Newsmakers

By Nancy Macdonald and Maclean's staff - Friday, April 15, 2011 at 12:50 PM - 0 Comments

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Revenge, actually

On screen, Hugh Grant has always excelled at playing the befuddled. But in real life, he’s awfully sharp. Last week, the long-time victim of Britain’s tabloid press turned the tables in an exposé for the New Statesman. After a chance encounter with a former News of the World journalist, Grant secretly taped a pub conversation where the man revealed that executives at the paper, including Andy Coulson, who went on to become David Cameron’s press secretary, knew all about the rampant hacking of celebrities’ voice mails. So did honchos at News Corp., the paper’s Rupert Murdoch-owned parent company, which subsequently issued a grovelling public apology. But the best part might have been the headline on Grant’s article: “The bugger, bugged.”

He feels for himself

Giving up a dictatorship is apparently not all roses and unicorns. Hosni Mubarak has issued his first, unrelentingly self-pitying statement since being forced from office two months ago. “I have been pained, and am still in pain because of what I have been subjected to,” the deposed Egyptian president begins, “from unjust campaigns and false allegations aimed at hurting my reputation and questioning my integrity, stances and military and political history . . . ” Mubarak, who went on to deny stashing money in foreign countries—a fortune rumoured to be in the billions—taped the five-minute remarks from his weekend home on the Red Sea, where he reportedly suffered a heart attack Tuesday before facing questioning by prosecutors over allegations of corruption and abuse.

Know when to fold ’em

Sometimes a backup goalie just gets bored, and Marty Turco broke up the monotony last week by wagering with a fan seated next to him in Montreal’s Bell Centre, as Turco’s Chicago Blackhawks took on the Canadiens. Season ticketholder Robert Walter says he egged Turco into taking a $5 bet that the Hawks wouldn’t score on the Canadiens. When they did, Walter wrote “Habs Rule” on a fin and dutifully passed it through the glass separating them while a friend photographed the transaction for posterity. Later, in the third, Walter persuaded the Hawks netminder to take 5-1 odds on the Habs winning in overtime and—wouldn’t you know it—the Canadiens came through. Turco reportedly sent several fives back through the barrier, but not before editing the original note to read: “Turco Rules.” Alas, the only “rules” that matter are NHL ones forbidding players from wagering on games. The league is investigating.

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The End | Htoo K'Bru Paw | 2000-2011

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 7:50 AM - 5 Comments

Illustration by Marian Bantjes

Htoo K’Bru Paw—”Bright Flower”—was born on March 19, 2000, at Mae Rama Luang refugee camp in western Thailand. Htoo, pronounced “Too,” was one of 13 children born to Say Ler Moo and Poe Gay, rice farmers from Burma’s persecuted Karen minority. Her parents had fled Burma just before Htoo’s birth. For years, the family had been on the run in the jungle, surviving on rice broth and bamboo shoots, never speaking above a whisper, hiding from the military, who’d razed their village, and slaughtered their relatives.

Although Mae Rama was a dirty, tightly packed refugee camp with no electricity or plumbing, it was paradise, says Poe Gay. The family was safe at last. They lived in a one-room bamboo hut, two metres above the ground. Sometimes, the bamboo would rot and you’d fall through the floor, Poe Wah, Htoo’s eldest brother, explains—far better, he adds with a smile, than falling into the outhouse. They ate rice, though there was never enough. Over time, Poe Gay acquired eight chickens, which she sold to supplement their rice rations; it was the first time she had ever seen money. The kids had no shoes, and were often sick. At any given time, 40 per cent of the camp’s children were ill with malaria, TB, or chronic diarrhea. Death was all around them.

Htoo’s world ended at the grey fence surrounding the camp. She didn’t have any toys: her prized possession was a collection of stones she’d amassed over the years. School, her great love, was an infrequent luxury. Once, she misplaced a textbook, and was inconsolable. Htoo, wise and funny and a whiz with her younger siblings, always kept the family laughing and happy. That was her role, her brother explains. She was their warm soul.

When Htoo was eight, Canada offered to take the family in. Each underwent medical testing. That’s when Htoo’s parents learned she had thalassemia, a genetic blood disease. She’d worked so hard caring for everyone, no one had realized she herself had been hurting. She immediately began blood transfusions. The camp hospital was grotesque. The sick were squeezed into one room, some screaming in pain. Drips were hooked to rotting thatched walls. Infections were constant. Once, Htoo awoke to find the woman lying next to her had died in her sleep. But soon, she would leave all this behind.

The journey to the Bangkok airport took five days. The only food Htoo’s parents could afford for the trip was a bag of chips. Inside, there were 12 chips: one for each child. On June 27, 2008, Htoo’s family landed in Langley, B.C., with no English, or any experience with the world outside of a refugee camp. Htoo entered Grade 4 at Nicomekl Elementary. Every afternoon, she and her sisters studied together, memorizing vocabulary lists, grammar rules and reciting Scripture. No one worked harder than Htoo, who always placed first at the Karen Heritage School, where she took weekend classes.

She learned to skate and play soccer, and flourished. Her health improved so much that doctors suggested a bone marrow transplant to cure her, thus ending monthly blood transfusions and visits to hospital. Poe Wah, it turned out, was a perfect match, and in June, Htoo underwent surgery.

By mid-July, she’d regained her strength, and doctors were set to release her when she caught an infection. By August, she was near death, but fought it and won. But constant infections meant her siblings couldn’t visit. Nurses hooked up a webcam; back in Langley, her family scrambled to borrow a matching set-up. The day the cameras went live, Htoo’s siblings rushed to take turns speaking to their favourite sister. As the novelty wore off, they resumed their routines. But no one turned off the camera. For hours, Htoo sat hugging the laptop to her chest, listening as her sisters recited their vocabulary lists and her brothers chattered away.

At Christmastime, she took a turn for the worse, and in January was admitted to the ICU. Htoo, wise beyond her years, understood how sick she really was. Only at the very end did she finally allow herself to cry. “I just want to see my brothers and sisters,” she told her dad, her voice barely a whisper. “I don’t want to die yet.” But she just didn’t have any fight left. Her family gathered round her bed; when Htoo could no longer open her eyes, she would squeeze her siblings’ hands. On Feb. 3, Htoo, who’d survived infection and disease in some of the ugliest hospitals in the world, died in Canada, of an infection, at one of the world’s best. She was 11 years old.

Long may she run?

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, April 7, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 12 Comments

Deddeda Stemler/CP

Elizabeth May’s campaign headquarters are located on what could be called Sidney, B.C.’s main drag, Beacon Street. That description, truth be told, suggests a degree of excitement absent from the sleepy Vancouver Island town. Nearby speed limits top out at 30 km/h; and odd is the business that doesn’t keep a dish of water for thirsty dogs. Fittingly, the scene inside the HQ feels more like a United Church basement after Sunday services than the campaign war room of a federal party leader. Green party volunteers scoop sunflower seeds into campaign door-hangers, which May will take with her when she knocks on doors on the even sleepier Pender Island the next day. Politicos in the backroom sip herbal tea. May, an “empty nester with dog,” as she describes herself, sits on a comfy couch facing the front door, presiding over the room. “Hi Jean!” she suddenly shouts, flashing a huge smile at a fiftysomething former Tory, interrupting the interview for the umpteenth time for a friendly chat. Dozens more supporters, and their dogs, stroll in on this sunny Saturday, one week into the campaign.

Sidney locals will see a lot more of May in the next month. The party’s strategy, this time, is simple: get May a seat, or bust. The Green party leader is planning to spend all but 10 days in the riding, in stark contrast to the last campaign, which she launched in Guelph, Ont., before flying to Vancouver to catch a cross-Canada election train that deposited her, eventually, in Central Nova, N.S., her home riding; there, she took on Peter MacKay. Although May sees the last campaign as a “watershed” for the party—the former activist muscled into the leaders’ debates, established the Greens as Canada’s fourth party, and upped electoral support by 41 per cent—analysts largely saw it as a fail, because she wasn’t able to unseat MacKay, the defence minister. “I remember an interesting meeting right after the 2008 election,” she explains. “A council member said: ‘I get so sick of hearing, “You didn’t even elect your leader.” ‘ Well, we weren’t even trying to elect the leader. But it kind of hung in mid-air, like a thought bubble: ‘We didn’t even try to elect the leader…’ Then, we started thinking: maybe we should have.”

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The last great bookshop

By Nancy Macdonald - Wednesday, March 23, 2011 at 3:50 PM - 7 Comments

Photograph by Brian Howell

For new visitors, the reaction rarely differs. After pushing through the front door, they stop, momentarily, in their tracks. On this rainy winter Sunday, an American tourist, dressed in purple Gore-Tex, lets out a gasp. “My God,” she says, to no one in particular, “I’ve never seen so many books in my life.” At MacLeod’s Books in downtown Vancouver, packed bookshelves stretch almost to the cathedral ceilings. Books are piled all over a worn, red Persian rug. “Please find the Faulkner paperback collection on the floor,” a note helpfully directs. A ladder leans haphazardly against a stuffed shelf. More books are stacked on its steps. “Is there any semblance of order at all?” asks a middle-aged man with tight black curls and John Lennon glasses. There is, of course; the finely ordered chaos is one of the marvels of MacLeod’s. There isn’t a computer in sight, but staff know exactly what they own, and where to find it. Within seconds, the churlish customer has the Tolkien he was after.

Behind him, a MacLeod’s regular, his wiry brown hair standing on end, rushes in and out, lugging suitcases filled with books into the store, adding to a pile stacked near the front. “He’s been buying books from us for years,” says the shopkeeper, as the man hurriedly retreats backwards, spilling out apologies, a farewell, a promise to return. “Now he’s leaving for Spain, and he wants us to buy them all back. I haven’t even agreed,” Don Stewart, the legendary—at least in the tight circle of Vancouver bibliophiles—owner of the bookshop adds with a shrug.

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A nation's grief

By Nancy Macdonald with Nicholas Köhler. - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 3:35 PM - 2 Comments

Asahi Shimbun/Reuters

At exactly 15 minutes to three in the afternoon, on Friday, March 11, 2011, Japanese time, in the moments just preceding the 9-magnitude earthquake that in the space of three minutes would wreak more havoc on Japan than that country has experienced since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Natsuko Komura was riding a horse along the Pacific coast in the northeastern city of Sendai. Rie Wakabayashi, 36, sat in a bus in Tokyo bound for a business meeting in the high-end Roppongi Hills complex. Chris Nixon, a 35-year-old American employed in the financial services sector, was working from his home in Chiba prefecture, next to Tokyo, his new wife, Aya, nearby.

In those same moments, 125 km off Japan’s east coast and 10 km beneath the ocean surface, the Pacific plate abruptly dove under its tectonic neighbour—the North American plate atop which northern Japan sits. That geological event, the consequence of eons’ worth of pent up energy, tore a gap into the Earth’s crust 400 km long and 160 km wide and pushed Honshu, Japan’s long main island, almost three metres. So gargantuan was the shift, scientists later calculated, that it rejigged the position of Earth’s axis by 16 cm and sped the planet’s rotation up by 1.6 microseconds, imperceptibly shortening our days. It was the largest quake in Japan’s history and tied for fourth largest in the world since 1900.

Just as Wakabayashi felt the ground move, then begin to shudder violently for more than two minutes, her transit bus had rolled under a Tokyo overpass; so intense was the quake that she feared it would collapse and crush her. Around 370 km north of her, in Sendai, Komura jumped off her horse, ran to her car and sped away from the coast. “The traffic lights had stopped working and there was massive congestion—rows and rows of cars,” she later told the BBC. In Chiba, Nixon and Aya stepped outside their home and held onto an outer wall.

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Vancouver's Olympic Village to become a hot property—finally

By Nancy Macdonald - Tuesday, March 8, 2011 at 11:26 AM - 3 Comments

Les Bazso/Vancouver Sun

Vancouver taxpayers breathed a collective sigh of relief last week as the Olympic Village, eerily quiet since Sidney Crosby’s golden goal on the final day of the Vancouver Games, showed, at last, a few signs of life. Even Bob Rennie, its marketer-in-chief, had taken to calling the development a “ghost town.” But with prices for its condo units slashed by as much as 50 per cent, at Rennie’s direction, potential buyers packed its narrow, cobbled streets, snapping up more than half of the 240 units in just four days. Bargain hunters like John Van Hoepen, a Lower Mainland contractor, were out in force. With its high-end finishings, proximity to the new SkyTrain line, downtown core and water, Van Hoepen figures his deeply discounted condo will pay off. “The old prices were ridiculous,” says Taylor Miller, a local video-game producer. He and his girlfriend, Brynn Harris, live in Yaletown, a lively young neighbourhood across the water. They consider the quiet jumble of glass and brick towers on the False Creek inlet an ideal place to start a family, and were on the hunt for a two-bedroom, with a den.

While the tide seems to finally be turning for the $1-billion project, which Rennie recently rebranded the Village on False Creek, a fierce debate over what went wrong still dominates conversation in B.C. It’s not easy, after all, to lose money on a condo development in Vancouver, voted, once again, the most livable city anywhere by the Economist, with a real-estate market that barely skipped a beat during the recession.

When fingering blame, most start with Vancouver’s 2006 decision to award the Olympic Village to Millennium Development, a local firm, on a $193-million bid. The city, meanwhile, retained title to the eight-block parcel; to guarantee housing would be finished on time, it needed to be able to step in and take over if trouble arose. But because the city held on to the deed, the developer couldn’t get a Canadian bank to finance the project, forcing it into the arms of a U.S. hedge fund, which demanded—and received, as Vancouver taxpayers belatedly learned—a loan guarantee from the city.

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Saving a lunch-hour landmark

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, March 3, 2011 at 1:20 PM - 0 Comments

When the Bay announced plans last month to bring in high-end restaurateurs Oliver & Bonacini to spiff up its department store dining rooms across the country, including Winnipeg’s Paddlewheel restaurant, thousands in the Prairie city reacted in horror. To deal with the backlash, a Toronto-based P.R. firm was promptly called in and the Bay appeared to change its tune: the Paddlewheel “brand” would remain anchored in the ‘Peg, the company promised. A reno, however, may still be in the cards—one, they carefully added, which will “honour the history and tradition” of the downtown hot spot, whose menu still includes cubed Jell-O and whipped cream.

Since the 1950s, generations of Winnipeg women have dined with their mothers and grandmothers at the restaurant on the sixth floor of the Portage Avenue Bay. “It’s part of Winnipeg’s fabric,” says Jino Distasio, director of the Institute for Urban Studies at the University of Winnipeg. “It harkens back to a time when downtown was the place to be, and the Paddlewheel was the place people would gather.”

In the ’60s, the country’s rock luminaries—including Neil Young—were regulars, says rock historian John Einarson. In the hopes of catching a glimpse, “you’d nickel nurse a Coke and a plate of chips,” he says; some young men would turn up with an empty guitar case (“chick magnet”). On Friday nights bands in town signed off saying: “See you tomorrow at the Paddlewheel.”

More recently, filmmaker Guy Maddin made it the setting for homoerotic “Golden Boy pageants” in his docu-fantasy My Winnipeg; in his revisionist history, the eatery became, by night, the “Paddlewheel Nightclub,” purveyor of gambling, booze and orange Jell-O. The place has history and cachet. Winnipeggers can only hope CEO Bonnie Brooks will see it.

Canada’s queen of the slopes

By Nancy Macdonald - Tuesday, March 1, 2011 at 11:03 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Steven G. Smith

Sarah Burke died on January 19 of the injuries she suffered in a training accident. Below is the profile of Burke Maclean’s published last spring.

Sarah Burke is among the planet’s best skiers. She has chops enough to also have been named one of the most influential of the past 35 years by Powder magazine—and sex appeal enough to have made Teen Vogue and the men’s magazine FHM, where she appeared au naturel, with just a pair of crossed skis for cover. But in Canada, the Midland, Ont., native is an unknown. Burke, dubbed the “female Shaun White” after the snowboarding god, was nowhere to be seen at the Olympics. Her sport, halfpipe skiing, is a bit much for the International Olympic Committee—she hits the pipe the same way snowboarders do, spinning and flipping above its 22-foot walls, but on skis—and for much of her career, the 28-year-old has not only been shut out of the Olympics, she’s had few women’s events to compete in at all.

In Aspen, Colo., late last month, however, she was in her element. There was huge buzz about Canada’s queen of the slopes at the Winter X Games, the one weekend a year the posh resort town gets mobbed by gravity junkies and party-hearty snowboarders—the kind of people who think nothing of jumping 300-foot gaps on snowmobiles, or triple-flipping face-first off the lip of an icy halfpipe. This is where the sport’s counterculture gets the major league treatment, and its heroes their 15 minutes of fame. “It’s the biggest event of the year,” says Burke. “The most people and energy and the biggest party.”

In 15 years, the X Games, the brainchild of an ESPN exec looking to create an outlet for skateboarding and snowboarding, has become the world’s pre-eminent action-sports festival. Like the Olympics, it boasts summer and winter versions, and stirs up its share of nationalist tub-thumping, Aussie face paint and inflatable Boxing Roos. These alternative games, however, target a younger, faster crowd—the Olympics, but with a hip-hop soundtrack and jaw-dropping aerial moves.

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Q & A: Gordon Campbell

By Nancy Macdonald - Wednesday, February 16, 2011 at 10:29 AM - 11 Comments

Later this month, three-term B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell—a three-term Vancouver mayor before that—will retire from public life. In 2010, he introduced the widely despised Harmonized Sales Tax. In November, after months of vicious public debate over the new tax, Canada’s longest-serving premier announced that he was stepping down.

Q: When you were first elected premier back in 2001, your peers included Mike Harris in Ontario and Bernard Landry in Quebec. Those seem like names from a bygone era. Does it feel like a long time to you?

A: Things change a lot less in 10 years than you’d think. It seems like a long time ago when I think about the things that were taking place. We came in with a major personal income tax cut, then we were confronted with a tech meltdown; 9/11; Afghanistan in October; SARS in November; there was a war in Iraq the next year; floods. All that stuff really grabs you right at the time you’re trying to work through a whole bunch of other things—we’d said we were going to balance our budget by 2003. So, it’s a very intense experience. But does it seem like a long time ago? Not really.

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This week: Newsmakers

By Nancy Macdonald - Wednesday, February 2, 2011 at 12:40 PM - 0 Comments

The greatest skate
To say Patrick Chan blew away the competition as he skated to his fourth straight national men’s title is a gross understatement. It was, according to the Vancouver Sun, “inarguably the greatest skate ever by a Canadian.” Chan didn’t so much as wobble as he laid out two back-to-back quads—the calling card of the sport’s greats—and went on to shatter the world record score for a male skater. “Brian Orser? Kurt Browning? Elvis Stojko? All great on any number of days,” wrote Cam Cole. “None as great as Chan was, on this one.” The spellbound crowd in Victoria brought down the house as Chan, finally, slowed to a stop. “That was the reaction I wanted at the Olympics,” said the Toronto native. “That’s what I dreamed about every night when I went to bed. And I finally got it.”

Attack of the former presidents
The dust has barely settled after former dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier’s arrival in Haiti, and another name from the country’s past is attempting a return to the homeland. Former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who’s been living in exile in South Africa since being forced from office in a 2004 coup, is eager to return, he said this week, to serve his “Haitian sisters and brothers as a simple citizen in the field of education.” “Baby Doc” Duvalier, meanwhile, whose lavish life in exile in France was abruptly halted by a pricey divorce, says he’s returned “to help”—not, as is widely suspected, to lay claim to a frozen Swiss bank account. Now that he’s there, investigators are building a fresh case against him over the alleged theft of $120 million—what they describe as a “gigantic fraud . . . from one of the poorest populations on Earth.”

Alas, poor Andy
British PM David Cameron’s embattled communications chief Andy Coulson stepped down on Friday amid continued questions about his possible involvement in the illegal hacking of celebrity voice messages when he was editor of the News of the World—making him, as Britain’s Independent cheekily reported, “the first person in history to resign twice for something of which he knew nothing.” In lesser political disgraces, a British MP was interrupted mid-speech by his own musical tie, whose tinny tune was picked up by his mike. Baffled MPs hunted for the source, until Tory backbencher Nad­him Zahawi realized who was to blame. “I apologize,” he said. “It is my tie to support the campaign against bowel cancer.” “Perhaps next time the honourable gentleman will be more selective in the ties he wears in the chamber,” said deputy speaker Dawn Primarolo.

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No holding the bacon

By Nancy Macdonald - Tuesday, February 1, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 3 Comments

Lego/Getty Images

Maybe it was the Wendy’s Baconator, an alarmingly thick hamburger packed with six strips of bacon, with sales of over 25 million in the first two months after its debut in 2007. Or it could have been Baconnaise: yes, that’s bacon-infused mayonnaise. Whatever the cause, by the time the recipe for “bacon explosion”—a barbequed brick of meat wrapped in two pounds of the crispy treat—appeared on the Internet in 2009, North America’s love affair with bacon was in full swing. The artery-clogging side dish had already inspired everything from new desserts, doughnuts and liquors to alarm clocks that wake you with the smell and sizzle of the real thing. Fast-food restaurants, of course, offer it atop a range of calorie-, fat- and sodium-soaked burgers, wraps and breakfast sandwiches. Even high-end restaurants have made it a big part of the menu, while bacon-wrapped asparagus and dates are popular cocktail treats.

All this demand has sent prices soaring. In fact, bacon currently retails for more than pork chops and ground beef, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics. And the wholesale price of pork bellies, the stuff used to make bacon, rose 72 per cent last year. Traditionally, demand for bacon drops off during the winter months, and producers store and freeze pork bellies. “Bacon tends to be a seasonal food—BLT sandwiches are a popular summer meal,” says Tom Cawthorne, director of hog marketing at R.J. O’Brien & Associates, a Chicago-based brokerage firm. But these days, pork bellies are being produced and sold immediately, leaving the pork-belly futures market, which bets on future frozen supplies, in jeopardy.

The weak U.S. dollar is also adding to demand, says Cawthorne. “American producers are shipping a lot,” he says, “mostly to China and Russia.” And key overseas exporters are facing supply problems of their own. An outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in South Korea has forced a 15 per cent cull of its hog population. Meanwhile, a dioxin contamination in Germany has resulted in a temporary ban on both hog and poultry exports.

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Breaking the ice

By Nancy Macdonald - Wednesday, January 26, 2011 at 11:40 AM - 3 Comments

Richard Wolowicz/Getty Images

By all logic, we should have long forgotten Dustin Byfuglien. After wreaking havoc in front of the net in Chicago’s run for the Stanley Cup last spring—tying the team lead with 11 goals—Byfuglien, who rounded out the Blackhawks’ first line with captain Jonathan Toews and Patrick Kane, was shipped to the feeble Atlanta Thrashers in a trade. There, the winger with the body of a linebacker and hockey’s strangest name—pronounced “Bufflin”—made the shock move back to defence. Lunacy, hockey’s talking heads quietly agreed. “Stupidest thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” said radio host and former Blackhawk Jeremy Roenick. “I would love to play against Dustin Byfuglien as a defenceman,” he told his weekly audience. “A defenceman? Maybe that’s why the Thrashers are 0-3. It’s crazy. What are they thinking?”

Cooler heads than Roenick agreed the twin moves threw a wet blanket on Big Buff’s rising star power. At best, the abrupt switch to the back end defied hockey logic, and the Chicago star was decamping for a Sunbelt squad that had missed the playoffs every year but one.

But as he gears up for his first All-Star appearance in Raleigh, N.C., next week, Byfuglien—the league’s top-scoring defenceman, Atlanta’s leading scorer, and a leading contender for the Norris, a trophy awarded annually to the league’s top defenceman—has got a lot of analysts eating crow. It’s not the first time. Byfuglien was drafted 245th overall in 2003, at the end of the eighth round, and after he let his weight balloon to almost 300 lb. as a junior, registering a body fat percentage in the high 20s (the NHL average is 9.7 per cent), scouts figured he didn’t have the discipline, drive or passion to make it. Seven years later, he was lifting the Cup over his head, a leader by example, and one of the most highly touted stars to emerge from Chicago’s run.

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Aung San Suu Kyi in conversation

By Nancy Macdonald - Monday, December 20, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 5 Comments

Mother and son: Suu Kyi and Kim Aris in Rangoon | AP; Soe Zeya Tun/Reuters

On Nov. 13, Aung San Suu Kyi, the world’s most famous political prisoner, walked free from house arrest in Burma. Her crumbling white villa on Rangoon’s Inya Lake had, for most of the past two decades, been her prison. She was first detained in 1989, a year before her National League for Democracy party took 82 per cent of the seats in nationwide elections. Those results were famously tossed out by the military regime that has ruled Burma since 1962 and threw the NLD leadership, Suu Kyi included, behind bars. Late last month, Suu Kyi was reunited with her youngest son, Kim Aris, 33, named for the Rudyard Kipling hero, after a decade-long separation. The 65-year-old Nobel laureate and democratic icon spoke to Maclean’s from Rangoon.

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Mozhdah: The Oprah of Afghanistan

By Nancy Macdonald - Friday, December 17, 2010 at 3:20 PM - 9 Comments

For her safety, Mozhdah seldom leaves her house. When she does, she’s mobbed by fans. | Andrea Bruce/Getty Images

On the face of it, the taping of the The Mozhdah Show looks like that of any other U.S. talk show. Green lights dim as the house band—Afghanistan’s only known rock group—starts up. A white spotlight sweeps the audience. Whistles and cheers erupt as the host, Mozhdah Jamalzadah, emerges, hopping gracefully onto the bright-pink set. “Salaam!” says the charismatic, Canadian-raised star, whose nine-month-old TV program has taken Afghanistan by storm. “Salaam!” she says again, smiling, her adoring crowd refusing to return to their seats.

Mozhdah, who like Beyoncé is known by her first name, and is mobbed whenever she leaves her Kabul home, has been labelled the Oprah of Afghanistan. The comparison is of course imperfect. Oprah doesn’t sleep with a gun. She doesn’t ride in bulletproof cars or travel with guards armed with AK-47s. Death threats don’t flood her inbox. Mozhdah, whose first thought on entering a new building is how she might escape, is gutsy in a way Oprah doesn’t need to be. Her black leather leggings, six-inch heels and silver hoop earrings wouldn’t get a second glance in Vancouver, where she’s spent all but five of her 26 years, but this is Afghanistan. Until a few years ago, the bare ankles alone could have earned her a public whipping.

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Marjorie Anne Heinrichs | 1956-2010

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 5:00 PM - 28 Comments

Illustration by Jack Dylan

MARJORIE ANNE HEINRICHS was born in Morris, Man., on March 2, 1956, the second of six children born to Helen and Sydney Reimer, a financial adviser. Marj, a redhead with a fiery personality and a yen for storytelling, grew up in the prosperous, conservative Mennonite community of Rosenort. She was an opinionated and curious tomboy—not your average Mennonite girl. TV and radio, the church believed, were a sin. Hard work brought you closer to God.

At 14, she met Jim Heinrichs, “the cutest boy in school,” as she described him. Gentle Jim, shy and soft-spoken, was her polar opposite. They married in 1974, after graduating from Rosenort Collegiate, and moved onto a hog farm west of town. At 19, Marj gave birth to Tom. Jen, Katie, Sara and Billy soon followed. Life was merry, but not without bumps. No one worked harder than Jim, who also managed the local lumberyard, but in the ’80s hog prices hit rock-bottom. Interest rates and feed prices were sky-high. In 1986, they had to sell the farm and move into town, where Jim took over G.K. Braun Insurance from father-in-law Sydney. Marj was devastated—she loved that old farm.

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Creating an urban jungle

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, December 16, 2010 at 3:20 PM - 2 Comments

Photography Stephanie Lim

Vancouver’s push to become the planet’s greenest city includes a bold new plan to plant 150,000 trees in the next decade, in what might be the largest urban tree-planting campaign in Canadian history. Indeed, it’s one of North America’s “most aggressive targets,” says deputy city manager Sadhu Johnston. Mayor Gregor Robertson snagged the 36-year-old whiz kid from a high-profile gig as Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s environmental czar a year ago; Johnston is also the unofficial point man for Robertson’s “Greenest City” initiative, aimed at turning Vancouver into the world’s environmental pacesetter by 2020.

As for the trees, the interim goal is to get 50,000 more in city-owned spaces within the next five years, before ramping up planting starting in 2015. Vancouver’s Board of Parks and Recreation will have a total cost estimate ready next spring, when council will be asked to okay the program. But things are already rolling. Last month, Falaise Park, in the city’s east end, got 25 fruit trees, the first of three new fruit-bearing orchards going into city parks ahead of the spring.

And businesses, like it or not, will be key to the program’s success. The city will likely ask businesses to put 56,000 trees in the ground, says Johnston. Mandating that new towers, for instance, add an undefined number of trees to their plans is being discussed, he says. The payoff: not only are tree-lined streets great for property values, says Johnston, but trees play a big part in the atmospherics market researchers drool over. A year-old University of Washington study found that consumers spend 12 per cent more in treed shopping districts than in those without.

Rogues' gallery

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, December 9, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Getty Images; AP; Reuters; Paul Darrow/Globe and Mail; Istock

Mel Gibson
He spared nothing in a series of secretly recorded aural assaults aimed at his girlfriend. Women and
African-Americans bore the brunt of his bug-eyed rage. So far, Hollywood is refusing to forgive. Even his cameo in “The Hangover” remake—however pathetic a shot at redemption—was axed after a revolt by the film’s cast.

Lloyd Blankfein
Goldman Sachs’s paltry $550-million fine to settle civil fraud charges was widely trumpeted as a victory for CEO Blankfein, unapologetic defender of Wall Street’s most repellent practices. His firm has also been accused of betting against clients, and of hiding Athens’s debt problems—“God’s work,” as Blankfein unforgettably once labelled it.

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The new normal

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, December 9, 2010 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

AP; CP; Getty Images; Istock; Illustration by Adam Cholewa | Banner year: (from left) Lynch; Smitherman and husband; Gaga

It’s hard to believe that a year marked by the heartbreaking suicides of a number of gay U.S. teens, including 13-year-old Asher Brown and Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi, could also be a banner year for gay rights. But their tragic deaths spurred an outpouring of public sympathy, hope and help for gay youth, including It Gets Better—a popular project featuring gay adults talking about overcoming bullies and hurt.

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Independence Day

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, December 9, 2010 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

AFP/Getty Images

When, on the evening of Nov. 13, Aung San Suu Kyi suddenly appeared from behind the red iron bars surrounding her house, her lonely prison for most of the past two decades, her ecstatic supporters erupted into cheers; many were reduced to tears. Thousands had rushed to Suu Kyi’s crumbling white villa on Rangoon’s Inya Lake after security forces began taking apart the compound’s barbed-wire barricades: a clear signal the world’s most famous political prisoner would finally be freed from house arrest.

The crowd’s size, enthusiasm, and the strong youth element suggest “the Lady,” as she is known in Burma, had emerged from captivity with her popularity and moral authority intact. “We haven’t seen each other for so long,” Suu Kyi, dressed in a purple longyi, a Burmese sarong, told supporters, her grace unbroken. “We have a lot to do.”

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Malcolm William Brent Johnson | 1977-2010

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, November 25, 2010 at 5:00 PM - 3 Comments

Illustration by Marian Bantjes

Malcolm William Brent Johnson was born in Vancouver on March 11, 1977, to Malcolm Sr., a navy officer and diver, and Lynda, a hairdresser. Malcolm, who was white-blond with piercing blue eyes, was “always ahead of the game,” says Lynda. “He walked early, talked early, read early.” But he didn’t always have it easy. His parents divorced when he was young, and he bounced around B.C., to Vernon, Mackenzie, Armstrong, then Prince George. He was only nine when his dad died, suddenly.

Malcolm threw his energy into karate—kyokushin, which is rooted in a philosophy of self-improvement, discipline and hard work. Soon, the ethic became his own. He was fiercely independent, and doted on his half-brother Lance, five years his junior, taking him trick-or-treating, and dropping him at school every morning, hanging up his jacket, pulling off his boots and putting him in his inside shoes. By 12, he was answering phones, making coffee and sweeping up hair at the Woolco salon his mom managed. At 15, he’d landed a job at Wendy’s.

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Ivan Polivka | 1945-2010

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, November 18, 2010 at 5:00 PM - 6 Comments

Illustration by Taylor Shute

Ivan Polivka was born on March 2, 1945, in the tiny Czechoslovakian town of Blovice on the River Úslava, in southern Bohemia. Ivan, a nature-lover with innate curiosity and a solitary streak, was the second of three boys born to Jarmila, a teacher, and František, a technician. He avoided school when he could, and loved fishing and roaming the Úslava valley—forever bringing home the mice, wounded birds and stray cats he encountered, says his younger brother Jiri. At 16, he enrolled in a four-year forestry program in nearby Plzen; there, he also joined an amateur theatre troupe. Mandatory military service was rough for the Soviet Bloc’s rebels and budding artists. But Ivan managed to snag a job training military dogs and feeding pigs. He emerged an outspoken critic of the hardline Communist regime and, in 1968, was briefly jailed when Soviet tanks crushed a nascent reform movement. In November of that year, he fled to Canada via Austria.

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The crushing recession that’s brought Ireland to its knees

By Nancy Macdonald - Wednesday, November 17, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 1 Comment

One in three Irish under 30 are out of work | Cathal McNaughton/Reuters

Two years ago, Mick Doherty was tooling around Dublin in a brand new, cherry-red Audi A4. “A six-speed,” the young Irishman adds, with a rueful smile. Today, Doherty drives around his adopted Vancouver in a 1990 Chrysler Daytona—automatic transmission. “And I’m grateful for it,” declares the 32-year-old construction worker who, last year, emigrated to Canada to escape a crushing recession that’s brought his native Ireland to its knees. It’s shrunk the economy by a tenth—the textbook definition of a depression.

What a difference a few years can make. As recently as 2006, the roaring Celtic Tiger was held up as a model economy. Doherty was making money hand over fist, holidaying three times a year, in Bulgaria, Las Vegas, Spain. Ireland famously boasted more BMWs per capita than Germany, and its lawyers and managers were earning bigger bucks than their counterparts in the U.S. But in late September 2008, Irish banks, overexposed to the property market, came under severe pressure as the credit crunch bit in. “More or less overnight,” says Doherty, “everything came crashing to a halt.” Ireland led Europe into recession.

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Canada's lousy mayors

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 1:20 PM - 0 Comments

O’Brien, Ottawa; McCallion, Mississauga; Robertson, Vancouver; Sean Kilpatrick/CP/ Vince Talotta/Toronto Star/ Jonathan Hayward/CP

In a sign of the season, in Ottawa this week, incumbent Mayor Larry O’Brien apologized for his first two years in office—a “complete disaster,” the mayor bluntly admitted. “I probably made every single major political mistake that was possible—I even made quite a few mistakes that, quite frankly, were impossible to replicate,” he continued. O’Brien couldn’t say whether he was Ottawa’s worst-ever mayor because, as he explained, he doesn’t know all of them. But the gaffe-prone mayor did want Ottawans to know how “sincerely sorry” he was for the way he’d run city hall.

What was remarkable was that this was not an exit speech, but a campaign speech. A year ago, the pugnacious ex-businessman was unsure voters would ever forgive him his bribery and influence-peddling charges. O’Brien was found not guilty, but the legal sideshow nevertheless garnered embarrassing headlines all over the country. Now, here he was again, having launched a re-election bid last month, complete with a recycled promise not to increase taxes. This notwithstanding the fact that taxes have jumped fully 14 per cent since he took office on a “zero-means-zero” tax increase pledge in 2006.

O’Brien does have competition. A record 20 Ottawans have paid $200 to run for mayor on Oct. 25, including O’Brien’s main contender: ex-MPP Jim Watson. But Watson, a former Ottawa mayor himself, has failed to excite Ottawans; although he’s leading in the polls, the race is such a dog’s breakfast that a disgraced mayor no one thought would show his face now stands a fighting chance come Oct. 25.

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Hayley Wickenheiser on men's versus women's hockey

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, October 14, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 0 Comments

Photography Chris Bolin

Hayley Wickenheiser, captain of Canada’s gold-medal-winning women’s hockey team, is the game’s most decorated female player, with more goals, assists, penalty minutes and medals in international play (including three Olympic golds and a silver) than any other woman. Her new memoir, Gold Medal Diary, recounts her experience of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, the gruelling six-month lead-up to the Games, and juggling life with her 10-year-old son, Noah.

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