Two things are absolutely clear about Prime Minister Stephen Harper: he has no hidden agenda and never had one; he is quite desperate for majority rule.

Descriptions of the Conservative government’s Speech from the Throne on Tuesday night as conciliatory are laughable. The throne speech (and subsequent statements made by Harper) had less to do with getting tough on crime (at a moment when crime in Canada, even gun-related crime, is hardly a pressing concern); little to do with undercutting John Manley’s panel on Afghanistan (by indicating the government’s preference to extend the mission beyond 2009); was not really about abandoning Canada’s Kyoto commitments (as the prime minister had already indicated his preference for US President Bush’s self-serving parallel synod on climate change); or any of the other quisling statements made to attract votes. Rather, Mr. Harper’s speech, made after a four month Parliamentary recess — an extended absence designed to prove that Ottawa and Parliament do not matter — was about the reduction of federal spending powers to matters of defence and foreign affairs (that is, weaponry and soldiers and the odd diplomatic mission, at a ratio, probably, of 10:1), granting provinces a veto on all other matters, telling them to create more “tax room” (the subtext of another chop to the GST), and, generally, reversing the flow of Confederation such that Ottawa can never again play a significant role over the commons.
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After a brief grey moment, a weekend to doubt and reflect, Conrad Black is back in the saddle, launching barbs, issuing challenges, regretting nothing. As it must be, his conviction on three counts of mail fraud and one of obstructing justice has become the staging ground for yet another bellicose assault. Black and his wife, Barbara Amiel Black, have manufactured their own particular kind of celebrity and they must now fight to preserve it.

Black’s rekindled engagement in this “long war” (in which he will now “take the gloves off“) is a posture, a necessary stance, if not a necessary fiction. Some time long ago, Black ceased being a maverick businessman, a takeover specialist, a backroom deal-maker, and media baron; he became an icon, a man representative of a way of being, if not of an age or era. In many respects, I sensed, the Chicago trial bored him as much as shareholders’ rights annoyed him: Black had moved on, left the boardroom to write laudatory appraisals of US presidents, to cement his own place in history not as a tycoon but as a man of letters. While worthy in their own right, these biographies cannot escape the subtext of attempts by Black to assert himself within the presidential orbit and as a great man of his time. (more…)

A self-confessed double agent for Saddam Hussein’s notorious intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, and Israel’s Mossad, has returned to Canada. How he engineered his escape, whether Canada delivered a man into torture, and whether Hussein Ali Sumaida has finally found sanctuary, are all part of a haunting, on-going, and disturbing tale.

Click here to read the Walrus Online Exclusive.

We might be burnt to a crisp, but Prime Minister Stephen Harper, if he’s still with us, will still be talking about climate change (or global warming or a strange mild night in December), rather than the obvious, planetary heat, and he will still be blaming the Liberals for the mess we’re in.

In the years leading up to his long term target of a 50 per cent reduction of 1990 greenhouse-gas emissions levels — to credit such an announcement with the term “policy” would be to discredit the more meaningful words “avoidance” and “evasion” — the polar ice cap will have melted and cartography will have become a growth industry, the mapmakers forever scrambling to keep track of vanishing islands, eroding coastlines, and the migration of people inland. (more…)

It always takes long to come to what you have to say,
you have to sweep this stretch of land up around your feet
and point to the signs, pleat whole histories with pins in your mouth
and guess at the fall of words.
– Dionne Brand, “Land to Light On”

Ian McEwan is a master prose stylist, a brilliant and dutiful researcher, and he has a spring-like wit. Interviewing him –- as part of the Harbourfront Centre’s International Festival of Authors –- was both a privilege and a daunting challenge. Though gracious, he is a man who would prefer, I sensed, not to suffer fools at all.

(Click Here to view a video podcast of the interview)

Our topic was On Chesil Beach (published by Knopf Canada), McEwan’s most recent novel and a book of near-perfect construction and organization: five chapters of roughly equal size, each finely calibrated, each sentence carefully crafted, and the whole so fluid that I imagined a “quick write.” While McEwan’s hope, he said, was to produce a novel that could be read in one sitting, I took two and would recommend not rushing. A quick read and you might miss some of McEwan’s delicious humour and/or some of the many subtle clues he drops along the way. (more…)

The Globe And Mail, National Post, and Toronto Star have proved that personality trumps policy. Faced with two big stories on Wednesday April 11 –- Belinda Stronach taking her leave of the federal Liberals and a couple more Canadian soldiers struck down in Afghanistan –- all three papers awarded Stronach the lead story and a large picture for their Thursday editions. The national dailies rendered their judgment and ensured one thing: Belinda Stronach’s celebrity would endure.

The decision was understandable. Mere days earlier, six Canadian soldiers were snuffed out on the killing fields of Kandahar province and, while a difficult, troubling matter, not much more could be said about another two good men lost in the fog of war. The Stronach story, on the other hand, dripped with convenience. The news copy essentially wrote itself or could be easily recycled, and the hoary details of a presumptuous and avaricious woman provided ample ammo for “I told you so” editorials, also recycled. With another strong, forceful, and unpredictable woman, Barbara Amiel, temporarily providing no theatrics (and the Conrad Black trial slipping into the yawn-inducing miasma of non-compete agreements), the search for fireworks settled on Stronach. (more…)

This past weekend’s Globe and Mail was a revelation. History and contemplation made a comeback in the form of Rex Murphy’s clever description of the “nexus” between religion and high art, and in his angry denunciation of Victoria Philharmonic Choir artistic director Simon Capet for bowdlerizing the masters and warping Biblical stories to serve craven artistic ends. “For it is certainly mischievous to take an Old Testament Jewish hero, from a time when there was no “Middle East” and there were no suicide bombers, and to turn this biblical Jewish figure into the prototype of modern-day sectarian slaughtermen,” wrote Murphy. All things, and certainly history, are subject to revision, but when relativism, righteous or not, is the order of the day, Murphy and his honourable ilk will have to fight uphill. Nonetheless, his question remains a good one: “Do we think either of these genuine artists, Milton or Handel, would be pleased to see their creations clotted and maimed with the superaddition of some dilettante and superficial conceit three and four centuries later?”

It is time to revisit not only Milton and Handel, but also Bach and Samson, to brush off some of the old books and discs, to get lost in the past and in high art. (more…)

It is everywhere, in this morning’s Globe and Mail, overheard last night at a downtown bar, on the subway ride into work this morning: “If Harper forces an election…” Exactly how the prime minister will do so is little considered, not part of the speculative sport of the day. Instead, it is assumed that Harper has near absolute power, that he can easily orchestrate his party’s defeat and, subsequently, “force” a spring vote, that the master planner has mastery over all things.

Strange fruit, this talk. For the moment at least, the only way Mr. Harper could achieve his maximalist aim of an election followed by majority Conservative rule is to do something truly inane and, in so doing, scupper his own chances and well-managed credibility. For an election call one of two things must happen: either the opposition parties defeat the government in a non-confidence vote in the House; or, Harper takes a trip to Rideau Hall and says to Michaëlle Jean, “The country is ungovernable, I must relinquish the job of prime minister, dissolve Parliament, and ask the people to elect a new government.” (more…)

The ball whizzes around the perimeter, inside, back out. The talls battle for position. On defence, they contest the pass and guard against back-door cuts. The centre pushes down towards the basket, shoulders bruising his opponent, and receives the ball. Help arrives. Back out. Sinewy, powerful arms stab into the passing lanes. Deny. Deny. On offence, the guards, the smalls, are hard at work, the ball handled as if on a string. Time runs down and the defence asserts itself, intimidates when necessary. This is it: Number one North Carolina versus number two Georgetown, and every advantage must be sought. When it was over, it was not.

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To mark “Freedom to Read Week,” last night at the University of Toronto’s Innis Town Hall Theatre, The Walrus Foundation and Canadian Journalists for Free Expression co-sponsored a panel discussion called “Leaks, Lies & Liability.” The panelists were investigative journalists Marci McDonald and Andrew Mitrovica; journalist and Chair of the School of Journalism at Ryerson University Paul Knox; and media law expert Brian MacLeod Rogers. All four panelists brought a wealth of knowledge and passion to one of the most difficult issues facing journalism today: in light of the Maher Arar affair and the discovery that state officials passed misinformation to members of the press, should the journalists who received this information name their sources?

It would seem a fairly straightforward matter – innocent victims like Arar need to be protected from sources passing off misinformation, and journalists in search of the truth should only gather information from reliable, if still unnamed, sources. Unfortunately, it is not this simple. In the case of Arar, Andrew Mitrovica argued that journalists who wrote damning stories should not only apologize but should also disclose the names of state officials who gave them misinformation. Without such disclosure, asks Mitrovica, what is preventing the same sources from acting in a similar fashion again? While there is no question that the public relies on journalists, and especially investigative journalists, to speak truth to power, to dig up information not in the public domain, and to do their level best to verify all facts, often this work involves explicit contracts of confidentiality with sources providing information that cannot be verified beyond a shadow of a doubt. But if investigative journalism is essential to a functioning democracy, it is also essential that whistleblowers be protected.

The key questions are, should this contract be voided upon the discovery that the source is lying? Does it matter if the source is unaware that he or she is delivering misinformation? What would happen to the necessary evil of confidentiality if sources are outed retroactively? And finally, what should the terms of contract be between journalists and secret sources?

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My former boss, Paul Jay, now chair of the Independent World Television network and senior editor of The Real News, used to say (and no doubt still does), “A single fact, clear and verifiable, will alter the story.” Of course, as David Byrne put it, sometimes facts just “twist the truth around,” but I did find a real eye-opener in today’s Globe And Mail: “In 2007,” writes Clive Doucet, “the City of Ottawa will build a record number of new roads – 200 kilometres.”

Jim Cracky, what the hell is going on?

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In the wake of the Maher Arar affair and considerable discussion about the use of unnamed sources, I read with great interest Jonathan Kay’s editorial in the National Post on February 27, 2007. His article correctly anticipated parliament’s opposition to the extension of preventative arrests and secret extra-judicial hearings, the two most problematic aspects of Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act, according to civil liberties advocates. It also suggests that the Liberal opposition is rooted in deals made prior to the Liberal leadership convention, and that Liberal MP Navdeep Bains was a major broker of such deals.

Under the headline “National security vs. Liberal ethno-politics,” Kay writes:

“Among veteran Liberal insiders, it is believed that the several hundred Sikh [Liberal] convention delegates Bains and his allies led into the Dion camp (via Gerard Kennedy) came with a price: an end to the investigative powers contained in the Anti-Terrorism Act, which was opposed for predictable reasons by various Sikh, Tamil and Muslim organizations.

“Indeed, I am informed by a well-informed source that the critical deals were cut months in advance, and were driven by Bains – and, in the case of Muslim delegates, by Arab-Canadian MP Omar Alghabra – through Kennedy, who’d been staked out early by ethno-politicians as an empty vessel into which they could pour their parochial agenda.

“These machinations should not be confined to history’s footnotes,” Kay continues.

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