The extreme dangers of action sports

By Charlie Gillis and Nancy Macdonald - Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photo by Richard Bord/Getty Images

These are the days when sports confound. In a cruel split second, the steady rise of a gentle, pioneering athlete destined for Olympic stardom lurched, violently, to tragedy. Canada’s Sarah Burke, the winningest female freeskier in the history of the sport, crash-landed an alley-oop flatspin trick in a Utah half-pipe. Her death, nine days later, has given the sport momentary pause.

Burke had pulled the simple manoeuvre time and again, according to her friend, skier Peter Olenick, who was riding with her in Park City. In landing, her ski “caught an edge,” whiplashing her, head first, into the icy pipe. The impact knocked her unconscious. Initially, Olenick figured she’d broken her collarbone. Soon, however, emergency personnel swarmed her, performing CPR. Burke, who had no pulse and could no longer breathe on her own, was rushed by helicopter to hospital where Olenick, among others, began a bedside vigil.

The only word on her condition came from Olenick’s younger sister Meg, another pro skier. In a message that appeared momentarily on Twitter, the 21-year-old said Burke’s eyelids fluttered and her heart rate increased when she was spoken to. Few, even within skiing’s tight-knit community, understood the severity of Burke’s injuries. After all, they’d seen her bounce back from countless injuries, and far worse falls.

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The fall of the BlackBerry titans

By Chris Sorensen, Charlie Gillis, Cathy Gulli, and Richard Warnica - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 7:20 AM - 0 Comments

Nathan Denette/CP

When Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, the former co-CEOs of BlackBerry-maker Research in Motion Ltd., cut their salaries to $1 last December, and asked investors for patience and confidence, most took that to mean the long-time partners were simply stepping up their efforts to halt RIM’s painful slide, and intended to stick around for some time. “We’re more committed than ever,” Balsillie said.

In reality, RIM was already a company in the midst of the biggest shakeup in its relatively brief but spectacular history. While they tried to reassure investors, the board of directors—including co-chairs Balsillie and Lazaridis—were already coming to some painful conclusions about what had been going wrong and were already considering a change of leadership at the very top.

“Mike and Jim” may have helped pioneer a global industry that’s expected to be worth US$150 billion by 2014, but in an age of iPhones and increasingly ubiquitous devices running Google’s Android software, investors had run out of patience, and pressure was mounting on the board.

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Newsmakers: Jan. 12-19, 2012

By Charlie Gillis - Friday, January 20, 2012 at 8:20 AM - 0 Comments

Graig Abel/Getty Images

When in Rome

Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands slapped down her country’s growing anti-Muslim movement last week, after the hard-liners inexplicably slammed her for wearing a head scarf while visiting a Mideast mosque. The normally reserved 72-year-old monarch had tied the red cloth over her customary black hat before entering the Sultan Qaboos Grand Mosque in Oman—prompting members of Geert Wilders’s far-right Party for Freedom to complain that she’d donned a symbol of female oppression. When visiting a foreign country, her majesty responded tartly, “you adjust out of respect for religion.” Much, she might have added, as Dutch hard-liners expect newcomers to respect European secularism.

Baby, it’s Coldin here

Give Ontario naturist Brian Coldin some credit: he drove naked through the drive-through of a Tim Hortons in Bracebridge, Ont., in order to challenge Canada’s laws against public nudity. But Coldin lost, and a nod must now go to Justice Jon-Jo Douglas of the Ontario Superior Court who, apart from boasting one of the best names in Canadian judicial circles, has a certain way with words. “Not only must those who live in glass homes not throw stones,” he told Coldin from the bench, “they must buy curtains.”

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Canada’s hottest power couple

By Cathy Gulli and Charlie Gillis - Monday, January 16, 2012 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments

The day began with a romantic walk on the beach. Nazanin Afshin-Jam and Peter MacKay ambled along white sand as waves crashed against dark rocks and pelicans dove around them. Eventually, they parted—it was, after all, their wedding day, Jan. 4, and in keeping with some level of tradition, they would get ready separately. The few dozen relatives and friends who had arrived in the last few days were now gathered inside the white chapel at the One & Only Palmilla resort in Los Cabos, Mexico. Afshin-Jam, an Iranian-Canadian human rights activist, model and singer, wrapped her arm around her father’s and they proceeded up the stone steps and down the aisle, where MacKay, Canada’s defence minister and, until that point, the country’s most eligible bachelor, awaited his bride. “I’ll never forget that moment,” Afshin-Jam, 32, recalls. “Peter looked so handsome. I saw a [glint] in his eyes.”

There were plenty of sentimental touches: on the altar, amid candles, were photos of their grandparents, all of whom have died, including Afshin-Jam’s maternal grandmother, who passed away recently; shoes she’d bought to wear to the wedding were tucked inside a pew. Their young nieces wore feathery angel wings. MacKay’s long-time pastor Glen Matheson from Nova Scotia performed the ceremony. “It was magical. There’s no other way to describe it,” says Matheson. “I’ve conducted more than 1,000 marriages in my career, but nothing compares.” The couple rode in a gold carriage, enjoyed an intimate oceanside reception under moonlight, and shared a first dance so personal they won’t reveal the song.

So secret were the details of this wedding, in fact, that the media and public only learned of it afterwards, when MacKay announced he had married “the most important person” in his life—never mind that his proposal to Afshin-Jam was not widely known. And what about that photo of the beaming newlyweds emerging from the chapel with white flower petals falling around them? It too was carefully released by MacKay days after the wedding, perhaps in an effort to quiet the frantic attempts online to piece together some information about—to make some sense of—this surprising turn of events.

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Dumping them onto the neighbours’ lot

By Charlie Gillis - Friday, January 6, 2012 at 5:40 PM - 0 Comments

Desperate times have prevailed so long among the Samson Cree that desperate measures were arguably overdue. But a proposal by Hobbema, Alta.’s largest First Nation to “evict” gang members has neighbouring Aboriginal bands worried, as critics wonder whether banished troublemakers will simply move a few hundred metres down the road, and start causing havoc all over again.

Members of the Samson Cree were to vote Wednesday in a referendum on the bylaw, which would allow any 25 residents of their community to apply to have another evicted. If the person in question was not a band member, a “residency tribunal” would make the decision. While commanders at Hobbema’s RCMP detachment supported the measures, three other nations in and around the central Alberta town—the Ermineskin Cree, the Louis Bull Tribe and the Montana First Nation—said it was a formula for passing ne’er-do-wells from one troubled native community to the next.

Few would disagree, though, that some new and drastic action is needed around Hobbema, a town located amid four native reserves about 95 km south of Edmonton. Afflicted by alcoholism, financial corruption and more recently by drug gangs, the area is a perennial staging ground for crime and sorrow. The 7,000-strong Samson Cree First Nation has been the scene of nine unsolved homicides in the last five years, while losing 49 homes to arson. This week, a resident of the reserve was sentenced to five years in prison for a drive-by shooting in April 2010 that nearly claimed the life of a 22-year-old woman. A 30-year-old woman was charged with murder after a New Year’s Eve stabbing that claimed the life of a 34-year-old man.

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Badly beaten

By Charlie Gillis - Friday, January 6, 2012 at 5:30 PM - 0 Comments

Isaac Brekken/AP; CanadaPoker.com

Pose for news cameras alongside a mountain of cash and you’re bound to draw the attention of some unsavoury characters. Jonathan Duhamel understood that risk after winning the World Series of Poker in 2010—an $8.9-million haul that made him an overnight celebrity in his home province of Quebec. But the 24-year-old from Longueuil never suspected how close to home the danger lay.

Four days before Christmas, Duhamel buzzed a man dressed as a courier into his luxury condo building, thinking a shipment of gifts he had ordered online had finally arrived. “The guy had a parcel and a pencil,” Duhamel recalls. “I didn’t think twice.” He had opened his door only a couple of centimetres when the fake delivery man burst through—followed by another man who had been hiding in the hallway. The pair savagely punched, kneed and kicked Duhamel before forcing him to open a safe where he kept money and valuables.

The attackers absconded with a $40,000 gold-and-diamond bracelet awarded to World Series of Poker winners, along with a Rolex watch and an undisclosed number of 500-euro notes. But the big surprise came a week later when Longueuil police announced they’d arrested Duhamel’s 20-year-old ex-girlfriend, Bianca Rojas-Latraverse, in connection with the invasion. Investigators believe she told the assailants where to find the young poker star and his valuables. All three suspects now face robbery-related charges, while a man who was allegedly spotted showing off the Rolex in the Beauce, a small-town region south of Quebec City, was charged with possession of stolen property.

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Who’s your daddy? Mommy doesn’t have to say.

By Charlie Gillis - Monday, December 19, 2011 at 1:29 PM - 0 Comments

Andrew Tolson/Maclean's

A Toronto man who believes he is the son of John Diefenbaker cannot sue members of his own family for allegedly cutting him out of an inheritance, an Ontario judge has ruled.

George Dryden says he will appeal, noting that his basic allegation remains untested—namely, that the man he grew up believing was his father mistreated him, and connived to keep family wealth out of his hands because he knew George was not his son.

Dryden alleges that his non-biological father, Gordon, knew all along that George is the child of Canada’s 13^th prime minister. Continue…

Rogers and Bell team up for the biggest play in hockey

By Charlie Gillis, Chris Sorensen, and Jonathon Gatehouse - Friday, December 16, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Mark Blinch/Reuters

Before the tentative phone calls, the fevered courtship and the awkward consummation of a blockbuster deal, there were breakfasts between Ted and Larry. They lived across the street from each other in ritzy Forest Hill, home to Toronto’s ultra-well-monied. They talked about sports franchises in the way car buffs talk about their favourite set of wheels.

Ted Rogers had bought baseball’s Toronto Blue Jays in 2000 with the idea of boosting his company’s profile in southern Ontario. Larry Tanenbaum was chair of Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment Ltd., the company that owned the coveted Toronto Maple Leafs and basketball’s Toronto Raptors. So once or twice a year, they noshed beside the Rogers family pool, talking pucks, bats and player salaries over scrambled eggs and orange juice. “Ted couldn’t tell you the latest scores,” recalls Tanenbaum. “He was more interested in the concept of sport as something that brought people together. But for as long as I knew him, he and I talked about the idea of one day hooking up and becoming partners in the Toronto Maple Leafs.”

Chances to buy into the crown jewel of Canadian sports and broadcasting don’t come around very often. For 16 years, the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan had watched the value of its interest in MLSE skyrocket, and was in no mood to sell. Moreover, any Rogers bid would surely meet a competing offer by Bell Canada Inc. (BCE), Rogers’ great rival in the cable, phone and wireless business (Rogers also owns Maclean’s). So when Teachers put its 79 per cent stake up for sale last year, the inheritors of Rogers’ corporate mantle quickly signalled their interest. Reports of a pending deal soon surfaced, and the coronation of Rogers Communications Inc. as winner of the MLSE sweepstakes seemed a matter of time.

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Finding a rights balance

By Charlie Gillis - Saturday, December 10, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

George Kovacic

Over the last couple of years, dozens of school boards across the country have introduced anti-discrimination policies aimed at protecting gay, lesbian and transgendered students from bullying. In most places, the initiatives have passed unopposed. But when the public board in Burnaby, B.C., tried to do so last spring, battle lines quickly formed.

Conservative parents demanded to know what the policy would mean for students who objected to homosexuality on religious grounds. Would they be told their views are discriminatory? Would they be “re-educated” if they spoke their minds? Supporters, in turn, accused the group of perpetuating homophobia and in short order things got ugly. Epithets flew on the comments sections of news sites, including racial slurs singling out Asian and Muslim parents opposed to the proposal (one comment on a story on Xtra.ca, the website of Canada’s gay and lesbian newspaper, featured a slur directed at Asian businesses, with the threat, “You will be run out of town”). Competing protests turned board meetings on the issue into media circuses. Demonstrators hoisted signs bearing slogans like “All love is the same,” or “Leave our children alone.”

It’s a controversy, in short, that seems sure to spawn a profusion of human rights complaints—the sort that commissions and tribunals have been eager to weigh in on in the past (a hate-speech complaint over the insult on Xtra.ca is already in the works). But if the protagonists go down this road, they’re bound to find a changed landscape at the other end. Over the past few weeks, Canada’s highest court has issued decisions curbing the powers of human rights tribunals, or making it harder for certain complainants to get a hearing, while government MPs have thrown their support behind a private member’s bill that would get the federal commission out of policing speech altogether.

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Things you can’t do at Niagara Falls

By Charlie Gillis - Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 4:08 PM - 0 Comments

The Niagara Parks Commission surprised no one yesterday when it denied high-wire artist Nik Wallenda clearance to walk a cable strung across Niagara Falls. The 10-member panel appeared to have made up its mind long before Wallenda, an enterprising 32-year-old, and heir to the Flying Wallendas circus legacy, got a measly 10 minutes to make his case.

The 126-year-old panel has long prohibited what it calls “stunting.” Evidently there can be no exceptions. If we understand chair Janice Thomson correctly, indulging Wallenda is the first step onto a slippery slope that leads to requests from other tightrope walkers, balloonists, river swimmers, kayakers and assorted thrill-seekers seeking a taste of notoriety. 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.”

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The value of a man on a rope is…

By Charlie Gillis - Tuesday, November 29, 2011 at 8:05 AM - 0 Comments

EPA/Thais Llorca/Keystone Press

High-wire artist Nik Wallenda made his case last week to perform a tightrope walk across Niagara Falls, saying it would bring $20.5 million worth of tourism spending to the region, plus a $122-million “legacy impact” over the next five years. But his appearance before the Niagara Parks Commission—which has control of the iconic gorge on the Canadian side—underlined the conundrum he now faces: how do you sell the commercial benefits of an event to people dedicated to fighting commercialization?

The commission was formed 126 years ago to curb the hucksterism and stunting that had come to sully the whole Niagara experience. Today, the board interprets its role as rigidly as when hawkers demanded five cents to view the falls through a peephole. “It’s sensationalism,” acting chair Janice Thomson told Maclean’s last summer of Wallenda’s proposal. “That’s not what the falls is supposed to be about.”

Wallenda, an heir to the Flying Wallendas circus dynasty, argues the spectacle will emphasize the falls’ natural beauty as much as his derring-do. Still, his pitch is, at bottom, one of financial benefit to a region buffeted by sagging U.S. tourism. He has submitted a study predicting 125,000 spectators would come to view the walk from the Canadian side, while a stunning 411 million would tune in on television—fully 320 million of them overseas. “What you’ve got is a prime-time event that will last two hours, with one of the wonders of the world as a backdrop,” says Michael Harker, senior partner of Enigma Research, the Toronto-based firm that did the study. “There are host venues around the world that would pay for something like this.” Commissioners responded coolly to the proposal, but have agreed to consider it over the next three weeks.

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.

The RCMP: a Royal Canadian disgrace

By Charlie Gillis and Ken MacQueen - Friday, November 18, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Arlen Redekop photo/PNG

A sleep-deprived Catherine Galliford is running on adrenalin and ragged nerves after a wild week that saw the RCMP corporal rock her employer with claims that she was sexually harassed and bullied by senior officers, even as she served as the spokesperson for two of the biggest investigations in the force’s history. Galliford was calm and competent on camera as the public face of the RCMP’s investigations into the Air India bombings that claimed 329 lives, and serial murders committed by Robert Pickton on his Port Coquitlam pig farm. But while Galliford’s allegations of harassment reached as far as the House of Commons this week, one of her most explosive claims is only now being made public. Galliford says the rampant sexism within the ranks of the RCMP that ruined her health and career may also have contributed to the mismanagement of the Pickton murder investigation, at a cost of many lives.

Galliford said during an internal affairs meeting with RCMP staff this April that a senior officer “did nothing” with information that could have broken open the Pickton murders more than two years before his arrest, and attributed the flawed investigation to sexist attitudes and misogyny. In two extended interviews with Maclean’s this week, she said her examination of a file from the Coquitlam RCMP, with information dating as far back as 1997, showed the force had more than enough information by the late 1990s to obtain a warrant to search the Pickton property. Instead, surveillance on the farm was curtailed, indicative, she says, of the “indifference” that marked the investigation of the disappearance of women from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and a “misogynist” attitude toward women.

She said in October 2001 she read an RCMP file dealing with the Pickton farm as she briefed herself on her assignment with the missing women’s task force. “I had one of those ‘oh, no’ moments because I saw what was already on the file. There was enough evidence there for another ITO (information to obtain a search warrant),” she said. She said the file included evidence of guns on the site of the farm, as well as women’s clothing, government identification and an asthma inhaler later tied to one of Pickton’s victims. Yet, she said there was only a cursory attempt at surveillance, which was cut short because it was impossible to see activity at Pickton’s trailer, which was set back far from the road.

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Dief’s my daddy

By Charlie Gillis - Monday, November 7, 2011 at 6:13 PM - 0 Comments

Andrew Tolson/Maclean's

If you thought you’d heard the last of Mel Lastman, think again. The paternity case against Toronto’s diminutive former leader has arisen 10 years on in the case of a man who believes he is the son of the late prime minister, John Diefenbaker. It could prove pivotal to Geroge Dryden’s legal and financial fortunes.

Louie v. Lastman came up as lawyers squared off over whether Dryden should be able to sue members of his own family, whom he alleges cut him out of an inheritance because they knew he was an illegitimate child. “He stands in the same position as [plaintiffs] in the case of Mel Lastman,” Clare Burns, the lawyer representing George’s non-biological father, Gordon, told the Ontario Superior Court in Toronto. “This court was clear in that case that concealment of paternity is not a cause of action.” Continue…

Are we ready for driverless cars?

By Charlie Gillis - Thursday, November 3, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 0 Comments

Cole Garside/Maclean's

The implication, of course, is that they don’t trust us. Why build a car that commandeers the brakes and wheel if not to eliminate that pesky statistical variable known as “human error”—which is to say, the fallibility that makes us all kin? The sooner we accept this truth the better: in Canada alone, 2,100 people die in traffic accidents each year. Fully 90 per cent of accidents are attributed to driver error.

But there’s something about piloting an automobile that stirs the inner irrationalist, which might explain the glee YouTube viewers have taken in video captured during a recent car safety demonstration in Gothenburg, Sweden. The exhibition was supposed to show off the vaunted “city safety” feature on Volvo’s S60 sedan, which applies brakes automatically in the event of an imminent crash.

Instead, a dais full of journalists was treated to the spectacle of the shiny, orange sedan plowing headlong into the back of a strategically placed transport trailer, then bouncing back after impact with its windshield wipers flapping ridiculously. Erik Coelingh, technical leader of Volvo’s so-called “active safety” program, recently told Maclean’s that the braking system had failed due to lack of power from an improperly charged battery. But there was no avoiding the tsunami of ridicule this sort of footage tends to elicit. “What’s the problem here?” snickered one Web commenter. “It came to a complete stop, no?”

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Hackers’ revenge

By Charlie Gillis - Monday, October 31, 2011 at 8:45 AM - 0 Comments

When hackers in Winnipeg reprogrammed an electronic road sign last week—“Slow the f–k down,” it read—police chalked the incident up to standard sophomorism. It turns out the prank was part of a continent-wide trend that has turned valuable traffic safety tools into the equivalent of bathroom walls. And—surprise, surprise—you can blame the Internet. Winnipeg is just the latest in a series of communities in which vandals, working from instructions posted to the auto website Jalopnik.com, have rigged the portable, pixelated signs to beam unsanctioned messages. “Nazi Zombies! Run!!” read one in Austin, Texas. Last month in Canmore, Alta., a hacked sign announced open season on bunnies, a reference to the mountain town’s problem with feral rabbits. Another, in Lubbock, Texas, offered the blood-stirring warning: “OMG the British R Coming.” While the new missive on the Winnipeg sign seemed safety-oriented, the agency that placed the device was not amused. The original message warned of frequent deer crossings, notes Brian Smiley, spokesman for Manitoba Public Insurance—a serious hazard on the stretch of road in question. “And on top of that, there’s the profanity.” Then again, the signs might be a touch more foolproof. Hacking instructions first posted to Jalopnik two years ago observed that sign owners often forget to padlock the programming keypads or change the manufacturer’s password: “DOTS” (Department of Transportation). For anyone who has been frustrated by the traffic delays the signs are often deployed to announce, that makes them an appealing target. To wit the message on a sign that was hacked two years ago in Springfield, Mo.: “Prepare to be annoyed.”

Canada’s game gets dirty

By Charlie Gillis - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

CP/Dave Chidley

Time was, Canadians looked upon race-baiting in the U.S. South with a sense of bemused pity, smug in our belief that such attitudes could never take root here. Today, we might consider the following question: where in contemporary America would a fan think it funny to throw a banana at a black athlete?

The hockey world was suitably revolted last week after someone did just that during an NHL exhibition game in London, Ont., in a bid to rattle Philadelphia’s Wayne Simmonds, who was taking his turn in the shootout. “Disappointing,” “despicable” and “disheartening” were the labels chosen by former goaltender Kevin Weekes, who is black. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman insisted that the unidentified culprit “is in no way representative of our fans.”

Well, not all of them. Simmonds, who grew up in Scarborough, Ont., told reporters afterwards that he’d experienced racism in the game before (ironically, he is alleged to have used a homophobic slur in play five days later). Weekes himself was the target of a banana-tossing incident in Montreal in 2002, while junior hockey crowds in Quebec have been known to mock Aboriginal players with war whoops and bow-and-arrow mimes.

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Why Bob Dechert kept his job

By Charlie Gillis - Monday, September 26, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 11 Comments

Meet the press: Dechert is parliamentary secretary to Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird

Firing him would have been easy. Few people outside of Mississauga, Ont., had heard of Bob Dechert before he rolled the dice on his career by trading amorous emails with a correspondent with the Xinhua news agency, Communist China’s official mouthpiece. Thanks in no small part to the 53-year-old MP’s own giddy prose—“I really like the picture of you by the water with your cheeks puffed” fits nicely into a single tweet—the story quickly found legs: by the middle of last week, the reporter, Shi Rong, was on front pages across the country.

Dechert downplayed the exchanges as “flirtatious.” “The friendship remained innocent and simply that—a friendship,” he said on his personal website, which also features a picture of him with his long-time wife, Ruth Clark. But the image of a middle-aged man in the throes of a grade-school crush has stuck, overshadowing Dechert’s little-known status as a party fixer that insiders believe may have spared him relegation to the backbenches. Messages sent from Shi’s inbox—apparently by her angry husband—revealed not only that the married MP had professed his love for the journalist, but that Shi had sought a divorce to pursue her new relationship. “To continue her love affair with this member of Parliament,” the jilted man typed in a message sent to all 240 of his wife’s contacts, “Shi Rong pitilessly asked to end her marriage while stationed overseas.”

For a Conservative government that once talked tough about Beijing’s espionage program, it was more than a bit of domestic unpleasantness. Xinhua is a state-owned news agency whose foreign bureaus have in the past served as less-than-convincing cover for Chinese spies. “It’s an open secret that many of the Chinese reporters stationed overseas actually work for Beijing’s Ministry of State Security,” says Li Ding, deputy editor-in-chief at Chinascope, a Washington-based agency that monitors and analyzes Chinese media. “Westerners think of Xinhua as a news service. In fact, it is a government agency.”

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Third-party advertisers take the spotlight in the Ontario election

By Charlie Gillis - Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 9:45 AM - 3 Comments

Andrew Tolson/Maclean's

Outsiders have never been terribly welcome in Canadian election campaigns. In federal votes, the 95 per cent of us who don’t belong to registered parties face a bulwark of laws restricting third-party campaign spending—rules rooted in the fear that, left unguarded, democracy will be sold off to the highest bidder. This theory has been an article of faith among left-wingers since the early 2000s, when a conservative activist named Stephen Harper waged a court battle against the limits, to the delight of Bay Street’s heavy hitters.

The Supreme Court of Canada ultimately upheld federal third-party spending limits. But few provinces have strong limits of their own. And if Ontario’s current election campaign is any guide, fears of big business stealing elections for conservative parties may have been laughably misplaced. As of last week, all six third-party advertisers registered with the province’s election watchdog were either labour organizations or coalitions who have in the past run attack ads against Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak. Meantime, an array of environmentalists, NGOs and green entrepreneurs have joined forces in hopes of saving the province’s two-year-old Green Energy Act, with plans for unprecedented forays into the ground-level campaign. Leaders of the ad hoc group deny they are acting for or against specific candidates or parties. But Hudak is the only leader committed to undoing the act’s key provisions.

The Tories might have seen this coming. Four years ago, they felt the full force of a labour-funded coalition called Working Families, which took advantage of Ontario’s loose laws on third-party advertisers by unleashing more than $1 million worth of anti-Conservative attack ads that helped propel Premier Dalton McGuinty to victory. The Tories later complained to the province’s chief electoral officer, claiming the group was a front for the Liberals. An investigation indeed revealed ties between Working Families and Grit campaign director Don Guy. But the probe found no evidence that the group was outright controlled by the party.

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Diefenbaker, Jr.?

By Charlie Gillis - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 8:40 PM - 2 Comments

Andrew Tolson/Maclean's

A Toronto man who believes he is John Diefenbaker’s biological son will get a chance to prove his lineage after all.

The Diefenbaker Canada Centre in Saskatoon, Sask., agreed today to grant access to personal artifacts in its collection to help George Dryden obtain a DNA sample and determine whether the late prime minister is his father.

“As previously indicated, we have sympathy for Mr. Dryden’s situation and are willing to help where possible,” wrote Michael Atkinson, the director of the centre, in a letter to Dryden’s lawyer Stephen Edell, and obtained by Macleans.ca. Continue…

Wade Belak’s final hours

By Charlie Gillis - Friday, September 9, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 17 Comments

Glenn James/NHLI/Getty Images

In broadcasting, as in hockey, reliability ranks high on the list of professional virtues. Dead air or squandered studio time are radio sins on par with an empty dressing-room stall before practice. The responsible party can expect retribution and, if he keeps it up, a ticket to the bush leagues.

Some athletes-cum-commentators take a while to grasp that, so the text Wade Belak sent Jeremy Bennefield last Tuesday night came as reassurance to the Nashville radio producer, who had been tasked with grooming the former NHL tough guy to host a weekly show on an all-sports FM station. “I’ll be there on Friday night,” wrote Belak, who was in Toronto at the time. “Staying until Sunday. Any way we can tape a show in that time slot?” The time signature on the message read 11:29 p.m. ET. Bennefield didn’t pick it up until 9:15 a.m. the following day, and he made sure to fire off a quick reply: “Yes, we’ll make it work.”

Three hours later, Belak was found hanging in his hotel room in downtown Toronto, the victim of an apparent suicide (though authorities have not confirmed the cause of death). And Bennefield has been pondering that text exchange ever since.“Somebody actually asked me whether I thought this was a reach-out,” he says from Nashville. “You know: whether Wade was seeking some sort of reassurance that he had something to live for.” But that doesn’t square with the man he had seen at a taping just days earlier, ribbing staff at 102.5 The Game, cracking jokes at his own expense. While recording the inaugural episode of his weekly show and podcast “The Game Changer,” the 35-year-old had enthused about setting down roots in Nashville, where he’d just wound down his playing career. “Based on my conversations with him, based on the texts that I got hours before the fact,” he says, “my impression is this wasn’t a guy looking for a way out.”

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A life without fear

By Charlie Gillis - Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

Photographs by Cole Garside

On the morning of May 2, having just returned from a family cruise along Canada’s east coast, Cindy Barkway waited in the kitchen of her Etobicoke, Ont., home with a piece of momentous news. “They’ve killed Osama bin Laden,” she told her nine-year-old son David as he descended, bleary-eyed, from his upstairs room. She scanned his face for reaction: when he laughs or frowns, the boy can look hauntingly like the father he never knew. This time she got an uncomprehending stare.

“Who?” he asked.

“The guy who killed Daddy,” said David’s older brother Jamie, exasperated, and with that the younger boy brightened. Since they were toddlers, Cindy has been conditioning her sons with early-years style accounts of their father’s death in the north tower of the World Trade Center—how David Sr., a trader with BMO Nesbitt-Burns, had gone to a meeting in New York; how an angry man had sent airplanes to fly into the tall building; how their dad and a lot of other blameless people died in a tragedy that changed the world.

Cindy was six months pregnant on Sept. 11, 2001, with the boy she’d name after her late husband. She had joined David Sr. on his fateful trip to New York to do a bit of shopping, so she bore witness to the smoke billowing from the towers before she knew what caused it (a drugstore clerk told her that the buildings had been struck by hijacked airliners). This cascade of misfortune would bring uninvited celebrity: as the loved one of a Canadian victim who was actually in New York at the time, she became the focus of intense interest to her own country’s media. She also counted among the so-called “9/11 moms” featured on Oprah Winfrey and Primetime with Diane Sawyer.

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A daredevil’s toughest challenge

By Charlie Gillis - Friday, August 5, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Dilip Vishwanat/Getty Images

High above the stage, under the glare of a spotlight and 800 sets of unblinking eyes, Nik Wallenda’s mother is perched on a chair. The chair looks like it might have been borrowed from a farmhouse kitchen, and it is teetering on a metal bar fitted at each end with padded brackets; the bar, in turn, rests on the shoulders of her son and a 21-year-old Canadian named Jonah Finkelstein.

Wallenda and Finkelstein, meanwhile, are seated on bicycles with rubber-free wheels, which balance precariously on a length of cable strung between heavily anchored towers of steel. The whole ensemble soars about two storeys high, with nothing but the cable between themselves and the floor. This is the so-called “Chair Pyramid,” the crowning manoeuvre of the Fabulous Wallendas’ thrice daily show at the Missouri theme park Silver Dollar City, and a trick as familiar to the team as brushing their teeth.

But today something seems to be going wrong. As his mother lifts one foot to the seat of her chair, the balance bar Wallenda holds to maintain stability bobs erratically. Wallenda’s movements grow increasingly frantic, and as the spectre of calamity grips the crowd, his voice fills the room: “Watch it, Mom!” Then, as quickly as it started, the crisis has passed: the men regain their balance and Delilah Wallenda—58 years old, grandmother of four—tucks her feet underneath her and stands upright on the chair. She holds the pose a few seconds, then sits back down as the men pedal to a platform at the end of the wire. A round of thunderous applause.

Later, still drying perspiration from his bristly orange hair, Wallenda cops to a secret: “I tell my mom to ‘watch it’ in every show. When I look like I’m off balance? Moving my bar like crazy? All to build drama.” Asked whether he might regret pulling back the curtain quite so far, Wallenda nonchalantly shrugs. “People understand that we’re entertainers. That’s where our skills come in, and believe it or not, it’s the hard part of what we do.”

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