David Johnston keeps calm and carries on
By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 3, 2011 - 2 Comments
He’s no Adrienne Clarkson or Michaelle Jean, but the Governor General believes a quiet and steady manner suits him, and his job
Photograph by Blair Gable
Standing on the steps of Parliament Hill, behind a thin wooden podium, David Johnston is delivering his 123rd speech as Governor General. The occasion is the Canadian Police and Peace Officers’ 34th Memorial Service. He speaks carefully and deliberately. “I would like to pay tribute to all of the men and women in uniform who made the ultimate sacrifice to keep our communities safe throughout our history,” he says, his words echoing off the buildings of downtown Ottawa. “On behalf of all Canadians, I am grateful for all that you have done for this country.”
He returns, walking purposefully, to his seat. Later he will lay a wreath and afterwards he will greet family members of the fallen, visit briefly the memorial behind Centre Block and then slip inside for a reception in the Hall of Honour. The next morning he will fly to British Columbia, the 10th province to officially make his acquaintance (having been to the Yukon and Nunavut, he has only yet to visit the Northwest Territories). On Oct. 1, he celebrates his first anniversary as the Queen’s representative.
It has been a quiet start to his term. Though that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, presented with a chance to rebut that adjective, he declines. “I don’t have any rebuttal,” he said in an interview last month. “I regard myself as a quiet person. As a university president for almost 27 years, [I learned that] quiet and steady and robust in the importance of the institution are good approaches.”
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Kitchener meets its Waterloo
By John English - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 3:50 PM - 9 Comments
Canada’s old ‘German capital’ is once again learning the art—and politics—of reinvention
Photograph by Cole Garside
In its postwar heyday, Kitchener was a lunch-bucket town. Most men and many women rose before six, packed their sandwich and thermos, and walked, rode the bus, or briefly drove to the large brick factories circling the city’s downtown. On the city’s western edge, assembly lines rolled out nearly all of Canada’s tires in “Canada’s Akron.” Closer to downtown, they made boots and condoms at Kaufman Rubber; shirts at Cluett Peabody and John Forsyth; leather goods at the Breithaupt and Lang tanneries; radios and Canada’s first colour television at Electrohome; and sausages and the local delicacy, pigtails, at J.M. Schneider’s.
Today, only Schneider’s survives as an outpost of the Maple Leaf Foods empire, but its famous hog kill and pork line where “only the squeal escaped” has ended. Kitchener, in common with other North American manufacturing centres, is struggling to adapt in a post-industrial age.
Kitchener began its industrialization in the 19th century as “Busy Berlin.” Canada’s “German capital” boasted bilingual shops, German newspapers, schools and churches, and a statue of German Kaiser Wilhelm I beside Queen Victoria. Berlin was the only Canadian city with a non-British, non-French majority. Not surprisingly, when Canada went to war with Germany in August 1914, things came undone.
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Too racy
By Josh Dehaas - Wednesday, April 20, 2011 at 7:00 PM - 17 Comments
Why a group of University of Waterloo engineers were suspended over a series of bikini-clad pics
Pictures of a bikini-clad woman posing next to a race car were splashed on auto blogs as far away as Italy last week, but not for the usual reason. The woman was, in fact, a mechanical engineering student at the University of Waterloo who had worked on the chassis design for the student-built car, and the dust-up was over the fact that the 20-year-old, and her entire team, had been reprimanded for the “unauthorized photo shoot” in U of W’s lab.Some students commend the decision. But many say the punishment was unfair and sends the wrong message to female engineering students. (At Waterloo, women make up 17 per cent of the engineering class.)
The full-length bikini shot was a requirement for a charity calendar the student hoped to be selected for, according to Michael Seliske, who took the pictures last month. “She wanted to show that she’s both feminine and capable of working on cars,” says Seliske, a third-year computer engineering student, who uploaded the photos to his blog. (The student in the pictures declined to be interviewed.)
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Mission Canadian
By Josh Dehaas - Thursday, November 18, 2010 at 10:40 AM - 0 Comments
Satellite campuses abroad aren’t just offering degrees, they’re selling our values
These engineering students will come to Canada to finish their degrees | University of Waterloo
The new campus of the University of Waterloo has lots of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Iranian students, but none from Ontario. You’ll see more hijabs than Flames jerseys at the University of Calgary’s new nursing school. That’s because both schools are in the Middle East—and they aren’t meant for Canadians.Waterloo’s new campus in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and Calgary’s three-year-old nursing school in Doha, Qatar, reflect a new strategy by Canadian universities to recruit bright students, train professors, and build connections throughout the world. These new campuses aren’t just small universities either. They’re mini diplomatic missions. If you ask Amit Chakma, president of the University of Western Ontario, they’re also the key to Canada’s future place in the world.
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The enrollment controversy*
By Stephanie Findlay and Nicholas Köhler - Wednesday, November 10, 2010 at 9:51 AM - 1,905 Comments
Worries that efforts in the U.S. to limit enrollment of Asian students in top universities may migrate to Canada
PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW TOLSON/ SIMON HAYTER
When Alexandra and her friend Rachel, both graduates of Toronto’s Havergal College, an all-girls private school, were deciding which university to go to, they didn’t even bother considering the University of Toronto. “The only people from our school who went to U of T were Asian,” explains Alexandra, a second-year student who looks like a girl from an Aritzia billboard. “All the white kids,” she says, “go to Queen’s, Western and McGill.”Alexandra eventually chose the University of Western Ontario. Her younger brother, now a high school senior deciding where he’d like to go, will head “either east, west or to McGill”—unusual academic options, but in keeping with what he wants from his university experience. “East would suit him because it’s chill, out west he could be a ski bum,” says Alexandra, who explains her little brother wants to study hard, but is also looking for a good time—which rules out U of T, a school with an academic reputation that can be a bit of a killjoy.
Or, as Alexandra puts it—she asked that her real name not be used in this article, and broached the topic of race at universities hesitantly—a “reputation of being Asian.”
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Pierre & Maggie: The untold story
By John Geddes - Monday, October 26, 2009 at 10:56 AM - 34 Comments
New revelations about the most fascinating marriage in Canadian history
There’s something dark, almost to the point of the occult, in the way Pierre Trudeau is often remembered. Scan across the shelf of books about him: titles refer to his “shadow,” the notion he remains “hidden,” and one even calls him a “magus.” The most famous biographical quote about him claims “he haunts us still.”Perhaps it’s all this gloom that makes the story of his courtship and marriage such welcome leavening in the tale. The dancing entrance of Margaret Sinclair, quintessential flower child, brings to the story a tie-dyed splash of contrast, occasionally sheer silliness—not to mention doomed romance, rare beauty and rock-star celebrity. No wage and price controls or constitutional amendments in this chapter. Continue…
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Small but smart
By Colin Campbell - Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 3:40 PM - 2 Comments
Why some schools don’t want a Big Five monopoly on research
The University of Waterloo has emerged as one of the leading research centres in quantum computing and digital media. Its computer science and mathematics faculty is the largest in the world. In terms of the number of grants and funding it attracts per faculty member, it is among the most research-intensive universities in the country. But Waterloo is not one of the so-called Big Five universities, who recently proposed in an interview with Maclean’s a radical rethinking of the higher education system: boosting government research funding and resources to the biggest universities—i.e., them—while having other schools shift focus toward undergraduate education.The proposal of the Big Five—British Columbia, Alberta, Toronto, McGill and Montreal—understandably doesn’t sit well with Waterloo’s president, David Johnston. “How sad it would be to say, ‘We don’t see Waterloo being of high priority for funding because you don’t happen to be in the Top Five universities,’ ” he says. “Simply because you’re big doesn’t mean you’re great.” Continue…
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The need to compete
By The Editors - Thursday, September 3, 2009 at 10:20 AM - 5 Comments
We should award our research dollars based on a school’s merit, not its reputation
Should Canada’s university system be more elitist? The country’s five largest universities think so.Last month, Maclean’s readers got a first look at a controversial proposal from the presidents of the University of British Columbia, the University of Alberta, the University of Toronto, McGill University and Université de Montréal. In an exclusive round-table discussion with senior columnist Paul Wells, they outlined a plan that would see their schools receive favoured government funding to promote their world-class research and graduate student education. The remaining 100-odd schools in Canada would become primarily undergraduate institutions, with commensurately reduced budgets and expectations.
Since our three-part series, furor over this idea has spilled across newspapers and onto online discussion forums. The idea of picking favourites within Canada’s post-secondary school system strikes many as unfair. Continue…
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Smartening up
By Cathy Gulli - Monday, August 10, 2009 at 5:42 PM - 4 Comments
Presidents of seven smaller universities take aim at the big five
When the presidents of Canada’s “big five” universities discussed their ideas for how to improve our post-secondary system in the last issue of Maclean’s, there were bound to be counterpoints made by leaders at the roughly 95 other schools in the country, especially the smaller ones.After all, the big five—the universities of Montreal, Toronto, Alberta, British Columbia and McGill—say they want to focus on doing more world-class research as well as graduate education. Other schools, they suggest, could concentrate on teaching undergrad students. The big five believe it’s time for Canadian institutions to break free from the “one-size-fits-all” mentality. Instead, they should consider adopting a “differentiation” model, where every university has a unique mission and resources. They’re also worried that Canada is at risk of being perceived internationally as a second-tier academic destination. And the big five say the country needs to do a better job of translating academic innovation into commercial enterprise. Continue…
