they do their jobs well, are unnoticed. They don’t draw attention to their work, and their successes are rarely celebrated or even acknowledged.

It is understandable, then, that when British artist James Hart Dyke was approached with an offer to embed with the Secret Intelligence Service, the British foreign spy agency known as MI6, to capture the agency’s life on canvas to mark its centenary, he suspected it was a joke. But the offer—made over a quiet cup of coffee—was real. Soon Hart Dyke, a painter who has previously worked as a war artist with the Grenadier Guards in Iraq and Afghanistan, was ushered into a world few outside it get to see.

Hart Dyke had to sign the Official Secrets Act, forbidding him from discussing his assignment until it was over. There were also some limits placed on where he could go and what he could see. He didn’t shadow agents on assignments in the field, for example. And he was not permitted to identify anyone in his art. But he says the agency was open and welcoming, even if some of its officers seemed suspicious when he told them what he was doing in their offices, sketchbook in hand. Hart Dyke had a pass for MI6 headquarters in London, and also travelled to its offices elsewhere in Britain, and in Afghanistan.

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Everyone’s an underdog in Ireland’s presidential race

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 7:30 AM - 0 Comments

Wenn/Keystone Press

Presidential elections in Ireland never mattered much. The job at stake consists, by and large, of greeting foreign heads of state, kissing babies and attending ceremonies. To some, it is even bizarre that voters should go to the polls to elect such a powerless president, a public office that most other European countries with similar figureheads fill through nomination, usually by parliament. This time, though, it’s different. The list of presidential hopefuls, in fact, includes a gay rights activist, a former leader of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, a Donald Trump-style businessman and a pro-life pop singer, in a topsy-turvy campaign that’s dominating Irish headlines and turning heads around the world.

The unusual set of candidates, says Paul Bew, a professor of politics at Queen’s University Belfast, reflects the Republic of Ireland’s anti-establishment mood. Faced with a $29-billion austerity program meant to pave the way for a $119-billion bailout package from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, voters are largely disillusioned with those who led them to more than a decade of record economic growth, but also, eventually, a disastrous financial crisis. “The Irish bourgeoisie, the heros of the Celtic Tiger, are now in disgrace,” he says.

Michael Higgins, who was until recently the front-runner, makes up for his long record in politics, which would effectively cast him as a member of the political establishment, by being “well to the left of the Irish mainstream,” says Bew. The 70-year-old former Labour cabinet minister, a university lecturer with snow-white hair, a taste for seizure-inducing ties and a famous dislike for Ronald Reagan and free-rein capitalism, sounds like he would be right at home among the protesters of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

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Sitcoms rule

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 7:20 AM - 0 Comments

CityTV; CTV; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

The biggest hit of the television season was supposed to be The X Factor, a reality performance show from American Idol’s Simon Cowell. But something has changed since the days when Idol and Survivor were crushing all other TV in North America. The X Factor is a success, but on Wednesday, it’s beaten in the ratings by the comedy Modern Family, and then it comes back on Thursday to lose to The Big Bang Theory. Meanwhile, new dramas like Pan Am and Terra Nova are getting trounced by comedies like the retooled Two and a Half Men, which is getting even more viewers with Ashton Kutcher than it did with Charlie Sheen. This scenario would have seemed bizarre only a few years ago, when reality and hour-long drama were the future of TV. But now everyone wants to do half-hour comedy. Matt Watts, a Canadian writer-performer who stars as a neurotic therapy subject in the CBC’s Michael: Tuesdays and Thursdays (airing Tuesdays, but not Thursdays), told Maclean’s that although it’s “more dramatic than most half-hours,” if it were an hour-long drama, “it would be tedious.” Comedy is where the fun is, in more ways than one.

The death of the sitcom was a big story in the ’00s, when Lost and American Idol were the huge hits and Two and a Half Men (the Sheen version) was one of the few comedies in the top 10. Veteran drama and comedy writer Jane Espenson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) warned blog readers in 2007 that “comedy is coughing up blood right now.” Critics speculated that hour-long dramas with comedic elements, like Ugly Betty and Desperate Housewives, would replace the sitcom entirely; Emily Kapnek, creator of the popular new half-hour comedy Suburgatory, told Maclean’s there were “a lot of one-hours that wound up getting nominated in the comedy categories at awards show time.”

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The last Liberal standing in Manitoba

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 0 Comments

Trevor Hagan/CP

Jon Gerrard looks down at his mushroom crepes and sighs. It’s not that breakfast isn’t to his liking, just the discussion accompanying it: the painful, post-mortem examination of an election that left the leader of Manitoba’s Liberals perhaps the loneliest man in Canadian politics. On Oct. 4, Gerrard’s party captured a sole seat in the provincial legislature—his own—and just 7.5 per cent of the popular vote. And his fellow Liberals didn’t even wait for the ballots to be counted before planting their knives firmly in his back. “It hurt and it had an impact,” he says, voice barely audible over the Sunday morning din at Winnipeg’s Pancake House.

In late September, when opinion polls showed the party dipping into single digits, Harry Wolbert, a member of the provincial executive and one of their few “name” candidates, started musing in the local media about electoral wipeouts and leadership reviews. Then two former federal Grit MPs, Anita Neville and John Harvard, publicly endorsed the NDP health minister—the principle target of Gerrard’s political attacks. “When it hit, it was a total surprise,” says the 64-year-old physician and one-time junior minister in Jean Chrétien’s cabinet. “I had spent the last 12 years being very concerned over what was happening in the health care system.”

“The media played it so high,” Gerrard’s wife, Naomi, a palliative home care nurse, chimes in from the other side of the table. “It was a bombshell, I thought.”

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REVIEW: My Song: A Memoir

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 0 Comments

Few performers embody the cultural contradictions of the 1950s and 1960s like Belafonte: a committed progressive and activist for civil rights, a member of Martin Luther King’s inner circle, who also played Caesars Palace in Vegas and hosted The Tonight Show for a week. In part, the singer-actor’s memoir is about how he balanced show business and activism, and how the two aspects of his life informed each other. His fame as a singer came about because his belief in “folk music as a tool for social change” gave his material a global style others didn’t have: with his use of Caribbean, American, Hebrew and other music, his act featured “different voices, but a shared humanity.”

Many of the key moments in Belafonte’s career are here: the calypso album that outsold Elvis, his breakout role in the movie Carmen Jones, and the frustratingly limited range of movie roles he received after that (including a movie about interracial romance where he and his love interest were never allowed to kiss). But as he points out, his show business career was less huge than it might have been had he not devoted so much of his time to civil rights. Other entertainers merely hovered around the edges of the cause, and Belafonte is ambivalent about them: Sammy Davis Jr. was “desperate to please his white overseers,” and Belafonte often clashed with Sidney Poitier over his unwillingness to get more politically involved. Belafonte, on the other hand, wasn’t just a celebrity dabbling in politics, but used his fame to create a “strategic space” for politics.

After King’s assassination, both Belafonte’s causes and his career grew less focused, and so does the book. Some of the anecdotes are interesting, including his wary but friendly relationship with Fidel Castro, and his attempt to educate Castro about Cuban rappers. But the core of the book remains his ’50s and ’60s prime, when, as Belafonte tells it, “I wasn’t an artist who’d become an activist. I was an activist who’d become an artist.”

Music: Edwin Outwater’s research in (rhythm and) motion

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 11:23 PM - 0 Comments

I just wanted to let people know what an extraordinary debut recording the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony has made under its fearless artistic director, Edwin Outwater. (It’s hardly the orchestra’s first recording, just the first under the new guy’s baton.) I wrote about Outwater two years ago. He’s a Californian who rather effortlessly mixes the standard orchestral repertoire with some really wild new compositions and multimedia projects. This season he’ll lead the orchestra in… something… he’s cooked up with the physicists at Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing. That’s the sort of thing he does. K-W already had a very good orchestra and, bizarrely, one of the two or three best concert halls in Canada. Outwater takes the whole package to another level.

Anyway. The CD is called From Here On Out, it’s on Montreal’s Analekta label, it encapsulates what Outwater is doing in Kitchener-Waterloo, and it stands as a rebuke to the conservatism of just about every other mainstream Canadian orchestra. Of the three composers represented, only one, Nico Muhly, is normally associated with concert halls, although when he isn’t writing operas for the English National Opera he sometimes plays keyboards for Bjork. The other two composers are Richard Reed Parry, who’s a member of Arcade Fire; and Jonny Greenwood, who’s the guitarist for Radiohead. Continue…

This afternoon in animal references

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 8:45 PM - 0 Comments

Picking up where the House left off last Wednesday, Gerry Ritz suggested this afternoon, in response to a question from the NDP MP, that Pat Martin had a “lingering case of beaver fever.”

Mr. Martin then suggested that Mr. Ritz probably didn’t know much about beaver fever because he was a “failed ostrich jockey.”

Mr. Ritz then observed that farming ostrich allowed him “the opportunity to get used to working with lesser life forms” much like he sees “sometimes on the floor of the House of Commons.”

The Speaker deemed all of this “unhelpful.”

The Commons: Over and over again

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 7:32 PM - 0 Comments

The Scene. At some point some months ago, it was decided—by whoever makes such decisions in whatever underground lair the important decisions are rendered—that Tony Clement would not be standing in the House any more to account for his actions in regards to the G8 Legacy Fund. Presumably, this seemed like a good idea at the time. Conceivably, this was thought to be fine communications strategy, at least insofar as “communications” now mostly involves figuring out how best to steer conversations away from any kind of reflection.

This decision was likely based on the premise that the questions would eventually cease to be asked if Mr. Clement refused to respond. That the opposition parties would get bored or distracted or frustrated, and the questions about gazebos and such would subside and everyone would move on to something less consequential.

Alas, the solution has become a communications problem of its own. For here we are, months later, and the questions have not ceased. Each and every day (or nearly so), at least one MP from the NDP side is sent up to ask at least one more question of or related to Mr. Clement. And each and every day (or nearly so), Mr. Clement sits and does nothing on his own behalf, except maybe to mutter at the question asked of him or applaud the answer offered for him.

We arrive at this daily spectacle as a result of what must only be termed an epiphany on the opposition side. Continue…

Leave no trace behind

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 3:54 PM - 18 Comments

In addition to eliminating the long-gun registry, the government’s new legislation will destroy all records related to the registry.

The government’s lead minister declared he wants to thwart the ability of any other party, such as the NDP, to recreate it as well. “We won’t have these records loose and capable then of creating a new long gun registry should they ever have the opportunity to do that,” ” said Public Safety Minister Vic Toews at a news conference at an Ottawa valley farm.

Newly-obtained documents suggest cabinet picked G8 projects

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 2:24 PM - 3 Comments

Documents obtained by the Toronto Star suggest cabinet ministers had discretionary power to approve G8-related projects in Huntsville. An email exchange involving Vern Freedlander, a media consultant hired by Huntsville Mayor Claude Doughty, and Environment Minister Peter Kent implies cabinet ministers John Baird and Jim Flaherty were intimately involved in the decision-making process. “Peter tells me that right now MPs are being asked to provide infrastructure projects to cabinet for direct approvals by Baird and Flaherty,” Freedlander wrote to Doughty and two other senior officials in Huntsville. “They earlier shovels get in the ground the better.” A spokesperson for Kent denied the conversation ever took place, while Flaherty’s office insisted the finance minister “was not part of the process.” Baird’s office said it considers the controversial dossier closed.

Toronto Star

Canada’s least popular mayors

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 2:19 PM - 0 Comments

Montreal and Toronto are home to the country’s two most unpopular mayors. Montreal’s Gerald Tremblay won the unpopularity derby with an approval rating of just 32 per cent. But Toronto’s controversial Rob Ford wasn’t far behind, with just 37 per cent of respondents’ approval. On the opposite side of the spectrum, long-time Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion took the top spot in the Forum Research Inc. poll with an approval rating of 78 per cent, with Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi finishing a close second at 76 per cent.

Globe and Mail

Kirchner re-elected in Argentina

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 2:12 PM - 0 Comments

Argentina’s Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner seized over 50 per cent of the vote this week, securing re-election to the presidency in a landslide victory, the BBC reports. Her closest opponent, Socialist leader Hermes Binner, was a distant second with only 17 per cent of the vote. In a triumphant speech, 58-year-old Kirchner told supporters in Buenos Aires’ Plaza de Mayo that she is committed to keeping Argentina on its current trajectory of strong growth. Some critics say her victory was the result of a “weak and fragmented opposition,” while other analysts ascribed her re-election to the booming economy.

BBC

‘He doesn’t know what he’s talking about’

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 2:10 PM - 2 Comments

Tony Clement repudiates his friend’s understanding of how government works.

Tony Clement said a Toronto-based media consultant he recommended for a municipal job in his riding did not know what he was talking about when he said infrastructure projects were being approved directly by Cabinet.

“That’s false and ridiculous,” Clement, the treasury board president, said Tuesday when asked about what Vern Freedlander, vice-president of production at X2O Media Inc. told Huntsville Mayor Claude Doughty in a December 29, 2008 email. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Everything that goes wrong in the world, I blame on the Montreal Canadiens

By Dave Bidini - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 1:12 PM - 2 Comments

F—in’ Habs. There, I said it. It’s not like I don’t say it at least 30 times a day. The paperboy misses the porch: F—in’ Habs! The Windows and Doors people wake me up from my afternoon nap with one of their incessant calls: F—in’ Habs! I burn the noodles: F—in’ Habs! An earthquake levels Bali: F—in’ Habs! Everything that goes wrong in the world, I blame on the Montreal Canadiens. It’s convenient and it fits. I believe we would all be much happier and the world would work better and there would be no more stress or pain or misfortune if only the Habs would throw their skates into the river already. But this isn’t going to happen. I am realist and, yes, I am learning to cope.

Someone once said that great clubs need great enemies, but why it can’t be Dallas or Florida or Buffalo, I don’t know. Instead, it has to be the most arrogant and self-satisfied of all teams grinding against that which I love. It has to be the (F—in’) Habs. Argghhhh. Once more, only longer: Arghhhhhhhhh! Continue…

Rank your income: Where do you stand compared to the rest of Canada?

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 12:59 PM - 14 Comments

The Occupy Wall Street movement and its various Canadian spinoffs are reviving the public debate about income distribution north of the border. On Friday, NDP leadership hopeful Brian Topp cast his lot with the “eat the rich” zeitgeist by advocating income tax hikes on the wealthy. Others are skeptical that heating up the fiscal pressure on the top earners is the most effective way to tackle yawning inequality.

Regardless of what constitutes the best policy cure, Occupy movements across the globe–and they’ve spread throughout the developed world–have put their finger on a real and widespread malaise of advanced economies. Between the mid-1980s and the mid-2000s inequality rose in most of the rich countries that make up the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and in Canada income disparities have surpassed the OECD average. Granted, our super-rich are not quite as “super” as America’s wealthiest. In 2007, the threshold to qualify as one of Canada’s top one per cent of earners was a relatively modest $169,000 a year, compared to the U.S.’s eye-popping $400,000. Still, between 1980 and 2005 the earnings of Canada’s bottom income group fell by 20.6 per cent, according to Statistics Canada, whereas top incomes rose by 16.4 per cent. Folks in between generally saw their salaries stagnate like their peers in the U.S., where increased worker productivity has not translated into comparable income gains for the middle class.

Whether it’s a matter of taxing the top, or propping up the bottom and the middle, income distribution is likely to become a hot-button issue. Check out our calculator above to find out where you rank!

*Calculations are based on data from the Canada Revenue Agency’s Interim Income Statistics report, 2011 Edition (2009 tax year), Table 2 (All returns by total income class). Note that percentiles refer to income brackets, so an income of $29,999 falls into the bottom 51.9 per cent of Canadian tax-filers, whereas an income of $30,000 belongs to the top 48.1 per cent. Also, incomes below $1 and above $249,999 are not pictured proportionally. We’d like to also thank the Conference Board of Canada and Armine Yalnizyan of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives for their assistance with research for the calculator.

This week in mocking Parliament

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 12:36 PM - 1 Comment

The NDP persisted again yesterday in asking questions about the G8 Legacy Fund. With Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird away from the House, the government side, again, sent up Deepak Obhrai to respond.

Mr. Obhrai’s responsibility for the management of the G8 Legacy Fund remains unclear. It would seem he is responding as the current parliamentary secretary to the minister (Mr. Baird), who, in a previous portfolio (Industry Transport), had the authority to sign-off on the requests made by Tony Clement and Mr. Clement’s mayors.

The list of Conservative MPs who could be said to have more to do with the expenditure of public funds for infrastructure and/or the ethical standards for the behaviour of cabinet ministers would include some or all of: Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, Industry Minister Christian Paradis, either of Mr. Paradis’ two parliamentary secretaries (Pierre Poilievre and Mike Lake), Transport Minister Denis Lebel, Mr. Lebel’s parliamentary secretary Pierre Poilievre, government House leader Peter Van Loan, Mr. Van Loan’s parliamentary secretary, Tom Lukiwski, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mr. Harper’s parliamentary secretary, Dean Del Mastro. Not to mention Mr. Clement himself.

Whatever Mr. Obhrai’s relevance, the Conservatives seated around him seem to find great humour in watching him stand and respond.

Bank of Canada holds interest rates steady

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 12:29 PM - 0 Comments

The Bank of Canada held its target overnight interest rate steady at 1.0 per cent on Tuesday, hinting it won’t tighten monetary policy for an extended period. The bank cited concerns about slowing global growth in a statement, noting that Canada’s export-driven economy is vulnerable to Europe’s debt woes, as well as weak demand from the U.S. and emerging markets. The Canadian dollar fell steeply on the news from above-par levels with the U.S. dollar before the bank’s announcement.

CBC

The sleepover dilemma

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

Katrin Thomas/Getty Images

Seven years ago Veronica Redgrave made a decision that many parents wouldn’t even consider. The Montreal-based publicist permitted her 17-year-old daughter to have her steady boyfriend sleep over occasionally. “Our communication was always very open,” says Redgrave, who was raised in a strict British family where sex was not discussed. “She had her own space in the basement. And I respected it.” Her daughter is now 24, a graduate of the London School of Economics and living in Amsterdam. She’s still involved with the same boyfriend.

At the time Redgrave knew her permissiveness was unconventional by North American standards. But now, with the November publication of Amy Schalet’s Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens and the Culture of Sex, it turns out she was “being Dutch.” As Schalet, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, reports, nine out of 10 Dutch parents sanction such arrangements, versus the “not under my roof” directive maintained by nine out of 10 American parents.

Schalet interviewed 130 parents and teenagers in both countries to explore the cultural gulf. Dutch parents “normalize” teenage sexuality, Schalet concludes, as a way of maintaining a connection with and continuing to exert an influence over their teenagers. It’s an extension of a Dutch matter-of-fact attitude toward sex ushered in since the ’70s: sex education begins at age four and contraception is readily available. Yet it’s far from an “anything goes” attitude, Schalet writes: Dutch parents have to feel comfortable that their child, generally 16 or 17, is old enough to be sexually active, is using reliable contraception, and is in a stable relationship with someone who will fit into the family unit. Dutch parents also expect teenagers to abstain from sex until they’re ready.

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REVIEW: Fiction Ruined My Family

By Jane Christmas - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 11:35 AM - 0 Comments

This memoir about growing up in a family of eccentrics opens with the author’s father, the magazine writer Stephen Darst, cashing in his job and the family home and moving his wife and four young daughters from St. Louis to upstate New York with the intent of writing the great American novel he is certain will reverse the family’s fortunes. It gets rejected. Ditto for novel No. 2. The parents’ world of grand delusions dissipates into a cloud of booze, cigarettes, breakup and poverty, leaving the daughters, by now college-aged, to take care of their alcoholic parents. It’s tragic, and yet Jeanne Darst relates it all in a bratty, fearless style of wit and humour that provides a number of laugh-out-loud moments.

The literary life is marbled through this tale: references to celebrated American authors flit in and out of the story like dropped names at a cocktail party; and the father, when he isn’t lost in his own novel, attempts to get his daughters to read real works of literature (“Showing up to meet him for lunch with a John Grisham book under your arm would have been like showing up with no pants on,” writes Darst). The mother, meanwhile, is a comic-tragic drunk of low expectations and high-style drama.

Darst herself fares not much better: she stumbles through college and adulthood mentored by drugs, alcohol and destructive behaviour. Despite its obvious dysfunction, the family sticks together. Beneath the raw nerves that Darst brazenly exposes runs a current of love and even admiration, and she draws each person with a kind of tenderness. Of her psychotic father, to whom she is clearly devoted, she acknowledges: “To have a father who was totally crazy pants who adored you was a special kind of agony.”

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Paul Dewar goes urban

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 1 Comment

The NDP leadership candidate has announced the broad points of his urban agenda.

Dewar committed to ensuring a seat at the table for municipalities in federal-provincial/territorial negotiations dealing with their interests. He also committed to guaranteeing an additional cent of the existing gas tax to provide municipalities with stable, long-term infrastructure funding.

The federal government currently transfers $2 billion in gas tax revenues to municipalities. An additional cent of the gas tax would equal, by the Dewar campaign’s estimate, another $500 million. But the gas tax promise was included in the last NDP election platform, so this might not differentiate Mr. Dewar in any particular way.