No apologies

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 0 Comments

Lisa Raitt and Vic Toews are profoundly saddened, but Pat Martin regrets nothing (aside from swearing at a specific Twitter user).

“What I say to my private universe is an expression of what I am really feeling and I don’t apologize for that. I don’t retract it. It is a f—ing disgrace, what they’re doing. They’re running roughshod over everything that is good and decent about our parliamentary democracy and Canadians should be outraged and their elected representatives on their behalf should be outraged.”

Ottawa in push for pooled pension plans

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 1:21 PM - 0 Comments

Ottawa introduced legislation on Thursday to create pooled registered pension plans for employees and employers in small businesses, as well as the self-employed, the Globe and Mail reports. The move is aimed at encouraging Canadians to save more for retirement. Although participation in pooled pension plans is voluntary, the Harper government is expected to including measures that would allow companies to automatically enroll new employees into these programs. Though there will be an opt-out option, auto-enrolment would raise participation.

The Globe and Mail

Canadian companies in pipeline race

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 12:57 PM - 0 Comments

Shortly after news that the U.S. government intended to shelve the Keystone XL project, Enbridge Inc. announced plans to reverse the direction in which crude oil flows in a pipeline connecting Oklahoma to Texas so as to send more oil from Midwest refineries to those on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Separately, rival TransCanada, who proposed the Keystone project, said it may start to build the southern leg of the pipeline if it receives approval for it from the U.S. State Department. Both projects aim at ending a bottleneck of crude in the Midwest that’s been building up for a year as supply from Canada and North Dakota rose. Unclogging the glut is expected to yield higher profits for Canadian upstream suppliers.

Reuters
National Post

With feeling

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 12:30 PM - 0 Comments

Stephen Harper, June 6, 2008. It’s one thing that they, the criminals do not get it, but if you don’t mind me saying, another part of the problem for the past generation has been those, also a small part of our society, who are not criminals themselves, but who are always making excuses for them, and when they aren’t making excuses, they are denying that crime is even a problem: the ivory tower experts, the tut-tutting commentators, the out-of-touch politicians. “Your personal experiences and impressions are wrong,” they say. “Crime is not really a problem.” I don’t know how you say that. 

Rob Nicholson, Sept. 20, 2011. We’re not governing on the basis of the latest statistics. We’re governing on the basis of what’s right to better protect victims and law-abiding Canadians … Canadians want and deserve to feel safe in their homes and in their communities.

Kevin Sorenson, yesterday. At the committee the Minister of Public Safety had to explain to the NDP that there is a difference between feeling safe and actually being safe. It is irresponsible to continue pouring tax dollars into the long gun registry because it feels like the right thing to do or the safe thing to do. The NDP proved again that it is unfit to lead.

Poor McGill

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

McGill University, as you may have heard, has been the site of various student protests as of late. There are several reasons why Montreal’s ivy-heavy institute of higher learning is a particularly ripe target for these things:

1) Its president, Heather Munroe-Blum, is probably the loudest president/rector in the province in arguing for tuition fee increases;

2) McGill is currently home to a nasty and protracted strike of much of its support staff;

3) Its campus is literally across the street from Jean Charest’s Montreal office;

4) It’s an historically English institution. Cue menacing music.

I don’t have much to say about two, three or four, except to say that they are aggravating factors in number one. Certainly, Monroe-Blum hasn’t done herself any favours in the PR department: with an annual combined salary of $585,481 (with a whopping $229,307 in perks and other compensation) she is, by far, the highest paid university president in Quebec. PR-wise, she would go a long way in the labour dispute if she publicly called on the university board to freeze her salary and do away with the most decadent perks. ($16K yearly car allowance? What, you can’t buy your own damn Honda Civic?) The changes of that happening, of course, are about as likely as Monroe-Blum actually owning a Honda Civic.

But to link rising tuition fees to Munroe-Blum’s salary—which protesters did last week when they occupied her office—cheapens the debate.

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Headache-free wine?

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

Photo by Simon Hayter

Enlightened self-interest is a powerful motivator. For 15 years now, Hennie van Vuuren has been building an army—one yeast cell at a time—to make the world a better, safer place for fellow wine lovers, a world without headaches and other nasty things. Van Vuuren, a South African-born microbiologist, holds the Eagles Chair in Food Biotechnology at the University of British Columbia, and he is the founding director of its Wine Research Centre, a little slice of heaven for oenophiles, and home to some 30 graduate student researchers and faculty.

The heart of the centre, at least for the less scientifically inclined, is the Wine Library, a temperature-controlled vault cradling a growing collection of some 6,000 bottles, many from B.C.’s burgeoning Okanagan vineyards. But there’s also a sampling of some of the best vintages from around the globe—donated by patrons in exchange for a tax receipt. You can’t make great wine unless you have tasted greatness, he says, and few students can afford that luxury. “We use these wines to train our graduate students.”

But while van Vuuren is passionate about the finished product, the focus of his academic research in South Africa, at Ontario’s Brock University, and now 12 years at UBC, is the lowly yeast cell, one of wine’s essential building blocks. Through years of research and genetic manipulation, his team has created a yeast that stops the production of headache-inducing allergens in wine, others that drastically reduce the presence of a carcinogen, and he’s closing in on another to reduce alcohol levels while enhancing flavour and body.

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South Park and Continuity Gags

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 11:21 AM - 0 Comments

Shortly before last night’s season finale, South Park was renewed for three more seasons. So much for the speculation, which the mid-season finale “You’re Getting Old” set off, that Parker and Stone were getting tired of the show. The other thing people started wondering when that episode aired is whether they were going to shake things up, stop relying on formula, and create some more story arcs and continuity. Of course that didn’t happen; the follow-up episode turned out to be a great big meta-episode about how franchises can become tired and stale, and it ended with a big meta-gag about pushing the reset button and bringing everything back to the way it was, because it’s easier. Since then, the ideas introduced in that two-parter – Stan being an embittered middle-aged kid; Stan’s parents reaching the end of their tether; Kyle and Cartman becoming friends – have been abandoned. Which, really, is the way it should be; South Park is a show where every episode is a hastily-produced excuse for Trey Parker to talk about whatever is on his mind, and a show with continuing characters can’t do that unless it’s grounded in a formula. There are certain constants, mostly having to do with characterization or who the main characters are (and even that can be abandoned, since there’s at least two episodes where none of the four main boys appear), and everything else is completely negotiable from week to week. If the events of one episode or two-parter bled into the events of the next one, then actions would have consequences, and Parker would have less freedom to get stuff off his chest. Some might consider that helpful – more character development, fewer references to reality shows – but that’s not what South Park is or was.

The closest the show ever really came to doing a real continuing storyline was in the sixth season, where Kenny was really dead for most of the year. There was something resembling a story arc: Kenny’s dead, his soul is trapped in Cartman’s body, the boys pick and then reject Butters as their new fourth friend, and pick Tweek as his replacement after (naturally) a reality-show parody. That’s as far as South Park has ever gone in the direction of making one thing lead to another. Otherwise, when they have continuity it’s usually almost a gag about continuity: a reference to a previous episode becomes a joke in itself, because most of the things that happen are forgotten instantly. Kenny is the source of a lot of these gags, where they try to explain why he can die and then come back. The idea that this is his superhero power, and that this is both a blessing and a curse that he alone has to deal with, is not a serious thing that is addressed again next week; it’s a parody of superhero comics, first of all, and second of all it’s a joke they can go to when they need it. (I personally find Kenny funnier as the dirty-minded member of the group – the only one of the four boys who isn’t a total innocent about sex – than the superhero parody. But Parker and Stone have always been annoyed by his inability to speak clearly, and they like to get him out of the hood and talking un-muffled English.)

Update: As noted in comments, Mr. Garrison’s sex change was another experiment with continuity, and so was his replacement as the boys’ teacher. All of that was eventually reversed, but it was there. Though Garrison has lost his position as the most-featured adult character on the show since he went back to being a guy; Randy has taken over most of the stories meant for grown-up characters.

I don’t think the show is at its best these days, though the nature of it is that it’s always going to be uneven: for all we know, the next three seasons could produce some great work, since the quality of an episode depends on whether the story idea is interesting enough. But I do feel, watching an episode like last night’s, that there’s only so much they can do to keep the formula fresh. (It’s been a while since they introduced or promoted a character who could freshen things up; Butters provided a shot in the arm for the writing, and so did the increased number of stories for Randy – further proof that Hollywood writers are most comfortable writing for a dumb middle-aged husband whose wife inexplicably doesn’t leave him. But it’s been years since they came up with something like that, so we mostly get stories about Cartman being an idiot and causing massive carnage.) But the lack of continuity and consistency is just part of the style, except for that very brief flirtation with the idea in the sixth season.

Predicting problems

By Cathy Gulli - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Ask a heart or kidney transplant patient about the worst part of recovery and they’ll often say it’s the biopsies to ensure they aren’t rejecting the new organ. “It’s about fear, discomfort, inconvenience, minor risks,” says Dr. Bruce McManus, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of British Columbia. So he is working to make this necessary evil much less awful.

With his team at the Prevention of Organ Failure Centre of Excellence (Proof Centre) in Vancouver, McManus is developing a blood test to detect acute and chronic rejection, or predict its occurrence. Since starting their research in 2003, the scientists have identified a collection of blood molecules, known as biomarkers, that indicate when an individual is a “rejector” and when they are not, says McManus, director of the Proof Centre. He hopes the blood tests will be widely used in hospitals by the late summer of 2013.

Besides being painless, the tests will be processed faster—the same day, instead of overnight. And the results will be based on quantitative information rather than the subjective reading of a pathologist using international guidelines.

Going forward, McManus has two goals in mind: first, “reduce the number of biopsies” that patients endure. And then, “to eliminate the biopsy” altogether.

REVIEW: The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

In the aftermath of 9/11, FBI special agent Soufan was one of the American intelligence agents ordered to use “any means necessary” to make terror suspects talk during interrogation. For Soufan, now retired from the bureau, the necessary means were the ones that worked: guile, deep knowledge of al-Qaeda and the person he was questioning, and compassion. He forged bonds with men who sought to kill his fellow countrymen, ordering their shackles to be removed when he spoke with them and procuring a satellite phone for one detainee to call his wife. He once held ice to the lips of a gravely wounded suspect fighting for his life. He debated religion with detainees, as well as American history and Hollywood films. He drew out their co-operation. He outwitted them.

Soufan says it was “odious” to sit and laugh with committed terrorists, but his tactics produced results. They were scorned and rejected, however, by those in the CIA who endorsed “enhanced interrogation techniques”—aggressive questioning employing methods such as sleep deprivation and waterboarding. Soufan methodically unravels the lies of those who claim those abuses produced good results. Even with sections of the book redacted by CIA censors, it makes for devastating reading. Soufan’s chronicle should end the debate on whether torture is ever justified, but probably won’t.

Soufan’s book is most illuminating for the light it shines on America’s interrogation program, and the painfully consequential lack of information sharing between the FBI and the CIA. It’s also revealing as a history of al-Qaeda and its war with America. Soufan has tracked the organization since the mid-1990s, and was intimately involved in investigating many of its crimes—notably the attack on the USS Cole. His experience shows. Even without endnotes, his book deserves to be widely read.

Four funerals and a wedding

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/CP

Six weeks before her body was discovered in a sunken black sedan at the bottom of the Rideau Canal, Zainab Shafia was riding in a different car: her uncle Latif’s. It was May 19, 2009—the day of Zainab’s wedding reception—and the bride was wearing her dress, her skin painted with henna. She was 19 years old.

As Latif Hyderi steered toward the Montreal restaurant hosting the feast, he asked his niece, yet again, the question that was torturing her Afghan family, both immediate and extended. Why him? Why must you marry a Pakistani boy? (“Everyone, their heart was bleeding,” Hyderi explained on the witness stand last week. “Marrying a foreigner affected everybody.”)

Zainab’s answer was far more heartbreaking. “She said: ‘Dear uncle, there has been a lot of cruelty towards me,’ ” her uncle recalled. “‘There were many other boys who wanted to marry me. I rejected them. This boy does not have money and he is not handsome. The only reason I am marrying him is to get revenge for the cruelty of my father. I sacrifice myself for my sisters so they will get this freedom after me.’ ”

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One last laugh

By Alex Ballingall - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments

Courtesy of Zellers

In its marketing push for the holiday season, Zellers is poking fun at its own fate, which will see most of its stores closing down to make way for American retailer Target in 2013. The ad campaign, called Zellers’s “Festive Finale,” features a series of spots showing employees shrugging off the closure of their stores. In one, an “executive marketing director” cleaning out his desk says, “We don’t worry about anything anymore. Seriously, I haven’t worn pants to work in a week.” He emerges from behind his desk in his underwear to reveal the concept for the holiday sale: Zellers is allowing customers, via Facebook, to vote on the sale prices for various merchandise. Also, in lieu of traditional holiday music, Facebook users can vote on songs to be included on in-store playlists. It’s a unique and humorous campaign. It’s too bad: Zellers could have used the laughs, not to mention this kind of creativity, a little sooner.

Innocent until, and even after, proven guilty

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 11:01 AM - 0 Comments

New Democrat MP Mathieu Ravignat asked yesterday whether the government would be pursuing the Conservative Party of Canada for the rebates it received as part of the In-and-Out scheme. Pierre Poilievre answered for the government.

Mr. Speaker, I thought the honourable member was rising today to apologize on behalf of the NDP. Just last week the NDP had to admit that it broke the Canadian election law, that it violated the law in attempting to use the power of the political donation tax credit in order to fund a third party organization. It did so in violation of the law. It has now had to admit it. On this side of the House, every single Conservative accused of wrongdoing has now been cleared. We are very pleased with the outcome. We will continue to stand by the fact that we followed all the rules.

In the case of the NDP’s violation—offering the party as a conduit for donations to the Broadbent Institute in Jack Layton’s memory—the commissioner of Elections Canada has confirmed that all improper donations were returned by the party.

Painless gum disease testing

By Cathy Gulli - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

“Rinse and spit” is a routine part of a trip to the dentist. But a University of Toronto researcher is turning the exercise into a tool to diagnose gum disease early and painlessly.

Typically, dentists detect the disease by running a metal probe underneath the gums, which can be uncomfortable and only catches it once damage has occurred. This rinse test, invented by Dr. Michael Glogauer, an immunologist, oral biologist and periodontist, identifies gum disease by measuring the amount of white blood cells—which indicate infection—present in the mouth.

After swishing water for 20 seconds, the patient spits into a cup; a dental professional adds in two drops of a chemical, and within a minute the water turns blue if disease is detected. “The degree of blueness tells you the severity,” says Glogauer, who is working to bring the test to market in Canada and the United States.

Diagnosing gum disease early is important for overall well-being. It has been associated with increased risk of diabetes, stroke, cardiovascular disease and low-birth-weight babies. “It’s not just about losing your teeth,” says Glogauer. “It’s about causing damage to the rest of your body.”

What it’s really like to grow old

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photo by Brent Foster

Old age is not for sissies, Bette Davis memorably proclaimed. But we’re working on it, and just in the nick of time. The baby boomers, the Western world’s social arbiters ever since their birth spawned a frenzy of school building, are passing another milestone in their march toward a gerontocracy the likes of which the world has never seen. The first of them turned 65 this year, and in Canada they will keep doing so at the rate of 1,000 a day for another 18 years, until the number of seniors is twice that of today. And what boomers need, boomers tend to get, from financial entitlements to social science and psychological theories, and these days the concept of positive aging is flourishing.

For those who will admit to aging at all, that is. More than half of the respondents aged 65 to 74 described themselves as middle-aged or young, in an American survey. Media reports are full of people whose children have had children—grandparents they were called, back before the flood—who insist on being called anything but. (The New Grandparents Name Book has suggestions: Bubbles, GoGo, Napa, Pebbles.) The burgeoning Zoomer media empire, which admittedly includes the middle-aged as well as the elderly in its target audience, remade CARP magazine into Zoomer, adding fashion, beauty, food and wine and relationship articles to the health and finance pieces that dominated the magazine when it was published by the Canadian Association of Retired Persons.

Despite the strong streak of denial in all this—Bubbles?—there is clearly an aura of positivity around contemporary aging, even in an era of mangled private savings and wobbly public finances. Both those who will have to live on retirement income (or have postponed retirement for financial reasons) and those who are going to pay for a significant portion of it through their taxes—a fusion recipe for intergenerational conflict—have good reason for a negative outlook. But positive aging is a concept divorced from economics. Rather, it is associated with great strides in physical health that are allowing us to live longer, as well as the resources being poured into the battle against what Toronto’s Baycrest geriatric-care centre calls the coming “sharp increase in the rate of dementia,” and the efforts of some to tease out the hidden upside in age-related cognitive decline.

Researchers like Stanford University psychologist Laura Carstensen cite the “positivity effect” in old age—the way elderly adults invest more of their diminishing cognitive resources in emotionally meaningful activities. They do this, according to Carstensen’s theory of “socio-emotional selectivity,” from rational, even wise, motives, to derive the most emotional satisfaction possible from their remaining time. The “paradox of aging,” she writes, means that millions of people “suffer significant [cognitive and physical] loss with age but experience life more positively.”

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How one man brought Greek yogourt to dairy cases everywhere

By Chris Sorensen - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Stephanie Noritz

Investors have understandably shied away from most things labelled “Greek,” as the debt-ridden Mediterranean country threatens to topple the eurozone and take the global economy down with it. But there’s one place where people seemingly can’t get enough: the yogourt section of their grocer’s dairy case. After years of focusing on making yogourt thinner, sweeter and laden with bacteria to improve digestive health, suddenly dairy companies are falling over themselves to produce so-called “Greek” variations that are thicker, creamier and tart tasting.

The sudden shift in direction is largely the result of one man. Several years ago, Hamdi Ulukaya, a Turkish-American businessman, spotted a market opportunity for a thicker, protein-rich strained yogourt like the yogourt he was familiar with back home (the straining removes excess liquid and sugar). Ulukaya’s first case of Chobani Greek yogourt rolled off the production line in 2007 and quickly tapped into an unfilled demand among Americans for a more substantial, but still good-for-you, snack. “Our goal was to reinvent the yogourt category,” says Kyle O’Brien, the vice-president of sales for Chobani’s parent company, Agro Farma, who has been involved since the beginning.

Reinvent it they did. Chobani is not only the dominant player in the fast-growing segment, which now accounts for 15 per cent of all yogourt sales in the United States, but it’s also the number one U.S. brand of yogourt altogether (it’s not yet officially sold in Canada, although some specialty retailers stock it in their stores). It’s the sort of disruptive innovation that one usually associates with technology, not foodstuffs. “It’s a success story that’s pretty amazing,” says Joel Gregoire, a Canadian food and beverage analyst for NPD Group, who notes that yogourt of all types is one of the fastest-growing food categories in North America, with consumption increasing by more than 100 per cent over the past decade in Canada alone.

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Jann Arden’s down-and-out days

By Elio Iannacci - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Charla Jones/GETSTOCK

Meeting Jann Arden is like watching a one-woman show on speed. Sitting in a downtown Toronto hotel lobby, the 49-year-old talks about her newly released memoir and album with so many different voices for effect, you’d think Robin Williams or Nicki Minaj coached her.

As soon as the subject of the upcoming holidays comes up, the Alberta-born singer-songwriter launches into an old-timey, high-pitched tone to recall her Christmases past. “You know when you go to the Bay and spend 60 or so dollars on cosmetics?” she asks, before moving into her best Lucille Ball drawl. “Sometimes you get a free makeup thing, like a brush or a travel bag. I always got that gift-with-purchase thing at Christmas from my mom. Jeezus, I tell ya!”

These types of slap-on-the-knee anecdotes—which Arden has been liberally sprinkling into her live performances since she first hit the charts with I Would Die for You (from her 1993 debut disc, Time for Mercy)—have become more than just shtick or a nervous tic. In fact, Arden’s homespun sense of humour has resulted in an unlikely title: Canada’s only multimedia pop diva. Aside from a consistent schedule of concert dates, a CBC radio show of her own where she frequently interviews stars (“I thanked Stevie Nicks for the many hours of necking I did to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours”), and TV spots (she cameos on This Hour Has 22 Minutes and is a regular on Canada Sings), Arden is a relentless twitterist, tweeting an average of 15 times a day to her more than 30,000 fans. Her thoughts have also resulted in three books, two of them—If I Knew, Don’t You Think I’d Tell You? and I’ll Tell You One Damn Thing, and That’s All I Know!—a hodgepodge of journal entries and notes.

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Detection in two seconds

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Verisante

One in seven Canadians will develop skin cancer during their lifetime. The good news is the disease has a high survival rate—if detected early.

Enter the Aura, a world-beating device that detects if a lesion is cancerous in less than two seconds. The technology, developed by the B.C. Cancer Agency and the University of British Columbia, was recently approved by Health Canada. The Aura should be available to health professionals by summer, says Thomas Braun, founder of Vancouver-based Verisante Technology, which licensed the device. It uses a hand-held wand to optically analyze the skin, allowing early detection of deadly melanoma, and more common skin cancers. Variants of the technology are under development for detecting lung, colon, cervical and gastrointestinal cancers. Both in terms of treatment costs and unnecessary biopsies, says Braun, “it’s got great potential to save lives, and save money.”

REVIEW: Catherine The Great

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

She wasn’t Russian and never expected to be monarch of a vast, northern empire. Yet Catherine oversaw Russia’s golden age, a time of strategic conquests and cultural blossoming. Her generals captured Crimea and opened up the Black Sea to Russian shipping. She bought so many Old Masters that she built the Hermitage to house them. She read voraciously, and corresponded with the likes of Voltaire and Diderot. And she had time for affairs of the heart, churning through a string of lovers.

Massie has written a biography as captivating as its subject. Born Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst in 1729, the daughter of a minor German prince, she was sent east at 14, converted to the Orthodox religion, had her name changed to Catherine, and was wed to the heir to the Russian throne. It was a disaster. Husband Peter’s early upbringing in Germany had been so violent that he grew up to be “fearful, deceitful, antagonistic, boastful, cowardly, duplicitous and cruel.” He loathed Catherine. The couple never had sex. All of her children were fathered by lovers.

While Peter loved all things German and hated everything Russian, Catherine fell in love with her adopted land, and, in turn, the insular nation fell in love with her. That affection was crucial after Peter acceded to the throne in 1762. He so alienated Russia’s elite that there was no resistance when Catherine and her lover Gregory Orlov masterminded a coup. During her 34-year reign she turned Russia into a great power. Yet she hated anyone calling her by that adjective. In 1788 she wrote to a friend: “I beg you no longer to call me Catherine the Great, because . . . my name is Catherine II.”

Netflix for toys: Parents reclaim the living room

By Davide Berretta - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 10:13 AM - 0 Comments

zsoltika/Flickr

Nikki Pope says she came up with the idea after spending time with her 11 brothers and sisters’ families. She couldn’t help but notice “the huge buildup in everyone’s houses of toys that the kids were no longer playing with, because they were growing so quickly,” she said.

The idea was to start Toygaroo, a toy rental subscription company that works pretty much like Netflix. Instead of creating a movie queue, parents select a number of toys online, along with a subscription plan, and Toygaroo delivers a box containing, for example, four sanitized toys once a month for about US$35.

If that sounds a bit pricey, there’s also Colorado-based BabyPlays, which offers slightly cheaper subscription rates.

In the States, similar companies renting baby clothes and children’s books are also taking off, as online services penetrate deeper and deeper into the lucrative children market. But the Netflix-for-toddlers model may soon be coming north of the border as well.

Pope said she is seeing a large number of inquiries from Canadian parents, enough to warrant an expansion to Canada, perhaps as early as 2012. And Canadian investors are already pouring money into it. When Toygaroo was featured in a startup reality show last March, it raised US$200,000 in investment, including from Canadian mogul Kevin O’Leary.

In the meantime, two Canadian moms who have been renting toys online for over a year, are also getting ready to offer the subscription option. Operating the self-funded Toys Trunk out of Milton, Ontario, Carolina Rey and Katia Parada rent individual toys, such as the “bilingual learning table” and  “jump smart trampoline” for prices mostly hovering around $7 for two weeks and $10 for four weeks.

Rey, a former industrial engineer with two children, says Toys Trunk wants to go the way of Toygaroo and Babyplays soon, but data on their 300 customers tells them most parents want a quicker turnaround than those offered down south. “The funny thing is that we noticed that our moms like to change the toys every two weeks,” says Rey. Especially in the case of city dwellers, she says, certain toys are so large that, “people.. want to try them and take them home but they take up so much room so they just want them for a couple of weeks.”

For now, Toys Trunk is serving Milton, Oakville, Georgetown, Mississauga, Campbellville and Burlington. “The dream,” says Rey, “is to have it national.”

You can follow Davide Berretta on twitter at http://twitter.com/#!/daveeday

Just another casual allegation of treason

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

After explaining to the House that opposition MPs were no longer relevant and dissenting opinions would no longer be tolerated, Peter Kent stepped into the foyer yesterday and described the visit of two NDP MPs to Washington as follows.

As you have seen this week, one of the opposition parties has taken the treacherous course of leaving the domestic debate and heading abroad to attack a legitimate Canadian resource which is being responsibly developed and regulated.  

Treachery is synonymous with treason. During World War II, the British parliament enacted the Treachery Act to prosecute enemy conspirators. Sixteen people were subsequently executed for violations under the act.

How much for democracy?

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Jeff Jedras questions the Liberal objection to adding seats to the House.

With all the countries in the world yearning for free elections and representative democracy, I refuse to seriously consider cost as an impediment to fairer representation…

I would truly love to see the Liberals be bold here and get serious with an agenda for democratic and parliamentary reform; let’s throw in looking at voting reform at the same time. It’s all part of the wider puzzle, and it’s time we stopped nibbling around the edges and got serious about this. But in the mean time, please stop complaining about the cost of democracy.

Bestsellers – Week of November 14th, 2011

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

And now a word from Pat Martin

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 8:59 PM - 0 Comments

Via Twitter, the NDP MP reacts to the government’s latest move to limit debate in the House.

This is a fucking disgrace…closure again. And on the Budget! There’s not a democracy in the world that would tolerate this jackboot shit

For gods sake. In these uncertain economic times, don’t you think our parliament should be debating our federal budget? Some due diligence?

The Commons: Down with inequality, up with the price of cheese

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 16, 2011 at 7:14 PM - 0 Comments

The Scene. It began with a rousing cheer for Nycole Turmel. The official opposition was perhaps behooved to loudly endorse their interim leader after a Conservative backbencher had used the House’s preceding minute to read aloud some scripted bit about how disgraceful Turmel had behaved on some matter or another.

“Mr. Speaker, over the past few months we have witnessed a protest movement on a scale never seen before,” she ventured. “The Occupy movement is denouncing economic disparity.”

There were grumbles and groans from the government side. Continue…