Byron Sonne in his own words

By Jesse Brown - Friday, May 25, 2012 at 11:09 AM - 0 Comments

Left: Pat Hewitt/CP Middle: Aaron Vincent Elkaim/CP Right: Aaron Vincent Elkaim/CP

Last week Byron Sonne was cleared of four explosives charges and one charge of counseling mischief. I’ve been covering his case since his arrest almost two years ago. I corresponded with Byron during his 11-month stint in jail and I asked him a few questions last week when he received his vindicating verdict. Until yesterday, though, I had never had a real conversation with him about his ordeal.

The extensive interview will run on an upcoming episode of my podcast. Here are some highlights:

On what he hoped to learn by “testing the system” by buying sensitive chemicals and posting controversial texts to the Internet:

“I wanted to discover how things actually work.”

On Detective Tam Bui, the police interrogator who told him “the onus is on you” to prove his innocence:

“I don’t know that they were after the truth as much as they just really wanted a confession.”

On the unwillingness of the police to accept that he was not a terrorist:

“You can’t say anything to help yourself in that situation. If you say ‘I love my mother,’ they’ll make a note: ‘loves his mother, willing to kill for her’. “

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Our latest e-book: The Queen

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 25, 2012 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II has been on the throne for 60 years but Maclean’s has been fascinated with her since long before she wore the crown. Our latest e-book, on the occasion of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, compiles the best of our royal coverage over the last seven decades from some of Canada’s most famous writers and photographers. Berton wrote a seven-part series in 1953, the year after George VI died and Elizabeth became Queen. (One of those articles, “How the princess was taught to rule,” is included in this collection; the others will be released in a special ebook, Pierre Berton on the Queen). Photographer Yousuf Karsh gave an account of his 1951 trip to Clarence House to shoot the young family. And more recently, Andrew Coyne explained why Canada needs the monarchy—even if it’s Charles and Camilla.

It was no easy task compiling this collection. Fourteen of the 23 stories only exist in bound copies. And our seemingly endless poring over them, and the resulting wear and tear, sent Maclean’s resident archivist, and author of our Royal Quarters blog, Patricia Treble into a sweat. We sat down with her to find out how she got the originals back in their locked cabinets, what her favourite stories about Elizabeth are and what royal has visited Canada the most (the answer may surprise some).

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Q: So you had to go through the locked archive cabinets in the Maclean’s library to retrieve some of these stories?

A: I had to go through bound volume by bound volume. The first thing I did was find out how many times she was on the cover. We had no clue. The total turned out to be 14. I started at the present day and went backward.  You’re looking through these big old bound volumes—and they’re just huge because Maclean’s was massive at the time—and you’re flipping over each page looking for the covers and then all of a sudden you’ll see her. You see the ones where she’s wearing the 1980s clothes, including the little Greek sailor hat, which is looks just horrid today but was of the time, and then you find all the different stories. We have an old card catalogue that’s very authoritative, but not exhaustive, on all the articles too.

Q: When do you really start to see stories about Elizabeth popping up?

A: The first ones exclusively on her and not the royal family are from 1944 when she turned 18, when she came of age. Obviously there were stories written on her father’s coronation in 1937, but she was just part of it. And then they started accelerating in 1947, of course, when she became engaged and married Philip. And then the children were coming. We even have the original cover art from her first 1951 tour of Canada in our office.

Q: What does that mean?

A: The magazine used to commission artists to do cover art back then. So it’s a painting by Franklin Arbuckle of Princess Elizabeth and Philip waving from of a train. The original painting is hanging outside our library. The other royal one we have is from her 1953 coronation. It’s amazing how there’s been a very long relationship: even when Maclean’s wasn’t a news magazine, we were doing lots of stories on the monarchy.

Q: What were we before we became a news magazine?

A: We were just a a general interest magazine, like Atlantic or Harper’s. And the same people that wrote for them wrote for us. It was only in the mid-70s that we became a news magazine; first a biweekly and then a weekly. Elizabeth started coming to Canada in 1951 and we did something on almost every trip—either the lead up or the trip itself. For one of them, the 1959 trip, we simply just have the official portrait, with no stories. And that was actually the most extensive tour she’s ever given anywhere. I think it went on for 45 days. She went from coast to coast, and amazingly she was pregnant at the time and nobody knew.

Q: Wow! With Charles?

A: With Andrew. Nobody in Canada knew but they had to very quickly send back for more dresses. Maybe that’s why Andrew has such a close affection to Canada. So when you look over the generations of writers—we have everyone from Pierre Berton to June Callwood and we even have Andrew Coyne, who is an amazing monarchist—you can see the reverence, the deference is really gone. People are far more critical about the monarchy, which I think is the way it should be. You should analyse it. But there’s also this sense of magic—that this is the Crown in Canada. And what really comes through is that she really likes coming here.  At the start of her last visit, which we covered in our magazine, she said, “It’s good to be home,” and you know she meant it. She’s been to more places in this country than virtually any Canadian. She’s been to every province and territory. In fact, she was very determined to be the first member of the royal family to go to Nunavut after it became independent in 1999. And sure enough she went there in her Golden Jubilee trip of 2002!

Q: Was there a story in the e-book that appealed to you the most?

A: I loved June Callwood’s take on the Queen’s visit in 1957. It was a really short visit but she captured it so well. The ones that I was really interested in, although they’re the most critical, are the ones from 1992. The royal family was in crisis and there are really strong, analytical pieces by Andrew Phillips, then our London bureau chief, covering all the troubles that were enveloping the royal family. They were in the seventh circle of hell–she said it was her annus horribilis. You can see how much has changed in 20 years.

Q: Like what?

A: One interesting thing is that members of the royal family are coming more and more frequently. I crunched the numbers: the Queen has come 23 times. She’s been to Canada more than any other realm country. But the most frequent visitor is Prince Philip! He’s been here 45 times.

Q: That’s incredible!

A: Exactly. Let’s face it, travel is easier now. And I think that’s the other change you see in these articles: the trips used to be long, big trips because it was harder to get here.

Q: Did it break your heart to have to open up some of those fragile bound volumes?

A: [laughing] Some of them are really quite fragile. What they did at the time was bind each year’s issues, or often each half year, into one bound volume. The paper used in the 1950s and 1960s was just terrible–it’s literally crumbling.

Q: But some from the 1930s look great.

A: They’re in perfect shape because they changed the paper and the inks in the ’50s. It was simply the quality they used that caused them to deteriorate so quickly. So you open up the ’50s volumes very gingerly. Sometimes the covers for specific issues are long gone. I was fearful, but I knew they would survive, although they’re a little shopworn. We’ll have to figure out a better system next time around.

Nik Wallenda puts his life on the line

By Charlie Gillis - Friday, May 25, 2012 at 10:22 AM - 0 Comments

Cole Garside

With a cold dew descending and the roar of falling water in the distance, Nik Wallenda stands with one foot on the wire and a look of apprehension on his face. It’s 11:30 p.m., and he has snuck out after dinner to take his first steps on a 455-m cable strung outside the Seneca Casino & Hotel in Niagara Falls, N.Y., where he will rehearse his historic walk across North America’s best-known landmark.

A taut length of rope is to Wallenda what a blank canvas is to an artist. But on this night he should have stayed indoors. His engineering team had just 24 hours to rig this steel behemoth—five centimetres in diameter, six tonnes on the spool—across three empty parking lots beside the hotel, and they’ve not yet identified its quirks. At one end, near where it is anchored to the earth, the cable hangs just two metres above the ground. From there, it traverses a falling grade across asphalt, gravel and a pedestrian bridge toward a crane that holds the other end some 20 m above the pavement.

Wallenda has walked enough wires to understand that no fresh rigging is perfect. But after a meal of steak and crispy shrimp (sans alcoholic accompaniment), his daredevil urge has overtaken him, and the 33-year-old has scrambled onto the roof of a friend’s pickup truck from whence he can board the cable near its low end. To his dismay, the thing begins twisting like licorice beneath his sock-clad feet. “I don’t like this,” he murmurs. He steps off, draws a breath and gets back on, arms extended for balance. One teetery step, then two. Back onto the truck. “Nope,” he says crisply. “I don’t like this at all.”

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Quebec politics amid strife: Charest, undead, lives on?!

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, May 24, 2012 at 3:58 PM - 0 Comments

The PQ, neck and neck with the Zombies Liberals. Courtesy Léger Marketing

Riddle me this: if, as a majority of Quebecers believe, the Quebec government’s special law regarding protests goes to far; and if, as the same Léger Marketing poll suggests, an overwhelming majority of Quebecers believe that the government should lay off the obstinacy and return to the bargaining table with the students; and if the recent 100,000-strong protest in the streets of Montreal was less about tuition fees than almighty rage against the Charest government, then why, pray tell, is the Parti Québécois still only neck and neck with with the big, bad Liberals, at 32 per cent a piece?

And why, despite having wholeheartedly embraced the student movement’s position to the point of wearing its red square on her lapel everyday, is Pauline Marois only just as popular as Jean Charest? The numbers speak for themselves: when Léger asked, “In the context of the ongoing conflict, do you have a good or a bad impression of the following people?”, Jean Charest ranked at 30 per cent good, 59 per cent bad. Marois, meanwhile, scored an equally paltry 31 per cent good, and only a mildly better 54 per cent bad. In short, despite having radically different and conflicting takes on the student movement, Jean Charest and Pauline Marois are basically within the margin of error with each other. This, after more than three months of headline-grabbing stalemate between the students and the government. What gives?

The answer, if not quite blowing in the wind, at least lies in the between Montreal and the rest of the province. For instance, 47 per cent of Montrealers are for Bill 78; In Quebec City, meanwhile, 54 percent of residents say they are for it. And while 75 per cent of Montrealers are for the City of Montreal’s ban on masks, the support is even higher in Quebec City and what is quaintly referred to as les régions: 80 per cent in both. (These numbers are from the detailed Léger that I can’t seem to find online.)

The numbers are even more stark when you consider how a large western chunk of the island of Montreal has always been staunchly Liberal. As Léger V-P Christian Bourque told me, “Provincially speaking, the west of Montreal is still very Liberal red.” Discount these Liberal red-or-die types (and they include French and English), and you have a real difference between Montreal and the rest of the province. ”We’re seeing how opinions in Montreal and the rest of Quebec is getting and further apart. Montreal is more left and open, while the rest of the province is more conservative.”

The split between Montreal and the rest of the (Quebec) world is nothing new. As long ago as 2006, the Bloc Québécois commissioned a report on the phenomenon after a light electoral spanking in the Quebec City region at the hands of The Conservatives. The ensuing “Alarie Report” noted the following: “The Bloc, its leader [Gilles Duceppe], its organization, its program, the colour and scent it puts off is too Montreal.” One anonymous Bloc candidate, quoted anonymously in the report, was quite succinct. “Our platform was too lefty, too Montreal.”

For the PQ, there is an odd disconnect in this. By tilting her party to the right of the Bloc’s traditional lefty perch—and by the virtue of largely not being implicated in the plethora of scandals wafting around the Liberals—Pauline Marois has made inroads within the province, and rightly so—though, it must be said, she was only briefly ahead of Charest in the polls even before the current brouhaha. The caveat: this support has come mostly from les regions—where antagonism against the student movement is at its highest. ”The PQ is ahead in the regions where the support for the government and tuition hikes is higher,” Bourque says. “By wearing the red square, the party has painted itself into a corner a little bit.” If the current protest had taken place in Quebec City rather than Montreal, Bourque says, “It would have been over a long time ago, and people would have been cheering the police.”

Certainly, the Charest government remains in crisis mode. Today, the Premier brought back Dan Gagnier as his chief of staff. He was Charest’s C-o-S in 2007, and managed to steady the Premier’s nosedive in the polls before resigning in 2009. Charest says Gagnier’s return has nothing to to with the student strike, which I believe about as much as his line about not paying attention to polls. And anything can happen in the coming days, weeks, and (oof) months with people and police frequently clashing in the street. And Charest will have to call an election before December 2013, when the collective memory of tear gas, strife and ugly laws (and alleged party finance skullduggery, and construction industry misery, and more mafia ties) will in all likelihood be stuck in Quebec’s collective memory.

But as dark as things are for the Premier, he can take comfort in this: his opponents aren’t fairing much better than him.

What’s your defining Canadian moment?

By Jessica Allen - Thursday, May 24, 2012 at 10:36 AM - 0 Comments

Sangudo/Flickr

This is a big country. And there are a lot us, as in nearly 34 million, living in our 10 provinces and three territories.

Some of us were born here, some of us came here long ago, and others have just arrived. But what defines us as Canadians? For the last five weeks, we’ve invited readers to share their most defining Canadian moment with us. And the response has been overwhelming!

In Ontario, Sheila O’Neill’s moment was watching her daughter carry the Olympic torch while Arnold Hoskyn in British Columbia counts the thrill of singing the national anthem after World War II ended as his. Our Political Editor Paul Wells’ moment was when he picked up a book at a community sale that eventually lead him to investigate the life of an unknown but inspiring Canadian.  My moment took place in a small, recently resettled, Newfoundland outport called Grand Bruit where I was lucky enough to have lived for six months.

There’s still time to send us your moment for a chance to have your story featured in our Canada Day issue of the magazine. Is it the time that tiny flag on your backpack made you welcome in a strange land? Or was it watching your grand-daughter score her first hockey goal? Maybe it was visiting the monument at Vimy Ridge.

The truth is, what it means to be Canadian is different for each and every one of us. So send us your photos! Send us your videos! Send us your report card when you got that A+ in Canadian history! Send them right here.

PEI gets a princely sum for the Diamond Jubilee

By Tamsin McMahon - Thursday, May 24, 2012 at 9:37 AM - 0 Comments

Considering it’s the only Canadian province named after a member of the royal family, perhaps it’s fitting that Prince Edward Island received a windfall from the Canadian government for Queen Elizabeth II’s Diamond Jubilee. Canada’s smallest province is to receive nearly $170,000 for tea parties, concerts and picnics. It’s the second-largest slice of the government’s $2-million budget for community celebrations, behind only Ontario.

Nearly all of P.E.I.’s local celebrations were approved for funding. The town of Souris received nearly $7,000 to offer a free picnic lunch. Revellers get to keep both the lunch bag and the ice pack put inside it to keep it cold. Federal bureaucrats approved Alberton’s $500 request for a tea party, but rejected one for $300 to plant shrubs and trees at the town hall. “It just seemed like a good idea to commemorate the anniversary and get what we needed done as well,” Mayor Michael Murphy told the CBC. The town still plans to go ahead with the project with plants donated from the provincial nursery.

The federal government is spending nearly $7.5 million to mark the occasion, including $75,000 for 682,000 paper flags and $52,000 for 300,000 lapel pins.

Monarchists in P.E.I. will have to be content with celebrating among themselves, however. Despite the plethora of community celebrations planned for the island, Prince Charles and wife, Camilla, duchess of Cornwall, are planning to visit only New Brunswick, Ontario and Saskatchewan when they come to Canada next week.

Canadian Heritage couldn’t provide details on how much money each province requested. But the government approved 147 of 200 funding requests, totalling just $1.2 million of its $2-million budget. Alberta and Quebec got the least: $46,600 will go to Jubilee celebrations in Alberta and $52,500 in Quebec.

Barbara Amiel on getting Conrad home

By Barbara Amiel - Wednesday, May 23, 2012 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

Mark Blinch/Reuters

No one got it right. Not me, not the press, not Conrad. The week of May 2 had no script. The way it was supposed to be was this: after nine years almost to the day, we were coming to the end of a nightmare. I would stand at the gates of the Miami Federal Correctional Institution in a pretty dress in one of the colours the prison rules had never allowed when visiting—which was pretty much every colour that looked any good on me except for black. Conrad would come through the door that had been slammed in my face with the warm comment “get her out of here” the previous Sept. 5 when he self-surrendered to prison for the second time. We would embrace and walk quietly into the twilight of our lives.

Precisely where we would go after that I didn’t know. We wanted to go straight to Toronto. But our “itinerary” had to be approved by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) before he left prison in case we ended up doing a Meyer Lansky, being shuttled from country to country and refused admission. Conrad had a British passport but no Canadian papers. We thought Canada would admit him as a visitor for a few days at least, and we hoped if he wasn’t allowed to go directly into Canada we could get out of the U.S. to a nearby British Overseas Territory and try from there. Bermuda was suggested. The Cayman Islands. Each one was being investigated by counsel and the British consul in Orlando.

Meanwhile, I was trying to find the cheapest way to fly out of the States without going commercial. Okay, I know that means dozens of letters telling me how rich and lucky we are to be able to have that as an option and yes we are. And if your husband faced the prospect of sitting in the Miami airport for God knows how many hours in handcuffs and shackles with U.S. marshals on each side of him, the media watching gleefully, and then being marched onto a planeload of passengers so they could look up from their bottled water to see him being unlocked, you might feel it was worth trying. But by the last week of April I was still unable to book flights for us. I didn’t know where we would be going.

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Wrongs and rights: how did Quebec’s student standoff come to this?

By Emmett Macfarlane - Wednesday, May 23, 2012 at 11:09 AM - 0 Comments

Ryan Remiorz/CP Images

Reasoned debate is off the table. The student protesters and the Charest government are sharply at odds – in fact, they despise each other – but they’ve collaborated in one respect: each side has acted to ensure that rather than a robust public discussion about how to fund the province’s universities we get an ugly, protracted battle about the right to protest.

Why has the situation deteriorated so miserably? There is no shortage of finger-pointing on either side.

From the government’s perspective, too many protesters engaged in unacceptable tactics, including blocking non-protesting students from attending classes, vandalism, intimidation and violence. Some critics assert that the peaceful majority failed to condemn, in strong enough words, the hooliganism of those in their midst. Then, last week, classes on one campus were literally invaded, in defiance of court injunctions.

From the protesters’ perspective, the government has been obstinate, initially refusing to meet with student groups and then offering a fishy-looking compromise they quickly and roundly rejected. Peaceful, legitimate protests were often broken up by police. Then the government passed a law which, as I wrote here a few days ago, criminalizes peaceful protest in ways that are likely unconstitutional.

It is this latest decision by the Charest government that has guaranteed consecutive nights of tension, violence and arrests for the foreseeable future. By passing, in hurried and thoughtless fashion, a bill that casts its net so widely, that contains vague provisions and harsh penalties, and that does next to nothing to address the real lawlessness that supposedly necessitated it, the government has legitimated the sense of victimhood that so thoroughly saturates the rhetoric adopted by student leaders.

If much of the blame falls to the government for exacerbating the situation, the protesters – especially the student leaders – are by no means exonerated. That their response to unacceptable legislation was to label it a declaration of war was no heat-of-the-moment exaggeration. Well before the Charest government crossed the line, the movement had declared itself the “Quebec Spring,” with protesters likening themselves to revolutionaries battling a totalitarian state.

It is this mindset that impoverishes our political discourse. It is emblematic of a shift away from policy debate, political compromise and democratic deliberation. It is an attitude that infects people of all political persuasions, although it tends to be more intense among the less moderate on either side.

Some of the protesters’ critics have dismissed the entire movement as representative of a “culture of entitlement.” I think this is problematic, largely because it ignores the reasons and justifications for their legitimate position (even if I happen to disagree with them). There should be room for the policy debate, for the expression of legitimate concerns about access, equality and universality with respect to post-secondary education.

The real problem is the increasing tendency to replace policy discussion and political debate with the invocation of rights. Invoking rights is the equivalent of playing a trump card. It leaves no room for compromise. It denies the validity of other perspectives or alternatives. It reduces political discourse to the making of demands. It subjugates other values, policy ideas or arguments about the distribution of resources. It risks replacing logic and deliberation with emotion and threats.

Now, lest anyone think I’m arguing otherwise, let me state the obvious: fundamental rights are imperative for any functioning democracy. More specifically, the right to free expression and free assembly (including the right to protest) must be fiercely protected.

That said, not everything is a right. In the face of a bylaw regulating unkempt lawns, for example, it would be incorrect to claim one has a “right” to let his or her grass grow three feet tall.

Even more significantly, the fundamental rights we do enjoy also come with limits. This is a fact which almost never emerges in debates about rights. My own research has demonstrated, for example, that media coverage of Supreme Court of Canada decisions concerning the Charter of Rights often ignores the extensive analysis the Court engages in about whether rights limitations are reasonable under the law. The very first section of the Charter is a statement that the rights within are subject to reasonable limits and limitations analysis is often the core feature of Charter cases.

The problem is not that Quebec’s student protesters have asserted the right to protest. The problem is their rhetoric and actions are premised on the notion that a tuition increase constitutes an unreasonable violation of their fundamental rights. They believe their concerns about accessibility and universality override other concerns, like sustainability or quality of education.

Many of those who support the student protests will find this argument unpersuasive. They’ve pointed to the Quebec Charter of Human Rights, which includes free public education under its social and economic rights, conveniently ignoring the language of the section (“to the extent and according to the standards provided by law”).

More generally, critics’ response to my argument that the debate should not be about rights often amounts to “of course it should, unless you don’t believe in social justice.” The problem with social justice, like rights-based arguments, is that everyone favours it but have legitimate disagreements about what counts as social justice. For example, proponents of the tuition increase have pointed out that rather than functioning as a progressive policy, subsidizing tuition is in fact a regressive policy that disproportionately benefits the middle and upper classes.

Unfortunately, that policy debate has been taken off the table. Thanks in part to a foolish law passed by a government that has bungled its response to the protests from the beginning, the rights narrative dominates. And look at how productive it has been.

Emmett Macfarlane is a political scientist at the University of Victoria. You can follow him on Twitter: @EmmMacfarlane

Who’s suing whom

By Gustavo Vieira - Tuesday, May 22, 2012 at 5:00 PM - 0 Comments

British Columbia: The Vancouver Park Board is suing a Langley farmer, alleging that he auctioned off 16 goats he adopted from Stanley Park’s petting zoo when it closed last year, “some or all of them” possibly going to slaughterhouses. The board says the conduct of the hobby farmer, who sells meat for human and dog consumption, “was calculated, harsh, reprehensible and malicious,” in breaching an adoption agreement to look after the animals for the rest of their lives.

Alberta: A food-service operator at Edmonton’s Rexall Place is suing a former bartender for $1 million, alleging he removed two bags of money from a vault. Despite making a modest salary, the man allegedly racked up more than $400,000 in credit card bills, including trips to Toronto, London, and Beijing, tickets to Taylor Swift and Jerry Seinfeld shows, and a bill from the Waldorf Astoria Hilton in New York and other extravagances.

Ontario: A University of Ottawa undergraduate student is suing his union for its mandatory $93 fee. The student says he is claiming his money back because he objects to funding the union to engage in political causes, such as the Occupy Ottawa protest, the postal workers’ strike and the Quebec student strikes. “They claim to represent all students, yet they take political positions I don’t agree with,” the 22-year-old chemistry major told the Ottawa Citizen. “If I wanted to save the whales and save the postal workers, I’d do that in my spare time.”

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In Burlington, a bird-brained lawsuit

By Michael Friscolanti - Tuesday, May 22, 2012 at 4:39 PM - 0 Comments

Barry Gray/The Hamilton Spectator

Nestled along the sandy shores of Lake Ontario, Burlington’s Beachway Park is a summer hot spot for sunbathers and swimmers and Frisbee chuckers. With a scenic waterfront trail that stretches for two kilometres (and a “Snack Shack” that’s open till dusk), it is easy to forget that the entire beach is lined with gigantic hydro towers. As the city’s website says, the park is “a bit of paradise.”

Except, of course, for all the dead birds.

For decades now, visitors have been stepping over the feathered corpses—slashed and bloodied after colliding with those hydro lines and plummeting to the earth. In one especially grim week, a park regular counted 35 cormorant carcasses lying in the sand. So what happened to Doreen Walker, back in the summer of 2007, was perhaps inevitable: while sitting in a beach chair, immersed in a book, one of the doomed birds plunked on the top of her head. Terrified, Walker flung her arms into the air, only to suffer multiple fractures to her left hand in the process. She filed a $750,000 lawsuit against both the city and the province’s power company, Hydro One, claiming that more could have been done to prevent such a traumatizing “bird strike.” Burlington chose to settle out of court (the dollar figure is secret). But Hydro One refused to admit liability, insisting that reasonable steps were taken to limit the number of cormorants crashing to their deaths—including the installation of 145 “diverters” designed to warn birds about nearby wires.

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Protective parents’ efforts erased when other parents are lax

By Ken MacQueen - Tuesday, May 22, 2012 at 11:14 AM - 0 Comments

ZUMAPRESS.com/Keystone Press

Prudent parents know their teenagers’ friends have a big impact on their children’s lives, but monitoring the conduct of the parents of those friends is a minefield that many are unable, or unwilling, to tread. Yet the failure to vet the parents of their teens’ friends can lead to trouble and sometimes tragedy, as new U.S. research confirms.

Findings published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs found that the good intentions of protective parents—those who monitor their adolescents’ whereabouts and activities—are often erased if their children’s peers have parents who condone, ignore or are oblivious to substance abuse. Researchers at Penn State University studied the self-reported parenting styles of 9,417 Grade 9 students, and those of their circle of friends. A year later the students were asked about their use of alcohol, cigarettes and marijuana. “If you belong to a friendship group whose parents are inconsistent [in discipline], and your parents are consistent, you’re still more likely to use alcohol,” said researcher Michael J. Cleveland. “The differences here are due to your friends’ parents, not yours.”

This March, one such story played out in B.C. Supreme Court. Shannon Raymond, 16, of Maple Ridge, drank alcohol and took an ecstasy pill before arriving at a friend’s house party. She passed out and was left unconscious overnight before her friend’s mother finally called an ambulance at 6 a.m. She was dead when paramedics arrived. The mother who hosted the party was charged with failing to provide the necessities of life, but was found not guilty. In 2009, 15-year-old Tamara Aller froze to death in a Dauphin, Man., parking lot after leaving a friend’s party. Her friend’s father drove the intoxicated teen partway home. She didn’t make it the rest of the way in -37° C temperatures. The host parents pleaded guilty last November to allowing drunkenness. The penalty: a $4,500 fine.

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Corp creep at the CBC

By Colby Cosh - Monday, May 21, 2012 at 5:10 PM - 0 Comments

Mark Blinch/Reuters

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is not sticking to its knitting. Until this year, nobody minded all that much. But it is a fact that the corporation’s mandate under the Broadcasting Act is to “provide radio and television services incorporating a wide range of programming that informs, enlightens and entertains.” You see any mention of the Internet in there? When the CBC started colonizing the web, nobody’s ox in particular got gored; any grumbling was destined not to last long in an environment of infinite bandwidth and zero pricing.

But now the grey area befogging the CBC’s mandate has officially become a problem—specifically, with the February launch of CBCmusic.ca, the Corp’s free digital streaming music service. Private broadcasters are crying foul, saying that CBC mission creep has finally gone too far. And they have taken their complaint to the CRTC, the national broadcast regulator.

The heart of the CBC’s new digital service is a set of some 40 “genre streams,” or channels, curated by the Corporation’s existing programming staff. This represents an impressive liberation of the CBC’s enormous library: instead of having to make an appointment to listen to Radio 2’s classical music programming, and suck on a firehose full of Edvard Grieg if it happens to be Edvard Grieg week, you can switch to the website and listen to an all-piano channel, an all-opera channel, an all-chamber channel, or an all-modern channel. If you favour rock, there’s a generic catch-all stream, but there are also specific indie, “classics” and metal channels.

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Quebec’s protest crackdown: It’s not just rights that make it wrong

By Emmett Macfarlane - Saturday, May 19, 2012 at 9:27 AM - 0 Comments

Ryan Remiorz/CP Images

If you’ve listened to some of the commentary about Bill 78, emergency legislation purportedly designed to deal with the out-of-control student protests in Quebec, you’d assume the government has thrown a match onto a powder keg.

Some may have hoped that in the midst of its massive, ongoing failure to deal with the protests these past few months, the Charest government might finally turn the corner by passing a law to settle things down. This was sadly – though somehow not surprisingly – optimistic. Apparently no one knows how to sour a lemon like Jean Charest.

Legal experts and critics have pounced on the bill to declare, with all the subtlety of a window-smashing tuition-phobe, that it represents “mass repression” and constitutes “the worst law since the War Measures Act.” One student leader declared the bill “an act of war.” Such rhetoric is about as helpful as smoke bombs in a metro station.

Don’t get me wrong, there are some obvious Charter of Rights problems with this law. One of the worst provisions, which would have treated as guilty anyone who by “omission” or “encouragement” helps or induces a person to contravene elements of the bill, has reportedly been removed.

Another section requires anyone organizing a demonstration of more than 10 people (now amended to more than 50) in a “venue accessible to the public” to report the date, time, duration, and venue to the police at least eight hours ahead of time.

As Andrew Coyne has pointed out on Twitter, many other jurisdictions in the rest of Canada, the United States and Europe have similar reporting requirements. But these often apply to events like planned marches on public streets. Canadian courts are unlikely to find the very broad language here acceptable. Not all public demonstrations are public disruptions, nor are all publicly accessible spaces equal: it may be a reasonable restriction on freedom of assembly to require reporting and impose other limits on street protests. Imposing the same limits on demonstrations in parks or empty fields may not meet the threshold of reasonableness.

Many commentators have also expressed displeasure at the harsh fines in the bill but there’s no reason to believe the penalties themselves lack constitutionality.

Does the bill, even after amendments, overreach? Possibly. The language is too vague in some places, and a reverse-onus clause in the section dealing with the civil liability of student groups and institutions might be a problem. Does the bill compare to the War Measures Act? Not even close.

But in several important respects, the potential Charter issues aren’t the main reason this bill represents a major failure on the part of the Charest government.

First, the bill does nothing to address the lawlessness that has characterized tactics used by certain elements of the protest movement. All of these activities – flagrant defiance of court injunctions, violence, vandalism, intimidation and assault – were already illegal. The problem up until now has been a lack of enforcement, not a lack of legislation.

Second, by casting its net so wide, the bill threatens to criminalize the largely peaceful activities of a majority of the protesters. Given the current climate, this is a bad idea.

Third, the bill cancels (okay, technically it postpones) remaining classes. For people who blandly titled a bill “An Act to enable students to receive instruction from the postsecondary institutions they attend,” I think the policy geniuses in Quebec City have an inappropriate flair for irony.

Finally, the bill encourages the protesters, media and critics to continue to frame the story as the Quebec state versus the right to protest. Such a narrative provides only a partial picture of the debate and of the rights that have been trampled during this saga. The majority of students in Quebec have not joined the protests; rather, they have sought to continue their classes. They have that right, or at least they did, until the government of Quebec failed to protect it

Emmett Macfarlane is a political scientist at the University of Victoria. You can follow him on Twitter @EmmMacfarlane

Victoria Day: Only in Canada

By Alan Parker - Friday, May 18, 2012 at 3:47 PM - 0 Comments

An unusually posed photograph of Victoria and Albert done in 1854, 14 years after their marriage. Roger Fenton / Royal Collection Trust

Many Canadians may have the idea that Victoria Day is an internationally observed event that connects us — however quaintly and tenuously — with other remnants of the old British Empire as we collectively celebrate our colonial heritage by pulling up lawn chairs and raising a glass or a beer bottle to the tubby little Empress of Canada, India, Australia, Britain and points between.

Couldn’t be further from the truth.

Canada is the only country in the world to celebrate Victoria Day, and the ‘May Two-Four’ long weekend is as distinctively Canadian as the two-four — a case of 24 bottles of beer — with which it is often celebrated.

There is a Victoria Day in Australia — but it’s a completely different critter, a localized event marking the founding of the southern Aussie state of Victoria (as a separate colony in 1851) and it’s celebrated, coincidentally, on July 1.

Our Victoria Day does mark the real birthday of Queen Victoria on May 24, 1819, and Canada (then a rump colony called the Province of Canada) was the first part of the young queen’s ramshackle realm to officially recognize her birthday as a day of honour in 1845.

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Budget bill: the omnibus stops here

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, May 18, 2012 at 12:57 PM - 0 Comments

Adrian Wyld/CP

On March 16, 1994, the Liberal government of the day tabled Bill C-17, an act to amend certain statutes to implement certain provisions of the budget. Nine days later, a new Reform party MP, elected just five months before, rose on a point of order to complain. The bill, he said, was “of an omnibus nature,” containing measures that dealt with disparate issues: public sector compensation, transportation subsidies, the CBC, employment insurance and payroll taxes. “In the interest of democracy I ask: how can members represent their constituents on these various areas when they are forced to vote in a block on such legislation and on such concerns?” the young Stephen Harper wondered aloud. “We can agree with some of the measures but oppose others. How do we express our views and the views of our constituents when the matters are so diverse?”

Though the rookie MP’s words were not enough to derail that year’s budget bill, his words live on, cited more than 18 years later to taunt a Prime Minister whose government is now accused of abusing Parliament with a budget implementation act that dwarfs the bill that so troubled the rookie MP. But Bill C-38 doesn’t merely invite inconvenient comparisons. It sets the stage for a great—and potentially defining—battle between the new majority government and the newly realigned official Opposition.

“On this one issue I actually agree with Stephen Harper,” NDP House leader Nathan Cullen told reporters at a news conference this month. “It is inappropriate to put so many sweeping changes to so many different areas in the budget bill. The Conservatives are trying to hide from the oversight and the accountability that Canadians deserve.” The budget implementation act currently before the House of Commons—quite literally, at least in theory, the legislation necessary to implement the government’s budget—measures more than 400 pages and proposes to amend dozens of acts of Parliament. Among other things, it deals with environmental regulations, resource development, employment insurance, Old Age Security and immigration policy.

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How the Conservatives are gutting tobacco control

By Geoffrey Lansdell - Friday, May 18, 2012 at 9:41 AM - 0 Comments

Trevor Haldenby/Flickr

About a month ago, Ottawa quietly announced it was slashing $15 million from Canada’s Federal Tobacco Control Strategy, one of the many cuts to the federal budget. Haven’t seen it in the headlines much? It might be because this is far from the first time the federal Conservatives have swung the axe at the national tobacco control budget. Over the last six years, funding for the FTCS has shrunk by nearly 60 per cent, down to $28 million in fiscal 2012 from $68 million in 2006.

This year’s cuts include $16 million in grants and contributions that used to help fund over 70 national and regional anti-smoking NGOs. As a result, the government is now planning to spend only 0.9 per cent of the $3 billion in annual tax revenues it collects from tobacco sales on measures to educate Canadians about its health hazards and monitor the industry. That works out to roughly $0.81 for every Canadian. To put that in perspective, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends government spending of $12 per capita to sustain a comprehensive tobacco control program.

Health groups and tobacco control advocates, naturally, are appalled. “Consider who wins by this decision: the only winner—and they are big winners—is Big Tobacco,” says Garfield Mahood, founding executive director of the Non-Smokers’ Rights Association. “By slashing funding to health groups, the Harper government has virtually assured that tobacco companies will have the upper hand in influencing federal policy decisions.”

Unperturbed, Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq noted in a press release about the forthcoming cuts that “Canada is a world leader in tobacco control,” adding, “our government is proud of the work we have done.” Most of the country, the document continued, seems to have kicked the habit: Time to spend our money on other things. (Aglukkaq did, however, concede that smoking rates are out of control among aboriginal populations. The government’s efforts, she promised, would zero in on them. Perhaps the minister meant the government will finally issue that new strategy it promised in 2006 after it “suspended” $10 million in annual funding for the First Nations and Inuit Tobacco Control Strategy.)

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NDP or Dutch?

By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, May 18, 2012 at 1:25 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Mitchel Raphael

‘Judge, referee and kindergarten teacher’

Former Speaker Peter Milliken had his official portrait unveiled last week. Milliken is the longest-serving Speaker in Canadian history, sitting in the chair from 2001 to 2011. At the unveiling, Government House leader Peter Van Loan referred to Milliken as a “judge, referee and kindergarten teacher all at once.” NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair said the ultimate testament to his “fair-handedness” was the fact that Milliken, who ran as a Liberal, was still elected Speaker when the Conservatives took power. Liberal interim leader Bob Rae noted Milliken is likely the only Canadian whose biography says he “began reading Hansard in his teens. I had no idea he had such a deprived childhood. Many of us were accused of hiding other things under our mattresses.” The portrait was painted by Prescott, Ont.-based artist Paul Wyse, who has painted portraits of musicians such as Billy Joel and Jim Cuddy. Wyse is originally from Maine. He came to Canada 15 years ago to get his Ph.D. in music at the University of Montreal. He is now a permanent resident of Canada and says he will become a citizen at the end of the year. Wyse left music a while back to focus on his art. Milliken was the first portrait he has done of a politician. The painting shows the former Speaker with his hands on a desk. One hand is open and the other is a fist. Behind Milliken are books containing Hansards.

MP’s mom listened to Beatles in graveyard

Hundreds of people came to Parliament Hill to celebrate the 20th World Falun Dafa Day, in support of the spiritual practice also known as Falun Gong. Among the MPs and senators at the gathering was Conservative MP Rob Anders, a vocal critic of China’s politics. Anders keeps a Tibetan flag outside his office and recently added one for South Vietnam. In high school he went to see a concert by Tibetan monks and was horrified by what he read in pamphlets about the Chinese occupation of Tibet. His mother grew up in Communist Poland and was forced to make pro-May Day posters in art class at school. She and others would sneak to graveyards to listen to the Beatles on free radio because the police left graveyards alone. Anders’s great-grandmother was shot by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution and the family lost all their property. Anders says he has tried to visit the Chinese mainland, but his requests so far have been denied. He says his own government would not take him on a government mission “because I would probably cause a loss of face.”

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Nova Scotia fishermen strike over price of lobsters

By Emma Teitel - Thursday, May 17, 2012 at 7:40 PM - 0 Comments

Most people think lobster is too expensive. Not the roughly 900 fishermen in southwestern Nova Scotia whose job it is to haul the crustaceans from the deep. Hundreds of fishermen have been floating their boats idly in and around Yarmouth, Shelburne, and Digby for more than a week, with no plan to resume fishing unless lobster buyers agree to meet their price of $5.50 per pound. The striking fishermen say they receive, on average, between $3.25 and $5 dollars per pound of fish and argue that’s a wage they cannot afford to live on. The 1688 Professional Lobster Fishermen’s Association is leading the protest over what it considers an “unfair” decade-long decline in the price lobster buyers will pay. “We want lobster dealers to make money,” says James Mood, president of the organization, “but we want them to share that wealth with fishermen.”

Mood says that anything under $5.50 per pound is simply not livable, but the buyers won’t budge. “We’ve had one meeting with them,” he says. “It was not fruitful. They say they don’t have a [fixed] price.”

Apparently though, neither do some fishermen who have continued to set traps, raising the ire of the lobster union.There have been reports of violence on some wharfs and the RCMP have been forced to intervene. “There are some people that didn’t honour the strike,” says Mood. “There have been some threats made, some bullying, some badgering, some arguments nose to nose. But we support and believe in democracy. You have the freedom to go fishing or not.”

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Quebec’s student protests: righteous anger, shame about the execution

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, May 16, 2012 at 6:45 PM - 0 Comments

Paul Chiasson/CP Images

At last, it's come true!

About a year and a half ago, sister mag L’Actualité published a rebuttal issue to our fun and frameable Bonhomme cover entitled Quebec: The Most Corrupt Province In Canada. Their cover picture depicted a pack of righteously outraged Bonhommes armed with (I think) vuvuzelas, marching in the street against corruption. The idea, of course, was that Quebecers were furious with corruption-addled Liberal government, and weren’t going to take it anymore.

I thought it was a neat-o picture. My friend/colleague Patrick Lagacé, not so much. “Bah,” he said when he saw the cover. ”Quebecers don’t protest in the streets unless it’s over a hockey team.”

Ouch.

And yet, he’s right, isn’t he? Despite being in power for nearly 10 years, most of which in the doldrums of public opinion, there has been no large-scale, grassroots protest against the Charest government. This is even more incredible given the numerous scandals (here, here, here and most recently here, for starters) over the last three or so years.

In fact, far from protesting the government, Quebecers keep re-electing it to office: Jean Charest’s Liberals are the only government since Duplessis to win three consecutive terms. If, as the polls suggest, Quebecers aren’t happy with the Charest government, they certainly haven’t done much about it. Meanwhile, the only blue march we’ve seen was a festive affair to (playfully) cajole the NHL into anointing Quebec City with a hockey team. Several thousands attended. And yes, there were plenty of vuvuzelas.

Which brings us to the current protest over tuition fees waging in the streets, Metros and, in an exceptionally unclassy episode today, in the classrooms of the province. I’m not sure when, exactly, it happened, but at some point the scope of the strike became larger even as those remaining on the street diminished. It’s at the point where CLASSE, the more radical of the four groups representing striking students, had its legitimacy challenged by Force étudiante critique, which counts among its members at least one of the alleged Metro smoke bombers.

The anti-capitalist group known as CLAC has incorporated “the fighting students” into its ranks of  ”radical feminists”, “anti-capitalists, anarchists, communists” and “those who are pissed off, and are at the end of their rope.” There are huge problems with their tactics and their rhetoric, but it remains that those students (and many non-students, surely) are the only ones to wear their discontent with the current government on their sleeve. Everyone else has stayed on the couch.

Of course, their boorish tactics and yawn-inducing nihilist spiel have only alienated these noyau dur protesters from a population that might otherwise feel a certain kinship to their cause. They aren’t humanitarians, freedom fighters or anything approaching such romantic connotations. At best, they are discontents; at their worst, thugs. Perversely, they add legitimacy to the government’s argument for a special law to end the strike. Yet there isn’t an ounce of apathy to their cause. The same can’t be said for the people watching them.

There is a much better outlet for their energies: work to vote the bums out. There are two political parties that at the very least support the broad strokes of the student movement. One of them, the Parti Québécois, stands a good chance of forming the next government—and its MNAs wear the red square on their lapels! Both these parties—the other is Québec solidaire—have histories of advocating broad social change, and together occupy a huge chunk of Quebec’s left political flank. Conveniently enough, there has to be an election within the next year and a half.

Marois and company, who know a thing or three about electoral pandering, need to be held to account on their pro-student rhetoric; meanwhile, Québec solidaire needs to elect more than one MNA. The low voter turnout, fueled largely by younger people staying home on election day, only helps the incumbent Liberals.

But no. There are injunctions to break, and windows that need smashing.

The time to take action on Toronto G20 summit security was 2009

By Alan Parker - Wednesday, May 16, 2012 at 5:13 PM - 0 Comments

Darren Calabrese/CP Images

The various reports now blasting police crowd control measures and violations of civil rights during the G20 fiasco in Toronto in 2010 are a classic case of closing the barn door after the horse has left.

Any I-told-you-sos now are a day late and a dollar short — actually two years too late and tens of millions of dollars off the mark.

The time to take action for any person holding a relevant responsible position — Toronto Police Chief Bill Blair, then-Mayor David Miller, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty and Jim Flaherty, the federal cabinet minister with responsibility for Toronto — was in 2009, a year before the June 2010 summit ravaged the city’s core.

It should have been obvious to the planners of the event then that middle of Canada’s largest city, the financial heart of the nation, was not the place to hold a gathering of world leaders that was guaranteed to attract swarms of violent protesters bent on mayhem and confrontation.

And if the bureaucratic party planners were too cowed by the demands of an overbearing prime minister to nay-say his commands, then those aforementioned responsible, representative leaders should have stood up and said ‘No’ to a surefire disaster-in-the-making.

Originally the G20 summit was supposed to be held in locked-down Muskoka with the G8 summit — until the big brains in Ottawa suddenly realized Huntsville wasn’t going to be able to handle the tens of thousands of G20 summiteers, hangers-on and observers.

Thus the switch to Toronto for the G20 portion of the combined billion-dollar photo op.

That was the first time — and almost certainly will be the only time — the G8 and G20 summits were held in conjunction.

This year’s G8 gathering will be held in the fortified presidential compound of Camp David outside Washington, D.C., this weekend. The summit had been originally slated for Chicago but far wiser heads than those attached to the bodies of the Toronto G20 planners prevailed.

And the 2012 G20 summit will be hosted by Mexico in mid-June on the isolated, defensible Baja California peninsula. It will be a quiet, peaceful, safe venue for world leaders to meet and discuss important affairs of state — even in a country torn apart by violence, crime, corruption and mass murder.

But it’s not as if the U.S. and Mexico are learning the right way to do things from Toronto’s bitter experience. Everyone involved in the planning of Toronto 2010 knew — or should have known — that mass demonstrations and outbreaks of violence have plagued every G8 and G20 gathering in the 21st Century. They had a decade to see the pattern and avoid repeating it.

But they didn’t.

Whether it was misplaced national pride or overweening personal willfulness, the decision was made to forge ahead toward a known, anticipated disaster. General Custer, meet the Titanic.

There is more than enough blame to be handed out in post-mortem reports and debates.

But the real blame — the real shame — should be attached to those politicians, bureaucrats and civic leaders who knew better than to let the G20 summit go ahead in Toronto, but allowed it to happen anyway.

Judge was right to keep Rafferty’s laptop out of the trial

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 at 4:43 PM - 0 Comments

Dave Chidley/CP

A new villain is emerging in the wake of the Tori Stafford trial: Judge Thomas Heeney.

Justice Heeney has been upbraided in a Globe and Mail masthead editorial and by the Toronto Star’s Rosie DiManno for not allowing into evidence the results of an improper search of Michael Rafferty’s computer. The Globe argues that Heeney had the authority to fudge the rules and let the evidence in, and therefore he should have. DiManno calls Heeney “stupid,” and suggests that if Rafferty had walked, it would have been Heeney’s fault. They’re both wrong. Justice Heeney made the right call, both in terms of delivering justice for Tori Stafford and her family, and with regards to his duty to the law.

As the Globe itself has reported, police fumbled the case by failing to obtain the secondary warrant they needed to search Rafferty’s computer. They had warrants to search his house and car, but to search Rafferty’s hard drive as well, they would have needed a warrant specific to that purpose. The Justice of the Peace and an O.P.P. forensic detective explicitly told investigators this, and there’s no question that they would have received the needed warrant if they had just asked for it. But they didn’t.

Had Justice Heeney ignored this and let the laptop in, he might have introduced an element of vulnerability into Rafferty’s conviction upon appeal. He could have put the crown’s case at risk and opened it up to legal challenge by accepting evidence the defence could have argued was inadmissible. The judge erred on the side of caution, and it’s hard to fault him for that.

Even if the laptop had been legally searched, one has to wonder whether the Crown should have been permitted to use the evidence gleaned from it. Let’s consider the implications of Judge Heeney allowing the jury to hear the Crown’s argument that by Googling search terms like “underage rape,” Michael Rafferty was  actively planning his crimes. I might very well Google “murder” when planning a murder–and in the Shafia trial, that was indeed the case–but there are limitless other reasons why I might do so.

Rafferty’s searches were more specific, but proving that they were done in order to plan his crimes, rather than say, out of a deviant erotic interest, is very problematic. The Google searches, just like the child porn police found on his laptop, would have provided jurors with damning evidence about Rafferty’s character, but little proof of his guilt in this specific crime. In other words, they would have succeeded in characterizing Rafferty as an absolute scumbag- the kind of guy you don’t mind sending up the river, whether or not you’re absolutely certain that he did it. As Judge Heeney ruled, their value as proof–their “probative value”–was “minimal,” but their capacity to prejudice the jury huge.

It would have cost us all something more. Our justice system needs to be very careful about setting precedents around using Internet histories as evidence. The Internet is where we go to explore out of curiosity, often (erroneously) thinking ourselves anonymous. Drawing connections between our online wanderings and our physical actions takes us on a slippery slope. Rafferty’s interest in disgusting sexual crimes is a moral abomination, and the possession of child pornography a crime in and of itself. But both are a very different thing than the crime he was convicted for.

The Star‘s Rosie DiManno disagrees. She writes that it was “crucial” for the jury to know that Rafferty “had an unhealthy interest in child pornography and bestiality” (as opposed to a “healthy” interest in them?). How was this crucial? What mattered was not Rafferty’s movie collection or his Google history. What mattered was that he raped and killed Tori Stafford.

Jesse Brown is the host of TVO.org’s Search Engine podcast. He is on Twitter @jessebrown

Byron Sonne cleared of all charges

By Jesse Brown - Tuesday, May 15, 2012 at 2:04 PM - 0 Comments

Aaron Vincent Elkaim/CP

If it can’t explode, can we call it an explosive?

If you didn’t detonate an explosive, and you didn’t make an explosive, can you be guilty of possessing explosives?

If you publicly announce that a fence can be climbed, are you encouraging people to climb that fence?

Is it credible that a grown man would be passionate about model rocketry and gardening?

Those are some of the questions it has taken our justice system almost two years to answer in the case of Byron Sonne, the self-described “security geek” who dared to scrutinize and mock the billion dollar security operation built to protect the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto. The answers, which I heard Judge Nancy Spies deliver today before a courtroom packed with Byron Sonne’s supporters, amounted to this:

Byron Sonne did nothing wrong.

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Studies say: Lifting weights and playing video games help the brain

By Jason Kirby - Monday, May 14, 2012 at 11:35 AM - 0 Comments

British Columbia: Older women who perform physical exercises like lifting weights may be able to slow the onset of dementia, according to researchers at the Univeristy of British Columbia. After studying women aged 70 to 80 who were divided into three exercise groups—balance training, aerobics and resistance training—those in the latter group showed “significant” cognitive improvement.

Alberta: The way consumers respond to good or bad service or products comes down to whether they are pleasure seekers or pain avoiders, according to research from the University of Alberta. Pleasure seekers are hurt more when a product doesn’t work well, but also get more joy out of positive consumer experiences. Pain avoiders, on the other hand, don’t take it so badly when a product or service is poor, but they don’t enjoy good consumer experiences as much, either.

Ontario: Researchers at the University of Toronto have found that after playing action video games, even for brief periods, people experience changes in their brain activity and improved visual attention. The results arose from brainwave tests on subjects who had never played video games before.

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Stephen Harper’s secret weapon in Quebec

By Paul Wells - Monday, May 14, 2012 at 9:44 AM - 0 Comments

David Kawai

Just about the only good word to be said for the faceless government office towers in downtown Ottawa is that you can get an excellent view from their top floors. Denis Lebel steered a visitor toward the floor-to-ceiling windows lining two walls of his 29th-floor office.

“My colleagues tell me this is the best view in Ottawa,” the minister of (take a deep breath) transport, infrastructure and communities and minister of the economic development agency of Canada for the region of Quebec said. He pointed down to the Chaudière Falls, the Supreme Court building, and the Parliament buildings arrayed far below.

“This is the highest office in the building,” Lebel said, leaning forward conspiratorially as he delivered his patter. “Nowhere to go but down.”

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Franklin the Turtle goes postal

By Brian Bethune - Monday, May 14, 2012 at 9:12 AM - 0 Comments

Franklin the Turtle, who famously could “zip zippers and button buttons, count by twos and tie his shoes,” can also make stamps come alive. Author Paulette Bourgeois’s kid-lit icon is the single most successful franchise in the history of Canadian publishing: 65 million copies of Franklin’s young-child-friendly adventures have been sold in 24 languages in 38 countries; he starred in his own TV series (with theme music by Bruce Cockburn) and even adorned a 1995 Maclean’s cover. And he’s turning 25 this year. To mark the event, on May 11 Canada Post issued its first-ever stamp series celebrating a character from an illustrated Canadian children’s book, depicting Franklin under both of the names he goes by here. He’s Benjamin in Quebec—not to mention Morten in Denmark, Patrik in Sweden and Konrad in Finland. “I read the children Benjamin, and my husband reads them Franklin,” notes Canada Post spokeswoman (and “huge fan”) Anick Losier.

But if Franklin is no ordinary turtle, neither is his moment of philatelic glory of the everyday humdrum kind. The Franklin series is also attached to the launch of Canada Post’s new “augmented reality” app for Apple and Android devices called Stamps Alive. Users can download the app for free and then scan an image on the stamp (or on the stamped package). For the Franklin stamps, the image is a maze. Once scanned, the maze comes to life and Franklin can walk through it, following the user’s finger, to the mailbox to drop in a letter. Small children will love the app, and because “every stamp tells a story, may want to discover the wonderful world of stamps,” says Losier. And perhaps grow up to be future Canada Post customers.