Politics and Press

The interaction of the press and politics; public diplomacy, and daily absurdities.

Canada

a southern and northern intellectual analyze the Stanley Cup

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#1 – a southerner: Ok i propose 2 loonies pergame and a 5 loonie bonus for winning the series. I understand you might be nervous and not want to bet. That is ok. Let me know.

#2 – a northerner: I doubt that you can afford loonies, so I suspect a trick.  But nevertheless I accept. I’ll be travelling south for a couple of days to see how the other half lives, and spend some toonies in the banana belt.  Will be back on Wednesday in time to see the first loonie go my way.

#1Some trick… The loonie costs me $1.2. Damn. That harper guy must know his stuff.. Playoff hockey is unbelievable.

#2 – after game 1: Why not just pay me now and relax?  Even Obama is refusing to make a bet with  Harper – perhaps he never heard of hockey (or Harper), or perhaps he doesn’t want to fork over anything  to a functioning economy – but you can’t back out now just because this is so one-sided. Estimates here are 7-0 for the first gameif theAmurcan goalie didn’t have a good evening, of course not as good as the Canuck one, one but still.  But can’t you find a power play coach down there? How about double or nothing?  It won’t be a sweep however since we want a couple of more home games and have promised to donate the proceeds to Winnipeg.

#1Between the ref missing the very obvious offside on the goal and the canucks resorting to biting the opponents, it does not look good for the Boston men. I will pass on the double or nothing but note that by betting in loonies I have already given you an extra 2%. Generous to a fault, I am, in despair, almost.
I watched much of the game in a barroom where everyone was asking the same question you ask RE: what is with the power play? Where is it and why is it hiding?
Am i ever glad i cancelled the bet.

#2 That’s not funny.  A guy sticks a finger in your mouth and then they complain when you bite it!  What else can you do with it? My cat does the same thing and doesn’t get a penalty! And these guys and the coaches are all pure laine and it’s an old tradition in maple syrup country to stick your finger in trees and things without being spied upon.
As for off side, that was only off sides if you think that off sides happens when your skate blade doesn’t quite make it back over the blue line, even though you try your very best!  I don’t think so in this day and age. It’s not winning that counts. It’s giving it the old college try!!

#1 can your cat skate? does it know how to stay onside? is it a Canadian cat or an Amurcan cat? These are the relevant questions to ask.

Where you want to live – – the Commonwealth by Jove

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The British magazine The Economist has come out with its annual ranking of most livable cities, and the results, controversial though they may be in the particulars, do indicate in their overall findings a remapping of the desired urban world which would have seemed frivolous only a decade ago. For the fifth straight year, Vancouver is ranked first, which is no surprise. But that 3 of the first 5 cities are in Canada – Toronto (4) and Calgary (5) join Vancouver in this group – and that 7 of the first 10 – Melbourne (2) , Sydney (7), Perth (8), Adelaide (9) and Auckland (10)- are from the British Commonwealth must give the Brits a rare sense of pride in the old colonial empire and the feeling that it did bear some fruit. After all, London itself is only ranked in the mid 50s, just after New York, and only 2 European cities – Vienna (3) and Helsinki (6) make the top ten. In its analysis of this surprising shifting pattern of livability, the Economist find a common denominator: the most livable cities are mid-sized and in wealthy countries with a low population density – Canada and Australia -and are splendidly situated, usually on the coast.

Whatever happened to nuclear power plants?

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They haven’t been much in the headlines of late. The deadly explosion at Tschernobyl happened almost twenty-five years and the blame can easily be put on an antiquated design and negligent maintenance typical of the old Soviet Union. Nothing like that could happen in technically advanced western Europe or North America, could it. Or rather could it? There are countries in those areas that have waffled for so long about whether they can live with nuclear power on their territory that the very plants that they were waffling over have become ancient in nuclear power-plant time, and should be deactivated before they begin to seriously threaten the environment with shaky turbines and leaky pipes and containers. Instead as governments change and attitudes towards nuclear power change with the economic difficulties facing power-short lands anywhere, official positions change with regard to the fate of the old used-up plants. A country like France, which is very dependant on nuclear power plants, has of course a large number of engineers and designers who have had steady employment and lots of experience and know how to build them. But what about the nuclear plant planners in countries like Germany, the USA or Canada, which have not built any new plants for decades, and are now faced with the dilemma of returning to the largely unpopular idea of getting back in the nuclear race? With few experienced experts around to build new plants wouldn’t it make sense to refurbish the old ones.
For a lot of nuclear engineers the answer to that is a clear ‘no’. It is much cheaper, of course, to try to spiff up an old Volvo model than to design and build a new one. But the a “best before” date makes that way of saving money no longer either reasonable or safe with regard to nuclear power plants, and those engineers are hoping that the Swedish government figures that out before it is too late. For of all western countries it is rich Sweden that seems most willing to run the biggest risks by taking the cheap spiff-up solution to its nuclear dilemma. A couple of decades the Swedes voted to show their moral backbone by announcing that all Swedish nuclear power plants would be closed down within a couple of decades from then. Namely now. But governments change in democracies and that original stance by the Social Democrats in defence of safety and the environment has been reversed by the now-ruling conservatives, who maintain (probably with some justification) that Swedish industry cannot run without nuclear power. So thirty to forty-year-old nuclear power plants in Sweden some of which have already had dangerous breakdowns, but have never been decommissioned as they were supposed to have been years ago, are now supposed to be reused after modernization. (Canada has some similar plans.) For many nuclear engineers this is a recipe for disaster since these plants were never designed to be overhauled like this. Many think Sweden will be trying to put a Porsche engine into an old truck and that an accident is just waiting to happen. At least they haven’t yet asked Volvo to provide the engineers for this.

Is America going Third World?

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“Is America going Third World? Bridges crumbling, schools and firehalls closed, streetlights turned off. The U.S. decline goes far beyond job losses and public debt.” That’s the cover story in this week’s edition of Canada’s national magazine, Maclean’s. My goodness. When exactly did that happen, that Canada looks south and is startled to see a country in threatening disarray, fighting fruitless wars it cannot afford or win while letting many of its urban centres turn into wastelands as hundreds of thousands of its citizens lose their homes due to the greed and lack of control of financial institutions. Not to mention a medical system that is great for the rich and non-existent for the poor.

Not very long ago, Canada would have been a laughing stock if it had given the impression that it considered itself to have designed a superior society to the superpower to its south, but that’s no longer the case. All the UN rankings of national liveability rate Canada at or near the top as the US sinks down into the mid-teens. It used to be that Seattle would have been considered a far more interesting city than its northern neighbour Vancouver, and Detroit more cosmopolitan than dull Toronto, but now those are laughable propositions. It used to be that Canadians moved south for better wages and job opportunities (and climate), and of course many still do, but now over a million Americans live in Canada, for the first time since the Vietnam War when Trudeau’s Canada became the refuge for Americans who felt disinherited, many of whom stayed on, making it the fourth-largest immigrant group in one of the major immigration lands.

It is of course perfectly legitimate to point out the hypocrisy of these kinds of articles, as Canada has its own third world problem that has failed to solve: the miserable conditions of far too many First Nations reserves, a true disgrace if the country is as wonderful and rich as this article suggests, the miserable performance of the current government on environmental issues like climate change, a drug problem that is out of control. Not to mention that if the US economy really tanks as many fear it will if it doesn’t stop fighting awful wars soon (what ever happened to you Barack Obama?) it will take Canada down with it part of the way. But the main point is still worth pondering. Has the US so mismanaged its economic and social affairs that its closest neighbour and best friend is right to have legitimate concerns in seeing how it can steady a wallowing ship of state? Let’s hope the hosers are wrong.

In Praise of Prose

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Here are four antidotes to the endless announcements of the death of books and reading. These are prose works written in the last couple of years in four different languages that can hold their own in any discussion of reading material that will keep you glued to the written page.

1: Per Petterson (Norway) – “Kjøllvannet” – In English “In the Wake”. Following up “Out Stealing Horses” with an equally convincing meditation on the power of memory and the importance of appreciating the potential of life before “the axe blow from within”, to quote one of his favourite authors Tomas Tranströmer, strikes home. The narrator talks about the grand perception of memory in another of his favourites, Alice Munro, and his two latest novels show that he has learned from the masters.

2. Daniel Kehlmann (Germany) “Die Vermessung der Welt” – in English, “Measuring the World”.
In his hugely successful novel about genius, Kehlmann juxtaposes the lives and adventures of two German geniuses who met in older age. One, Alexander von Humboldt, let his genius unfold through great exploratory journeys to the ends of the world; the other, Johann Gauss, explored the wonders of mathematics from a solitary room. Kehlmann’s work is also surprisingly funny.

3. Sofi Oksanen (Finland/Estonia) “Puhdistus” in English “Purge”
Oksanen takes on nothing less than the epic of the small Baltic state of Estonia from the Nazi occupation through the Soviet counter-attack and takeover followed by the establishment of an independent state after the fall of the Soviet Union, and the current situation. In a stunning display of narrative control, Oksanen delivers a grand epic through the fates of individuals. Written in Finnish, it may well become the national epic of linguistically-related Estonia.

4. John Vaillant (Canada) “The Tiger”.
Vaillant’s just-published epic of the Russian Far East as seen through the eyes of the last wild tigers in the world and the people who live with them talks the talk and walks the walk. On its way to a climax that will knock your socks off, it tells the extraordinary tale of a world that hasn’t changed much in the last century and whose inhabitants still live in awe and on occasion deadly fear of the tremendously powerful animal who wanders through their mutually-shared taiga.

And now for some tremendous environmental news – the salmon return in record numbers

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After apparently unending terrible stories about the destruction of the environment by oil drilling, global warming, habitat destruction, etc, something amazing has happened that no scientists predicted or could hope for in their wildest dreams. One year after the worst return of sockeye salmon to the Fraser River in history – 1,5 million returned instead of the predicted 12 million and the end of the salmon on the world’s largest free-running salmon river seemed inevitable – the largest run in a century has come from nowhere and stunned both the despairing pessimists and the ever-hopeful scientists.

25 million sockeye salmon are now making their way towards or up the Fraser on the long run to their spawning grounds in the remote heartland of British Columbia and the river is jumping with fish and fishermen who have been allowed to catch salmon for the first time in four years. The spirit of native bands, commercial fishery, recreational fishers and really the whole provincial community has been uplifted by the amazing display of an event that it was assumed would never be seen again. May the force be with it.

World Cup, Bring it on – G8 and G20 meetings, Send them to Baffin Island

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The Canadian government is spending 2,5 billion dollars (yes that is a b), instead of the originally budget 20 million dollars (yes that is an m) to provide security for the upcoming G8 and then G20 conferences, first in backwater Ontario and then in Toronto. Having learned nothing whatsoever from the catastrophic Greek government’s philosophy of living beyond its means, Prime Minister Harper has decided to impress the world by following suit. One of his most creative ventures is to spend who knows how many millions to create an artificial lake with real Muskoka chairs .(i.e. Adirondack chairs in deep south parlance) for the economic wizards of the world to relax in deep in black fly country. Apparently no one told the Alberta-born primo that there are countless lakes up there that you don’t have to build. Then there’s the 8 million dollar fence set up in central Toronto to mimic the Berlin Wall. Nobody told him that Baffin Island is comparatively black-fly free and easily isolated at a thousandth of the price – and it’s certainly also more interesting than Toronto for those sightseeing tours.

The World Cup of Soccer on the other hand is taking place in South Africa, and plenty of those same western experts who will leave Ontario after a week of sound and fury signifying nothing (pace Copenhagen) and had been predicting a disaster in primitive Africa, can settle down before their tv sets and watch a very big public event in which even South and North Korea are both participating . As far as my brother and I can see, the only violence has been in the incessant horn-blowing of the capacity rainbow-coloured crowds. We’re sure there has been some real money spent on security for the month of the tournament in South Africa, but nothing like the absurd amounts being spent for a week in Ontario. So what gives? Can’t we either send those suited economic chaps out onto the soccer pitch in short pants to duke it out for economic bragging rights just like Monty Python sent out the Greek and German philosophers against each other in one of their most compelling skits. In the end they could even exchange shirts and make sweatily embrace the previous enemy. And if they refuse, send em to Baffin Island.

Mrs. Clinton Goes to Ottawa

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The U.S. Foreign Minister, Mrs. Clinton, accepted an invitation to attend a meeting of the Foreign Ministers of the Arctic countries -Canada, the U.S., Denmark, Norway and Russia – this week in Ottawa and, without missing a beat, managed to insult and alienate the government whose invitation she had accepted on three different points. First she chided them for not having invited two other “Arctic” countries to the meeting, Finland and Sweden, making the Canadian Foreign Ministry wonder whether the U.S. even had maps in its Foreign Affairs Office since neither Finland nor Sweden have any coastline on the Arctic Ocean. Don’t even ask why she didn’t include Iceland. Then she told Canada it should not withdraw its troops from Afghanistan in 2011, as it had said it would do some years ago. That made the Canadian Foreign Ministry wonder whether the US Foreign MInistry realized that Canada was a sovereign nation, and that it had certainly done more than its part in the “NATO” war in Afghanistan , and had no intention to let another couple of hundred Canadians be killed in yet another fruitless war in the Hindu Kush. And then she told Canada it should change its abortion policy on foreign aid, strangely forgetting her own government’s failure to include such a policy in its own, by Canadian standards, extraordinarily weak domestic health bill.

On the same day in which she thought it was appropriate to lecture a host who had been cordial enough to invite her, four border guards under her command popped out of the shadows in the shared Vermont/Quebec border town of Stanstead/Upper Derby and captured an 82 year old Quebecker. He had wandered across the invisible border to buy a hamburger in Vermont as he had for many decades and the officers held him in custody for several hours before deporting him 10 meters north, after threatening him with a permanent exile from his once-friendly neighbour. Mrs. Clinton, who had been allowed to cross the border in the other direction without assault, declined comment on why a group of burly, rude border guards had been ordered into a town, where the border runs through the middle of the shared US/Canadian library, to take captive any senior citizens they spotted on their way to MacDonald’s.

les jeux sont finis

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Who would have guessed that the Vancouver Winter Olympics would turn into an event of great national unity, and become what many felt was the best of all Olympic Games. After all it had begun with some glitches and lousy weather? John Furlong, the decent, tenacious and ultimately triumphant organizer of it all said he felt that the turning point came when the obnoxious and snobbish British press, representing a country which managed a total of one medal at the games, printed a series of unfair and untruthful articles that only demonstrated their jealousy at the success of their long-ago colony. These unprovoked attacks managed to unite English, French and allophones and, with some reservations, even First Nations, in a public display of defiance of such attiudes by a former colonial occupier. In any case at some point the pent-up pride, even anger, seemed to transfer itself onto the athletes, who quite suddenly began winning so many events that with their 14 gold medals they not only set an Olympic record but easily relegated Germany with 10 and the US with 9 gold medals to the runner-up positions.

This was an extraordinary example of the configuration of politics and sport, and analysts are beavering away on the question of whether it will have lasting consequences in the forming of a national identity. Certainly the culminating sporting event, the gold-medal men’s hockey final between the US and Canada, which apparently was viewed by 85% of the Canadian population, has already achieved something along that line. All you had to do was observe the behaviour of the 150,00 people who poured out onto the streets of Vancouver after Sidney Crosby scored the winning overtime goal. It was the most dramatic example of two weeks of surging crowds that may have displayed too high spirits at times but streamed through the streets of a major city for 17 days without a single serious incident. The next Olympics will be in London. May the power be with them, but don’t count on it.

Lunching at Sachsen Haus

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Die Sachsen are the only people to have so far outmaneuvered the Olympic bureaucrats that have turned Vancouver into a security training ground for the next potential terrorist attack at a major world event. The security chiefs of the next Olympics in very vulnerable London must be shaking their heads wondering how they can possible protect a very large city with many unhappy people and a complex subway system to the level that the combined police forces of Canada have managed in a large city with a largely contented population and its mountain resort two hours away. The answer is – not easily and certainly not without considerable disruption of the normal affairs of the city.
The German province of Saxony is not a recognized national national concept to the Olympic bureaucrats and therefore should not exist. But the clever Dresdeners rented the Vancouver Rowing Club in gorgeous Stanley Park and are doing a roaring business since no seat is more comfortable than one on the patio of a cafe on the waterfront of Stanley Park on a warm sunny day in British Columbia with a Sächsisch beer and Wurst in hand.
Hundreds of thousands of visitors have come to see the spectacular sports events and cruise the city streets on the lookout for the best entertainment spots in the evening. And lots of them go to the Saxons for both lunch, dinner and entertainment, as the much larger and authorized Dutch, Russian and Swiss houses are jammed to overflowing in the city centre. As for the sports events, it’s been a very good Olympics so far for the Amurcans, Swedes and Swiss, leaving lots of smiling Uncle Sams, Vikings and cowbell ringers wandering about. For the Canajuns it’s been somewhat lala, but the big event has just started, and this promises to be the best hockey tournament ever. Once you’ve seen the Russian, Canadian and Swedish teams in action (the great Peter Forsberg has reappeared out of nowhere for the Swedes and looks fit as a fiddle). you can’t imagine betting against any one of them. If you’ve got a spare $4000 around you can pick up a ticket to the final, and one of those teams will be missing. Don’t miss it.