A history of violence at the Shafia home

By Michael Friscolanti - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:55 AM - 0 Comments

Rona (left) and Sahar Shafia (Canadian Press)

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.

Mother and son have both confessed, in separate tape-recorded statements, that they were there when the car-turned-coffin plunged into the canal. Beyond that, their recollections couldn’t be more different. Tooba Yahya told police that she fainted after hearing the splash, and doesn’t remember anything else about “the accident.” Hamed Shafia, meanwhile, claimed that both his parents were actually fast asleep at a motel, and that his sister, Zainab, somehow steered the sedan into the Kingston Mills Locks while he and his Lexus were parked nearby. Hamed, of course, did what anyone would do if four of his closest relatives drove into a body of water. He tossed down a rope and wiggled it around, like a fisherman hoping for a bite.

As absurd as both stories sound, there is one common denominator: in neither narrative does Hamed dial 911. Continue…

The Warm-Up Guy

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:53 AM - 0 Comments

I’m a longtime, confessed and incurable WKRP in Cincinnati fan, so finding this gag reel on YouTube made me quite happy. It’s mostly just a typical gag reel – people say their lines wrong, everybody laughs, and the crew is amused – but it’s still fun to see.

Note that the creator of the show, Hugh Wilson, is doing the warm-up, and as a friend pointed out, he’s more easy-going than professional warm-up guys tend to be. The warm-up job (and there is a warm-up on almost any type of show with an audience) usually goes to a professional comedian whose job it is to keep the audience hyped up at all times. But at that time, some shows still had the warm-up done by a writer, who might or might not be a performer at all, and they often entertained the audience with laid-back anecdotes or goofy writers’ room schtick, like Stan Daniels’ routine (on The Mary Tyler Moore Show) about an old Jewish man performing Ol’ Man River. I’m not sure that could happen today, since tapings usually take longer, are more complicated, and have more retakes; the audience has to be worked up more. And a bad warm-up can have a surprisingly big effect on the show; James L. Brooks has said that one of the reasons the first taping of the MTM pilot bombed is that he did the warm-up himself, and wasn’t any good at it.

The magic wand of the makeup bag

By Joanne Latimer - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Jenna Marie Wakani

“There we were, four women lined up at the bathroom mirror in the gym, each with our Touche Éclats,” laughed Liza Herz, a Toronto-based beauty industry writer. “We just smiled at each other.” Touche Éclat is Yves Saint Laurent’s wildly popular beauty product—the first complexion highlighter in a pen for easy application around the brow, cheekbone or anywhere that benefits from added light reflection. Touche Éclat turns 20 next year, and the momentum behind it has yet to subside. Firmly embedded in the canon of beauty tools, it frequently gets unsolicited shout-outs from starlets like Salma Hayek, Demi Moore and Victoria Beckham. Last spring, Touche Éclat was in Kate Middleton’s wedding makeup kit.

“A friend buys Touche Éclat for me at Holt Renfrew in Montreal,” said Maura Smith, a retired ballroom dancer in London, Ont., where she has trouble finding Yves Saint Laurent. “I simply can’t go someplace dressy without it.” Denise Fraser, an assistant director of nursing in Brockville, Ont., uses hers every day. “One tube lasts me about eight months because I only use it under my eyes,” said Fraser, who was stocking up at the Yves Saint Laurent counter in Montreal’s Holt Renfrew earlier this month.

Some people consider it a professional essential. “Couldn’t live without it,” said Scottish actor Lisa Gardner, who was rehearsing for a play called Ana at Espace Go in Montreal. “It’s perfect for the stage, for reflecting light, and it’s also quick and easy to use on TV sets.”

Continue…

Are exhibitionist births dangerous?

By Shanda Deziel - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

Johannes Kroemer/Getty Images

It may have been the year’s most anticipated birth—and it certainly was the most sensational. On Oct. 25, New York performance artist Marni Kotak delivered a baby boy in a Brooklyn gallery in front of an audience of 20. As worldwide press inundated the gallery for information, Kotak retreated from the spotlight. But a week later she and baby Ajax were back in the gallery talking to visitors and finishing the exhibit she called “The Birth of Baby X”—now complete with the placenta, the bloody pillow and sheets and, of course, the video. Canada had its own public childbirth in October, when Ottawa chiropractor Nancy Salgueiro live-streamed the home birth of her third child over the Internet and 2,500 people watched. Nothing, it seems, is sacred anymore, not even the once very private act of pushing out a baby. And now a retired French obstetrician says stunts like these have not only perverted the idea of natural childbirth, but are actually setting women up for dangerous births.

“We are at the present time—in regard to the history of childbirth—at the bottom of the abyss,” says Michel Odent, who’s been a part of over 15,000 hospital births and is widely considered to be one of the fathers of the natural childbirth movement, having introduced water births in the 1970s. And he blames it on all the people in the room—medical staff, partners, family members, doulas and especially cameras. “People look at [birth] videos and miss the important point—that during childbirth the most basic need of a labouring woman is not to feel observed.”

The 81-year-old doctor describes birth as an “involuntary process” that cannot be helped. So all the support people are making it more difficult for the labouring woman to do it on her own. Fetal monitors, cameras, people talking and other stimuli engage the thinking part of her brain, the neocortex, which needs to be shut off in order for the woman to produce the hormones needed to have a baby quickly and easily. Instead, the majority of women experience long, painful labours and are fed synthetic forms of the “love hormone” oxytocin.

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In conversation: Diane Keaton

By Anne Kingston - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

Munawar Hosain/Fotos International/Getty Images

Diane Keaton is known for portraying memorable women onscreen—Annie Hall in Woody Allen’s 1977 movie of the same name, Kay Adams Corleone in the Godfather trilogy and Erica Barry in the 2003 hit Something’s Gotta Give. Now, in her new evocative memoir Then Again, the 65-year-old Oscar winner weaves her own life with that of her mother, Dorothy Deanne Keaton Hall.

Q: You’ve written a unique memoir, which is not about you per se but a duet with your mother in which you weave her journals and letters with your life story. What inspired you?

A: Well, my mother died in 2008 and there was this mass of information that she had collected over the years, which included journals and letters and scrapbooks and photo albums, and every single bit of detail you could possibly have on four kids, so it needed to be tended to. I’d had an incident earlier in my life, in the ’70s, where I was using my mother’s darkroom and I came across this journal. So I opened it up and there was a harmless entry saying she had gotten a job at Hunter’s Bookstore and she was excited about this. I thought, “Oh, yeah, that’s kind of nice,” and then I moved on, and it said, “You friggin’ bastard,” something like this. I just went, “Okay, that’s it, I don’t want to read this.” I didn’t want to know about my mother’s personal problems.

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That cheap manufacturing labour: a portrait gallery

By Brendan Brady - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:48 AM - 0 Comments

Down the paper trail again

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:32 AM - 0 Comments

The NDP says Tony Clement misled the public accounts committee when he testified three weeks ago. The emails in questions can be viewed here.

There is also some question as to how and why the rush transcript of Mr. Clement’s committee testimony came to be altered before being entered into the official record. More here and here.

“There was a time when a minister who spent $50-million without providing any documentation would have been subject to serious sanction,” Mr. Angus said. “We now have the question of a parliamentary minister of the Crown coming to a parliamentary committee, providing false information and having someone, whoever it was, alter the public record.”

Arthur ‘Art’ Armond Mainil

By Susan Mohammad - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

llustration by Juliana Neufeld

Arthur “Art” Armond Mainil was born on Oct. 13, 1933, in Lampman, Sask. He was the oldest of three children for Hector and Emma, a farming couple who settled on the same 960-acre grain and cattle farm that Art’s grandfather homesteaded near the town. Even though he was only a year older than his brother Jerry (his sister Valerie was born six years after him), Art was expected to lead by example in helping to manage the property. At age seven, Art could be seen driving a tractor through fields with his father on a binder behind him.

“Farming was in his blood,” says Jerry, who describes his brother as “strong-headed” even as a child. Along with stubbornness and a solid work ethic, Art developed a lifelong love of horses early on. He had a pinto named Snookie that he rigged up to a cart or sled in order to take his siblings to their one-room school four kilometres from where they lived, after their previous school burned down.

In order for the children to continue to attend school, Art’s family moved to the town of Yellow Grass when he was nine, and then to the town of Weyburn three years later, where they settled (Art’s father made the 45-minute commute to the farm each day). Art was a top student who also played baseball, and was a fast-running centre on his high school football team at Weyburn Collegiate. Four years after graduating from high school, Art decided farming wasn’t for him, and set out to get a higher education. He spent 2½ years pursuing an engineering degree in Denver, Colo., before dropping out and trying his hand as a logger in the bush of northern B.C. After another 2½ years, he returned home to work the land. When Art’s father retired in 1961, he took over the farm, and took great pride in renovating it.

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REVIEW: The Lives of Conn Smythe

By Charlie Gillis - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Forgive fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs a longing glance back at their founding father, who brought home eight Stanley Cups over 34 years as owner and sometime manager of the fabled hockey club. Conn Smythe’s ideal players were “hard-nosed warriors, as skilled with their elbows as they were with the puck,” writes author McParland. While current management pays lip service to this creed, the paucity of parades down Yonge Street leads one to wonder: what did Smythe have that today’s bunch lacks?

Determination, it would seem, and fear. The humiliating poverty of Smythe’s childhood manifested itself in relentless ambition and an insecurity he never quite shook. His iron-fisted rule of the Leafs was rooted partly in his paranoid sense that others were plotting to push him out of the organization, and he was not the sort of man to go quietly. Such qualities made him a champion, McParland notes, and an awfully hard man to work with.

Smythe rose above his flaws, however, and not just in hockey. He forged ahead with the construction of Maple Leaf Gardens during the height of the Great Depression, bequeathing to Toronto a civic landmark, while bringing well-paying jobs when the city most needed them. A decade later, he almost single-handedly shamed the King government into sending properly trained and equipped soldiers overseas during the liberation of Europe in 1945—activism for which McParland accords overdue credit.

As for his success as a hockey executive, well, that’s harder to explain. Like many of the best, Smythe was guided by mysterious instincts about players (he spoke often of “bloodlines,” though he really meant character). Yet his intuition yielded the greatest NHL franchise of the 1930s and ’40s, featuring icons like King Clancy, Busher Jackson and Turk Broda. And while he’d have been lost in today’s world of salary caps and $100-million contracts, only a fool would bet against him for long were he in charge of today’s Leafs. If McParland’s entertaining and thorough account is any guide, Smythe wouldn’t have quit working until he found a way to win.

My list of the worst toys for Christmas

By Scott Feschuk - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

CP; Getty Images; iStock; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

The Canadian Toy Association recently showcased its annual list of “must-have” toys for the holidays, featuring the usual array of gadgets and gizmos that require enough batteries to power the sun.

This list of hot toys always attracts some good press. Getting far less publicity, for some reason, is my annual list of Worst Toys for Christmas:

Stupid Thing From China You Can’t Get Out of the Package, Dammit. You’ve tried scissors, a screwdriver, now a blowtorch—but the sucker won’t budge. So many wires! So much plastic! The sweat is beading on your forehead. Your hands are starting to shake. That thing’s not coming out and your kid is not getting any happier. Hurry up, Daddy! WANT THE UNICORN NOW!

Continue…

REVIEW: Jerusalem: The Biography

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

“The romantic image is far more vivid” than any verifiable facts. Montefiore is talking about Jerusalem in the time of King David, but it could just as easily apply to all of Jerusalem, the story of the world’s most legendary city from Biblical times to the Six Day War of 1967. Though it’s a linear history, the book frequently changes perspective depending on whose story dominates Jerusalem at a given time: early Jews, Christians or Muslims. Entering the 20th century and the Zionist era, we see how the city has been central to religion and politics for hundreds of years.

Since Jerusalem is so closely bound up with those three great religions, early sections of the book sometimes leave a lingering doubt about which stories are real; as Montefiore notes, the Gospels are the only source for the story of Jesus’ crucifixion, although “no faith is required to believe in the life and death of a Jewish prophet.” And yet the legendary aspect of Jerusalem is what shapes the history in the rest of the book; “The writers of the Bible created their narrative of Jerusalem,” Montefiore writes, and that narrative became the thing that people around the world fight, crusade and die over.

Montefiore has so much ground to cover that complicated stories like the Balfour Declaration take place in only a few pages. But the fast pace helps convey just how quickly things change in the city, and how many times the balance of power has swung. Because the book rarely lingers on one movement or religion for very long, it has a more objective feel than most books about Israel; the main character, as the term “biography” suggests, is the city itself.

Bad portraits done good

By Anthony A. Davis - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Chris Bolin

In Calgary’s Crossroads Market, Mandy Stobo spends her days in the blood pit of a former Canada Packers meat plant. Here in her somewhat spooky art studio, Stobo, 28, paints large neo-expressionist paintings that sell for anywhere from $800 to $8,000. But it’s a different kind of art the self-taught Stobo began creating last May on her kitchen table—a project she calls Bad Portraits—that’s generating, if not art-circle buzz, then plenty of tweets. In the past six months, Stobo has created more than 800 Bad Portraits: stacks of splashy neon watercolour renderings of people, ranging from the famous to pretty much anyone who asks. She spends about 45 minutes on each portrait, and then sells the original watercolour for $100. So far, she has sold about 150, a few dozen of which have been purchased by the “Twitterati”—celebs and lesser-knowns who have large followings on Twitter. But you need not spend a nickel to get your own Bad Portrait. Stobo will happily paint a Bad Portrait for anyone who asks, then email them a free digital copy. Many people use them as avatars on personal Web pages. Continue…

Black Friday creep

By Colin Campbell - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Daniel Acker/Getty Images

The day after Thanksgiving is a quasi-religious shopping experience in the United States. It kicks off the all-important holiday shopping season with a day of frenzied buying amounting to over $10 billion in sales. This year, many big box retailers plan to open a little earlier than the normal 4 a.m.—some on Thursday, Nov. 24, Thanksgiving Day itself. Target, Macy’s and Best Buy will all open at midnight on Thanksgiving, reports the New York Times. Wal-Mart, the hours-expanding trailblazer of the bunch, will open at 10 p.m. Thursday. Critics say this is yet another sign of the evils of consumerism. Employees will have to work on the biggest holiday of the year, while shoppers will have to head to the mall before the turkey is even carved, if they hope to beat the lineups. But with recent data showing worrying signs that retail sales are slowing leading into the holiday season, retailers appear to be wisely searching for any kind of advantage—even if it’s only an extra hour or two with the tills open.

How the winners were selected

By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

This week, Maclean’s, in partnership with L’Actualité and the Historica-Dominion Institute, is pleased to present our fifth annual Parliamentarians of the Year awards. Bob Rae wins the top honour. His lifetime of political experience, unparalleled debating skills and intelligent approach to difficult issues belie the current state of the federal Liberal party and his title as its interim leader. When Rae speaks, colleagues on both sides of the House know to pay attention. He joins previous honourees John Baird, Jason Kenney, Bill Blaikie and Ralph Goodale.

From the hardest working to most knowledgeable, these awards celebrate those who represent what is right about Ottawa. To determine the winners, Ipsos Reid asked all 308 members of Parliament to nominate the best MPs from both inside and outside their own parties, in each of seven categories. (Votes were converted to a point system to ensure that larger parties did not have an advantage. The winner of Parliamentarian of the Year was awarded on the basis of the highest number of total points across all categories.)

And this year, for the first time, we are presenting a Lifetime Achievement award, as chosen by the editors. The winner, Jack Layton, made history this spring by single-handedly lifting the NDP to Canada’s official Opposition in a mesmerizing display of campaigning skill and character, before succumbing to cancer over the summer. His presence is sorely missed in Parliament.

How AIDS really got started

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Daniel Rosenthal/laif/Redux

In 1976, a handful of Belgian nuns were operating a badly needed hospital in Yambuku, a remote village in Zaire. Some 300 patients a day came, many seeking antiviral drugs, which nurses provided via the poorly funded hospital’s five reusable syringes. The result of the inevitable cross-infection was the first outbreak of the blood-borne virus Ebola, which killed 280 of its 318 victims—far more deaths than if there had never been a hospital in the first place.

The Yambuku incident is one of the most harrowing proofs ever recorded of the old adage that no good deed goes unpunished. But the story of the Ebola outbreak differs little in its essentials from that of an exponentially more lethal disease, AIDS. Now marking its 30th official birthday—counting from the 1981 U.S. Centers for Disease Control paper about an unlikely pneumonia cluster in Los Angeles—AIDS has so far killed 30 million people. And in Dr. Jacques Pepin’s convincing account of its history, The Origins of AIDS, it emerges as the greatest man-made health disaster of our times.

The disease itself is much older than 30. Molecular studies show that chimpanzees, hosts to the virus that causes AIDS in humans, have carried it for centuries. Pepin, an infectious disease physician and professor at Quebec’s Université de Sherbrooke, uses mathematical modelling to show that dozens of people—chimp hunters or their wives preparing the meat—must have thereby contracted AIDS. One spouse would then infect the other sexually, but those couples became what Pepin calls in an interview “epidemiological dead ends: the disease would develop in them for a decade, and then they would die, with no effect on the larger population.”

Continue…

Why Cuba is embracing golf

By Lyndsie Bourgnon - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Marcovitch PR

In a famous picture, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara are playing a round of golf. Guevara, in military fatigues, is studiously preparing a putt, and Castro stands aside, scrutinizing his position. They both look serious, but the context is hotly contested among historians—were they practising for an upcoming meeting with U.S. president Dwight D. Eisenhower? Or were they actually taunting him?

Cuba experts tend to agree it was a taunt. In post-revolutionary Cuba, golf was a sport for the rich, the bourgeois. And for 50-odd years, it all but disappeared from the island. (There’s currently only one 18-hole course.) But now Cuban authorities have given preliminary approval to develop four luxury golf resorts. Two of those contracts have been handed to Canadian developers.

Of the four, Ottawa-based Standing Feather International is the closest to breaking ground. Their joint venture with a division of the Cuban tourism ministry has been approved, and they’re waiting for a final sign-off from Havana to begin building. Plans for the Loma Linda Golf Estates, in the eastern Holguin region, cover 520 acres and include two golf courses, a five-star hotel, and 1,200 townhouse-style condos.

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UBC’s Richard Johnston on a polarizing political year

By John Geddes - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 10:42 AM - 0 Comments

Richard Johnston, Canada research chair in public opinion, elections and representation at University of British Columbia, is a leading expert on how democracy works in Canada and abroad. He is co-author of 2007’s award-winning The End of Southern Exceptionalism: Class, Race, and Partisan Change in the Postwar South, and co-editor of  2005’s Strengthening Canadian Democracy, a collection of essays on democratic reform issues. Johnston spoke to Maclean’s this week about how the federal political landscape changed this year.

Q: It looks like 2011 might be remembered as a watershed year in Canadian politics. Do you see the May 2 election and its aftermath that way?

A: There’s a task of further consolidation of the coalitions for the Conservatives and the New Democrats, especially the NDP. But I would say the starting point is to realize that the fate of the Liberal party is no longer in the hands of the Liberal party. Superficially, at least, the system has now clicked into an orientation that would be pretty familiar to someone from Australia, New Zealand or the UK.

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How about a part-time Parliament?

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 9:02 AM - 0 Comments

It turns out that adding and distributing seats in the House of Commons is complicated. Those particularly concerned about the cost of representative democracy might find inspiration in Rick Perry’s plan for Congress.

The U.S. does not need a full-time Congress that is more focused on increasing its perks instead of reducing spending. America needs a part-time, Citizen Congress – populated with those who choose to serve not for profit, or for the promise of a high-paying lobbyist job, but for the good of their communities, states, and the nation. Even with a 50 percent pay-cut, Congressional members would still make a significantly higher income than the average American. By changing the way Congress operates, and moving towards a part-time legislature, Congressman will have the freedom to live in their communities, engage their constituents, and truly speak for the people they represent. Rules preventing members of Congress from holding private sector jobs must also be repealed. – When lawmakers hold the same types of jobs as their constituents, they will gain a much greater understanding of how congressional laws impact the real world.

On shooting a deer

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 0 Comments

London looks/Flickr

This began long before I was born. More than fifty years ago my father, 20 years old, attended a job fair for teachers in Toronto. The lines for local school boards were long, so my father applied for a job in a community on the north shore of Lake Superior called Pass Lake. It was farther from home than he had ever been. The recruiters said it was mostly inhabited by Danes. “Danes are good people,” my grandfather told my father when he got home. My grandfather had immigrated to Canada from northern Greece a few decades earlier. I don’t know where he had encountered Danes before.

My dad spent three years in Pass Lake, and another elsewhere in the north. It made a tremendous impression on him. Everyone hunted and fished up there, so my dad did, too. He’s told me about fish caught and deer shot so often that I can recite the stories as if I had been there. There was the huge pickerel that unexpectedly hit a Canadian Wiggler on a scorching summer day; the steelhead that was hauled out of the pool beneath Portage Falls and then fell back into the water when a poorly tied knot unraveled; my dad’s first deer, of which he was immensely proud, until a local man, blind and gruff, gripped its leg and pronounced it the size of a dog. Continue…

Scorsese’s ‘Hugo’ is quietly enchanting. Imagine that.

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, November 23, 2011 at 12:33 AM - 0 Comments

Asa Butterfield and Chloë Grace Moretz in Martin Scorsese's 'Hugo'

I was braced for the worst. The notion of Martin Scorsese making a 3D spectacle of family entertainment sounded like a bad joke, as if Mr. Mean Streets had finally thrown in the towel. The messy trailer did not help. But when I saw Hugo, something happened that reminds me why, after all these years, I’m still thrilled by movies. I was surprised. Really surprised. Adapted from The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the bestselling children’s book by New York writer and illustrator Brian Selznick, Hugo is Scorsese’s first 3D movie, and it could serve as a primer for his Hollywood colleagues. Although it has moments where it might threaten to turn into a whiz-bang action movie—some brief chase scenes and a shattering dream sequence—the pace is on the whole remarkably slow and subdued. With 3D, that’s a good thing. The Dream Factory may have developed 3D technology to feed the war machine of action blockbusters, but throw in that extra plane of movement and too often the eyeballs feel they’re dodging shrapnel. In Hugo, Scorsese uses 3D to build an immersive display case that opens a portal to worlds within worlds: (a) a sad childhood (b) a picaresque Montparnasse train station in 1931 Paris, and (c) the magic of silent cinema’s own childhood in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Hugo, who’s played by  Asa Butterfield (The Boy in the Striped Pajamas), is an orphaned urchin who lives as a secret stowaway behind the walls of the Montparnasse station, maintaining the clocks and stealing food. Inheriting the mechanical acumen of his late father, he can fix all kinds of gadgets. But his passion project is to build a clockwork automaton, a tin man who seems to be his closest companion. Hugo lives on the edge, playing cat-and-mouse with the strict Station Inspector, a war veteran with a mechanical leg played by Sacha Baron Cohen. What winds up the narrative is Hugo’s fractious relationship with Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley), a curmudgeon who runs a toy shop in the station. George is vault of intrigue just waiting to be unlocked. Continue…

Musharraf must have known where Osama bin Laden was hiding: MP Chris Alexander

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 9:10 PM - 0 Comments

Former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf surely knew that Osama bin Laden was hiding in a compound a short walk from a Pakistani military academy, says Conservative MP Chris Alexander, who previously served as Canada’s first resident ambassador in Afghanistan after the overthrow of the Taliban.

“I can’t prove Musharraf’ knowledge, but everything I know about Pakistan’s system would tell me that he as chief of the army staff and he as president would have known,” Alexander said during a speech today at the International Development Research Centre in Ottawa.  Continue…

Treacherousness is in the eye of the beholder

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 7:13 PM - 0 Comments

Last week, Peter Kent used the term “treacherous” to describe the “course of leaving the domestic debate and heading abroad to attack a legitimate Canadian resource which is being responsibly developed and regulated.” In the two days after, Conservative MPs used the phrase “anti-Canada” to describe the trip of two NDP MPs to Washington.

Today in QP, Mr. Kent returned to the adjective with the following for the NDP’s Megan Leslie.

Mr. Speaker, I welcome my colleague back from her treacherous adventure abroad. I am sure Canadian workers and our resource industries will rest much more quietly now that she is back in this place.

There are at least two definitions of treacherous—”hazardous” and treasonous”—that could conceivably be applied here. This second reference by Mr. Kent seems to me to be closer to “hazardous,” if only when heard with the sarcastic tone Mr. Kent used to say it. The first reference seemed to me at the time to be closer to “treasonous” (though I was not there to hear his tone at the time). A commenter in this thread did beg to differ. Still now, I think it seems to imply treason, though I suppose it could merely be an unfortunately timed attempt at withering sarcasm. (I remain fairly confident that the implication of  the phrase “anti-Canada” is fairly clear.)

For the sake of clearing up any and all misunderstandings, I’ve sent an email to Mr. Kent’s office seeking clarification as to his exact meaning.

The Commons: Ipso facto governance

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 7:06 PM - 0 Comments

Sean Kilpatrick/Canadian Press

The Scene. Adherents to the faith of smaller government take note, for the Harper government has successfully identified and eliminated one of the prime inefficiencies standing between us and true freedom.

“This government cannot say how many jobs were created after having spent $47 billion of Canadians’ money,” lamented the NDP’s Peter Julian this afternoon of the government’s trademarked action plan. “The program was so badly monitored that no one knows if it was effective.”

Of this, Mr. Julian can claim the authority of the auditor general, who apparently found no attempt by the government to determine precisely how many jobs it “created” (in the messianic parlance) with its billions in bridges, roads and hockey arenas.

But just because the government can’t—indeed, won’t—add, doesn’t mean Mr. Julian can’t subtract. “We now know that 72,000 full-time jobs were lost last month thanks to the policies of this government,” he asserted with his next breath. “Now that the truth is out, when will this government put aside bogus and unsubstantiated job claims and take real and immediate action to create jobs here in Canada for Canadian families?”

Jim Flaherty would at least stand to respond to this. Continue…

To the shredder

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 4:21 PM - 0 Comments

The information commissioner has concerns about the government’s commitment to destroy records related to the gun registry.

Suzanne Legault told a Commons committee Tuesday that a federal bill to scrap the long-gun registry – and delete millions of records – violates the letter and spirit of the Library and Archives of Canada Act.  “It does raise major concerns in terms of transparency and accountability in general,” Legault said. “As Information Commissioner, I have serious concerns about the impact this bill will have on government information management.”

Various members on the government side of the House laughed when the NDP’s Jack Harris raised this in QP. Otherwise, here’s the transcript of his exchange with Vic Toews. Continue…