Newsmakers: Rihanna, the Windsor-Colbert feud, Fieri gets into a food fight

By macleans.ca - Thursday, November 22, 2012 at 2:39 PM - 0 Comments

FREDRIK SANDBERG/AFP/Getty Images

Eggs on her face

Alberta’s scandal over kickbacks of public funds to the governing Progressive Conservative party developed a new wrinkle after a CBC News access-to-information request uncovered documents pointing to Lynn Redford, sister of Premier Alison Redford. As a government-relations adviser to the Calgary Health Region, Lynn held a barbecue for MLAs at CHR’s expense, and was compensated for tickets to a 2005 PC constituency fundraiser for then-premier Ralph Klein. And in her current job as a vice-president at Alberta Health Services, she approved a controversial expense claim by AHS president Chris Eagle, who had attended a 2011 “premier’s dinner” fundraiser. The request also revealed that in 2008, Lynn Redford expensed the $37.29 cost of a breakfast with her sister, tastefully referred to on the claim form only as “MLA, Calgary Elbow.”

Snaky on a plane

Journalists travelling on Rihanna’s private 777 tour jet (seven concerts in seven cities in seven days) may not get the outrageous stories they were hoping for, because according to one journalist’s inflight video, “We are the story.” Britain’s Independent reports that the sleep-deprived media has yet to get more than a glimpse of the singer—who sold the tour as a chance to “party” with fans and press alike. So the press has taken to partying on its own, indulging in complimentary champagne, chanting Rihanna’s nickname—Riri—and, occasionally, streaking: an Australian reporter was captured on video running naked through the airplane’s aisles, as desperate reporters called out, “I need a headline,” and, “Just one quote!” Continue…

Government abolishes media censorship

By Scaachi Koul - Monday, August 20, 2012 at 9:31 AM - 0 Comments

In a dramatic move for freedom of speech, Burma’s government has announced it will no longer directly censor the media.

According to the new rules, journalists will not have to submit work to state sensors prior to publication, as they have been required to do for nearly half a century.

The announcement was made to a group of editors in Rangoon by the head of the ministry’s Press Scrutiny and Registration Department.

Guy Delisle: stranger in strange lands

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, April 26, 2012 at 1:34 PM - 0 Comments

Guy Delisle

Over the past 10 years or so, while few people in his native Canada have taken notice, the comic book artist Guy Delisle has been busy writing wry, sharply observed graphic novels depicting life in some of the world’s most remote, strange and forbidding cities. Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China describes his stay at ground zero of the country’s wild economic ascent. Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea is a postcard from the hermit capital. Burma Chronicles is the story of Delisle’s life as a househusband in Rangoon, where his wife worked as an administrator with the humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders. “Some products have managed to take over the entire world,” Delisle, in one typically sardonic slice-of-life observation, thinks to himself in a Rangoon supermarket while holding a package of The Laughing Cow cheese. “You can’t go anywhere without finding Nescafé and The Laughing Cow. Here, this is the real face of globalization: a grinning red cow.” Later, spotting a man in robes and a shaved head at the same supermarket, he exclaims: “Wow, a monk in the cookie aisle.”

His latest book, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City, just released in English by Montreal publishing house Drawn & Quarterly, describes his time as a stay-at-home dad at the centre of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In sometimes amusing, often painful detail, Jerusalem outlines the absurdities of the city’s sectarian stalemate from the point of view of a mild-mannered Canadian cartoonist living in an Arab section of Jerusalem who just wants to find a decent school for his kids, buy diapers on the Sabbath, and maybe pick up a bottle of wine.

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Burma’s transition away from military rule continues

By Brendan Brady - Monday, April 2, 2012 at 11:31 AM - 0 Comments

Khin Maung Win/AP

Update: Aung Sun Suu Kyi’s party won 40 of 45 seats in Burma’s by-elections on Sunday

The sun-baked dirt road was already chock full of chanting supporters when Phyu Phyu Thinn emerged from her headquarters in downtown Rangoon. They had been waiting for hours in the sweltering heat to catch a glimpse of the politician, whom they hurriedly pursued on foot after she was whisked away in an open-top vehicle. The size and furious energy of the crowd were startling sights in Burma, where stultifying and violent military rule has long suppressed public expressions of support for figures outside the ruling clique. The last time the streets of Rangoon rang with calls for political change, in 2007, soldiers gunned down scores of protesters and detained thousands more.

“We have been living in fear for a long time,” Thinn, 40, who is the country’s leading HIV activist and has served multiple stints in prison for participating in protests, told an attentive audience packed inside a Buddhist temple. “But times have changed. We should not be afraid anymore.” It is a hopeful message that Thinn and her fellow National League for Democracy (NLD) member, Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, 66, have balanced with caution as they run in parliamentary by-elections on April 1; they will mark their party’s return to electoral politics after being sidelined for over two decades.

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Aung San Suu Kyi’s party wins by a landslide in Burmese by-elections—economic sanctions may ease

By Alex Ballingall - Monday, April 2, 2012 at 10:16 AM - 0 Comments

In what is being widely hailed as an historic day for democratic progress in Burma, Aung San Suu Kyi’s political party won a landslide victory in by-elections in the military-ruled south east Asian country.

The Nobel Laureate, who has spent the better part of the past three decades under house arrest, led her National League for Democracy to victory in 40 of the 45 seats up for grabs in Sunday’s election, according to Burma’s Union Electoral Commission, Reuters reports. Earlier, Suu Kyi’s party had declared victory in 44 of the ridings.

Thousands of people gathered to celebrate the election results outside the NLD headquarters in Rangoon, cheering and dancing after it was announced that Suu Kyi had won in her riding. “It is natural that the NLD members and their supporters are joyous at this point,” said Suu Kyi in a statement, quoted by the BBC. “However, it is necessary to avoid manners and actions that will make the other parties and members upset. It is very important that NLD members take special care that the success of the people is a dignified one.”

Sunday’s vote was the first after a series of recent democratic reforms in the country—most political prisoners have been freed, media restrictions have been loosened and opposition parties have been allowed to campaign in these election.

But the NLD is still a far shot from power. Suu Kyi’s party will be nothing more than an opposition bloc in parliament; the 664-seat chamber will remain dominated by a government replete with former generals and officials with military ties. There have also been reported “irregularities” at some polling stations in the country, the Globe and Mail reports.

Still, the country could see an easing of long-standing economic sanctions imposed by Canada, the U.S. and other Western countries.

REVIEW: The Lady and the Peacock: The Life of Aung San Suu Kyi

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, February 16, 2012 at 8:15 AM - 0 Comments

Aung San Suu Kyi demanded a condition of Michael Aris, the English suitor who sought to marry her, before she would agree to the match: “I only ask one thing, that should my people need me, you would help me to do my duty by them.”

Suu Kyi is the daughter of modern Burma’s greatest hero, Aung San, who led the country toward independence following the Second World War and died months before it was achieved. This history burdened Suu Kyi with great expectations, but for her first 42 years little suggested she might meet them. She had left Burma as a teenager and settled in Oxford with her scholar spouse and two children, but few achievements of her own.

All this changed in 1988, when she returned to Burma to care for her ailing mother, as protests against the ruling military regime shook the country. The movement needed a symbol, a figure to rally around, and in a part of the world with a soft spot for familial dynasties, activists looked to Suu Kyi. And so the Oxford housewife, the “trailing spouse,” in the author’s words, found herself a vessel for the hopes of millions of Burmese.

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Is real change on the horizon in Burma?

By Richard Warnica - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Lai Seng Sin/AP

In Burma, rumours of reform are best taken with a pinch, or more, of salt. Hints of liberalization tend to trickle out of the closed-off nation every few years. But in nearly 50 years of military rule, little changed in the country sometimes known as Myanmar. Today, a nominally civilian government reigns in Rangoon, but the military remains dominant, if not all-powerful.

There are increasing signs, however, that real change may be in the offing. Public outcry recently forced President Thein Sein to put a temporary halt to a massive dam project on the Irrawaddy River. The development would have flooded a huge expanse of sensitive wetlands and forced thousands of villagers from their homes. In the past, none of that likely would have mattered. But this time, for whatever reason, it did. Whether the dam decision triggers deeper democratic change, however, remains to be seen. As democracy activist Aung San Suu Kyi told the BBC: “I think I’d like to see a few more turns before I decide whether or not the wheels are moving along.”

Good news, bad news: June 9 – 16, 2011

By macleans.ca - Friday, June 17, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

Dirk Nowitzki is named MVP as his Dallas Mavericks win the NBA title. (David J. Phillip/AP)

Setting it straight

Federal government lawyers took a justified bruising from judges of the Ontario Court of Appeal at hearings on the fate of Canada’s prostitution laws. The Crown is appealing a decision that struck down bans on brothel organizing. The government argued existing Criminal Code provisions had only a “remote connection” with increased sex-trade risks. The judges exploded in disbelief. “What’s ‘remote’ about a law that prevents a prostitute from having a bodyguard?” asked Justice James MacPherson. The judges also admonished an effort to compare prostitutes—practising a business that is legal in itself—with drug pushers.

A slick move

Bowing to technical realities, the U.S. auto-service company Jiffy Lube is abandoning its rule that oil should be changed in any car every 3,000 miles (or 4,800 km). As engines and gasoline quality improve, manufacturers have lengthened recommended intervals between changes to as long as 16,000 km. Jiffy Lube will now follow the makers’ advice for each model. It’s a reminder that even in hard times, the auto sector has been improving in ways we barely bother to notice.

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Aung San Suu Kyi in conversation

By Nancy Macdonald - Monday, December 20, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 5 Comments

Mother and son: Suu Kyi and Kim Aris in Rangoon | AP; Soe Zeya Tun/Reuters

On Nov. 13, Aung San Suu Kyi, the world’s most famous political prisoner, walked free from house arrest in Burma. Her crumbling white villa on Rangoon’s Inya Lake had, for most of the past two decades, been her prison. She was first detained in 1989, a year before her National League for Democracy party took 82 per cent of the seats in nationwide elections. Those results were famously tossed out by the military regime that has ruled Burma since 1962 and threw the NLD leadership, Suu Kyi included, behind bars. Late last month, Suu Kyi was reunited with her youngest son, Kim Aris, 33, named for the Rudyard Kipling hero, after a decade-long separation. The 65-year-old Nobel laureate and democratic icon spoke to Maclean’s from Rangoon.

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Independence Day

By Nancy Macdonald - Thursday, December 9, 2010 at 10:20 AM - 0 Comments

AFP/Getty Images

When, on the evening of Nov. 13, Aung San Suu Kyi suddenly appeared from behind the red iron bars surrounding her house, her lonely prison for most of the past two decades, her ecstatic supporters erupted into cheers; many were reduced to tears. Thousands had rushed to Suu Kyi’s crumbling white villa on Rangoon’s Inya Lake after security forces began taking apart the compound’s barbed-wire barricades: a clear signal the world’s most famous political prisoner would finally be freed from house arrest.

The crowd’s size, enthusiasm, and the strong youth element suggest “the Lady,” as she is known in Burma, had emerged from captivity with her popularity and moral authority intact. “We haven’t seen each other for so long,” Suu Kyi, dressed in a purple longyi, a Burmese sarong, told supporters, her grace unbroken. “We have a lot to do.”

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Aung San Suu Kyi vs. Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, December 1, 2010 at 5:23 PM - 4 Comments

Aung San Suu Kyi

When, on the evening of Nov. 13, Aung San Suu Kyi suddenly appeared from behind the red iron bars surrounding her house, her lonely prison for most of the past two decades, her ecstatic supporters erupted into cheers; many were reduced to tears. Thousands had rushed to Suu Kyi’s crumbling white villa on Rangoon’s Inya Lake after security forces began taking apart the compound’s barbed-wire barricades: a clear signal the world’s most famous political prisoner would finally be freed from house arrest.

Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani

“I am a sinner,” a woman wrapped in a black chador told TV-watchers in Iran in a public broadcast on Nov. 15. It was the second TV “confession” for Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a 43-year-old mother of two who faces death by stoning for adultery and by hanging for complicity in her husband’s murder. While Ashtiani’s circumstances are not unique in Iran, it was the image of her iconic pale face framed by the black chador that galvanized human rights activists across the world, from Laureen Harper to topless Ukrainian feminists.

Back to the contest bracket

The Memory Project – Bob Farquharson, Supplying the front

By Philippe Gohier - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 0 Comments

Bob Farquharson (left) and Corporal White, with a Japanese fighter | Courtesy of The Memory Project

Click play to hear Bob Farquharson’s complete audio story

Bob Farquharson, a Royal Canadian Air Force pilot born in Gleichen, Alta., dropped supplies into mountain-locked Burma, where he contended with the Japanese military, monsoons, and heavy cumulonimbus clouds.

There was no way to get supplies to the Allied army except to fly them to them. To make a drop, you have to fly around, the aircraft “low and slow,” maybe 300 feet above the ground. The kickers in the back piled the doorway with as many sacks of rice, or whatever we were dropping. And we dropped absolutely everything. I even dropped a crate of eggs packed in straw in a wicker basket, a big wicker basket. Now mind you, we always dropped eggs with a parachute. And the gasoline we dropped with a parachute. But rice was free-dropped, called “slack packed-double sacked.” It was packed slack, in a big hessian sack, and another sack over that, so that it didn’t burst immediately when it hit. In fact it bounced and skipped along quite a ways before it came to rest. We flew in everything: ammunition, clothing, rations. If somebody at the front lost his eyeglasses or false teeth, we flew in false teeth and eyeglasses.

Will Aung San Suu Kyi be freed?

By Jane Switzer - Tuesday, November 2, 2010 at 9:40 AM - 0 Comments

Khin Maung Win/AP

After years in isolation, Burma’s detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi wants to reach out to the world’s youth when released from house arrest—and do so in 140 characters or less. “She told me she wants to use Twitter to get in touch with the younger generation inside and outside the country,” her lawyer, Nyan Win, told reporters after visiting Suu Kyi at her lakeside home last week. “She wishes to be able to tweet every day and keep in touch.”

Microblogging may be a welcome change for the 65-year-old Nobel Peace laureate, who has been placed under house arrest on and off for the majority of the last 20 years by the ruling military junta. Whether she will be able to do so after her impending release on Nov. 13 is questionable. Like many of her countrymen, Suu Kyi has no phone line or access to the Internet, and while she can watch state-run TV, her other news sources are strictly controlled.

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Omar Khadr v. Nay Myo Hein

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, August 21, 2009 at 2:45 PM - 25 Comments

The Ottawa Citizen compares and contrasts.

There is a strong argument to be made that Omar Khadr was a child soldier, which makes this government’s treatment of him all the more egregious. The Conservatives have made a few half-hearted attempts to explain why they won’t accept his child-soldier status; most of the time, they’ve simply ignored the question, as if it weren’t important.

Meanwhile, a 25-year-old Burmese man in Saskatoon, Nay Myo Hein, was about to be deported this month when he got the news that two cabinet ministers had intervened to save him. Granting a stay of deportation and a residency permit was the right thing to do. But it raises the question: How can Canada be so compassionate to one former child soldier, and so indifferent to another? Canada shouldn’t merely reach out to help its citizens when the courts decide it has a legal duty, or when there are rallies in the streets. It should follow a consistent, transparent policy.

Fair enough. Unfortunately, the Citizen overlooks the important fact that Deepak Obhrai, the parliamentary secretary for foreign affairs, possesses the power to determine who qualifies as a child soldier simply by looking the suspect in the eye.

The End of Democracy?

By Michael Petrou - Tuesday, March 3, 2009 at 12:40 PM - 971 Comments

Earlier this month a Russian court acquitted three men accused of involvement in the 2006 murder of investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya. Politkovskaya’s writing had exposed Russian human rights abuses in Chechnya, and she had been detained on occasion by the Russian military as a result. The end of that court case followed the murder of Stanislav Markelov, another critic of the Russian government who had represented many victims of Russia’s security services. He was gunned down on the streets of Moscow in January. Anastasia Baburova, a 25-year-old student and journalist with Novaya Gazeta, a newspaper that is often critical of the Kremlin, and for which Politkovskaya also wrote, was shot dead when she tried to help. She was the fourth Novaya Gazeta journalist murdered since 2000.

Russia isn’t the only country where it is dangerous to oppose the government these days. China has recently arrested dozens of dissidents as part of a crackdown on free speech on the Internet, which it says is necessary to protect its children from “vulgarity.” Censored websites include those of the BBC and Voice of America. Kyrgyzstan has similarly removed Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty’s Kyrgyz-language programs from its national, government-owned TV and radio networks. Kyrgyz authorities said the programs were too critical of the government and would not be broadcast unless they are submitted to and approved by government censors in advance. And Syria last fall sentenced 12 pro-democracy dissidents to 2½ years in prison. The activists had called for greater freedom of expression and an end to the ruling Baath party’s monopoly on power.

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Burma sets its sights on online critics

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, September 25, 2008 at 12:00 AM - 0 Comments

Last week marked the one-year anniversary of Burma’s Saffron Revolution, which saw massive monk-led protests against the military junta and a crackdown that left at least 100 dead or missing. Now, it seems the state has turned its attention online—the junta has reportedly launched a series of Internet attacks on dissident websites hosted outside the country.

Just before the anniversary, at least three websites run by Burmese exiles were crippled by “distributed denial-of-service” attacks that jammed them with fake traffic, reported the Thailand-based newspaper Irrawaddy, one affected outlet. Websites for the Burmese-language newspaper Khit Pyaing (New Era Journal) in Thailand, and the Oslo-based Democratic Voice of Burma, which runs radio and satellite television stations, were also affected. The attacks coincided with increased surveillance at Rangoon’s Internet cafés, and a slowdown of Internet service within the country that rendered it impossible to upload photos or videos, noted Irrawaddy, which continued reporting through a mirror site and blog.

Irrawaddy came back online Monday, but some are fearful that similar attacks could follow. “If the military government has well-trained computer technicians, the exiled media may be targeted again,” said Irrawaddy office manager Win Thu, who supervised the efforts to get back online. “It doesn’t cost very much to carry out such attacks.”

For many Burmese, the Internet is a crucial link to the outside world—for which it also provided a window into the country last year as protests and escalating violence unfolded. “Internet sites based outside the country are one of the few remaining sources of reliable news for Burmese people,” Irrawaddy founder and editor Aung Zaw recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “Now it appears not even those sites are safe.” Zaw worries this latest cyberattack could be a sign of things to come: “Over the past 20 years, the battle between Burma’s regime and pro-democratic forces has shifted from the streets to the jungle and now to the computer.”

Ducks, seals and polar bears first. Then women and children if there's room.

By selley - Friday, May 16, 2008 at 1:34 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Chantal Hébert on Ottawa’s sorry state of affairs; Dan Gardner on official bilingualism; Rosie DiManno on the burqa in Afghanistan; Colby Cosh and Don Martin on the woebegone polar bears; Richard Gwyn on the responsibility to protect.

Dawn of the philistines
From Question Period to the Portrait Gallery to Peter Worthington’s desk, it has been another unedifying week in Canadian politics.

Jeffrey Simpson owes us a beer for reading past the first eight words of today’s effort: “In the centre of the Australian capital, Canberra…” (For the uninitiated, The Globe and Mail‘s eminence grise went walkabout last year, and it eventually became… insufferable.) We are, however, sympathetic to his point, namely, that it’s “sheer grubbiness and … intellectual tawdriness” to “farm out” the National Portrait Gallery to a city other than Ottawa, and to shoehorn it into some kind of “mixed-use development” wherever it’s eventually built.

In the Toronto Star, Chantal Hébert attempts to figure out how a party (i.e., Reform) that “provided a lot of the policy impetus of the last Liberal era, notably on the fiscal, justice and unity fronts,” merged with the remnants of another big-idea party (i.e., the Progressive Conservatives), won an election, and produced a government with “a chronic deficit of policy ambition”—not to mention a parliamentary dynamic in which the level of “animosity … is inversely proportional to the issues that are at stake,” and a Prime Minister who won’t change strategic tack even as he fails to make up ground against a hobbled and poorly-led opposition. We’re not sure she succeeds, but she lays out the problem beautifully.

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Norman Bethune to the rescue!

By selley - Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 1:44 PM - 0 Comments

Must-reads: Lawrence Martin on the RCMP “information czar”; Peter Worthington on what Hillary hath wrought; John Ivison on gas taxes; Margaret Wente on Chinese fishermen.

Ooh! Ooh! Let’s call it Bikergate!
At least one B.C. columnist isn’t ready to let Maxime Bernier off the hook just yet.

“You’re darn right” the Foreign Affairs Minister’s girlfriend is “our business,” an unusually combative Barbara Yaffe argues in the Vancouver Sun, because “he must be—and be seen to be—above reproach in all things.” (We double-checked—she is indeed talking about Mr. Bernier.) Other than this sudden appearance of fallability, the only “concern” she raises is his—by which she presumably mean Julie Couillard’s—access to sensitive information. So, security checks for Cabinet Ministers’ significant others would be a good idea, right? Nope! “The only thing required to regulate these matters is ordinary good judgment and a watchful prime minister,” she contends. Problem is, the nation’s “ordinary good judgment” has pretty much declared this a non-issue, so we’d say the burden’s on Yaffe to make the case. It doesn’t help when Couillard has “pretty significant links to biker gangs” in the sixth paragraph but is only “connected—however circuitously and remotely—to members of an outlaw gang” in the 18th.

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Responsibility to plead

By Paul Wells - Tuesday, May 13, 2008 at 6:39 PM - 0 Comments

Did anyone see Michael Ignatieff and Paul Heinbecker on the brooooadcast this afternoon? Am I the only one who thinks these two advocates of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P to the cool kids) did a bang-up job of demonstrating the doctrine’s — what’s the word I’m looking for here — sucking vapidity?

I’m a fan of Heinbecker and at least an occasional critic of Ignatieff, but regardless, I’m not sure how you can argue that R2P is a tool for deciding whether or how to intervene in the Burma disaster zone. R2P holds that intervention is permissible, over the objections or despite the resistance of sovereign states, if they are unable or unwilling to protect their populations from natural or human-inflicted disaster. The doctrine was written up, at Lloyd Axworthy’s behest by a UN committee of which Ignatieff was a member, essentially to provide ex post facto justification for the NATO bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999. Vaclav Havel spoke to Canada’s parliament during that campaign and essentially wrote the script for the R2P, three years ahead of time:

“The idol of state sovereignty must inevitably dissolve in a world that connects people, regardless of borders, through millions of links of integration ranging from trade, finance and property, up to information: links that impart a variety of universal notions and cultural patterns….we all, whether we like it or not, suffer responsibility for everything that occurs.”

So how would Ignatieff and Heinbecker fulfill the Responsibility to Protect in Burma? Ignatieff told Don Newman he wants Canada’s government to go to the Burma thugocracy and say — this is a quote — “Come on, guys!” Continue…

The Rosie DiManno Show is back for another season

By selley - Monday, May 12, 2008 at 1:51 PM - 0 Comments

WEEKEND ROUNDUP

Must-reads: Rosie DiManno on Afghan corruption, Afghan weddings and US Marines; Scott Taylor on Canadian counter-insurgency training; Rex Murphy on Clinton Inc.; Lysiane Gagnon on immigration; Chantal Hébert on Stephen Harper and Quebec; David Olive on the New York Times.

Welcome to the James Travuniverse
Up is down. Wrong is right. Julie Couillard matters. The Prime Minister must not undertake home improvements, on pain of electoral disaster.

Despite what you may have heard or very reasonably concluded on your own, the Toronto Star‘s James Travers argues that Julie Couillard’s relationship with Maxime Bernier is very important. Why? Buckle up, Canada. It’s because Harper only appoints Cabinet ministers for reasons of optics and strategy, not competence—in Bernier’s case, “to put a pretty face on the unpopular Afghanistan mission while getting under Bloc Québécois skin.” Thus, it doesn’t matter that a past romance with a woman who once dated a Hells Angel is unimportant to the foreign minister’s job; it matters that it compromises the optical and strategic reasons Harper installed Bernier in the first place. Got that? Us neither. Luckily, none of it matters.

If Harper risks political suicide by following the Auditor-General’s advice by ordering repairs on 24 Sussex Drive, Sun Media’s Greg Weston suggests (apparently in earnest) that he move into Rideau Hall and kick the Governor General down the driveway to Rideau Gate. Continue…