From Trudeau’s woman troubles to Reform MPs’ moral missteps
By Nicholas Köhler - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 - 2 Comments
Craig Oliver recounts life on the Hill in ‘Oliver’s Twist: The Life and Times of an Unapologetic Newshound’
Photograph by Peter Bregg
When not distracted by their métier—bearing witness, asking questions, conveying facts—journalists do what comes most naturally to them: they drone on, drop names and deliver glib pronouncements on those they cover. Reporters who write memoirs risk bronzing that same tripe. How lucky we are that Craig Oliver, best known for his political reporting for CTV, often opposite Lloyd Robertson, saw the dangers and dove in anyway, writing a book at once human and sharp.
The Dickensian allusion in its title, Oliver’s Twist: The Life and Times of an Unapologetic Newshound, is earned: he grew up in tough Prince Rupert, B.C., both his parents alcoholics; his father made a job of his hobby, becoming a bootlegger. When his mother vanished, turning to taxi driving and another man, Oliver’s father shopped him around to various paid foster homes, an unhappy experience. One surrogate, Mabel, was particularly tormenting. “I forgot myself and called her ‘Mommy,’ ” he writes. “I had a real mother, Mabel told me, but she was an immoral woman who had left me behind.”
Oliver otherwise fended for himself, growing up among prostitutes, gamblers and other modern-day pirates—a one-legged steam-bath owner and Ricardo the Hook, who lost a hand in the war. “I felt no loneliness and in fact revelled in the novelty of my circumstances,” he writes. Billeted with a Christian family, he briefly became a target for conversion, a failed project: “Too much untried temptation lay ahead, and I was willing also to give the devil a chance to convert me.”
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The Internet can’t fix democracy—only citizens can
By From the editors - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments
It is not clear online voting actually has the power to draw more people to the polls, whatever their age
Photograph by Carlo Allegri
The technology of voting has changed substantially since ancient Athenians tossed coloured stones in jars and scratched names on pottery shards. Today it’s paper ballots that seem ancient and outdated.
Poor turnout by voters in Manitoba and Ontario this month has prompted renewed calls for online voting. “We have to do something,” vowed Greg Selinger, recently elected premier of Manitoba, referring to his province’s depressing turnout numbers. “We’re going to take a look at e-voting.” Elections Canada plans to test electronic balloting in a federal by-election
by 2013sometime after 2013. Many municipalities across the country are already using the new technology.The appeal of online voting is obvious. Voter turnout is poor across the board, but particularly dismal among the youngest cohort of voters. Since this generation has grown up immersed in online communications, its members might be enticed to vote in greater numbers if the ballot was in a format familiar and convenient to them. Voting at home via a smartphone certainly seems more attractive than walking down the street to a public school or community hall, standing behind a cardboard screen and putting an X on a piece of paper.
And yet it is not clear online voting actually has the power to draw more people to the polls, whatever their age. From the municipal election evidence in Canada, it appears online voting may boost the number of people who vote in advance polls, but does little to change overall voter turnout. A large-scale experiment in Britain was abandoned in 2007 after numerous technical glitches and no appreciable improvement in turnout. All of which suggests online voting provides already-committed voters with a more convenient means of voting, but fails to address the underlying apathy of those who don’t.
This makes intuitive sense. Declining voter turnout is unlikely to stem from the physical requirements of voting—it is no more difficult to vote than to go to the grocery store, something most Canadians of all ages manage to do on a regular basis. Rather, what is crucial to the decision to vote is the time invested before that walk.
Casting an informed vote requires a mental effort that far outweighs the physical act. Thinking about the election, learning about the candidates and their platforms, getting involved in politics in general; it is social failure in these areas that has produced the poor voter turnout. Any real solution to the voter turnout question thus lies not in new technology but old-school effort. Parties and candidates need to stir greater excitement among the voting public. And voters themselves need to take the time to understand how politics affects them personally.
One of the great ironies of the Internet age is that while it has made it far easier for voters to inform themselves about elections, it has done little to increase the interest that people show for democracy in general. If there is a role for the Internet to play in reducing the democracy deficit, it should come in improving the level of public engagement and altering voter behaviour prior to election day, through the use of forums, blogs and various other online tools. This is where the innovation ought to occur.
A further note of caution arises from the impersonal and impulsive nature of electronic voting, often with grimly humorous results. In 1999, Time magazine’s Person of the Century global online poll was hijacked by Turks eager to express their admiration for Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. Ataturk became the top vote-getter in all categories, including Entertainer, Scientist and Warrior of the Century. Time instead gave Albert Einstein the top honour. Similarly in 2009, an online vote to name a new NASA space module was swamped by fans of television comedian Stephen Colbert; “Colbert” outpolled “Serenity” by 40,000 votes but NASA ignored this result as well. The same goes for a poll organized by the Northwest Territories in which “Bob” appeared as a top pick among potential new names for the jurisdiction. While such results are obviously meant as a bit of fun, the flippancy encouraged by online polling ought to give all voters pause for thought.
Online voting may indeed hold the promise of greater convenience for many voters. And for this reason alone Elections Canada and other electoral authorities should continue their experiments. Every little bit helps. But it is impractical and naive to expect electronic ballots to reverse the long-standing trend of voter disinterest. That responsibility lies with all Canadians. Democracy is no easy job. And it’s time for everyone to get to work.
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Terror plot—or fantasy?
By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments
Did Iran really plan to kill the Saudi ambassador?
Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images
It’s a baffling plot that strains the credulity even of those deeply familiar with Iran’s capacity for murder and intrigue.
Last week, the U.S. Justice Department said it had disrupted an Iranian plan to assassinate the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, Adel al-Jubeir. Several options were supposedly discussed, including a restaurant bombing that likely would have killed many innocent bystanders.
The U.S. has charged two individuals with the alleged plot. One, Gholam Shakuri, is a suspected member of the Quds Force, a wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps responsible for operations—including terrorism and assassination—outside Iran. The second, Mansour Arbabsiar, is an Iranian-born American citizen who, over the past three decades, has failed at a variety of business ventures selling everything from used cars to horses, gyros and ice cream. He’s been sued, chased by angry creditors, and charged with theft. Friends say he’d often forget keys and cellphones, and that his socks didn’t always match.
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REVIEW:
By Sarah Murdoch - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 11:15 AM - 0 Comments
Book by A.D. Miller
Another wickedly cold Moscow winter looms, and Nick Platt, the 38-year-old British expat lawyer and narrator of Snowdrops, has stepped onto a slippery slope. He has fallen for a tawny-haired twentysomething named Masha, even as he realizes that everything about his new girlfriend is as false as her fake Burberry purse. At work, the oil boom of the early ’00s has been great for business: Nick and his colleagues, eager for the fat bonuses they’ll get if they don’t ask too many questions, are pushing through a lucrative deal involving Western banks and the ex-KGB goons at the state energy company.Early on, Nick’s cynical journalist friend sets the stage for this energetic novel of self-deception: “In Russia, there are no business stories. And there are no politics stories. There are no love stories. There are only crime stories.” That is the axle on which Miller’s novel turns: Nick’s crime is to allow love and greed to erode decency and honour.
None of what we’ve seen and read of Russian mobsters and endemic corruption approaches the moral stink depicted in Snowdrops (“snowdrops” being the corpses of the homeless and murdered who get buried in the snow, revealing themselves during the spring thaw). Nick feels above the cheapness, brutality and nastiness of Moscow life but avails himself of its many seamy pleasures. He believes he’s better than the thugs who drink vodka from bottles shaped like Kalashnikovs, the cheating functionaries, the drink-soaked cabbies, the desperate girls whose lap dances he buys. He’s wrong, of course.
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Birds, bees and poisonous rhetoric on sex ed in Ontario
By Emma Teitel - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 3 Comments
Sexual orientation isn’t a lifestyle. It’s a life sentence.
Photography by Andrew Tolson
Fall, it seems, is the official season for scare tactics—and I’m not talking about Halloween. I’m talking about sex, and a coming of age tradition that’s supposed to render it totally unsexy: sex education—or, as I remember it, a queasy 45 minutes of watching your teacher put a condom on a banana and advocate something called “heavy petting” as an alternative to “doing it.” Apparently, though, sex ed’s just not what it used to be, and lefty school boards across Canada are brainwashing kids as young as six to believe they can—according to Charles McVety, president of Canada Christian College—“change their gender.” McVety, a televangelist who says he has many “ex-gay friends” (friends who used to be gay, not, decidedly, the other way around) is behind stopcorruptingchildren.ca, a pet project of his Institute for Canadian Values, creator of the controversial advertisement pictured with this column.
The motive behind the ad, and what had Charles McVety’s moral shorts in a knot, was a controversial plan of the Ontario Liberal government to institute a more comprehensive sex education curriculum—one that included teaching Grade 3 students about homosexuality and Grade 7 students about anal and oral sex. The fact that the Liberals walked away from their plans in the face of ferocious opposition was apparently not enough to assuage McVety (who, buoyed by examples in a resource guide for the Toronto school board, maintains that children across Ontario are even now being required to cross-dress to show solidarity with various sexually “confused” communities).That McVety is right to the extent that such a plan would be a bad idea (the educational merits of cross dressing are beyond me) is irrelevant because he’s wrong about virtually everything else. And he’s not alone.
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A rebirth for one of the best comic strips ever
By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments
Four years after it was announced, volume one of the collected Pogo is finally coming
Fantagraphics Books
Fantagraphics’ Pogo: Through the Wild Blue Yonder collects the first two years of Walt Kelly’s creation. It took twice as many years to get the book ready. The company announced in 2007 that it would create the first-ever complete collection for Kelly’s satirical strip about southern-accented talking animals, which Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes) cited as one of his two biggest influences, and which many comics historians consider the greatest of all time.
But it kept being announced and delayed; now that the first volume is ready, four years later, many fans can barely believe it. Everyone knows how much work it takes to restore an old movie or a painting, but it turns out restoring a comic strip can take even longer. The company has reprinted Watterson’s other favourite strip, Peanuts, but Peanuts is so popular that it wasn’t as hard to assemble the material in pristine form.
But Pogo, which started only two years before Peanuts, has always been more of a cult favourite than a massive hit. The story of various animals living together in a swamp, including the title character, a possum, and his best friend, a cigar-smoking alligator, Kelly’s strip combined funny animal slapstick—reflecting his training as a Disney animator—with a sense of political and social engagement that newspaper comics hadn’t seen before.
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‘These are not easy times for leaders’
By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 10:39 AM - 5 Comments
The Prime Minister talks to Postmedia about the global economy.
In the case of financial-sector reform, as you know, substantial progress has already been made. Obviously, there are some in the financial sector who don’t necessarily like the proposals, and there are some legitimate complaints, and in Canada, we pay attention to what the financial sector says. But that said, one of the things we know is the financial sector can’t just write its own rules. The crash of 2008 made very clear that there must be credible regulatory systems on the financial sector or it can lead us in a position where we don’t want to be. That is being done, that has to be done.
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Is the Automated Future Finally Here?
By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 10:09 AM - 6 Comments
People have been talking for decades about a future where machines are able to do most of the work that humans did. Now two economists are publishing an argument that the future is almost here, and that we are reaching the point where the jobs computers wipe out will not be replaced by an equal number of new human jobs:
Faster, cheaper computers and increasingly clever software, the authors say, are giving machines capabilities that were once thought to be distinctively human, like understanding speech, translating from one language to another and recognizing patterns. So automation is rapidly moving beyond factories to jobs in call centers, marketing and sales — parts of the services sector, which provides most jobs in the economy.
During the last recession, the authors write, one in 12 people in sales lost their jobs, for example. And the downturn prompted many businesses to look harder at substituting technology for people, if possible. Since the end of the recession in June 2009, they note, corporate spending on equipment and software has increased by 26 percent, while payrolls have been flat.
As they note, the computer-driven truck is not that far away, and the success of HAL-like forms of A.I., like Watson and Siri, point toward a future where computers can replace humans at just about anything imaginable. Which is the future that science fiction and other popular culture has been predicting for a long time, and it always seemed a bit alarmist; but just because it was alarmist doesn’t mean it can never happen. There could be a point at which almost every business can do more with fewer people. Which in turn would turn all sorts of science fiction ideas into reality (though now that I think about it, science fiction usually seems a bit sanguine about what people will do in the future when computers have taken over; warnings about mass unemployment usually come from doomsday economists and such).
Well, as I said, people have been predicting this since the ’50s and even earlier. Movies like Desk Set were made to deal with our automation fears and to reassure us all that computers are our friends, contributing to a never-ending economic boom. And if computers got out of hand, there was always Captain Kirk to talk them to death and show us that they didn’t know what it is to feel, to love. Still, just because dystopia didn’t happen isn’t proof that it will never happen.
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Our gerontocracy
By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 9:33 AM - 6 Comments
Frank Graves considers the ramifications of declining voter turnout.
Have we passed the brink from democracy to oligarchy? While on pattern with a disturbing downward trajectory in voter participation, this movement into the realm where the majority of citizens aren’t voting may be a wakeup call for those who think that elections shouldn’t be on track to a fringe activity. What may make matters worse is that this democratic decline is particularly pronounced in two sectors of our society — the young and the economically vulnerable. Although these groups have always had lower participation rates, their current anaemic levels of voting make it difficult to claim that governments legitimately speak for these large and growing portions of society.
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Rogers Communications turns 50
By Mitchel Raphael - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments
Rogers Communications celebrated their 50th anniversary in Ottawa at the Metropolitain Brasserie.
(Left to right) Rogers president and CEO Nadir Mohamed and Rogers Vice Chairman Phil Lind.
(Left to right) U.S. Ambassador David Jacobson and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird.
Liberal MP Justin Trudeau.
Loretta Rogers.
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No Political Parties On Teevee
By Jaime Weinman - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment
It’s a bit early to tell about how good a series Boss will be, though we can confidently say that Kelsey Grammer is an excellent actor and that the creator has done a good job of giving him opportunities to show this. Also that Erik Satie is a go-to guy when a film or TV series needs a wistful piano piece. We can also see that the show has consciously chosen the “No Party Given” concept, where a show about politics does not identify the political party the characters belong to. Gus Van Sant, the director of the pilot, addressed this a few months ago by saying that “The show isn’t about political platforms and ideas as much as (the characters) grabbing as much power as they can. You can look at the machine without having to take sides.”
Now, there are several forms that No Party Given (or NPG) takes. One is where the party is simply left very vague. The Continue…
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You’ve got a friend in government
By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 8:30 AM - 1 Comment
The Star obtains new emails related to the goings on in Huntsville.
An email dated Dec. 29, 2008, has Freedlander detailing a conversation with Environment Minister Peter Kent, his former broadcast colleague, who at that time was minister of state for the Americas. His written recollection of the conversation suggests that Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and John Baird, who was then minister of transport, were approving infrastructure funding applications submitted to them by their Conservative caucus colleagues.
“(Kent) told me he will whole-heartedly (sic) support the Huntsville IMC at cabinet and wanted to make sure we pass along our pitch to Tony Clement ASAP,” says the email addressed to Doughty and copied to two other senior municipal officials. “Peter tells me that right now MPs are being asked to provide infrastructure projects to cabinet for direct approvals by Baird and Flaherty. They earlier shovels get in the ground the better.”
Mr. Kent’s office denies any such conversation ever took place.
Vern Freedlander was previously referenced in an email between Tony Clement and Huntsville mayor Claude Doughty, in which Mr. Clement put Mr. Freedlander in touch with Mr. Doughty about a job. (Mr. Doughty told the CBC that Mr. Freedlander began working for the town of Huntsville on that job in early 2009. The email obtained by the Star predates that, but only slightly.)
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Occupy Column-Inches!
By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, October 25, 2011 at 8:15 AM - 25 Comments
By chance, I was on scene for the initial stage of the Occupy Calgary event last weekend. The Occupants, exhibiting the same implacable literalism as the terrorists who thought the World Trade Centre was somehow crucial to world trade, had descended upon the courtyard of the city’s Bankers Hall complex. But they posed no particular threat to any banking activity, legitimate or otherwise. Mostly they just impeded pedestrian access to a shopping mall for a little while, creating an ephemeral nuisance to a few small businesses. They did have one Starbucks quite effectively hemmed in, but if my back-of-envelope calculations are right, they indulged in just enough corporate caramel macchiatos to make up for it. Soon the mob shambled off to Olympic Plaza, where I gather they are still struggling to bring about Year Zero. Continue… -
Celebrating women in Canadian military forces
By Mitchel Raphael - Monday, October 24, 2011 at 8:54 PM - 8 Comments
Rona Ambrose, Minister for Status of Women, hosted a reception in Senate Speaker Noël Kinsella’s salon in honour Women’s History Month. The gathering was to celebrate women in Canadian military forces.
(Left to right) Conservative Senator Pamela Wallin, Leader of the Government in the Canadian Senate Marjory LeBreton and Rona Ambrose.
NDP MP Irene Mathyssen.
Conservative MP Ed Holder and Minister of Health Leona Aglukkaq.
Conservative Senator Pamela Wallin.
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MPs celebrate Jewish holiday of Succoth
By Mitchel Raphael - Monday, October 24, 2011 at 7:59 PM - 0 Comments
The Jewish holiday of Succoth saw Rabbi Chaim Mendelsohn of the Canadian Federation of Chabad-Lubavitch set up a sukkah (a temporary dwelling to symbolize what the Jews used when they wandered the dessert for 40 years) in the East Block courtyard.
Rabbi Chaim Mendelsohn of the Canadian Federation of Chabad-Lubavitch and Conservative MP Kelly Block.
Conservative MP Chris Warkentin (left)
Continue…(left to right) Mendelsohn, Liberal MP Irwin Cortler, Conservative MP James Lunney
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MPs behind the wonders of the Bay of Fundy
By Mitchel Raphael - Monday, October 24, 2011 at 7:36 PM - 0 Comments
Terri McCulloch, Executive Director of Bay of Fundy Tourism, was on the Hill helping to spread the word to vote for the Bay of Fundy as one of The New 7 Wonders of Nature. Vote here. The Bay is the only Canadian entry remaining in the contest. She arrived with a giant bottle with messages from school children.
Peter MacKay, Minister of National Defence, (left) and Terri McCulloch (in blue).
New Brunswick Tory MP John Williamson (right) and other MPs with the bottle.
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The Commons: The F-35 has as many explanations as problems
By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 24, 2011 at 6:41 PM - 11 Comments
The Scene. “The F-35 saga continues,” Nycole Turmel declared by way of opening.The latest twist in this epic tale of stealth flight involves the small matter of whether or not the expensive aircraft will be more or less useless when patrolling our vast northern frontier. ”We learned today that the aircraft will be delivered to Canada without adaptive equipment to allow communication in the Arctic. It’s really something,” the interim NDP leader exclaimed for the benefit of those who like their parliamentary invective relayed in the most folksy manner possible.
Peter Van Loan, the government House leader, duly stood here to wrap himself in the flag and throw himself around the troops. ”We are proposing to deliver to Canadian Forces the resources and equipment it needs to be able to protect Canadian sovereignty and security and to ensure that our defences are strong,” he explained. “The F-35 will have all the capabilities that are necessary to do so, including that primary critically important mission of ensuring our northern sovereignty is protected.”
This did little to assuage Ms. Turmel, who returned to her feet with a list of concerns. Continue…
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In Quebec, construction pigs fly
By Martin Patriquin - Monday, October 24, 2011 at 5:05 PM - 2 Comments
Here, your favourite two goddamned Englishmen finally dive arms-deep into the issue of Quebec, construction and Jean Charest’s latest 180-degree demi-pas.PATRIQUIN Hi Phil. You remember Friday, right? You know, the day before the Habs’s truly undisciplined loss to Toronto. Yes, that long ago. Way back then, you and I started an email exchange about how Our Fair Premier Jean Charest flipped the mother of all flops and called a public inquiry into Quebec’s construction industry. I recently wrote something about Charest’s curious tendency to go back on his word after having incurred the maximum amount of political damage on himself, but this was a doozy, given that sometime in the last two years, the Preem basically had the words “no inquiry, let the police do their work” etched into granite and foisted up on the mantlepiece at Manoir Charest in Westmount. Continue…
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David Anderson would seem to have a lot of free time
By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 24, 2011 at 4:40 PM - 13 Comments
Glen McGregor spots an informative cartoon on the website of Conservative MP David Anderson.
The Wheat Board official Mr. Smith (portrayed by a bald character in a tie) responds in monotone, “Slow down, young man. You’re talking Eskimo” — that is, he sounds foreign or makes no sense.
Wheat Board Guy explains how the existing rules govern crop sales, and Franklin replies, “How can such a system exist in Canada? That sounds sort of Communist.” Later in the video Mr. Smith says, There you go, talking Eskimo again.”
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The country boy at the heart of four murder investigations
By Ken MacQueen - Monday, October 24, 2011 at 3:17 PM - 5 Comments
To his friends in northern B.C., Cody Legebokoff was a popular and well-adjusted kid
Cody Legebokoff
As an anonymous friend of suspected serial killer Cody Alan Legebokoff put it after the life of the country boy with the baby face and the bruiser’s body began to unravel, “Cody has always been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and this could have been one of those moments.” The post, on the website of Prince George, B.C. TV station CKPG, arrived after Legebokoff, then 20, was charged last November with the first-degree murder of 15-year-old free spirit Loren Donn Leslie of the northern B.C. resource community of Fraser Lake, B.C. The post expressed outrage and disbelief at the arrest of Legebokoff, “my two-stepping partner nights we would go out dancing.” Shock gave way to horror in the Prince George region when the RCMP announced Oct. 17 three more murder charges against Legebokoff in the deaths of Jill Stacy Stuchenko, Cynthia Frances Maas, both 35, and 23-year-old Natasha Lynn Montgomery.
RCMP Insp. Brendan Fitzpatrick, head of the province’s major crime unit, refused to use the term serial killer in an interview with Maclean’s, saying that is for the courts and experts to determine. Still, he conceded B.C. attracts more than its share of multiple murders. They include the ugly legacy of child-killer Clifford Olson, who died last month, William Pickton, convicted of the murders of six vulnerable women and suspected in the killing of dozens more, and the 18 unsolved murders on the so-called Highway of Tears, the same Prince George corridor where these four women died. Fitzpatrick said forensic evidence and Legebokoff’s young age at the time of the 18 disappearances preclude any link. Continue…
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When taxes aim high
By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 24, 2011 at 2:35 PM - 33 Comments
Stephen Gordon questions the effects of taxing the rich.
What becomes more problematic is just who will bear the burden of those taxes – or, in the language of public finance, what is the incidence of increased income taxes on high earners? The ostensible targets of the UK bonus supertax were high-earning bank employees, and since they bore the statutory incidence of the supertax, they did indeed pay more taxes. But since they were able to obtain increases that left their after-tax incomes untouched, they weren’t left out of pocket by the measure: the economic incidence was passed on to shareholders, other employees and bank customers – in short, everyone except the original target. If the goal of the bonus supertax was to reduce the gap between high earners and the rest of the income distribution, it’s hard to see how it could be considered a success.
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Google backs down, nickname-users win
By Jesse Brown - Monday, October 24, 2011 at 2:02 PM - 2 Comments
Image by Botgirl Questi
The #Nymwars, if you’ve never heard of it, is the hyperbolic title of the battle between Google and thousands of users who don’t want to use their real names on its Google+ social network. Not only does the search-engine giant have a “real names” policy in place, but unlike Facebook, it actually enforces it. The do-no-evil digital behemoth suspended the accounts of those found to be using nicknames–or merely suspected of doing so, as many children of hippies found out.
The online reaction was predictably loud and angry, but also thoughtful and substantive. Former Google employee “Skud” listed many reasonable circumstances in which an individual would want to use a pseudonym. The Atlantic editor Alexis Madrigal pointed out that forcing people to us their real names online actually makes the Internet less like “real” life–when I walk down the street, who knows my name? Who records my every action? The vast majority of our public behaviour is undocumented and anonymous. “Real names” policies radically upset that expectation.
At first, Google seemed unmovable. Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt dug in his heels, creepily describing Google+ not as a social network, but an “identity verification” service. The future of JimmyFlashPants893 seemed dark.
Now, though, word has come that Google will relent. At the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Google executive Vic Gundotra revealed that pseudonyms will soon be supported on Google+. Previously, he had said that banning made-up names was a way of “setting a tone,” the way a restaurant won’t serve shirtless customers.
The comparison was an insult to any user with a legitimate reason for using a pseudonym: women fearing harassment, teachers and other professionals who are not allowed to use their real identities on social network sites, victims of stalkers, closeted homosexuals, and anyone else who is simply not comfortable with having their every casual exchange documented online and linked to their legal name.
The chief distinguishing feature of Google+ is supposed to be privacy. Good for Google that it (finally) seems to realize that, for many, pseudonyms are not a coverup for online mischiefs, but a choice to remain safe.
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Milk management fee
By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 24, 2011 at 1:04 PM - 18 Comments
Barrie McKenna explores the government’s attempt to support both the free market (when it comes to the Canadian Wheat Board) and supply management (when it comes to dairy farmers).
If open markets are so clearly in the best interests of grain farmers in Western Canada, why aren’t they also good for the dairy farmers of Quebec and Ontario? The answer, of course, is politics in a country where rural areas are still overly represented in the House of Commons. Supply management has become a proxy for rural entitlement and protection of family farms – a message that helped the Conservatives to a sweep outside the major cities in Southern Ontario in the May election. And by retaining the regime, Mr. Harper presumably calculates he will keep those seats four years from now.
There is no sound economic or policy rationale for keeping supply management. The government is sacrificing the interests of 34 million Canadians for the sake of fewer than 15,000 dairy and poultry farmers … Every year the distortions caused by the system grow larger. Canadians may not realize it when they go to the grocery store, but they’re paying twice the world average for dairy products – and up to three times what Americans pay. That’s a hidden $3-billion a year tax on all of us.
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New multi-billion dollar fighter jets ill-equipped for Arctic use
By macleans.ca - Monday, October 24, 2011 at 12:42 PM - 6 Comments
F-35 jets can’t communicate from Canada’s north
American-built F-35 fighter jets are expected to be delivered without the ability to communicate from Canada’s northernmost regions, even though the warplanes are costing the federal government billions of dollars. Defending the Arctic was one of the key reasons put forward by the Conservative government to upgrade Canada’s fleet of fighter jets, which currently consists of CF-18s. A senior official from Lockheed Martin, the company that builds the new jets, told The Globe and Mail that the F-35s will eventually be equipped with the ability to communicate from the Arctic, saying the hope is that the software can be installed by the fourth phase of their production in 2019. The Defence Department has reportedly asked the company whether a special communication system can be placed in the planes. Typically, fighter jets communicate by sending signals into space and back via satellites. Communicating in the Arctic is difficult because of a lack of space satellites in the region.
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Death toll from earthquake in Turkey reportedly at 272
By macleans.ca - Monday, October 24, 2011 at 12:36 PM - 0 Comments
Israel, among others, offers assistance
A powerful earthquake near Turkey’s eastern border killed 272 people and injured possibly thousands more on Sunday, the Associated Press reports. The magnitude 7.2 quake toppled buildings in and around the city of Van. Rescue workers used flashlights to search through the rubble for survivors. Neighbouring countries, including rival Israel, have offered aid, but Turkish authorities so far say they have rescue efforts under control.
