Things to do when you’re stuck at a debate

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 5:02 PM - 0 Comments

NDP MP Bruce Hyer plays with iPad, naps.

Has NASA found another Earth?

By macleans.ca - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 4:11 PM - 0 Comments

NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler mission has found its most Earth-like planet yet, confirming its first planet in the “habitable zone,” where liquid water could exist on the surface. Called Kepler-22b, the planet is just over twice the size of Earth; if the greenhouse effect works there in a similar way to how it does here on Earth, NASA’s team predicts Kepler-22b’s surface temperature could be a comfortable 22 degrees Celsius (72 degrees Fahrenheit). While the team hasn’t yet confirmed whether the planet has a rocky surface, it orbits a star similar to our own sun. On top of this exciting find, NASA’s Kepler mission has also discovered more than 1,000 new planet candidates, which almost doubles its original count. Ten are close in size to Earth and in the habitable zone of their suns, although they still have to be confirmed as actual planets. “This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth’s twin,” says Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

NASA

Maclean’s reported on the Kepler mission in February, when NASA first announced Kepler had discovered 1,235 potential planets, including 54 in the habitable zone. Kepler-22b is one of these 54. As the mission continues, we’ll learn whether planets like Earth are relatively common, or rare.

Maclean’s

The minister enjoys a good helicopter ride

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 3:54 PM - 0 Comments

The Globe further complicates Peter MacKay’s complicated explanation for his helicopter ride in July 2010.

Earlier this fall, when the contentious 2010 flight first came to light, the Defence Minister’s office defended the 30-minute trip from the vacation spot to the Gander airport as an infrequent opportunity to watch the rescuers in action. “After cancelling previous efforts to demonstrate their search-and-rescue capabilities to Minister MacKay over the course of three years, the opportunity for a simulated search and rescue exercise finally presented itself in July of 2010,” Mr. MacKay’s office said in September.

But the Defence Minister got a chance in 2009 to see the SAR crew in action when they took him on a ride that lasted about one hour. The Globe has learned it took place at the same time of year.

Of course, as I noted on Friday, the search-and-rescue reasoning has been dropped from the public explanation for the minister’s trip.

Science-ish calls for submissions

By Julia Belluz - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 2:42 PM - 0 Comments

At a time when politicians are casting doubts on evolution theory, large sections of the public seem to have given up on one of the single greatest advances in health sciences of the last century (vaccines), and the Canadian government is telling the world that asbestos is safe to use, the discourse around science may have hit its nadir.

But there is a silver lining: there are more science myths around to explore and, if necessary, debunk.

After six months of writing this column, I’ll do a year-end round up of the most pressing Science-ish debates of 2011, based on your reactions, opinions, and views.

Do you have a burning question about science or a health claim you’ve seen this year that seems dubious? Please write a brief description of the question or claim that most baffles you, and send it to julia.belluz@medicalpost.rogers.com or, on Twitter, at @juliaoftoronto.

The deadline is Tuesday, Dec. 13.

Science-ish is a joint project of Maclean’s, The Medical Post, and the McMaster Health Forum. Julia Belluz is the associate editor at The Medical Post. Got a tip? Seen something that’s Science-ish? Message her at julia.belluz@medicalpost.rogers.com or on Twitter @juliaoftoronto

OECD: Canada’s income inequality well above average

By macleans.ca - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 1:44 PM - 0 Comments

A labour market that rewards high-skilled workers and increasingly shifts towards temporary and part-time jobs, coupled with tax breaks for the wealthy, has widened the income gap between rich and poor to record levels in Canada, a new study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Developed found. Inequality in Canada is well above the organization’s 34-country average, though still considerably lower than in the United States, the Globe and Mail reports.

The Globe and Mail

First impressions

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 1:23 PM - 0 Comments

Greg Fingas finds in Nathan Cullen’s favour.

I’ve been careful to avoid docking candidates too many points for having some room to improve in a second language. But in order to win the benefit of the doubt, a candidate does need to sound compelling in his or her more familiar language. And on that point, Paul Dewar suffered in comparison to Nathan Cullen – who seemed more comfortable than any contender other than Mulcair, sounding more confident even in his entirely improvised lines than Dewar did in presenting his own policies. That made Cullen the candidate who gained the most from yesterday’s debate – even if it’s an open question whether any amount of personal appeal can overcome his strategic choice to make cooperation with the Liberals the centrepiece of his campaign. But Cullen’s ease in front of an audience may end up serving as the dividing line between the NDP’s serious contenders and its also-rans – and yesterday, Dewar fell short of the standard. 

Progressive Proselytizing sees a top three. Continue…

NDP debate 1: an embarrassment of riches

By Paul Wells - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 1:22 PM - 0 Comments

Paul Dewar, Brian Topp and Thomas Mulcair (L-R) (Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press)

“There were only two candidates on that stage who were ready for prime time,” a guy who works for Tom Mulcair’s NDP leadership campaign told me. “And one of them will never be prime minister.”

I smiled knowingly and nodded. Mulcair Guy, quickly sensing that I had no idea what he was talking about, filled in the blanks. “Nathan was on fire today. If it was maybe 10 years later…”

Ah-ha. This is how you know you’re in a leadership race: every whispered confidence comes with a healthy dose of spin. Continue…

Islamic mortgage lender in Canada fails

By macleans.ca - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 1:20 PM - 0 Comments

UM Financial Inc, a small Islamic mortgage lender, went into receivership back in October, but the consequences of the bankruptcy are emerging only now, Reuters reports. Not only does the case risk giving a bad name to sharia-compliant finance (and especially small Islamic funds with little oversight) in North America, it also poses a series of legal hurdles that could lead to mortgage holders to losing their homes. Since the use of interest is forbidden in Islam, sharia-compliant mortgages are set up so that lender and homebuyer share the costs of purchasing a home. Rather than paying interest, homeowners rent the property from the lender while gradually purchasing the outstanding share of their house. Ownership is transferred to the homeowner only when the full value of the house is paid. That, though, makes it difficult to asses who ultimately owns a house in case of a bankruptcy.

Reuters

Canada-U.S. border deal to cost $1 billion

By macleans.ca - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

The Canada-U.S. border deal that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and President Barack Obama are due to announce on Wednesday comes with a price tag of $1 billion, the Canadian Press reports. That’s how much it will cost to implement new entry-exit screening requirements demanded by the White House, according to Colin Robertson, formerly a diplomat in Washington, who has spoken to negotiators of the Beyond the Border deal. The new border security enforcement measures, though, will benefit Canada as well, allowing the government to better keep track of unemployment insurance recipients who no longer live in Canada, and landed immigrants who fail to meet residency requirements.

The Canadian Press

No winner in NDP leadership debate

By macleans.ca - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 12:42 PM - 0 Comments

One thing clearly emerged from the NDP’s televised leadership debate on Sunday: There was no clear winner in the crowded and tightly regulated exchange. That’s the assessment of newspapers ranging from the Vancouver Sun to the Toronto Star. Even the National Post’s John Ivison avoided picking a front-runner, while iPolitics’ Lawrence Martin was a lone voice in declaring Thomas Mulcair first-round winner.

The Vancouver Sun

The Toronto Star

The National Post

iPolitics

France and Germany agree on new fiscal rules

By macleans.ca - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 12:13 PM - 0 Comments

France and Germany announced on Monday they had reached an agreement over a new set of fiscal rules for the eurozone that they will ask EU members of the currency union to approve at a summit on Friday, the Financial Times reports. The new measures include amendments to the EU’s governing statutes to ensure that countries maintain balanced budgets. German Chancellor Angela Merkel also reportedly agreed to drop a provision requiring private bond holders to bear some of the losses involved in sovereign debt restructurings, a point Berlin insisted on earlier this year when coming to Greece’s rescue. Fear among investors that they may not be repaid when holding bonds from other highly indebted governments such as Italy and Spain resulted in steep increases in the yields of those countries as well.

Financial Times

Saving the House of Commons (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 12:01 PM - 0 Comments

Further to this, Mark Jarvis chimes in via email with some of the other ideas discussed in Democratizing the Constitution.

-Adopt legislation limiting the size of ministries to a maximum of 25 individuals and the number of parliamentary secretaries to eight.

-Use secret preferential ballots to allow committee members to select Commons’ committee chairs for the duration of the parliamentary session.

-Adopt a set schedule for opposition days in the House that cannot be unilaterally altered by the government.

-Reduce the partisan political staff complement on Parliament Hill by 50 percent.

-Restore the power of party caucuses to dismiss the party leader.

-Remove the party leader’s power to approve or reject party candidates for election in each riding.

That last one goes hand in hand with amending the Elections Act. It also fits with what I tend to think should be the focus right now: changes that can be made with (reasonably straightforward) legislation and amendment. And, as noted by a few readers, I’d add one other: changing the guidelines to allow for CPAC to show more than the individual speaking. In the interests of objectivity, assigning television directors to show a “televised Hansard” makes a certain sense, but, at the very least, stationary cameras should be setup that feed live shots of the government and opposition sides to CPAC’s website. You shouldn’t have to go to the House of Commons to see what goes on there.

Harper among the immortals

By Paul Wells - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 11:51 AM - 0 Comments

Every once in a while, a mysterious Conservative emails a bunch of people to remind them that Stephen Harper is about to pass another prime minister in the longevity stakes. I got onto the recipient list when Harper passed Alexander Mackenzie in the autumn of 2010. Since then he’s passed Lester Pearson and R.B. Bennett and now he has John Diefenbaker in his sights.

Turning to the noted authority on Prime Ministerial longevity, Wikipedia, we learn that there will now be a bit of a pause until Harper begins catching up to the PMs who served two full majorities: Louis St. Laurent, Robert Borden and Brian Mulroney, at intervals through 2014 in a manner that should help goose the sales of the by-then-brand-new paperback edition of my next book.  Continue…

REVIEW: Conquered Into Liberty: Two Centuries of Battles Along the Great Warpath that Made the American Way of War

By Brian Bethune - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Canadians don’t tend to think of themselves as they’re portrayed by Cohen, a prominent American academic and former high-ranking Defense Department official. It is no surprise, then, that Conquered has stirred considerable buzz here, primarily for the author’s intriguing declaration that his countrymen’s distinctive way of waging war was forged in see-saw combat with “our most enduring and effective enemy of all: Canada.” Not that Cohen can’t back it up, at least in part. The thesis may require taking the present-day border and labelling as Canadian anyone who ever lived north of it—and fired a flintlock or swung a tomahawk at anyone living south of it—but the struggle along the Great Warpath was one of the deciding elements in the history of North America.

Approximately 300 km wide, an axis with Montreal at one end and New York at the other, the warpath had always been a natural water-transport route for hostile tribes and later for warring Europeans. The stakes were high: long-term control of the entire axis would have separated New England from the southern colonies, fatally weakening the nascent U.S., or ensured that there would be only one nation north of the Rio Grande.

As for the American way of war, Cohen points to the special-ops frontiersmen named Rogers’ Rangers after founder Robert Rogers. The U.S. Army Rangers still claim direct descent from them. But so also do the Canadian Forces’ Queen’s York Rangers, for Rogers remained loyal to the Crown during the American Revolution—showing the slippery terms involved in Cohen’s Canada-versus-America narrative. He’s on surer ground with his title. “You have been conquered into liberty,” ran the opening line of the propaganda sheet American revolutionary invaders took to Quebec in 1775. The Québécois then, much like the Iraqis now, were having none of it, but that American mix of idealism and realpolitik—conquest-borne freedom—has marked U.S. war policy ever since.

Losers: the down and out

By Michael Friscolanti - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

David J. Phillip/AP

Backbenchers

After losing ground ever so slowly in the previous three elections, the federal Liberals were slaughtered this time around, relegated to just 34 seats. The once-unbeatable party of Wilfrid Laurier, Pierre Trudeau and Jean Chrétien is on the brink of political irrelevance, and some long-time Liberals are not convinced that their fortunes can recover. As one senior official said: “It’s do something or die.”

Nickelback-lash

Despite album sales topping 50 million, Nickelback could be the most despised band in the history of musical instruments. Critics have long panned the Canadian rockers as dull, predictable and formulaic, but the venom reached a new level this year when the group was chosen to perform the halftime show at the annual Thanksgiving football game between the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers. The announcement triggered such rage that 52,000 people signed a petition, demanding a replacement.

Continue…

In conversation: Mark Carney

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Blair Gable

He’s among the most respected voices anywhere on financial regulation and monetary policy, and the Canadian closest to the centre of efforts to solve the European debt crisis. Governor of the Bank of Canada since 2008, Mark Carney, 46, was also recently named head of the Swiss-based Financial Stability Board. He’s a leading figure in the struggle to shore up a fragile world economy.

Q: Let’s talk about Europe. You hear people saying we may be in the last days of the euro. What is the way out of this crisis?

A:Let me say two things. One, there are longer-term issues that absolutely have to be addressed. They have to rework the way the monetary union functions—fundamental questions of competitiveness in these economies—which require multi-year reform programs. Those absolutely have to be done for this thing to work in the medium term—and there’s no point saving it in the short term, if it’s not going to work in the medium term. But in terms of creating the bridge so there’s time to do all of that, we have long advocated that they create a mechanism—a firewall—that ensures that all eurozone countries can fund themselves at sustainable rates for the next two, three years. And that is a requirement that is at least on the order of a trillion euros.

Continue…

REVIEW: Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope

By Dafna Izenberg - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Giffords had just started an exciting new job in New York when her father summoned her home to Tucson, Ariz., to take over the family tire business. At 26, Giffords was already what her husband, Mark Kelly, describes as a “Renaissance woman.” In high school, she became an accomplished horsewoman. After college, she won a Fulbright scholarship and did research in a Mennonite community. Dealing tires had not been in her plans. But home she went, and with characteristic aplomb pulled her dad’s company out of debt, sold it to Goodyear and made sure the staff kept their jobs. In the process, she immersed herself in Tucson’s social and financial concerns and found her life’s true calling: to represent her hometown as an elected member of government.

Kelly’s loving and lively conjuring of the vivacious young Giffords offers a glimpse into the congresswoman’s resourcefulness. In January, she was targeted in a shooting rampage in which six people were slain. Luck saved her life—a bullet shattered a hand’s width of her skull but stopped short of killing her. Her amazing recovery—eight months after the attack, Giffords was back on Capitol Hill, voting to support the debt-ceiling bill—is a testament to her unique tenacity.

Giffords continues to suffer from aphasia, a brain injury-related condition that interferes with her verbal expression, and she speaks mainly in one- or two-word phrases. Annoyed when Kelly missed her 41st birthday to visit Richard Branson in London (though not when he went forward with the May launch of NASA’s second-last space-shuttle mission, on which he was commander), she told him: “I am mad at me!” Her non-verbal communication, however, has always revealed sharp attunement. Five days after the shooting, Kelly sat by his wife’s bedside, holding her hand. Suddenly, she pulled off his wedding ring, then moved it around her fingers. It was her ritual from when the two went out for dinner. Kelly was heartened. “She’s still Gabby,” he reminded himself. “She’s going to pull out of this.”

This year’s winners: the game changers

By Anne Kingston - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Chris Wattie/Reuters

ARCADE FIRE

The once-fringe Montreal band was handed a scad of mainstream music hardware for their third studio recording, The Suburbs, which was praised for expressing familiar big themes with greater bounce and lightness. The multi-talented ensemble was rewarded with Album of the Year at the Junos and the Grammys and International Album and Best International Group at the Brit Awards.

MARK CARNEY

It’s a bird, it’s a plane—it’s Solvency Man, a.k.a Mark Carney, newly named chairman of the Financial Stability Board, the international body that oversees the global economy. The 46-year-old Bank of Canada governor is an ideal fiscal superhero—a Ph.D. economist and former investment banker, he’s also a disciplined, fit marathon runner. Who knows better that slow and steady wins the race?

CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT THIS YEAR’S EPIC FAILURES

Continue…

Losers: the Canucks

By Charlie Gillis - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Jonathan Hayward/CP

Like many cities with a history of mediocre NHL teams, Vancouver also has a tradition of heroic goaltenders. Glen Hanlon, Richard Brodeur and Kirk McLean count among those who learned their trade one 40-shot night at a time, lifting merely passable West Coast squads to the level of their more gifted opponents. But not Roberto Luongo. The self-confident Montrealer landed in B.C. a bona fide star, with no assembly required. Just like that, he became the centrepiece of a team that seemed destined, finally, to bring the Stanley Cup to Vancouver.

There’s no denying the Canucks had the makings of a powerhouse. And there’s no denying Luongo has under-delivered. Supported by the most talented lineup ever to pull on Vancouver sweaters, the rangy goaltender has faltered just when his team needed him most, and never more so than during the 2011 Stanley Cup final. Key saves too often occurred at the other end of the rink, where former minor-leaguer Tim Thomas weaved a magical spring for the brawny Boston Bruins. With each dubious loss, Luongo’s dour, defiant persona seemed more out of place. At one point, he actually criticized Thomas’s handling of a Canucks’ scoring play—then proceeded to blow his next game. Fate, it would seem, had developed a sense of humour.

Alas for Luongo, Vancouverites had not. On June 13, as their team played Game 6 in Boston, Canuck partisans watched in their home arena as Luongo surrendered three goals within three minutes during the first period, and cheered when coach Alain Vigneault yanked him. It was the fourth time Luongo had been pulled during the ’11 playoffs, the second time in the final. Two nights later, in Game 7, he looked soft on the opening goal by Patrice Bergeron, sliding backward as the puck trickled in. The Canucks never recovered, and afterward, as the Bruins drank from the Cup, Luongo seemed reluctant to shoulder his share of blame. “It’s a team game,” he said when asked how much responsibility he took for the loss. “We all want to be better. That’s the bottom line.”

Continue…

A slow-moving trainwreck

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 10:45 AM - 0 Comments

Chuck Strahl further complicates John Duncan’s complicated explanation of who knew what about Attawapiskat and when.

In an interview with CBC Radio’s The House, Strahl tells host Evan Solomon the crisis at Attawapiskat “has been a slow moving train-wreck for a long time … Attawapiskat “was always a problem,” said Strahl. ”It was not good when I was there, and I don’t think it’s appreciably, or any better now. That was well known, everybody knew it was a very difficult community for a bunch of reasons.”

Get off your lazy axis!

By Scott Feschuk - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

iStock; Getty Images; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

Dear Earth,

We’re still sweet on you and everything, and you totally remain one of our favourite spheres—but over the last couple months, something has changed between us. You’re different. You’ve grown colder, less hospitable. You’ve gotten… darker.

In the hopes that you’re willing to change, we wrote this poem for you.

Love, Everyone

Like, WTF, Earth?
In the annals of what prompts despair
Ranked just above losing one’s hair
(But below wedding a Kardashian)
Is the sun going down at 4 p.m.

The roads with headlights are festooned
Though the clock says it’s still afternoon.
Our skin so pale, our moods defective
Disorders seasonally affective.

The early dusk makes tempers short
Our smiles the dark will surely thwart.
Reduced we are to glares and glowers
When our star is keeping banker’s hours.

And in our homes as many yawns
As shirtless scenes in Breaking Dawn.
PJs, slippers, vim diminished
And Jeopardy’s not even finished.

Up north the dark’s a constant pest
The sun no more than fleeting guest.
It peeks out briefly just to tease
Like a thong above a woman’s jeans.

December’s global truth behold!
Some must be hot, some others cold.
A tilt of 23 degrees
Makes Earth one big McDLT.

(Was that last reference too obscure?
I know that’s not the meal du jour.
But I thought it surely would be glib
To compare our Earth to a McRib.)

Each year it takes us by surprise
The early gloaming, late sunrise
The street lights coming on at four
And your grumpy eight-year-old just swore.

Come summer we’ll stand in ovation
To praise the ways of your rotation.
But a curse, a hex, a thousand pox
Upon autumnal equinox.

And winter solstice, even worse
The hour of dusk just plain perverse.
It’s a cruel and truly heartless ruse
To make a day short as Tom Cruise.

Across our cranky hemisphere
There comes a unifying cheer:
Hey Earth—get off your lazy axis!
Autumn’s no time to relaxis.

We hear you’re suffering climate change
Hot flashes have you feeling strange.
And word is that we are the cause
Of your planetary menopause.

Perhaps a deal we can beget
(Though technically it’s more a threat):
Spare us from the winter bummers
Or we’re all buying H2 Hummers.

It’s not as though we’re asking much
Just angle your fat arse a touch
So your top half leans toward the sun
And the next four months don’t make us glum.

For some there’ll be a cost, we’ll vouch
The briefer daylight hours will ouch
Much like a kick in the genitalia
Thanks for your sacrifice, Australia.

My Occupy (a job) movement

By Emma Teitel - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Mark Blinch/Reuters

I’ve avoided writing about the Occupy movement for the following reasons: 1. Until last week I thought Warren Buffett sang Margaritaville. 2. I’m young and I have a job—a fortuitous, albeit awkward combination, as working for a major corporation isn’t exactly popular in most (drum) circles these days. In other words, it’s not the best time to be a liberal arts grad turned corporate lackey. As a result, I’ve been feeling a bit alienated from the pro-Occupy demographic you’d think would be my natural constituency, my peers. My Occupy contemporaries wear clothing made of plants and live in yurts. I just bought a coat with a genuine rabbit collar and I live in a building made of brick. One friend of mine who shall remain nameless appeared in a Toronto Star photo of the St. James Park encampment, beating a bongo drum to apparent oblivion. Another friend who doesn’t mind being named, Jen Anderson, states on her Facebook page that she believes in “energy” and that “we are creatures of the sun / no worries, no wishes / . . . the sun rises to greet us / we spin to meet the sun / There is always more than one truth.”

As disaffected as I sometimes felt from the Occupy movement, its detractors have left me even colder. Both sides have co-opted the supposedly free discourse with claims that strike me as unfounded. But, absent a side on the issue I can fervently embrace—and I suspect I’m not alone here—there are some truths I do stand by:

1. Less is more. Most people would take one good lie over multiple depressing truths. Most people are tired, busy and ignorant, and you don’t Occupy when you’re preoccupied. I love Jen Anderson, but as far as I can see, she doesn’t represent the 99 per cent. I do. Every time I read a story in the newspaper about the Canadian Occupy movement, I feel as though I just opened a book halfway through and I don’t know the plot.

Continue…

Memorable no-chance candidates

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 10:29 AM - 0 Comments

The thing that I felt most acutely while watching Herman Cain on Saturday was that this campaign seemed to be a great idea—until the moment it started being taken seriously. It’s still hard to say whether or not Cain was running a serious campaign. (Though there are different levels of seriousness: Pat Robertson probably wasn’t “serious” in the sense of expecting to win, but he was serious in attempting to demonstrate the strength of religious conservatives as a voting bloc, and making sure that the eventual nominee would pay attention to their concerns. Ron Paul is probably serious in the same sense: even though he won’t win, his campaign allows his ideas about monetary and foreign policy to be heard in these debates.) But what we can say is that if we read it as an un-serious, fun campaign, it was a brilliant move at first, making him more famous and popular than he’d ever been before. But then he did so well that he became the “front-runner,” and his campaign had to be taken seriously. And once a campaign is taken seriously, the candidate has to deal with all the stuff that a serious candidate must face, like intense scrutiny of every question he can’t answer, and revelations about his past. Front-runner status also automatically transforms a candidate into a partisan figure, meaning that Donald Trump and Herman Cain are disliked far more on the opposite side of the aisle than they used to be—which is fine for a professional politician, but not so great for a businessman. It does seem like these guys would have been better off, if not necessarily happier, if no one had ever taken them seriously.

The other thing I was wondering about is whether Herman Cain’s candidacy will be remembered. Offhand I would say no, just because most losing candidates aren’t remembered. In the U.S.—and not just there—people who get the nomination and lose are barely remembered; the people who lose the nomination are completely forgotten unless there is some other compelling reason to remember them (they win the nomination later, like Reagan, or they are already extremely famous people, like Hillary Clinton). Pat Robertson and Pat Buchanan are well-known and they ran fairly successful campaigns of their kind, but even their campaigns aren’t all that much more than footnotes now. Continue…

Why the markets can’t run hospitals

By Julia Belluz - Monday, December 5, 2011 at 10:24 AM - 0 Comments

“The evidence is very, very clear that the core provision of health services is more effectively done through the public model.”—Roy Romanow, Nov. 27, 2011

It’s an exciting time in the world of health care. Like our neighbours to the south and other developed countries across the ocean, we’re in the midst of another discussion about the future of our health-care system. But there’s one debate that rears its head no matter what decade we’re in: private versus public health-care. After a meeting on the new health accord in Halifax last month, Roy Romanow—the former Saskatchewan premier who led a landmark commission on how to improve the health system in 2002—stated very clearly that expanding “private” care would be perilous. But does the evidence support the mighty Romanow’s claim?

Defining public vs. private care

Before we go any further, let’s clear up what private and public funding and delivery means in the Canadian context. Continue…