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[
"Allison Jones",
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald"
] | 2016-08-26T13:03:39 | null | 2016-08-25T17:01:53 | Only 35 per cent of available carbon pollution credits were sold in California and Quebec's latest joint auction – Ontario will join the market next year | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcap-and-trade-auction-suffers-low-demand-again-should-ontario-worry%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Emissions.jpg | en | null | Cap and trade auction suffers low demand again. Should Ontario worry? | null | null | www.macleans.ca | TORONTO – Auctions in a cap-and-trade market that Ontario is set to join sold just a fraction of its allowances for the second time in a row, but the environment minister insists it doesn’t spell trouble for the province.
Only 35 per cent of the available carbon pollution credits were sold in California and Quebec’s latest joint auction – though that’s up from the approximately 10 per cent in the previous round.
Next year, Ontario is set to launch its cap-and-trade program, requiring emitters to pay for greenhouse gases released into the air, and will link with California and Quebec’s market the following year.
Environment Minister Glen Murray said fluctuations in that market are “normal” and are affected by a host of political, economic and legal factors. He believes Ontario will fare well in the first, unlinked year.
“We know that there is demand,” he said. “We’re not in an oversupply position with allowances. We have a fairly tight market, so there’s no doubt that there will be some real uptake.”
Ontario is capping emission allowances at roughly 142 metric tonnes per year in 2017, and the cap is expected to decline 4.17 per cent each year to 2020, when the Liberals hope to have achieved a 15-per-cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions over 1990 levels.
That rate of decline is more aggressive than California and Quebec’s, Murray said, which he believes will protect against oversupply.
NDP critic Peter Tabuns said the Liberal government has to “seriously consider” delaying the linking of Ontario’s market.
“If people can’t buy their allowances in Ontario they’ll buy them in California and Quebec,” he said.
If the programs are linked too early, Ontario may not see the $1.9 billion a year in revenue it is counting on, Tabuns said.
That revenue is earmarked to fund the Liberal government’s climate change action plan, but Murray said the plan has built-in ranges of costs.
Ontario’s revenues could be as low as $300 million some years, or as high as $2.5 billion in other years, Murray said, adding that the $1.9-billion figure is an average. Priority program areas for the cap-and-trade revenue are transportation and building emissions reductions, he said.
The Ontario Chamber of Commerce has called for a one-year delay on cap-and-trade and suggested the province wait for a new national climate change plan.
“The success of the government’s climate change action plan will depend on the success of these auctions moving forward,” CEO Allan O’Dette said. “At a minimum, the Ontario government needs to outline its contingency plan in the event that these auctions fail to reach revenue targets.”
The Progressive Conservatives want cap-and-trade scrapped all together.
“The Liberal government is setting Ontario up for failure by entering the province into California’s oversupplied carbon market,” said critic Lisa Thompson.
In California, pollution credits consistently sold out after the program began in 2012, bringing in hundreds of millions of dollars quarterly for initiatives that reduce greenhouse gases. The proceeds are used to fund a high-speed rail project, along with other transit construction and energy conservation efforts. This year, demand plummeted amid uncertainty about the program’s viability.
With files from The Associated Press | http://www.macleans.ca/news/cap-and-trade-auction-suffers-low-demand-again-should-ontario-worry/ | en | 2016-08-25T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/94ed52c2d22131988d722fa7981ac15b733b9aefdf343a49a48ba22096c43bd2.json |
[
"Julie Pace",
"Associated Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald"
] | 2016-08-31T00:49:32 | null | 2016-08-30T20:21:56 | If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency, her husband will leave the foundation that bears his name | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fbill-clinton-anticipates-possible-exit-from-clinton-foundation%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Bill-Clinton.jpg | en | null | Bill Clinton anticipates possible exit from Clinton Foundation | null | null | www.macleans.ca | WASHINGTON – When Bill Clinton told the staff of his global charity he would have to step down if Hillary Clinton won the White House, he was vividly clear about how that felt: Worse than a root canal, he said.
For Clinton, the foundation that bears his name has shaped much of his post-White House legacy, helping transform him from a popular yet scandal-tainted former president into an international philanthropist and humanitarian. But the Clinton Foundation is also the focus of election-year scrutiny – pushed along by Donald Trump – about the Democratic power couple’s ability and willingness to separate the organization’s wealthy contributors from past and possible future government roles.
The decisions surrounding the foundation’s future are the latest chapter in an unprecedented partnership of personal and political ambitions. While political spouses – Hillary Clinton among them – often put aside their own goals, never before has that been required of a former president.
Friends and associates say that while Bill Clinton knows his role in the high-profile charity has to change, settling on how and when he might walk away has been emotional. He’s also said to be deeply frustrated with the criticism shadowing his potential exit.
“We’re trying to do good things. If there’s something wrong with creating jobs and saving lives, I don’t know what it is,” he said last week.
Mark Updegrove, the director of the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential library and author of “Second Acts: Presidential Lives and Legacies After the White House,” said that while the foundation has unquestionably done good work around the world, the former president has no choice but to step aside if his wife wins the White House.
“Bill Clinton is smart enough to know that as much as the Clinton Foundation might help to augment his legacy, Hillary Clinton becoming president will be a far greater legacy than anything he himself can do as a former president,” Updegrove said.
The foundation made some adjustments after she became secretary of state, but it has still faced numerous questions about how rigorously firewalls were upheld that were meant to separate donors from her government work.
An Associated Press review of Clinton’s calendars from a two-year stretch show that more than half of those she met with from outside of government had made contributions to the foundation.
For Trump and other Republicans, the Clintons’ overlapping worlds are rife with ethical lapses. And for some Democrats, even that perception is worrisome in an election year where control of the White House and Congress are at stake.
Meanwhile, there’s an odd reality of modern American politics: What presidents do after leaving the White House can shape their legacy almost as much as their tenure in the Oval Office.
It can be an opportunity to bolster presidential successes and try to make up for failures. And those who leave office relatively young – Clinton was 54 – can spend many more years on these legacy projects than they did in the White House.
“For the last 15 years, it has been his life,” said Tina Flournoy, Clinton’s chief of staff. During the announcement of his potential departure, she said he noted that his role as head of the foundation was “the longest job he has held.”
Jimmy Carter, who was seen by some as an ineffectual one-term president, has dramatically reshaped his image with decades of work on global issues. George W. Bush left office deeply unpopular, but has been applauded for dedicating his post-White House years to HIV programs in Africa and work with wounded military veterans. President Barack Obama has been discussing plans for his White House afterlife with confidants for months.
“There’s a certain expectation that you stay involved, you don’t totally get off the scene,” said Anita McBride, a longtime Bush family aide.
Bill Clinton’s foundation began largely to support the building of his presidential library in Little Rock, Arkansas. As his post-White House ambitions grew, so did the foundation, ballooning into a $2 billion charity focused on global health, climate change and other international efforts.
The former president has leveraged his contacts to fill the foundation’s coffers and travelled the world to meet with people helped by its work. He’s the star of the annual Clinton Global Initiative meetings in New York, a mingling of international power players and celebrities that has become the hottest invitation in the philanthropic community.
The plan for the foundation’s future in the event of a Clinton victory this fall includes daughter Chelsea Clinton remaining. Foreign and corporate donations will be halted, though the foundation is looking for ways to spin off some programs and keep them running.
The prospect of Bill Clinton stepping away from the foundation that has been the main outlet for his energy and intellect has renewed discussions about how he would fill his time in his wife’s administration. Though he’s now 70 and slowed by health issues, people close to the Clintons say they fully expect him to seek a prominent role. Hillary Clinton has even raised the prospect of putting her husband in charge of “revitalizing the economy.”
“He just has to feel productive every single day,” said Susie Tompkins Buell, a longtime Clinton friend. “If he gets into another situation where he’s going to have that ability, he’s going to be fine.” | http://www.macleans.ca/news/bill-clinton-anticipates-possible-exit-from-clinton-foundation/ | en | 2016-08-30T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/91874151054be3ad483b08f56b1da67afda375127d44872cc9564992241cabd6.json |
[
"Alex Panetta",
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald"
] | 2016-08-28T18:48:29 | null | 2016-08-28T13:05:00 | A cemetery of unmarked graves belies the notion that simple solutions exist on the Mexican border | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Ftrumps-immigration-talk-runs-into-reality-at-the-mexican-border%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/AXP701357347_high.jpg | en | null | Donald Trump's immigration talk runs into reality at the Mexican border | null | null | www.macleans.ca | JACUMBA, Calif. – An American border guard steps out of his vehicle onto a dusty desert road, seeking to chat with the strangers he sees milling about the mesquite bushes a few metres from Mexico.
His team catches a dozen migrants crossing here illegally each day, he says. A few dozen others slip through, he figures. Evidence lies in the sand, in the discarded bits of cloth desert-walkers placed under their shoes to hide their footprints.
The conversation turns to Donald Trump. He’s asked whether Trump’s proposed border wall would halt the flow of migrants crossing through California’s Yuha Desert. He doubts it. There’s already a wall across almost one-third of the border — people still get over.
“You’d need to get rid of all the ladders in Mexico,” he says.
“If you build a bigger wall, they build bigger ladders… They’ve got fine engineers in Mexico, I have no doubt.”
Trump is now wrestling with difficult realities for his immigration plan. Some are political. His new attempt to soften his message for a general-election audience risks fracturing his own base, which was largely built on his immigration stance.
Some involve practical questions: Does Trump plan to cut off U.S. access to the Rio Grande? A wall already covers part of the border; the rest is mostly river. Does he actually intend to deport 11 million people in the U.S. illegally? If so, what’s the plan to prevent the collapse of industries that rely on migrant labour? And, if not, does that mean breaking his pledge against granting legal amnesty?
A sombre monument nearby belies the idea of simple solutions here.
A cemetery of unmarked graves is filled with people who perished crossing the border. Thousands have died — their numbers grew the last time politicians tried fixing the border, during the Clinton administration in the 1990s.
A partial wall went up in the populated areas near San Diego and Tijuana by the ocean, built from old scraps of metal that belonged to the military. As steel sheets and poles rose in the west, migration routes moved east, toward new threats: the desert, the river, and the human smugglers.
Enrique Morones leads a group praying in the cemetery. They’re volunteers with his organization Border Angels, which deposits jugs of water in the desert to keep people from dehydrating or roasting to death in the scorching desert sun.
Migrants generally cross when it’s cooler, he says — especially at night. Yet accidents happen constantly. People get lost and disoriented. The water bottles run empty — sometimes vandals cut them.
“When we say, ‘I’m dying of thirst,’ it’s just an expression. For them it’s real,” says Morones, who used to work in marketing for baseball’s San Diego Padres before turning to full-time work as an activist and public speaker.
“Every summer there’s more deaths because of that wall than in the entire history of the Berlin Wall.”
Hugo Castro is among the volunteers dropping water. He usually works in the fields — numerous crops grow in the valley near the Holtville cemetery, including cantaloupe, lettuce, watermelon and cabbage.
He said many workers go back to Mexico at night because they can’t afford lodging in California. He said many make $40-$50 for a 10-hour day in the field, head south, wake up before 2 a.m., and return in the morning: “They cross daily.”
He said many workers have legal papers to cross — himself included.
Many don’t.
The effect of undocumented labour extends all the way to Canada’s kitchen tables. Whether or not they’re aware of it, Canadians have a distant personal connection to the migrants who’ve become a major U.S. election issue.
In a literal sense, Canada eats the fruits of their labour. Dennis Nuxoll of the Western Growers farming association said of the 400,000 farm workers in California alone, the majority are believed to have falsified work documents.
They pick delicate crops that can’t be harvested by machine — especially grapes, tomatoes, strawberries and lettuce.
“If these workers disappeared tomorrow, we could not harvest many of the crops that Canadians consume,” Nuxoll said.
These workers are unnerved by the election.
The sound of a transistor radio crackles in the vineyards, in an elegant winery near Napa. The owner says staff have been listening to Spanish-language political radio lately, not music, while they work.
She admits she’s unsure whether they all have legitimate documents. There’s such a labour shortage in the area, she says, that she’s grateful for the workers she has: “I don’t know what we’d have to do if we had to hire.”
Trump’s immigration plan, meanwhile, is in flux. Where he once promised to deport all illegal migrants. he now says he would force them out — then allow an unspecified number back in, require them to pay back taxes, and grant legal status.
A shift in tone won’t mollify Morones.
“I don’t want anything to do with him,” he said of Trump. “He represents the worst of the American spirit, and in my eyes he’s not welcome here.” | http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/trumps-immigration-talk-runs-into-reality-at-the-mexican-border/ | en | 2016-08-28T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/8ee58201226214181d8ebd12842e16aa1cd920efd564334196be8e5395fe075f.json |
[
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff",
"Shannon Proudfoot"
] | 2016-08-30T22:49:32 | null | 2016-08-29T17:00:53 | Evan Solomon and John Geddes react to the federal announcement of funding for UN peace operations, which have shifted away from the kind of peacekeeping Canadians remember from decades past. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fpolitics%2Frapid-fire-politics-is-peacekeeping-a-thing-of-the-past%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/13639244001_5103346406001_5103325474001-vs.jpg | en | null | Rapid-Fire Politics: Is peacekeeping a thing of the past? | null | null | www.macleans.ca | The health minister may have paid back some of the money she spent on an expensive car service, but Canadian Press reporter Kristy Kirkup tells Evan Solomon why Jane Philpott will still be under the microscope. | http://www.macleans.ca/politics/rapid-fire-politics-is-peacekeeping-a-thing-of-the-past/ | en | 2016-08-29T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/9a8310e39899f61486e4a73453fb83a7ad9e081464451d1d322e3217d22a6b18.json |
[
"Natalie Castellino",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T14:49:33 | null | 2016-08-26T10:08:53 | The week in pictures: Maclean's photo department curates a week's worth of fantastic, stunning, moving and beautiful shots | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fmultimedia%2Fphoto%2Fweek-in-pictures-150%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/10-4.jpg | en | null | See the best photos from the last seven days | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Super Mario
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, dressed up as Super Mario, makes an appearance during the closing ceremony of the Rio de Janeiro Olympics on Aug. 21, 2016. | http://www.macleans.ca/multimedia/photo/week-in-pictures-150/ | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/0ba40aad63bfb77458b19f6e94f925ba9f8253f7f570c634f08e5fe0007e2022.json |
[
"Colin Horgan",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-30T22:49:31 | null | 2016-08-30T17:05:36 | Facebook is in the news business, whether it likes it or not | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fsociety%2Ftechnology%2Fis-facebook-a-media-company%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Zuckerberg_post.jpeg | en | null | Is Facebook a media company? | null | null | www.macleans.ca | On Aug. 26, Facebook published a blog post titled “Search FYI: An Update to Trending.” The post explained that Facebook was making some changes to its “trending topics” widget, a square that appears to the right of users’ news feed when they sign in to Facebook. In theory, the trending topics widget is designed to keep users up to date with the hottest discussions on the social site.
Facebook decided to change two things about trending topics. First, rather than showing users a topic followed by a description of why that topic was trending (e.g. “Mars: NASA Rover Captures Incredible 360 View of Mars”), Facebook has decided to simply state the topic and the number of people discussing it (e.g. “Mars: 4.2k people talking about this”). Now, instead of seeing a descriptor, users can click or hover and will be shown “a search results page” listing “the news sources that are covering it, posts discussing it and an automatically selected original news story with an excerpt pulled directly from the top of the article itself.”
The second thing Facebook said it was going to do was get rid of the humans—or, most of them. While humans might still be around to confirm “that a topic is tied to a current news event in the real world” (that is, to ensure things like #lunch are kept from the list), they will no longer physically write summaries that once appeared next to the trending topics as descriptors. The trending topics section, in other words, would be left up to an algorithm, monitored by a few engineers. In conjunction with this change, Facebook reportedly laid off its entire editorial staff—some 15 to 18 people.
It took two days for these changes to equate to disaster.
On Sunday, Facebook’s trending topics widget featured a story about Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly that claimed she had been fired for secretly backing Hillary Clinton. The story was completely false, created by a right-wing site called endingthefed.com, which has just over 200,000 followers on Facebook. Eventually, Facebook removed the “story” and issued an apology. In its apology, it explained that a “topic is eligible for Trending if it meets criteria for being a real-world news event and there are a sufficient number of relevant articles about that topic.” The Megyn Kelly hoax piece, said Justin Osofsky, vice-president of global operations for Facebook, met those initial qualifications. “We then re-reviewed the topic based on the likelihood that there were inaccuracies in the articles,” he said in a statement. Only then did Facebook take the story out of its trending widget.
It has been a difficult year for Facebook’s trending news section, especially its human overseers. The detail mostly left unmentioned in Facebook’s update on the 26th (alluded to only via hyperlink) was that in May, its trending topics editorial team—the people who were reportedly let go last week—were accused of anti-conservative political bias. The fallout from that accusation, originally reported by Gizmodo, is now being felt. As it turns out, humans are still better judges of what makes something newsworthy than a computer program.
But Facebook’s disbanding of its human editorial team might speak to something else beyond mere hope of inoculating itself from allegations of bias; it might also be a way that Facebook feels it can distance itself from another allegation: that it has become the world’s largest news media organization.
This is something Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, denies. In fact, he did so Monday while speaking to university students in Italy. “No, we are a tech company, not a media company,” he reportedly said when asked whether Facebook will become a news editor. According to Reuters, Zuckerberg said that, as a technology company, “We build the tools, we do not produce any content.”
Yet the difference between production and distribution of news may increasingly be too fine a hair to split, thanks entirely to Facebook’s own actions.
Facebook has built upon its massive audience by incorporating more and more news content into itself, thereby bringing a more literal sense to its “news feed,” the cascade of posts users see when they first sign in. The result of this strategy is staggering. A Pew Research poll released in May showed that more than 66 per cent of Facebook users get news on the site. Pew contextualized that figure thusly: “Facebook is by far the largest social networking site, reaching 67 per cent of U.S. adults. The two-thirds of Facebook users who get news there, then, amounts to 44 per cent of the general population.”
That access has only increased in the last year, since Facebook has introduced its Instant Articles, a feature that allows news organizations, including Maclean’s, to post stories directly into Facebook’s app, thereby eliminating the need for users to wait to be redirected to the news site after clicking a headline. News content, in other words, is now increasingly difficult to physically, as well as cognitively, separate from Facebook itself. Facebook wants it that way, in order to build and retain engagement, and thereby market share. It just doesn’t seem to want to suffer any of the residual consequences.
“We care about creating a product that people want,” Will Cathcart, who oversees product management of Facebook’s news feed (i.e. not the trending section specifically), told The Verge in May. “Whether or not we can do that entirely with automated systems, or it’s helpful to have people help, is actually just a detail. What’s more important is the product principle, which is that we want to show you what you’re most interested in.”
But what about the details of the things people are most interested in?
Presciently, The Verge’s Casey Newton asked Cathcart: “What happens when everybody’s saying, ‘Obama was born in Kenya.’ Is there someone who comes in and says no, actually he was born in America?”
Cathcart replied: “I think you already see that happen on the platform today. It doesn’t have anything to do with us—people post a lot of this stuff and talk about it, and other people post different points of view. And the nitty-gritty of the details of how we should be involved I actually think is less important than building a platform where if people want to talk about that, it’s really easy to talk about that and find different points of view.”
Of course, it is on this last point that Facebook cannot step away, claiming it is merely a technology company. For along with all the other changes that Facebook has brought to news distribution, the most notable is its creation of a personalized echo chamber—a feature so defined and self-reinforcing that the Wall Street Journal can create sample feeds of “Liberal Facebook and Conservative Facebook” to highlight the silos.
In other words, Cathcart’s vision of what Facebook actually does with news and information (that it allows for a cross-ideological discussion) seems like pure fantasy. Facebook is a news aggregator and distributor like no other in history. It is a media company that, thanks to big data, targets information to individuals. Crucially, it does not do this benignly, just so that people can see it. Facebook targets online news content so that the information can be further disseminated, and so, consequently, Facebook’s hold on readership and traffic can increase. Facebook is in the news business, whether it likes it or not.
Moreover, just because information is distributed and a discussion ensues does not mean the process is inherently, or democratically, pure, as Cathcart suggests. For that to be the case, the information upon which that discussion takes place has to first be based in reality. As it turns out, technology—bots and algorithms—doesn’t know what that reality is, yet. Uncomfortably for Facebook, human news editors do. | http://www.macleans.ca/society/technology/is-facebook-a-media-company/ | en | 2016-08-30T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/dc041dd4729c8a2b620ca7163305de529232477156b8363f3f7975ce7f8cea9f.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-29T04:48:35 | null | 2016-08-28T23:17:27 | Workers at the Canadian operations of the Detroit Three automakers threaten job action with no deal before Sept. 19 | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fcanadian-workers-at-major-u-s-automakers-give-union-strike-mandate%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/06615170.jpg | en | null | Canadian workers at major U.S. automakers give union strike mandate | null | null | www.macleans.ca | TORONTO – The union representing workers at the Canadian operations of the major American automakers has received a strike mandate from its members as it prepares to negotiate contracts.
Unifor says its members at General Motors, Ford Motor Company and Fiat Chrysler Automobile voted overwhelmingly in favour of strike action to back contract demands.
Unifor President Jerry Dias says the clear mandate shows full support for the union’s bargaining committees.
He says the union won’t accept deals with any of the three automakers unless they show a commitment to invest in Canada’s auto sector.
The union is threatening job action if it doesn’t get an agreement before midnight on Sept. 19.
Dias says the three companies have done well financially since the last contracts were negotiated four years ago and it’s time to reward workers.
“Our demand for new investment is not just about us. It is about maintaining and creating good paying jobs, it’s about our communities and it’s about the next generation,” Dias says in a statement released Sunday.
Last month, Dias said that negotiating wage increases and other benefits would be moot if there are no plants in Canada to employ the workers.
The union will select one of the automakers to start negotiations and use the contract reached with that company as a pattern for negotiations with the other two companies.
Unifor says it will announce which company will be first up in negotiations on Sept. 6.
Unifor represents some 23,000 workers at the three companies and is Canada’s largest private sector union boasting more than 300,000 members in all. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/canadian-workers-at-major-u-s-automakers-give-union-strike-mandate/ | en | 2016-08-28T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/b3a828b124272af6bf27b3275cfa6e62a86dbf3a96aad5a0c125d549e31beb90.json |
[
"Martin Patriquin",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-28T22:48:30 | null | 2016-07-28T16:12:36 | Why did the Quebec government hand millions to the Port-Daniel cement factory, an emission-belching, billionaire-owned plant? | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fin-quebec-a-government-supported-cement-factory-encased-in-hypocrisy%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/MAC31_CEMENT_CAROUSEL02.jpg | en | null | In Quebec, the Port-Daniel cement factory is encased in hypocrisy | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Cement is created by crushing together calcium-rich rock, typically limestone, with clay and sand, then heating the mixture to nearly 2,000° C.
Critics say the political process by which Quebec’s $1-billion Port-Daniel–Gascons cement plant came to fruition is nearly as straightforward. The provincial government issued a $250-million loan and invested $100 million, then sidestepped its own environmental regulations in order to hang on to a key riding in a far-flung region—and curry favour with Laurent Beaudoin, the scion of the Bombardier clan, one of Quebec’s most politically influential families. (La Caisse de dépôt, the province’s public pension fund manager, also invested $100 million.)
Whether it is an astute public investment or the product of political favouritism, this much is true: the plant, which is located on the southern flank of Quebec’s Gaspé Peninsula, will emit between 1.8 and 2.2 million tonnes of greenhouse gases a year after it starts up this fall. This will make it the largest emitter of carbon in the province, according to Canada’s environment ministry, and will dwarf the yearly emissions of Shell Canada’s oil sands operations in Fort McMurray, Alta.
It will also rival, if not exceed, the emissions associated with the Energy East pipeline project, which Quebec has opposed on environmental grounds. According to figures in a report prepared for the Ontario Energy Board, the planned pipeline that would transport bitumen eastward from Alberta will generate somewhere between 0.7 and 4.3 million tonnes of extra carbon a year, depending on increases in production. At the very least, the cement plant will generate the equivalent of roughly half those emissions from a single location—without an environmental assessment.
What’s more, Quebec’s economic ministry recently acknowledged that the project had cost overruns of nearly $450 million, without having produced a single tonne of cement.
Though Quebec economic minister Dominique Anglade recently expressed her frustration at the overruns, she said the project would be “profitable” because of a low Canadian dollar and an increase in construction in the United States, where the plant will export the vast majority of its product.
Others disagree. “I think it’s an open question as to whether [the plant] will be financially viable,” says Colin Sutherland, president of SC Market Analytics, a cement market forecasting firm. “People in the industry don’t think they’re going to sell as much as they need to sell to be profitable.”
If there is a cautionary tale in government forays into the Gaspé economy, it is the barren field on the outskirts of the town of Chandler, roughly 40 km northeast of Port-Daniel. Until 2007, when it was sold to a Vietnamese company, this site was home to Gaspésia, a paper mill that was the source for upwards of 700 direct and indirect local jobs in the region.
Hampered by high costs and outdated technology, the plant couldn’t compete amidst a downturn in demand and a glut of supply. The Quebec government invested some $465 million in the plant, all for naught. In 2004, faced with cost overruns of $200 million, the plant powered down. It shut its doors permanently three years later.
Like Gaspésia, the first promoters of the Port-Daniel cement factory touted the region’s bountiful natural resources (limestone is in great supply), a ready workforce and proximity to the U.S. market. In 1995, businessman Guy Rousseau proposed a plant that could produce just over one million tonnes of cement a year, nearly all of which would be put on container ships and carted to voracious American markets on the eastern seaboard.
Rousseau’s company, Cimbec, couldn’t secure funding, and the project lay dormant until 2011, when Cimbec was purchased by Beaudier Group, the investment arm of the Beaudoin family. The new company, baptized McInnis after a prominent local family, would develop the mothballed project. And it would have help.
As the corporate stewards of rail and aeronautics giant Bombardier, the Beaudoin name looms large on Quebec Inc.’s horizon. A staunch if discrete federalist, Laurent Beaudoin has found favour from governments on either side of the province’s federalist–nationalist divide—much more so than the Desmarais family, Quebec’s other billionaire-business clan, which had little regard for anything associated with the Parti Québécois.
Such favour was on display on Jan. 31, 2014, when Péquiste premier Pauline Marois announced her government’s $450-million investment in the project. “The people of Bonaventure [the riding where the plant is located] made an excellent choice last election, and today you have the results of that choice,” Marois said at a press conference, prompting a chuckle from Beaudoin, who was sitting beside her.
The project announced that day would be double the size of the 1995 version. Despite this, and despite the nearly 20 years that passed between the old project and its larger offspring, the new project wasn’t submitted to an environmental review process, which includes public hearings.
The governmental logic was that the original project was proposed in 1995, months before Quebec adopted far stricter environmental standards for new projects. Therefore, it should be held to those 1995 standards. “If a new cement plant project was submitted to Quebec’s environment ministry, it would be subjected to an evaluation process and an examination of the environmental impacts. This would include public hearings,” says Geneviève Lebel, of Quebec’s environment ministry, adding, “Port Daniel isn’t subject to this process.”
As it happens, TransCanada’s* pipeline project is subject to such an environmental review. Hearings wrapped up last spring, and the Quebec government is expected to produce a report on the project in November, about the same time the cement plant is scheduled to begin production.
Though the PQ retained the riding of Bonaventure, Marois and the party lost the election a few months after the McInnis announcement. Among the first orders of business for the incoming Liberal government, apart from changing the name of its environment ministry to include the words “fight against climate change,” was to maintain its support of Port-Daniel, which will be the largest producer of greenhouse gases in the province’s history.
Even former critics have come around. A few weeks after Marois announced the government support of Port-Daniel, Coalition Avenir Québec MNA Christian Dubé denounced the PQ for “trying to win elections” with $450 million in public funds. Dubé left the CAQ the following August to become vice-president of the Caisse de dépôt, which put him in charge of overseeing the Caisse’s Port-Daniel investment. He has since been decidedly less critical of the cement plant.
“Dubé still thinks the project was political from the start. Now that he’s seen the numbers, though, he believes it is economically sound,” a Caisse source told Maclean’s. (Dubé didn’t respond to an interview request.)
Along with a low Canadian dollar, the viability of the plant will depend on the health of the U.S. market. It has been a bumpy ride. The U.S. consumed 131 million tonnes of cement in the pre-crash days of 2006, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It reached a low of 69 million tonnes in 2010, and has since recovered slightly, to 93 million tonnes in 2015—about what it was in 1995, when the plant was first proposed.
“Port-Daniel’s success lies in the American market—if the dollar continues to be low, if it is able to produce on time at volume, and if it is able to compete with Europe and Asia. There are a lot of ifs there,” says Sutherland. The Portland Cement Association, which represents American cement manufacturers, recently downgraded its 2016 growth forecasts from five per cent to 3.4 per cent. It has also trimmed its 2017 forecasts from 5.7 per cent to 4.3.
In 2014, Sutherland and his partner, David Chereb, produced a report on the status of the industry in northeast Canada and United States. Even without Port-Daniel’s estimated 2.2 million tonnes of concrete, “demand is for the most part exceeded by the current supply,” the report read.
Quebec producers were outraged the new plant got the go-ahead from the province. Swiss-based LafargeHolcim, which has holdings in the province, sued McInnis in an attempt to quash the Quebec government’s authorization of the plant. The suit has pitted the Beaudoins against the Desmarais family, whose Power Corporation owns a minority stake in Lafarge.
Though it is ongoing, the suit won’t likely halt Port-Daniel’s production of cement this fall. Despite nearly half a billion dollars in public funding, Port-Daniel’s viability remains up in the air—like so much carbon dioxide.
CORRECTION, Aug. 6, 2016: This story originally claimed that Enbridge is the proponent of the Energy East pipeline project. In fact, that proposal is a TransCanada project. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/in-quebec-a-government-supported-cement-factory-encased-in-hypocrisy/ | en | 2016-07-28T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/a9bd49d7ec6972fccfef480ca469fbb7067580acea93d597be39dfab89d33252.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-27T18:48:41 | null | 2016-08-27T13:04:32 | Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former governor general Michaelle Jean were among those who spoke during Belanger's funeral service in Ottawa | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fat-mauril-belangers-funeral-mourners-sang-a-gender-neutral-rendition-of-o-canada%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/BELANGER.jpg | en | null | At Mauril Belanger's funeral, mourners sing a gender neutral rendition of O Canada | null | null | www.macleans.ca | OTTAWA — Veteran Liberal MP Mauril Belanger’s funeral has ended with mourners singing a rousing, gender-neutral rendition of O Canada.
Belanger, who died last week after a 10-month battle with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as ALS or Lou Gherig’s disease, championed a bill to change the English lyrics to the national anthem from “in all our sons command” to “in all of us command.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and former governor general Michaelle Jean were among those who spoke during the funeral service at Ottawa’s magnificent Notre-Dame Basilica.
Trudeau said generations of Canadians to come won’t necessarily know Belanger’s name, but they’ll be honouring his commitment to inclusion and equality every time they sing O Canada.
Belanger’s bill was passed by the House of Commons in June; it must still be approved by the Senate.
Belanger was also remembered as a champion of minority language rights, a passionate advocate for democratic development in Africa and a hardworking MP who was devoted to his constituents. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/at-mauril-belangers-funeral-mourners-sang-a-gender-neutral-rendition-of-o-canada/ | en | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/4109d1b39ba8a58d03eb44fc1cf1ff385ab21ca282257a93602e24f3531831ac.json |
[
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff",
"Shannon Proudfoot"
] | 2016-08-26T22:47:56 | null | 2016-05-26T18:23:54 | Former colleagues and advisors talk about former prime minister Stephen Harper's place in Canadian history | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fpolitics%2Fottawa%2Flooking-back-on-stephen-harpers-legacy%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Harper-income-splitting.jpg | en | null | For the record: Stephen Harper's lasting legacy | null | null | www.macleans.ca | As Stephen Harper officially began his exit from political life with a farewell speech to the Conservative Policy Convention in Vancouver, Maclean’s asked several former colleagues and advisors what they see as his lasting legacy.
TONY CLEMENT
Former minister of Health, Industry and President of the Treasury Board; Conservative MP for Parry Sound-Muskoka
He’s going to be seen as one of the most successful Canadian prime ministers in Canadian history. It’s going to be a legacy that history will shine upon. In terms of domestic policy, he led a government that was incredibly successful in keeping the ship of state righted at a time of the worst global recession since the Great Depression. He kept taxes low. He primed the pump in terms of spending when there was a credit crisis affecting the entire world, but brought us out of the deficit when there was no further need for this kind of spending. He avoided the crises that other countries had to deal with.
I don’t think [the bad press] affected him, because he felt he was doing the right thing for the country. Maybe it wasn’t the right thing for him politically, in terms of being better liked or having adulation, but he thought it was the right thing for the country. People don’t talk about it, but we never had a national unity crisis under Stephen Harper, and that’s rare. Sometimes it was the things that didn’t happen rather than what did happen.
He was a relentless political machine that always took advantage of his advantages. I ran against him for leader 12 years ago, and in retrospect I scratch my head and ask, ‘What was I thinking?’ But here’s the thing: I ran against him, failed, and yet he appointed me to his first cabinet. He could have ground me down and tossed me into the trash heap but he didn’t do that.
MAXIME BERNIER
Former minister of Industry, Foreign Affairs, and Small Business and Tourism; Conservative MP for Beauce
I think one of his most important successes before becoming Prime Minister was his uniting of the right and creating the Conservative Party. It’s what allowed us to take power in 2006. After that, what I remember most is his economic record. His signing of the free trade agreement with the European Union before the Americans will give access to some of the biggest and richest markets in the world. The negotiations were long and arduous, and it was a huge success for him.
The fact that Canada best weathered the world financial crisis because of our economic policies will mark history. Before Harper, there was an idea that was basically, ‘Tax me, I’m Canadian.’ When we had a problem, the knee-jerk reaction was to increase taxes. But Mr. Harper changed the rules, and now there’s a tendency in Canadian politics that governments now will have to think twice before a increasing taxes. We reduced income taxes, we cut the size of governments and had balanced budgets without cutting transfer payments to the provinces. That is all to the credit of Mr. Harper.
The most important aspect of Mr. Harper’s foreign policy was the change in how we viewed the Middle East and Israel. Before, the ministry of foreign affairs was to be an honest broker between Israel and Palestine. Under Harper, we were bigger partisans of the state of Israel. We believed that the two states could live in peace, but having clearer policies in regards to Israel, I think it was a big change.
TOM FLANAGAN
Author, pundit and former Harper advisor; Professor Emeritus of Political Science, University of Calgary
I would imagine what he would see as his greatest achievement was the fact that the federal government takes in the lowest share of tax revenues in proportion to GDP in 50 years. He didn’t radically reduce the size of government, he kind of held the line. Overall, I think he’ll look back and say I kept government from growing much bigger. It’s not a permanent victory, obviously, because things may well change under the next Prime Minister, and it looks like they might.
One thing that probably hasn’t been discussed enough is redirecting our tax and transfer policies so that more revenue flows to families with children. The Liberals have picked up on that and even expanded it. They’re cutting some of the tax credits as well as some of the higher income people, but the general idea that parents with children deserve a better break from the tax system I think is something that here to stay, and it’s a major achievement.
I don’t think there is a big signature achievement like with [Brian] Mulroney and the Free Trade Agreement or with [Pierre] Trudeau passing the constitution in 1982. It’s more like [Jean] Chrétien, who when asked what he accomplished as prime minister said, ‘What do you mean? I was prime minister!’ Harper’s term was sort of like that. If there was a signature accomplishment for Harper it was before he became prime minister, when he created of a competitive alternative to the Liberals. When that happened, people were writing about how the Liberals were going to be in power forever.
STOCKWELL DAY
Ex-leader of the Canadian Alliance; former Conservative minister of Public Safety, International Trade and President of the Treasury Board
He demonstrated that in our somewhat superficial media world, you can still get elected on principle, that you don’t have to sway in the wind. He was very good at clearly articulating, particularly on the economic side, what were the basic principles that can make the standard of living better for everybody and make us more prosperous. And he stuck to them.
On the international front, he was never one who pandered to the superficial. He was always very clear when he met with other leaders on what he believed worked and always open to cooperating. Whether it was our position on Israel—one of the clearest in the world, I think—or drawing a map of how to deal with a country that doesn’t have the same principles that we do, like a Communist regime; engaging while still raising concerns. It was a very Canadian approach.
What a lot of people don’t realize is how attuned he was to basic MP democratic expression. In our weekly caucus meeting anybody could go to the microphone and challenge him on any position that he was putting out there. If you were prepared, and you had the facts and you could make the pragmatic case, you could win the day. You wouldn’t always have your way, but you always had your say. Caucus was a meeting among equals. And at the cabinet table, the Prime Minister would often ask a cabinet minister what MPs thought about their proposals. In spite of the massive machinery of cabinet and government, he was very focused on making sure that MPs had their say.
MARJORY LEBRETON
Retired Conservative Senator; former Leader of the Government in the Senate, staffer, advisor and confidant to every Tory leader since John Diefenbaker
He and our government got us through the worst economic situation the world has faced since the 1930s, with solid management and a very professional public service. We got all of the economic stimulus and infrastructure programs delivered that really gave the economy a shot in the arm. And all done without sponsorship-type scandal. That’s a major milestone.
It was a scandal-free government. There were no billion-dollar boondoggles, or cost overruns on gun registries. The Senate issue was particular to that chamber, and it was over $90,000—which ultimately, no matter how you stack it up, was repaid to the Canadian taxpayer, in rather strange, circuitous ways.
It was our government that brought in proactive disclosure in the name of transparency, and shone the light where it had never been shone before. And it was our government—I was the Senate leader at the time—that called in the Auditor General.
I’ve been through many iterations on this party. And after 10-years in government, we were defeated while still getting 32 per cent of the vote and 99 seats in Parliament. There were many years in the past that I would have considered that a victory. And there was unity. Despite what people might like to believe, the party is in very good shape and we still have great capability to raise money.
Personally, I admired his kind of no-nonsense style. He was not given over to overblown rhetoric, like Jean Chrétien. He did things for the right reasons. You’ll never see him hanging around Ottawa worrying about his legacy.
IAN BRODIE
Former Harper advisor; University of Calgary political scientist
He’s the only Conservative Prime Minister since Sir John A. Macdonald to leave both the party and the country more united than he found it. I think that’s the most important thing. I don’t think he killed off Quebec separatism, but I don’t think it’s any surprise that on his watch the Bloc has declined to a handful of seats in the House and the PQ is in trouble in Quebec. When we got elected in 2006, the Bloc was on the upswing because of the sponsorship scandal in Quebec. It was important for someone at the time to prove that wasn’t the face of the federal government in Quebec and I think he was a success at that.
It was very deliberate. The combination of dealing with the fiscal imbalance claims in Quebec and then the resolution that recognized the Québécois as a nation within a united Canada. The Bloc voted for that resolution, as did the other parties. And I think at that point, people looked at the Bloc, and said, ‘That’s settled. So why do we need them anymore?’ It wasn’t an issue that he was looking for, but once the Bloc put it on the agenda, he dealt with it quickly, dealt with it well and didn’t look back.
He meant what he said about respecting provincial jurisdiction and made lots of low-profile moves in that regard. But I think that moment in November 2006, when the parties came together unanimously, that put to bed a sore spot that had plagued Canadian politics for more than a generation. It put an end to a lot of unproductive polarization between federalists and nationalists in Quebec. He didn’t really reap the benefits in Quebec until his losing campaign, until it was too late. But I think the party is stronger for it, and the country is stronger for it.
The last several Conservative leaders have all left office with the party deeply divided—and in some cases splintered into separate parties. He brought everybody into the tent. A lot of people underestimated his ability to be a unifier on the conservative side of the spectrum, but he genuinely won over a lot of people who were not his biggest fans at the beginning. In my lifetime at least, he’s the first Conservative leader at the federal level who can say after his time in office that the party still thought well of his time in government.
MONTE SOLBERG
Retired MP for the Reform, Alliance and Conservative parties; former minister of Immigration and Human Resources
A lot of people said he’d be very provincial and inward-looking, and he turned out to be a significant figure on the world stage. And some would say, and I’d be one of them, that he became one of the most adept people leading the G8 countries. Here he is — this hard-ass, “wants to go to war all the time,” “war-monger,” and he leads the charge on child and maternal health. That was and is being still being lauded. In fact, being lauded now more than when the decision was made. He was quite proud of the role Canada was playing, leading on childhood and maternal health.
When we first came, no question, he drew all the communications into the Prime Minister’s Office, and we couldn’t talk about issues. I think that was fine initially, but I think they went too far. I think they should have taken the restraints off earlier, case by case, minister by minister once they figured out how adept people were at communicating. They did loosen up with some people like Jason Kenney, John Baird, Flaherty — and others they just controlled the communication very tightly. I think people inferred from that he controlled everything top to bottom, and that’s not true. Not remotely true. It’s easy to criticize now, but I suspect Justin Trudeau will learn quickly that you’re as strong as your weakest link. You can have 27 strong ministers and one weak one, and the news will all be about that one weak one.
The pressure of the job caused him to change. He was never Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky, but he would joke around. And then as the pressure of the office came to bear, there was less of that. I noticed it in myself too. You get into that, you’re a hale fellow, well met. And all of a sudden you’re consumed with these issues. You get consumed with it and it’s hard to be aware of your environment. Some people are good at it; Chrétien was excellent at it. But Stephen Harper would have to consciously turn it on for public demand and then get right back in it again.
You come in to see him and Ray (Novak, Harper’s principal secretary) would say, ‘Sir, Monte’s here.’ And he’d be writing. He’s looked up for a second, but he doesn’t see me. He doesn’t know anything about what’s happening outside of what he’s working on. It would take sometimes a minute or two just for him to finish his thought and then realize it’s time to talk to one of the ministers in his office. That tells you a lot about who he is. That was his approach to everything in the office: complete devotion to trying to solve the problem at hand, then moving on to the next thing. I wasn’t offended by it. You could see who he was and what he was doing. On the other hand, I remember going up to Chrétien’s office when he was prime minister. Took my oldest son and his friend up to meet the prime minister. He says: ‘Monte, welcome! Come on in!’ And he’d show us the pictures on the wall. You could see why Chrétien was successful. But you could also see why Harper was successful. If being a man of the people is important to you, you’d like Chrétien. If you want someone dedicated with a big brain who was working on these big issues, you’d like Stephen Harper.
—As told to Jonathon Gatehouse, Martin Patriquin and Jason Markusoff
HARPER’S TENURE IN PICTURES: | http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/looking-back-on-stephen-harpers-legacy/ | en | 2016-05-26T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/9beac1830f651af84c145f2f34f3dc42438916cd5e03fdb127b7cfe09100d419.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T16:48:29 | null | 2016-08-26T11:22:56 | Finance Department's numbers are down from a surplus of $5.0 billion in the same period last year | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Ffederal-government-runs-1b-deficit-in-first-quarter%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/07515158.jpg | en | null | Federal government runs $1B deficit in first quarter | null | null | www.macleans.ca | OTTAWA – The federal government ran a deficit of $1.0 billion for the first quarter of its fiscal year, down from a surplus of $5.0 billion in the same period last year.
The Finance Department released its fiscal monitor today showing the state of Ottawa’s finances.
For June, the federal government ran a deficit of $1.1 billion as revenue fell and spending increased.
The shortfall compared with a surplus of $1.1 billion in the same month last year.
Revenue fell $500 million or 2.2 per cent in June due to lower corporate income tax revenue, non-resident income tax and excise taxes and duties.
Program spending grew by $1.6 billion that month, an increase of 7.5 per cent, due to growth in major transfers to other levels of government and direct program expenses, though that was partially offset by a drop in major transfers to people.
Public debt charges increased by $100 million or 3.1 per cent, mainly due to higher consumer price index adjustments on real return bonds. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/federal-government-runs-1b-deficit-in-first-quarter/ | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/5666f2c94bbc5b881cc660d07c2d9c5286bee2e26c7b334694543ebe1818fc93.json |
[
"Andy Blatchford",
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald"
] | 2016-08-28T20:48:31 | null | 2016-08-28T15:54:59 | China sees the coming visit of Justin Trudeau as a 'new opportunity' to strengthen business ties | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fchina-seeks-to-ease-human-rights-worries-on-trudeau-visit%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/12674335.jpg | en | null | China seeks to ease human rights worries on Trudeau visit | null | null | www.macleans.ca | OTTAWA – With Prime Minister Justin Trudeau set to embark on his first official visit to China, the Chinese government is trying to ease concerns about its human rights record as a way to encourage a deeper business relationship with Canada.
The economic superpower sees last year’s election of Trudeau’s Liberal government as a “new opportunity” to strengthen business ties between the two countries, China’s ambassador to Canada told The Canadian Press.
For both sides, the expectations around Trudeau’s week-long trip are high.
Trudeau, who leaves for China on Monday, will focus on building the economic connection between the two countries. On Friday, he described the trip as something of a “reset” in the relationship.
The prime minister, however, has also vowed to continue Canada’s practice of voicing its concerns at the highest levels of the Chinese leadership over the country’s record on human rights, democracy and governance.
While China has championed the need for the two countries to pursue a free-trade deal, the Trudeau government has taken a more-cautious approach amid public worries over human rights.
Ahead of Trudeau’s visit, the Chinese government made an attempt to calm those fears.
Ambassador Luo Zhaohui raised the matter of human rights himself last week during an interview at the Chinese Embassy in Ottawa.
“You say you’re concerned about human rights issues? I think this is understandable,” Luo said. “Every country has their own problems with human rights issues. No country thinks that their human rights situation is perfect.
“(In) China, we’ve got a long way to go to improve the human rights situation, but at the same time we have also made a lot of progress in the past many years.”
The Chinese government has had renewed optimism — and “high expectations”— about its relationship with Canada, particularly since Trudeau’s Liberals came to power, Luo said.
Through 10 years of working with the Conservative government, he said Canada-China relations made some progress, but noted that sometimes the “pace and priorities” were “quite different.”
Canada’s relationship with China under the Harper government was at times inconsistent, many experts say. Historically, Luo acknowledged China has had warmer connections with Canada’s Liberal-led governments.
He said China viewed the Jean Chretien era as the “golden years” in its business dealings with Canada.
The country, Luo added, also hasn’t forgotten how Trudeau’s father, Pierre Trudeau, was among the first western leaders to recognize “new China” when he established diplomatic ties in 1970.
“This is so important,” he said, describing China’s expectations for the younger Trudeau’s visit, which will include meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang.
Luo also noted the significance of Li’s scheduled visit to Canada, a trip expected in late September.
“Within a very short time the two countries (will) exchange high-level visits — that’s quite unusual and it really shows … we attach great importance for these bilateral relations.”
Trudeau’s itinerary will be packed with business-related meetings as well as the G20 leaders’ summit. Between Aug. 30 and Sept. 7, he will make stops in Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Hong Kong.
From Canada’s perspective, the stakes of the visit are also very high. Canada’s future prosperity in increasingly tied to China, the world’s second-largest economy, a senior government official said last week.
Trudeau will strive for a closer, longer-term bond with China as a way to unlock untapped potential in the countries’ commercial ties — with hope of creating new opportunities for Canadian businesses, the official added.
But as Trudeau tries to create a fresh tone with China, he will have to navigate several ongoing irritants.
In his meetings with Xi and Li, Trudeau is expected to discuss a dispute over Chinese rule changes that could affect Canada’s multibillion-dollar canola exports.
Trudeau has also indicated he will once again raise the issue of jailed Canadian Kevin Garratt, who was arrested in China two years ago for espionage. The prime minister has said there’s no evidence to support the allegations.
Last month, Canada also weighed in on the South China Sea dispute by delivering a thinly veiled call to China to abide by an international ruling that has angered Beijing.
Balancing such issues is sure to complicate Trudeau’s goal of making inroads.
Trudeau and many business leaders argue that Canada has much to gain from closer economic ties with a rapidly growing economy and middle class in China, which is already Canada’s second-largest trading partner.
But economists like Jim Stanford warn Canada should be careful when it comes to opening up new trade channels with China — because it could make the existing relationship even more lopsided.
Stanford, now an adviser to the Unifor auto-sector union, pointed to Canada’s “enormous” $45 billion trade deficit with China last year — a shortfall that ballooned from about $190 million in 1992, according to Statistics Canada. That means Canada imports far more from China than it sells there.
China is viewed as one of the world’s most-important growing markets, but Canada is largely invisible in it, he added.
Trudeau’s schedule includes meetings with the China Entrepreneur Club, Canada China Business Council, the Chinese firm Fosun, known for its investment in Cirque de Soleil, women entrepreneurs in China and Jack Ma, founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba.
The prime minister will also visit a high school with former NBA basketball player Yao Ming; take a boat cruise to highlight tourism opportunities in Canada; visit to the Great Wall of China; and pay tribute to Canadian soldiers who defended Hong Kong during the Second World War. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/china-seeks-to-ease-human-rights-worries-on-trudeau-visit/ | en | 2016-08-28T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/25afc8c9d5f790bac3ee40783bd0d0ce04073a84ac5af10c389288092259b1b2.json |
[
"Chris Sorensen",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T20:48:35 | null | 2016-08-26T15:46:33 | Fortress, the largest company in the syndicate mortgage industry, and the Ontario Financial Services Commission are named in a proposed class-action suit. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Feconomy%2Fangry-investors-seek-class-action-against-high-profile-seller-of-risky-syndicated-mortgages%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MAC37_SORENSEN_POST02.jpg | en | null | Lawsuit targets Ontario's $4-billion syndicated mortgage industry | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Investors have launched a proposed class action against a high-profile Toronto-area condo development firm, with projects across Canada, that raises millions from mom-and-pop investors through risky pooled mortgage products—many of which are advertised as safe and “secure.”
The suit, filed earlier this month in Ontario Superior Court, claims $27.5 million in damages, as well as the return of any profits, in relation to a troubled condo project in Barrie, Ont., which was marketed to investors by Fortress Real Developments, Fortress Real Capital and their various affiliates. It also accuses the Financial Services Commission of Ontario (FSCO) of failing to properly regulate the sector, dubbed by critics as a wild west of lending. “They were aware of the issues we’re complaining about in the suit for many years, but have done nothing to protect the public,” says Kevin Sherkin, the lawyer acting on behalf of two investors who hope to become representative plaintiffs if the suit is certified as a class action.
The allegations, which have yet to be proven in court, accuse Fortress and its principals—CEO Jawad Rathore and COO Vince Petrozza—of misleading investors by suggesting they were putting money into a relatively safe product, called a syndicated mortgage, that offered exposure to Canada’s booming condominium market and promised eight per cent annual returns, plus more if the projects performed well. The suit focuses on a condo project in Barrie called the Collier Centre that was forced into bankruptcy protection last year.
Fortress is also involved with several other condo and housing development projects across Canada, from Victoria to Winnipeg. It has forged a particularly close partnership with Toronto’s “condo king,” Brad Lamb.
Natasha Alibhai, a Fortress spokesperson, said in an email that Fortress is “puzzled” as to why it was named in the statement of claim. She says the company was retained by the Barrie project’s original developer, Charles Mady, as a real estate development consultant, but later took over the project, funded by both banks and syndicated mortgages, when Mady ran into financial trouble. “Fortress was not a developer of the project,” she says. A spokesperson for the FSCO, which oversees mortgage brokers in the province, said only that the suit contains “unproven allegations.”
The suit claims Fortress, along with a partner firm called Centro Mortgage, began raising money for the project in the summer of 2012, marketing it “widely to its network of referring mortgage brokers and agents as well as to members of the public.” One interested investor was Arlene McDowell, a 62-year-old IT worker. She invested $80,000 after meeting with a mortgage agent and expressing interest in the attractive eight per cent returns, according to the suit. The suit’s other plaintiff, a contractor who waterproofs basements, invested $15,000, as did his wife, after he attended a seminar where Rathore spoke, the suit claims.
Rathore and Petrozza founded Fortress in 2008, according to the suit, after previously working in the province’s securities market. In fact, the pair received a 15-year ban from the Ontario Securities Commission, or OSC, as part of a $3-million settlement agreement they signed in 2011. The agreement said the pair, along with another colleague, “engaged in conduct contrary to the public interest” when they sold shares of two companies later implicated in a B.C. stock scam to clients of their debt management business. However, the ban did not include “mortgage instruments,” which fall outside of the OSC’s jurisdiction.
Though sold like securities, syndicated mortgages are loans made by group of investors to a developer. They are typically used to fund the “soft costs” of condo projects—like building a sales centre or commissioning drawings. In exchange, investors are promised regular interest payments on their loan—generally around eight per cent annually—and may be entitled to receive more once the project is completed. In addition, the loans are secured against the property in the form of a mortgage, which is why the marketing for many syndicated mortgage products often touts them as safe or “secure.” (For more on the industry and Fortress, read Maclean’s story from last April here).
In reality, however, such investments are quite risky. The loans made by syndicated mortgage investors are usually subordinate to a project’s main bank lenders, making the chance of getting one’s money back if something goes wrong—and there’s plenty that can go wrong in a large, complex commercial development—highly unlikely. Hence the attractive eight per cent interest rates offered.
But the suit doesn’t just allege that Fortress and its partners, including a network of brokers, misrepresented the risks. It claims investors were also kept in the dark about how, exactly, the nearly $17 million raised for the Collier Centre was being used and how much Fortress was keeping for itself. The suit says Fortress’s agreements with developers call for “advance payments to Fortress of ‘anticipated profits’ at the time financing is raised. This results in a substantial portion of an investor’s money (approximately 35 per cent) being retained by Fortress as anticipated profits (before any profits are actually earned),” according to the suit. Some of that money, the suit says, was used to pay broker and agent commissions, which ran as high as 15 per cent. Similarly, the suit alleges additional funds are held back by Fortress so it could be used to pay investors interest on their loans. “They took an interest reserve, so they were basically paying them back with their own money,” says Sherkin, the lawyer.
In the end, the suit alleges, less than 50 per cent of the funds raised from investors actually went toward the development. Asks Sherkin: “If you were getting a mortgage with a bunch of people and half that money wasn’t going to the project, but to the people who were pitching you, would you invest?”
The suit also takes issue with the free, independent legal advice that Fortress offered to investors in the Collier Centre, claiming the lawyer in question, Derek Sorrenti, had a conflict of interest since he also acted as a trustee for the syndicate in the project’s loan agreement. Sorrenti did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Similarly, the suit alleges Fortress misled investors by artificially inflating the value of the land that their loans were registered against. Rather than using an appraisal, the suit claims, Fortress relied on an opinion of market value that suggested the land was worth nearly $22 million—a figure that assumes the project, which included condos and commercial space, would be fully sold and completed. “The opinion did not disclose that Mady-Collier had purchased the land for $4 million from the City of Barrie approximately two to three weeks earlier,” the lawyers claim. The valuation question was highlighted when the developer, Mady, filed for protection under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act, or CCAA, in early 2015, owing about $30 million to Laurentian Bank, the primary lender, and nearly $17 million to the Fortress investors.
Yet another potential consequence raised by the suit: excessive loan-to-value ratios aren’t eligible to be held in RRSP accounts, which is where many syndicated mortgage investments often end up.
The suit also names the province’s regulator, FSCO, as a defendant. It claims FSCO failed to act “meaningfully” in response to complaints and in compliance with its statutory duty to oversee mortgage investments in Ontario. Separate from the suit, an expert panel struck by the provincial government to review the regulator’s mandate recently raised questions about FSCO’s oversight of the syndicated mortgage industry, which is worth roughly $4 billion in Ontario. In its final report, released in June, the panel said it was “concerned with what appears to be a regulatory gap regarding syndicated mortgages.” Because of their complexity, it recommended they be overseen by the province’s securities regulator to ensure “a consistent application of disclosure requirements across products and investments seen by investors as comparable.” Investor rights activists have also called for the OSC assume oversight of syndicated mortgages in the province.
The lawyers for the two Collier Centre investors involved in the proposed class action argue their plaintiffs effectively lost their money when a Fortress affiliate purchased the assets of Collier Centre project through the CCAA process last November, extinguishing the rights of the syndicated mortgage investors in the process.
Fortress, however, claims it acted as a saviour by bailing out the troubled project, noting that it’s invested an additional $5 million. “Fortress is now working to complete the Collier Centre project, and in fact, will only realize a profit on the project should the sale price exceed the amount of outstanding principal and arrears interest owed under the mortgage given to the original Collier Centre syndicated mortgage lenders,” Alibhai wrote in an email. “Based on current projections, Fortress Collier anticipates there will be sufficient value in the projects to repay the original project’s lenders, including the Mady Collier syndicated mortgage lenders.”
The two investors, however, call Fortress’s promises “empty” and “crafted for public relations purposes,” according to the suit, because “the obligation is worded in such a manner that it is highly unlikely there will ever be any ‘available cash flow’ once the Collier Centre is completed.” | http://www.macleans.ca/economy/angry-investors-seek-class-action-against-high-profile-seller-of-risky-syndicated-mortgages/ | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/0b8dda87a7257d1eb8d751566708533d45dc9c5d55a128539d3418d632efcfb9.json |
[
"Meagan Campbell",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-30T00:49:19 | null | 2016-08-29T19:32:15 | In 2016, Colin Kaepernick chose to sit during the anthem. At the 1968 Olympics, Tommie Smith raised his fist. Smith explains why it's the same fight | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fsociety%2Ffrom-one-bold-sports-stand-to-another-tommie-smith-on-colin-kaepernick%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MAC37_RACISM_POST01-737x1024-1.jpg | en | null | From one bold sports stand to another: Tommie Smith on Colin Kaepernick | null | null | www.macleans.ca | At the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, American track athlete Tommie Smith won the gold medal for the 200-metre dash. He and his bronze-medalist teammate, John Carlos, stepped onto the podium, waited for the American anthem to begin to play, then did something unexpected, and game-changing: they raised their arms with black gloves, in protest of racism in America. On Monday, 48 years later, San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick made a similar statement by sitting during the singing of the national anthem before an NFL preseason game against the Green Bay Packers. In a post-game scrum, he told reporters that he wanted to “bring awareness and make people realize what’s really going on in this country. There are a lot of things that are going on that are unjust, people aren’t being held accountable for, and that’s something that needs to change. This country stands for freedom, liberty, justice for all. And it’s not happening for all right now.”
In the wake of Kaepernick’s act, Maclean’s spoke with Tommie Smith from his home in Stone Mountain, Georgia.
Q: What was your reaction to Colin Kaepernick’s gesture?
A: I viewed it with anticipation of trouble from those who didn’t understand how a rich, young professional football player could make such a statement about reality. Since he was very comfortable in society, some believe he should have kept quiet and received the benefits of professional football and leave his humanhood behind. I don’t feel that way. Colin’s made a very important and a non-volatile statement about the realities of the society in which he lives. I congratulate him and his beliefs of total parity.
Q: How would you compare his statement to your stand at the Olympics in 1968?
A: He is in his prime of his profession. We were not paid to compete in the Olympic games. He is giving up a livelihood possibly, because of his beliefs.
Q: How risky was Kaepernick’s act, compared to yours in 1968?
A: Back in 1968, “danger” was spelled the same way, felt the same way, and it could do the same harm to someone who’s standing out by him or herself against the evolution in racism. Colin said it himself. He said, “I know there’s danger out there, but I’m ready to accept that.” There is a sacrifice. He or she will be redeemed, but there is a chance that redemption might take longer than the life of the person making the stand.
Q: Reflecting on the past 50 years, what impact did your sta tement have?
A: That was the first time the Olympics were live on television. It has had a paramount affect in moving a direction of proactivity. People might view that as a militant act because all they’ve heard is that it was a Black Power salute. Tommie Smith has never called it a Black Power salute. That’s from people who needed a reason to be mad. That was my Olympic project for human rights. That was a cry for freedom. That was a victory stand. It showed elegance, the hand covered in a black glove to show the power in humans to provide the strength of a nation. I understand that it scared folks, but I never said a word about what it meant at that particular time. It was in the eyes of the beholder. I was 24. It was a feeling of the heart to do what was necessary because I was the fastest man on Earth, and I had something to say.
Q: Do you think athletes at the Rio Olympics should have used their publicity to make statements?
A: No, I don’t think it’s necessary to go to any game to make a stand just because you are there. The stand is made from the heart, and you can do that in the grocery store.
Q: Some say it’s disrespectful to sit down during the national anthem. What do you think?
A: I don’t think he sat down to eradicate the pride of the flag. There are problems in a system that carries the flag and doesn’t address the needs under that flag. America’s a great country—you better believe it’s a great country, one of the greatest on this planet—but even the greatest needs to pay attention. I wish the powerful sources that run this country could understand that. Don’t take him down because he’s the only one on that victory stand, or that platform in his case.
Q: What’s been the worst backlash you’ve received?
A: Let me say one and it will cover all: death. I could deal with them coming to the house, but telephone calls or notes thrown through your window saying, “you will die tomorrow,” or, “Go back to Africa. Here is a ticket.” They would send mock tickets with rocks through the window. One rock nearly hit my son. I was married when I was a senior in college, and a rock missed my son by an inch as he laid in his night crib, sleeping.
Q: Donald Trump has spoken out against Kaepernick’s decision to stay seated, saying that “maybe he should find a country that works better for him”. What would you say if you met Donald Trump?
A: “Hi Donald. How are you?” I have no hate for the man. The man hates himself because he can’t get what he wants because he already has everything. I would not educate Donald trump. He is a very educated man.
Q: If you met Colin Kaepernick, what would you say?
A: I know what this young man is going through. The eradication of stupidity takes sacrifices sometimes, and this time, Colin said himself: “I hope people hear me because I have something to say. I’m not out there to hurt anybody.” I’m 72 now. You’ve got two people here that are fighting for the same thing, a half a century apart. | http://www.macleans.ca/society/from-one-bold-sports-stand-to-another-tommie-smith-on-colin-kaepernick/ | en | 2016-08-29T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/4028c0e7ec3f32c7c773bcba01272c9845792491f225802e48556ce9241b1d8b.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T13:06:25 | null | 2016-08-24T15:20:25 | Death of man in Cape Breton jail raises questions for an addictions expert about why he wasn't sent to hospital | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fhealth-staff-aware-inmate-who-died-of-overdose-intoxicated-took-pills-report%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/CPT113357001_high.jpg | en | null | Health staff aware inmate who died of overdose 'intoxicated', took pills: report | null | null | www.macleans.ca | A police report says a man who died from a drug overdose in a Cape Breton jail told a prison nurse he had taken five “nerve pill(s)” and appeared intoxicated, raising questions for an addictions expert about why he wasn’t sent to hospital rather than a prison cell.
According to the report obtained by The Canadian Press, a prison nurse who assessed Jason Marcel LeBlanc at the Cape Breton Correctional Facility told a guard that he found the prisoner “appeared to be intoxicated by something” and had “slurred speech and (was) lethargic.”
“If these circumstances occurred even in a regular hospital bed, the patient would need to be transferred to a monitored setting … where resuscitative measures could be implemented and the patient closely monitored,” said Dr. Evan Wood, an addictions medicine physician at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver and a professor at the University of British Columbia.
The report also says the nurse was told “Jason admitted to taking five Lyrica (nerve pill).”
The police document says in a second check on the afternoon of Jan. 30, the nurse found the prisoner’s vital signs had improved and the investigators say the nurse told a guard he didn’t have any concerns “at this time.”
An autopsy report says when LeBlanc returned to his cell after the assessment he had a concealed bag full of pills and near-fatal levels of methadone in his blood.
That autopsy concluded the 42-year-old labourer died 13 hours after admission from the combination of methadone and bromezapan, an anti-anxiety drug he swallowed while in the cell. There was no confirmation of the presence of Lyrica in the autopsy’s blood or urine screens.
The Nova Scotia Health Authority, which runs prison health care in the province, declined to comment on the police report or answer questions about the health care provided to the prisoner.
However, Wood said it’s important that health care issues be explored.
He noted that Lyrica is an anti-epileptic prescription drug usually used to treat epilepsy, but it also is sold on the street. He said it can cause slurred speech and drowsiness in the case of an overdose.
He said symptoms like those described in the police report warrant a call to a poison control centre and he believes that such a centre would recommend taking the individual to an acute care setting.
“Lethargy and slurred speech would set off major alarm bells under any circumstances and … would warrant both a call to poison control and moving the individual to an environment where an overdose can be safely managed,” he wrote in an email.
A Justice Department review of the case has already stated that correctional staff did not follow all steps in the strip search process, and they failed to complete their rounds at standard intervals.
As well, the department concluded corrections staff did not get a required health transfer form describing LeBlanc’s medical history or an explanation for why escorting officers didn’t have one.
However, the report also said that the Nova Scotia Health Authority — which operates health care in Nova Scotia’s prisons — didn’t participate in the review because the Personal Health Information Act “prevented health care staff participation in the investigation or access to health records by Correctional Services.”
Health authority spokeswoman Cindy Bayers said legislation prohibits talking about the case. “We are, however, available to speak with appropriate family members,” she added.
Jason’s father Ernie LeBlanc said in an interview Tuesday he hasn’t been in touch with the Nova Scotia Health Authority, but he would like to see a copy of any review done into his son’s death, not just chat with officials.
“I think they should have participated. My son ended up dying and we really don’t know what they did or didn’t do,” he said. “Health care should have gotten Jason to a hospital.”
The Justice Department report has said that LeBlanc appeared to have smuggled the pills into the jail, and said he was seen by health care staff at 3:43 p.m. and again at 6:33 p.m. before falling asleep at 7:44 p.m.
The original review also says health-care staff had little to say about the inmate’s condition to corrections officers who brought him for the two checks.
“No recommendation or advice was received from health care for special precautions, special watch of the offender or that the offender should be transported to the hospital,” the review says.
A surveillance video showed LeBlanc’s breathing started to slow at 1:50 a.m. on Jan. 31, and it took 45 minutes before corrections officers found him unresponsive in his cell. He was declared dead at 2:45 a.m. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/health-staff-aware-inmate-who-died-of-overdose-intoxicated-took-pills-report/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/46915d78f3844b30f9e874cc439935c99a06b4395c2a9a39ae70e2cae7451ae7.json |
[
"Andray Domise",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T12:48:43 | null | 2016-08-25T13:57:21 | The young Indigenous man's death is yet another reminder of lessons still not learned by many Canadians | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fthe-tragedy-of-colten-boushie-racism-canada%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MAC37_DOMISE_POST01.jpg | en | null | What the tragedy of Colten Boushie says about racism in Canada | null | null | www.macleans.ca | “In my culture, you’re not supposed to name the dead,” she says. “At least not for the first while, or they might not be able to move on. But I had to say something. People had to talk about him, or nothing was going to happen.”
Chelsea Vowel, an Edmonton-based Métis educator and writer, is speaking about the death of 22-year-old Colten Boushie. Throughout the conversation, Chelsea wavers between righteous strength and tearful exhaustion. By the accounts so far, Boushie did not have to die. And yet the young man was laid to rest last week, gunned down in rural Biggar, Sask., after an altercation with farmer Gerald Stanley. Stanley now awaits trial for second-degree murder.
“They think they know about Indians,” Chelsea says, of non-Indigenous Canada. “They have this belief, that’s taught to them from birth, that everything Native people face is our own choice. Particularly in the Prairies, where there are very high populations.”
As Chelsea pours her heart out to me, I’m reminded of Claudia Rankine’s book Citizen: An American Lyric. Facing opposite a purposefully unfinished memoriam to Black men killed by police and white vigilantes, stand these lines:
because white men can’t
police their imagination
black men are dying
According to the friends who were with Colten, they were returning to the Red Pheasant reserve after an afternoon of swimming when their car tire went flat. They steered onto Stanley’s farm to seek help. Eric Meechance, who was sitting in the back seat of the vehicle with his girlfriend, described a rapid escalation to violence that ended with Colten’s death. “Some guy came and smashed in the front windshield,” he told the Saskatoon StarPhoenix. The frightened driver attempted to escape, but collided with another parked vehicle. Meechance and another of the car’s occupants fled on foot, and gunshots cracked behind him. The two were separated after Meechance ducked into bushes and ran two kilometres along a dirt road before being picked up by police.
Of those gunshots that split the afternoon sky, at least one of them killed Boushie.
In the aftermath of the shooting, the response from white Canada has limned in staggering detail our sins against the Indigenous body, and the ease with which we excuse our violence. First there was the RCMP press release, explaining matter-of-factly that the witnesses to Boushie’s killing—this is right after their friend was shot and killed—were taken into custody “as part of a related theft investigation.” None of the three were charged with any such crime. Then the racial animus began to seep out of the Facebook page for the Saskatchewan Farmers Group, with comments like “F–king indian,” and “He should have shot all 5 of them and given a medal.” Ben Kautz, a councillor for the Rural Municipality of Browning, Sask., had this to say: “In my mind his only mistake was leaving witnesses.”
Days later, CBC Saskatchewan published an article claiming that the social media debate in the wake of Boushie’s death was over the “right to defend.” In that piece, CBC interviewed a criminal defence lawyer who detailed the legal means by which killing an intruder on one’s property might be permitted. “Are these people known to them, or not known to them? Is there a history of violence between them or no history at all? Do the people appear armed or not armed?”
“When there doesn’t appear to be any reasonable alternative, lethal force is no doubt permitted.”
Enough people seemed to agree with the sentiment that a crowdfunding drive in the name of Stanley’s wife drew over $11,000 in donations before it was taken down by GoFundMe. Regular people, who probably consider themselves tolerant and enlightened individuals, opened their wallets to support a man who, purportedly, shot and killed an Indigenous youth.
At Stanley’s bail hearing in North Battleford, Indigenous groups and allied activists took to the streets in a demonstration of solidarity with Boushie’s family. Multiple witnesses, including Métis artist and author Christi Belcourt, snapped pictures of RCMP officers standing sentinel on rooftops surrounding the demonstration. According to Belcourt, officers were visibly armed, taking down their rifles as the crowd began turning cellphone cameras in their direction. Stanley, by the way, was granted bail. A privilege that too many Indigenous people have themselves been denied for far lesser crimes.
This past weekend, during the Tragically Hip’s last concert, beloved singer Gord Downie re-asserted Canada’s obligations to Indigenous peoples for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau: “He’s going to take us where we need to go. He cares about the people way up North, that we were trained our entire lives to ignore.”
To wit, Trudeau himself once declared: “It is time for a renewed, nation-to-nation relationship with First Nations peoples.” In addition to launching a public inquiry into the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women, Trudeau also promised to implement all 94 recommendations from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The TRC (which should be required reading for every Canadian who claims to understand our history) is a broad document that outlines the damage done not only by the horrific legacy of residential schools, but by Canada’s turning a blind eye to what we have wrought on Indigenous communities through purposeful neglect and wanton violation of our promises.
Those calls to action, even if fully acted upon by the federal government, ring hollow when Canadians, who think they know about Indians, misunderstand who and what they have been trained to ignore. The people who flooded the Saskatchewan Farmers Group with hateful comments, those who gave from their own accounts in Stanley’s name, the media who question where to draw the line between property rights and dead Indians, the councillor who regretted that Stanley failed to execute all of the passengers in that vehicle, and possibly Gerald Stanley himself—all bear the stain of Colten Boushie’s blood.
As do I, kidnapped body living on stolen land that I am.
As do you.
Because we cannot police our imagination,
Colten Boushie is dead. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/the-tragedy-of-colten-boushie-racism-canada/ | en | 2016-08-25T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/1303688b53e1a9ba3d6ddfcc913f07b1401ade965749431a0adc21cddd9d1001.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-28T16:49:02 | null | 2016-08-28T10:34:58 | The Toronto Zoo's pandas are to arrive at the Calgary Zoo in 2018 for a five-year stint at a cost of $30 million | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Ftrudeau-rebuffs-nenshis-request-for-federal-funding-for-pandas%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/MAC11_PANDAS_POST01.jpg | en | null | Trudeau rebuffs Nenshi's request for federal funding for pandas | null | null | www.macleans.ca | CALGARY – It’s from one self-declared lover of baby panda snuggles to another.
Calgary Mayor Naheed Nenshi has written to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asking for Ottawa’s help in defraying the considerable cost of housing the critters at Calgary’s zoo in two years.
“As a fellow lover of cute cuddly panda cubs, and having observed with envy your recent opportunity to hold Jia Panpan and Jia Yueyue in Toronto during their naming ceremony, I trust you can understand my own desire to embrace these pandas with open arms here in Calgary,” Nenshi wrote to Trudeau in a May 27 letter.
The word “envy” is underlined twice, followed by two typed exclamation points, and circled in purple ink with another handwritten exclamation point thrown in for good measure.
“I am writing today to request a federal government contribution towards investments required in Calgary to host both the panda family and the large number of new visitors the zoo expects. The decision for Calgary to host the pandas was supported and encouraged by the previous federal government in 2012, but no funds were provided,” the mayor writes.
Trudeau’s June 21 response thanks Nenshi for his “enthusiastic” letter and opens by telling the mayor that holding the pandas was a “once in a lifetime event” for the prime minister that “made me the envy of many, including my own children.”
But Trudeau rebuffed the funding request and suggested that the Calgary Zoo explore programs offered by the federal Western Economic Diversification agency. Trudeau said he forwarded Nenshi’s letter to Navdeep Bains, the minister in charge of that organization.
“The city of Calgary’s generosity of spirit, as most recently evidenced by welcoming Syrian refugees and those displaced from the Fort McMurray fires, leaves little doubt the giant pandas will be made to feel at home,” Trudeau writes.
Both letters were provided to The Canadian Press by Nenshi’s office, which declined to be interviewed.
Two giant pandas, Da Mao and Er Shun, were loaned to Canadian zoos for 10 years as part of a 2012 deal with China. Since 2013, the pair has been at the Toronto Zoo, where the cubs were born and later famously photographed in the arms of Trudeau.
The pandas and their progeny are to arrive at the Calgary Zoo in 2018 for a five-year stint. The exhibit is expected to prompt an influx of visitors and provide a much-needed economic boost, but the upfront outlay is sizable.
Calgary Zoo president Clement Lanthier said the “Pathway to Panda” project has a price tag of about $30 million. Renovations need to be made to the building where the creatures will live and expanded parking lots, washrooms and restaurants are required to accommodate more visitors.
Lanthier said it’s fantastic to see the mayor advocating on behalf of the zoo and it will look into what Western Economic Diversification can offer.
Calgary has committed about $8.2 million and the Alberta government is kicking in $10 million. Sponsorship deals, fundraising and the zoo’s capital reserve could make up the remainder, said Lanthier.
“I think fiscally we are very comfortable with our ability to deliver on this.”
In his letter, Nenshi said attendance at the zoo is expected to increase by 600,000 visitors a year to 1.8 million because of the pandas.
Lanthier estimates the pandas could mean an $18-million economic boost for Calgary annually.
Upgrades at the Toronto Zoo for the pandas were far less extensive.
About $3 million that was on the books to renovate a tiger exhibit was instead directed toward the pandas, said spokeswoman Jennifer Tracey. The spruced-up enclosure can be used for the tigers once the pandas leave and the big cats return.
The Toronto Zoo already gets some city funding for its capital budget and received $500,000 from the Ontario government for a panda interpretive centre. There was no federal contribution.
The city’s animal park is already large, so no other facilities needed to be expanded for increased visitors, said Tracey.
“We were fortunate in that we didn’t have to do any major upgrades aside from renovating the exhibit where the pandas would actually be.” | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/trudeau-rebuffs-nenshis-request-for-federal-funding-for-pandas/ | en | 2016-08-28T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/e8d5ae1097a9d1d00a33833dd16b9829d66a2213f5fc8e579f37417d0eabdce3.json |
[
"Jim Bronskill",
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] | 2016-08-26T13:05:03 | null | 2016-08-25T12:17:52 | Liberal MP Kate Young's written support went against official ethics guidelines | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fpolitics%2Fliberal-mp-wrote-to-crtc-to-back-bell-media-licence-renewal%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Kate-Young.jpg | en | null | Liberal MP wrote to CRTC to back Bell Media licence renewal | null | null | www.macleans.ca | OTTAWA – Liberal MP Kate Young has apologized for writing a letter to Canada’s broadcast regulator to support a television station’s licence renewal application despite federal guidelines that prohibit parliamentary secretaries from making such interventions.
The Ontario MP wrote the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission earlier this month to encourage renewal of Bell Media’s licence for CTV London, where she was news anchor for many years.
She is member for the riding of London West, where the station is located, and also parliamentary secretary to Transport Minister Marc Garneau.
Federal conflict of interest and ethics commissioner Mary Dawson issued a guideline in October 2013 saying cabinet ministers and parliamentary secretaries “may not under any circumstances” attempt to intervene in the decision-making process of an administrative tribunal, such as the CRTC, on behalf of any constituent in any riding.
Such contact may be considered an attempt to influence a decision in breach of the Conflict of Interest Act, Dawson wrote in a directive for public office holders – as ministers and parliamentary secretaries are known under the law – on serving constituents.
Section 9 of the act says no public office holder may use their position to seek to influence a decision “to improperly further another person’s private interests.”
Parliamentary secretaries, though not members of cabinet, serve as key representatives of the government and as important links between ministers and Parliament, according to a federal guide published in January.
A parliamentary secretary supports his or her minister by helping advance the government’s legislative program, speaks in the House of Commons in the minister’s absence, acts as a liaison between the minister and caucus and may be given specific duties for policy development or public engagement.
The Canadian Press came across Young’s letter during a routine examination of filings with the CRTC.
When asked about the letter, Jocelyne Brisebois, a spokeswoman for the commissioner, said Wednesday that Dawson was unaware of it but “will look into the matter.”
In a statement late Wednesday, Young said that when she wrote the letter, she was acting as a voice for her community “and did not take into consideration the implications of my role as parliamentary secretary and sincerely apologize for any inappropriate actions on my part.”
“I have spoken with the conflict of interest and ethics commissioner’s office about my obligations and will comply fully with any guidance they may have.”
Dawson issued her October 2013 guideline after public controversy over letters to the CRTC from a Conservative cabinet minister and parliamentary secretaries.
Earlier that year, Dawson had admonished Jim Flaherty, then finance minister, and two parliamentary secretaries – Eve Adams and Colin Carrie – for breaching the Conflict of Interest Act by writing letters to the broadcast regulator in support of radio licence applications.
In February 2016, Dawson ruled that former Conservative MP Parm Gill contravened Section 9 of the act by sending letters of support to the CRTC on behalf of two constituents when he was a parliamentary secretary.
Young, a rookie MP, was elected last October following a lengthy career in journalism and public relations.
In an Aug. 3 letter on behalf of the TV licence renewal, Young said she understands the importance of supporting Canadian culture.
“Bell Media’s proposals in their application seek to better position Canadian broadcasters to contribute to the broadcasting system in this country while continuing to offer programming that entertains, informs, and engages audiences,” the letter said. “I therefore ask that the CRTC approve Bell Media’s application.”
The CRTC has yet to decide on the licence renewal.
Young’s letter makes no mention of her duties as a parliamentary secretary. Ordinary MPs are not precluded from sending letters of support to the CRTC.
In addition, Section 64 of the Conflict of Interest Act says nothing in the act bars a member of the House of Commons who is a public office holder from activities he or she would normally carry out as an MP.
However, in her February report on the Gill letters, Dawson wrote: “Parliamentary secretaries cannot remove themselves from their responsibilities as reporting public office holders by signing letters of support as members of Parliament, even if they do not include their parliamentary secretary title.” | http://www.macleans.ca/politics/liberal-mp-wrote-to-crtc-to-back-bell-media-licence-renewal/ | en | 2016-08-25T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/3228b7f3f887b51a39f1195d6bd35b456f4b68bde764069703239afba81a4f3d.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
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] | 2016-08-26T16:48:24 | null | 2016-08-26T10:49:52 | Brett Ryan, 35, has been charged with three counts of first-degree murder | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Ftoronto-man-charged-with-murder-in-crossbow-triple-homicide%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/cp-logo.jpg | en | null | Toronto man charged with murder in crossbow triple homicide | null | null | www.macleans.ca | TORONTO – A 35-year-old Toronto man is facing murder charges in a triple homicide police said appeared to involve a crossbow.
Two men and a woman were found lying in the driveway of a home in a quiet residential neighbourhood on Thursday afternoon.
Police have said they believe the victims sustained injuries from crossbow bolts, and a crossbow was found lying nearby.
Police took an injured 35-year-old man into custody immediately after discovering the bodies, and on Friday announced that he had been charged with three counts of first degree murder.
Brett Ryan is scheduled to appear in court later on Friday. Police have not released the names of the victims.
Property records show the bungalow is listed in the name of Susan Ryan. She previously co-owned the home with William Ryan, who records show died last year.
Police began investigating the slayings on Thursday afternoon after being summoned to a bungalow in the east end of the city in response to reports of a stabbing.
“Indications were that (a) person had been stabbed — their injuries were fairly serious,” Const. David Hopkinson said at the time. “When officers arrived, they found that person and two others suffering from injuries from what we believe to be a crossbow bolt.”
About four hours after the incident, police said there was a link between the deaths and a suspicious package found in downtown Toronto. They said the downtown scene, which was near a building housing a daycare, was declared safe by 5 p.m.
Vijaya Cruz, whose house backs on to the bungalow where the incident is believed to have taken place, said she was home with her husband Thursday afternoon when he heard a commotion.
“My husband said he heard some screaming, someone was screaming there,” she said. “Then he said he heard ‘bang, bang, bang’ noise, and then someone was saying ‘calm down.'”
Cruz said she soon saw the flashing lights of a fire truck which was among the emergency crews that responded to the scene. Police later knocked on her door and told her three people had died in an incident involving a crossbow.
Cruz said she had seen a couple in the bungalow’s backyard on occasion, but said she didn’t know much about them.
Faiza Siddiqui, who lives on an adjoining street next to a park, said the incident was disturbing.
“It’s scary because this park is always full with kids,” she said. “You don’t hear about people being killed by crossbows, especially in the city. I don’t know why you would need that in the city, have it around the house.”
Police said autopsies on the three victims are slated to take place later Friday. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/toronto-man-charged-with-murder-in-crossbow-triple-homicide/ | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/d1eae6fe61f8d2632ca9c3f1f5f40a8415ede85e0d0ec706f7483d4b4a2507b1.json |
[
"The Associated Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
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] | 2016-08-31T00:49:38 | null | 2016-08-30T18:48:58 | Amid claims that the governor was coming 'unhinged' after controversial unsupported statements, Paul LePage tweets that he will stay on after all | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Fmaine-governor-reports-of-political-demise-greatly-exaggerated%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ap-logo.jpg | en | null | Maine Governor: Reports of political demise 'greatly exaggerated' | null | null | www.macleans.ca | AUGUSTA, Maine — Amid political pressure and calls for his resignation, Republican Gov. Paul LePage on Tuesday suggested that he might be considering stepping aside but seemed to reject the idea entirely hours later in a tweet, saying, “The reports of my political demise are greatly exaggerated.”
Meanwhile, House Republicans prepared to gather Tuesday evening in Augusta to figure out potential ramifications for LePage’s latest crisis while Democrats promoted a rally near the Blaine House to call for the governor to resign.
LePage, who already had a tempestuous relationship with lawmakers, has been criticized in recent days for an obscene voicemail he left for a Democratic legislator and for blaming minorities for the state’s heroin crisis. Democratic lawmakers have warned that LePage was coming unhinged, and they called for a political intervention.
Speaking Tuesday on WVOM-FM radio, LePage apologized for his tirade last week against Rep. Drew Gattine and said it was “unacceptable and totally my fault.” LePage said he intends to make amends, and he is scheduled to meet with Gattine on Wednesday morning in Augusta.
He seemed to toy with the idea of stepping down as governor, saying if he has lost his ability to convince Maine residents that he is the right person for the job, “maybe it is the time to move on.”
“I’m not going to say I’m not going to finish it,” LePage said. “I’m not saying I am going to finish it.”
When asked by WGME-TV hours later about whether he was considering resigning, LePage said “I am looking at every option available to my family.” He said his daughter has been “harassed enormously.”
A tweet later in the day seemed to specifically rule out resignation.
“Regarding rumours of resignation, to paraphrase Mark Twain: ‘The reports of my political demise are greatly exaggerated,'” LePage wrote.
Senate Democratic Leader Justin Alfond called the tweet back-pedalling and an example of LePage’s “erratic” and “troubling” behaviour.
“One moment he says he’s doing the solemn soul-searching necessary to decide whether he is fit to serve,” Alfond said. “The next moment, he’s shooting off a tweet saying he didn’t mean it.”
On Thursday, LePage left a voicemail message for Gattine that said, “I am after you,” and then told reporters he wished he could challenge Gattine to a duel and point a gun “right between his eyes.”
LePage said at the time that his reaction was warranted because he heard Gattine had called him a racist. Gattine has repeatedly denied calling LePage a racist.
Previously, the governor has complained about out-of-state drug dealers named “D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty” impregnating young white girls and has blamed a rise in infectious diseases on immigrants without providing data.
LePage has blamed liberals for inserting race into his comments and distorting his meaning.
At a town hall in North Berwick on Aug. 24, he said he keeps photos of drug dealers arrested in the state in a binder and claims it shows that 90 per cent of them “are black and Hispanic people from Waterbury, Connecticut; the Bronx; and Brooklyn.”
LePage told reporters his repeated mentioning of the race of drug traffickers is relevant because when you go to war, “you shoot at the enemy.”
“And the enemy right now, the overwhelming majority of people coming in are people of colour or people of Hispanic origin,” LePage said. He said that heroin traffickers are mostly minorities while whites are largely responsible for methamphetamine crimes in Maine.
LePage on Tuesday said the photos in his binder come from press reports of drug arrests, not scientific data. The Associated Press has requested a copy of the binder.
In 2014, according to the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Service, 1,211 people were arrested for selling or making drugs in Maine. Of those, 170—or 14 per cent—were black.
There are signs of exasperation with LePage’s conduct among Maine Republicans and Democrats alike. But any possible ramifications against LePage—who has repeatedly avoided punishment and retained his base of political support—are unclear.
Republican Senate President Mike Thibodeau and Republican House Minority Leader Ken Fredette met with LePage at the Blaine House on Monday night. The two had earlier called for “corrective action” but didn’t elaborate on what that might be.
House Majority Leader Jeff McCabe, a Democrat, said that LePage has crossed a line but that he and other lawmakers may reconsider their calls for resignation if the governor agrees to seek professional help for his behaviour and outlines a treatment plan. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/maine-governor-reports-of-political-demise-greatly-exaggerated/ | en | 2016-08-30T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/cf9143c1eb108f77460df016e30acc7592ae2a195aeddc31c8acf0c7bb6b1cf2.json |
[
"Joanna Smith",
"The Canadian Press",
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] | 2016-08-26T12:51:47 | null | 2016-08-25T15:04:56 | 'As a government, we need to look 40 years down the road, not just four,' Trudeau says | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fpolitics%2Ftrudeau-tells-national-caucus-to-stay-focused-on-partys-promises%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Trudeau-caucus.jpg | en | null | Trudeau tells national caucus to stay focused on party's promises | null | null | www.macleans.ca | SAGUENAY, Que. – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cautioned his Liberal MPs on Thursday to resist resting on their laurels now that they have formed government, and to avoid becoming too distracted by the daily ups and downs of life in politics.
“We should be proud of what we’ve accomplished, but never satisfied,” Trudeau told the national Liberal caucus, which gathered in Saguenay, Que., to hammer out the legislative and political agenda before returning to Parliament Hill next month.
“I know that it’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day, but let’s never forget why we are all here in this room — to help the middle class and those working hard to join it.”
The prime minister said that vision applies not just for the rest of the year, nor even the rest of the majority Liberal mandate before the 2019 election, but for generations to come.
A senior government source said that inside the meeting, caucus was urged to think of the goals for the future of the country in terms of a ship, which is both leaking and headed in the wrong direction.
Patch the holes with quicker measures such as the new Canada Child Benefit — a reworked monthly payment to families that Trudeau said will lift some 300,000 children out of poverty — and then focus on changing direction through longer-term goals.
That includes efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and combat climate change — a “daunting challenge,” Trudeau said in his speech — as well as spending on infrastructure and innovation they hope will have positive impacts on the country and its economy for years to come.
Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan said he did not want to confirm any analogies used behind the closed doors of the caucus meeting, but said he agrees with the potential the Canada Child Benefit has to level the playing field.
“As a former police officer, I’ve seen the issues when parents have a difficult time raising their children,” said Sajjan, who mentioned the link between poverty and gang involvement as one example.
The message served as the more uplifting side of the main theme out of the cabinet retreat that took place earlier this week in Sudbury, Ont., which was that the second year of government will involve tough choices and coming to terms with the fact that they can’t please everyone all of the time.
Thursday’s long-game reminder from Trudeau also came after a rough few days of negative attention over expensive mistakes by some rookie ministers, such as the thousands of dollars Health Minister Jane Philpott spent to be chauffeured around in a luxury vehicle owned by a Liberal volunteer.
The caucus retreat is a way for Liberal MPs to reconnect after the summer away from Ottawa, but also to get updates from cabinet ministers on their legislative plans for the fall on everything from electoral reform and UN peacekeeping to a price on carbon and national security.
There were also discussions with newly appointed government House leader Bardish Chagger about proceeding with an ambitious legislative agenda without things once again devolving into the bitter partisanship that tainted the spring session.
Backbench MPs, who did not get to take part in the bonding experience of sharing dormitory rooms at Laurentian University at the cabinet retreat in Sudbury, are also getting face time with ministers to air any grievances and make their pitches for pet projects and policies.
The Quebec caucus, for example, was looking for an update on what to do about Bombardier — Liberal MPs from the province are keen to see the federal government step up with a requested $1-billion bailout.
Economic Development Minister Navdeep Bains, who said he could not tell whether talks would end next month or next year, confirmed Ottawa is still insisting the Montreal-based company its support would mean keeping jobs and research and development resources in Canada.
“This is the healthy discussion we’re having,” Bains said when asked whether this had become a sticking point.
In last year’s federal election, Liberal MP Denis Lemieux took the riding of Chicoutimi-Le Fjord, the first time someone from the party had won the seat since 2000.
Trudeau, who joined his colleagues on a boat ride and plans to go kayaking Friday afternoon, said holding the summer caucus retreat in the region 210 kilometres north of Quebec City was meant to demonstrate that the party has grown nationwide.
Dairy farmers, however, showed up with their tractors outside the hotel Thursday morning to protest the Liberal government not stopping imports of U.S. diafiltered milk proteins. | http://www.macleans.ca/politics/trudeau-tells-national-caucus-to-stay-focused-on-partys-promises/ | en | 2016-08-25T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/82574af6e624df1c3daeed04d75913c6a293f684488044796a7ca9f07b5b4d35.json |
[
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] | 2016-08-30T00:48:50 | null | 2016-08-29T20:16:16 | Last week, Patrick Brown said he would scrap changes to sex ed curriculum. Now, he's saying the opposite. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fpatrick-brown-reverses-position-on-sex-ed-changes%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/MAC13_SOLOMON_POST01-1.jpg | en | null | Patrick Brown reverses position on sex-ed changes | null | null | www.macleans.ca | TORONTO – Ontario’s Progressive Conservative leader now says it was a mistake to pledge to scrap the Liberal government’s sex-ed curriculum if his party wins the 2018 election.
In a letter distributed last week, just days before a byelection in the east Toronto riding of Scarborough-Rouge River, Patrick Brown wrote that a Progressive Conservative government would “scrap the controversial changes to sex ed.”
The curriculum was updated last year, for the first time since 1998, but some parents complained that the government didn’t consult them enough and others were angered by mentions of same-sex relationships, gender identity and masturbation.
In an op-ed published by the Toronto Star, Brown writes that the Scarborough-Rouge River campaign letter went “too far” in saying he would scrap the curriculum because he will not.
The curriculum changes are “hot topics” in the riding, Brown says, and that while parents should be consulted, it doesn’t mean “opening the door to intolerance.”
“It is important to have sex education to combat homophobia, and raise important issues like consent, mental health, bullying, and gender identity,” Brown writes.
“I want to correct the record before the byelection on Thursday, whatever the political consequences. I do not want people voting in Scarborough-Rouge River thinking I will scrap sex education. I will not.”
A statement released Monday by Institute for Canadian Values president Charles McVety suggests Brown may have indeed lost the social Conservative vote.
“Patrick Brown campaigned to become leader on a pro-family platform, promising to protect children from the radical sex education curriculum of Kathleen Wynne,” McVety wrote.
“It is always sad to see a politician be deceitful, but it is especially troubling when he is so brazen the he will flip three times on the same issue. We have been used, deceived and betrayed.”
Brown’s spokeswoman tweeted Friday that the letter was not a new announcement. Brown himself tweeted late that night that he “strongly” supports an updated curriculum “that takes into account changing attitudes and (the) world in which children now dwell” and said parents must be consulted, but didn’t dispute that he planned to scrap the Liberal curriculum.
During the party’s leadership race last year, Brown spoke at a rally protesting the sex-ed curriculum, saying, “Teachers should teach facts about sex education, not values,” without identifying what parts of the curriculum he felt were teaching values.
The Liberals have alternately accused Brown of harbouring extreme social Conservative views and tried to paint him as “an old-style politician who just says whatever he thinks people want to hear.” | http://www.macleans.ca/news/patrick-brown-reverses-position-on-sex-ed-changes/ | en | 2016-08-29T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/bb15ef91be3521b3b4bad53aea5ddd7124f9485ad2bd8339eb185aa80e0b8540.json |
[
"Terry Pedwell",
"The Canadian Press",
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] | 2016-08-30T02:48:48 | null | 2016-08-29T22:13:34 | eBay pens letter via its sellers to Justin Trudeau warning businesses are harmed by uncertainty about parcel delivery | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Febay-wants-trudeau-to-end-canada-post-labour-dispute%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ebay.jpg | en | null | eBay wants Trudeau to end Canada Post labour dispute | null | null | www.macleans.ca | OTTAWA – E-commerce giant eBay urged Canadian businesses on Monday to write to the prime minister and demand a legislated end to the labour dispute at Canada Post as a threatened work disruption was once again put on hold.
Launch of the letter-writing campaign came as contract negotiations between the Crown agency and its biggest union stretched into overtime, and was dismissed by the opposition New Democrats as interference in the collective bargaining process.
While government officials expressed optimism that a 24-hour extension of the talks would break a months-long impasse over pensions and wages, small and medium-sized businesses have heard it before, said eBay Canada managing director Andrea Stairs.
“Negotiations are ongoing, but we don’t see a solution coming down the pipe,” Stairs said in a telephone interview.
“So we really felt it was time for the prime minister to get involved.”
But NDP Canada Post critic Karine Trudel called the push for legislation “troubling,” warning that it would “only serve to stack the deck against workers and prolong the dispute, not resolve it.”
The letter, emailed to eBay sellers and addressed to Justin Trudeau’s Langevin Block office in Ottawa, encourages the prime minister to “explore legislative solutions to the current situation” at Canada Post and warns that businesses are being harmed by uncertainty about whether parcels will be delivered.
“EBay sellers, like other small and medium businesses across Canada, have been dealing with this uncertainty for months,” the letter states.
“We have been forced to adapt our businesses and make other shipping arrangements for our goods.”
A number of businesses catering to online customers have already offered alternative shipping options, should there be a disruption in deliveries. Indigo Books and Music Inc., announced Monday it would fill home deliveries using carriers other than Canada Post, but didn’t say whether shipping costs would be higher.
Canada Post has been bargaining with its employees for more than nine months, but both sides were far apart as of late last week on key issues including pension changes for new employees and pay scales for rural postal workers.
In a statement issued late Monday night, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers said job action in the form of a refusal of overtime will begin in British Columbia and in the Yukon on Tuesday morning if no settlement is reached with Canada Post.
“The refusal of overtime will rotate to different provinces and territories one day at a time, and is expected to cause minimal disruption to mail service,” the union’s statement said.
CUPW initially said on the weekend it would begin job action on Monday by having its members refuse to work overtime on a rotating basis, starting in Alberta and the Northwest Territories. The plan was halted when both sides agreed to a request for more time from a special mediator mediator, who was brought into the dispute Friday.
In a statement issued by her office early Monday, Labour Minister MaryAnn Mihychuk welcomed the extension of the talks as “an encouraging sign of ongoing progress and a renewed determination to negotiate a new collective agreement.”
CUPW national president Mike Palecek previously said that the union’s planned job action would have little effect on Canada Post customers, noting mail would still be delivered.
Canada Post spokesman Jon Hamilton disagreed with that assessment, warning in a phone interview that the threat of job action was creating uncertainty for customers and would have a huge impact on the business “whether the union likes it or not.”
The federal government hasn’t raised the possibility of legislation to end the contract dispute. During the summer, the prime minister all but ruled out back-to-work legislation to end a threatened lockout of its workers by Canada Post and has repeatedly expressed confidence that a negotiated settlement could be reached.
At the height of the last Canada Post labour dispute in 2011, the former Conservative government passed back-to-work legislation, which ended a lockout by the Crown corporation and put pressure on mail carriers to accept their current collective agreement. CUPW launched a charter challenge of the Restoring Mail Delivery for Canadians Act and in April of this year it was struck down in Ontario Superior Court as unconstitutional. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/ebay-wants-trudeau-to-end-canada-post-labour-dispute/ | en | 2016-08-29T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/4e7b84e5db8cf73b952a5509a9a6f8802f92cd88453925f9fdeb693a1674a764.json |
[
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"Shannon Proudfoot"
] | 2016-08-26T14:48:49 | null | 2016-08-26T10:00:12 | We tested Peter Dyakowski on everything from reality TV to Nicolas Cage movies. Can you beat his 87%? | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fneed-to-know%2Fhey-smart-guy-can-you-beat-our-genius-at-trivia%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/quiz-sell1.jpg | en | null | Hey, smart guy! Can you beat our Genius at trivia? | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Welcome back to the Maclean’s Quiz, a diversion designed by Terrance Balazo to test your trivia skills. Good luck, and remember: no Internet assistance allowed.
We’ve also invited the Maclean’s Genius, Peter Dyakowski, to take the quiz. Dyakowski is a lineman with the CFL’s Hamilton Ticats who also bested the competition in CBC’s Canada’s Smartest Person contest in 2012. And we don’t call him our genius for nothing—he solved the viral Singapore brain teaser that had been stumping the Internet. (And during his workout, no less!) And try to beat his very Canadian score at our very Canadian Canada Day Quiz here!
This week, we tested Dyakowski on everything from reality TV and rugby, to Nicolas Cage movies and European capitals. How did he do? He scored 87 per cent.
Ready to try your hand? Click here to take the Quiz,or take it below. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/need-to-know/hey-smart-guy-can-you-beat-our-genius-at-trivia/ | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/831f2cd4204962a3212ee9087e7ba44fd30d8a369976c4c7bde591d3678989c6.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-29T20:49:20 | null | 2016-08-29T14:34:04 | The federal regulatory body will try to resume proceedings Tuesday after protests against TransCanada's pipeline project | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fnational-energy-board-cancels-first-day-of-energy-east-hearings-after-protests%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/pch101357725_high.jpg | en | null | National Energy Board cancels first day of Energy East hearings after protests | null | null | www.macleans.ca | MONTREAL – Protesters chanting anti-pipeline slogans forced the cancellation Monday of the first day of hearings in Montreal into TransCanada’s Energy East project.
The head of the hearings for the National Energy Board said the federal regulatory body will try to resume proceedings Tuesday.
“TransCanada will not pass,” screamed one protester as police dragged him away from a downtown conference room.
Police made three arrests. Two men aged 35 and 44 were charged with assaulting a police officer and with obstruction of justice, while a 29-year-old woman was charged with obstruction of justice.
The 35-year-old man remained detained as of early Monday afternoon, while the two others were released.
Montreal Mayor Denis Coderre, along with the mayor of nearby Laval and other municipal representatives, walked out of the hearings not long after the demonstrators charged in.
Coderre was the first person scheduled to give testimony Monday but chose instead to leave, calling the protests a “masquerade.”
He and many provincial politicians and First Nations groups oppose TransCanada’s project to transport crude oil from Alberta to New Brunswick.
“There are too many problems we are witnessing to accept the project,” Coderre told reporters after he decided to leave Monday’s hearings.
“We’re saying the project (TransCanada) presented is wrong, it’s bad and we don’t have the answers. And frankly one of the main issues is contingency plans, everything regarding safety.”
Coderre asked last week for the hearings to be suspended after media reports revealed that two of the three NEB commissioners overseeing the review process met former Quebec premier Jean Charest, who was at the time a lobbyist for TransCanada (TSX:TRP).
He said he wasn’t calling for the commissioners to resign, but that there was a perception of bias.
Nonetheless, Coderre said it was important for him to give testimony in order for the NEB and the rest of the country to appreciate the concerns of local citizens.
One of the anti-pipeline protesters, Kristian Gareau, entered the room and started chanting and clapping with the other protesters.
He said the entire NEB process is illegitimate because two of the commissioners had met with Charest.
“There is a perception of bias,” said Gareau, 36. “These two commissioners are part of this democratic institution, which has the sweeping power of a federal court.
“So a judge cannot go and meet with people in a back room. It just shows this smug elite privilege which is completely unacceptable.”
The hearings are set for this week in Montreal before moving to Quebec City the week of Oct. 3. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/national-energy-board-cancels-first-day-of-energy-east-hearings-after-protests/ | en | 2016-08-29T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/fbfbd4385cab85864c2a7cf269cb849c5ad07faec1583ee6b1c42a4dd70f0bd5.json |
[
"Jaime Weinman",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-29T22:49:19 | null | 2016-08-29T17:14:47 | Jaime Weinman on the charms and talents of New Hollywood comedy star Gene Wilder, who has died at 83 | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fculture%2Fmovies%2Fremembering-gene-wilder-the-everyman-star-both-from-and-of-the-past%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MAC37_GENE_WILDER_POST01.jpg | en | null | Remembering Gene Wilder, the everyman star both from and of the past | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Gene Wilder, who has died at the age of 83, was one of many unlikely movie stars who emerged in the New Hollywood era that began in the late 1960s. But unlike most of these other stars, he found his niche as a comedy star in an era that didn’t have a lot of great comedy stars.
His breakout role, after working his way up on Broadway and having a small and effective part in Bonnie and Clyde, was in Mel Brooks’ The Producers as the nerdy, self-described hysteric Leo Bloom. Not only did Wilder get an Oscar nomination for the part, he made a creative contribution as well: in a courtroom scene near the end of the film, Brooks allowed Wilder to expand a speech with his own rewrites and improvisations, adding a big chunk of dialogue that isn’t in Brooks’s script. (“I was…. this man…. no one ever called me Leo before. I mean, I know it’s not a big legal point, but even in kindergarten they used to call me Bloom. I never sang a song before. I mean with someone else, I never sang a song with someone else before. This man…. this man… this is a wonderful man.”) Wilder’s creativity impressed Brooks enough that they worked together on the script of Young Frankenstein, one of two back-to-back comedy hits he did with Brooks (the other was his supporting role in Blazing Saddles).
Apart from his collaborations with Brooks, Wilder is probably best known today for playing the title role in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (that is, he played Wonka, not the factory), and for a number of comedies he did with Richard Pryor; the two of them had such chemistry that a lot of us instinctively think of them as a comedy team, even though a lot of their movies together aren’t very good. A lot of Wilder’s filmography, in fact, is unfortunately not very good; most of the movies he wrote and directed himself didn’t have much success, and in the 1980s he chose a lot of bad comedies. He wasn’t by any means the only New Hollywood star to make inconsistent choices after the New Hollywood era ended, and after the death of his wife Gilda Radner, he did less film acting and more writing.
One of his specialties seemed to be playing an Old Hollywood character for the New Hollywood era. A lot of his most popular movies are pastiches of older styles: Young Frankenstein is as much a take-off of 1930s movies as it is a parody, and Silver Streak is mostly a tribute to Hitchcock movies. But Wilder doesn’t look or act like the kind of stars who would have been in this type of movie in the 1930s; his hairstyle alone would not have been tolerated back then. So he inhabits these old-fashioned subgenres while also standing a bit outside them; his appeal is that he seems more like a regular guy than a movie star, so we can identify with him as he lives out our dream of being in a part that might once have been played by John Wayne or Cary Grant.
Still, The Producers may still be his most important performance. Up against the star, Zero Mostel, the biggest ham in the universe, Wilder counters with his own, different, more controlled hamminess, playing a meek character who occasionally explodes in ways that are both realistic and funny.
One of the most iconic lines from that movie comes when Wilder, deciding to join in Mostel’s illegal get-rich-quick scheme, shouts, “I want everything I’ve ever seen in the movies!” It’s a testament to the late Wilder’s charm, and his talent, that we believed he was the kind of person who didn’t already have everything we’d ever seen in the movies. | http://www.macleans.ca/culture/movies/remembering-gene-wilder-the-everyman-star-both-from-and-of-the-past/ | en | 2016-08-29T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/9163d655faf235ba8c934fb4a86e468ddcdd8712fe7ccbfdac00c3d09e84a0ce.json |
[
"Bob Weber",
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald"
] | 2016-08-26T13:02:42 | null | 2016-08-25T16:48:04 | Deline will get what is being called Canada's first combined aboriginal-public government | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fnwt-towns-unique-self-government-structure-seen-as-model%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/cp-featured.jpg | en | null | NWT town's unique self-government structure seen as model | null | null | www.macleans.ca | DELINE, N.W.T. – A tiny northern community is preparing to break ground in aboriginal self-government with a deal taking effect next week that’s being watched across the country.
“We get calls from all over Canada – international, too,” said Raymond Tutcho, who on Thursday will become the head of what is being called Canada’s first combined aboriginal-public government.
“We have a bit of a unique model,” said Fred Talen, head negotiator for the Northwest Territories.
“We have a government that certainly represents Dene and Metis of Deline. It’ll also do all things for all residents including grading the roads and providing municipal services for everyone.
“I’m not aware of any agreement that creates what this (does).”
The new Deline administration will take over from the local band council, the land-claims body and the municipal government.
Its decisions will apply to Deline’s Dene and non-Dene residents and its power will range from decisions over land use to municipal services, education and health.
The leader must be Dene and the deal gives council the right to guarantee up to three-quarters of its seats for band members, who make up about 90 per cent of the community’s 450 residents. But some seats will be open to non-band members in regular elections.
Those non-members will not be eligible to vote in matters concerning the land claim.
The idea was to give local people more control over local decisions, said Tutcho.
“It’s more of a direct control. We’ve got powers to make law for ourselves.”
The deal includes the promise of a funding agreement from the territory and Ottawa. The Deline council will also have the right to levy its own taxes on all residents.
The Deline agreement will be considered a treaty under Canada’s Constitution, said Talen. However, federal and territorial laws will continue to apply in the community.
The Deline government will only be able to supercede territorial or federal law in specific areas outlined in the agreement. It could, for example, pass a law banning alcohol in the community, even though it’s legal everywhere else.
It will also have extensive powers over school curriculum and teacher certification. It will be able to regulate gambling and the certification of traditional healers.
Tutcho said the new government’s first goal will be to simply find its feet and pass the necessary enabling legislation to operate. After that, it will focus on ensuring existing rules and guidelines conform to Dene beliefs.
“The idea that our laws pertain to our language and spirituality and everything has to be put in there. That’s going to take time.”
Non-aboriginals have to be consulted as well, said Tutcho.
“It’s for non-aboriginal people, too. We have to accommodate their issues, too.”
Talen said the Deline agreement, which stems from the Sahtu land claim for the west-central N.W.T., is being looked at as model for at least four other self-government deals in the territory.
“It does set a precedent and one that other negotiations in the N.W.T. have considered carefully and are following quite closely,”said Talen.
The Tli Cho agreement, which covers the territory’s central region, is similar. But its community governments are part of territorial legislation, not the Constitution.
Deline residents are looking forward to the new regime, Tutcho said.
“We are really excited about it,” he said.
“We’ve got all eyes on us to see how it turns out for our people. We are really watching ourselves, too, to make sure we’re making the right choices for everybody.” | http://www.macleans.ca/news/nwt-towns-unique-self-government-structure-seen-as-model/ | en | 2016-08-25T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/4774b19f4e972709aba67ee267940556a199a0fafb31ed57712e710c0ca17087.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T13:04:23 | null | 2016-08-25T19:57:50 | The union representing nearly 51,000 postal workers will be in a legal strike position by Aug. 28 | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fclaiming-canada-post-has-forced-a-labour-dispute-cupw-issues-strike-notice%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/MAC30_CANADA_POST_POST01.jpg | en | null | Claiming Canada Post has forced a labour dispute, CUPW issues strike notice | null | null | www.macleans.ca | OTTAWA – Labour Minister MaryAnn Mihychuk said Canada Post and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers will begin working with a special mediator Friday morning in the face of a union threat of job action.
“In an attempt to push the two parties, help them facilitate a mediated, negotiated settlement, we’ve got a special mediator coming in who will start working with both parties tomorrow morning,” Mihychuk said Thursday evening in Saguenay, Que., where she was attending the Liberal summer caucus retreat.
“We hope to have significant resolution by Sunday,” Mihychuk said.
The union representing nearly 51,000 employees issued a 72-hour notice of job action Thursday, accusing the Crown corporation of forcing a labour dispute.
It was not immediately clear whether the action would result in a disruption of mail and parcel deliveries, something that — if it does happen — could come as early as next week.
The union said the notice, delivered to management just hours before a strike mandate was set to expire, “listed anticipated job actions” but stopped short of a full-blown walkout. The union hasn’t said exactly what actions it was planning.
The notice puts postal carriers in a legal strike position by Aug. 28.
In a statement, CUPW national president Mike Palecek said Canada Post forced the union’s hand by refusing to accept a request from the federal labour minister to continue negotiations under a 24-hour deadline extension with the help of a special mediator.
“This was an eleventh-hour intervention from the government to avoid a dispute and of course we said, ‘Yes,'” said Palecek.
“From the outset, our goal has been a negotiated collective agreement without service disruptions. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Canada Post, whose president and CEO Deepak Chopra refused the minister’s request.”
But a spokesman for the agency said that was not the case.
“Canada Post will fully co-operate in the (mediation) process,” Jon Hamilton said in an email.
“We hope that the assistance of a neutral third party will help both parties address the real challenges facing the postal service caused by declining mail volumes and increasing pension obligations.”
The union’s strike mandate was set to expire at midnight.
Had it expired, Canada Post employees would likely have had to vote to approve another mandate, a costly process that could take up to two months to complete.
CUPW had asked the agency to allow an extension of the mandate, a request that was refused as “inappropriate.”
The two sides had been in sometimes bitter negotiations for more than nine months but were still far apart on key issues, including pay equity for rural carriers and proposed changes to the Canada Post pension plan, despite days of intensive talks that carried through last weekend.
CUPW offered a glimmer of hope Thursday that a strike could be averted, saying it’s still prepared to talk.
“We are still willing to withdraw our notice if Canada Post agrees to an extension,” said Palecek.
The Crown corporation also has the option to lock out workers.
A pay equity issue pitting rural and urban carriers against each other and a proposed move from a defined benefit pension plan to a defined contribution plan for new employees are the main stumbling blocks in the dispute.
The union claims rural postal workers earn, on average, nearly 30 per cent less than city carriers.
Other issues revolve around part-time and temporary work, staffing improvements and the possible closure of nearly 500 retail postal outlets that could result in the elimination of up to 1,200 full-time jobs that are currently protected.
Although Mihychuk hoped the latest effort would bring results over the weekend, she cautioned that it might not work.
“Canadians need to get prepared for a potential work stoppage,” she said.
“I think that’s the reality.”
With files from Joanna Smith in Saguenay, Que. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/claiming-canada-post-has-forced-a-labour-dispute-cupw-issues-strike-notice/ | en | 2016-08-25T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/a7ff58590c57edbdeed2c24a87619e07a544a964c73739383291e90c32030988.json |
[
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff",
"Shannon Proudfoot"
] | 2016-08-29T16:49:12 | null | 2016-08-29T12:22:02 | Win or lose, Donald Trump has elevated a new kind of politics—one of provocative non-accountability | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fpolitics%2Fdonald-trumps-new-politics-of-unaccountability%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MAC36_COULD_TRUMP_HAPPEN_HERE_CAROUSEL01.jpg | en | null | Could Donald Trump happen in Canada? | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Never mind a week. For Donald Trump, a few seconds in politics can be a dangerously long time. Less than three months before Americans go to the polls, as Republican campaigners wait with dread for his next verbalized brain cramp, the party’s nominee keeps showing the speed and ease with which he can demolish all effort to make him seem credible. You’d think he was doing it on purpose.
Trump’s recent suggestion that gun rights supporters might take matters into their own hands to keep Hillary Clinton out of the Oval Office was the appalling case in point: mere hours after delivering a speech in Detroit, one meant to cast him as an informed and responsible steward of the U.S. economy, he blew apart that spadework with his smirking aside about the threat Clinton posed to a constitutional right to bear arms. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” he shrugged, before adding: “Although the Second Amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know.”
There was no denying how badly the statement scanned, and coming hard on the heels of his attack against the family of an Arab-American soldier who’d died in Iraq, it added to the aura of irresponsibility surrounding his campaign. With each racially charged remark, with each thinly veiled exhortation to violence, one wonders what kind of country Trump hopes to govern should he defy the polls and win.
The question applies to his actual platform as surely as to his inflammatory musings. One regrettable outcome of the Second Amendment uproar was that it pre-empted serious examination of Trump’s speech in Detroit, where he doubled down on proposals to scrap NAFTA, pick a trade war with China and force Mexico to pay for a wall on the southern U.S. border. Trump offers such ideas in the name of “protecting American jobs.” But they’re so unworkable, and so potentially damaging to the interests of voters Trump claims to represent, that long-time campaign observers like Stephen Craig are warning of a failed presidency should he try to enact them. “Who’s going to support the Muslim ban? How are we going to get this wall built?” asks Craig, a political scientist at the University of Florida who has studied the impact of campaigns. “How much energy if he becomes president is he going to put into trying to get these things done?”
If Trump seems unworried by such mundanities, perhaps it’s because voters in the U.S., and throughout the Western world, seem increasingly comfortable with the politics of non-accountability. Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, the two most visible leaders of the “Brexit” campaign, spent weeks making sweeping claims of what the U.K. stood to gain by leaving the European Union—and dark forebodings of foreigners stealing jobs from native-born Britons if it didn’t. Farage’s campaign had claimed, among other things, that decoupling would free up some $500 billion annually for Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), an assertion they had emblazoned on the side of bus.
To the world’s astonishment, Britons bought it, voting 52 per cent in favour of abandoning the EU. But with the actual process of Brexiting suddenly in motion, the principal proponents of the idea shrank from the task: Johnson sloughed off calls to run to replace David Cameron as Conservative leader and prime minister, while Farage quit his position as leader the U.K. Independence Party, saying he needed “a break.” As for that NHS promise, Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith, a key Leave supporter, waved the number off as “an extrapolation,” adding with breathtaking levity: “Our promises were just a series of possibilities.”
Not, in short, an inspiring example of leadership. Yet the success of their campaign has inspired demagogues of a purer strain, who are keen to capitalize on the anxiety. In the Netherlands, Party for Freedom Leader Geert Wilders has proposed a “Nexit” for his own country, working diligently to fuse Euroskepticism with anti-Muslim tension. In a newspaper op-ed last month, he claimed the EU’s mishandling of “the immigration crisis” had allowed Muslims to pour into the continent unchecked. “Islam does not belong in Europe,” Wilders wrote. “We must stop all immigration from Islamic countries and start de-Islamizing.” In France, Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Front Party is polling as high as 35 per cent with its warnings that Muslims will impose their religious values in France if allowed (though Le Pen’s proposal to take France out of the EU, à la Brexit, is less popular).
That kind of messaging has lifted leaders like them and Trump from their status as political provocateurs to legitimate contenders for power. But what happens if they take the next step? Governing, notes Craig, is a lot harder than stirring up hostility: unless they plan to tear up their countries’ constitutions, he says, they’ll soon find that forging their rhetoric into viable legislation demands self-restraint, consensus-building and tolerance for others’ views. In short, the opposite of what’s gotten them to where they are.
In the Trump camp, there have been fleeting signs of that realization hitting home. In July, the candidate’s son and adviser, Donald Jr., reached out to Ohio governor and former Republican leadership candidate John Kasich, whose record of coalition-building and building support for his program might have lent some measure of coherence to Trump’s demolition-derby style of politics. According to media reports that were later confirmed by Kasich, Trump Jr. said his father would put Kasich in charge of both “foreign policy and domestic policy” if the veteran Republican joined the Trump ticket as candidate for vice-president. What, if any, responsibility that would leave Trump was unclear (his team denied the accuracy of the story).
In the end it didn’t matter. Kasich demurred, leaving the veep nod to Mike Pence, the rigidly right-wing governor of Indiana. Trump last week shuffled his campaign team, handing the top job to Stephen Bannon, an executive of the right-wing Breitbart News site and a self-professed fan of Trump at his most provocative.
The candidate himself, meanwhile, reverted to customary excess, repeatedly calling President Barack Obama the “founder” of ISIS and proposing an ideological litmus test for prospective Muslim immigrants. So the campaign of destruction continues apace, raising the question of what outcome it might produce in the hands of a more disciplined, less narcissistic leader. Trump might be headed for an election-day embarrassment. But he and others have elevated a new, zipless style of politics—one to which experts warn no Western democracy, not even Canada, should consider itself immune.
Kasich may have been scared off by the perplexing questions all this raises: why is such potentially destructive politics working? Do its adherents really want to see it in action?
About all we know at this stage is that they’re feeling threatened. In the U.S., as in Britain and Europe, the white, middle class has been hit hard by the exodus of manufacturing jobs to countries where labour is cheaper, and by historic shifts in income distribution. A recent analysis by the Pew Research Center, for example, found the share of American adults living in middle-income households decreased in 203 of the country’s 229 largest metropolitan areas, while the share in the lower-income tier rose in 160 areas. The median income also fell in all but eight of those areas, which comprise 76 per cent the population.
With disparity has come a sense of political impotence: mainstream parties increasingly assume that the influence of the white, working class is on the wane. Add the transformative effects of international migration, say experts, and voters’ feeling of helplessness can take on existential dimensions. Matthew Goodwin, co-author of a 2014 book examining the rise of extremist politicians in Britain, makes much of the disproportionate strength of the Leave vote in communities that have seen the greatest influx of EU migrants over the last decade. “Really, this was a case of identity trumping economics,” he says. “The outcome of the referendum was intimately tied up with our experience of the EU membership, and how people have perceived that to have changed their local communities.”
It also made clear that white voters are not the spent electoral force that party data-jocks assumed. In the U.S., according to a recent analysis by the New York Times, the sub-group of white, blue-collar electors from which Trump draws his support has been significantly undercounted, which might explain why so many pundits were caught off guard by his success in the primaries. The problem is that parties’ demographic models rely heavily on election exit polls that provide an incomplete profile of the electorate. During the 2012 U.S. election, for example, they suggested 23 per cent of voters were white, over age 45 and lacking college degrees; more recent research, based on census numbers and data from individual voter files, pegs their share closer to 30 per cent—a difference of about 10 million people in an election in which 129 million went to the polls.
The anger bubbling within this demographic was no secret. But even close followers of the political mood were surprised by the suddenness with which America’s better angels scattered. The taste for Trump’s name-calling, Muslim-bashing and mockery of civil debate has no precedent in presidential politics, says Craig, the University of Florida professor, and that’s exactly why it works: it’s a thumbing of the nose at convention that signals an abrupt break with the politics of the past, and never mind the consequences. The consummate conventionality of Trump’s opponent—a former first lady, senator for New York, secretary of state and all-round avatar of the ruling class—only feeds the syndrome. Fully 55 per cent of Republicans tell pollsters they see their choice less a vote in favour of Trump than one against Hillary Clinton.
At its worst, this antipathy lies beyond Trump’s capacity to contain. Supporters have been recorded at his rallies shouting “Hillary’s a whore!” and other misogynistic epithets at Clinton. Vendors outside last month’s Republican National Convention in Cleveland did brisk business selling a button featuring an unflattering photo of Clinton with the slogan: “Life’s a bitch. Don’t vote for one.” Others have directed their hostility toward Muslims and Hispanics. “Build the wall! F–k those dirty beaners!” hollered one man during a Trump appearance last spring in Dayton, Ohio.
The depth of the fervour has some in this country wondering whether it might take hold here and, if so, how to head it off. It’s thought that Canada’s positive experience with immigration mutes the politics of xenophobia: thanks to geography, the country sees nothing like the waves of migrants landing in Europe, or crossing into the U.S. from Mexico. But David Green, a professor at the University of British Columbia’s Vancouver School of Economics, suspects Canada’s recent resource boom played no less a role, forestalling the increase in inequality seen in other countries by preserving high-paying jobs for people without college degrees. “Those middle-income guys don’t feel like the world is turning against them in the same way,” Green says, noting that employment in Alberta and Saskatchewan surged just as Ontario’s manufacturing sector was nose-diving.
The acid test, he warns, is yet to come. Western Canada now lies in the throes of an oil bust, while there’s no sign of recovery in central Canada’s manufacturing sector. Soon, says Green, Canada’s white working class could feel severe pain, “and that’s when you start getting angry white men looking around for [political] options. To me, the danger lies in Canadians doing something we do fairly often, and that’s look south of the border and decide we’re better, we’re fundamentally different. We’re not.”
We’re certainly not immune to the allure of populists and iconoclasts. Rob Ford won the Toronto mayoralty in 2010 by setting himself up as a foil to articulate, well-groomed candidates whom he portrayed as creatures of the system, beholden to “unions and special interests.” Working-class voters—many nursing grievances toward the city’s downtown elite—were delighted by his refusal to play by the unwritten rules, mocking his opponents and brushing off media; they turned out to the polls in unprecedented numbers to support him. Another outlier, Kevin O’Leary, the venture capitalist known for his part on CBC’s Dragons’ Den, has been mooted for the federal Conservative leadership in part because of his undeniable similarities to Trump. Like the Republican nominee, he’s built an enormous following on reality TV, where he excels in the delivery of glib judgments. But O’Leary has shown no appetite for Trump’s brand of ethnic and gender chauvinism. And Ford, who died of cancer in March, never seemed bent on laying waste to the political landscape. Though plenty divisive, he practised populism in the name of winning power and trying to enact his program of tax cuts and spending curbs.
Canadians’ apparent faith in that quaint model, where leaders present platforms they imagine will serve the common good, may be what sets them apart from their counterparts in other Western democracies. A Quinnipiac University poll released in June found that fewer than a quarter of U.S. respondents said they believe that Trump, if he wins, will be able to build his vaunted wall and have Mexico pay for it. Fully, 39 per cent said he will try and fail and 29 per cent said he won’t even try. Just 19 per cent believed he’ll be able to deport 11 million illegal immigrants, as he has vowed to do.
The same air of disbelief has emerged in Britain, with one in 10 poll respondents saying they don’t believe Brexit will be implemented, as if the whole campaign had been nothing more than theatre. They might yet prove correct, because in the same survey, published by the Independent newspaper, seven per cent of Leave voters said they’d reverse their choice if they had a do-over—almost enough to erase the decision—while some four million people have signed a petition calling for a revote. Khembe Gibbons, a lifeguard from Suffolk, summed up the sentiments of the “mulligan” crowd when he told surveyors he now feels misled by the Leave campaign’s claims and promises. “I personally voted Leave believing these lies, and I regret it more than anything,” he said. “I feel genuinely robbed of my vote.”
It’s an encouraging sign for fans of sober second thought, if not for the idea that campaigns matter. And there are indications that similar doubts will prevail in the U.S., where poll averaging suggests Trump’s rhetorical excesses have dearly cost him. By the end of last week, he trailed Clinton by 10 points, and was openly acknowledging the prospect of defeat, raising more questions as to whether he ever imagined his toxic campaign would carry him to the White House. “It’s either going to work, or I’m going to, you know, I’m going to have a very, very nice, long vacation,” he shrugged to CNBC.
Still, there are miles to go before voting day, and plenty more ground for Trump to scorch. That he keeps burning himself makes him no less a menace to everyone else. | http://www.macleans.ca/politics/donald-trumps-new-politics-of-unaccountability/ | en | 2016-08-29T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/c079724ebc82d358711c0c579d0e06a130a80f24964c19186912ffd4483b6dbb.json |
[
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Charlie Gillis",
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"Shannon Proudfoot"
] | 2016-08-26T12:57:13 | null | 2016-08-24T16:36:59 | Canada set a high standard in Rio, and is emerging as a Summer Olympics power | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Folympics%2Fhow-rio-canadas-breakthrough-olympics%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MAC36_OLYMPICS_POST02.jpg | en | null | How Rio became Canada's breakthrough Olympics | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Andre De Grasse won three medals at the Rio Olympic Games, but didn’t realize his full potential. The 21-year-old phenom can go faster—much faster. It’s only been four years since he took up sprinting, and his form is still imperfect. Coaches have fixed some of his worst habits—throwing his head back, getting fully upright too early in the race. But he remains a twitch too slow out of the blocks, and often expends his energy in the wrong places. It’s an oddity of the sport that the quickest man is usually the one making the least effort.
In the 100-m race, where the Markham, Ont., native won bronze in a personal-best 9.91 seconds, De Grasse was .10 behind Usain Bolt’s gold, and .02 off Justin Gatlin’s silver. Afterwards, he and Stuart McMillan, the American who has been coaching him since December, both talked about how he should have been closer to 9.6 seconds, or even 9.5. The world record, set by Bolt in his prime in 2008, is 9.58.
De Grasse’s 200-m, where he came second to Bolt in 20.02, was slow by his own blazing standards. In the semifinal, he’d run 19.80 and set a new Canadian record as he grinned and pushed the big Jamaican legend to the line. De Grasse said his legs were maybe a little tired. His coach put it down to trying too hard on the curve, tightening up just enough to allow Bolt to pull away down the straight. “We had a strategy to try to tire out Usain [in the semifinal] and I think we did that,” said McMillan. “That’s why we’re a little bit frustrated. He was there for the taking, and we just couldn’t get it done.”
In the 4 x 100-m relay, Canada came fourth behind Jamaica, Japan and the United States, then got upgraded to bronze after the Americans were disqualified for an illegal hand-off. De Grasse’s anchor run propelled his team to another new Canadian record: 37.27. (The old one, 37.69, the gold-winning performance by Robert Esmie, Glenroy Gilbert, Bruny Surin and Donovan Bailey in Atlanta, had stood for 20 years.)
Late that night, after Bolt completed his endless triple-triple gold celebration and Olympic retirement by tossing a javelin 56 m across the stadium infield, McMillan took to Twitter to deliver a message. “For those who think you have to sprint maximally to get faster—not once all year did De Grasse sprint at maximal speed,” he wrote. “Rhythm, timing, technique, coordination, fluidity, flow, etc.—all abilities that can be improved via sub-maximal sprinting.” In other words, the best is yet to come.
This is good news for Canada. But of course, there was no shortage of things to be happy about coming out of Rio. Canada’s 22-medal performance—four gold, three silver and 15 bronze—matches Atlanta in 1996 as the true national high-water mark for a Summer Games. (The 44 won at the Soviet-boycott-thinned L.A. Games in 1984 will always have an asterisk.) It was enough hardware to put Canada among the top 10 countries in overall haul. And more encouraging still is how and where they were won. Six in track and field—including a high jump gold from Derek Drouin, and bronzes from Damian Warner in decathlon and Brianne Theisen-Eaton in heptathlon. Six more in the swimming pool, led by 16-year-old Penny Oleksiak’s amazing gold, silver and two relay bronzes. A pair of bronzes in team sports: women’s soccer and rugby sevens. Two more in cycling—team sprint on the track and Catharine Pendrel’s mountain bike comeback. Another two in women’s diving, a repeat gold in trampoline from Rosie MacLennan, and a joyful top-of-the-podium finish by Erica Wiebe in women’s 75-kg wrestling. Canada was winning medals all over the place in Rio: a Winter Olympic powerhouse that is suddenly on the verge of becoming a summer nation too.
A tone was set before the Games even officially began, with Canada’s women’s soccer team, ranked 10th in the world, taking down the fifth-ranked Australians 2-0. (They would end up doing the same to third-ranked France, and splitting a pair of games versus Germany, the world’s No. 2 power, and eventual winner of Rio gold.) Then it carried over to the pool with a bronze in the women’s 4 x 100-m freestyle relay on the first finals night and never really stopped. Canada medalled for 13 straight days in Rio, and there were only two days of competition without a podium finish. In Beijing in 2008, the first medal finally arrived at the Games’ midway point, the second Saturday. In Athens in 2004, the country had but one bronze at the beginning of week two.
“We’ve had so many great performances,” said Curt Harnett, a three-time Olympic cycling medallist and Canada’s chef de mission in Rio. “And it’s not only depth, but youthfulness. It’s a young team in so many ways. Our future does look so bright that those kids better be wearing some shades.”
The Canadian Olympic Committee’s public prediction coming into Rio was 19 medals. Privately, it was hoping for somewhere between 20 and 24. It’s never an exact science; favourites fail at every Games. But whether through effort, momentum or luck—or more likely a combination of all three—Canadians converted almost all of their big chances. And several unheralded athletes came heart-wrenchingly close to joining the podium party. Evan Dunfee led for much of the 50-km race walk, and was in third when a bodycheck from a Japanese competitor knocked him off his stride near the finish line. (His post-race protest briefly gave Canada another bronze before it was overturned on appeal. Dunfee, to his own and his country’s credit, refused to pursue the matter further. “I will sleep soundly tonight, and for the rest of my life, knowing I made the right decision,” he explained in a statement. “I will never allow myself to be defined by the accolades I receive, rather the integrity I carry through life.”) At the pool, 21-year-old Santo Condorelli came fourth in the men’s 100-m freestyle, missing bronze by .03 seconds. And on the final night of track and field—while Brazilians were celebrating men’s soccer gold and Canada was singing and crying with the Tragically Hip—there were three more near misses; a fourth from Melissa Bishop in the 800-m, a fourth for Canada’s 4 x 400-m women’s relay team and a fourth from Mohammed Ahmed in the men’s 5,000-m.
So why is Canada finally breaking through at the Summer Games? The simplest answer is money. In the four years running up to the 2008 Beijing Games, Canada’s non-winter sports received $44.3 million in government funding. For the quadrennial leading to London 2012, the amount was increased to $106.2 million. And the total invested coming into Rio was $116.1 million. Add in the cash that flows from corporate backers including RBC, Canadian Tire and Visa, and private funds from groups like B2ten, and Canada’s athletes are being supported in an unprecedented fashion—they’re able to afford the best coaching and support, and train and travel as they need.
Anne Merklinger, CEO of Own the Podium (OTP), the body in charge of allocating most of those funds, says the model that worked so well for Vancouver 2010—a top-of-the-table finish with 14 golds, seven silvers and five bronzes—is now proving its worth in Summer Games too. It took a little longer because the competition is deeper, and the extra cash only really kicked in two years before London. But now the expectation is for Canada to sustain or better its Rio performance at the 2020 Tokyo Games and in 2024.
There are more sports in summer, and the choices about what to target are more difficult, but the guiding principle remains the same. “Wherever there is evidence of medal potential, we are providing a funding recommendation, and that’s consistent across Summer, Winter and the Paralympics,” says Merklinger. “We need to make sure that we do the most with the money available.”
Post-London, OTP and Canada’s sporting federations made a subtle shift, allocating some of the money that would traditionally have gone to high-performance programs to developing athletes instead—kids with the potential to medal in five to eight years. Some of them showed up on the podium in Rio, ahead of schedule. And now, thanks to additional funding announced by the Harper government in 2015—up to $20 million over the next four years to match private sector donations—the country is even better able to balance its Olympic present and future. “There’s lots of depth in the system,” says Merklinger. “And that investment in next-gen is really going to make sure that we don’t leave any athletes behind.”
Some other funding tweaks for the 2016 Games worked: A relatively modest investment helped qualify five teams—women’s soccer, rugby and basketball, and men’s volleyball and field hockey. Two of them won medals, and two more advanced to the final eight.
A couple did not. Rowing Canada’s “small-boat strategy,” a change in focus from men’s and women’s eights with the idea that splitting up the big crews and having more athletes in more races would result in more medals, was a colossal failure. The federation delivered just one podium finish—a silver in women’s lightweight double sculls, from Lindsay Jennerich and Patricia Obee, two holdovers from the London Games. Not much bang for the $17.4 million invested over the past four years. The equestrian team, which received just $1.17 million, won exactly as many medals; Eric Lamaze’s individual bronze.
Canada’s canoe-kayak athletes, who had medalled in five straight Olympics, return from Rio with none, despite receiving $10.4 million in government funding over the quadrennial. “It’s certainly a time for us to pause and reflect with those sports,” says Merklinger, who previously ran Canada’s paddling program. “All the partners are saying the same thing—we need to figure out what we have to do differently.”
Based on their Rio performances, track and field and swimming are likely to receive more money going forward. But there is a limit to what funds alone can accomplish. “It’s not ‘give me more money and I’ll go get more medals,’ ” says Peter Eriksson, Athletics Canada’s head coach. “I don’t think it’s that simple. It’s how you invest the money.”
Eriksson, who took over the program in 2013 after stints with Great Britain’s track and Paralympics teams, has taken a looser approach than some of his predecessors, spreading funds wider and deeper. “You have to build from the bottom up,” he says. “Making the changes we did, we got $3 million to $4 million more out the door directly to the athletes. So that makes a difference.”
After underperforming in London—Drouin’s surprise bronze in high jump was the only medal—Rio’s six podiums marks Canada’s best track and field showing since the 1932 Olympics. Eriksson sees disciplines where there’s still room to improve: distance and endurance events, and the jumps, long and high. But he cautions that Canada is unlikely to again keep pace with China and Great Britain, who had six and seven track medals, respectively, at the 2016 Games. For a country of 35 million, where track ranks well down the sporting list, Canada punched above its weight in Rio. Eriksson thinks four medals might be a more reasonable goal for the 2020 Tokyo Games. All of them gold, however. The bar has been raised, and standards will only get higher, he warns. “We have very tough rules. We’re investing in today’s performance and tomorrow’s potential, not yesterday’s.”
John Atkinson, Swimming Canada’s high-performance director, took over a program that won two medals in London and saw just seven swimmers make a final. He preached the need to improve not just times, but outcomes, pushing athletes to progress to semifinals, then finals, and the three-step podium. “Everybody can improve, no matter where you are in the world,” he says. Up-and-coming talent, like Oleksiak and her fellow 16-year-old medallist Taylor Ruck, were given a chance to compete with more established swimmers for an Olympic berth. In Rio, with one of its youngest teams ever, Canada made more than a dozen finals and won six times. Having finally tasted success, there will be a different attitude heading to Tokyo. “I like to talk about the difference between pressure and stress. I like to think that pressure is good. People can thrive under pressure,” says Atkinson. “Stress is something that can be disruptive. And preparing people to deal with the stress so it doesn’t cause disruption is something we’ll have to look at.”
While all the medals in the pool—and 16 of the country’s 22 in Brazil—were won by women, there is a sense that the gender imbalance won’t be quite so dramatic four years from now. Atkinson points to a core group of young Canadian men, including Condorelli, 21, and Javier Acevedo, who at 18 was the youngest male on the Olympic team, as potential stars in Tokyo. Own the Podium’s Merklinger notes that “strategic” funding choices for Rio—targeted investments in new sports like rugby sevens, or women’s events where the field wasn’t as deep as for the men—helped boost the medal count, making the competitive gap between the women and men look larger than it probably is.
Regardless, Canada finally found some summer confidence, perhaps even a bit of swagger, in Rio. And for the first time in decades, our athletes have come away expecting podiums rather than dreaming of them. Four years from now, with Olympic monsters like Bolt and Michael Phelps finally vanquished by age, if not by the competition, is it too much to hope that maybe a Canadian swimmer or runner might become the global superstar of the Tokyo Games?
De Grasse, at least, seems comfortable with that notion. Perfecting his game, making progress, step by step, until the world is at his feet. “I have a lot left in the tank. I think I can do some incredible things, and run some times that I never thought I could do before,” he proclaimed one night in Rio, while wrapped in a Canadian flag. “I can do it, if I just put my mind to it.” | http://www.macleans.ca/olympics/how-rio-canadas-breakthrough-olympics/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/4ea5649fc5ff90e76b3d87b52d6fd1b5054ef45a62d1d49671d94343ca0858dd.json |
[
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"Anne Kingston",
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] | 2016-08-30T16:49:32 | null | 2016-08-30T12:37:23 | Turkish authorities also detained a former police chief, several governors and nine journalists as they investigate last month's failed coup | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Fanti-coup-probe-in-turkey-detains-istanbul-ex-mayor%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MAC33_GILMORE_FEATURE01.jpg | en | null | Anti-coup probe in Turkey detains Istanbul ex-mayor | null | null | www.macleans.ca | ISTANBUL — Turkey detained a former police chief, several governors and nine journalists Tuesday as part of the probe into the movement allegedly behind last month’s abortive coup, according to state media.
Also, Greek authorities said that a man claiming to be a judge facing persecution in Turkey after the July 15 failed coup had reached the eastern Aegean island of Chios on a boat with a small group of refugees. The Merchant Marine Ministry said the 48-year-old Turk was arrested for illegally entering Greece. A ministry official said he told authorities he would seek asylum in Greece.
Greek asylum officials are currently interviewing eight Turkish military personnel who flew a military helicopter to a northern airport on July 16 seeking protection.
The six helicopter pilots and two flight mechanics deny involvement in the coup. Turkey has requested their extradition.
Over the past week, seven Turkish nationals have clandestinely entered Greece, claiming to be fleeing the government crackdown that followed the coup attempt.
On Tuesday, the Istanbul chief public prosecutor’s office issued a detention order for former Istanbul police chief Huseyin Capkin, an unnamed governor and two district governors, after new evidence surfaced in its investigation into the finances of the movement led by U.S.-based Islamic cleric Fethullah Gulen. The state-run Anadolu Agency says Capkin was detained in the western city of Izmir.
Turkey alleges that Gulen was responsible for the coup attempt that left over 270 people dead. Gulen denies any involvement.
Former Istanbul Gov. Huseyin Avni Mutlu, one deputy governor and three district governors are among those who had been put under arrest earlier this month as part of the coup probe.
Nine journalists, meanwhile, were detained Tuesday in police operations in Istanbul, Ankara and the northwestern province of Kocaeli, according to Anadolu.
The operations came after the Istanbul chief prosecutor’s office issued detention orders on Tuesday for 35 journalists with alleged ties to the Gulen movement. Eighteen of the journalists have left the country and authorities are still searching for the remaining eight.
Two staff colonels accused of co-ordinating military units in Istanbul on the night of the coup were also put under arrest Tuesday, Anadolu reported. Col. Nebi Gazneli and Col. Muslum Kaya had been detained in the central Anatolian province of Konya earlier this month and brought to Istanbul.
Anadolu said that during their testimony they confessed to attempting a coup, but denied that they were members of the Gulen movement.
The Turkish government declared a state of emergency and launched a massive crackdown on Gulen’s supporters in the aftermath of the coup. Around 35,000 people have been detained for questioning and more than 17,000 of them have been formally arrested to face trial, including soldiers, police, judges and journalists.
Tens of thousands more people that the government believes have suspected links to Gulen have been suspended or dismissed from their jobs in the judiciary, media, education, health care, military and local government. Some say they have been wrongly dismissed.
The government crackdown has raised concerns among Turkey’s Western allies and human rights organizations, who have urged the government to show restraint. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/anti-coup-probe-in-turkey-detains-istanbul-ex-mayor/ | en | 2016-08-30T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/fd71fef3b6d63729fa917ad99ac3ae01008e5b693a43cb62ee11e82de43fc836.json |
[
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] | 2016-08-26T13:05:48 | null | 2016-08-25T10:59:57 | 'You can beat the pollsters, you can beat the commentators, you can beat Washington,' Farage tells crowd | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fpolitics%2Fdonald-trump-stage-nigel-farage%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Trump-Farage.jpg | en | null | Donald Trump shares a stage with the real 'Mr. Brexit' | null | null | www.macleans.ca | JACKSON, Miss. – Republican nominee Donald Trump is linking his “movement to take back the country” to Britain’s surprising vote to leave the European Union.
The architect of the withdrawal campaign, known as Brexit, joined the GOP presidential nominee on stage during a rally late Wednesday in Jackson, Mississippi.
“If I was an American citizen, I wouldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton if you paid me,” said Nigel Farage, the outgoing leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party.
“You have a fantastic opportunity here,” he told members of the audience. “You can go out, you can beat the pollsters, you can beat the commentators, you can beat Washington, and you’ll do it by doing what we did for Brexit in Britain.”’
Only moments before, Farage had denounced President Barack Obama for urging the British, before the June 23 referendum, to reaffirm their commitment to the European Union, and said he would not try to influence the American election.
Farage helped propel his party from the political fringe to power broker. Over the past few years, it has won over large numbers of voters from other parties by appealing to concerns about globalization and large-scale immigration.
Farage, who had pushed for the June 23 referendum on whether Britain should remain in the European Union, stepped down as party leader shortly after his side won.
He was the subject of controversy in the hours after the vote, when he stepped back one of the key “leave” pledges that Britain should use the 350 million pounds a week it sends to the EU to fund the National Health Service instead. Asked if he could guarantee that 350 million pounds a week would go to health care, Farage answered: “No, I can’t.”
Trump said Farage’s appearance was an honour and that “the nation’s working people will take control again.”
The billionaire businessman noted the leave side trailed in opinion polls heading into the referendum, and Farage suggested that U.S. voters who might be keeping their personal views silent on the White House race will flock to Trump and propel him to victory.
Trump did support the leave moment, but only in the final days before the vote, after acknowledging earlier that he didn’t know much about the referendum.
“I was very supportive of their right to do it and take control of their own future like exactly what we’re going to be voting for on Nov. 8. November is our chance to redeclare American independence,” he said at the rally.
Farage predicted that Trump’s campaign would “smash the establishment,” prompting polite applause from rally-goers. | http://www.macleans.ca/politics/donald-trump-stage-nigel-farage/ | en | 2016-08-25T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/e5107d5204479841796e77e206b17f3e96767e403763cba98b004c15376058c9.json |
[
"The Associated Press",
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] | 2016-08-26T13:02:16 | null | 2016-08-25T22:45:15 | Tragedy continues to mount in hard-hit places like Amatrice and Accumoli as politicians, prosecutors and priests sort through the rubble | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Fas-earthquake-aftershocks-rattle-italy-the-death-toll-rises%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/12670645.jpg | en | null | As earthquake aftershocks rattle Italy, the death toll rises | null | null | www.macleans.ca | PESCARA DEL TRONTO, Italy—As the search for survivors grinded on, Premier Matteo Renzi pledged new money and measures Thursday to rebuild quake-devastated central Italy amid mounting soul-searching over why the seismic-prone country has continually failed to ensure its buildings can withstand such catastrophes.
A day after the deadly quake killed 250 people, a 4.3 magnitude aftershock sent up plumes of thick grey dust in the hard-hit town of Amatrice. The aftershock crumbled already cracked buildings, rattled residents and closed already clogged roads.
It was only one of the more than 470 temblors that have followed Wednesday’s pre-dawn quake.
Firefighters and rescue crews using sniffer dogs worked in teams around the hard-hit areas in central Italy, pulling chunks of cement, rock and metal from mounds of rubble where homes once stood. Rescuers refused to say when their work would shift from saving lives to recovering bodies, noting that one person was pulled alive from the rubble 72 hours after the 2009 quake in the nearby town of L’Aquila.
“We will work relentlessly until the last person is found, and make sure no one is trapped,” said Lorenzo Botti, a rescue team spokesman.
Worst affected by the quake were the tiny towns of Amatrice and Accumoli near Rieti, 100 kilometres (60 miles) northeast of Rome, and Pescara del Tronto, 25 kilometres (15 miles) further to the east.
Many were left homeless by the scale of the destruction, their homes and apartments declared uninhabitable. Some survivors, escorted by firefighters were allowed to go back inside homes briefly Thursday to get essential necessities for what will surely be an extended absence.
“Last night we slept in the car. Tonight, I don’t know,” said Nello Caffini as he carried his sister-in-law’s belongings on his head after being allowed to go quickly into her home in Pescara del Tronto.
Caffini has a house in nearby Ascoli, but said his sister-in-law was too terrified by the aftershocks to go inside it.
“When she is more tranquil, we will go to Ascoli,” he said.
Charitable assistance began pouring into the earthquake zone in traffic-clogging droves Thursday. Church groups from a variety of Christian denominations, along with farmers offering donated peaches, pumpkins and plums, sent vans along the one-way road into Amatrice that was already packed with emergency vehicles and trucks carrying sniffer dogs.
Other assistance was spiritual.
“When we learned that the hardest hit place was here, we spoke to our bishop and he encouraged us to come here to comfort the families of the victims,” said a priest who gave his name only as Father Marco as he walked through Pescara del Tronto. “They have given us a beautiful example, because their pain did not take away their dignity.”
Italy’s civil protection agency said the death toll had risen to 250 by Thursday afternoon, with more than 180 of the fatalities in Amatrice. At least 365 others were hospitalized, and 215 people were pulled from the rubble alive since the quake struck. A Spaniard and five Romanians were among the dead, according to their governments.
There was no clear estimate of how many people might still be missing, since the rustic area was packed with summer vacationers. The Romanian government alone said 11 of its citizens were missing.
As the search effort continued, the soul-searching began.
Premier Renzi authorized a preliminary 50 million euros in emergency funding and the government cancelled taxes for residents, pro-forma measures that are just the start of what will be a long and costly rebuilding campaign. He announced a new initiative, “Italian Homes,” to answer years of criticism over shoddy construction across the country, which has the highest seismic hazard in Western Europe.
But he also said that it was “absurd” to think that Italy could build completely quake-proof buildings.
“It’s illusory to think you can control everything,” he told a news conference. “It’s difficult to imagine it could have been avoided simply using different building technology. We’re talking about medieval-era towns.”
Those old towns do not have to conform to the country’s anti-seismic building codes. Making matters worse, those codes often aren’t applied even when new buildings are built.
Armando Zambrano, the head of Italy’s National Council of Engineers, said the technology exists to reinforce old buildings and prevent such high death tolls when quakes strike every few years. While he estimated that it would cost up to 93 billion euros ($105 billion) to reinforce all of the historic structures across the country, he said targeted efforts in the riskiest areas could be done for less.
“We are able to prevent all these deaths. The problem is actually doing it,” he told The Associated Press. “These tragedies keep happening because we don’t intervene. After each tragedy we say we will act but then the weeks go by and nothing happens.”
Some experts estimate that 70 per cent of Italy’s buildings aren’t built to anti-seismic standards, though not all are in high-risk areas.
Funding shortfalls and bureaucracy are obstacles to making the country’s buildings quake-resistant. A new law tries to encourage homeowners to make their homes earthquake-proof by reimbursing 65 per cent of the cost over 10 years, but it isn’t enough to push Italians, who are facing years of economic stagnation, to put up the cash to make the upgrades.
Compounding the problem, many of the oldest and most vulnerable structures are in remote villages inhabited mostly by retired Italians getting by on pensions with no cash to spare. In the cities, upgrades are stifled by the condominium-style rules of buildings requiring the agreement of multiple owners for such investments.
“We’re among the best in the world in managing emergencies,” Renzi said, praising the men and women, many of them volunteers, who jump into action when crises hit. “But it’s not enough to be in the vanguard in emergencies.”
Geologists surveyed the damage Thursday to determine which buildings were still inhabitable, while Culture Ministry teams were fanning out to assess the damage to some of the region’s cultural treasures, especially its medieval-era churches.
Italian news reports said prosecutors investigating the quake were looking in particular into the collapse of Amatrice’s “Romolo Capranica” school, which was restored in 2012 using funds set aside after the last major quake in 2009.
In recent Italian quakes, some modern buildings—many of them public institutions—have been the deadliest. Those included the university dormitory that collapsed in the 2009 L’Aquila quake, killing 11 students, and the elementary school that crumbled in San Giuliano di Puglia in 2002, killing 27 children—the town’s entire first-grade class—while surrounding buildings survived unscathed.
Major quakes in Italy are often followed by criminal charges being filed against architects, builders and officials responsible for public works. In the case of the L’Aquila quake, prosecutors also put six geologists on trial for allegedly failing to adequately warn residents about the temblor. Their convictions were overturned on appeal.
In Pescara del Tronto, rescue crews were looking Thursday for three people believed crushed in a hard-to-reach area.
“The dogs from our dog rescue unit make us think there could be something,” said Danilo Dionisi, a spokesman for the firefighters.
Emergency services set up tent cities around the quake-devastated towns to accommodate the homeless, housing about 1,200 people overnight. In Amatrice, 50 elderly people and children spent the night inside a local sports facility.
“It’s not easy for them,” said civil protection volunteer Tiziano De Carolis, who was helping to care for the homeless in Amatrice. “They have lost everything: the work of an entire life, like those who have a business, a shop, a pharmacy, a grocery store.” | http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/as-earthquake-aftershocks-rattle-italy-the-death-toll-rises/ | en | 2016-08-25T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/befa878cf0948442e5aba9d9588ecbdf29d29d2f39087b451183638d636c84ac.json |
[
"Martin Patriquin",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T14:47:52 | null | 2016-03-11T10:20:32 | New Brunsick's economy is in free fall, it has more deaths than births and an ugly language war to rival Quebec’s | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Feconomy%2Fcan-anything-save-new-brunswick%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/MAC11_NEW_BRUNSWICK_POST04.jpg | en | null | Can anything save New Brunswick? | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Katherine McDonnell, aged 104, moved to the Mount Saint Joseph Nursing Home in Miramichi, N.B., four months ago. She was born in Rogersville, a mostly francophone town 50 km south of where she sits now, and lived most her life in nearby Nelson, in a home overlooking the river. She’d still be there were it not for an accident. “I fell on the floor and never walked again,” she says, chuckling in her wheelchair. She and her husband, John Dolan, had three children; a great-grandmother several times over, she has outlived John by a quarter-century and counting.
Along with her demeanour, McDonnell’s age has made her something of a legend in Miramichi—and for good reason. She is among the oldest people in the province, and her memories stretch back to when New Brunswick was an economic powerhouse driven in no small part by what was cut down, dug up and fished out of Miramichi.
Today, Miramichi is a microcosm of New Brunswick’s myriad social and demographic challenges. The closure of most of its mines, lumber and pulp and paper mills, along with the air force base in 1996, spurred an out-migration of its younger residents. The average age of the residents of the region of Campbellton–Miramichi, encompassing roughly a third of the province, is 49.4—the second-highest amongst Atlantic Canada’s 15 economic regions, according to Statistics Canada.
One of the few growth industries in the area is the housing and caring for those, like McDonnell, who have stayed behind. Last May, the government announced Miramichi would be the site for a 240-bed nursing home, which will add to the 4,500 existing nursing home beds in the province. The home, which will be the largest of its kind in the province, “will achieve our goals of creating jobs, growing our economy and supporting families,” Premier Brian Gallant said at the time. He said roughly the same thing a few days earlier about a government investment in a shipyard. Wood, metals and fish used to be New Brunswick’s economic staples; now, more and more, it is old age.
Present-day New Brunswick is testament to the well-worn adage that the story of Atlantic Canada is one of leaving for other places. Nearly 21,000 New Brunswickers—about the population of Dieppe, the province’s fourth-largest city—have left the province since 2005. Though Maritimers often yearn to come home, increasingly more New Brunswickers won’t do so in this lifetime. 2014 marked the first time in its history that there were more deaths than births in the province, a dubious honour shared by Newfoundland and Labrador as well as Nova Scotia.
It doesn’t help that New Brunswick is more drive-through than fly-over; thanks to successive governments and their vote-friendly promises of building roads, it is now possible to drive from the border of Quebec to Nova Scotia on a single tank of gas. The current Liberal government briefly considered installing tolls on its borders; a cynic would say it was to capitalize from the steady outflow of its residents. (The government eventually reneged on the idea.)
Those who stay are faced with these hardening economic and demographic realities, along with a burgeoning language war and a political culture steeped in linguistic tribalism arguably rivalling even that of Quebec. As a result, governing New Brunswick often means pitting north against south, French against English and urban against rural, amidst a stumbling economy and crippling debt, projected to hit $13.5 billion at the end of the fiscal year. (Other provinces like Quebec and Ontario may carry more debt per capita, but they’re better positioned to manage that debt.)
Meanwhile, Brian Gallant’s Liberal government has cut the number of days for debate in the legislature to historic lows, and limited media access to the premier and his caucus. (Despite repeated attempts, Maclean’s was unable to secure an interview with Gallant for this article.)
“You’d think small would be simple, but New Brunswick is the classic example of how that really isn’t true,” says Robert Campbell, president of Mount Allison University in Sackville, N.B. “For a little province like this, we just can’t get our act together.”
Twenty years ago, New Brunswick was in enviable financial shape. Former premier Frank McKenna’s government produced successive surplus budgets and made a significant dent in the province’s debt. “A lot was done to restructure the province during the McKenna years,” says federal auditor-general Michael Ferguson, who held the same position in New Brunswick from 2005 to 2010.
Fast forward to 2015, when economist Richard Saillant published Over A Cliff?, a compendium of New Brunswick’s various economic and social ailments. As the title suggests, the picture isn’t pretty. Saillant invokes the possibility of outright bankruptcy for the province, which has posted five straight budget deficits. An aging population, out-migration, diminished economic opportunities and at times profligate governments put New Brunswick in the dubious company of Greece, Portugal and Italy, only with more trees and less Old World charm.
“I’d say that New Brunswick, and Atlantic Canada more generally, have missed the urbanization boat,” Saillant says. “While there are individual successes in the Maritimes, world-first innovation is disproportionately concentrated in large urban areas.”
About half of New Brunswick’s population lives in rural areas, more than double the number in neighbouring Quebec, according to Statistics Canada. For the government, it means services are more expensive, particularly in the areas of health and education, which together make up 60 per cent of the provincial budget. It also means fewer higher-paying jobs and more reliance on an extraction economy and the federal government. Federal cash transfers make up about 36 per cent of the province’s budget, the second-highest percentage in the country, behind Prince Edward Island.
It also means rural areas have outsized political clout. Saint John, Fredericton and Moncton, the province’s three largest urban centres representing a total of about 188,000 people, have a combined 16 seats. The remaining 33 are mostly rural ridings, which tend to jealously guard their services and institutions even as their populations diminish.
The result, according to former provincial Liberal cabinet minister Kelly Lamrock, is a continuation of New Brunswick’s unsustainable status quo. “We’ve targeted our policies on just getting re-elected and so we prop up failing industries and we bail out failing companies. Atlantic Yarns went under and lost an $80-million loan. The government I was a part of lent $70 million to [Miramichi-based] Atcon, a failing construction company that went under a year later. The Marriott call centre closed. It turns out they were subsidized to the tune of $20,000 a job and just left when the subsidies ran out. And the list goes on. We have generally been about keeping the majority of people comfortable rather than attracting new people.”
New Brunswick’s electoral map reveals another latter-day truth about the province. Following the 2014 elections, with a few exceptions, it is divided between Liberal red in the north part of the province and Progressive Conservative blue in the south. Not coincidentally, this is the rough divide between New Brunswick’s French and English populations. There are 10 sitting anglophone MLAs amongst the Liberals government’s 27 members. The Progressive Conservatives have exactly one francophone MLA in their ranks.
As the country’s sole officially bilingual province, New Brunswick is often held up as the closest thing to that hoary Canadian ideal of compromise and compassion, with the two solitudes living in harmony on the same chunk of rock. Certainly, operating in both French and English has had economic benefits. In the mid-1990s, attracted by the bilingual workforce and government subsidies, call centres and office-support operations began to set up in the province. Today, these industries employ roughly 15,000 people, according to a 2015 government report. It also says bilingualism has helped foster business with Quebec, to the tune of $3.9 billion in yearly export revenues between 2007 and 2011.
But New Brunswick has also seemingly imported some of Quebec’s language woes, complete with sign laws, absurdist legal battles and doomsday-style rhetoric from linguistic camps. The most recent kerfuffle involves the busing of school children.
Last spring, New Brunswick NDP Leader Dominic Cardy suggested French and English students should be allowed to take buses together, if only to save on costs. (French and English schools are operated separately from each other, but in a few cases, one bus was able to serve both schools). Education Minister Serge Rousselle expressed his anger at such a thing, and was further angered when he learned that a handful of francophone students in Richibucto (pop. 1,965) were being bused to school on English rolling stock. In a statement to the National Post, Rousselle promised to rid his department of what he called an “administrative anomaly.” The issue of whether being bused in one’s mother tongue is a Charter right is currently before New Brunswick Court of Appeal.
In actual fact, busing children according to the language they speak doesn’t appear to be more expensive. According to its 2015-16 budget, the province spends about $57 million a year to bus nearly 98,000 students, or roughly $580 a student. In contrast, Nova Scotia spends about $910 a student.
For English-language advocates, the issue is less about cost than what they see as favouritism of French New Brunswickers. According to Statistics Canada, 71 per cent of French New Brunswickers are bilingual, while only about 15 per cent of the province’s English can speak French. “More than 70 per cent of the province is disqualified from a majority of government positions, and a growing number of private sector positions,” says Sharon Buchanan, the president of the Anglophone Rights Association of New Brunswick (ARANB).
There are other insidious effects of French in New Brunswick, Buchanan says. The city of Dieppe has issued fines to businesses that neglected to put French first in their bilingual signage, and an attempt was made to change the name of Moncton’s Robinson Court to honour Acadian poet Gérald Leblanc.
Buchanan, 47, herself a unilingual English manager at a call centre, says her kids can’t get work beyond Tim Hortons because they don’t speak French well enough. She says she’s been threatened. “One of our members was spit on while passing out ARA flyers in front of Wal-Mart in Moncton,” she says.
Language issues aren’t particularly new in the province. There was once a fledgling separatist Acadian party, Parti Acadien, which had similar goals and socialist sensibilities as the Parti Québécois in Quebec. There was also the Confederation of Regions Party, an anti-bilingualism party that sent several elected members to the legislature in 1991 before the party self-imploded four years later.
“I think [tension over language] is at a level not seen since the 1980s,” says Christian Michaud, a constitutional lawyer who has worked for the New Brunswick government on language cases in the past. Part of the blame falls on the francophone minority, he says. “We put too much weight on the court system. As francophones, we’ve evolved through the courts, and we’ve won. But we’ve lost touch with the population. We seem to think the way to get things moving is to attack it in the public sphere.”
At the same time, “everything in government happens in English. There needs to be more francophone spaces within government.”
Michaud sips his cortado and looks out at downtown Moncton. It’s a bustling place, with the traffic jams to prove it. Moncton is the fastest-growing region in Atlantic Canada, thanks in large part to the francophone migration from the north. For English rights groups, it’s another sore point. Moncton is booming largely because it is bilingual, and therefore home to many of the call-centre and public sector jobs. “Yeah, nobody is happy here,” Michaud says, laughing. He’s joking, of course.
For the last decade, New Brunswick has had two successive one-term governments—an anomaly in a province known for political dynasties. Premier Louis J. Robichaud served for 10 years. His successor, Richard Hatfield, was in power for nearly 17. McKenna also served for 10 years; he came to power in 1987, when his Liberal government won every seat in the legislature.
Former minister Kelly Lamrock says the recent, quick-change governments are a result of poor leadership. “We’ve had a lot of premiers who don’t meet the basic test of, ‘If you are not scripted by your advisers, can you explain why you’ve decided what you’ve decided?’ As a result we’re getting them out of any situation where they might be unscripted,” Lamrock says.
Coincidence or not, the Gallant government has reduced the number of days in which he and his caucus would be forced to face such scrutiny. In February, the government shut down the legislature, which will allow the provincial budget to move through committee without daily opposition questions. Media access to the premier, meanwhile, “is becoming increasingly scarce,” says New Brunswick press gallery president Adam Huras. Limiting access is old hat, if only because it’s so successful—just ask Stephen Harper. The downside, as Lamrock sees it, is a general erosion of the regard for the political class, exactly when New Brunswick needs strong political leadership.
“We’ve got some incredibly creative people doing some very good things. But there’s a sense that politics isn’t where you make a difference. You make a film, you start a small business. You don’t go to the legislature,” Lamrock says.
Greg Hemmings has done both, 115 km south of the legislature in Fredericton. In 2007, Hemmings set up his film production studio in Saint John. The gritty counterpoint to Fredericton’s staid bureaucracy, Saint John’s mix of cheap rent and industrial decrepitude has sparked an East Coast artistic mini-renaissance—like Detroit, albeit with a heartier social safety net.
Hemmings House, the film studio, has produced documentaries about computer coders in Estonia and youth orchestras in Venezuela, among others, from its offices in the city’s uptown district. He is relentlessly bullish about the city. “I dare say, it’s thriving,” Hemmings says. He feels about the same about New Brunswick in general. “There’s a scrappy entrepreneurialism here,” says the usually bearded and always smiling 39-year-old. Today, Hemmings House employs 10 people. “In 2002, Enterprise Saint John [a government-funded entrepreneurial initiative] gave me a loan, an apprenticeship and then an award. It was like a hot knife through butter to get interest in what I was doing.”
Hemmings’s optimism for his home province is heart-warming. Given the state of New Brunswick, hopefully it’s contagious as well. | http://www.macleans.ca/economy/can-anything-save-new-brunswick/ | en | 2016-03-11T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/91f719a9a0945155faa77f3365bd5a8801d518f74263912b5d93a33aea0b35c5.json |
[
"Brian Bethune",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-29T20:49:17 | null | 2016-08-29T16:26:45 | With no more unknown victims of mass deaths, there’s now a struggle between personal grief and public memorials | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fculture%2Fbooks%2Fhow-we-respond-to-mass-death%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MAC36_BOOKS_POST02.jpg | en | null | How we respond to mass death | null | null | www.macleans.ca | WHO OWNS THE DEAD?
By Jay D. Aronson
Americans’ response to the two modern poles of terrorist assaults on their soil—the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 (domestic) and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 (international)—varied tremendously, across realms ranging from the geopolitical to the cultural. This absorbing investigation by Aronson, the director of the Center for Human Rights Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, zeroes in on commemoration and what he calls the individualization of mass death. After an explosion demolished the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, unidentified human remains were labelled “common tissue” and buried together.
The situation after 9/11 couldn’t have been more different, in part because DNA identification technology had taken a quantum leap in the six years since the Murrah bombing, and what was now scientifically possible had a profound impact on what was politically permissible.
In its way, that aspect of 9/11’s aftermath marked the culmination of a century’s worth of changing responses to mass death, especially if those deaths could be seen as a result of sacrifice, martyrdom or war. Before the Great War, ordinary soldiers were burned in giant pyres or dumped en masse into unmarked pits. After the war, the combatant nations demanded that all soldiers be honoured equally. Even if they couldn’t be identified, they would be laid under headstones, in what are now Commonwealth cemeteries, bearing words suggested by Rudyard Kipling, “A soldier of the Great War—known unto God.” Their names would be recorded otherwise: a series of long walls at Vimy Ridge is inscribed with the names of 11,285 Canadians whose bodies were never recovered or identified.
Western countries have striven ever since to fuse the two halves of this democratic drive, to join the names and the remains. By the 21st century, forensic scientists thought it possible or at least foreseeable, even though 9/11 was as harsh a test case as could be conceived. Aronson’s tale, as he soberly points out, “is not for the faint of heart.” Only 293 of the 2,753 victims who died at the World Trade Center left mostly intact bodies. The rest were separated out from 22,000 human bits and pieces found in the rubble of the collapsed towers or on the rooftops of nearby buildings; the remains of 1,113 are still not identified.
Yet within days of the attacks, the office of New York City’s chief medical examiner vowed to continue in perpetuity its efforts to identify and return to families every single human body part recovered. Fifteen years and $80 million later, the effort continues; in March 2015, 26-year-old Matthew Yarnell became the latest identified victim.
It has not been smooth sailing. The interests and desires of the various stakeholders—the American government, determined to make a statement about national resolve triumphing over trauma; the city of New York, facing a gaping hole in some of the world’s most valuable real estate; the grieving families—soon collided. The city began trucking site debris, including human remains, to its unfortunately named Fresh Kills landfill site (kills derives from a Dutch word meaning riverbed) on Staten Island, for recovery work. That the remains of their loved ones were brought to a garbage dump and made potentially vulnerable to scavenging seagulls appalled many families.
The key division—summed up by Aronson’s title—lay in the design and structure of what became, in 2014, the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. A vocal subset of families wanted an above-ground, free-access site for the unidentified remains, a memorial separate from the museum. But the need for continuing access by forensic scientists kept those remains within the main structure, 20 m down in Manhattan bedrock below—even if that made the remains seem, to some, to be exhibits in a museum. The line once drawn between private mourning and public commemoration is now blurry, Aronson concludes, a double-edged gift from genetic science. | http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/how-we-respond-to-mass-death/ | en | 2016-08-29T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/ed1d1b02b9a03e4317c084dbbc9cede19fc9a457b2a5c48171a212ca04310c4f.json |
[
"The Associated Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T13:05:26 | null | 2016-08-24T19:44:03 | Micah Johnson returned home from Afghanistan in 2014 and sought treatment for anxiety, depression and hallucinations | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Fsoldier-who-killed-five-dallas-officers-showed-ptsd-symptoms%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/DALLAS_POST05.jpg | en | null | Soldier who killed five Dallas officers showed PTSD symptoms | null | null | www.macleans.ca | The Army reservist who shot and killed five Dallas police officers last month showed symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder after returning home from Afghanistan in 2014 and sought treatment for anxiety, depression and hallucinations, according to newly released documents from the Veterans Health Administration.
Micah Johnson told doctors he experienced nightmares after witnessing fellow soldiers getting blown in half and said he heard voices and mortars exploding, according to the documents obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act.
“I try to block those out, but it is kinda hard to forget,” Johnson told his care provider, according to the documents.
Johnson, 25, was the sniper who targeted the officers at the conclusion of a peaceful march July 7 in downtown Dallas, where demonstrators were protesting fatal police shootings in Minnesota and Louisiana.
Armed with an assault rifle, he took multiple positions as he fired. Hours later, authorities used a bomb-carrying robot to kill him.
During his deployment, Johnson was largely confined to base in an area of Afghanistan that had seen heavy combat but that was relatively quiet when his unit arrived in November 2013, according to his former squad leader.
Upon his return to the U.S. nine months later, Johnson told doctors he was experiencing panic attacks a few times a week, including once while at Wal-Mart, where there was an unspecified conflict that required police response, the records said.
“Veteran states hearing all the noises, fights and police intervening caused him to have palpitations, ‘My heart felt like someone was pinching it while it was beating fast,’ ” the records state. Johnson said he began physically shaking, felt short of breath and got chills following the Wal-Mart incident.
Doctors concluded that Johnson presented a low risk for suicide or for hurting anyone else.
Johnson was “not acutely at risk for harm to self or others,” according to a medical record from a visit on Aug. 15, 2014. The patient was “not felt to be psychotic by presentation or by observation.”
The patient told health care providers he had lower back pain and was avoiding “crowds of people and when in the public, scanning the area for danger, noting all the exits, everyone’s actions.”
“I feel like I can’t trust all of these strangers around me,” Johnson told his doctor, who noted that he had taken to drinking since his return to Dallas, taking three to four shots of vodka up to three times a week. “It’s hard for me to be around other people and I am so angry and irritable.”
Records from the Aug. 15 visit state that Johnson described his childhood as “stressful.” His responses to a section of the form titled “Sexual/Physical/Emotional Abuse History” were redacted. Johnson was also advised to talk with a health care worker about erectile dysfunction.
Johnson was prescribed a muscle relaxant, an antidepressant and anti-anxiety and sleep medication, and a nurse offered him tips on managing anger, records show.
He also saw a psychiatrist and was further evaluated for his PTSD symptoms in September of that year, but the physician noted his mood was “better.”
When providers called Johnson in October 2014, he requested to put off further evaluation for PTSD, saying he was busy remodeling his mother’s house, according to the records. He had previously told providers he planned to find a job in construction and that his long-term goal was to become a self-defence instructor.
Johnson’s mother, Delphene Johnson, previously had said her son had sought medical care from the VA for a back injury, but got no help after filling out forms and going to meetings so he “just finally gave up,” she told TheBlaze, a news site founded by conservative talk show host Glenn Beck.
Dallas VA spokesman Ozzie Garza did not immediately respond to questions regarding Johnson’s treatment within the VA North Texas Health Care System, the second largest VA health care system in the country. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/soldier-who-killed-five-dallas-officers-showed-ptsd-symptoms/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/bec371465164e8fc51554db515ef57334e000ce8b764932565e12af1730ae30e.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T13:08:43 | null | 2016-08-24T18:20:22 | It cost Sarnia more than $8,000 to deal with the wave of unexpected U.S. visitors who were adrift, partying on inflatable boats | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fsarnia-mayor-invites-1500-american-invaders-to-return-to-city-as-tourists%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/floatdown-1.jpg | en | null | Sarnia mayor invites 1,500 American 'invaders' to return to city as tourists | null | null | www.macleans.ca | The mayor of an Ontario border city that was unwittingly visited by 1,500 wayward Americans over the weekend said he’d like them to come back someday — but this time with money, clothes and passports.
“I think we can use this to boost tourism from our neighbours,” said Sarnia Mayor Mike Bradley. “Come for a visit, we’ll take care of you and this time you can stay longer.”
Bradley said it cost his municipality more than $8,000 to deal with the wave of unexpected visitors who were on inflatable rafts and boats — attending the annual Port Huron Float Down — when they drifted off course Sunday due to high winds and strong currents.
But Bradley is not asking for that money back, although a fundraising campaign — started by an American — had raised more than US$2,300 by Wednesday afternoon.
“I think it’s a wonderful gesture,” Bradley said. “The City of Sarnia can survive — our budget is over $130 million a year and we can absorb these costs — but the gesture that they appreciate what happened is important and welcomed.”
In a press release, the city broke down the costs from the incursion, including $1,977.97 to Sarnia Transit for providing ten buses, drivers, and supervisory staff to take the Americans across the border.
The costs do not include those incurred by agencies outside the city, which included efforts by Ontario Provincial Police and the Canadian Coast Guard.
Bradley, who watched the Americans float down the St. Clair River from his apartment, said many of the visitors were “over-refreshed” and chanting “USA, USA” as they washed ashore. The revellers left a mess in their wake.
On Monday, city workers spent several hours picking up trash — beer cans, coolers, rafts and even picnic tables.
The mayor said he would use any funds raised by the campaign to celebrate cross-border relations, but he would not ask the Americans to pay back his city for the trouble.
“Even if we wanted to ask someone to pay us back, there is no one to ask, there is no organizer and it’s not an official event,” Bradley said.
But he remains proud of how everything went down.
“Everyone who responded — police, fire, and the coast guard — took the right approach,” Bradley said. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/sarnia-mayor-invites-1500-american-invaders-to-return-to-city-as-tourists/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/4e2424910266e0893251d72362f018d96b859cd0c9a655a0ebf76d1a15bccfd3.json |
[
"The Associated Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-30T22:49:33 | null | 2016-08-30T16:42:24 | AP maps out the mass graves discovered so far and speaks to those who knew some of the thousands who have been killed and buried—or nearly joined them | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Fas-isis-retreats-a-horrifying-discovery-72-mass-graves%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/12702924.jpg | en | null | As ISIS retreats, a horrifying discovery: 72 mass graves | null | null | www.macleans.ca | HARDAN, Iraq—Surrounded by smoke and flames, the sound of gunshots echoing around him, the young man crouched in the creek for hours, listening to the men in his family die.
On the other side of the mountain, another survivor peered through binoculars as the handcuffed men of neighbouring villages were shot and then buried by a waiting bulldozer. For six days he watched as the extremists filled one grave after another with his friends and relatives.
Between them, the two scenes of horror on Sinjar mountain contain six burial sites and the bodies of more than 100 people, just a small fraction of the mass graves Islamic State extremists have scattered across Iraq and Syria.
In exclusive interviews, photos and research, The Associated Press has documented and mapped 72 of the mass graves, the most comprehensive survey so far, with many more expected to be uncovered as the Islamic State group’s territory shrinks. In Syria, AP has obtained locations for 17 mass graves, including one with the bodies of hundreds of members of a single tribe all but exterminated when IS extremists took over their region. For at least 16 of the Iraqi graves, most in territory too dangerous to excavate, officials do not even guess the number of dead. In others, the estimates are based on memories of traumatized survivors, Islamic State propaganda and what can be gleaned from a cursory look at the earth.
Still, even the known numbers of victims buried are staggering—from 5,200 to more than 15,000.
Sinjar mountain is dotted with mass graves, some in territory clawed back from IS after the group’s onslaught against the Yazidi minority in August 2014; others in the deadly no man’s land that has yet to be secured.
The bodies of Talal Murat’s father, uncles and cousins lie beneath the rubble of the family farm, awaiting a time when it is safe for surviving relatives to return to the place where the men were gunned down. On Sinjar’s other flank, Rasho Qassim drives daily past the graves holding the bodies of his two sons. The road is in territory long since seized back, but the five sites are untouched, roped off and awaiting the money or the political will for excavation, as the evidence they contain is scoured away by the wind and baked by the sun.
“We want to take them out of here. There are only bones left. But they said ‘No, they have to stay there, a committee will come and exhume them later,'” said Qassim, standing at the edge of the flimsy fence surrounding one site, where his two sons are buried. “It has been two years but nobody has come.”
ISIS made no attempt to hide its atrocities. In fact it boasted of them. But proving what United Nations officials and others have described as an ongoing genocide—and prosecuting those behind it—will be complicated as the graves deteriorate.
“We see clear evidence of the intent to destroy the Yazidi people,” said Naomi Kikoler, who recently visited the region for the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. “There’s been virtually no effort to systematically document the crimes perpetrated, to preserve the evidence, and to ensure that mass graves are identified and protected.”
Then there are the graves still out of reach. The Islamic State group’s atrocities extend well outside the Yazidi region in northern Iraq.
Satellites offer the clearest look at massacres such as the one at Badoush Prison in June 2014 that left 600 male inmates dead. A patch of scraped earth and tire tracks show the likely killing site, according to exclusive photos obtained by the imagery intelligence firm AllSource Analysis.
Of the 72 mass graves documented by AP, the smallest contains three bodies; the largest is believed to hold thousands, but no one knows for sure.
“It’s very difficult to look at them every day.”
On the northern flank of Sinjar mountain, five grave sites ring a desert crossroads. It is here that the young men of Hardan village are buried, under thistles and piles of cracked earth. They were killed in the bloody ISIS offensive of August 2014.
Through his binoculars, Arkan Qassem watched it all. His village, Gurmiz, is just up the slope from Hardan, giving a clear view over the plain below. When the jihadis swept over the area, everyone in Gurmiz fled up the mountaintop for refuge. Then Arkan and nine other men returned to their village with light weapons to try to defend their homes.
Instead, all they could do was watch the slaughter below. Arkan witnessed the militants set up checkpoints, preventing residents from leaving. Women and children were taken away.
Then the killings began. The first night, Arkan saw the militants line up a group of handcuffed men in the headlights of a bulldozer at an intersection, less than a kilometre down the slope from Gurmiz. They gunned the men down, then the bulldozer plowed the earth over their bodies.
Over six days, Arkan and his comrades watched helplessly as the fighters brought out three more groups of men—several dozen each, usually with hands bound—to the crossroads and killed them. He didn’t always see what they did with the bodies. One time, he saw them lighting a bonfire, but he couldn’t see why.
Finally, the jihadis brought in artillery and prepared to make an assault on Gurmiz. Arkan and his comrades fled up the mountain to where their families had taken refuge.
Now, since IS fighters were driven out of the area, the 32-year-old has returned to his home. But he’s haunted by the site. As documented by the aid group Yazda, which has mapped the Sinjar sites, the graves are in a rough pentagon flanking the crossroads, largely unprotected. Around one of them is a mesh fence and a wind-battered sign. As Arkan spoke at the site, a shepherd herded his flock nearby.
“I have lots of people I know there. Mostly friends and neighbours,” he said. “It’s very difficult to look at them every day.”
“This body is wearing my father’s clothes”
As IS fighters swarmed into the Sinjar area in early August 2014, Talal fled his town along with his father, mother, four sisters and younger brother. They and dozens of other men, women and children from his extended clan converged on an uncle’s farm outside the town of Tel Azer. They prayed it was remote enough to escape the killings that were already engulfing so many Yazidis.
It wasn’t.
The jihadis fired at the house from a distance. Then they rolled up in their vehicles and shot one man in the head as they stood in the yard. They surrounded the farmhouse, ordered everyone outside and demanded the impossible: Convert.
The Yazidi faith, one of the region’s oldest, has elements of Christianity and Islam but is distinct. Yazidis worship the Peacock Angel, fallen and forgiven by God under their tradition, and their shrines feature carved images of the birds and references to the sun. Muslim extremists condemned them as “devil worshippers” and over the centuries have subjected them to multiple massacres—72, by the Yazidis’ count.
In its own propaganda, the Islamic State group made clear its intention to wipe out the Yazidi community. In an issue of its online English-language magazine Dabiq, it scolded Muslims for allowing the Yazidis to continue existing, calling their ancient religion a form of paganism. It quoted Quranic verses to justify killing the Yazidis unless they become Muslim.
Thwarted in their halfhearted attempt at conversions, the fighters separated about 35 teenage girls and young women from the rest, crammed them into a few cars and drove away. The militants herded the older women and young children into the farmhouse and locked the door.
Then they lined the men and teenaged boys against the wall of the stables—around 40 in all, including Talal.
There were too many of them, too bunched up, to efficiently mow down, so the fighters then ordered them to lie on the ground in a row, Talal said. That was when his uncle told him to make a run for it. Talal bolted into his uncle’s hayfield, as did several other men. The militants fired at them, and the bullets ignited the hay, dry from the summer sun. The fire covered Talal’s escape, and he took shelter in a nearby creek.
There he hid, listening as the gunmen shot his family to death. He eventually fled toward the mountain, joined by three others who had survived the massacre. Four out of 40.
Back at the farm, the gunmen eventually left and the women and children emerged, looking around with growing horror.
Nouri Murat, Talal’s mother, found her husband. His body was untouched, but his head was shattered. Her daughters, she said, were confused at first. “This is strange, this body is wearing my father’s clothes,” one of them said. As Nouri frantically searched around the property for any surviving menfolk, her 9-year-old daughter Rukhan lay down beside her father’s corpse.
Finally, other women persuaded the family to head to the mountain before the Islamic State fighters returned.
As they began the long walk north, Nouri noticed Rukhan’s bloody fist. Fearing her daughter was wounded, she pried open the girl’s clenched fingers. Inside were a handful of her father’s teeth.
“They don’t even try to hide their crimes”
Nearly every area freed from IS control has unmasked new mass graves, like one found by the sports stadium in the Iraqi city of Ramadi. Many of the graves themselves are easy enough to find, most covered with just a thin coating of earth.
“They don’t even try to hide their crimes,” said Sirwan Jalal, the director of Iraqi Kurdistan’s agency in charge of mass graves. “They are beheading them, shooting them, running them over in cars, all kinds of killing techniques, and they don’t even try to hide it.”
No one outside ISIS has seen the Iraqi ravine where hundreds of Shiite prison inmates were killed point blank and then torched. Satellite images of scraped dirt along the river point to its location, according to Steve Wood of AllSource. His analysts triangulated survivors’ accounts and began to systematically search the desert according to their descriptions of that day, June 10, 2014.
The inmates were separated out by religion, and Shiites were loaded onto trucks, driven for a few kilometres and forced to line up and count off, according to accounts by 15 survivors gathered by Human Rights Watch. Then they knelt along the edge of the crescent-shaped ravine, according to a report cited by AllSource.
“I was number 43. I heard them say ‘615,’ and then one ISIS guy said, ‘We’re going to eat well tonight.’ A man behind us asked, ‘Are you ready?’ Another person answered ‘Yes,’ and began shooting at us with a machine-gun. Then they all started to shoot us from behind, going down the row,” according to the Human Rights Watch account of a survivor identified only as A.S.
The men survived by pretending to be dead.
Using their accounts and others, AllSource examined an image from July 17, 2014, that appeared to show the location as described, between a main road and the railway outside Mosul. The bodies are believed to be packed tightly together, side by side in a space approximately the length of two football fields end to end, in what the AllSource analysis described as a “sardine trench.” Tire tracks lead to and from the site.
“There’s actually earth that has been pushed over and actually moved to cover parts of the ravine. As we look across the entire ravine we only see that in this one location,” said Wood. “Ultimately there are many, many more sites across Iraq and Syria that have yet to be either forensically exhumed or be able to be detailed and there’s quite a bit more research that needs to take place.”
The key, Wood said, is having photos to indicate a grave’s location taken soon after its creation.
Justice has been done in at least one ISIS mass killing—that of about 1,700 Iraqi soldiers who were forced to lie face-down in a ditch and then machine-gunned at Camp Speicher. On Aug. 21, 36 men convicted in those killings were hanged at Iraq’s Nasiriyah prison.
But justice is likely to be elusive in areas still firmly under IS control, even though the extremists have filmed themselves committing the atrocities. That’s the case for a deep natural sinkhole outside Mosul that is now a pit of corpses. In Syria’s Raqqa province, thousands of bodies are believed to have been thrown into the giant al-Houta crevasse.
Conditions in much of Syria remain a mystery. Activists believe there are hundreds of mass graves in IS-controlled areas that can only be explored when fighting stops. By that time, they fear any effort to document the massacres, exhume and identify the remains will become infinitely more complicated.
Working behind IS lines, local residents have informally documented some mass graves, even partially digging some up. Some of the worst have been found in the eastern province of Deir el-Zour. There, 400 members of the Shueitat tribe were found in one grave, just some of the up to 1,000 members of the tribe believed to have been massacred by IS when the militants took over the area, said Ziad Awad, the editor of an online publication on Deir el-Zour called The Eye of the City who is trying to document the graves.
In Raqqa province, the bodies of 160 Syrian soldiers, killed when IS overran their base, were found in seven large pits.
So far, at least 17 mass graves are known, though largely unreachable, in a list put together from AP interviews with activists from Syrian provinces still under IS rule as well as fighters and residents in former IS strongholds.
“This is a drop in an ocean of mass graves expected to be discovered in the future in Syria,” said Awad. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/as-isis-retreats-a-horrifying-discovery-72-mass-graves/ | en | 2016-08-30T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/5c9b2b5300956813f4b3ea52e8cdc3bc48a59df2de962b6999ef980da9edf2d2.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
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] | 2016-08-29T22:49:21 | null | 2016-08-29T18:40:59 | Alberta PC Party says response to Sandra Jansen's suggestion would be hypothetical, given that no candidate can formally enter the race yet | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fpolitics%2Fpotential-alberta-pc-leadership-hopeful-says-rules-should-nix-wildrose-merger%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/cp-logo.jpg | en | null | Potential Alberta PC leadership hopeful says rules should nix Wildrose merger | null | null | www.macleans.ca | EDMONTON – A potential candidate for the leadership of Alberta’s Progressive Conservatives says rules adopted by the party should end the bid by Calgary MP Jason Kenney to merge the province’s two right-of-centre parties.
Sandra Jansen noted the rules released by the PC board of directors on the weekend forbid any leadership candidate from taking actions that would harm the party.
“If his goal is to collapse the PC party, then it would appear that he doesn’t fit the criteria for running for leader,” Jansen said Monday.
But she added she’ll leave it to the PC party executive to deal with the question when the leadership race formally begins Oct. 1.
“That’s not my call to make. I respect the board’s autonomy in making decisions about who can and cannot run and we’ll leave it to them,” said the Tory member of the legislature for Calgary North West
Kenney has yet to respond to the leadership race rules.
The board voted to include a clause from the 2014 campaign that said candidates must “avoid causing harm or disrepute to the (Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta) and its brand through any detrimental action or conduct.”
Party president Katherine O’Neill declined to speculate Sunday on what the harm rule means for Kenney. She called any response hypothetical, given that no candidate can formally enter the race yet.
Kenney is running on a platform to merge the PCs with the Opposition Wildrose to create a new right-of-centre party to challenge Premier Rachel Notley’s NDP in the 2019 election.
He has said vote-splitting on the right is crushing the conservative movement in Alberta and that drastic action is necessary to halt what he calls the economy-killing policies of the New Democrats.
The Wildrose party endorses a merger idea in principle, but is taking a wait-and-see approach on Kenney’s idea.
At last spring’s PC annual general meeting, rank-and-file members overwhelmingly endorsed a plan to rebuild the party rather than merge with anyone else.
Also on the weekend, the PC board spelled out specifics for what will be the first leadership vote in the province to have delegates in 30 years.
Each of the 87 constituency associations will vote to send 15 delegates to the March 18 convention in Calgary. Of those 15, five will be from the local constituency association board and 10 from members at large.
Jansen said she is happy with the rules. She pointed out that 50 directors from across the province, not a select few, hashed it out.
“I’m pleased with what they came up with. That is grassroots democracy in action.”
Interim PC leader Ric McIver, who is also weighing a leadership run, said he voted against the delegate breakdown. He would rather see all 15 delegates come from members at large.
“One of the things that we’ve promised ever since the last election is that we were going to be a party that was open and available to all Albertans,” said McIver. | http://www.macleans.ca/politics/potential-alberta-pc-leadership-hopeful-says-rules-should-nix-wildrose-merger/ | en | 2016-08-29T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/2588d7a1451f71acec8a474736c39269833572841d23d7dddb22888c208a4f33.json |
[
"Jasmine Miller",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-30T00:48:49 | null | 2016-03-15T14:26:41 | Career paths are not a straight line and, as experts will remind you, ‘no career decision is fatal’ | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Feducation%2Ftheres-no-such-thing-as-a-straight-career-path-anymore%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/MAC90_JOBS_PATHWAYS_POST011.jpg | en | null | There's no such thing as a straight career path anymore | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Clare Sully-Stendahl is barely old enough to vote, at 18, but the first-year university student has been making career choices for years. “I’ve always liked the humanities and the sciences,” she says from her dorm room in Halifax. “But in high school, there was pressure to pick one over the other.”
Instead of opting for theatre or film studies classes, Sully-Stendahl decided to be strategic and chose a second science while still in high school. But, “physics and I didn’t really get along very well. There’s no way I would continue with that in a career. I chose it because I knew a lot of universities require physics for engineering, medicine, a lot of sciences . . . ”
She’s not hell-bent on those fields, but like many people her age, Sully-Stendahl felt she had to keep those in-demand, potentially high-paying options open. When it came time to decide which university offer to accept, however, Sully-Stendahl opted for a general arts degree.
The Foundation Year Program at the University of King’s College will immerse her in the arts she loves with small-group tutorials, reading and debating ancient and modern literature. “I still don’t know what I want to do as a career,” she says. “I’m entering this university phase of life thinking I’ll take it a year at a time.” While that flies in the face of common advice, it’s a smart move.
Despite three years of classes that may have exposed them to computer skills and finite math, to world issues or a foreign language, most high school students face their final year without the training they need to make career choices. “Career development is seen as the poor cousin of the real curriculum,” says Donnalee Bell of the Ottawa-based Canadian Career Development Foundation. Students don’t usually confront the issue until it’s time to choose post-secondary programs, short-list schools, and submit applications, so it feels like they have to get it right, right now. But “no career decision is fatal,” says Bell. “Over the course of your lifetime, you’re going to make many, and none of them are wrong. Youth are so stressed out and concerned about their career future. We need to pull that off a bit.”
Some would argue more than a bit.
“It’s crazy. You think you have so much time to plan your life and plan a career you want, but honestly, Grade 12 just smacked me in the face,” says 17-year-old Kim Shaw. She’s quit her part-time job to focus on studies. “You want to get 80 per cent or higher so it looks good on applications and you’re eligible for scholarships,” she says.
Money is a big part of student stress. Shaw entered a joint program between Assiniboine Community College in Brandon, Man., and her high school in nearby Birtle. This fall she’ll add a college-level health care aide class to her high school timetable, one period a day; in the winter, she’ll forgo regular classes and study only the health care aide course. At the end of the year, she’ll be qualified to work as a health care aide right away, so that if she decides to continue at post-secondary, this will help her pay for it. “I don’t want to have any debt when I come out of school.” Clearly practical, Shaw calls herself an “indecisive person” (until a few months ago she wanted to be a lab technician, and she hasn’t ruled out becoming a teacher . . . ). But she isn’t indecisive; she’s just young.
Despite the fact that, give or take, we’ll have 12 careers over our lifetime, the majority of us won’t settle on that first career until we’re 25. According to Statistics Canada’s Youth In Transitions Survey, less than seven per cent of 25-year-olds had the same career expectations they did as 17-year-olds. That’s not flip-flopping, it’s learning.
That doesn’t make it easier for Shaw, though. “You go to school for this one career, and then you’ll be stuck with it for the rest of your life, thinking you have to do it for 50 or 60 years,” she says. “It’s terrifying.”
The thought of becoming a statistic is part of the fear. No one wants that. You want a career that’s lucrative and brings bragging rights, but you’re being bombarded—from news reports, teachers, and family, all telling you the best way to make that happen. That can cause high school students to shut down.
“They have a real sense of disengagement, and at the same time feel this pressure to go to university,” says Adriano Magnifico, an English teacher and divisional consultant at Nelson Mack High School in Winnipeg. “I was just talking to a former student who is in the completely wrong university program. When I asked her why she did it, she said, ‘My parents have saved for this for years and I didn’t want to let them down.’ ”
While postponing post-secondary (for a mission-filled gap year, maybe) could make sense, forgoing post-secondary altogether is a mistake. Studies repeatedly confirm that college and university grads outearn high school grads; it doesn’t matter what program you’re talking about, post-secondary isn’t just a piece of paper.
The problem is that with youth unemployment nearly double the national average, and post-secondary grads entering the work force with crippling student debt, the stress is on to choose a program that will immediately lead to sustainable work in a growing industry. Where is that? Everyone thinks they have a crystal ball—Choose STEM! Run from the arts! Master a trade!—but no one does. “There was a time when IT was huge and there were all kinds of early offers going to students even before they graduated,” says Robert Shea, associate VP, academic and student affairs, at the marine institute of Memorial University in Newfoundland. “That has dissipated now, and there are a lot of unhappy IT people.”
Today a teaching degree is considered a waste of time and money, because we have more teachers than we can employ in the public system. “But what if they went and became a youth worker or a counsellor?” asks Shea, who has an undergraduate degree in social work and has never been employed as a social worker. “Sometimes we put kids in boxes: if you have a degree in this, then you must do this,” he says.
The way to find a lasting career—the goal of all post-secondary—is “knowing yourself,” says Shea. Not only can that be done at any type of institution, it can be done in any program.
School tracks aren’t linear as they were a generation ago. Even medical schools don’t always require an undergraduate degree in a pure science. “People with degrees in music get accepted to medical school,” says Shea. Not all of you want to go into medicine, but the point is this: choose something you love and get good at it. How? “Focus on competencies, not credentials,” says Shea, who has taught university-level business courses. (“Invariably students will ask me, ‘Where did you get your M.B.A.?’ but I don’t have one.”)
Acquiring targeted skills well after graduation is common, and a general arts degree can set you up for that. “Arts grads are analyzers, they’re thinkers,” says Magnifico. “These are major 21st-century skills.” Yet the cliché of the philosophy-major barista persists. “Universities have got to start letting their students know that when you finish a particular program, these are the skills you’ll have and here’s who values these skills. When they do that, watch arts take off,” says Magnifico. That’s the goal of the Career Integrated Learning Project that Shea started at Memorial in 2010 (see sidebar).
If you find yourself fielding the question “but what will you do with that degree?” Shea wants students to know they have options. “I don’t thumb my nose at any education,” he says. He also wants them to know they have time. “My daughter is starting her first year at Memorial this fall,” he says. “She has no idea what she wants to do with her life and I think that’s brilliant.”
Thinking outside the box
While college programs have always been set up with the job hunt in mind, other levels of schooling are setting a new standard for career-integrated learning.
High school
Career Internship Program, Windsor Park Collegiate, Winnipeg
Offered through the English program, Grade 9 and 10 students attend skill-building retreats and start networking with local businesses. Students in Grade 11 get job-shadowing experience and Grade 12s add in business-plan writing and logistics-management instruction.
After establishing the program at Windsor Park Collegiate, Adriano Magnifico has expanded it to another institution, Nelson McIntyre High School.
Options and Opportunities, Nova Scotia
Nearly 60 academies, junior- and high schools offer hands-on learning through “O2.” The program focuses on kids who aren’t performing well, but provides work readiness that experts say all students should be immersed in.
All Nova Scotia students start a work/life portfolio in Grade 7 and develop it until graduation. It’s a personal plan that must include a resumé and career explorations, as well as debriefing of job-shadowing and co-op placements.
University
Career Integrated Learning Project, Memorial University of Newfoundland
Robert Shea proposed the program in 2010, because, as the associate VP of academic and student affairs at the school’s marine institute, he saw that kids in general, and those in arts programs especially, were struggling with “career indecisiveness.” There had to be a way to translate skills learned from arts classes into “career competencies” that would be recognized by employers. There is: by working with faculty to revise all course syllabi to include specific, marketable skills. Prospective students can see at a glance what skills they will have upon completion. “We’re talking interpersonal, leadership and presentation skills that are highly valuable,” says Shea.
UR Guarantee Program, University of Regina
The career services department offers resumé building, interviewing skills and targeted workshops, along with aptitude testing. The selling point is the guarantee: Students who follow the program and don’t land career-related work within six months of graduating can come back for another year—for free. U of R is the first Canadian school to make this offer. “In Europe, guarantee programs are on the rise,” says Krista Benes, consultant at the Canadian Career Development Foundation. “In Denmark, for example, no young person graduates without a guarantee of finding degree-related work. In Canada, U Regina is leading-edge.” | http://www.macleans.ca/education/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-straight-career-path-anymore/ | en | 2016-03-15T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/857cd4c7d9d23d32d66f292bfe1e9db3b893120022108f4994cd5ff281a6ff80.json |
[
"The Associated Press",
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] | 2016-08-27T18:48:45 | null | 2016-08-27T12:36:39 | A top counterterrorism official said police raided a two-storey house in Narayanganj district near Dhaka | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Fcanadian-suspect-in-deadly-bangladesh-cafe-attack-killed-by-police%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ap-featured.jpg | en | null | Canadian suspect in deadly Bangladesh cafe attack killed by police | null | null | www.macleans.ca | NEW DELHI — Police in Bangladesh killed three suspected militants Saturday, including a man they identified as a Canadian accused of masterminding a deadly attack on a cafe in Dhaka last month.
Top counterterrorism official Monirul Islam said police raided a two-storey house in Narayanganj district near Dhaka and killed the suspects early Saturday.
The dead included Tamim Chowdhury, a Bangladeshi-born Canadian, who police believe was one of two masterminds of the July 1 attack on a popular restaurant in Dhaka that left 20 people dead.
The militants belonged to the banned group Jumatul Mujahedeen Bangladesh, or JMB, Bangladesh’s police chief A.K.M. Shahidul Hoque told reporters.
Chowdhury was the mastermind of the July 1 attack and another attack on an Eid congregation outside Dhaka on July 7 marking the end of the holy Muslim month of Ramadan, he said.
Bangladesh police have been conducting raids across the country to hunt down those behind the attacks.
The police chief said security officials raided the house acting on a tip that Chowdhury, along with other suspects, was hiding in the building. The suspects opened fire at officials who retaliated, he said.
A SWAT team made the final push and fatally shot the suspects after they failed to surrender. Haque said the team asked them to give themselves up but they went on firing.
The Islamic State group had claimed responsibility for the restaurant attack, but authorities have denied that all along, saying it was the act of the JMB and that the ISIL has no presence in the Muslim-majority country.
The attack on the upscale Holey Artisan Bakery killed 20 people, including 17 foreigners. The July 7 attack on the prayer gathering north of Dhaka left four people dead, including two police officers.
Global Affairs Canada said in a statement Saturday it is aware of news reports that Chowdhury was killed in Bangladesh.
“Canadian officials are in contact with Bangladeshi authorities to gather additional information,” said Global Affairs spokeswoman Diana Khaddaj in an email. “No further details can be provided at this time.”
Also, the family of a Toronto university student who was detained in Bangladesh after surviving the cafe attack said Friday that the young man had been transferred to prison.
Tahmid Hasib Khan’s family has maintained the 22-year-old’s innocence ever since the July 1 attack.
Khan is a permanent resident of Canada and an undergraduate student studying global health at the University of Toronto.
He had arrived in Dhaka on July 1 to celebrate Eid with his family, and planned to travel to Nepal to begin an internship with UNICEF the following week.
He was with friends at the Holey Artisan Bakery when five gunmen attacked. Security forces stormed the restaurant on July 2, killing the gunmen and rescuing the remaining hostages.
Khan was taken into custody for questioning immediately after the attack, and police formally announced his arrest at the beginning of August.
Part of the narrative around Khan’s case are media reports that quote hostages from the restaurant as saying Khan was ordered to hold a gun during the attack, and that he was photographed doing so.
Global Affairs Canada has said Canadian officials are monitoring Khan’s situation. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/canadian-suspect-in-deadly-bangladesh-cafe-attack-killed-by-police/ | en | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/a37c05dd2382a4522cce579a9d45cdf8a9a8c9db94a12d611b1996637fc44eca.json |
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] | 2016-08-26T13:08:33 | null | 2016-08-24T15:08:46 | At least 18 cats and dogs have mysteriously disappeared in recent months in the community of 12,000 | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fpolice-open-investigation-as-pets-vanish-in-nova-scotia-town-of-truro%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/macleans-fb-sell.jpg | en | null | Police open investigation as pets vanish in Nova Scotia town of Truro | null | null | www.macleans.ca | TRURO, N.S. – Bedtime for Stacey Taylor’s 11-year-old son Kai hasn’t been the same since his cat Marley went missing — one of more than 18 pets that have mysteriously disappeared from Truro, N.S., in recent months.
“(Marley) would sleep in Kai’s room and climb up on top of him and lick him and he’d pat her. They were very, very close. Marley is more his cat than anyone else’s,” said the 38-year-old Taylor on Wednesday.
“He’s devastated.”
Insp. Rob Hearn of the Truro Police Service said patrol officers recently noticed an increased number of missing cat flyers in the community of roughly 12,000 people.
After discussing the issue, investigators decided to be proactive and open an investigation into the curious rash of vanishing pets, said Hearn.
He said officers are urging people to report their missing animals and as of Wednesday afternoon, there were 18 missing cats and dogs reported to police.
“It’s not something we usually see in Truro… We don’t know what’s happening here,” said Hearn of the number of missing pets.
Hearn said most animals have gone missing within the last few months, but at least one case dates back a year.
The Taylor family feline — a fluffy three-year-old, multi-coloured bobtail cat — was last seen on Aug. 18.
Taylor said Marley always sticks close to their property on quiet Lavinia Drive, occasioning grazing in the neighbour’s grass, but never straying far from the yard.
“My children are devastated,” said Taylor, who also has a four-year-old boy named Zane. “(Marley) loves people. It would be very easy for someone to pick her up and walk off.”
Hearn said there’s no indication yet of what’s behind the disappearances, but police are taking the matter very seriously.
“Family pets are part of the family. I grew up with animals and I can tell you if something happened to one of them, you’d be disturbed by it,” said Hearn.
“I’m not saying that someone is harming these animals, but if it comes to that, that person or persons needs to be held accountable for it.” | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/police-open-investigation-as-pets-vanish-in-nova-scotia-town-of-truro/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/b3ecf8c1402db8fea13dde7f95912e66ab3f952afc1f377107d9991f9c40c690.json |
[
"The Associated Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T13:04:01 | null | 2016-08-26T00:01:46 | Brazilian police charge Ryan Lochte with filing a false robbery report during Rio Olympics incident | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Fus-swimmer-ryan-lochtes-legal-troubles-mount-in-brazil%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/149203981.jpg | en | null | US swimmer Ryan Lochte's legal troubles mount in Brazil | null | null | www.macleans.ca | RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazilian police charged American swimmer Ryan Lochte on Thursday with filing a false robbery report over an incident during the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
A police statement said Lochte would be informed in the United States so he could decide whether to introduce a defence in Brazil. The indictment will also be sent to the International Olympic Committee’s ethics commission, it said.
“The investigation was concluded on Thursday and Olympic American swimmer Ryan Lochte was indicted for the crime of falsely reporting a crime,” the statement said.
It said the case was turned over to a special Brazilian court that has jurisdiction over crimes related to major sporting events. The court, which was established before Brazil hosted soccer’s 2014 World Cup, is authorized to receive cases straight from the police when lesser charges are involved, without a need for prosecutors.
The swimmer’s spokeswoman, Melissa Nathan, said Lochte had no comment.
During the games, Lochte initially said that he and fellow swimmers Jack Conger, Gunnar Bentz and Jimmy Feigen were robbed at gunpoint in a taxi by men with a police badge as they returned to the Olympic Village from a party Aug. 15.
Video surveillance emerged showing the athletes getting into a confrontation with security guards at the gas station when their taxi pulled over to let them use the restroom. While there have been conflicting versions over whether the guards pulled their weapons on the swimmers, Lochte has since acknowledged he was highly intoxicated and that his behaviour led to the confrontation.
Lochte left Brazil shortly after the incident. Three days later, local authorities took Conger and Bentz off an airliner heading to the United States so they could be questioned about the robbery claim. They were later allowed to leave Brazil, as was Feigen, after he also gave testimony. Feigen, who initially stood by Lochte’s testimony, was not charged.
Under Brazilian law, the penalty for falsely filing a crime report carries a maximum penalty of 18 months in prison. Lochte could be tried in absentia if he didn’t return to face the charge.
The United States and Brazil have an extradition treaty dating back to the 1960s, but Brazil has a long history of not extraditing its own citizens to other nations and U.S. authorities could take the same stance if Lochte is found guilty.
That is currently the case of the head of Brazil’s football confederation, Marco Polo del Nero, who faces charges in the wide-ranging scandal entangling international soccer’s ruling body, FIFA. He has not travelled outside Brazil for more than a year to avoid being arrested by U.S. authorities somewhere else.
The charges in Brazil raise questions about the future for Lochte, who is planning to take time off from swimming but wants to return to compete in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. He has 12 Olympic medals, second only to Michael Phelps among U.S. male Olympians.
Lochte lost four major sponsors early this week over the controversy, including Speedo USA and Ralph Lauren. But on Thursday he picked up a new sponsor—Pine Bros. Softish Throat Drops. Pine Bros. said people should be more understanding of the swimmer and said he will appear in ads that say the company’s product is “Forgiving On Your Throat.” | http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/us-swimmer-ryan-lochtes-legal-troubles-mount-in-brazil/ | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/8d57100be1b458980bcd21c3b47f6b40f1a64f6041083fd36a3ac24360e0db0d.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T13:08:19 | null | 2016-08-24T21:47:17 | Rural councillor Ben Kautz resigned after comment about the shooting death of a First Nations man | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fsaskatchewan-councillor-resigns-after-colten-boushie-comment%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/cp-logo.jpg | en | null | Saskatchewan councillor resigns after Colten Boushie comment | null | null | www.macleans.ca | LAMPMAN, Sask. – A Saskatchewan rural councillor has resigned from his job after posting an online comment about the shooting death of a First Nations man.
The rural municipality of Browning, southeast of Regina, says in a news release that it has accepted the resignation of Lampman farmer Ben Kautz.
A screen-grab of Kautz’s post was widely circulated after the death of 22-year-old Colten Boushie earlier this month.
Boushie, from the Red Pheasant First Nation, was killed after the vehicle he was in drove onto a farm west of Saskatoon.
The property owner, 54-year-old Gerald Stanley, has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder and is free on bail.
Kautz’s post read: “His only mistake was leaving witnesses.”
The comment was later removed from a Saskatchewan farmers group Facebook page, and the group also closed.
“The Council of the R.M. of Browning No. 34 thanks Mr. Kautz for his years of dedicated service to the R.M. as well as his volunteering on several boards, committees and associations of the community,” said the release, posted on community’s website.
Dawn Kautz told The Canadian Press last week that her husband regretted the comment and had offered to step down as councillor.
Reeve Pius Loustel said the matter would be discussed at an upcoming meeting.
Greg Wallin, administrator for the rural municipality, said Kautz’s resignation was received Tuesday and won’t need to be debated at the next council meeting.
“That’s about all we’re really going to say about it,” he said. “It was his choice to resign and that’s what he did.”
Racial tensions flared after Boushie’s killing, especially on social media, and Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall took to Facebook to condemn what he called “racist and hate-filled” comments on the case.
RCMP also issued a public plea for people to be more respectful, saying some posts are possibly criminal. A spokeswoman said some comments are under investigation but no charges have been laid. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan-councillor-resigns-after-colten-boushie-comment/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/85d98fdf4130baa6673e2c9725621cf7cc1381d67b09ed31904310d91e228ea0.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-29T20:49:16 | null | 2016-08-29T14:42:33 | Trial of 42-year-old Andrea Giesbrecht resumed after month-long break | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fsome-infant-remains-found-in-winnipeg-locker-were-full-term-pathologist%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/cp-logo.jpg | en | null | Some infant remains found in Winnipeg locker were full-term: pathologist | null | null | www.macleans.ca | WINNIPEG – A pathologist who examined the remains of six infants found in a Winnipeg storage locker says some were so decomposed, they were just bones.
But Raymond Rivera told court most appeared to be full-term births.
“It was a full-term (baby),” Rivera said of “infant No. 1” — the first of the six he examined in October 2014 shortly after they were discovered.
It was also one of the least decomposed.
The trial of 42-year-old Andrea Giesbrecht resumed Monday.
It was adjourned in July to allow her husband Jeremy to seek legal counsel and decide whether he was going to waive his right to not testify about things the couple may have said to each other. He could return to the witness box as early as Tuesday or Wednesday.
Rivera, who has performed around 1,200 autopsies, said placentas and attached umbilical cords were found with most of the remains but some had deteriorated so much it was impossible to determine the gender.
Even infant No. 1, a boy, had decomposed and the brain had liquefied.
“I couldn’t determine the cause of death.”
The same was true of the other five, nor could he determine whether they had lived after birth.
“Decomposition made it impossible to tell.”
The trial has already heard that Giesbrecht was pregnant at least six times and had several legal abortions over the years, as well as a miscarriage. Defence lawyer Greg Brodsky has raised the idea that Giesbrecht may have had a medical issue that prevented her from carrying a baby to term in the years since her last child, now a teenager, was born.
The Crown has yet to suggest a motive for the alleged crime.
The remains were discovered by employees of the storage company after fees went unpaid on the locker where they had been kept.
Rivera said most were in white garbage bags inside various bags and containers. One was in a pail under concrete-like material. Another had been covered in a white powder that halted decomposition but dried out the body and left it rock hard.
He said the gestation age of the remains was determined by measurement and most were close to or at full term — about 40 weeks. All were estimated to be more than 30 weeks.
The third infant he examined was little more than a pile of bones, wrapped in a towel and placed in one of the white garbage bags, which was itself in a maroon duffel bag.
He had to call in an anthropologist to examine the remains because there was nothing to autopsy. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/some-infant-remains-found-in-winnipeg-locker-were-full-term-pathologist/ | en | 2016-08-29T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/c373f4efdeda5d7c34f6e131460812e412b54c99e80bcc402735563021bed641.json |
[
"Meagan Campbell",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-27T14:48:45 | null | 2016-08-27T08:53:56 | Oleksiak's friends keep her grounded. They're less entourage, more peanut gallery. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fhow-penny-oleksiak-stays-humble%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MAC_OLYMPICS_PENNY_POST01.jpg | en | null | How Penny Oleksiak stays humble | null | null | www.macleans.ca | As Penny Oleksiak graces the Rogers radio building in Toronto on Friday, she is accompanied not just by a coach from Swimming Canada, but also, just as importantly, by two friends in matching slippers. Their names are Sarah Nolan and Asia Reid, aged 16 and 15 respectively, and they hold the unspoken responsibility of keeping Oleksiak grounded.
“Sarah likes multigrain bagels with margarine,” Oleksiak explains in a sound check, while testing the audio levels in a video shoot for Maclean’s, in which she took the 60-second challenge. Sarah corrects her: “I’m honestly moving to cream cheese now.” Oleksiak’s parents aren’t with her, nor are her four siblings, giving the 16-year-old the independence that any teenager craves. The friends tease Oleksiak when she answers questions about Instagram and favourite restaurants. “Just watch Penny post a photo saying, ‘Come for a date with Sarah Nolan at David’s Tea on Queen Street West,” jokes one. The girls are less entourage, more peanut gallery.
Successful athletes are vulnerable to the toxicity of fame. The Ryan Lochte fiasco reminded the world what happens when sporting celebrities come to feel untouchable (the swimmer got drunk and trashed a convenience store in Rio, then lied about being robbed). Oleksiak, now a quadruple Olympic medalist and the chosen torchbearer for the closing ceremonies, could find herself millions of dollars in endorsements. Yet, she has thus far accepted no sponsors or gifts, which would make her ineligible to swim competitively in university. She did, however, get to host her own one-hour radio show on Kiss 92.5 on Friday, broadcasting her favourite songs. “I got really excited when talking about ‘Gold Digger,’” she says of the song by Kanye West.
Oleksiak is young, but not reckless. Her head is groomed, with curled lashes, streamlined eyebrows and studded earrings, which are too tempting not to play with. Most critically, her head is on her shoulders. “My friends around me and family are trying to keep me grounded,” says Oleksiak. “I’m going to try my best, too.” When the swimmer returns to school for Grade 11 next month, Nolan predicts, “there are some Grade 9’s who haven’t met her before who’ll be like, [‘Whoa!’], but mostly it’ll be the exact same.”
Her answers in the 60-second challenge emphasize nothing but normalcy. First question: What’s her current state of mind? “Right now I’m just chilling out, trying to live my normal life.” She likes Tim Horton’s doughnuts and Starbucks frappucinos. Her favourite subject in school is “lunch.” The last picture she posted on Instagram? “My cat and I.”
At the peak of her friends’ playfulness, they start fooling around with her medals. Reid, a lacrosse player, tucks two in each of her jeans pockets and starts doing squats. “I’m going for 30,” she says. “That’s a leg workout.” Reid twists and jumps and wiggles her bottom, with the medals shaking like tail feathers. The girls are making Olympic medals seem like no big deal, and that’s exactly what friends, in Oleksiak’s case, are for. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/how-penny-oleksiak-stays-humble/ | en | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/88e0b7135eb8dc9bfaceea615baf27be23a969a7612087413af6f0f8f14ced78.json |
[
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff",
"Shannon Proudfoot"
] | 2016-08-31T14:49:09 | null | 2016-08-08T13:17:51 | A historical look at Toronto's most loved (and loathed) buildings | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fsociety%2Ftorontos-architectural-renaissance-fuses-the-old-with-the-new%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/MAC31_TORONTO-ARCHITECTURE_FEATURE.jpg | en | null | Toronto's architectural renaissance fuses the old with the new | null | null | www.macleans.ca | The Art Gallery of Ontario’s present-day incarnation tells the architectural journey of an entire city: from brown brick mansions to schizophrenic additions and finally more elegant redesigns that pay homage to the past without sacrificing modern convenience or aesthetics.
For the AGO, it all began with an 1817 Georgian manor that housed the original 1913 art collection. Four years later a Beaux Arts addition was opened, followed within 10 years by yet another expansion. In the 1970s, the gallery added a sculpture wing and gift shop and in 1993 affixed a two-storey concrete structure onto the existing series of makeshift buildings. It would take a 2008 renovation by Toronto-born, L.A.-based architect Frank Gehry to knit the seven separate structures together into what is now regarded as a post-modern masterpiece.
The AGO renovation coincided with the architectural transformation of other Toronto cultural institutions. The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM), the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) and the Royal Conservatory of Music all received spectacular and eye-catching renovations.
As a group, the work announced Toronto as a destination for architecture enthusiasts and shutterbugs alike. Sure, Toronto already had buildings from architectural masters including Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, I.M. Pei and Santiago Calatrava Valls, but suddenly, as if overnight, Toronto’s dated and often dowdy streetscapes were reborn.
Matthew Blackett, publisher of Spacing, a magazine that explores urbanism, notes the ease with which signature buildings from different eras coexist. “Toronto’s two city halls are beside each other; built 60 years apart, they represent two different eras,” says Blackett. “New City Hall was about the city of the future and about moving forward. That building itself speaks so much of what this city once represented and still represents.”
Lisa Rochon, Toronto architectural critic and design strategist, notes this most recent period is defined by greater confidence and delight in architectural expression with more attention paid to human scale and the beautiful use of materials.
Right up until the 1990s, many heritage buildings were torn down in Toronto, but Rochon believes that the city has entered a new phase where City Hall, residents and developers generally agree on the importance of introducing new buildings while at the same time preserving quality heritage architecture to enhance public spaces where possible.
“So long as we keep thinking in aspirational terms,” says Rochon, “what used to be a very boring, safe place of city building and architecture, I think is going to increasingly bloom and blossom.”
Then & Now
Toronto City Hall
Architect: Viljo Revell
Completed: 1966
For Toronto residents, their new modernist City Hall was a symbol of progress and pride for a young city boldly striding on the world stage. Architect Viljo Revell prevailed over more than 500 designs submitted in the international competition, but the Finn died 10 months before the building was completed. On the day of its opening the Toronto Star wrote, “Suddenly today every Torontonian is 10 feet high.”
“You can have memories, but you can’t live in the past. The old City Hall, and I knew it for 54 years, served its purpose. The new City Hall is a symbol of Toronto’s progress and outlook on life. The City Hall should lead in new architecture.”—City worker Jack Boustead, Toronto Star, September 1965
CN Tower
Architect: John Hamilton Andrews, WZMH Architects
Completed: 1976
Toronto’s most iconic building was the world’s tallest free-standing structure for 34 years. Initial, unrealized plans for the tower and adjacent Metro Centre development included tearing down Union Station to build a convention centre, mall and beer hall.
“We’ll live to regret it if we let this monstrous dart go up.”—Toronto councillor Elizabeth Eayrs
Transformation AGO
Architect: Frank Gehry
Completed: 2008
Toronto-born Gehry, designer of the Guggenheim Bilbao and Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, reinvented the gallery with a wood-and-glass exterior, new interiors and a titanium-and-glass-faced south wing overlooking Grange Park. On the first day the gallery re-opened, nearly 52,000 arrived to tour the space.
“This is not a stylistic flash in the pan by another architect in designer glasses. Thankfully, for Toronto and the rest of Canada, Gehry’s transformation of the AGO is inspired not by personal ego but by allowing for a journey that goes deep into art and the city.”—Lisa Rochon, architecture critic, The Globe and Mail
Sharp Centre for Design
Architect: Will Alsop
Completed: 2004
Ontario College of Art and Design’s $22-million addition features a “floating box” supported by 12 multi-coloured 29-metre columns. Weighing 20 tonnes each, project managers rented North America’s second-largest crane to do the heavy lifting.
“Some people call it a spaceship; some call it a flying rectangle; some call it a tabletop…but whatever you call it, there’s never been anything like it in North America.”—Peter Caldwell, executive vice-president, OCAD
Brookfield Place Allen Lambert Galleria
Architect: Santiago Calatrava
Completed: 1992
Inspired by Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, Time magazine called the 6-storey pedestrian thoroughfare connecting Bay and Yonge Streets one of the best 10 designs of the year. Two 19th century buildings are contained within the galleria’s soaring glass and white steel arches, the former Midland Commercial Bank and the former Bank of Montreal building at the at the corner of Yonge and Front Streets that now hosts the Hockey Hall of Fame.
“[The atrium] together with the incorporated heritage buildings raise the significance of the development beyond building and architecture into the realm of art, urban design and the culture of cities.”—The Canadian Architect
Michael Lee-Chin Crystal
Architect: Daniel Libeskind
Completed: 2007
Inspired by the Royal Ontario Museum’s gem and minerals collection, the Crystal’s dramatic appearance–25 per cent glass and 75 per cent brushed aluminum–provoked intense reaction. (Libeskind’s original concept called almost exclusively for glass, but the design was changed due to concerns about the impact on artefacts, interior temperature and other structural concerns.) The Washington Post named the final product the worst building of the decade, while others call it an architectural marvel and “one of six modern buildings to rival Australia’s Sydney Opera House.”
“It’s just a wonderfully extravagant moment for Toronto. [Daniel Libeskind] is one of these real artists who has pulled back the curtain on a new face of beauty.”—William Thorsell, chief executive, ROM
“Sure, there were a lot of Walmarts thrown up in the Aughts, but Daniel Libeskind’s addition to the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto surpasses the ugliness of bland functional buildings by being both ugly and useless.”— Philip Kennicott, architecture critic, The Washington Post
Aga Khan Museum
Architect: Fumihiko Maki
Completed: 2014
Designed by Japanese architect and Pritzker Prize-winner Fumihiko Maki, the opening of the museum was heralded by The Toronto Star as “the single most significant style event of 2014.” Displaying the vast art collection of the spiritual leader of the world’s Ismaili community, the museum was originally planned for London, UK.
“A billionaire playboy and two of the world’s most celebrated architects have created a cosmic space for a spectacular hoard of Islamic art.”—Oliver Wainwright, architecture and design critic, The Guardian
John P. Robarts Research Library
Architects: Warner Burns Toan & Lunde and Mathers and Haldenby
Completed: 1972-73
Known by students as “Fort Book,” Robarts is one of North America’s most important examples of brutalist architecture and a frequent nominee as Toronto’s most unloved structure. The library is thought to be the model for the secret library in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose. Toronto’s most famous architectural eyesore has, however, been reappraised as of late and is gaining if not universal praise, at least grudging respect. When viewed from the southeast, Robarts resembles a peacock.
“Approach [Robarts] with an open mind and examine the intricacies of the composition and articulation of the form. The most difficult things in life are often the most rewarding. Brutalism can be one of them. It’s hard to get your head around, but once you’re there it may never let you go.”—Toronto heritage architecture consultant Thomas Wicks
“There is something about the library that offends every sense. It resembles not so much a place of learning as a World War II gun emplacement.”—The Canadian Architect | http://www.macleans.ca/society/torontos-architectural-renaissance-fuses-the-old-with-the-new/ | en | 2016-08-08T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/f2181a46f15c2adfd679bb1e56e97a0e645fa03e272f75f320a96dd1067590f5.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T13:08:08 | null | 2016-08-25T12:05:17 | Canadian Union of Postal Workers has until midnight Thursday to serve Canada Post with 72-hour strike notice | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fottawa-urges-both-sides-in-canada-post-dispute-to-work-with-mediator%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/MAC30_CANADA_POST_POST01.jpg | en | null | Ottawa urges both sides in Canada Post dispute to work with mediator | null | null | www.macleans.ca | OTTAWA – An 11th-hour effort was underway Thursday to avert a work stoppage at Canada Post, even as both sides in the labour dispute dug in their heels, declaring an apparent impasse.
With a strike mandate set to expire at midnight, the federal government stepped in, saying it would appoint a special mediator in hopes of breaking the stalemate.
Labour Minister MaryAnn Mihychuk offered the mediation service late Wednesday after months of bitter disagreement, and encouraged both sides to come together.
“I expect both parties to work with this special mediator to come to a resolution and avoid a work stoppage,” Mihychuk said in a brief statement.
“I continue to closely monitor the situation.”
Officials from both Canada Post and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers appeared to go into a media lockdown shortly after the minister’s announcement, refusing to say whether there was any room for movement in the talks.
But the union said it was retaining its right to serve the Crown corporation with a 72-hour strike notice should the mediation effort fail before midnight.
As of late Wednesday, the union was accusing Canada Post of stalling the talks by continuing to make unacceptable demands.
The Crown agency also complained Wednesday that union bargainers were being unrealistic.
“The union continues to press for more than $1 billion in demands with no appreciation for the current and troubling future state of the postal service caused by declining mail volumes and increasing pension obligations,” said Canada Post spokesman Jon Hamilton.
“Canada Post remains committed to negotiating agreements that are fair to our employees, and allow us to continue to provide affordable pricing and service to Canadians.”
A pay equity issue pitting rural and urban carriers against each other and a proposed move from a defined benefit pension plan to a defined contribution plan for new employees are the main stumbling blocks in the dispute.
The union claims rural postal workers earn, on average, nearly 30 per cent less than city carriers.
“Canada Post’s proposal on pay equity (for rural carriers) was nothing more than an attempt to complicate and delay that process,” the union told its members in a statement.
“Canada Post wants to drag out pay equity with binding arbitration, a process that could take years or even decades.”
Other issues include “precarious part-time and temporary employment, no improvements in staffing, the ability to close all 493 protected CUPW staffed retail locations eliminating up to 1,200 full-time jobs,” the union said.
Should the union give formal notice of a strike, mail and parcel deliveries could be disrupted by as early as Monday.
The Crown corporation also has the option to lock out workers after Thursday. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/ottawa-urges-both-sides-in-canada-post-dispute-to-work-with-mediator/ | en | 2016-08-25T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/f8d99d4a89eacc298415e5342717a17cc8610c11deed6dcffa25c2492174d1e4.json |
[
"Jaime Weinman",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-28T08:48:27 | null | 2016-08-19T11:40:25 | The TV action hero was revered for his arcane ability to make weapons out of ordinary household objects | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fculture%2Ftelevision%2Fmacgyver-is-back-and-it-could-save-tv%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MAC34_MACGYVERMERGE_POST.jpg | en | null | MacGyver is back-and it could save TV | null | null | www.macleans.ca | The TV shows we remember from the 1980s aren’t Emmy-winning dramas; they’re shows like MacGyver. The light-hearted series is being revived by CBS this September, with Lucas Till (X-Men) taking over for Richard Dean Anderson as a handsome adventurer who can make weapons out of ordinary household objects. If the series succeeds, it could revive an entire subgenre that dominated television 30 years ago: the action drama.
People who grew up in that era remember The A-Team, where the heroes blew things up without killing anyone, or The Fall Guy, about a daredevil stuntman who moonlights as a bounty hunter. These shows didn’t have a lot of depth, but they had plenty of explosions and helicopter chases.“If you are doing an action show,” says TV writer Lee Goldberg (Martial Law), “it’s a given that the bulk of your budget is earmarked for stunts and effects.”
Despite its popularity, this kind of show has been mostly absent from North American TV for a long time. Instead, popular drama has been dominated by mystery procedurals like the CSI or Law & Order: series that spend most of their time indoors, with characters arguing over clues and motives, and don’t have the self-mocking campiness that ’80s action shows were famous for. Even superhero shows like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and The Flash de-emphasize stunts in favour of soap opera complications—unlike a stunt-dominated series like MacGyver, or The Dukes of Hazzard, where the title characters’ souped-up car was more popular than they were.
One reason the action show died out may simply be that it was incredibly expensive to produce. “The various action shows I produced all had significant budget deficits and problems,” says Larry Brody (The Fall Guy). Stunts and chases require a second filming unit, not to mention a lot of cars that can be destroyed. Brody says action series sometimes had to cut corners with stock footage: “On The Fall Guy, we actually started buying previously unseen stunt footage shot for major films, putting our stars in matching costumes and driving matching vehicles.”
But no matter how far over budget an action show got, it could hardly ever be as good as its equivalents on the big screen. “Action is very expensive and most TV shows can’t top what the movies can deliver,” Goldberg says. “Why watch a TV action show, with limited production values, when you can easily stream a $150-million budgeted action movie instead?” A CSI-style mystery story, or even a science fiction drama like Netflix’s nostalgic ’80s throwback Stranger Things, can match feature films by focusing on character and suspense, rather than special effects. But a car chase on a TV budget often looks disappointing.
Yet it makes sense for networks to try and revive the genre. For one thing, action shows often hold up longer. Not only did MacGyver inspire a whole movie, MacGruber, based on a Saturday Night Live parody of it, but the organizers of this year’s Olympic Opening Ceremonies compared themselves to the title character: Daniela Thomas, one of the directors who worked on the ceremonies, told reporters that because of the low budget, they had to get used to “makeshift improvising, being MacGyver.” The Dukes of Hazzard and The A-Team have been made into feature films, while the quality dramas of their era, like Thirtysomething or Hill Street Blues, are not watched much.
That’s partly because action-oriented drama has one advantage over other types of TV: it “transcends language barriers,” Goldberg says. Plot, characterization and jokes often lose something in translation, but not jumping out of a burning building or flipping a car over. One of the longest-running international successes in TV is a German series, Alarm For Cobra 11, which has been known to buy people’s used cars just for the purpose of destroying them; Goldberg says it “has been on the air for 20 years and airs in a zillion countries.” If MacGyver works out, it will give CBS something it can market much more widely, and for much longer, than a more serious drama. And if it doesn’t work out, perhaps they can save the stunt footage and sell it to some other action show. | http://www.macleans.ca/culture/television/macgyver-is-back-and-it-could-save-tv/ | en | 2016-08-19T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/3858b5867ee76b2219c110251b55e5f5e2036d7879dd158e3726d5449e8b9432.json |
[
"Jonathan Lemire",
"Lisa Lerer",
"The Associated Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee"
] | 2016-08-26T12:53:20 | null | 2016-08-25T16:21:05 | Clinton campaign also releases video that compiles footage of prominent white supremacist leaders praising Trump | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fpolitics%2Ftrump-rebukes-clinton-accusations-of-prejudice-shame-on-you%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Donald-Trump-face.jpg | en | null | Trump rebukes Clinton's accusations of prejudice: 'Shame on you' | null | null | www.macleans.ca | MANCHESTER, N.H. – Donald Trump confronted head-on allegations that he is racist on Thursday, defending his hard-line approach to immigration while trying to make the case to minority voters that Democrats have abandoned them.
His poll numbers slipping behind Hillary Clinton’s with less than three months until Election Day, Trump tried to get ahead of the Democratic nominee, who addressed a rally in Reno, Nevada minutes later, warning that the Republican Party is being taken over by “a radical fringe,” motivated by “prejudice and paranoia.” Her speech focused on the so-called “alt-right” movement, which is often associated with efforts on the far right to preserve “white identity,” oppose multiculturalism and defend “Western values.”
“Hillary Clinton is going to try to accuse this campaign, and the millions of decent Americans who support this campaign, of being racists,” Trump predicted at his rally in Manchester, New Hampshire. “It’s the oldest play in the Democratic playbook: say ‘You’re racist, you’re racist, you’re racist.’ It’s a tired, disgusting argument. It’s the last refuge of the discredited Democratic politician.”
“To Hillary Clinton, and to her donors and advisers, pushing her to spread her smears and her lies about decent people, I have three words,” he said. “I want you to hear these words, and remember these words: Shame on you.”
Clinton also warned that Trump has “built his campaign on prejudice and paranoia,” which is “taking hate groups mainstream.” The Democratic nominee, who has been working to paint her opponent as fearmongering and racist, also said that Trump’s “disregard for the values that make our country great is profoundly dangerous.”
Her campaign also released an online video that compiles footage of prominent white supremacist leaders praising Trump, who has been criticized for failing to immediately denounce the support that he’s garnered from white nationalists and supremacist, including former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke.
More: The real homegrown extremist: Donald Trump
Trump – whose campaign says has never used the term “alt-right” and disavows “any groups or individuals associated with a message of hate” – tried to turn the tables on Clinton, suggesting that she was lashing out in order to distract from questions swirling around donations to The Clinton Foundation and her use of her private email servers.
“She lies, she smears, she paints decent Americans as racists,” said Trump, who then defended some of the core – and to some people, divisive – ideas of his candidacy.
“People of this country who want their laws enforced and respected by all, and who want their border secured, are not racists,” he said. “People who speak out against radical Islam, and who warn about refugees, are not Islamophobes. People who support the police, and who want crime reduced and stopped, are not prejudiced.”
Trump, who also met Thursday in New York with members of a new Republican Party initiative meant to train young – and largely minority – volunteers, has been working to win over blacks and Latinos in light of his past inflammatory comments and has taken to claiming that the Democrats have taken minority voters’ support for granted. At rallies over the past week, the Republican presidential nominee cast Democratic policies as harmful to communities of colour and in Mississippi on Thursday he went so far as to label Clinton “a bigot.”
“They’ve been very disrespectful, as far as I’m concerned, to the African-American population in this country,” Trump said. He was joined in Mississippi by Nigel Farage, one of the architects of Britain’s push to leave the European Union – a movement that succeeded, in part, because voters sought to block the influx of foreigners into the United Kingdom.
Many African-American leaders and voters have dismissed Trump’s message – delivered to predominantly white rally audiences – as condescending and intended more to reassure undecided white voters that he’s not racist, than to actually help minority communities.
In his speeches, Trump has painted a dismal picture of life for black Americans, describing war zones as “safer than living in some of our inner cities” and suggesting that African-Americans and Hispanics can’t walk down streets without getting shot. The latest census data show that 26 per cent of blacks live in poverty, versus 15 per cent of the country overall.
But Trump insisted Thursday that his message had already “had a tremendous impact” on the polls.
“People are hearing the message,” he said.
More: Did Trump really say that? Take our quiz
Trump also said that he’ll give an immigration speech “over the next week or two” to clarify his wavering stance on the issue. During the Republican primary, Trump had promised to deport the estimated 11 million people living in the United States illegally. In recent days, he’s suggested he might be open to allowing them to stay.
Before the meeting in New York, several protesters unfurled a banner over a railing in the lobby of Trump Tower that read, “Trump
they railed against Trump for “trying to pander to black and Latino leaders.” ”Nothing will change,“ they yelled.
Lerer reported from Reno, Nevada. Jill Colvin contributed reporting from Washington. | http://www.macleans.ca/politics/trump-rebukes-clinton-accusations-of-prejudice-shame-on-you/ | en | 2016-08-25T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/d47e692176a11245a033e1fca032fc869eb76bfbc683d884bb411262b13e3963.json |
[
"Chris Sorensen",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T20:47:58 | null | 2014-07-28T18:11:23 | A surge of HGTV reality shows–from Property Brothers to Deck Wars–is inspiring Canadians' love affair for renovations. But it's putting the economy at risk. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Feconomy%2Frealestateeconomy%2Fthe-dark-side-of-the-renovation-boom%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/MAC31_RENOS_FEATURE01.jpg | en | null | The dark side of Canada's renovation boom | null | null | www.macleans.ca | The hit Canadian TV show Property Brothers follows a formula as rigid as a newly sistered floor joist. Real-life twin brothers Drew and Jonathan Scott, the former a real estate agent and the latter a contractor, meet a couple searching for a new home. After listening to their list of “must-haves”—soaker tub, gourmet kitchen, ensuite bathroom—they tease the prospective buyers by wowing them with a swish pad far beyond their price range. Next, it’s off to view a more affordable but dumpier abode that inevitably draws such reality TV-esque observations as, “When I walked in, I was, like, no.” Unfazed, the winsome brothers–tall, stubbly faced and each capped with a lustrous head of hair–transform the ugly duckling into a magazine-worthy swan through an epic renovation (compressed to the show’s 60-minute run time), making sure to encounter a few dramatic surprises and setbacks along the way.
Now in its fourth season, Property Brothers airs in Canada on the W Network and on HGTV in the United States, where it’s among the U.S. network’s top-rated programs. Brother vs. Brother, another Scott Brothers show, is also a favourite with U.S. audiences. The same goes for W Network’s Love It or List It program. In fact, three out of every four HGTV Canada shows are picked up in the U.S., according to a HGTV Canada spokeswoman. In other words, after all those years fretting about CanCon, we’re now inundating millions of Americans with our non-flag-flying front porches and chesterfield-harbouring living rooms without even realizing it.
The growing universe of made-in-Canada home reno shows, from Deck Wars to Holmes on Homes, is only the most visible example of the country’s preoccupation with redesigns, remodels and wholesale redos. Others include the ubiquitous Dumpster bins dropped on lawns across the country, the decision by U.S. home improvement giant Lowe’s to follow Home Depot into Canada back in 2007, and the seemingly ever-present sound of the neighbour and his trusty circular saw embarking on his latest weekend project.
Total spending associated with residential renovations and repairs has more than doubled since the late 1990s to nearly $64 billion last year, or nearly four per cent of Canada’s GDP, according to a recent report from Altus Group, a Toronto-based property consulting firm. And it has almost nothing to do with a growing population or the increase in the number of houses over that time. In fact, three-quarters of the gains can be directly attributed to Canadians’ willingness to open their wallets ever wider, if it means getting a cathedral ceiling in the master bedroom or a heated floor in the basement loo.
How did we get to be such an indulgent and inward-focused lot? Our white-hot housing market had a lot to do with it. Most new homebuyers contemplate at least a few updates before moving in, while sellers now routinely spruce up their properties before listing them, in the hopes of fetching a higher price. And since money is cheap, thanks to record-low interest rates, it has never been easier for Canadians to borrow to get that new breakfast-nook addition or backyard patio. But mostly, it’s driven by the premise that thousands spent on new floors and fixtures is an “investment,” as opposed to mere conspicuous consumption. A 2013 survey by the popular home-remodelling website Houzz found that 60 per cent of Canadians cited “increasing value” as the key motivation to renovate—just as on Love It or List It, when the homeowners learn that $90,000 worth of renos to their tired bungalow just increased its “expected value” by—wait for it—$120,000.
Yet, while all that flying sawdust juiced Canada’s economy, some fear that the remarkably resilient sector (unaffected by the 2009 recession, thanks in part to Ottawa’s home renovation tax credit) could prove to be a house of cards. A hike in interest rates or a slump in home prices—or, more likely, both together—promises to dramatically curtail renovation spending, since homeowners would no longer be able to convince themselves that splurging for tropical hardwood floors will, magically, net them a huge return. Nor is it clear whether the flurry of spending has improved the country’s aging housing stock, or merely painted it several times over with truckloads of expensive lipstick.
It’s the age-old story of wanting to keep up with the Joneses—except that now, the Jones family is a perky young couple armed with a pile of borrowed cash and a pair of grinning TV hosts.
Canadians’ love affair with home renovations is second only to our seemingly insatiable lust for owning real estate—and the two are linked at the hip. A report by TD Economics last year found that renovation spending has increased, on average, at a rate of seven per cent a year since 2003, and that roughly half the growth can be directly attributed to rising numbers of home sales and soaring prices. The reason is simple: In a hot housing market, shelling out $2,000 for a new granite countertop could add another $10,000 or more to the value of a house, providing the buyers fall in love with the kitchen. “In recent years, the idea of staging a house and doing reasonably substantial changes to a house prior to listing has become more the norm in the resale world,” says Peter Norman, Altus Group’s chief economist. “There’s a lot of revamping of kitchens and bathrooms and other types of projects to get a $900,000 house up into the $1.2-million range.”
Norman calls it the “HGTV effect,” and it applies equally to buyers. Many young Canadians shopping for their first home have found themselves squeezed out of hot markets in cities such as Toronto, Vancouver and Calgary. So, instead of trying to compete in vicious bidding wars for “move-in-ready” houses—earlier this year a renovated semi-detached home in Toronto’s west end sold for $210,000 over the asking price, after getting 32 offers—many opt to buy older fixer-uppers and renovate themselves. Depending on the house, fixes can be anywhere from cosmetic updates to complete gut jobs. No wonder Canadians spend, on average, $21,000 more on their homes in the year following the purchase of a house, according to data from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.
Flipping houses has become another lucrative pastime in many cities. Buyers—often contractors—scout out overlooked, rundown homes in otherwise desirable neighbourhoods, and put in a few months’ work before turning around and selling the property for substantially more than they paid for it. Sometimes the renovations are truly spectacular, but, more often than not, it’s a case of throwing up some Ikea cabinetry on the kitchen walls and laying cheap laminate flooring directly over the concrete pad in the basement.
It’s not only buying or selling their houses that prompts homeowners to spend. Merely watching house prices inch higher in a hot market is sufficient. Economists call it the “wealth effect,” and TD cites studies that show for “every $1 increase in wealth due to home-price appreciation, households go out and spend an additional nickel—a chunk of which ends up in renovations.” Though they may not be as noticeable to neighbours, Norman says, most renovations are smaller jobs in the $3,000-to-$7,000 range—finishing a basement, knocking down a wall or two. He adds that Canada’s Baby Boomers have contributed to the reno boom because many are opting to stay in their homes, rather than downsize to a condo. “A lot of renovations are aimed at adapting homes for those pre-retirement years,” he says.
It seems there’s a never-ending list of things that need attention. The last big building boom in Canada occurred in the mid-1980s, meaning that many of those houses are now reaching the age where updates are required— and not just because brass fixtures and billowy window treatments are no longer in vogue. Blaine Swan, a home inspector and the president of the Canadian Association of Home and Property Inspectors, says many structures erected in the era are suffering from mould and other moisture-related problems, because builders had begun increasing levels of insulation in, and airtightness of homes, but didn’t always improve ventilation systems. “We started living in a plastic bag,” he says.
Even the country’s recent condo boom is a driver. While most of the soaring towers erected in cities such as Toronto, Calgary and Vancouver are still relatively new, the renovation cycle for units tends to be shorter, since part of the appeal of condo living is a swish, contemporary design. And, as new condo construction lures people back downtown, prompting the opening of new restaurants, coffee shops and yoga studios, it is simultaneously raising the value of older inner-city homes—the ones most likely to be in need of the biggest upgrades.
With tearing down and rebuilding property now a national pastime, it’s little wonder TV producers have tapped the reno trend for reality-TV treatment. Christine Shipton, the vice-president of original content at Shaw Communications’ media division, which owns HGTV Canada, says the genre really took off in earnest about three or four years ago—just as Canada’s housing market resumed its skyward climb following a brief lull during the recession. Prior to that, she says, most of the shows on the network were more “decorator-centric,” focusing on furniture, paint colours and clever ways to spruce up the patio. Those shows that did focus on renovations tended to target DIYers, following the sort of how-to format pioneered by PBS’s This Old House back in the 1980s. Even Mike Holmes, whose popular Holmes on Homes show first aired in 2001, was initially liked by audiences mainly because of his expertise and the way he verbally disembowelled the shoddy work of the contractors and developers who had preceded him.
These days, by contrast, the renos and the homeowners undertaking them have taken centre stage. “It’s not just the personalities of the hosts,” says Shipton. It’s also about “the people who are renovating their homes, what their stories are, what the stakes are for them and how it changes their lives.” In other words, renos make for good television, with their unexpected surprises, high stakes and big payoff at the end. Which is fine, as long as those contemplating real-life renos realize that most projects featured on TV aren’t simple weekend jobs, and they’re not mortgaging their future in the process.
Sadly, however, that appears to be just what Canadians are doing. A Bank of Canada report two years ago found an average of $8 billion in annual renovation spending between 1999 and 2010 was financed through debt, including loans borrowed against the existing value of real estate through home equity lines of credit, or HELOCs. The Houzz survey found that a growing number of Canadians borrow to pay for their renos, with 34 per cent saying they would take out a line of credit in 2013, compared to 14 per cent a year earlier.
Call it the dark side of the country’s reno obsession. At a time when Canadians are awash in mortgage and other debt, owing an average $1.63 for every disposable dollar earned, many are gleefully doubling down on a single, relatively illiquid asset class: housing. And they’re doing so at a time when many observers believe it’s hugely overvalued. Debt-rating agency Fitch estimates Canadian home prices are, on average, 20 per cent too high; other forecasts are even more dour. If there’s a significant correction, or a crash, homeowners will not only be faced with both the declining value of their homes, but paying back tens of thousands to the bank on top of it—potentially leaving them on the hook for more than their homes are worth.
It’s not just a risk to those renovating, but the economy as a whole. The debt-fuelled reno trend has played a major role in artificially inflating the price of houses in Canada, as eager buyers take advantage of cheap mortgage rates to compete in bidding wars for showpiece homes, each offering tens of thousands more than the next. Nor is it just people who plan on living in the homes who are responsible for soaring prices. In cities such as Toronto and Vancouver, buyers often find themselves competing head-to-head with contractors or other real estate professionals keen to buy cheaper properties that can be renovated and flipped at a huge profit. Add it all together and it’s akin to throwing gasoline on a raging brush fire—an inferno Ottawa has tried to cool four times by tightening restrictions on government-backed mortgage insurance, albeit with little effect.
The concern is what happens to consumer spending, and the economy it supports, if the housing bubble pops. “Household spending on consumption and home renovation can become vulnerable to house-price shocks,” concluded the Bank of Canada, noting that countries that had the biggest increases in home prices and debt-to-income ratios in the run-up to the 2008 crash experienced the biggest hit to spending during the recession that followed. Put another way, Canadians will suddenly feel poorer and more indebted, prompting them to snap their wallets shut. Even a modest correction could have a significant impact, given housing and the various industries that support it make up a quarter of Canada’s GDP, by some estimates. “The psychology would change, such that a new kitchen won’t so easily be justified as an ‘investment’ when property values are falling,” says Ben Rabidoux, the president of North Cove Advisors, a research firm. He adds that spending would be further affected by the challenge of borrowing money, since “HELOC and cash-out refinancing lending would tighten,” as the assets securing the loans—people’s homes—fall in value.
At least Canadians could comfortably wait out the carnage in their well-appointed castles, right? Maybe not. Though rarely talked about, there’s mounting evidence to suggest Canadians are mostly loading up on cosmetic improvements (the type most often depicted on TV shows) and ignoring more important fixes that would make their homes more comfortable and energy-efficient in the long term. Russell Richman is a professor of building science at Toronto’s Ryerson University. A few years ago, he bought a dilapidated century-old home in Toronto’s east end and made his $300,000 reno a real-world experiment in sustainable building practices. “We did really easy things, like high insulation levels, really good windows, tight air-leakage ratings, an efficient [radiant in-floor heating] system and LED lighting,” he says, adding that the energy-efficient extras contributed between $40,000 to $60,000 to the final price tag. “We operate the house in a tree-hugger, nuts-and-berries fashion. I have the windows open most of the summer while my neighbours close the windows on June 1st and put on the AC.” The result? A recent test comparing his house to his neighbour’s showed he used a fraction of the air conditioning in the summer and about half the energy to heat the house during the winter. “Five to 10 years and beyond, you will actually start to make money on this type of investment.”
Unique among his renovation-happy neighbours, Richman fears we’re collectively missing an opportunity to upgrade the country’s aging housing stock, just as many predict energy costs are poised to spike. “At the end of the day, most of the stuff we see in the pop-culture media is house porn,” he says. “But, to me, everything you don’t see in a house is equally as important as what you do see. If you spend $5,000 on the floors, it should be in our psyche to spend $5,000 behind the drywall. We need to move toward that.”
Canadians also need to move away from the idea that renovations are an easy way to make money. Those who’d balk at borrowing thousands to bet on stocks think nothing of doing so to gamble on home improvements, reasoning they’ll recoup the cost or even earn a profit. But earning a return on your renos only works if you undertake the right ones, then sell immediately in a rising market. (Those brand-new floors will be a lot less valuable after being subjected to the family dog for a few years.) Even then, there are no guarantees—other than laying the groundwork for some future TV-show makeover, of course. | http://www.macleans.ca/economy/realestateeconomy/the-dark-side-of-the-renovation-boom/ | en | 2014-07-28T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/e84f2a32ababc0dc4718bc210f6e05184eaeff7cfe33b99cac026a6df316816c.json |
[
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff",
"Shannon Proudfoot"
] | 2016-08-30T18:49:27 | null | 2016-08-30T12:30:10 | The Yazidis lived peacefully in northern Iraq. Then Islamic State arrived. Watch the victims of the region's worst atrocities tell their stories. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Fyazidi-women-seek-justice%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/MAC26_GENOCIDE_FEATURE.jpg | en | null | Yazidi women seek justice | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Maclean’s political editor Paul Wells visits the Paris neighbourhood where the Charlie Hebdo gunmen lived. The reaction from the community is shock, having learned that these mass murderers were living in their midst. Read our full coverage on the Paris shootings. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/yazidi-women-seek-justice/ | en | 2016-08-30T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/7fe4b82cb01928711f6cef4866ccb11e9b6a1040ae0b86227c97586d29d6ff43.json |
[
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff",
"Shannon Proudfoot"
] | 2016-08-27T14:48:42 | null | 2016-08-27T00:42:41 | What's the best advice Emma Thompson has ever received? What item can't she do without? What's her worst habit? She answers all of that and more in just one minute. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fculture%2Femma-thompson-takes-the-60-second-challenge%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/EMMA_THOMPSON_822.jpg | en | null | Emma Thompson takes the 60-Second Challenge | null | null | www.macleans.ca | What’s the best advice Emma Thompson has ever received? What item can’t she do without? What’s her worst habit? She answers all of that and more in just one minute. | http://www.macleans.ca/culture/emma-thompson-takes-the-60-second-challenge/ | en | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/5858819992d0486f91abdad65e22110e41716e2d61d7e65c31108bb85ad886ed.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T13:06:41 | null | 2016-08-24T17:37:07 | Study confirms those gases locked away in ice for thousands of years are indeed seeping free, but amounts are not yet large | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fits-a-lit-fuse-release-of-ancient-carbon-from-melting-permafrost-measured%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/09124982.jpg | en | null | 'It's a lit fuse': Release of ancient carbon from melting permafrost measured | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Researchers have confirmed the widespread release of ancient carbon from melting Arctic permafrost in what could be the lit fuse on a climate-change bomb.
A paper published this week in Nature Geoscience has released the first measurements of greenhouse gases from permafrost under Arctic lakes. But while the study confirms those gases locked away in ice for thousands of years are seeping free, it concludes the amounts are not yet large.
“It’s a lit fuse, but the length of that fuse is very long,” said lead author Katey Walter Anthony of the University of Alaska.
“According to the model projections, we’re getting ready for the part where it starts to explode. But it hasn’t happened yet.”
Scientists have long known that permafrost contains vast quantities of carbon in dead plants and other organic material, about twice as much as the entire atmosphere. Now, that permafrost is melting more quickly as the Arctic warms up faster than anywhere else on Earth.
The melt often takes place in Arctic lakes where liquid water thaws long-frozen soil. The material released is digested by tiny bugs and turned into carbon dioxide and methane.
“I’ve been walking on these lakes when they were frozen for a very long time,” said Walter Anthony.
“I would go out after the ice formed, look at the lake ice surface and see bubbles. I observed that bubbles are most dense and largest along the edge, where the margins were expanding, where the permafrost was thawing.”
Her observation led to three questions: Were the bubbles generated by melting permafrost? If so, was the permafrost releasing ancient, long-dormant carbon? And, if so, how much?
Researchers looked at lakes in Alaska and Siberia, as well as data from Canada. They used aerial photographs and other information to measure how the area had changed over the last 60 years.
They found that, across the Arctic, the amount of gas being released from a lake was directly related to its expansion. The more permafrost was melted around the water’s edge, the bigger the lake became, and the more greenhouse gases were released.
The team captured some of those gases and subjected them to radiocarbon dating. They found the gases had been generated from carbon stored for anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000 years.
It was the answer to the final question that most surprised Walter Anthony.
Climate scientists have long predicted a spike in the release of such long-dormant carbon. But if that’s true, it isn’t happening yet.
“Today, the permafrost-carbon feedback is pretty small,” she said.
Models suggest that over the next 90 years, greenhouse gas releases from permafrost will be 100 times higher than the levels Walter Anthony measured.
“I believe it will (happen), but when are we going to start seeing that?” she asked.
The increasingly warmer Arctic may eventually reach a permafrost-carbon tipping point, Walter Anthony suggested.
The stakes are high. Scientists estimate there are more than 1,400 petagrams of old carbon stored in permafrost. Each petagram is a billion tonnes.
“There’s a lot of interest in what the fate of that permafrost carbon is.” | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/its-a-lit-fuse-release-of-ancient-carbon-from-melting-permafrost-measured/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/34b901d3255057cb089c8ca25de679682fd8fdd8629761a7cd18441fd21a5290.json |
[
"Camille Bains",
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald"
] | 2016-08-26T12:59:34 | null | 2016-08-25T13:44:05 | Canadian Medical Association survey shows 72 per cent of doctors polled want THC levels regulated | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fregulate-thc-levels-marijuana-doctors%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/MAC17_LEGAL_WEED_POST27-2.jpg | en | null | Canadian doctors want feds to regulate THC levels in marijuana | null | null | www.macleans.ca | VANCOUVER – The Canadian Medical Association says 72 per cent of doctors who responded to a survey it conducted want the federal government to regulate THC levels in recreational marijuana.
A total of 788 doctors, or 19 per cent of the total number of doctors who received the online survey, responded to it earlier this summer, the group’s annual meeting heard Wednesday.
Dr. Jeff Blackmer, vice-president of medical professionalism at the association, said the survey was based on federal Health Minister Jane Philpott’s request for feedback from physicians.
“We really want to take a public health view to this and represent the views of physicians the same way we would on other issues, for example, smoking or alcohol use,” he told the meeting.
“It’s not to say that we do or don’t support legalization, it’s to say if it is legalized, here’s what we think that should look like.”
THC is the main psychoactive ingredient in marijuana.
Blackmer said doctors who responded to the survey were split on whether the government should combine recreational and medicinal marijuana regimes or deal with them as separate issues as part of legislation that is set to be introduced next spring.
Over 57 per cent of survey respondents said they did not want medical marijuana to be sold in health-care settings, such as pharmacies.
“The feeling was that that would send the wrong message, that in fact recreational marijuana was somehow equated with other types of pharmaceutical products,” Blackmer said.
Forty-seven per cent of respondents said pot should be distributed in non-health care settings, such as liquor stores, where there would be regulatory controls on who could buy it, along with requirements for identification.
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne has mused about selling marijuana through the province’s liquor stores.
In British Columbia, the B.C. Government and Service Employees’ Union and the B.C. Private Liquor Store Association have joined forces to advocate for the right to sell recreational cannabis through public and private liquor stores.
Doctors responding to the survey were also divided on whether people with medical exemptions could grow their own marijuana.
However, a new law that came into effect on Wednesday allows users with a medical exemption to grow a limited amount of the plant or have someone else cultivate it for them.
Nearly 87 per cent of physicians who took part in the survey said they need updated research on the harms of cannabis.
The association, which represents 83,000 physicians across the country, said it will meet with a federal task force considering recommendations involving marijuana legislation.
An earlier version of this story erroneously reported that 9 per cent of the Canadian Medical Association’s membership responded to a survey on marijuana. In fact, 19 per cent represents the total number of doctors who received the online survey. The post has been updated to reflect this. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/regulate-thc-levels-marijuana-doctors/ | en | 2016-08-25T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/801c7af666381af12372cb13c78a8e86f2c8a6b8e206e573796cdd60fbb5901c.json |
[
"Michael Barclay",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T13:07:52 | null | 2016-08-24T15:32:11 | It wasn't only Canadians who flocked to Kingston, Ont., for the Tragically Hip's final concert. Hear from the American diehards who made the trip. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fculture%2Famerican-fans-watched-tragically-hip-last-exit%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MAC36_THEHIP_BARCLAY_NYT_POST01.jpg | en | null | The American fans who watched the Tragically Hip's last exit | null | null | www.macleans.ca | When thousands of Tragically Hip fans crowded Kingston, Ont.’s Springer Market Square and packed the K-Rock Centre down the road, the sense was one of a nation coming together to celebrate a band beloved by so many. As he spoke to fans who’d made long treks to downtown Kingston, Michael Barclay discovered Americans amidst all the Canadian patriotism. These are some of their stories.
Lucas Murray is from Philadelphia, and is here because “you have to pay homage to a guy who’s given so much to a generation.” Wait, what generation? How many of his Philly friends have heard the Hip? Murray was exposed in 2002, via a roommate from Halifax—“and from being in hockey locker rooms, where they were the soundtrack.” Murray goes to see the Hip every time they play Philly. “The friends I have up here [in Canada] are always jealous of the shows that I go to, because [the Hip] will play to 17,000 people in Toronto but in Philadelphia, at the Theatre of the Living Arts, they’ll play to 200 people. At the show was me, my two buddies, half the women from the Princeton hockey team, and some guys from the AHL [Lehigh Valley] Phantoms and [Hershey] Bears. Afterwards, the band came out and just sat at the bar and drank with us, and showed a genuine appreciation for who we were.”
Outside the venue, Murray is helping Jason Stanton of London, Ont., to hold corners of an enormous Canadian flag, approximately 10 x 20 feet, which Stanton bought for $100 after he made plans to come to the final show. Stanton wanted to get as many of the 7,000 attendees as possible to sign well wishes for Downie and somehow direct it to the stage during the show, “to let Gordie know he’s always in our hearts.” Indeed, during the show the flag circulated around the arena several times, as did a banner that reads, “Thank you Prime Minister Downie.” Stanton was also circulating copies of the lyrics to “Courage,” hoping he could get the crowd to sing the song to Downie during a break between encores. He didn’t get a chance. The roar of the crowd was too deafening.
Fran and Bob Stanhope travelled from Raymond, Maine, with seven friends for the occasion. The Stanhopes, who used to be Deadheads, have seen the Tragically Hip 42 times since 1998, when they first heard them at a tailgate party skiing in Vermont. “It took three years after Jerry [Garcia] died before we found the Hip,” says Bob. “We tried a couple of Phish shows,” says Fran, “but the camaraderie with the Hip shows is a lot like the Grateful Dead.” This week, they went to shows in Hamilton and Ottawa and decided to tack on a visit to Kingston to watch the outdoor screen in the band’s hometown. They’ve seen a few shows in Montreal, but don’t normally see the Hip in Canada. “We’ve seen them in Portland, Maine, with 300 people, so why would we come to Canada?” asks Fran. This time, of course, “We knew chances were they weren’t going to do a U.S. tour.”
Keith Johnson of Austin, Texas, drove up with his two brothers—Jeff of Oklahoma City, Jerome from Temple, Texas. They got tickets through two Canadian friends, Joe and Melanie Dobroski of Niagara Falls, Ont., whom they met at a Tragically Hip show in Boston several years ago. Keith’s fandom stemmed from a random discovery: he listens to a tech podcast from Canada that played a Hip song as an outro on one episode. Texas fans are not that rare: the Johnson brothers saw the Tragically Hip at the 1,000-capacity club Emo’s on a recent tour.
William Walton of Syracuse, N.Y., drove up with his daughter to watch the show in the square. He first heard the band only a few years ago, via a friend from Buffalo—where one can easily pick up Canadian radio signals. “I’ve never seen them in concert before, just on YouTube,” he says. “We’ve had a lot of cancer in our family, so we also came to support Gord. And my brother-in-law is here from Kentucky.”
Sam Baijal books the Hillside Festival in Guelph, Ont. He’s seen the Hip a dozen times, the first being a university show he booked in the late ’80s for about 400 people. One year the Hip wanted to play Hillside; Downie was impressed with the festival when he played his first big solo show there in 2002. Baijal thought the Hip would overshadow the rest of the lineup, so instead he booked them for a single night a month before the festival, with Buck 65 and the Weakerthans. Like the Stanhopes, Baijal too is a former Deadhead. “The amount of emotion that’s going on with this tour is phenomenal, and the only thing I can equate it to is Deadheads,” he says. “The actual circumstance of what’s taking place, there’s nothing like it. I think all of us are feeling a place that we’re occupying in this story.” | http://www.macleans.ca/culture/american-fans-watched-tragically-hip-last-exit/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/02ea22ab918b48c9ed064a2e5f89ffa9814f12648bf89b2a8c17f62f9a2b98b9.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-30T18:49:29 | null | 2016-08-30T12:45:19 | Sandee MacLean is pledging to give away 0.8 hectares of woodland to anyone who makes a five-year commitment | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fcape-breton-store-offers-land-in-exchange-for-for-five-years-of-work%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/cp-featured.jpg | en | null | Cape Breton store offers land in exchange for five years of work | null | null | www.macleans.ca | WHYCOCOMAGH, N.S. — Two Cape Breton businesswomen are using the promise of land to draw potential employees to their family’s roadside general store.
Sandee MacLean is pledging to give away 0.8 hectares of woodland to anyone who commits to work at The Farmer’s Daughter Country Market for five years.
MacLean says she knew she had to “think outside the box” in coming up with ways to attract employees to the quaint bakery and store, because conventional ads hadn’t worked.
So after a walk along a mountaintop in Whycocomagh, she and her sister posted a note on Facebook offering parcels of land to anyone who will work at the store and might not mind living off the grid.
Since posting the note on Sunday, MacLean says the response has been overwhelming with more than a thousand people calling or sending them messages.
The 40-year-old, who recently took over the business from her parents, says she’s hoping they can hire about three more people to boost their year-round staff to 15. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/cape-breton-store-offers-land-in-exchange-for-for-five-years-of-work/ | en | 2016-08-30T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/f4ffa8a2318b8f3252a771709b831f95d5a7266cd199963515fe850bda1d5080.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T18:49:15 | null | 2016-08-26T13:41:05 | Canada Post says it earned a profit of about $1 million in the second quarter, as huge pension obligation looms | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fmediator-appointed-as-canada-post-warns-of-pension-problem%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/MAC30_CANADA_POST_POST02.jpg | en | null | Mediator appointed as Canada Post warns of pension problem | null | null | www.macleans.ca | OTTAWA – With the clock ticking toward a potential work stoppage at Canada Post, lawyer and author William Kaplan was appointed Friday to seek an end to the months-long labour dispute at the Crown agency.
In appointing the seasoned mediator and arbitrator to lead a team of interveners, Labour Minister MaryAnn Mihychuk said her hope was the Toronto-based Kaplan could avert threatened job action by members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers.
“I am hopeful that this will bring a new perspective to the negotiating table, which could motivate the parties to find a solution and move beyond their current impasse,” Mihychuk said in a statement.
“I continue to closely monitor the situation.”
The union issued a 72-hour strike notice Thursday, accusing Canada Post of forcing a labour disruption.
Nine months of contract talks between the Crown corporation and CUPW reached a stalemate this week with both sides saying they remained far apart on key issues including pay scales for rural letter carriers and proposed changes to pensions for future employees.
Adding fuel to its argument that its ability to meet the union’s contract demands is severely restricted, Canada Post revealed Friday that it earned a profit of about $1 million in the second quarter of operations this year, a result it termed “essentially break-even” compared with a before-tax loss of $31 million during the same period a year ago.
It credited recent cost-cutting and a growing parcel delivery business for the small profit.
However, the fiscal black ink was far overshadowed by a daunting pension obligation, Canada Post warned.
“Canada Post’s pension solvency deficit . . . is estimated at $8.1 billion as of July 1, 2016, up from $6.1 billion at December 31, 2015 (using the market value of plan assets),” the agency said.
“The large size and volatility of this obligation compared to the corporation’s revenue and profit presents a major challenge to the corporation’s financial self-sustainability.”
Canada Post wants move from a defined benefit pension plan to a defined contribution plan for new employees, a move CUPW said would create a two-tiered pension system.
The union has been arguing for wage parity between rural and urban postal workers, claiming that rural carriers earn, on average, roughly 30 per cent less than city carriers.
Mihychuk indicated Thursday the pay equity issue should be taken off the table.
“The prime minister and this government is fully committed to pay equity,” she told reporters outside a Liberal caucus meeting in Saguenay, Que.
“We actually do not believe that pay equity should be a negotiable item. It’s the law of the land and needs to be implemented,” she said.
It was not immediately clear whether a work stoppage — if it happens — would result in a disruption of mail and parcel deliveries.
CUPW said Thursday the strike notice it delivered to management did not envision a full-blown walkout. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/mediator-appointed-as-canada-post-warns-of-pension-problem/ | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/382f4dac18f22b2408aaf1e6c93dcba023f7289e1333ab7f74e1ea66287ae398.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T13:07:39 | null | 2016-08-24T22:03:07 | Canada has been training around 2,000 peshmerga in Iraq since 2014, who will now be sidelined | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Fcanadian-trained-kurdish-forces-wont-clear-isis-from-mosul%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/MAC09_KURDISTAN_POST01.jpg | en | null | Canadian-trained Kurdish forces won't clear ISIS from Mosul | null | null | www.macleans.ca | OTTAWA – Canadian-trained Kurdish forces in Iraq are expected to watch the upcoming fight for the city of Mosul from the sidelines, underlying the ethnic and religious divisions that persist within the country.
Preparations to liberate Mosul from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant have been underway for months, with the Kurdish peshmerga, Iraqi military and Shia militia groups closing on the city. A humanitarian response is also being prepared to help the city’s 1 million people once the fighting starts.
Victory in Mosul will mark a key moment in the fight against ISIS, as the city is the last major urban centre still controlled by the militant group in Iraq.
But Brig.-Gen. David Anderson, who is in charge of an international team of military advisers posted within Iraq’s ministry of defence, indicated the approximately 2,000 peshmerga that Canada has trained in Iraq since September 2014 will not be directly involved in rooting ISIS from the city.
“The role of peshmerga, as I understand it, will be to in essence secure the northern flank of Mosul, and to some degree the eastern flank, to allow the Iraqi security forces to move forward and clear through Mosul,” Anderson told reporters in a call from Baghdad on Wednesday.
International leaders have previously warned about the need to control which groups are involved in clearing Mosul. The focus has largely been on the Shia militia groups, which are accused of indiscriminately killing Sunni Muslims in areas freed from ISIS’s grip. The groups say those killed were ISIS sympathizers.
But the Kurds, who have a semi-autonomous government in northern Iraq, have made no secret of their hopes for full independence after ISIS is defeated. They have also clashed several times with the Shia groups, and warned they will not return territory liberated by the peshmerga but claimed by Baghdad.
Officials warned Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last year that the Kurds could use the military training and equipment Canada is providing to fight ISIS to one day push for an independent state.
Anderson would not say when the fight for Mosul will begin. But he said the Iraqi government and international allies are already looking past the looming battle toward the “difficult part” that comes after, namely how to reconcile the various armed groups in the country.
“The long-term vision is actually probably the most important question to be answered,” he said. “(ISIS) is going to be defeated. There is no doubt about that, and Mosul and Raqqa are going to fall. There is no doubt about that. The important piece is what happens afterward.”
Part of Anderson’s responsibility within Iraq’s defence ministry is to monitor efforts to train Iraqi forces in the fight against ISIS. He said Canada and its allies have trained more than 13,500 Iraqi forces, including 6,000 peshmerga and 4,000 members of the Iraqi military.
Allegations of corruption have long plagued the defence ministry, with some saying the problem contributed to the Iraqi military’s inability to stop ISIS two years ago. Just this month, Defence Minister Khaled Obeidi accused several Iraqi MPs of using their positions to lobby for defence companies.
Anderson said about $1.6 billion has been spent arming and equipping Iraqi forces through a special fund since 2015. However, he said he had seen no evidence of corruption within the ministry, and that requests for money from the fund go through a stringent vetting process. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/canadian-trained-kurdish-forces-wont-clear-isis-from-mosul/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/331e252fcadd194a9fd86299abc7599b20b73e0f5d31ac56577885f7b431693b.json |
[
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff",
"Shannon Proudfoot"
] | 2016-08-26T13:09:28 | null | 2016-08-24T14:00:05 | The health minister may have paid back some of the money she spent on an expensive car service, but Canadian Press reporter Kristy Kirkup tells Evan Solomon why Jane Philpott will still be under the microscope. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fpolitics%2Fwhy-jane-philpotts-limo-scandal-isnt-over%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/13639244001_5097045038001_5097036691001-vs.jpg | en | null | Why Jane Philpott's limo scandal isn't over | null | null | www.macleans.ca | The health minister may have paid back some of the money she spent on an expensive car service, but Canadian Press reporter Kristy Kirkup tells Evan Solomon why Jane Philpott will still be under the microscope. | http://www.macleans.ca/politics/why-jane-philpotts-limo-scandal-isnt-over/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/c6fd2b3d316fee1b036812c6180a140fe4dacb006b23a4a591892c42fea94cbb.json |
[
"Jason Markusoff",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Shannon Proudfoot"
] | 2016-08-31T02:49:30 | null | 2016-08-30T22:13:58 | Donald Trump has criticized Hillary Clinton for transactional politics. But he should look in the mirror, too. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fpolitics%2Fwashington%2Fclinton-trump-and-the-art-of-the-quid-pro-quo%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/12695339.jpg | en | null | Clinton, Trump, and the art of the quid pro quo | null | null | www.macleans.ca | At the intersection of arguably the world’s most powerful government department and a high-glitz humanitarian charity, there stood Hillary and Bill Clinton. They’ve brought along numerous others to join them in straddling the Clinton Foundation and dealings with the U.S. State department: from top State aide (and foundation consultant) Huma Abedin to the growing list of donors who sought and/or received access to government.
Even without clear evidence of wrongdoing, the risk of conflict of interest has long hung in the air, and the Democrat nominee has pledged to limit how much it wafts over to the White House. Donald Trump has predictably whipped up accusations of payola: “It’s impossible to tell where the Clinton Foundation ends and the State Department begins,” the Republican nominee said last week. With a trove of emails recently released and the election 10 weeks away, it’s safe to expect more investigative journalism, and more protests that such scrutiny is coming at all, that it’s a witch hunt based on a few trace broom fibres.
It’s defensive and naive to grouse about attempts to explore a potential president’s flaws, weaknesses and possible conflicts—especially given the access donors got to the Lincoln bedroom when her husband was president, a thank-you gift still paying dividends two decades later.
Energy is better spent asking the same question about Clinton’s opponent, a man whose history you don’t have to comb exhaustively for his view of what scratching one’s back should render.
Few know better than Donald Trump about the expectations that come with donations, and few so demand a tat for a every tit. If elected, it seems clear that Trump would be the transactional president, the chiseller of quid pro quo as America’s new Latin seal, the leader who might just trade off a patch of New Mexico in negotiations to make Mexico pay for the border wall. (New Mexicans aren’t nice and won’t vote for him anyway, so what’s the problem?)
When Trump was asked whether he would defend NATO allies in the Baltic states against Russian aggressions, his thinking went straight into pay-for-play: if Latvia doesn’t pay, maybe not. The same rationale led him to suggest Japan was on its own against North Korea. The country is “killing” the United States on trade and is costly to defend, so why bother?
He’s emerged from a National Rifle Association endorsement meeting to spout rhetoric that ranged from right up the NRA’s alley to too extreme even for the gun lobby, by suggesting Orlando nightclub-goers should have mixed booze and Berettas. In exchange for some love from evangelical pastors, he vowed to scrap a 1954 rule limiting political speech from the pulpit.
Before he was the Republican nominee, Trump has viewed his own donations to politicians as useful largely because he sees them as chits he can call in later. “When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me,” Trump said at a primary debate last year. He even suggested he secured Clinton’s attendance at his third wedding since “she had no choice! Because I gave.” Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi, a Trump supporter, denied that the $25,000 donation she got from Trump had anything to do with her office choosing not to join a Trump University investigation, but if an exchange wasn’t the business mogul’s intent, that would run counter to his philosophy.
Even on occasions of personal charity, he’s depicted altruism not as a virtue, but rather something to complain about. “I didn’t have to do this with the money for the vets, but I decided to because I thought it was a good idea,” Trump said this spring—as though charitable donations would normally only be something he had to do.
“That might be why he is hammering this issue with Hillary and the Clinton Foundation,” says Michael D’Antonio, author of the biography The Truth About Trump. “He might find it being impossible to believe that somebody isn’t paying to play. Because in that frame of reference, that’s all that is ever going on.”
Trump’s business career was all about cost-benefit analysis and leverage, D’Antonio tells Maclean’s. And that approach would extend to his own staff, who would enjoy inflated salaries but would therefore have to tolerate 3 a.m. phone calls from the boss and other high demands. “It’s ‘I’m going to pay you a lot, and I’m going to give you more authority and responsibility than you normally might get, but in exchange I own you,’ ” D’Antonio explains. “He wants to own people. This is why he told him people who cross him are dead to him.”
The Republican nominee will feel free to ridicule and insult if he perceives somebody isn’t being nice to him; on the other hand, because he (wrongly) says Vladimir Putin has called him a genius, he’s genteel in response to the Russian President. In July, he complained via tweet that a liberal Fox News commentator who had just asked for a picture with him shouldn’t have criticized him.
Why is Juan Williams so UNFAIR to me?! I never even insulted his wife or father. He should resign!! @realDonaldTrump https://t.co/bL5DIpPWe2 — DonaId J. Trump (@realDenaldTrump) July 25, 2016
Politics is seldom so plainly transactional. The most donors can regularly expect in return is a fair hearing, though policy reforms would be awful nice (and are too often won). A candidate has to find the secret blend of ideas and approaches to woo one side and not alienate another, a challenge he’s clearly having with his latest pretzelling on illegal immigrants.
“The idea there are members of Congress and party leaders and interest groups who have independent sources of power, I think it would be difficult to cope with,” D’Antonio says. “In another context he would buy up the property from a resistant seller.”
Perhaps some of his policy offerings to voter groups might mark the end of the transaction in Trump’s thinking, the biographer reasons: “I made the promise; you gave me your votes. Let’s move on to the next thing.” If Clinton’s dealings and links might provide four more years of smoke for journalists to investigate, a Trump presidency could bring whole ecosystems of soot. | http://www.macleans.ca/politics/washington/clinton-trump-and-the-art-of-the-quid-pro-quo/ | en | 2016-08-30T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/d1bb77cecc22242c4c71a53f65721be5d957d337a4a2cab7247d86392356763d.json |
[
"The Associated Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-29T04:49:13 | null | 2016-08-28T23:44:28 | The speech, pushed back to Wednesday, comes as Trump mulls softening stance on illegal immigrants | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Fwednesday-speech-could-clarify-trumps-immigration-policy%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/TRUMP-822.jpg | en | null | Wednesday speech could clarify Trump's immigration policy | null | null | www.macleans.ca | WASHINGTON—Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump announced he’ll be making a speech on illegal immigration on Wednesday in Arizona, after a week of speculation that he might be softening his hard-line promise to deport 11 million people living in the United States illegally.
The speech, posted in a tweet late Sunday, was initially set for last week in Phoenix, but was pushed back as Trump and his team wrestled over the details of what he would propose. There has been debate within his campaign about immigrants who haven’t committed crimes beyond their immigration offences.
The candidate’s shifting stance hasn’t made it easy for top supporters and advisers, from his running mate on down, to defend him or explain some campaign positions. Across the Sunday news shows, a parade of Trump stand-ins, led by vice-presidential nominee Mike Pence, couldn’t say whether Trump was sticking with or changing a central promise to use a “deportation force” to expel immigrants here illegally. And they didn’t bother defending his initial response Saturday to the killing of a mother as she walked her baby on a Chicago street.
Questioned on whether leaving key details on immigration policy unclear so late in the election is a problem, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus demurred: “I just don’t speak for Donald Trump.”
It was a striking look at Trump’s leadership of a team he had said would help drive him to victory in the Nov. 8 election.
Surrogates speak for and back up their presidential nominee. But Team Trump’s struggled to do so even as they stayed tightly together on the details they know: Trump will issue more details on the immigration plan soon, the policy will be humane, and despite his clear wavering, he’s been “consistent” on the issue. Any discussion of inconsistencies or potentially unpresidential tweeting, Pence and others suggested, reflected media focus on the wrong issue.
Asked whether the “deportation force” proposal Trump laid out in November is still in place, Pence replied: “Well, what you heard him describe there, in his usual plainspoken, American way, was a mechanism, not a policy.”
Added Trump’s campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway: “The softening is more approach than policy,” adding that on immigration, Trump “wants to find a fair and humane way.”
The Indiana governor, Conway and other surrogates said the main tenets of Trump’s immigration plan still will include building a wall along the southern U.S. border and making Mexico pay for it, no path to status adjustment or citizenship for people here illegally and stronger border enforcement. Pence also did not answer whether the campaign believes, as Trump has said, that children born to people who are in the U.S. illegally are not U.S. citizens. That, he said, “is a subject for the future.”
Native-born children of immigrants, even those living illegally in the U.S., have been automatically considered American citizens since the adoption of the 14th Amendment in 1868.
Trump has focused lately on deporting people who are in the U.S. illegally and who have committed crimes. But who Trump considers a criminal remained unclear Sunday.
Trump in recent days has suggested he might be “softening” on the deportation force and that he might be open to allowing at least some immigrants in the country illegally to stay, as long as they pay taxes.
But by Thursday, he was ruling out any kind of legal status — “unless they leave the country and come back,” he told CNN.
Recent polls indicate Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton is ahead in some of the most competitive and pivotal states. The first presidential debate is set for Sept. 26.
His surrogates on Sunday refused to comment on Trump’s reaction to the fatal shooting of NBA star Dwyane Wade’s cousin Friday, as she pushed her baby in a stroller in Chicago.
Trump’s first tweet about the shooting ended this way: “Just what I have been saying. African-Americans will VOTE TRUMP!”
A few hours later, he followed up with a tweet offering condolences to Wade and his family.
Asked whether the initial tweet was presidential or appropriate, GOP officials and campaign advisers instead talked about reducing crime or said they were pleased Trump followed up with a tweet of condolence and empathy.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie said the media “focus on process … instead of the message.” He said the killing of someone pushing a stroller “is unacceptable in an American city” and that “the level of violence in Chicago is unacceptable.”
Pence appeared on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Priebus was on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Christie was interviewed on ABC’s “This Week” and Conway was on Fox and CBS’ “Face the Nation.” | http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/wednesday-speech-could-clarify-trumps-immigration-policy/ | en | 2016-08-28T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/bb81150013e760ea12c34819e85ff3f3a33f73caac782e0a7a8034deca61bae5.json |
[
"Nikki Wiart",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T18:48:08 | null | 2016-07-05T17:14:57 | Postal-service expert Robert Campbell discusses Canada Post’s potential lockout, and the future of Canada's mail service | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fwhy-both-sides-in-the-canada-post-dispute-are-in-bad-positions%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/MAC29_CANADA_POST_POST01.jpg | en | null | Why both sides in the Canada Post dispute are in bad positions | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Here’s a not-so-special delivery: Canadians may be forced to prepare for a postal-service disruption as early as Friday. (Maclean’s subscribers, here is what you need to know about your magazine deliveries.) Early Tuesday, Canada Post served a 72-hour lockout notice to the Canadian Union of Postal Workers, halting negotiations between the two, and possibly sending postal workers across Canada to the picket line by the end of the week. CUPW and Canada Post have been working on a collective agreement since December, and this latest disruption has to do with the union wanting a pay increase for its rural, female carriers, and Canada Post saying it’s not affordable, especially while the corporation undergoes a government review of its operations—including door-to-door delivery.
MORE: Canada Post issues 72-hour lockout notice
Robert Campbell is the president and vice-chancellor of Mount Allison University. He’s authored two books on postal systems, and chaired the committee that reviewed Canada Post’s mandate back in 2008. He spoke to Maclean’s about what the future of postal service in Canada could look like, and how this current labour dispute fits into it.
Q: Can you put this current labour dispute in context with what’s been happening to Canada Post over the past decade or so?
A: I think Canada Post just simply wants this to end the uncertainty. Because it’s not in its business interest to have a long period of uncertainty, even if there’s no strike or lockout. I think the lockout business, and I’m guessing, is just a sign that Canada Post feels that it can’t afford uncertainty, which is almost as damaging as a strike.
The flip side of this is that I don’t, in my heart of hearts, think the union’s in a particularly strong position in terms of having public opinion or anyone else on their side in a labour dispute. How many strikes have you seen around these days? Times are tough, the unemployment rate’s not great, the growth prospect’s not great. I think people understand that the context of Canada Post is one in which it’s not quite a smokestack industry, but it’s a transformative sector in which everyone’s gotta change, for good or for bad, for right or for wrong. I don’t think there’s going to be a lot of sympathy for the union. That’s not to suggest they’re not arguing meritorious things—they have the right to bargain at the table and they have the right to look after their members. But I think that both sides are negotiating from positions of weakness: Canada Post in terms of its exposure in the market, and labour in terms of the fact I don’t think there will be a lot of public sympathy for their position if they went on strike.
Q: If a deal isn’t reached between the union and Canada Post, what does that mean for Canadians?
A: Well, that’s an odd thing. Because there will be an ambivalent, if not schizophrenic, response by Canadians. On the one hand, vast proportions of your readers have exited physical to the digital communications world. For a lot of people who are doing their banking, doing their financial services, their professional work, their communication with people, they’re using digital communications, this will be a bit of a tree falling in the forest. From the perspective of the Canada Post brand, it’s a bad idea to have a whole bunch of people wandering around saying, ‘See? There’s a strike on and nobody notices.’ So that’s the one hand.
On the other hand, there’s a different part of society, perhaps less urban, rural, small-town, small to medium-sized business that still rely on physical communication. It’s part of their lives. Maybe they haven’t exported over to digital yet because they don’t know how to do it, or it’s because it’s too expensive and there’s too much uncertainty. Or they may be in a line of work in which physical communication still makes a lot of sense, whether you’re selling stuff through catalogues or doing internet commerce, or fundraising, in which the physical thing is still more effective than the digital thing.
I think there will be an ambivalent response, and it will put the government in an awkward position if it dragged on, because typically there’s a kind of simple narrative around a strike that a government will then react to. But I’m not sure the narrative here will be so clear cut, one way or the other.
Q: You’ve been quite a strong advocate for Canada Post to remain a public service. What are the downsides of privatization?
A: The merits of the public format, at the moment, is that for Canadians it offers a from-anywhere-to-anywhere kind of approach, at a relatively uniform and accessible price. One just doesn’t know, if you unpack that model, what the service levels will be to outlying areas or small towns. One would not know what would go on with the price that people would have to pay and so on. It may very well be, when you look around the world, at this function being privatized or quasi-privatized, if you look at Holland, or England, or Belgium, these are all well-run postal services that have privatized and the sky has not fallen. But I think they were perhaps more ready; a lot of the questions were sorted out, and the organization of the firm was probably better placed to go the private route. The regulatory models had been experimented with. We don’t really have any sort of regulatory model, a third-party regulation model for post at the moment. We’d have to develop that. I think maybe one or two more stages yet and then maybe we’ll come back and have that discussion.
Q: What is it that needs to happen now to stabilize postal service in Canada, so that we’re not either in the midst of a strike, or the threat of a strike, every few years?
A: I think that would have been a fair comment talking about the ’60s, ’70s, early ’80s, but from say the mid-’90s to now, there hasn’t been a lot of postal disruptions. It’s been reasonably calm. The last thing under Harper lasted a couple of days, and there were a couple of contracts before that where there was a strike. So I would have characterized the labour situation a little bit differently than you have. If you look around the world, there’s been very little postal disruption, partially because, this is just my opinion, the union has been weakened in its ability to negotiate at the table. The market is changing so fast and there’s such shedding of business, it doesn’t really have a strong position in which to bargain. Most unions around the world have been able to sit down with management and try to see what their common interests are in going forward in terms of a changing market. I think of a labour dispute like this as a sign of weakness on the part of the union. I’m not saying that in a pejorative sense, but in a mechanical sense. I think that if they were able to make a case with Canada Post on their terms, they would have been able to do it at the table. So they’re obviously not seeing eye-to-eye on the longer-term health, the future of the postal sector. Whereas in other countries they seem to have been able to get to that point. I’m afraid it’s kind of a, ‘Is there a God?’ quality to what’s being discussed here right now, and I think that’s kind of a dopey debate to be having when you’re losing four, five per cent of your volumes every year.
Q: Where do you see the future of Canada Post headed?
A: I think Canadians have a want-your-cake-and-eat-it kind of approach to things, like we do for most things in life. Hell, I want a wild and crazy life and I want money in my bank. Canadians want a level of service that perhaps they don’t need and I think a lot of people have come to that place, but not enough. I think one of the discussions we have to have in Canada is to say, ‘Look, seriously folks, what do we actually want the post office to do? What are our real needs here? And what are we willing to pay for it?’ Because I think the parade’s gone by on universal daily service, one- or two-day delivery at a cheap price. That’s not going to happen anymore because there’s not enough volume to sustain that. So are we willing to give up home delivery? Are we willing to give up daily delivery? What are we willing to pay for this? That’s number one.
Number two. If you buy something from Amazon, or you buy something online, you’re very often are given a choice of how you want the delivery, right? If you want it for free, we’ll get it to you in seven to 10 days. If you want in three to five days, you pay x, and if you want it in one to two days, you pay y. I think that’s going to be the model. And now with digitization in which every address in the country is kind of unique, I think you’re going to see a lot more one-on-one relationships like that develop between the customer and the provider of the service. And the sellers on Internet commerce are going to want to accommodate that. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/why-both-sides-in-the-canada-post-dispute-are-in-bad-positions/ | en | 2016-07-05T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/0612f086ddb123a772c0de5f5715da99f9baa187a495e5116ecadceb148d8d38.json |
[
"The Associated Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-30T20:49:30 | null | 2016-08-30T15:08:43 | The Islamic State group has suffered a string of defeats in recent weeks, forcing them to retreat in Syria and Iraq | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Fisis-says-spokesman-abu-muhammed-al-adnani-killed-in-syria%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/MAC26_ISIS-KILL-LIST_Post.jpg | en | null | ISIS says spokesman Abu Muhammed al-Adnani killed in Syria | null | null | www.macleans.ca | BEIRUT—The Islamic State group said Tuesday that its spokesman and senior commander has been killed while overseeing military operations in northern Syria, and threatened to avenge his death.
The IS-run Aamaq news agency said Abu Muhammed al-Adnani was “martyred while surveying the operations to repel the military campaigns in Aleppo,” without providing further details.
His death, if confirmed, would be the latest blow to the Islamic State group, which has been on the retreat in Syria and Iraq, where it has declared a self-styled Islamic caliphate straddling both countries.
Adnani, a senior leader in the group, has been the voice of IS over the past few years, and has released numerous, lengthy audio files online in which he delivered fiery sermons urging followers to carry out attacks.
Earlier this year, he called for massive attacks during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. He has also called for attacks in Western countries, telling Muslims in France on occasion to attack “the filthy French” in any way they could, including “crush them with your car.”
He has also disparaged Saudi Arabia and its influential clerics for failing to rally behind the rebels that the monarchy supports in Syria like they did decades ago in Afghanistan.
There was no immediate comment or confirmation from Washington of his death.
Aamaq vowed revenge against the “filthy cowards in the sect of disbelief.” It said a generation raised in ISIS-held territory will take revenge.
The Islamic State group has suffered a string of defeats in recent weeks, including in Syria’s northern Aleppo province, where Turkish troops and allied Syrian rebels drove IS out of the border town of Jarablus last week.
In Iraq, the group has lost its strongholds in Fallujah and Ramadi, in the western Anbar province. It still controls Mosul, but Iraqi forces are gearing up for a long-awaited operation to retake the country’s second largest city. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/isis-says-spokesman-abu-muhammed-al-adnani-killed-in-syria/ | en | 2016-08-30T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/9340cba0f6416c5cd545f540ae737745de7ee2f5d014d8625e5fa64a019a5b40.json |
[
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff",
"Shannon Proudfoot"
] | 2016-08-26T16:48:32 | null | 2016-08-26T11:00:51 | Martin Patriquin talks to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about his choice to prioritize public appearances. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fpolitics%2Fjustin-trudeau-on-his-constant-visibility-with-captions%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Trudeau-Sudbury.jpg | en | null | Justin Trudeau on his constant visibility (with captions) | null | null | www.macleans.ca | The health minister may have paid back some of the money she spent on an expensive car service, but Canadian Press reporter Kristy Kirkup tells Evan Solomon why Jane Philpott will still be under the microscope. | http://www.macleans.ca/politics/justin-trudeau-on-his-constant-visibility-with-captions/ | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/711984ab40a28c059b2dff093850ff4b9909dcb12b5034dc436936602759a7bc.json |
[
"John Geddes",
"Scott Feschuk",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff",
"Shannon Proudfoot"
] | 2016-08-26T13:00:26 | null | 2016-08-24T15:38:18 | The Ministry of Public Safety takes the lead from the RCMP | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fwhat-aaron-driver-taught-us-about-terrorism%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MAC36_COUNTER-RADICAL_POST-1.jpg | en | null | What Aaron Driver taught us about terrorism and the RCMP | null | null | www.macleans.ca | In showing that chilling video of Aaron Driver, clad in a black balaclava, on a big screen at the force’s Ottawa headquarters, above the heads of two grim-faced senior Mounties, the RCMP’s message was clear: This is what homegrown terrorism looks and sounds like, and Canadians should be thankful that fast, smart police work stopped him from carrying out his murderous plan.
But another point could also be taken from the story of Driver’s death on Aug. 10 in Strathroy, Ont., killed by a police bullet after the 24-year-old self-proclaimed ISIS supporter set off a homemade explosive device in the back of a taxi. In fact, Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale wasted no time making it: “The government of Canada has to get far more proactive on the whole issue of outreach, community engagement, counter-radicalization, determining how and in what means the right positive constructive influences can be brought to bear to change what otherwise would be dangerous behaviour.”
Within days he was visiting a Montreal centre that tries to help parents who fear their sons are being drawn to violent ideas, like Driver’s embrace of radical Islam. Goodale announced that he will soon appoint an adviser on the issue, and later set up a counter-radicalization office. What Goodale didn’t spell out was that by assuming the lead on this long-overdue push, his department appears to be taking over where the RCMP has failed to make visible progress.
The federal police force has been touting its work on countering violent extremism for a few years. In late 2014, Mounties said a landmark program would be rolled out in early 2015. The basic concept was to support “hubs” where RCMP officers would work with groups of social agencies, religious leaders and community groups to intervene when radicalized individuals looked to be heading toward violence. But no big national launch ever happened.
In its official plan for 2015-16, the RCMP promised to “implement a Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) program,” but the 2016-17 version of the same planning document pledged only to “allocate resources to develop a formal community-based prevention program to address violent extremism.” The force wouldn’t make an officer available for an interview about this apparent back-to-the-drawing-board step, but said by email it has “a number of mutually reinforcing initiatives to help reduce the risk of radicalization to violence” and “has been and will continue to be engaged in discussions around” Goodale’s new centre.
Several independent experts on violent extremism said the RCMP faltered on the file. “They’ve really struggled on this stuff,” said Larry Brooks, who retired from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in 2014 as its director general of Middle East and Africa operations, and has more recently advised Public Safety on counter-radicalization. One problem, Brooks said, is that the RCMP tends to want to run things, and counter-radicalization programs are generally better spearheaded by street-level agencies.
Lorne Dawson, a University of Waterloo sociology professor and co-founder of the Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society, credited RCMP officers with “really diving into the research” and talking to top outside experts. In the end, though, Dawson said those efforts “just stalled.” He added that Goodale’s initiative, which fulfills a Liberal campaign promise, changes everything. “It’s a total new game,” Dawson said. “So the RCMP activity, I’m sure, has gotten subsumed under it.”
That might be just as well. The RCMP hasn’t always seemed comfortable with what’s sometimes called the “soft side” of fighting terrorism. For instance, the RCMP co-operated with Muslim groups in Winnipeg in 2014 on writing a counter-radicalization handbook called United Against Terrorism, but then withdrew support at the last minute. The RCMP faulted its tone as “adversarial,” though without specifying how. (The handbook did advise Muslims that co-operating with police in Canada is voluntary.)
Sara Thompson, a criminology professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, said the RCMP is likely waiting now to see what steps Goodale’s new counter-radicalization office takes. But Thompson, whose research focuses on youth radicalization, added that police at the local level, sometimes including the RCMP, are already pursuing the promising “hub” approach in dozens of Canadian cities.
The model involves police, social service agencies, community groups, and others, meeting to coordinate interventions when signs point to a risk of violence. It works not just for terrorism, Thompson says, but other sorts of crime, too. “It’s really imperative that the effort play out at the local level and really be controlled at the local level,” she said.
Still, Thompson said Ottawa could play a key role financing these local programs, and funding research into what works and what doesn’t. That could be a job description for Goodale’s new national office, with the RCMP relegated to a supporting role that’s yet to be determined. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/what-aaron-driver-taught-us-about-terrorism/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/638fe3fa29bded2c5a99e037e644cae1c4dd8cedf7f9101f58cf9387dc4b20c9.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T14:49:21 | null | 2016-08-26T10:27:08 | 'Today I wish to inform you that I am stepping down as the member of Parliament for Calgary Heritage,'' wrote former prime minister Harper | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fpolitics%2Ffor-the-record-stephen-harpers-resignation-message-to-constituents%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/MAC30_HARPER_GALLERY11.jpg | en | null | For the record, Stephen Harper's resignation message to constituents | null | null | www.macleans.ca | For the record, the text of Stephen Harper’s remarks following his resignation Friday as member of Parliament for Calgary Heritage:
Greetings, fellow Calgarians and fellow Canadians.
Today I wish to inform you that I am stepping down as the member of Parliament for Calgary Heritage.
For a total of nearly 18 years, I have had the tremendous honour of representing Calgary in the Parliament of Canada. On seven occasions, I have been deeply humbled by your trust and support, time and again. And I leave elected office proud of what our team accomplished together.
We united all Conservatives behind our agenda. We cut taxes, made critical investments and balanced the national budget. We got tough on crime and put families first. We managed our G7 economy through the worst global recession since the Great Depression, and came out in the strongest position of them all. We took principled decisions in a complex and dangerous world. And, whether at home or abroad, we were always proud to stand up for Canada.
Friends, we did a lot together, but I know the best is yet to come.
Our country must continue to serve as a model of prosperity and freedom. Pursue the principles we have stood for at home and abroad, and our children, and children’s children, will inherit the Canada we know and love so dearly.
As I bid farewell to the Parliament of Canada, and prepare for the next chapter of my life, my eternal thanks to the constituents of Calgary Heritage, to the members of the Conservative Party, and to all Canadians for having given me the honour of serving the best country in the world.
May God bless all of you and may God bless Canada. | http://www.macleans.ca/politics/for-the-record-stephen-harpers-resignation-message-to-constituents/ | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/aef6bffae7f63a08fc31fbdf0464bf678a1c4dc954004759e7956a44563a3f3d.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-28T18:49:01 | null | 2016-08-28T13:26:11 | Iranian-Canadian national Abdolrasoul Dorri Esfahani arrested on suspicion of 'infiltration', released on bail | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Firan-confirms-arrest-of-member-of-negotiation-team%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/macleans-fb-sell.jpg | en | null | Iran confirms arrest of member of negotiation team | null | null | www.macleans.ca | TEHRAN, Iran – Iran’s judiciary on Sunday confirmed the brief detention of a member of Iran’s negotiation team with world powers on suspicion of “infiltration,” the official IRNA news agency reported.
On Wednesday, hard-line news outlets said authorities detained a dual Iranian-Canadian national, Abdolrasoul Dorri Esfahani, a member of the Ontario Institute of Chartered Accountants in Canada.
The Sunday report by IRNA quoted judiciary spokesman, Gholamhosein Mohseni Ejehi, as saying, “The report is correct. He was released based on bail. Yet, his charge is not proved.”
He neither elaborated on the case nor identified the suspect by name. However IRNA called the suspect, an “infiltrating element.”
Esfahani reportedly worked as a member of a parallel team working on lifting economic sanctions under one of the main negotiators for last year’s landmark nuclear deal between Iran and world powers. He was also an adviser to the head of Iran’s Central Bank.
After the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Esfahani reportedly served as a member of the Iranian team working at the Hague on disputes between Iran and the United States over pre-revolution purchases of military equipment from the U.S. by Iran.
On Monday, Iran’s Foreign Ministry denied the report and said none of the members of its nuclear negotiation team was detained.
Diana Khaddaj, a spokesman for Global Affairs Canada, the government department that oversees diplomatic matters, said Sunday week that it was aware of reports of a Canadian citizen’s detention when asked about Esfahani. She declined to elaborate due to privacy concerns.
It remains unclear why Esfahani is under investigation, though dual nationals have been increasingly targeted by security forces since the nuclear deal and accused of a variety of security-related crimes.
However Esfahani’s release on bail suggests his case is not considered serious by Iran’s Iranian judiciary, which traditionally does not offer bail to suspects accused of major crimes.
The nuclear deal remains a sore spot for Iranian hardliners, but it has boosted the popularity of moderate President Hassan Rouhani and helped his supporters make major gains in March parliamentary elections. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/iran-confirms-arrest-of-member-of-negotiation-team/ | en | 2016-08-28T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/6eeef2be3907541760f730c1d5f402daede18168f3ee824aafd3d97ac18213ec.json |
[
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff",
"Shannon Proudfoot"
] | 2016-08-26T22:48:34 | null | 2016-08-26T17:00:55 | Penny Oleksiak won four medals in Rio, where she set an Olympic record in the pool. Watch her take on our 60-Second Challenge. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fvideos%2Fpenny-oleksiak-takes-the-60-second-challenge%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/OLEKSIAK_POST01.jpg | en | null | Penny Oleksiak takes the 60-Second Challenge | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Just how fast is Canada’s swimming sensation? After years away from the pool, former competitor Levi Nicholson went to her home training ground to find out | http://www.macleans.ca/videos/penny-oleksiak-takes-the-60-second-challenge/ | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/fbd8866c774131c3456fab8a5a5a9a7597b4841a761a30905860b021ad033a0b.json |
[
"Lee Berthiaume",
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald"
] | 2016-08-31T00:49:35 | null | 2016-08-30T20:14:26 | But fact that more people are coming forward to report sexual offences is being taken as a sign of progress | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanadas-military-says-it-still-has-work-to-do-to-address-sexual-misconduct%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Jonathan-Vance.jpg | en | null | Canada's military says it still has work to do to address sexual misconduct | null | null | www.macleans.ca | OTTAWA – The military’s top brass says progress has been made in the war on sexual misconduct in the ranks, as evidenced by an increase in the number of cases being reported.
But they admit that victory remains a distant and elusive goal, even as questions persist over what repercussions offenders are really facing.
Chief of defence staff Gen. Jonathan Vance released an update Tuesday on efforts to root out what a former Supreme Court justice found last year was an “underlying sexualized culture” within the military.
The progress report said during the first six months of the year, military police received 106 complaints of sexual misconduct that warranted a criminal investigation.
That put 2016 on pace for a 22-per-cent increase over the 174 complaints received in 2015. The majority of those are sexual assault cases.
Speaking to reporters at National Defence Headquarters, Vance warned that the military still has a great deal of work to do. But he took the fact more people were coming forward to report sexual offences as an encouraging sign of progress.
“This demonstrates to me that those military members are more confident that they will be heard, and that we will act,” he said as the commanders of the Canadian air force, army and navy looked on.
Yet the report did not say how many criminal investigations resulted in charges or convictions.
Julie Lalonde, an assault prevention educator who has lectured at the Royal Military College of Canada, said such information is a “bare minimum” for assessing the military’s progress on fighting sexual misconduct, particularly as one of the primary concerns raised by victims was a lack of accountability.
“We should be finding out what’s being done with every single one of those complaints,” she said. “Not just as an accountability measure, but that’s what the victims deserve.”
The report did not focus on the 106 cases that warranted criminal investigation. Instead, it focused on disciplinary measures taken in response to 148 other complaints of “harmful and inappropriate” sexual behaviour between the beginning of April and the end of July – most of which were non-criminal in nature.
Investigations had been completed on 51 of those cases, with 30 military personnel punished. Vance said 24 had received “severe” punishments that ranged from fines to outright dismissal. Six did end up being convicted of criminal charges, while three others were referred to civilian authorities. Ten cases were ruled unfounded.
While Vance said he was encouraged by the military’s progress, “incidents of harmful sexual behaviour are still occurring, and that is completely unacceptable.” Vance acknowledged that some personnel in uniform and members of the public will remain skeptical that the military is taking the issue seriously.
“We have to earn the trust, we have to earn the respect, we have to earn it from those who are victims now or who feel that they could be victimized,” he said. “But we’re going to stay with it until those who judge us, our own members and those who would want to join us, are satisfied. Until then, I won’t be.”
Military officials said the next few months will involve analysing the results of a survey of 40,000 Canadian military personnel conducted in conjunction with Statistics Canada earlier this year to get a handle on the scope of the problem.
In the meantime, the military has created six sexual offence response teams across the country that will be tasked with investigating reports of criminal activity. Work is also underway to see if there are ways to improve a victims’ response centre that was established last year.
Military commanders have been grappling with the issue of sexual misconduct in the ranks since l’Actualite and Maclean’s magazines reported in April 2014 that a large number of military sexual assaults were being ignored or played down.
Retired Supreme Court justice Marie Deschamps was tapped to lead an independent investigation into the issue and her explosive report, released in April 2015, described an “underlying sexual culture” in the military that was hostile to women and left victims to fend for themselves. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canadas-military-says-it-still-has-work-to-do-to-address-sexual-misconduct/ | en | 2016-08-30T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/2020b2f9cda712da3dce2571f694cdc2f4d9acbd92711cf9b34d860a6dcfdf65.json |
[
"John Semley",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-30T16:49:35 | null | 2016-08-30T12:08:11 | Alan Moore's mammoth new book, 'Jerusalem,' is ambitious—but he's hardly the first literary light to explore the meaning and possibility of the fourth dimension | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fculture%2Fbooks%2Fon-alan-moore-and-the-abiding-romance-of-literatures-fourth-dimension%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MAC37_JERUSALEM_MOORE_POST01.jpg | en | null | On Alan Moore and the abiding romance of literature's fourth dimension | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Alan Moore’s comic Watchmen has a fairly simple conceit. It’s a superhero story with only one actual superhero: Dr. Manhattan, a mild-mannered scientist (as per the comics cliché) who is reborn as a blue-skinned, balding, super-powered entity after fumbling into an Atomic Age experiment.
As a result of his transformation, Dr. Manhattan conceives of all of human existence—past, present and future—in unison. As he explains it, “Time is simultaneous, an intricately structured jewel that humans insist on viewing one edge at a time, when the whole design is visible in every facet.”
It is, perhaps, a heady idea: that time itself constitutes its own dimension, its passage perceptible to humans while its grander design remains hidden out of view. And yet Alan Moore is the perhaps the most conspicuously heady of comics authors, equal parts deconstructionist, postmodernist, and bug-eyed mystic oddball. The view that history possesses a discrete but invisible “architecture” (as it’s described in Moore and Eddie Campbell’s Jack the Ripper comic From Hell) crops up repeatedly throughout his work, as it does in his new non-graphic novel Jerusalem.
The exploration of this fourth dimension is the central concern of Moore’s exceptionally long, 600,000-word book—at least inasmuch as a tome of such varied indulgence, epic scope and sheer heft can be said to have a “central concern.” As he told The Believer in 2013, when he was in the final throes of completing Jerusalem, “pretty much all of the book is predicated upon the assumption, which seems to be implicit in the work of most modern physicists since Einstein, that we inhabit a universe that has at least four spatial dimensions.”
Moore is right to invoke Einstein, and other such “modern physicists,” in his understanding of the fourth dimension. In Einstein’s own words, his radical general theory of relativity “robbed time of its independence.” Yet, in art and literature, attempts to understand the fourth dimension predate Einstein, general relativity, or the emergence of the field of quantum mechanics. Since at least the late nineteenth century, artists flirted with these high-level mathematical abstractions, expanding the conceptual boundaries of their art, and warping the taken-for-granted concept of a workaday reality rendered in three boring ol’ dimensions.
In 1920, shortly after the emergence of Albert Einstein’s rigidly quantified exploration of four-dimensional space-time, a letter-to-the-editor in the British science journal Nature pointed to another, earlier, thinker whose writing seemed to anticipate Einstein’s discovery: of Edwin Abbott Hinton.
A theologian by training and schoolmaster by trade, Hinton is now best known as author of the satirical novella Flatland, first published in 1884 to nominal attention. The basic premise of Flatland is restated, in densely accented cockney, in Jerusalem: subtitled “A Romance of Many Dimensions,” Flatland imagined a two-dimensional world inhabited by triangles and other flattened polygons (the story’s narrator is a square, named A Square) that is visited by a three-dimensional shape called A Sphere.
Through contact with the three-dimensional being, A Square begins to reckon with a universe of multiple dimensions: first three, then four, then six, and so on. As the letter in Nature put it, connecting Abbott to Einstein: “If there is motion of our three-dimensional space relative to the fourth dimension, all the changes we experience and assign to the flow of time will be due simply to this movement, the whole of the future as well as the past always existing in the fourth dimension.”
But Flatland did more than anticipate Einstein and general relativity. It also worked as a social satire, with the two-dimensional flatlanders hewing to a pecking order that reflected the Victorian social world. A Square’s revelation of a three-dimensional world are deemed heretical, illustrating the hostility that often greets radical, paradigm-shifting models of understanding the world (see: Galileo, Giordano Bruno, and so on). In Flatland, the notion of a three-dimensional space is seen as a threat, destabilizing the rigid hierarchies of knowledge and social class.
A different understanding of geometric space—less politicizing, and more mystifying—appears in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s last novel, The Brothers Karamazov. There, the highly intelligent and deeply religious Ivan speaks of “geometricians and philosophers, and even some of the most distinguished, who doubt whether the whole universe, or to speak more widely the whole of existence, was only created in Euclid’s geometry; they even dare to dream that two parallel lines, which according to Euclid can never meet on earth, may meet somewhere in infinity.”
For Ivan, the concept of a spatial dimension that extends past that of “Euclid’s geometry” is one of religious experience—the realm of God Himself, one beyond “the impotent and infinitely small Euclidian mind of man.” At one point in the novel, when Ivan suffers a nightmare about the Devil, he notes that Lucifer doesn’t wear a watch, as if such an appurtenance would be pointless in the domain of collapsed space-time he is presumed to inhabit. In Ivan Karamazov’s mystic mind, the fourth dimension is where the sins, inequities, confusions, and contradictions of our delimited, three-dimensional world are reconciled and resolved.
If there’s a recurring theme across the literature of four dimensions, it’s the exploration of possibility—the desire to express something seemingly inexpressible, to comprehend something that exists just outside the parameters of human comprehension.
Kurt Vonnegut considered this idea of space and time intersecting across some unseen horizon in his 1969 Second World War sci-fi satire Slaughterhouse-Five, in which a fumbling, fatalistic American solider named Billy Pilgrim is abducted by a race of aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians experience all of time simultaneously, a perspective that Billy tries to express in a letter.
“All moments,” he writes, “past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.”
Among more contemporary fabulists, the reclusive postmodern meta-historical author Thomas Pynchon flirted with four-dimensional space in 2006’s Against the Day. Like Jerusalem, the book involves scores, if not hundreds, of characters and unfolds over an extended period of time. (It is also, like Jerusalem, a doorstopper of a novel; it clocks in as Pynchon’s longest, at nearly 1100 pages.)
Against the Day is experienced primarily through a fictional club of aeronautical adventurers, the Chums of Chance, whose airship hangs above the events of the novel, seemingly able to travel through time. As in Hinton’s Flatland, the Chums enjoy a privileged, three-dimensional perspective not shared by other characters in the story. As one of their crew puts it, “We went from two dimensions, infant’s floor-space, out into town- and map-space, ever toddling our way into the third dimension, till as Chums recruits we could take the fateful leap skyward.”
Elsewhere, the novel is amok with anarchists, industrialism, physicists, and crackpot scientists, scuttling across America, Europe, East Asia, and elsewhere, in the period between 1893’s Chicago World’s Fair and the outbreak of the Great War. From the privileged perspective of the Chums of Chance, Pynchon seems to be observing the emerging themes and antagonisms of the twentieth century—capitalism vs. communism, quantum theory, general relativity itself—in a kind of madcap kerfuffle.
Where Vonnegut uses the fourth dimension to shrug against the cruel inescapability of time and history, Pynchon holds out the hope of somehow changing it. The novel suggests that if only we could extract ourselves from being immersed inside history—say, by peering down upon its patterns from an airship dangling safely above the action—we might be able to more fruitfully forecast (and forestall) its great tragedies.
As if to underscore this theme of perspective, Pynchon also introduces a fourth-dimensional ripple in Against the Day. The Chums are themselves visited by characters called “Trespassers,” whose presence in the realms of workaday three-dimensional perceptions “had been owing only to some chance blundering upon a shortcut through unknown topographies of Time.”
In Jerusalem, Moore makes these mysterious topographies known. Here, the fourth dimension is both temporal and spatial—as much a way of seeing as a thing unseen. Moore’s fourth dimension is both conceptual (i.e., a collapse of temporal moments, like Vonnegut’s “beads on a string” or Dr. Manhattan’s “intricately structured jewel”) as well as a material plane, called Mansoul, invisible to the naked eye, home to all manner of mystical and supernatural creatures. It’s very much the stuff of escapist high fantasy, like a 4-D Narnia.
The extra-dimensional level of Jerusalem is place of “twisting crystals” and “ghost-seams” and afterlife academies, where characters use the made-up word “wiz” as linguistic copula that refers to something happening across the caved-in tenses of past, present and future. Back on the solid, three-dimensional footing of Earth, an eccentric artist called Alma Warren attempts to represent this mystical, magical realm, informed by recollections from her brother, who was transported there as a child.
The centrality of an artist to Jerusalem’s plot, as not only a key character but the one who charged with presenting the action of the story to the reader, further speaks to Moore’s interest in the philosophy, physics and aesthetics of fourth-dimensional thinking. Indeed, as Linda Dalrymple Henderson—author of The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art—writes, the concept of an extra dimension (or dimensions) existing outside of perceivable material reality was “primarily a symbol of liberation” for visual artists of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
For Moore, the fourth dimension reveals itself through art as a kind of magic. The author—whose official bio describes him as a “magician and performer,” even before it describes him as an acclaimed author—has spoken at length about art and magic, which he holds as “pretty much synonymous” with one another. As he put it in that Believer interview, “magic is, on one level, the willful attempt to alter those perceptions [of reality].”
The connection between the confounding science of the fourth dimension and wizardry also occurred to Einstein, who once wrote that, “The non-mathematician is seized by a mysterious shuddering when he hears of ‘four-dimensional’ things, by a feeling not unlike that awakened by thoughts of the occult.” The emerging notion of a fourth dimension in the twentieth century shook the foundations of reality, and of the hard sciences. Physics—the domain of matter and motion, of how objects in the observable world operate—became conceptual. It didn’t just collapse time into space, but also the boundaries between what’s imaginable and what’s possible.
It’s in this long tradition that Moore’s ambitious, weird, unwieldy novel plunks itself. As the character Mick Warren notes, “imagining ourselves as soon from some superior elevation, some projected and omniscient point of view, is probably as old as literature, as old as civilization.”
If authors like E.A. Hinton and Fyodor Dostoyevsky were intuiting Einstein’s discovery, and followers such as Vonnegut and Pynchon grappled with the consequences of the theory of space-time, Alan Moore’s Jerusalem speaks to the abiding romance of many dimensions—not merely as an expression of the possibilities of mathematics and physics, or art and magic and literature, but as a grand metaphor for the very idea of possibility itself. | http://www.macleans.ca/culture/books/on-alan-moore-and-the-abiding-romance-of-literatures-fourth-dimension/ | en | 2016-08-30T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/53a4959404a75be65c16efe4233a6b1d87964105336212aae0079715bec44c5a.json |
[
"Chris Sorensen",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T12:54:26 | null | 2016-08-25T18:58:59 | Interest from China in Vancouver real estate listings worth more than $1 million is down sharply, but local buyers shouldn't get too excited. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Feconomy%2Fafter-new-tax-buyers-from-china-cool-to-luxury-vancouver-homes%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Vancouver-real-estate-post.jpeg | en | null | After new tax, buyers from China cool to luxury Vancouver homes | null | null | www.macleans.ca | The B.C. government’s new 15 per cent tax on foreign buyers of homes in Vancouver would so far seem to be having the intended effect: cooling demand from deep-pocketed mainland Chinese investors who are blamed for contributing to soaring prices. But some industry data suggest the trend, assuming it holds, could actually make it more difficult—not easier—for locals to gain a foothold in Canada’s most unaffordable housing market.
Searches for Vancouver properties on the popular Chinese-language property portal Juwai.com have fallen by nearly 10 per cent since the controversial new tax went into effect Aug. 2, according to Juwai’s president of the Americas Matthew Moore. But the decline is being driven mostly by a 55 per cent drop in searches for homes listed for more than $1 million (which, admittedly, doesn’t get you more than a mouldy teardown in many Vancouver neighbourhoods these days). Meanwhile, Chinese property inquiries in the sub-$1 million category, including condos and single family homes elsewhere in the Lower Mainland, are actually up by eight per cent over the same period.
In other words, the tax may be curbing foreigners’ interest in Vancouver’s priciest ‘hoods and pushing them into more affordable areas where they’re more likely to compete with budget-conscious Canadians. Moore explains that, like many Canadians, buyers in mainland China remain attracted to Vancouver’s pristine setting, clean air and great post-secondary education. The tax, which amounts to $300,000 on a $2 million house, simply means they have less money to spend on Vancouver-area homes than they used to. “Not everyone in China is a billionaire,” he says.
It may not be the result the B.C. government was hoping for when it first unveiled the measure in late July. Applying to foreign nationals and corporations, the tax was unveiled alongside figures that showed one out of every 10 houses sold in metro Vancouver between June 10 and July 14 was purchased by a foreign buyer. In areas like Burnaby and Richmond, the number of homes being purchased by foreigners was closer to 20 per cent. Critics lambasted the government for failing to grandfather purchases that had already been signed, but not yet completed. However, Finance Minister Mike de Jong said buyers had a week to close their deals and defended the sudden move as necessary, saying, “it is to discourage foreign investment in the residential real estate sector and free up housing for purchasing by British Columbians.”
More than $1 trillion is estimated to have flowed out of China last year as Chinese businesses and families seek to protect their fortunes in the face of China’s weakening growth and the mounting threat of a currency devaluation. A sizeable chunk of that money found its way into real-estate investments in cities like London, Sydney and Vancouver, putting additional stress on bubbly-looking local housing markets. But because B.C. only started tracking foreign investment in June, the impact of foreign buyers on Vancouver’s home prices has so far been based largely on anecdotal evidence and a handful of studies that tracked things like buyers’ names and electricity usage. Even de Jong has admitted the government has no idea how the tax will play out in the Lower Mainland.
Preliminary numbers released this week by the Greater Vancouver Real-Estate Board offer a few clues, but nothing more. They show detached home sales are down 66 per cent during the first two weeks of August, compared to the same period last year. That continues a cooling trend that began in May. Some have warned it’s the beginning of a significant correction in a market where prices were skyrocketing by as much as 30 per cent year-over-year in recent months. Others say its a seasonal slowdown and that the market will bounce back come fall.
Moore says many Chinese are taking a wait-and-see approach. He points to the hundreds of people who called Juwai’s Shanghai call centre in recent weeks to ask about the new tax, why it was implemented and whether it will impact the overall stability of the Vancouver property market. “It raises questions,” says Moore, “and anything that raises questions will delay purchases.” But how many and for how long, nobody knows. | http://www.macleans.ca/economy/after-new-tax-buyers-from-china-cool-to-luxury-vancouver-homes/ | en | 2016-08-25T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/848855d8b01cef939fe29a8bc06f07e2a8bb0eac2a5de82d684d4a9686c27990.json |
[
"Sally Armstrong",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-30T16:49:33 | null | 2016-08-30T12:03:59 | In a search for justice in a blood-soaked land, the victims of Islamic State’s worst atrocities speak up | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fyazidi-women-tell-their-horrific-stories%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MAC36_WARCRIMES_FEATURE01.jpg | en | null | Yazidi women tell their horrific stories | null | null | www.macleans.ca | “Why should I tell you my story? I told it before and no one came to help.” Zinab, a 31-year-old Yazidi, was captured by Islamic State in Kocho, a village in Kurdistan, Iraq, on Aug. 3, 2014. That was the day the terror group invaded the ancient Yazidi homeland and began a reign of terror.
She was made a sex slave, endured constant rapes and beatings; she escaped her captors three times, was caught and sold again four times. On March 21, 2016, she was sold to a man who turned out to be a rescuer sent by her family. Now she sits in the dank room of an abandoned building near Dahuk, Iraq, with her uncle’s wife, whose two daughters, age 12 and 15, are still in the hands of ISIS.
So is Zinab’s 20-year-old sister. Twenty-six hundred girls and women have escaped; 3,200 are still missing. Most of their men are dead, lying in mass graves around Shingal Mountain (the Yazidi word for the Arabic Sinjar Mountain). She decides to gamble on telling her story one more time—hoping someone in the world will find her sister.
Their story is a brutal and terrifying reality in much of the Middle East today where religion has become a code word for hate and marauding gangs of murderous men have become the new normal. While the world debates the parameters of genocide, the Yazidi people want to know why they aren’t worth rescuing. They want their people back. They want recognition for the hideous crimes committed against them and they want assurance that this won’t happen again—ever.
That’s why Payam Akhavan, a former UN prosecutor in The Hague, is in the Kurdistan quarter of Iraq today. A professor at McGill University’s law school and an expert in the analysis of genocide, he was approached by the Kurdistan Regional Government to find a route to justice for the Yazidi people. “This is not only about punishing the perpetrators, it’s about letting the victims heal,” he says.
The bloodsoaked land in this region is ancient Mesopotamia; it’s a diverse tapestry of villages that have been shredded by the betrayals of neighbours and hatred of religious extremism. “The antidote for this is the language of human rights,” says Akhavan. “The long-term solution is not military, beyond that needed to gain a ceasefire; it’s giving the Yazidis a measure of justice to restore their humanity. Then the object of pity becomes an agent of change.”
Akhavan sees a “truth commission” as the way forward. Although it is still a work in progress, he says it would be established by the Kurdistan Regional Government with international assistance. It would hear the testimony of survivors, disseminate those truths widely and establish a historical record. It could also include the testimony of perpetrators. That, says Akhavan, could heal the region.
The Yazidi people settled on this land thousands of years ago. They are farmers and shepherds who live unto themselves and practise a religion that goes back to the 12th century, tending their fields of tomatoes and eggplant, herding their sheep. The menace that wrecked their lives on Aug. 3, 2014, is, by their count, the 73rd genocidal attack committed against them since the 1800s, when the Ottomans ruled the area.
Most Yazidis have never heard of the International Criminal Court. The concept of human rights is new to them. But just as surely as night becomes day, they know they have been wronged—severely, tragically. So far they know they are alone in trying to right those wrongs. Everyone has been here—Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the UN—but two years after the attack, 450,000 Yazidis are displaced, dead or being used as sex slaves.
Hussein Hasoon, a member of the High Government Commission on the Recognition of Genocide Against Yazidis, Kurds and other Religious and Ethnic Groups who will oversee the truth commission, says the Yazidi catastrophe could have been prevented. A Yazidi himself, he was there on that fateful day when ISIS arrived and the people tried to escape by climbing Shingal Mountain. “On Aug. 2 we were living our lives. A few hours later our lives changed forever. We were all on Shingal Mountain [Shingal City was home to three-quarters of the Yazidi population in Iraq] calling everyone, begging them to help us. The international community had time to close the road, to stop the advance of Daesh [a pejorative Arab acronym for ISIS]. They could have created a corridor for us to escape like Moses did at the Dead Sea. We saw the planes and hoped they would use air strikes to open a path for us, but they didn’t.”
“We were in Kocho village when they came,” Zinab says. “We’d heard that people who resisted were punished severely—the men were beheaded and the girls were taken away. So we stayed at the village. They told us to give them our arms. We did, then they said give us your wealth, we did that too.
“We did everything they said to try to stay safe. But then the men and boys over the age of 14 were taken outside the village and shot to death. The older people, including my mother, the boys under seven and the disabled ones, were taken to Shingal. The girls ages 10 to 30 were taken to Mosul; the boys seven to 13 were also taken away. I said I was married to escape going to Mosul but was taken to Tal Afar and kept in a cage. They didn’t know I had a phone hidden in my dress. I called my friend Paraza and she told me my family was safe.
“The first chance I had, I escaped and walked for five days to get to Shingal but was caught again just before getting there. That time I was kept in a house as a slave for a month, then another girl and I got out through a small window. We hid in empty houses for two days and then got to what we thought was a safe house. The Arab family there said, ‘If you are Muslim, we will protect you.’ Then they handed me right back to Daesh. I was shifted to Mosul that time then back to Tal Afar.”
She has black circles under her eyes; her face is as pale as the plaster wall of the house where she sits working over her fingers, clutching her hands and telling her story. “The man who bought me that time beat me badly and raped me whenever he wanted. He made me wash his clothes and clean his house.” She got away again, this time in a taxi—but the driver brought her to his family. His wife told him to kill her. He locked her in a room and the next day sold her to a man in Mosul. “That guy beat me, raped me and kept me in a locked room. Then he sold me to a man in Syria. Half the things that were done to me, I cannot say out loud. By now I was sick, cold and hungry. There was no one to look after me. I didn’t think I could survive much more. Then someone came to the house at 8 o’clock one night and said, ‘Sell this girl to me.’ They did and I was rescued. He’d been sent by my family. We ran as fast as we could and arrived in Shingal at midnight. It was March 22, 2016. I was home.”
Her friend Paraza cannot speak about what happened to her except to say her daughters are still missing. She shows a photo of the girls, hoping someone somewhere has seen them. Zinab’s sister is also missing. They want to raise money to buy them back—but first they need to find them.
Akhavan says a truth commission would educate the people of the region about what really happened here and strip away the innuendo and gossip. “There is a virus of violence spreading in the Middle East that is reaching the rest of the world,” he says. “The attacks have a sameness about them: the seeds of genocidal violence always dehumanize—you can’t kill people you have empathy for.”
Hasoon and his committee say they are ready to start that process now. They opened an investigation centre in Dahuk, have a prosecutor, a judge, police officers, a psych-social team and more than 1,000 sworn testimonies from the victims (700 Yazidis, 200 Christians and 150 other religious minorities). Thirty mass graves have been found and are being exhumed. There are bodies all over Shingal Mountain. One of the questions they asked in the survey of victims was, “What do you want?” The vast majority answered, “Justice.” They want a telling, they want the perpetrators punished and the y want the international community to protect them.
While Akhavan feels a truth commission is more expedient and less expensive than a genocide trial, he doesn’t rule out the International Criminal Court in The Hague, especially if a senior ISIS officer can be captured alive. Or the UN Security Council could simply call for a trial. In fact, Canadian Foreign Minister Stéphane Dion wrote to the UN with that very suggestion on May 30. Akhavan says, “Russia will likely veto his request.”
ISIS isn’t the only killer in the region. President al-Assad of Syria has slaughtered 10 times more people than ISIS has. The Shia are also responsible and so is the Shabiha militia. “If there’s to be co-existence, there needs to be an apology and a telling—an acknowledgement of the atrocities,” says Akhavan.
He barely contains his anger when he speaks of the short-sighted political thinking here in Iraq. “If we continue to indulge dictatorial fanatic regimes, [then] radicalism and terror will get worse. We need to invest not just in bombing, but in creating a culture that allows human rights to take root.”
Genocide is not a natural disaster that comes out of nowhere. It’s a political choice that requires plans and resources, says Akhavan. “There is always an incubation period and plenty of early warning signs, which is when you must act.” ISIS has used social media brilliantly to spread its hateful doctrines and causes: it’s glorious to be a suicide bomber; it’s glorious to rape the daughter of an infidel. “Daesh consider us infidels, so according to their interpretation of the Quran they should kill us and Allah will reward them,” says Hasoon,
The stories are disturbingly similar, as if scripted with a sense of ritualistic, carefully organized and precise extermination. The People of the Book (as Christians and Jews are called) are told to leave. But the Yazidis and anyone else ISIS sees as infidels and not from Abrahamic religions are to be exterminated. They round up the villagers, separate the men and boys from the women and girls. The next selection is separating the young boys and older women and the disabled into another group. Then the men are taken away. Then the young girls are taken. Then the prettiest ones, preferably girls with blue eyes, are selected. It goes on day after day while the Yazidi girls are herded from one town to another.
“One day there will be no Daesh as an organization, but the mind of Daesh will remain in the form of suicide bombers, assassinations, the bombing of places considered to be economic centres,” says Hasoon.
He’s right. Everyone on this file knows it’s easy to get rid of ISIS with military action. But somehow these people need to be able to live together again, and the Yazidis need to know that someone’s got their back this time.
A 14-year-old Yazidi girl, Amira Hussein, has a tattoo on her left forearm that reads, “Bring back my people.” She wears a medallion around her neck with a photo of her missing older brother “so he will always be close to me.” She says she was taken to a place that ISIS calls “Infidel Village” and given to a fighter called Abdullah as a slave. Eight months later she escaped, but says, “If the world cared about us they would have rescued every girl by now. But no one cares.”
There are several refugee camps scattered on the outskirts of Dahuk, well north of ISIS-controlled areas in Iraq. Every tent has a horror story. It’s dusk when four women gather together and decide to tell theirs: Zatoon, 35, is missing her husband, three daughters and two sons. Gaury, 50, says, “Six of my children are with Daesh, my husband is captured too.” Markaz, 30, says her daughter and husband and 11 family members are being held by ISIS. Nadira, 30, says her older daughter and husband are missing. “I was breastfeeding my three-day-old daughter. They yanked her from me but she cried so hard and so loud they gave her back to me.”
The community in the refugee camp begged in the street to raise money to buy Nadira back from Islamic State. On June 6, she walked into the camp. She hadn’t seen her 12-year-old daughter for almost two years. But her anxiety about the fate of her 10-year-old is palpable. “Imagine what they are doing to her.”
“We’ve had no news in 22 months, we don’t know if our men are dead or alive,” says Markaz. The women look away when they describe what was done to them. “We were made sex slaves in the same house. Whatever is the hardest, toughest thing you can imagine is what they did to us,” says Zatoon. “Anything morally dirty they did it. They took our honour, they took our men and our boys, they raped us and beat us. They took everything from us.”
One night Zatoon, Gaury and Markaz, who were being kept in the same house, decided to run, “We will either die or we will run,” says Markaz. “It was 11 p.m. We opened the door and we ran until we found peshmerga soldiers who brought us here to Dahuk.” Now with achingly sad eyes and raised hands pleading, they speak as one when they say, “Please take our voices to the world, we want our people back.”
Two months later Beshra and her sister Badia and their cousin were taken to Syria. “There I became a sex slave and was raped by a different fighter every day,” says Beshra. To underscore the sadistic rituals Daesh uses, the girls were brought back home to their parents for two days before being removed again, this time being sold to fighters in two different towns. “The man who bought me is an Iraqi called Arkan,” she says. “His nickname—they all had pseudonyms—was Abu Sarhan. But he lived with 15 men. They raped me and my cousin whenever they wanted to.”
When the men were praying one day, Beshra and her cousin decided to flee. “We told the one left to guard us that we were going to the toilet. It was 5:15 a.m. We crept out of the house and started to run. Whenever we suspected movement, we hid in empty houses and waited for the road to be clear. When we started it was barely light enough for us to see our way. We ran and hid and kept running and hiding until we got to the paved road. Then we hid in the grasses at the side of the road until at last we saw peshmerga soldiers, who took us to Shingal Mountain. By 9 p.m. we were home.”
Her sister Badia, who was also used as a sex slave and managed to escape with the help of a shepherd, describes the ISIS fighters as “dirty, filthy men with huge scraggly beards who are always shouting, always angry, always stinking. They kicked us, raped us, did things to us I cannot describe as I have never heard of them before.”
Her kid sister, Beshra, nods her head when Badia says, “I hope some day I will tell this story in a court, in front of all the world so they will know what those men did to us.” | http://www.macleans.ca/news/yazidi-women-tell-their-horrific-stories/ | en | 2016-08-30T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/6f1ec07537f14b869d836b30f82b16eb94ea4f8d95ee475b4705be43a0764d2f.json |
[
"Todd Pettigrew",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T12:58:28 | null | 2011-02-15T10:36:25 | Redeemer University College, according to its published statements, promotes religion over knowledge. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Feducation%2Funiversity%2Firredeemable%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Bible-88301788.jpg | en | null | Irredeemable | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Frequent readers of this blog will know that I have, in the past, taken issue with religious universities like Trinity Western and Crandall, the sort of institutions that require fundamentalist faith statements of all their faculty and seek to foster religious extremism in their students. You will also know that the CAUT has been after such universities too and has created a black list of universities that require a faith or ideological test for faculty.
Redeemer University College is the latest institution to fall under CAUT’s stern gaze, and the Redeemer case provides a good opportunity to address some of the sloppy and tentative thinking — so it appears to me — that always swirls around this issue. As always, I want to make it clear, that it is the particular kind of religion practiced at these schools that bothers me — I fully acknowledge that there are other, better ways practiced by others.
First, the claim is often made that all universities have an ideology of some kind or another, so why is a Christian university any worse than a secular university? The sloppiness here comes from an inconsistent use of the word “ideology.” In its broadest sense, whereby ideology means any kind of system of ideas, it’s true, a priori, that all universities must have an ideology. In this sense, a university that says that it promotes knowledge and critical thinking because these things serve the greater good of humanity — well they have an ideology.
But that’s surely not what CAUT means when they are concerned about an ideological test for faculty. Because in a more narrow sense, ideology often means a particular and focused set of beliefs about how the world works and how it ought to be. To be sure, individuals or groups at particular universities may have strong ideological commitments, but that is not the same as the institution as a whole requiring a specific ideological view of all faculty. I am a committed atheist, but I would not want my university to require everyone to be an atheist. Academic disciplines may require a certain level of agreement on some basic issues, but typically these are matters of fact (a biologist needs to accept evolution).
But what about, say a Women’s Studies department? To work there you would have to be a feminist, right? I would say no: a Women’s Studies prof would have to accept that the place of women in society is an important issue — but no Women’s Studies department should insist that its members agree on specific details or policies about, say, child care. Show me a department in a public university where all members, as a matter of published policy, must sign a commitment to specific values and views, and I will speak out against them, too.
But even if other universities did have their own ideologies, it would still be misleading to say such a university was ideological in the same way that Redeemer is. Apart from religious zealots, even ideologues differ. Committed socialists can disagree about almost everything and still be socialists. Feminists can, and do, disagree about key issues like abortion. These disagreements are possible because these ideologies, whatever their strengths and weaknesses, are at least grounded in the real world and their arguments can be evaluated by the normal standards of reason.
But Christianity as practiced at Redeemer (though not everywhere, I concede) is not an ideology like that. As with TWU, Redeemer’s vision of Christianity is precise, and exclusionary. According to their stated principles, God created the world, revealed His will to humanity through the Bible, and was incarnated as Christ who is the only hope for the world. This is not just a university with a Christian leaning — this is a university with a very strict program of belief that no Muslim, Jew, or atheist could ever sign in good conscience, and that even many Christians would reject. Indeed, according to Redeemer, knowledge itself is “made possible only by means of a true faith in Jesus Christ, in whom are found all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” (my emphasis). Am I the only one who sees the implication here? So extreme is this institution that it denies the validity of all the knowledge of non-Christians! I’m not making that up; it’s right there on the web site! The kind of religion espoused by Redeemer is not even ideology. It’s superstition.
And Redeemer does not just stop at belief: they also seek to control faculty conduct, a point not stressed in any story I can recall. At Redeemer, faculty members are expressly discouraged from doing too much work on Sunday. More incredibly, Redeemer promises to punish faculty who swear, are gay, who enjoy pornography, and who have sex outside of marriage. Some have had the gall to call the investigation a witch hunt, but how can an institution like this ask others to mind their own moral business while it claims to have jurisdiction over whether Professor Virile’s girlfriend is staying the night? We all know who perfected the art of witch hunting.
Still, if that’s their thing, as Redeemer President Hurbert Krygsman suggests, why not leave them to it? They are not publicly funded and their members are not members of CAUT, so why does CAUT or anyone else care? Well, setting aside that Redeemer does get some public money, I care and CAUT cares because all academics have an interest in preserving the clear use of academic terms like “university” and “degree.” These terms have fairly well understood meanings in Canada and having a “university education” or holding a “university degree” should carry a certain weight and should say certain things about one’s education.
If the aim of the institution is to prepare students to be knowledgeable, curious, critical, and capable of ongoing learning, then we are talking about a university. But if the self-proclaimed task of the institution is to “equip young men and women to serve as witnesses to Christ’s victory in the various vocations they will take up in society” and that they take advantages of “the opportunities for evangelism that their positions may afford, […] by testifying to the transforming power of Christ in every aspect of their professional or vocational conduct” (my emphasis), then you are not a university. You are a radical, fundamentalist indoctrination centre and you should call yourself that. Or Bible College. Whichever you prefer. | http://www.macleans.ca/education/university/irredeemable/ | en | 2011-02-15T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/1400cbd11ddfcaf2affce52875b7fbcd3deb552418c3761e01ee0494eaf3281b.json |
[
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff",
"Shannon Proudfoot"
] | 2016-08-26T22:48:37 | null | 2016-08-26T17:00:05 | Andre De Grasse, a three-time medallist in Rio, is a speedy sprinter. We figured one of the world's fastest men could handle our 60-Second Challenge. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fvideos%2Fandre-de-grasse-takes-the-60-second-challenge%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/GATEHOUSE_200M_POST02.jpg | en | null | Andre De Grasse takes the 60-Second Challenge | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Just how fast is Canada’s swimming sensation? After years away from the pool, former competitor Levi Nicholson went to her home training ground to find out | http://www.macleans.ca/videos/andre-de-grasse-takes-the-60-second-challenge/ | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/2b2c7a8344ebb78cfa409ad2b5687e6efd1ba1b8a38869886d626392f9eaa7e7.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-30T18:49:30 | null | 2016-08-30T12:40:16 | Both companies said no agreement has been reached—and there is no assurance that any transaction will result from these discussions | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Feconomy%2Fbusiness%2Fpotash-corp-and-agrium-confirm-merger-negotiations%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/PotashCorp.jpg | en | null | Potash Corp and Agrium confirm merger negotiations | null | null | www.macleans.ca | CALGARY — Potash Corp. of Saskatchewan, the world’s largest fertilizer company by capacity, and Calgary-based Agrium have confirmed they are in preliminary merger talks.
Both companies issued statements today confirming the news after their shares were halted on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
They said no agreement has been reached and there is no assurance that any transaction will result from these discussions.
Before the companies’ shares were halted, PotashCorp stock had climbed $2.40 or 11.48 per cent to $23.30 on the day and Agrium was up $8.28 or 7.1 per cent to $124.81.
The rise in share prices made PotashCorp worth $19.6 billion and Agrium worth $17.4 billion, creating the potential for a $37 billion agricultural giant.
The merger talks come as the fertilizer industry struggles with a steep drop in prices in recent years following a ramp-up in production and the breakup of a Russia-Belarusian potash trading cartel in 2013.
Potash producers have responded to the price drop by cutting production, with PotashCorp going so far as to shutter its recently opened Picadilly mine in New Brunswick in January, putting 430 people out of work.
The industry has looked for consolidation in the past, with PotashCorp pushing for a US$8.7 billion takeover of K+S Group last year that was rebuffed by the German fertilizer group.
PotashCorp was itself the target of a US$38.6 billion takeover bid by BHP Billiton in 2010, but the Canadian government ultimately blocked the offer as not having enough net benefit for Canada.
The Saskatchewan government formed PotashCorp in 1975 as a Crown corporation. The company was privatized in 1989.
Agrium, a major producer of agricultural products including potash, was founded in 1931. | http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/potash-corp-and-agrium-confirm-merger-negotiations/ | en | 2016-08-30T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/c49714d881389ea78f2e1f10264edabb319921a8ac39a96b15fd95c903a3dddd.json |
[
"Lee Berthiaume",
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald"
] | 2016-08-26T13:08:55 | null | 2016-08-25T13:29:07 | Over 3,000 Canadians registered as being in Italy, with 72 in the areas affected by the earthquake | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fdion-canadian-killed-italy-earthquake%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/RTX2MRZB.jpg | en | null | Dion: Canadian among those killed in Italian earthquake | null | null | www.macleans.ca | OTTAWA – One Canadian was killed and another was injured during this week’s devastating earthquake in central Italy, where aftershocks continue to rattle residents and rescue workers.
“I was extremely saddened to see the tragic loss of life following the devastating earthquake in central Italy, which now includes the death of a Canadian citizen,” Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion said in a statement Thursday.
“We share in the grief of the lives cut short by this terrible event.”
The government did not identify the Canadians or say they were from, citing privacy. They were among the hundreds killed and injured when a 6.2-magnitude quake levelled three small towns in central Italy early Wednesday morning.
The area was struck again by a 4.3-magnitude aftershock Thursday that crumbled already cracked buildings as rescue workers struggled to find survivors among the rubble. It was only one of the more than 470 temblors that have followed Wednesday’s pre-dawn quake.
Italy’s civil protection agency said the death toll had risen to 250 Thursday afternoon with at least 365 others hospitalized. Most of the dead _ 184 of them _ were in Amatrice, a tiny town 100 kilometres northeast of Rome. A Spaniard and five Romanians were also among the dead, according to their governments.
There was no clear estimate of the missing, since the rustic area was packed with summer vacationers ahead of a popular Italian food festival this weekend. The Romanian government alone said 11 of its citizens were missing.
Global Affairs Canada said 72 Canadians were registered as being in the affected area when the earthquake struck. However, the numbers are likely low as many Canadians never register with the department while travelling abroad. Officials did not say whether any Canadians are missing.
Dion said he had spoken with his Italian counterpart to express Canada’s condolences and support, and officials said the government is waiting for any request for assistance.
“Canada continues to stand behind the people of Italy during this difficult period.”
Firefighters and rescue crews using sniffer dogs worked in teams around the hard-hit areas, pulling chunks of cement, rock and metal from mounds of rubble where homes once stood.
Worst affected by the quake were the tiny towns of Amatrice and nearby Accumoli, and Pescara del Tronto, 25 kilometres further to the east, where rescue crews were still looking for three people believed crushed in a hard-to-reach area.
Rescuers refused to say when their work would shift from saving lives to recovering bodies, noting that one person was pulled alive from the rubble 72 hours after the 2009 quake in the Italian town of L’Aquila.
Many have been left homeless by the scale of the destruction, their homes and apartments declared uninhabitable.
Emergency services set up tent cities around the quake-devastated towns to accommodate the homeless, housing about 1,200 people overnight. In Amatrice, 50 elderly people and children spent the night inside a local sports facility.
Charitable assistance began pouring into the earthquake zone in traffic-clogging droves Thursday. Church groups from a variety of Christian denominations, along with farmers offering donated peaches, pumpkins and plums, sent vans along the one-way road into Amatrice that was already packed with emergency vehicles and trucks carrying sniffer dogs. Other assistance was spiritual.
“When we learned that the hardest hit place was here, we came, we spoke to our bishop and he encouraged us to come here to comfort the families of the victims,” said the Rev. Marco as he walked through Pescara del Tronto. “They have given us a beautiful example, because their pain did not take away their dignity.”
Some experts estimate that 70 per cent of Italy’s buildings aren’t built to anti-seismic standards, though not all are in high-risk areas. After every major quake, proposals are made to improve, but they often languish in Italy’s thick bureaucracy and chronic funding shortages.
In recent Italian quakes, some modern buildings – many of them public institutions – have been the deadliest. Those included the university dormitory that collapsed in the 2009 L’Aquila quake, killing 11 students and the elementary school that crumbled in San Giuliano di Puglia in 2002, killing 27 children – the town’s entire first-grade class – while surrounding buildings survived unscathed.
Major quakes in Italy are often followed by criminal charges being filed against architects, builders and officials responsible for public works if the buildings crumble. In the case of the L’Aquila quake, prosecutors also put six geologists on trial for allegedly having failed to adequately warn residents about the temblor. Their convictions were overturned on appeal.
With files from the Associated Press | http://www.macleans.ca/news/dion-canadian-killed-italy-earthquake/ | en | 2016-08-25T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/434c2d9ee447383134c00f5817edc5eac1e56c60a5218813cc4bf70610dc5989.json |
[
"Stephanie Levitz",
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald"
] | 2016-08-26T14:49:08 | null | 2016-08-26T10:21:54 | Harper announced he was stepping down as MP for the riding of Calgary Heritage in a statement and video posted to his social media channels. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fpolitics%2Fottawa%2Fstephen-harper-ends-speculation-resigns-from-house-of-commons%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/MAC30_HARPER_GALLERY07.jpg | en | null | Stephen Harper ends speculation, resigns from House of Commons | null | null | www.macleans.ca | OTTAWA — Former prime minister Stephen Harper resigned his seat in the House of Commons on Friday, ending a career in politics that spanned over two decades.
Harper announced he was stepping down as MP for the riding of Calgary Heritage in a statement and video posted to his social media channels.
“On seven occasions, I have been deeply humbled by your trust and support, time and again. And I leave elected office proud of what our team accomplished together,” he said.
Harper had stepped down as Conservative party leader in October on the night he lost the election to Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau, but had chosen to remain as an MP.
He showed up routinely in the House of Commons for votes, but never spoke from the floor and remained absent from most of the weekly meetings of Conservative MPs.
In his farewell remarks, Harper listed some of his proudest accomplishments, including navigating the Canadian economy through the 2008 recession and his government’s tough-on-crime agenda.
“Friends, we did a lot together, but I know the best is yet to come,” Harper said Friday.
Harper will now make a move into consulting on international issues alongside two of his most trusted former advisers, Ray Novak and Jeremy Hunt.
The trio are listed as directors on a corporation first set up in December called Harper and Associates Consulting.
“As I bid farewell to the Parliament of Canada, and prepare for the next chapter of my life, my eternal thanks to the constituents of Calgary Heritage, to the members of the Conservative Party, and to all Canadians for having given me the honour of serving the best country in the world,” Harper said Friday.
“May God bless all of you and may God bless Canada.”
The party will choose a new leader next May and Harper urged conservatives to remain united.
“Our country must continue to serve as a model of prosperity and freedom,” he said.
“Pursue the principles we have stood for at home and abroad, and our children, and children’s children will inherit the Canada we know and love so dearly.”
Harper served as a Reform MP from 1993 to 1997, before taking a hiatus from politics until 2002.
That year he was elected as the leader of the Canadian Alliance and won a Calgary seat in a by-election. In 2003, he merged the party with the Progressive Conservatives and in 2004, he became leader of the Conservative Party.
He led the Conservatives to a minority government victory in the 2006 election and again in 2008, winning his first majority mandate in 2011 after an election that was forced by opposition parties.
HARPER IN PICTURES: | http://www.macleans.ca/politics/ottawa/stephen-harper-ends-speculation-resigns-from-house-of-commons/ | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/a2ac1cabcbc6ee8a1f54c705004ca3a426ab9ed614c03fd3437035f4e56740d2.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-27T16:48:41 | null | 2016-08-27T12:32:33 | At a memorial service, former Quebec premier Jean Charest said there was "nothing ordinary" about Elsie Wayne | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fchampion-lost-causes-new-brunswick-mourns-elsie-wayne%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Elsie-Wayne.jpg | en | null | 'A champion of lost causes': New Brunswick mourns Elsie Wayne | null | null | www.macleans.ca | SAINT JOHN, N.B. — New Brunswickers gathered in a church in Saint John to celebrate the life of Elsie Wayne, who championed the community she dubbed “the greatest little city in the east” as its former mayor and a force to be reckoned with in Ottawa.
Wayne’s family says the former New Brunswick member of Parliament died Tuesday in her home at the age of 84.
The right-wing firecracker was remembered at Saturday’s service by Jean Charest, her lone Progressive Conservative companion in the House of Commons after the party lost all but two of their 156 seats in the 1993 federal election.
Charest compared the task before the two-member caucus as “like being in charge of a trainwreck” and described his partner in rebuilding the country’s Conservative movement as “the all-time Canadian champion of lost causes.”
The former Quebec premier said there was “nothing ordinary about Elsie,” citing her reputation as a flamboyant political personality and relentless advocate of causes she cared about _ like funding for the Canadian Forces and benefits for merchant mariners.
Charest said Wayne achieved the sort of one-of-a-kind-status held by few Canadian politicians, so iconic she was known simply by her first name.
The service at RiverCross Church was streamed online and mourners were invited to share their sympathies on the Brenan’s Funeral Home website.
Born in Shediac, N.B., Elsie (Fairweather) Wayne became the first female mayor of Saint John in 1983 and represented the city’s riding in Parliament for more than a decade before announcing her retirement in 2004.
Wayne was married to Richard Wayne and they had two sons, Daniel and Stephen. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/champion-lost-causes-new-brunswick-mourns-elsie-wayne/ | en | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/70541891ba329a332b45611f04d5a2390ffad27170650116f3fbb4c3a9cefbd9.json |
[
"The Associated Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T12:57:40 | null | 2016-08-25T15:15:27 | Department investigating hack that exposed Saturday Night Live star's the driver's license, passport and intimate photos | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fculture%2Fhomeland-security-investigating-leslie-jones-hack%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Leslie-Jones.jpg | en | null | Homeland Security investigating Leslie Jones hack | null | null | www.macleans.ca | LOS ANGELES – Department of Homeland Security investigators said Thursday they are investigating the hack of Leslie Jones’ website that revealed several private details of the actress-comedian’s life.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of Homeland Security Investigations, said Thursday that its New York office is investigating the hack that exposed the driver’s license, passport and intimate photos of the “Saturday Night Live” star, along with hateful and racist images.
ICE Public Affairs Officer Rachael Yong Yow said the agency does not release information related to active investigations. Jones’ website was taken offline after the hack was exposed Wednesday.
The “Ghostbusters” actress was also targeted on Twitter last month with a barrage of racial slurs and obscene photos. She called on the social networking service to do more to curb harassment, and Twitter banned several users as a result.
In recent years, Jennifer Lawrence, Scarlett Johansson, Mila Kunis, Christina Aguilera and Kate Upton have been among Hollywood actresses who’ve had stolen nude images of themselves posted online.
No charges have been filed against those who hacked and posted images of Lawrence, Upton and numerous other celebrities in a massive dump of intimate images of celebrities in August 2014.
Two men were recently convicted after federal prosecutors charged them with hacking into the accounts of several celebrities and stealing images and other personal information. However, neither of the men, Andrew Helton of Astoria, Oregon, or Ryan Collins of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, are suspected of posting the stolen images online.
Helton was sentenced to six months in federal prison in July, half of the sentence prosecutors had sought. Helton pleaded guilty to stealing 161 nude or explicit photos from 13 people, including unidentified celebrities, and said his arrest forced him to confront his mental health issues. He is due to report to prison in October.
Collins’ sentencing date has not been set.
Johansson, Kunis and Aguilera were hacked by a Florida man, Christopher Chaney, who used publicly available information to obtain access to the email accounts of more than 50 people in the entertainment industry. Chaney was sentenced to 10 years and remains in a low-security federal prison in Mississippi.
“I have been truly humiliated and embarrassed,” Johansson said in a tearful videotaped statement played in court before Chaney was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison in December 2012.
Private information and images of celebrities are frequent targets for hackers. In 2012 a site posted credit reports, Social Security numbers and other financial info on celebrities, including Jay Z and his wife Beyonce, Mel Gibson, Ashton Kutcher and many others. | http://www.macleans.ca/culture/homeland-security-investigating-leslie-jones-hack/ | en | 2016-08-25T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/68fda8a1bd55832806c64e4262f2fdd2e7287fd860ad822033896e905b3d8357.json |
[
"Joseph Boyden",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T12:55:20 | null | 2009-04-13T14:00:00 | Novelist Joseph Boyden talks to his friend Gord Downie of the Tragically Hip about family, fishing, the Bruins and the new album | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fgeneral%2Fmacleans-interview-gord-downie%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Screen-Shot-2016-05-24-at-7.52.37-AM.png | en | null | 'Life’s too short for bad coffee.' The Gord Downie interview | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Update, May 24, 2016: The Tragically Hip announced on Tuesday that Gord Downie has terminal brain cancer. “In privacy along with his family, and through all of this, we’ve been standing by him,” the band told fans in a letter, which also announced plans to tour. “This feels like the right thing to do now, for Gord, and for all of us.”
From the Maclean’s archives, a 2009 conversation between author and Maclean’s contributor Joseph Boyden and Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie:
Q: You are a showman of epic proportions, and yet offstage you are a very different person. Where do you go when you get up on stage?
A: I surrender. I throw myself on the altar of song and I see my own personal musical life in fast flashes of faces and names and colours and sounds and I get lost in the euphoria of standing up there like Howlin’ Wolf or Otis Redding or David Bowie with a mike in my hand and an audience that’s ready.
Q: Jim Morrison called himself a shaman, claimed he was possessed up on stage.
A: Who? Yeah, I’m really riding something up there, and it’s a hell of a ride. The way I always felt is that for a show to be great, something’s got to happen. I go for it; I sing, I dance, I listen to this great band, I do what the music urges. My brain tries to get a step ahead: jump there, turn, kick, spin, drop to your knees, dab brow with white hanky. Throw hanky into crowd. It’s just all really so fun and improvisational and cool and when things break or fall down or go wrong, it can be even better. This is my show, and having said all that, I really want and work to be a great singer. That drives me as well. To do my part for the band.
Also on Macleans.ca: The Tragically Hip — in rehearsal
Q: It isn’t a rehearsed routine. There’s this absolute feel of excitement in the crowd of “Holy *#%&, what’s going to happen next?” Like watching a tightrope act.
A: I watched Stevie Nicks the other night and with just a flick of her shawl the place drops to its knees. So I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.
Q: Maybe shawls are in your future?
A: Well, maybe they ought to be. What incredible economy. So American.
Q: Have you always been this way onstage? A wild man?
A: Pretty much. I’ve really refined it, believe it or not.
Q: So you can refine a wild man?
A: Yes. With dance. I’m a dancer. It’s what I love to do more than anything.
Q: Are you classically trained?
A: [Laughing. Pause.] No. I’m, uh, self-taught.
Q: The Tragically Hip are the long-reigning kings of Canadian rock ’n’ roll. To where does the credit go?
A: The songs. It’s the things we’ve made together that keep us together and, maybe more than that, it’s the vague promise of what we might still make together. Everyone is listening for the same thing, from an old songwriter or from a new one: potential. A great song’s greatest attribute is how it hints at more. The Hip has always had a strong curiosity to see what’s around the next corner. To see what more we can do, what more we can say—to each other, primarily. We try and serve the song. If we’re any good at all it’s because we’re together on that.
Q: We Are The Same, your new album, feels like it stretches boundaries for the band and for you as a songwriter, Depression Suite, especially—which I call an opera of sorts.
A: Bob Rock, our producer, wanted to try and combine three songs. It was Paul [Langlois, one of two guitarists for the band] who suggested these particular three songs and it was instantaneous. It totally worked. Then, it was just a practical matter: how do we stitch three songs together and make them flow? I gave it the name Depression Suite as a bit of a laugh; it appealed and stuck. I think, with this record, we have pushed the margins a bit wider and this song helped us do that.
Q: A mutual and dear friend, when he first heard this new album, said, “This is The Tragically Hip’s Harvest,” in reference to Neil Young’s opus. What do you make of that?
A: Wow. I’ll take it. I know we wanted to say something a bit differently this time; that we established some notions going in about what we wanted to do. This in itself, for a band that avoids most preconceived notions, made it a different record. Otherwise, we just tried to do what anyone does in the studio; jump wisely, hopefully, and with both feet from decision to decision.
Q: Let’s talk about your vocal range on this one: classic Downie is there in songs like Love is a First, and Frozen in my Tracks, but I see a softer, contemplative voice in songs like Morning Moon, Coffee Girl, The Last Recluse. Are you exploring your voice in new ways?
A: Bob kept calling it my hotel voice.
Q: Hotel voice?
A: I dunno. A quieter voice for quieter ideas? Wishes to be done with loneliness and dislocation are sometimes better whispered? Dreams dared quietly for fear they won’t come true? There were times I thought I needed to pick up the big circus hammer, swing, and ring the bell. But Bob would come in and gently remind me, “You don’t need to do that.” He didn’t want to lose the intensity at all. I was very challenged but very happy in the studio with Bob pushing me. With some producers, the singer can tend to get treated a bit like the goalie: the coach has no end of things to say to the forwards and defencemen. But when it comes to the goalie, coach is at a bit of a loss. “And you!? Umm, you go over there and . . . stretch.” Bob is a great producer, editor and friend. He takes the task to heart more than anyone I’ve known, to create beautiful songs. He would say that that’s really all it’s ever about.
Q: You don’t live the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, do you? What grounds you?
A: Family and my work. I like hanging with my family and helping them on their way however I can. There’s a new tragicomedy every half-hour, there is laughter, there are tears, and it’s all real. They are endlessly entertaining, they have given me so much, they’ve given me a chance to “see” things again. And then there’s my work. Lifting the 400 lb. feather. I work every day. I write every day. I walk around in silent conversation with my latest unfinished songs. I love it, I love all aspects of it, and I’ve found that doing it every day is the best (but by no means sure) way to get open, at the ready, and able to recognize what Raymond Carver called “a new path to the waterfall.” To find those simple statements to pass along that help or don’t.
Q: You are a supporter of environmental issues, especially of water rights. Why?
A: You mean Waterkeeper? I think the health of our water is tied to a lot: the health of our communities, hence our economy, the health of our basic human rights. I grew up on the lake and my tie to it came naturally. Our water laws are as old as the hills; they’re strong and they’re toothsome, and because they are so effective, I guess I can’t blame these guys who are trying to defang them. But these water laws, whether under the Fisheries Act or the Navigable Waters Protection Act, are there to protect what is rightfully ours. Our waterways belong to all of us, and for me to relearn this simple fact was life-changing. Our environment does not stand in the way of progress or stimulus. It is progress. A healthy environment and a healthy economy are not antithetical to one another. They are one. Waterkeeper Alliance gets results. They remind polluters of the good laws that are on the books and they remind everyone else of the treasures of our heritage.
Q: Any outdoor activities that you enjoy?
A: I love fishing. I fished every day as a kid on Lake Ontario. I never caught a big fish ever, till I met you, Joseph, when you took my son and me to James Bay. Anyway, as kids, we spent every waking moment up and down the rocky shore. We used to tie a skipping rope to a pitchfork and try to spear big carp. We never got one. My kids love that story, very Lord of the Flies.
Q: Do you consider yourself an environmentalist?
A: If I’m to be an “ist” then, like Bobby Kennedy, I’m probably more of a free market capitalist than an environmentalist. Rather than wanting to tell people to be less bad, I’m saying let’s make it fair across the board and stop subsidizing the big heavy-polluting fat cats, let’s make it a level playing field.
Q: Is it true you drive a minivan, you rock star?
A: Well, on occasion, yes. I own a minivan. We call it the Black Potato or Stinkmobile.
Q: Many of us know you as singer, a poet, and even an actor. But a championship hockey goalie?
A: When I was a kid, Bantam age, our team, Ernestown, went all the way to the provincial “B” championship. We had to beat four teams in four series to get there. The crowds were huge, the stakes brutal and crushing. I was the goalie. Teen hero or teen goat. It teaches you things.
Q: Was Bob Rock your coach?
A: I wish. He knows what to say to a goalie. And goalies are strange. You do want to play but there’s also a part of you that kinda hopes a compressor will blow or that there’ll be too much snow on the roof and part of it will cave in and they’ll have to cancel the game.
Q: You’re a big fan of the Boston Bruins. This could be considered a travesty, even treason with many Canadians.
A: I have loved them since the early ’70s. All of my siblings were big Bruins fans. It was a certain type who liked the Bruins. They were known as a “blue-collar” team. They seemed to me like an outlaw team. You were a bit of an outlaw if you liked the Bruins.
Q: Why not the Leafs?
A: My grandfather liked the Leafs. Because of him I always carried—and still do—a place in my heart for the Leafs—albeit a small place. I should mention, also, that Harry Sinden and his wife, Eleanor, are my godparents.
Q: The Harry Sinden, godlike Bruins head coach and coach of Team Canada in the famed 1972 Summit Series against the U.S.S.R.?
A: I didn’t like to make a big deal of it when I was a kid. But I was very proud of our connection and I still am. My brothers and me defended every move he made, and loved the Bruins fiercely, spiritually, as any number of our friends will painfully attest to.
Q: Okay, now for my own Proustian questionnaire. What is your single most prominent guiding principle in life?
A: Life’s too short for bad coffee.
Q: If you could change the world, what would you choose to do?
A: End poverty.
Q: How do you hope the world will be changed by the time your children reach your age?
A: Looking at all these kids, I know the world will be a more enlightened place.
Q: Name at least one TV show you like.
A: Survivorman.
Q: Given the option of living at a temperature of zero degrees or 40 degrees every day for the rest of your life, which would it be?
A: Forty.
Q: If you could design your favourite meal, what would it be?
A: My wife’s orzo with onions, Italian sausage, mushrooms.
Q: When I exert myself physically, I sweat a lot. I notice on stage that you sweat, a lot, too. Have you ever considered bottling it?
A: I do bottle it! I pour it out of my boots after every show. I call it “Whoa!” There’s nothing wrong with us, Joseph. It’s our body’s way of saying, “Easy there, volcano.” It’s why we’re so cool. | http://www.macleans.ca/general/macleans-interview-gord-downie/ | en | 2009-04-13T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/0192b770830d1c103b27b2871f7c553399f733691cb9a08a4c4377103fb78620.json |
[
"Aaron Hutchins",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T18:49:32 | null | 2016-08-26T12:43:55 | From helicopters on emergency standby to cleaning up beer cans on the beach, we tally the total bill of the Port Huron Float Down gone awry | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fwhat-it-really-cost-to-save-1500-drunk-americans-276000%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MAC37_COAST_GUARD_POST01.jpg | en | null | What it really cost to save 1,500 drunk Americans: $280,000 | null | null | www.macleans.ca | It’s been just under a week since 1,500 inebriated Americans took to the St. Clair River between Michigan and Ontario in inflatable rafts, triggering a minor border security crisis and a massive rescue effort and clean-up operation. But only now are seeing the final costs of the annual Port Huron Float Down event, which went awry when strong winds blew the rafters into Canadian waters near Sarnia, Ont., coming to light.
In response to the debacle our neighbours to the south started a GoFundMe page to recoup the costs for Sarnia, which topped $8,000 as the city paid to bus thousands of Americans back home, and so far the crowdsourcing initiative has raised $5,000. It’s a nice gesture, but it will hardly put a dent in the full cost of the unsanctioned event, once expenses for the U.S. and Canadian coast guards are included, not to mention the impact to commercial vessels that were blocked from using the river for eight hours during the event.
So how much did it cost to help the tubing drifters—between the foreseen and unforeseen costs on both sides of the border? Here’s a full breakdown, and perhaps a new GoFundMe fundraising goal:
Here’s a full breakdown of the costs.
UNITED STATES
U.S. Coast Guard: $225,000
30 active duty members involved
four boats, each one staffed with four fully qualified vessel operator
a helicopter on emergency standby with two pilots
air crew command staff
11 hours of active duty time
Port Huron Police and Fire Departments: $6,900 (Note: does not include related expenses such as boat fuel.)
St. Clair County Sheriff’s Office: $5,900
Sheriff’s Office Marine Division: $2,700
Sheriff’s Office Dive Team: $3,200
CANADA
Canadian Coast Guard: $21,700
The Canadian Coast Guard ship Limnos
An on-scene command vessel
Several fast rescue craft
City of Sarnia: $8181.77
Sarnia Police Service: $3,405
Sarnia Transit: $1,977.97, for 10 buses and supervisory staff making 19 trips to U.S. side of Bluewater Bridge
Sarnia Public Works Department: $712.40, for closure of streets for the purpose of convening U.S. citizens
Sarnia Fire Rescue Services: $1,435.88, for a Marine Unit on the water, fire apparatus, rescue truck, and crew members to assist on land
Sarnia Parks and Recreation Department: $649.60, for garbage clean up on the Canadian shore
Canada Border Services Agency: $3,975
Six officers re-assigned to designated marinas, plus time and resources for preparation prior to the event.
Point Edward Fire Department: $100
$100 in boat fuel
50 man hours of volunteer time from firefighters
County of Lambton Emergency Medical Services Department: $2,500
$2,500 for supplies, mostly blankets
Two ambulances and a supervisor on the site for a number of hours, of which the cost is approximately $2,000, though they were already on duty
COMMERCIAL
Estimated cost due to delays for commercial vessels: More than $80,000
When the eight-hour temporary restriction on vessel traffic was lifted at 8 p.m. there were eight commercial ships waiting to pass through the St. Clair River. The Chamber of Shipping roughly estimates the downtime for each operator costs $10,000 to have a ship anchored for an eight-hour waiting period, not to mention the costs to businesses for the delayed arrival of supplies.
OTHER
RCMP: No dollar amount provided. One member from Sarnia Detachment was on a regular shift and 3 members from Windsor Shiprider worked 12-hour overtime shifts
Sarnia Red Cross: Four volunteer provided 35 to 40 blankets to rafters. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/what-it-really-cost-to-save-1500-drunk-americans-276000/ | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/d716b0815cb80f7f7df41a8846b6c4752189d2d15d68d3263ed2393311baa292.json |
[
"The Associated Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-30T16:49:31 | null | 2016-08-30T12:32:12 | Estonia's legislature passed on the task of picking a head of state to an electoral college. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fpolitics%2Fworldpolitics%2Festonias-parliament-fails-to-elect-new-president%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/ap-featured.jpg | en | null | Estonia's parliament fails to elect new president | null | null | www.macleans.ca | TALLINN, Estonia — Estonia’s parliament has failed to elect a new president in three rounds of voting and has passed on the task of picking a head of state to an electoral college.
The voting process started Monday and ended Tuesday with a runoff between former prime minister and European Union commissioner Siim Kallas and former education minister Mailis Reps.
Kallas beat Reps with 42 votes against 26, but that wasn’t enough because a candidate needs the backing of 68 of the 101 lawmakers to win the presidency.
An electoral college made up of the lawmakers and over 200 municipal officials must now pick the head of state in a vote planned for Sept. 24. A majority of just over 50 per cent is enough to win.
Kallas and Reps will automatically become contenders in that election but other candidates can register too.
The winner will replace President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who is stepping down in October after serving two five-year terms.
The Baltic country’s governing three-party coalition has been divided over who should become the next president, a mostly ceremonial post. | http://www.macleans.ca/politics/worldpolitics/estonias-parliament-fails-to-elect-new-president/ | en | 2016-08-30T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/10793ce4ce19ff6dd744434db1203365f941e93e4df880d619731d25b6fac626.json |
[
"The Associated Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-29T22:49:23 | null | 2016-08-29T17:30:38 | Comedy actor best remembered for roles in The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein dies of complications from Alzheimer's | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fculture%2Fmovies%2Factor-gene-wilder-star-of-mel-brooks-movies-dies-at-83%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/12700717.jpg | en | null | Actor Gene Wilder, star of Mel Brooks movies, dies at 83 | null | null | www.macleans.ca | LOS ANGELES—Gene Wilder, the frizzy-haired actor who brought his deft comedic touch to such unforgettable roles as the neurotic accountant in The Producers and the mad scientist of Young Frankenstein, has died. He was 83.
Wilder’s nephew said Monday that the actor and writer died late Sunday at his home in Stamford, Connecticut, from complications from Alzheimer’s disease.
Jordan Walker-Pearlman said in a statement that Wilder was diagnosed with the disease three years ago, but kept the condition private so as not to disappoint fans.
“He simply couldn’t bear the idea of one less smile in the world,” Walker-Pearlman said.
Wilder started his acting career on the stage, but millions knew him from his work in the movies, especially his collaborations with Mel Brooks on The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. The last film—with Wilder playing a California-born descendant of the mad scientist, insisting that his name is pronounced “Frahn-ken-SHTEEN”—was co-written by Brooks and Wilder.
“Gene Wilder, one of the truly great talents of our time, is gone,” Brooks wrote in a statement Monday. “He blessed every film we did together with his special magic and he blessed my life with his friendship. He will be so missed.”
With his unkempt hair and big, buggy eyes, Wilder was a master at playing panicked characters caught up in schemes that only a madman such as Brooks could devise, whether reviving a monster in Young Frankenstein or bilking Broadway in The Producers. Brooks would call him “God’s perfect prey, the victim in all of us.”
But he also knew how to keep it cool as the boozing gunslinger in “Blazing Saddles” or the charming candy man in the children’s favourite “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” His craziest role: the therapist having an affair with a sheep in Woody Allen’s “Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex.”
“The greatest comedic mind of my childhood is now gone,” actor Josh Gad wrote on Twitter. “#RIP #GeneWilder & thank you 4 your pure imagination. This one hits hard.”
Tweeted Jim Carrey: “Gene Wilder was one of the funniest and sweetest energies ever to take a human form. If there’s a heaven he has a Golden Ticket.”
Wilder was close friends with Richard Pryor and their contrasting personas—Wilder uptight, Pryor loose—were ideal for comedy. They co-starred in four films: Silver Streak, Stir Crazy, See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Another You. And they created several memorable scenes, particularly when Pryor provided Wilder with directions on how to act black as they tried to avoid police in Silver Streak.
But Wilder would insist in a 2013 interview that he was no comedian. He told interviewer Robert Osborne it was the biggest misconception about him.
“What a comic, what a funny guy, all that stuff! And I’m not. I’m really not. Except in a comedy in films,” Wilder said. “But I make my wife laugh once or twice in the house, but nothing special. But when people see me in a movie and it’s funny then they stop and say things to me about ‘how funny you were.’ But I don’t think I’m that funny. I think I can be in the movies.”
In 1968, Wilder received an Oscar nomination for his work in Brooks’ The Producers. He played the introverted Leo Bloom, an accountant who discovers the liberating joys of greed and corruption as he and Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) conceive a Broadway flop titled Springtime For Hitler and plan to flee with the money raised for the show’s production. Matthew Broderick played Wilder’s role in the 2001 Broadway stage revival of the show.
Though they collaborated on film, Wilder and Brooks met through the theatre. Wilder was in a play with Brooks’ then-future wife, Anne Bancroft, who introduced the pair backstage in 1963.
Wilder, a Milwaukee native, was born Jerome Silberman on June 11, 1933. His father was a Russian emigre, his mother was of Polish descent. When he was 6, Wilder’s mother suffered a heart attack that left her a semi-invalid. He soon began improvising comedy skits to entertain her, the first indication of his future career.
He started taking acting classes at age 12 and continued performing and taking lesson through college. In 1961, Wilder became a member of Lee Strasberg’s prestigious Actor’s Studio in Manhattan.
That same year, he made both his off-Broadway and Broadway debuts. He won the Clarence Derwent Award, given to promising newcomers, for the Broadway work in Graham Greene’s comedy The Complaisant Lover.
He used his new name, Gene Wilder, for the off-Broadway and Broadway roles. He lifted the first name from the character Eugene Gant in Thomas Wolfe’s Look Back, Homeward Angel, while the last name was clipped from playwright Thornton Wilder. A key break came when he co-starred with Bancroft in Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, and met Brooks, her future husband.
“I was having trouble with one little section of the play, and he gave me tips on how to act. He said, ‘That’s a song and dance. He’s proselytizing about communism. Just skip over it, sing and dance over it, and get on to the good stuff.’ And he was right,” Wilder later explained.
Before starring in The Producers, he had a small role as the hostage of gangsters in the 1967 classic Bonnie and Clyde. He peaked in the mid-1970s with the twin Brooks hits Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein.
He went on to write several screenplays and direct several films. In 1982, while making the generally forgettable Hanky-Panky, he fell in love with co-star Gilda Radner. They were married in 1984, and co-starred in two Wilder-penned films: The Lady in Red and Haunted Honeymoon.
After Radner died of ovarian cancer in 1989, Wilder spent much of his time after promoting cancer research and opened a support facility for cancer patients. In 1991, he testified before Congress about the need for increased testing for cancer.
That same year, he appeared in his final film role: Another You with Pryor.
Wilder worked mostly in television in recent years, including appearances on Will & Grace—including one that earned him an Emmy Award for outstanding guest actor for his role as Mr. Stein, the boss of Will Truman played by Canadian Eric McCormack—and a starring role in the short-lived sitcom Something Wilder. In 2015, he was among the voices in the animated The Yo Gabba Gabba! Movie 2.
As for why he stopped appearing on the big screen, Wilder said in 2013 he was turned off by the noise and foul language in modern movies.
“I didn’t want to do the kind of junk I was seeing,” he said in an interview. “I didn’t want to do 3D for instance. I didn’t want to do ones where there’s just bombing and loud and swearing, so much swearing… can’t they just stop and talk instead of swearing?”
Wilder is survived by his wife, Karen, whom he married in 1991, and his daughter from a previous marriage, Katherine, from whom he was estranged. | http://www.macleans.ca/culture/movies/actor-gene-wilder-star-of-mel-brooks-movies-dies-at-83/ | en | 2016-08-29T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/1089dacc82ff1f5aa02248c0ea5263c4ff75363365ca00328fabacfd9449b191.json |
[
"Andray Domise",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-30T22:49:29 | null | 2016-08-30T17:01:09 | San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick believes his country attaches a low cost to Black lives. He's right, says Andray Domise. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fsports%2Fwhy-colin-kaepernick-sat-down%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MAC37_Colin-Kaepernick_POST01.jpg | en | null | Why Colin Kaepernick sat down | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Colin Kaepernick, backup quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers, touched off a firestorm last Friday in a pre-season game against the Green Bay Packers. As the teams stood on the field, and the rest of the stadium rose for the national anthem, Kaepernick remained seated in protest. When asked about it after the game, he told the NFL Network: “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of colour.” He added: “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”
It’s fitting that Kaepernick protested in Wisconsin, on the heels of demonstrations against the police killing of Sylville Smith in Milwaukee. Kaepernick himself was born in Wisconsin, and spent his early childhood in the suburb of Fond du Lac, about halfway between Green Bay and Milwaukee. Almost every relevant economic indicator ranks Wisconsin as one of the worst American states for Black people, including high incarceration rates, low family income, low net worth, and an outrageous achievement gap between Black and white students. Kaepernick’s hometown is only a short drive away from the Milwaukee neighbourhood of Bronzeville, a once-burgeoning Black neighbourhood whose homes were demolished by the Wisconsin government in the 1960s to make room for an interstate freeway. Wisconsin’s Black residents have, for decades, remained bounded by the purposeful segregations of urban design, economic immobility, and prison walls.
After Kaepernick made his comments, his social media accounts were deluged with racial slurs, wishes for season-ending injuries, and even videos of former fans burning his jersey. A common criticism (outside of exhortations that he go “back to Africa” to play football there) was that Kaepernick showed insufficient gratitude and respect for the flag, and the country that gave him the opportunity for a multi-million-dollar NFL contract. Drew Brees, quarterback for the New Orleans Saints, told ESPN: “Like, it’s an oxymoron that you’re sitting down, disrespecting that flag that has given you the freedom to speak out.” This was echoed by Jerry Rice, perhaps the greatest player to ever put on a 49ers jersey, when he tweeted, “All lives matter. So much going on in this world today. Can we all just get along! Colin, I respect your stance but don’t disrespect the Flag.”
Others, such as NBC analyst and former New England Patriot Rodney Harrison, alluded to the fact that, since Kaepernick was raised by white adoptive parents, he has no claim on personal oppression. Even Kaepernick’s biological mother, Heidi Russo, tweeted: “There’s ways to make change w/o disrespecting & bringing shame to the very country & family who afforded you so many blessings.”
Colin Kaepernick is the biological child of a white mother and Black father. Perhaps his racially ambiguous features helped reduce the social friction that comes packaged with Blackness. Perhaps his multi-million-dollar contract with the 49ers has provided a heat shield against racism. But Kaepernick identifies as a Black man in America, whose highest laws were originally drafted to the exclusion of Black people, and whose wealth was cultivated by a slave economy powered by kidnapped Black bodies. White Americans may have the convenience of honouring the flag without a true accounting of the atrocities committed under its aegis, but this is not so for Black America. In the eyes of Kaepernick’s critics, though, elite athletes exist in an imaginary plane outside of this reality and have no business bringing personal politics into the game.
Ignore, for a moment, that American athletes are regularly lauded for open displays of patriotism. Also put aside the fact that professional and college teams have raked in millions of dollars from the Pentagon for military tributes. Consider that Kaepernick plays in the NFL, a league whose troubled racial history has led to Black men comprising 68 per cent of players, 16 per cent of the head coaches, and none of the owners. Where an East Coast team is still named for a slur against Native Americans, and where Richie Incognito can racially abuse a Black teammate into leaving the Miami Dolphins, yet land a lucrative contract and earn a Pro Bowl selection a short time later. The NFL is where Kaepernick’s current coach, Chip Kelly, once came under fire for shutting out Black coaching staff during his tenure with the Philadelphia Eagles, and where the Eagles turned the other cheek in 2013 after wide receiver Riley Cooper threatened to “fight every nigger in here” at a Kenny Chesney concert.
The daily reminders that being born on American soil does not grant full protection of the American flag—this steady and pernicious accretion of proof—is yet another obstacle for Black athletes that neither their white peers nor white sports fans will ever know first-hand. When Black athletes do speak up, they know they will be hurt personally and professionally. This year, the WNBA assessed a $500 fine against players on the Indiana Fever, New York Liberty and Phoenix Mercury teams for wearing shirts referencing Black Lives Matter. That fine was only rescinded after a widespread backlash. And Minneapolis police officers walked off the job when Minnesota Lynx players wore the shirts to their pregame warm-up. The WNBA fine was rescinded after a widespread backlash, but the Minneapolis police union has maintained that officers will refuse to work the games if players continue to wear the shirts.
Former Denver Nuggets guard Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf fared much worse when he refused to stand for the national anthem 20 years ago. Seeing the American flag as a “symbol of oppression, of tyranny,” Abdul-Rauf weathered a league suspension, and ire from Denver sports media and Nuggets fans. His promising NBA career withered soon afterwards. This is to say nothing of the beloved and recently deceased Muhammad Ali, whose staunch anti-racism stance and refusal to fight in Vietnam nearly cost him everything. In his time, Ali was also called ungrateful, un-American, and far worse by critics who expected him to carry a gun in Vietnam, but would never themselves carry a protest sign alongside Black Americans.
Under the press of white supremacy in America, which applauds the virtue of nonviolent protest until it is exercised by Black people, Black athletes carry a social weight they neither want, nor asked for. How they reconcile that experience, their own beliefs, and America’s expectations toward them as role models is entirely up to them. Kaepernick obviously believes he owes something to the Black community, and finds his obligations incompatible with an American culture that places a low value on Black lives, and on holding police accountable. He earned his right to that belief through his life experience, and acquired his right to expression by birth, despite what his mother and so many others may think. Kaepernick wasn’t “given opportunities” by anyone. He worked and trained hard enough to be drafted by two teams in two different sports—the Chicago Cubs, and later the San Francisco 49ers. That work is all he owes his team, and all he owes an America that has yet to repay its own blood debt to Black Americans.
To those upset with a perceived lack of gratitude on his part, Colin Kaepernick owes nothing. And they should be ashamed for asking.
Andray Domise is a Toronto writer, activist and co-founder of txdl.ca, a mentorship and development program. | http://www.macleans.ca/sports/why-colin-kaepernick-sat-down/ | en | 2016-08-30T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/21f5f49978897884eebea5eb5cc23564830302480b12ae442668805464f5f01a.json |
[
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff",
"Shannon Proudfoot"
] | 2016-08-26T13:09:21 | null | 2016-08-24T14:39:06 | Speed read the news with our Talking Points round-up—our short takes on the week’s news—and sound like the smartest person in the room. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fneed-to-know%2Ftalking-points-un-shafts-off-course-rafts%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MAC36_GOOD_POST01-1.jpg | en | null | Talking Points: Of UN shafts and off-course rafts | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Need an answer for that? Trying to look like the smartest person at the dinner party? Our Talking Points have you covered. Read our short takes on some of the big stories from the week that was:
1. Shoot first, avoid questions later
In May, Filipinos sick of drugs and crime chose as president the tough-talking Rodrigo Duterte. His promised cleanup has been soaked with blood: 1,800 suspected dealers and others have died, many in police shootouts or at the hands of vigilantes. Two UN special rapporteurs have called for formal investigations. Duterte’s response: let’s leave the UN. “If you are this rude, take us out of your organization,” he said. His foreign secretary says the threat shouldn’t be taken seriously. Foreign leaders should take very seriously a democratically elected regime that cares so little for human rights and due process.
2. House bound
Welcome as it is for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to keep creating more firsts for women, there’s a tactical error in naming Bardish Chagger the House leader. She’s also minister for small business and tourism, two files with many advocates and players far from Ottawa. House duties and legislative prep work will keep Chagger chained to her Parliament Hill office. House leader should be a job unto itself. It could have gone to Health Minister Jane Philpott, who billed taxpayers for thousands of dollars for a limo service and first-class airport lounge membership. She could use a job that limits her travel.
3. Putin the peacemaker
European and U.S. leaders have failed to revive Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, but Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi has revealed someone new waiting in the dove-wings: Vladimir Putin, who invited the two sides to Moscow. The Russian strongman’s idea of honest brokerage in Syria includes bombing factions that oppose the Assad regime, and he’s quietly bolstered campaigns of French ultra-nationalist Marine Le Pen and, it appears, Donald Trump. When Putin extends an olive branch, test it first for toxic material.
4. Muzzle this
Zoe Mintz was fined $149 for walking her poodle on the wrong Montreal sidewalk. They were just over the Westmount/City of Montreal border, when a canine inspector—they’re out in force after some headline-making dog attacks—flagged Mintz’s pooch for not having a Montreal tag; only a Westmount tag. A former mayor is back in court on corruption charges, infrastructure remains a mess, and local entrepreneurs are pleading for business-friendly reforms; the city doesn’t need a pet bureaucracy running in circles.
5. Back to La Loche
Too often, politicians forget about a remote town’s suffering in the months after a major trauma, such as the fatal shooting of four people last January at a high school and home in La Loche, Sask. Premier Brad Wall followed up earlier broad pledges with action on Aug. 16. The remote northern town will get new trades education programs, as well as a long overdue suicide prevention worker. Wall also deserves credit for repeatedly preaching racial tolerance in the wake of this month’s flare-up of bigotry after an Indigenous man was slain on a Biggar-area farm. Saskatchewan is grappling with some deep troubles, and needs this sort of steady leadership.
6. Women who work
More than 81 per cent of Canadian women now participate in the workforce, up from just three-quarters in the late 1980s, according to a new Statistics Canada study. The gains can partly be attributed to family-friendly policies that permit paid maternity leave, although Canada’s strong post-2009 economy may have also helped. By contrast, the percentage of American women who work—but aren’t guaranteed paid time off after giving birth—has fallen below 74 per cent over the same period. It’s yet more evidence that Canada’s more enlightened approach to work-life balance is paying off.
7. Resourceful under fire
Iraqi troops are continuing their push into the ancient city of Mosul, where as many as two million people remain under the control of Islamic State fighters. And they may have a new weapon to show off when they finally arrive. Two Iraqi brothers have apparently built a tank-like remote-controlled vehicle that’s equipped with both a machine gun and rocket launcher, according to military news website Defense One. The name of the creation? Al-robot.
8. Michigan raft people
Roughly 1,500 Americans washed up on Canada’s shores, albeit inadvertently, after high winds blew their inflatable rafts and tubes off course during this year’s boozy Port Huron Float Down. The ill-advised annual event on the St. Clair River, which separates Michigan and Ontario, created big headaches for Canadian Coast Guard, RCMP and customs officials, who were charged with corralling the drunken interlopers and bussing them back to the States. On the plus side, it was a good dry run for the U.S. refugee crisis that may erupt if Donald Trump becomes president. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/need-to-know/talking-points-un-shafts-off-course-rafts/ | en | 2016-08-24T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/85b72c0d3feffecd99bfaa52250c84633f3476f7a8960e420eb7df49cd17bcac.json |
[
"Kate Lunau",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-30T04:48:51 | null | 2012-09-05T14:54:20 | Canadian students feel hopeless, depressed, even suicidal | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Feducation%2Funiandcollege%2Fthe-mental-health-crisis-on-campus%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/tile-lunau.jpg | en | null | The mental health crisis on campus | null | null | www.macleans.ca | This in-depth look at the mental health crisis on university campuses first appeared in 2012. Read the story, check out our tips for dealing with stress.
In late August, as the first leaves changed from green to red and gold, university ghost towns were coming back to life. Residences were dusted out. Classrooms were readied. Textbooks were purchased—and new outfits, new computers, new posters to decorate dorm room walls. Amid this bustle, construction workers at Cornell University began installing steel mesh nets under seven bridges around campus. They overlook the scenic gorges for which Ithaca, N.Y., is known; in early 2010, they were the sites of three Cornell student suicides of a total of six that year. Students cross the bridges daily on their way to class.
Cornell’s bridge nets are the latest and most visible sign that the best and brightest are struggling. In an editorial in the Cornell Daily Sun following the 2010 suicides, president David J. Skorton acknowledged these deaths are just “the tip of the iceberg, indicative of a much larger spectrum of mental health challenges faced by many on our campus and on campuses everywhere.”
Last year, Ryerson University’s centre for student development and counselling in Toronto saw a 200 per cent increase in demand from students in crisis situations: “homeless, suicidal, really sick,” says Dr. Su-Ting Teo, director of student health and wellness. Colleagues at other schools noticed the same. “I’ve met with different key people. They’re saying last year was the worst they’ve ever seen,” says psychologist Gail Hutchinson, director of Western University’s student development centre in London. “The past few years, it’s been growing exponentially.” Fully a quarter of university-age Canadians will experience a mental health problem, most often stress, anxiety or depression.
One need only to look at the results of a 2011 survey of 1,600 University of Alberta students to know something is very wrong. About 51 per cent reported that, within the past 12 months, they’d “felt things were hopeless.” Over half felt “overwhelming anxiety.” A shocking seven per cent admitted they’d “seriously considered suicide,” and about one per cent had attempted it. These problems aren’t unique to U of A. “It’s across all of North America,” says Robin Everall, provost fellow for student mental health.
In March 2010, first-year Queen’s University student Jack Windeler died by suicide. “He did well in school, was active in sports, and we thought he was ultimately prepared to go to university,” his father, Eric Windeler, says. But Jack, who seems to have been suffering from depression, had begun withdrawing from friends. “It seemed to go amiss,” Windeler says, “and go amiss very fast.”
In the 14 months that followed, five more Queen’s students (all male) died suddenly, three by suicide. “It was a very difficult period,” says Queen’s principal Daniel Woolf. In the wake of these deaths, he established a commission on mental health to see what could be done. Its panel of five members—two administrators, the head of the school of nursing, one student, and chair Dr. David Walker, former health sciences dean—met once a week for eight months, and heard from students, parents and others.
The Queen’s commission was, in some ways, influenced by Cornell’s experience. That university has grappled with the label of “suicide school,” a reputation Tim Marchell, director of mental health initiatives, acknowledges, but insists is a misperception. Cornell’s student suicide rate resembles that of other universities and colleges across the U.S. What’s different is that at Cornell, nearly half of suicides occurred at the city’s public gorges. The fact is Cornell’s mental health initiatives have been a model to other schools. Cornell’s bridge nets are just a small, if highly visible, part of its overall mental health strategy—an effort aimed at restricting access in case of impulsive suicides, not unlike keeping firearms locked inside a cabinet.
At Queen’s, a final report from the commission is due in October. A discussion paper, delivered in June, offered a range of reasons students are grappling with mental health problems: everything from the stress of moving away from home, to academic demands, social pressures, parents’ expectations, and a looming recognition of the tough job market awaiting them. More students than ever are entering university with a pre-existing diagnosis of mental illness, and there’s less stigma attached to getting help. This partly explains the flood that counsellors are seeing. But there’s something else going on, too. Some wonder if today’s students are having difficulty coping with the rapidly changing world around them, a world where they can’t unplug, can’t relax, and believe they must stay at the top of their class, no matter what.
The stress of it all is a huge burden to bear. In preliminary findings from an unpublished study involving several U.S. schools, Cornell psychologist Janis Whitlock found 7.5 per cent of students who started university with no history of mental illness developed some symptoms. About five per cent who did have a previous history of mental illness saw symptoms increase while at university. She says, “there’s probably never been a more complicated time to be growing up than right now.”
The truth is, it’s never been easy to be young. People in their late teens and early twenties are at the highest risk for mental illness; in these years, first episodes of psychiatric disorders like major depression are most likely to appear. After motor vehicle accidents, suicide is the leading cause of death in Canadians aged 10 to 24, the Queen’s report notes. In this delicate life period, people move out on their own, strike up new relationships, experiment with drugs and alcohol, and assume new responsibilities. At college or university, they could be away from friends and family who know them best—people who might better recognize the warning signs of mental illness, like social withdrawal, increasing anxiety, a growing inability to cope, or other changes in behaviour.
If some pressures are age-old, others are brand new. Students are competing more fiercely to win a spot in top universities: the average grade of incoming students at Queen’s in 2011 was 88.1 per cent, up from 87.4 in 2007. At the University of Virginia, 90 per cent of students are from the top 10 per cent of their high school classes, according to Joseph Davis, associate professor of sociology. But only 10 per cent of those high achievers can leave UVA with the same distinction. “Students experience it as a kind of downward mobility,” he says. “Maybe you were in your high school gifted program, and suddenly you’re no longer the brightest student in the room. You might not even be close.”
Davis’s student Katherine Moriarty surveyed UVA undergrads about the illegal use of prescription stimulants, like Adderall and Ritalin, to get an academic edge. Of 525 respondents, 20 per cent said they’d used stimulants non-medically at least once in their lifetimes, most commonly to “improve academic performance,” “study more efficiently” and “increase wakefulness.” Other motives—recreational use at parties, or weight loss—were deemed less important than academic ones.
Students might feel they have little choice but to compete as hard as they can. Tuition costs are rising, and the job market looks grim. In July, the unemployment rate for Canadians aged 15 to 29 was nearly 12 per cent; having an undergraduate degree doesn’t make job candidates stand out like it once did. After graduation, often weighed down by student debt, many will have to string together short-term contracts with unpaid internships—and even those can be hard to get. “Students say, ‘I need to know what I’m doing now,’ ” Hutchinson says. “ ‘I need to get into this or that program, because the world is scary and I see people out of work.’ ”
The postings to Kids Help Phone’s Ask Us Online counselling service give a hint of how dire the future can seem. “Im a 2nd year University student and the #1 thing that has been on my mind is marks!” one writes. “im worried that im not going to be able to get into teachers college and if I dont get into teachers college I really dont know what to do! In High School I was an overachiever but now in the real world it is more of a challenge! Things just seem so hopeless right now and I can barely sleep because of the stress.”
Another says, “My parents want me to become a doctor. My mom puts a lot of pressure on me. I have chemistry which I dislike, although I loved it in high school. I’m not sure why that is, maybe it’s because it has become much harder, and im so use to just ‘getting it’ that i dont feel like putting the extra effort, even though i know i should.” Students seem to be under more pressure than ever from home. Part of it could be due to the fact that families are smaller, Hutchinson suggests, so students carry a bigger piece of their parents’ expectations. Failing a class, or an exam, can seem disastrous.
Miranda struggled with depression most of her life. When she moved to Toronto to attend Ryerson, the 22-year-old (who asked not to use her last name for fear it could jeopardize her chances with future employers) found her symptoms worsening. By her second year, she was suffering from more frequent panic attacks. “I realized I was struggling, and tried to reach out for help, but [Ryerson’s is] a very widely utilized program,” she says. “There was a very, very long wait list. They do their best to find you help, but in the rest of the city, wait lists are just as long.”
Miranda was eventually referred to a counsellor at St. Joseph’s Health Centre in Toronto, but didn’t feel she was improving. Halfway through her third year, Miranda—who’d been living with a roommate—moved into her own place. “My mental health issues peaked the first summer I lived by myself,” she says. “I got bedbugs, and that was it.” She packed up and moved in with her grandparents. Finally, afraid she might hurt herself, she went to the ER and was held in a psychiatric intensive-care unit for eight days. “The resources at Ryerson weren’t helping,” she says. “That seemed like the best option.”
Ryerson has three full-time equivalent (FTE) family physicians and half an FTE psychiatrist, Teo says, as well as 14 counsellors, three of them psychologists. (After last year’s demand, two more counsellors were added.) With such a small staff, and a student body of 28,300, it’s no wonder on-campus mental health care resources can feel stretched to the limit. (Cornell has 30.6 FTE mental health professionals to serve 22,000 students.) At Ryerson, those in crisis can usually see somebody the same day “or the next at the latest,” Teo says. “If you’re not as urgent, that’s when the wait comes in.” The goal is to get each student an appointment within two weeks, says Teo, “but last year, because of the level of severity, the wait became much longer. Maybe three or four times as long.”
After Miranda got out of the hospital, and as she adjusted to new medication, her family helped her get back on her feet. She graduated from Ryerson in the spring. She’s now working an unpaid internship, hoping to land a job in communications. “It’s as promising as it is terrifying. There’s so much unknown,” she says. “Not knowing where your next paycheque is going to come from; working 60 hours a week. A lot of people I know, whether they have mental health issues or not, have trouble balancing it all.” She sometimes sits outside her building, chatting with older women who live on her street. “They say, ‘We wouldn’t trade with you to be young again.’ ”
Some problems are the natural ups and downs of life, like a bad mark or a sloppy roommate. There’s a question of whether today’s young adults are somehow less equipped to cope. “Not all pressures can be removed,” says Woolf, principal of Queen’s. “There is pressure just by going to university, or doing anything in life.” When he was in university in the 1970s, he recalls, students didn’t fret so much about their marks, or employment prospects after graduation.
“If we got a bad mark, it was ‘Too bad, on to the next one,’ ” Woolf says. “There’s a generation of students now—and I’m not saying it’s every student—but a tendency to want to be a winner in all that they do. They all get a trophy at field day; they all get a treat bag at the party; and then they get to university and suddenly find they’re now playing in a different league, and no longer necessarily the smartest in their class.” Woolf is quick to note that serious, long-term mental health struggles are a different matter.
The ability to cope is an acquired skill, and one that takes time to learn. “I speak to parents who insist their children not take summer jobs so they can go to summer school, to get the best marks,” says Trent University psychology professor James Parker, who holds the Canada Research Chair in Emotion and Health. “I say, ‘I’m not sure that’s the best strategy.’ ” It’s often at those summer jobs that kids learn resiliency: serving coffee, waiting on tables and dealing with demanding bosses and crabby customers. Overprotective parents may think they’re helping their kids, but once these kids arrive on campus, small problems can seem overwhelming.
Getting over the hurdles of life takes time for introspection, and that’s also in short supply. Students aren’t left alone with their thoughts on the bus to school or the walk across campus. They’re texting, listening to music, checking Facebook or Twitter, often all at once. There’s no time to mull over difficult, complicated emotions, and no immediate reason to do it, either.
In a 2011 study of eight U.S. universities, Whitlock, who is director of the Cornell Research Program on Self-Injurious Behaviors, found that 15 per cent of students had cut, burned or otherwise injured themselves. This behaviour is most common at the end of the day, when they’re supposed to be winding down into sleep. “It’s terrifying for them,” Whitlock says. “They can’t make that transition. They don’t have experience with it.”
Mariette Lee couldn’t wait to become a student at McMaster University in Hamilton. Toward the end of her second year, she began to feel overwhelmed. “I was trying to do too much simultaneously, to be the perfect student,” says Lee, 22. She began skipping class, and she wasn’t eating right; she became increasingly withdrawn, gripped by sadness or anxiety for reasons she couldn’t understand. “I remember sitting in class, and a whole hour would go by without me realizing it.” It wasn’t until a friend reached out to her—one who said he himself had a mental illness—that Lee understood she needed to talk to someone.
Lee got help, first at the campus health clinic, and then at St. Joseph’s Healthcare in Hamilton. She was diagnosed with depression. At first, Lee was shy about sharing her diagnosis, but once she saw others were supportive, she opened up. “If people don’t talk about it, they won’t recognize the signs,” she says. Lee, who’s beginning her fourth year, is now president of COPE McMaster, a student club. This fall, they’re holding their first-ever “Move for Mental Health” five-kilometre run, with the purpose of speaking openly about depression and other mood disorders.
Student-run mental health programs are an increasingly important resource. At the University of King’s College in Halifax, Stephanie Duchon, 23, appears on posters that say, “I am not my mental illness.” Duchon, an organizer with the King’s Mental Health Awareness Collective, came up with the idea. “I’ve suffered from depression for 12 years,” she says. “By coming out to the community, I’m hoping others will do the same.”
Alongside students’ own efforts, university administrators are introducing an ever-growing number of programs. Queen’s, Cornell and others instruct faculty and staff on how to look for warning signs that could signal a student in crisis, making it a campus-wide effort. The Queen’s report mentions initiatives at other institutions as possible models, like Bounce Back, at Carleton University, which sets up undergrads who receive less than a 60 per cent average in their first semester with an upper-year mentor. Teo, of Ryerson, sits on the board of the Canadian Association of College and University Student Services, which has a mental health working group, partnered with the Canadian Mental Health Association, to study best practices in Canada and abroad. And Everall, at the University of Alberta, is producing a report on campus mental health services and best practices elsewhere, due in 2013.
Universities are still trying to define their exact role when it comes to students’ mental health. “We are not a treatment facility,” Woolf says. “Our role is education and research, and to some degree, community service. That said, we do have a care and nurturing role over the young people that come to us.” Eric Windeler believes that mental health and well-being of students should rank alongside academics. “If students are healthy and happy, it will help them succeed academically and socially,” he says.
Following Jack’s death, Windeler and his family made a decision: to be open about what happened and to encourage others to seek help. They partnered with Kids Help Phone to launch the Jack Project, aimed at supporting young people through the transition period from high school to college. Over 20 high schools and 12 post-secondary institutions in Ontario joined in the Jack Project’s year-long pilot, involving a series of workshops and presentations, which wrapped up in June. Windeler is a full-time volunteer.
As he and others, like Lee and Duchon, come forward, the stigma around mental health issues can only diminish. In her work with COPE McMaster, Lee has been surprised to learn just how many people have struggled, but didn’t admit it, or couldn’t. “When we run events, people say, ‘Thank you, I never would have felt comfortable before talking about this,’ ” Lee says. “It does feel good.” | http://www.macleans.ca/education/uniandcollege/the-mental-health-crisis-on-campus/ | en | 2012-09-05T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/888ce9db602f1d297f025c1075318d6ce4eebcd7433bba7655212c6341213ff9.json |
[
"Amanda Shendruk",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T22:48:36 | null | 2016-08-26T17:49:31 | Proxima b is the nearest exoplanet to Earth, and it lies within its star's habitable zone. That means it could—maybe—host life. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fsociety%2Fscience%2Fproxima-b-explained-why-everyone-is-excited-about-the-newly-discovered-exoplanet%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MAC37_PLANET_PROXIMAB_POST01.jpg | en | null | Why everyone is excited about an exoplanet named Proxima b | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Scientists have discovered an Earth-like planet orbiting Proxima Centauri, the star closest to our sun. This rocky exoplanet, dubbed Proxima b, has the astronomical community pretty excited because, as the European Southern Observatory explains in its announcement, “it may be the closest possible abode for life outside the Solar System.”
At a mere four light years from Earth, Proxima b is our nearest exoplanet—a planet that orbits a star outside the solar system. That’s close enough to allow us to study it in detail, something scientists have not yet had the opportunity to do with a potentially habitable planet.
Proxima Centauri, Proxima b’s host star, is a red dwarf that is quite a bit smaller than our yellow dwarf sun. It’s found in the Centaurus constellation. Proxima b itself is 1.3 times more massive than Earth, and it takes 11.2 days to completely orbit its star. Scientists think only one side of the exoplanet is exposed to light from Proxima Centauri (similar to our view of the moon).
Proxima b orbits closer to its star than Mercury does to the sun; however, its host star is cooler than ours and so, as ESO explains, “Proxima b lies well within the habitable zone around the star and has an estimated surface temperature that would allow the presence of liquid water.”
Life, as we understand it, needs water. In order for an exoplanet to be considered potentially habitable, it needs to exist at a distance from its host star that allows for the formation of liquid water on its surface. If the exoplanet is too far from the star, temperatures may be too cold for liquid water; if its orbit is too close, temperatures will be too hot. The area in between, where the temperature is just right, is the habitable zone—or, as some call it, the “Goldilocks Zone.”
To help explain the concept, let’s look at the habitable zone around our own sun. This is where we find the Earth. (Good thing.)
Very few planets lie within the sun’s habitable zone. In fact, only the Earth and Mars have temperatures that allow for the formation of liquid water.
Just because an exoplanet is in a star’s habitable zone, however, does not mean it can host life. It simply means that if the exoplanet featured a similar atmosphere and surface pressure as the Earth, the planet could sustain liquid water. Unfortunately, we know nothing about Proxima b’s atmosphere.
For an exoplanet to be potentially habitable, scientists consider more than just whether or not it can host water. The star around which the exoplanet orbits needs to be of a particular type—one that burns long enough to allow life a chance to evolve, and emits appropriate amounts of ultraviolet radiation.
Additionally, the exoplanet must have significant similarities to Earth. The Earth Similarity Index (ESI) is a way to measure this likeness, and it places objects on a scale of zero to one, where one is Earth itself. The closer to 1.0, the more similar the exoplanet is to our home. The measurement takes into account radius, density, escape velocity, and surface temperature.
No other planets in our solar system are Earth-like; however, in addition to being the nearest of the 44 potentially habitable exoplanets we’ve found, Proxima b also has the highest ESI.
Proxima b has a high ESI and exists within its star’s habitable zone, but don’t go packing your bags just yet. At the speed of current rockets, it would take humans over 100,000 years to get to there.
Oh, also, there’s a small chance the planet doesn’t even exist. | http://www.macleans.ca/society/science/proxima-b-explained-why-everyone-is-excited-about-the-newly-discovered-exoplanet/ | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/e89bca5590e68693de73862ec455f5ab436ab995903800bfdba7bedbb3715b8e.json |
[
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff",
"Shannon Proudfoot"
] | 2016-08-28T16:48:26 | null | 2016-08-07T23:29:13 | The Toronto swimmer has four events to go. Says a former coach, 'she's always been able to find a way to win' | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Folympics%2Fthe-amazing-penny-oleksiak-i-just-tried-to-hold-on%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/PENNY-822.jpg | en | null | The Amazing Penny Oleksiak: 'I just tried to hold on' | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Penny Oleksiak was nervous. Jittery enough that she spent a good part of her day sitting in her room at Rio’s Athletes Village, shaking. Canada’s outpouring of joy and pride in response to her and her teammates’ bronze medal performance in the women’s 4 x 100-m freestyle relay Saturday left her happy, but worried. Concerned that maybe she’d be letting the country down if she failed to hit the Olympic podium again in the 100-m butterfly finals Sunday night.
It’s the kind of reaction you would expect from a 16-year-old, in the spotlight for the first time on the world’s biggest sporting stage. Except the nerves then just went away. Ten minutes before the race, Oleksiak decided to be calm instead and trust that Canada “had my back.”
The six-foot-one Torontonian loped out to the pool deck, waved to the crowd, took her mark and laid down the race of her very short life. Sitting in third at the turn, she powered down the back stretch to take a silver medal in 56.46—well behind Sarah Sjostrom of Sweden’s golden world record of 55.48, but comfortably ahead of American Dana Vollmer, the 2012 Olympic champion who had to settle for 2016 bronze. In doing so, she lowered her own Canadian and junior world records—again.
“I think a lot of people knew that Sarah was going to win this race,” Oleksiak said afterwards. “I definitely had my eye out for her when we turned and I saw her out in front and I just tried to hold on.”
The push to the finish was so furious that Oleksiak, nicknamed “the child” by her not-that-much-older teammates, wasn’t even sure how she had placed. She took a few seconds to catch her breath before daring to turn around and look at the scoreboard.
“I wasn’t really even sure that I medalled, until I looked up and saw the Canadian flags in the air around me,” she said. “Getting to see that and getting to see that you medalled is just an amazing feeling.”
Then she searched the stands and tried to locate her dad, Richard, mother, Alison, sister, Hailey, and big brother, Jamie, a defenceman with the NHL’s Dallas Stars.
“I saw my dad. He stood up and waved to me and he was literally the only person I saw in the crowd. Like everything else was just blurred.” Oleksiak blew him a kiss and calmly strolled away to the waiting TV cameras.
Oleksiak seems awfully nonchalant about two medals in two days, and turning in the best Olympic performance by a Canadian woman since Anne Ottenbrite’s gold, silver, bronze in Los Angeles in 1984—16 years before Oleksiak was born. Perhaps that’s because she is so used to winning: six medals at the 2015 FINA World Junior Championships, eight at the 2015 Australian Age Group Championships as a 14-year-old, and 10 at 2014 Canadian Age Group Championships.
In many ways she’s still a kid. Just a couple of weeks before leaving for Rio she showed up at the Toronto Summer Swim Camp at the outdoor Olympic pool in Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood to do flutterboard lengths with the little swimmers, shyly posing for pictures and signing autographs.
Bob Hayes, the camp’s director, used to coach Oleksiak at the Toronto Swim Club. She arrived as a raw 12-year-old, having only been at it for a couple of years under the tutelage of her first coach, Gary Nolden. But Hayes recalls her talent being evident to all.
“She came in without a lot of technique, but she just loved to race,” he says over the phone from Toronto. “She was very invested.”
The skinny kid challenged him as a coach, Hayes says, asking questions, demanding answers to her problems, and always wanting to know how to be better.
Within a year, she had caught the eye of Ben Titley, the Brit who now coaches Canada’s Olympic team. On a Wednesday night session at the University of Toronto, where the swim club shared the pool with the national high-performance squad, he wandered over and asked Hayes for her name.
“He said, ‘Who’s that? I want to work with that girl once a week.’ ” It was the only time that ever happened. Hayes estimates he has worked with more than 1,000 Canadian swimmers in his years as a coach. Oleksiak isn’t just the first to medal. She’s the first to make the Olympics.
“She’s always been able to find a way to win,” he says. “She may not win by a lot, but if it’s tight, she’ll win by a stroke.”
As Rio progresses, Canada will get to see if that still holds true. Oleksiak still has four events to go—the 100-m freestyle, the 200-m free, the 4×200-m freestyle relay and the 4×100 individual medley.
“Before [Olympic] trials I didn’t even think I would make the team,” Oleksiak said minutes before stepping out to collect her silver on the podium. “I for sure want to get there again, but I’m an Olympic medallist already and I can’t complain if I don’t get another medal.”
Who’d like to bet against her? | http://www.macleans.ca/olympics/the-amazing-penny-oleksiak-i-just-tried-to-hold-on/ | en | 2016-08-07T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/3751c31a7898844d6154dae11ffc35e5836c5b721c3e8d7ef68d6ff27479e10a.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-29T22:49:20 | null | 2016-08-29T17:12:42 | There were lessons learned about the systems and services needed to process and support new arrivals, and also in community partnerships | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Farrival-of-second-influx-of-syrians-will-be-smoother-immigrant-support-groups%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/DEC_11_PATRIQUIN_POST01.jpg | en | null | Arrival of second influx of Syrians will be smoother: immigrant support groups | null | null | www.macleans.ca | VANCOUVER – Many of the immigrant support groups that leapt into overdrive less than a year ago to welcome the first influx of Syrian refugee families say the intensity of that experience has helped lay the groundwork for what is expected to be a far more manageable second wave this fall.
Canada is on the cusp of receiving another surge of Syrians in order to meet its ambitious refugee admissions target by the end of 2016, though government officials are mum on the details around timing.
Immigration Canada pledged to bring in 25,000 government-assisted refugees this calendar year. About 6,000 are still to come.
Chris Friesen of British Columbia’s Immigrant Services Society was unequivocal about the progress made since last year and whether Canada is more prepared to handle the upcoming arrivals.
“Oh, God, yes. Absolutely,” Friesen said in an interview Monday, laughing heartily. “We’re in a much better situation.”
Experience from the first phase, combined with a longer lead-up time, means the many lessons learned can be put into practice in preparation for the fall, he said.
Friesen said those lessons include expanded orientation, more education around tracking down permanent housing and better measures to accommodate large families.
Mario Calla, head of COSTI Immigrant Services in the Toronto area, said he also expects the fall to be less intense because of a lower number of expected arrivals.
He said improvements include more children’s programming to accommodate the larger-than-expected families and better dental services for some groups.
Calla said these lessons related not only to the systems and services to process and support new arrivals, but also the networking and community partnerships that formed between various agencies and government departments.
“All of that is in place and it hasn’t been dismantled. And so it’s going to be a much smoother process,” he said.
But not all immigrant-support groups are as optimistic about the fall.
Marta Kalika of Welcome Place in Winnipeg raised concerns about the anticipated number of Syrian refugees due to arrive before the end of the year, as well as about the lack of information around support from other stakeholders, including the provincial government.
“The biggest problem now is everything is still up in the air,” she said. Manitoba underwent a change of government following a provincial election in April.
Kalika said Manitoba is set to welcome just under 1,200 refugees by the end of 2016, including a large number of Syrians.
“Let’s do the math. If the numbers that the federal government is providing are correct, then how do you expect no challenges (with) … 300 clients a month?” she asked, adding that Welcome Place has temporary accommodation for only 120 people at a time.
Debbie Douglas, executive director of the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants, said that while the immediate kinks of the refugee-resettlement process have been mostly addressed, there is still a need to focus on the longer-term pressures faced by Canada’s recent newcomers.
She pointed to a greater need for childcare spaces affiliated with English-language instruction.
“This is of particular concern to us because we want to ensure that Syrian women, right from the get-go, are accessing programs, including language training,” Douglas said.
She also flagged resources for school systems and children’s services as vital, given the disproportionate number of young people included among the refugee families.
Since the start of November last year, Canada has received just over 30,000 Syrian refugees, more than 19,000 of whom were government assisted. The 19,000 figure includes blended visa office referred refugees, who receive partial government help. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/arrival-of-second-influx-of-syrians-will-be-smoother-immigrant-support-groups/ | en | 2016-08-29T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/3402255e2ec3ac8b76720332c465e1f3258861f8bea98a2b7e70e72edd7696ab.json |
[
"Sarah Niedoba",
"Canadian Business",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald"
] | 2016-08-26T13:01:21 | null | 2016-08-25T17:21:50 | Consumers already have some preconceptions about the fledgling Internet of Things, but businesses are finding novel applications | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Feconomy%2Fbusiness%2Fhow-the-internet-of-things-is-going-to-transform-retail%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/FEB20_GEDDES_POST01.jpg | en | null | How the Internet of Things is going to transform retail | null | null | www.macleans.ca | This post originally appeared at Canadian Business.
“We are entering into an era of deep personalization where everything from our bodies to our homes are interconnected,” declares a recent report by MaRS Discovery District. The report—Canada’s Innovation Landscape: Consumer & Commerce—outlines some of the fastest growing industries in the country. One of the most-hyped but still poorly understood technologies the report covers is the “Internet Of Things.”
IoT technology has long garnered a certain degree of public mockery, of the “Why do I need my fridge connected to the Internet?” variety. But, the report argues, this is a simplification of an industry that will soon come to revolutionize commerce as we know it.
“Obviously IoT is somewhat vague and nebulous to a lot people,” admits one of the report’s authors, Sue McGill. “When you actually look at the definition of IoT, simply put, it’s about connecting any device or object to the Internet. So that includes everything from your cellphone to your car engine—and it includes people.”
In the report, McGill writes that IoT technology is “narrowing the gap between the physical and digital worlds” and that “retailers are leveraging the enormous amount of data being collected to connect with their consumers in real time, both inside and outside of stores.”
Because of this, more and more Canadian startups are looking to capitalize on the Internet of Things. Pieter Boekhoff heads up Nobal Technologies, a company that’s developed an interactive mirrors it calls the “iMirror.” These reflective interactive screens are being installed around the world, such as in tourist destinations like the Mall of America. Boekhoff’s says the company has just launched a partnership with Tommy Hilfiger in Europe.
When asked where the demand for the tech comes from, Boekhoff is quick to explain his belief that certain surfaces present a more intuitive interface—namely, reflective ones. “So there’s a TV beside me and it’s off. And if I were to tell you that I’d stare at it for 18 minutes a day when it’s off, you would say that I’m crazy. But people spend on average 18 minutes a day looking in the mirror, so it’s a completely intuitive and natural place for people to look, and real estate that has never been utilized before,” he explains.
When it comes to the future of the IoT industry, Boekhoff’s beliefs are equally plain: “I think it’s going to ubiquitous—people are going to be using it actively and daily.”
And while the iMirror is the kind of product that feeds directly into consumers’ current assumptions of what IoT technology looks like, there are plenty of Canadian companies finding business applications that consumers will hardly notice.
Take Rubikloud. This Toronto-based startup is developing data platforms that allow retailers to “manage, optimize, and test complex one-to-one campaigns.” This could mean that when customers enter a store, they’ll be given relevant information about deals and promotions based on their past purchase history. And—perhaps more importantly—retailers will be able to collect data on their habits.
“Companies like Rubikloud are trying to figure out, now that we have all of these devices and objects connected to the Internet, what does this mean in terms of the data points that are being collected, and what can we bring to a shopper’s experience to help optimize it,” explains McGill. “Really at the heart of this IoT ecosystem is the data layer itself. In many ways data is the platform that is powering this next level of consumer experience.” McGill believes that the future of commerce will see brands and retailers focusing on how to leverage IoT to personalize the sales process.
And while she says that, as things currently stand, the “implementation and mass adaptation of IoT technology remains rather latent,” McGill is firm in her belief that the technology will eventually become pervasive. “As IoT starts to become massive, we’re looking at how to educate the world about all of these interesting growth opportunities,” she says. “These are areas in technology that are going to be a catalyst for growing our economy, and opening up a wave of innovation.” | http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/how-the-internet-of-things-is-going-to-transform-retail/ | en | 2016-08-25T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/70a9b55c33dd5c80e01db7054f9f295b283eef04c74a8cce53ef33a8461f3a4c.json |
[
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"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-28T20:48:28 | null | 2016-08-28T15:36:08 | The star of CBC's 'This Hour Has 22 Minutes' was accused of 'triggering' by Michelle Rempel | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Fcomedian-removes-photo-mocking-harper-after-mp-complaint%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/RTR4RO9G.jpg | en | null | Comedian removes photo mocking Harper after MP complaint | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Comedian Mark Critch has removed a photo mocking former prime minister Stephen Harper from his Instagram account following a barrage of tweets from a Conservative MP that included obscenities.
Calgary MP Michelle Rempel posted on Twitter that she has since apologized to Critch “that he got flamed,” and she says that he, too, told her he was sorry.
The photo showed Critch inside what appeared to be a closet on Parliament Hill in an apparent parody of Harper’s decision to shelter in a closet when Michael Zehaf Bibeau stormed the Parliament Buildings in Oct., 2014.
The star of CBC’s “This Hour Has 22 Minutes” appeared to be clutching himself in fear, and the caption read, “Stephen Harper has stepped down. Here I am in his closet.”
Rempel was in the caucus room with Harper when the shots rang out, and she told Critch on Twitter that she hoped he never suffers from panic attacks in movies with gunshots in them, or has to wonder if colleagues are alive or dead.
Critch told the CBC that he has spoken to Rempel and that things are “all good now.”
“Michelle and I had a good conversation. She wrote me an apology for flaming out and I deleted the picture. No hard feelings on either side,” Critch said in a statement to CBC.
Neither Rempel nor Critch could be immediately reached for comment.
In her tweets responding to the photo, Rempel accused Critch of “triggering” her.
“I don’t really have words to describe my disgust at this post of yours,” she began.
“May you never have to choose between running for your life or trying to protect your friends from the unknown,” she continued.
“What you posted isn’t satire or comedy.”
The photo and Rempel’s reaction late Friday triggered a flood of debate on social media that continued through Sunday afternoon. Some people accused Critch of showing poor taste while others criticized Rempel for over reacting. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/comedian-removes-photo-mocking-harper-after-mp-complaint/ | en | 2016-08-28T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/459b0a0948d12ba18880b9dabb992d31487a65dff6bd5f17807dbc32e10e1389.json |
[
"Scott Feschuk",
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"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff",
"Shannon Proudfoot"
] | 2016-08-26T16:48:19 | null | 2016-08-26T11:00:55 | Martin Patriquin talks to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about his choice to prioritize public appearances. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fpolitics%2Fjustin-trudeau-on-his-constant-visibility%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MAC36_WORKING_TRUDEAU_POST01.jpg | en | null | Justin Trudeau on his constant visibility | null | null | www.macleans.ca | The health minister may have paid back some of the money she spent on an expensive car service, but Canadian Press reporter Kristy Kirkup tells Evan Solomon why Jane Philpott will still be under the microscope. | http://www.macleans.ca/politics/justin-trudeau-on-his-constant-visibility/ | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/d3c30f09498dc1edbcf7ab0a8a7b23eee9421a4d35125d92ac3b6d2d15272caa.json |
[
"The Associated Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T18:49:03 | null | 2016-08-26T14:02:08 | Despite significant move, Canada says the likelihood Zika enters blood system is 'extremely low' | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fsociety%2Fhealth%2Ffda-expands-zika-screening-to-all-us-blood-centres%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/DAILY_ZIKA_VIDEO_POST01.jpg | en | null | FDA expands Zika screening to all US blood centres | null | null | www.macleans.ca | WASHINGTON – The Food and Drug Administration wants all U.S. blood centres to start screening for Zika, a major expansion intended to protect the nation’s blood supply from the mosquito-borne virus.
Friday’s advisory means all U.S. states and territories will need to begin testing blood donations for Zika. Previously, the FDA had limited the requirement to Puerto Rico and two Florida counties.
“There is still much uncertainty regarding the nature and extent of Zika virus transmission,” said Dr. Peter Marks, director of the FDA’s biologic products centre, in an agency release. “At this time, the recommendation for testing the entire blood supply will help ensure that safe blood is available for all individuals who might need transfusion.”
Blood collection sites already test donations for HIV, hepatitis, West Nile virus and other blood-borne viruses.
FDA officials said Zika testing is already underway in Puerto Rico and parts of Florida, where “it has shown to be beneficial in identifying donations infected with Zika virus.”
The FDA has authorized use of two experimental blood-screening tests for Zika, one made by Roche and another from Hologic Inc. Several testing sites are already voluntarily using the technology, including blood centres in Texas. The cost of adding Zika testing to the blood screening process is less than $10, according to officials at South Texas Blood and Tissue Center.
Since February, U.S. blood centres have been turning away people who have recently travelled to areas with Zika outbreaks, under a previous FDA directive.
In Canada, the agency that oversees the country’s blood supply is keeping a close eye on Zika transmission in the U.S., but has made no changes to the way it screens blood for infectious diseases or to its restrictions on donations. Since February, Canadians who have travelled outside Canada, the continental U.S. or Europe must wait 21 days following their return before donating blood.
“We’ve determined the risk of Zika virus entering the Canadian blood system to be extremely low, but as we monitor the situation, we are prepared to update our screening criteria should it pose a risk to the Canadian blood supply,” Nujma Bond, a spokeswoman for Canadian Blood Services, said Friday by email.
Zika is spread primarily by mosquito bites, as well as sex. There have been cases of Zika transmission through blood transfusion in Brazil.
The FDA works with other federal agencies to set standards for screening, testing and handling blood donations.
Last month, blood centres in Miami and Fort Lauderdale had to halt donations until they could begin screening each unit of blood. The order followed now-confirmed reports of local Zika transmission in the Miami area — the first in the continental U.S.
Puerto Rico suspended blood donations and imported blood products in March until the island began screening its blood.
Friday’s announcement follows recent pressure from members of Congress urging the FDA to expand Zika screening.
“We must implement widespread universal screening now to prevent any further contamination of the blood supply before it occurs and to pre-empt a widespread shortfall in the blood supply,” stated Reps. Lloyd Doggett, D-Texas, Patrick Murphy, D-Fla. and a half-dozen other House members, in a letter to the FDA earlier this month.
The Zika virus causes only a mild illness in most people, but scientists have confirmed that infection during pregnancy can lead to severe brain-related birth defects.
The tropical mosquito that spreads Zika and other viruses is found in the southern U.S. While health officials have predicted that mosquitoes in the continental U.S. would begin spreading Zika this summer, they also have said they expect only isolated clusters of infections and not widespread outbreaks. So far, there have been about 40 cases of homegrown Zika in Florida. | http://www.macleans.ca/society/health/fda-expands-zika-screening-to-all-us-blood-centres/ | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/5f794509425c2fb39f57b7ae9624c13f7289b4d2d9352bceac0cf30bcf69e117.json |
[
"The Associated Press",
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] | 2016-08-26T12:58:04 | null | 2016-08-25T11:09:16 | Russia was suspended due to evidence of state-sponsored doping | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fputin-calls-ban-on-russias-paralympic-team-inhumane%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/MAC31_EDIT_POST.jpg | en | null | Putin calls ban on Russia's Paralympic team inhumane | null | null | www.macleans.ca | MOSCOW – Russian President Vladimir Putin attacked the ban on his country from the Rio de Janeiro Paralympics as immoral and inhumane on Thursday, while six Russian athletes launched a bid to compete at next month’s games as individuals.
Russia was suspended on Aug. 7 over what International Paralympic Committee president Philip Craven called a “medals over morals” culture with evidence of state-sponsored doping. The ban was confirmed Tuesday when the Court of Arbitration of Sport rejected a Russian appeal.
“The decision to disqualify our Paralympians is outside the bounds of law, morality and humanity,” Putin said at an award ceremony for Olympic athletes at the Kremlin. He called the ruling against Russia “cynical” and claimed that “it even humiliates those who take such decisions.”
Foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova added to the criticism, calling the ban “collective responsibility for an unproven crime.” While Russia has accepted there were some shortcomings in its anti-doping system, it insists drug use was not systemic or supported by the government.
The Paralympics start Sept. 7. On Thursday, six Russian athletes, including three gold medallists , wrote to IPC president Craven asking for a route into the games as individuals.
“I strongly believe that real perpetrators of the dirty system must be punished and banned from sport. I do not want to lose to cheaters and I don’t want to compete with cheaters, even Russians,” says the letter, which was provided to The Associated Press by Andrei Mitkov, an agent representing the six. “However even more strongly I believe that innocent people should not suffer for actions of cheaters that tried to deceive clean athletes of the world.”
The athletes, who say they have been repeatedly tested outside Russia and found to be clean, asked for the IPC to provide criteria which could allow some Russians to compete if they can show they are clean. The approach is similar to the criteria that allowed U.S.-based Russian long jumper Darya Klishina to compete at the Rio Olympics when the rest of the Russian team was banned.
“I would be very grateful if you review my individual request for entry to the Paralympic Games in such exceptional circumstances or, alternatively, describe me conditions upon which my participation in Rio Games would be possible,” the letter states. In the event of a refusal, the athletes say they may request a ruling from the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
On Thursday, Putin said special competitions will be organized in Russia for banned Paralympic athletes with winners getting the same prizes they would have had from success in Rio. Russia awards cash prizes to Olympic and Paralympic medallists and gave out dozens of BMW luxury cars to its Olympic medallists Thursday.
Putin also attacked what he said was political manipulation of sport directed against Russia, whose team was reduced to a single athlete in track and field and banned entirely from weightlifting at the Olympics. That came after World Anti-Doping Agency investigations detailed widespread doping and evidence that senior sports ministry officials allegedly covered up hundreds of doping cases.
“You came through a tough test with honour,” Putin told a room full of Olympic gold medallists . “We know how difficult it was for our athletes in Rio. Ahead of the competition, the team was cut by almost a third, and was deprived of the chance to show what it can do in sports where Russia is traditionally considered one of the favourites. But our team, you, my friends, coped with all the difficulties, competed as a united team.”
Russia was fourth in the medal count with 56 medals, 19 of them gold.
Earlier, Sports Minister Vitaly Mutko appeared to cast doubt on the achievements of second-placed Britain, suggesting it had won medals in Rio thanks to its lobbying power.
“Look at the comparative growth in results of some countries, such as Britain. I don’t want to accuse them of anything,” he said in comments reported by the state R-Sport agency. “And look at the leadership of all the sports institutions. There are only British and Canadians there.”
Britain won 67 medals in Rio, with 27 golds, in its best performance for more than a century. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/putin-calls-ban-on-russias-paralympic-team-inhumane/ | en | 2016-08-25T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/db42953db381bc6f4a760e1f953ca61a3ace63583d60d4ecacad606fc1bad91e.json |
[
"The Canadian Press",
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] | 2016-08-31T00:49:36 | null | 2016-08-30T19:57:34 | Canada Post has described the tentative agreements as short-term | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada-post-and-the-postal-union-reach-tentative-deals%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/MAC30_CANADA_POST_POST02.jpg | en | null | Canada Post and the postal union reach tentative deals | null | null | www.macleans.ca | OTTAWA – Labour Minister MaryAnn Mihychuk says Canada Post and the Canadian Union of Postal Workers have reached tentative agreements, averting the prospect of a labour dispute that has loomed over the talks for months.
In a statement, Mihychuk says the agreements were reached “voluntarily,” but provides no other details about the deals themselves.
The negotiations were extended twice since the weekend, when a deadline expired on a 72-hour job action notice issued last Thursday by the Canadian Union of Postal Workers.
The two sides were in talks nearly around the clock at the request of a special mediator appointed Friday by Mihychuk.
Canada Post described the tentative agreements as short-term. It said they are for two years and that four-year contracts were typically negotiated in the past.
“The agreements will avert a work disruption, bringing much-needed certainty in the postal system for our employees and customers,” said Canada Post in a statement. “Canadians can now use the postal system with confidence.”
The tentative agreements, however, still must be ratified by the members.
The Canadian Union of Postal Workers is Canada Post’s largest union, representing more than 50,000 postal workers.
The tentative settlement came the same day that calls for direct federal government action in the matter had grown louder.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had again been asked to get personally involved, this time by a group of prominent women from across the country who called on the prime minister to direct the Crown corporation to live up to its legal obligations on pay equity.
A day earlier, small businesses that rely on web-based sales were encouraged to write Trudeau and demand legislation to break the impasse.
The issue of differences in paycheques for rural mail carriers – most of whom are women – and urban letter carriers has been at the forefront of contract talks between Canada Post and its biggest union.
An open letter sent to the prime minister Tuesday called on Trudeau to keep his promise to support equal pay for work of equal value.
“We are asking you to use your influence to ensure that rural and suburban mail carriers achieve pay equity with (urban) letter carriers.”
It is not known what the tentative deals contain in regards to the pay equity issue.
Trudeau is in China this week for a formal state visit.
Tuesday’s letter was signed by 200 women primarily from English-speaking Canada, including actress Sarah Polley, author Naomi Klein and social activists Maude Barlow and Judy Rebick. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada-post-and-the-postal-union-reach-tentative-deals/ | en | 2016-08-30T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/ec43aeeaa9226444bf2be43737765df83f69a21e331c22157d7b4b5f22dcd703.json |
[
"The Associated Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-29T02:49:06 | null | 2016-08-28T21:51:49 | Ceasefire and agreement for rebels to turnover of weapons comes in exchange for congressional seats | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Ffarc-sets-permanent-ceasefire-under-colombia-peace-deal%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/12691931.jpg | en | null | FARC sets permanent ceasefire under Colombia peace deal | null | null | www.macleans.ca | HAVANA — The commander of Colombia’s biggest rebel movement said Sunday its fighters will permanently cease hostilities with the government beginning with the first minute of Monday, as a result of their peace accord ending one of the world’s longest-running conflicts.
Rodrigo Londono, leader of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, made the announcement in Havana, where the two sides negotiated for four years before announcing the peace deal Wednesday.
“Never again will parents be burying their sons and daughters killed in the war,” said Londono, who also known as Timochenko. “All rivalries and grudges will remain in the past.” Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos announced on Friday that his military would cease attacks on the FARC beginning Monday.
Colombia is expected to hold a national referendum Oct. 2 to give voters the chance to approve the deal for ending a half-century of political violence that has claimed more than 220,000 lives and driven more than 5 million people from their homes
Top FARC commanders are planning to gather one final time in mid-September to ratify the accord.
FARC guerrillas are supposed to turn over their weapons within six months after the deal is formally signed. In return, the FARC’s still unnamed future political movement will be given a minimum 10 congressional seats—five in the lower house, five in the Senate—for two legislative periods.
In addition, 16 lower house seats will be created for grassroots activists in rural areas traditionally neglected by the state and in which existing political parties will be banned from running candidates. Critics of the peace process contend that will further boost the rebels’ post-conflict political power.
After 2026, both arrangements would end and the former rebels would have to demonstrate their political strength at the ballot box.
Not all hostilities are ending under the deal with the FARC. The much-smaller National Liberation Army remains active in Colombia, although it is pursuing its own peace deal with the government. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/farc-sets-permanent-ceasefire-under-colombia-peace-deal/ | en | 2016-08-28T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/cd360f2627dd05b3e6dacda08bbde094945ba54ddceef726e2af02b1d0e3e9dc.json |
[
"Stephanie Levitz",
"The Canadian Press",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald"
] | 2016-08-28T20:48:30 | null | 2016-08-28T15:59:16 | Conservative immigration minister vetoed exempting Syrians and Iraqis from rule requiring UN refugee status | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fnews%2Fcanada%2Ftories-twice-rejected-change-that-could-have-opened-doors-for-refugees%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/033.jpg | en | null | Tories twice rejected change that could have opened doors for refugees | null | null | www.macleans.ca | OTTAWA – In spite of relentless pressure to help Syrians flee the perils of civil war, Canada’s former Conservative government twice rejected a proposal last year to make it easier for Canadians to sponsor them, newly disclosed documents show.
Twice in 2015—first in March, then again in July as the refugee crisis escalated—federal bureaucrats proposed exempting Syrians and Iraqis from a rule requiring them to have official UN refugee status in order to be sponsored by small groups of people to come to Canada.
On both occasions, the recommendation as described in documents obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act was rejected by then-immigration minister Chris Alexander.
The Conservatives eventually agreed to the change, but not until September, when the original policy became linked to the story of Alan Kurdi – the three-year-old Syrian boy whose tragic drowning galvanized global sympathy for the Syrian refugee crisis.
A memo, entitled “Public policy to facilitate the sponsorship of Syrian and Iraqi refugees by groups of five and community sponsors,” was first sent to Alexander on March 17, 2015.
The issue was a 2012 rule change put in place by the Conservatives that made it nearly impossible for informal groups without sponsorship agreements with the government to bring refugees to Canada.
As a result, such so-called “groups of five” could only sponsor people who carried an official refugee designation the United Nations or the host country.
Applications from non-registered refugees were harder to vet and took longer, gumming up the sponsorship system, according to government materials published at the time, which is partly why the change was made.
But the Tories also didn’t like that the program had become a means of family reunification and feared those applications were pushing out people in more dire need of resettlement, said a source close to the decision process at the time.
The result was a steep drop in the number of applications that had previously brought upwards of 2,000 people to Canada each year.
In 2015, the Kurdi family was trying to make just such an application – indeed, they wrote to Alexander on the very day the minister received the March 17 memo.
In their letter, the family outlined how it was trying to get Alan Kurdi’s uncle and his family out of Turkey, but could not since they had not registered as refugees by either the UN or the Turkish government. Canadian requirements were slowing things down, they wrote.
Alexander would not see that letter for another few months.
He chose not to approve the policy because he wanted to make things faster – and was running up against politics, said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the details had not been previously disclosed.
At the time the memo was written, the government had only just belatedly reached its original 2013 target of bringing 1,300 Syrians to Canada in the space of a year.
Alexander had already promised that January to admit a further 10,000 refugees – a promise that took more than a year to get cleared by the Prime Minister’s Office.
The memo pointed out how instrumental groups of five were in meeting previous refugee settlement commitments and that they continued to express interest in sponsorship, often being referred to the formal sponsorship groups instead, who had more latitude in selecting refugees.
Alexander had some power, it noted.
“Section 25.2 authorizes the minister of (immigration) to grant permanent resident status, or an exemption from any criteria or obligations of (the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act), based on public policy considerations,” it said.
The Conservative promise to resettle 10,000 refugees came with a catch, however – they had to meet at least one of a specific list of criteria, like being a member of a vulnerable minority or survivor of sexual violence. Screening non-official refugees against that list would be difficult, and only slow things down.
Two audits of the process, prompted by a Prime Minister’s Office wary of who was coming in, slowed things down even more.
By July, millions of Syrians were on the move and officials sent Alexander another memo, reiterating their March proposal – an unusual show of persistence, considering a federal election was looming and officials had been told to propose no new policy ideas.
Any idea that wasn’t likely to play well with the Conservative voter base had no chance of making it through the Prime Minister’s Office, said the source.
Instead, on Aug. 10, 2015, and with the federal campaign in full swing, the Tories promised to admit 10,000 more Syrians and Iraqis over four years, if re-elected.
Less than a month later, Kurdi’s lifeless body washed ashore on the beach of a Turkish resort; the heart-rending photos were splashed on newspaper front pages around the world.
The public reaction was immediate, its message unmistakable: Syrians being forced to flee their own country and those around it needed help, and now.
On Sept. 19, a notice would appear on the Immigration Department’s website, a carbon copy of which had been in Alexander’s briefing note that past March and again in July.
This one, however, bore Alexander’s signature.
It established “sufficient public policy considerations” warranting an exemption from the rule for “for Iraqi and Syrian nationals who have fled their country of nationality or habitual residence as a result of the current conflicts in Syria and Iraq, in order to facilitate the sponsorship of these persons by groups of five and community sponsors.”
But the challenges in processing the paperwork clearly remain. Since September, over 30,000 Syrians have arrived in Canada. By May, only 195 came under the groups of five program, which the Liberals announced late last week they would extend. | http://www.macleans.ca/news/canada/tories-twice-rejected-change-that-could-have-opened-doors-for-refugees/ | en | 2016-08-28T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/f92a07dc32c5b9e545196bca840f532ff910c1875750404a6ba858632d81d02b.json |
[
"Jason Markusoff",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Shannon Proudfoot"
] | 2016-08-27T14:48:44 | null | 2016-08-27T09:43:44 | Most served as corporate directors. Two were subject to public inquiries. One will help appoint the next Supreme Court justice. | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fpolitics%2Flife-after-24-sussex-next-former-prime-ministers%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/MACBULLDOG_SEPT21_FLORA_PORTAL_POST01.jpg | en | null | Life after 24 Sussex: What comes next for former prime ministers? | null | null | www.macleans.ca | Stephen Harper has now joined the elite club of six living former Sussex Drive residents who roam through private life with the honorific Right Honourable. Among former prime ministers, it’s not rare that he’s leaping straight from his federal seat into something else; namely, his Harper and Associates international business consultancy. But what does nearly set Harper apart from most of his cohort is his decision not to stick it out as MP until the next election—the only other living former MP to make the same decision was Jean Chrétien.
What other paths of his predecessors will Harper follow or avoid? Will he pen a blandly titled autobiography? Will he stick his nose back into politics or public advocacy? Will some past dealings land him back in the public eye in ways he’d rather avoid?
Here’s how other former PMs have busied themselves in between those visits to the mailbox for federal pension cheques:
Paul Martin
Left the House of Commons: after the October 2008 election, following a 2.5-year backbench term
Memoir: Hell Or High Water: My Life In And Out of Politics (2008)
Current age: 77
Martin is the former PM whose post-political profile has most resembled those of ex-presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, who launched namesake charitable organizations (one of which has been in the news a fair bit lately, for whatever reason). Shortly after losing as PM—but while he was still a Montreal MP—the former shipping magnate launched and personally financed the Martin Aboriginal Education Initiative, which brings entrepreneurship programs and other initiatives to schools with the aim of improving outcomes and curbing Indigenous student dropout rates. That area of concern was to be a focus of his life as prime minister with the 2005 Kelowna Accord, but Martin’s successor wasn’t so keen on that file. The MAEI is no massive venture—Revenue Canada reports three paid staff, and $1.9 million in revenue in 2014—but it’s become Martin’s calling card, paired with a $50-million Capital for Aboriginal Prosperity and Entrepreneurship Fund he launched in 2010 with the help of several large corporations.
Martin has also taken an interest in Africa since his retirement from elected politics. In addition to work with the African Development Bank, he was named chair of the Congo Basin Forest Fund, which quietly wound down last year. He still enjoys giving advice on policy in various fields, whether it’s solicited (as an advisor for Kathleen Wynne’s Ontario pension plan and Canada’s Ecofiscal Commission) or not (urging the Trudeau government to re-engage with Africa; and all sorts of Harper policies).
Jean Chrétien
Left the House of Commons: December 12, 2003, the same day he formally surrendered the keys to 24 Sussex.
Memoir: My Years as Prime Minister (2007); Straight from the Heart (1985)
Current age: 82
After leaving politics in late 2003, Chrétien endured an infamous return to the limelight barely a year later: his testimony at the Gomery commission into the Liberal sponsorship scandal that sprang up on Chrétien’s watch and doomed his successor. But by the time he was pulling branded golf balls from his briefcase in response to Justice John Gomery’s “small town cheap” swipe, Canada’s 20th prime minister had long started his new life as globetrotting counsel for Heenan Blaikie, the same law firm where another former PM, Pierre Trudeau, worked until his death in 2000. Chrétien also swiftly secured a gig as special advisor to Calgary-based PetroKazakhstan, the first of many energy-related posts he held. Like Martin, Chrétien’s travels often sent him to Africa, but for him it’s been mostly business. His time as international man of mystery included last year’s bewildering Moscow sit-down with Vladimir Putin, which ran counter to Stephen Harper’s bid to isolate the expansion-minded Russian president. When Chrétien’s law firm collapsed in 2014, he quickly found work with Dentons.
Despite the tensions with the Martin camp that hastened his political departure, Chrétien has remained the Liberals’ most beloved elder statesman. He was a key negotiator for the failed 2008 NDP-Liberal coalition, and showed the kid how it’s done last fall when he campaigned for Justin Trudeau. He remains an in-demand public speaker.
Kim Campbell
Left the House of Commons: after losing her seat in the 1993 election
Memoir: Time and Chance (1996)
Current age: 69
The choice of when to enter private life was made for North America’s first head of government. Campbell lost her seat in the Tory armageddon of 1993, which reduced her party’s caucus to two MPs. A year later, she took a fellowship at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. In 1996, it was Chrétien who gave her four years in office after earlier denying her: she was appointed consul-general in Los Angeles. Her deploring of the Canadian Alliance likely helped make Stephen Harper want far less to do with her, but Justin Trudeau recently brought her back as chair of his new Supreme Court selection advisory board.
Campbell has been involved with myriad international organizations, led the Council of Women World Leaders and International Women’s Forum, and also held corporate directorships. She has been the principal of the University of Alberta’s Peter Lougheed Leadership College since 2014.
Brian Mulroney
Left the House of Commons: after 1993 election
Memoir: Memoirs: 1939-1993 (2007)
Current age: 77
After giving Canada the GST and free trade with Mexico and United States, Mulroney’s approval ratings entering 1993 were in the teens, so he decided that election year was a fine time to leave. That year, he returned to Ogilvy Renault, the law firm he first joined in 1964, fresh out of law school. Mulroney is still with the firm, now known as Norton Rose Fulbright. He also answered the door-knocking of several major corporate firms, and holds board posts with Barrick Gold Corp., Quebecor Media and the Blackstone Group.
It was another business relationship that kept Mulroney wincing in the public spotlight for much of his post-political life: his 1993 and 1994 acquisition of cash-stuffed envelopes from German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber, a lobbyist for plane manufacturer Airbus. The saga lasted until 2010, when a public inquiry determined that Mulroney’s dealings with Schreiber while still an MP were not appropriate. Before Harper was pressured to call the inquiry, he occasionally consulted Mulroney for advice.
John Turner
Left the House of Commons: after 1993 election
Memoir: None published
Current age: 87
Pierre Trudeau’s successor spent 79 days as prime minister, and as of Aug. 26, 2016, 11,666 days as a former prime minister. Unlike Martin and Harper, Turner didn’t take electoral defeat as a sign he should resign as party leader. He didn’t just remain top Liberal after badly losing in 1984; he lived on to fight the 1988 free trade election against Brian Mulroney, and stayed at the helm until Chrétien won the party leadership in 1990. Turner later returned to law with Miller Thomson, and worked for that Toronto law firm until retiring in 2013 at age 83. He’s still on some corporate boards, including electricity producer Northland Power, and was formerly a director of major insurance companies.
The shortest serving of today’s living former PMs has also been the most quiet in public, certainly in this century. But a few years after leaving office, he was a director of the World Wildlife fund and pushed for stronger protections against mining and wildlife habitat degradation in the Arctic. Last fall, the Niagara Peninsula Conservation Authority gave out its first Rt. Hon. John Turner Award for Water & Environmental Leadership. The recipient was John Turner.
Joe Clark
Left the House of Commons: 1993, then again after the 2004 election
Memoir: None, but authored A Nation Too Good To Lose: Renewing the Purpose of Canada in 1994; and How We Lead in 2012
Current age: 77
Like Turner, Clark’s loss after a few months in power didn’t end his political career. In fact, the majority of it occurred after he lost the top job in 1980. Mulroney named him foreign affairs minister from 1984 to 1991, a span that included the Canada-U.S. free trade deal and anti-apartheid sanctions on South Africa, as well as the Berlin Wall’s collapse. He then served as constitutional affairs minister amid the Charlottetown Accord, and planned to exit public life on the same election day in 1993 that would also be the last for three of his prime ministerial successors.
After stints as a scholar at Berkeley and a United Nations representative in Cyprus, Clark started (stop us if this sounds familiar) an international business consulting firm named Joe Clark and Associates in 1994. But his political retirement didn’t last; he returned as Progressive Conservative leader from 1998 to 2003, before Peter MacKay took over and merged the Tories with Harper’s Canadian Alliance. Clark loudly cursed that move, and would persist for years as an old Red Tory critic of the Harper government. He’s currently a professor at McGill, and a member of several international advisory bodies and corporate boards. | http://www.macleans.ca/politics/life-after-24-sussex-next-former-prime-ministers/ | en | 2016-08-27T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/7ee9711970748e9a4db7d08c42e5354e0548ca6ad4dbbbe0789352bb5719e46d.json |
[
"Brian Bethune",
"Scott Feschuk",
"John Geddes",
"Jonathon Gatehouse",
"Charlie Gillis",
"Scott Gilmore",
"Anne Kingston",
"Adrian Lee",
"Nancy Macdonald",
"Jason Markusoff"
] | 2016-08-26T20:48:34 | null | 2016-08-26T15:47:10 | For Africa the First World War “was both the culmination of European imperialism and the beginning of its decline." | http%3A%2F%2Fwww.macleans.ca%2Fsociety%2Fgreat-war-africa%2F.json | http://www.macleans.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/MAC37_BETHUNE_1916_POST02.jpg | en | null | 1916 series: What the Great War meant for Africa | null | null | www.macleans.ca | In his 1916: A Global History, a month-by-month account of the First World War’s hinge year—the one after which no negotiated peace could possibly have restored the world that was—Irish historian Keith Jeffery turned his attention to the war in Africa. Unlike in Asia, where many countries had some degree of control over their involvement, Africans had little choice: in 1914 there were only two independent states in the entire continent (Ethiopia and Liberia); the rest were parcelled out among European powers, almost all of them immediate or eventual belligerents. In the popular memory of most of the Great War’s combatant nations, the fighting in Africa is at best a sideshow compared to the slaughter in France or the revolution in Russia. (It’s perhaps best remembered as the setting for the 1951 film The African Queen, in which tramp steamer captain Humphrey Bogart—playing a Canadian because he couldn’t master a Cockney accent—and spinster missionary Katherine Hepburn manage to sink a German gunboat. It won Bogie his only Oscar.)
But in Africa, where, in the words of historian John Iliffe, the war “was both the culmination of European imperialism and the beginning of its decline,” it was no sideshow. The fighting began immediately in August 1914, even though European colonists were uneasy about so few white men fighting each other in the presence of so many black Africans, and went on past the Armistice that stopped fighting in France and Belgium. The number of white casualties was a fraction of the Western Front toll, but the upheaval in African communities was overwhelming. Just the British, in East Africa alone, had almost a million Africans serving their forces—as gun porters, medical staff, casual labour and the catch-all term of “carriers.” The French on the west side of the continent conscripted—by means observers compared to the tactics of the illegal slave trade—171,000 troops. In all, over two million Africans served European armies and upwards of 200,000 died from it.
Then there were, as in the restive southern flank of the Czarist empire, the requisitions. In Nyasaland (later part of Rhodesia, now Malawi), the Great War became known as “the war of the thangata,” a Chichewa word meaning “help,” in reference to the demands of British colonial officials. That meant food, troops and labourers, and eventually absorbed 200,000 men, two-thirds of the adult male population, sparking uprisings and local famines. In Senegal, French recruiters ran man hunts, paying local agents well for delivered “recruits” who frequently arrived bound. It took several decades—and another world war—before the Europeans finally began departing, but several historians quoted by Jeffery point out how the experiences of 1914-1918 showed Africans the true vulnerability of their European overlords.
And how little they received in turn. The Northern Rhodesian war memorial, dedicated to those “who gave their lives for the Empire” lists the names of three dozen white men and the words, “also many other natives of the territory of whose names no complete record exists.” The Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission was dedicated to the revolutionary notion that all combatants, regardless of rank, were to be commemorated, but in Africa a familiar racial hierarchy ruled. In 1925, Lord Arthur Browne, principal assistant secretary of the commission, ordered that even if identified Africans were known to be in particular cemetery plots their names would not be included in the register, because “we should be unnecessarily drawing attention to the fact we have neglected to commemorate [them] by a headstone.” Best to forget, as the world at large outside Africa has done, about the Great War there. | http://www.macleans.ca/society/great-war-africa/ | en | 2016-08-26T00:00:00 | www.macleans.ca/cac1f3a20a50c8949c39fa356733e6bc5a9bc5c777c3aa7535b1c96a88a70fdf.json |
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