50 yards from Parliament Hill

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, February 4, 2012 at 6:53 AM - 0 Comments

I almost never disagree with Chris Selley. Indeed, I am almost willing to make it a rule not to disagree with Chris Selley. But his analysis yesterday of Brad Trost’s groping for more backbencher power in Parliament is uncharacteristically superficial. Selley celebrates Trost’s public ruminating over his inability to spurn the party whip on polarizing issues; wouldn’t it be nice, he asks, if we had a Conservative Party more like the eclectic, dissent-tolerating one in old Westminster? Perhaps it would be. But there is an awkward plain fact staring us in the face. Continue…

Sino-Forest: a prolonged moan from the investigators

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 6:48 AM - 0 Comments

Recommended to those following the Sino-Forest story: the final report from the independent committee empanelled by the company’s board of directors to investigate the company’s claimed assets and its relationships with suppliers. I have to say the report confirms what I thought in June: the issue with Sino-Forest is not necessarily fraud, but with the practical impossibility of confirming almost anything about its secretive business model. The committee did confirm that Sino-Forest’s cash holdings had been reported accurately, and was able to follow some selected title claims to timber more or less back to the actual trees. But with some extra emphasis on the “less”.

Could a curious investor look at actual maps of timber controlled by Sino-Forest agents, you ask? Well, you see, it’s not exactly kosher for foreigners to carry around maps of remote parts of China. You can borrow them from forestry officials if you really need to. Will the local forestry bureaus confirm Sino-Forest’s claims about plantations operated by its agents? Well, sometimes they’ll give you a certificate of sorts, for all the good it might do. “The confirmations are not title documents, in the Western sense of that term,” the committee report notes. (As I understand it, the Western meaning of “title document” is that it gives one an unquestioned, justiciable claim to ownership of something, whether the Party or the Army or the good Lord in heaven approve or not.) Continue…

GOP: not even the end of the beginning

By Colby Cosh - Friday, January 27, 2012 at 8:37 AM - 0 Comments

A data refresher for those who are following U.S. politics and feeling winded after all these Republican royal rumbles:

Republican debates held so far: 19

Democratic debates already held by this date in 2008: 20

Candidates still remaining in the Democratic race on this date: 3 (Barack Obama, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton)

Date of 26th and final Democratic debate in 2008: April 16

Date on which Hillary Clinton suspended her campaign and endorsed Obama as the candidate: June 7

Yeah, so get comfortable. It is easy to forget how much happened, and how late, in the Democratic race of 2008. The swollen Super Tuesday, Feb. 5, was all but tied. Obama’s money advantage pulled him slightly ahead through February (remember Austan Goolsbee’s back-fence chat about how Obama’s threats against NAFTA shouldn’t be taken too seriously?). Clinton bounced back on “Mini-Super Tuesday”, March 4. The Jeremiah Wright controversy hit the Obama campaign on March 14, during a long stretch without primary events. Clinton won Pennsylvania April 26; much of May was consumed by a wrangle over pro-Clinton Florida and Michigan delegations that had been chosen in primaries held on unlawful dates; and Obama didn’t seal the deal mathematically until a rush of superdelegate endorsements arrived June 3.

There is a perception in this Republican contest that Mitt Romney has been a tad slow to wrap things up, but the Republicans weren’t done either by this point in 2008; John McCain only saw off Romney on Super Tuesday, and Mike Huckabee hung around until Mini-Super Tuesday in March. (Ron Paul’s 2008 campaign just kept going. In fact, it’s pretty much still going.) Only 11 states hold primary events on this year’s Super Tuesday, March 6, so this contest could easily have some life in it until June. It is much too early to be talking of a brokered convention, although people will keep talking about it because it’s what every political journalist hopes for. (They love nostalgia, spectacle, and expense accounts. A national convention without a preordained ending would be Elysium.)

Crowns and chaos in the Middle East

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, January 22, 2012 at 7:45 AM - 0 Comments

Abstract: This paper helps explain the variation in political turmoil observed in the MENA [Middle East and North Africa] during the Arab Spring. The region’s monarchies have been largely spared of violence while the “republics” have not. A theory about how a monarchy’s political culture solves a ruler’s credible commitment problem explains why this has been the case. Using a panel dataset of the MENA countries (1950-2006), I show that monarchs are less likely than non-monarchs to experience political instability, a result that holds across several measures. They are also more likely to respect the rule of law and property rights, and grow their economies. Through the use of an instrumental variable that proxies for a legacy of tribalism, the time that has elapsed since the Neolithic Revolution weighted by Land Quality, I show that this result runs from monarchy to political stability. The results are also robust to alternative political explanations and country fixed effects.

I wouldn’t suggest taking this classic bit of political science too seriously, with its everything-but-the-kitchen-sink regressions on a small data set and its inherently dubious use of an “instrumental variable” to ferret out causation. That said: Victor Menaldo’s basic observations would be hard to refute. Monarchies in the Middle East and North Africa have been stable relative to their republican neighbours; the replacement of a monarchy with a republic rarely if ever makes the people better off; and the monarchies in the region tend to be more liberal economically, even if they don’t have particularly liberal political structures.

In the ci-devant monarchies of the Arab and Persian world, nostalgia for overthrown Western-friendly regimes of the past seems fairly common. When the Libyans got rid of Gadhafi last year, for instance, they promptly restored the old flag of the Kingdom of Libya (1951-69), and some of the anti-Gadhafi protesters carried portraits of the deposed late king, Idris. From the vantage point of Canada, constitutional monarchy looks like a pretty good solution to the inherent problems of governing ethnically divided or clan-dominated places. And in most of the chaotic MENA countries, including Libya, there exist legitimist claimants who could be used to bring about constitutional restorations.

The most natural locale for such an experiment would have been Afghanistan, where republican governments have made repeated use of the old monarchical institution of the loya jirga or grand council. The U.S. met with overwhelming pressure from Afghans to include ex-king Zahir Shah in the first post-Taliban loya jirga in 2002, but twisted the old man’s arm to ensure that his participation would be no more than ceremonial. At least one South Asia analyst, Shireen Burki, thinks this was a regrettable missed opportunity that can only be attributed to reflexive suspicion of monarchism by U.S. officials.

“We don’t do kings,” Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once said when she was asked if restoration could help solve the problems of the south Slavs. “Pity you don’t,” the happy Commonwealth realms and the peaceable kingdoms of northern Europe might have added. The U.S. turned out to be more interested in easily-overwhelmed American clients like Ahmed Chalabi and Hamid Karzai; and how has that turned out?

Things The King’s Speech was silent about

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, January 22, 2012 at 3:34 AM - 0 Comments

I got the book The King’s Speech for Christmas and just finished it; in the very wide field of “slender material adapted into a thrilling hit movie, on whose strength it is then flogged”, it must be some kind of record-breaker. I enjoyed the book, as a reader with about a degree-and-a-half in European history and a keen interest in the pre-war period, but I do not have the creative imagination to have imagined it as fodder for Hollywood. The plain fact is that Lionel Logue scored his big breakthrough in treating the Duke of York (the future King George VI) very quickly, taking a matter of literally a few weeks in late 1926 to help him overcome his stammer and to raise his oratorical abilities to a standard of adequacy. After that time, Logue was consulted very occasionally, serving the King as a sort of good-luck totem on major occasions like the Coronation.

The men obviously got on well, and for decades His Majesty treated Logue with a touching solicitude. Logue’s life was otherwise uneventful. As even the most unschooled reader must have intuited, most of the stuff of the movie—the shouting match in the street, the poignant reconciliation, the surprise royal visit to Logue’s home—is a fairy tale.

But the Hollywoodization of the source material, which researcher/grandson Mark Logue waited until the Queen Mother’s demise to bring to the big screen, goes even further than that. A year after the Oscar triumph of The King’s Speech (still a marvellous film, in my view), most of the audience may still not know that the real Lionel Logue didn’t look anything like Geoffrey Rush. I was surprised to flip to the illustration plates in the book and find that Logue, far from being a vaguely ruined-looking, sad-faced fellow, was actually handsome in a Kennedy-family way. He seems to have positively shone with health and confidence—which, when you think about the background, should really be no surprise at all.

As the movie concedes, Logue had no professional credentials to speak of. He fell into “speech therapy”, a field that did not really exist when he started out, almost by accident. Elocution was about all Logue was any good at in school. In his day, that talent opened the door to a career in entertainment, as a reciter of poems and dramatic monologues. Mark Logue records that, as a young stage performer, he was an erotic sensation among the “goldfield girls” of Western Australia during a resource boom. The movie, by contrast, suggests that Logue’s acting career was no more than a pathetic fantasy. (How could somebody who looked like Geoffrey Rush ever have been a star of stage and screen?)

It was only with the return of Australian soldiers from the First World War that Logue’s calling as an elocution teacher began to tilt, almost imperceptibly, toward the bailiwick of medicine. Like chiropractors of today, he was ostensibly able to assist some afflicted people for whom scientifically validated medical care cannot do much good. His looks, along with a bit of actor’s training, must have helped a great deal.

(Incidentally, after Logue climbed to the top of the new discipline with royal help, he shrewdly pulled the ladder up after himself, employing George VI in an effort to establish standards and licensing criteria he could never himself have met when he was starting out. Public-choice economists will find this a textbook example of how health cartels establish “restricted entry” barriers.)

There’s something else the movie doesn’t disclose: Logue had cash. His grandson’s book shuffles around this topic a tad, but he mentions that the founder of the Logue family in Australia ran a leading brewery that eventually became part of a South Australian beer cartel. Young Lionel went to the best private schools, had the means to travel the world more or less on a whim, and seems to have had no trouble coming up with the cash to obtain office space in London’s Harley Street in 1924—the key decision of his life, amounting to a more or less outright purchase of instant quasi-medical respectability. (Even today Harley Street is the world’s most recognizable physical marketplace for private medical consulting.) Logue was not what you call rich, but the movie depicts a sort of brave, shabby gentility that probably understates the class standing of the real Logue—just as Geoffrey Rush’s rubber mug does poor justice to Logue’s looks.

Of course, “Handsome, affluent guy works his way into the good graces of royalty without much difficulty” wouldn’t have made for much of a movie, would it?

Canada’s looming battle over labour

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

Mark Blinch/Reuters

The Occupy movement, globally ubiquitous and proudly obtrusive, is remembered as one of the top news stories of 2011. In reality, the effort by various species of crank to take over public parks probably wasn’t even the most important “people occupying stuff” news item of the year, at least in North America. That honour rightly belongs to the February swarming of the Wisconsin legislature by up to 100,000 protesters dedicated to stopping Gov. Scott Walker’s “budget repair bill.” The new Republican governor, hoping to balance the state budget without reversing tax cuts of the past decade, struck at the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers, taking away their right to negotiate benefits and capping pay increases at the inflation rate.

The result was a ferocious multi-theatre battle over the value of public sector unions. It raged all year from the steps of the Capitol building in Madison to the state Supreme Court, the schools and universities, and even Wisconsin’s prisons, where guards threatened a wildcat strike and Walker countered by contemplating the use of the National Guard for replacement manpower. In August the state set a record for the largest number of recall elections held simultaneously in the U.S., as six Republicans and three Democrats in the state Senate were caught in the crossfire. (All but two Republicans survived.)

One wonders why this sort of massive fundamental confrontation over public sector unions—a type of confrontation that is all but perpetual in the United Kingdom—has been absent from Canada. It is not as though Canadian governments have failed to present pretexts for warfare. For 30 years the federal government has intervened in labour disputes only occasionally, but in 2011 Labour Minister Lisa Raitt went on a tear, threatening Air Canada customer-service staff with back-to-work legislation in June, pushing a Canada Post lockout of CUPW workers to binding arbitration by statute, and pre-empting Air Canada-CUPE negotiations in October.

Continue…

The ecstasy and the agony

By Colby Cosh - Friday, January 13, 2012 at 4:01 AM - 0 Comments

Curtis Gregory Perry/Flickr

In recent weeks, it seems, adulterated ecstasy (MDMA) has left Alberta and B.C. with a sizable heap of young corpses. A tragedy has thus come home to roost in the West: namely, the tragedy of policy that incentivizes adulteration of drugs that, if manufactured in the open and checked for purity, would kill hardly anybody. Pure MDMA has a larger “therapeutic index”—a wider safety margin for overdose—than alcohol. It would probably make a pretty reasonable substitute for alcohol in many settings if we were to sit down and rebuild a drug culture from scratch. But over the past ten years or so, both Liberal and Conservative governments have worked to increase penalties for and monitoring of the flow of “precursor chemicals” used in the manufacture of MDMA.

It has been their goal to make pure MDMA more difficult to manufacture; when precursors are seized it is hailed as a triumph. But illicit drug factories never do put out the follow-up press release announcing that they’re putting less MDMA in their “ecstasy” and replacing it with other party drugs that have much smaller safety margins, or with drugs that interact dangerously with MDMA. And when rave kids die as a result, the RCMP chooses not to pose imperiously alongside the body bags giving a big thumbs-up. They are eager to take credit only for the immediately visible results of their work. Continue…

A little Rae of sunshine

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 2:43 AM - 0 Comments

“Better a Rae Day than a Harper lifetime.” Not a bad line, is it? I take this minor witticism to be a major portent for the Liberals. When the Conservatives attacked Michael Ignatieff for his truancy, his response was all tear-streaked indignation. A lot of people still think the attacks on Ignatieff were harmful and despicable; I think they weren’t answered properly because there was no good answer. But we might still agree (and by this I mean it would now be insane not to) that the man could have afforded to display a little more self-awareness, a little less wounded amour-propre. By denying the possibility that any amount of time out of the country could impinge on his moral eligibility for leadership of it (MAH PATRIOTIZM!), he forced his defenders into absurd logical postures while allowing undecideds to suspect that he was protesting just a little too much. “How dare these colonials expect me to have actually lived amidst their kooky regional accents and odd cooking smells?”

The important thing to notice about Rae’s little gag is that he is actually part of the punchline. He’s acknowledging (by referring openly to Rae Days) that people still have bad memories of his Ontario premiership. He has assembled the first draft of a defence of his record, rather then shrieking at the temerity of those who might bring it up. Rae says he’s learned from the mistakes he made as a young New Democrat premier, and if he’s going to lead the Liberals, we shall have to hope he has. In the meantime, it sure looks like he’s learned from his pal Iggy’s experience.

SCTV in Edmonton: notes toward an FAQ

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, January 11, 2012 at 2:00 AM - 0 Comments

There’s a movement—it’s a clever piece of magazine marketing, actually, but we’ll call it a movement—to build some sort of local monument in Edmonton to the SCTV television series, which was produced here from 1980 to early 1982. Why would Edmonton build a monument to SCTV? Continue…

Nugent-Hopkins takes the hyphen to new hockey heights

By Colby Cosh - Monday, January 9, 2012 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

Claus Andersen/Getty Images

The Edmonton Oilers’ Ryan Nugent-Hopkins has been doing for the hyphen what Wayne Gretzky once did for the tucked-in sweater. Nugent-Hopkins, the first overall pick in the 2011 NHL draft, had Oiler fans wondering about his league-readiness when he was chosen at the head of a slightly weak queue, with his slight frame and his modest (for a top pick) junior stats. But the fast-thinking Nuge tore into the league like a hyena, earning its Rookie of the Month honour for both October and November.

If you like hyphens, Edmonton hockey fans have four of them for you: nobody compares with the Great One, but Nugent-Hopkins, with his puck vision, body type, and tactical insouciance, can fairly be referred to as not-entirely-un-Gretzky-like.

The young magician gives the Oilers their best-ever shot at snagging the Calder Trophy for best rookie, an award that the franchise has somehow got to seven Stanley Cup Finals without ever winning. (Gretzky was declared ineligible in his first NHL season, having already played a full pro year for the Oilers in the old World Hockey Assocation.) But on the Internet, his double-barrelled surname makes for polarization, attracting love from fans of sweater oddities and abuse from haters who think young RNH—as sportscasters sometimes call him in the interest of efficiency—should just “pick a name and stick with it.” It’s probably already too late for the budding legend to take that advice. But others in the game have done so after arriving in pro hockey with compound surnames.

Continue…

A Double-E G-G?

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, January 7, 2012 at 2:57 PM - 0 Comments

In the journalism game, we call it “burying the lede”. Friday’s Postmedia papers have a column by Stephen Maher in which he waxes utopian about “modernizing” Canada’s monarchy by introducing an elected head of state. “Pfaugh,” I hear you say, “I’ve read it all before.” For the most part, you have. After all, most of the heavy lifting in the argument is done by the mere use of the loaded word “modernizing”; who’s against modernity? Maher chats admiringly about other countries (Jamaica and Ireland) for a few hundred words before letting fly with an easily-overlooked bomblet of originality:

If the prime minister is able to hold consultative elections to select senators—a question the Supreme Court may ultimately decide—then surely we could select our governor-general the same way.

My reaction to this idea was: “Good heavens, I suppose that’s right.” I’ve never heard anyone suggest it before, even in technical literature on the constitution. But like Senate elections, it would appear to be a natural consequence of responsible government: the prime minister can presumably use whatever process he likes—a reality show, a Ouija board, a lottery—to arrive at a candidate for recommendation to the Queen.

It’s hard even to count the things that would have to happen before it would be in some credible political leader’s interests to advocate an elected governor-general. But, then, it wasn’t political leadership that got the Senate-reform ball rolling in the first place.

Banknotables: a holiday conversation starter

By Colby Cosh - Friday, December 23, 2011 at 8:14 AM - 0 Comments

Hilarity! Both of the metropolitan broadsheets in Alberta are throwing a tantrum about the Mint’s plans to dump the Famous Five feminists of the 1920s from the $50 bill and replace them with a picture of an icebreaker. Like most pundits who take a thwack at the occasional issue of personages and emblems on our currency, the authors of these editorials act like they have never been east of Flin Flon.

I ask you to sincerely disregard the epic loathsomeness of the Famous Five—that quintet of unsmiling prohibitionists, pacifists, and white supremacists, at least three of whom bear direct personal responsibility for a four-decade regime of sexual sterilization of the “unfit” in Alberta. Leave aside, too, the fact that women would obviously have been admitted to the Senate soon enough if there had never been a Persons Case. No, I ask you merely to look at the people other countries put on their paper currency. With the exception of Australia, which shares our fetish for early female politicians utterly unknown elsewhere, you’ll find they mostly like to put world-historical figures on there. Japan honours Noguchi, who discovered the syphilis spirochete. England honours Darwin and Adam Smith. Sweden remembers Linnaeus and Jenny Lind. New Zealand commemorates Edmund Hillary and Ernest Rutherford. Continue…

Securities Reference: the power of one

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, December 22, 2011 at 9:28 PM - 0 Comments

If you’ll pardon an off-the-cuff reaction to the Supreme Court’s securities-regulation finding: the federal government tried to argue that the right number of securities-regulating bodies for our country is, eternally and as a matter of Euclidean certainty, “one”. The counter-argument is that the optimum number might be higher than that: it might be one, or two, or three, or ten. Leaving aside the actual constitution, and going only from first principles, you could only support the federal reference if you believed no answer but “one” was ever, under any circumstances, appropriate for a country.

Ten systems seems unlikely to be a sensible choice, of course, but then, the SCC’s decision doesn’t obligate us to keep ten (or 13) systems running in parallel; it leaves the provinces free to devise cooperative arrangements between themselves if they perceive no benefit in the independent exercise of that constitutional power. It is not really difficult to imagine a collaborative process that leaves us with one regulator in the medium term (or maybe two, CPP/QPP-style), the moreso since the efficiency argument for one regulator is ostensibly strong. (Let us note that Alberta has had a change of government, a change that looks increasingly radical with each passing week, since this whole brawl started.)

What, then, has been lost by this decision? As I see it, a finding in favour of the federal government would have closed off one future path permanently, and ended the debate; the finding we got leaves any overall arrangement for securities regulation attainable. That seems like a positive feature. Continue…

The doge of Des Moines

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 5:32 AM - 0 Comments

What has me concerned is that on Main Street Iowa people are coming up to me and saying, ‘What do you think about Dr. Paul?’ These are folks who have to be informed. They have to get past the 30- and 60-second ads. If you ask Iowans if they’re for legalizing marijuana or legalizing heroin, they’d say no. But Dr. Paul has said on many occasions that that’s OK. But people don’t all know that.

I’m not sure whether to be delighted or depressed by the reaction of Iowa Republicans like Andy Cable to the suddenly-real possibility that Ron Paul might win—and thereby discredit!—the state’s first-in-the-nation nominating caucuses. The anomalous importance of Iowa within the U.S. election system has traditionally been defended on two major grounds: (a), that the state is pretty representative of the American “middle” in both geographic and demographic senses, and (b), that a small state like Iowa (or New Hampshire) can scrutinize candidates with a salutary close-up intensity, given a long pre-election period in which to do it.

There is no doubt something to these arguments. (Along with obvious rebuttals to both.) But how can a major party have its cake and eat it too? Specifically, how can the concept of Iowa’s special mission as a testing range for candidates be reconciled with Mr. Cable’s panicky Yuletide talk of uninformed goon voters flying off the handle? Cable’s state has benefited significantly from being a political bellwether, both from the quadrennial media activity and attention and from the political pork that follows. (Ethanol accounts for 9% of the state’s GDP.) Yet Cable is not even waiting for Paul to be nominated before undermining the whole basis for taking Iowa seriously.

Maybe it should be taken seriously; it would be hard to argue, at any rate, that Ron Paul is doing well in Iowa just because he’s so friendly to federal ethanol subsidies. Iowans have taken a good look at Paul, with his anti-Drug-War stance and his isolationist foreign policy and his constitutional literalism, and they appear to have tentatively decided that they like what they see. The response from the “elites”–specifically described as such in Jonathan Burns and Alexander Martin’s story for Politico—seems very much like Brecht’s line about dissolving the people and electing a new one.

You say the party’s insanely elaborate nominating procedure is threatening to deliver a frontrunner who doesn’t want to bung dope-smokers into jail or garrison the lunar surface? In that case, the governor of Iowa warns, “People are going to look at who comes in second and who comes in third.” This is not, I hasten to add, how Iowa chooses a governor.

Most people don’t realize just how far removed the “Iowa caucuses” are removed from any actual end-result in the form of a delegate count. It is not especially easy even to find out this information, though you will have a sense of it if you have ever viewed the chaos on C-SPAN. The marquee event is actually a process of selecting delegates from each precinct for county-level Republican conventions; after some free-form canvassing, voters in any individual precinct may be given a preprinted ballot, may be handed a blank scrap of paper, or may simply be asked to participate in a show of hands. There is no requirement that delegates even represent a specific presidential candidate.

Nonetheless, by some shockingly vague and opaque procedure, the state Republican Party manages to immediately generate and publicize a tally of notional “votes” for each nominee. But the precinct delegates to the county conventions don’t actually get together until March, at which time they assemble to select delegates to the congressional district conventions (which happen in April) and the statewide convention (in June). Iowa’s ultimate national delegation consists of three representatives each from the four congressional districts; 13 at-large delegates representing the entire state; and three state party mucky-mucks.

The whole system captures the arbitrariness, the ceremoniousness, and the rampant bargaining of the infamous electoral system of the pre-Napoleonic Venetian Republic. The Venetians used ten unsummarizable, half-daft rounds of lot-drawing and delegation to select their chief magistrate, the doge. For five centuries, nearly everybody in Europe, including the Venetians themselves, found this system incomprehensible. But it had virtues. In particular, it made the identities of the ultimate electors so difficult to predict that it was inefficient to target any person in particular for corruption or for what we now call “lobbying”. At the same time, it promised a clear and objective result if the procedures, which themselves acquired a charming patina of sacredness over time, were followed religiously.

Today’s U.S. party nominating process has the same totemistic quality, but without any of the benefits to democracy. The reported “outcome” of the January precinct caucuses may not reflect the reality of voter will, and it usually takes the form of a subjective “message” anyway. The perceived winner, as the governor says, might be the fellow who finished third—as long as he was expected beforehand to finish sixth. (Who creates these expectations? Don’t ask!) And far from dispersing and concealing the potential targets of “lobbying”, the Iowa caucuses make the whole state a focus of lavish promises by candidates for the national executive. If Ron Paul really does win, and thus turn Iowa into a sideshow, it may actually end up counting as the most consequential accomplishment in a long lifetime of public service.

Tim Tebow: he wins in mysterious ways

By Colby Cosh - Friday, December 16, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 0 Comments

Garrett W. Ellwood/Getty Images

The secret to the polite, positive, peppy Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow—an athlete-evangelist who concludes sideline interviews with “Thank you” and tells print reporters to “Have a good day”—is obvious if you study his alliterative name. With his incessant talk of Jesus and his grovelling humility in the face of success, he is clearly a character who escaped from the dusty pages of some old, didactic magazine for children. Somewhere out there in the fiction universe, a mischievous, unkempt Will Webow is giving hotfoots and skipping church and mopily wondering where his straitlaced doppelgänger can possibly have gone.

Double Heisman Trophy winner Tebow, drafted by Denver in 2009 amid jeers from experts, took over the offence from Kyle Orton at halftime on Oct. 9. The Broncos were 1-3 in the standings and trailing their AFC West rivals San Diego 23-10 on the scoreboard. Tebow completed just four of 10 passes, but kept it close, passing for a touchdown and running for another. The Chargers eked out a 29-24 win, and Denver fans, then still as divided as professional critics were about Tebow’s unorthodox throwing technique, chanted his name appreciatively. The desperate Broncos, figuring they might as well see what they really had in their wild-throwing, fast-scrambling, bull-bodied talent, named him the starter.

And the magic began. Two weeks later, after a Denver bye, Tebow mounted a clumsy, near-disgraceful performance against Miami for 57 minutes, falling behind 15-0. No NFL team had ever come back from such a deficit, but Tebow’s Broncos won, 18-15, in overtime. He trampled the Oakland Raiders 38-24 alongside running back Willis McGahee the next week. Then he beat the Kansas City Chiefs 17-10 at formidable Arrowhead Stadium with another late comeback; his final passing stats were a feeble 2-for-8. Same story four days later against the New York Jets, and then the week after, against Miami.

Continue…

In conversation: Alberta Premier Alison Redford

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

Jason Franson

Since she clinched the leadership of Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives in October to become premier, Alison Redford has focused her efforts on promoting the province’s interests across Canada and the U.S., including the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, which was put on hold by the Obama administration last month. Her whirlwind tour through Washington, New York, Toronto and Ottawa in November was a sharp contrast with Redford’s homebody forerunner Ed Stelmach. But her approach is no surprise to those familiar with the important work she did on the international stage, which she has rarely discussed in detail.

Q: The potted biographies about your international work are very jargony—“she facilitated this,” “she served in such-and-such an office.”

A: Well, I think part of the reason for that is the biographies are written by people that don’t have international backgrounds. They’re written for the way my political life has been for the past two or three years, as opposed to when you get into the guts of it.

Q: Can you talk about your career in plain English, then?

A: I’d gone to law school in Saskatchewan and taken a lot of human rights law, on top of the regular training, and I had always been involved in politics, so I spent time in Ottawa working for Joe Clark, who was then chair of the Commonwealth Ministers on South Africa. That’s where the debates were happening over whether sanctions should be applied to South Africa—debates that involved Mulroney and Reagan and Thatcher. I worked for Clark on a regional desk that included South Africa, and then I went back and articled, but I never got it out of my system.

I had an opportunity in about 1990 to go back to South Africa on what was originally a six-week contract, working for the European Union. At that time in South Africa you had a government that was getting ready for transition. Nobody knew what it was going to look like. You had the African National Congress, which was not just a political force but was really almost becoming a de facto government. Essentially, a government in parallel was beginning to be established there.

Q: What was your role there?

A: I was a technical adviser to the legal and constitutional affairs committee of the ANC, which was providing advice to the most senior leadership levels of the ANC. The constitution was essentially being written and negotiated at the same time. So I worked on that; and I also worked on individual special projects. They were going to have to create a public broadcaster with a governance board; they were going to have to create a human rights commission. So I would go out and work with Canadian experts, or experts from other countries, and provide policy recommendations on institutional change. And then they would make decisions as to what they wanted to do.

When a lot of that work started to get done, I went to work for the Australian Embassy doing what you would think of as nuts-and-bolts development work. I funded projects through the embassy on things like sports development, HIV/AIDS, theatre groups that were teaching local communities about education. We built water projects, we dealt with domestic violence. All of the issues about huge, transformative social change, but at a community level.

I was there until 1996 and then I came back to Calgary and I practised family law. I was in a partnership with a couple of people who were criminal defence lawyers, but I didn’t like that.

Q: Why not?

A: I’d come out of a South African tradition, which involved mediation, intraspace bargaining, all that kind of stuff. It was the beginning of the “getting to yes” model of the world. And I came back to Canada and practised family law, and saw a criminal law that was completely litigious and adversarial. I practised law for about four or five years in Calgary and then decided I wanted to go back to development work. I moved to Ottawa and managed a constitutional development project for the Canadian Bar Association. Our partner in South Africa was called the Legal Resources Centre; it did a lot of test-case litigation on freedom of expression, employee rights, whether pregnant women had the right to antiretroviral HIV drugs, that kind of stuff.

Q: Was there a moment when you considered committing to South Africa permanently?

A: Yes. When I lived in South Africa in 1995, I applied for citizenship. And they turned me down. I don’t think South Africa in 1995 was looking for a lot of white people to immigrate, quite honestly. So I just went through the normal process and didn’t get accepted, and I thought, well, that’s fate telling me it’s time to come home. Which it probably was.

Q: In a hypothetical future after politics, is there a chance you’d go back?

A: No, no. The second time I went back I had the chance to spend a year in Cape Town, on and off, not working, just living. I really did love it. But it felt like I’d been there long enough. And so we came back to Calgary, and that’s when my daughter was born, in 2002. I carried on in Calgary doing international development work for a company called Agriteam Canada, which would run projects for the World Bank, the United Nations, the European Union, that sort of thing. They’d done education, health care, water, but they’d never done governance. We started to get projects around things like judicial training in Vietnam, judicial training in Bosnia. And I managed three or four of those projects over a long period of time.

Q: And is that what ultimately put you in Afghanistan?

A: I was in Afghanistan in 2005 for the first parliamentary elections. It’s a compelling country. I felt very fortunate to get to go. It wasn’t dangerous like being there during the worst of it, and I think it’s more dangerous now than in 2005, but there was so much to do and we were starting from nothing. That was the first time that I’d taken one of the most senior leadership roles in an election system. We ended up not just having to organize a system where you were telling people it was okay to vote, and safe to vote. I’d be going and talking to women about what a vote was. They knew it was something important, because I’d go to these meetings and they’d bring their daughters. This was very fundamental voter education, with comic books and theatre and trying to get communication to the mosques and imams.

We also had to draft the election law. When I got there the first night, I said to my two colleagues, an American and an Australian, “Okay, where’s the elections act?” “Well, you’re writing it.” A group of us wrote the election act, took it to cabinet, and got it approved. We were doing things like negotiating who was going to be allowed to run as a candidate; we’d have rules, like, if you still funded your own private standing army, we didn’t think you should be able to run. That was really difficult to get through cabinet, because there were some people at the table who had private armies.

Q: Is your international experience going to be a particular asset to you as premier? You took the Keystone XL pipeline file by the throat with your recent trip, and it makes one wonder why this sort of thing wasn’t tried before things started to get out of control in D.C.

A: Well, first of all, the process of making a regulatory decision on Keystone is one that has to run domestically in the United States and we needed to respect that. The citizens of the United States need to talk about how that infrastructure project will impact communities and state governments and all of that.

What I do think is that it’s a really big world out there. There are a lot of players. There’s no doubt that we have known for some time that we were going to start to see the agenda around energy issues and environmental issues change. And my view has always been that it’s possible to be effective in that arena if you can anticipate what’s coming next. I’ll tell you that I believe that in the last while Alberta hasn’t had leadership that understood Alberta’s role internationally. We needed to understand that decision-makers in Europe could impact us, not just decision-makers in Ottawa. It’s not just us in control of our own destiny. We are part of a global economy, and a global energy sphere, and we need to understand the impact that the political dialogue could have on our province.

Q: Is that part of why you won?

A: I believe Albertans saw in this leadership campaign that it was time to have a leader who understood all that. I’ve gotta tell you, I’m a little surprised by some of the commentary around the fact that [I’ve done] a lot of travel. Really? In my life? This isn’t a lot of travel.

Q: So we should expect to see you on the road a lot more then?

A: I’m very ambitious and bold on trade missions. I think Alberta’s future is China, India and Vietnam. We need to be in those countries. I look at the people in this province, whether they live in Edmonton or Fort McMurray or Calgary, and the way that they do business. They move around this globe pretty fast. They’re doing it effectively and making important decisions and attracting investment to this province, and I think Albertans want their government to be that way. And we’re gonna be that way.

The latest in world-needs-more-Canada news (Nordic dep’t)

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, December 11, 2011 at 1:46 AM - 0 Comments

I learn from a sister publication that a handful of economists in Iceland is recommending that the volcanic statelet adopt the Canadian dollar. News from Iceland is always of special interest in Canada, where the Icelandic diaspora has given us legitimate world-historical notables like William Stephenson and, er, the other William Stephenson. The inherent vulnerability of Iceland’s own currency, the króna, has had Icelanders looking at the euro as a refuge, but that option has been yanked off the table for the time being, and may be permanently unavailable within weeks.

One of Canada’s contributions to humanity, as it happens, is the theory of optimum currency areas. The loonie-ization advocates argue that the Canadian dollar is a good choice because Iceland is dependent upon commodity exports and thus has a business cycle more or less in sync with Canada’s. Iceland is also part of the EFTA, with which Canada has a rudimentary free-trade agreement. But that agreement doesn’t cover services and credentials. Mundell’s test for optimality would require free movement of labour between the countries, a common language, and, ideally, some fiscal-transfer mechanism to smooth out the differential effects of the single exchange rate. There is a strong presumption that a currency area should actually be a contiguous area, or very nearly one. Continue…

‘Fundamental constitutional imperatives’, the man says

By Colby Cosh - Friday, December 9, 2011 at 7:53 AM - 0 Comments

Canadian judges are rightly protective of their independence. It takes no more than a whisper of political interference in their work—indeed, arguably much less than a whisper—to raise their hackles and bestir them to the clamorous defence of this most sacred principle. But this principle ought to cut both ways, yes? Mischievous interference in politics by judges should be castigated just as seriously, if we are to preserve the proper relationship between elected institutions and the bench—if only because involvement in law-making by judges invites reaction, pushing us toward an open contest of force between the branches of government. The branch that doesn’t command fighter jets probably shouldn’t want that.

This is worth considering, I think, after Hon. Douglas Campbell’s Wednesday afternoon decision in the Federal Court case of Friends of the Canadian Wheat Board et al. vs. Canada. Campbell’s decision has inspired an immediate loathing and derision from lawyers of a sort I don’t remember seeing since the Miglin case (2003).

Campbell was presented by the government with the argument that section 47.1 of the Wheat Board Act, which Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz pretty obviously violated, contravenes parliamentary sovereignty. 47.1 was added in 1998; it forbids the minister from introducing a statute to take grains out of the single-desk marketing regime without holding a plebiscite of growers. As I wrote earlier, the section has never been considered quite kosher. Parliaments can bind their future successors by means of “manner and form” procedural rules, but (leaving aside some quibbles and wrinkles and impish theoretical contrarianism) they can’t put a fence around their legislative legacy by making it harder to repeal individual statutes than it was to pass them in the first place. This is as much a matter of rudimentary logic as it is of the “constitution” per se, for whose will would we expect and desire to prevail in a contest between the Parliament of 1998 and the Parliament of 2011? Continue…

REVIEW: A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

What if 9/11 is largely forgotten two decades from now? Won’t happen. Yet young people today rarely hear of the 1978 murder-suicide of more than 900 people, mostly Americans, at an agricultural colony in Guyana. Reverend Jim Jones’s mass killing of followers has dropped out of our consciousness of the 1970s for a multitude of regrettable reasons—the lack of a physical memorial being one, the political inconvenience of the incident surely being another. (Jonestown has, for example, been edited out of the myth of martyred San Francisco city supervisor Harvey Milk, who cynically protected Jones’s Peoples Temple in exchange for its votes.)

Mostly, the Jonestown deaths have been shifted into a foggy mental category of “cult suicide,” where degrees of culpability are imprecise. Scheeres’s account of the Peoples Temple and Jonestown, founded on new and overlooked FBI records, brings clarity. She tells the story through the testimony of five people, four of whom survived. The record left by Edith Roller, a left-wing English instructor who served as Jones’s official diarist, is perhaps the most poignant: Scheeres reads closely and decodes messages of despair that the teacher left between the lines as her messianic communist “Dad” grew crazier.

Scheeres’s aim is to help us see the valid, even praiseworthy reasons people joined the Temple, and to grasp how hard it was to escape the gulag that was Jonestown. Her absolution effort, however, is partly countered by her own reporting: no other writer has chronicled so forcefully how much help Jones had in engineering death. Doctors, lawyers, journalists and politicians all violated core rules of their callings for him. Focusing on innocents, Scheeres shows how effective Jones’s original anti-racist message of communal love was in its time. Now who will explain the motives of the thugs, concubines and informants who gave Jones power?

Exits: the newly departed

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, December 7, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Charles Rex Arbogast/AP

SIGNED OFF: OPRAH

Oprah Winfrey, America’s richest-ever female entrepreneur, retired the syndicated afternoon TV talk show that represented the heart of her media empire. For her final episode, Winfrey eschewed the usual celebrity guests and gift-giving spectacles, opting for a low-key recital of favourite empowerment messages. “Nobody but you is responsible for your own life,” she told the audience. Her Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) is received on cable in 80 million U.S. households and took over the Corus-owned Viva brand in Canada this year.

DUMPED: GLENN BECK

Meanwhile, Oprah’s mirror-image, the conservative historian-polemicist Glenn Beck, departed network TV after just 2½ years. Beck joined Fox News Channel at the start of 2009 and rocketed to the top of the cable totem pole with impassioned monologues and paranoid chalk talks diagramming the leftist infiltration of American institutions. But advertisers and his audience abandoned him. Beck claimed, “The show has become a movement . . . it doesn’t belong on television anymore.” He was right about that at least: Fox dropped him.

Continue…

Villains: Meet the shame gang

By Colby Cosh and Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 6, 2011 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Getty Images

MADMAN OF NORWAY

Anders Behring Breivik, a 31-year-old Norwegian ultranationalist obsessed with the Muslim presence in Europe, allegedly killed eight people in a bombing of government buildings in Oslo and 69 more in a shooting rampage. Most of the victims were teenagers attending a summer camp held on the island of Utøya by the youth wing of the country’s Labour Party. “I had to save Norway and Western Europe from Muslim takeover,” Breivik later told a court. “Labour has betrayed the country and the people.”

HAREM COULDN’T SAVE HIM

U.S. Navy SEALs killed 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden after the CIA discovered him living in a three-story compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, 1,300 m from the national military academy. The SEALs chosen to enter Pakistan without notifying the country’s compromised government cheered when told, “We think we found Osama bin Laden and your job is to kill him.” Bin Laden’s last line of defence ended up being two shrieking wives who unsuccessfully tried to shield him as SEALs broke into his bedroom.

CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT MACLEANS’ OTHER NEWSMAKERS OF 2011

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Native cigarettes are now a problem for Western provinces, too

By Colby Cosh - Monday, November 28, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 0 Comments

Tim Smith/Brandon Sun

Chief Frank Brown of the Canupawakpa Dakota Nation doesn’t smoke, but he swears by the Mohawk-manufactured cigarettes on sale at the Dakota Chundee Smoke Shack near Pipestone, Man. “We did our research and the provincial [name brand] cigarettes have a lot of chemicals in them,” he says. “We think our smokes don’t have the cancer that the province’s cigarettes do.”

Whatever the supposed health claims put forth by Brown, the Manitoba government isn’t listening. In mid-November, officials seized 90,000 contraband cigarettes, which were not authorized for sale in the province. The next day, Dakota Chundee, which doesn’t sit on reserve land, was open again, crowded with non-Aboriginal buyers.

The raid, and subsequent reopening of the smoke shack, is the latest in a growing frontier war between First Nations and western provincial governments. Unlike in Ontario and Quebec, where the booming Indian tobacco business has also been linked to gangs, not to mention billions in lost taxes, Indian cigarette sales haven’t been an issue in the West. That’s changing as western bands turn to smokes to not only fill their coffers, but to assert land claims, too.

Continue…

R. v. The Doobie Brethren

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, November 24, 2011 at 4:26 PM - 0 Comments

Smokers High Life/Flickr

From the Postmedia wire, today:

Christopher Bennett, who claimed that he should be allowed to smoke up to seven grams of marijuana—about 35 joints—every day for religious purposes, argued that Canada’s drug laws infringed upon his religious rights.

But in a 21-page ruling, Judge Michel Shore wrote, “While the applicant has shown that his practice is based on the belief that cannabis is the tree of life, this, in and of itself, does not make it a religious practice.”

Kind of bizarre if you think about it, isn’t it? The idea that “cannabis is the tree of life” could not more obviously be a religious concept, in the ordinary meaning of the term “religious”. What else would you call it? And what would you call an activity predicated on such a belief? If the belief is assumed to be sincere, and Judge Shore specifically concedes this assumption, then it’s a religious practice. The sentence in quotation marks is, when read as plain English, oddly nonsensical. Continue…

Occupy protests & the Falun Gong precedent

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, November 19, 2011 at 6:14 AM - 0 Comments

As Occupy Toronto gets a slightly bumpy ride in court from Superior Court Justice David Brown, I’ve been waiting for just one legal analyst, amateur or professional, to stumble across what appears to me to be the best, highest-level judicial treatment of the Charter issues that the Occupy movements raise. The case, Vancouver v. Zhang, is all of a year old, and involved a unanimous decision of the B.C. Court of Appeal.

I’m no lawyer, but Zhang seems awfully instructive. The BCCA was presented with a question of crucial importance to the Occupy situations: can a non-artistic structure, in itself, have protected expressive content? Falun Gong protesters had erected a “meditation hut” and a billboard in front of the Chinese consulate on Granville Street. The City Engineer ordered it torn down as an admittedly minor, hypothetical sort of traffic “obstruction”, and the city argued that removing a structure didn’t unduly restrict the protesters’ free-expression rights. City officials weren’t making a political distinction between types of speech, the lawyers contended; they simply had an inflexible mandate to smash any structure that was on city property without a permit. Continue…