Canada lags Russia in Arctic race

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 1:17 PM - 0 Comments

As the Arctic climate warms and polar ice continues to melt, the Northwest Passage through Canada’s Arctic archipelago promises to become an increasingly important strategic and economic concern. Likewise, the Northern Sea Route for shipping in Russian Arctic waters. But unlike Canada, Russia is eagerly developing its shipping infrastructure in its northern waters, reports the Toronto Star. The Russian port of Murmansk alone is slated for $10 billion in investment over the next decade. By contrast, the Northwest Passage, which only saw its first commercial shipment in 2008, has little major infrastructure. Although the Northwest Passage is considered an international waterway by the U.S. and the European Union, Canada could stand to gain by controlling access to the dangerous, but potentially lucrative route.

Toronto Star

This Court doesn’t lean

By Paul Wells - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 12:39 PM - 0 Comments

“You know, the Supreme Court, it’s like the Tower of Pisa,” Maurice Duplessis used to say. “It always leans in the same direction.” Ho-ho. Toward Ottawa, he meant. The mid-20th-century Quebec premier was arguing that Quebec couldn’t win at the highest court in the land because the court would always invoke a “national interest” to ignore the Constitution and run roughshod over provincial rights.

It’s super-popular in Quebec nationalist circles to quote Duplessis on the Tower of Pisa, as the St.-Jean-Baptiste Society of the Mauricie does in this .pdf — without worrying too much that what set Duplessis off was the top court’s demolition of his loathsome Padlock Act, which he used to shut down suspected Communist-owned businesses in defiance of due process and free speech. Also handily ignored: the Supremes were upholding lower-court decisions in Quebec courts when they tossed Duplessis’s law out. Basically, justices from across Canada, when asked, joined a string of Quebec judges in protecting the people of Quebec from a lousy democrat. You’d think people would bear that in mind when quoting Duplessis on leaning towers. But no such luck.

Moving along, we note that one of the first things René Lévesque’s new Parti Québécois government did in 1976 was to contract legal scholar Gilbert L’Ecuyer to poke through Supreme Court jurisprudence looking for leaning towers. He didn’t find any: his 1978 study said the Supremes were faithfully applying the tenets of an 1867 constitution (that, to be fair, L’Ecuyer found unconscionably biased in its provisions toward the federal level).

No matter. The Leaning Tower metaphor is impervious to bullets and evidence. Lucien Bouchard and Gilles Duceppe rehearsed it in anticipation of the 1998 Supreme Court reference decision on secession. That’s when I first heard about it.

Fast forward to today, when the Supremes brought down their opinion on the national securities reference. Continue…

Green Christmas

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

The number of Canadians going without snow on Christmas will be at its highest since Environment Canada began recording holiday accumulation in 1955, The Globe and Mail reports. While 85 per cent of the country will be snow-covered on Dec. 25, populated regions including several big cities will go without. Meteorologists predict snowfall for the 25 in most of the North, including the territories and northern B.C., Ontario, and Quebec, but some areas that are typically known for getting the most snow, like Winnipeg, will see green instead. Average December temperatures have jumped six or seven degrees above average across the country this year. What little snow has fallen on most southern areas has been washed away by rain. With little chance of snowstorms on the days before Christmas, shoppers will be out in full force, but likely not looking for heavy-duty winter apparel.

Globe and Mail

Can a bond offering help cure poverty on Native reserves?

By Erica Alini - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 12:05 PM - 0 Comments

www.fnfa.ca

Money, goes conventional wisdom, comes with strings attached. Especially other people’s money. Especially when it comes as lump-sum transfer. And, as the ongoing Attawapiskat saga shows, the strings tie both ends of the money chain, with receivers accusing Ottawa of stinginess and neglect, and lenders always keen to point to suspicious accounting practices–or at least maladministration.

Yet, there’s a smart way around all this: borrowing from the markets. Though few seem to have noticed, First Nations are working on it. They plan to issue their first bonds in the fall of next year, in a collective offering worth at least $100 million. The money raised will serve for things like housing and to build badly needed infrastructure, which will create jobs and the conditions for banks and private business to set up shop on Native reserves, says Steve Berna, chief operating officer of the First Nations Financial Authority, the voluntary not-for-profit organization tasked with issuing the bonds.

Continue…

Americans don’t take us serious

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 0 Comments

HBO has, with great imagination and originality, changed the title of Aaron Sorkin’s upcoming show from “Newsroom” to “The Newsroom.” The announcement of the new title already has some fun comments pointing out the existence of another show called “The Newsroom” that somebody at the network, if not necessarily Aaron Sorkin, might have heard of.

No, this isn’t a serious affront to our own “The Newsroom.” And it doesn’t violate any rules either. (Titles aren’t under copyright.) It’s just a bit of a grimly amusing reminder that the U.S. TV industry doesn’t take Canada very seriously (and doesn’t need to). If a Canadian network wanted to make a show called “The Wire,” there would be nothing stopping them – a generic or baldly descriptive title like that doesn’t usually raise any trademark problems. But we wouldn’t call a show “The Wire” because it would create unflattering comparisons with a show that is often considered the greatest the U.S. has ever produced. Well, “The Newsroom” is often considered the greatest show Canada has ever produced, but a U.S. network feels no need to fear unflattering comparisons: assuming they’ve heard of the show, they probably think most people in the States have not heard of it.

Again, this is not a serious complaint; it’s only a title. And the test of a show is not whether it’s taken seriously in the States, but whether it’s taken seriously in its home country – meaning, “The Newsroom” is good whether or not Americans have heard of it. It’s just that I kind of thought our best export might be at least somewhat famous enough in the U.S. to scare off a new show from attaching the same title to a similar subject; I guess not, so expect to see new American shows called “Slings and Arrows” and, of course, “Kids In the Hall,” about a bunch of kids who hang out in a school hall a lot. That one is a natural for the revamped MTV.

The enduring stereotype of the male nurse

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

Todd Korol

One recent November day, Tyler Hume, a 20-year-old nursing student, was at work in the maternity ward of Calgary’s Foothills Medical Centre. Tending to a patient who’d just given birth, he listened to her heart and checked other vital signs, then moved on to her new baby. Being a male nurse in a maternity unit can be tricky, he says—but as one of just a handful of men in the University of Calgary’s entire faculty of nursing, Hume is used to feeling like the odd man out sometimes. “It’s unconscious things, like when [an instructor] is talking about a nursing action, and always refers to the nurse as ‘she,’ ” he says. To create a resource for men in the program, he co-founded the Nursing Guys’ Group, a club for male nursing students.

This fall, 13 per cent of the high school students admitted to the University of Calgary’s nursing program were male, an all-time high. Across the country, the number of male nurses has doubled in the past decade, according to the Canadian Nurses Association (CNA), and now sits at roughly six per cent. But, compared to other professions that suffer from a gender imbalance, nursing is still incredibly skewed. Consider the fact that about 19 per cent of Canadian police officers are female, or that upwards of 30 per cent of elementary school teachers are male. The CNA predicts we’ll be short about 60,000 nurses by 2015, but there are no national strategies to attract more men into the profession. Calgary’s Nursing Guys’ Club is one of the few supports that’s been set up specifically for male nurses, who still face what Hume calls a “societal stigma.”

Male nurses have long been viewed as “less masculine,” notes a study in the American Journal of Men’s Health in November that attempts to put this stereotype to bed. Researchers took a survey of male and female nursing students across the U.S., scoring them based on certain personality traits. It concluded that the nursing profession attracts “males who hold a high degree of masculinity.” The fact that researchers bother to study questions like this might seem surprising, but gender-driven clichés about the nursing profession go back generations: for women, it’s “Hot Lips” Houlihan, or the “sexy nurse” Halloween costume. If female nurses are over-sexualized, male nurses are just the opposite, like Ben Stiller’s goofy character in Meet the Parents. On the TV show Scrubs, one of the main characters (a female doctor) finds herself attracted to a “murse,” despite her initial aversion to his profession.

Continue…

Advantage, working mothers

By Cathy Gulli - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Liam Norris/Getty Images

The Clash’s hit Should I Stay or Should I Go? was written in 1981, but it could serve as the anthem of mothers through the ages grappling with the eternal question of whether they and their children are better off with them returning to work or remaining at home. It ranks among the most polarizing and personal of choices—and everyone thinks their decision is best. And often, they have studies to prove it.

Witness the latest evidence for re-entering the labour force post-baby: researchers at the department of human development and family studies at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro compared non-employed mothers to those working full- and part-time, and the effects on maternal health, couple intimacy, work-family conflicts, housework and child care. The article, in the latest Journal of Family Psychology, found that in most cases, employed moms are at an advantage.

“Work offers mothers some pretty important opportunities and resources that may promote parenting and a sense of well-being,” says co-author Cheryl Buehler. “It minimizes social isolation, and helps develop and refine skills like problem-solving, dealing with diverse sets of people and working as a team.” Those abilities lend themselves to motherhood, explains Buehler, because they “provide children with the kinds of environments and experiences that they need to do well in the world.”

Continue…

The baby killer at Toronto’s Sick Kids was rubber

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

QMI Agency

In April 2010 a story concluded in a Dutch courtroom, much like a similar one burned into the memories of Canadians of a certain age. Nurse Lucia de Berk was cleared of seven murder convictions that had put her in prison, supposedly for life, in 2004. After the unexpected death of a baby cardiac patient—determined by autopsy to be a case of deliberate poisoning with the heart drug digoxin—de Berk was arrested. Deaths previously ruled natural were relabelled because de Berk was present. Prosecutors took as proof of guilt indications that fell far short of evidence—in her diary de Berk confessed to a “very great secret,” which she later said was her unscientific interest in tarot cards—and ignored the fact she wasn’t present for some of the “murders.”

In short, it’s a close replay of Toronto nurse Susan Nelles, the deaths of dozens of babies at the city’s Hospital for Sick Children during 1980 and 1981, and the resulting Grange inquiry after the bogus case against Nelles collapsed. But the real parallel remains unknown to most Canadians even now: it’s not that the wrong person was fingered for murder, but that no murders were committed at all.

That’s the conclusion meticulously and persuasively argued by retired physician Gavin Hamilton in The Nurses Are Innocent. Between June 1980 and March 1981, baby deaths spiked 625 per cent at Sick Kids’ cardiac unit—43 cases in all. Autopsies belatedly performed as death inexorably followed upon death seemed to show poisonous levels of digoxin. Investigators focused on Nelles, because she was (apparently) on duty for 24 of the deaths, and because she had the temerity to ask for a lawyer. Later, the Grange inquiry managed to cast a lifelong cloud of suspicion over another nurse, Phyllis Trayner (now dead), while ruling eight of the deaths as murders.

Continue…

David Cameron’s main rival? Boris Johnson.

By Leah McLaren - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Suzanne Plunkett/Reuters

Earlier this month, when British Prime Minister David Cameron used his veto against changing the European Union’s legal framework treaty to help ailing eurozone nations, the hardline Eurosceptic contingent of his party rejoiced. But it was the reaction of Boris Johnson, mayor of London and one of the most vocal Tory critics of European integration, that garnered the most national attention.

In a BBC radio interview, Johnson approvingly declared the prime minister had “played a blinder”—skilfully performed a move—in refusing to join the treaty. Secretly, however, one can’t help but suspect that Johnson, who is also a popular columnist with the Telegraph and the former MP for Henley, was ever so slightly put out. It’s not that the mayor privately disagrees with Cameron’s stubborn isolationist stance (far from it). But by using Britain’s veto, the PM has effectively pushed Johnson’s own much-speculated-on leadership ambitions to the back burner, where they will be forced to languish for the next little while (but not, it is safe to assume, forever).

The notion that a shambolic city politician with a long history of infidelities and verbal gaffes could represent the biggest threat to Cameron’s leadership might seem laughable to the outside world—but here in Britain it’s accepted fact. The two men have known each other since their school days—first as boarding students at Eton, where Johnson was a King’s Scholar and Cameron a fee-paying boy from an upper-class family, and later at Oxford, where both became members of the legendarily exclusive (and champagne-soaked) Bullingdon Club. And while in the past Johnson strenuously insisted he has no interest in ascending to the prime minister’s office, his denials are not given much credence at home.

Continue…

On the job with ‘Hillary’s angels’

By Alex Ballingall - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

No U.S. Secretary of state has travelled like Hillary Clinton does. As Barack Obama’s top diplomat, she clocked more than 354,000 km in 2010—enough to circle the globe nearly nine times. And as the woman who famously said she made “18 million cracks” in the “glass ceiling” during her 2008 bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Clinton also travels with a highly trained security contingent that includes more than a dozen women.

They were chosen from thousands of applicants to personally guard the secretary as she trots the globe touting American interests. Writing in Elle magazine, Laura Blumenfeld dubbed them “Hillary’s Angels.” Given that they’re trained to fire guns upside down, run for miles on end and take people down in hand-to-hand combat, the handle seems entirely appropriate.

A member of Clinton's security detail keeps watch as the secretary of state speaks in the United Arab Emirates last January.

Karen Grey takes part in training drills at a training facility in Summit Point, W. Va.

Brittany Cross on guard, also in the U.A.E.

Cross and Stacey Berg in combat training at the Summit Point facility.

More drills at Summit Point.

Cold city. Hot market.

By Kristy Hutter - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

A housing crunch is hitting Yukon, land of the great wide open. New construction has virtually stopped in Whitehorse, causing bidding wars in the territorial capital. The average price for a single-family home hit a record $455,000 this year—twice what it was six years ago, and on par with the price of an average home in Toronto.

The vast territory is, believe it or not, suffering a land shortage. The Yukon government has had trouble authorizing land for housing development; citizens, it seems, are fond of those wide open spaces and oppose new development. This, coupled with the fact that Canadians are migrating to Yukon in near-record numbers to take advantage of high-paying jobs in government and the mining industry, has made houses almost as sought-after as the gold southerners have come to unearth.

The housing problem has also affected the rental market. Vacancy is at one per cent—the lowest in years—because people who could normally afford to buy cannot find a house to purchase, and are forced to lease instead.

Continue…

Allyn Robert Parker

By Cathy Gulli - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

Illustration by Jack Dylanw

Allyn Robert Parker was born on March 11, 1946, in Vancouver. His father George was a plasterer nicknamed “Shorty” for never growing taller than five feet after getting rheumatic fever at 11. His mother Hazel was a homemaker who also bore three older children, Don, Davina and Georgina, and enjoyed reading: she chose her youngest son’s name from a romance novel about a Welsh forester.

Allyn was never bookish. He preferred adventure: commandeering his bicycle 45 km from home to Fort Langley, B.C., or target shooting. His travels provided fodder for his budding obsession with photography. He had his own darkroom, worked on the high school yearbook and played the bongos. The one subject he excelled at was technical drawing.

That skill landed him a job with the Vancouver park board, despite not having graduated from high school because he was short an English credit. For two years, Allyn helped survey and plot parts of Stanley Park, which he referred to as “his.” Around then he met Sandra, an aunt’s foster child, and they married in 1967. Eventually the couple moved to Port Alberni, B.C., where Allyn worked as a municipal draftsman. He and Sandy were married 12 years and had three children, Vikki, Dawn and Allyn Dean, before splitting up.

Continue…

The pool chair stakeout

By Rebecca Eckler - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

James Marshall/Getty Images

Torontonian Jasmine Miller went on a four-day jaunt to a family resort in Jamaica with a friend recently. But it wasn’t entirely relaxing, as she explains. “I was sitting on a lounge chair by the pool around 11 one morning. My friend and I had been there since 7 a.m. but she had moved to a chair in the shade. I was reading a book when suddenly I heard this woman calling my friend a bitch and screaming, ‘Did you put your book on my chair?’ ”

Miller’s friend retrieved the book from the chair, but not without exchanging words. “They started going at it. My friend argued, ‘You have been gone for four hours!’ ” The woman said she went for breakfast and had put five towels on five chairs to reserve them.

Everyone around the pool was watching the heated exchange. “All I kept thinking was, ‘Honestly? Is this really happening?’ I thought there would be a brawl,” says Miller. “Her anger was completely out of context with the beautiful surroundings of the sky and the sound of the ocean. She really was enraged.”

Continue…

China’s panda census

By Jen Cutts - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 10:45 AM - 0 Comments

CDSB/ChinaFotoPress

They might be easy to come by on YouTube, but panda sightings in the wild are nearly once in a lifetime—making the bears awfully hard to count. But researchers in China are trying anyway, in the first census of the endangered population in 10 years.

Pandas are shy and solitary by nature. “I’ve been working in these mountains for 20 years, and I’ve never seen a panda in the wild,” Dai Bo, a biologist with China’s forestry ministry, told the Los Angeles Times. So, for the next year, more than 100 people will be scrambling over 32,000 sq. km of mountains in central China, not looking up for the bamboo-munching mammals, but down, for their pale-green droppings.

By analyzing those droppings, scientists can estimate how many pandas are living in an area. In 2000-01, when the animals were last counted, the number stood at around 1,600. Researchers are hoping that when results from the current survey are published in 2013, they will show that conservation efforts, such as a quadrupling of nature reserves and strict anti-poaching laws, have made a difference.

A hotel quiet as the grave

By Emma Teitel - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Yuriko Nakao/Reuters

A hotel in a suburb of Japan’s second-largest city, Yokohama, has been forced to turn away several couples looking for a place to stay. Why? Because the Lastel Hotel is a hotel exclusively for dead people—waiting their turn for a place in the city’s overcrowded crematoriums. The deceased (there are 18 “guests” so far) are stored in cold-storage rooms, in refrigerated coffins. Each coffin costs roughly 12,000 yen ($157) daily to rent.

According to Britain’s Daily Mail, death has become a “booming market” in Japan, with 1.2 million people dying in 2010. By 2040, annual deaths are anticipated to reach 1.66 million. Hisayoshi Teramura, the Lastel Hotel’s owner, notes that Japan’s largest farming association and one of the country’s biggest retail chains, Aeon, have also gotten into the body-storing business. Indeed, the average wait time for a crematorium oven in Yokohama is over four days, putting hotels like Lastel in high demand. “Otherwise people have to keep the bodies at home,” says Teramura, “where there isn’t much space.” At Lastel, families can view their deceased relatives in their respective “hotel” rooms, until crematorium space opens up.

Spielberg’s creatures, great and small

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

Paramount Pictures

Creatures have been good to Steven Spielberg. His career took off with Jaws, which starred a mechanical shark, got a stratospheric boost from E.T.’s animatronic alien, and made prehistory with Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs. Now he’s about to dominate the holiday season with a one-two blockbuster punch—a wartime epic about a horse trying to find his way home, and the animated tale of a Belgian boy detective and his wonder dog. But perhaps the most unstoppable creature of all is the man himself: the 800-lb. gorilla who leaves the biggest footprint in Hollywood.

There isn’t a filmmaker alive who is as powerful, successful or wealthy as Steven Spielberg. No one comes close. Over a 40-year career, the movies he’s directed have grossed over $8 billion worldwide, while movies he has produced have earned $12 billion. His personal net worth is estimated at $3 billion. And as the principal partner of DreamWorks, he’s also the only Hollywood director who controls a major studio. Despite winning three Oscars (for Schindler’s List and Saving Private Ryan), Spielberg’s accolades haven’t always kept pace with his commercial triumphs. Lately he has left producing credits on a load of junky sci-fi—Super 8, Transformers 3, Cowboys and Aliens and Reel Steel. But after a three-year hiatus from directing—his last movie, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, was arguably his worst—he’s back in the game. Spielberg the Artist has finally pushed aside Spielberg the Mogul.

The director has two high-pedigree blockbusters opening within days of each other: The Adventures of Tintin (Dec. 21) and War Horse (Dec. 25). Spielberg is also in the thick of filming Lincoln, a biopic about Abraham Lincoln starring Daniel Day-Lewis. The director, who turns 65 on Sunday, has never been busier. When he finds time in his Lincoln shooting schedule to squeeze in an interview after postponing it twice, you can almost hear the meter ticking.

Continue…

REVIEW: The Unconquered

By Peter Shawn Taylor - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

In 2002, Brazilian explorer Sydney Possuelo set out to locate the mysterious flecheiros—Arrow People—thought to be living deep in the Amazon rainforest and one of the last uncontacted tribes left in the world. He never saw them. And he considered his expedition a complete success because of it.

Possuelo was then head of Brazil’s Department of Isolated Indians and author of a unique national policy that sought to protect long-lost tribes. Even the most benign contact, he realized, inevitably brings hardship and death, often by introducing diseases for which natives have no natural defences. Possuelo sought to protect their way of life by creating a sprawling native homeland, Terra Indigenas, off limits to outsiders. To do this, it was necessary to establish the limits of flecheiros territory. Accompanying Possuelo on this arduous three-month journey by riverboat, dugout canoe and foot is National Geographic writer Wallace, who describes the trek in vivid, if unsettling, terms. Both river and jungle provide a seemingly inexhaustible supply of hidden horrors: from poisonous caterpillars to anacondas lurking just below the waterline. The Amazon, writes Wallace, is “an enormous laboratory where the process of evolution continued to unfold by the minute, spawning a mind-boggling array of deadly creatures and toxic plants.”

Humanity proves to be just as hostile. The river system is rife with poachers, drug smugglers, illegal gold miners and violent tribes already acquainted with the dangers of modern life. Then there’s the gradual disintegration of social order within Possuelo’s party, as the group tromps its way into its own heart of darkness. Surviving the trek, if barely, Possuelo finally locates a flecheiros village. It is empty, although they’re likely watching his every move from the jungle. Only later, while flying over the route, does Possuelo actually see the Arrow People, watching as his strange craft buzzes overhead. “I prefer to keep things this way,” he says. “We will never know each other.”

Big portions weigh down small women

By Julia McKinnell - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images; iStock; Photo illustration by Sarah Mackinnon

“Have you ever wondered why they make clothes for petite women but not food?” asks fitness expert Jim Karas in a new book that’s specifically written for women five foot four and under.

The Petite Advantage Diet is aimed at shorter women who are wondering, in frustration, why regular diets don’t work for them.

“Petite women can’t eat like the big girls,” Karas tells Maclean’s from his office in Chicago, where he’s been personal trainer to celebrities like Diane Sawyer, Hugh Jackman and Oprah Winfrey’s best friend, Gayle King.

With the release of The Petite Advantage Diet, “women are looking at me like I’m the second coming,” he says. “They’re saying, ‘Oh my God! I always knew there was something different! None of these other programs is working for me.’ It’s an interesting sense of urgency for this book. In the United States, 47 million women are five foot four and under. There are tens of millions of women in the U.S. and Canada who are falling into this category.”

Continue…

On the Supreme Court rejecting a national securities regulator

By John Geddes - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 10:12 AM - 0 Comments

The key thing to keep in mind about today’s Supreme Court of Canada rejection of the Conservative government’s bid to create a national securities regulator is that the nine judges didn’t say it was a bad policy idea.

Their unanimous opinion, handed down this morning, only said the federal attempt to usurp the longstanding provincial regulation of stock markets and other securities trading is unconstitutional. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty’s proposed law, they say, “overreaches the proper scope” of the federal government’s broad constitutional power to regulate “trade and commerce.”

The court doesn’t doubt—and in fact confirms—that valid reasons for national securities regulation exist. But that’s not the point. Flaherty’s problem is that the provinces, under the Constitution, have jurisdiction over contracts and property matters. They’ve long regulated securities. The federal government failed to make its case that something about trading stocks and bonds and derivatives has changed so fundamentally in recent times that Ottawa must now step in.

“It is not for the court to suggest to the governments of Canada and the provinces the way forward…” the judges delicately say, before going on to suggest just that: “Yet we may appropriately note the growing practice of resolving the complex government problems that arise in federations, not by the bare logic of either/or, but by seeking cooperative solutions that meet the needs of the country as a whole as well as well as its constituent parts.”

Continue…

Bestsellers – Week of December 19th, 2011

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 8:54 AM - 0 Comments

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

SOPA, theft and the new Cold War

By Peter Nowak - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 7:25 AM - 0 Comments

Will Lion/Flickr

Much has been written about the highly controversial Stop Online Piracy Act currently being considered by U.S. Congress. The legislation would allow for the taking down or blocking of websites that aid in legally-grey file-sharing, such as The Pirate Bay. From the heads of major tech companies writing about how the Act would effectively break the Internet to commentators chiding politicians for their potentially harmful ignorance on technological issues, just about anyone who is concerned with the Internet’s future is frothing mad.

Most of the arguments against SOPA have been bang on, but not many have taken the historical or psychological context of piracy into account. When such aspects are considered, it becomes even clearer just how futile and bone-headed the legislation—if enacted—would be.

It’s handy if we start with defining “piracy.” Under Webster’s traditional meaning, piracy is an act of robbery on the high seas. The only difference between a pirate and a thief, therefore, is water.

Digital piracy obviously doesn’t take place at sea, yet “pirate” somehow emerged as the term of choice for someone who engages in file sharing, rather than “thief.” Why? It’s probably because the people who object to file-sharing—the entertainment industry—think it’s safer and less provocative to call customers “pirates” rather than “thieves.” It’s a small but important idiomatic distinction, so the industry has probably been correct in its approach. Continue…

What to do when the boss has a dumb idea

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 11:54 PM - 0 Comments

A few days before the 1995 Quebec secession referendum, the Montreal Gazette’s publisher, a wonderful man named Michael Goldbloom, took it into his head to run a front-page editorial in French explaining to the province’s majority why we were pretty sure No was the way to vote this thing. Several staffers sat around marvelling at this vision: a front-page editorial in the language we didn’t usually publish stuff in, signed by the boss of all of us. We huddled around a computer terminal, poring over his gentle, insistent argument.

There was a mistake in Michael’s French.

I forget what it was. Subject-verb agreement, or something similarly trivial. We sat around trying to figure out who would tell the big boss he needed to give his French a quick edit. “I’m not going to do it,” said one wide-eyed reporter. A few others voiced similar sentiments. Fix the boss’s French! Finally I said we were being silly. He’d be angrier if we ran this thing with the mistake than if we helped him fix it beforehand, and I was the guy who told Goldbloom he needed to add an ‘e’ to his adjective or whatever. Of course he fixed it immediately, thanked me offhandedly and didn’t think twice about it. But that instinct — the unwillingness to stand up to one’s employer, even if it might objectively do everyone some good — well, we’ve all seen that before.

And so we come to Jonathan Kay’s excellent column about the folly of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. It’s possible to read it and still believe a human-rights museum in Winnipeg would be an excellent idea, but that’s not the likely conclusion. Your likely takeaway would be that this thing had White Elephant written on it from the start.

Anyway, there was about a second’s gap between the voice in my head saying, “Hey, Jon, good column” and the voice saying, “I notice you didn’t write this during the decade when people named Asper ran the paper.”  Continue…

Health transfers: More on flat tires and etiquette

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 4:04 PM - 0 Comments

I discover, as I go over the year’s columns and blog posts, that I predicted all of this health-transfer business in April, at the height of the federal election campaign. The argument then was pretty close to the argument in Monday’s flat-tire federalism post; here’s the bit of my April column you should read if you’re only reading one:

Harper’s plan is to continue shrinking the federal government. It’s not a hidden agenda. He’s announced every part of it. Health care transfers will actually help. They’re just blank cheques to the provinces, good mostly for getting money out of Ottawa…

On the other end of the ledger, he’ll keep squeezing his revenues. That process began with the GST cuts after the 2006 election. It will continue with two policies Harper announced in this campaign’s first week. [Both, you'll recall, are to be introduced after the budget balances - pw] Income splitting will allow a higher-earning taxpayer to transfer part of his salary to a spouse for tax purposes—and cost $2.5 billion a year in foregone revenue. Doubling contribution room to tax-free savings accounts (TFSA) will cost even more. Economist Kevin Milligan has estimated a “revenue cost” of $6.6 billion a year once the TSFA increase is fully phased in.

Add the cost of those growing health transfers and the foregone revenue from Harper’s new tax promises, and you get more than $10 billion a year in reduced fiscal capacity for the federal government. And if Ottawa is locked into a few multi-year spending increases—on military equipment and prisons—there’s progressively less room for everything else. Economist Frances Woolley has said that to reach Harper’s projected savings without cutting defence, public safety or the Canada Revenue Agency, he’d need to cut everything else by one-third.

“Everything else” here includes departments like Environment, Fisheries and Oceans, Industry, Transports and Veterans Affairs.

The main obstacle to making my point comprehensible is all the garment-rending over the “cuts” in transfers from a 6% escalator to a nominal-GDP-plus-inflation escalator with a 3% floor. Tom Walkom is pretty sure that reduction from 6% increases to 4-ish or 5-ish per-cent increases will destroy everything. With John Geddes, I prefer to see it as a lot of money.  Continue…

Return of the mack

By Ian Gormely - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 2:40 PM - 0 Comments

Abel Tesfaye

It should come as some surprise that this year’s biggest R&B star, at least in terms of Internet buzz, wasn’t a flashy major label backed showman, but a self-made, reclusive crooner from Toronto. The Weeknd, aka Abel Tesfaye, spent much of the year in hiding, ditching lucrative gigs in New York for shows in Guelph and London, Ontario. His mixtapes, House of Balloons and Thursday, which he gives awayonline, shirk the genre’s party life tropes. Instead, Tesfaye weaves dark, anxiety-fueled tales built on woozy beats that sample airy indie acts Cocteau Twins and Beach House.

For all the twists and turns music took this year, 2011was the year dance took over. The past twelve months have seen a collective shaking off of the swinging R&B beats that ruled pop for the past decade in favour of the driving, teutonic rhythms of 90s Eurodisco. But while R&B lost its long-held stranglehold on the mainstream, it emerged as the source of the year’s most interesting and progressive music. Continue…