What does ministerial accountability mean?

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 12:54 PM - 0 Comments

NDP MP Ryan Cleary thinks Peter MacKay should resign.

“The email trail that has been released doesn’t back up his story,” Cleary, a New Democrat, told CBC News Friday. ”It looks like he lied about it, that’s how it looks. So when you have a federal minister of Canada come out and tell one story and a chain of emails indicate another story and it looks like he’s lying, I think that he has to resign,” Cleary told reporters in St. John’s.

RIM warns of financial target miss

By macleans.ca - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 12:45 PM - 0 Comments

Research In Motion warned on Friday that it expects to miss its financial target for the year, due to steep discounting of its weak-selling PlayBook tablet, declining BlackBerry shipments and a charge related to the global service outage that disrupted service in October. The hit from the PlayBook firesale, meant to promote the tablet among sceptical consumers, was estimated at US $485 million, while the October outage cost the company $50 million, meaning the Waterloo giant likely won’t meet its revenue guidance of $5.3-billion for the year.

Globe and Mail

U.S. unemployment drops to 8.6 per cent

By macleans.ca - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 12:24 PM - 0 Comments

The U.S. economy delivered an unexpectedly low unemployment rate in November, at 8.6 per cent from 9 per cent in October. The number of new jobs, which comes from different data from the U.S. Labor Department, at 120,000, fell just short of economists’ expectations of 125,000 new openings. The surprise drop in the unemployment rate reflects both a pick-up in economy activity and growing number of Americans who’ve given up looking for a job aren’t therefore counted as “unemployed.”

Financial Times

You can’t ask that here

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 12:15 PM - 0 Comments

On the requirement that questions concern the “administrative responsibility” of government, the Speaker now seems to be taking a strict stance. Yesterday, for instance, he ruled the following, from Liberal MP Geoff Regan, out of order.

Mr. Speaker, the Conservatives have admitted the phone campaign of lies to the citizens of Mount Royal. The government House leader has actually said he is proud of these unsavoury tactics that seem to be straight from the era of Watergate. Would the Prime Minister heed the calls of commentators, even Conservatives, apologize for this outrage against democracy, shut down his dirty tricks team and call on Elections Canada to investigate?

Mr. Regan challenged the Speaker after Question Period and the Speaker duly promised to get back to the House with clarification of the rules. As Mr. Regan noted, questions about the in-and-out scheme were not ruled out of order and so it will be interesting to see where Mr. Scheer intends to draw the line here.

F-35 jet faces new delays

By macleans.ca - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 12:07 PM - 0 Comments

Fresh hurdles in the production of Lockheed Martin Corp’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter are bound to translate into new criticism of the Conservative government’s decision to purchase 65 of the troubled fighter jets, the Globe and Mail reports. Delivery of the aircraft should be delayed, the Pentagon recommended this week after the discovery of cracks and “hot spots.” The constant hiccups and swelling price tag that have characterized the F-35 program are creating frustration in the U.S. as well. “The analyzed hot spots that have arisen in the last 12 months or so in the program have surprised us at the amount of change and at the cost,” U.S. Navy Vice-Admiral David Zenlet recently told the Web-based publication AOL Defense.

Globe and Mail

More of Everything. More!

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 11:39 AM - 0 Comments

Macleans.ca has posted my contribution to our End-of-the-year wishlists. I wrote a sort of lengthy top ten list of things I would like to see more of on the television box (and all the affiliated boxes, including the ones that are really too small to watch TV on but we do it anyway) in 2012.

Some of the wishes may be familiar, like the preference for ripoffs over remakes (unless that remake is Homeland, of course) and for more sadistic endings in comedies, but all the words are new. Well, the individual words aren’t new, but they’re newly-arranged into different sentences. Anyway, have a look, and you can go to Macleans.ca/wishlist to see other wishlists; there’s already Geddes on politics and Bethune on books, and more are coming. There are many things to wish for in 2012. Besides world peace, I mean, which probably isn’t happening.

Saving the House of Commons

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

As much fun as it might be to lament for the House of Commons, some of that energy might be put to use figuring out how to fix it.

Reform has been a bit of a preoccupation around here over the last few years and various proposals have been offered, noted and considered. And here is a collection of many of those proposals: real, structural reforms that could change the way our House of Commons functions.

There is much here to debate. And there are no doubt other ideas out there. But this could be the basis of an agenda for fixing the institution. Continue…

‘Least resistance’

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

Ontario Aboriginal Affairs Minister Kathleen Wynne criticizes the federal government’s response to the Attawapiskat crisis. And in an interview with APTN, Ms. Wynne says she can’t get Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan to answer her calls.

Minister Duncan ran into NDP MP Charlie Angus yesterday at the CBC offices in Ottawa.

The minister insisted his department did not have “an awareness of what was in the community until a few days after Oct. 28.” But he went on to tell van Dusen that the feds had “people in the community” since April. ”I don’t understand,” she interrupted. “You said you didn’t know until Oct 28.” Duncan shot back with: “They did not identify there was an issue — and neither did Charlie Angus, the representative of the area, who is not shy about talking about Attawapiskat.”

If the latter was a dig at Angus’ abundant media availability, then Duncan was repaid in more than equal measure when he attempted to make a break from the interview. Hustled off by handlers —’We gave you the time. We have to go’ — Duncan made it down one stairwell before bumping into the man himself. Angus greeted him with a hearty, “Mr. Duncan! We’ve got an emergency in Attawapiskat. You’ll know now. Just so you don’t get caught flat-footed.”

Full video here.

The (other) royal weddings of 2011

By Patricia Treble - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Belarus: Europe’s ugly little dictatorship

By Paul Wells - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Viktor Drachev/AFP/Getty Images

For the longest time, the ruling regime in Belarus permitted Ales Michalevic to practise politics almost as he might if he were living in a democracy. The soft-spoken lawyer from Minsk, now 36, ran as a candidate in last December’s presidential election. He travelled widely, held rallies, met local officials and delivered a centrist message that sought to peel votes away from the country’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, by offering only muted criticism of Lukashenko’s violent, corrupt, economically and morally bankrupt government.

And Michalevic was permitted to go about his political business, as were more than a half-dozen other opposition candidates, right up until the election returns came in on Dec. 19. Then the news anchors announced that Lukashenko had won almost 80 per cent of the vote. His nearest rival, Andrei Sannikaü, had won less than three per cent. Michalevic scored even lower. Many Belarusians sensed a gap between the official result and the message of their own hearts. Thousands spilled into the streets to protest. Black-clad thugs showed up to beat them senseless.

The police arrested perhaps 800 people overnight, including seven presidential candidates. The KGB—Belarus is the last country in the world to keep the Soviet-era name for its secret police—came for Michalevic at 4 a.m., while he sat drinking cognac with his campaign staff.

Continue…

See spot drag the human

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Canicross

It’s an odd thing, strapping yourself to a jumping, slobbering, overeager animal for the first time. Yet here you are, about to be yanked through the forest by your crotch, harnessed to something that barks when it’s mad, pees when it’s excited and has a brain roughly the size of a plum. What if the poor bugger’s heart explodes from pulling you, a two-legged mass about seven times its weight? What if a squirrel shows up? What if your friends do?

Funnily enough, no one else here in a wooded Quebec City park on a shivery Sunday morning, their dogs duly tethered, seems to be asking themselves these questions. In fact, despite being as novice as I am, the small group that’s gathered here is almost as eager as their pets are to run between the trees, harnessed to their proverbial best friends. The act of running behind one’s dog is called “canicross.” Part sport, part group activity practised by a sprightly, spandex-clad bunch to the point of obsession, canicross is the suddenly de rigueur alternative to walking your dog. In fact, you let the dog walk you—usually very quickly.

Quebec, the North American ground zero for canicross, has Canicross Québec. The group had 16 members in 2006; today there are 300. The association is the brainchild of Amelie Janin, a 28-year-old French chemist who emigrated to Quebec that same year; Héryk Julien, who runs the FouBraque canicross training school with his partner, Laurence Boudreault, sees Janin as something of a proselytizer. “She brought canicross to North America,” he says reverentially.

Continue…

Clash of the biopic titans

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, December 2, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Monroe

Here’s a pretty safe prediction: when the Oscars are handed out next February, the contest for best actress will come down to a duel between two icons, a bombshell and a battle-axe—between Marilyn Monroe and Margaret Thatcher, as portrayed by Michelle Williams and Meryl Streep. Oscar has always had a soft spot for biopics, especially if Brits, royals or showbiz icons are involved. The main event at the last Academy Awards was an unfair fight between The King’s Speech and The Social Network, as King George VI handily trumped the Machiavellian Facebook guru Mark Zuckerberg. And as the current award season warms up, it looks like real-life figures will dominate the field as never before.

They are led by a trio of heavyweights: Streep’s Thatcher in The Iron Lady, Williams in My Week with Marilyn, and Leonardo DiCaprio as Hoover in J. Edgar. Bringing up the rear in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method are Viggo Mortensen as Sigmund Freud and Michael Fassbender as Carl Jung. The Lady adds a Nobelist wild card to the race with its portrait of Burmese opposition heroine Aung San Suu Kyi (Michelle Yeoh). Don’t count out Brad Pitt as Moneyball’s Billy Beane, the legendary manager who rewrote baseball’s bible and irrevocably changed the game. And trailing far behind the pack is W.E.’s Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), the woman who forced the abdication that gave us that stammering George VI.

In Hollywood, where making history is almost as important as making movies, the biopic craze shows no signs of slowing down. Steven Spielberg is currently shooting Lincoln, with Daniel Day Lewis carving out his own Rushmore portrait of the American president. And next year, ghostbuster Bill Murray gains gravitas as Franklin D. Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson, which has FDR and Eleanor mingling with Queen Elizabeth and King George VI (him again).

Continue…

Taking the joy out of sex in ‘Shame’

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 11:59 PM - 0 Comments

Michael Fassbender and Carey Mulligan in 'Shame'

By the end of the Toronto International Film Festival, Shame was no longer just a movie. It was The Most Talked About Movie At TIFF. Its star, Michael Fassbender, had been named best actor at the Venice Film Festival. That buzz, and the film’s stark portrayal of sex addiction, put it on the top of everyone’s must-see list. Not to mention that it’s the second feature from British art-star-turned-auteur Steve McQueen, who made such an incendiary debut in 2008 with Hunger (also starring Fassbender, in a stunt-like tour de force as hunger-striking IRA martyr Bobby Sands).

When I first saw Shame, at TIFF, I found much about it amazing and admirable, but I was left cold. Despite all the carnal eye candy and sleek Manhattan visuals, the film’s descent into a hell of loveless sex seemed desperately bleak. What’s worse, I was disappointed by my disappointment, as if it were a personal failing akin to that of the film’s protagonist. For fans of Shame, that would just be proof that the film was doing its job. Art, after all, is meant to disturb. “You say Fassbender’s character is shallow and soulless? Well, of course he is! Welcome to the real world!”  Yet something still felt not right with the film that I couldn’t put my finger on. When I came out of it, my first thought was that I wouldn’t have to see it again, or want to. But as time went on I felt so conflicted about it that eventually, I did. Now I finally have an opinion or two. Continue…

Compared to last year, how much do you plan to spend on Christmas gifts this year?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 7:06 PM - 0 Comments

The Commons: The power and the responsibility

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 6:42 PM - 0 Comments

The Scene. Peter MacKay stepped out into the foyer just long enough to turn and walk up the stairs. The small horde of reporters that had been waiting for him were left to shout questions at his retreating figure. For the record, the back of his head had no comment.

“I would suggest to the minister, if he’s open to advice,” the NDP’s David Christopherson offered to a different gaggle of reporters a few minutes later, “that he get to a microphone fast and come clean and tell the true story and then ask for forgiveness.”

It is often said that with great power comes great responsibility and maybe that was even true at some point. At it is, it would be more accurate to say that with great power one is afforded the authority to decide what one wants to take responsibility for. And that modern power means, and depends on, doing everything to avoid ever saying sorry. Continue…

Did a BlackBerry hack bring down DSK?

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 5:06 PM - 0 Comments

Richard Drew/AP Photo

This year may go down in history as the year of the phone hack. Vulnerabilities in mobile communication have, in one way or another, revealed everything from News Corp’s moral turpitude to Scarlett Johansson’s bum. According to a report by investigative journalist Edward Jay Epstein in the New York Review of Books, phone hacking may also have changed the course of European history, if not the world’s.

The article suggests that Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s enemies hacked his BlackBerry in order to engineer the set-up that destroyed his political career. The scandal has of course resulted in DSK’s resignation as director of the International Monetary Fund at a crucial moment for the euro, and scuttled his once-likely election as France’s next president. Could all of this have been avoided if DSK had had more uppercase letters and weird punctuation marks in his password?

We may never know. Some time after DSK’s disputed sexual encounter with hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo and before his arrest, his BlackBerry vanished. Even before that, DSK suspected that his phone was compromised–a friend working in Sarkozy’s political party offices had told him she had found a copy of a private email he had written to his wife, that had somehow been intercepted. DSK had made arrangements to have his device checked for bugs or tampering upon his return to France. Continue…

Attawapiskat math (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 4:44 PM - 0 Comments

Aboriginal Affairs Minister John Duncan says “things don’t add up.”

Romeo Saganash has forwarded this blog post as a rebuttal to the Prime Minister’s math.

Meanwhile, during QP today, Nycole Turmel quibbled with the Prime Minister’s numbers of choice. Continue…

My wish list: Jaime Weinman on TV

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 4:32 PM - 0 Comments

Macleans.ca has asked its leading bloggers, pundits and critics to weigh in with what they’d like to see in 2012—in politics, television, film, books, wherever. The wish lists will run throughout the month of December and will be archived at macleans.ca/wishlist.

There are many things I would like to see in television in 2012. More singing competition reality shows. More jokes about sexual organs. More cable dramas about morally-ambiguous protagonists. These things have become so rare. But here are some other things I might like to see.

(1) More action: Or at least less talk. A lot of shows this year set up premises that seem to call for lots of action and chases, like a bunch of people threatened by dinosaur attacks (Terra Nova), another bunch of people threatened by zombie attacks (The Walking Dead) or a couple of vigilantes fighting crime in a creepy illegal way (Person of Interest). But most of them seem to resolve themselves into a lot of talk and a few token action scenes thrown in when the producers sense that we’re getting bored by all the talking. Even the genuine action-adventure shows sometimes seem a bit light on the chases and stunts compared to the shows they’re homaging. Not that every show needs a car chase or an explosion in every act; this isn’t the ’80s. But sometimes it can be a blessing to take a break from the actors and watch stunt drivers instead. Let us just say that Person of Interest needs some heavy rewriting from the ghost of Stephen J. Cannell, or as I like to call him, TGOSJC.

(2) More hastily-scheduled shows: Continue…

My wish list: John Geddes on pundits, politicians and policy

By John Geddes - Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 4:32 PM - 0 Comments

Macleans.ca has asked its leading bloggers, pundits and critics to weigh in with what they’d like to see in 2012—in politics, television, film, books, wherever. The wish lists will run throughout the month of December and will be archived at macleans.ca/wishlist.

(1) When pundits, lobbyists, economists, former bureaucrats and retired politicians—along with sundry other commentators— decide to pronounce on the state of Canadian health care, I wish they would stop just saying it’s getting more expensive. We know the population is aging and demands on the system are increasing. No point repeating it over and over, unless you’re also offering concrete suggestions for reform.

(2) When cabinet ministers puff out their chests and declare that they are taking responsibility for dubious goings-on—blatant pork-barrel spending in their ridings, say, or failure by their departments to keep Parliament properly informed of costs—I wish they would actually take responsibility. Just speaking the words doesn’t make it so. They must say which bureaucrats or political staffers have been fired or demoted, or offer the prime minister their own resignations.

(3) I wish work on reforming the Senate would be abandoned and work on abolishing it taken up with gusto. Continue…

For Roger

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 2:46 PM - 0 Comments

NDP MP Glenn Thibeault reflects on his brother, Roger, who died 20 years ago of AIDS.

For World AIDS Day, Thibeault is hoping to bring the experiences he learned from his brother to Parliament. “I hope I can bring the message that our job’s not done yet, that we still need to bring forward awareness, we still need to work harder on research, we still need to work harder on making sure that society understands that on World AIDS Day, it’s affecting everyone,” Thibeault says. “The sad thing that I see in some instances, coming from different parts of the country, there’s still the stigma that this is still a gay disease. It’s not.”

‘Under the guise’

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 1:12 PM - 0 Comments

After it was reported in September that he had been airlifted out of a fishing trip by a Canadian Forces helicopter, Defence Minister Peter MacKay was called to explain his actions in the House of Commons. His first response came to a question from Liberal MP Scott Simms.

Mr. Speaker, with respect to the question from the honourable member, I was in fact in Gander in July of 2010, on a personal visit with friends for which I paid. Three days into the visit I participated in a search and rescue demonstration with 103 Squadron of 9 Wing Gander. I shortened my stay by a day to take part in that demonstration and later flew on to do government business in Ontario.

The NDP’s Jack Harris asked the minister next and Mr. MacKay restated his version of events.

Mr. Speaker, I think I just explained that I shortened a personal visit to take part in a search and rescue demonstration in Gander.

Now the Star has obtained emails that detail the preparation, planning and internal concerns around that pick-up. Continue…

My wish list: Brian Bethune on books

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 12:49 PM - 0 Comments

Macleans.ca has asked its leading bloggers, pundits and critics to weigh in with what they’d like to see in 2012—in politics, television, film, books, wherever. The wish lists will run throughout the month of December and will be archived at macleans.ca/wishlist.

(1) According to journalistic adage, it takes three to make a trend, but there’s one trainee trend that ought to be nipped after two. In 201,1 two big-name authors released big-time follow-ups to the works of even bigger, but long dead, writers. P.D. James, now 91 but still smarter than most of us, wrote Death Comes to Pemberley, featuring most of the cast of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (and a handful of other Austen characters), while Anthony Horowitz channeled Arthur Conan Doyle and the gaslit world of Sherlock Holmes right through The House of Silk. Both living writers produced admirably—quality isn’t the problem here, rather it’s the unlikelihood anyone else will do as well. That goes for James and Horowitz too, as the latter is well aware. “I wouldn’t want to be that guy,” he allows, “the one about whom people say, ‘He wrote another of those too, but it wasn’t as good.’”

(2) Back in 1944 Raymond Chandler famously wished for more of the sort of (fictional) murderers who “commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse.” Continue…

Diamonds and squalor up on James Bay

By John Geddes - Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 12:29 PM - 0 Comments

A frequently mentioned dark irony in the story of deplorable living conditions at Attawapiskat, Ont., is that the Cree community is just 90 km from a De Beers diamond mine. A reasonable, concerned outsider trying to make sense of what’s going on might well wonder how abject squalor can exist so close to such a conspicuous emblem of resource riches.

NDP MP Charlie Angus, who has done more than anyone to highlight the disgraceful state of Attawapiskat’s housing, has bitterly complained that “not a dime of the provincial royalty money” from the De Beers mine “comes back to help the community with infrastructure or development.”

Continue…

Two or more

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 12:01 PM - 0 Comments

Of appointments to the Immigration and Refugee Board, Jason Kenney told the House on Tuesday that, in fact, he was aware, he thought, of two appointees, out of a total of 140, who had “any association with the Conservative party.”

The NDP says they’ve found one former ministerial advisor, four former Conservative candidates and nine party donors. The Citizen puts the total at 16.