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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Who owns the North Pole?

By Charlie Gillis - Monday, July 25, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Janice Lang/NRCan/DFO

The ancient Norsemen believed the mountains and oceans were made from the remains of Ymir—an unlucky “frost ogre” whom the gods slaughtered for the purpose of creating the world. Odin and company were not known for tenderness, but they must have had a sense of humour. The undersea mountain range they left at the top of the planet makes that much clear.

Known as the Lomonosov Ridge, this towering, silt-covered furrow on the ocean floor begins from the nexus of Ellesmere Island and Greenland, then runs some 1,800 km beneath the polar ice cap to an archipelago called the New Siberian Islands. About halfway across, there is a single jag that sticks a couple of hundred kilometres toward the Barents Sea. And there, just below the point of the elbow, under about 4,200 m of frigid water, lies the geographic North Pole.

If they’d had degrees in international boundary law, the creators of the Lomonosov Ridge hardly could have concocted a surer recipe for 21st-century trouble. The Russians laid claim in 2001 to a section of it that includes the pole, and a glance at a relief chart would suggest their claim has merit. By all appearances, the ridge is an extension of the Eurasian continent. Then, last month, leaked documents revealed Danish plans to put dibs on the range based on Greenland’s proximity and apparent geological connections to it. Not to be outdone, Canada is preparing its own claim on territory we’ve long romanticized but historically ignored: this summer, our scientists will take the last in a series of Arctic research voyages intended in part to prove the Lomonosov Ridge is a “natural prolongation” of Ellesmere Island, which it also appears to be. We’re gathering our information with the help of Denmark and the United States—the better to save money and avoid future disputes as to the findings. But make no mistake, we’re in it for ourselves.

The project has amassed an impressive array of data, from the depth of silt across our Arctic shallows to the constitution of the rock going 40 km down. But the geological origins of the Lomonosov Ridge? Well, that’s not so clear. “Russia says it’s a prolongation of their margin, we say it’s a prolongation of ours,” concedes Jacob Verhoef, the federal geologist in charge of Canada’s research mission. “I think the end result is that we both are right.”

That’s a greater level of candour than one hears these days from Moscow, where political leaders speak as though Russia’s Arctic claims require nothing more than the UN’s rubber stamp of approval. But Verhoef’s words are also an acknowledgement that after more than a century of superhuman effort—ill-fated sea voyages, sled-dog expeditions, low-altitude flyovers—we are no closer to answering a question that goes to the heart of any Arctic country’s identity: who, if anyone, owns the North Pole?

We used to think it was ours. Back in 1925, Canada raised eyebrows around the world by declaring as our maritime boundaries the 60th and 141st western meridians, a pie-slice expanse between Alaska and Greenland that converged at, and presumably included the pole. A few months later, the Soviet Presidium passed a law declaring an even larger Arctic domain on its side of the globe, while the recognition of Greenland as Danish territory in 1933 suggested a potential claim for that country between the 60th and 10th western meridians. Both extended in a triangular form toward the pole, as per the so-called “sector principle” countries used at the time to determine polar boundaries.

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Playing footsie with Beijing

By Charlie Gillis - Friday, July 22, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 31 Comments

Andy Wong/AP

Birthday greetings are nice, but when you’re the governing party of a Western country that has styled itself as a defender of human rights, you might think twice about firing off happy returns to the authoritarian rulers of 1.3 billion people. The message is liable to get used in ways you never intended.

That’s what happened a couple of weeks back with a congratulatory letter the federal Conservatives sent the Communist Party of China, marking the organization’s 90th anniversary. State news agencies in China seized on the note, which was signed by Tory party president John Walsh and looked ahead optimistically to “future relations between the two parties,” as proof that political movements around the world are celebrating the birth of Chinese Communism.

Conservative party officials did not return calls for comment, but if they thought the gesture might slide by unnoticed, they were wrong. Dermod Travis, executive director of the Canada Tibet Committee (CTC), demanded that the party retract “the flattering, backslapping words,” and wondered aloud why the idea failed to set off alarms at Conservative headquarters. “Someone should be wise enough to appreciate that the [Communist] regime only maintains power through military oppression,” he said in a statement. “It doesn’t deserve congratulations, but rebuke.”

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Review: Lost in Shangri-La

By Charlie Gillis - Thursday, July 14, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

In May of 1945, as the Second World War was winding to a close, two dozen American servicemen and Women’s Army Corps members took off from a supply base in Dutch New Guinea in search of “Shangri-La”—a pristine valley deep in the island’s interior, populated by what was thought to be tens of thousands of pre-contact natives. It was a sightseeing flight, meant as a treat to Americans stationed in a sleepy corner of the Pacific Theatre. But the C-47 crashed in the jungle, and only three survived to fight their way to the open space of the valley floor.

Lieut. John McCollom, Sgt. Ken Decker and Cpl. Margaret Hastings then found themselves at the mercy of stone-age tribesmen who split their time between primitive farming and village-to-village warfare. Thus began a saga that was largely forgotten after the first atomic bombs landed on Japan. Through newly declassified documents, along with interviews and contemporary press accounts, Zuckoff has pieced together the long lost story of the survivors befriending the natives and fighting wounds, burns and gangrene as they awaited rescue. The Dani and Yali were not technically pre-contact peoples, as one group of researchers had made a cursory trip through the valley seven years earlier. Yet only a handful had ever seen a white-skinned human.

The rescue, when it eventually came, was every bit as improbable as the Americans’ survival (hint: it involved gliders), while the resulting press frenzy transformed the trio into reluctant celebrities. The tribesmen, meanwhile, struggled to adjust to the onslaught of Western civilization, as Zuckoff found after travelling to the valley to interview survivors among those who had assisted the Americans. Still, their recollections add considerable poignancy to a grand adventure: they lived, loved and warred, we realize, during the same lifetime as those who unlocked the power of the atom.

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How do you solve a problem like Roberto Luongo?

By Charlie Gillis - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 5:26 PM - 15 Comments

He’s never been one to pour out his soul, so one might reasonably interpret the phone call Roberto Luongo placed on April 21 as a full-on cry for help. After two straight blowout losses to the Chicago Blackhawks, Vancouver’s superstar netminder had lost the starting role in Game 6 of the Western Conference quarter-finals to his backup, Cory Schneider. Now, with the Hawks threatening to erase a 3-0 deficit in the series, Canucks coach Alain Vigneault was having a public crisis of confidence in his $10-million-a-year goaltender. Luongo’s future hung in the balance.

So he reached out to his brother Leo, a goaltending instructor in the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, and like any good coach, Leo steered the conversation toward the positive. Roberto’s recent failures went unmentioned, as did the attendant pressures of his epic 12-year, $64-million contract. “We talked about him staying focused and sharp and being ready,” Leo told Maclean’s. “In hockey, you never know what’s going to happen.”

As it turned out, Schneider went down in Game 6 with leg cramps, and Luongo entered the game in the third to make a series of impressive stops in an overtime loss. Continue…

Vancouver's 40-year-old virgins

By Charlie Gillis - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 6:04 PM - 9 Comments

Deep in the fuggy, aromatic basement of TD Garden, in a corner of the Boston Bruins’ dressing room, Johnny Boychuk’s words to live by loom above his stall: “Move your feet, play physical, shoot the puck!” They are not so much a credo as a command, penned on a strip of yellowed masking tape like a reminder to an errant child. The defenceman reddened last week when a visitor noticed. “Just something I wrote to myself,” he mumbled through his playoff beard. But there was no need to be sheepish, because here was Bruin hockey boiled to its essentials—skate, hit, shoot. Thus did Boston find its way to the 2011 Stanley Cup final. They would forget it at their peril.

They didn’t, of course. The Bruins championship was a masterpiece of blood and sweat, forged from the work of role players and a goaltending performance for the ages. And the Canucks? They might have used that bit of tape. Continue…

Is democratic reform dying out?

By Charlie Gillis - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 10:05 AM - 25 Comments

Mark Blinch/Reuters

For would-be reformers of the mother of all parliaments, it was a brief and ill-fated courtship—ending with a door-slam to the face. One year ago, nearly six out of 10 Britons were telling pollsters they’d gladly dump the familiar first-past-the post electoral system (FPTP) in favour of a method that better reflected their democratic will. But when given their say in a referendum last week, voters dispatched the alternative with extreme prejudice: nearly 68 per cent opted to retain the old method of electing MPs, soundly rejecting the proposed system of preferential balloting known as the alternative vote (AV).

Advocates for change were quick to marshal explanations. The rejection spoke less to disapproval of AV than to dissatisfaction with its chief proponent, Liberal-Democrat Leader Nick Clegg, they said. Some complained voters had been hoodwinked by hysterical-sounding advertisements suggesting that a costly overhaul of the electoral system would suck money from, among other vital services, intensive care for infants.

None seemed to consider the possibility that FPTP might have its own inherent appeal. “It’s simple, and it normally produces parliamentary majorities,” says Louis Massicotte, a Université Laval political scientist who has studied electoral reform initiatives around the world. “The ambiguities of minority parliaments may fascinate intellectuals. But for the average folk in the street, a clear outcome is always better than a murky one.”

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The future of al-Qaeda

By Charlie Gillis - Tuesday, May 10, 2011 at 9:35 AM - 7 Comments

Getty Images

In the spring of 2004, as investigators scoured mobile phone records for evidence in the Madrid train bombings, a disturbing truth about the killers began to emerge. Far from bloody-minded professionals carrying out Osama bin Laden’s orders, these suicide bombers appeared to be novices—self-radicalized warriors who believed themselves to be carrying out the al-Qaeda leader’s wishes. The closest many of them ever had come to the man was reading his polemics on a jihadist website.

This phenomenon wasn’t new. In the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, cells of wannabes had popped up around the world; most showed all the acumen of Wile E. Coyote hunting the Road Runner. But the coordinated assault on Madrid’s commuter rail network marked a frightening new turn for the world’s first truly global terrorist organization. With its leaders in hiding or on the run, it had managed to outsource its work to self-styled “affiliates”—from the absurdist amateurs of the so-called “Toronto 18” to the homegrown jihadis who killed 52 people by bombing the London Underground. Just when Western intelligence agencies thought they had a handle on the threat, the threat had morphed into something almost as dangerous.

This quicksilver quality had long been al-Qaeda’s key to survival. Bin Laden had assembled his following in the late 1980s from remnants of Arab volunteer brigades who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, and who shared his outrage at the Saudi royal family’s decision to allow U.S. troops on their soil during the 1990 Gulf War. Though the scion of a construction dynasty in Saudi Arabia, he was expelled from the country the next year, and quickly shifted operations to Sudan, where his organization began to live up to its name (in Arabic, al-Qaeda means “the base”).

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Kate’s royal catwalk is a hit

By Charlie Gillis - Wednesday, April 27, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 0 Comments

TEAA/ZDS/Keystone Press

Every outing is a minefield, every greeting a potential made-for-YouTube train wreck. Take the woman who turned up last month to Kate and William’s whistle-stop appearance in Belfast: she drew a laugh with her vain attempt to get the couple to don silly caps labelled “bride” and “groom.” But her too personal remark about Kate’s recent weight loss—well, that wasn’t so amusing. “It’s all part of the wedding plan,” the bride-to-be replied gamely, stifling any urge to tell the woman to mind her own body mass.

Being Kate Middleton is not easy. The former art history student has made four public appearances in official capacity since Prince William proposed, each time drawing a frenzy of scrutiny. Her hemlines have been measured, her posture checked, her smiles reviewed for width and authenticity. If, heaven forbid, she were to utter an offensive word in public, it would travel the globe at warp factor nine.

Yet unlike Diana, who appeared stricken in her first official outings, Kate moves naturally under the public gaze. “She’s not put a foot wrong,” says Claudia Joseph, the author of Kate: Princess in Waiting. Her poise suggests not only intuition but studiousness, says Joseph, as “Kate the commoner” has reportedly undergone rigorous training over the past five months in the myriad anachronisms known as royal protocol. An archaic requirement to stay two steps behind the prince can be trying: she’s as great an attraction as her fiancé, and gets held up by admirers while William is forging down greeting lines.

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