Christopher Michael Sheppard

By Stephanie Findlay - Wednesday, August 24, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Illustration by Jack Dylan

Christopher Michael Sheppard was born on a wet, snowy, windy morning in Bay L’Argent, Nfld., on Feb. 6, 1978, to Rupert Sheppard and Patricia “Pat” Baker, the middle of four children. (Two years later, the couple would lose their second daughter Ruby to health complications.) Pat, whose father was a deep-sea fisherman, was a homemaker. Rupert, who grew up with 14 brothers and sisters, worked, among other jobs, with CP Rail in Ontario and the Canadian Coast Guard in Newfoundland.

Toddler Chris had a shock of shaggy, dark brown hair, like his dad, and emerald green eyes, like his mom. His grin was infectious. “Chris was a bit of a rambunctious fellow,” says Rupert, “but if he couldn’t make you smile throughout the day, then girl, you had a glass jaw.” Older sister Ann-Marie, Chris, and younger brother Jamie made an inseparable trio. “They had their little toughs every now and again,” says Pat, “but one protected the other.”

The Sheppards’ early stomping grounds were in Harbour Mille, an 18th-century fishing village on Newfoundland’s southeast shore. Days after school ended, the family would pile into their bright yellow wooden boat for the 20-minute ride across Fortune Bay to the cove where their small log cabin stood. “Me and my brother would be curled in the bow of the boat with a blanket over our heads and there’d be 14-foot waves,” says Jamie. “It was lots of fun. Giggles left, right and centre.”
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Louisina monks enter the casket business

By Stephanie Findlay - Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 6:03 PM - 0 Comments

In December 1889, Benedictine monks established a monastery in the pine forests of southeast Louisiana, 65 km north of New Orleans. At Saint Joseph Abbey, as it’s known today, the monks have long run cottage industries to help pay the bills. More recently, they’ve started manufacturing funeral caskets—a venture that prompted the Louisiana funeral industry to complain they were unlicensed vendors.

The monks wanted to craft simple “monastic” caskets, as well as slightly less simple “traditional” caskets. (Both models are customizable for crypts and mausoleums—the way to bury the dead in the land of the bayou—and priced below the national average of $2,200). But before they could deliver their first casket, they received a cease-and -desist letter from the Louisiana State Board of Embalmers and Funeral Directors—a Louisiana law prohibited the sale of caskets except by licensed funeral homes. Rather than turn the other cheek, the monks went to court. Last month, a judge ruled in their favour, saying the law was unconstitutional. The monks now hope to sell 10 caskets a month. “A Christian death is not about having this big fancy casket, but going out simply,” says Abbot Justin Brown. “We come in with nothing—we go out with nothing.”

Cashing in on foreign students

By Stephanie Findlay - Friday, August 12, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 5 Comments

Simon Hayter

Last year, Patricia Gartland, who works for a suburban Vancouver school district, brought in $16 million selling 1,700 B.C. classroom spots to foreign students, largely from China and South Korea. Gartland, who started her job as director of international education with the Coquitlam School District in suburban Vancouver over 10 years ago, has made the program in Vancouver one of the most extensive in Canada and the envy of the scores of districts across the country looking to cash in on the growing market for international students.

With international students paying $10,000 to $14,000 to attend Canadian schools, public school administrators across the country are setting up for-profit international student programs to compete for their dollars. One 2009 study estimated some 35,000 foreign students in the K-12 system contribute almost $700 million annually to the Canadian economy—a win-win for students, who get an invaluable leg-up when applying to North American post-secondary schools, as well as district administrators, who make up to 50 per cent profit on the tuition.

International student programs aren’t new to Canada, but at the K-12 level they’re rarely talked about, although most provinces have had programs for at least a decade. No province has been more successful at bringing in international students than B.C., with some 9,000. Capitalizing on the demand for a Western diploma and an English-language education, B.C. schools compete with Britain, the U.S. and Australia to recruit students overseas. School districts send staff abroad to meet foreign school officials and to attend trade shows. Domestically, the districts liaise with the Lower Mainland’s tight-knit Chinese and Korean communities, looking for overseas relatives. Once in Canada, the students live with extended family or billets. The students are offered supplementary language classes in tandem with regular studies, though eventually most opt for the standard curriculum.

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Character builders

By Stephanie Findlay - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 12:20 PM - 0 Comments

Photo by Jenna Marie Wakani

Mascots often define a brand. Just think of Kellogg’s Tony the Tiger or Kraft’s Kool-Aid man. And if you see one in person, there’s a good chance the costume was made in Toronto, where a thriving industry has emerged selling to clients around the globe. “Toronto is the mascot mecca of the world,” says Christina Simmons, president of Loonie Times Inc., one of the half-dozen mascot companies in the city.

Why Toronto? “I think we just put more TLC into them,” says Simmons. Unlike mass-produced mascots made overseas, Toronto’s mascots are conceived by bona-fide artisans. Take Sugar’s Costumes Studio, founded in 1980 by Peter deVinta, an Italian immigrant who comes from a long line of tailors. (His father, Joseph, now 91, was a master tailor in Italy who worked for top military generals.) A medium-sized firm, Sugar’s makes upwards of 400 mascots a year. Some are famous, like the Blue Jays’ Ace, and others obscure, like the Calvary Chapel’s California Nuts for Jesus: PJ, Al, Wally and Hazel. DeVita just shipped Nahkool, a date palm tree and mascot of a town in Bahrain.

The companies hire from nearby schools, like OCAD University and Seneca College, who pump out sculptors, designers and sewers. “When you’re making a custom character like the Honey Nut Bee, you need a fashion design graduate so they can do the pattern drafting and do the math to look like the design,” says Mike Chudleigh, president of 1-800-Mascots, another local firm.

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Death on a roller coaster

By Stephanie Findlay - Friday, July 15, 2011 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

National News/Keystone Press Agency

Late last week, Sgt. James Thomas Hackemer, a 29-year-old Iraq war veteran who had lost both legs in combat, died after falling out of the Ride of Steel roller coaster at Darien Lake Theme Park in Genesee County, N.Y. Though the park website stipulates passengers must be taller than 4½ feet, and that those “with certain body proportions may not be able to ride,” this accident wasn’t the roller coaster’s first.

In 1999, one day after the Superman: Ride of Steel rollercoaster opened (Superman was dropped from the name in 2007), a 37-year-old man was thrown from his seat and hospitalized with minor injuries. Park officials said his weight—in excess of 300 lb.—was probably to blame. Elsewhere, in 2001 on the ride at Six Flags New England in Springfield, Mass., 21 passengers were injured, some with broken noses, after two cars collided. Then, in 2004, an overweight man who had cerebral palsy fell out of the same Superman: Ride of Steel roller coaster and died.

Rose Ann Hirsh, author of Western New York Amusement Parks, says that the few accidents that happen on roller coasters are less likely to be due to mechanical failure than a result of human negligence. “I wish he had thought twice before he did it, and I wish Darien Lake had thought twice about it,” says Hirsh of the Hackemer tragedy.

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Terry Lee Pettigrew

By Stephanie Findlay - Wednesday, July 6, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 0 Comments

Illustration by Juliana Neufeld

Terry Lee Pettigrew was born in Brandon, Man., on Sept. 7, 1952, the third of seven children, to Marvin, a brakeman for the Canadian Pacific Railway, and Helen, a nurse. In search of employment, Marvin moved the family “like gypsies” across Canada, all the while teaching his boys to play board games, fish, skate and camp. Seven years later, seeking permanence, the Pettigrews returned to Brandon, Marvin’s hometown.

Terry was a happy-go-lucky toddler like his older twin brothers, Garry and Larry, but couldn’t leave his terrible twos behind. As he grew, so did his temper. One day, when seven-year-old Terry was playing with the neighbourhood kids, he got hold of a small camping hatchet and in a fit took after one of his friends. Soon after, he threatened a different kid, this time with a rock. Marvin and Helen were at their wits’ end. They called social services, who advised them to place Terry in a group home. “That was about the only recourse I had, was to do something terrible to get something good done,” says Marvin. “Awful thing to have to do to get help, isn’t it?” Terry was eight when he moved into the home, where he stayed until he was 18. During that time, he didn’t see his parents once, and, even years later, never spoke with them about his time there.

But if Terry went in troubled, he came out smiling. With his twinkling blue eyes, straw-blond hair and lithe frame—he stood about five-feet-eight-inches tall—Terry took after his mother’s side: in his early 20s, he was the spitting image of granddad Harold Edward Appleyard, a jockey. After some stints up north working the oil rigs, Terry took a job as a groom at the Calgary Stampede race track. There, he met Bud Keizer, owner of a horse transport company in Calgary, in the late ’80s. “Some horses were very, very hard to handle,” says Bud, “he just seemed to do it without any problems.” For the next decade, Bud hired Terry as a truck driver transporting horses across Canada and the U.S. Often, Terry would have dinner with Bud and his wife, Patty. “I tried putting weight on him but boy could he eat,” says Patty. (Terry loved Patty’s fried chicken and befriended her two Maltese dogs). “I like people who like animals,” says Patty, “I think there’s a kindness to them a lot of people don’t have. He had a big heart, Terry did.”

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Prisoners of the world, unite!

By Stephanie Findlay - Monday, July 4, 2011 at 2:26 PM - 1 Comment

In January 2010, a 50-something inmate serving a life sentence at Mountain Institution, a medium-security prison in Agassiz, British Columbia, polled his fellow prisoners to see if they were in favour of starting a labour union. Over 76 per cent of the inmates said yes. By March, he and a core group of 14 inmates at Mountain had drafted a constitution for the union and have been working towards certification ever since. If the inmates are successful, the union will be the first of its kind in the country.

It’s not surprising the movement is happening at Mountain, given its unique status as a work-focused prison where inmates must have steady jobs. As of 2007, there were 449 inmates at Mountain–the majority of whom work in one of four industries: textiles, manufacturing, construction, and prison services, such as printing and laundry. They’ve only recently met their first hurdle: getting 51 per cent of the prisoners to sign up. This is usually a routine affair, but represents a problem inside a prison, where inmates have been denied the right to assemble.

In a press release, the prisoners said their proposed union would raise issues that “plague the prison population as a workforce,” including workplace safety, access to vocational training, and pay, which hasn’t been adjusted to inflation since 1986. The union tactic comes in response to a dysfunctional inmate grievance system that is overloaded, understaffed, and inefficient. According to the Correctional Investigator’s office the volume of complaints has grown from around 20,000 in 2005-06 to over 28,000 in 2009-2010

A 2010 review of the complaints and grievance process by David Mullan, a constitutional lawyer and professor emeritus at Queen’s University, found “serious problems” with the current system. A routine grievance can take over 150 days from its initial filing to be resolved, in part because of improperly trained staff. (Mullan says staff do “little more than [process] paper.”) And the system is tied up by “frequent users”–serial grievers, determined to bog down the process. In 2008-09, Mullan found that in some institutions, just a dozen offenders accounted for 11.3 per cent of all submissions.

Canada’s prisoners’ rights movement dates back to the 70s, when a series of brutal uprisings and violent deaths spurred an overhaul of prison legislation, including extending the vote behind prison walls. Since then, a series of legal reforms that have guaranteed rights to prisoners, notably the adoption of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 and the adoption of the Corrections and Conditional Release Act in 1992, which includes the inmate grievance policy. In many respects, Canada’s commitment to prisoner’s rights is admirable.

But just because something is written, doesn’t mean it’s enforced, cautions Allan Manson, a criminal law professor at Queen’s University. “The problem,” says Manson, “is enforcing compliance with the act and that continues to be a problem today.” There are statutory standards, he says, “but prisoners have to be able to force compliance. And given the obstacles to judicial remedies and cost of litigation, there hasn’t been a crucial mass of judicial scrutiny that will keep penitentiary officials in line.”

The Correctional Service of Canada wouldn’t speculate on the impact a union might have on the federal prison system and pointed out that inmates already have a say in their treatment. “Each institution has an inmate committee which is formed to allow inmates to identify issues, including work-related issues, affecting them and to raise them with wardens and institutional staff,” CSC spokesperson Jean-Paul Lorieau wrote in an email to Maclean’s. “So far no union has been formed, and we do not have any further comments on this issue.”

In the meantime, Mountain inmates and Natalie Dunbar, a Vancouver-based criminal lawyer who’s been serving as a liaison between the prison and the outside world, continue to organize. While the process is slow, Dunbar is optimistic. She says a prisoners’ union could “change the dynamic” between guards and prisoners for the better. “Prison staff are unionized and they have issues they have to deal with and believe it or not some of the issues intersect with prisoners issues.” Ideally, Dunbar says prison labour unions will propagate across the country: “Mountain would be local 001 and hopefully Kent would be unionized, then places throughout BC and then Canada.” Though, until then, “it’s baby steps,” she says. “We just want to get the application in at Mountain.”

Meet the single-serve baby formula machine

By Stephanie Findlay - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 11:30 AM - 16 Comments

Denis Balibouse/Reuters

Ever wish you could feed your nursing babe by simply pressing a button? Nestlé has the product for you: BabyNes, a single-serve baby-formula machine that resembles a single-serve coffee maker. The US$297 contraption makes formula out of a range of capsules (costing roughly US$65 for a 26-pack) to feed infants up to three years of age. In May, BabyNes went on sale in Switzerland and is expected to launch globally next year. “We think this could be as successful as Nespresso,” Martin Grieder, director of BabyNes, told Fox News, referring to Nestlé’s capsule coffee system. Nespresso is its fastest-growing brand—sales increased 20 per cent to US$3.55 billion in 2010.

Predictably, breastfeeding advocates are unimpressed, accusing the food giant of undermining the World Health Organization’s guidelines recommending breastfeeding for the first six months. But Nestlé prefers to highlight the technological genius of its product. As Grieder puts it: “This is a game changer.”

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Save the earth, kill a camel

By Stephanie Findlay - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 10:55 AM - 5 Comments

Joel Saget/AFP/Getty Images

A dead camel in Australia may soon pay off in carbon credits. Down under, where feral camels are running rampant in the rangelands and producing unholy amounts of methane, the government is proposing an official camel cull to help combat climate change. There are 1.2 million feral camels in Australia, and with few natural diseases and no natural predators, the population is expected to reach two million by 2020. One camel emits an estimated 45 kg of methane a year—the equivalent of a metric tonne of carbon dioxide. (In contrast, a passenger car emits about 5.2 metric tonnes annually.)

Under the proposed new regime, expected to become law this summer, accredited marksmen will be able to shoot the animals for carbon credits. “Potentially it has tremendous merit, because feral camels are a dreadful menace across the whole of arid Australia,” said Mark Dreyfus, Australia’s parliamentary secretary for climate change. Camels were first introduced to Australia in the late 1800s to work in the outback. Today, in the age of planes, trains and automobiles, the humped beast is just an exotic pest—albeit a gassy one.

Where have Georgia's immigrant workers gone?

By Stephanie Findlay - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 15 Comments

Karen Kasmauski/Science Faction/Corbis

Following in the controversial footsteps of Arizona’s lawmakers, the ruling Republican party in Georgia introduced beefed-up immigrant legislation earlier this spring. The bill, HB 87, empowers police to question the immigration status of criminal suspects and demands business owners use E-Verify, a federal database, to check a prospective employee’s immigration status. HB 87 will take effect July 1. But, just as in Arizona, a class-action lawsuit was filed against the legislation: last week, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), along with several rights organizations and individuals, challenged the law in federal district court. “This legislation turns Georgia into a police state,” says Azadeh Shahshahani of the Georgia chapter of the ACLU. Even Carlos Santana weighed in on the national debate: “The people of Arizona, the people of Atlanta, Georgia, you should be ashamed of yourselves,” said Santana earlier this month at Major League Baseball’s annual civil rights game.

Along with opposition from civil rights groups, leaders of the agricultural industry—one of Georgia’s largest—are protesting the bill. Charles Hall, executive director of the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association, says migrant workers have “heard horror stories of people being harassed, being deported, being stopped at a licence check.” As a result, says Hall, farm workers are bypassing Georgia, causing a massive labour shortage in the state and sending the $1.1-billion industry into a tailspin. Hall reports farmers are experiencing labour shortages of up to 50 per cent, and estimates that a quarter of Georgia’s crops will go unharvested—representing some $300 million in lost revenue.

Although Georgia’s unemployment rate sits at 9.9 per cent, Hall says hiring domestic workers isn’t an option. “If we could get domestic workers to do our field work, we would,” he says, “but they’re not available.” Domestic workers might work in the cooler packing houses, but not in the fields. “It’s back-breaking work,” says Hall.

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Budapest’s burning love

By Stephanie Findlay - Monday, June 6, 2011 at 10:30 AM - 0 Comments

Torbjorn Andersson/CP

On Wednesday last week, Budapest’s city council voted in favour of naming Elvis Presley an honorary citizen. Presley endorsed the hard-fought but unsuccessful 1956 Hungarian uprising against the Communist government when, on Jan. 6, 1957, he appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and performed the gospel song Peace in the Valley in dedication to the Hungarian rebels. It was the last song of his set and would be his last time ever on the Sullivan show. “The reasons for honouring Elvis are not sentimental but political,” said István Tarlós, mayor of Budapest, according to the Guardian. Indeed, Sullivan collected donations from the TV audience, in the order of some 25 million Swiss francs, to donate to a Hungarian relief fund.

The honorary citizenship isn’t Hungary’s first commemoration of “the King.” Earlier this March, Budapest also named a park in his name, part of a nationwide effort to remove names given during the Communist era. It’s perhaps understandable why war and peace were on Presley’s mind. Two days after his Sullivan appearance, the Memphis draft board announced that the 22-year-old would inducted into the army.

India's female population is dwindling at an alarming rate

By Stephanie Findlay - Monday, June 6, 2011 at 10:05 AM - 0 Comments

Raveendran/AFP/Getty Images

When it comes to girls, China gets the bad rap. But it’s not the only country with an overwhelming preference for boys. The 2011 Indian census revealed that there are 7.1 million fewer girls than boys aged under seven. The sex ratio in that age group is now 914 girls to 1,000 boys, the lowest since records began in 1961. And a study released last week concluded the growing gender imbalance is a result of selective abortion of female fetuses.

The study found that selective abortion of Indian girls, especially for pregnancies after a first-born girl, has increased substantially over the past 10 years. It used to be that the phenomenon was restricted to a few northern Indian states, but it is now common throughout India’s population. Prabhat Jha, a University of Toronto professor and author of the study, says the abortions are consistent with the country’s economic development: as fertility drops and a preference for sons continues, families with the means to select the gender of their child will do so. Jha says the repercussions of the skewed ratio are glaring. “In the hardest hit places of India, they’re importing brides,” he says. “There just aren’t enough women.”

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When the cat's a stray

By Stephanie Findlay - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 9:30 AM - 2 Comments

Last year, when Carla Leardi joined the Cat Assistance Team (CAT), a non-profit volunteer group in the small southwestern Ontario town of Amherstburg, friends wondered why. After all, Leardi, an owner of two dogs, doesn’t have a cat. But the fortysomething office assistant considers herself an equal-opportunity animal enthusiast. And she was quick to take on CAT’s biggest task: dealing with Amherstburg’s proliferating cat population—a problem that’s more than a little gross. “One gentleman,” says Nancy Greenaway, a board member of CAT, “complained because his very expensive hockey equipment had been sprayed.”

Leardi’s solution is a “cat sanctuary.” She’s proposing that CAT’s volunteers build and maintain a fenced-in site for the local herd. Each feline would get a “cat condo”—a small house, complete with linoleum floors, straw and a shingled roof. The plan, says Leardi, is more cost-effective than the $50,000 it would cost to trap and euthanize all the town’s approximately 100 wild cats. By comparison, neutering a cat costs about $200, shelter is $400, and food is about $5 a month. It’s also, she says, simpler than introducing and enforcing stricter animal bylaws. (She uses Ottawa’s Parliamentary Cats, a similar residence behind Parliament Hill, as an example).

In April, CAT met with the town council and requested a piece of land and $10,000 to cover start-up costs for a 20-cat colony—donations and fundraising will cover ongoing needs. The idea was well received, says Greenaway, and CAT hopes it will be approved soon. “People are starting to say ‘how can we help?’ ” she says. “And it’s not only the people that want to get rid of the cats and have threatened to poison them.”

A sommelier in your pocket

By Stephanie Findlay - Wednesday, May 25, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 4 Comments

Photograph by Jenna Marie Wakani

Last year, VinTank, a “digital think tank for the wine industry” based in Napa, Calif., released a report that reviewed 75 wine-related iPhone apps. Last month, VinTank did a redux of the report—this time the number of apps on the market had soared to 452.

A small industry has sprung up around smartphone apps for wine. Some better than others, says Paul Mabray, VinTank’s chief strategy officer, who notes, “there’s a ton of trash out there.” Mabray suggests the best wine apps are the ones with a specific function and a simple interface. Some of his favourites include: Cor.kz, a bar-code scanning app that pulls up info on 750,000 wines, and Nat Decants, described as a “personal sommelier in your pocket,” run by noted Canadian wine writer Natalie MacLean. (It also has a label scanner for wines sold in B.C., Ontario and Quebec.)

The wine app industry is still in its infancy. “There is a tendency for the application to be myopically focused on the oenophile,” says Mabray. He predicts wine apps will soon be more like Instagram or Foodspotting—visual apps where you can post pictures and trade notes with friends. “I’m looking forward to following what wines my friends are talking about,” says Mabray. “More like Facebook, or Twitter.”

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What happened down on the farm?

By Stephanie Findlay - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 9:35 AM - 0 Comments

The United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW), a union that represents food industry workers in Canada and the U.S., filed a complaint to the B.C. Labour Relations Board against the Mexican government and a Mission, B.C.-based farm, for allegedly blocking the return of a seasonal Mexican worker to Canada for his involvement in a union. The UFCW claims it has a Mexican government report blacklisting Victor Robles Velez, who had worked the last four years at Sidhu & Sons Nursery Ltd., for his union involvement. “The Mexican consulate has gone to the farms and injected themselves in the democratic process by telling workers and threatening workers that if they unionize or vote for a union they’ll be sent back to Mexico immediately,” says Wayne Hanley, the UFCW president. The hearing for the complaint, filed last month, is expected to take place in the next couple of weeks.

The Mexican consulate in Vancouver and the owners of the farm categorically deny the charges. “Absolutely not, there is no blacklist,” says a consulate spokesperson, adding the consulate has “absolute respect for the workers’ right to join the unions.”

The B.C. complaint is the latest in a series of controversies relating to the rights of migrant agricultural workers in Canada. Last month, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld a controversial ban on collective bargaining rights for migrant agricultural workers in Ontario, a decision critics say benefits employers and leaves foreign workers vulnerable. Andy Neufeld, a communications director with the UFCW, says that, if proven, the B.C. complaints have national, even international, consequences. “We’re talking about a government’s interference with their citizens’ rights,” says Neufeld, adding, “It would be surprising if somehow we were special out here in B.C. and this was an isolated incident.”

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This one's for the birds

By Stephanie Findlay - Wednesday, May 18, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Aaron Vincent Elkaim

Bill Malis describes the sound as a “a thud. And it’s a gross thud.” The Telus call-centre employee is recalling the first time he heard a bird crash into the Scarborough, Ont., office tower where he works. It was the spring of 2005, and Malis, who had recently started a new job at Consilium Place, an office complex consisting of three mirrored high-rises, was outside on a smoke break. “I dropped my cigarette and was like, what just happened? I picked the poor little guy up—luckily it was okay—and ran across the street to let him loose in the field.”

Malis, who has the manic energy of Jim Carrey but is five foot nine and favours rockabilly-style shirts and pants, started making his rescue missions a habit. Almost every day since, before his shift begins at 7:30 a.m., Malis has patrolled the grounds around the office towers rescuing stunned birds. He makes Consilium Place sound like a zombie adaptation of Hitchcock’s The Birds. “It’s happened, birds falling into people’s meals,” says Malis, who usually finds “beaks, legs, heads, everywhere on the property over the summer from all the hawks and seagulls ripping the birds apart.”

Now, six years since his first rescue mission, Malis, 42, is a key witness in what could be a precedent-setting case against Menkes Developments, the owners of Consilium Place. On March 4, Ontario Nature and Ecojustice, two independent environment organizations, launched a private prosecution against Menkes, which could lead to big fines for using reflective windows that they allege has caused the death or injury of some 800 migratory birds over a nine-month stretch between 2008 and 2009.

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Armed and libellous?

By Stephanie Findlay - Monday, May 16, 2011 at 9:50 AM - 14 Comments

An international spat between Greece and Germany was sparked when Venus de Milo, a Greek marble statue of Aphrodite—arguably the most famous armless goddess in the world—made a controversial appearance on the cover of the German magazine Focus. The problem? Her right arm was intact and she was flipping readers the bird. The magazine’s cover story—“Swindlers in the euro family”—explored German concerns regarding the bailing out of debt-stricken Greece, and outlined the nation’s supposed “2,000 years of decline,” including tax fraud and failed construction projects.

The cover was condemned by the Greek president shortly after it hit newsstands in February 2010. And now, more than a year later, six Greek citizens are taking legal action against Focus—alleging the cover was defamatory, libellous, and responsible for the denigration of Greek national symbols. Along with nine other employees of Focus, Helmut Markwort, the magazine’s founder, is due to appear in an Athens court on June 29. Despite facing two years in prison if found guilty, Markwort is unfazed: “I’m not on the run, and I’m also not afraid that I will have to go to prison.” He says he has a “clean conscience” and that he was simply doing his “journalistic duty.”

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'A murky, muddy mess'

By Stephanie Findlay - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 7:15 AM - 0 Comments

Roads closed: Bryan Ezako boats home in St. François Xavier, Man.

Hours after the Manitoba government declared a provincial state of emergency this week to deal with “unprecedented and historic” flooding of the Assiniboine River, Steve Ashton, the minister of emergency measures, announced the government’s decision to break Assiniboine dikes and release “controlled” water—an unusual plan that speaks to an increasingly unmanageable situation. The release of 2,000 to 6,000 cubic feet per second of water will affect 150 rural properties. Ashton said it wasn’t an easy decision, but it was a necessary one: an uncontrolled release would put 850 homes at risk.

Since early April, the floods—underestimated by faulty river gauges, and caused by a series of wetter-than-average springs—have displaced about 2,000 people. And the government has estimated that the final bill for damages could be $100 million. (The 2009 flood cost Manitoba $70 million.)

The same day a state of emergency was declared, some 800 members of the Canadian Forces arrived. Their job? Help top up existing dikes, fortify previously unprotected properties, and deploy mobile flood protection equipment to high-risk areas. Brandon, Manitoba’s second-largest city, is one of the high priorities. On May 7, the water level in Brandon measured 1,181 feet, the highest it’s been since 1923. An evacuation order was issued this week for those in about 900 homes and businesses in “the Flats, an area south of the river in Brandon. (Winnipeg, with three major water diversions, remains relatively safe.) “It’s a murky, muddy mess,” says Matt Goerzen, an editor for the Brandon Sun.

Shawn Atleo, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, says First Nations communities are disproportionately hurt by the floods since their poor diking systems are “nowhere near” able to displace the water. He says “major policy issues” must be addressed. But for now, it’s a race against time as the flood-fighters try to mitigate the effects of a rising Assiniboine.

The twittering classes

By Stephanie Findlay - Monday, May 9, 2011 at 11:50 AM - 4 Comments

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images; National News/KEYSTONE PRESS; Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Image

When Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles got married in 2005, Facebook had just extended its membership eligibility to high school students, YouTube was in its nascency, Twitter didn’t exist, and no one really knew how to live-stream video. Fast-forward six years, to a brave new world. Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding set online viewership records, dominated social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, and created instant Internet stars.

The big winner? Live-streaming video providers. Livestream, which provided online video for the Associated Press and CBS, said the royal wedding was its most popular stream ever, with 300,000 concurrent viewers. Yahoo also saw big gains: its royal video stream exceeded the record set by Michael Jackson’s funeral by 21 per cent. “Consuming video on the Internet is an increasingly complementary choice to broadcast TV, even when the event is available on TV,” according to Jennifer Donovan, spokesperson for Akamai, another Web streaming service. (The official royal channel provider, YouTube, expected an unprecedented 400 million viewers, though the numbers aren’t yet in.)

Major television networks, too, are finally leveraging social media to their advantage. Indeed, being on every platform—namely Facebook and Twitter—is becoming a necessity: “It’s about providing people with information they want in the format they want it,” says Wendy Rozeluk, a Google representative in Toronto. “One of the advantages is the ongoing commentary that people can make, as well as the participation people can have with an event.”

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Anthony Joseph McColl

By Stephanie Findlay - Wednesday, May 4, 2011 at 1:45 PM - 4 Comments

Illustration by Ian Phillips

Anthony Joseph McColl was born in Gatineau, Que., on March 11, 1992, the first of two children to David, a manager at an Ottawa travel agency, and Monica Thibault, a social worker at an Ottawa health centre. He quickly stood out for his strength. Still in the hospital—he was being monitored in an incubator for fear of being diagnosed with diabetes like his mother—his father was doing his first diaper change when the newborn grabbed hold of the metal rail. “He just managed to grab hold of it and he was about to pull himself off the change table,” says Dave. “He was incredibly strong.”

With big cheeks, a mop of strawberry-blond cherub curls and a boisterous spirit, toddler Anthony was energetic, physical and gregarious. His family nickname, Ant, was incongruous with his bigness. “People would say, ‘Why isn’t he talking?’ ” says Monica, who says strangers would peg him at seven or eight. “Sorry to disappoint you,” she’d say, “but he’s three.” In 1995, sister Alanna was born. “He would rub my tummy and talk to her,” says Monica. “He wanted to help me give her first bath.”

Exposed to art by his family (his father was an avid photographer), Anthony became interested in things Japanese, drawing from Miyazaki films and characters from Yu-Gi-Oh! and Pokémon. His interest in the arts would span from music—he became a vocalist in a screamo band—to video. In his early teens, without any formal training, he and three of his closest friends began work on Bow chicka wow!© productions. The 15-year-olds would use the camera Anthony’s parents lent him to “film and make dumb jokes,” says Nicolas Moncion, one of the friends. “It was his camera so he was the one doing the edits—that showed a lot of his leadership skills. The video turned out great.”

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Universal support from the Donald

By Stephanie Findlay - Monday, May 2, 2011 at 10:45 AM - 0 Comments

When Donald Trump published The America We Deserve, a political manifesto of sorts in 2000, the business tycoon outlined a very un-Republican policy agenda, including much praise for how Canada deals with the sick. “We must have universal health care,” wrote Trump. “I’m a conservative on most issues but a liberal on this one. We should not hear so many stories of families ruined by health care expenses.” He continued, “Doctors might be paid less than they are now, as is the case in Canada, but they would be able to treat more patients because of the reduction in their paperwork.”

Along with the book, the host of Celebrity Apprentice, who now tops some polls as the leading Republican candidate for 2012, has made untold statements over the past decade that could discredit his bid, including frank critiques of George W. Bush and the Iraq war. He even donated to Barack Obama’s campaign. But he’s since made a political about-face. He’s taken up the birther cause, questioning Obama’s U.S. citizenship, backed the invasion of Iraq, and has reversed his stance on abortion—Trump is now pro-life.

So does The Donald still love Canadian-style universal health care? After all, he made his stance pretty clear back then: “The Canadian plan also helps Canadians live longer and healthier than Americans,” he wrote. “There are fewer medical lawsuits, less loss of labour to sickness, and lower costs to companies paying for the medical care of their employees.” Speaking to a crowd of Tea Partiers a couple weeks ago in Boca Raton, Fla., Trump said he’d “fight to get rid of Obamacare, which is a total disaster.” Though he didn’t say it, perhaps he has a made-in-Canada alternative in mind.

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How far can he go?

By Stephanie Findlay - Tuesday, March 29, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 1 Comment

Buda Mendes/GETTY IMAGES

Can Recep Tayyip Erdogˇan win Turkey’s upcoming parliamentary elections this June? Just months before the election, Erdogˇan , the leader of the ruling Justice and Development (AK) party, a moderate Islamist faction, is campaigning hard. And though it’s his eighth year in power, it’s likely the incumbent prime minister will be victorious yet again.

In Erdogˇan’s favour, the Turkish economy—dubbed the “Anatolian Tiger”—remains strong. The IMF predicts that it will grow between four and five per cent in the next year. But there are trouble signs, A March 7 report by Moody’s said that the Turkish economy has “substantial external vulnerabilities, including a large current account deficit.” Earlier this February, the IMF said Turkey has become dangerously vulnerable to “excessive domestic demand and volatile short-term capital flows.” Still, given the turmoil in Arab states, Turkey and its thriving free-market economy have emerged as a poster child in the tumultuous Muslim world.

But while Erdogˇan may be popular at home, he’s been angering others abroad. Last month, in a bid to stir up nationalist sentiment among voting Turks in Germany, he soured his relationship with Berlin when he told a 10,000-strong crowd in Düsseldorf, “Nobody will be able to tear us away from our culture. Our children must learn German, but they must learn Turkish first.” (Germany is effectively the fourth largest Turkish electoral district, behind Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir; between 1.1 million and 1.3 million Turks live there but are eligible to vote in the elections.) It was not the first time Erdogˇan  has ruffled foreign feathers: three years ago, in Cologne, he declared that assimilation was a “crime against humanity”—irking Germans who say that his words work against integration efforts in Germany and are counter-productive.

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Beer: it's no longer food

By Stephanie Findlay - Friday, March 4, 2011 at 10:08 AM - 2 Comments

The state Duma is taking beer to task in Russia. In the past, the beverage was regulated by a 2005 law that classified it as a foodstuff. As such, its distribution did not require state licensing, and it could be advertised at night on TV and sold 24 hours a day in kiosks and supermarkets. Last week, however, Moscow almost unanimously adopted a bill that recognizes beer as alcohol. Beginning July 1, there will be new regulations for the drink that include restricted nighttime sales, and, like vodka, making it illegal to sell at street kiosks. The size of beer bottles is also set to decrease from 500 ml to 300 ml.

The new legislation is part of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s campaign to curb alcoholism and underage drinking in the country (another proposed bill is a nationwide ban on alcohol sales from 11 p.m. to 8 a.m.). Russians are among the highest imbibers in the world: last month, a report released by the World Health Organization found that Russians drink an average of 15.7 litres of alcohol a year, compared to the world average of 6.3 litres. One in five Russian male deaths is caused by alcohol. And yet, the new beer legislation will only apply to suds stronger than five per cent—just a modest proportion of beer sales—leading some to criticize the legislation as too soft.

Let's plug it with kerosene!

By Stephanie Findlay - Tuesday, March 1, 2011 at 3:23 PM - 1 Comment

Even in the best-case scenario, polar drilling is risky, complicated by roving icebergs, lethally cold temperatures and long periods of darkness. And then there are other problems, as the latest Russian attempt to drill into Antarctica’s Lake Vostok—at 10,000 square kilometres one of the world’s largest sub-glacial lakes—shows.

Discovered in 1993, Lake Vostok is under four kilometres of ice and provides a paleoclimatic record dating at least 400,000 years back. Experts believe that undiscovered ancient microbial life exists in the unique environment. But last week, Russian scientists announced that the expedition had to be stopped short because of the encroaching winter. However, the drilling team didn’t want to lose the progress that they’d made—they were just 29.53 m short of their goal—and so dumped kerosene down the 3720-m-long borehole to prevent it from freezing.

Other scientists now worry that the purity of the lake has been ruined, and that the unique ecosystem that lies beneath the ice could be irreversibly damaged. Sadly, it’s not the first time Lake Vostok has been contaminated. In a 2007 Russian drilling attempt, when a drill bit broke off, scientists poured anti-freeze into the hole. That expedition was abandoned completely.