Building a better city
By Cathy Gulli - Monday, November 28, 2011 - 0 Comments
The high cost of aging infrastructure inspires researchers seeking the longevity of the parthenon
Photograph by Roger Lemoyne; ENVAC
Deep beneath the streets of Montreal’s entertainment district, running alongside the usual water, sewage and gas pipes that lie underground in every community across the country, something entirely unique is buried: 1.5 km of carbon steel tubes that will eventually funnel the neighbourhood’s garbage, recycling and organic waste into a massive subterranean container with a capacity of up to 10 tonnes. The trash will be sucked through the pipes and into the container by four fans with a combined power of 440 kilowatts, and later trucked to a landfill or another destination.
Once up and running in 2014, the Envac system will be Canada’s first municipal automated vacuum waste collection program—a stark contrast to the weekly curbside pickup most people are used to, which is labour-intensive and inefficient. “Today we are collecting waste like we did hundreds of years ago,” says Sean Monclús of Envac, who has been working with the city of Montreal to set up the system, which is costing $8.2 million. That makes no sense, he says: “If we have waste water underground, why not the waste?”
Perhaps most surprising about the implementation of this innovative program is the fact that it’s being done in Quebec, which has become the poster child for aging infrastructure, and the perils of failing to manage municipal services in a progressive way. In Laval in 2006, five people were killed, including a pregnant woman, when the neglected Concorde overpass crashed onto cars below. Parts of the Champlain Bridge corridor, which crosses the St. Lawrence, have been deemed “mediocre to deficient,” according to an annual inspection obtained by the Montreal Gazette. And in July, a 25-tonne concrete beam collapsed from Montreal’s Ville Marie tunnel onto an expressway travelled by 100,000 vehicles every weekday (no one was hurt). “But it’s not just a Montreal problem,” said Mayor Gérald Tremblay then. “When I talk to my colleagues in other big Canadian cities it’s the same issue.”
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Decency alone can’t save Parliament
By Andrew Coyne - Monday, November 28, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments
Andrew Coyne on an institution that’s largely irrelevant and increasingly impotent
Sean Kilpatrick/CP
This year’s Parliamentarians of the Year awards were, as ever, a grand occasion, and while I’d quibble with one or two choices, the recipients were all deserving enough. The premise of the event is a good one: there are decent, conscientious people in politics who take Parliament seriously and treat each other with respect, and it is worth recognizing them, if only to encourage others to follow their example.
Yet it was hard to escape a certain rage-against-the-darkness feeling about the whole thing. We can point to this or that exemplary individual, but it does not change the reality that Parliament is dying. Largely irrelevant, increasingly impotent, it is treated with contempt by those in power, matched only by the indifference of the general public.
The institution is caught in a death spiral, wherein each new assault on its prerogatives makes the argument for the next. The more degraded it becomes, the harder it is to rally people to its defence: it’s only Parliament, after all. So even after an unprecedented seven invocations of “time allocation”—a politer form of closure—to cut off debate in as many weeks, it wasn’t until Pat Martin’s foul-mouthed outburst on Twitter last Wednesday that the press gallery, who are paid to pay attention, could rouse themselves to make an issue of it. But their enthusiasm soon passed. All it took was last Thursday’s question period: by common consent the worst in years. Who, in all seriousness, could mount a defence of Parliament’s right to debate who had actually watched Parliament in debate?
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Native cigarettes are now a problem for Western provinces, too
By Colby Cosh - Monday, November 28, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments
Tax-free have long been a big business in Ontario and Quebec
Tim Smith/Brandon Sun
Chief Frank Brown of the Canupawakpa Dakota Nation doesn’t smoke, but he swears by the Mohawk-manufactured cigarettes on sale at the Dakota Chundee Smoke Shack near Pipestone, Man. “We did our research and the provincial [name brand] cigarettes have a lot of chemicals in them,” he says. “We think our smokes don’t have the cancer that the province’s cigarettes do.”
Whatever the supposed health claims put forth by Brown, the Manitoba government isn’t listening. In mid-November, officials seized 90,000 contraband cigarettes, which were not authorized for sale in the province. The next day, Dakota Chundee, which doesn’t sit on reserve land, was open again, crowded with non-Aboriginal buyers.
The raid, and subsequent reopening of the smoke shack, is the latest in a growing frontier war between First Nations and western provincial governments. Unlike in Ontario and Quebec, where the booming Indian tobacco business has also been linked to gangs, not to mention billions in lost taxes, Indian cigarette sales haven’t been an issue in the West. That’s changing as western bands turn to smokes to not only fill their coffers, but to assert land claims, too.
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REVIEW: 11/22/63
By Brian Bethune - Monday, November 28, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments
Book by Stephen King
Opinions vary (and how) about the literary quality of Stephen King’s vast output—more than three dozen novels alone—but no one denies the man can tell a story. Or that he has an authentic channel to the zeitgeist, both capturing baby boomer pop culture and contributing to it: who can imagine a prom gone wrong without recalling Carrie, or notice a dog acting strangely without thoughts of Cujo? So it comes as no surprise that when King, 64, wanted to write a time-travel novel, its plot would pivot on his generation’s watershed moment, the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.Jake Epping, a young Maine schoolteacher, takes up the mission bequeathed him by Al Templeton, the owner of a local diner who discovers that his pantry offers a portal to the age of Ike and Elvis, to 11:58 a.m., Sept. 9, 1958, to be precise. Al has learned that every time one of us visits 1958, it’s like the first time: everything he has done on previous visits has vanished as though it had never been. So Al, dying of lung cancer, needs Jake to go and live back then permanently, or at least long enough—five years—to accomplish a mission both consider vital: the portal doesn’t extend back far enough for Jake to kill Hitler, so he had better save Kennedy.
Al offers a summary of the expected benefits of erasing that bad day in Dallas, succinct enough not to bog down readers and persuasive enough to convince Jake, before King starts tackling just about every classic conundrum ever raised in sci-fi’s time-travel subgenre. Some are disposed of quickly—what would happen should he kill his own grandfather, Jake wonders aloud; “Why the f–k would you do that?” Al retorts. Others unfold more slowly over the novel’s 842 pages. Time is “obdurate,” and resistant to change, Jake soon learns; only later does he realize that’s a good thing, in a story that’s as ingenious as it’s compulsively readable.
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REVIEW: Trudeau Transformed: The Shaping of a Statesman
By John Geddes - Monday, November 28, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments
Book by Max and Monique Nemni, translated by George Tombs
An enduring element of his myth has it that Pierre Trudeau was a dilettante well into adult life. The image of the future prime minister indulging in a motorcycle-riding, beard-growing, job-hopping arrested adolescence has been cultivated both by admirers—it makes him more fun—and detractors—it confirms his lack of seriousness. The Nemnis, a husband-and-wife writing team devoted to burnishing their subject’s memory, set out to demolish the image of an aimless Trudeau.And they largely succeed. In a previous volume, 2006’s Young Trudeau, they revealed the narrowness of his early thinking, which shockingly featured pro-Fascist sympathies. Now they trace his 1944-47 postgraduate education from Harvard to Paris’s Sciences Po to the London School of Economics. Their painstaking study of his notes, letters and journals shows how Trudeau systematically acquired democratic ideas centred on individual rights and absorbed economic theory.
Previous biographers have viewed his celebrated travels through Asia after his university years as evidence of rootlessness. The Nemnis cite a letter to his mother in which Trudeau writes of setting out “to understand the world’s politics,” and argue that his itinerary shows he followed through. They pounce on evidence that Trudeau later sought out, rather than stumbled into, his key first experience in Ottawa as a junior bureaucrat.
In their telling, Trudeau’s rise in the 1950s as a public intellectual in Quebec—a blur of writing, editing, lecturing and organizing—flows naturally out of what came before. So does his 1965 jump into federal politics, which closes this instalment of their multi-volume project. Of course, the anti-Trudeau camp now ascendant in Canada needn’t buy this laudatory version. But to go on dismissing him as gifted but undisciplined, charismatic but shallow, has just gotten that much less plausible.
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The kids are, you know, fine and stuff, I guess
By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 28, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments
Elections Canada has released its national survey of young adults. Three-quarters of them claim to be voting and they generally seem okay with the state of things.
There were reasonably high levels of satisfaction among the youth surveyed with the way democracy works in Canada, with 53% of youth being somewhat satisfied and a further 17% very satisfied. … A key difference between voters and non-voters was that voters were more likely to have agreed that the government plays a major role in their lives compared to non-voters (81% versus 62%, respectively).
Youth voters were more likely than non-voters to identify with a political party and to feel that by voting they could make a difference. Nearly all voters (95%) agreed that there was at least one political party that talked about the issues that they felt were important, compared to fewer (85%), but still a high proportion, of non-voters. When youth were asked whether they felt that by voting they could make a difference, 88% of voters agreed, compared to 72% of non-voters. Most youth, both voters and non-voters, disagreed that all federal political parties were the same (85% of voters and 76% of non-voters).
Setting aside the obviously dubious self-reporting of voter turnout, the report gets at what’s driving the decline in voter turnout: lack of knowledge, lack of interest, lack of relevance and, as Apathy is Boring has argued, a lack of direct engagement.
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Ken Russell’s Elgar (and others)
By Jaime Weinman - Monday, November 28, 2011 at 7:55 AM - 0 Comments
Director Ken Russell has died at the age of 84. He was an original. And despite the excesses of his films (note: “excesses” is the word you will hear most often in describing Ken Russell; it’s like that guy in Annie Hall automatically uses the term “indulgent” for Fellini), I think his genuine love for music always came through.
To an extent, what Russell did in his classical music films was to reverse the old music-appreciation formula. The idea of a lot of films about classical music was to present a story with musical interludes – the story of a composer’s life would, hopefully, make us interested in his music. Russell almost made the composer’s life (what there was of it in the film) an accompaniment to the music.
You can see this in his first big success, the BBC documentary Elgar. This isn’t typical Russell, because his producers restrained him a bit (he was allowed to use actors, but not to have them speak). But it is more about Elgar’s music than his life story, and it emphasizes the emotional reactions that are provoked when music is juxtaposed with images – like having “Land of Hope and Glory,” the ultimate anthem of Edwardian confidence, played over footage of World War I, which made it all seem like a lie.
“Elgar” helped to redeem the reputation of a composer who was sometimes unfairly dismissed as a symbol of stuffy Edwardian bombast. And it made Russell one of the BBC’s most important filmmakers in a great era of TV making, up until his Richard Strauss film (which you can find on YouTube, along with the rest of the Elgar documentary) got banned by the Strauss estate and made him persona non grata at the BBC. But by then, he was already concentrating on controversial feature films more than controversial TV films, anyway.
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MPs, clams and Aquaculture
By Mitchel Raphael - Sunday, November 27, 2011 at 10:01 AM - 0 Comments
The Canadian Aquaculture Industry Alliance (CAIA) held a reception at the Weston Hotel in Ottawa.
Gail Shea (left), Minister of National Revenue, with the executive director of CAIA, Ruth Salmon
Liberal MP Mark Eyking (right) with his son Josh.
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Movember madness
By Mitchel Raphael - Saturday, November 26, 2011 at 11:37 PM - 0 Comments
Liberal MP Justin Trudeau said last year he went for a three musketeers stache but this year it was more pirate. “It’s more roguish,” he quipped.
Three quarters of the way through the month Conservative MP Ed Holder has a beard and is still deciding what moustache to go for. Please leave any suggestions.
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This is the week that was
By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, November 26, 2011 at 12:11 PM - 0 Comments
The long-gun registry split the NDP leadership contenders. Paul Dewar talked medical infrastructure. Nathan Cullen pitched energy policy. And Romeo Saganash explained how the NDP can grow.
Charlie Angus brought attention to Attawapiskat. Justin Trudeau quizzed Peter Kent, who spoke of treachery and dismissed himself. Rob Anders napped. Bob Rae was named parliamentarian of the year. Rob Merrifield and John Weston were dutiful partisans. Two New Democrats tried to sing along. Patrick Brown allowed that all MPs love Canada. Rick Dykstra segued. The NDP turned up new emails in the G8 Legacy Fund affair and Tony Clement pleaded his innocence. Jason Kenney brought props. And MPs debated disturbances in the House.
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Fur on the Hill
By Mitchel Raphael - Saturday, November 26, 2011 at 10:07 AM - 0 Comments
Manitoba Conservative MP Robert Sopuck shows off his fur in the House of Commons foyer.
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Before honour, reconnaissance
By Michael Friscolanti - Saturday, November 26, 2011 at 12:02 AM - 0 Comments
At the Shafia murder trial, cellphone records reveal some disturbing detours during a family “vacation”
Michael Friscolanti is covering the honour killing trial for Maclean’s, filing regular reports from the Kingston, Ont. courtroom to Macleans.ca and weekly dispatches for the magazine. The reports will continue for the duration of the trial, which is expected to run into December.The cellphone photos appear to chronicle a typical family vacation: smiling faces on a hotel bed, a teenager in a bikini, the CN Tower. But the cellphone records—analyzed by police after four of those vacationers were found in an underwater car—suggest something far more sinister: an intense, week-long reconnaissance mission in search of the perfect murder scene.
It was June 2009, and the polygamous Shafias (husband, two wives, and seven children) were piled into a pair of cars for a road trip to Niagara Falls. By then, the family of wealthy Afghan immigrants had been living in Canada for nearly two years—in a household so divided and dysfunctional that one daughter told her vice-principal: “I’ve had enough. I want to die.”
Nineteen-year-old Zainab, the eldest of the sisters, had recently run away and married, a decision that disgraced the family to the point that even she agreed to a divorce. Sahar, the suicidal one, was showing up to school with bruises on her arms and tears in her eyes. Geeti, at just 13, was telling anyone who would listen that her dad was a monster and that she wanted to be placed in foster care. Rona, the infertile first wife, was possibly the most imprisoned in her new country: ostracized, ignored and prone to wandering alone through Montreal parks. Life, she wrote in her diary, was “a torture for me.” Continue…
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Routine mammograms: evil, necessary, or both?
By Anne Kingston - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 7:12 PM - 0 Comments
Radiation oncologist Eileen Rakovitch on the latest confusion over breast cancer screenings
Last week, the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care issued new breast cancer-screening guidelines that have raised questions and stoked debate. The task force recommended women under 50 who are not at high risk of breast cancer forego routine mammograms. It also recommended that the interval time between mammograms for women aged 50 to 69 be extended from every one to two years to every two to three years—unless their doctors suggest otherwise. And, contrary to what women have been told for decades, it concluded women should no longer conduct regular breast self-examinations.To sort through the confusion, Anne Kingston spoke with Eileen Rakovitch, a radiation oncologist and chair of the breast cancer program at Toronto’s Sunnybrook hospital.
Q: It seems this debate never ends. Let’s start with mammograms. Radiologists in the U.S. and Canada have disagreed on this in the past: in the U.S., the recommendation is that women over age 40 should have regular mammograms; in Canada, the thinking has been that women at average risk should begin screening at age 50. Continue…
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Those damned ‘elites’
By Emma Teitel - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 6:18 PM - 0 Comments
It’s not clear who the ‘elites’ are, but they sure do make life miserable
As a new columnist, I understand the compulsion to repeat yourself. There are only so many segues and qualifiers, and I’ve probably exhausted all of them already. In fact, “in fact,” takes first place on my list of most recycled phrases—it appears in half the columns I’ve written for Maclean’s so far—with “The truth is” and “After all” competing for second place. I have yet to find other words for “In other words” and, contrary to the advice of my high school English teacher, all of my paragraphs begin with “and” or “but.” But, I like to think that my word choice—no matter how repetitive—doesn’t muddy the point I’m trying to make. It’s one thing to repeat words for the sake of clarity. It’s another to use repetition to blur distinctions in the service of your politics.
This is exactly what National Post columnist Barbara Kay has been doing for years. In true Orwellian fashion (think Politics and the English Language), Kay forever enjoys railing against the same ambiguous enemy, ever ambiguously. I suspect, as George Orwell once argued about another obfuscator, she “either has a meaning and cannot express it, or inadvertently says something else, or is almost indifferent as to whether [her] words mean anything or not.” In the world according to Barbara Kay, every problem big and small is consistently blamed on anonymous elites.
I now present you with a list of Kay’s favourite word, in no particular order (emphasis mine): Continue…
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RCMP investigating claims it waited years before searching Pickton farm
By Ken MacQueen - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 5:56 PM - 0 Comments
As many as 14 actual or suspected Pickton victims were killed in the meantime
The RCMP is reviewing explosive claims that its members could have acted much sooner in obtaining a search warrant that may have stopped Robert Pickton’s murder spree years earlier.The allegations, by Cpl. Catherine Galliford, once the high-profile RCMP spokesperson for the Pickton and Air India investigations, were first revealed in a story in Maclean’s Nov. 28 issue, A Royal Canadian Disgrace. The story was based on interviews with Galliford, and on the 115-page transcript of a statement she gave senior RCMP officers in April. Continue…
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This week has four sketches
By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 4:29 PM - 0 Comments
Monday. James Moore’s audition
Tuesday. Ipso facto governance
Wednesday. Whatever he meant, Tony Clement stands by what he said
Thursday. Grumpy old men -
Holding the government to account
By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 3:37 PM - 0 Comments
Like Rob Merrifield earlier this week, here is the question Conservative MP John Weston asked this morning of the parliamentary secretary for the Minister of International Trade on behalf of his constituents in West Vancouver—Sunshine Coast—Sea to Sky Country.
Could the parliamentary secretary please explain to the House how the NDP views trade?
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Parliamentarians of the Year Awards party
By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 3:11 PM - 0 Comments
Maclean’s 5th annual Parliamentarians of the Year Awards ceremony at the Fairmont Château Laurier. See winners here.
Immigration MInister Jason Kenney (left) and Ken Whyte, President of Rogers Publishing Limited
Liberal MP Rodger Cuzner (left) and NDP MP Pat Martin.
NDP MP Peter Stoffer accepts his award.
Stephen Harper’s communications director Angelo Persichilli and CBC’s Julie Van Dusen.
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Welcome to the infomercial
By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 2:35 PM - 0 Comments
Jason Kenney displays the latest advancement in communications.
Cabinet ministers often arrive at Commons hearings with their own entourage in tow. But Immigration Minister Jason Kenney surprised the immigration committee Thursday by bringing his own backdrops.
Bright Conservative blue with small maple leaf flags and the name of Mr. Kenney’s new program for families spelled out in white lettering, they were erected behind the minister and in front of the visitors gallery, effectively blocking the committee proceedings from some members of the media and obscuring the view of other onlookers.
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The Saganash doctrine
By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 0 Comments
Romeo Saganash explains how to beat the Conservatives.
We will start by returning to our roots in rural Canada. Rural communities are hollowing out and people are angry about it … When we were the CCF, rural Canadians knew we were on their side. We need to reach out to them again with respect, to listen to their concerns and to act on their behalf. When we do, they will come back to us and we will grow together.
And we must understand suburban Canada. Whether we are talking about new Canadians who moved from the cities or the proverbial soccer moms and hockey dads who grew up in those same towns, fundamentally, people want the same things. They want the freedom to live their lives as they see fit and they want security for their children and the future. The NDP can offer that. We can refrain from paternalism, respecting people’s ability to make their own decisions.
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Crying over managed milk
By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 12:30 PM - 0 Comments
The Agenda convenes a panel, including our Andrew Coyne, to debate supply management.
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Eurozone leaders push for “fiscal union”
By macleans.ca - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 11:55 AM - 0 Comments
Yields on Italian short-term bonds at record highs
The leaders of the eurozone’s three largest economies, Germany, France and Italy, jointly called on Thursday for a “fiscal union” to be enshrined in a treaty, the Financial Times reports. The measure would drive economic integration and serve to enforce greater budgetary discipline, said German chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and newly appointed Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti, who’s been eagerly welcomed by eurozone leaders, unlike his predecessor Silvio Berlusconi. Creating a fiscal union may be what’s needed for Merkel to warm up to the idea of commonly backed eurobonds, a proposal which some say is the best option to stave off a possible collapse for the euro. Talk of fiscal unity, however, failed to calm the markets, which pushed yields on Italy’s short-term bonds to euro-era highs on Friday, and even higher than long-term bonds, meaning investors are pricing in the risk that Italy could soon default.
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Week in Pictures: November 21-27, 2011
By macleans.ca - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 11:48 AM - 0 Comments
The week’s best photographs from around the world
0Week in Pictures: November 21-27, 2011
Students from St Andrews University participate in the traditional Raisin Monday celebrations
Students from St Andrews University participate in the traditional Raisin Monday celebrations in St Andrews, Scotland November 21, 2011. The tradition dates back to the early days of the university when new students would give senior students a pound (0.45kg) of raisins in gratitude for their help in adapting to university life, in exchange for a receipt written in Latin. Failure to produce such a receipt could result in a dousing in the local fountain. Nowadays the raisins have been replaced with a bottle of wine and the dousing with foam. (David Moir/Reuters)
1 of 14 Photos
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White House backs Egyptian protesters
By macleans.ca - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 11:37 AM - 0 Comments
Military appoints Mubarak-era PM
The Obama administration is calling for a “full transfer” of power in Egypt to a civilian government, siding with thousands of protesters who have flocked to Cairo’s Tahrir Square to demand the resignation of the country’s ruling military council. Activists are asking that the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, which has ruled Egypt since former dictator Hosni Mubarak stepped down in February, resign immediately and transfer power to a civilian government. In an effort to subdue the protests, the military appointed a new prime minister on Friday, Kamel el-Ganzoury, who served in Mubarak’s cabinet in the 1990s. The military rulers plan to go ahead with parliamentary elections scheduled for Monday, despite violence, spreading dissent, and the refusal of prominent political parties to participate.
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Future-proofing
By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments
Nathan Cullen has released his energy policy platform.
Among the items on his agenda: interest-free retrofit loans for low income households, high speed rail between Windsor and Quebec City, east-west power transmission, retro-fitting federal buildings, investments in clean energy technologies, the elimination of subsidies for the oil and gas sector, the elimination of subsidies for the nuclear industry, stopping the export of raw bitumen, pricing carbon through cap-and-trade and appointing a Minister of Energy Security.
