The World Junior Championships are obscene. But we better win.

By Dave Bidini - Friday, December 16, 2011 at 4:41 PM - 0 Comments

This is not a Leafs column, so let’s put the sorrow and hope and impossibility of faith aside for a moment. Let’s take a breath, let’s launder that blood and mustard-splotched Boimstruck sweater. Let’s set aside the schedule and the standings and forget that Luke Schenn was ever born, for in a few weeks, NHL teams won’t matter. Pro hockey won’t matter. What will matter is what happens in Calgary and Edmonton, and even there, the Oilers and Flames won’t matter. Soon, it will be Christmas and New Year’s: junior hockey time. Players you don’t yet know yet will fill your screens and busy your papers and crowd your radio dial. Canada will be playing. Canada is always playing. And they better win. They better.

That our country—or rather, the dominant hockey-loving pie slice of our country—will bend routine and design days and evenings around games is a given. What’s not a given is whether this is necessarily, unequivocally, a good thing. A few questions: Are we putting too much pressure on kids to carry on Canada’s obsessive desire to succeed at all things blade and skate? Does that obsession mean that we unconsciously absolve the trappings of the junior game: young men playing for peanuts while owners get rich off their dreams; the dirty secret of hazing and alcohol and drug abuse; youth fight culture; and a citizenry that emerges from the pro hockey derby having learned nothing through their formative years except how to take a pass and throw a hit? Lots about junior hockey is good—giving identity and economy to small places; allowing kids, in the best case scenario, to absorb lessons about leadership and courage—but there’s a certain obscenity in blanket coverage of awkward kids posing for TSN promos like the gladitorial men they are not. And if discussions about the failings of the NHL to make the ice friendlier and more concussion-free—consider wider rinks and small equipment—then shouldn’t that be part of the junior hockey discussion, too? Continue…

‘An act of sabotage’

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 13, 2011 at 11:37 AM - 0 Comments

Japan, India and Tuvalu add their concerns.

The tiny South Pacific island nation of Tuvalu, one those most at risk from rising sea levels caused by climate change, was more blunt. ”For a vulnerable country like Tuvalu, its an act of sabotage on our future,” Ian Fry, its lead negotiator said. ”Withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol is a reckless and totally irresponsible act,” he said in an email to Reuters.

Critics in Australia are using the Harper government’s decision to scorn the Australian government.

About that border deal between Canada and the U.S.

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Thursday, December 8, 2011 at 12:02 AM - 0 Comments

Amid the pageantry of a joint appearance at the White House alongside President Obama, the prime minister on Wednesday touted the new border security agreement in grandiose terms: the “most significant steps forward in Canada-U.S. cooperation since the North American Free Trade Agreement.” The agreement, though, is less a single leap than a series of many incremental gains, say the technocrats who labored in the shadows to put the multifaceted deal together. One Canadian official likened border negotiations to the cliché about football—it’s a “game of inches.” And this agreement covers a lot of inches—including myriad new ways in which the two nations will share data about travelers and cargo, the promise of a single on-line portal for importers and exporters who today have to schlep paper documents to a variety of government agencies, and pilot projects that will allow certain kinds of pre-inspected cargo to cross the border without stopping. It also includes a border wait-time measurement system and an inventory of border fees to help citizens and policy makers understand how well things are working—or not.

There is no doubt that Canadian officials have learned their lesson from years of trilateral “Three Amigos” summitry that resulted in lengthy bureaucratic to-do lists and more controversy than results. This time, they cut out Mexico, instead running a bilateral process focused on a limited number concrete high-impact results that could be implemented in a short period of time. Rather than endlessly negotiating over grand policy changes, they agreed to more modest pilot projects in complicated areas such as land border-preclearance in order to “build confidence” and demonstrate tangible results on the ground. Continue…

UNESCO, Palestine and Canada

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 2, 2011 at 1:25 PM - 0 Comments

Speaking with reporters after QP yesterday, John Baird explained the Harper government’s response to UNESCO’s decision to accept Palestine as a member.

Canada is deeply disappointed by the decision taken by UNESCO. Canada believes the only solution to this issue is a negotiated settlement between the two parties. Under no circumstances will Canada cover the budgeting shortfall as a result of this decision and Canada has decided to freeze all further voluntary contributions to UNESCO … 

We believe that statehood is the product of peace negotiations. And a significant number of UN Security Council resolutions have said that. The last peace accord said that. We believe the two parties should negotiate a peace agreement and not seek unilateral action at multilateral institutions. We think that is the wrong way to go and we cast our vote against and we’ve signalled our disappointment and our displeasure by the two actions we’re taking.

Campbell Clark explains the math.

What Brazil knows that we don’t

By Paul Wells - Friday, October 28, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 0 Comments

Pedro Ladeira/Agencia Estado/Keystone Press Agency

This week we are wondering whether the government of Canada thinks it’s more important to talk or to act.

Every now and then, Stephen Harper’s government phones up some experts and asks them to lead a panel and come up with smart advice. Then it ignores the advice. In 2008 it asked a businessman named Red Wilson for advice on making Canada more competitive. Wilson offered 65 recommendations. Most were never implemented. This fall there are new reports, from businessman Tom Jenkins on corporate R&D, and from career soldier Andrew Leslie on the structure of the military. We’ll see whether they do better.

Meanwhile, every week brings a new panel. In October, Ed Fast, the trade minister, was in China announcing a panel to come up with advice on “an international education strategy.”

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Iranian-Canadians fear Canada is becoming refuge for Iranian regime-linked officials

By Michael Petrou - Friday, October 14, 2011 at 11:51 AM - 5 Comments

An impressive list of Iranian-Canadians, including top scholars, has penned a letter to Immigration Minister Jason Kenney expressing their concerns about the number of Islamic Republic regime-linked individuals who are setting up camp in Canada. Most notable of late has been Mahmoud Reza Khavari, who until recently helped run an Iranian state-owned bank that has been blacklisted by the United Nations Security Council for allegedly funding Iran’s nuclear weapons program. He’s now believed to be living in his three-million-dollar Bridle Path home.

“For years members of the Iranian-Canadian community have been concerned that high ranking members of the Islamic Republic of Iran and their relatives are securing residency status in Canada and funnelling their investments to this country. Our expressions of concern to various Members of Parliament are seldom given proper due, and are generally dismissed with mere suggestions that we proceed to inform Canadian authorities of any individuals with ties to the Government of Islamic Republic.”

[...]

“Turning a blind eye or failure to act by the Canadian Government with respect to Mr. Khavari would send a signal to other high ranking members and Government functionaries of the Islamic Republic of IRan that Canada represents a safe haven to which they may escape with impunity. Moreover, a display of moral clarity and vigilance by the Canadian Government will deter international figures with sullied associations from arriving on our shores.” Continue…

A roundabout way of easing congestion, and scaring seniors

By the editors - Wednesday, October 5, 2011 at 10:40 AM - 7 Comments

Louisa Gouliamaki/AFP/Getty Images

There’s a revolution occurring on Canadian streets. And it’s moving in a counter-clockwise direction.

The roundabout, once unique to Europe, is becoming commonplace in many parts of Canada. Fans of these circular intersections point to reductions in congestion and accidents as evidence that they’re simply a better way to move traffic. Anyone on foot, however, may require a bit more convincing.

Always prone to moving in packs, city planners across the country are rapidly adopting roundabouts as their preferred means of traffic control. Prince Edward Island recently installed two roundabouts on the Charlottetown bypass, part of the Trans-Canada Highway. Last year, Winnipeg removed numerous stop signs at neighbourhood intersections in favour of small, traffic-calming roundabouts. Calgary now considers them to be the intersection of choice in new developments and is making plans for dozens more. Hamilton, Waterloo Region in southwestern Ontario, Montreal and Halifax all have new roundabouts. Even Yorkton, Sask., is in on the trend.

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When Italy met Canada

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, October 4, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 5 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

Like any Italian nonna, Victoria Orlando relishes the chance to reminisce about the good old days, including her early years in the southern Italian village of Gagliato, growing up in Timmins, Ont., and settling in Toronto, where she raised two daughters with her late husband, Salvatore.

Unlike the nonnas who still live in the Calabrese village where she was born, Orlando’s stories feature houses with two kitchens, Christmas parties with 50 family members, and stacking the basement shelves with jars of homemade tomato sauce, preserves, sausages and wine.

At 79, she’s still a proud Calabrese, but she was only four when she left Italy. Though she arrived in 1937, a decade or two before the great wave of postwar immigrants, Orlando was the same age as the generation of trailblazers who created a transplanted culture of their own, filled with traditions either long forgotten or completely foreign to the folks back home. These include backyards given over completely to the growing of tomatoes and peppers, plastic-covered sofas and colossal weddings.

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Less worse off

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 10:55 AM - 13 Comments

Stephen Gordon considers how much credit the government can take for our relatively good economic situation.

What of the role of the federal government? The proper way to evaluate policy is to consider the counterfactual: what would have happened if the federal government had behaved differently? I can think of many ways that the government could have made things much worse — the spending cuts that were its initial reaction were certainly ill-conceived. But since that austerity program was abandoned, it’s hard to point to a serious error that significantly deepened and/or prolonged the recession.

So the Conservatives cannot claim all the credit for those cross-country differences: Canada was luckier than the United States and the other G7 countries. The best it can say is that it didn’t make any serious mistakes that made the recession significantly worse.

‘Same heart and same values’

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 22, 2011 at 9:45 AM - 1 Comment

The Prime Minister and Benjamin Netanyahu exchange greetings in New York.

During the brief photo op, the two men both said the solution to the Israel-Palestinian impasse lies in a resumption of two-way peace talks, not a United Nations declaration of statehood for Palestine.

“We know that nobody wants this more than our friends in Canada and our friend, the prime minister of Canada,” said Netanyahu. “I want to say Stephen, we have a lot in common.” The Israeli leader added: “Same heart and same values. And that I say with great appreciation for your stance, for your conviction, for your friendship.”

Despite some previous consternation over Lawrence Cannon’s choice of words, Canada still officially opposes Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. Embassy magazine looked at that and other issues last year in a fairly extensive review of Harper government policy in regard to Israel.

The future of manufacturing in Canada

By Erica Alini - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 6:20 AM - 4 Comments

Photography by Andrew Tolson

When the assembly line at Ford’s plant in St. Thomas, Ont., came to a halt on Sept. 15, it wasn’t just one factory that shut down. The closure could bring the death of an entire industrial ecosystem, experts warned. More than 300 suppliers feed into the St. Thomas plant—35 of them in Canada. Job losses are likely to extend far beyond the 1,100 workers directly employed at the southern Ontario plant that had been churning out Ford Crown Victorias, Mercury Grand Marquises and Lincoln Town Cars for the past 44 years.

The story of St. Thomas and its displaced workers follows a script well-known to this and most other rich countries. Between 2004 and 2008, Canada shed nearly 322,000 manufacturing jobs, according to Statistics Canada, and this was before the economic downturn took hold. In the U.S., the hemorrhage, driven, as elsewhere, by cheaper foreign competition and a general shift toward the service sector, amounts to eight million jobs lost since 1979. And workers transitioning to a job outside the factory often have to accept a painful pay cut—in Canada it averages around $10,000 less a year, according to a 2008 report by Toronto-Dominion Bank—driving up the divide between rich and poor. Yet the loss of industrial jobs has simply been assumed to be the price of advanced development.

There are signs, though, that the factory era may not be over in Canada just yet. Some manufacturers in niche markets are flourishing. Others are showing how the production plant, with a high-tech spin on it, could even be the future of the Canadian economy—or at least an integral part of it.

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Ranking Canada’s law schools

By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 1:30 PM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Ian Barrett

Are a law school’s professors significant contributors to the intellectual life of their discipline? Do a law school’s graduates land the most sought-after jobs in government, the private sector and academia? These are the two questions Maclean’s annual law survey seeks to answer.

All of the data used in the Maclean’s law rankings are publicly available. All focus on law school outputs. Fifty per cent of the overall ranking is determined by faculty quality, and 50 per cent by graduate quality.

The four measures of graduate quality look at the success each law school has had producing graduates able to land the most competitive jobs. The indicators are:

Elite Firm Hiring: Maclean’s calculated how many of each school’s graduates are serving as associates at law firms on Lexpert’s list of the largest firms in Canada across all regions, or at one of the five leading New York firms, according to the employment website Vault. This was done by examining the online biographies of thousands of lawyers at dozens of law firms. To scale this measure to each school, the tally was divided by first-year class size, averaged over the past three years. This measure is worth 20 per cent.

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Worried about terrorism? Not us.

By Philippe Gohier - Friday, September 9, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 12 Comments

Steve Payne/The New York Times/Redux

Even though memories of 9/11 remain vivid for Canadians, the threat of terrorism is hardly at the top of our minds. An Innovative Research poll done for Maclean’s shows that 27.1 per cent of Canadians consider 9/11 to have been the most important international development of the last decade, ranking it just slightly higher than the credit crisis of 2008 (26.2 per cent) and well above other developments like climate change and the rise of the middle class in China and India. Which isn’t to say 9/11 has had a lasting impact on our national psyche. Asked to name the one issue that concerns them most, just 3.4 per cent of respondents identified the threat of terrorism. Indeed, Canadians are much more likely to be worried about the state of our health care system (19 per cent) and the potential for another recession (18.2 per cent) than they are of a repeat of 9/11.

That may be partly explained by the seemingly widespread perception among Canadians that terrorist attacks aren’t likely to affect them personally. If terrorist threats are to happen at all, Canadians believe they’ll target people other than themselves. Nearly eight in 10 Canadians say they’re either not very concerned or not concerned at all that someone they know could fall victim to a terrorist attack. A comparably meagre 3.9 per cent say they are very concerned about the possibility. The online poll had 1,066 respondents and a margin of error equivalent to plus or minus three per cent.

But Canadians have come to some firm conclusions about the fallout from 9/11. As a nation, we’ve grown particularly skeptical about the benefits of the two wars that followed the attacks. Canadians are twice as likely to say the war in Afghanistan made the world a more dangerous place as they are to say it made the world safer. The divide is even more stark when it comes to Iraq: Canadians are more than four times more likely to say the war in Iraq made the world more dangerous rather than safer.

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A life without fear

By Charlie Gillis - Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

Photographs by Cole Garside

On the morning of May 2, having just returned from a family cruise along Canada’s east coast, Cindy Barkway waited in the kitchen of her Etobicoke, Ont., home with a piece of momentous news. “They’ve killed Osama bin Laden,” she told her nine-year-old son David as he descended, bleary-eyed, from his upstairs room. She scanned his face for reaction: when he laughs or frowns, the boy can look hauntingly like the father he never knew. This time she got an uncomprehending stare.

“Who?” he asked.

“The guy who killed Daddy,” said David’s older brother Jamie, exasperated, and with that the younger boy brightened. Since they were toddlers, Cindy has been conditioning her sons with early-years style accounts of their father’s death in the north tower of the World Trade Center—how David Sr., a trader with BMO Nesbitt-Burns, had gone to a meeting in New York; how an angry man had sent airplanes to fly into the tall building; how their dad and a lot of other blameless people died in a tragedy that changed the world.

Cindy was six months pregnant on Sept. 11, 2001, with the boy she’d name after her late husband. She had joined David Sr. on his fateful trip to New York to do a bit of shopping, so she bore witness to the smoke billowing from the towers before she knew what caused it (a drugstore clerk told her that the buildings had been struck by hijacked airliners). This cascade of misfortune would bring uninvited celebrity: as the loved one of a Canadian victim who was actually in New York at the time, she became the focus of intense interest to her own country’s media. She also counted among the so-called “9/11 moms” featured on Oprah Winfrey and Primetime with Diane Sawyer.

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Maher Arar’s mind cannot forget

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 8 Comments

Blair Gable/Maclean's

It doesn’t take much to carry Maher Arar back to the place he least wants to be. The sight of a mustachioed policeman, any sort of filthy smell, or even the sound of a crying baby has the power to transport him to that tomb-like prison cell. Nine years on, his body has recovered from the beatings the Syrian Mukhabarat inflicted with their fists and thick strips of cable, but the psychological scars of his rendition, imprisonment and torture persist. It is worse when he travels. “When I take the plane, I’m always tense and nervous,” he says. “It just triggers a fear in me that I might be kidnapped again.”

Sept. 26, 2002, was the day U.S. authorities detained him at New York’s J.F.K. airport, as he was heading home to Ottawa from an extended family stay in Tunisia. Oct. 8 was the night he was hustled on to a CIA-leased private jet and flown to Jordan, then driven—shackled and blindfolded—to the border of his native Syria. It was early April 2003, when he next felt daylight, allowed to roam a prison courtyard for a few minutes. Freedom—and a flight back to Canada, his wife and two young children—finally came that Oct. 5.

There’s no doubt, however, of when everything really did change for the 41-year-old telecommunications engineer. On the morning of the Sept. 11 attacks, Arar was in San Diego, Calif., on business for a Boston-based client. The sun wasn’t even up when the phone in his hotel room rang. It was his friend and colleague David Hilf telling him about terrorists hitting the World Trade Center. At first, Arar thought it was a prank—he and Hilf, who is Jewish, spent a lot of their time on the road joking about their odd-couple alliance. When he was finally convinced to turn on the TV, Arar was devastated by what he saw. One of his first thoughts was of the inevitable anti-Muslim backlash. He called his wife, Monia, then pregnant with their second child, in Ottawa and warned her not to leave the house. “She’s visible. She wears a head scarf,” he says. “There might have been some crazy people trying to get revenge.”

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Hey Google! We’re over here!

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, September 1, 2011 at 4:39 PM - 3 Comments

The words ‘Google’ and ‘Canada’ have been bumping into each other recently, in ways both good and bad for the search giant.

*Last week Google bought off the Big Pharma guard dog known as the U.S. government, which the search giant had rankled by letting online Canadian pharmacies advertise cheap prescription drugs to Americans. While Google hoped the settlement would be the end of the matter, they may not be so lucky. One of their own investors is suing the board claiming the company neglected its fiduciary duty in allowing the ads to run. Continue…

Mind the border

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 31, 2011 at 12:14 PM - 1 Comment

Earlier this week, John Baird released two reports on the proposed security perimeter deal with the United States. The Star summarizes.

Big business, tourism associations and others who stand to profit from greater access to U.S. markets expressed a greater willingness to hand over things like flight passenger lists and other personal information if it means a more fluid border. Individual Canadians are decidedly more skeptical, said one of two reports released by the government Monday that detail the messages delivered in the first round of consultations.

“Individual Canadians voiced concerns about enhanced sharing of traveler and travel information,” said the report on the proposed perimeter security deal. “These concerns centered on the loss of sovereignty, the protection of personal information shared between the two countries, and a general sentiment that not enough was known about the proposed measures.”

Carl Meyer looks at the possibility of a continental no-fly list.

And that’s the kind of life it’s been

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Monday, August 29, 2011 at 11:00 AM - 2 Comments

CTV; The Toronto Star; Photo Illustration by Taylor Shute

It was two decades ago that the media first started asking Lloyd Robertson when he was finally going to retire. We’re talking 1991, the year of Bush the elder’s Iraq war, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Brian Mulroney was prime minister and the GST came into effect. Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas and that Coke can were a hot topic. A time so distant that a Kevin Costner movie won the Best Picture Oscar. Nirvana, then the world’s hottest band, is now played on “oldie” stations.

Robertson, CTV’s éminence orange, was just 57, but had already been anchoring the network’s national news for 15 years, and before that had been a CBC fixture for another 22. “I always thought I’d be out of there by now, that someone would come along and tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘Hey, you’re getting long in the tooth—get out,’ ” he told the Montreal Gazette. Absent the push, the trick, said the anchor, was to “pick a time that’s obvious to you and your audience.” He mused about the big 6-0. It’s possible that some people even believed him.

Should all go according to plan, Robertson will actually step down this Sept. 1. Now 77, and with a combined 41 years behind the anchor’s desk at CBC and CTV, he is the longest-serving national anchor in North American TV history. Not exactly a retirement, since Robertson plans to continue on in his other job co-hosting the current affairs show W5, and will appear for some special event coverage. But it brings an end to his nightly television presence, and an era in Canadian broadcasting.

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The next frontier for beer: women

By Chris Sorensen - Friday, August 26, 2011 at 11:05 AM - 0 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

With beer consumption falling for seven straight years and neighbourhood pubs closing at a rate of 29 per week, traditionally suds-soaked Britain is facing a beverage identity crisis while brewers are left scrambling to find new markets for their products. And at least one, Molson Coors Brewing Co., believes it has found the answer: women.

Molson Coors, the company that resulted from the merger of the storied Canadian brewer and Coors Brewing Co. in 2005, is rolling out a new brand in the U.K. and Ireland called Animée, aimed directly at the fairer sex, which currently accounts for just 17 per cent of beer sales there. Described as “lightly sparkling and finely filtered with a delicious fresh taste,” Animée contains four per cent alcohol by volume and comes in three flavours: “clear filtered, crisp rosé and zesty lemon.”

“We are way behind almost every other beer drinking country in the world when it comes to women,” says Kristy McReady, a spokesperson for Molson Coors in Britain, noting that 79 per cent of women in the U.K. say they never, or rarely, drink beer—in part because it’s viewed as being high in calories. “Beer is seen as very masculine, the way it’s marketed and sold. It’s drank from pint glasses and sold in big boxes.”

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The $25,000 cow

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, August 15, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 111 Comments

Don Mason/ GETTY IMAGES

What I have in mind is some sort of scheme whereby the government would restrict the supply of opinion in magazines and newspapers to some fixed number of column inches per year, with a view to propping up—er, stabilizing—salaries at a target rate. Naturally I am sensitive to the concerns of magazine readers, not to mention magazine owners, but I don’t imagine it would raise the cover price of magazines by more than about 200 per cent or so.

No? Foolish? Extortionary? Outrageous? Then allow me to introduce you to the world of supply management: an actual policy pursued by the governments of Canada and the provinces for the past 40 years. Only I’m not talking about comparative fripperies like magazines (we have our own indefensible support programs, though not, ahem, on the same scale). I’m talking about basic foodstuffs, the kind the typical Canadian family eats every day: dairy products (milk, cheese and butter), eggs, and poultry (chicken and turkey), whose prices are maintained, by means of a strict regime of production quotas, at two and three times their market levels.

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‘A slow process’

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 4:25 PM - 7 Comments

The Canadian general overseeing NATO’s operations in Libya quibbles with the suggestion that the conflict has reached a stalemate.

“I disagree with the term stalemate,” Lt.-Gen. Charles Bouchard told Postmedia News on a busy day Friday as NATO dealt with conflicting reports about the possible death of Gadhafi’s son and fended off criticism from Italy on the handling of fleeing migrants … ”How do we define stalemate? If we judge it against perhaps the operation in Iraq one would say, ‘Well, it’s certainly not as fast,’ but from my perspective, and I know that of (NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen), is that this is not a stalemate but rather a slow process.”

Google graph too small to show S&P/TSX tumble this morning

By Erica Alini - Monday, August 8, 2011 at 12:09 PM - 33 Comments

The Canadian stock market took such a dive this morning it went–literally–through the bottom of a Google Graph of the S&P/TSX Composite, the Canuck benchmark index (see this screenshot we took at 10.14 AM). The drop was largely attributed to Standard and Poor’s downgrading of the US’s long-term creditworthiness from AAA to AA plus on Friday.  The S&P/TSX Composite tumbled over 3 per cent in early morning trading before rebounding slightly.

Drinks with the duke and duchess

By Anne Kingston - Wednesday, July 13, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 3 Comments

Paul Darrow/Reuters

The invitation, issued by the press secretary of “TRH The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge,” was impossible to decline: a 7:10 p.m. drinks reception with the royal couple immediately after their arrival in Charlottetown on Sunday night. Just 200 or so journalists and provincial organizers for 40 minutes. The setting was shockingly intimate, given that royal tour coverage dictates the royals are always at least a three-metre remove from the ink- and digitally stained wretches. Following the couple around feels like being embedded in a military mission without any proximity: journalists wait hours in a slightly more privileged position than the hoi polloi for a glimpse of the couple, and are forever on the lookout for colourful crumbs with which to pad out reports.

The soiree had rules. It was to be casual, no cameras—which is like asking hunters who’ve been tracking big, exotic game to come face to face with their quarry stripped of their weapons.

The gathering was held on the second-storey deck of a casual restaurant overlooking the harbour. The night was gorgeous. Drinks flowed. Oysters were shucked, lobster rolls served and a fiddle band played. Before the newlyweds arrived, journalists were herded inside and divided by media type—Canadian, print, etc. Then the royals worked the reception line separately, each led by handlers. The prince came through first, shaking hands in a dark suit with a Canada flag pin, carrying a drink that looked like Coke, though he joked about wanting to have a couple of them. He’s an old pro at this—engaged, leaning in, making eye contact, quick to joke in a self-deprecating manner. Yet if you look closely, his jaw clenches; there’s tension there.

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Canada’s next mission

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, July 7, 2011 at 1:10 PM - 5 Comments

Xinhua News Agency/eyevine/Redux

Headquarters for Canada’s new training mission in Afghanistan smells of fresh-cut wood and is located around the corner from a gymnasium with wall murals that proclaim “Freedom over tyranny” and “Afghanistan rising from the ashes.” The art is obscured by new construction.

Located at Camp Phoenix, a NATO base in Kabul, this is where the Canadian Forces will run the new phase of Canada’s engagement in Afghanistan. The current combat mission in Kandahar province ends in July, but Ottawa has committed to keep 950 trainers in the country until 2014 as part of NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan. Most will be based in Kabul, with smaller contingents, including police and medical advisers, in Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif.

Col. Peter Dawe, a combat veteran of the war in Kandahar and former commanding officer of 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, is deputy commander of the Canadian mission. Because its commander, Canadian Maj.-Gen. Michael Day, is also in charge of the entire army component of the multinational NATO training mission, Dawe will be running day-to-day operations for the Canadians. “It’s not to dismiss for a second what we’ve been doing for 10 years down south. It was an incredible accomplishment, and I think it’s set the conditions for the surge and the successes that are being achieved down there,” says Dawe. “But this is where the campaign will be won or lost.”

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