10.10.2009
Former Beach Boy to complete Gershwin songs
The musical genius behind the Beach Boys has been asked to complete the work of a pop composer from earlier in the 20th century — George Gershwin.
Gershwin, a famed lyricist and composer who created works such as Porgy and Bess, An American in Paris and the Oscar-nominated They Can't Take That Away From Me, left behind dozens of unfinished songs when he died in 1937.
According to the Los Angeles Times, the Gershwin family trust, administered by the composer's nephew Todd Gershwin, has approached former Beach Boy Brian Wilson to finish some of the songs.
Link
Wilson was the lead songwriter for the '60s band, penning hits such as Good Vibrations and Little Deuce Coupe, but also the more sophisticated album Smile, which came out in 2004.
Wilson, 67, said he was "thrilled" at the prospect of working with the ghost of Gershwin, adding that one of his earliest memories was of hearing Rhapsody in Blue, a Gershwin jazz-classical composition.
Wilson plans to issue an album of Gershwin classics, with his own arrangements, next year that will include at least three new Gershwin songs.
"George for his time was a visionary," Todd Gershwin told the Times. "He certainly crossed genres and musical lines, tried things that hadn't been done before and Brian Wilson has done exactly the same thing."
10.08.2009
Canada’s biggest problem? America
by Luiza Ch. Savage
It has been almost two years since Stephen Harper disclosed that his cabinet was having serious discussions about what to do to “restore the special Canadian and American relationship” that he said had become “lost” in the Bush years. “What has happened is that Canada lost that special relationship with the United States. We increasingly became viewed as just another foreign country, albeit an ally, a good friend, but nevertheless a foreign country. You know, the northern equivalent of Mexico in terms of the border,” the Prime Minister told Maclean’s in an interview back in December 2007. “That isn’t just a shift in the view of the administration, that’s somewhat a shift in American public opinion as well, which concerns me.”
At the time, Harper was preoccupied with a new passport requirement that threatened tourism and trade, adding a new scale to the ongoing red-tape “thickening” of the world’s longest undefended border. “I’m certain this trend will not be reversed in the lifetime of the current American administration,” Harper said at the time. “I’m more optimistic it will be deferred later by a new administration.” But, he added, “I’m far from sure.”
He was right to be wary. If the special relationship was lost under George W. Bush, nine months into the new administration it remains missing. At his Sept. 16 meeting with Obama at the White House, Harper boasted that it was his seventh session with the new President. But the passport requirement remains, as do agricultural inspection fees on commercial cross-border traffic and air travellers. Instead of “un-thickening” the border, the new administration has kept the Bush policies in place and even piled more on: in February, the U.S. sent unmanned aerial surveillance drones to patrol parts of the border with Canada. The drones, which can detect human movement 10 km away, are supposed to help catch smugglers. But they have raised concerns about privacy in border communities, and although they are unarmed, give the 49th parallel something in common with the tribal lands between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Since Obama’s February trip to Ottawa, where he was greeted with a rapturous welcome on his first official foreign visit, the state of the world’s largest trading relationship has become even more fraught. Given that fully one quarter of the Canadian economy depends on exports to the U.S., growing American protectionism has proven to be a growing threat. Problems began with a Buy American provision in the US$787-billion stimulus bill. While there have been reports that an exemption for Canada may be imminent, in return for Canadian municipal and provincial governments allowing procurement contracts for U.S. companies, rules similar to the Buy American provision are now being repeated in other legislation. Protectionism has also surfaced in proposed climate change legislation that would impose border tariffs on imports from countries whose carbon policies Washington deems insufficient. And there are other issues galore that affect Canada, from complicated and costly trucking rules and the treatment of Canadian hydroelectricity under U.S. environmental laws to “country of origin” labelling that imposes costs on Canadian agricultural producers and reduces the appeal of their goods in the U.S. marketplace.
Oh—there’s Canada’s national sport as well. In August, Canadian NHL teams faced the prospect of having their seasons thrown into limbo by a sudden Obama administration crackdown on Canadian charter flights operating between U.S. cities. That issue arose when a U.S. charter airline and an American pilots’ union complained that the Air Canada charter company was beginning to take U.S. business, and the Department of Transportation stepped in. When Harper sat down with Obama at his Sept. 16 Oval Office meeting, he took precious minutes away from discussions of Afghanistan and Iran to address the war over hockey players.
That problem was eventually resolved, with Air Canada agreeing to “an unprecedented level of monitoring and enforcement” of who boards the flights. But it was just one more high-profile imbroglio between the two countries that may have left many Canadians asking the question: is America Canada’s biggest problem?
Jason Myers, the president of the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, calls growing American protectionism “the hottest issue for us.” He is not only concerned about new rules that affect us directly, but also those aimed at other countries that lead to problems for Canada. For example, when Obama announced in September that the U.S. would impose tariffs on tires from China, Myers worried that any Chinese retaliation against the U.S. auto industry would hurt Canadian businesses, too, because that sector is so integrated in North America. “We just see a whole lot of areas where the U.S. is becoming more closed, protectionist and isolated in terms of trade,” Myers says. “It’s not just that it’s our biggest market, but we make things together. We are part of an integrated supply chain. It has far-reaching impacts throughout industries.”
The impact of the Buy American provisions has been not only to exclude Canadian suppliers from government contracts at the state and local level, but also to encourage American distributors to stop carrying Canadian products. “The impact of this goes well beyond the procurement markets at state and local levels and beyond the federal restrictions,” Myers says. The economic impact is hard to estimate, in part because only a small portion of the stimulus money has been disbursed, but at least 250 Canadian companies have lost business, he adds.
Washington, Ottawa and the provinces have worked toward a solution to the problem. But even if Canada gains an exemption from the Buy American provision, Canadian businesses are worried that initiative may have been just the tip of the iceberg. Similar protectionist rules have been included in several bills pending in Congress, including the Water Quality Investment Act, which Myers notes could affect $4 billion worth of Canadian exports.
Of course, U.S. protectionism is rising precisely because the American economy is struggling, with the country’s global trade deficit now a domestic political football. To American ears, this drumbeat of Canadian complaints is beginning to look predatory. The Canadian Embassy arms itself with fancy maps detailing just how many jobs in each congressional district depend on the annual US$742 billion in trade with Canada. But congressmen know a trade deficit when they see one: the Canada-U.S. imbalance happens to amount to several billion dollars each month—in Canada’s favour (it was US$2.2 billion in July).
“I think we need a whole new vocabulary in the relationship,” says Scotty Greenwood, executive director of the Washington-based Canadian-American Business Council. The two countries are often tone-deaf to each other’s politics, she observes. “Canadians like to talk about NAFTA and say, ‘We’re your biggest trading relationship.’ Well, here NAFTA is a dirty word and everyone knows that Canada has a trade surplus. That is not what Americans want to hear. Basically, Canada is saying, you guys are an awesome market. We know that. We want you to be an awesome market for us, too.”
Likewise, in an America where national security concerns are top of mind, Canadian complaints about “thickening” at the border fall on deaf ears, Greenwood says, including those of the new secretary of homeland security. “Janet Napolitano leaned over to me at a dinner,” she recalls, “and said, ‘They talk about this like it’s a bad thing.’ ” Greenwood suggests new language for discussing border issues. “The Canadian vocabulary should be something like, ‘smart, breathable armour.’ If Canadians would talk about it as smart, breathable armour it would automatically reassure Americans that you understand the concerns.” Canadian governments should adapt to the fact that U.S. attitudes changed permanently after 9/11, she says. “It’s like the passport thing. If you want Canadians to be advantaged and have privileged access to the U.S., then get a secure card instead of arguing that we should accept 5,000 different documents.”
David Wilkins, the former U.S. ambassador to Canada, says Canadians should recognize the immense power of Congress when trying to press their case. That is what Wilkins himself is doing in his new role as a lobbyist for Saskatchewan, which wants to develop and export production from its oil sands at a time when some members of Congress want to penalize “dirty oil” in upcoming climate change legislation. He recently flew several influential U.S. senators to the province to see a joint Canadian-American carbon capture and sequestration project aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He also praised Harper for calling on congressional leaders on Capitol Hill during his last visit to Washington. “He obviously gets it because he did that visit to the Hill,” says Wilkins.
Better late than never, says Colin Robertson, a former Canadian diplomat in Washington. “It’s been five years since a Canadian prime minister has been out there in a formal sense,” says Robertson, a senior fellow at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University. “It is entirely appropriate for the Prime Minister to go to Congress—he is our legislator-in-chief. If we started doing that on a consistent basis, that will give us more credibility. It opens the conversation on future engagement,” he adds.
To address concerns about border security, Robertson says the heads of Canadian security agencies such as CSIS and the RCMP, and their U.S. counterparts, should jointly educate members of Congress about the deep bilateral co-operation in law enforcement and intelligence. “If you send that information to Congress, it will make it easier on border issues,” he says. Likewise, Robertson says Canadian labour should take an aggressive role in pressing top U.S. labour leaders on protectionism that hurts Canadian unions. “A third of Canadian unions are affiliates of U.S. unions. It’s brother hurting brother,” he says. “Canadians need to work the American system the way the Americans themselves use it. You have to play by American rules.” Myers agrees. “It’s clear Canada won’t go far just by trying to encourage the U.S. to do us favours,” he says. “We have a lot of work to do to build a stronger voice among stake-holder groups like business associations and labour associations across Canada and the U.S. to say that we are in this together.”
But when it comes to direct dealings with the Obama administration, Canada has to walk a fine line between raising bilateral issues and trivializing the relationship. “Because of the U.S.’s position in the world, the President is dealing with international issues, whether it’s Afghanistan, Iran or North Korea,” Wilkins says. “Those are the primary focus. It behooves any country dealing with the U.S. to talk about the international issues before you turn your attention to wait times at the Peace Bridge.”
Robertson has much the same message. “With the Americans we tend to focus on just the little neighborhood stuff,” he complains, noting that the Canadian emphasis on bilateral irritants came to irritate Bush’s secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. “She would say, ‘Here come the Canadians with their condominium issues.’ ” Robertson, for one, regrets that Harper raised the issue of hockey flights at his tête-à-tête with Obama, rather than leaving it to ministers and ambassadors. “It makes them wonder: are we dealing with a border state governor or a serious G8 nation? We tend to ratchet stuff up because we think this is what the public wants. But the public wants results. A lot of stuff the President can’t resolve.”
Meanwhile, Robertson says, the U.S. is strongly interested in the Canadian perspective and Canadian contacts on issues from Afghanistan to Pakistan to the western hemisphere. Indeed, the outgoing Canadian ambassador to Washington, Michael Wilson, has called Canada’s military role in Afghanistan the “best calling card I had” in Washington. When that military commitment winds down, it will not make the Canada-U.S. relationship any easier. “That’s going to be front and centre for the government, for Parliament, for some time, as to how we handle this in a way that doesn’t undermine the terrific goodwill that we have,” he told Maclean’s in a recent interview.
Despite the tensions, there have been notable examples of smooth co-operation between the two countries on urgent matters. Facing a possible swine flu pandemic, labs in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico worked together to identify the new virus. There were also the neatly dovetailed government bailouts for the auto industry. “It was definitely a team effort,” says Ann-Marie McGaughty, a partner at the law firm McKenna Long and Aldridge, who was counsel for the Canadian government in the negotiations. “The word at the top was ‘get it done,’ and everybody tried to find a way to make it happen.” Despite the Canadian government’s much smaller stake in Chrysler and General Motors, McGaughty says that “from the beginning the mantra was, ‘U.S. and Canada side by side.’ Which meant if it was a right or a privilege that the U.S. was getting, then Canada would get it too.”
Lawrence Cannon, Canada’s foreign minister, says that while border-thickening and Buy American issues draw disproportionate attention, the underlying relationship is solid. “They aren’t issues that prevent us from continuing on a good relationship,” he says. Evidence that the Conservative government is working on the bilateral bonds can be found in the 36 trips by Canadian cabinet ministers to Washington since Obama took office, as well as the eight meetings between the Prime Minister and the President (the last one was at the G20 in Pittsburgh). Obama, too, has tried to put a happy face on relations. At his meeting with Harper on Sept. 16, he said protectionism is a “legitimate issue” but encouraged Canadians “to keep things in perspective.” “Canada continues to be a huge trading partner to the United States,” the President added. “Businesses in the United States and Canada both benefit from that trade, as do consumers. On the scale of our overall trading relationship, [irritants] shouldn’t be considered the dominant element of our economic relationship.”
But Liberal MP Scott Brison, his party’s trade critic, says the Tories started out with a serious disadvantage when Obama came into power, since Harper had been seen as ideologically close to Bush. “Their focus was very much partisan and ideological,” Brison charges. He slams the Harper government for failing to adequately push back against new border rules that have decreased casual travel between the two countries, which he says has been “devastating” for Canadian small businesses that rely on U.S. travellers. Brison also says Ottawa should have fought back harder against new U.S. country-of-origin labelling rules that hurt Canadian food producers.
And there is a growing recognition in Ottawa that Canada can’t count on things getting better quickly. In the halls of the Foreign Affairs and International Trade Department there’s growing talk of diversifying to other countries as a hedge against not-so-reliable U.S. markets. Trade Minister Stockwell Day alluded to that during a recent two-day mission to Brazil to promote trade and investment. “We do have a relationship with the U.S. that is in many ways the envy of the world,” Day said. “But as we have experienced, when they hit a downturn in the economy, their demand drops and that hits us hard.” Brazil, which has emerged as the clear focal point of Ottawa’s beyond-the-U.S.A. strategy in the western hemisphere, is a huge prize—an economy just slightly smaller than Canada’s and a notch bigger than Mexico’s. Day, in fact, has been to Brazil twice since being named trade minister after last fall’s election. In 2008, Canadian exports to Brazil—everything from fertilizer to paper—totalled $2.6 billion, a 70 per cent leap over the previous year. “We see our engagement with Brazil kicking up to a new strategic level as a partner in the post-economic-crisis global marketplace,” said one Canadian trade official.
That may be so. But America will remain Canada’s biggest opportunity, and greatest challenge, for years to come. After all, Brazil remains small potatoes compared to the U.S. market. And there is nowhere else for those NHL charter flights to go.
Link
It has been almost two years since Stephen Harper disclosed that his cabinet was having serious discussions about what to do to “restore the special Canadian and American relationship” that he said had become “lost” in the Bush years. “What has happened is that Canada lost that special relationship with the United States. We increasingly became viewed as just another foreign country, albeit an ally, a good friend, but nevertheless a foreign country. You know, the northern equivalent of Mexico in terms of the border,” the Prime Minister told Maclean’s in an interview back in December 2007. “That isn’t just a shift in the view of the administration, that’s somewhat a shift in American public opinion as well, which concerns me.”
At the time, Harper was preoccupied with a new passport requirement that threatened tourism and trade, adding a new scale to the ongoing red-tape “thickening” of the world’s longest undefended border. “I’m certain this trend will not be reversed in the lifetime of the current American administration,” Harper said at the time. “I’m more optimistic it will be deferred later by a new administration.” But, he added, “I’m far from sure.”
He was right to be wary. If the special relationship was lost under George W. Bush, nine months into the new administration it remains missing. At his Sept. 16 meeting with Obama at the White House, Harper boasted that it was his seventh session with the new President. But the passport requirement remains, as do agricultural inspection fees on commercial cross-border traffic and air travellers. Instead of “un-thickening” the border, the new administration has kept the Bush policies in place and even piled more on: in February, the U.S. sent unmanned aerial surveillance drones to patrol parts of the border with Canada. The drones, which can detect human movement 10 km away, are supposed to help catch smugglers. But they have raised concerns about privacy in border communities, and although they are unarmed, give the 49th parallel something in common with the tribal lands between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Since Obama’s February trip to Ottawa, where he was greeted with a rapturous welcome on his first official foreign visit, the state of the world’s largest trading relationship has become even more fraught. Given that fully one quarter of the Canadian economy depends on exports to the U.S., growing American protectionism has proven to be a growing threat. Problems began with a Buy American provision in the US$787-billion stimulus bill. While there have been reports that an exemption for Canada may be imminent, in return for Canadian municipal and provincial governments allowing procurement contracts for U.S. companies, rules similar to the Buy American provision are now being repeated in other legislation. Protectionism has also surfaced in proposed climate change legislation that would impose border tariffs on imports from countries whose carbon policies Washington deems insufficient. And there are other issues galore that affect Canada, from complicated and costly trucking rules and the treatment of Canadian hydroelectricity under U.S. environmental laws to “country of origin” labelling that imposes costs on Canadian agricultural producers and reduces the appeal of their goods in the U.S. marketplace.
Oh—there’s Canada’s national sport as well. In August, Canadian NHL teams faced the prospect of having their seasons thrown into limbo by a sudden Obama administration crackdown on Canadian charter flights operating between U.S. cities. That issue arose when a U.S. charter airline and an American pilots’ union complained that the Air Canada charter company was beginning to take U.S. business, and the Department of Transportation stepped in. When Harper sat down with Obama at his Sept. 16 Oval Office meeting, he took precious minutes away from discussions of Afghanistan and Iran to address the war over hockey players.
That problem was eventually resolved, with Air Canada agreeing to “an unprecedented level of monitoring and enforcement” of who boards the flights. But it was just one more high-profile imbroglio between the two countries that may have left many Canadians asking the question: is America Canada’s biggest problem?
Jason Myers, the president of the Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters, calls growing American protectionism “the hottest issue for us.” He is not only concerned about new rules that affect us directly, but also those aimed at other countries that lead to problems for Canada. For example, when Obama announced in September that the U.S. would impose tariffs on tires from China, Myers worried that any Chinese retaliation against the U.S. auto industry would hurt Canadian businesses, too, because that sector is so integrated in North America. “We just see a whole lot of areas where the U.S. is becoming more closed, protectionist and isolated in terms of trade,” Myers says. “It’s not just that it’s our biggest market, but we make things together. We are part of an integrated supply chain. It has far-reaching impacts throughout industries.”
The impact of the Buy American provisions has been not only to exclude Canadian suppliers from government contracts at the state and local level, but also to encourage American distributors to stop carrying Canadian products. “The impact of this goes well beyond the procurement markets at state and local levels and beyond the federal restrictions,” Myers says. The economic impact is hard to estimate, in part because only a small portion of the stimulus money has been disbursed, but at least 250 Canadian companies have lost business, he adds.
Washington, Ottawa and the provinces have worked toward a solution to the problem. But even if Canada gains an exemption from the Buy American provision, Canadian businesses are worried that initiative may have been just the tip of the iceberg. Similar protectionist rules have been included in several bills pending in Congress, including the Water Quality Investment Act, which Myers notes could affect $4 billion worth of Canadian exports.
Of course, U.S. protectionism is rising precisely because the American economy is struggling, with the country’s global trade deficit now a domestic political football. To American ears, this drumbeat of Canadian complaints is beginning to look predatory. The Canadian Embassy arms itself with fancy maps detailing just how many jobs in each congressional district depend on the annual US$742 billion in trade with Canada. But congressmen know a trade deficit when they see one: the Canada-U.S. imbalance happens to amount to several billion dollars each month—in Canada’s favour (it was US$2.2 billion in July).
“I think we need a whole new vocabulary in the relationship,” says Scotty Greenwood, executive director of the Washington-based Canadian-American Business Council. The two countries are often tone-deaf to each other’s politics, she observes. “Canadians like to talk about NAFTA and say, ‘We’re your biggest trading relationship.’ Well, here NAFTA is a dirty word and everyone knows that Canada has a trade surplus. That is not what Americans want to hear. Basically, Canada is saying, you guys are an awesome market. We know that. We want you to be an awesome market for us, too.”
Likewise, in an America where national security concerns are top of mind, Canadian complaints about “thickening” at the border fall on deaf ears, Greenwood says, including those of the new secretary of homeland security. “Janet Napolitano leaned over to me at a dinner,” she recalls, “and said, ‘They talk about this like it’s a bad thing.’ ” Greenwood suggests new language for discussing border issues. “The Canadian vocabulary should be something like, ‘smart, breathable armour.’ If Canadians would talk about it as smart, breathable armour it would automatically reassure Americans that you understand the concerns.” Canadian governments should adapt to the fact that U.S. attitudes changed permanently after 9/11, she says. “It’s like the passport thing. If you want Canadians to be advantaged and have privileged access to the U.S., then get a secure card instead of arguing that we should accept 5,000 different documents.”
David Wilkins, the former U.S. ambassador to Canada, says Canadians should recognize the immense power of Congress when trying to press their case. That is what Wilkins himself is doing in his new role as a lobbyist for Saskatchewan, which wants to develop and export production from its oil sands at a time when some members of Congress want to penalize “dirty oil” in upcoming climate change legislation. He recently flew several influential U.S. senators to the province to see a joint Canadian-American carbon capture and sequestration project aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He also praised Harper for calling on congressional leaders on Capitol Hill during his last visit to Washington. “He obviously gets it because he did that visit to the Hill,” says Wilkins.
Better late than never, says Colin Robertson, a former Canadian diplomat in Washington. “It’s been five years since a Canadian prime minister has been out there in a formal sense,” says Robertson, a senior fellow at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University. “It is entirely appropriate for the Prime Minister to go to Congress—he is our legislator-in-chief. If we started doing that on a consistent basis, that will give us more credibility. It opens the conversation on future engagement,” he adds.
To address concerns about border security, Robertson says the heads of Canadian security agencies such as CSIS and the RCMP, and their U.S. counterparts, should jointly educate members of Congress about the deep bilateral co-operation in law enforcement and intelligence. “If you send that information to Congress, it will make it easier on border issues,” he says. Likewise, Robertson says Canadian labour should take an aggressive role in pressing top U.S. labour leaders on protectionism that hurts Canadian unions. “A third of Canadian unions are affiliates of U.S. unions. It’s brother hurting brother,” he says. “Canadians need to work the American system the way the Americans themselves use it. You have to play by American rules.” Myers agrees. “It’s clear Canada won’t go far just by trying to encourage the U.S. to do us favours,” he says. “We have a lot of work to do to build a stronger voice among stake-holder groups like business associations and labour associations across Canada and the U.S. to say that we are in this together.”
But when it comes to direct dealings with the Obama administration, Canada has to walk a fine line between raising bilateral issues and trivializing the relationship. “Because of the U.S.’s position in the world, the President is dealing with international issues, whether it’s Afghanistan, Iran or North Korea,” Wilkins says. “Those are the primary focus. It behooves any country dealing with the U.S. to talk about the international issues before you turn your attention to wait times at the Peace Bridge.”
Robertson has much the same message. “With the Americans we tend to focus on just the little neighborhood stuff,” he complains, noting that the Canadian emphasis on bilateral irritants came to irritate Bush’s secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. “She would say, ‘Here come the Canadians with their condominium issues.’ ” Robertson, for one, regrets that Harper raised the issue of hockey flights at his tête-à-tête with Obama, rather than leaving it to ministers and ambassadors. “It makes them wonder: are we dealing with a border state governor or a serious G8 nation? We tend to ratchet stuff up because we think this is what the public wants. But the public wants results. A lot of stuff the President can’t resolve.”
Meanwhile, Robertson says, the U.S. is strongly interested in the Canadian perspective and Canadian contacts on issues from Afghanistan to Pakistan to the western hemisphere. Indeed, the outgoing Canadian ambassador to Washington, Michael Wilson, has called Canada’s military role in Afghanistan the “best calling card I had” in Washington. When that military commitment winds down, it will not make the Canada-U.S. relationship any easier. “That’s going to be front and centre for the government, for Parliament, for some time, as to how we handle this in a way that doesn’t undermine the terrific goodwill that we have,” he told Maclean’s in a recent interview.
Despite the tensions, there have been notable examples of smooth co-operation between the two countries on urgent matters. Facing a possible swine flu pandemic, labs in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico worked together to identify the new virus. There were also the neatly dovetailed government bailouts for the auto industry. “It was definitely a team effort,” says Ann-Marie McGaughty, a partner at the law firm McKenna Long and Aldridge, who was counsel for the Canadian government in the negotiations. “The word at the top was ‘get it done,’ and everybody tried to find a way to make it happen.” Despite the Canadian government’s much smaller stake in Chrysler and General Motors, McGaughty says that “from the beginning the mantra was, ‘U.S. and Canada side by side.’ Which meant if it was a right or a privilege that the U.S. was getting, then Canada would get it too.”
Lawrence Cannon, Canada’s foreign minister, says that while border-thickening and Buy American issues draw disproportionate attention, the underlying relationship is solid. “They aren’t issues that prevent us from continuing on a good relationship,” he says. Evidence that the Conservative government is working on the bilateral bonds can be found in the 36 trips by Canadian cabinet ministers to Washington since Obama took office, as well as the eight meetings between the Prime Minister and the President (the last one was at the G20 in Pittsburgh). Obama, too, has tried to put a happy face on relations. At his meeting with Harper on Sept. 16, he said protectionism is a “legitimate issue” but encouraged Canadians “to keep things in perspective.” “Canada continues to be a huge trading partner to the United States,” the President added. “Businesses in the United States and Canada both benefit from that trade, as do consumers. On the scale of our overall trading relationship, [irritants] shouldn’t be considered the dominant element of our economic relationship.”
But Liberal MP Scott Brison, his party’s trade critic, says the Tories started out with a serious disadvantage when Obama came into power, since Harper had been seen as ideologically close to Bush. “Their focus was very much partisan and ideological,” Brison charges. He slams the Harper government for failing to adequately push back against new border rules that have decreased casual travel between the two countries, which he says has been “devastating” for Canadian small businesses that rely on U.S. travellers. Brison also says Ottawa should have fought back harder against new U.S. country-of-origin labelling rules that hurt Canadian food producers.
And there is a growing recognition in Ottawa that Canada can’t count on things getting better quickly. In the halls of the Foreign Affairs and International Trade Department there’s growing talk of diversifying to other countries as a hedge against not-so-reliable U.S. markets. Trade Minister Stockwell Day alluded to that during a recent two-day mission to Brazil to promote trade and investment. “We do have a relationship with the U.S. that is in many ways the envy of the world,” Day said. “But as we have experienced, when they hit a downturn in the economy, their demand drops and that hits us hard.” Brazil, which has emerged as the clear focal point of Ottawa’s beyond-the-U.S.A. strategy in the western hemisphere, is a huge prize—an economy just slightly smaller than Canada’s and a notch bigger than Mexico’s. Day, in fact, has been to Brazil twice since being named trade minister after last fall’s election. In 2008, Canadian exports to Brazil—everything from fertilizer to paper—totalled $2.6 billion, a 70 per cent leap over the previous year. “We see our engagement with Brazil kicking up to a new strategic level as a partner in the post-economic-crisis global marketplace,” said one Canadian trade official.
That may be so. But America will remain Canada’s biggest opportunity, and greatest challenge, for years to come. After all, Brazil remains small potatoes compared to the U.S. market. And there is nowhere else for those NHL charter flights to go.
Link
Why the U.S. doesn’t trust Canada
by Paul Rosenzweig
On June 1, for the first time in history, Canadians and Americans crossing the border were required to show a passport (or equivalent) document. By all accounts the transition has, despite Canadian fears, proceeded with remarkably modest disruption. Canadians, however, continue to question the requirement and to object to other U.S. border security measures. As I worked (on behalf of the United States) over the past four years to prepare for these changes, most Canadians expressed a quiet dismay: “How,” they wondered, “could you be doing this to us when we are such good friends?”
After all, it has been a major sea change in the American approach to the land border with Canada. For more than 100 years, though Canadians have thought frequently and almost obsessively about the United States, most Americans have paid relatively little attention to Canada. Except for those who live close to the border (let’s all say it together: “the longest undefended border in the world”) or whose business is linked to Canadian products, most Americans don’t hold any strong opinion about Canada. You’re just like us, we think, only a little different and a little less temperate. We’re the lucky ones, because we have Florida (though each winter the residents of Ontario invade).
In the years since 9/11, I think many Canadians have come to yearn for this era of benign neglect. Before then, Canada had come to rely on the fact that America had not been paying very much attention to it. In effect, that let Canada have the best of both worlds—the capacity and interest in pursuing policies that are independent from those followed by the United States, joined with the enjoyment of an open border that substantially reduced any practical sovereign distinction between the two countries insofar as travel and trade were concerned.
The result was an undefended border, but one that had an inherent tension to it as differences grew in American and Canadian policies. By and large Canada has much greater openness to the rest of the world than does the U.S. Canadian asylum policies are more liberal; Canada extends the privilege of visa-free travel to the citizens of many more countries. And, more fundamentally, Canada takes a much lighter hand in screening arriving travellers.
These are, of course, generalizations, so let me provide a specific example. The United States has long had challenges on its southern border with Mexico. At this juncture, we have fairly stringent identification requirements for Mexicans entering the United States directly. Yet until new Canadian visa restrictions came into effect on July 14, Canada had chosen to allow visa-free travel for Mexicans to Canada; the lack of a more concrete identification requirement on the part of the U.S. at the northern border until June 1 created an opportunity for Mexicans to evade the southern border restrictions. Let me be clear: Canada is a good friend of the United States and a separate sovereign nation. It is, and ought to be, perfectly free to make independent sovereign decisions regarding its admissions policies. Nobody in the United States would say otherwise. But differences—like Canada’s past treatment of Mexican nationals—necessarily have consequences.
Before Sept. 11, 2001, the disharmony in immigration and border control policies was of relatively minor importance—certainly not worth attempting to correct if the cost would be a disruption in cross-border trade. That changed after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. At the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where I served, we spent a large fraction of our time thinking about Canada—and with good reason. Created in 2003, DHS is the locus for American efforts to prevent another terrorist attack on the United States. To a large degree that means that DHS is a border security agency—and as a border agency, we worry about (surprise!) borders. That means that DHS spends a lot of its time thinking about Canada (along with Mexico and our “third border” in the Caribbean), and much less time worrying about more distant overseas threats in, say, South Asia or the Middle East. For DHS, “international affairs” frequently means “Canadian affairs” (or Mexican or Caribbean).
So the initial problem for Canada was a simple practical one—we were paying more attention. And what we saw caused us some concern. What had earlier been very modest divergences in immigration policy now loomed larger as differences in counterterrorism policy. Some Canadians have yet to come to grips with the new reality that Canada can’t have it both ways—it can’t both exercise its own sovereign authority over its border policies, and expect the United States not to do the same thing. If we did we would, in effect, be outsourcing American security decisions to Canada, a state of affairs that simply cannot continue in a post-9/11 world.
This new reality would be of little moment if we had a shared sense of the terrorist problem and could anticipate a commitment to working on a convergence of policies. Unfortunately, over the course of many discussions with my Canadian colleagues, all of which have been exceedingly amiable and pleasant, I’ve begun to worry that the U.S. and Canada are not as closely aligned as they think they are. We have tried to work at realigning our vision (the preferred course of action), but if we don’t succeed and continue down a path of divergence, that will, inevitably, lead to even greater disparities and controversies between the two countries.
The opening assumption that I brought to the negotiating table, and that I think every American would begin with, is that the U.S. and Canada more or less see the world in the same way. At the core, we like to believe that we think alike and have the same aim—a free and safe citizenry. Increasingly, however, I’m not sure this assumption holds. We don’t seem to see the world the same way anymore, and as a result there is perceptible erosion in the trust between us. Americans responded to Sept. 11 in ways that most Canadians don’t seem to have internalized. At an intellectual level, they recognize that 9/11 was a traumatic experience for the U.S. They understand and respect the fact that it has caused a reaction. But in their most candid moments, I suspect most Canadians think the U.S. overreacted (a view that some in the U.S.—though likely a minority—also share). Many Americans, by contrast, think that Canada didn’t react enough to Sept. 11, and that what little reaction there was amounted to, if anything, tepid half-measures.
Back in 2006, DHS made a broad strategic proposal to our Canadian counterparts: let’s work to synchronize our perimeter security approaches as much as possible. The payoff would be relaxed controls along our mutual border. I remember when then-DHS secretary Michael Chertoff first presented this idea to his counterpart, Stockwell Day, then minister for public safety. We laid out a comprehensive proposal that included: greater information sharing, coordinated standards for passenger screening, shared technology and targeting for cargo containers, and other similar concepts. Essentially we proposed a joint security model for homeland security that resembled NORAD in conception. Even at that first meeting the response from Canada was lukewarm, at best.
I continue to believe that there are many real benefits that would flow from co-operation of this sort. Here’s a concrete example. The U.S. has begun to develop a series of policies aimed at deterring the importation of a nuclear weapon or radiological material for a “dirty bomb” into the United States aboard small private aircraft (known, in the trade, as “general aviation”). Some of those policies are internal to the U.S.—we’ll be requiring better identification for passengers and pilots, for example. But one key component of the strategy is the idea of screening general aviation airplanes overseas, before they depart for the United States.
This was a win-win proposition for everyone. America would have greater security, since any radioactive material would be interdicted before it even started toward the U.S. The general aviation community would benefit, since they would undergo all of the regular U.S. customs and immigration screening overseas and then be allowed to travel to any airport in the U.S. (instead of the current practice, where they must first land at an official port of entry, like Miami, and then fly onward to their ultimate destination). And the host country and airport would benefit from increased traffic, with the resulting economic benefits. The attraction is so great that in less than two years the U.S. has already signed agreements of this sort with Ireland, Bermuda and Aruba. More are likely.
Early on, we saw this as a great opportunity to synchronize our perimeter security with Canada. The idea would be for Canadians to co-locate their own customs and immigration officials at the same facilities and provide the same service for Canada-bound general aviation. Since it’s unlikely that a terrorist would actually be able to acquire a loose nuclear weapon in Canada, there would be no real need for screening Canadian traffic to the U.S. if Canada and U.S. radiological screening overseas were coordinated in this way.
I can’t say why, but while I was at DHS we had absolutely no real expression of Canadian interest in the project (or in any of the other synchronization proposals). I personally briefed our general aviation plans to Canadian delegations on at least three occasions—but when I left DHS in January 2009, Canadian participation in a joint general aviation screening program was firmly placed on the back burner.
Maybe it is because the nature of minority government prevents co-operation of this sort. Maybe it was the product of a distrust of the Bush administration that will dissipate now that Barack Obama is president. But I suspect, as well, that it simply reflects a Canadian disposition toward the terrorism issue: if you don’t think terrorism is that important an issue, then you aren’t willing to invest the time and energy required to address the problem. And if that really is the cause of our divergence of views, it will become a permanent and enduring reality, with consequences at the border.
Finally, there is one other piece to the puzzle that must be mentioned in any candid assessment of the U.S.-Canada relationship. Since both countries, broadly speaking, seek the same social ends through the same governmental means, we have come to believe that we each are a trustworthy partner. There is a very good, historical basis for this trust. We used to say at DHS: “If the Canadians say they will do something, they’ll do it.” I’m not sure that mutual trust exists as much anymore—especially Canadian belief in American trustworthiness. Though we continue to co-operate closely and well on a tactical level (shared law enforcement investigations and the like), I and my colleagues at more senior levels had a distinct perception of distancing by our Canadian counterparts, and a notable reduction in our ability to share information across the border.
Much of this, I think, traces back to the Maher Arar incident. And here I begin to worry even more, because I cannot see reconciliation. In Canada, the belief is that Arar was mistreated. It has become so strong a belief that it has become an article of faith. This is neither the time nor the place to rehash the questions about Arar, save to make an important point that often gets lost: the U.S. is both entitled to, and obliged to, form its own judgment about Arar.
And reasonable friends may interpret facts differently. Where Canadians see an innocent 20-minute walk in the rain (according to the report issued by Justice Dennis O’Connor, who oversaw Canada’s public inquiry into the affair, on Oct. 11, 2001, Arar spent 20 minutes outside in the rain talking to an individual who was the subject of an ongoing terrorism investigation), some Americans (and the RCMP) see behaviour reminiscent of those seeking to avoid surveillance and “taking great pains not to be overheard.” A walk in the rain is, in our experience, a tactic frequently adopted by organized crime figures to avoid audio surveillance. On the basis of this conduct, and other information, I expect that Arar will continue to remain an object of U.S. concern for the indefinite future.
This is not to say that either side is necessarily right in its judgment about Arar’s activity, and it is certainly not to suggest that what Arar reports having experienced in Syria was proper treatment. But it is to say that the Canadian reaction to what is, at worst, a disagreement as to a single (albeit prominent) case does broad damage to our relationship—and that damage can have wide-ranging effects. If we do not trust each other enough, we are unlikely to find ways to bring greater openness to our borders.
But another aspect of the erosion of trust, from our side of the border, lay in Canadian public diplomacy over the potential imposition of border controls. What would be the reaction in Canada if American cabinet officials and ambassadors were personally engaged in overt efforts to lobby Parliament to change Canadian laws that Americans thought were not beneficial? Canadians would, and quite rightly, object. Yet, for nearly four years, I witnessed exactly congruent Canadian conduct—ministers and your ambassador vigorously lobbying Congress for a change in American law. On at least one occasion, the ambassador hosted a dinner at the embassy for the sole apparent purpose of having all of his guests publicly lecture the DHS officials present about how wrong-headed our policies were. Discussions that ought to have occurred between our respective executive branches were made the fodder of American politics. And that, too, erodes trust.
Indeed, given the successful implementation of the passport requirement—which by most accounts has had a modest disruptive effect on trade and travel—we can see, in retrospect, how Canadian fears caused Canadians to overreact. There is a bit of an irony here, because overreaction is supposed to be the flaw in America’s response to the terrorism threat, not the flaw in Canada’s response to America.
There is still much to be celebrated in our relationship. Despite our differences we continue to co-operate routinely in ways that no two other countries in the world are capable of doing. But that kind of relationship requires constant care and attention. For too long we’ve benefited from a lack of any challenges. Today that is changing—we have much work to do to rebuild a shared consensus and world view and recreate an atmosphere of trust. The task is not an easy one, and the first step on the road is a candid assessment of where we are. No longer can we rely on just hoping we don’t notice our differences. Instead, let’s begin to acknowledge them for what they are, with the hope and expectation that good friends can resolve them if they are willing.
Link
On June 1, for the first time in history, Canadians and Americans crossing the border were required to show a passport (or equivalent) document. By all accounts the transition has, despite Canadian fears, proceeded with remarkably modest disruption. Canadians, however, continue to question the requirement and to object to other U.S. border security measures. As I worked (on behalf of the United States) over the past four years to prepare for these changes, most Canadians expressed a quiet dismay: “How,” they wondered, “could you be doing this to us when we are such good friends?”
After all, it has been a major sea change in the American approach to the land border with Canada. For more than 100 years, though Canadians have thought frequently and almost obsessively about the United States, most Americans have paid relatively little attention to Canada. Except for those who live close to the border (let’s all say it together: “the longest undefended border in the world”) or whose business is linked to Canadian products, most Americans don’t hold any strong opinion about Canada. You’re just like us, we think, only a little different and a little less temperate. We’re the lucky ones, because we have Florida (though each winter the residents of Ontario invade).
In the years since 9/11, I think many Canadians have come to yearn for this era of benign neglect. Before then, Canada had come to rely on the fact that America had not been paying very much attention to it. In effect, that let Canada have the best of both worlds—the capacity and interest in pursuing policies that are independent from those followed by the United States, joined with the enjoyment of an open border that substantially reduced any practical sovereign distinction between the two countries insofar as travel and trade were concerned.
The result was an undefended border, but one that had an inherent tension to it as differences grew in American and Canadian policies. By and large Canada has much greater openness to the rest of the world than does the U.S. Canadian asylum policies are more liberal; Canada extends the privilege of visa-free travel to the citizens of many more countries. And, more fundamentally, Canada takes a much lighter hand in screening arriving travellers.
These are, of course, generalizations, so let me provide a specific example. The United States has long had challenges on its southern border with Mexico. At this juncture, we have fairly stringent identification requirements for Mexicans entering the United States directly. Yet until new Canadian visa restrictions came into effect on July 14, Canada had chosen to allow visa-free travel for Mexicans to Canada; the lack of a more concrete identification requirement on the part of the U.S. at the northern border until June 1 created an opportunity for Mexicans to evade the southern border restrictions. Let me be clear: Canada is a good friend of the United States and a separate sovereign nation. It is, and ought to be, perfectly free to make independent sovereign decisions regarding its admissions policies. Nobody in the United States would say otherwise. But differences—like Canada’s past treatment of Mexican nationals—necessarily have consequences.
Before Sept. 11, 2001, the disharmony in immigration and border control policies was of relatively minor importance—certainly not worth attempting to correct if the cost would be a disruption in cross-border trade. That changed after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. At the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), where I served, we spent a large fraction of our time thinking about Canada—and with good reason. Created in 2003, DHS is the locus for American efforts to prevent another terrorist attack on the United States. To a large degree that means that DHS is a border security agency—and as a border agency, we worry about (surprise!) borders. That means that DHS spends a lot of its time thinking about Canada (along with Mexico and our “third border” in the Caribbean), and much less time worrying about more distant overseas threats in, say, South Asia or the Middle East. For DHS, “international affairs” frequently means “Canadian affairs” (or Mexican or Caribbean).
So the initial problem for Canada was a simple practical one—we were paying more attention. And what we saw caused us some concern. What had earlier been very modest divergences in immigration policy now loomed larger as differences in counterterrorism policy. Some Canadians have yet to come to grips with the new reality that Canada can’t have it both ways—it can’t both exercise its own sovereign authority over its border policies, and expect the United States not to do the same thing. If we did we would, in effect, be outsourcing American security decisions to Canada, a state of affairs that simply cannot continue in a post-9/11 world.
This new reality would be of little moment if we had a shared sense of the terrorist problem and could anticipate a commitment to working on a convergence of policies. Unfortunately, over the course of many discussions with my Canadian colleagues, all of which have been exceedingly amiable and pleasant, I’ve begun to worry that the U.S. and Canada are not as closely aligned as they think they are. We have tried to work at realigning our vision (the preferred course of action), but if we don’t succeed and continue down a path of divergence, that will, inevitably, lead to even greater disparities and controversies between the two countries.
The opening assumption that I brought to the negotiating table, and that I think every American would begin with, is that the U.S. and Canada more or less see the world in the same way. At the core, we like to believe that we think alike and have the same aim—a free and safe citizenry. Increasingly, however, I’m not sure this assumption holds. We don’t seem to see the world the same way anymore, and as a result there is perceptible erosion in the trust between us. Americans responded to Sept. 11 in ways that most Canadians don’t seem to have internalized. At an intellectual level, they recognize that 9/11 was a traumatic experience for the U.S. They understand and respect the fact that it has caused a reaction. But in their most candid moments, I suspect most Canadians think the U.S. overreacted (a view that some in the U.S.—though likely a minority—also share). Many Americans, by contrast, think that Canada didn’t react enough to Sept. 11, and that what little reaction there was amounted to, if anything, tepid half-measures.
Back in 2006, DHS made a broad strategic proposal to our Canadian counterparts: let’s work to synchronize our perimeter security approaches as much as possible. The payoff would be relaxed controls along our mutual border. I remember when then-DHS secretary Michael Chertoff first presented this idea to his counterpart, Stockwell Day, then minister for public safety. We laid out a comprehensive proposal that included: greater information sharing, coordinated standards for passenger screening, shared technology and targeting for cargo containers, and other similar concepts. Essentially we proposed a joint security model for homeland security that resembled NORAD in conception. Even at that first meeting the response from Canada was lukewarm, at best.
I continue to believe that there are many real benefits that would flow from co-operation of this sort. Here’s a concrete example. The U.S. has begun to develop a series of policies aimed at deterring the importation of a nuclear weapon or radiological material for a “dirty bomb” into the United States aboard small private aircraft (known, in the trade, as “general aviation”). Some of those policies are internal to the U.S.—we’ll be requiring better identification for passengers and pilots, for example. But one key component of the strategy is the idea of screening general aviation airplanes overseas, before they depart for the United States.
This was a win-win proposition for everyone. America would have greater security, since any radioactive material would be interdicted before it even started toward the U.S. The general aviation community would benefit, since they would undergo all of the regular U.S. customs and immigration screening overseas and then be allowed to travel to any airport in the U.S. (instead of the current practice, where they must first land at an official port of entry, like Miami, and then fly onward to their ultimate destination). And the host country and airport would benefit from increased traffic, with the resulting economic benefits. The attraction is so great that in less than two years the U.S. has already signed agreements of this sort with Ireland, Bermuda and Aruba. More are likely.
Early on, we saw this as a great opportunity to synchronize our perimeter security with Canada. The idea would be for Canadians to co-locate their own customs and immigration officials at the same facilities and provide the same service for Canada-bound general aviation. Since it’s unlikely that a terrorist would actually be able to acquire a loose nuclear weapon in Canada, there would be no real need for screening Canadian traffic to the U.S. if Canada and U.S. radiological screening overseas were coordinated in this way.
I can’t say why, but while I was at DHS we had absolutely no real expression of Canadian interest in the project (or in any of the other synchronization proposals). I personally briefed our general aviation plans to Canadian delegations on at least three occasions—but when I left DHS in January 2009, Canadian participation in a joint general aviation screening program was firmly placed on the back burner.
Maybe it is because the nature of minority government prevents co-operation of this sort. Maybe it was the product of a distrust of the Bush administration that will dissipate now that Barack Obama is president. But I suspect, as well, that it simply reflects a Canadian disposition toward the terrorism issue: if you don’t think terrorism is that important an issue, then you aren’t willing to invest the time and energy required to address the problem. And if that really is the cause of our divergence of views, it will become a permanent and enduring reality, with consequences at the border.
Finally, there is one other piece to the puzzle that must be mentioned in any candid assessment of the U.S.-Canada relationship. Since both countries, broadly speaking, seek the same social ends through the same governmental means, we have come to believe that we each are a trustworthy partner. There is a very good, historical basis for this trust. We used to say at DHS: “If the Canadians say they will do something, they’ll do it.” I’m not sure that mutual trust exists as much anymore—especially Canadian belief in American trustworthiness. Though we continue to co-operate closely and well on a tactical level (shared law enforcement investigations and the like), I and my colleagues at more senior levels had a distinct perception of distancing by our Canadian counterparts, and a notable reduction in our ability to share information across the border.
Much of this, I think, traces back to the Maher Arar incident. And here I begin to worry even more, because I cannot see reconciliation. In Canada, the belief is that Arar was mistreated. It has become so strong a belief that it has become an article of faith. This is neither the time nor the place to rehash the questions about Arar, save to make an important point that often gets lost: the U.S. is both entitled to, and obliged to, form its own judgment about Arar.
And reasonable friends may interpret facts differently. Where Canadians see an innocent 20-minute walk in the rain (according to the report issued by Justice Dennis O’Connor, who oversaw Canada’s public inquiry into the affair, on Oct. 11, 2001, Arar spent 20 minutes outside in the rain talking to an individual who was the subject of an ongoing terrorism investigation), some Americans (and the RCMP) see behaviour reminiscent of those seeking to avoid surveillance and “taking great pains not to be overheard.” A walk in the rain is, in our experience, a tactic frequently adopted by organized crime figures to avoid audio surveillance. On the basis of this conduct, and other information, I expect that Arar will continue to remain an object of U.S. concern for the indefinite future.
This is not to say that either side is necessarily right in its judgment about Arar’s activity, and it is certainly not to suggest that what Arar reports having experienced in Syria was proper treatment. But it is to say that the Canadian reaction to what is, at worst, a disagreement as to a single (albeit prominent) case does broad damage to our relationship—and that damage can have wide-ranging effects. If we do not trust each other enough, we are unlikely to find ways to bring greater openness to our borders.
But another aspect of the erosion of trust, from our side of the border, lay in Canadian public diplomacy over the potential imposition of border controls. What would be the reaction in Canada if American cabinet officials and ambassadors were personally engaged in overt efforts to lobby Parliament to change Canadian laws that Americans thought were not beneficial? Canadians would, and quite rightly, object. Yet, for nearly four years, I witnessed exactly congruent Canadian conduct—ministers and your ambassador vigorously lobbying Congress for a change in American law. On at least one occasion, the ambassador hosted a dinner at the embassy for the sole apparent purpose of having all of his guests publicly lecture the DHS officials present about how wrong-headed our policies were. Discussions that ought to have occurred between our respective executive branches were made the fodder of American politics. And that, too, erodes trust.
Indeed, given the successful implementation of the passport requirement—which by most accounts has had a modest disruptive effect on trade and travel—we can see, in retrospect, how Canadian fears caused Canadians to overreact. There is a bit of an irony here, because overreaction is supposed to be the flaw in America’s response to the terrorism threat, not the flaw in Canada’s response to America.
There is still much to be celebrated in our relationship. Despite our differences we continue to co-operate routinely in ways that no two other countries in the world are capable of doing. But that kind of relationship requires constant care and attention. For too long we’ve benefited from a lack of any challenges. Today that is changing—we have much work to do to rebuild a shared consensus and world view and recreate an atmosphere of trust. The task is not an easy one, and the first step on the road is a candid assessment of where we are. No longer can we rely on just hoping we don’t notice our differences. Instead, let’s begin to acknowledge them for what they are, with the hope and expectation that good friends can resolve them if they are willing.
Link
Canadian muslim group urges gov't to ban burkas, niqabs in public
By: The Canadian Press
Middle Eastern garments designed to cover a woman's face are "medieval" and "misogynist" symbols of extremism with no basis in Islam, a Canadian Muslim lobby group said Wednesday as it urged Ottawa to ban the burka and the niqab.
The Muslim Canadian Congress called on the federal government to prohibit the two garments in order to prevent women from covering their faces in public -- a practice the group said has no place in a society that supports gender equality.
"To cover your face is to conceal your identity," congress spokeswoman Farzana Hassan said in a telephone interview, describing the issue as a matter of public safety, since concealing one's identity is a common practice for criminals.
The tradition of Muslim women covering their faces in public is a tradition rooted more in Middle Eastern culture than in the Islamic faith, Hassan added.
There is nothing in any of the primary Islamic religious texts, including the Qur'an, that requires women to cover their faces, she said -- not even in the controversial, ultra-conservative tenets of Sharia law.
Considering the fact that women are in fact forbidden from wearing burkas in the grand mosque in Mecca, Islam's holiest site, it hardly makes sense that the practice should be permitted in Canada, she said.
"If a government claims to uphold equality between men and women, there is no reason for them to support a practice that marginalizes women."
The proposed ban would include the burka, an iconic head-to-toe gown with a mesh-like panel over the face that allows the wearer to see and to breathe, as well as the niqab -- a veil that leaves only the eyes exposed.
Hassan said the ban would not extend to the hijab, a traditional headscarf that does not cover the face.
The proposed ban comes on the heels of reports that Sheikh Mohamed Tantawi, dean of Egypt's al-Azhar university and the country's highest Muslim authority, is poised to issue a fatwa, or religious edict, against the garments.
Media reports Monday said Tantawi described the face coverings as "a custom that has nothing to do with the Islamic faith."
Mohamed Elmasry, former president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, said he agrees the tradition has its roots in cultural customs rather than religious teachings, but that the issue is irrelevant in Canada where the practice is not widespread.
Elmasry disputed suggestions that the garments pose a security threat, saying only a minority of Muslim women living in Canada feel the need to conceal their features in public.
He said he believes those women should have the freedom to decide whether they wish to cover their faces, and that a ban would limit freedom of expression.
"People feel it's part of their identity, people feel it's part of their culture," Elmasry said.
"It's not for you and me to decide."
Link
"These stories leave me conflicted.
On one hand, I completely support the decision of women who want to wear a burqa. I might disagree with it, but I'll fight to the death for their right to wear it.
On the other hand, I very much doubt that the majority of women who wear one do so out their own free will and because they want to instead of being forced to, or doing it out of fear of ostracization at best, corporal punishment being quite likely, and being killed for honour reasons is not an extremely unlikely possibility."
Middle Eastern garments designed to cover a woman's face are "medieval" and "misogynist" symbols of extremism with no basis in Islam, a Canadian Muslim lobby group said Wednesday as it urged Ottawa to ban the burka and the niqab.
The Muslim Canadian Congress called on the federal government to prohibit the two garments in order to prevent women from covering their faces in public -- a practice the group said has no place in a society that supports gender equality.
"To cover your face is to conceal your identity," congress spokeswoman Farzana Hassan said in a telephone interview, describing the issue as a matter of public safety, since concealing one's identity is a common practice for criminals.
The tradition of Muslim women covering their faces in public is a tradition rooted more in Middle Eastern culture than in the Islamic faith, Hassan added.
There is nothing in any of the primary Islamic religious texts, including the Qur'an, that requires women to cover their faces, she said -- not even in the controversial, ultra-conservative tenets of Sharia law.
Considering the fact that women are in fact forbidden from wearing burkas in the grand mosque in Mecca, Islam's holiest site, it hardly makes sense that the practice should be permitted in Canada, she said.
"If a government claims to uphold equality between men and women, there is no reason for them to support a practice that marginalizes women."
The proposed ban would include the burka, an iconic head-to-toe gown with a mesh-like panel over the face that allows the wearer to see and to breathe, as well as the niqab -- a veil that leaves only the eyes exposed.
Hassan said the ban would not extend to the hijab, a traditional headscarf that does not cover the face.
The proposed ban comes on the heels of reports that Sheikh Mohamed Tantawi, dean of Egypt's al-Azhar university and the country's highest Muslim authority, is poised to issue a fatwa, or religious edict, against the garments.
Media reports Monday said Tantawi described the face coverings as "a custom that has nothing to do with the Islamic faith."
Mohamed Elmasry, former president of the Canadian Islamic Congress, said he agrees the tradition has its roots in cultural customs rather than religious teachings, but that the issue is irrelevant in Canada where the practice is not widespread.
Elmasry disputed suggestions that the garments pose a security threat, saying only a minority of Muslim women living in Canada feel the need to conceal their features in public.
He said he believes those women should have the freedom to decide whether they wish to cover their faces, and that a ban would limit freedom of expression.
"People feel it's part of their identity, people feel it's part of their culture," Elmasry said.
"It's not for you and me to decide."
Link
"These stories leave me conflicted.
On one hand, I completely support the decision of women who want to wear a burqa. I might disagree with it, but I'll fight to the death for their right to wear it.
On the other hand, I very much doubt that the majority of women who wear one do so out their own free will and because they want to instead of being forced to, or doing it out of fear of ostracization at best, corporal punishment being quite likely, and being killed for honour reasons is not an extremely unlikely possibility."
10.01.2009
The extraordinary true story of a Malawian teenager who transformed his village by building electric windmills out of junk
By Jude Sheerin
The extraordinary true story of a Malawian teenager who transformed his village by building electric windmills out of junk is the subject of a new book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.
Self-taught William Kamkwamba has been feted by climate change campaigners like Al Gore and business leaders the world over.
His against-all-odds achievements are all the more remarkable considering he was forced to quit school aged 14 because his family could no longer afford the $80-a-year (£50) fees.
When he returned to his parents' small plot of farmland in the central Malawian village of Masitala, his future seemed limited.
But this was not another tale of African potential thwarted by poverty.
Defence against hunger
The teenager had a dream of bringing electricity and running water to his village.
And he was not prepared to wait for politicians or aid groups to do it for him.
The need for action was even greater in 2002 following one of Malawi's worst droughts, which killed thousands of people and left his family on the brink of starvation.
Unable to attend school, he kept up his education by using a local library.
Fascinated by science, his life changed one day when he picked up a tattered textbook and saw a picture of a windmill.
Mr Kamkwamba told the BBC News website: "I was very interested when I saw the windmill could make electricity and pump water.
"I thought: 'That could be a defence against hunger. Maybe I should build one for myself'."
When not helping his family farm maize, he plugged away at his prototype, working by the light of a paraffin lamp in the evenings.
But his ingenious project met blank looks in his community of about 200 people.
"Many, including my mother, thought I was going crazy," he recalls. "They had never seen a windmill before."
Shocks
Neighbours were further perplexed at the youngster spending so much time scouring rubbish tips.
"People thought I was smoking marijuana," he said. "So I told them I was only making something for juju [magic].' Then they said: 'Ah, I see.'"
Mr Kamkwamba, who is now 22 years old, knocked together a turbine from spare bicycle parts, a tractor fan blade and an old shock absorber, and fashioned blades from plastic pipes, flattened by being held over a fire.
"I got a few electric shocks climbing that [windmill]," says Mr Kamkwamba, ruefully recalling his months of painstaking work.
The finished product - a 5-m (16-ft) tall blue-gum-tree wood tower, swaying in the breeze over Masitala - seemed little more than a quixotic tinkerer's folly.
But his neighbours' mirth turned to amazement when Mr Kamkwamba scrambled up the windmill and hooked a car light bulb to the turbine.
As the blades began to spin in the breeze, the bulb flickered to life and a crowd of astonished onlookers went wild.
Soon the whiz kid's 12-watt wonder was pumping power into his family's mud brick compound.
'Electric wind'
Out went the paraffin lanterns and in came light bulbs and a circuit breaker, made from nails and magnets off an old stereo speaker, and a light switch cobbled together from bicycle spokes and flip-flop rubber.
Before long, locals were queuing up to charge their mobile phones.
Mr Kamkwamba's story was sent hurtling through the blogosphere when a reporter from the Daily Times newspaper in Blantyre wrote an article about him in November 2006.
Meanwhile, he installed a solar-powered mechanical pump, donated by well-wishers, above a borehole, adding water storage tanks and bringing the first potable water source to the entire region around his village.
He upgraded his original windmill to 48-volts and anchored it in concrete after its wooden base was chewed away by termites.
Then he built a new windmill, dubbed the Green Machine, which turned a water pump to irrigate his family's field.
Before long, visitors were traipsing from miles around to gawp at the boy prodigy's magetsi a mphepo - "electric wind".
As the fame of his renewable energy projects grew, he was invited in mid-2007 to the prestigious Technology Entertainment Design conference in Arusha, Tanzania.
Cheetah generation
He recalls his excitement using a computer for the first time at the event.
"I had never seen the internet, it was amazing," he says. "I Googled about windmills and found so much information."
Onstage, the native Chichewa speaker recounted his story in halting English, moving hard-bitten venture capitalists and receiving a standing ovation.
A glowing front-page portrait of him followed in the Wall Street Journal.
He is now on a scholarship at the elite African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Mr Kamkwamba - who has been flown to conferences around the globe to recount his life-story - has the world at his feet, but is determined to return home after his studies.
The home-grown hero aims to finish bringing power, not just to the rest of his village, but to all Malawians, only 2% of whom have electricity.
"I want to help my country and apply the knowledge I've learned," he says. "I feel there's lots of work to be done."
Former Associated Press news agency reporter Bryan Mealer had been reporting on conflict across Africa for five years when he heard Mr Kamkwamba's story.
The incredible tale was the kind of positive story Mealer, from New York, had long hoped to cover.
The author spent a year with Mr Kamkwamba writing The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, which has just been published in the US.
Mealer says Mr Kamkwamba represents Africa's new "cheetah generation", young people, energetic and technology-hungry, who are taking control of their own destiny.
"Spending a year with William writing this book reminded me why I fell in love with Africa in the first place," says Mr Mealer, 34.
"It's the kind of tale that resonates with every human being and reminds us of our own potential."
Can it be long before the film rights to the triumph-over-adversity story are snapped up, and William Kamkwamba, the boy who dared to dream, finds himself on the big screen?
Link
"This remarkable example shows how much of a contribution one could make by taking an initiative with a sound vision."
9.19.2009
We only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control.
The Referendum
By Tim Kreider
Recently an editor asked me for an essay about arrested adolescence, joking: “Of course, I thought of you.”
It is worth mentioning that this editor is an old college friend; we’ve driven across the country, been pantsless in several nonsexual contexts, and accidentally hospitalized each other in good fun. He is now a respectable homeowner and family man; I am not. So I couldn’t help but wonder: is there something condescending about this assignment? Does he consider me some sort of amusing and feckless manchild instead of a respected cartoonist whose work is beloved by hundreds and has made me a thousandaire, who’s been in a committed relationship for 15 years with the same cat?
My weird touchiness on this issue — taking offense at someone offering to pay me money for my work — is symptomatic of a more widespread syndrome I call “The Referendum.”
The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home. It’s exacerbated by the far greater diversity of options available to us now than a few decades ago, when everyone had to follow the same drill. We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning.
It’s especially conspicuous among friends from youth. Young adulthood is an anomalous time in people’s lives; they’re as unlike themselves as they’re ever going to be, experimenting with substances and sex, ideology and religion, trying on different identities before their personalities immutably set. Some people flirt briefly with being freethinking bohemians before becoming their parents. Friends who seemed pretty much indistinguishable from you in your 20s make different choices about family or career, and after a decade or two these initial differences yield such radically divergent trajectories that when you get together again you can only regard each other’s lives with bemused incomprehension.
I may be exceptionally conscious of the Referendum because my life is so different from most of my cohort’s; at 42 I’ve never been married and don’t want kids. I recently had dinner with some old friends, a couple with two small children, and when I told them about my typical Saturday in New York City — doing the Times crossword, stopping off at a local flea market, maybe biking across the Brooklyn Bridge — they looked at me like I was describing my battles with the fierce and elusive Squid-Men among the moons of Neptune. The obscene wealth of free time at my command must’ve seemed unimaginably exotic to them, since their next thousand Saturdays are already booked.
What they also can’t imagine is having too much time on your hands, being unable to fill the hours, having to just sit and stare at the emptiness at the center of your life. But I’m sure that to them this problem seems as pitiable as morbid obesity would to the victims of famine.
A lot of my married friends take a vicarious interest in my personal life. It’s usually just nosy, prurient fun, but sometimes smacks of the sort of moralism that H.G. Wells called “jealousy with a halo.” Sometimes it seems sort of starved, like audiences in the Great Depression watching musicals about the glitterati. It’s true that my romantic life has produced some humorous anecdotes, but good stories seldom come from happy experiences. Some of my married friends may envy my freedom in an abstract, daydreamy way, misremembering single life as some sort of pornographic smorgasbord, but I doubt many of them would actually choose to trade places with me. Although they may miss the thrill of sexual novelty, absolutely nobody misses dating.
I regard their more conventional domestic lives with the same sort of ambivalence. Like everyone, I’ve seen some marriages in which I would discreetly hang myself within 12 hours, but others have given me cause to envy their intimacy, loyalty, and irreplaceable decades of invested history. [Note to all my married friends: your marriage is one of the latter.] Though one of those friends cautioned me against idealizing: “It’s not as if being married means you’re any less alone.”
Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master.
I have never even idly thought for a single passing second that it might make my life nicer to have a small, rude, incontinent person follow me around screaming and making me buy them stuff for the rest of my life. [Note to friends with children: I am referring to other people’s children, not to yours.] But there are also moments when some part of me wonders whether I am not only missing the biological boat but something I cannot even begin to imagine — an entire dimension of human experience undetectable to my senses, like a flatlander scoffing at the theoretical concept of sky.
But I can only imagine the paralytic terror that must seize my friends with families as they lie awake calculating mortgage payments and college funds and realize that they are locked into their present lives for farther into the future than the mind’s eye can see. Judging from the unanimity with which parents preface any gripe about children with the disclaimer, “Although I would never wish I hadn’t had them and I can’t imagine life without them,” I can’t help but wonder whether they don’t have to repress precisely these thoughts on a daily basis.
Yes: the Referendum gets unattractively self-righteous and judgmental. Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret.
The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, “Light Years,” James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.” Watching our peers’ lives is the closest we can come to a glimpse of the parallel universes in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or got on that plane after all. It’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own.
A colleague of mine once hosted a visiting cartoonist from Scandinavia who was on a promotional tour. My colleague, who has a university job, a wife and children, was clearly a little wistful about the tour, imagining Brussels, Paris, and London, meeting new fans and colleagues and being taken out for beers every night. The cartoonist, meanwhile, looked forlornly around at his host’s pleasant row house and sighed, almost to himself: “I would like to have such a house.”
One of the hardest things to look at in this life is the lives we didn’t lead, the path not taken, potential left unfulfilled. In stories, those who look back — Lot’s wife, Orpheus and Eurydice — are lost. Looking to the side instead, to gauge how our companions are faring, is a way of glancing at a safer reflection of what we cannot directly bear, like Perseus seeing the Gorgon safely mirrored in his shield.
Link
By Tim Kreider
Recently an editor asked me for an essay about arrested adolescence, joking: “Of course, I thought of you.”
It is worth mentioning that this editor is an old college friend; we’ve driven across the country, been pantsless in several nonsexual contexts, and accidentally hospitalized each other in good fun. He is now a respectable homeowner and family man; I am not. So I couldn’t help but wonder: is there something condescending about this assignment? Does he consider me some sort of amusing and feckless manchild instead of a respected cartoonist whose work is beloved by hundreds and has made me a thousandaire, who’s been in a committed relationship for 15 years with the same cat?
My weird touchiness on this issue — taking offense at someone offering to pay me money for my work — is symptomatic of a more widespread syndrome I call “The Referendum.”
The Referendum is a phenomenon typical of (but not limited to) midlife, whereby people, increasingly aware of the finiteness of their time in the world, the limitations placed on them by their choices so far, and the narrowing options remaining to them, start judging their peers’ differing choices with reactions ranging from envy to contempt. The Referendum can subtly poison formerly close and uncomplicated relationships, creating tensions between the married and the single, the childless and parents, careerists and the stay-at-home. It’s exacerbated by the far greater diversity of options available to us now than a few decades ago, when everyone had to follow the same drill. We’re all anxiously sizing up how everyone else’s decisions have worked out to reassure ourselves that our own are vindicated — that we are, in some sense, winning.
It’s especially conspicuous among friends from youth. Young adulthood is an anomalous time in people’s lives; they’re as unlike themselves as they’re ever going to be, experimenting with substances and sex, ideology and religion, trying on different identities before their personalities immutably set. Some people flirt briefly with being freethinking bohemians before becoming their parents. Friends who seemed pretty much indistinguishable from you in your 20s make different choices about family or career, and after a decade or two these initial differences yield such radically divergent trajectories that when you get together again you can only regard each other’s lives with bemused incomprehension.
I may be exceptionally conscious of the Referendum because my life is so different from most of my cohort’s; at 42 I’ve never been married and don’t want kids. I recently had dinner with some old friends, a couple with two small children, and when I told them about my typical Saturday in New York City — doing the Times crossword, stopping off at a local flea market, maybe biking across the Brooklyn Bridge — they looked at me like I was describing my battles with the fierce and elusive Squid-Men among the moons of Neptune. The obscene wealth of free time at my command must’ve seemed unimaginably exotic to them, since their next thousand Saturdays are already booked.
What they also can’t imagine is having too much time on your hands, being unable to fill the hours, having to just sit and stare at the emptiness at the center of your life. But I’m sure that to them this problem seems as pitiable as morbid obesity would to the victims of famine.
A lot of my married friends take a vicarious interest in my personal life. It’s usually just nosy, prurient fun, but sometimes smacks of the sort of moralism that H.G. Wells called “jealousy with a halo.” Sometimes it seems sort of starved, like audiences in the Great Depression watching musicals about the glitterati. It’s true that my romantic life has produced some humorous anecdotes, but good stories seldom come from happy experiences. Some of my married friends may envy my freedom in an abstract, daydreamy way, misremembering single life as some sort of pornographic smorgasbord, but I doubt many of them would actually choose to trade places with me. Although they may miss the thrill of sexual novelty, absolutely nobody misses dating.
I regard their more conventional domestic lives with the same sort of ambivalence. Like everyone, I’ve seen some marriages in which I would discreetly hang myself within 12 hours, but others have given me cause to envy their intimacy, loyalty, and irreplaceable decades of invested history. [Note to all my married friends: your marriage is one of the latter.] Though one of those friends cautioned me against idealizing: “It’s not as if being married means you’re any less alone.”
Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master.
I have never even idly thought for a single passing second that it might make my life nicer to have a small, rude, incontinent person follow me around screaming and making me buy them stuff for the rest of my life. [Note to friends with children: I am referring to other people’s children, not to yours.] But there are also moments when some part of me wonders whether I am not only missing the biological boat but something I cannot even begin to imagine — an entire dimension of human experience undetectable to my senses, like a flatlander scoffing at the theoretical concept of sky.
But I can only imagine the paralytic terror that must seize my friends with families as they lie awake calculating mortgage payments and college funds and realize that they are locked into their present lives for farther into the future than the mind’s eye can see. Judging from the unanimity with which parents preface any gripe about children with the disclaimer, “Although I would never wish I hadn’t had them and I can’t imagine life without them,” I can’t help but wonder whether they don’t have to repress precisely these thoughts on a daily basis.
Yes: the Referendum gets unattractively self-righteous and judgmental. Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others’ as selfish or pathological or wrong. So it’s easy to overlook that hidden beneath all this smug certainty is a poignant insecurity, and the naked 3 A.M. terror of regret.
The problem is, we only get one chance at this, with no do-overs. Life is, in effect, a non-repeatable experiment with no control. In his novel about marriage, “Light Years,” James Salter writes: “For whatever we do, even whatever we do not do prevents us from doing its opposite. Acts demolish their alternatives, that is the paradox.” Watching our peers’ lives is the closest we can come to a glimpse of the parallel universes in which we didn’t ruin that relationship years ago, or got that job we applied for, or got on that plane after all. It’s tempting to read other people’s lives as cautionary fables or repudiations of our own.
A colleague of mine once hosted a visiting cartoonist from Scandinavia who was on a promotional tour. My colleague, who has a university job, a wife and children, was clearly a little wistful about the tour, imagining Brussels, Paris, and London, meeting new fans and colleagues and being taken out for beers every night. The cartoonist, meanwhile, looked forlornly around at his host’s pleasant row house and sighed, almost to himself: “I would like to have such a house.”
One of the hardest things to look at in this life is the lives we didn’t lead, the path not taken, potential left unfulfilled. In stories, those who look back — Lot’s wife, Orpheus and Eurydice — are lost. Looking to the side instead, to gauge how our companions are faring, is a way of glancing at a safer reflection of what we cannot directly bear, like Perseus seeing the Gorgon safely mirrored in his shield.
Link
9.11.2009
The mystery of Lake Louise's missing water
Unexplained absence of 510,000 cubic metres of water from resort's distribution system 'an embarrassment for Canada'
by Dawn Walton
The Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise taps into the iconic emerald-blue lake in Alberta that shares its name for everything from supplying its laundry room and watering its gardens to ensuring the ice buckets are filled.
That water distribution system has lost almost 510,000 cubic metres of water – the equivalent of 33,630 tanker trucks or 204 Olympic-sized swimming pools – pulled from the lake since 2003, according to records that the hotel submits to Parks Canada, which oversees all operations in Banff National Park.
That's almost as much water as Ottawa allows the hotel to draw each year from the postcard-perfect lake that thrives on glacial runoff in Canada's oldest national park.
Brad Cabana, a former member of Parks Canada's advisory development board, rang alarm bells about the water losses for more than a year before he resigned. He said he received little explanation – or assurances the problem has been fixed.
“This is not a slough in Saskatchewan,” said the former mayor of Elstow, Sask., who lives in the Rocky Mountain resort town of Canmore, Alta. “This is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I'm trying to save something that can't speak for itself. I want to hold people accountable.”
Parks Canada doesn't monitor levels at Lake Louise because it is always changing, affected by the seasons and dependent on rain as well as the melt from Victoria Glacier above it. But evidence suggests the main glacier is under pressure.
“It's definitely melting away,” said Gerald Osborn, a professor of geoscience at the University of Calgary who has studied glaciers.
Although the icepack loss has not been calculated recently, scientists say glaciers in the Rockies are declining and at a more rapid pace.
“It's a natural recession, but it is augmented by the man-made effects,” Prof. Osborn said.
The impact of global warming is a problem for huge regions, including Western Canada, that rely on glaciers for water for their homes, businesses and farms.
Mr. Cabana noticed what he considered a large water-loss rate at Lake Louise in February, 2008, when the hotel presented his board with a $7-million plan to upgrade its water-treatment plant and build a huge new reservoir.
Records eventually showed that one-fifth of the lake water drawn by the hotel's treatment plant (which is used by the hotel and the nearby Deer Lodge and Parks Canada washrooms) has been disappearing from the metered distribution system.
Over the years, the hotel has installed low-flow toilets and shower heads, tap aerators and taken other high-tech conservation measures. Since 2001, water consumption has dropped 36 per cent.
While experts say even well-run water systems have an 8- to 12-per-cent loss or leakage rate, average annual losses at the hotel ranged from 6.9 per cent to 33.4 per cent. There has been an average annual loss of 21 per cent between 2003 and today.
The board rejected the upgrade, but it went ahead with Parks Canada's blessing. Mr. Cabana pursued the issue, but recently quit the board in frustration. He continues to hunt for answers.
“Apart from where the hell is the water going and what the hell are people doing about it, it's certainly an embarrassment for Canada,” he said.
The advisory development board, which has seven volunteer members, was set up in 1998 to let Canadians be involved in deciding what projects go ahead in Banff, Yoho and Kootenay national parks in Alberta and British Columbia. It's supposed to make sure permit applications receive “consistent, fair and transparent reviews.”
When Mike McIvor of the Bow Valley Naturalists, a Banff-based conservation group, attended the board's first public hearing, he was impressed by the tough questions. But soon, he said, the board turned pro-development, and its recommendations could be overruled by the park superintendent.
“We came to call it the approval development board,” Mr. McIvor said.
“We stopped participating because we thought the role of the board had been reduced to choosing what colour should be on the bathroom walls,” he said.
Interested in conservation issues, Mr. Cabana joined the advisory board in January, 2008.
The next month, the waterworks upgrade at Lake Louise was presented. According to the hotel, which has roots dating back to 1890 and some water pipes that are a century old, the project was needed to meet new federal and provincial regulatory rules for drinking water and to ensure enough storage capacity in the event of a disaster such as a fire. The new reservoir would hold 1,450 cubic metres of water, more than three times as much as the existing one.
During the presentation, records showed that the hotel had been consuming well below its annual permit of 525,653 cubic metres of water.
The board was told water consumption had dropped between 2003 and 2006 and ranged from 267,809 to 346,533 cubic metres. During the same period, water production ranged between 357,803 and 384,989 cubic metres.
(Water that is produced, but not clocked by consumption meters, is not paid for. The hotel pays only for water it uses.) A chart showing the growing gap between the amount of water produced and the water consumed by the hotel and other facilities jumped out at Mr. Cabana and some other board members.
“Where is this water going?” he recalled asking. “They could not answer me.”
Three of six board members voted against the proposal, in part over concerns about adding a new water project to what seemed like a faulty system. Questions about aesthetics were also raised. The tie defeated the project. But a Parks Canada superintendent, satisfied that the concerns were addressed, later gave it the green light.
“We asked that aesthetics be improved and that's why it was approved,” explained Pam Veinotte, Parks Canada's field unit superintendent for Lake Louise, Yoho and Kootenay.
“There will always be a level of discrepancy in any municipal water system between withdrawal and usage. That doesn't necessarily mean there's been a loss of water. It's often a result of unmetered water usage,” she added.
Mr. Cabana asked for the water balance sheets for 2007 and 2008. Unlike the numbers in the presentation to the board, the charts he was given were vague. This week, he was offered more complete – and in some cases different – figures for those years, as well as the first eight months of 2009.
There were seven months between 2003 and today when water from the treatment plant didn't vanish. But during those years, the system could not account for 509,208 cubic metres of water. Mr. Cabana figured that would be like nearly 33,630 tanker trucks loaded with 4,000 gallon drums.
Last February – one year after the project was approved – Mr. Cabana tabled a motion to find out what measures had been taken to locate the sources of the losses and fix the problem.
A month later, Parks Canada received a letter from Jackie Budgell, the hotel's environmental systems manager, who attributed the discrepancy to non-metered water consumption for irrigation, annual fire-hydrant testing and cleaning the plant filters. She also suggested that some meters might be inaccurate.
Harsh winters sometimes burst water lines and cause leaks, Ms. Budgell said. One hydrant line ruptured in the winter of 2006 and could not be fixed until spring, she said. As well, non-metered hydrants were used during a big landscape project between 2003 and 2006. She assured Parks that the discrepancy between the water production and consumption was not because of leaking pipes or other causes.
“The most important fact is that we have continued to reduce our production and consumption since 1995,” she wrote.
But those explanations didn't wash for Mr. Cabana.
The hotel estimates that cleaning the filters accounts for 2.5 to 3.2 per cent of the water consumed, and includes it on the balance sheet, therefore that can't be the cause, he said. Water losses tend to be greatest between September and March, not during the prime summer landscaping season when new plants and trees would need heavy watering, he added. And, large water losses continued after the major landscaping project was completed, he said.
“Estimates are often difficult,” said Ms. Veinotte of Parks Canada.
Hotel spokeswoman Alicia Chelsom said an environmental assessment concluded that as long as the hotel stays below its permit, there's no ecological risk.
“We draw well below that number, so even if there is a slight difference between our production and consumption numbers, there is no risk for environmental damage. Also, any water that would leak from the distribution system would run back into the ground and return to the water table,” she said.
Chris Huston, leader of asset operation for water services for the city of Calgary, called monthly water losses ranging from 20 to 42 per cent “huge.”
“There's something going on there,” he said.
It could be as simple as inaccurate meters. The system could be over-pressured, which is pushing water through leaks faster. Theft can also be a factor. But in most cases, he explained, leaks are to blame.
“It could be water running underground and they don't even know it,” Mr. Huston said.
Back in the 1980s, Calgary lost 30 per cent of its water, about 140 million litres per day. The city launched an aggressive water-main replacement program and water loss dropped dramatically. While about 1,500 water mains used to break in a year, now fewer than 400 do.
“It's a major issue across North America – the state of infrastructure,” Mr. Huston said.
At an advisory board meeting in May, 2009, Mr. Cabana quit, citing concerns about “environmental negligence.” Neither Parks Canada nor the board, he said, appeared to have any intention to hold themselves or the hotel to account.
“It remains a shock to my system that the very organization entrusted with protection of our national parks, and thereby their ecosystems, would allow such a systemic abuse of perhaps the most recognized symbol of our country,” he wrote in his resignation letter.
At the meeting, the board gave the hotel until the end of the year to show how the new system, which went into operation in June, was working. (It includes new meters and a new irrigation system.) So far, the water-loss rate has ranged from 3 to 28 per cent.
Parks Canada said it needs more data to find out whether it has a handle on its water losses.
Joe Obad, associate director with the Water Matters Society of Alberta, an independent organization focused on watershed protection, said when talking about a Canadian icon like Lake Louise there should be no questions about where the water is going.
“What I would like to see is that every drop coming out of that lake is accounted for,” he said.
Mr. Cabana has enlisted the help of Wild Rose Conservative MP Blake Richards, who has the Environment Minister's office looking into the issue.
“Water is a pretty valuable resource and you want to make sure it's being used properly,” Mr. Richards said.
Parks Canada has been directed to get to the bottom of it.
Meanwhile, Parks Canada is undertaking a mandated facelift under federal legislation. It will look at what, if anything, it should do with the many committees, such as the advisory development board, that offer Ottawa advice. Boards could be disbanded or merged.
Mention Mr. Cabana's name around the lake and people tend to bristle. When asked about his water crusade, Ms. Veinotte offered a diplomatic response.
“We really appreciate the efforts of a number of private citizens to sit on advisory groups and I think that these advisory groups have served us well in the past and many will serve us well into the future,” she said.
Mr. Cabana would still like to see an independent audit, wonders how far back the losses go and doubts the water-plant upgrades will help. So what happened to Lake Louise's water?
“That's a question I wish I had the answer for,” he said.
Link
9.09.2009
Walmart's Latest Move to Crush the Competition
By Sean Gregory
Walmart loves to shock and awe. City-size stores, absurdly low prices ($8 jeans!) and everything from milk to Matchbox toys on its shelves. And with the recession forcing legions of stores into bankruptcy, the world's largest retailer now apparently wants to take out the remaining survivors.
Thus, the company is in the beginning stages of a massive store and strategy remodeling effort, which it has dubbed Project Impact. One goal of Project Impact is cleaner, less cluttered stores that will improve the shopping experience. Another is friendlier customer service. A third: home in on categories where the competition can be killed. "They've got Kmart ready to take a standing eight-count next year," says retail consultant Burt Flickinger III, managing director for Strategic Resources Group and a veteran Walmart watcher. "Same with Rite Aid. They've knocked out four of the top five toy retailers, and are now going after the last one standing, Toys "R" Us. Project Impact will be the catalyst to wipe out a second round of national and regional retailers."
Though that's bad news for many smaller businesses that can't compete, Walmart investors have clamored for this push. Despite the company's consistently strong financial performance, Wall Street hasn't cheered Walmart's growth rates. During the 1990s, the company's stock price jumped 1,173%. In this decade, it's down around 24% (Walmart's stock closed at $51.74 per share on Sept. 3). "Walmart is under excruciating pressure from employees and frustrated institutional investors to get the stock up," says Flickinger.
Many analysts believe that the store-operations background of new CEO Mike Duke will keep investors quite happy. Though the recession finally caught up to Walmart last quarter, when the company reported a 1.2% drop in U.S. same-store sales, Walmart was a consistent winner during the worst days of the financial crisis, as frugal consumers traded down. While most retailers are shutting down stores, Walmart has opened 52 Supercenters since Feb. 1. Joseph Feldman, retail analyst at Telsey Advisory Group, estimates that each store costs Walmart between $25 and $30 million. In order to continue the momentum that it has picked up during the retail recession, over the next five years the company plans to remodel 70% of its approximately 3,600 U.S. stores.
So what does a Project Impact store look like? One recent weekday afternoon I toured a brand new, 210,000-sq.-ft. Walmart in West Deptford, N.J., with Lance De La Rosa, the company's Northeast general manager. "We've listened to our customers, and they want an easier shopping experience," says De La Rosa. "We've brightened up the stores and opened things up to make it more navigable." One of the most noticeable changes is that Project Impact stores reshape Action Alley, the aisles where promotional items were pulled off the shelves and prominently displayed for shoppers. Those stacks both crowded the aisles and cut off sight lines. Now, the aisles are all clear, and you can see most sections of the store from any vantage point. For example, standing on the corner intersection of the auto-care and crafts areas, you can look straight ahead and see where shoes, pet care, groceries, the pharmacy and other areas are located. And the discount price tags are still at eye level, so the value message doesn't get lost.
"They are like roads," De La Rosa says proudly. "And look around, the customers are using them. We've already gotten feedback about the wider, more breathable aisles. Our shoppers love them."
The layout is also smarter. "You can kind of guess where everything is going to be," says Sharon Tilotta, 73, a shopper in the West Deptford store. The pharmacy, pet foods, cosmetics and health and beauty sections are now adjacent to the groceries. In the past, groceries and these other sections were often at opposite ends of the store, which made it more difficult for someone looking to pick up some quick consumables to get in and out of Walmart. "Under Project Impact, Walmart is providing more of a full supermarket experience within its walls," says Feldman. "The biggest complaint against them has always been that it takes a long time to get through everything. This definitely improves efficiency." De La Rosa also points out the party-supply section. Favors, wedding decorations, cards and scrapbooks are all in one area. "In the past, these products would be in three different places," he says.
And although Walmart won't admit to targeting specific competitors — "We're just listening to what our customers want," De La Rosa says — it's clear that, under Project Impact, Walmart will make major plays in winnable categories. The pharmacy, for example, has been pulled into the middle of the store, and its $4-prescriptions program has generated healthy buzz. With Circuit City out of business, the electronics section has been beefed up. Walmart is also expanding its presence in crafts. Sales at Michael's Stores, the country's largest specialty arts-and-crafts retailers, have sagged, and Walmart sees an opportunity. Stores are chock-full of scrapbooking material, baskets and yarns. "Look, they're selling the stuff that accounts for 80% of Michael's business, at 20% of the space," says Flickinger. "It's very hard for any company to compete with that."
Apparel, one of Target's traditional strengths, gets a prominent position at the center. The color palettes of the shirts and dresses are brighter and more appealing than they've been in the past. "Walmart has figured out fashion for the first time in 47 years," Flickinger says. "They've gone from a D to an A-minus." Briefs and underwear have been shuttled to the back. "That's a smart move," Flickinger says. "People know to come to Walmart for the commodity clothing. Now, they have to walk past the higher margin, more fashionable merchandise to get what they need."
Of course, Project Impact isn't perfect. You'd think that if Walmart was going to open a massive new store with a cutting-edge layout, the company would at least put a sign up. In West Deptford, it's easy to miss the entrance to the Walmart — which is buried in the back of a parking lot — while driving along a main thoroughfare. And of course, customers will always nitpick. One elderly shopper complained about a shortage of benches in the store (she needed a rest). Another had a more esoteric, yet legitimate, gripe. "Their meat is leaky," says Jeff Winter, 30, a West Deptford shopper. "And instead of giving you a wet wipe to clean it off, they give you a dry towel. How's that going to prevent E. coli or whatever?"
What analysts really want to see from Project Impact, however, is a faster pace of implementation. "The biggest hurdle facing Walmart is the speed with which they can roll this out," says Feldman. As more Project Impact stores pop up, the existing stores appear worse by comparison. For example, while the merchandise at the Project Impact store outside of Philadelphia really speaks to that particular market — there's tons of Eagles and Phillies gear — at one regular discount store outside New York City, Minnesota Twins and Seattle Mariners pajama pants wasted away on the racks. There were plenty of associates staffing the electronics section at the Project Impact store; at the discount store, five frustrated shoppers waited in line for help from a customer-service rep. Soon, it was closer to 10.
What about the friendly service? In West Deptford, the associates were sunny and bright. At the New York–area discount store, not so much. "You'll notice we've been in the store for two hours, and no one has even said hello to us," Flickinger says after he and I toured that store. He's right, we weren't feeling any love. But if Project Impact keeps picking up momentum, many more Walmart salespeople, and shareholders, should be smiling.
Link
Walmart loves to shock and awe. City-size stores, absurdly low prices ($8 jeans!) and everything from milk to Matchbox toys on its shelves. And with the recession forcing legions of stores into bankruptcy, the world's largest retailer now apparently wants to take out the remaining survivors.
Thus, the company is in the beginning stages of a massive store and strategy remodeling effort, which it has dubbed Project Impact. One goal of Project Impact is cleaner, less cluttered stores that will improve the shopping experience. Another is friendlier customer service. A third: home in on categories where the competition can be killed. "They've got Kmart ready to take a standing eight-count next year," says retail consultant Burt Flickinger III, managing director for Strategic Resources Group and a veteran Walmart watcher. "Same with Rite Aid. They've knocked out four of the top five toy retailers, and are now going after the last one standing, Toys "R" Us. Project Impact will be the catalyst to wipe out a second round of national and regional retailers."
Though that's bad news for many smaller businesses that can't compete, Walmart investors have clamored for this push. Despite the company's consistently strong financial performance, Wall Street hasn't cheered Walmart's growth rates. During the 1990s, the company's stock price jumped 1,173%. In this decade, it's down around 24% (Walmart's stock closed at $51.74 per share on Sept. 3). "Walmart is under excruciating pressure from employees and frustrated institutional investors to get the stock up," says Flickinger.
Many analysts believe that the store-operations background of new CEO Mike Duke will keep investors quite happy. Though the recession finally caught up to Walmart last quarter, when the company reported a 1.2% drop in U.S. same-store sales, Walmart was a consistent winner during the worst days of the financial crisis, as frugal consumers traded down. While most retailers are shutting down stores, Walmart has opened 52 Supercenters since Feb. 1. Joseph Feldman, retail analyst at Telsey Advisory Group, estimates that each store costs Walmart between $25 and $30 million. In order to continue the momentum that it has picked up during the retail recession, over the next five years the company plans to remodel 70% of its approximately 3,600 U.S. stores.
So what does a Project Impact store look like? One recent weekday afternoon I toured a brand new, 210,000-sq.-ft. Walmart in West Deptford, N.J., with Lance De La Rosa, the company's Northeast general manager. "We've listened to our customers, and they want an easier shopping experience," says De La Rosa. "We've brightened up the stores and opened things up to make it more navigable." One of the most noticeable changes is that Project Impact stores reshape Action Alley, the aisles where promotional items were pulled off the shelves and prominently displayed for shoppers. Those stacks both crowded the aisles and cut off sight lines. Now, the aisles are all clear, and you can see most sections of the store from any vantage point. For example, standing on the corner intersection of the auto-care and crafts areas, you can look straight ahead and see where shoes, pet care, groceries, the pharmacy and other areas are located. And the discount price tags are still at eye level, so the value message doesn't get lost.
"They are like roads," De La Rosa says proudly. "And look around, the customers are using them. We've already gotten feedback about the wider, more breathable aisles. Our shoppers love them."
The layout is also smarter. "You can kind of guess where everything is going to be," says Sharon Tilotta, 73, a shopper in the West Deptford store. The pharmacy, pet foods, cosmetics and health and beauty sections are now adjacent to the groceries. In the past, groceries and these other sections were often at opposite ends of the store, which made it more difficult for someone looking to pick up some quick consumables to get in and out of Walmart. "Under Project Impact, Walmart is providing more of a full supermarket experience within its walls," says Feldman. "The biggest complaint against them has always been that it takes a long time to get through everything. This definitely improves efficiency." De La Rosa also points out the party-supply section. Favors, wedding decorations, cards and scrapbooks are all in one area. "In the past, these products would be in three different places," he says.
And although Walmart won't admit to targeting specific competitors — "We're just listening to what our customers want," De La Rosa says — it's clear that, under Project Impact, Walmart will make major plays in winnable categories. The pharmacy, for example, has been pulled into the middle of the store, and its $4-prescriptions program has generated healthy buzz. With Circuit City out of business, the electronics section has been beefed up. Walmart is also expanding its presence in crafts. Sales at Michael's Stores, the country's largest specialty arts-and-crafts retailers, have sagged, and Walmart sees an opportunity. Stores are chock-full of scrapbooking material, baskets and yarns. "Look, they're selling the stuff that accounts for 80% of Michael's business, at 20% of the space," says Flickinger. "It's very hard for any company to compete with that."
Apparel, one of Target's traditional strengths, gets a prominent position at the center. The color palettes of the shirts and dresses are brighter and more appealing than they've been in the past. "Walmart has figured out fashion for the first time in 47 years," Flickinger says. "They've gone from a D to an A-minus." Briefs and underwear have been shuttled to the back. "That's a smart move," Flickinger says. "People know to come to Walmart for the commodity clothing. Now, they have to walk past the higher margin, more fashionable merchandise to get what they need."
Of course, Project Impact isn't perfect. You'd think that if Walmart was going to open a massive new store with a cutting-edge layout, the company would at least put a sign up. In West Deptford, it's easy to miss the entrance to the Walmart — which is buried in the back of a parking lot — while driving along a main thoroughfare. And of course, customers will always nitpick. One elderly shopper complained about a shortage of benches in the store (she needed a rest). Another had a more esoteric, yet legitimate, gripe. "Their meat is leaky," says Jeff Winter, 30, a West Deptford shopper. "And instead of giving you a wet wipe to clean it off, they give you a dry towel. How's that going to prevent E. coli or whatever?"
What analysts really want to see from Project Impact, however, is a faster pace of implementation. "The biggest hurdle facing Walmart is the speed with which they can roll this out," says Feldman. As more Project Impact stores pop up, the existing stores appear worse by comparison. For example, while the merchandise at the Project Impact store outside of Philadelphia really speaks to that particular market — there's tons of Eagles and Phillies gear — at one regular discount store outside New York City, Minnesota Twins and Seattle Mariners pajama pants wasted away on the racks. There were plenty of associates staffing the electronics section at the Project Impact store; at the discount store, five frustrated shoppers waited in line for help from a customer-service rep. Soon, it was closer to 10.
What about the friendly service? In West Deptford, the associates were sunny and bright. At the New York–area discount store, not so much. "You'll notice we've been in the store for two hours, and no one has even said hello to us," Flickinger says after he and I toured that store. He's right, we weren't feeling any love. But if Project Impact keeps picking up momentum, many more Walmart salespeople, and shareholders, should be smiling.
Link
9.08.2009
A skull that rewrites the history of man
It has long been agreed that Africa was the sole cradle of human evolution. Then these bones were found in Georgia...
By Steve Connor
The conventional view of human evolution and how early man colonised the world has been thrown into doubt by a series of stunning palaeontological discoveries suggesting that Africa was not the sole cradle of humankind. Scientists have found
a handful of ancient human skulls at an archaeological site two hours from the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, that suggest a Eurasian chapter in the long evolutionary story of man.
The skulls, jawbones and fragments of limb bones suggest that our ancient human ancestors migrated out of Africa far earlier than previously thought and spent a long evolutionary interlude in Eurasia – before moving back into Africa to complete the story of man.
Experts believe fossilised bones unearthed at the medieval village of Dmanisi in the foothills of the Caucuses, and dated to about 1.8 million years ago, are the oldest indisputable remains of humans discovered outside of Africa.
But what has really excited the researchers is the discovery that these early humans (or "hominins") are far more primitive-looking than the Homo erectus humans that were, until now, believed to be the first people to migrate out of Africa about 1 million years ago.
The Dmanisi people had brains that were about 40 per cent smaller than those of Homo erectus and they were much shorter in stature than classical H. erectus skeletons, according to Professor David Lordkipanidze, general director of the Georgia National Museum. "Before our findings, the prevailing view was that humans came out of Africa almost 1 million years ago, that they already had sophisticated stone tools, and that their body anatomy was quite advanced in terms of brain capacity and limb proportions. But what we are finding is quite different," Professor Lordkipanidze said.
"The Dmanisi hominins are the earliest representatives of our own genus – Homo – outside Africa, and they represent the most primitive population of the species Homo erectus to date. They might be ancestral to all later Homo erectus populations, which would suggest a Eurasian origin of Homo erectus."
Speaking at the British Science Festival in Guildford, where he gave the British Council lecture, Professor Lordkipanidze raised the prospect that Homo erectus may have evolved in Eurasia from the more primitive-looking Dmanisi population and then migrated back to Africa to eventually give rise to our own species, Homo sapiens – modern man.
"The question is whether Homo erectus originated in Africa or Eurasia, and if in Eurasia, did we have vice-versa migration? This idea looked very stupid a few years ago, but today it seems not so stupid," he told the festival.
The scientists have discovered a total of five skulls and a solitary jawbone. It is clear that they had relatively small brains, almost a third of the size of modern humans. "They are quite small. Their lower limbs are very human and their upper limbs are still quite archaic and they had very primitive stone tools," Professor Lordkipanidze said. "Their brain capacity is about 600 cubic centimetres. The prevailing view before this discovery was that the humans who first left Africa had a brain size of about 1,000 cubic centimetres."
The only human fossil to predate the Dmanisi specimens are of an archaic species Homo habilis, or "handy man", found only in Africa, which used simple stone tools and lived between about 2.5 million and 1.6 million years ago.
"I'd have to say, if we'd found the Dmanisi fossils 40 years ago, they would have been classified as Homo habilis because of the small brain size. Their brow ridges are not as thick as classical Homo erectus, but their teeth are more H. erectus like," Professor Lordkipanidze said. "All these finds show that the ancestors of these people were much more primitive than we thought. I don't think that we were so lucky as to have found the first travellers out of Africa. Georgia is the cradle of the first Europeans, I would say," he told the meeting.
"What we learnt from the Dmanisi fossils is that they are quite small – between 1.44 metres to 1.5 metres tall. What is interesting is that their lower limbs, their tibia bones, are very human-like so it seems they were very good runners," he said.
He added: "In regards to the question of which came first, enlarged brain size or bipedalism, maybe indirectly this information calls us to think that body anatomy was more important than brain size. While the Dmanisi people were almost modern in their body proportions, and were highly efficient walkers and runners, their arms moved in a different way, and their brains were tiny compared to ours.
"Nevertheless, they were sophisticated tool makers with high social and cognitive skills," he told the science festival, which is run by the British Science Association.
One of the five skulls is of a person who lost all his or her teeth during their lifetime but had still survived for many years despite being completely toothless. This suggests some kind of social organisation based on mutual care, Professor Lordkipanidze said.
Link
Historian says creating new Saskatchewan cities has 'great significance'
By Jennifer Graham
The last time two Saskatchewan towns became cities in the same year, Premier Walter Scott was walking the halls of the newly completed provincial legislative building, agricultural was the driving force of the economy and most of the province's nearly 500,000 residents lived in rural areas.
It was 1913 when North Battleford and Weyburn became the province's newest cities.
Nearly 100 years later, Saskatchewan is doing it again, announcing last week that the towns of Meadow Lake and Martensville have reached city status.
"There's a great significance to yet another city in Saskatchewan because in the national consciousness, Saskatchewan is a place that time forgot - of rural roads, country elevators, wheat fields," says Bill Waiser, a professor in the history department at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.
"What people don't realize today is that Saskatchewan is essentially an urban province. More people in Saskatchewan live in urban centres than they do in the countryside."
For years, Saskatchewan was a place people loved to leave.
After reaching a high of more than 1,032,000 people in 1987, the province's population started to drop. It fell to below 992,000 in 2006 before things started to turn around.
Saskatchewan's population was at 1,027,092 in June, according to figures released by Statistics Canada. Most of the growth came from people moving to Saskatchewan from other provinces.
Waiser says two out of every three people in Saskatchewan live in urban centres - most in Regina and Saskatoon.
The historian, who penned the book "Saskatchewan: A New History," says people need to get away from the images of Saskatchewan as one big wheat field or as a small town where most people are engaged in agriculture.
"That's not the real Saskatchewan of today," Waiser says.
"The fact that Martensville is becoming yet another in the list of cities in Saskatchewan reflects the fact that there's this growing urbanization in Saskatchewan, that people are moving off the farms into the cities where they can get better services."
"Yes, Saskatchewan has that feel of a rural province because of the grid roads, the country elevators, the grain fields, but that rural population is becoming increasingly smaller as the urban population grows."
In fact, Waiser says a lot of smaller communities will likely see their numbers decline and might eventually disappear.
Such hamlets, villages and towns were put on the map a century ago to service the agricultural community so that producers didn't have to haul their crops too far. But Saskatchewan's economy has expanded into areas such as mining and oil and gas. Agriculture's contribution has declined, taking with it the need for all the small rural centres, says Waiser.
In Saskatchewan, a community must have a population of 5,000 or more to get city status.
Martensville has seen its population grow because of its proximity to Saskatoon, the province's largest city. Martensville is just 20 minutes north of Saskatoon, but it doesn't want to be seen as a bedroom community.
"We want our own identity," says Martensville Mayor Giles Saulnier.
Saulnier says the city is trying to move forward and grow with the Saskatchewan economy. He insists the personable image that makes small town life appealing won't change.
"It's the people. It's walking down the street and saying hello to your neighbour and that will continue to happen because everybody wants to lend a helping hand in Martensville," says Saulnier.
"It's a sign of what we are as a community."
Premier Brad Wall says two towns becoming cities in the same year is evidence that Saskatchewan is growing even during the recession. The growth in Meadow Lake is being driven by many factors, including agriculture, energy exploration and the potential of oil sands development.
But the situation is not all rosy.
Saskatchewan was the only province to experience a sizable deterioration in the job market in August, losing 3,200 jobs, according to the latest Labour Force Survey released by Statistics Canada. However, the province still boasts Canada's lowest unemployment rate at five per cent.
Waiser admits there are challenges with a shifting population and the current economy, but he says people should look forward to what Saskatchewan is going to do.
"It's not going to be an easy road ahead of us, it's going to be bumpy, but I suggest that Saskatchewan will find its own solutions to the challenges that it faces and that the rest of Canada should be watching closely."
Link
The last time two Saskatchewan towns became cities in the same year, Premier Walter Scott was walking the halls of the newly completed provincial legislative building, agricultural was the driving force of the economy and most of the province's nearly 500,000 residents lived in rural areas.
It was 1913 when North Battleford and Weyburn became the province's newest cities.
Nearly 100 years later, Saskatchewan is doing it again, announcing last week that the towns of Meadow Lake and Martensville have reached city status.
"There's a great significance to yet another city in Saskatchewan because in the national consciousness, Saskatchewan is a place that time forgot - of rural roads, country elevators, wheat fields," says Bill Waiser, a professor in the history department at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.
"What people don't realize today is that Saskatchewan is essentially an urban province. More people in Saskatchewan live in urban centres than they do in the countryside."
For years, Saskatchewan was a place people loved to leave.
After reaching a high of more than 1,032,000 people in 1987, the province's population started to drop. It fell to below 992,000 in 2006 before things started to turn around.
Saskatchewan's population was at 1,027,092 in June, according to figures released by Statistics Canada. Most of the growth came from people moving to Saskatchewan from other provinces.
Waiser says two out of every three people in Saskatchewan live in urban centres - most in Regina and Saskatoon.
The historian, who penned the book "Saskatchewan: A New History," says people need to get away from the images of Saskatchewan as one big wheat field or as a small town where most people are engaged in agriculture.
"That's not the real Saskatchewan of today," Waiser says.
"The fact that Martensville is becoming yet another in the list of cities in Saskatchewan reflects the fact that there's this growing urbanization in Saskatchewan, that people are moving off the farms into the cities where they can get better services."
"Yes, Saskatchewan has that feel of a rural province because of the grid roads, the country elevators, the grain fields, but that rural population is becoming increasingly smaller as the urban population grows."
In fact, Waiser says a lot of smaller communities will likely see their numbers decline and might eventually disappear.
Such hamlets, villages and towns were put on the map a century ago to service the agricultural community so that producers didn't have to haul their crops too far. But Saskatchewan's economy has expanded into areas such as mining and oil and gas. Agriculture's contribution has declined, taking with it the need for all the small rural centres, says Waiser.
In Saskatchewan, a community must have a population of 5,000 or more to get city status.
Martensville has seen its population grow because of its proximity to Saskatoon, the province's largest city. Martensville is just 20 minutes north of Saskatoon, but it doesn't want to be seen as a bedroom community.
"We want our own identity," says Martensville Mayor Giles Saulnier.
Saulnier says the city is trying to move forward and grow with the Saskatchewan economy. He insists the personable image that makes small town life appealing won't change.
"It's the people. It's walking down the street and saying hello to your neighbour and that will continue to happen because everybody wants to lend a helping hand in Martensville," says Saulnier.
"It's a sign of what we are as a community."
Premier Brad Wall says two towns becoming cities in the same year is evidence that Saskatchewan is growing even during the recession. The growth in Meadow Lake is being driven by many factors, including agriculture, energy exploration and the potential of oil sands development.
But the situation is not all rosy.
Saskatchewan was the only province to experience a sizable deterioration in the job market in August, losing 3,200 jobs, according to the latest Labour Force Survey released by Statistics Canada. However, the province still boasts Canada's lowest unemployment rate at five per cent.
Waiser admits there are challenges with a shifting population and the current economy, but he says people should look forward to what Saskatchewan is going to do.
"It's not going to be an easy road ahead of us, it's going to be bumpy, but I suggest that Saskatchewan will find its own solutions to the challenges that it faces and that the rest of Canada should be watching closely."
Link
9.07.2009
Turning to Tie-Ins, Lego Thinks Beyond the Brick
By NELSON D. SCHWARTZ
FROM the outside, there is nothing playful about the drab, two-story Lego Idea House here, where designers gather in whitewashed rooms to dream up new toys. But upstairs, behind a series of locked doors accessible only to employees with special passes, is a chamber that might as well be toy heaven for kids — and more than a few adults.
Multicolored Lego creations in every imaginable size and shape spill from the shelves, from Indiana Jones’s biplane to Darth Vader’s fighter. Boxes stamped “confidential” hold potential future blockbusters, like Buzz Lightyear, the hero of the “Toy Story” animated films, as well as a police station bustling with miniature cops and robbers.
“It’s our way of looking at the world,” says Soren Holm, the head of Lego’s Concept Lab. “We have happy criminals; even they are smiling. The sun is shining every day.”
While that may be true of Lego’s toys, until recently it was hardly the case for Lego’s bottom line. But five years after a near-death experience, Lego has emerged as an unlikely winner in an industry threatened by the likes of video games, iPods, the Internet and other digital diversions.
Even as other toymakers struggle, this Danish maker of toy bricks is enjoying double-digit sales gains and swelling earnings. In recent years, Lego has increasingly focused on toys that many parents wouldn’t recognize from their own childhood. Hollywood themes are commanding more shelf space, a far cry from the idealistic, purely imagination-oriented play that drove Lego for years and was as much a religion as a business strategy in Billund.
Just as the toys are changing, so is the company. Jorgen Vig Knudstorp, 40, a father of four and a McKinsey & Company alumnus who took over as Lego’s chief executive in 2004, made it clear that results, not simply feeling good about making the best toys, would be essential if Lego was to succeed.
“We needed to build a mind-set where nonperformance wasn’t accepted,” Mr. Knudstorp says. Now, “there’s no place to hide if performance is poor,” he says. “You will be embarrassed, and embarrassment is stronger than fear.”
But the story of Lego’s renaissance — and its current expansion into new segments like virtual reality and video games — isn’t just a toy story. It’s also a reminder of how even the best brands can lose their luster but bounce back with a change in strategy and occasionally painful adaptation.
Founded in 1932 on the principle of “play well,” or “leg godt” in Danish, by a local carpenter, Ole Kirk Christiansen, this privately held company had a very Scandinavian aversion to talking about profits, much less orienting the company around them.
Mr. Christiansen’s family still owns Lego and its business may still be fun and games, but working here isn’t. Before Mr. Knudstorp’s arrival, deadlines came and went, and development time for new toys could stretch out for years; in 2004, the company racked up a $344 million loss.
Now, employee pay is tied to measuring up to management’s key performance indicators (K.P.I.’s, in Lego-speak). And cost-saving touches are encouraged when it comes to designing new toys.
That has helped to lower development time by 50 percent, with some new products moving from idea to box in as little as a year. Mr. Knudstorp’s bottom-line-oriented team, meanwhile, has shifted some manufacturing and distribution from Billund to cheaper locales in Central Europe and Mexico.
Nevertheless, Lego hasn’t entirely shed its Scandinavian sense of social mission when it comes to making toys. It kept quality high and never moved any manufacturing to China, avoiding the lead paint scare and grabbing market share when rivals stumbled amid multiple recalls.
Now, with profits swelling and the turnaround firmly in place, Lego is preparing for a future that moves well beyond the basic brick but carries big risks as well.
Last month, it opened its first “concept store” in Concord, N.C., where parents can bring children for birthday parties and classes with master builders; another concept store is set to open near Baltimore this fall. It’s all part of a broader retail expansion that will give Lego 47 retail stores worldwide by year-end, up from 27 in 2007.
In 2010, the first board game designed by Lego will go on sale in the United States, while its new virtual reality system, Lego Universe, will make its debut on the Web, with children able to act out roles from Lego games and build toys from virtual bricks.
Video games — yes, Lego is there, too — are increasingly important to the company, as are Lego’s legions of adult fans, who can now buy kits to build architect-designed models of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and the Guggenheim Museum. What’s more, the company is in talks with Warner Brothers about a mixed live-action and animation Lego-themed movie that would move the company and its Lego brand even further into the Hollywood orbit.
“Developing a movie doesn’t come cheap,” says Soren Torp Laursen, a 23-year Lego employee who heads its North American operations. “But five years ago, we were in the midst of a crisis, and now we’re in a growth phase. We are definitely taking bigger risks than we previously did.”
WHILE that shift has disappointed purists and prompted worries from experts that some of what has long made Lego special may be in jeopardy, it’s paying off, at least in the short term.
Amid a 5 percent drop in total United States toy sales last year and the industry’s worst holiday season in three decades, according to Sean McGowan, an analyst at Needham & Company, Lego’s sales surged 18.7 percent in 2008. And despite a worsening global recession, Lego powered through the first half of 2009, with a 23 percent sales increase over the period a year earlier. It earned $355 million before taxes last year, and $178 million in the first half of 2009.
The numbers are all the more impressive given the sales declines this year at the two biggest toymakers, Mattel and Hasbro.
“I was stunned when I heard how strong Lego’s performance was,” says Mr. McGowan, who has covered the toy industry for 23 years. “How could an $80 Lego set sell better than a $10 action figure?”
The answer is as multifaceted as one of Lego’s most complicated brick creations — and, like the best children’s stories, contains elements of luck, hard work and the loss of innocence.
SOREN HOLM looks down at the machine gun atop Indiana Jones’s jeep and winces. By the standards of video games like Grand Theft Auto and of other childhood attractions, it’s mild stuff.
But here in Billund, toy weapons have always been a touchy subject. “I can tell you there’s been a lot of debate about how far we can take it,” Mr. Holm says. Right down to Indy’s gun? “Oh, yes,” he says slowly. “Oh, yes.”
Since Lego overcame its initial hesitation about rolling out a “Star Wars” series a decade ago because the word “war” would appear on the box, the company has grown more comfortable with conflict.
“We’ve opened up slightly,” Mr. Holm says. After all, he adds, “when you give boys a bunch of bricks, they build a gun.”
In fact, Lego has opened up more than slightly. Whether it’s the Star Wars Assassin Droids Battle Pack or the Indiana Jones Ambush in Cairo set — featuring a pistol-wielding Indy against a scimitar-swinging local — many of Lego’s most popular toys today seem inspired by the special effects and violence of the big screen.
In the United States, Lego’s biggest market and the biggest toy market in the world, games with themes like “Star Wars” and “Indiana Jones” were among the reasons Lego sales jumped 32 percent last year, well above the global pace. But experts like Dr. Jonathan Sinowitz, a New York psychologist who also runs a psychological services company, Diagnostics, wonders at what price these sales come.
“What Lego loses is what makes it so special,” he says. “When you have a less structured, less themed set, kids have the ability to start from scratch. When you have kids playing out Indiana Jones, they’re playing out Hollywood’s imagination, not their own.”
Even toy analysts who admire the company and its recent success acknowledge a broad shift. “I would like to see more open-ended play like when we were kids,” says Gerrick Johnson, a toy analyst at BMO Capital Markets in New York. “The vast majority is theme-based, and when you go into Toys “R” Us, you’d really be challenged to find a simple box of bricks.”
Lutz Muller, an independent toy analyst in Williston, Vt., who has long followed the industry, estimates that 60 percent of Lego’s American sales are linked to licenses, double the amount five years ago.
And the coming “Toy Story” sets have retailers salivating, as Disney prepares to release the latest movie in the hit series next June. “ ‘Toy Story’ is a fit made in heaven,” raves Jerry Storch, the chief executive of Toys “R” Us, which has increased the shelf space allotted to Lego in recent years.
Nevertheless, acquiring licenses to make toys linked to hot Hollywood properties like “Toy Story” carries risks. “It’s a slippery slope,” Mr. Johnson says, and today’s hit can quickly turn into tomorrow’s dud, adding volatility that Lego never faced in the past.
Indeed, unlike the Cabbage Patch Kids or Atari or the Beanie Babies, it was Lego’s seeming aloofness from the market that helped it endure, rather than ending up in the back of the closet like those toys of yesteryear.
For longtime Lego executives like Mr. Laursen, it’s a delicate issue, and his own comments echo Lego’s ambivalence over creativity and hallowed Lego traditions versus the appeal of more profitable, Hollywood-influenced toys.
He says that “we’re definitely more commercially oriented” and notes that licenses play a bigger role in the American market than overseas. But he says that “we’ve never sacrificed our values, and have never been a fundamentally profit-oriented company.”
In fact, he says that there is often a long debate about values when acquiring new licenses, and that “we’re far from always agreeing to take on new ones.” He won’t specify which movies or themes Lego has passed on, but says that “there are many licenses out there that represent a level of violence that is not suited to Lego and doesn’t fit with the trust of parents.”
As Lego ventures deeper into video games and virtual reality with Lego Universe, the question of violence, not to mention commercial temptations, will become only more charged.
One answer, Mr. Laursen says, is to make “violence not explicit, but humoristic.” For example, when a minifigure “dies” in a “Star Wars” or “Indiana Jones” video game, he dissolves into a pile of bricks and then springs back to life, cartoon style.
“We think kids really want to have this good-against-evil play; they want this fighting against each other,” says Charlotte Simonsen, a Lego spokeswoman. “But we want to do it with a wink.”
Analysts add that the recession has proved to be an unexpected boon for Lego, as parents favor spending more time at home with traditional toys instead of going out to the movies or taking trips with the children.
Even parents who won’t let video games in the house, like Alyson Richman Gordon of Huntington Bay, N.Y., say Lego has retained its innocence, especially when it comes to toys built around the traditional bricks. “It echoes back to a bygone era,” she said. “And I find as a parent that I’m drawn to things from my own childhood that inspired my creativity.”
Lester Munson, a father of two in Alexandria, Va., agrees, even though he sees a difference between the Legos of his own childhood and those favored by his 8-year-old son, Jonas. “The most exotic thing I could build when I was a kid was an ambulance,” he says. “Now Jonas can build the Death Star.”
“I still like Legos, and I’m 41,” he says. “Instead of watching TV or playing computer games, the kids are building something, and Jonas and I will build stuff together. The pieces and the sets are a lot cooler than they were 30 years ago, and if the price you have to pay is these tie-ins, that’s fine.”
IT’S not only children who fight over toys. John Barbour, a former top executive of Toys “R” Us, recalls “a series of truly frustrating meetings” with Lego officials in Billund and New York at the beginning of the decade, which climaxed when Mr. Barbour bluntly told them that Toys “R” Us cared more about the Lego brand than they did.
The most popular toys would run out, he recalls, and Lego was simply unable to ship more or manage the complex process of producing the plastic pieces for its most complicated sets.
That began to change in 2004, after Mr. Knudstorp took over in Billund and Mr. Laursen arrived at Lego’s regional headquarters in Enfield, Conn. Besides reaching out to top retailers and cutting costs, they untangled a supply chain that churns out 29 billion pieces a year.
The changes also filtered down to the ranks of Lego’s toy designers, says Paal Smith-Meyer, head of Lego’s new-business group. The number of different bricks or elements that go into Lego toys has shrunk to less than 7,000 from roughly 13,000, and designers are encouraged to reuse parts, so that a piece of an X-wing fighter from the “Star Wars” series might end up in Indiana Jones’s jeep or a pirate ship.
That’s very different from when Mr. Meyer joined Lego a decade ago. Though creating a mold to make a new plastic element might cost 50,000 euros. on average, he recalls that 90 percent of new elements were developed and used just one time.
Nowadays, Mr. Meyer says, “you have to design for Lego. If you want to design for yourself, go be an artist.”
For those would-be Lego artists out there, the company has created a Lego Certified Professional program, selecting adult Lego enthusiasts who don’t work directly for the company but whose creations are aimed at Lego’s vast population of adult fans as well as museum and gallery shows.
It’s part of another broad new effort at Lego — reaching out to those adult fans, who maintain thousands of Web sites and blogs, like GodBricks, which features Lego creations inspired by different faiths, and the Brothers Brick, which showcases all things Lego, whether a life-size Lego house, news, or advice on how to shine up yellowing bricks (hydrogen peroxide).
“There’s a huge community of people that treat Lego as an art form rather than just a toy,” says Andrew Becraft, a technical writer at Microsoft who created the Brothers Brick blog. His site pulls in 125,000 unique visitors a month, and Lego officials estimate that 915,000 people worldwide attended Lego conventions and other events in the first seven months of 2009. Five to 10 percent of Lego toys are snapped up by adults.
In the past, Mr. Knudstorp says, “we considered the adult fans like vintage cars, a bit bizarre.” But he called on another longtime Lego executive, Tormod Askildsen, to work with adult fans. Now Mr. Askildsen journeys to Lego conventions organized by adult enthusiasts, while working with 44 Lego “ambassadors” from 27 countries, seeking advice about new toys and heading off public anger when older lines, like Lego’s 9-volt train sets, are phased out.
Ultimately, Lego came up with a new, profitable train set, after inviting the 9-volt enthusiasts to two workshops in Billund to brainstorm and help design it. “If you rock the boat, people will notice,” Mr. Askildsen notes. “They were fighting furiously for us not to give it up, but we were able to turn tension into opportunity.”
The same might be said for Lego as a whole, as it navigates the fiercely competitive toy market and ventures into movies and virtual reality while clinging as best it can to the more innocent, Scandinavian values that made it so popular in the first place.
“In the end, you’ve got to go where your consumer is going,” Mr. Barbour says. “And the reality is that themes and movies are what kids want. There’s no point in developing the best product in the world if you can’t put it on the shelf.”
Link
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)