Alberta’s old boys’ club elects a new premier

By Colby Cosh - Monday, October 10, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 4 Comments

Chris Schwarz

Alison Redford, who has captured the leadership of the Alberta Progressive Conservatives and will soon be sworn in as the province’s 14th premier, was the preferred candidate of those who wanted to blow up the “old boys’ network.” One of the ways she sought to establish her probity/transparency bona fides was to release a complete list of her major donors. This proved deft: the list won her brownie points, but few noticed that it is practically an index of highly connected, politically conscious Alberta money men.

Redford got five-figure donations from Maclab Enterprises, the property-rental giant co-founded by philanthropist Sandy Mactaggart; Ed McNally’s Big Rock Brewery, longtime provider of social lubricant for conservative events; Irv Kipnes, who spun Tory booze-retail privatization into gold as CEO of the Liquor Stores Income Fund. Name an elite Calgary clan and you’re almost certain to find its handle in Team Redford’s accounts: McCaig, Southern, Haskayne, Markin, Hotchkiss—builders whose names are physically all over the city, chiselled into the stones of schools and clinics.

These forces backed the “outsider” whose victory in the Oct. 1 PC leadership showdown sent ripples of surprise across the country. The original heir apparent had been Gary Mar, a Klein-era health and education minister who left the province to become its official agent in Washington in 2007. Mar, a Chinese-Canadian who could count on a strong ethnic ground game, started strong but watched inherent weaknesses transmute into fatal flaws.

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‘The Bell Jar’ at 40

By Flannery Dean - Thursday, September 29, 2011 at 1:36 PM - 0 Comments

Mike Krzeszak/Flickr

Who needs another feel-good coming-of-age story when there’s a classic bleak coming-apart-at the-seams tale to savour?

Forty years after it was first published in North America, The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath’s acid chronicle of teenage depression in Eisenhower-era America, stubbornly resists simple categorization. Like its head-sick teenage heroine Esther Greenwood, the novel doesn’t really fit in among its sunnier, more conventionally appealing peers.

And not unlike your above average teenage contrarian—you shall know said creature by her crossed-arm scowl—it doesn’t really want to fit in either.

The Bell Jar concerns itself solely with the recollection of a “queer, sultry summer” in 1953 and a singular season in the life of Esther Greenwood, 19. An inveterate overachiever with dreams of becoming a poet, Esther is in the middle of a highly coveted internship at a quasi-literary women’s magazine called Ladies Day in Manhattan.

It’s a dream come true and, as often happens when dreams take on reality, it’s the worst summer of her life. Continue…

How Dutch women got to be the happiest in the world

By Claire Ward - Friday, August 19, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 73 Comments

Photo by: Thomas Schlijper

Like many Dutch women, Marie-Louise van Haeren views herself as liberated. “Every woman in Holland can do whatever she wants with her life,” says Van Haeren, 52, who lives just outside of Rotterdam and rides her bicycle or the train to work three days a week at a police academy, where she counsels students. She has worked part-time her entire career, as have almost all of her friends—married or unmarried, kids or no kids—save one or two who logged more hours out of financial necessity. Van Haeren, who wasn’t married until last year and has no children, says she’s worked part-time “to have time to do things that matter to me, live the way I want. To stay mentally and physically healthy and happy.”

Many women in the Netherlands seem to share similar views, valuing independence over success in the workplace. In 2001, nearly 60 per cent of working Dutch women were employed part-time, compared to just 20 per cent of Canadian women. Today, the number is even higher, hovering around 75 per cent. Some, like Van Haeren, view this as progress, evidence of personal freedom and a commitment to a balanced lifestyle.

Others, however, view it as an alarming signal that women are no longer seeking equality in the workplace. Writer and economist Heleen Mees, for example, argues that the stereotypical Dutch woman has become complacent. “Even at the University of Amsterdam—the most progressive university we have—I had a 22-year-old student say, ‘Why is it your business if my wife wants to bake cookies?’ and the female students agreed with him! I was like, what’s happening here?”

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Why breastfeeding is overrated

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Monday, January 10, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 330 Comments

"Telling a woman that the only feminist position is to breastfeed is antithetical to feminism" | Photography Brandon Thibodeaux/Getty Images

Joan B. Wolf is an assistant professor of women’s studies at Texas A&M University and the author of the controversial new book Is Breast Best? Taking on the Breastfeeding Experts and the New High Stakes of Motherhood.

Q: The Canadian Paediatric Society recommends that babies be exclusively breastfed for the first six months of life. In your book, you argue that human breast milk is being falsely touted as a magical elixir.
A: The discourse surrounding breastfeeding is extraordinary. We’re told it can protect against everything from ear infections and diabetes to leukemia and heart disease, and can even improve social skills.

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Mars and Venus on Earth

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 2, 2010 at 3:55 PM - 36 Comments

Elizabeth May talks to Newsweek about the differences between men and women when it comes to the environment.

It’s always risky to speak about how women and men are different. But it would be wrong for me to ignore that a lot of the good that comes in the world is from motherly instincts. We cannot have any notion that our children are going to have a livable world if we don’t apply ourselves to political decisions—like making sure our governments ease our addiction to fossil fuels. A big part of urban concerns is to have healthy, locally grown food—a lot of that comes from moms going to the stores and seeing that the food is full of pesticides and doesn’t come from around here. Perhaps it is motherly.

A fierce desire to protect the vulnerable certainly comes from wanting to protect kids, but I wouldn’t want to portray women in green politics as more caring than men. Many men are great feminists, and many women are not. I see [Canadian politician] Stephen Lewis as a strong feminist, then I look at Sarah Palin and I think, oh dear, oh dear.

Outraged moms, trashy daughters

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, August 10, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

Bennett Raglin/ Getty Images/ Cole Garside

A few weeks ago, when she was chatting with her teenage daughter, Olivia, Leanne Foster mentioned the word “feminist.” “She just wrinkled her nose,” Foster recalls. “It was ‘Eww, yuck.’ ” Olivia, an articulate 15-year-old who’s about to enter Grade 10 at a Toronto private girls’ school, thinks feminists are about as relevant to her life as a rotary-dial phone. “When I hear the word I think of the hippie-ish generation where they’re all ‘girl-power,’ ” she says. And not in a sexy Spice Girls “girl power” way, more in a humourless, style-less way: “They refuse to wear perfume because they don’t want to be seen as sex objects,” she says dismissively.

Like many other teenage girls, Olivia regards the fight for female equality as over. “In the Western world, we’re pretty equal,” she says.

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The stats behind date-rape drug detectors

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, July 22, 2010 at 10:32 AM - 0 Comments

A detection kit for the most common date rape drugs is going on sale throughout Canada shortly, according to the Montreal Gazette. The Gazette did not have to look far to find someone to denounce the ethical premise of such apparatuses: a spokesman for a Vancouver women’s shelter said “This is a cynical attempt to make some money and shame on the company for feeding off the fear that women, reasonably, have of being raped.”

I suppose most of us would respond with something very like Adam Smith’s classic formulation: we are not to look to a “lack of cynicism” for the answers to our social problems, any more than we look to the fellow-feeling of the butcher and the baker to provide us with sustenance. If something like the Drink Detective—which consists of a pipette and three pieces of treated paper—enabled us to end drug-facilitated rape tomorrow, that would be a very good thing indeed.

Unfortunately, almost 100% of barroom beverages contain a highly effective substance that diminishes inhibitions and impairs memory. More to the point, it is odd that a test for “date rape drugs” other than ethanol should be criticized on the premise of its effectiveness without any attempt at an inquiry into that effectiveness. The Drink Detective website, by itself, doesn’t encourage confidence. It features a supposedly independent, but thinly sourced, “technical report” into the accuracy of the kit. One press release on the site, perhaps in a ham-handed attempt to double the market for the product, recycles the urban legend that “In some countries, it is even possible to be drugged and incapacitated so that organs, such as kidneys, can be surgically removed and sold.”

You are probably wondering whether there have been any peer-reviewed studies of the Drink Detective, and why, if there are, they aren’t mentioned on the “Science” page of the product’s website. The answer to your first question is “Yes”. And you probably already have a potential answer to the second if you’ve studied statistics.

An team of public health researchers in Liverpool published a study of the Drink Detective in the journal Addiction in 2006. They found that the Drink Detective was significantly superior to a rival product, and as a technical feat of fast, cheap detection of complex molecules, the kit deserves not just praise but wonder. But is it really of much use? The authors found that the overall sensitivity of the kit was about 69.0% and its specificity was 87.9%. In plainer English, this means that for every 100 samples of adulterated booze, the test will, on average, miss (100-69), or 31; and for 100 non-drugged drinks, the test will give (100-87.9), call it 12, false positives.

Women who are hyper-conscious of the possibility of drug-assisted rape will not be happy to hear that the Drink Detective gives a clean bill of health to almost one-third of drink-tampering sociopaths. But the false positives are a concern too: it would be easy to design a test that “caught” every single spiked drink if you didn’t care about specificity as well as sensitivity. (A heuristic of “Run straight home if a napkin becomes moistened when you dip it in your glass” would have 100% sensitivity.) In situations where the real odds of getting a spiked drink were as high as 1 in 100, a test with 88% specificity would still finger 12 innocents as toxic creeps for every 1 guilty man it identified. Even at a reasonable-sounding price per kit of $5.99, test fatigue seems likely under realistic circumstances.

The Drink Detective’s manufacturers had some specific gripes about the Liverpool test—complaining, for instance, that the testers’ use of pharmaceutical-grade GHB was inappropriate—but they had received the benefit of the doubt in at least one large, obvious way: the kit was put through its paces, not in a dimly-lit pub toilet by experimenters half-wrecked on Cosmos, but by sober scientists working in a laboratory. It is hard to disagree with the conclusion that “Use of drug detector kits by the public in the night-time environment…may create a false sense of security (false negatives) and undue concern (false positives) among kit users.” And the same could be said—to her credit, Daisy Kler of the Vancouver Rape Relief and Women’s Shelter does say it—about the overall focus on drug-facilitated sexual assault by strangers. No one is certain how often this really happens, and the best guess is “not very”.

Defending Lilith Fair

By Elio Iannacci - Monday, May 10, 2010 at 11:54 AM - 17 Comments

Photograph by Raphael Mazzucco

It’s hard to believe it’s been 11 years since Sarah McLachlan’s Lilith Fair wended its way across North America in Birkenstocks and hemp-made scarves. What started as a small songwriters’ showcase geared toward celebrating female musicians of the folk and adult-contemporary variety has grown into an internationally renowned festival replete with top-billing pop artists and sold-out crowds. Ever since the event announced a 2010 return last year (the first city stop will be Calgary on June 27), posts on a variety of music websites are debating whether the new Lilith lineup will hold a patchouli-scented candle to the legendary concert series produced from 1997 to 1999.

Selling over 1.5 million tickets ($10 million was donated to national and local charities), the event was a labour-intensive effort. “People don’t know how exhausting it is to put on,” McLachlan says over the phone from Vancouver, explaining Lilith’s decade-long hiatus. “We were happy to put it up on the shelf once it ended on a high note [in 1999] because it was just so much work. Aside from juggling the [multi-artist] logistics of it, you have to realize that back then, I felt I had to defend it daily,” she says. “During many of our press conferences, I remember saying, ‘I started a musical festival here, not a political campaign.’ ”

What McLachlan was defending herself from was the copious amounts of criticism Lilith received (a few mainstream magazines, including Rolling Stone, used the words “estrogen-fest” and “feminazis” to describe the crowd). Although proceeds from ticket sales broke records and the bulk of reviews was stellar, McLachlan—who performed at each and every city stop—still took the flak for just about everything connected to Lilith: the charities involved, the lack of shoes worn on stage and the constant use of the other F-word: feminism.

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Would you please make up your minds?

By Andrew Coyne - Saturday, November 28, 2009 at 3:02 PM - 117 Comments

Jane Taber, in feminist mode:

It is striking to sit in the House of Commons during Question Period and watch how the big issues of the day are divvied up along gender lines.

Consider two of the significant stories of this fall – the H1N1 crisis and the allegations of torture of Afghan detainees. When it came to dealing with H1N1, women MPs asked the questions and the female Health Minister answered. This changed dramatically, however, when the story moved on to guns, war and torture. That’s when the guys took over. For the most part, the women sat quietly in their seats.

Quite. Silly old gender stereotypes. Imagine, in 2009, assigning portfolios according to outdated sex roles:

As a leading expert on women in politics, the University of Toronto’s Sylvia Bashevkin says this is not uncommon – women traditionally deal with the butter issues (social spending, health and the arts) and men with the gun issues.

“What cabinet positions women historically were offered were portfolios that were seen as a logical extensional of a traditional maternal role: health, education, welfare, culture,” Ms. Bashevkin said.

There is a gender bias, too, when the issue is the economy. The Finance Minister is male (and always has been in the federal government) and so are his opposition critics.

So we’re agreed: everyone thinks this is wrong. Everyone, that is, except … other feminists. Or sometimes even the same ones: when it suits them, they will invoke exactly the same stereotypes, only with a feminist twist — how women are more caring and compassionate, while men are confrontational and macho; how if women ran the world, there would be no more wars; how women lead in different ways, by consensus and relationship-building, while men win through brute force. You only have to Google the word “testosterone” to see how often this line of argument is invoked.

Indeed, you can see this same whip-sawing between equality-seeking and difference-invoking going on just in the course of Jane’s story:

Anita Neville, a Winnipeg MP and chair of the Liberal women’s caucus, doesn’t entirely buy in to the women-are-butter-men-are-guns theory…

“I think there tends to be some stereotyping of it, but I don’t think it’s universal,” Ms. Neville said.

She said that she has asked a question about torture in Afghanistan; she sits on the Commons Defence committee and has been to the special parliamentary committee examining the torture issue.

So gender is beside the point; men and women are on the same intellectual and moral plane, right? Uh, no:

Despite their numbers, Ms. Neville remains positive about the impact of women in the House. She said female MPs can play a big role behind the scenes. For example, she said that the Liberal women’s caucus pushed former prime minister Jean Chrétien to resist sending Canadian troops into Iraq.

Sigh. The boys wanted to play with their guns, until the nurturing, peaceloving Gaiawomen stayed their hands. Of course.

The only way to approach this subject is to accept that there is no logic or consistency to it whatever. Sex differences are irrelevant; sex differences are all-explanatory. Women are equals; women need special treatment. Don’t call me a waitress, I’m a waiter; I’m a Mistress of Arts, not a Master; my title is chairperson/chairwoman/chairman/chair. It’s utter chaos out there, and it’s not going to get any better.

Mum’s fine, Dad’s an absolute mess

By Monique Polak - Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 3:00 PM - 2 Comments

It’s not just moms whose feathers droop when their offspring fly the nest. It’s dads, too. In fact, with more and more dads playing an important role in their children’s upbringing, many modern fathers take it hard when their children leave home. Some suffer even more than their wives do.

Serge Bouharevich is still adjusting to the fact that his children, Ali, 25, and Yuri, 21, have left the family home in Montreal. “It’s been easier for Annie,” Bouharevich said of his wife Anne Soden, a lawyer. “Her work is much more structured than mine. I was a quasi-house husband,” said Bouharevich, 56, a video producer who works mostly out of a home office. Continue…

Megapundit: Are the Tories 'off the hook'?

By selley - Monday, September 29, 2008 at 3:10 PM - 14 Comments

WEEKEND ROUNDUP

Must-reads: Rex Murphy on debate reform; Rosie DiManno on Malalai Kaker; Don Martin in southwestern Ontario; Lawrence Martin on Paul Martin on the economy; Lorne Gunter on Lesley Hughes.

Majority report
Stephen Harper’s victory march may not go through Quebec after all. But it’s still a victory march.

The Tories’ youth crime crackdown and arts funding cuts are playing badly in Quebec, L. Ian MacDonald concedes in the Montreal Gazette, but the arts community’s outrage “doesn’t translate into many votes,” and hey, at least Harper can lay sole claim to the “constituency that believes if you want to go to Cuba, fine, pay your own way.” (For the last time, the government asked Gwynne Dyer to go to Cuba! Yeesh!) More problematic as campaign strategies go, MacDonald argues, was having Michael Fortier lead the attack painting the Bloc Québécois as a completely useless political entity. “However useless Bloc members might be,” MacDonald notes, at least “they’ve been elected.”

Chantal Hébert, writing in the Toronto Star, believes the arts funding/juvenile delinquent combination may well have taken “a made-in-Quebec Conservative majority” off the table; the province, she argues, is “once again Gilles Duceppe’s to lose.” But luckily for the authors of those two campaign clunkers, she says a “made-outside-Quebec majority [is] actually within Conservative reach. And “if the debates reinforce these mid-campaign trends,” she expects the front lines of the campaign to move rapidly westward from Quebec into “the trenches of Ontario.”

If “lawn signs and coffee shop conversation” are any indication, the Calgary Herald‘s Don Martin says the Tory MPs in southwestern Ontario are “reasonably safe”—which is remarkable, really, given the rapid, highly visible decline of the region’s manufacturing industry under the Conservatives’ watch. Amidst the layoffs and abandoned factories, the CAW is preparing to endorse the Liberal candidate in Chatham-Kent, Martin notes, and yet the incumbent, Dave Van Kesteren—who founded a Hyundai dealership, of all crazy things—won’t even agree to speak to Martin about the local economy. If the Tories can get away with this down Windsor way, he suggests, they might just be “off the hook everywhere.”

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