Boris Johnson of London vs. Toronto’s Rob Ford: One bumbles, one fumbles

By Leah McLaren - Friday, May 11, 2012 at 2:05 PM - 0 Comments

Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP (left); Frank Gunn/CP (right)

Consider for a moment the improbable parallels between the newly re-elected mayor of London, Boris Johnson, and Toronto’s scandal-embroiled leader, Rob Ford. Both are outspoken, gaffe-prone conservatives with a clownish fallibility that is as appealing to voters as it is often appalling. Both have been underestimated to the ultimate detriment of their political opponents and are defined by their obsession with bikes. (Johnson rides his everywhere while Ford would like to see them more or less banned from the roads.) Both loathe unions and graffiti, love senior citizens and commuters and never saw a tax they didn’t want to cut. Even their names lend themselves to similar diminutives: BoJo and RoFo. Creepy, huh?

Their similarities even extend to their oddly distinctive looks. Zaftig, rumple-suited and childishly tow-headed, the two men share a squishable Pillsbury Doughboy quality that belies a deeper ambition and steel. To the unacquainted, both mayors appear vulnerable and as slow-moving as overfed lab rats, and yet each managed to storm city hall on his first attempt despite the cards being stacked against him. More remarkable still, both accomplished this feat in roughly the same way—by tirelessly courting the outlying edges of their respective cities rather than the downtown core. Here in London, political commentators described this effect as the “Boris doughnut,” while in downtown Toronto, they call it “revenge of the suburbs.” In both cases, appealing to the suburbs is a strategy that’s worked well—in Johnson’s case twice. Last week the London mayor was re-elected over his Labour rival Ken Livingstone by a narrow three percentage point margin, a crucial win for the British Tories who were otherwise humiliated in recent local elections across the country.

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Quebec: From Quiet Revolution to not-so-quiet student riot

By Alex Ballingall - Friday, May 11, 2012 at 1:55 PM - 0 Comments

Photographs by Roger Lemoyne

For more than 12 weeks, tens of thousands of Quebec students have taken to the streets in anger and frustration. They’ve hurled slogans from worn-out vocal cords, sung and danced and taken their clothes off. Protesters threw stones, smashed windows and clashed with riot police, all in an effort to halt the government’s proposal to increase tuition $1,625 over the next five to seven years.

Students began walking out on their classes in February. More than three months later, the dispute has become the longest student strike in Quebec history. The stubborn persistence of the strike has left many in the rest of Canada scratching their heads over why there’s been such uproar. Even in Quebec, the intensity of the protests has puzzled observers. “The whole political and media class has been taken by surprise,” says Eric Pineault, a sociologist at the Université de Quebec à Montréal (UQAM). Quebecers currently enjoy the lowest tuition in the country. And never mind that with Premier Jean Charest’s proposed hike, the average tuition in Quebec would then be the second-lowest in Canada. Yet more than 165,000 students are on strike indefinitely. Many of them will lose their semester if they don’t head back to class soon. How did the movement attain such strength and longevity?

The answer lies largely with a particular thrust in Quebec society that links ideals of social democracy—such as widely affordable university education—to a sense of national identity. These ties date back to the Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, a time when Quebecers became maîtres, or masters, of their own province, instituting changes that gave Quebec a more left-leaning bent than elsewhere in North America. “The Quiet Revolution is a very important moment in Quebec history,” says André Pratte, editor of Montreal’s La Presse newspaper. “Every time someone questions the decisions that were made at the time, it’s almost as if you are trying to destroy a very important part of that moment.”

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Tsunami debris hits the shores of B.C.

By Ken MacQueen - Friday, May 11, 2012 at 1:01 PM - 0 Comments

HO-Tofino Photography/CP

It began in December with a flotilla of bottles, cans and lumber with Japanese trade stamps washing up on the beaches of Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island. Mayor Perry Schmunk, among those who gathered the debris, was the first elected official to raise the alarm that wreckage from the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of March 11, 2011, was hitting the North American shore more than a year earlier than expected. While skeptics doubted Schmunk’s claims, events have proved him right.

In recent weeks an abandoned 49-m Japanese fishing vessel drifted to within 500 km of the B.C. coast before it it was sunk by the U.S. Coast Guard. A soccer ball belonging to 16-year-old Misaki Murakami, who lost his family home in the disaster, washed up on an island off Alaska. Most recently, a shipping container hit the shore of Graham Island in B.C.’s Haida Gwaii, spilling a rusting Harley-Davidson onto the beach. “I think there’s no doubt now that it’s coming ashore much quicker than everyone anticipated,” says Schmunk.

So far the largest item to hit Tofino beaches is a 45-gallon drum that once held a fish extract, but communities along North America’s West Coast expect much worse. An estimated 1.5 million tonnes of material light enough to float was swept out to sea. Much of it is expected to swirl in what is known as the North Pacific garbage patch between Hawaii and North America, but significant amounts could hit beaches from Alaska to California by October. Posters in Washington state advise beachcombers to be aware that garbage, personal belongings and hazardous material will wash ashore. “It is extremely unlikely any human remains from the tsunami will reach the U.S.,” the signs say.

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Art imitates life as Maclean’s inspires ‘The Darling of Kandahar’

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, May 9, 2012 at 11:07 AM - 0 Comments

The start: The cover, featuring Ilyes, and a report on the death of Karigiannis in Afghanistan

It all seems strangely inevitable, given the endless cycle of self-reference in modern literature (and media). First, a young woman in Toronto, Kinga Ilyes, has her photo appear on the cover of Maclean’s April 2, 2007, University Student issue. Sgt. Christos Karigiannis, a Canadian soldier in Afghanistan, sees it a month later and writes the magazine a (politely) appreciative letter about “the extremely attractive young lady.” The media knows a feel-good story, arising from a situation that is always in sore need of one, when it sees it. Newspapers reprint the sergeant’s letter and flash “Darling of Kandahar” headlines. Maclean’s dispatches another photographer to Ilyes, and this time a reporter calls too, to ask a few details about her life.

A few weeks pass, and it’s no longer a cheerful story: the soldier, like so many other Canadian troops before and after him, is killed by a roadside bomb. The young woman, shocked and saddened, withdraws from the public eye. Five years later, Montreal author Felicia Mihali publishes a novel, The Darling of Kandahar, about a girl whose picture appears on the cover of a magazine called Maclear’s—the standard phrase “lightly fictionalized” hardly describes the alteration of a fraction of a single character—and catches the eye of a soldier in Afghanistan. The cycle begins anew, but this time a Maclean’s reporter phones Mihali.

The prolific and multilingual novelist—three books in Romanian, seven in French, plus Darling, her first in English—has been in Canada since 2000. Mihali, 45, already spoke French when she arrived in Montreal from southern Romania. In 2007, after years of study, she was just becoming comfortable in English when she read the story of Kinga and Christos in Maclean’s—the publication she had adopted as her window into English Canada’s psyche. What first captured Mihali’s attention was that Ilyes was born in Romania. “People are always talking about Romanian women,” she says laughing, “but they don’t often say we’re beautiful. I felt a little touch of national pride.”

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Canadian ‘corpse flower’ is a blooming record breaker

By Alan Parker - Monday, May 7, 2012 at 4:06 PM - 0 Comments

Photo: Alan Parker

It’s very big. It stinks to high heaven. And it’s a transplanted Canadian resident. What more could you ask for in a flower?

Well, maybe a little staying power.

Photo: Joan Cornelius, Niagara Parks Floral Showhouse

Meet the titan arum, tallest flower in the world and pride of the Niagara Parks Floral Showhouse, where one of the giant plants named “Morph” bloomed spectacularly over the weekend and where its baby brother “Clive” is expected to put on a similar show next weekend or shortly thereafter.

The flowering of one titan arum is rare enough — Morph’s coming out on Friday evening was only the 151st time for which there is a public record of a cultivated titan arum blooming since Italian botanist Odoardo Beccari brought the first seeds from Sumatra to Europe in 1878.

As far as Floral Showhouse supervisor Joan Cornelius can determine, this is the first time a titan arum has ever bloomed in Canada—and Clive will the second, in a week or so.

So it’s a big deal for a big flower. And big they are: Morph topped out at 2.41 metres (taller than the tallest NBA player) and it looks like Clive will be just a tad shorter.

The tallest titan arum on record reached 3.1 metres. That one was grown by Louis Ricciardiello, the same New Hampshire horticulturalist who donated the 70-kilo bulb caches (called corms) for Morph and Clive and four other smaller corms to the Floral Showhouse in Niagara Falls last December.

Now there are a few other things you should know about the titan arum:

Its official name is Amorphophallus titanum—which translates as “giant misshapen penis.” An understandable description when you look at pictures of the flower.

Noted British naturalist David Attenborough gave it the name titan arum in the early 1990s while he was filming his BBC documentary “The Private Life of Plants” — because he didn’t want to say “Amorphophallus” repeatedly on television.

The second thing you have to know is that the titan arum is one of the worst-smelling plants in existence.  Its nickname is “the corpse flower” because it smells like dead, rotting meat — on purpose, to attract carcass-eating insects to pollinate it.

Windows were kept open and air circulation was set on high at the Niagara Falls Floral Showhouse on Friday and Saturday, but staff members said the smell wasn’t too bad — more like old meat in the fridge than something the dog rolled in. By Sunday, the odour was no more than a musky, musty memory.

And finally, titan arum is generally referred to as the world’s “tallest” flower not “biggest” because there’s another monster flower in Sumatra that, while lower to the ground, has a wider bloom. It, too, is known as a “corpse flower” for the same insect-attracting olfactory reasons.

Photo: Joan Cornelius, Niagara Parks Floral Showhouse

From the time Morph poked its pointy head out of the ground on March 26 until it fully bloomed on Friday night, the flower grew at a monstrous rate — 2-5 cm a day initially and 10-15 cm a day by last week.

Staff at the Floral Showhouse were like expectant parents, waiting all week for the flower to bloom. Once it finally started about 5 p.m. Friday, it only took five hours for the giant to open completely, revealing its blood-red — almost black — interior and fully erect spandix in the centre.

Did champagne corks pop for the happy occasion?

“No,” said showhouse supervisor Joan Cornelius on Sunday, “I wish we had some on hand, but we didn’t. There were just a few of us here watching it open but it was very exciting.”

Cornelius and her staff, going on the experiences of other growers, were expecting their titan arum to stay in bloom for about three days. But nature follows its own timetable.

Photo: Alan Parker

Morph’s glory days were counted in mere hours and by midday Saturday the bloom was fading fast. By Sunday afternoon, visitors were asking “Where’s the giant plant? That’s it?” while standing next to Morph’s withered, wilting remains.

Now it’s another two or three years of leaf growth and dormancy cycles before Morph can be expected to rise again to its full floral prominence.

Luckily, Clive is still on the horizon. Cornelius said Clive appeared about 10 days after Morph so its flowering day is probably a week or so away.

This time the Floral Showhouse staff will be expecting one full day of flowering instead of three. But there’s no blooming guarantee how nature on this scale will unfold.

In British Columbia, school may not be out for summer

By Alex Ballingall - Monday, May 7, 2012 at 10:59 AM - 0 Comments

For many elementary and high school students in B.C., this could be the last year they get to run out into the dazzling June sun with the knowledge that they won’t have to touch a pencil for more than two glorious, homework-free months. George Abbott, the B.C. minister of education, introduced legislation in Victoria last week that will give B.C. school districts the power to change the classic school calendar by spreading the summer holidays throughout the rest of the year.

The idea of a year-round calendar is hardly new, and proponents argue that a more balanced schedule—three months on, one month off—decreases so-called “learning loss” that occurs over long summer breaks. They also say it lets parents and teachers holiday outside peak travel times. “Teachers love it. Parents love it,” says Katie Sullivan, principal of Kanaka Creek Elementary School in Maple Ridge, one of a handful of B.C. schools already on the “balanced calendar.” (Under the current rules, every year the school must seek approval from the ministry to set its own calendar.) Sullivan has noticed her students need less time to review previous lessons after breaks, and that teachers seem more energized. She says the model is the envy of teachers in the Fraser Valley city, and that there’s a waiting list to get in her classrooms. Although it might not be right for all schools, Sullivan backs the bill. “I support choice,” she says.

Not so for Susan Lambert, president of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation. By devolving authority on school calendars, she says the government is putting the stability and standards of the B.C. school system at risk. “I’m very concerned about the impact on families of a chaotic school system, where any school can be on a different schedule.”

Regardless of such concerns, the long, lazy days of summer will likely get a bit shorter for many B.C. students.

Bravery award raises outrage at Awkesasne

By Richard Warnica - Monday, May 7, 2012 at 10:36 AM - 0 Comments

Adrian Wyld/CP

It’s a thin line, sometimes, between brave acts and foolish ones. Just ask Mike Biron, a constable with the Akwesasne Mohawk police near Cornwall, Ont.

Late last month, Governor General David Johnston pinned the Medal of Bravery on Biron’s chest. In the official citation, he praised the officer for trying “desperately” to pull an elderly couple from a burning car. But less than two years earlier, Biron faced criminal charges related to that wreck. Even today, the family of the couple who died in the crash blame Biron for causing it. They’ve sued him and his force, and are outraged by the award.

The controversy stems from a pursuit on Cornwall Island in November 2008, when Biron chased a suspected tobacco smuggler through the streets at more than 160 km/h. The suspect, Dany Gionet, a 21-year-old from Quebec, blew through two four-way stops before his van crashed into another car. The two vehicles caught fire. Biron and Canadian Border Services officer Yves Soumillon tried to yank the older couple from the other car, but they were too late. Gionet, along with Eileen and Edward Kassian from upstate New York, died at the scene.

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What you’re thinking: finding religion and lost in traffic

By Alex Ballingall - Monday, May 7, 2012 at 10:22 AM - 0 Comments

British Columbia: People in B.C. have far less confidence in the police than those in the rest of Canada, according to a recent poll. Just 27 per cent of B.C. respondents trust the RCMP, while 28 per cent expressed confidence in municipal police forces. The Canadian average for support of local and provincial cops was 40 per cent.

Manitoba: God lives on the Prairies. According to a recent poll, people in Manitoba and Saskatchewan are the most religiously inclined in Canada. Fifty four per cent of respondents from those provinces said religion is important to them, compared to 42 per cent among Canadians as a whole, while 79 per cent from the Prairies professed a belief in God.

Ontario: A recent survey found nearly two-thirds of people in the Greater Toronto area feel their daily commute is “detrimental” to their quality of life. It’s little surprise, then, that 70 per cent would pay a toll or higher taxes if they knew the money would be spent on transit that would ease traffic, according to the poll. Another option: work from home—which 95 per cent would prefer to do.

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Meditations on diplomacy with the Dalai Lama

By Paul Wells - Friday, May 4, 2012 at 11:22 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by David Kawai

The Dalai Lama was in Ottawa to speak to 7,000 people at the Civic Centre in late April. He did not intend to bring controversy. It follows him anyway. For days there was speculation about whether Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader would meet Prime Minister Stephen Harper for the first time since 2006, when Harper was in the business of snubbing China’s ruling regime and gave His Holiness honorary Canadian citizenship. Now, Harper is conspicuously in the business of cozying up to China. He has steered clear of the ageless Buddhist cleric whose continued existence vexes Beijing. But in the end, wary of upsetting allies who like the old, anti-Communist Harper, the Prime Minister welcomed the Dalai Lama for a private “courtesy visit.”

The next morning as he prepared to address a crowd, the Dalai Lama told Maclean’s he has no patience for any notion of isolating China. “It is extremely important, close ties with Chinese government, for economy reasons. Canada needs Chinese market. China needs Canadian resources.” But also Canadian values. “Western nations, democratic nations, your principles—democracy, freedom, liberty—these must stand firm.”

Harper is still trying to find his way as he engages more closely with China. The political headaches are as potent as the economic payoff. On this Saturday morning, the Dalai Lama sounded like an ally, not another problem. “I think fairly speaking, whom to meet by Prime Minister is your business, not China’s business,” he said. “Chinese control over who you can meet, that’s interference into your own affairs. After all, the Canadian government made me honorary citizen of this country. So the Prime Minister is meeting another Canadian person.”

Justin Trudeau should be the next leader of the Liberal Party. No, seriously.

By Paul Wells - Friday, May 4, 2012 at 11:08 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Blair Gable

The only time Justin Trudeau had for an interview on a recent Thursday was over breakfast at his Ottawa hotel. Under his suit jacket, the sleeve buttons on his dress shirt were undone. His necktie was knotted, but left loose over an open top button. His mane of black hair was tousled. Even in genteel disarray, even dressed more or less like a couple hundred of his parliamentary colleagues, the 40-year-old Liberal MP for the Montreal riding of Papineau looked like a million bucks.

I showed up late, slumped into a seat, ordered an omelette. I’ve known Trudeau for nine years, never well. Trudeau wondered why I’d convened this little meeting. “Your first note to me said you’d need three minutes to chat. Now it’s breakfast and your photo department is calling my office looking to take pictures. What’s up?”

There was no point beating around the bush. It’s not as though he hadn’t heard the question before.

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The Liberal crisis

By John Geddes - Friday, May 4, 2012 at 10:59 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Blair Gable

Mike Crawley, the new president of the Liberal Party of Canada, may be a youthful 43, but he boasts a surprisingly long history of stepping up when the party finds itself in dire circumstances. A few months after then-leader John Turner led the Liberals to a soul-sapping defeat against Brian Mulroney’s ascendant Conservatives in the 1984 election, Crawley opted to join the losing side. Growing up in an Ottawa family that didn’t care much about politics, he was nonetheless a teenaged true believer. “My first event was a hoity-toity fundraising reception that I got a free ticket to,” he remembers. “I showed up, didn’t know anybody—a geeky 15-year-old with all these people in nice suits. Even though I was just 15, I thought I could have some influence, and that attracted me.”

Since Liberals elected him to head their national board of directors at a convention early this year, Crawley has taken on a behind-the-scenes rebuilding challenge even more daunting than what confronted his elders in the party back in the dark days of the mid-1980s. Turner had at least clung to official Opposition status. But in the May 2, 2011, election, Michael Ignatieff led the Liberals to a third-place humbling, as the NDP vaulted over them to become the government-in-waiting. A party laid so low normally looks to a leader for direction. But the Liberals put off picking Ignatieff’s permanent successor until spring 2013. That left Crawley and his board to map out two or three years of painful recuperation. His diagnosis of the Liberal malaise is blunt enough to come from a disdainful Tory or New Democrat. “The root of the party’s problem,” he told Maclean’s, “is that it’s gradually become more and more closed both to new people and new ideas.”

In fact, critics have long slammed the federal Liberals as a closed club. In the past, however, that club always offered the cachet of power, or close proximity to it. Losing three elections in a row under three leaders—Paul Martin, Stéphane Dion and Ignatieff—wiped out any aura of exclusivity. So now the Liberals are trying to reconnect even with sympathetic Canadians too wary to sign a membership card. As of this week, the party began inviting mere “supporters” to register, just by entering their names and email addresses on the Liberal website. No initiation fee is charged.

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The opposition must ask better questions about the F-35

By Philippe Lagassé - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 at 5:20 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph: Office of the Prime Minister of Canada

Philippe Lagassé is assistant professor of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa.

What did members of Parliament learn from Tuesday’s public accounts committee hearing on the F-35 procurement? Mostly that arguing with senior officials about costs and accounting methods is a frustrating experience, one where the opposition is at a disadvantage. Unless New Democrat and Liberal MPs hone their questions regarding the planned sole-source acquisition of new fighter aircraft, they will find that their ability to hold the government to account over the F-35 will soon dissipate. It is time for the opposition parties to ask better questions about the F-35.

Since the Auditor General’s latest report was tabled in early April, opposition parties and pundits have been fixated on his finding that the government excluded $10 billion in operating, personnel, and contingency costs from the stated price of the F-35 acquisition. Although the government was aware of these estimated life-cycle costs, ministers chose to present only the aircraft’s acquisition and sustainment cost when the decision to buy the planes was announced in the summer of 2010. This omission has been upheld as evidence that the Conservative government lied to Parliament and Canadians about the true cost of the planned procurement.

Opposition members hoped that senior executives involved in the F-35 process might be compelled to corroborate this assessment before the public accounts committee. It did not happen.

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Chatting with the Dalai Lama

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 at 3:09 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph: David Kawai

The Dalai Lama was in Ottawa to speak to 7,000 people at the Civic Centre. He did not intend to bring controversy. It follows him anyway. For days there was speculation about whether Tibet’s exiled spiritual leader would meet Prime Minister Stephen Harper. It would be their first meeting since 2006, when Harper was in the business of snubbing China’s ruling regime and gave His Holiness honorary Canadian citizenship.

Now, Harper is conspicuously in the business of cozying up to China’s rulers. He has steered clear of the ageless Buddhist cleric whose continued existence vexes Beijing. But in the end, wary of upsetting allies who used to like the old, anti-Communist Harper, the prime minister welcomed the Dalai Lama for a private “courtesy visit.”

The next morning as he prepared to address the crowd at the Civic Centre, the Dalai Lama dismissed the whole business with a trademark chuckle. “I don’t think about controversy,” he told Maclean’s. “I think some people, out of their fear or anxiety, create a sort of controversy. To me, no differences: Queen, prime minister, president, beggar, AIDS patient. No differences. So there is no basis for controversy.”

Richard Gere, the Hollywood actor and practicing Buddhist who was travelling with the Dalai Lama, had publicly complained that the meeting wasn’t public. The Dalai Lama disagreed. “No differences” between a public and private meeting, he said. “Meeting. Person to person. That’s important. Talk. I don’t like formality. Formality, no help. Chinese leaders, too much formality. Even to the point of not knowing how to breathe.” That laugh again.

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Irwin Cotler’s secret: calm amid the chaos

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 at 2:25 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Blair Gable

It’s Tuesday afternoon, and Parliament is engaged in the daily schoolyard display known as question period. Everybody is shouting. Hyperbole and outrage rain down.

MP Irwin Cotler is seated in the midst of the Liberal caucus, his glasses perched atop a messy lick of hair, his head buried in his papers. When MP Wayne Easter noisily questions the Prime Minister’s commitment to democracy, his Liberal colleagues erupt in a bout of righteous applause. Not Cotler. Rather, the man who helped free the likes of Nelson Mandela, Russian dissident Natan Sharansky and Egyptian blogger Maikel Nabil from various tyrannical regimes around the world puts on his glasses and looks around to see what all the fuss is about. Then he smiles and goes back to his notes.

It’s a classic Cotlerian moment: calm in the face of chaos, intellect amidst noise, utter obliviousness to the brutish partisanry of present-day Ottawa. It is the type of politics the 71-year-old MP, human rights advocate and former justice minister has practised since arriving in Ottawa in 1999—politics with a purpose, not a sideshow for the sake of re-election. Yet his constituents in the Montreal riding of Mont Royal keep sending him back, six times in 12 years, despite an aggressive Conservative campaign last year that left many of Cotler’s former supporters questioning his very Jewishness. Last December, Campaign Research, a market research firm linked to the Conservative Party of Canada, conducted a phone campaign in Cotler’s riding in which its staff suggested Cotler was about to retire—an incident that foreshadowed the recent so-called robocall scandal, in which voters in some ridings were misled as to where to vote. The Speaker of the House of Commons deemed the suggestive poll question about Cotler as “reprehensible.” It was certainly dirty, Cotler says, and there will be no more. “The position I’ve taken was that this would be my last election,” he tells Maclean’s at 10:30 at night, before delving into another three hours of work.

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Weeding out the pot from the carrots in Vancouver

By Ken MacQueen - Wednesday, May 2, 2012 at 10:19 AM - 0 Comments

Like many of Vancouver’s urban farmers, Emi Do operates outside the law. Unlike most, her product is no more nefarious than Swiss chard and collard greens. The 28-year-old owner of Yummy Yards has backyard garden plots throughout the city’s west side. Her commercial enterprise, however, exists in a “murky area” of city licensing and bylaws, so she calls that aspect of her business “edible landscaping” to be on the safe side. That may eventually change. After years of fighting to stamp out marijuana cultivation, Vancouver council wants to tweak its laws to encourage legitimate commercial farming in a city better known for growing condo towers.

The move will require easing prohibitions on businesses operating on residential land and in indoor commercial hothouses—laws that were created to stop marijuana grow operations, says Coun. Andrea Reimer, a member of council’s Greenest City Action Team. A crackdown in the 1990s created the “unintended consequences” that now block urban food production. “To open that door again, we have to do it in a way that doesn’t allow grow ops to also walk through.”

As it stands, Do can’t get a license as a “food producer” in Vancouver. Nor can she sell veggies that have been grown in the yards of people who offer up their land in exchange for landscaping and fresh produce. For now, she views her Vancouver plots as a form of business advertising and has moved her commercial crops to agriculturally zoned land on the city fringe. For $640, customers get a weekly box of fresh veggies throughout the 18-week growing season.

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Brace for ladybugs with a real bite this summer

By Gabriela Perdomo - Tuesday, May 1, 2012 at 11:03 AM - 0 Comments

Multicolored Asian Ladybird Beetle

Ladybugs are the rarest of insects in that people actually enjoy having them around. But residents of the Ottawa Valley should brace for an invasion of a particularly annoying variety of the creatures this summer. Warmer weather is expected to bring large numbers of the Asian ladybug to the area, attracted by the soy and canola fields that surround Ottawa, says Jeff Dawson, associate professor at Carleton University’s department of biology. And here’s the thing: they bite.

The orange-and-black beetles live in large swarms and have been known to take nips out of people’s skin. It’s not that they’re out to get humans. “Their nervous system tricks them into thinking [you] might be an aphid or a food substance so they take a little bite,” Dawson explains, noting that once the bugs realize a person is not edible, they move on. But by then they’ve left an itchy red mark on the skin.

Though the bugs are effective at eating aphids, a common pest in many crops, the species is both a nuisance and a threat. Dawson says biologists worry they are displacing native ladybugs. “Species extinction causes loss of diversity, and for ecosystems to be healthy we want lots of diversity, lots of different species,” he says.

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A men’s centre at Simon Fraser University raises questions

By Josh Dehaas - Tuesday, May 1, 2012 at 10:48 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Brian Howell

Keenan Midgley played basketball, soccer, baseball and football. But it isn’t his athletic skill that has made him well-known on campus in Burnaby, B.C. It’s the budget he’s written as treasurer of the Simon Fraser Student Society. The fifth-year accounting student added funding that will carve out a special space on campus for guys. The men’s centre, assuming the budget passes a final vote, will get $30,000 next year. That’s the same amount that the women’s centre, started in 1974, will receive. The pending creation of the men-only space is the source of much discussion at Simon Fraser University. Since the news broke in April, many students have questioned whether the men deserve funding. Along with that, a debate has emerged over whether women—who make up 55 per cent of undergraduate students at SFU—still need their own women-only space.

The women’s centre is a 450-sq.-ft. space in a building near the centre of campus with couches, a kitchen and a library. It provides a place for students to discuss women’s issues, offers referrals to services like counselling and serves as a war room for campaigns, such as advocating for child care on campus. Marjorie Griffin Cohen, a professor in the department of gender, sexuality, and women’s studies (GSWS), says the centre was important to the women’s movement in the 1970s when women were a minority of the student body and even more rare as professors. Today it’s important, she says, for its work fighting violence against women.

Midgley says men could benefit from a similar “safe space.” He says his gender deals with more suicides, alcoholism and drug abuse, and suffers negative stereotypes just like women do. “As a student society, we’re supposed to represent all undergraduates. I don’t think we’re currently doing that.”

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Omar Khadr’s day of reckoning

By Michael Friscolanti - Monday, April 30, 2012 at 10:43 AM - 0 Comments

AP/US Department of Defense

As always, the latest “development” in the endless Omar Khadr saga provides few definitive answers. Here’s what we know for sure: Khadr’s official application for a prison transfer—from a cage at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to a cell in his home country—is now on the desk of Vic Toews, Stephen Harper’s public safety minister. And Toews has confirmed, as reluctantly as ever, that he will sign his name to the bottom of the page. At some point.

Beyond that, the future of Canada’s most (in)famous child soldier/homicidal jihadist remains as hazy as ever.

When will the minister actually pull out his pen? When will Khadr spend his final night at Gitmo? Which Canadian prison will become his next temporary home? Could he be eligible for parole the same day his plane touches down? And when the Toronto native is eventually set free (whether it’s five months from now or five years), where exactly will he go? Will Khadr run back into the arms of his notorious family and their fanatical sympathizers? Or will the feds ask a judge to impose special conditions on the convicted war criminal, limiting his movements and dictating his associates?

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Police blotter: Pizza heists and theft by sword

By Gustavo Vieira - Monday, April 30, 2012 at 1:41 AM - 0 Comments

British Columbia: RCMP in Surrey are investigating after a number of pizza delivery drivers were robbed. In three recent incidents, a gang of teenagers ordered up more than $100 in pizza using undisclosed phone numbers and misleading addresses. When the drivers came with the pizza, the teens mugged them by threatening to assault the drivers with bear spray.

Saskatchewan: Two men wearing masks wielded a sword while robbing a store in Saskatoon last week. Shortly after, about eight blocks away from the scene of the crime, the police, acting on a tip from a witness, stopped a vehicle and recovered the sword, cash and other items from the car. Three men and a woman were arrested.

Ontario: Thieves chose the wrong house to try to break into recently. When they cut the phone line to Joel Matlin’s Toronto home, an electronic voice inside the house bellowed “phone line cut,” waking Matlin’s stepson. He yelled and scared off the trio. All the high-tech security system was provided by AlarmForce Industries, whose president is Joel Matlin. Police arrested three men in connection with the incident.

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Pollsters were wildly off the mark in Alberta’s election

By Colby Cosh - Friday, April 27, 2012 at 10:01 AM - 0 Comments

Todd Korol/Reuters

One point three. Twelve. Fourteen. Seventeen. Eight, seven, seven, six, eight, seven, ten, nine, nine . . . two.

That’s a word picture of the polls taken in the run-up to April 23’s Alberta election, starting with a Leger survey for which interviews took place April 5-8. The numbers represent the Wildrose party’s estimated province-wide lead over the incumbent Progressive Conservatives. No public poll taken by a respectable firm during the campaign had the Wildrose behind the PCs. All pollsters agreed that at least a narrow Wildrose majority government was likely. Reporters in Eastern Canada dutifully filed “Wildrose wins” copy for the April 24 morning papers, believing that the outcome was certain.

And then came the shocking result of the election itself, arriving at the end of the mathematical sequence like some indecipherable symbol from a lost language:

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Please lock up your valuables, Mr. Harper

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, April 26, 2012 at 11:10 PM - 0 Comments

Memo to all staff at the Prime Minister’s Office: don’t leave your valuables unattended. There is a thief (or thieves) lurking inside the Langevin Block, the PM’s supposedly secure headquarters.

For the second year in a row, the Public Accounts of Canada—the federal government’s three-volume, line-by-line spending breakdown—reveals sticky fingers lurking inside the nation’s highest office. The details are scarce (the Privy Council doesn’t discuss internal security issues) but one thing is clear: the PMO crime spree has cost taxpayers $4,440.

As Maclean’s reported in 2010, the first victim was Jason Ransom, one of Stephen Harper’s two official photographers, who was reimbursed $1,298 after someone swiped his personal laptop. (Ransom’s government-issued computer was being repaired that day, so he was using his own laptop at work). An investigation was launched, but neither the crook nor the Mac was ever found.

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Quebec: Cheap degrees, but nobody’s buying

By Martin Patriquin - Thursday, April 26, 2012 at 5:20 PM - 0 Comments

Graham Hughes/CP

Clearly, 1969 was a great year to be going to university in Quebec. The province was in the process of detaching itself from its church-dominated past, priming the demand for an educated class. Prospective university students could also take heart in knowing that, because of a tuition freeze that year, they would pay $500 a year throughout their studies. Having been in effect for 32 of the past 43 years, the tuition freeze has been as enduring as it is economical. As a result, students today are getting an even better bargain than their forebears. A Quebec resident attending university today pays $1,968 a year—or just $311 in 1969 dollars. And as the months-long student boycott of universities across the province shows, low tuition is something of a sacred cow here, like cheap electricity and beer at the dépanneur. The student movement says the provincial government’s plans to increase tuition to $3,793 will hinder access to higher education.

Yet, as enduring as it has been, the tuition freeze has done little to increase university enrolment in the province. According to a study published by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, about 30 per cent of Quebec’s young people go to university, six percentage points below the Canadian average and more than 20 percentage points behind Atlantic Canada, where the average tuition is nearly three times that in Quebec. For Ross Finnie, the University of Ottawa economics professor and author of the study, part of the problem of low university enrolment is rooted in Quebec’s history. According to the study, young people are more likely to go to university if their parents did the same, regardless of family income; in Quebec, there are simply fewer university-trained parents. “The intergenerational transition is the single most important factor in determining who goes to college and university,” Finnie says. In Quebec, “there’s less understanding of the benefits of going to university. There’s no appreciation that it’s an investment.” The problem apparently begins before university; Quebec has one of the highest high-school dropout rates in the country. Among male Quebec francophones, for whom the problem is particularly acute, one in four drops out of high school before completion, according to education ministry statistics. “We find in our data that male francophones in Quebec, but not outside Quebec, are a group at risk with respect to high secondary-school dropout rates and low education attainment,” Finnie says.

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A Canadian hockey pro in Kazakhstan

By Richard Warnica - Thursday, April 26, 2012 at 2:10 PM - 0 Comments

KHL Photo Agency

About four years ago, Kevin Dallman, a Niagara Falls, Ont., native and former junior hockey star, looked set for the kind of journeyman career common to players not quite good enough to be permanent pros.

Dallman, who once scored 86 points in a single Ontario Hockey League season, had spent six years bouncing between the NHL and hockey’s minor leagues. By 2008, he seemed destined for another six of the same. But rather than settle, Dallman took a risk. Instead of signing another two-way contract with an NHL team that would have allowed management to send him back to the minors, he moved to Kazakhstan, where he has since become the unlikely face of professional hockey in Astana, the capital.

But now the honeymoon between Dallman and the Kazakhs looks like it’s over. After four years as captain of the country’s best professional team—Barys Astana of the Russian-based Kontinental Hockey League (KHL)—Dallman is back in Canada now, waiting for his agent to find him a new deal.

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Moira Stilwell’s motherhood issue

By Alex Ballingall - Thursday, April 26, 2012 at 2:06 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Stephen Hui

British Columbia MLA Moira Stilwell wants to make it easier for B.C. medical students studying abroad to land residency positions in their home province. Stilwell, recently named parliamentary secretary to Health Minister Michael de Jong, wrote a report on the subject in December called “Action Plan for Repatriating B.C. Medical Students Studying Abroad.” In it, she argued that British Columbians studying medicine outside North America have a tough time returning home to work.“The primary challenge they face is in regard to accessing residency positions in B.C.,” Stilwell wrote. What she didn’t state in her report: the fact that her son is one of those students.

When asked about her personal stake in the issue, Stilwell was undeterred.“It’s not about one person, it’s about thousands of Canadian kids abroad,” she told the online newsmagazine The Tyee last week. Health Minister de Jong, meanwhile, told the B.C. news website that he was unaware Stilwell has a son attending med school in Ireland.

As it stands now, residency positions are only open to graduates of North American programs, which share the same accreditation process. Those studying outside the continent must pass exams before they can apply for Canadian residencies. Stilwell’s report recommends that B.C. create 57 new residency positions before opening up the application process to B.C. students at medical schools outside North America.

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Mandatory exercise? Programming students hit ‘delete’

By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, April 26, 2012 at 1:35 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Simon Hayter

“I try not to get too riled up about it,” says Chris Holisky, “but it’s hard.” Indeed, Holisky has plenty of time to stew during his hour-long commute to the British Columbia Institute of Technology on Thursday mornings. The first-year computer systems technology student is required to be inside the campus gym by 8:30 a.m. sharp. His weekly rush-hour jaunt is rewarded with a 50-minute free-for-all (there’s no actual instruction) and a signature on an attendance sheet. The 36-year-old says he’d rather spend the mornings helping his girlfriend get her kids to school. But if he doesn’t get those signatures, Holisky won’t graduate. “It’s insulting,” he says.

Mandatory gym time has been part of the Burnaby polytechnic’s computer programs for several years, but students like Holisky are starting to revolt. As the only group of students on campus forced to get physical, they say the prerequisite unfairly implies they are exercise-phobic geeks.

“People have a stereotype image of a computer programmer. It’s usually a rotund guy with big thick glasses and bad shirts hunched over a computer in his parents’ basement,” says Holisky. Those people exist, he says, “but you can’t tell most of us apart from business students.” And business students, he adds, aren’t forced to take gym.

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