The CBC led tonight’s National with a rather serious allegation: that detainees in Afghanistan were deliberately transferred so that torture could be used to extract information. The allegation is made by University of Ottawa law professor Amir Attaran, who claims to have seen uncensored documents that indicate this.

Here is Terry Milewski’s report. Make of it what you will.

If I had a time machine, I’d make my fortune off hipsters, selling them tickets back to 1950s Canada:

After years of battling addiction on-air, Howard Stern Show writer/performer (and, in a very indirect way, CBC employee) Artie Lange has finally had his long-dreaded Richard Pryor moment, ending up in hospital after a bloody suicide attempt. The New York Post’s story this morning, almost certainly provided by law-enforcement sources, was essentially confirmed by Stern on today’s show.

The incident presents Stern, nearing the end of his contract with satellite radio monopolist Sirius XM, with one of his greatest performing challenges. His entertainment philosophy has traditionally been “Anything personal I find out about my cast is fair game for the air”. Robin Quivers’ disclosures about being sexually molested by her father have been a running gag on the show for 15 years. But Lange’s act of frightening self-violence is on an entirely different level (though it arrives against an ugly, intensifying backdrop of deaths and criminal-justice run-ins for Stern’s “Wack Pack” of peripheral freaks and misfits), and Stern is obviously flustered and discouraged.

What strikes me about the incident is that Artie Lange could get his hands on a gun easily enough if he wanted to. Equally obviously, what he did was done in earnest. But self-harm doesn’t always mean that one is pursuing extinction per se. Over the period in which Lange’s personal problems and addictions have been fodder for the show, the comic has talked endlessly about his psychological issues concerning his father, who was paralyzed in a fall when he was in high school. One notices, however, that he was discovered on Saturday by his mother when she came to drop off food—which, as listeners know, she does almost every day. (Hell, listeners can tell you what specific dishes were probably in the tinfoil.) So my question is: who was Artie really trying to hurt?

Our their Kady gives you all the details of the Corp’s latest Ekos poll, which shows an appreciable softening of Conservative support in many parts of the country — and a perhaps-surprising dead-fifth-party bounce for the Greens.

To me, the narrowing of the Conservative lead over the Liberals is the story (though of course a poll is never a story, polls are for dogs, the only poll that counts is the blah blah blah). As for the Greens, my hunch is that it’s a reflection of the issue du jour: disaffection with the prorogation of Prarliament. That’s shenanigans, and the public is perhaps a little less willing than, say, Liberals are to believe a Liberal prime minister would never pull the same stunt. Elizabeth May, on the other hand, wrote a whole book about electoral reform, so her party becomes a wee bit of a refuge for disaffected voters.

Your mileage may vary. Discuss in the comment box below! Say learned things about the margin of error! All ages can play, and what could be more fun?

The Globe, Star, Canwest, Sun, CBC, Reuters and Bloomberg write-up various points from the Prime Minister’s conversation with Peter Mansbridge.

Video of the interview is available, in two parts, here and here.

I realize nobody has all that much interest in being strictly fair to insurance companies, but I’m sort of horrified by the way the Nathalie Blanchard story is being handled in the press and electronic media. The evidence for the notion that Ms. Blanchard lost her long-term disability benefits “over Facebook photos” appears to amount entirely to “She says she was told that’s what happened.” Now, she could be quite right. Manulife admits it does use Facebook to investigate disability claims, as anyone would expect them to do. Here’s a news flash for particularly naïve children and desert-dwelling stylites: an insurance company following up a suspicion of a false claim uses every kind of evidence it can scrape up. Its hirelings will quiz your neighbours, co-workers, and friends! They will rummage through your garbage! They will engage in photo and video surveillance! They’ll Google you until the cows come home!

In short, this is, like this spring’s “Craigslist killer” news story, a narrative to which the supposed cynosure of attention really has no special relevance. At all. It would be nice if news organizations could get together, run one last banner headline announcing that THE INTERNET EXISTS, and be done with these trumped-up technology angles for all time.

Anyway, since we don’t know what other evidence Manulife’s investigation turned up, and they are bound not to tell us, it seems inappropriate for the headlines and the secondary commentary on the story to take Blanchard’s version as the gospel. Which is exactly what everybody is doing, even though Manulife may have had a dozen other reasons for cancelling the claim.

I’m not suggesting, mind you, that they necessarily do. An insurer makes decisions like this with hypothetical litigation in mind. That’s not necessarily conducive to clear thinking: it’s conducive to thinking like a juror, which may well be the diametrical opposite. It would not be surprising if some excitable junior associate had been shown Blanchard’s Facebook pictures of fun in the sun and thought “Well, well, well. These will be awfully hard to for her to explain to a jury.” You would have to be an idiot to think that such pictures are, in themselves, good evidence that Blanchard is not depressed. And, unfortunately, the world is full of idiots.

The key question for an insurer, however, is not whether Blanchard has depression, but whether she is making bona fide efforts to return to her job. Her duty isn’t to stop being ill, but to do what she can to get as well as she can and start earning her paycheques again. There are plenty of seriously depressed people who still manage to drag their butts out of bed and punch the clock most days. Blanchard’s statements to the CBC leave me wondering a little about her self-understanding, and since thousands of bloggers and editors apparently have no trouble questioning Manulife’s credibility, I feel quite licensed to wonder.

She says, for instance, “that on her doctor’s advice, she tried to have fun, including nights out at her local bar with friends and short getaways to sun destinations, as a way to forget her problems.” I suppose that a physician treating depression would recommend, in a general way, that his patient should try to get exercise, seek pleasant new experiences, maintain strong social networks, etc., etc. On the other hand, I can’t see any doctor having a display of travel brochures on the wall of his office, or publishing a guide to Eastern Townships nightlife. Again, pictures of Blanchard at a bar cannot possibly demonstrate that she is not depressed. But they could show that she was defying a doctor’s advice concerning the safe use of psychiatric medication, or the consumption of alcohol itself, if she were at risk of co-morbidity from substance-abuse problems.

Blanchard also says, by the way, that she “doesn’t understand how Manulife accessed her photos because her Facebook profile is locked and only people she approves can look at what she posts.” I hope that since this interview, someone has taken her aside and gently explained the Sherlockian maxim that “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” In this case, the compelling conclusion is that somebody Blanchard trusted snitched on her to the insurer, perhaps in a spasm of dudgeon over her insurance-subsidized lifestyle. It happens. In fact, it was known to happen before there was such a thing as Facebook.

It’s Winter Schedule day at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and Diane at TV-Eh has the press release the CBC sent out today.

With the new Kids in the Hall limited-run reunion series, the Rockford Files-inspired Newfoundland mystery Republic of Doyle, a bunch of returning comedies, and the new comedy 18 to Life (which was originally announced as a CBC-ABC co-production, until the U.S. partner pulled out), it’s a very light, comedy-heavy lineup, apart from the Bush-era bad-assery of The Border.

This seems like an understandable strategy in times like these, though of course it may not be an intentional strategy; sometimes it just happens that the shows that make the schedule are relatively lighthearted shows. Anyway, it’s a reminder of how quickly network schedules and branding can change, because it was only a couple of years ago that the CBC was touting its “sexy” lineup.

National Post, November 5. Mild-mannered, absolutely. But Environment Minister Jim Prentice wants the world to know he’ll be no boy scout when crucial climate change talks convene in Copenhagen a month from today … In the end, it’s almost a guarantee that no matter what happens, Canada will be vilified on the world stage as an energy superpower that abandoned the Kyoto Accord and isn’t shouldering its share of carbon reductions. ”Well, if the price of having strong, capable, tough negotiators at the table is being singled out and given ‘fossil of the year’ awards, then so be it. Bring it on,”  Mr. Prentice told me, doing his best impression of not being a boy scout.

National Post, November 12. As the most middle-of-the-road federal cabinet minister, Jim Prentice was never apprehensive about appearing on CBC. But the environment minister turned down an invitation to appear Friday morning on CBC radio’s flagship show The Current for a very good reason: a hostile host. That would be David Suzuki, the wildly successful environmental crusader and perennial alarm-ringer, who has seen the end of the world coming under a variety of climate change scenarios … What bothers Minister Prentice’s people is how they’re being asked to appear on a national current affairs show where the host would be an obvious antagonist.

Leaked news that Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, is urging President Barack Obama to think twice about sending more troops to the troubled country makes for some interesting discussion about the ways diplomats and generals sometimes try to publicly pressure their political masters.

Eikenberry, himself a retired three-star general, seems to be pushing back against the media campaign of Gen. Stanley McChyrstal, the top U.S. soldier in Afghanistan, whose own pleas for many more U.S. troops to be sent to help him against the Taliban were leaked earlier this fall. Eikenberry reportedly argues that Obama should wait for clear signs of reform on the part of the Afghan government before more American soldiers are committed.

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