If you want to insult the dignity of the House, you have to get elected first

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 10:29 AM - 0 Comments

On Wednesday evening, during a vote on the government’s Canadian Wheat Board legislation, a protestor in one of the visitors’ galleries began shouting his objections. He apparently held a sign that read “lies” and yelled out that “this government does not represent me.” One way or another, the individual was removed from the chamber.

Yesterday after QP, deputy government House leader Tom Lukiwski rose on a point of order to say that this individual’s protest had been facilitated by the NDP’s Niki Ashton and to complain that various opposition MPs had not shown sufficient disapproval when the disruption occurred. This led to a discussion about the extent of Ms. Ashton’s involvement and the justification one might have to protest. And that then segued into a general debate over decorum.

All of which is fairly reminiscent of the scene two years ago and the discussion that followed (see here, here, here, here and here).

Real wages decline

By macleans.ca - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 10:28 AM - 0 Comments

The purchasing power Canadians get from their paycheques is failing to keep up with the cost of living, making it harder for many people to make ends meet, the Globe and Mail reports. New figures from Statistics Canada show that the average weekly wage increase over the past year was 1.1 per cent, the slowest rise since November 2009. Meanwhile, inflation is close to three per cent, meaning real wages have declined. Furthermore, rising commodity prices are translating into higher energy and food costs for Canadians. The new numbers also point to a widening income divide between the western provinces, which are benefitting from an ongoing commodity boom, and the former manufacturing heartland of central Canada.

The Globe and Mail

Spilling secrets, parties and poutine

By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Mitchel Raphael

MP has cover envy

Maclean’s fifth annual Parliamentarians of the Year Awards ceremony this week at the Fairmont Château Laurier had Stephen Harper’s communications director Angelo Persichilli spilling secrets to the CBC’s Julie Van Dusen. Persichilli told the reporter the secret to good pasta sauce was “light on the mushrooms and lots of garlic.” That night, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney took the award for Hardest Working MP but is still bitter about the year he won the big prize of Parliamentarian of the Year: “I still can’t believe that every other winner before me got a cover story but I was bumped by [former Liberal MP] Ruby Dhalla.” At the time, Dhalla was making headlines over allegations of mistreated nannies. Former NDP leader Jack Layton received the first ever Lifetime Achievement Award, which was accepted by his widow, Toronto MP Olivia Chow. With Chow was screenwriter Shelley Eriksen, who is working on a script for a TV biopic on Layton. Eriksen was in Ottawa for a tour of the NDP war room from the last election and other significant places, such as Layton’s old offices.

Chez what?

Conservative MP Michael Chong took the award for Best Represents Constituents. Second runner-up in that category was NDP MP Niki Ashton, who’s been fighting for the miners in her Manitoba riding and, more recently, trying to save the Canadian Wheat Board, something vital to the future of the port of Churchill. Ashton, 29, is currently seeking the NDP leadership. She joked that she may adopt the slogan of a snack bar in Quebec City called Chez Ashton (no relation), which is: “Only fresh. Only real.” Chez Ashton is known for its poutine. The MP has eaten there recently, as well as when she was eight, when she “took one of the placemats and put it on my wall.”

Continue…

Good news, bad news: Nov. 17-24, 2011

By macleans.ca - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

Sidney Crosby scores four points in a triumphant return to the NHL. (Gene J. Puskar/AP)

Speak freely

After avoiding section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act for years, the Conservatives are finally standing up in defence of free speech. In a 2009 interview with Maclean’s, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said section 13’s contentious definition of hate propaganda was “a very tricky issue.” Last week, however, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson was far clearer. He said: “Section 13 is not an appropriate or effective means for combatting hate propaganda” and urged all MPs to support a private member’s bill calling for its repeal. He specifically mentioned Maclean’s for our efforts in focusing attention on this important issue. Better late than never.

Mopping up

It will take time, but a better Libya is emerging from the horror of Moammar Gadhafi’s rule. The national transitional council’s new cabinet, unveiled this week, includes representatives from all regions and ethnic groups, soothing fears of infighting. And the recent capture of Gadhafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, and his former intelligence chief, Abdullah al-Senussi, lessens the threat posed by loyalists to the late dictator. The next hurdle will be providing the pair with the sort of fair trials that Gadhafi never would have allowed.

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Welcome to my yurt

By Nicholas Köhler - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photography by Andrew Tolson

Late last month the same central Asian dwelling appeared in both the posh Neiman Marcus Christmas catalogue and in the park where anti-consumerist protesters with Occupy Toronto remained camped out for the long haul: the yurt, that collapsible, cylindrical hut with a conical top that for eons has housed all classes of nomads, from simple shepherds to the Great Khan.

The Neiman Marcus yurt, dubbed the “Dream Folly,” starts at $75,000, boasts an interior designed to look like the inside of a genie’s bottle, comes equipped with a Plexiglas dome, and is billed as “the ultimate girls’ club.” Photographs make it look like Martha Stewart’s grotesque shrine to the cult of Moammar Gadhafi. The Toronto protesters, meanwhile, got three authentic yurts for $20,000: imported from Mongolia by Gatineau, Que.-based Groovy Yurts Inc., they stand swathed in high-quality sheep’s felt, are covered in whimsical Mongolian designs, and sheltered Occupy Toronto’s library, media centre, assembly space and health clinic. In such incongruous pairings can the voice of the zeitgeist be heard: finally, millennia after the Greek historian Herodotus described the Scythians camping out in them, the yurt’s time has come in the West, where they’re now big business. Purveyors report sales as much as doubling, thanks to two contradictory trends—an appetite for roughing it à la luxe on one hand, and apocalyptic fears of a collapsed economy on the other.

The yurt has made its trek into modern times with few alterations: the true Mongolian yurt is assembled on the bare earth using a series of latticed wooden sections brought together in a circle, with wooden rafters meeting in the centre. It’s a skeleton that can be put up and dismantled quickly but that gives the yurt an amazing durability against wind and snow. Clad in layers of canvas and felt, it is bound together using horsehair ropes, with carpets thrown down on the packed dirt.

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New allegations of mishandling in Pickton saga

By macleans.ca - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 9:54 AM - 0 Comments

An inquiry appointed in 2010 to assess police handling of Robert Pickton’s case found that the RCMP lost the first tip it received about the serial killer. The call came in to Vancouver Crime Stoppers on July 27, 1998, the Globe and Mail reports, when a caller said a woman visiting a man living in a trailer on a farm in Port Coquitlam had noticed at least 10 purses, along with female identification and women’s clothing. Though Crime Stoppers passed on the information to an RCMP corporal, it did not reach the detective investigating the disappearances of a number of downtown women in Vancouver until nine days later, when the tipper called again. Pickton was eventually arrested 3 1/2 years later, in February 2002. Separately, Cpl. Catherine Galliford, who recently said publicly she suffered years of sexual harassment from male colleagues as a female RCMP officer in B.C., said she reviewed a 1999 RCMP file on Pickton that she said contained enough information to obtain a search warrant for the killer back then.

The Globe and Mail

The Canadian Press

Newsmakers: Nov. 17-24, 2011

By Alex Ballingall, Nicholas Köhler, Richard Warnica and Kate Lunau - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

STR/AFP/Getty Images

A mystery fit for Hollywood

One of Hollywood’s most enduring mysteries, the drowning of Natalie Wood during a trip on the family yacht, Splendour, made headlines again last week. In a bombshell interview, captain Dennis Davern admitted he hadn’t told investigators the “honest truth” 30 years ago. Davern told the Today show he holds Wood’s husband responsible for her death—though the L.A. County Sheriff’s Office said Robert Wagner is not a suspect. “It was a matter of ‘we’re not going to look too hard, we’re not going to turn on the searchlight, we’re not going to notify anybody right at the moment,’ ” said Davern.

Baby takes Bollywood

After months of breathless speculation, Bollywood’s First Baby finally arrived this week, born to Aishwarya Rai Bachchan. The former Miss World became Bollywood royalty in 2007, when she married leading man Abhishek Bachchan, the son of Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan. After furiously tracking the pregnancy, India’s rambunctious media was oddly restrained last week, the result of a 10-point code of ethics governing the birth. The self-imposed blackout meant the Bachchan birth could not be treated as breaking news, no cameras were to be dispatched to hospital, and journalists were to keep broadcast birth stories to within 90 seconds.

Continue…

The curtailment of debate

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

The House will spend Friday debating an NDP motion on the use of time allocation and closure.

That, in the opinion of the House, the thorough examination and debate of proposed legislation on behalf of Canadians is an essential duty of Members of Parliament, and that the curtailment of such debate limits the ability of Members to carry out this duty and constitutes an affront to Canadian democracy; and, therefore,

That the Speaker undertake a study and make recommendations to amend the Standing Orders with respect to closure and time allocation, such that: (i) a Minister would be required to provide justification for the request for such a curtailment of debate; (ii) the Speaker would be required to refuse such a request in the interest of protecting the duty of Members to examine legislation thoroughly, unless the government’s justification sufficiently outweighs the said duty; (iii) criteria would be set out for assessing the government’s justification, which would provide the Speaker with the basis for a decision to allow for the curtailment of debate;

These days, no news is good. Period.

By Paul Wells - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 7:30 AM - 0 Comments

Tara Todras-Whitehill/AP

The other day, Martin Scorsese screened his new 3-D children’s movie, Hugo, for his daughter Francesca, who was turning 12, and 50 of her friends. Two thoughts occur:

It’s probably a good thing Scorsese didn’t have a daughter turning 12 the year he made Taxi Driver.

It’s official: you’re an inadequate parent.

“What? A pinata?! Daddy, I wanted 3-D Jude Law! Francesca’s dad gave her 3-D Jude Law!”

Continue…

American idiots

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, November 25, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 0 Comments

Isaac Brekken/AP

“We are protecting Herman Cain,” announced a spokesman for the U.S. Secret Service on Nov. 18. The Godfather’s Pizza magnate became the first Republican candidate for U.S. president to request Secret Service protection in this election cycle, and a campaign spokesman told the Washington Post that Cain needed protection from reporters, who have been “trying to follow him with a lot of heavy equipment and cameras.” Cain later denied this, saying only that he needed the protection “because of the popularity of my campaign.” By the time he said that, though, his popularity was declining, with polls showing that his support was going to another candidate—Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker who resigned in disgrace in 1998 and spent most of the next few years reviewing spy novels on Amazon.com. It was a familiar step in a bizarre campaign season: reporters stop focusing on one transparently unelectable candidate, and move on to what historian Rick Perlstein calls “the next shiny object,” an equally unelectable candidate.

The Republican campaign season, from Donald Trump’s birtherism to Rick Perry’s inability to remember which government agency he wanted to cut, has been one of the wildest in recent memory. It drove apostate conservative David Frum to lament the effect the conservative movement was having on the presidential race: in a widely discussed article, he called the parade of Tea Party candidates “a series of humiliating fizzles and explosions that never achieved liftoff.” With Republican voters fired up to beat Barack Obama but also disillusioned with politics in general, any candidate who claims to be a political outsider can get a serious look. Doug Gross, an Iowa Republican operative and former gubernatorial candidate, told Maclean’s that candidates like Cain or Trump “are products of the voters’ concerns about the failure of the current system to produce leaders who can solve problems.”

Continue…

The Commons: Grumpy old men

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 6:02 PM - 0 Comments

Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press

The Scene. Whatever Joe Oliver and Peter Kent are actually accomplishing in their capacity as ministers of the crown, these two children of the 1940s have at least the basis of a promising buddy comedy.

If memory serves, Mr. Oliver’s first forays were mostly unmemorable. Then, at some point, the Natural Resources Minister started shouting.

Recent weeks have been spent metaphorically shaking his fist at the official opposition and imploring them to get off his metaphorical lawn. He has linked them to Hugo Chavez and “European socialists” and “jet-setting Hollywood stars” and, worst of all, “European bureaucrats.” He has said that their only priority is to protect the interests of “their foreign socialist comrades and billionaire U.S. limousine liberals.” He has accused them of standing in the way of social services for children and health care for the elderly. He has ventured, in the course of a single sentence, that “NDP members have never met a job creating private sector policy or project that they do not want to kill, a tax they do not want to raise, a regulation they do not want to impose, a freedom they do not want to curtail, an issue they do not try to use to divide Canadians, and a fictitious problem they do not want the government to solve at great cost.” One day he concluded his remarks with a cry of “send in the clowns!”

All of this, apparently, because the New Democrats have some reservations about the Keystone pipeline project. And all of it committed to the record in the sort of tone—grumbly and impatient—that is generally employed to advise hippies that they might cut their hair and get a job. Continue…

SOPA, a U.S. bill that could “break the Internet”

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 5:39 PM - 0 Comments

American Censorship

By now you may have heard of SOPA–the Stop Online Piracy Act–an anti-infringement bill that’s working it’s way through the U.S. House of Representatives while its companion bill PIPA–Protect Intellectual Property Act–makes its way through the Senate. Opposition to the legislation has gone viral, with over a million emails hitting Congress, carrying the phrase “Don’t Break the Internet.”

These people’s beef? There are many. A tentative summary: Critics argue that, in their desire to curb piracy, SOPA and PIPA will in effect render the Internet itself legally untenable by holding search engines, ISPs and user-generated content sites responsible for other people’s piracy. The proposed legislation targets not just infringers, but anyone suspected of being associated with them–advertisers, payment sites, even those who just link to them. With their shaky understanding of technology, the bills will potentially result in entire websites (like say, Wikipedia) being blocked due to infringements found in a small section of them. Though the bills were not designed to be censorship legislation, censorship could be the outcome, as false positives and false infringement claims could block access to millions of non-infringing sites. Before things even get to that stage, self-censorship will chill voices online that simply can’t risk possibly transgressing the bills’ overly general language. Meanwhile, censorship-circumvention tools like TOR, used to evade Net-censors in Iran and China, will be rendered illegal, as such tools can also be used to gain access to pirated content.

The effects of SOPA and PIPA will be felt throughout the world, as the way the bill defines “U.S. websites” is so broad as to cover most of the Internet itself. The list of collateral damage the bills are feared to cause goes on, and the list of the bills’ critics keeps expanding. In addition to the million+ citizens who have spoken out, the legislation is also opposed by tech companies such as Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, AOL, LinkedIn, eBay, Mozilla, Wikimedia, and, yes, even Microsoft.

Here’s what people are saying about SOPA and PIPA:

“The definitions written in the bill are so broad that any U.S. consumer who uses a website overseas immediately gives the U.S. jurisdiction the power to potentially take action against it.”
-Art Bordsky of Public Knowledge

“…this aggressive U.S. approach… simply asserts jurisdiction over millions of Canadian registered IP addresses and domain names.”
-Michael Geist, law professor at the University of Ottawa and Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law

“It’ll have a stifling effect on venture capital. No one would invest because of the legal liability.”
-Internet entrepreneur Lukas Biewald, founder of Crowdflower

“This is just another case of Congress doing the bidding of powerful lobbyists—in this case, Hollywood and the music industry, among others.”
-Fortune Magazine

“…this would mean the end of the Internet as we know it.”
-Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA)

“This bill cannot be fixed; it must be killed.”
- The Electronic Frontier Foundation

Jesse Brown is the host of TVO.org’s Search Engine podcast. He is on Twitter @jessebrown

Please handle your segues with care

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 4:44 PM - 0 Comments

During members’ statements before QP this afternoon, Stephane Dion stood to acknowledge the recent passing of Rene Maheu, husband of former Liberal MP Shirley Maheu, and a dedicated member of the Liberal party in Mr. Dion’s riding. In Mr. Maheu’s memory, Mr. Dion commended all those who volunteer for political parties.

Avec René Maheu, ce sont tous les militants de base que je veux remercier , les militants de tous les partis démocratiques qui, poussés par leurs convictions, font avancer notre démocratie. Ils et elles en sont le carburant, une énergie perpétuellement renouvelable, du moins, tant que nous garderons dans nos coeurs et nos esprits le souvenir de valeureux citoyens comme René Maheu.

Conservative MP Rick Dykstra was scheduled to stand next and was apparently prepared with a statement about all of the ways in which the Liberal party is apparently plotting to raise taxes. But, for whatever reason, Mr. Dykstra opted to attempt a segue.

Mr. Speaker, I am glad I am following the godfather of the carbon tax.

As Ron Cannan demonstrated two years ago, the segue is a tricky rhetorical device that should only be handled by professionals.

R. v. The Doobie Brethren

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 4:26 PM - 0 Comments

Smokers High Life/Flickr

From the Postmedia wire, today:

Christopher Bennett, who claimed that he should be allowed to smoke up to seven grams of marijuana—about 35 joints—every day for religious purposes, argued that Canada’s drug laws infringed upon his religious rights.

But in a 21-page ruling, Judge Michel Shore wrote, “While the applicant has shown that his practice is based on the belief that cannabis is the tree of life, this, in and of itself, does not make it a religious practice.”

Kind of bizarre if you think about it, isn’t it? The idea that “cannabis is the tree of life” could not more obviously be a religious concept, in the ordinary meaning of the term “religious”. What else would you call it? And what would you call an activity predicated on such a belief? If the belief is assumed to be sincere, and Judge Shore specifically concedes this assumption, then it’s a religious practice. The sentence in quotation marks is, when read as plain English, oddly nonsensical. Continue…

The flu shot: to vaccinate or not?

By Julia Belluz - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 3:58 PM - 0 Comments

Rich Pedroncelli/AP Photo

“… those who are so willing to inject mercury containing vaccines into people under the delusion that they are forwarding public health… should be required to submit the scientific evidence for their decisions.” — Flu vaccine statistics don’t add up, in the Nelson Star, 15/11/2011

In a world where paranoia and distrust of science abound, this op-ed in a local B.C. paper certainly fueled uncertainty around flu vaccines. In the piece, the writer suggests that public health officials and the media were deliberately misinterpreting data from a recent Lancet review about the flu shot by concluding that it’s effective for most people.

Science-ish poked around in the studies, and found a more nuanced story about the flu shot. Continue…

Nickelback haters are just jealous

By the editors - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

Chris Ryan/Corbis

When Detroit Lions fan Dennis Guttman heard that Nickelback would be playing during his team’s halftime show on American Thanksgiving this week, he wondered why organizers had picked a Canadian act, let alone one with a such an awful reputation. (A U.K. magazine once voted it “the worst band in the world.”) Guttman started a petition to have it booted from the show, and within weeks drew over 50,000 signatures and international attention. “Does anyone even like Nickelback?” he wrote.

For the band from Hanna, Alta., this kind of pile-on is nothing new. They’ve been taking abuse from armchair music critics since they broke on the scene in 2000. When reports emerged that Nickelback might be performing in Winnipeg to kick off the NHL season, Free Press music critics called on the NHL to scrap the plan, calling it “tantamount to spitting on Bobby Hull’s toupée.”

There have always been bands that people dislike, or dismiss as overrated and artless. But the response to Nickelback goes far beyond that—to the point where some say they are ashamed the band is Canadian. It is a view so vicious it borders on cruel. And it’s just plain wrong.

Continue…

When Will the Age of Internet Entertainment Arrive?

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 2:38 PM - 0 Comments

Not with soap operas, at least, not yet. It seemed logical that soaps, which have adjusted to every major change in broadcasting, would be the first shows to make the jump to creating full-length, full-scale episodes for the internet. But the plans to do All My Children and One Life To Live online have been canceled.

What made the deal fall through is going to be a matter of some dispute for some time to come, but the term “unions” turns up a lot, rightly or wrongly. Prospect Park, the company that was going to produce the shows online, wanted all the guilds involved to take a much-reduced rate of pay, because it’s the internet. Now, the dispute (so far) seems to be over whether this was the real sticking point: Prospect Park would naturally want to claim that it was, but there are other stories out there to the effect that they were “close to a deal.” Besides, no matter how much they slashed the budget, they would have to get a lot of revenue to cover the cost of producing the episodes, and reports indicate that it wasn’t clear where the money was going to come from. That’s probably a bigger factor than the negotiations over cost.

Soaps may be at a special disadvantage here because their core audience mostly hasn’t migrated online: soaps appeal to an older audience that might not watch them on the internet, meaning the new viewers they pick up online won’t outweigh the viewers they leave behind. And more generally, though everyone is looking for the big breakthrough in internet programming, no one has yet found a way to transfer broadcast TV’s model – produce the shows, pay for them through sponsorship, and deliver them for free to people with the necessary devices – to the internet.

It’s possible that the model is broken; in some ways, it was broken for a long time on regular TV, given how many shows operated at a deficit, counting on something else (syndication, international sales, home video) to make up the difference. It’s possible that soaps weren’t the best test case for internet TV because they have very few other outlets, and (as their name implies) depend mostly on advertising. But since the internet makes some of those other outlets irrelevant – except maybe international sales, since we in Canada and elsewhere don’t get the shows – it still remains to be seen how the online model will work. Someday it’ll fall into place, I think, just because it has to; TV figured out how to pay for expensive shows and I think the internet will too, just because so many people are watching.

There’s always Netflix, of course, which is trying to establish a model similar to pay TV. Though Netflix has its own problems getting its customers to move to an online distribution model. And the Arrested Development episodes Netflix is planning, well, I think it’s hard to comment on that until we find out what form they take. If, as originally hinted, each episode will focus on whatever member of the cast who can clear his or her schedule, that’s not really a continuation; that’s a webisode, a supplement to the series rather than full-fledged episodes.

Iran: 12 CIA ‘spies’ arrested

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 2:04 PM - 0 Comments

Iran says it has arrested a dozen spies working for the CIA, according to reports by the official news agency IRNA. Parviz Sorouri, a prominent member of the Iranian parliament, told the agency that the operatives were coordinating with Israel’s secret service, the Mossad, and targeting Iran’s nuclear program. The claim is similar to that made in June by Lebanon’s Hezbollah, whose leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said he had uncovered two CIA informants who had infiltrated the organization. Although U.S. authority initially dismissed the accusations, U.S. officials later confirmed Nasrallah’s story to the Associated Press.

BBC

Building better health care

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 1:58 PM - 0 Comments

Paul Dewar calls for the inclusion of medical facilities in a national infrastructure fund.

“Mr. Harper excluded health care investments from the Economic Action Plan and ended federal support for medical equipment,” said Dewar. “It’s time for the federal government to invest in renewing our hospitals, community clinics and medical equipment.”

That will presumably be up for discussion at what seems an increasingly busy debate schedule for NDP leadership contenders. After Mr. Dewar’s called for more than the six debates scheduled by the party, at least two other forums have been announced: one in Sudbury and another in Cambridge.

Arab League threatens sanctions against Syria

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 1:12 PM - 0 Comments

The Arab League has threatened to impose sweeping sanctions on Syria if it fails to sign a protocol allowing Arab monitors into the country by Friday, Reuters reports. It is a historical step for the League, which usually avoids punishing its own member states. A similar initiative by Arab countries calling for a no-fly zone over Libya paved the way for NATO air strikes there, but the League rejected the idea of an international intervention in Syria. Separately, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe was pushing for humanitarian convoys to be sent inside Syria with or without approval from Damascus. Though the French initiative does not entail military intervention, it represents a break from a previous, commonly shared stance among world powers against any direct involvement in Syria.

Reuters

‘Freedom seldom flowers in undisturbed ground’

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 12:41 PM - 0 Comments

The prepared text of the Prime Minister’s remarks at today’s Parliament Hill ceremony marking the end of the mission in Libya.

“Your Excellency, Speaker Kinsella, Speaker Scheer, Ambassadors, Ministers, Honourable Senators and Members of Parliament, General Natynczyk, Lieutenant-General Bouchard, Members of Her Majesty’s Canadian Armed Forces, honoured guests , ladies and gentlemen; this is a day of honour. It is a day to celebrate the success of the NATO mission to Libya, and Canada’s contribution to it; it is a day to pay tribute to the extraordinary men and women of our Armed Forces who played their part; and yes, it is a day to honour the great Canadian who led them. This is, as I said, a day of honour.

“Of course, when it comes to the Canadian Armed Forces, every day is a day of honour. We must always remember it is no small thing to put your life on the line, day in and day out for your country: something we should always honour. But, even by that measure, today is special because we are celebrating a great military success: the success of Canada’s participation in Operation Unified Protector and Operation Mobile, respectively the NATO mission to Libya and Canada’s contribution to it.

“It is a day to pay tribute to the extraordinary men and women of our Armed Forces who played their part. And yes, it is a day to honour the great Canadian who led them.

Continue…

Health funding discussions start in Halifax

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 12:41 PM - 0 Comments

Discussions that will lay the ground work for the 2014 Health Accord between Ottawa and the provinces kicked off in Halifax on Thursday. The talks, which currently involve health ministers from the provinces and territories, will continue next month with provincial and territorial finance ministers and end in January, when premiers gather for final negotiations. Among the issues likely to dominate the discussion are increasing financial pressures from an aging population, obesity and chronic disease, the Globe and Mail reports.

The Globe and Mail

Dalton McGuinty rumoured interested in federal Liberal leadership

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 12:29 PM - 0 Comments

Rumours that Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty may be interested in seeking the leadership of the federal Liberals became more credible on Thursday, after the premier’s brother strongly supported his sibling’s candidacy in an interview with veteran journalist Lawrence Martin. David McGuinty, MP for Ottawa South, told Martin that Dalton would “rebuild the Liberal party, just like he did in Ontario.” David’s remarks could be meant to create buzz about Dalton’s possible candidacy at the 2013 federal leadership convention. A severe downward revision of Ontario’s growth prospects on Thursday, which could jeopardize Dalton’s electoral pledge to balance the provincial budget, however, cast a shadow on his possible leadership run.

iPolitics

Ottawa Citizen

Patrick Brown Maverick Watch

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 11:29 AM - 0 Comments

Conservative backbencher Jeff Watson twice used the term “anti-Canada” to describe the NDP during a statement before QP yesterday. Meanwhile, fellow backbencher Patrick Brown posted the following note to Facebook last night.

Had our first government vs opposition hockey match tonight in Ottawa. All in all it was a great social outing for MPs from all three parties in the Commons to get to know each other. We may all come from different parties but we are all in public service because we love Canada. (and yes team govt won….)