REVIEW: Boy from nowhere: A life in ninety-one countries

By Ken MacQueen - Monday, October 31, 2011 at 7:35 AM - 0 Comments

This reviewer recalls a hike into the mountains with the esteemed columnist Allan Fotheringham on a free afternoon while covering the 1988 Calgary Olympics. Dr. Foth carried a briefcase onto the ski lift. Odd? Its purpose soon came clear. Inside were fixings for (here it gets fuzzy) martinis? Screwdrivers? G&Ts? Whatever. The point is: the man travels in style.

And so he has: 91 countries and counting. At his peak in the 1980s, he had five jobs: a national column for Southam newspapers, a 27-year run on the back page of Maclean’s, a gig on CBC’s Front Page Challenge, an author with Key Porter, a turn on the lecture circuit. Annual income: $492,000. Five employers meant five separate expense accounts, Fotheringham notes. “And if one of them didn’t like my expense account, there were always four others.”

This kaleidoscopic summation of his eight-decade globe trot (Maclean’s being his longest fixed address) was born of a near-death experience in 2007, after a colonoscopy went disastrously wrong. The sad irony is he finished the book, only to write a hurried dedication to his eldest son Brady, who died of a heart attack in Korea, worn down by the daily doses of the epilepsy meds that kept him alive.

But don’t expect a brooding meditation on death. Foth is a storyteller, a dancer, a lover of women. He lunches well, dines better, and remembers every detail. You could toss Who’s Who off the CN Tower, and not drop as many names as he does in this book. He remains, though, the wide-eyed correspondent from Hearne, Sask., “a gregarious loner” whose greatest allegiance is to his audience. “Life is a collection of memories,” he writes. “They pile up, connect together, disconnect and make in a scrambly way what life is all about.” It’s an apt description of the book: the sort of breezy tales you’d get over drinks with the good doctor. An agreeable way to spend a few hours.

Whistler’s sled dog massacre

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, October 27, 2011 at 8:30 AM - 3 Comments

Darryl Dyck/CP

Even now, it is the conflicted sense of apprehension that Marcie Moriarty remembers: hoping to find a mass grave under piles of junk in a forest clearing north of Whistler, B.C.—and hoping not to. Then the ugly reality of the dozens of tangled corpses of sled dogs emerging as the ground was sifted away by some of the world’s leading forensic investigators. That, and the smell of death that followed her home. “It brings shivers to me,” says Moriarty, general manager of cruelty investigations for the B.C. Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “It’s hard not to look at something like this and just lose all faith in humanity.”

Few murder cases, animal or human, have generated such instant revulsion as the gory killing in April 2010 of some 56 unwanted sled dogs belonging to Whistler-based Howling Dog Tours. The panicked animals were shot or had their throats slit in the presence of the 300-dog herd before being dumped in mass graves, allegedly by Bob Fawcett, then general manager of the company, and the man who raised and nurtured most of the dogs. Details of the gruesome killings leaked out in January after Fawcett filed a successful claim with the provincial workers’ compensation board, saying the cull left him with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). “Some I missed, had to chase around with blood everywhere,” Fawcett wrote this January on a website for soldiers suffering from PTSD before he retreated from public view. “Some I had to slit their throats because it was the only way to keep them calm in my arms.”

The case drew international outrage, blackened the reputation of one of B.C.’s premier resort destinations, and triggered a task force that toughened provincial animal cruelty laws. It was apparent, however, that pressing criminal charges required more than Fawcett’s unsubstantiated claims. Even unearthing the bodies was insufficient, says Moriarty, a lawyer. “What needs to be shown is that the animals suffered unnecessarily to prove the Criminal Code offence.” Last month, the society filed thousands of pages of evidence with Crown prosecutors, recommending criminal charges of causing unnecessary pain and suffering to animals. It may be months before the Crown decides if charges are warranted.

Continue…

The country boy at the heart of four murder investigations

By Ken MacQueen - Monday, October 24, 2011 at 3:17 PM - 9 Comments

Cody Legebokoff

As an anonymous friend of suspected serial killer Cody Alan Legebokoff put it after the life of the country boy with the baby face  and the bruiser’s body began to unravel, “Cody has always been in the wrong place at the wrong time, and this could have been one of those moments.” The post, on the website of Prince George, B.C. TV station CKPG, arrived after Legebokoff, then 20, was charged last November with the first-degree murder of 15-year-old free spirit Loren Donn Leslie of the northern B.C. resource community of Fraser Lake, B.C. The post expressed outrage and disbelief at the arrest of Legebokoff, “my two-stepping partner nights we would go out dancing.” Shock gave way to horror in the Prince George region when the RCMP announced Oct. 17 three more murder charges against Legebokoff in the deaths of Jill Stacy Stuchenko, Cynthia Frances Maas, both 35, and 23-year-old Natasha Lynn Montgomery.

RCMP Insp. Brendan Fitzpatrick, head of  the province’s major crime unit, refused to use the term serial killer in an interview with Maclean’s, saying that is for the courts and experts to determine. Still, he conceded B.C. attracts more than its share of multiple murders. They include the ugly legacy of child-killer Clifford Olson, who died last month, William Pickton, convicted of the murders of six vulnerable women and suspected in the killing of dozens more, and the 18 unsolved murders on the so-called Highway of Tears, the same Prince George corridor where these four women died. Fitzpatrick said forensic evidence and Legebokoff’s young age at the time of the 18 disappearances preclude any link. Continue…

Are we ready to subsidize heroin?

By Ken MacQueen and Martin Patriquin - Friday, October 7, 2011 at 10:20 AM - 221 Comments

Brian Howell/Maclean's

For the last 22 years, Cactus Montréal has doled out needles, crack pipes and other necessities of drug use to the city’s addicts. North America’s first needle exchange program had humble beginnings; it once provided its services from a cockroach-infested storefront on St-Dominique St., facing a particularly seedy section of Montreal’s red-light district. Today, Cactus’s headquarters are a monument to respectability. Its drop-in centre and needle exchange occupy a bright, glassed-in corner of an avant-garde building in downtown Montreal, across the street from a university pavilion. “A lively and warm place,” as its website advertises, “where people of all stripes come to get injection equipment, condoms, crack pipes, counselling and even to draw a picture or play an instrument.”

Thanks to last week’s landmark Supreme Court of Canada ruling directing the federal government to stop obstructing Vancouver’s Insite supervised injection clinic, Cactus will soon be renovating once again. Cactus administrators, and those across the country who advocate harm reduction, a policy of mitigating the damage of drug use without requiring abstinence, interpret the ruling as essentially green-lighting supervised injection sites, albeit under strict conditions. By next spring, Cactus administrators hope to have an area where drug users will be able to inject drugs under the supervision of a medical professional. Many of Montreal’s other needle exchange sites, as well as those in Quebec City, will likely follow suit in the coming year, if they meet the criteria the court established to win a federal exemption from drug possession laws.

You might say it’s infectious. Supervised injection sites have the backing of several of the country’s biggest health authorities, including those in Montreal and Vancouver. There are preliminary plans for another site in Vancouver, and possibly one in Victoria. Some advocates look ahead to a time when addicts might receive prescription heroin rather than street drugs. While many governments are reluctant to endorse giving addicts a place to shoot up, let alone the drugs to do so, every province has some sort of needle exchange program. Even Calgary gave out safer crack pipe kits for three years until health officials nixed the program over the summer.

For proponents, providing a clean, medically supervised place to imbibe drugs is simply a logical extension of a service already provided across the country. “The Supreme Court decision let us stop being hypocrites,” Cactus community coordinator Jean-François Mary told Maclean’s. “For 22 years, we gave people clean tools, then sent them out into the street. We were doing half the work. Now they’ll be able to shoot up in complete safety.”

Continue…

Tatiana and Krista go to school

By Ken MacQueen - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 1 Comment

Photograph by Brian Howell

Not many kids get to delay the start of kindergarten by a few days so they can fly to Manhattan for a network television appearance, but then few children are as unique as Tatiana and Krista Hogan. Last Wednesday, the twins from Vernon, B.C., who are conjoined at the head, and their parents, Felicia Simms and Brendan Hogan, were the star attractions on Anderson Cooper’s new syndicated daytime talk show. This week, one month from their fifth birthdays, they’re back with their kindergarten classmates at Okanagan Landing Elementary, enjoying every minute of it.

“They love school,” says grandmother Louise McKay. The staff at the school have gone out of their way to make the girls comfortable, including setting aside a quiet room if they need a break and retrofitting a special toilet, she says. “They have a really nice team behind them, they’re helping us out trying to figure out ways of accommodating Tati and Krista so they’re comfortable at school.”

The girls have certainly caused a stir. One girl, especially, followed them around the first few hours, clearly curious. They quickly formed a friendship. “Every morning she waits for Tati and Krista to get there, and takes them over to play finger puppets,” says McKay. “They’re laughing and giggling.”

Continue…

Closing Insite would violate Charter: Supreme Court

By Ken MacQueen - Friday, September 30, 2011 at 12:46 PM - 5 Comments

Brian Howell/Maclean's

A crowd gathered on the gritty streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside burst into cheers Friday morning at news the Supreme Court of Canada ruled unanimously that Insite, the supervised injection site for drug addicts can remain open. The ruling is a stinging defeat for Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, which claimed the site fostered addictions, encouraged crime and violated the federal criminal code by facilitating the use of illegal drugs.

The court ordered the federal health minister to immediately issue an exemption at the site from laws prohibiting drug possession and trafficking to allow the facility to operate. The ruling almost certainly assures that similar sites will open across Canada. Montreal, Toronto and Victoria are among the communities that have expressed interest in establishing similar services. Continue…

Don’t give these kids the keys

By Ken MacQueen - Friday, September 9, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 13 Comments

Tom Zytaruk/Surrey Now

The 911 calls started rolling about 3:30 p.m. last Wednesday, just as the B.C. Lower Mainland’s notorious rush hour was starting to build: so many high-powered luxury cars were weaving recklessly through traffic as they raced south on Highway 99 that it looked like a Need for Speed video game come to life. A squadron of Ferraris, Lamborghinis and the like flew past anxious drivers as they streaked out of the narrow George Massey tunnel under the Fraser River toward Surrey and the seaside community of White Rock.

Lower Mainland RCMP scrambled to get a helicopter over the scene for an accurate measure of the speeds, which may have exceeded 200 km/h, but there wasn’t time, said RCMP Supt. Norm Gaumont, the officer in charge of traffic for the region. RCMP cruisers corralled some of the racers in Surrey, while the rest were pulled over in White Rock. In all, they impounded 13 vehicles worth $2 million by police estimates.

“I’ve got a Ferrari 599, I have three Lamborghini Gallardos, I have an Audi R8, I have three Nissan GTRs, I have two Maserati Turismos, I have two Mercedes SLS and I have an Aston Martin,” said Gaumont, reading through the list of cars impounded for seven days under provincial anti-street-racing laws. None of the 12 males and one female, all from Vancouver or Richmond, was older than 21. Six were novice drivers, required under B.C.’s licence system to display an “N” sign on the rear of their vehicle. “My son drives a ’94 Mazda,” said Gaumont, “and he thinks he’s pretty hard done by after this.”

Continue…

Too many cops?

By Ken MacQueen and Patricia Treble - Thursday, August 25, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 104 Comments

Ian Lindsay / Vancouver Sun

This spring, Tamara Cartwright dropped off an envelope at her local post office outside Lethbridge, Alta. A friend had sent her a jar of hemp-based ointment, so she replied with a thank you card, wrote her name and return address on the envelope and, in a decision certain to haunt her for years to come, enclosed four grams of her homegrown marijuana, enough for perhaps four cigarettes. On an April morning some days later she returned to the post office to pick up another package. Moments later, police pulled her over, handcuffed her, put her in a cruiser and hauled her off to the police station.

It made quite a spectacle, says the 41-year-old mother of four, who suffers from colitis and is one of more than 10,000 medical marijuana patients registered with Health Canada. “It was embarrassing,” she says. “I was still in my pyjamas.” She emerged four hours later with a trafficking charge for giving away those four grams.

Her charge is part of a recent marked increase in arrests for cannabis offences. Cannabis arrests jumped 13 per cent in 2010 to 75,126. Of those, almost 57,000 were for simple possession, a 14 per cent jump from the year before. (The statistics reflect cases where the arrest was the most serious charge a person faced, not the thousands more where a pot charge was tacked onto a string of more serious crimes.) The cannabis arrest rate is an anomaly at a time when the overall crime rate in 2010 fell to its lowest level since the mid-1970s.

Continue…

On the need to restart the debate on assisted suicide

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, August 17, 2011 at 9:33 AM - 4 Comments

Photographs by Simon Hayter

On Jab. 15, 2010, Kathleen (Kay) Carter of North Vancouver had a date with death, an event she’d been seeking for months. She was 89 years old and nearly paralyzed by spinal stenosis. She made a last journey to Dignitas, a Swiss clinic devoted to assisted dying, accompanied by her daughter Lee Carter, Lee’s husband, Hollis Johnson, and other family. There, she drank a lethal drug, nibbled on a Swiss chocolate and drifted off to death. Her legacy is a renewed debate on the right to die. Carter and Johnson are now part of a challenge to the law prohibiting assisted suicide. It will be heard in the B.C. Supreme Court in November.

Q: Lee, tell me about Kay Carter, your mother.

LC: She was a fiercely independent person. She was well-read. She was interested in politics, social issues. She went to university and spent one year teaching elementary school in White Rock, B.C. And then she started having children, and had seven. There was no room for a job. She was married to my dad, Ron Carter, until he died in his mid-60s.

Q: In 2008, she was diagnosed with spinal stenosis. What did it mean to her quality of life?

LC: Basically, it’s to do with the [degenerating] spinal cord. You begin to lose your extremities, the ability to use your hands, your feet and eventually your legs. When she was diagnosed, it was hard to use her arms. She knew something was wrong. She would have been around 86 or 87.
HJ: I think the prognosis was particularly horrifying for her. The doctor said at some point, “You’ll be completely paralyzed, and just be on a gurney, and all of your needs will have to be attended to by others.” For her to lose that mobility was really terrifying.

Q: At what point did she decide she wanted to end her life?

LC: She woke up in the middle of the night [in July 2009] and said, “I’ve got it. I know what I want to do. I want to go overseas. Over there they can allow me to die with dignity.”
Continue…

Premiers’ ‘life-saving’ pact

By Ken MacQueen - Tuesday, August 9, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 1 Comment

Garrett Shakespeare, a North Vancouver swim instructor and nightclub DJ, turned 23 on July 22. When you have lived more than a decade with paroxysmal nocturnal haemoglobinuria (PNH), a rare and fatal blood disease, you don’t take such events for granted. But this birthday was special: he got back his life. Thanks to a joint purchase agreement reached among Canada’s premiers, announced coincidentally on his birthday, Shakespeare and other PNH sufferers have started treatment with Soliris, one of the world’s most expensive drugs, but one shown to restore health and longevity in those with the disorder.

“I’m so happy,” says Shakespeare, who has lived with debilitating pain, frequent hospitalization and the threat of organ failure or a fatal blood clot because the B.C. drug plan had deemed Soliris not “cost effective.” The drug costs about $500,000 a year, and patients require treatment for the rest of their lives. In June, Maclean’s wrote about Shakespeare’s plight in a story about the inequities caused by the lack of a national pharmacare strategy. There are fewer than 90 Canadians with PNH. Some had treatment paid through private health plans, some in Ontario and Quebec were treated on compassionate grounds, others did without. About 30 other countries provide the drug free for PNH patients.

Shakespeare and his mother, Rita, learned he’d get the drug in a meeting with provincial Health Minister Mike de Jong. “She started crying right away,” Garrett said of his mother’s joyous reaction, “and didn’t stop the whole way home.” He praises the lobbying efforts of Barry Katsof, a fellow sufferer and the founder of the Montreal-based Canadian Association of PNH Patients. Katsof, a 63-year-old retired businessman, receives Soliris under a Quebec program. He calls it “a miracle drug” that restored his health. Katsof said the provinces negotiated an unspecified price reduction, something he hopes will inspire greater co-operation and an equitable, cost-effective national drug strategy. “This is truly life-saving and life-altering for people.”

In conversation: Shawn Atleo

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, July 20, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 8 Comments

Photograph by Simon Hayter

AFTER TWO YEARS as national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Shawn Atleo is cautiously optimistic about the relationship he is forging with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government. On Tuesday, at the assembly’s annual meeting in Moncton, N.B., he proposed replacing the federal Aboriginal Affairs Department with a system that allows bands more autonomy and lessens the heavy federal intervention required under the Indian Act. “The patterns of the past have to be essentially smashed,” he told Maclean’s. Atleo, a hereditary chief in the tiny B.C. island community of Ahousaht, reads vindication in the recent report by now-retired auditor general Sheila Fraser. It warns, as Atleo and successive national chiefs have said, that the quality of life on reserves is worsening and the existing system of financing and accountability must be overhauled.

Q: The last time we spoke, you called your home community of Ahousaht a microcosm of First Nations across the country. So, how is Ahousaht faring?

A: Oh, it has its struggles, to be frank. They’re working on them, and we’ve got a new generation of leadership coming on.

Continue…

How Kate and Will broke the rules

By Ken MacQueen - Friday, July 15, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 0 Comments

Andy Clark/Reuters

By the time William and Catherine waved au revoir from Calgary’s airport, they’d set a new standard for royal tours, shredding the fetters of precedent, protocol and stifling formality. From the first event in Ottawa to wheels-up in Calgary nine days later, the duke and duchess signalled that past practices were made to be broken. Let us count the ways:

Royals don’t apologize: That one went by the wayside with the duke of Cambridge’s first credible attempt at speaking French in Ottawa. “It will improve as we go on,” he said, with a self-deprecating grin. In Quebec there was another winning smile: “Thank you for your patience with my accent, and I hope that we will have the chance to get to know each other over the years to come.” The fact that William and Catherine, in her rookie performance as a touring royal, would visit both Montreal and Quebec City, tells you all you need to know about the confidence the palace places in the young couple. The largely positive reception there, while allowing the inevitable anti-monarchist protesters to make their point, also ended the myth that Quebec is a royal pain for the Wales family.

Royals like to watch: Aside from tree plantings and ribbon cutting, touring royals generally limit their activity to bland small talk and limp handshakes. No one expects 85-year-old Queen Elizabeth II to become an action hero, but grandson William and his bride are not above plunging into activities. They donned chef outfits in Montreal and helped prepare their dinner. William skimmed one of Canada’s aging Sea King helicopters atop a lake in Prince Edward Island, where he and Kate also proved adept and competitive as dragon boat racers. Granted, William’s hockey shootout attempt in Yellowknife was lame, but they looked comfortable and strong paddling a canoe across choppy Blachford Lake in the territory. In Alberta they stole away to rustic Skoki Lodge above Lake Louise to hike the high alpine. The next day they donned cowboy duds for a preview of events at the Calgary Stampede, with William clambering up the rails of the metal chute for a perilously close look at a massive, snorting rodeo bull.

Continue…

‘This place is what Canada is all about’

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, July 14, 2011 at 12:35 PM - 1 Comment

Phil Noble/Reuters

What drew Yellowknife Mayor Gordon Van Tighem to the Northwest Territories 20 years ago, after years in Calgary and Toronto, are some of the same experiences Prince William and Catherine were able to sample during their 40-hour visit to the territorial capital and the wilderness beyond. “You’re on the edge of some of the little remaining, but accessible, wilderness in the world,” says the mayor. “Twenty minutes in any direction you won’t be finding any cigarette packages or Tim Hortons cups, and you can get lost.”

There was little risk of William and Catherine going astray during their whirlwind visit to what the BBC breathlessly described as “the remote settlement of Yellowknife.” The description amused rather than offended the mayor. With almost 20,000 people, representing 120 ethnic groups—and “two McDonald’s”—the mayor considers Yellowknife “a little-big city.” But he couldn’t have been more delighted with William’s glowing description of life above the 60th parallel. “This place is what Canada is all about,” the duke of Cambridge told a cheering crowd of about 3,000 at the civic plaza beside city hall, “vast, open beauty, tough, resilient, friendly peoples. True nature. True humanity.” Behind him were the glistening waters of Frame Lake. Beside him and Catherine on stage were territorial leader Floyd Roland and Aboriginal dancers and drummers. William earned an even bigger roar of approval when he closed his brief remarks by adding his thanks in the languages of the Dene and the north coast Inuvialuit. After opening with a few words of French, the duke looked pleased at acing what may have been his first-ever quadrilingual speech.

The couple, having travelled almost 3,700 km from Charlottetown through three time zones, was allowed a late start Tuesday, and looked the fresher for it. Yellowknife, this time of year, is murder for the sleep deprived. The sun pulls 20-hour days, and the city is bathed in twilight for the remainder of what passes for night. Once up, the couple had a full agenda, “the full meal deal,” as the mayor put it. After opening remarks at the plaza, they watched demonstrations of Dene hand games (a form of gambling) and Inuvialuit high kicks. They also were presented with red Canadian Olympic hockey jerseys with “Cambridge” written across the back. They watched a brief but spirited game of street hockey with a group of young people. William picked up a stick, but failed at three shoot-out attempts to get past goalie Calvin Lowmen, despite the duke’s joking plea that “You’ve got to let one in!”

Continue…

William and Kate’s great Canadian honeymoon

By Ken MacQueen - Monday, July 11, 2011 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

Phil Noble/Reuters

A royal visit is a lot like the lobster soufflé the duke and duchess of Cambridge whipped up during their 40-minute cooking class in Montreal. It’s a high risk-reward proposition: a miscue in the preparation, a sudden shock, and it flops like a spent party balloon. Ah, but done well, it is spun gold: savoury or sweet as the occasion demands, fluffy without being insubstantial.

As the nine-day visit of William and Catherine nears its close, the newlyweds have hardly set a foot wrong. They’ve enthusiastically embraced pursuits from dragon boat racing to road hockey with the same ease they’ve managed the traditional dinners, tree plantings and hospital visits. They’ve chucked out the schedule, and the strictures of protocol, to mix with those who’ve lined the route—as comfortable with the crowds as they seem with each other.

They travelled by frigate, helicopter and float plane; by motorcade, landau and dragon boat. In this, Catherine’s first visit to “the honeymoon capital of the Commonwealth,” as Governor General David Johnston put it, she’s experienced a concert by Great Big Sea, a Canada Day on Parliament Hill, and a citizenship ceremony. All Canadians should be as lucky.

Continue…

This week: Newsmakers

By Ken MacQueen, Nicholas Kohler, Jason Kirby and Nancy MacDonald - Monday, July 4, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

Mike Hewitt/FIFA/Getty Images

Hollywood’s high rollers

His day job is playing such film roles as Spiderman and Nick Carraway, in the upcoming Great Gatsby adaptation. But incredible as it may seem, Tobey Maguire’s hobby—high-stakes poker—may be even more lucrative than the silver screen. Maguire’s winnings, which could amount to as much as $30 to $40 million over three years, came to light in a lawsuit filed against the 35-year-old actor by a group of investors attempting to recoup money lost to Brad Ruderman, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for operating a $5.2-million Ponzi scheme. Ruderman lost much of the money playing Texas Hold ’em, including over $300,000 to Maguire, in an exclusive poker ring that drew players like Leonardo DiCaprio, Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. Now, Ruderman’s investors want some of that cash. DiCaprio, Affleck and Damon aren’t being sued, though. “Matt never won,” a whistle-blower said.

One for the lads

As contingencies go, this one was a doozy. David Hart, a 23-year-old Royal Marine killed by a bomb blast in Afghanistan last year, earmarked $160,000 from his life insurance policy for an all-expenses paid trip to Las Vegas for his best friends and their girlfriends—32 people in all. “In a letter, David said he had had a great life and had no regrets about anything,” one friend told a reporter. “He said, ‘Go and have a good time and spend all this money.’ ” He left a second portion to his family, and the rest to charity. Hart, who died a day short of his 24th birthday, had always dreamed of a Vegas weekend. When his pals return to England they will continue training for a 275-km bike ride to raise money for the Royal Marines Charitable Trust.

Stick with a bike

The 911 call to police in Caseville, Mich., went something like this: “Believe it or not, I just passed about a five-, six-year-old flying down the road with a red Pontiac Sunbird.” Actually, Chief Jamie Learman discovered that the driver, who stood on the floorboard of his stepfather’s car to see over the steering wheel, was a pyjama-clad seven-year-old. He hit speeds of 80 kph during a 32-km drive across Huron County, north of Detroit. Police gingerly boxed him in, stopping him without incident. “He was crying, and just kept saying he wanted to go to his dad’s,” Learman said. “That was pretty much it: he just wanted to go to his dad’s.”

Quit that racquet!

There are tasks where a grunt or two are justified. Piano moving or childbirth come to mind. But tennis? It’s all a bit much, says Ian Richie, head of the All England Lawn and Tennis Club. “Whether you are watching it on TV or here, people don’t particularly like it,” he told Britain’s Telegraph, with precisely the sort of understatement he’d like to see on Wimbledon’s grass courts. Jimmy Connors was a pioneering grunter back in the 1970s. Women then took it up with great enthusiasm. Maria Sharapova was recorded at 105 decibels in 2009—as loud as a car horn from three feet. Portugal’s Michelle Larcher de Brito and Serena Williams have also employed the tactic as a weapon of mass distraction. Richie has made his concerns known, but certain fans find the sound effects appealing. Former Wimbledon Champ Michael Stich accuses the women of trying to “sell sex.”

#DMFail

Think a weakness for sexy social networking, à la Anthony Weiner, is a purely American failing? Turns out the language of <3 knows no borders. Xie Zhiqiang, a health bureau official in the Chinese city of Liyang, set up an account with Weibo, a Twitter-like service in China, early this year believing it was a private chat tool. “Please marry me if there is a second life, so that we can live in romance until we are 100 years old,” he wrote to a married woman on the site before the pair were able to follow through on a planned tryst. Xie learned of the mistake after a reporter called about the exchange. “How can you view our messages on Weibo? It is impossible, isn’t it?” He has since been suspended from his job.

Captain courageous

For more than a half-decade, she has been the face of Canadian women’s soccer—though perhaps never more so than now. Christine Sinclair wrote herself into the country’s sports lore for refusing to leave the field after her nose was broken in the opening game of the women’s World Cup at Berlin’s Olympiastadion. “You can’t play on,” Canada’s team doctor, Pietro Braina told her, trying to corral her onto the bench. But the Canadian captain turned, teary-eyed to Italian-born coach Carolina Morace who shrugged, palms up, and nodded to the field. Sinclair, of course, went on to score Canada’s lone goal, on a beautifully executed free kick in the dying minutes of the gutsy 2-1 loss—the first goal the two-time defending champion Germans have allowed since 2003. Sinclair, after having her nose resculpted by a German doctor, took to Twitter to opine on the new appendage: “amazing,” she wrote—joking, of course.

How to lose a billion dollars

It takes a lot to go from “the wealthiest divorcée in history” to bust in two decades—a lot of waste, that is. Patricia Kluge landed a $1-billion settlement when she split from media mogul John Kluge in 1990, only to blow the lot on parties for royalty, a 120-hectare estate in Virginia’s Blue Ridge mountains and a private winery. Kluge and her third husband, William Moses, have racked up $46 million in debt and filed for bankruptcy last week. Her antiques, and her personal jewellery collection have already been auctioned off, and the Kluge winery was sold at auction—to none other than Donald Trump, her old friend, for $6.2 million. But Kluge isn’t the only one exiting the billionaire club. Research in Motion’s co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis lost their status after a sharp drop in RIM’s share price cut their personal net worth to around $800 million each, down from $1.8 billion in March.

The Doc returns

After 12 years on the mound for the Toronto Blue Jays before he was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies, star pitcher Roy Halladay is set, this week, to make his long-awaited return to the mound at Rogers Centre, where he earned both a reputation and a nickname. The two-time Cy Young winner, Toronto’s first pick at the ’95 draft, was set to pitch against the Jays last year, but security concerns around the G20 summit forced the series to be shifted to Philadelphia instead. “Doc,” as he’s known around the league, was calm before the game: “I feel like it’s any other start.”

Tears of joy

“Alec! Now we can get married!” Steve Martin tweeted to his Oscar co-host, after New York legalized gay marriage in the state. “Ok,” Alec Baldwin responded, “but if you play that effing banjo after eleven o’clock…” Lady Gaga, meanwhile, was a bit more emotional: “I can’t stop crying,” said the staunch gay-rights activist. “We did it kids. The revolution is ours to fight.”

Life out of office

It was a good week for Gordon Campbell, who is off to London as Canada’s high commissioner to the U.K.; the plum posting comes with a chauffeur, a chef and an official residence in swank Mayfair. In London, the former B.C. premier, who always resisted the temptation to bash the feds, will further hone his diplomatic skills among royals and the global elite. Gilles Duceppe, an Ottawa basher par excellence, had a big week too, granting his first televised interview since the Bloc’s stunning collapse in the last federal election. Unless Quebecers choose sovereignty, they’ll be “eating gumbo” in 50 years, he told Radio-Canada. He went on to hint at a return to politics, likely at the helm of the PQ, which appears to be imploding, a mere two months after the Bloc. He may well return to helm a sovereignist party, but the better question may be whether anyone will still be interested in the idea.

No medal for the penguin?

Dozer, a three-year-old goldendoodle from Fulton, Md., now merits his own runner’s page on the Maryland Half Marathon website, after escaping his masters Sunday and running the race. He crossed the finish line at the 2:12:24 mark, limping and exhausted, and received a medal from organizers after they discovered he was running solo. Truth is, Dozer probably slipped into the run several miles into the event. Far more impressive is the emperor penguin who swam an astonishing 4,000 km from Antarctica to New Zealand. Happy Feet, as he was nicknamed, was operated on at the Wellington Zoo to remove the stick and pebbles he’d eaten on Peka Peka beach. A committee has been struck to decide whether he should be returned home.

Building ships, and political futures

After a week in Ottawa spent championing the province’s bid for part of an estimated $35 billion in federal shipbuilding contracts, B.C. premier Christy Clark returned home to announce a major investment in a new marine trade training facility on Vancouver Island, sweetening the pot. If successful, the contract, which could create thousands of new jobs and raise millions in spinoffs, could also help Clark in a possible fall election, which could come as early as September.

Returning the warm embrace

Michelle Obama was hailed as a queen in her first solo trip to Africa this week. There, the U.S. First Lady spoke passionately to students, danced with African youth, met with Nelson Mandela and even squeezed in a dinner with her gal-pal Oprah Winfrey, a queen in her own right.

The case for a national drug plan

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 10:35 AM - 42 Comments

Photographs by Simon Hayter

On June 7, Maclean’s hosts “Health Care in Canada: Time to Rebuild Medicare,” a town hall discussion at the National Gallery of Canada, in Ottawa. The public forum is held in conjunction with the Canadian Medical Association and broadcast by CPAC.

Garrett Shakespeare is 22. He lives in North Vancouver where he supports himself as a lifeguard and swimming instructor at the local recreation centre. Many nights you’ll find him working as “DJ G-Ratt,” spinning electronic music and mixes at Vancouver nightclubs. Shakespeare exists in a world of chronic pain caused by an exceptionally rare and fatal blood disease, paroxysmal nocturnal haemoglobinuria (PNH), in which his red blood cells are attacked by the body’s immune system. There are, perhaps, 80 or 90 people in Canada similarly afflicted. Without treatment, about one-third of patients die within five years of diagnosis, and half die within 10 years, says the Canadian Association of PNH Patients. Shakespeare was diagnosed 11 years ago. And he is just one example of the many ways in which Canada’s health care system is neither universal, nor equitable, as far as our drug policy is concerned.

What is the life of a guy like Garrett Shakespeare worth? Should he be allowed to live if it costs $10,000 a year? What if $50,000 is the price of his life? How about $500,000? Is Garrett Shakespeare’s life worth $500,000 a year?

Continue…

You can't do that in San Francisco

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 10:15 AM - 7 Comments

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

It’s one of those conversations where the interviewer starts to think, Whoa, dude, too much info. Jonathon Conte is 29, an employee in San Francisco’s service industry, and an ardent defender of the foreskin. He was circumcised as a baby, as many boys are, and now years later he keenly feels the loss. “There are a lot of complicated emotions around it,” he says. “To admit this is a harmful practice, a lot of men would have to come to terms with the fact that they may be sexually compromised, and that’s not easy to accept or verbalize or even think about.” He notes in detail the protective and sexual functions of the foreskin. “We’re talking in an adult male it’s about 15 square inches of erogenous tissue,” he says, “which is a lot of skin to be removing. A lot.”

The issue of circumcision, like the part of the anatomy in question, is front and centre in San Francisco at the moment, but it’s a crowded field. Conte is a member of the Bay Area Intactivists, part of a grassroots collective seeking to outlaw in San Francisco the circumcision of males under age 18. In late April, organizers submitted more than 12,000 signatures of support to the city’s elections department. Assuming at least 7,168 of those are verified, they’ll meet the threshold to put the issue on the city ballot in November. Then the citizens will have their say. It’s a long shot, but this being San Francisco, you never know.

A ban on circumcision—those doing the deed would face a fine of up to $1,000 and a year in jail—would be unique in North America, though this is hardly the first time the city has been accused of overreaching its mandate to deliver such mundanities as sewers, water, roads, and the like. A daunting number of proclamations and prohibitions emanate from “Ban Francisco,” some already in force, others waiting to pounce from left field. Or right field. The government here is either the last redoubt of the flower child, or a neo-fascist cabal, depending on whose ox is being gored on any given day.

Continue…

This time they got it right

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, May 12, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

Dominic Lipinski/Reuters

She wore a tiara borrowed from her new grandmother, and diamond drop earrings, a wedding gift from her beloved parents, and that dress, which so perfectly captured the spirit of the day: a confluence of the modern and the traditional; a sense that the monarchy, the country and the couple were moving forward, with a fond look back. And at the altar of Westminster Abbey her husband-to-be turned, and became what seems like the last person on earth to see his bride in her finery. “You’re beautiful,” he said, as many a nervous groom before him has said. While every aspect of this day—the union of a future king and queen of Britain, Canada and the rest of the realms—would be weighed, debated and analyzed for deeper meaning, there was no arguing that heartfelt statement of fact. And, briefly at that moment, lost in each other’s eyes, this grand spectacle—1,900 guests, and two billion more watching over their shoulders—shrank to a universe of two.

Then, before the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, Catherine Elizabeth Middleton and William Arthur Philip Louis Wales gave each other their “troth” in the archaic language of the Church of England, to love and to comfort and to forsake all others—pledges honoured more in the breach than the observance by generations of Britain’s royals. But maybe this time they’ll get it right. At least that is the hope of Queen and country. With that they became husband and wife, and, at the behest of their granny, Queen Elizabeth II, they were granted the titles duke and duchess of Cambridge and a mouthful of others.

Like any royal event, the wedding had elements of the absurd: headgear, for example, which Britons of a certain class embrace and treat with such seriousness that even fashion disasters are elevated into art forms. And so it was that Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice, the daughters of Prince Andrew and the uninvited Sarah Ferguson, entered the abbey looking as if they’d been dressed by a blind quartermaster of the Ministry of Silly Hats. In this they were not alone. When television cameras in the abbey swept the bonneted crowd, it resembled the haphazard cluster of dishes and jury-rigged antennae you’d find on the rooftops of a Third World slum.

Continue…

Patient, help thyself

By Ken MacQueen - Tuesday, April 26, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 17 Comments

Andrew Vaughan/CP

On April 27, Maclean’s hosts “Health Care in Canada: Time to Rebuild Medicare,” a town hall discussion at the Marriott Pinnacle Downtown Hotel in Vancouver. The public forum is held in conjunction with the Canadian Medical Association and broadcast by CPAC.

Numerous polls put health care as the top priority in the federal election campaign, yet until recent days there was little debate about the failures of a health system that is a middling performer among most wealthy nations in its scope, cost and outcomes.

There’s an alarming lack of new ideas among national leaders on ways to either help provinces improve delivery of public health services or to rein in what a new report by the C.D. Howe Institute calls “chronic health care spending disease.”

Continue…

A Hollywood agent for conjoined twins Krista and Tatiana

By Ken MacQueen - Monday, April 25, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 2 Comments

Photograph by Roman Cho/Getty Images

We meet at the Magic Castle—a private club for magicians, in a rambling mansion off Hollywood Boulevard. It’s Friday night, and the valet attendants are dealing with a line of cars disgorging sharp-dressed folks in suits and ties or cocktail dresses. This is old Hollywood—exclusive and a touch bizarre—and even if you wrangle an invite, you don’t get in looking like a bum. We’re here because this is Chuck Harris’s kind of joint, and because he knows the owner, naturally. And because Stoil & Ekaterina, one of Harris’s many, many incomparable acts, is headlining in the castle’s main theatre.

In the mansion’s entrance alcove, Harris points to a statue of a gilded owl sitting on a walled bookcase. “Say ‘open sesame,’ ” he says. With that, the bookcase swings wide, and we enter the buzz and chatter of the Grand Salon. That’s what Chuck Harris does: he opens doors.

Harris is an agent, just not a typical one. Oh, he’s got the cigar, and the patter; he’s got glasses the size of cruise ship portholes, some big-money clients and contacts around the world. It’s just that a significant portion of his client base is…way out there. “I am the conductor,” he has said, meaning it in the kindest possible way, “of a symphony of wackos.” You want a man who dances with four puppets and can do a one-man recreation of the Jackson Five? He’s got Christopher, who recently did a command performance for Mexico’s Carlos Slim, considered the world’s richest man. He’s got a one-armed juggler and a guy who balances a car on his head. You want Wolf Boy, Rubber Girl, or the world’s smallest Elvis imitator? He’ll have them on a plane the moment the contract is signed. The same with the Regurgitator, who swallows coins and brings them up in order. And he’s got Mr. Methane, who for safety reasons probably shouldn’t be double-billed with Electricity Girl.

Continue…

‘There is no normal in this family'

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 10:09 AM - 6 Comments

Photograph by Brian Howell

On the last day of February, the family of Krista and Tatiana Hogan, Canada’s only conjoined twins, piled into a van leased by the provincial government for the journey southwest from Vernon, B.C., to Vancouver for a week-long series of medical appointments for the girls. The trip almost ended in disaster when they were caught in the midst of a multi-vehicle pileup during a blizzard on the mountainous Coquihalla Highway. They narrowly missed hitting a vehicle stopped on the highway during whiteout conditions. Louise McKay, the twins’ grandmother, put the van into a skid, stopping sideways on the road. Behind them, a car crashed into a semi-trailer and two pickups slammed into ditches on either side of the van. “God was looking after us,” says McKay.

The frequent medical trips to Vancouver, a 900-km round trip, are taking an increasing emotional and economic toll on the family, which subsists largely on social assistance and disability payments from the provincial Social Development Ministry. Money is so tight that they say they’re left destitute meeting the extraordinary needs of the 4½-year-old girls—craniopagus twins who are joined at the head and share a bridge between each girl’s thalamus, a part of the brain that relays sight and other sensory information.

McKay says the family used much of its March rent money to finance part of its recent trip to Vancouver, where the twins had a series of checkups and tests. They fear they’ll  face eviction if they don’t come up with the month’s $1,750 rent. Adults in the extended family of 14 sometimes go hungry to ensure there is food for the children. “We’ll go a couple of days sometimes without eating anything. As long as the kids are fed, we’re okay,” says McKay, who has diabetes, and who has a small disability pension for an anxiety disorder.

Continue…

Japan after the earthquake: 'People were very stoic'

By Ken MacQueen - Friday, March 11, 2011 at 2:51 PM - 2 Comments

Maclean’s Vancouver-based correspondent Nancy Macdonald was on assignment in Japan when the earthquake hit Thursday. She spoke with Maclean’s Vancouver bureau Chief Ken MacQueen.

Q: Glad to know you’re safe, could you tell me where you are?
A: Hi Ken, thanks, I’m in Toyota City in southern Japan, two hours south of Tokyo on the fast train.

Q: Where were you when the quake hit?
A: I was headed from Toyota City to Nagoya and then to Tokyo. I was in a taxi on the highway when it hit. The first sign I had was the taxi started swerving left and right.

Q: Did you understand what was happening?
A: No, I didn’t. The taxi had the radio on, and it reminded me of that old War of the Worlds scene where the radio announcer cuts in [with news of a disaster]. The building he was in was shaking, he was looking outside the window, describing boats being pulled out to the ocean. Then he was saying ‘Oh my God, and buildings are being pulled out to the ocean.’ I had someone in the car with me who was translating what the radio was saying so I understood very quickly that something very serious was happening.

Q: Did the traffic stop?
A: No, we carried on. I headed to an electronics shop with the guy I was travelling with. There were hundreds of people there watching the images on the TV screens.

Q: What was the response of the public?
A: They were very stoic. I was looking around and I saw the images that you’ve seen in Canada now of the water hitting the north and grabbing cars and people. I think if I were in Canada and North America [in similar circumstances] people would have been shouting ‘Oh my god.’ No one there was. People were very stoic. No one was making any kind of noise. This is a very earthquake-prone country so they’ve seen this kind of thing happen before.

Q: There was some thought you were going to be heading north yesterday, what happened?
A: I’m here in Toyota City doing a story on Toyota. I had been speaking with the company and we’d been trying to decide whether to go to Toyota City or their new plant in Northern Japan, in which case we would have wrapped up the interview and would have been heading to Sendai Airport. That’s the airport that was [devastated], that you’ve seen the footage of, when the earthquake hit. We’re lucky we decided ultimately to do the interview in Toyota City.

Q: Japan has a reputation for being one of the best prepared countries in the world when it comes to earthquakes. You live in Vancouver, which is rather less prepared. Are you concerned about the state of preparations in your own city?
A: I am. I’m not sure how much warning people had for this quake. I think they had enough time to get under their desks. Certainly that is a concern going forward for me.

Q: Do you have an earthquake kit?
A: I don’t. Something to consider.

The student's Quest

By Ken MacQueen - Thursday, March 3, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Photographs by Brian Howell

When Celeta Cook of Deseronto, Ont., applied five years ago as a 17-year-old to Quest University, the hilltop site in the coastal mountain community of Squamish, B.C., was little more than dirt and dreams. “I did my preview day in a hard hat and a reflective vest,” says Cook, now part of Quest’s first grad class this April 30. The library will be finished, she was promised, “it just hasn’t been built yet.” Far from being put off, she was excited. “All right,” she said, “I’ll see you guys in September.” She was one of 73 students in 2007. There are now about 300, as it builds toward its capacity of 650—still smaller than most of the high schools the students came from.

For Cook, it was a good fit. Quest, a private, not-for-profit undergraduate liberal arts and sciences university, is not for the faint of heart. Its promotional literature welcomes “iconoclasts, convention-challengers, pioneers, risk-takers, edge seekers, creators… ” The same criteria apply to its faculty, and certainly its outgoing president, David J. Helfand, who divides his time between two coasts. He’s a teacher and administrator at Quest, and he chairs the astronomy department at New York’s Ivy League Columbia University.

What’s different about Quest is pretty much everything. Classes are capped at 20 students and average about 15. There being no place to hide, Quest has an astonishing level of student participation. Helfand points with pride to the new results of the 2010 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), revealed in this issue of Maclean’s. Quest’s first-year students (there were no senior students yet to survey) recorded student involvement and satisfaction far beyond larger, older universities. It finished top among Canadian universities in five key outcomes: academic challenge, student-faculty interaction, supportive campus environment, active and collaborative learning, and enriching educational experience. “That’s the one bit of truly independent evidence that we have that what we’re doing is really quite special,” Helfand says of the NSSE scores.

Continue…

Don't seniors deserve better?

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, February 23, 2011 at 4:59 PM - 51 Comments

Dr. Mark Nowaczynski

On March 1, Maclean’s is hosting “Health Care in Canada: Time to Rebuild Medicare,” a town hall discussion at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts in Toronto. The event, in conjunction with the Canadian Medical Association, will be broadcast by CPAC. The conversation on health care reform continues in the coming months in Maclean’s and at town halls in Edmonton, Vancouver and Ottawa.

He was a frail old man living in Vancouver. Call him Mr. B. One night he developed excruciating back pain, and his doctor was summoned. Mr. B was a lucky man in that his doctor was John Sloan, a general practitioner whose practice consisted of treating the frail elderly in their homes. Sloan’s diagnosis was a compression fracture of the vertebrae due to osteoporosis. He prescribed pain medication, and recommended keeping him at home. “It hurts like hell for six weeks,” Sloan said, “and then it gets better.”

His family was skeptical. Aren’t hospitals where you go when you’re sick? But Sloan was a trusted doctor and diligent with his  follow-up visits. One day, Mr. B had a setback, and the hired caregiver dialled 911. Three days later, Sloan received hospital reports, the first he knew his patient was admitted. Not good, he thought. He tried to convince the family to continue treatment at home, but they were awed by the medical resources deployed in aid of Mr. B. “He saw a psychiatrist. He saw a heart specialist. He saw a respiratory specialist. He saw an orthopaedic surgeon,” says Sloan. “The inevitable happened. He lost strength. He became confused.” He was put on antibiotics. He developed a C. difficile infection. Mr. B died in hospital.

Continue…