Busting ghosts in ‘Albert Nobbs,’ ‘Woman in Black’ and ‘W.E.’

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, February 3, 2012 at 7:40 PM - 0 Comments

Glenn Close (left) and Mia Wasikowska in 'Albert Nobbs'

We have three period films opening this week, all written or co-written by women, directed by men, and all about tormented folks in what we used to call the British Isles. Two of them, Albert Nobbs and The Woman in Black, are both adapted from stories that originated in 1982; both take place in dour climes of the Victorian era; and both feature Janet McTeer in supporting roles. What all those coincidences mean, I have no idea.  W.E.,  as in Wallis Simpson, is unlike anything else. It shuttles between the 1930s and the present—but for all intents and purposes it’s set in the thoroughly post-modern mind of Madonna, its self-possessed writer-director. All three films, meanwhile, feature bold attempts at transformation: Glenn Close playing a man, Daniel Radcliffe not playing Harry Potter, and Madonna playing at being an auteur.

Glenn Close has a well-deserved Oscar nomination for her uncanny performance in the title role of Albert Nobbs, as a woman who disguises herself as a man to work as a hotel butler in 19th-centry Dublin. For Close, Nobbs has been brewing as a passion project ever since she starred in a 1982 stage version of the story. And her command of the role is so complete it’s creepy. Close is mesmerizing as Nobbs, a character who is so fastidiously repressed he/she is like a ghostly apparition on screen, even more haunting than the supernatural spectre that stalks Daniel Ratcliffe in The Woman in Black. The role is not about cross-dressing so much as annihilating identity. Nobbs is like an asexual alien; a visitor from the same austere planet that brought us Edward Scissorhands and any number of characters played by Tilda Swinton. She’s not the only cross-dresser in the movie. Janet McTeer portrays a robust lesbian who masquerades as a married man, an example that inspires Nobbs to embark on a deluded courtship, hoping to marry a capricious young maid (Mia Wasikowska) and invest her life savings into a mom-and-pop tobacco shop. Continue…

Harper meets with Turmel

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 3, 2012 at 6:36 PM - 0 Comments

A statement from the interim NDP leader on a meeting with the Prime Minister.

I have just concluded a face to face meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper.  The meeting was cordial and focussed on the upcoming budget. I urged Mr. Harper to ensure that the upcoming budget does not harm families or cut the services they rely on in these tough times.  I also urged him, in the face of rising unemployment numbers and yet another plant closing today, to ensure his budget focusses on real job creation above all else. I shared with him what I have heard from Canadians in the past month. Too many families are worried about their jobs and their future. Too many of them are waiting months for the unemployment insurance they’ve paid for their entire lives.  These Canadians know that with further budget cuts coming, it will be even harder for them to make ends meet.

The Prime Minister and I also discussed the relationship between the federal government and the provinces, which I believe requires immediate improvement.   Canadians want the federal government to work with the provinces to improve front-line health services for Canadians.   I asked him to listen to those like the Quebec Premier who don’t want to see the federal government act unilaterally in cutting Old Age Security for future generations.

It was a good discussion and I believe the Prime Minister understood my concerns.  I hope that he will act on them in the upcoming budget. In these tough times, the government simply can’t leave families out in the cold.  It’s time to focus on job creation, and on helping families make ends meet.

And a report from the Prime Minister’s Office. Continue…

‘It’s being considered’

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 3, 2012 at 6:28 PM - 0 Comments

The Prime Minister talks to Postmedia about OAS, China and Iran.

Postmedia: There are Canadians who are wondering, ‘What does it mean to me?’ So that’s why I asked the question. Are you in a position to tell us whether or not the OAS eligibility is being considered as an option?

Harper: Absolutely, it’s being considered. But what we have to be clear on is that we are not looking at changes that are going to affect people that are currently in retirement or approaching retirement. We’ve been very clear on that.

Postmedia: Should anybody over the age of 50 be concerned?

Harper: I’ve just said we’re examining these things. The government hasn’t taken final decisions, so I don’t want to speculate on particulars. But I think we have been very clear in our electoral mandate that we’re not going to make any changes to seniors or to pensions in any way that deals with the current deficit.

Great: sugar is toxic

By Jessica Allen - Friday, February 3, 2012 at 6:05 PM - 0 Comments

Seth Perlman/AP

Yesterday, the National Post ran a story about a report in Nature that suggests sugar is toxic. It’s so bad, says the research journal, that the government might want to restrict the sale of soda pop to those who are at 17-years-old. That would put sugar in the same latitude of evil as alcohol and tobacco. And like those other two harbingers of depravity, sugar is everywhere: from sweet, colourful cereals to candy, fast food and sports drinks. But the real target of the report seems to be soda pop.

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Samsung’s Galaxy Note: between smartphone and iPad?

By Peter Nowak - Friday, February 3, 2012 at 4:45 PM - 0 Comments

Remember when the iPad first came out and Apple touted it as the device that would fill the void between smartphone and laptop? The jokes came along pretty quickly about how long it would be till someone tried to squeeze something more into the space between smartphones and tablets.

Well, laugh no more because Samsung is going there.

The South Korean electronics giant is spending a pile of money on a 90-second commercial during Sunday’s Super Bowl to promote its new Galaxy Note, a weird device that launches in Canada on all three big wireless carriers on Feb. 14.

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This week has four sketches

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 3, 2012 at 4:07 PM - 0 Comments

Monday. Having it both ways
Tuesday. The case of actions v. words
Wednesday. The Russians are coming for our pensions
Thursday. Good help is hard to find

‘The utter failure of right wing, trickle-down economics’

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 3, 2012 at 2:10 PM - 0 Comments

A statement from Brian Topp on today’s Electro-Motive announcement.

Caterpillar’s decision to close its plant in London Ontario, throwing over 400 workers out of work is a powerful indictment of the Harper government’s economic agenda.  

A hugely profitable company, Caterpillar benefited from millions of dollars in Harper government tax giveaways. But instead of investing in its Canadian operations, Caterpillar chose to provoke a conflict with its Canadian workforce demanding outrageous salary cuts that it knew would be rejected. In the end, Caterpillar took the tax breaks and then shipped out the jobs, all with the able assistance of the Harper Tories.  

What is happening in London, Ontario today stands as a powerful testament to the utter failure of right wing, trickle-down economics. For over 20 years, Liberals and Conservatives have argued that tax giveaways to profitable companies like Caterpillar would result in increased investment and good jobs. How wrong they were. What we got instead are growing levels of income inequality, big deficits and governments starved of revenue for vital public investments, like education and training.

Continuing down this path will only lead to more lost jobs, economic insecurity, and growing inequality. That’s why I have made tax fairness a fundamental platform in my leadership campaign. Profitable corporations and the top one per cent must start paying their fair share. And New Democrats must take this argument head on and win it. If we don’t, then the Harper Conservatives and companies like Caterpillar will control Canada’s economic destiny. It’s the job of the New Democratic Party not to let that happen.

Paul Dewar says the Prime Minister must demand that “Caterpillar reverse its decision or return the millions of dollars it took from Canadian tax payers.” Peggy Nash says this is a “a perfect example of just how poorly the Harper Conservative are treating our communities and mismanaging our economy” and she calls on potential supporters to join her in the “fight against precisely this kind of greed.”

Nash on pensions

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 3, 2012 at 1:08 PM - 0 Comments

Peggy Nash has released her platform on pensions and retirement security. It includes the four promises outlined in the last NDP election platform, plus a fifth policy.

In addition to upholding the NDP’s 2011 platform commitments to improve retirement security, Nash’s plan proposes to work with the provinces/territories to permit a transfer of the value of private pensions to the CPP/QPP in the event that an individual terminates employment and his/her company continues in operation or in cases where the company ceases to operate.

Q & A: critical experts wade in on the OAS debate

By John Geddes - Friday, February 3, 2012 at 12:30 PM - 0 Comments

A tough, detailed appraisal of the government’s plan to somehow curb Old Age Security spending is available today both on 3D Policy’s webite and over at iPolitics as a featured opinion.

It’s by two former senior finance department mandarins, Scott Clark and Peter DeVries, and brings badly needed clarity to the debate sparked by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s surprise remark about his intention to reform pensions in his “major transformations” speech last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Clark and DeVries argue that since the government has already clamped down on spending growth in big-ticket areas like defence and health, the projected rise in OAS costs isn’t by itself large enough to pose any real threat to federal finances.

Their commentary is well worth reading, but I also took the opportunity to interview Clark this morning for a less formal sense of how he sees this volatile debate unfolding. He brings the unique perspective of a former deputy minister of finance, and a key insider during the fight to eliminate the deficit back in the 1990s—when the Liberals decided against cutting seniors benefits as too politically risky.

Here’s part of our conversation, edited and condensed:

Continue…

Topp on winning

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 3, 2012 at 11:54 AM - 0 Comments

Brian Topp has released a policy paper on building the party, including calls to expand the party’s outreach and fundraising efforts, launch a policy review and commit to working with other parties after the 2015 election.

There are, as Jack Layton used to say, many tools in the toolbox to do this – cooperation case-by-case and bill-by-bill; a budget accord on the model of the 2005 “NDP budget”; a governing accord in the style of the 1985 Peterson-Rae accord; or a coalition government, in the style of the coalitions that govern most of the democratic world. By talking early and often about these options, we will counteract the nonsense the Conservatives say about them; moreover, we will ensure that Canadians know that in the NDP, they have the party that is always prepared to work with others in the House of Commons to get things done –including the central task of ridding Canada of the Harper government.

After the photo op

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 3, 2012 at 11:13 AM - 0 Comments

March 2008. He also toured the Electro-Motive Diesel plant on Oxford Street where he met many of the firm’s 900 employees. Harper said his visit to the rail locomotive plant was intended to highlight tax measures from his government aimed at keeping manufacturers competitive.

Today. The company that owns the locked-out Electro-Motive plant in London, Ont. has decided to close the plant permanently. Progress Rail Services Corp., a subsidiary of U.S. construction conglomerate Caterpillar, announced “it is regrettable that it has become necessary to close production operations at the London facility,” in a release on Friday. The company locked out 450 workers from the facility on Jan. 1. Costs were the main factor in the dispute, with the company pushing employees to take a 50 per cent pay cut.

Ask a simple question

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, February 3, 2012 at 8:38 AM - 0 Comments

Here are four of the first five questions asked by the NDP yesterday afternoon.

Will he rise in his seat and say to the country that the age of eligibility for OAS will not be raised to age 67, yes or no?

Will he raise OAS eligibility to 67 years, yes or no?

There is enough money for tax gifts for large corporations, but now seniors will have to wait until the age of 67 to get their $540 a month? Yes or no?

Is the eligibility age going to increase to 67, yes or no?

None of those questions received straight answers. The House did though spend the day discussing the pension system and Old Age Security—starting here, resuming here. For whatever it might foretell or explain, Diane Finley’s speech on behalf of the government is here.

The Finance Minister seems intent on doing something. A poll conducted by Ipsos Reid found 74% disapproved of raising the eligibility age to 67.

The Commons: Good help is hard to find

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 5:26 PM - 0 Comments

The Scene. Seated almost directly across the aisle from his opposition critic, Jason Kenney shook his head as the NDP’s Don Davies read the indictment.

“Mr. Speaker, just last month the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism told Canadians how solemn he thought our citizenship ceremonies are, and they are indeed serious occasions,” Mr. Davies recalled. “Now, however, we learn that his office is fine just faking it. It was his office that arranged to have employees pose as fake new citizens in a made-up ceremony for a misleading news conference. Can the minister explain why he forced government employees to pose as fake new citizens and mislead Canadians?”

However fake the display, Mr. Kenney was quite sure his responsibility had been overstated here.

“Mr. Speaker, that is completely untrue. The only misleading going on is coming from that member,” the Immigration Minister scolded. “Every year CIC officials do a good job organizing special citizenship and reaffirmation ceremonies across the country including sometimes in studio televised ceremonies to raise the profile of citizenship. Today, I became aware that one small reaffirmation ceremony last year had logistical problems that were poorly dealt with—”

The opposition side descended into laughter and even a little desk thumping (it being hard, one supposes, to slap one’s knee when seated at a desk). Continue…

‘The science is clear’

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 4:25 PM - 0 Comments

Picking up where questions on Monday and Tuesday had failed to receive a straightforward answer, Megan Leslie tried again this afternoon to clarify Joe Oliver’s views on climate change. Here’s how that went.

Megan Leslie: Monsieur le Président, hier j’ai donné un break au ministre des Ressources naturelles afin qu’il prenne le temps de penser à ses réponses. On ne sait toujours pas si le ministre se range dans le camp des radicaux qui nient l’existence des changements climatiques ou s’il accepte le fait que la science explique les changements climatiques. Alors, qu’en est-il? Est-ce que le ministre croit à la science des changements climatiques, oui ou non?

Joe Oliver: Mr. Speaker, the member opposite gave me a break because I was not here. The science is clear that human beings cause global warming. Our government has shown its support with investments of over $10 billion to support a cleaner environment and fight climate change through innovation. What I do not believe in is the NDPs ideologically driven Luddite battle against thousands of jobs in Canada. Does the NDP want to deny Canadian families jobs and a secure future, yes or no?

Continue…

The counterintuitive truth about piracy and profits

By Peter Nowak - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 1:44 PM - 0 Comments

Jonathan_W/Flickr

One of my favourite writers is Terence Corcoran, who as editor of the Financial Post is an old colleague of mine. I enjoy reading his columns because whenever he ventures into technology and telecom issues, the result is usually a car wreck. And who doesn’t enjoy watching a car wreck?

Such is the case with a recent column on copyright, which he promoted on Twitter as being penned by the “anti-Geist.” One of Corcoran’s favourite whipping boys is, of course, Michael Geist, the University of Ottawa law professor and Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-Commerce Law who is one of the country’s most-cited experts on copyright law. If you follow both gentlemen, you probably know they, well, don’t like each other, to put it mildly.

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‘I know I can get us there’

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 1:38 PM - 0 Comments

A new video from the Nash campaign.

Musical Addendum

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 12:50 PM - 0 Comments

Watching Smash, and thinking about untold stories about the making of a musical, reminded me that I recently enjoyed reading William Goldman’s book The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway. He saw and wrote about every Broadway show in the 1967-8 season, incorporating his own opinions about what was wrong with Broadway as well as interviews with many insiders (some anonymous, some not, all with axes to grind). I recommend the book both as a snapshot of the attitudes of the time and as a repository of Broadway gossip. It includes at least two fascinating stories of how highly anticipated musicals, The Happy Time and Golden Rainbow (hopefully you haven’t heard of them; they weren’t very successful) arrived on Broadway with their original stories distorted completely beyond recognition by the “Muscle” of the production, the person with the power to shape the show: a powerful director-choreographer in the first case, a powerful star in the other case.

But I thought this would be as good a place as any to present Goldman’s list of reasons why a song might bomb in front of an audience. Goldman, who had already written a Broadway musical with his brother James, was Continue…

Welcome to the infomercial

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 12:19 PM - 0 Comments

Canadian Press reports that a few weeks before citizenship week celebrations last fall, Jason Kenney’s office asked his department to organize a ceremony at the Sun News studio in Toronto.

The goal was to find people who had recently taken the real oath. ”I have also just confirmed … that all the clients that are calling back are declining the request as they have to attend work and are not able to take the time off to participate in this reaffirmation ceremony,” wrote one civil servant.

Four days before the ceremony, a bureaucrat in downtown Toronto again pleaded whether Sun News could instead go to an already planned event. ”Please advise if the alternative would be acceptable since we do not have the resources to call over 3,000 clients to hopefully get 10 clients for this proposed event.”

In the end, only three of the 10 people the department had lined up to appear at the Sun’s studios actually showed up. But the show went on — featuring at least six federal bureaucrats. Three of those who took the oath wore identical T-shirts with a citizenship logo on it.

CP has video here. Justin Trudeau deems this “incredibly stupid.” An official in Mr. Kenney’s office was busy this morning assuring one and all that this was a “well intentioned mistake” made by a civil servant. And Mr. Kenney’s spokeswoman has now apologized to Sun News.

Psychotropes and children: are we ruining a generation?

By Julia Belluz - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 12:09 PM - 0 Comments

(Dan Cepeda, Star-Tribune/AP Photo/)

There were a couple of troubling reports about the use of prescription drugs to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in children and youth this week. The Vancouver Sun reported “a striking increase” in the rate of second-generation antipsychotics prescribed to kids. South of the border, the New York Times ran a big op-ed entitled “Ritalin Gone Wrong,” in which a psychology professor rang alarm bells over the three million U.S. children who take stimulants like Ritalin and Adderall for “problems in focusing.” With more than 40 years of experience under his belt, the professor said “we should be asking why we rely so heavily on these drugs,” adding that few physicians and parents “seem to be aware of what we have been learning about the lack of effectiveness of these drugs.”\

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Facebook’s going public, and so are you

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 11:26 AM - 0 Comments

Since launching eight years ago, Facebook has navigated an uneasy tension between profitability and privacy.  From the start, Facebook had marketers and advertisers salivating. Forget surveys, forget guesswork, forget market research. Here was a fun, “free” service that somehow compelled users to willingly divulge the most intimate details about themselves. Facebook now owns the most comprehensive and accurate marketing database that the world has ever known. If fully exploited, it could all but guarantee that no advertiser ever waste money on a false impression again: no middle-aged man need ever see another tampon commercial, no teenager need ever again be urged to refinance their mortgage. Every dollar spent on an ad would connect products with people who might actually buy them.

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Quick Thoughts on “Smash”

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 11:16 AM - 0 Comments

The thing about Smash that was most striking to me, almost from the first non-musical scene, is that it is one of the best-directed shows I’ve seen in a long time. Michael Mayer, who has done mostly Broadway shows like Spring Awakening, was chosen to direct the pilot and the first two episodes, and he was an exceptional choice (NBC must be pleased, as they’ve just signed him to do another drama pilot for them). The musical scenes are not cut to pieces and usually give you a clear idea of where everyone is – essential for a show where most of the numbers take place in a real space. The dialogue scenes avoid hamminess and aren’t artificially pumped up: Mayer isn’t afraid to keep the camera steady or hold a shot for a few extra seconds, and the whole thing feels almost like a classical movie in its un-fussy style. That style goes a long way toward making this show work. A more obviously interventionist director would just wind up making the thing look glitzier or grittier than the subject can bear. Continue…

The futures market

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 10:34 AM - 0 Comments

Alice Funke considers the possible predictive value of yesterday’s NDP fundraising numbers.

If the 2003 NDP leadership race is anything to go by, a candidate’s share of the overall funds being raised for the contest could predict his or her first ballot vote-share to within 1.5 percentage points … That being the case, roughly half-way through the 2011-2012 NDP leadership race, Brian Topp and Thomas Mulcair are leading the pack. With 23.6% and 20.4% of the total take respectively, the two early front-runners represent 44% of all the funds raised to December 31, 2011 between them.

Peggy Nash, Paul Dewar and Nathan Cullen are behind with 15.1%, 13.1% and 12.0% (representing another 40% of all the leadership fundraising to the end of 2011), while the other four registered candidates trail below 7%.

Off message

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 9:48 AM - 0 Comments

A year and a half after the chief statistician resigned, Statistics Canada’s chief economic analyst resigns.

Mr. Cross has plenty of praise for Statscan – it is managing pending budget cuts “efficiently yet humanely” and error rates have gone down in recent years. But “a lot of good can be offset if you get one big thing wrong – and the big thing in this instance is census and NHS [national household survey],” he said.

Survey response rates are his chief concern – the 69.3-per-cent response rate from the household survey is based on distribution to a third of households, meaning it’s actually based on answers from a fifth of the population. And it’s still unclear, he said, which segments of the population are missing from the sample. “The focus on response rates ignores questions about the quality and distribution of the responses, but discussion of the latter issues is limited by management’s insistence on being ‘on-message’ all the time about [2011] census and NHS being a success.”

Former chief statistician Ivan Fellegi describes Mr. Cross as a “top-notch economic analyst.” The Globe also has a transcript of its interview with the current chief statistician, Wayne Smith.

Never mind the major transformation?

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 8:30 AM - 0 Comments

A week after the speech in Davos, CTV has the Prime Minister in “retreat.”

Sources have told CTV News that MPs told Harper during a Conservative caucus meeting Wednesday that reforming pensions “is not a vote winner” and complained they were taken by surprise by the plan.

The government has since toned down their language from the “transformative” changes that Harper spoke about in Davos. ”It’s a review . . . to make sure we have a sustainable, long-term fiscal plan for our country,” Finance Minister Jim Flaherty told CTV. He also said that the upcoming federal budget will have nothing to do with OAS.

Update 9:52am. A note from the Finance Minister’s office. Continue…