Is it time to chuck welfare?

By Ken MacQueen - Friday, April 19, 2013 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

Steve Russell/Toronto Star

On April 23, Maclean’s hosts “Health Care in Canada: What Makes Us Sick?,” a town hall discussion at Theatre Junction Grand in Calgary. The free event—focusing on the social conditions that impact the health and longevity of Canadians—is held in conjunction with the Canadian Medical Association. It will be broadcast by CPAC. The conversation on the health impact of disparities in income, education, housing and employment continues online at healthcaretransformation.ca.

Last week UNICEF, the United Nations agency, released a report on the status of Canada’s children compared to 28 other industrialized countries. It placed Canada’s kids a mediocre 17th in overall well-being. Among the results are poor rankings in many basic necessities to reach a healthy, productive adulthood. Canada’s in the bottom third in “relative child poverty”; there are too many teens spinning their wheels by not being in school, training or employment; and we’re 27th (ahead of only Latvia and Romania) in health and safety, including vaccination levels and rates of infant and child mortality. In the 10 years since the last UNICEF survey, our children’s view of their life satisfaction dropped seven notches to 24th place. Only five Eastern European countries fared worse.

At the root of this, and other international reports on Canada’s subpar performance, is poverty and all its ugly, spendthrift offspring: illiteracy, undereducation, unemployment, substance abuse, teen pregnancy, fractured families, incarceration, mental illness, excessive hospitalization and chronic disease. The percentage of Canadians living below the poverty line has stalled in the 11-14 per cent range for more than three decades, despite—and in many cases because of—an array of expensive government programs. Federal and provincial governments plead they are hamstrung by debt and soaring costs for health care and social programs, yet, critics say, they offer little in the way of bold thinking or new approaches.

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Sex shocker: Why men fake it, too

By Ken MacQueen - Sunday, April 14, 2013 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Tim Gray/Getty Images

Harvard Professor Dr. Abraham Morgentaler, founder of a Boston clinic for male sexual and reproductive disorders, offers a glimpse behind the examination-room door at the hopes and hang-ups of his patients. His latest book, Why Men Fake It: The Totally Unexpected Truth About Men and Sex, takes the measure of manhood in the age of Viagra, Internet porn and shifting gender roles. Medicine has made huge advances in overcoming male sexual dysfunction. Now it’s time to end the myth that men are selfish sexual louts, he says. Satisfying their partner is the true goal of modern man, he says. No, really.

Q: As an undergrad you researched the effects of testosterone on the brains of lizards. If stereotypes hold it’s a short hop to the sex lives of men.

A: Women have joked for a long time that the male brain is pretty similar to a lizard brain. In fact, sexuality comes from the deep part of our brain that we do call the reptilian brain. The fascinating thing about human sexuality is this interface of primal, biological urges with thoughts, reason and culture.

Q: Can you describe your practice at Men’s Health Boston treatment centre?

A: I’m a specialist in what I call guy stuff. For 25 years I’ve been seeing men around their most intimate issues, sexual issues, reproductive issues and along the way have made a specialty out of low testosterone for men. There’s a huge part of this about how the guy sees himself as a person, how his sense of masculinity is affected by these difficulties.

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King Ralph’s parting shots

By Ken MacQueen - Friday, March 29, 2013 at 5:11 PM - 0 Comments

(John Ulan/CP)

Originally published September 19, 2006:

Ralph Klein — outgoing premier of the money machine that is Alberta — is sitting in his sprawling legislative office this late August afternoon, looking at once bemused, puzzled and disengaged. He has just warmed the seat for the second-to-last Question Period he will ever need to endure, in an Edmonton legislature he’s never much liked. The tone of the opposition questions — outrage both real and imagined — is the stuff of any democratic chamber in the land. But that’s where the similarity ends.

Alberta is burdened with prosperity and drowning in cash. The only debt-free province, it will have $26 billion stuffed into various savings and endowment funds by the end of this fiscal year. It has one-tenth the country’s population, yet it piled up a surplus last year larger than the federal government’s, even after paying every Albertan $400 in “Ralph Bucks.” Well, you’ve got to do something with the filthy stuff: lucre is choking the streets, clogging the drains, and clouding the mind. Half the province is being rebuilt on a grander scale. The other half would be too if not for the darned labour shortage. It’s a crisis, say Klein’s critics — the sort of crisis any other leader in North America would kill for. And yet, prosperity has been King Ralph’s undoing. He heaves a sigh: “Isn’t it strange?”

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B.C. novelist takes a gamble on ‘life of crime’

By Bookmarked and Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, March 27, 2013 at 7:57 AM - 0 Comments

Owen Laukkanen has been a commercial fisherman, an impoverished university student and an international tournament reporter for a poker website. But the biggest gamble for the young British Columbian was a decision to live off his savings, reinvent himself as a crime novelist and write The Professionals. Such efforts usually die forgotten in a dusty corner of a computer hard drive, but with its release last year, Laukkanen stepped onto the top tier of the genre, earning raves from such giants as Jonathan Kellerman, John Sanford and Lee Child (“characters that live and breathe, and chills aplenty”).

It’s not just a case of working a formula—constant action, crackling dialogue, short chapters with cliff-hanger endings. Laukkanen builds that framework and populates it with flesh and blood, offers outsider insights into the economic decay of urban America and spins plots that build from an everyday premise into spiralling disaster. In The Professionals, it was underemployed university grads launching a low-risk kidnap business. What could go wrong? In this riveting second novel, we meet Carter Tomlin, number-cruncher, overextended family man, volunteer high school basketball coach. Then he’s laid off. Happens every day. The job market sucks. He robs a bank, with a note. Then another with a pistol. Then he finds true love with an AR-15 assault rifle and the rush of playing God with people’s lives. As for the money, well, there’s never enough, is there?

What powers both novels, though, is the complicated chemical attraction of its heroes, FBI Special Agent Carla Windermere and Kirk Stevens, Minnesota state investigator: husband, father, basketball coach. Windermere is the prickly loner who craves the big case; married to the job. Stevens re-enters the quiet life in the second novel, working cold cases, pining for a hit of adrenalin; married to Nancy, with a high hotness quotient and a low tolerance for cowboy cops. Windermere and Stevens are a team, better together; strictly professional, of course. What could possibly go wrong?

Visit the Maclean’s Bookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary

What makes Canadians sick?

By Ken MacQueen - Saturday, March 23, 2013 at 8:00 PM - 0 Comments

Andy Clark/Reuters

On March 28, Maclean’s hosts “Health Care in Canada: What Makes Us Sick?,” a town-hall discussion at the Mack Theatre, Confederation Centre of the Arts, Charlottetown. The free event—focusing on the social conditions that influence the health and longevity of Canadians—is held in conjunction with the Canadian Medical Association (CMA). It will be broadcast by CPAC. The conversation on the health impact of disparities in income, education, housing and employment continues in April in the magazine, at a town hall in Calgary, and online at healthcaretransformation.ca.

As Canadians, we love our health care system to death. But in fact health care systems around the world—be they publicly or privately funded and all the variations in between—are but one part of the complex web of social supports and personal and governmental decisions that determine our life course. Health care may be a misnomer, and we have an effective—if expensive—“illness care system” to mend us when we break, as many participants noted during the town hall meetings staged this winter by Maclean’s and the CMA in Winnipeg and Hamilton. But set Canada against its peers—the world’s wealthiest democracies—and we are at best a middling performer when it comes to health outcomes. Many blame a waning concern for creating the living and working conditions that maintain healthy lives.

The Conference Board of Canada, an independent body researching economic and social policy issues, publishes one of the most comprehensive comparisons of international health outcomes. Its most recent survey, “How Canada performs,” puts Canada a mediocre 10th place among 17 industrialized nations. It is well behind the leading nations on such key indicators as infant mortality and deaths due to cancer, diabetes and such musculoskeletal diseases as arthritis, osteoporosis and muscular dystrophy—though Canada’s relative rate of health spending exceeds the top six countries that outperform it: Japan, Switzerland, Italy, Norway, Finland and Sweden. It’s true that Canadians are living longer and with better outcomes for many diseases, but other wealthy countries are improving at faster rates, said Dr. Gabriela Prada, director of health innovation, policy and evaluation for the conference board.

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Christy Clark’s multicultural outreach outrage

By Ken MacQueen - Tuesday, March 12, 2013 at 7:00 PM - 0 Comments

Ben Nelms/Reuters

“Welcome to Bollywood East,” B.C. Premier Christy Clark enthused in January during a glitzy announcement that the province was spending $11 million to host the Times of India Film Awards in Vancouver. Clark dismissed insinuations the April 4-6 event was a sop to Indo-Canadian voters weeks before the May 14 provincial election, calling it “an incredible opportunity for us to sell our province.” But as a series of devastating leaks made clear in the past week, it also now appears part of an effort to buy ethnic votes for the B.C. Liberals with taxpayer funds.

It was a chastened Clark who appeared in Victoria on Monday in an attempt to keep her restive caucus in line, and to face the legislature for the first time since the opposition New Democrats released a leaked draft copy of a 17-page “Multicultural Strategic Outreach Plan,” a strategy to woo ethnic votes that was circulated to senior party insiders and staff, many of whom were collecting a paycheque from taxpayers. Among the strategy’s key points was a plan to issue government apologies for “historical wrongs,” such as the Chinese head tax and the refusal to let Sikhs disembark when their chartered ship, the Komagata Maru, arrived in Vancouver in 1914. Such apologies offer “quick wins” for the Liberals, the document said. The memo was circulated on Jan. 10, 2012, by Kim Haakstad, a Clark confidante and then the premier’s deputy chief of staff.

Clark spent most of question period on Monday admitting the strategy was a disastrous mistake and that she mishandled the resulting furor by sending Deputy Premier Rich Coleman to read her apology in the legislature, instead of doing it herself. “I want to apologize for the ideas in it and I want to apologize for the language in it, as well,” she said. She also said she’ll stand by the future results of an investigation she instigated last week. The lead investigator is John Dyble, who is both head of the public service and deputy minister to the premier.

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Newsmakers

By Emily Senger, Ken MacQueen, and Manisha Krishnan - Thursday, March 7, 2013 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

Chris Wattie/Reuters

Out with a bang

The now former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason is known for being a bit eccentric—a reputation he upheld on his way out. “After 4½ intense and wonderful years as CEO of Groupon, I’ve decided that I’d like to spend more time with my family. Just kidding—I was fired today,” Mason wrote in a letter to staff last week. “I’m OK with having failed at this part of the journey,” he added. But don’t cry for the Groupon founder. Getting fired made him $34 million richer this week—Mason owns seven per cent of Groupon’s stock, which rose five per cent in the days following his exit.

Whose bottom?

David Beckham bragged about doing all of his own stunts for his action-packed H&M commercial, but when it came to flashing a close-up of his bottom, he let a body double take over. The soccer star repeatedly denied using a stand-in for the Guy Ritchie-directed underwear ad—which shows him sprinting, swimming and jumping hedges, all in his gitch—but H&M finally came clean last week: “Due to the tightness of Beckham’s schedule, a body double was used in parts of the video.”

Out of this world

Having conquered Earth, at least in the eyes of his fans, Justin Bieber shared his next ambition with his 30-million-odd Twitter followers last week: “I wanna do a concert in space,” he wrote. The space agency NASA was quick to tweet a reply, referencing one of his hit songs: “Maybe we can help you with that. All Around the World, next off it?” Whether the Bieb gets to be an astronaut or not, he’s clearly training for something. After a concert in Birmingham, England, last week, he bee-lined to his hotel to change for his 19th birthday bash. He just happened to strut into his hotel with his shirt off, displaying an impressive ab six-pack.

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The outrage over Christy Clark’s outreach plan

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, March 6, 2013 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

Ben Nelms/Reuters

“Welcome to Bollywood East,” B.C. Premier Christy Clark enthused in January during a glitzy announcement that the province was spending $11 million to host the Times of India Film Awards in Vancouver. Clark dismissed insinuations the April 4-6 event was a sop to Indo-Canadian voters weeks before the May 14 provincial election, calling it “an incredible opportunity for us to sell our province.” But as a series of devastating leaks made clear in the past week, it also now appears part of an effort to buy ethnic votes for the B.C. Liberals with taxpayer funds.

It was a chastened Clark who appeared in Victoria on Monday in an attempt to keep her restive caucus in line, and to face the legislature for the first time since the opposition New Democrats released a leaked draft copy of a 17-page “Multicultural Strategic Outreach Plan,” a strategy to woo ethnic votes that was circulated to senior party insiders and staff, many of whom were collecting a paycheque from taxpayers. Among the strategy’s key points was a plan to issue government apologies for “historical wrongs,” such as the Chinese head tax and the refusal to let Sikhs disembark when their chartered ship, the Komagata Maru, arrived in Vancouver in 1914. Such apologies offer “quick wins” for the Liberals, the document said. The memo was circulated on Jan. 10, 2012, by Kim Haakstad, a Clark confidante and then the premier’s deputy chief of staff.

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Christy Clark in for a rough ride as fallout from memo tests leadership

By Ken MacQueen - Sunday, March 3, 2013 at 9:21 PM - 0 Comments

British Columbia Premier Christy Clark fields questions in this file photo from November 2012. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Andrew Vaughan

It was all sunshine, rainbows and unity as British Columbia’s 18 cabinet members met in Vancouver Sunday in a show of support for embattled Premier Christy Clark. Deputy Premier Rich Coleman said there was “absolute unity” among the cabinet and the B.C. Liberal MLAs he’s spoken to. “There isn’t the angst that you guys think there is,” he told reporters gathered outside the Vancouver government offices.

It was Clark’s first sit-down with her inner circle since Wednesday, the day the opposition New Democrats released a leaked draft copy of a 17-page Multicultural Strategic Outreach Plan, a highly detailed strategy to woo ethnic votes that was circulated to senior party insiders, many paid by the public purse. Among the plans, which included a full-court press to have Liberal politicians at key multicultural events, was a strategy to issue a series of government apologies to correct such “historical wrongs” as the Chinese head tax and the refusal to allow a shipload of Sikhs to disembark when their charted ship, the Komagata Maru, arrived in Vancouver in 1914.

Such apologies offered “quick wins” for the Liberals the document said. The memo was circulated Jan. 10, 2012 by Kim Haakstad, a Clark confidante and then the premier’s deputy chief of staff.

Instead of a win, the cynicism implicit in the planned apologies and the mixing of partisan politics and government policy has devastated Clark’s leadership and the Liberal’s already faint hopes of catching the opposition New Democrats under leader Adrian Dix, who have long held a consistent and substantial lead in the polls.

Clark, who was away from Victoria for a series of campaign events and speaking engagements when the news broke, drafted an apology that was left to Coleman to read in a hostile legislature. Clark called the strategy “absolutely inappropriate.”

Late Friday, Clark said in a vague and terse statement that Haakstad had resigned without severance “after much consideration of her roles and responsibilities.” That resignation, and an investigation by four senior public servants that Clark initiated to determine if public funds had been misappropriated, have done little to quell the outrage within her party.

The real test of Clark’s leadership may come Monday when she meets with the B.C. Liberal caucus in Victoria. She’s expected to have a rougher ride from MLAs who are feeling the heat from constituents and their riding associations, though the prospect of the Ides of March coming early to depose her leadership would be a huge risk just two months before the May 14 provincial election.

Two outgoing Liberal MLAs, Kash Heed and Dave Hayer, both Indo-Canadians, called the plan insulting and demanded those responsible be held accountable. An outraged James Plett resigned as vice-president of the Surrey-Tynehead riding association, one of many in the area with a substantial Indo-Canadian membership. Plett also quit the party, writing in an angry statement that he was “horribly embarrassed” for his association with the Liberals. “What makes it so repugnant is that the government misused taxpayer dollars to put together a document explaining how the government could misuse taxpayer dollars further and to offer apologies for absolutely horrible things—all for a bump in the polls.” Meanwhile, 89 party members, most of Indo- and South Asian descent, called for Clark to resign after the group held a breakfast meeting in Surrey Sunday. They said Clark made “the ethnic vote a joke” in B.C. Coleman, however, said the calls for her resignation were overblown “nonsense. As far as I’m concerned, we will got into the next election with Christy, and we will beat the NDP.”

To hear cabinet members tell it, the extraordinary cabinet meeting Sunday was merely business as usual. While it was an unscheduled meeting it was not an emergency meeting they all insisted. In fact, when you get down to it, it wasn’t even an unscheduled meeting, said Transportation Minister Mary Polak. “From time to time, cabinet does get together outside of its regular schedule. What does unscheduled mean?” she asked. “As soon as you schedule it, it’s scheduled.”

So, nothing to look at here, folks. Move along. It’s not that simple, however. The party has clearly sprung a leak as often happens to fretful insiders in times of unscheduled, scheduled non-emergencies. On Sunday, the Province newspaper obtained a four-page spread sheet Multicultural Outreach—Coordinated Effort Meeting that placed Haakstad, other members of the premier’s office and senior members of the caucus in a planning meeting for the ethnic vote strategy.

Clark’s future may well hang on the results of the investigation into the strategy and on the party’s ability to stem the damaging series of leaks. Justice Minister and Attorney General Shirley Bond said the resignation of Haakstad was a first step. The apology and the launching of an investigation into the multicultural strategy were a vital start to putting the issue behind them. “From our perspective there needed to be action, and it needed to be taken quickly,” she said.

Clark, who was sworn in as premier two years ago on March 14, 2011, has been running from behind from the start. She replaced Gordon Campbell, who beat a hasty retreat after sinking the party’s popularity by imposing a 12-per-cent Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) on the province without any public notice or consultation. After the public rejected the tax in a referendum, Clark was forced to oversee a return to the previous provincial and federal goods and services tax. The combined PST and GST returns this April 1, reopening old wounds.

Just one caucus member had backed Clark’s leadership bid. But many of her former rivals and potential leadership candidates have left politics or signalled they aren’t running in the next election. Nor is there much appetite to take on the leadership now, when the polls indicate the party is doomed to opposition status unless there is a miraculous turn around in its fortunes.

Where you live may decide how soon you die

By Ken MacQueen - Sunday, March 3, 2013 at 6:00 AM - 0 Comments

Stephen Brookbank

On March 6, Maclean’s hosts a town-hall discussion, “Health care in Canada: what makes us sick?” focusing on the social conditions that affect the health of Canadians, especially those in impoverished neighbourhoods. Held at the McIntyre Performing Arts Centre at Mohawk College in Hamilton, in conjunction with the Canadian Medical Association, it will also be broadcast on CPAC. The conversation about the health effects of disparities in income, education, housing and employment will continue in the coming months in the magazine, and at town halls in Charlottetown and Calgary.

What if you could see the future? What if you could see a young pregnant woman walking down Barton Street in Hamilton’s depressed north end and know her unborn child had already lost life’s lottery; that his or her fate was predetermined by Mom’s postal code?

You would know that this mother—in this neighbourhood, and in the bottom 20 per cent of the city’s income earners—is six times less likely than the wealthiest Hamiltonian to seek first-trimester prenatal care, and more than six times as likely to be a teenager or to have dropped out of school. You’d know the chances of her baby being born underweight and needing weeks in neonatal intensive care would also be higher.

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Book review: Antarctica: An Intimate Portrait of a Mysterious Continent

By Bookmarked and Ken MacQueen - Friday, February 15, 2013 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Antarctica belongs to nobody and everybody; it’s a continent dedicated to “peace and science,” a utopian prospect helped by the fact it has no founding race, barely a century of human history and no permanent human inhabitants to muck things up. Oh, it has visitors: some 30,000 tourists annually, 3,000 transient scientists and quite frequently English science writer Gabrielle Walker. Her book is a multi-dimensional examination of the closest thing we have to Mars. One is tempted to call it a warm look at a cold place, but it is more accurately a respectful exploration of all that makes it tick: its history, geography, the characters both human and animal that cling to this vast, indifferent, all-powerful ice sheet. Barely a page goes by without Walker holding up a shiny new fact, much like the stones gathered as symbols of wealth and utility by the penguins—those inevitable “annoyingly cute icons” she tries—and fails—to despise. Did you know, for instance, dinosaurs roamed through the ferns and forests there less than 100 million years ago? Or that today’s more modest warming trend is disintegrating ice sheets at an alarming rate on a continent with “enough ice to swamp our puny, shore-hugging civilizations.”?

We know this because scientists are crazy enough to live there. Crazy’s formal name is “winter-over syndrome,” when light, logic and inhibition vanish for months. She writes of a scientist who set out to ski 1,300 km in the dark to the relative comfort of McMurdo Station with just a few chocolate bars in his pocket, and another who packed his bags, bade farewell, and deludedly tried to walk there on a treadmill.

Then there are those who pay with their lives. This January a Twin Otter crashed into a remote mountain slope. The bodies of its three Canadian crew remain entombed in the wreckage; the prospect of recovering them is uncertain. “The truth is,” writes Walker, “Antarctica has little time for humans.”

Visit the Maclean’s Bookmarked blog for news and reviews on all things literary

Wealth equals health

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, January 31, 2013 at 2:00 PM - 0 Comments

Ryan Remiorz/CP

On Feb. 4, Maclean’s is hosting “Health Care in Canada: Poor Health No More,” a town hall discussion at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. The free, two-hour event—focusing on the social conditions that impact the health and longevity of Canada’s Aboriginal people—is held in conjunction with the Canadian Medical Association, and will be broadcast by CPAC. The conversation on the effect of social disparities on health will continue in the coming months in the magazine, and at town halls in Hamilton, Calgary, and Charlottetown.

It was 3 p.m. on Sept. 19, 2008, when 45-year-old Brian Sinclair rolled his wheelchair into the emergency department of the Winnipeg Health Sciences Centre, referred by a clinic doctor because of a bladder infection caused by a blocked catheter. He was a Metis with a cascade of social and health issues, the product of a mother haunted by her residential school experience. He had neurological and speech problems, a past history of substance abuse. He’d lost both legs to frostbite in 2007 after spending a bitter February night outside. His landlord had locked him out.

To some who saw him on the streets he was a stereotype of dysfunction. But what killed him in this busy, inner-city hospital on a September weekend were equally insidious attitudes that rendered Sinclair invisible. He spoke to a staff member at the triage desk, then rolled into the waiting area . . . and waited, vomiting and growing weaker. When he finally received medical attention—almost 34 hours later—it was to pronounce him dead. Fellow patients had found him dead in his wheelchair. The cause of death was “peritoneal infection.” A change of catheter and antibiotics could have saved him. An inquest will finally be held this August. But as a headline succinctly said, Brian Sinclair was “ignored to death.” Continue…

Newsmakers

By Ken MacQueen, Patricia Treble, and Emily Senger - Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at 2:45 PM - 0 Comments

Christophe Pallot/Agence Zoom/Getty Images

Sovereignists unite!

Quebec Premier Pauline Marois visited Scotland this week. Possibly Edinburgh is lovely this time of year, but interestingly Scotland is led by the Scottish National Party, which hopes to gain independence from the U.K. in a referendum next year. The Parti Québécois leader’s meeting with First Minister Alex Salmond was thus subject to much anticipation, even if it turned out to be a relatively low-key, private affair. “It’s purely a courtesy event—‘very nice to meet you,’ ” a Scottish civil servant assured the Guardian. The two exchanged gifts and committed to keep in touch, but Salmond didn’t appear with the premier afterwards. All the same, Marois came away inspired. “It is encouraging,” she said, “because when you see people [such] as the Scottish population, which has such a long history, to decide to ask the question on their future in a referendum, I think it is hope for us.”

Old Dogs, nice trick

A bunch of the boys from the Old Dogs old-timers hockey team were having a few beers at a Kamloops, B.C., riverfront locale when they witnessed Kathryn Easton plunge through the ice of the Thompson River. She was trying to rescue two dogs she was walking that had wandered onto the ice and fallen in. Team members formed a human chain stretching into the river, and wisely used a flagpole to reach out to Easton. She and the two dogs were plucked from the river, freezing but unharmed. “I missed the Polar Bear Swim,” Old Dog Bert Kant told the Kamloops Daily News. “We can laugh because everything is okay.” Like Don Cherry says, it’s all about keeping your stick on the ice.

There are hills in Saskatchewan?

Don McMorris may be Saskatchewan’s highways minister but these days he’s better known as dad to 19-year-old snowboard superstar Mark McMorris. Mark won both silver and gold medals at the X Games in Aspen, Colo., last weekend. What was to have been an slopestyle showdown with the legendary Shaun White wasn’t even close. White crashed out in two of three runs while McMorris recorded the highest score in the event’s X Games history. Among his jumps is the triple cork 1440: three off-axis spins while rotating four times over 15 to 18 m of air. No hockey rink in the McMorris yard. “Ours had a drop-in with a down rail and a box,” dad told Snowboarder Magazine.

Lies and misplaced loyalty

The Supreme Court of Canada has refused to hear an appeal of bomb-maker Inderjit Singh Reyat’s nine-year sentence for perjury. Reyat built the bombs that killed 329 people aboard a June 1985 Air India flight from Canada and another that killed two baggage handlers in Japan. He was at best a foot soldier in the Sikh separatist conspiracy, but he pays a heavy price. His life has been a series of trials, appeals and jail cells for more than two decades. He remains the only person convicted in the terrorist attack. In 2011, Justice Mark McEwan convicted Reyat of repeated lying during the trials of his co-accused Ripudaman Singh Malik and Ajaib Singh Bagri. His perjury sentence is believed to be the longest in Canadian history.

Queen Bea no more

The Netherlands’ Queen Beatrix, 75, announced this week that she’s handing over the throne to her 45-year-old son, Willem-Alexander. Beatrix, who was schooled in Ottawa during the Second World War, says she’s abdicating “out of conviction that the responsibility for our nation should now rest in the hands of a new generation.” Willem-Alexander’s accession is set for April 30. He’ll be a male blip in recent monarchical history—since the last Dutch king died in 1890, the country’s monarchs have all been women—and next in line is his eldest daughter Catharina-Amalia.

Talk about male Bonding

“Rumor has it,” as the great Adele is known to sing, that the Academy Awards show on Feb. 24, will bring together for the first time all six men who have played Bond, James Bond. What would one call that? A six-pack of Bonds sounds too plebeian; a bevy of Bonds too girly. A 006 of Bonds, perhaps? The reason, of course, is the 50th anniversary of the bullets, booze and babes movie franchise. And the 006 007s would be: Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig. One thing is a dead certainty: Adele is confirmed to be singing her nominated song Skyfall during the broadcast.

Humble? Well, maybe.

Toronto was spared a multi-million-dollar by-election after Mayor Rob Ford won an appeal of his conflict of interest conviction last week. Ford, elected mayor two years ago, holds onto his office and Torontonians keep their front-row seats on the circus that is city hall. Ford called the trial and the appeal court ruling “a very, very humbling experience.” That said, he pledged to continue his attack on municipal waste and to seek re-election in 2014. “The job is not finished yet, and I plan to spend the next six years on getting the job done.”

Talk about first-class postage

Ann Weiszmann has an understandable fascination with Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Hungarian Jews by giving them doctored identity papers called “shutz-passes.” After all, her mother, then known as Judith Kopstein, was one of those Wallenberg saved. So when Canada issued a stamp in January honouring the great man, Weiszmann bought several booklets in Toronto. When she gave the stamps a close look she was stunned to see a photo of her mother as a 14-year-old, staring back. Canada Post has used a copy of Judith’s 1944 schutz-pass as the stamp’s background. Judith Weiszmann, 83, a retired structural engineer living in Winnipeg, is honoured to be linked with one of her heroes, she told the National Post. She and her mother were stopped by the Hungarian Gestapo. “Those papers saved our lives.”

Tiger takes a mulligan

Anyone who has witnessed Olympic gold medallist Lindsey Vonn attack a ski run knows she is absolutely fearless. This may explain why she has apparently plunged into a romance with golf great Tiger Woods. Star magazine reports the two have dated since November. Vonn, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Woods’s deeply aggrieved ex, Elin Nordegren, has reportedly been teaching his kids, Sam and Charlie, to ski. If anyone can keep Woods—who captured his 75th PGA Tour victory with a win at the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines this week—out of the rough and on the straight and narrow it’s Vonn, who has ski poles and knows how to use them.

An angry young man with nukes

Don’t let North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s baby face fool you: he may prove more warlike than either his late dad or grandpa. Last week a defence communiqué pledged the country’s missile and nuclear programs “will target against the U.S., the sworn enemy of the Korean people.” A day later another statement threatened to take “physical countermeasures” against South Korea if it helps enforce United Nations penalties against the outlaw regime. “Sanctions mean a war and a declaration of war against us,” it warned. Such rhetoric bodes ill for the South’s incoming president Park Geun-hye. Her election platform included dismantling the North’s nuclear program and working toward reconciliation.

Zimbabwe goes bust

Zimbabwean Finance Minister Tendai Biti announced this week that his government had only $217 in the bank. That’s all that was left in government coffers after civil servants were paid. Biti warned that the government doesn’t have enough to fund this year’s presidential election. That leaves the government with no choice: “We will be approaching the international community,” he said. Whether donor countries pay up is an open question. President Robert Mugabe, 88, who’s led—and ruined—Zimbabwe since 1980, has announced he is running again.

Third time unlucky

French judges believe there is evidence suggesting Dominique Strauss-Kahn played a key role in a prostitution ring and should stand trial. In a decision leaked to French newspaper Le Figaro last week, a panel of judges said Strauss-Kahn had “effective and crucial participation in acts of pimping.” Though the former IMF chief has managed to dodge a sexual assault charge in New York in 2011, then a gang rape charge relating to sex parties he attended, it seems he may have to face justice after all, and faces up to 20 years in prison.

Furlong fallout

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, January 23, 2013 at 6:22 AM - 0 Comments

After the Olympic cauldron was extinguished in Vancouver in 2010, John Furlong, the head of its organizing committee, created a new life as a motivational speaker. He commanded fees as high as $50,000 on the international lecture circuit for such topics as vision, leadership, Aboriginal and government relations. He was at his best, the National Speakers Bureau said, “when he can tell his own story naturally,” adding that “the reviews are incredible!”

Now, in an increasingly ugly civil lawsuit in B.C. Supreme Court, the credibility of his story, which usually begins with his arrival in Canada as an Irish immigrant in 1974, is indeed in question. Ontario freelance journalist Laura Robinson, writing in Vancouver’s Georgia Straight newspaper last September, revealed Furlong omitted his past as a Frontier Apostle Catholic missionary teacher in the early 1970s in northern B.C. Furlong sued after Robinson claimed he was physically abusive to students at the school.

Robinson has now escalated the fight.

In court documents filed Jan. 21, she levels searing new allegations of physical and sexual abuse. In unproven claims, she alleges Furlong “abused, bullied and made racist statements” against students, and sexually groped Aboriginal girls while teaching in Burns Lake and Prince George. She also claims, based on witnesses she said came forward after her story was published, that he “physically and psychologically assaulted” his first wife, and “physically assaulted, bullied, psychologically abused and raped” a woman he lived with in Nanaimo between 1979 and 1982.

Last September, Furlong called a news conference to deny all Robinson’s allegations, accusing her of waging a “vendetta” against him. He sued her and the newspaper for defamation, saying in court filings he suffered “grave damage” to his reputation. He said he lost speaking engagements and the allegations affected sales of Patriot Hearts, the book he co-wrote about his life and Olympic experience.

In a statement, Furlong called the new allegations “completely unfounded” and said his lawyers would file a response in the coming days.

Newsmakers of the week

By Jaime Weinman, Jonathon Gatehouse, Ken MacQueen, and Patricia Treble - Wednesday, January 9, 2013 at 4:21 PM - 0 Comments

Sarah Polley

Talking back to the crowd

AC Milan midfielder Kevin Prince Boateng has inspired a spirited debate over how to deal with the growing problem of racist taunts by soccer fans. Boateng, a German-born Ghanaian, led his visiting team off the field during a “friendly” match last week with Pro Patria in northern Italy, to protest racist epithets being hurled from a group of home-team supporters. His decision to “run away” was criticized by Sepp Blatter, president of FIFA, the sport’s governing body. But Boateng was applauded by his coach, many fellow players and by AC Milan president and former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. “This is an uncivilized problem that needs to be stopped,” said Berlusconi, enjoying a rare moment on moral high ground. Such boorish behaviour is “giving Italy a negative image,” he said. Continue…

Clean up plan in the works for Japan tsunami debris

By Ken MacQueen - Tuesday, January 8, 2013 at 11:13 AM - 0 Comments

For 21 months, a 20-metre concrete and steel dock floated across the Pacific from Japan only to wash ashore just before Christmas on a remote beach on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Researchers think it’s part of a 1.5-million-tonne debris field adrift in the ocean after an earthquake-generated tsunami smashed into the coast of Japan on March 11, 2011—and a harbinger of a greater mess due to hit the North American coastline in the next few months.

Governments from Alaska, B.C., Washington, Oregon and California are co-operating with their federal counterparts and local governments on clean-up plans and strategies to deal with anything that makes land—including aquatic species not native to North America—as the winter storm season reaches its peak. The latest report from the Japanese environment ministry said most light, wind-blown debris like Styrofoam and buoys have already hit the Alaskan and B.C. coasts. Lumber, much of it from houses ripped apart by the tsunami, is expected to hit the coast between now and June, though tracking what remains afloat is an inexact science. Other debris discovered to date includes a fishing boat and a motorcycle in a shipping container.

The origin of the Olympic Peninsula dock has yet to be confirmed. Researchers are testing for radioactivity and to ensure the array of sea life attached to it doesn’t include invasive species from Japan. The nearest communities to the site are Forks and La Push, famous haunts in the Twilight series of books and movies, and a suitably eerie setting. A similar 150-tonne dock that washed ashore in Oregon in June proved to be an ecological nightmare, home to no less than four invasive species native to Japan. It was sterilized with blowtorches before it was cut up and hauled away.

Rewiring Trevor Greene’s brain

By Ken MacQueen - Monday, January 7, 2013 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

Kevin Light

It has been 25 years since Trevor Greene gave up competitive rowing for other pursuits: journalism, travel, soldiering, fatherhood, marriage. But today, at age 48, sitting in a wheelchair in his Nanaimo, B.C., home, the forcibly retired army captain is rowing as hard as he’s trained for any event in his life.

Today he rows only in his mind, where he also visualizes walking. The frustrations are enormous for a man once thought of as invincible. He used to be part of the men’s eight crew at King’s College in Halifax, and at the elite club level, pulling until his muscles screamed and the callouses were thick on his hands. Now he makes perfect strokes with his mind, the neurons firing along a familiar course as he stirs up long-remembered sensations: the feel of oar in hand and boat in water. “All that stuff: the sound and the heat and the pain,” he says. When the oar enters the water, “I imagine the tug on my shoulders, because it’s a very good feeling. Very distinctive.” Continue…

Newsmakers 2012: The right stuff

By Ken MacQueen - Friday, December 21, 2012 at 11:44 AM - 0 Comments

Murray Close/Lionsgate/CP

Krush Barrier

Say what you will about the Hummer, that ungainly beast of a motor vehicle can be a lifesaver in the right hands. On Aug. 31, Darrell Krushelnicki, a 46-year-old energy-company worker in Fort Nelson, B.C., sacrificed his 2006 Hummer H3, at no small risk to himself, to stop a speeding car from slamming into four young pedestrians on an Edmonton crosswalk.

It was 4:30 p.m., and Krushelnicki, in Edmonton to visit his family, was exiting the Bonnie Doon Shopping Centre parking lot. Traffic was stopped for three teens and a three-year-old child on a crosswalk with amber lights flashing. Krushelnicki was edging the Hummer out onto the road to make a left turn when he noticed a grey Pontiac speeding down the street, the driver allegedly talking on a cellphone. Krushelnicki edged out further, but it was clear the driver was oblivious to the kids on the road.

“He was accelerating, and I had to make a decision, I felt, and that was to stop the vehicle,” he later explained. He gritted his teeth, braced for impact and drove directly into the path of the car to shield the young people. There was a loud bang, a clatter of debris, and the two vehicles skidded to a stop just feet away from the stunned foursome, who had been unaware they were even at risk. “If it wasn’t for that guy, I’m pretty sure I would be dead,” a shaken 15-year-old Janice Marett told a CBC interviewer. “He could have died if it hit the wrong way. He risked his life for four kids he didn’t even know. It’s amazing.” Continue…

Pickton inquiry report met with anger, recrimination and tears

By Ken MacQueen - Monday, December 17, 2012 at 9:14 PM - 0 Comments

It is one of life’s enduring mysteries that about six Vancouver city blocks down Hastings Street from the rich wood panelling, gleaming granite and fine carpets of the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue, women are climbing into cars with strangers to sell their bodies for a $10-rock of crack cocaine. That they vanish into streets and alleys, into single-room occupancy hotels, into emergency shelters. That even today, with the infamous predator Robert Pickton in jail this past decade, women still sometimes vanish into the ether—their photographs posted on shelter bulletin boards and flapping from telephone poles in the city’s notorious Downtown East Side.

They are lost to the families, in many cases, lost to society. They are the “Forsaken” as retired B.C. Appeal court justice Wally Oppal titled his five-volume report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry, released Monday during a chaotic, tear-filled event at the Wosk Centre.

Outside the centre, First Nations people sang and drummed and held dozens of sheets of paper, each with a name and a picture of a women missing or dead. There was Sherry Irving, and Samantha Belcourt and a woman named Mary Ann Clark, who lacked even a photo to accompany her name, as though she passed invisible through this life.

Inside the centre, Oppal stood before a news conference packed with journalists, family members and advocacy groups, ready to share the results of an inquiry that seemed doomed from its inception in September 2010.

It was born in controversy and cynicism to investigate the utter failure for years of the Vancouver Police Department and the RCMP to recognize that the women vanishing from the neighbourhood were being slaughtered by Pickton, a simple-minded pig farmer from Port Coquitlam, B.C.

After two years, 93 hearing days, dozens of witnesses, 1,500 pages and $10- million dollars, the report seems to have done little to satisfy the aggrieved families of Pickton’s victims: the six he is convicted of murdering, the 27 others whose DNA evidence was found on his farm, and of the dozens more who fell victim to unknown predators.

It took exactly eight words from Oppal’s prepared statement— “The story of the missing and murdered women” — before the first attacks came from families and their advocates. “It’s not a story,” someone shouted. “It’s reality,” shouted another. “The Bible is a story,” added another heckler.

Oppal, stone-faced, pressed on, wearing his heart on his sleeve, calling the murders “a tragedy of epic proportions,” telling audience members this was “an emotional day, a challenging day for each family member.” He credited the dedication of family members “who continue to demand justice for their loved one” for causing this inquiry to be called. “I believe everyone connected with this inquiry has the same goal, to make the changes necessary to help keep our most vulnerable citizens safe and to stop the violence, to stop the violence against all women …”

“Hogwash,” shouted a heckler. And on it went for more than an hour, Oppal doing his best to lay out the report’s key findings to a crowd that had little interest in listening.

He spoke of the ineffective police co-ordination between Vancouver and the RCMP. He described the “systemic bias” that caused the police to dismiss as runaways the women, most of them drug addicted sex-trade workers, many of them aboriginal, even as the numbers piled into the dozens. He condemned the failure of Coquitlam RCMP to press an investigation and a Crown prosecutor to proceed with charges against Pickton in 1997 after he almost killed a drug-addled prostitute the inquiry called “Miss Anderson.” Had Pickton been charged then, rather than five years later many lives would have been saved, Oppal said.

“Why did it take so long for action?” Oppal asked.

From the back of the room came the sound of drums. Audience members rose, then singing and chanting filled the room. It was more than four minutes before it petered out and Oppal could continue. Some family members and dissident native groups who’d loudly proclaimed their voices weren’t heard during the inquiry showed little inclination to listen today.

Oppal pressed on through hisses and boos and sarcastic asides. There were muttered claims of racism. Some family of the murdered women tried to quiet the crowd, but with little success. The anger was deep, the cynicism engrained after years of police and government indifference. Others seemed mired in a learned helplessness. “You know what they don’t have for us is Kleenex,” a woman in the audience muttered in disgust, as though the thought of providing her own was beyond the pale. Those who boycotted the hearings because of a government refusal to offer legal representation claimed they were shut out of the hearings. Yet they seemed more than capable Monday of making their feelings known without a lawyer at their side.

There were more than 60 recommendations. Among them:

• a provincial compensation fund for the children of missing and murdered women;
• a healing fund for families;
• “equality audits” to ensure the police and Crown lawyers deal fairly with marginalized women;
• better training for those in police and justice positions to learn “the history and current status of Aboriginal peoples in the provinces;”
• better programs to prevent violence against missing women, and to enhance services in the Downtown Eastside.

The overarching recommendation was for a regional police force to replace the hodgepodge of municipal police and RCMP detachments in the Lower Mainland. As Oppal rightly noted, it is a common denominator of failed serial killer investigations, from Pickton to Clifford Olson to Paul Bernardo, that key evidence often falls between the jurisdictional cracks.

Ironically, Oppal had recommended a regional police force during a previous police inquiry he headed in 1994 — to no avail. Nor was there action to regionalize policing when Oppal served as attorney general in Gordon Campbell’s provincial Liberal government. And the odds of a move to regional policing now? Unlikely. The province has just signed a 20-year municipal policing contract with the RCMP.

Perhaps good things may yet come from the inquiry. But as Oppal’s presentation Monday ended in anger, recrimination and tears, there didn’t seem much to celebrate. And down Hastings Street, and in the alleys, it was business as usual.

‘Nature Wars’ author Jim Sterba on Bambi and wildlife overpopulation

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, December 12, 2012 at 10:36 AM - 0 Comments

PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHANIE NORITZ

Jim Sterba is a veteran foreign reporter at the Wall Street Journal and one-time war correspondent, but his latest book, Nature Wars, is about insurgency of a different sort: the resurgent population of North American wildlife and the uneasy relationship with its neighbours. Both humans and overabundant populations of deer, bear, goose, beaver, coyote and others have taken to suburban life with sometimes disastrous consequences. “We turned a wildlife comeback miracle into a mess” of fouled parks, deer-vehicle accidents and downed jetliners, he writes. He argues our Disneyfied view of animals has tipped the balance of nature.

Q: I live in British Columbia, where trees are sacred and we love our wildwood creatures. Each has their own special interest group. Yet you say we have too much wildlife.

A: Certain species are over-abundant, like white-tail deer in many parts of the country. Some are just nuisances, like Canada geese. Some are damaging, like beavers. The problem with bears is that people have such an anthropomorphized view of them because they haven’t been around bears a lot, except teddy bears, so when a bear shows up they think, “Oh, it’s a cute little person,” and they throw it a doughnut, or they let it rifle through the garbage can and take its photograph, and the bear begins to associate the smell of people with food, not fear. It’s not the bear’s fault, it’s our fault. Continue…

A Royal pregnancy: grace under pressure

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, December 12, 2012 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Brilliant timing: The birth of an heir would cap a ‘terrific year’ for the royal family

The statement Monday from St. James’s Palace had all the hallmarks of a rush job: “Their royal highnesses the duke and duchess of Cambridge are very pleased to announce that the duchess of Cambridge is expecting a baby,” began the terse statement. After a nod to the happy relatives, it concluded with the meat of the matter: “The duchess was admitted this afternoon to King Edward VII Hospital in central London with Hyperemesis gravidarum. As the pregnancy is in its very early stages, her royal highness is expected to stay in hospital for several days and will require a period of rest thereafter.”

As any parent will tell you, children have minds of their own, and so it was the potential future king or queen of Britain, Canada and 14 other realms who set the agenda in a most unpleasant way. Hyperemesis gravidarum (HG), as most everyone now knows, is a severe form of nausea and vomiting, an amped-up morning sickness that must have made Kate’s weekend visit to her parents’ home in Bucklebury, Berkshire, a hellish experience. Protocol should have dictated that William’s granny, Queen Elizabeth II, would have been the first to know her third great-grandchild and heir was on the way. But even if the couple hadn’t chosen that weekend to share the news of the pregnancy, Kate’s parents, Carole and Michael Middleton, would have surmised it soon enough as their usually unflappable 30-year-old daughter made repeated dashes for the nearest bathroom. By Monday, her nausea was severe enough that a worried William was on the phone to doctors. That afternoon, he drove her into the city to King Edward VII, “London’s foremost private hospital.” He stayed with her until about 8:20 p.m. Monday, returning to the hospital Tuesday morning. Continue…

Newsmakers: Drake vs. Chris Brown and other head-to-head battles of 2012

By Ken MacQueen - Tuesday, December 4, 2012 at 5:00 AM - 0 Comments

of Photos

Newsmakers 2012: Crown Jewel

By Ken MacQueen - Friday, November 30, 2012 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Brian Snyder/Reuters

In the week before Remembrance Sunday, Queen Elizabeth II trekked to the scenic London borough of Richmond Upon Thames to tour the Poppy Factory. She is patron of the Royal British Legion and Prince Harry, her gunship-flying grandson, is among the British and Commonwealth troops in peril in Afghanistan. She was greeted by local dignitaries, toured the production area, had a go at assembling a poppy, and met with staff and clients from the factory-funded employment program for wounded veterans. “The Poppy Factory hasn’t had a visit from the Queen for 20 years,” the facility’s chief executive would later remark. Not that you’d think anyone’s counting—but they are.

By any measure 2012 has been exceptional for the 86-year-old monarch. It marked her 60th year on the throne. She had a historic rapprochement with an ex-Provisional Irish Republican Army commander, whose group blew up her cousin Lord Louis Mountbatten 33 years ago. She presided over the opening ceremonies of London’s Olympic and Paralympic Games, including a star turn with Daniel Craig’s James Bond. On Nov. 20, Elizabeth and 91-year-old Prince Philip observed their 65th wedding anniversary. Continue…

Living to 100 is not all in your genes

By Ken MacQueen - Tuesday, November 13, 2012 at 7:00 AM - 0 Comments

Alex di Suvero/The New York Times/Redux

One of the fastest-growing segments of the Canadian population is its oldest citizens, those 100 years of age or more. Between 2006 and 2011, the number of centenarians jumped by almost 26 per cent to 5,825, a number that is expected to double in the next 10 years, and soar to near 80,000 when a healthy generation of baby boomers hits the milestone in the mid-21st century. Today’s centenarians were alive when the Titanic sank and have lived to see robots exploring Mars like photo-snapping tourists. They saw the advent of penicillin, insulin, polio vaccines, pacemakers and publicly funded health care, to name but a few advances that have contributed to longevity. Medical science is only part of the equation; researchers are finding this hardy group holds many keys to the secret of longer, healthier lives for the rest of us.

The world’s largest study of extreme old-agers is the New England Centenarian Study, which has gathered data on more than 1,600 centenarians worldwide since its start in 1995 under founding director Dr. Tom Perls, a geriatrician at the Boston Medical Center. Its website is a treasure trove of studies documenting the unique characteristics and commonalities of those living to extreme old age. Among the myths the studies shatter is that genetics alone account for advanced old age and that centenarians are the lucky few who have escaped major illness.

Centenarians tend to fall into three groups. Just 15 per cent reach 100 years with no clinical evidence of disease. “We call them escapers,” Perls writes in an overview of the studies. Another 43 per cent are “delayers,” those who don’t acquire age-related diseases until at least 80 years. Another 42 per cent are “survivors,” whose earlier bouts with cancers, heart issues or other age-related diseases have not significantly curtailed their lifespans.

The studies show centenarians are a diverse lot, varying in education, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, religion and diet. (An exception to the religion rule are the much-studied Seventh-day Adventists of Loma Linda, Calif., who have an average life expectancy of 85 years, far longer than the typical American’s. In part, researchers believe it’s because their religion forbids smoking and drinking and encourages exercise, a vegetarian diet, a sense of community and a strict adherence to a day of rest and reflection.) The research does reveal characteristics of those likely to reach 100. Many are incorporated into the site’s popular Life Expectancy Calculator (livingto100.com). Among the predictors:

• Few centenarians are obese.

• A long history of smoking is rare.

• At least half of centenarians have immediate family that lived to very old age.

• Children of centenarians tend to follow a parent’s path to a longer life and, like them, tend to be extroverts who are able to handle stress with little evidence of neurosis.

• 85 per cent of centenarians are women.

The disparity between genders is explained in part because women have lower probabilities of dying at all ages than men, who have higher rates of death by accident and misadventure in their early years.

Canadian experts in geriatric care tend to concur with the study’s conclusions. Dr. Samir Sinha, director of geriatrics at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, who was appointed by the Ontario government this May to help craft a seniors care strategy, says a social network, a sense of purpose and engagement, physical exercise and preventive health care are as vital as good genetics. All of those priorities are likely to have a place in Sinha’s report, due late this year. The “poster child” for Sinha’s seniors strategy is a 102-year-old Toronto resident known as Mr. W., a witty and engaged retired architect who lives in a book-filled Toronto apartment. Sinha helped spring him from a hospital bed almost two years ago with the help of his physician, Dr. Mark Nowaczynski, clinical director of House Calls, an interdisciplinary team for frail, house-bound seniors. Though Mr. W. has multiple health issues, he’s not been back to the hospital since. Two Rubik’s cubes sit on a windowsill, testament to his sharp mental faculties. He’s the very essence of the optimistic, socially engaged centenarian.

“It’s not that centenarians have had particularly healthy lifestyles, other than not smoking, but that they have positive outlooks, are generally optimistic and don’t sweat the small stuff,” says Nowaczynski. “To witness Mr. W. expertly flirt with a beautiful young woman in the most daringly gentlemanly way is not only watching an artist at work, but a reminder that age is only time, and his zest for life is timeless.”

When Sinha finishes his seniors report later this year, he’s promised to give one of the first public copies to Mr. W. Like his fellow centenarians, he is both a link to the past and a harbinger of our future.