The season in politics: a cheat sheet

By Scott Feschuk - Wednesday, September 2, 2009 at 2:40 PM - 13 Comments

Admit it—you haven’t paid close attention to federal politics over the summer. You’re so clued out that I could make some ridiculous claim, like saying the Liberal party’s boldest initiative of the season was sending its national director from Kingston to Ottawa in a canoe for some reason, and you might even believe me—which is absurd, because he was actually in a kayak. Sorry, Conservative Party of Canada: you had a good run but there’s no competing with that.

Autumn approaches. Let’s get you up to date. First things first: Stephen Harper is still our Prime Minister. You can tell because the country’s colour-coded Partisan Tirade Threat Alert remains set to Red. Continue…

Hey look: We stand on guard for something or other

By Paul Wells - Friday, August 28, 2009 at 1:58 PM - 8 Comments

This week’s column from the print edition is really long, and it’s about Arctic sovereignty, and on the whole it may prevent me from getting invited back onto a Navy ship anytime soon.

He doesn't believe any taxes are good taxes

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 24, 2009 at 12:11 PM - 34 Comments

Except maybe for those taxes that pay for cool stuff like this. (Video courtesy of David Akin.)

So what was that all about?

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 24, 2009 at 1:44 AM - 57 Comments

The Nunatsiaq News calls it “the most expensive photo op you’ll ever see.”

Torch blogger Mark Collins laments the “jingoistic nonsense” of it all.

And then there is what our own Andrew Coyne wrote. A year ago.

In fact, Canada’s Arctic sovereignty is getting along just fine, thank you. For all the emphasis the Conservatives have placed on it — “use it or lose it,” in Harper’s famous formulation — and for all the reams of hyperventilating, the-Russians-are-coming reportage it has received in the media, no one is actually threatening to invade Canada’s frozen North. Neither is there much dispute over Canada’s territorial waters — the ribbon of sea along our coast, 200 nautical miles wide, that international law acknowledges as ours. Even the much bolder claim we have lately advanced to the waters beyond the 200-mile limit, reaching as far as the North Pole, is for the most part uncontested…

It can’t hurt our case, and may help, if we bolster our physical presence in the North. Certainly we should hope that the Arctic spoils are divided by something resembling a legal process, rather than by military force or international free-for-all. And there are good reasons — environmental, security — why it would be in everybody’s interest for Canada to continue to police the passage. But on its merits, the question of Arctic sovereignty would not seem to warrant anything like the attention it has received from this government.

It does, however, serve an important political objective — namely, as part of the Conservatives’ efforts to rebrand themselves as the Canada Party, or perhaps to redefine Canada itself: to devise an alternative language and symbology of patriotism to the one so successfully exploited over the years by the Liberals.

Mission accomplished

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 20, 2009 at 1:00 PM - 66 Comments

Alison Crawford reflects on the exquisite precision of a Stephen Harper photo op.

The Coast Guard’s Pierre Radisson ship and the submarine HMCS Cornerbrook lined up one one side of the frigate HMCS Toronto. On the deck of Toronto, was a gaggle of reporters, cameras at the ready.

Then, Defence Minister Peter MacKay sauntered onto the deck with Prime Minister Stephen Harper. They stopped to make idle chit chat until urged by handlers to move forward a few metres in order to have them perfectly positioned with the other two vessels in the background.

But wait! There’s more! Three CF-18 jets flew past in formation. But the fly-by was a little to fast for some camera operators and photographers to catch the entire montage of sub, jets and coast guard, so the CF-18s passed over four more times.

Stephen Harper takes brave stand against vegetarianism

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, August 20, 2009 at 11:14 AM - 46 Comments

Having sampled seal, the Prime Minister will now eat only that. And is forcing his eating habits on others.

Harper arrived in Iqaluit, Nunavut on Monday night with a planeload of the cabinet ministers that sit on cabinet’s Priorities and Planning Committee. P&P held a meeting in Iqaluit Tuesday. At lunch, at Harper’s request, cabinet was served a menu of boiled and raw seal livers and ribs.

On Wednesday, as he bantered with reporters aboard the HMCS Toronto while sailing on Frobisher Bay, Harper noted that even Transport Minister John Baird, a vegetarian, tried some seal meat at lunch. ”I’m tired of John’s vegetaranism,” Harper joked.

But lunch on Tuesday did not, apparently, quench Harper’s appetite for seal. For dinner Wednesday, Harper requested seal steaks and encouraged his staff to try a bit. We have been told that journalists travelling with the prime minister this week — I’m one of them — will see seal in some form or another on the menu Thursday.

Tickle Trunk diplomacy

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 19, 2009 at 2:30 PM - 49 Comments

As our forefathers foretold, the North shall be controlled by he who stages the manliest of photo opportunities.

So shall it be Mr. Putin without his top?

Or Captain Harper preparing for takeoff?

(More of the Prime Minister on Arctic parade is available here.)

Stephen Harper eats seal. Or something.

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 18, 2009 at 5:50 PM - 29 Comments

Perhaps to stifle today’s fevered speculation, the Prime Minister’s Office has released the official portrait of Stephen Harper and various cabinet ministers eating what they claim to be seal meat. But, wait, Vic Toews, Peter MacKay, Lawrence Cannon and Lisa Raitt don’t appear to be joining in the feast. Scandal!

Wimps?

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 18, 2009 at 5:22 PM - 5 Comments

More from David Akin.

Just in: PM & cabinet eating seal ribs and liver, both raw and boiled. First time PM has eaten seal. Sadly – no photos!

'People with unwiped bums'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 18, 2009 at 12:17 PM - 53 Comments

The Prime Minister’s team learns that spelling is hard. And important.

An unfortunate blunder by the Prime Minister’s Office has residents of Nunavut alternately chuckling and cringing. A news release sent out Monday outlined Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s itinerary as he began a five-day tour of the North.

The release repeatedly spelled the capital of Nunavut as Iqualuit — rather than Iqaluit. The extra “u” makes a world of difference in the Inuktitut language.

Iqaluit, properly spelled, means “many fish.” Spelled with an extra “u,” the Nunavut language commissioner’s office says the word translates as a derogatory reference to “people with unwiped bums.”

The Prime Minister’s Office calls to say they’ve corrected the mistake on the PM’s website and note that various media outlets have published the same error—including, well, this one. “So hopefully our collective typos … will help better inform all of us to not make the same mistake twice,” says Dimitri Soudas, Mr. Harper’s press secretary.

Wimps

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, August 18, 2009 at 11:52 AM - 2 Comments

David Akin reports on lunch from the Prime Minister’s Arctic adventure.

On seals — When cabinet breaks for lunch today — seal is on the menu — fresh, too – caught yesterday. Won’t be raw. More later …

Never mind all that

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 29, 2009 at 12:43 PM - 2 Comments

Doug Saunders suggests all that blustery talk of The North is a bunch of hooey.

In fact, it is emerging that the North never really has been a major part of the Canadian identity. A more accurate representation was outlined two years before Confederation by British Liberal leader and future prime minister William Gladstone. He stood in the House of Commons, during an 1865 debate about whether to grant semi-independence to the colony, and dismissed Canada glibly as a “long and comparatively thin strip of occupied territory between the States on one side, and the sterility of pinching winter on the other.”

Lawrence Cannon carries on undaunted.

Oh yeah, well, I sleep under a seal skin duvet. So there.

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, May 31, 2009 at 3:33 PM - 19 Comments

Adrienne Clarkson is unimpressed.

“I’ve eaten raw food here since 1971. It’s nothing new to me, okay?” Clarkson told The Canadian Press this weekend. Both women were attending an arctic gathering hosted by Clarkson’s husband John Ralston Saul. ”I have a lovely seal skin coat. . . I’ve eaten raw food since 1971 – and there you are.”

How's this for an encore?

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, May 27, 2009 at 11:26 PM - 6 Comments

The Governor General is going on a seal hunt.

So many heart puns

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, May 26, 2009 at 12:05 AM - 23 Comments

Michaelle Jean guts a seal, eats its heart.

Your move, Paul McCartney.

Northern blight

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, March 26, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 4 Comments

Readers of Iqaluit’s Nunatsiaq News might know that when Maclean’s released its annual crime rankings last week, Canada’s most violent region was absent from the list. Iqaluit, Whitehorse and Yellowknife, the biggest cities in the three northern territories, with a combined population of around 50,000, are too small to figure into the roll, which ranks Canada’s 100 largest cities. Yet crime data from Statistics Canada are shocking. Whitehorse had a homicide rate 355 per cent higher than the Canadian average in 2007 (the most recent StatsCan data available). The rate of aggravated assault in Yellowknife was more than 350 per cent higher than average. And Iqaluit recorded an aggravated assault rate 1,033 per cent above the Canadian average. Its rate of sexual assault is more than 1,270 per cent above the average—and, according to the RCMP, climbing.

The north’s violent crime wave, much of it sexual in nature, defies easy explanation. Still, there are clues. For starters, there’s simple demographics. “Nearly two-thirds of all crime is committed by young men between the ages of 15 and 29,” says Neil Boyd, a criminologist at Simon Fraser University; 56 per cent of Nunavut residents are under 25 compared with 16 per cent in Canada as a whole. The population of Iqaluit—the country’s fastest-growing capital—has roughly doubled to 6,800 in the decade since it was chosen capital of the new territory and people flocked to new jobs in government, construction, the service industry. Parts of the N.W.T. and Yukon have also boomed, thanks to new resource-extraction projects. And boom towns, as Fort McMurray, Calgary and Vancouver have learned, see increases in crime, violence, and drug and alcohol use (which fuels most northern crime, according to the RCMP).

Continue…

Masterpiece theatre

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, January 14, 2009 at 1:03 AM - 0 Comments

Speaking of Larry Cannon, there’s breaking news on the foreign policy front. Seems there’s no reason for you to lose any more sleep over our claim to arctic sovereignty.

On Monday, in one of his last acts as U.S. president, George W. Bush released a 10-page Arctic policy spelling out American priorities. Bush said his country’s presence in the North should grow. He repeated American claims that the Northwest Passage is an international waterway and emphasized the need for his country to have access to the region’s untapped energy resources.

Last November, the European Union released its own discussion paper in which it said that rules for shipping, fishing and drilling in the North should be established by international agencies, not just the states with Arctic coastlines.

But on Tuesday Cannon said Canada’s claims to the Arctic continue to be widely recognized internationally…

The Conservatives have promised civilian projects such as a state-of-the-art icebreaker and a commercial harbour in the Nunavut community of Pangnirtung. Those developments – as well as the military spending – have yet to materialize.

Cannon said Canada’s plans and positions are clear enough to its partners without having to produce a policy paper. ”I don’t think it’s a question of releasing documents,” said Cannon. ”The prime minister has stated clearly our intentions in the Arctic. We want to be able to make the Arctic our masterpiece in foreign policy.”

But that’s good enough for some people. Namely, Northwest Territories Premier Floyd Roland. Continue…

As arctic ice melts, South Pole ice grows

By Alex Shimo - Monday, January 5, 2009 at 12:38 PM - 36 Comments

We haven’t heard a lot about the other ice sheet, the one at the South Pole. This is probably because no one lives on in the Antarctic, other than a few very cold scientists, and not that much is known about it, compared to the arctic, where data was amassed by Canadian, United States, and the Soviet military in their struggle for power during the cold war. What we do know is that the Arctic is in a very bad state: September Arctic sea ice has decreased between 1973 and 2007 at a rate of about -10% +/- 0.3% per decade. By contrast, ice in the Antarctic has shown very little trend over the same period, or even a slight increase since 1979. Continue…

A tiny airline with really big bonuses

By Colin Campbell - Monday, December 15, 2008 at 9:00 AM - 14 Comments

How much CEOs deserve to be paid is a topic of much debate in these dark economic days. But spats over executive pay are not con?ned to the boardrooms of New York and Toronto. The latest one is taking place in Canada’s Arctic, where a scandal is brewing over the huge bonuses doled out to senior executives at First Air.

The airline, controlled by Inuit-owned Makivik Corp., handed company executives $1.5 million worth of bonuses last summer. Pita Aatam, chairman of First Air and president of Makivik, received a record-breaking bonus of $600,000, and George Berthe, Makivik’s corporate secretary, received a bonus of $250,000, according to Nunatsiaq News. By comparison, the head of Air Canada, Montie Brewer, took home a $690,000 bonus last year—only $90,000 more than Aatam, even though Air Canada has revenues of $2.5 billion compared to just $200 million for First Air.

Continue…

Feist's (and other's) arctic photos and blog

By Alex Shimo - Wednesday, October 8, 2008 at 3:53 PM - 0 Comments

The A-list arctic tour has wrapped up and arrived back in the real world on Monday. Celebrities Feist, KT Tunstall, Vanessa Carleton, ex-Pulp frontman Jarvis Cocker,  Martha Wainwright and rock legend Lou Reed’s artist wife Laurie Anderson were in Greenland to see the fast-melting Jakobshavn Glacier Continue…

Stumped

By John Geddes - Wednesday, October 1, 2008 at 10:32 AM - 7 Comments

Ladies and gentlemen, it’s always a pleasure for me to campaign here in Brisbane… Wait, that can’t be right…

So, let’s say, a pleasure to campaign in this particular city or town within the recognized borders of Canada, I would think.

Because in places like this I get to meet properly vetted folks, particularly those of you willing to array yourselves inside the camera shot behind me at my portable podium, fixing blank expressions on your faces even though you’re thinking the whole time about the possibility that we’re hurtling toward another Depression.
Continue…

Meanwhile, under the Arctic ice… (Part II)

By John Geddes - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 at 3:47 PM - 22 Comments

If no coherent debate about climate change is generated during this campaign, we will look back years from now and feel deeply ashamed. It’s too alarming to ignore. (Or is it so alarming that ignoring it is the easiest out?) At the very least, if we’re not going to seriously consider policies to fight global warming, can we join the adult conversation about how to best cope with it?

Meanwhile, under the Arctic ice…

By John Geddes - Wednesday, September 24, 2008 at 10:59 AM - 74 Comments

The most depressing thing about this campaign is the way the climate change debate has gone. Any hope that it might rise to the level of an informed argument about which strategy for cutting greenhouse gas emissions is better—the Tories’ suspiciously complicated cap-and-trade plan, or the Liberals’ more straightforward carbon tax—is all but dead.

Instead, this epochal issue is being reduced to merely one campaign theme among many, and Stéphane Dion is forced to reassure audiences that his Green Shift wouldn’t hurt them, rather than focusing on how it might be Canada’s first real contribution to the global effort to avert a planetary crisis. And while our election turns on the psychology of short-term self-interest, the real news is about science warning us that climate change is likely to turn into an even worse problem, even faster than we imagine.

FOR MORE: Meanwhile, under the Arctic Ice… (Part II)