[Updated] More on the oil industry’s hand in a federal museum’s energy show

By John Geddes - Tuesday, January 24, 2012 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

CBC has an interesting story (from its French service Radio-Canada) on the Imperial Oil Foundation’s involvement in the Canada Science and Technology Museum’s current exhibition “Energy: Power to Choose.”

Last month, here at Maclean’s we published an exclusive related piece, touching on the foundation’s sponsorship of the show, but focusing more on Access to Information documents detailing how the museum courted industry support, and how the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers influenced the museum’s portrayal of the oil sands. Over at Le Devoir, Helene Buzzetti has also done original reporting on this issue.

UPDATE: And, this morning, the Ottawa Citizen wades in with a follow that adds comments from the museum’s former vice-president, confirming what I called “pervasive influence from the energy sector in shaping the exhibition’s content.”

Self respect

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, December 16, 2011 at 1:16 PM - 0 Comments

The Ottawa Citizen editorial board challenges MPs to save themselves.

Minority or majority, the constant is the lack of honour and civility in Parliament. What hasn’t changed is the reduction of the role of elected members to bit players in hackneyed political theatre. Every MP, of any party, who acquiesces in this must answer for it to his or her constituents.

The holidays should be a time for every MP to consider this problem and how he or she might contribute to a solution when the House reconvenes. The caucus is ultimately the only source of authority for any party in the House of Commons. MPs should demand a greater role in question period than that of heckler and, occasionally, script-reader.

In and out and settled?

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, November 10, 2011 at 1:17 PM - 0 Comments

(This post last updated at 8:24pm.)

Both the Ottawa Citizen and CTV are reporting word of a settlement in the in-and-out case, possibly in relation to the charges against four Conservative party officials. Full history of the in-and-out controversy here.

Update 1:18pm. Canadian Press has details.

The party is set to agree to what a caucus source called “administrative imperfection” for the way it handled advertising spending during the 2006 federal election. As a result, sources say charges against four senior Conservative officials – including two senators – for breaking the Elections Act are being dropped.

Update 1:24pm. Glen McGregor’s FAQ is probably the easiest way to get up to speed. Last March, the House passed a motion deeming the financing scheme to be “an act of electoral fraud.” Three years ago, chief electoral officer Marc Mayrand explained his view in detail before a parliamentary committee.

Update 2:46pm. The Globe confirms.

In return, the Conservative Party of Canada and its fundraising arm are pleading guilty to lesser charges that characterize what took place as a mere error instead of intentional misconduct. At the same time, the charges against four Conservative officials – two sitting senators – are being dropped.

CTV reports the party has been fined $50,000. The Supreme Court will still apparently hear the separate dispute between the Conservative party and Elections Canada.

Update 3:24pm. A statement from Elections Canada. Continue…

Islamists, Iran, and a "Just and Sustainable Peace" — media response

By Michael Petrou - Friday, October 29, 2010 at 10:45 AM - 0 Comments

The National Post and the Ottawa Citizen have editorials. (The Post acknowledged that Maclean’s broke the story; the Citizen did not.)

Lorne Gunter has a column.

The Citizen covered last night’s conference.

Here is the original story.

Hookers, hacks, and Himel

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 2:20 PM - 0 Comments

The Citizen‘s Dan Gardner is impatient with the columnists cawing against Justice Susan Himel’s prostitution ruling. This morning he exasperatedly tweeted at them that “You don’t have to agree. You do have to read”—that is, read what Himel wrote. I’m on Dan’s side in this debate, but, hey, isn’t he being a little unfair and obnoxious? Surely respectable writers like Daphne Bramham wouldn’t denounce the Himel decision in such strong terms without examining the evidence:

If prostitution were a job freely chosen, as the pro-legalization forces would have us believe, it’s unlikely that the average age of entry into that workforce would be 14.

Damn, I guess Dan was right after all. This soundbite is a poor choice for an opening salvo against Himel, since it came up specifically in her hearing of the evidence from supporters of the existing law [emphasis mine]:

I find that Drs. Raymond and Poulin were more like advocates than experts offering independent opinions to the court. At times, they made bold, sweeping statements that were not reflected in their research. For example, some of Dr. Raymond’s statements on prostitutes were based on her research on trafficked women. As well, during cross-examination, it was revealed that some of Dr. Poulin’s citations for his claim that the average age of recruitment into prostitution is 14 years old were misleading or incorrect. In his affidavit, Dr. Poulin suggested that there have been instances of serial killers targeting prostitutes who worked at indoor locations; however, his sources do not appear to support his assertion. I found it troubling that Dr. Poulin stated during cross-examination that it is not important for scholars to present information that contradicts their own findings (or findings which they support).

Himel’s judgment gives the impression that she carefully scrutinized and weighted the massive body of evidence before her; Bramham, by contrast, uses cherry-picked stats in a way that recalls the old proverb about the drunk and the lamppost. Indeed, her column is such an impossibly confused piece of argument that one is tempted to think the drunkenness literal.

Like other critics of Himel, Bramham sneers at the idea that selling sex can possibly constitute an exercise of “choice”; you know this, she suggests, because you wouldn’t want your sister to be a prostitute. Well, I sure as hell wouldn’t want my sister to be a columnist at a Postmedia newspaper; I did that job, and, given my sister’s other options, the uncertainty and meagre pay certainly wouldn’t maximize her happiness or her income. It’s nonsensical to criticize someone’s means of earning a living from the standpoint that she could just presumably go be a master mariner or an accountant tomorrow if she didn’t have an imaginary gun to her head.

We are all trying to get by within a context of skills, credentials, abilities, and tastes, and these things are limited by our life experiences (particularly the horrible ones) and our inherent endowments. This is not the prostitute’s condition; it is the human condition. Sneering comments about the meaning and value of choice don’t reflect well on any commentator’s realism.

They’re especially odious when realism is precisely what those commentators claim to be advocating. Bramham writes: “Selling sex is dehumanizing and soul-destroying to most of the people who do it. That’s not a moral judgment. It’s fact.” This couldn’t be more embarrassing if she’d shouted “SCIENCE!” instead, could it? Has this soul-destruction been quantified by a graduate student? Is there an SI unit of dehumanization? Or is the columnist simply reluctant to admit that there might, in fact, be some irrational prejudices and scolding Methodist ghosts swirling around in her hindbrain?

Oh, not possible: Bramham eventually comes around to advocating the progressive, presumptively sex-positive “Nordic model” of prostitution—having either forgotten or never realized that the crux of the Nordic model is decriminalization of the supply side of the sex trade. It’s the pre-Himel law that’s inconsistent with the Nordic model! As Himel’s decision points out!

In Sweden, where prostitution is approached as an aspect of male violence against women and children, buying sex and pimping are illegal, but the seller of sexual services is seen as a victim and not criminalized. Public education campaigns targeting buyers of sexual services have reduced demand. Intensive police training has led to a 300 per cent increase in arrests and a reduction of complaints that the law is too difficult to enforce.

This evidence suggests to me that Canada’s prohibition of all public communications for the purpose of prostitution is no longer in step with changing international responses. These legal regimes demonstrate that legislatures around the world are turning their minds to the protection of prostitutes, as well as preventing social nuisance. The communicating provision impairs the ability of prostitutes to communicate in order to minimize their risk of harm and, as such, does not constitute a minimal impairment of their rights.

I don’t mean to pick on Daphne Bramham in particular; she’s just the latest target to pop up, and the faults in her rhetoric, enormous and fatal though they are, don’t descend to the level of Barbara Kay, who is sure that legalizing prostitution today means she’ll be clapped in irons for being agin it tomorrow. Still, at least my friend Barbara is upfront about not giving a fig about any harm done to prostitutes by the law. I was criticized a little bit last week for suggesting that opponents of the Himel ruling, people who don’t like to entertain arguments about “harm”, should logically regard serial killers as Dexter-esque defenders—perhaps distasteful but in a sense admirable—of the social order they value so highly. I’m afraid this implication is hardly even disguised by Mrs. Kay: in her first column on Himel she brings up Robert Pickton explicitly, mentions in a flat, neutral way that his murder spree “seem to have been a strong motivation for [Himel's] decision”, and goes on to dismiss the question of “harm” willy-nilly. You’re left to infer her feelings about Pickton: she doesn’t take an explicit position. I think I know that she would oppose his particular species of social activism, but given her arguments against harm reduction, I can’t really account for why she would.

Espousal of the Nordic model of supply-side decriminalization is probably more reasonable, and Bramham should be given credit for that, even if the idea collides with absolutely everything else she apparently believes. For myself, I’d prefer it if we could just get past our superstitions about power imbalance in technically victimless exchanges. Our law, in practice, now pretty much treats pot growers as Satan and pot smokers as delusional, lazy unfortunates; suppliers bad, demanders OK. When it comes to prostitution we take the opposite tack: suppliers victims, demanders monsters—though at other times, for no better reason, the reverse approach has prevailed. I’m content to let the Nordic model be judged on a close, unbiased study of its practical effects (and I certainly do believe that policy surrounding prostitution should facilitate, even encourage exit from it), but at root, do all these just-so stories make sense?

My ideology is that it takes two to tango and that people should be allowed to tango. Nobody wants to argue for a man’s right to buy commoditized sex, just as he buys commoditized brainpower (in theory) when he buys the Vancouver Sun or the commoditized sweat of Mexicans when he buys garlic and oranges from California. The anti-prostitution regiment, though it may appear in our minds arrayed in the black bonnets and hoop skirts of our Victorian foremothers, seem to me like nothing more than degraded Marxists or hippies carping about alienation, or about how we don’t deal with each other as real human beings, maaaan. We commoditize each other and are commoditized; that’s where everything that lifts us above the miseries of subsistence farming comes from.

And that’s really pretty OK. Unless you’ve breathed in too much nonsense borrowed from nitwit German philosophizing about “the I and the thou”, you know that capitalist alienation doesn’t prevent civilized persons from forming genuine connections, or acting with decency and kindness, within a client-servant framework. As prostitutes will be the first to tell you. My argument here would probably seem stronger if I had some good, obvious objects of pathos to parade—if, for instance, ex-johns wrote as many blogs and books and news articles as ex-hookers do. But that’s the price of monsterizing the john: people can blather on about how “prostitution is violence” without even having seen or heard of the widowers, the social castoffs, and the deformed and disabled who make up part of pretty much every whore’s clientele. (Whether that whore is male or female.)

This is not to say that a lot of johns aren’t woman-haters: the only question, absolutely the only question, is how best to protect the women. Which brings us back to Bramham. She cites a case, and it is a fantastically rare case, in which a Vancouver “incall” prostitute was murdered by a client in an apartment being used as a massage parlour. (OMG! Another “Craigslist killing”!) But as Bramham presumably understands, many women are killed every year by husbands, boyfriends, and acquaintances under similar circumstances; we probably cannot expect prostitution policy to make sex for pay any safer than sex in general. So how is prostitution relevant to the example at all?

If anything, its relevance would seem to be that there was a record of the man’s internet browsing, a record of the cash transaction, and security-camera images of his arrival at the illicit business. The commercial aspect of his visit is almost certainly the reason he got caught; it’s the only way Bramham is able to give us the exact amount he paid. As an argument that violence against prostitutes can’t be deterred by making indoor security arrangements legal, her anecdatum isn’t just ineffective, it’s self-annihilating.

So, too, is the quote she provides from a UBC law professor who says “says at most the decision might change [prostitution] from ‘an extremely dangerous job to a very dangerous job’.” Here, again, the idea that prostitution should be made safer is just being laughed at. We have a whole universe of occupational health and safety regulations devoted to making extremely dangerous jobs very dangerous, don’t we? Are these rules somehow bad or ridiculous?

A useful exercise in assessing columns about prostitution is to substitute “taxi drivers” for “sex workers” and see how the rhetoric holds up. Driving cab carries the highest risk of violent assault and homicide of any commonly performed lawful profession—higher, easily, than that faced by cops. So imagine Bramham writing “What are the chances, if driving a taxi really were a choice, that so many who choose it are poor, under-educated immigrants or members of minority groups?” Whoa, the demographics check out and everything! Could Bramham find a lawyer to say that it is “naive, disingenuous and dangerous to frame cab driving only in terms of safety, choice and individual autonomy”? I wouldn’t bet against it. A journalist—particularly one who’s a brilliant, tireless reporter—can always find what she has decided to look for.

Mitchel Raphael on senator Frum, princess Di’s lawyer and new lyrics for ‘o canada’

By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, February 26, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 19 Comments

A Senator’s busy retirement

Photograph by Mitchel Raphael

Tory Sen. Linda Frum held a book launch in her home for Anthony Julius’s new book Trials of the Diaspora: A History of Anti-Semitism in England. Julius, a lawyer and professor, famously represented Diana, Princess of Wales in her divorce from Prince Charles. Diana knew Julius because he had helped her sue a newspaper after its photographer invaded her privacy by snapping photos of her working out.

Photograph by Mitchel Raphael

When Diana asked Julius to represent her for her divorce, he had never done that kind of legal work: “This would be my first divorce,” he told her. Diana quickly said, “It will be mine, too,” and said they would figure it out together. Attendees at the book launch included Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and recently retired senator Jerry Grafstein, who is part of a group of investors interested in buying the National Post, Ottawa Citizen and Montreal Gazette, and who will soon launch the Wellington Street Post, an online paper named after the famous street that runs in front of Parliament Hill. The website plans to cover politics from a federal perspective.

Bev Oda’s hair fascinates

Photographs by Mitchel Raphael

Three years ago, Liberal MP Glen Pearson, known for his humanitarian work in Sudan, asked the government for aid for Sudan, and $3 million was approved. The money went to such projects as women’s centres that helped on the educational and micro-enterprise front. When Pearson was in Sudan this year, he took with him pictures of International Co-operation Minister Bev Oda to show the Sudanese the minister who had approved the funds. They were surprised to learn it was a woman who had approved the money, and also that she was not white. But the most fascinating thing for them was Oda’s short blunt haircut. Sudanese women are known for their elaborate hairstyles.

Continue…

How about "Somewhat benign, but sort of an a-hole"?

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, December 31, 2009 at 8:16 PM - 89 Comments

Historian Michael Behiels commences his Citizen op-ed on the present constitutional emergency by describing the prime minister as “our not-so-benign dictator”. Kind of a remarkable rhetorical ploy, that. I’m from the tribe of Westerners who used to gripe about the Liberal “benign dictatorship”, but I realized how and silly overwrought this sort of language was on the day the B.D. Himself was ousted by his own caucus without so much as a “Thanks for the customized golf balls”. Ever since then, my Zen answer to every kerfuffle, foofaraw, and flibberty-floo about Parliament and its powers has been the same, no matter who was in power. Parliament has just as much power as its members care to take. No more, no less.

But little did I realize what a favour I was doing the dictator of old by consenting to describe him as “benign”, despite actual ethical misgivings about several of his policies! The Tom Flanagans of the world felt the need to throw that word “benign” in there as a pre-emptive apology for their own excessiveness. But now Behiels–unashamed! Unflinching!–has upped the ante: Stephen Harper’s not just a dictator, he’s one of those evil dictators. McLuhan would weep to behold such mastery of figure-ground effects.

A blight on the beautiful game

By Charlie Gillis - Tuesday, December 1, 2009 at 4:20 PM - 6 Comments

When Declan Hill’s account of pervasive match-fixing in international soccer hit bookstores last year, the doubters popped up like spring grass on turf. FIFA, the governing body of the so-called “beautiful game,” dismissed The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime with a rhetorical wave. European sports commentators scoffed, while even Hill’s hometown paper, the Ottawa Citizen, brushed off his first-hand accounts of a match-rigger in Asia paying off players, referees and coaches as a “slash at the game” that “proved little.”

“It was as if because I’m Canadian, I couldn’t possibly be an expert,” says Hill, a seasoned investigative journalist who now lives in Britain. “There was an enormous amount of push-back.” But at least one man in a position of influence found Hill’s exposé compelling. Michel Platini, president of the European Football Associations (UEFA), ordered a copy of The Fix and read it carefully, says Hill, then quickly announced the formation of an “integrity unit” charged with ferreting out schemes to manipulate game results to the benefit of gamblers wagering on illegal networks in Asia. In October 2008, Platini invited Hill to a summit in Geneva to discuss findings with members of the newly formed task force.

Hill was careful not to give away his sources—“Some of these people would kill me if they thought I was co-operating,” he says. But he did offer ideas as to how UEFA might fight back, most importantly by monitoring betting patterns in places like Shanghai and the Philippines. And the results weren’t long in coming. Last week, German police stunned the soccer world by announcing the arrest of 15 people as part of a sweeping investigation into match-fixing in nine European countries, at levels ranging from third-division pro to Champions League qualifying games. At least 200 matches are under suspicion, but investigators say that’s a mere fraction of the rot caused by the Asian gambling interests Hill had documented. Continue…

See no Tigers

By Michael Petrou - Wednesday, April 8, 2009 at 10:05 AM - 17 Comments

The Ottawa Citizen runs a front-page story about Tamil protesters shutting down downtown Ottawa without mentioning that virtually every protester waved a Tamil Tiger flag or wore a Tiger t-shirt. Several chanted slogans calling the Tigers freedom fighters.

The Tamil Tigers are banned as a terrorist organization in Canada and several other countries. Their decades-long struggle for a Tamil homeland in the north and east of Sri Lanka has featured the ethnic cleansing of non-Tamils; the forcible recruitment of child soldiers; more than 150 suicide bombing attacks against both military and civilian targets (including at Colombo’s International Airport in 2001, an attack that killed 16); and multiple massacres of civilians, including, on one occasion, more than 30 Buddhist monks who were shot and hacked to death with swords. 

Who needs nine hours of pre-game eyeglazery when you've got a brand new BlackBerry Roundtable?

By kadyomalley - Sunday, February 1, 2009 at 12:21 PM - 34 Comments

Okay, it’s possible that was an ever so slightly rhetorical question – but here’s the link anyway. Enjoy!

Yes, it's come to this: The First Annual BlackBerry Roundtable Year in Review

By kadyomalley - Sunday, December 28, 2008 at 9:36 PM - 61 Comments

Enjoy! And, as always, feel free to chide us for unbearable predictability in the comments.

From the Ottawa Citizen: An emergency ad hoc session of the BlackBerry Roundtable

By kadyomalley - Sunday, December 7, 2008 at 12:52 PM - 26 Comments

… featuring the usual suspects: Colleague Potter, Scott Reid and your humble blogatrix – and as a bonus, Hot Room confrere Glen McGregor has more juicy details on the aftermath of the Great Tape Debacle. (Short version: Don’t shoot the videographer — or, for that matter, the party communications office.)

Just when you thought the world was safe from post-cabinet shuffle ruminations …

By kadyomalley - Sunday, November 2, 2008 at 11:28 PM - 66 Comments

… the BlackBerry Roundtable reunites to survey the damage.

Where Props are Due

By Andrew Potter - Sunday, November 2, 2008 at 4:29 PM - 0 Comments

A couple of things this week at the Other Place:

First, I join in the Paul Martin piling-on with a piece telling the man to give the L20 a rest already, in yesterday’s Observer.

Second, Kady, Scott and I dusted off our bberries to talk cabinet shuffle on Friday, published today here.

BlackBerry Roundtable: By the clicking of our thumbs …

By kadyomalley - Sunday, October 19, 2008 at 8:44 AM - 70 Comments

… yet another election postmortem this way comes.

Save the last PIN for us: The Final BlackBerry(tm) Roundtable

By kadyomalley - Sunday, October 12, 2008 at 12:40 PM - 0 Comments

… enjoy!

The Blackberry Roundtable: "He told me he deleted those pictures from his hard drive after we broke up!"

By kadyomalley - Sunday, September 28, 2008 at 9:32 AM - 40 Comments

Courtesy of the one and only Andrew Potter, check out our latest back-and-forthing here. Oh, and somehow, a mischievous gremlin in the printing press incorrectly attributed a paragraph of my musings to poor Scott Reid. For the record, this is all me:

That’s true, but not every foot soldier slogging through the mud on the electoral battlefield may have expected to be there, and unless you’re willing to live your entire life as though you might, at any point, be on the national — or even the local — stage, fielding pointed questions from the media — I’m not sure if there’s any way to anticipate every potentially embarrassing eventuality. What you should do, however, is make sure that your campaign knows about that experimental art video you made with your now-estranged ex-boyfriend before they find out about it through a press release from the opposing team.

Enjoy!

Nano(s)technology: It's the cell phones, stupid!

By kadyomalley - Tuesday, September 23, 2008 at 7:25 AM - 25 Comments

Hot Room Colleague and Ottawa Citizen election notebooker Glen McGregor talked to Nik Nanos about his stubbornly trend-bucking numbers in today’s edition of Polls Notes, thereby providing at least a mornings’ worth of comment-fodder. A teaser:

Mr. Nanos says the key difference is methodology. Unlike other polling firms, his asks open-ended questions on voter intention. Instead of offering a list of choices — “Would you vote a) Conservative, b) Liberal …” — Nanos phone operators ask an open-ended question that requires respondents to come up with their own answers instead of multiple choice.

“If they don’t get the list, you get the cleanest read because they have to articulate their support,” Mr. Nanos said. The open-ended question eliminates the importance of the order in which the parties are listed, although most companies vary the the order to mitigate this factor.

Also, the open-ended method tends to put the Greens lower than other parties because, Mr. Nanos believes, respondents are not reminded of the party when they answer. Some will choose the Greens as a none-of-the-above if they hear the party name on a list before answering.

Another difference: Nanos pays more to get cellphone exchanges included in its calling list. Cell users tend to be young and more transient than those with land-lines, Mr. Nanos says.

“Those people are not as likely to have conservative attitudes.”

Watch out, the world's behind you …

By kadyomalley - Sunday, September 14, 2008 at 12:33 PM - 11 Comments

For the first time in what feels like several geological ages but is, in reality, three weeks, the Sunday morning ITQtinerary does not include hanging around outside the gates at 24 Sussex; in celebration of that fact, I’m going to spend the rest of the day recharging my batteries (figuratively and literally; I managed to drive both berries into the red zone yesterday), and not thinking about Canadian politics. Okay, make that trying not to think about Canadian politics. We’ll see how long I can hold out.

In the meantime, you can always read my semi-rattled musings in this morning’s Ottawa Citizen, courtesy of Andrew Potter, Commander in Chief of the BlackBerry Roundtable.

UPDATED: Memories of Moments of Goldsteinian Candor Past …

By kadyomalley - Friday, August 15, 2008 at 2:45 PM - 0 Comments

If only the former Conservative candidate for Trinity-Spadina hadn’t stormed off before  his turn to speak, just imagine what he might have had to say to the Ethics committee. Especially considering what he told the Ottawa Citizen reporters who wrote the very first In-and-Out story ever:

Tories clash with Elections Canada; Candidates got national party cash, applied for federal rebates, Citizen analysis reveals
The Ottawa Citizen
Thursday, August 23, 2007
Page: A1 / FRONT
Section: News
Byline: Tim Naumetz and Glen Mcgregor

[...]

Lawyer Sam Goldstein, who ran a token campaign for the Tories against
New Democrat Olivia Chow and Liberal Tony Ianno in the Toronto riding
of Trinity Spadina, said the advertising money he paid was not for his
campaign.

“It’s national advertising is what it is,” he told the Citizen.

Continue…

PVL – Rhymes with … oh, never mind.

By kadyomalley - Monday, June 2, 2008 at 9:21 AM - 0 Comments

We’re just thrilled to see that he’s finally getting his due, as (Technically, That Was An) Answer Man, courtesy of Glen McGregor at the Ottawa Citizen:

By Wednesday of last week, he had already responded to opposition questions on 419 occasions, compared to 254 responses from Mr. Harper and 124 from Transport Minister and Quebec lieutenant Lawrence Cannon, House records show.
Continue…