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THOMAS MULCAIR: HOW HE WOULD RUN THE COUNTRY P.14

THE PROBLEM WITH ALMONDS P.71

EMMA TEITEL ON SEX PICS HYPOCRITES P.12

We’re treating seniors like they’re financially frail. In fact, they’re the most prosperous generation ever. Why it’s high time they paid up. P.38

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014 macleans.ca

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Taking aim: Polish citizens pass by posters comparing Putin’s policies to Nazi-era tactics in Warsaw. NATO is aiming to thwart Russia’s ambitions. p.30

S E P T E M B E R 1 5, 2 0 1 4 • V O L U M E 1 2 7 • N U M B E R 3 6 The Editorial 5 | Letters 6 | Good News/Bad News 8 | Newsmakers 10 | Interview Thomas Mulcair on how he would run the country 14 Columns Emma Teitel on Hollywood’s nude-photo scandal; Paul Wells on why Harper and Obama have more in common than they think 12

The Quiz 72 | The End John Craig Lowe, 1972-2014 74 National

Economy

Stephen Harper’s secret weapon: As a veteran of Bay Street, Joe Oliver has proven to be surprisingly adept at retail politics— and a pivotal player in an election year ............................................ 18

ON THE COVER: Old and loaded: Why are we doing so much to help seniors when they’re already the wealthiest generation in history?.... 38

Gimme gimme: Want a frenzy in your inbox? Give a federal party

Jason Kirby: Before the fraud case into Sino-Forest’s collapse began, it was clear the outcome would bring satisfaction to no one.............. 44

your email address. Better yet, give it to all of them ...........................26

Econowatch: A scorecard on the state of the economy..................... 45

Leave the kids at home: New age limits on dependents could

COVER: PHOTOGRAPH BY KOUROSH KESHIRI; INSETS: PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW TOLSON; DAVID M. BENETT/GETTY IMAGES; THIS PAGE: ALIK KEPLICZ/AP

hurt thousands of families—and possibly the economy ...................... 27

Society

International

In over our heads: The brain’s evolution hasn’t kept up with the information revolution. How do we clear our cluttered minds? ........ 46

The lines of war: NATO is preparing to bulk up its military presence in Eastern Europe. Will it thwart Putin, or merely prod the bear? ..... 30

Of poison pens and profs: Cyberbullying is well documented, but research is just beginning on students who abuse teachers online ..... 50

Colby Cosh: California’s water woes are entirely man-made. And so is the solution .................................................................................... 34

Trading to extinction: One photographer exposes the cruel reality of the underground animal trade .......................................... 52

What a croque: With restaurant standards slipping and fast food sales soaring, France is struggling to save its culinary image ............. 36

Driven to ecstasy: A near-death experience isn’t enough, it seems, to keep someone from the EDM club scene ........................ 57

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This Week

THE EDITORIAL If the West wants to defend its own values to the rest of the world, Canada is going to have to pick up the slack

L

ast Thursday, U.S. President Barack Obama was in the midst of discussing U.S. air strikes against ISIS in Iraq when he made what’s widely been seen as a major foreign-policy gaffe. Referring to the possibility of future attacks on ISIS inside Syria, he called such speculation premature. Why? “We don’t have a strategy,” he said. He then paused for the briefest of moments before adding the qualifier “yet.”

The notion the U.S. President lacks a plan for dealing with the chaos created by ISIS in the Middle East has been seized upon by his political opponents as evidence of his inability to lead an increasingly dangerous and unstable world. Texas Republican Congressman Louis Gohmert sneered that “Barney Fife is in charge.” Such criticism is unfair. Obama certainly does have a strategy. His strategy is to do less. The big question is whether his allies are prepared to do more.

Since winning the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize just a few months after taking office, it often seems as if Obama has spent the rest of his tenure trying to live up to the honour by orchestrating a dramatic narrowing of America’s military presence around the globe.

Aside from the temporary surge in Afghanistan in 2009 and various small-unit special forces operations, the world is seeing a lot less of G.I. Joe these days.

The reasons are both practical and political: The fiscal-cliff deal in Congress has imposed dramatic cuts on U.S. military spending, which limits operational capabilities, and the American people have grown bone-weary of their role as world cop. A Pew Research Center poll released last week shows more Americans think their country does “too much” to solve world problems rather than “too little.”

(Although isolationist sentiment has receded somewhat since the murder of journalist James Foley.) Where once the U.S. was prepared to “bear any burden, meet any hardship, defend any friend” in support of liberty—as president John F. Kennedy declared in his 1961 inaugural address—Obama has put such grandiose and unlimited commitments in abeyance.

It is as a result of this shrinking U.S. global bootprint that 2014 has seen such a sudden spike in international conflagrations. Besides Syria and ISIS, Russian President Vladimir Putin has brazenly invaded Ukraine, China is stretching its legs in the South China Sea, bedlam reigns in Libya, and so on. All this clearly represents a serious threat to global security and Western values. But, given an increasingly disinterested and reclusive U.S., if the Western world wishes to defend its own values, it’s going to have to pick up the

slack on its own. Doing so will be neither cheap nor easy, but it is entirely necessary. This week’s NATO summit in Wales seems like a good place to start.

During the peak of the Cold War, U.S. military spending represented approximately half the total defence budgets of all NATO countries.

Today, NATO is much bigger, but America’s share is now more than 70 per cent. Some U.S. commentators have taken to suggesting that countries not pulling their weight—all members have pledged to spend at least two per cent of GDP on defence, although only the U.S, Britain, Estonia and Greece do—should be tossed from the organization.

In a sign that some countries may be willing to shoulder a greater burden, British Prime Minister David Cameron last month wrote to his fellow NATO leaders urging a new sense of collective Western commitment, particularly with respect to Ukraine. “It is clear Russia views NATO as an adversary,” he wrote, suggesting NATO return the favour. With respect to military budgets, “I would urge other allies to make the strongest possible commitment to increase their defence spending,” he said.

For Canada, Cameron’s call-out ought to be considered a major embarrassment. While Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird have scolded Putin over his Ukrainian adventures in the sternest possible language, financially strapped Greece is actually doing more to meet its NATO pledge than Canada, which spends a mere one per cent. And the 2014 federal budget actually removed $3.1 billion in capital spending from the defence budget.

It is no longer sufficient for Canada and the rest of the Western alliance to poke holes in the air with our fingers while America does all the hard work to promote international peace and security. As the U.S. recedes from the world stage, it is time for the rest of us to step up and do more.

While Harper and Baird have scolded Putin, financially strapped Greece is actually doing more to meet its NATO pledge than Canada

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This Week

LETTERS Trudeau’s long road Justin Trudeau keeps harping on the middle class (Interview, Sept.

1), which is a small, wealthy elite in today’s Canada. The vast majority of Canadians eke out a living on two part-time jobs, but Trudeau is still obsessed with yesterday’s issue of the declining number of privileged people with cushy, overpaid unionized jobs. We need to face the fact that civil servants, auto and steel workers, and the old folks lucky enough to have bought a nowmillion-dollar house back in the 1970s, when it cost $20,000, are a privileged elite now. A prime minister needs to look out for the interests of Canadians struggling to make ends meet on poverty-line incomes in degrading low-level jobs.

Kheleya Fahrmann, Toronto It appears that the title of the cover story about Justin Trudeau in your Sept. 1 issue, “How he would run the country,” is missing the letter “i.” It should be: “How he would ruin the country.”

Len Skowronski, Calgary Trudeau has never run anything of substance in his life, so we may as well let him practise by running the country.

Wayne Stockton, Regina Your Sept. 1 cover headline promises to tell us how Justin Trudeau would run the country. Politicians like to think they run the country, but that’s more a reflection of their egos than their actual influence. Politicians might lead their parties to power and enact legislation, but those laws are implemented by bureaucrats, regulated by government agencies, judged by courts and enforced by the police. Democratic countries are 6

Meanwhile, back on the farm . . .

‘When government agencies’ research doesn’t match Stephen Harper’s ideology, he opts for “decision-based evidence-making” ’ David A. Walden, Ottawa

Who knew we’d moved this far away from our agrarian past? The “hay fork” pictured in your “Summer of lists” article is really for turning soil, not hefting loose hay onto a wagon or in or out of a barn’s mow. A hay fork is longer, lighter in weight and, generally, has only three slender tines. I guess they’ve kind of gone the way of buggy whips and square hay bales.

Mark Armstrong, Ottawa

Whose side are you on?

“run” not by the politicians, but by government employees and ordinary citizens making personal decisions every day.

Gerold Becker, Thunder Bay, Ont.

and with one foot permanently ensconced in his mouth.

W.P. Kinsella, Yale, B.C.

Made in prison

In your “Summer of lists” feature, it’s mentioned that “goods manufactured or produced wholly or in part by prison labour” are banned from entering Canada.

Huge multinational companies make good use of cheap, readily available prison labour in the U.S. Surely Canada imports a fair bit of prison-made merchandise; in the past, subcontractors for Starbucks, Victoria’s Secret, JC Penney, IBM and Microsoft have used prison labour. I would also bet that whatever government agency controls the border knows this, and looks the other way. The media are full of reports of “slaves” in China, but they only have to look south of the border to see that the United States Trudeau is the Ted Baxter of Can- is doing exactly the same thing. adian politics: pretty, but empty, Brian Mahoney, Toronto I hope Justin Trudeau brings back Paul Martin and Ken Dryden’s proposed National Child Care Program if he becomes prime minister. We do too little for early childhood education; teachers in the higher grades see the challenges many years later of kids who don’t get a good head start.

A nationwide early intervention program could help level the playing field. We would’ve had it already, if Jack Layton and Stephen Harper hadn’t put their political ambitions ahead of our nation’s children.

Colin MacEachern, Cole Harbour, N.S.

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

Jonathon Gatehouse’s article about the Israel-Gaza crisis (“The blame game,” International, Aug. 18) repeats the calumny of the required proportional response by Israel: that is, the terrorist group Hamas can fire as many rockets as it wants at Israel, but Israel is supposed to just take defensive action because any offensive action will be deemed too much by the bien pensants in the West. When the Palestinians have the audacity to ask the International Criminal Court to charge Israel with war crimes, there is not a sentence about the heavy death toll being largely due to Hamas’s practice of using Palestinians as human shields, not a sentence about the speciousness of the many claimed as civilians who are in reality Hamas fighters, not a sentence about Israel being the only democracy in the cesspool of the Arabic Middle East. Thus, Hamas continues its slaughter of the Palestinians under the cover of praise from the “progressive West.”

Bevelyn MacLise Park, Calgary

Money can’t heal the pain The petition by one of Russell Williams’s victims, Laurie Massicotte, to amend the Canadian Forces Superannuation Act so she could get her hands on his pension is

ridiculous, to say the least (“The killer and his pension,” National, Aug. 18). If she wins, do you really think she will be well and fully compensated? Don’t get me wrong: I sympathize with her, but no amount of money, nor fortune, would compensate for what she and the family of the other victims went or are still going through. It is a tedious and hard process, but one is only at peace with oneself and what happened when one learns to accept and totally forgive, which, eventually, frees one from the burden and hatred within.

Karen D. Apostol, Medicine Hat, Alta.

A wee dram of fear I believe a “Yes” win in the referendum for Scottish independence will have significant implications for Ireland (“Disunited kingdom,” International, Sept. 1). You mention that the makers of Glenfiddich malt whisky donated $183,000 to the Better Together campaign.

Independence from Britain in 1921 had a devastating impact on the Irish whiskey industry. Prior to independence, Irish whiskey distillers were producing five million gallons per year, compared to 100,000 gallons produced in Scotland. As part of independence negotiations, Britain attempted to continue claiming the excise tax on Irish whiskey production. Ireland’s natural disagreement with this position resulted in a trade war with Britain that imposed a sales tax on Irish whiskey in Britain and throughout its colonies, its main market. Most of the 28 licensed distilleries in Ireland were forced to close, with only three remaining in the Irish Republic and two in the north of Ireland.

Under this new environment, Scottish whisky production flourished.

It would be an interesting twist of fate if Scottish independence again creates a fair playing field for both styles of wonderful whisk(e)y.

Bill Ryding, Frankford, Ont.

Museum of human blights Winnipeg’s Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR) is not

a thing of beauty, any way you look at it (“An outlaw’s vision,” Exhibit, Aug. 18). It is ugly in the sense that its drab, disorderly external appearance looms over Winnipeg’s city centre like some sinister rogue spaceship that has mysteriously landed to dominate the skyscape. It is ugly in the sense that it hoarded money that could have been used for far more efficacious humanitarian purposes, such as badly needed strategies to alleviate the city’s ongoing innercity poverty. And the CMHR is ugly in the sense that its primary raison d’être is to promote

or that it has lost its research capabilities (“Damn the experts.

Full steam ahead!” National, Sept.

1). The same has happened in many other departments and agencies where research and indepth examination of issues has yielded results that do not support the government’s ideology or political agenda. This approach is best summed up by a new approach to public policy: “decision-based evidence making.”

David A. Walden, Ottawa

It is unfair to compare a disease without any known cause to heart disease, which has many known causes, mitigation and treatment.

To call the ice bucket challenge a marketing gimmick is also unfair.

This was a publicly initiated activity to raise awareness, and not advocated by ALS Canada in any way.

Sure, ALS has won a lottery without buying a ticket, but it is a deserving organization that needs funding just to make the short lives of those diagnosed with ALS easier.

Alan Pentney, Calgary

An icy reception

Scott Gilmore feels ALS isn’t My wife of 35 years passed away in March of this year after suffering a tremendously painful two-year battle with ALS. After more than 30 years as a personal trainer, fitI don’t care how many people get ALS. If it is a ness instructor and runner, she finally lost her battle after many loved one, it is one too many (“Let’s put this cammonths of not being able to speak, paign on ice,” Society, Sept. 8). My husband has swallow or breathe. Her body was had ALS for 14 years. He lost his income, his abilravaged, and she was forced to undergo many very unpleasant ity to feed himself, to walk, to turn a page in a procedures with no anaesthetic book, to breathe on his own, to eat and drink. He because of her lack of ability to breathe. She had tubes everyis one of the fortunate ones. He can still talk and where for medications that had he lived long enough to see his two children grow to be administered hourly, day up to be adults. Not everyone with ALS is that and night. Scott Gilmore should actually take the time to speak to lucky. Some children die from ALS; imagine havsomeone who is suffering from this ing a child with this dreaded disease. When Terry disease before writing such garbage Fox and Rick Hansen raised millions, did about the wonderful people who are actually trying to fund research people rain on their parade? for this disease.

Karen Letendre, Sicamous, B.C. David Barrett, Vancouver the selective historical horror of deserving of the funding it is the Jewish Holocaust, above and currently receiving, compared CLARIFICATION beyond any other genocides, such to other causes (“Let’s put this The article “Second-class chilas the genocidal activity against campaign on ice,” Society, Sept dren” (National, July 21) stated pre-European Americans in all 8). Not once did he mention the that students in Grades 8 to 12 at the Americas, from Columbus quality of life of someone with Skeetchestn Community School on—or other human rights atroci- ALS, how quickly the disease in B.C. were taught on a hometies, such as Israel’s mistreatment progresses, or that it can, within school curriculum. That applies of the Palestinians. months, take away the sufferer’s only to students in Grades 11 and ability to do anything for him- 12, who are taught a provincially Brian W.A. MacKinnon, self. ALS might have a “high dol- approved distance-education proWinnipeg lar amount per death” ratio, as gram in a classroom under the A before Q far as fundraising statistics are guidance of a teacher.

It should not come as a surprise concerned, but I’m sure that if We welcome readers to submit to anyone that Stephen Harper’s you ask someone dying of ALS letters to either letters@macleans.ca government has reduced the cap- if the ratio of $3,382 per death or to Maclean’s, 11th floor, One Mount Pleasant Road, Toronto, acity of the Department of Justice’s is too much, he will have some- Ont. M4Y 2Y5. Please supply your criminal law policy section to the thing to say about it—if he is still name, address and daytime telephone number.

Letters should be less than point where “it is not operating able to speak.

300 words, and may be edited for in a manner that is sustainable,” Jenna Rogerson, Barrie, Ont. space, style and clarity.

GOOD POINT

MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

7

This Week

High and dry: Sixteen-year-old Annaleise Carr completed her marathon, 75-km swim across Lake Erie, raising more than $190,000 for cancer research

GOOD NEWS British Prime Minister David Cameron is proposing new legislation that will make it easier for authorities to combat a disturbing trend: Westerners fleeing the free world to wage war alongside Islamist militants. The law would allow police to seize passports from residents planning to join violent groups such as ISIS, which beheaded yet another journalist this week, and ban fighters from returning to the country. Canada, meanwhile, has announced its own countermeasures, including “targeted interventions” aimed at counselling youths who have embraced fanatical Islam. Alone, neither initiative will curb what has become an all-too-familiar problem. But it’s a start.

more than 1,500 people and left entire towns under quarantine. But amid fears of a global epidemic come signs of hope. An experimental treatment developed by researchers at the Public Health Agency of Canada has proven widely effective during clinical trials on Ebolainfected monkeys; all 18 who received the vaccine (a blend of three antibodies known as ZMapp) fully recovered from the virus. At the same time, human trials are about to begin on a second vaccine co-developed by the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline.

The medication can’t arrive soon enough.

Justice must be seen to be done

It won’t turn back the clock, but it may prevent the past from repeating itself. In Ferguson, Mo.—the St. Louis suburb that erupted The race for a cure into weeks of furious protests after a white An Ebola outbreak in West Africa has killed cop shot an unarmed black teenager—police 8

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

officers are now armed with something other than guns: body cameras. An increasingly common tool for law enforcement agencies, the wearable recording devices will help separate fact from fiction in contentious cases such as the altercation that ended with the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown. In this modern age of technology, deciphering the truth is always easier with instant replay.

Obesity is a state of mind Why do we crave chips instead of cucumbers?

Or chocolate cake instead of cherries? Because most of us have trained our brains to desire junk food. The good news? A new study says we can reprogram our minds to be addicted to healthy alternatives—by sticking to a strict, low-calorie diet for six months. In time, the researchers say, we’ll instinctively crave fruits and veggies over pies and ice cream.

DANIEL R. PEARCE/SIMCOE REFORMER

Homegrown solution

‘Revolutionary March’: Protesters beat a riot policeman during an Islamabad demonstration aimed at dislodging Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif

BAD NEWS

FAISAL MAHMOOD/REUTERS

No more teachers, no more books It was back to school this week for students across the country—except in British Columbia, where a bitter teachers’ strike has led to cancelled classes and furious parents. The province and the union remain far apart on key contract issues, from wage hikes to signing bonuses to benefits, and a settlement looks nowhere in sight. The education minister is promising to give parents up to $40 a day to cover the cost of temporary daycare—a “bribe,” according to the president of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation. Perhaps both sides should try channelling their inner kindergarten student—and learn to compromise.

to allow major voting reforms in Hong Kong.

Insisting that candidates for the city’s top leadership position must “love the country, and love Hong Kong,” China’s Communist Party enacted numerous procedural barriers that will ensure Beijing keeps a firm grip on the post. For Hong Kong’s legislature, the options are bleak: adopt a voting plan based on China’s demands, or keep the current system, in which the leadership position is not elected by voters.

A cruller fate

Canada’s favourite coffee shop enjoyed a banner week on stock markets—but not in front of Ontario’s Human Rights Tribunal. Fresh Chinese intervention off its megadeal with Burger King, Tim HorIgnoring months of protest rallies calling for tons was ordered to pay $12,500 plus three free, democratic elections, China’s legislature months worth of lost wages to a former resdid what most observers expected, refusing taurant designer who was fired, in part, because MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

she suffered from a disability that forced her take time off work. “The decision to terminate the applicant’s employment was influenced by discriminatory factors,” the tribunal concluded in an exhaustive ruling. “[She] is entitled to monetary compensation for injury to dignity, feelings, and self-respect.”

We repeat: don’t drink and drive Why is that message still not getting through to some people? Olympic sprinting champion Donovan Bailey was fined $1,500 and barred from getting behind the wheel for a year after pleading guilty to a drunk driving charge. An off-duty police officer from Brantford, Ont., is facing similar charges after a crash left a friend clinging to life. And in Alberta, a 21-year-old man was clocked at 149 km/h— and well over the legal alcohol limit—with six children in the back of his minivan.

9

No love lost: Canadian tennis star Milos Raonic lost to the 10th-seeded Kei Nishikori of Japan during a late-night marathon match at the U.S. Open

Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt A decade ago, two of Hollywood’s biggest names played a married couple (and assassins) in Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Now, they’re married for real (though minus any careers in contract killing): Jolie and Pitt tied the knot in Correns, France, where they own a vineyard. All six Jolie-Pitt kids took part in the private ceremony. Tabloid editors, who’ve long speculated about when a wedding would finally happen, must be breathing a sign of relief.

The couple, however, don’t have time to relax in matrimonial bliss, as both have high-profile fall movies—Fury for Pitt, Unbroken 10

for Jolie—to promote on the film kaw Lake, their canoe capsized festival circuit. and the couple were separated.

Enid, who has extensive wilderDanny the police dog ness experience, swam to shore— One of the iconic images from and managed to survive in the the Moncton shooting in June, remote area for eight days, with which killed three RCMP officers, only minimal supplies. (Accordwas a German shepherd sitting ing to the CBC, she recovered her by the flag-draped coffin of Const. husband’s backpack, which conDavid Ross, his handler. Now, tained a sleeping bag and fireafter three months off the job, starting kit, but no food.) On Aug. Danny is returning to duty. Fol- 26, David’s body was recovered. lowing Ross’s funeral, Danny was Ten hours later, Enid was spotted brought back to the RCMP dog- from a rescue plane. training facility in Innisfail, Alta., to train and bond with a new handler, who has yet to be identified. Danny “is one of our top dogs,” says Insp. André Lemyre, the officer in charge of RCMP Police Dog Services.

Enid Dice The 62-year-old Prince Albert, Sask., woman had just begun a canoe trip on the Churchill River with her 66-year-old husband, David, when disaster struck. On a set of rapids entering Kinosas-

Lilia Ratmanski and Melana Muzikante En route to Cuba aboard a Sunwing flight, two Toronto-area

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

women got so “unruly” the plane had to turn back to Pearson airport—complete with military escort. Ratmanski, 25, and Muzikante, 26, allegedly ducked into the aircraft’s lavatory to drink duty-free alcohol, and triggered the smoke alarm with a lit cigarette. According to Sunwing, the pair then got into a physical fight— with each other—before making a threat against the aircraft. The 737 flew home with two NORAD fighter jets as an escort. Both women face charges.

James Costello After suffering serious injuries in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, the 31-year-old told the Today show that he’s “glad [he] got blown up,” because that’s how met his future wife: nurse Krista D’Agostino, who tended to Costello through painful skingraft operations and rehabilitation. The two recently married in Boston, and are off to Hawaii on a honeymoon.

ADAM HUNGER/REUTERS; JULIAN PARKER/UK PRESS/GETTY IMAGES; AARON VINCENT ELKAIM/CP

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This Week

THE COLUMNISTS

EMMA TEITEL

FANS AND STALKERS, WE CLICK ON IT ALL Early on in Notes on a Scandal, a 2006 film about voyeurism and unrequited love, Barbara Covett (Judi Dench), a spinster school teacher-turned-stalker, sits down to lunch for the first time with the object of her obsession: a beautiful, affluent art teacher named Sheba (Cate Blanchett), who proceeds to tell Barbara her entire life story, unsolicited. Barbara’s voice-over soon chimes in: “It’s a peculiar trait of the privileged,” she says. “Immediate, incautious intimacy.”

For the privileged person who also happens to be famous, however, the trait in question is turned on its head. A celebrity—especially a female one—isn’t prone to incautious intimacy, but involuntary intimacy. She doesn’t have to dish about her secrets over lunch, because whether she likes it or not, we’re bound to discover not only who she is but also what she looks like naked.

For proof look no further than the present: as I write this, the FBI is investigating a major case in the United States, where one or more hackers stole and leaked numerous nude photos of more than 100 female celebrities on to the image-sharing site 4chan, from Academy Award-winner Jennifer Lawrence and supermodel Kate Upton right on down to lesser-knowns such as Jessica Brown-Findlay, a.k.a. Lady Sybil on Downton Abbey.

The public, equal parts fan and stalker, has eaten this up, either condemning the mali12

cious pervert(s) who leaked the photos or tabloid kings are made to apologize for exploitperving out themselves. ing their subjects and merely viewing leaked I’d be a fraud if I didn’t admit that the first nudes is compared earnestly to sexual assault. thing I did upon hearing about the leak, while It may be, as Ashley Csanady argues on Cansurfing the Internet in bed on Labour Day ada.com, that “leaked nude pics of celebrities morning, was to immediately and frantically cross the Internet’s own line . . . The swift, search for the photos. I even became indig- raucous outcry suggests we haven’t given nant at one point when the folder labelled up our collective decency to social media “Rihanna” wouldn’t open. “But they prom- yet,” she writes.

On the contrary, I think we gave it up a ised she’d be in there,” I muttered to myself impatiently like a child disappointed with her long time ago. At least I don’t recall being gifts on Christmas morning. (Some on Reddit ashamed in 2004, after viewing 1 Night in have dubbed the scandal “the Fappening,” Paris, the leaked sex tape of heiress Paris Hilin reference to “fapping,” a commonly used ton (in which she interrupts coitus to answer her cellphone) or Kim K Superstar, the leaked Internet synonym for masturbation.)

Then I checked Twitter. The avalanche of sex tape of reality-TV star Kim Kardashian. support for the actresses and musicians in North America took so-called slut shamthe photos, Jennifer Lawrence in particular, ing to a new level when these women were seemed unending. So was the condemna- exposed without their consent, yet we show tion of people like me, who though basic- enormous compassion for Jennifer Lawrence. ally moral in every other sense, felt entitled Why? Because the former are talentless attento the intimacies of celebrition whores and the latter is ties’ lives. Comedian Ricky Streep in training. The I BECAME INDIGNANT Meryl outrage at hackers and voyGervais, who later tried to AT ONE POINT soften his position by tweeteurs this time around isn’t ing a nude bathtub selfie, proof that human decency is WHEN THE FOLDER was excoriated as a “victim making a comeback on social LABELLED ‘RIHANNA’ media, or that we respect blamer” for tweeting that celebrities would be wise women’s bodies more than WOULDN’T OPEN not to keep nude pictures of themselves on their computers. Perez Hilton, arguably the highest-profile celebrity blogger in the world, issued an apology for posting a censored version of the photos of Lawrence on his website— the journalistic equivalent to the Toronto Star apologizing for publishing photos of Rob Ford smoking crack, or the Washington Post deciding to keep Watergate under wraps. Clearly something is afoot in our culture when SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

ROBYN BECK/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

Emma Teitel on the nude-photo scandal that’s shaking up Hollywood; Paul Wells on why Harper and Obama are more alike than they’d admit

we did a decade ago. It’s proof that we respect Jennifer Lawrence—a lot. (It should be noted that the sympathetic coverage of the leak has focused almost exclusively on Lawrence, and not the other, lesser stars involved). Moreover, it proves that we are almost exactly like our grandparents, who divided half the world into “respectable women” and “tramps,” and also found it easier to sympathize with the former. Our sympathy doesn’t stem then, from a new, progressive attitude but an oldfashioned one. We can pat ourselves on the back the day we’re as outraged about the violation of America’s bimbos as we are about its sweethearts.

Have a comment to share? emma.teitel@macleans.rogers.com

PAUL WELLS

JIM WATSON/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

TWO MEN WHO CAN’T AGREE TO DISAGREE Stephen Harper and Barack Obama spoke by phone on Aug. 30. The White House “readout” of the call—the bland paragraph-length summary that gets sent out after every such conversation— said the two men discussed the NATO summit in Wales and the “situation in Iraq.” The readout from the Prime Minister’s Office said the same. The White House added: “The President stressed that agreement on increased defence investment in all areas is a top priority at the NATO Summit.” The PMO didn’t mention that part.

Of course it didn’t. Obama’s country spent about 3.8 per cent of GDP on national defence last year, down from 4.7 per cent in 2010, when spending was higher and the U.S. economy was a good deal weaker. Harper’s government spent one per cent of GDP on defence.

That’s less than Germany does, and less than

France, and less than Russia and Estonia do, But again, the differences are mostly as a fraction of total national wealth. Why, rhetorical, if not misleading. Obama and it’s even less than Canada spent when Paul Harper were both reluctant to arm the SyrMartin was the prime minister. And it’s way ian opposition, for fear that extremist groups below NATO’s suggested level of two per cent there would be strengthened. With the rise of GDP for each member country’s defence of ISIS, their modesty looks becoming in retrospect. The two men worked together budget.

There are all kinds of reasons for our mod- with others to provide military cover for esty as a warrior state. Harper is trying to the rebellion against Moammar Gadhafi. It eliminate his budget deficit without cutting worked great for 2011; who brags about the transfers to individuals (for results there today? pensions, mostly) or provThere is not, in fact, OBAMA’S STRATEGY inces (for health care and going to be a military soluISN’T FAR FROM social services). That leaves tion in Ukraine, except the only programs run out of HARPER’S: AVOIDING BIG one imposed from Moscow.

Ottawa to cut, and defence The same was true in Huncuts are easy: Armoured per- FIGHTS WHILE PUSHING gary in 1956, Prague in 1968 A HUNDRED LEVERS sonnel carriers don’t comand Poland in 1981, when plain to reporters when you stern and sturdy men held stop buying them. the office Obama occupies today. The only But if Russian President Vladimir Putin’s solution to Putin’s adventures is to draw a adventures in eastern Ukraine are an existen- deep line around NATO with jets and artiltial fight between good and evil, then prudent lery, pray Putin doesn’t test it, and try to budgeting really shouldn’t enter into it. The wreck the Russian economy in the meanPrime Minister suggested as much in a speech time. On this, Harper and Obama, who can last month to a group raising funds for a barely stand to talk to each other, do not memorial to the victims of Communism. disagree, except that Obama wishes Harper “Canadians have always supported freedom would pay more of the bill.

Why is Obama such an unsatisfying leader? and democracy for all people,” he said, “and we will not hold back that support now from Partly it’s temperament. But there are two other reasons. First, he inherited three related the people of Ukraine.”

It’s reasonable to suspect that Harper will predicaments: the wars in Iraq and Afghanemerge from the Wales summit with a commit- istan and a collapsing domestic economy. ment for renewed Canadian defence spending. Fixing the third meant ending the first two.

But he sure won’t nearly quadruple the depart- He kept George W. Bush’s last defence secment’s budget. Suddenly, it becomes harder retary, Bob Gates, who left the post saying than it seemed to identify the hawk and the any man with his job who advised a big American war abroad “should have his head dove in any picture of Harper and Obama.

Sure, there are important nuances. Harper examined.” visited Ukraine early, in March and again in The other reason is that Obama is seekJune. Obama, who sends Vice-President Joe ing to accomplish by stealth what Bush Biden or Secretary of State John Kerry to do couldn’t with big traditional invasion forces: most such visits, hasn’t been yet. And, of sap and disorient America’s enemies in a course, Harper spends way more time talk- thousand small ways, with drones, special ing the way columnists like to hear leaders forces, cyberwarfare and more. Little of talk. Obama says things like, “We don’t have Obama’s aggression abroad is announced a strategy yet,” when it comes to ISIS and, with pomp. Some is never revealed at all.

“There is not gonna be a military solution,” He wants results, not rhetoric, to triumph.

It’s early to take the measure of his strategy, when it comes to Ukraine.

Add the mounting pile of trouble on but it’s what you might try, too, if you’d Obama’s watch—Ukraine, ISIS, Hamas, sav- inherited two wars and the U.S. economy. ages cutting reporters’ heads off, savages It’s not that far from the way Harper conshooting down passenger jets, Egypt and the ducts domestic politics in Canada, avoiding United Arab Emirates launching their own big fights, pushing a hundred other levers, air strikes in a Libya that has regressed from many hidden. Even in ruins, the Harperauthoritarianism into anarchy—and you have Obama relationship continues to fascinate, an image of a president adrift. It’s a near- because the two men have more in common certainty that, when Harper runs for re-elec- than either will ever admit. tion in 2015, he will contrast Canada’s steady On the web: For more Paul Wells, visit his blog at macleans.ca/inklesswells hand with Obama’s waffling.

MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

13

THE INTERVIEW

BY PAUL WELLS · If there’s going to be a happy warrior in the 2015 election, then, by God, Tom Mulcair is determined it’ll be him. The NDP leader arrived at Toronto’s Rogers headquarters, fresh from a Labour Day parade, and remained determinedly upbeat through a half-hour conversation. Next year’s election campaign is already under way, he said. He hinted at what the NDP will promise on business taxes, carbon pricing, child care, the Senate and more. The past year has been frustrating for the man who replaced the revered Jack Layton as head of Parliament’s first NDP official Opposition. Too much of the spotlight, for his taste, has gone to Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau. But if ever a leader has relished an uphill fight, it’s Mulcair.

Q: You are off to Edmonton for your national caucus retreat. I have this image of every MP vanishing into a chute. When they come out the end of it, there will be a new prime minister, or the one we’ve got now. Is this essentially a pre-electoral session of Parliament?

A: No question. Everything that the government’s going to be doing for the next year, 14

everything we’re going to be doing as the Opposition, has one objective in mind: forming the government. We’d love, for the first time in Canadian history, to have an NDP government, and that’s what we’re working toward.

Q: What are you going to do to achieve that?

A: We’re going to keep putting substantive things on the table, which we started doing just over a year ago. [Prime Minister Stephen] Harper announced, without ever telling anyone in advance that this was something he was thinking of, in Davos, Switzerland, that Canadians now have to work until 67 to receive their pension. I remember the 2011 campaign where he never mentioned that to Canadians. We’re going to call him out on that and ask what else is he hiding, if he ever gets re-elected. The NDP is going to roll that age back from 67 to 65. We’ve already started to talk that, if there is a surplus, we’ll avoid the reduction in the transfers that the Conservatives have already announced. Remember that [former finance minister Jim] Flaherty, after no discussion or debate, simply announced that there would be as much as $36 billion less transferred to the provinces.

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

What we’re saying is that, if you have a surplus, it’s a false one, because you’re planning that cut—then make sure it goes over to health care as a priority. This fall, you’ll hear us talk about child care. I’ve been going across Canada, listening to parents, talking with provincial authorities. It’s a big issue for us. The Liberals got rid of the federal minimum wage the last time they were in power—you’ll hear us talking a lot about that, as well.

Q: So let’s start to add some of this up: pensions back to age 65, stopping the closure of post offices, holding up the rate of health care transfers to what it had been for the last several years, and reopening veterans’ centres. That’s a lot of money.

A: Nine veterans’ centres does not cost a lot of money. In fact, in the overall budgets of the government, it was more of a slap in the face to those brave men and women than anything else. And, yes, we will reopen those nine offices. The post office made a profit 18 out of the last 19 years. The only year it didn’t was when the Conservatives locked out the workers. It was bad-faith bargaining from the word go, because they wanted to create a

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREW TOLSON

Thomas Mulcair, leader of the Opposition, on a PM who won’t talk to anyone, fair taxes, dealing with Quebec, and winning the next election

This Week

condition where they could play that game of forcing them back to work. It came as Jack Layton’s last work in Parliament. It was also an opportunity for Canadians to get to know the young women and men who were in our caucus, and it gave them the ability to develop their chops on a tough issue, the longest filibuster in Canadian parliamentary history.

Q: Post offices and veterans’ centres don’t cost a lot, but pensions and health transfers still do.

A: These numbers were run by [former parliamentary budget officer] Kevin Page. There was no reason except for ideology to move the age of retirement from 65 to 67. Page couldn’t have been clearer: He ran the numbers and the system was sustainable the way it was. And if you really believe in something and you’re the Prime Minister of Canada, do you go to the Swiss Alps to make that announcement? Or do you have the courage to go to Sudbury, [Ont.] and tell hard-rock miners that they don’t work hard enough and need to do it for another couple of years?

I know which choice Stephen Harper made.

I’d talk to Canadians, straight up.

Q: Straight up, then, how are you going to get the revenues for your spending promises?

A: Unlike the Liberals, who say they aren’t going to touch anything, we’ve been clear that the only Canadians who haven’t been paying their fair share are Canadian corporations.

They’ve had their tax level dropped way below the OECD average, way below what the Americans are paying. All the things that cost the general public a lot through their taxes, corporations—who use that money to generate profit—should be paying their fair share. Mr. Harper doesn’t believe in that, but we do.

Q: In your speech to the Canadian Medical Association, you talked about $50 billion in corporate tax cuts, with $36 billion being paid for by health transfers. Is that about the scale of the corporate income tax increases you’re looking at, $50 billion?

A: We will make sure that Canadian corporate taxes stay below what the Americans have been charging, because we’ve always had the competitive gap. We need to make sure Canada remains an attractive place to invest. We’ll also wind up below the OECD average, but we’re so far below both right now, it doesn’t make any sense. And the order of magnitude that you’re discussing? No, we won’t put things back to exactly where they were before. We’re going to make sure Canada remains competitive, but also ensure corporations pay their fair share, which they aren’t doing right now.

We’ve lost the balance in our tax system.

Q: Are you anticipating any revenues from some kind of carbon pricing mechanism?

A: We’re going to have revenues, because there’s going to be a price on carbon, and that money is going to be paid over immediately for purposes that have to do with the environment.

In other words, Canada will become a major player in green renewables. Right now, we’re not a major player, because our current government doesn’t believe our state has a role to play. But we think it’s the key to creating the next generation of well-paid jobs in our country.

Q: I’m catching up with you in Toronto, where there are 30-odd federal seats within several miles of us. Do the people of Toronto know Tom Mulcair well enough?

A: I’m certainly doing what I can to make that the case.

We’ve been multiplying our presences here, trying to go to a range of cultural and business events. When I came out of Quebec politics, I was a well-known figure, but less so federally. Jack gave me an excellent opportunity to shine in Ottawa when he made me the deputy leader. But there’s no question that my family name might be common in Ireland, but less so here. We’re trying to increase our profile and let people know we’re continuing the proud tradition of the NDP. Q: I often remind people that, in 2011, most NDP seats were in Quebec, but most of its voters are outside of Quebec and that’s a difficult— A: Equation?

Q: Yes, it’s hard to strike a balance: Quebec is a distinct society. Do you often find yourself having to arbitrate between your Quebec base and reaching beyond it?

A: Across Canada and within Quebec, people are reacting very well to our MPs. So I watch them and I watch how people react to them— I’ve been in this game a long time, I’ve got some subjective analysis—and they’re doing great. That’s the positive side of what Jack put together. The 2006 offer, the Sherbrooke Declaration, without reopening the Constitution, simply answering some of the longstanding requests Quebec has had that don’t take anything away from anyone—that’s the way to go, as far as we were concerned. And Quebecers were ready for that sea change: rejecting the Bloc [Québécois] because all they could do was block, and wondering if they could make things work while staying part of Canada; that’s the hope for the future.

Q: Are you ruling out constitutional change to accommodate Quebec’s traditional demands?

A: It’s not on the table. It doesn’t mean these things couldn’t be constitutionalized at a later date, but I think Canadians have always seen this as the third rail for the whole country.

Q: You’re talking about a substantial increase in health transfers over what the Conservatives have planned. Would you ask for some kind of deal in return from the provinces?

A: It’s not that hard. If you do it right, you can get the best practices on the table. I’ve heard, “The federal government should be doing X to require Y of the provinces.” But, in this case, the federal government is itself a health care provider—about 20 per cent across the country, when you add together veterans, penitentiaries and First Nations. I think some of the federal health care practices are worth copying, but, otherwise, I don’t know that it has that many lessons to offer the provinces and territories. Even so, Stephen Harper hasn’t once met with the Council of the Federation. You can’t run a country like Canada if you don’t talk to your partners. We’ve undertaken to have two meetings a year, one in Ottawa and one in a province or territory on a rotating basis to ensure we work together.

Q: Would the Prime Minster attend both meetings?

A: I would, as prime minister.

Q: Would they ever get a chance to meet alone?

A: As often as they want. But the Council of the Federation was a hopeful sign that an era of bickering was now over. Instead, we got a Prime Minister who won’t talk to anyone else.

He won’t talk to journalists, either. I’m not afraid to talk to either.

‘There was no reason but ideology to move the retirement age to 67. If you’re the PM, do you go to the Alps to announce it?’

MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

15

Eyes on the prize: Mulcair says, ‘My attention is on Stephen Harper,’ and not on Justin Trudeau

Q: Would a prime minister Tom Mulcair show up at one of these Council of the Federation meetings with a proposal to abolish the Senate? And how would he do on that day?

A: Well, I’ve been doing that for a couple of years now. I’ve been going across the country, whether it’s meeting with Premier [Robert] Ghiz in P.E.I. . . . He was quite clear with me; he’s not going to fight to keep senators.

He does want to keep his four MPs, and that wouldn’t be a hard deal to make. We believe that, in this day and age, having this simulated House of Lords dictating to the elected what they can and can’t do is an absurdity. In Quebec City, [the former upper house, abolished in 1968] is a lovely meeting room, and in the House of Commons, we think the Senate would make the ideal daycare.

Q: The Supreme Court says: Not so fast; you need the consent of every provincial legislature.

A: I don’t disagree with that. In fact, I just said that.

Q: Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard says he doesn’t want to play.

A: Well, Philippe Couillard said something a little bit more substantial than that. He had a series of things, looking at what he would call traditional demands, or requests. Those would include the ability to opt out of federal spending in areas of exclusive provincial jurisdiction. Go to the Sherbrooke Declaration: You don’t need constitutional change to have that sort of arrangement between Quebec

and the federal government, so the things he’s set down could easily be answered. If you look at the Sherbrooke Declaration, it’s there— most of it. The only one that requires a little bit of fine tuning is, he’s talking about exclusive jurisdiction on immigration. Obviously, Canada’s a country, there’s going to have to be continued co-operation, but Quebec has a more open ability to deal with the selection of immigrants than any other province, and we can enhance that. But Canada would still have to be Canada.

Q: The Conservatives have been running radio ads against Trudeau and his marijuana policy. They’ve spent about a million bucks on them. They’ve run far fewer ads against Mulcair and the NDP. Do you feel left out?

A: Well, I’ll let the Conservatives make their evaluations.

They’re pretty smart politicians. They obviously consider it a good investment; I wouldn’t put my money on that.

Q: Is it frustrating to ask at least five questions a day in question period; to travel the country as avidly as you do; and to see, for 16 consecutive months, the Liberals leading in the polls?

A: You know, what’s going to happen a year from now is that people are going to be voting to determine who can actually run the government and lead a G7 country. I think the concentration of people around that issue is going to lead a lot of people to the NDP. I’ve always understood that the NDP is going to have to fight for every column-inch. We’re going to continue fighting. I do have the well-

‘We believe that having this simulated House of Lords dictating to the elected is an absurdity’

16

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

deserved reputation of being a strong fighter.

I bring that fight to issues that are important to us in the NDP and have always identified us: Fighting for workers’ rights. Fighting for better wages. Fighting to ensure that families have a better shake in the current economy, where a lot of good-paying jobs are lost. We’re the only ones who talk about that, and we’re going to continue doing it.

Q: I think one of the Conservative calculations is that, in the election, you’ll stop turning all your attention on the government and turn a good measure onto the Liberals.

A: My attention is on Stephen Harper and his Conservatives. The Conservative policies of Stephen Harper are hurting the country that I know and love. I love Canada. I’m proud of being a Canadian. When I go across the country, I see just how lucky we are, and when I go across Quebec, I see a hopefulness that I haven’t seen in decades.

Q: So, in 13 months, we’re going to have a federal election. It’s easy to imagine a scenario that looks like this: The Conservatives lose a bunch of seats, but still have more seats than any other party. Liberals and New Democrats together have more seats than the Conservatives do. Who should be prime minister in that kind of situation?

A: Well, I’ll let you and the other pundits discuss that one ad infinitum, but I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to work tirelessly from coast to coast to coast to elect an NDP government.

Q: Should the party that wins the most seats at the next election form the government?

A: Yes. The party that forms the next government is the party that has the largest number of seats. That’s our constitutional order.

Q: Let me test that with a hypothetical: If it’s the Conservatives with 130 seats, and the other two parties between you have way more than that, should the Conservatives still form the government?

A: Our constitutional form of government says that the first kick goes to the party that has the largest number of seats.

Q: “The first kick”: The Conservatives would get to test the House, and then the House would decide?

A: Not really, because the NDP is going to be forming the government, because we’ll have the largest number of seats.

For a video of highlights from Thomas Mulcair’s conversation with Paul Wells, see this week’s iPad edition of Maclean’s

RICHARD LAUTENS/TORONTO STAR/GETTY IMAGES

This Week

National

POLITICS

The PM’s latest secret weapon

A veteran of Bay Street, Joe Oliver is surprisingly adept at retail politics—and he’ll be a pivotal player in an election year. By Anne Kingston It’s mid-August, 390 days before a federal election and the campaign has clearly started as Conservatives gather at a fundraiser for MP Terence Young, at a swish restaurant in his riding in Oakville, Ont. Platters of wasabi shrimp, dumplings and mini-sliders are circulated and wine is poured as the well-heeled crowd who’ve paid $200 a ticket await Finance Minister Joe Oliver, the evening’s guest of honour. For many, this is the first opportunity to hear from the man who replaced Jim Flaherty after the veteran finance minister’s sudden resignation in March. The arrival of the trim 74-year-old in a navy, pin-striped suit, Canadian flag pin on the lapel, is met with a low buzz; people gather to have their photo taken with him as Oliver smiles gamely for the camera.

At first glance, there would seem little in common, personality-wise at least, between the late Flaherty, known for his man-of-thepeople Irish charm and being the sort of guy you’d have a proverbial beer with, and the earnest Oliver, deemed a “grumpy old man” by former NDP natural resources environment critic Megan Leslie; Oliver’s friends report he relaxes by reading Commentary and rarely imbibes more than a half-glass of wine.

But Oliver is now as important to Stephen Harper’s fortunes as Flaherty ever was.

In the four years since Oliver entered politics, he has quietly established himself as one of the Harper government’s most strategic assets. In 2011, at 70, an age most Canadians are deemed unemployable or retired, the former Bay Street investment banker turned Rookie of the year: Joe Oliver, a former Bay

Street investor, won his MP seat at age 70 MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

market regulator toppled a Liberal stalwart on his second try and won the Conservatives a breakthrough seat in the coveted Toronto city core. As a rookie MP, he was rewarded with the high-profile Natural Resources portfolio. This spring, a year after bouncing back from triple-bypass heart surgery, the man who names Margaret Thatcher as inspiration was handed Finance, a portfolio that thrusts him into the spotlight in an election year; it’s up to Oliver to deliver and sell an electionfriendly budget while helping spearhead the Conservatives’ election in and around the Greater Toronto Area.

Party talking points are highlighted in Oliver’s 20-minute speech delivered without notes: the $6.4-billion surplus means government can “reduce taxes for hard-working, middle-class Canadians,” he tells the crowd to applause, promising “no reckless spending spree” and limited government interference: “You’re better off making decisions about your money—where you want to spend it, where you want to save it, than some social engineer or bureaucrat in Ottawa.” He boasts federal personal income tax is “at the level it was when Diefenbaker was prime minister” and that his government “focused like a laser beam on job growth and economic welfare of Canadians,” a nod to persistent national unemployment of seven per cent, and youth unemployment of 14 per cent.

Oliver also jabs at the Liberals’ “tax-andspend initiatives” and Justin Trudeau’s statement that “budgets balance themselves.”

“Well, budgets don’t balance themselves, they require a plan and they require discipline,” says Oliver. He slams the Liberals’ proposed carbon tax, warning of an “advancing a multi19

billion-dollar tax on everything.” Ontario Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne is also mocked for requesting $12 billion for infrastructure: “If you extrapolate that to the rest of the country, [it] would be another $30 billion in additional debt every year.” Throughout, Oliver references his boss, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, praising him as “dean of the G20 leaders” for his stance on Ukraine and Israel.

It’s a bravura partisan performance, capped by questions from the floor that Oliver fields with ready statistics and good humour. When it’s over, the crowd throngs around him.

The event stood in stark contrast to a far less scripted evening last May: a private cocktail reception thrown by Gerry Sheff, cofounder of Bay Street investment adviser Guskin Sheff + Associates at Sheff ’s modernist, art-filled house to fete Oliver’s promotion.

The gathering reflected the new finance minister’s entrenchment in the country’s elite, a group connected less by partisan ideology than profile and power. Five years ago, Oliver was less well-known than most there that night, a group that included past and present heads of major financial institutions, former Ontario premier David Peterson and former diplomat Alan Gottlieb; now, he’s the guest of honour.

Some guests, including Liberal MP Irwin Cotler, knew Oliver since he was “the Odge” (JO backwards) at McGill University, a policy wonk who headed the McGill Law Journal’s editorial board and wore a three-piece suit in the yearbook photo. Most know him from his 37 years on Bay Street, where some called him “Teflon Joe” and he sat on endless industry committees and on boards of high-profile charities, including Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital and chair of the Prostate Cancer Research Foundation of Canada. Also present were friends from another network: Holy Blossom, Canada’s most activist and influential synagogue, whose attendees include Gottlieb, Sen. Irving Gerstein, Onex chairman Gerry Schwartz and Indigo CEO Heather Reisman.

Within his broad circle, Oliver summons admiration. “He’s rock solid guy, says Sheff, who recalls bonding with him over their mutual divorces three decades ago. “There’s nothing fancypants about him; he has no sense of entitlement.” Proof of that, in this crowd, is that Oliver drives himself to his private club.

“Smart as hell,” is how his former boss, Ken

Copland, describes him. Copland, former vice-chairman of BMO Nesbitt Burns, met Oliver in 1970 at Merrill Lynch Royal Securities. When Copland left for Nesbitt Thompson, he recommended Oliver for his job, then later hired Oliver away. “Joe’s a gentleman, he’s honest, he’s witty as can be, he’s happily married, a good father, and a terrible athlete,” Copland says. Hugh Segal, former Conservative senator and now master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, recalls meeting Oliver in the 1990s when he was a lobbyist for the Investment Dealers Association (IDA), where he’d talk passionately about fiscal policy and advocated for a national securities regulator, an entity he’s still working to create: “He was a sunburst of intellectual acuity and intensity and he did

Some say it doesn’t matter who’s in Finance. The PM calls the shots. Oliver disagrees: ‘I make my own decisions.’

20

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

not lack a sense of humour as so many folks in the investment industry sometimes did,” says Segal, who’s a regular with Oliver at the annual “boys’ weekend” at Scheff ’s country house, along with former interim Liberal leader Bob Rae: “We’ve had some wonderful blow-out discussions, me being a classic Red Tory, him not being one,” Segal says. “Joe has never been afraid to express his point of view.

And I say that as someone who disagrees with him quite a bit on some issues.”

The night of his party for Oliver, Sheff silenced the crowd to pay tribute: “No one can ever accuse Joe of peaking too soon,” he joked. That’s an understatement. After being put out to pasture at the IDA, Oliver forged a whole new career as a surprisingly adept retail politician who now has the country’s second-top job. His appointment to Finance was clearly strategic, given his history as an Establishment man with deep personal connections to Ontario-based money and power.

But, if past performance is the best indica-

PREVIOUS SPREAD: PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW TOLSON

National

On the hustings: Oliver promoting the federal Gas Tax Fund in July as new streetcars are ready to roll in Toronto

MARK BLINCH/REUTERS

tion of future performance, as they like to say on Bay Street, the man with something to prove and nothing to lose may be the one politician to watch.

In late August, Joe Oliver is in Toronto, in his office on the 24th floor of an office tower in the heart of the financial district, as part of a push to his visibility in the city. He’s hired staff to build contacts with “stakeholders” and local officials. Today alone he’ll conduct five in-person media interviews, a departmental briefing, and a pre-budget consultation.

Yet the minister is more interested in talking about just completing the ALS ice bucket challenge. “Strategic” is a word often used to describe Oliver; the quality is evident when he shares the list of people he challenged: John Tory, the Toronto mayoral candidate, “because he needs the exposure”; NDP finance critic Nathan Cullen “because he’s my critic”; Ontario Liberal Finance Minister Charles Sousa, “to pour cold water on his $12-billion

ask.” Oliver, who can appear almost Eeyorelike on TV, is engaging and forthcoming oneon-one. He’s definitely chatty, says Sen. Linda Frum, who campaigned with him. “He gets really engaged with voters and it can be quite charming, but not if you’re leading him from door to door. Whether he’s talking to a supporter or a foe, you have to say, ‘Joe, you can’t spend 15 minutes per person.’ ” He also doesn’t hesitate to voice displeasure. When Dan Miles, a former Flaherty aide now running his Toronto office, hovers, placing two tape recorders on a table to capture the conversation before sitting in a chair inches from the minster, Oliver bristles: “Could I have some space here?” he asks.

Oliver, born in Montreal in 1940, paints a picture of a humble upbringing—“but not quite a log cabin,” he jokes. His father was a dentist, but before dentists made “big money,” noting his dad bought his first car at age 40.

His mother, a teacher, was forced to quit when she married. “She thought that was MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

outrageous.” The family lived in middle-class Notre-Dame-de-Grâce on Grand Boulevard— which “was neither grand nor a boulevard,” he says.

Oliver describes himself as a “normal” kid: “I wasn’t the nerd in the corner and I wasn’t the football star.” He could be a bit mouthy, he says: “My father would tell me I’ve got to be careful.” Verbal alacrity took him to McGill, where he graduated in the law class of ’64.

“It was law or medicine,” says Oliver. “I didn’t particularly like the sight of blood but I was comfortable with words.” Awarded a Quebec government scholarship, he pursued graduate legal studies at the University of Paris, in part to better his French. He returned to practise civil law before earning an M.B.A. from Harvard in 1970; he hoped it would give him competitive advantage in corporate law: “No other Quebec lawyer had one,” he says.

Drawn by the pace and money of investment banking, he was hired by Merrill Lynch & Co. Inc. in New York, then went to work at its Canadian arm. For a change of pace, he became director of the Ontario Securities Commission in 1991, leaving two years later to join First Marathon Securities, a boutique known for its “eat what you kill” mantra. In 1995, he was named CEO and president of the Investment Dealers Association, a selfregulator that policed the industry and acted as a trade industry group. He stayed for 12 years, leaving just after the two functions were separated into an industry lobby group, IIAC, and regulator, IIROC. The protracted negations proved Oliver adept in handling alpha males, says Ron Lloyd, now chairman of Credit-Suisse Securities, who was involved in the negotiations. “You had all of these A-type personalities and everyone had an opinion,” he says. “One of Joe’s strengths was a great ability to listen. He was able to act as a catalyst for coalition around key issues; he moved the ball forward.” “He also could be stubborn,” says William Moriarty, now CEO and president of University of Toronto Asset Management Corp. “It could take a while to get him to move to the middle ground— it took lots of convincing.”

Oliver didn’t make as much money at the IDA as he did in investment banking, he offers, “but I wasn’t working for the national poverty association either; I was a paid a good wage.” He loved the public policy aspect of the work and travelling to talk about Canada to senior people in government and business.

21

He says he considered running for office in the 1990s but rejected the idea: “It would have been a huge sacrifice—I was bringing up a family. Also, the prospects were uneven.”

He’d long leaned to the far right of centre for philosophical and practical reasons, he says: “My values start with freedom; the government has a role—an important role. But what is the public policy justification for it?”

Pierre Trudeau influenced his movement to the right, Oliver says: “He was pushing for the government’s involvement in everything.”

Oliver was living in the U.S. when the War Measures Act was enforced: “Being a little more libertarian, it shocked me.” He also noted more successful economies are those in which the government didn’t have as big a role: “Socialist countries don’t tend to do well.” Margaret Thatcher remains an inspiration: “She saved the U.K. at a very difficult time. She was tough but clear about what she wanted to do. And she was successful until they booted her out.”

In 2007, at age 67, politics beckoned again when his contract at the IDA wasn’t renewed.

“I wasn’t anxious to stop working,” Oliver says. In early 2007, he’d received a call from

Tom Hockin, a former Mulroney cabinet minister then running the Investment Funds Institute of Canada, saying Prime Minister Harper was looking for candidates. Oliver, “intrigued and a bit flattered,” considered the Toronto midtown riding of St. Paul’s, where Peter Kent had been defeated by 25 per cent in 2006. “I said Peter Kent is highly recognized, a nice guy. Why would I do better than him?” Eglinton-Lawrence, a Liberal stronghold held by Joe Volpe since 1988, offered a fighting chance: a lesser-known Conservative candidate had lost by 23 per cent. The riding is diverse ethnically—Italian, Jewish, Somali, Filipino—and also economically as the home to Lawrence Heights housing projects and the mansions of Lawrence Park. Oliver started making calls, reaching lawyer Stanley Hartt, Mulroney’s ex-chief of staff, who was on the riding’s nominating committee. Oliver prevailed over a huge nomination battle, Hartt recalls.

Oliver tried to bring his “small-c conservative” view of economic freedom and opportunity to the big-L riding. He talked a lot about the negative effects of rent control, and excessive taxation on direct foreign invest-

Campaign Joe: Harper and then natural resources minister Oliver tour a Canada Goose factory 22

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

ment to Canada, says Segal, who campaigned with him. He lost by 2,000 votes, but was out campaigning again the next day. Oliver knocked on an estimated 38,000 doors over the next 3½ years. “He worked like a dog,” says Hartt, noting Oliver specifically targeted Filipino and Somali communities. The party brought in the big guns: cabinet ministers Flaherty and Jason Kenney stumped, as did right-leaning locals, including Toronto city Councillor Doug Ford and MP Julian Fantino. Oliver, who’d met the Prime Minister during the 2007 campaign, recalls his first conversation with Harper, a half-hour discussion of riding politics on the campaign bus.

“He was interviewing me,” Oliver says. “I didn’t realize it until after.” “Cerebral” is the first word he uses to describe Harper.

Sandra Buckler, Harper’s former director of communications turned consultant, received a call from party headquarters to become a foot soldier. “Joe was a force of nature,” she says. “He was not leaving anything to chance.” In 2011, Oliver won by more than 4,000 votes, a win Hartt attributes to a well-orchestrated “get out the vote” effort.

Volpe saw otherwise, alleging phone calls “that pretended to be from the Liberal party but clearly were not” drove down his vote count. In 2011, Elections Canada reported it was looking into the allegations but the issue has disappeared from public view.

Oliver admits he was on tenterhooks hoping for a cabinet post; he says he was losing faith when then chief of staff Nigel Wright called to say the Prime Minister wanted to see him at Harrington Lake. Natural Resources came as a surprise, he says: “But it is an economic portfolio; I had some experience; I had done financing for gas companies.” The choice was strategic, says Segal: “You don’t choose a minister of natural resources from downtown Calgary.” Industry was delighted with the choice.

Oliver’s allegiance to industry interests was highlighted a month after the election, in June 2011, when he promised that chrysotile asbestos, a carcinogen known to cause lung disease, could be used “in a safe and controlled manner,” in support of the foundering Quebec asbestos industry, a Harper campaign promise. He also finalized the sale of Atomic Energy of Canada to SNC-Lavalin. “That was big, an important statement,” says Oliver.

His ability to adapt his personal style to the parliamentary style impressed Hartt. “You can’t mumble, you have to speak at the top of your lungs, you have to cut to the chase, which is not Joe.” Frum wasn’t surprised: “He’s a decent and gentle person but he has a thick skin and he can handle rough and

CHRIS YOUNG/CP

National

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National tumble.” Oliver proved an outspoken defender of the oil sands as “Canada’s economic engine,” cheerleading relentlessly for two controversial pipelines: Enbridge’s Northern Gateway, which remains mired in court challenges, and TransCanada’s Keystone XL, which was blocked by the Obama administration. In a January 2012 open letter calculated to elicit media coverage and controversy, Oliver attacked Canadians who opposed oil sands expansion, calling them “radicals . . . with radical ideological agenda[s]” who “use funding from foreign special interest groups to undermine Canada’s national economic interest.” Predictably, the letter summoned fierce backlash, particularly in British Columbia, where Oliver also drew ire for describing First Nations communities as “socially dysfunctional” and promising trailing pond water would be safe enough to drink.

Oliver remains unrepentant. “When you say something that’s politically incorrect but correct, opponents can’t criticize what you said because it’s accurate. So they attack you personally or they can misrepresent what you said. And both happened.”

Pitching Canada’s oil and gas sector kept Oliver on the road; he was the third-most travelled minister, behind Harper and John Baird, minister of foreign affairs; his department spent more than $2 million on travel, Oliver’s share amounting to close to $334,000. Destinations included four trips to China and two to India to negotiate deals on nuclear co-operation. He also travelled to Israel three times as natural resources minister, once accompanying the Prime Minister on his first visit to the Jewish state this January.

Selling natural resources is clearly a priority for the Harper government; it comprised nearly two-thirds of the federal advertising spending. Under Oliver, Natural Resources’ advertising ballooned from $237,000 in 2010-11 to $40 million in 2012-13; $24 million spent advertising abroad, $16.5 million domestically. In 2013, Oliver requested another $12.9 million to augment an international campaign designed to portray Canada as a stable and environmentally responsible source of energy, a sales pitch vigorously contested at home, where Oliver presided over the streamlining of regulatory checks on energy industry mega-projects.

On March 17, two days before Flaherty’s resignation was made public, Oliver got word the Prime Minister wanted to speak to him

while he was waiting to board a flight. For five hours, he wondered whether the news was good or bad; when he heard, he was “delighted.” Insiders say Flaherty’s departure wasn’t a surprise. A month earlier, Flaherty, battling illness, went off party message when he questioned the merits of income-splitting for couples with dependent children under age 18, sparking speculation that the Conservatives were stepping back from a 2011 campaign promise. Harper signalled his disapproval when he uncharacteristically stood in the House to take a half-hour of questions directed at Flaherty, with the minister sitting two seats away. Appointing Oliver was viewed as a masterstroke—hard-right fiscal continuity from a former Bay Streeter without being seen to anoint a prospective Conservative leader.

“Whatever you might think about Joe, one is not going to think he’s secretly conspiring to unseat the Prime Minister,” says Segal. After Oliver’s private swearing-in, Harper tweeted it was business as usual: “[Oliver] will continue to strengthen the economy & balance the budget by 2015.”

Opposition Leader Thomas Mulcair called the appointment “a disappointment,” and suggested Oliver is “an even more dogmatic, hard-line right-winger” than Flaherty.

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May saw the move as a signal to Bay Street: “You don’t have to worry: One of your own now has his hand on the tiller,” a criticism that nicely summarizes the appointment. Scott Clark, a past deputy minister of finance who left government in 2005, believes Oliver’s Bay Street background is absolutely of no benefit as a minister of finance: “He’s responsible for tax decisions, federal-provincial issues like pension reform, and international relations; he has no experience in any of that,” he says, noting the Conservatives’ 2011 campaign promises have eaten up much of next year’s pre-election budget.

Others suggest it doesn’t matter who the finance minister is; the Prime Minister is calling the shots. Oliver disagrees: “I make my own decisions about what I am going to recommend to the Prime Minister and cabinet; It’s not different from any other government to my knowledge.” Oliver is no puppet, says Sheff: “He’s aligned ideologically; he’s totally in sync.”

That’s reflected in Oliver’s ongoing campaign for “responsible” development of nat-

‘When you say something that is politically incorrect but correct, opponents attack you personally’

24

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

ural resources, which he calls a “defining issue” for Canada. In Oakville, he attacked opponents of hydrocarbon development as having no basis in fact: “It’s an ideological thing.” The government’s mission, he says, is “educating the Canadian public” on the fact the country must diversify markets to replace markets being lost, now that the U.S. is producing oil and shale gas: “To do that, we need to build infrastructure—which is to say the pipelines.”

Oliver is clearly worried about international economic fragility, pointing to declining growth in China and Europe. The Canadian housing market is less of a concern: “We don’t think there’s a bubble here,” he says. “Neither does the CMHC.” He’s leaning to a “lowtax, job stimulus” plan, he says, while crossing the country, in pre-budget consultation.

Any comment on its content is premature, he says when asked about income-splitting.

He’ll provide an economic update to the nation in the late fall; many expect him to announce the deficit has been eliminated.

Already, Oliver is facing pressure from fiscal conservatives, including C.D. Howe Institute academics, to delay deficit reduction and spend to bring down unemployment, an issue that bedevilled Thatcher.

A surplus will put also Oliver under pressure from his caucus, with everyone coming to Finance looking for something, says Christopher Ragan, an economics professor at McGill and former Flaherty adviser who recalls Flaherty had a rubber stamp for printing the word “No” on budget requests. If past performance is an indicator, Oliver won’t cave. To take a page from the “What would Margaret Thatcher do?” handbook, he’ll cut taxes, quash unions, bully opponents and get government out of people’s lives, believing the free market will conquer all. That he’s doing this at 74, an age many Canadians are fearful about their own financial resources, isn’t something Oliver likes highlighted, friends say. When asked, Oliver offers he’s happy to be a role model: “to the extent to which I’m the leading edge on that, terrific.”

Sheff watches his friend’s second act with amazement: “It’s bizarre: He was unemployable in a conventional situation; now he’s highly employable.” As for how long that will last, we’ll just have to keep watching.

To watch a video of highlights from Anne Kingston’s conversation with Joe Oliver, see this week’s iPad edition of Maclean’s

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OTTAWA

Subject: Gimme, gimme, gimme Want a frenzy in your inbox? A free T-shirt? Give a federal party your email. Better yet, give it to all of them.

If you want to feel wanted, give your email address to a political party.

Or, better yet, give your address to all three major federal parties and watch them compete for your attention. To be emailed on a regular basis by the party machines is to understand politics as a competition of great consequence. Your side needs you. And, if you act now, they’ll throw in this free “limited edition” T-shirt.

All major parties have joined the permanent campaign and the demand for money is relentless. In 2013, the Liberals and New Democrats set new annual party records for funds raised, while the Conservatives enjoyed their best non-election year. Altogether, the three took in just less than $37.6 million (the Greens raised another $2.2 million, their own record). And perhaps the cheapest way for them to find that money is to send an email, or several.

Over the last two months, the three major parties have collectively sent more than 60 emails to subscribers. Last week alone, the NDP sent out 10 emails, while the Conservatives fired off five of their own. “If we don’t win the next election, the NDP and Liberals are promising to undo everything we’ve worked to accomplish,” one Conservative email warned. Another touted a recent column in the Toronto Star as proof that “the urban media elite are mobilizing against us.”

That same day, the Liberals told their supporters that the Conservatives had raised millions more than they had so far this year. The day before that, the NDP told their supporters that Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau was charging $1,000 for a ticket to one of his fundraising events, but New Democrats were rallying together their small donations: “That’s what this is all about: people like you, chipping in what you can to build this campaign from the ground up, not the other way around.”

Every team is the underdog. An NDP email in July noted how much more the Liberals and Conservatives were spending on advertising, and boasted, “We don’t count on easy money from well-connected friends or rich insiders.”

The Conservatives have fretted that, “In the next election, we won’t be fighting just the Liberals and NDP—we’ll be up against the Ottawa

BY AARON WHERRY ·

26

media, the union bosses, and the radical left.” A Liberal email in late July, entitled “Bad news,” explained that the last fundraising results for the Conservatives were “scary.” “Justin Trudeau needs your help to build the team and the plan for Canada. Let’s show him we’re ready to do everything it takes for our country’s future,” the note read. (The Conservatives subsequently sent out an email telling their supporters about

LIBERALS The party offers donors ‘limited edition’ sweatshirts and Trudeaubranded T-shirts and scarves to keep you warm at night

GET YOUR SWAG ON One incentive for succumbing to pleas for your hard-earned money: free stuff, of varying degrees of quality

CONSERVATIVES Perhaps a ‘commemorative’ PDF of Stephen Harper’s speech to Israel’s Knesset will adorn your living room wall?

NDP If buttons aren’t your thing, then there’s also the presumably scintillating chance to join campaign phone calls with ‘senior’ party staff

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

the Liberal email as a warning that the Liberal party would now be “digging deep to try to get an advantage over us.”)

The Liberals have sent their supporters images of the latest Conservative attacks on Justin Trudeau—“Don’t let them get away with this” was the subject of one recent bulletin—and, from all three parties, there are reminders about fundraising deadlines and goals that need to be met. But it is not all fretting; there are also great values and policies to fight for. That sense of urgency, says NDP director Anne McGrath, is important “to motivate people, to remind people of what’s at stake, to encourage them to participate.”

And there are perks. The Liberals have offered donors “limited edition” Justin Trudeau T-shirts and scarves, as well as sweatshirts, in exchange for a donation. Donors have also been entered in draws to have dinner with Trudeau. The NDP has offered Thomas Mulcair buttons and, for agreeing to a monthly commitment of $3 or $5, supporters would be “invited to join campaign calls with senior staff.” In June, members of the Conservative party mailing list were offered, free of charge, a “commemorative PDF” of the Prime Minister’s speech to Knesset in Israel.

In the U.S., Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns demonstrated the huge potential of digital politics. In 2012, the Obama campaign raised $500 million via email, social media and the Internet. Both the NDP and Liberals have consulted with Obama organizers, and both parties say online fundraising is their fastest-growing revenue stream. The advantages are various: Emails are easy to send, the messages can be personalized and tailored to specific groups, the responses can be tracked, different messages can be tested.

Emails also help with branding and reinforcing your community of supporters. “Fundraising is not just about bringing in money.

It’s also about communicating and entrenching,” says former NDP strategist Brad Lavigne.

If the people receiving the email are made to feel needed, it’s because, ultimately, they are.

“I cannot overstate how important [donors] are,” says Christina Topp, director of fundraising for the Liberal party. “Everything we do, anything we do, we can only do thanks to the generosity of Canadians who want us to achieve our goals and either open up their pocketbook and choose to make a financial contribution, or contribute in some other way with their time.”

Even if you don’t want to give, you might at least accept, as the Liberals offered last week, a “free limited-edition Liberal sticker for your bicycle, laptop or cellphone.”

ADAM SCOTTI; LIBERAL PARTY OF CANADA; CONSERVATIVE PARTY OF CANADA; NDP CANADA; SHUTTERSTOCK

National

IMMIGRATION

Leave the kids at home New age limits on dependents could hurt thousands of families—and, some argue, the Canadian economy In the dead of summer, when most people weren’t watching, a Tory government intent on beefing up its economic bona fides quietly made it more difficult for immigrants to make a new home in Canada. Thousands of young adults who used to qualify as dependents can no longer make the trip on their parents’ coattails. The move, which took effect on Aug. 1, has upset advocates for immigrants and refugees and sparked the latest round in an ongoing feud between the governing party and its critics at the Canadian Bar Association.

Until the end of July, children of new immigrants could apply as dependents until they turned 21. The new rules set the ceiling at 18. The rationale is that kids who arrive in Canada earlier can benefit from a Canadian education, and ultimately offer more to our fragile economy than their older counterparts.

It’s a change the Tories spent two years trying to make. Jason Kenney, then minister of citizenship and immigration, first raised the idea during public consultations in spring 2012, when he was coming up with a tighter approach to family reunification. A year later, at a press conference in Mississauga, Ont., he dismissed dependency rules as “peculiar.”

He was speaking that day about dependents in their late 20s and 30s who used to qualify if they enrolled in a post-secondary program.

“You’re not a child anymore. You’re an adult.

Take responsibility for yourself,” Kenney said.

“Come as a tourist. Apply for permanent residency. Apply for immigration as an independent economic immigrant. You’re more than welcome, but come as an independent immigrant.”

The new rules disqualify those so-called freeloaders, but they reach far deeper and target 19-year-olds who might be barely out of high school, and children of potential refugees who scramble for resettlement. Federal data suggests 7,832 eligible dependents in 2012 were older than 18 years of age—about 10 per cent of all dependent children under the old definition. The only ones from that group who would now qualify are applicants between 19 and 22 who suffer from a mental or physical disability.

STAN BEHAL/TORONTO SUN/QMI AGENCY

BY NICK TAYLOR-VAISEY ·

The government argued its case in the Canada Gazette last year. “Statistics demonstrate that older dependent children have lower economic outcomes over the long run,” read its analysis, which pointed out that 66,782 applicants in 2012 would still qualify now.

Kenney eventually moved into a different portfolio, but the policy survived, despite the waves of disagreement sparked by a second consultation last year. Sixty submissions largely opposed the change. The Canadian Council for Refugees (CCR) warned

surround you—and might support you through times of sickness, child rearing, job loss,” he says.

There’s an economic cost to shutting out a pool of young adults. “Canadian employers need to find new entrants into the labour force,” says Dan Kelly, president of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, “and often kids that come with their parents will look for a job.” There’s another question that remains unanswered, which is how much of a difference those three years make. A sevenyear-old might assimilate much more quickly than a child of 21, but how much better does one adapt at 18 than at 20?

Kenney declined to speak to Maclean’s for this story, but Arthur Sweetman, an economics professor at McMaster University and coauthor of a 2001 paper referenced in government analyses, says immigration toward the end of high school is “disruptive”: learning a new language is difficult at that time, and

They’re on their own: Children up to 21 years of age could previously apply with their parents

the policy would break apart families and leave defenceless dependents in unsafe conditions. Loly Rico, the CCR’s president, told Maclean’s that Conservatives who have kids ought to know better and “really don’t have a heart.” Mario Bellissimo, chair of the bar association’s national immigration law section, says a purely economic rationale allows government to exert more control over who settles in Canada, but damages the country’s immigration model because every potential dependent left behind could provide a benefit down the line. “You’re looking at economic units entering Canadian society without the societal supports that you might later have from individuals that MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

younger kids are better at bridging a quality gap between two countries’ education systems. But he admits older kids are often able to overcome those challenges.

It’s too early to tell how many families will be forced to split apart or build new lives elsewhere, or what the cost to our economy will be of losing skilled-worker parents. Bellissimo has only anecdotal evidence of impact on families. Rico says she’ll know more in six months. Meanwhile, the Tories seem focused on their economic message. It’s unclear how the hard-won immigrant vote will respond to the change, but the economy-first mantra is a political position the Tories plan to ride all the way to the voting booth.

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RUSSIA

The lines of war

NATO is preparing to bulk up its military presence in Eastern Europe.

Will it thwart Putin, or merely prod the bear?

In Brussels last Saturday for an emergency meeting of the European Union, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaitè described Russia as “practically in a war against Europe.” Indeed, it’s no longer enough that Russia seems poised for a full-on war with Ukraine. With NATO leaders at a summit this week in Wales, the larger issue of

BY KATIE ENGELHART ·

30

security on the European continent has become far more urgent.

There are few lingering doubts as to Vladimir Putin’s eagerness to flex Russian muscle in regions once under the Soviet thumb. This week, Putin reportedly told a European official that he could “take Kyiv in two weeks” if he wanted. Earlier, on Aug. 27, a mass of RusSEPTEMBER 15, 2014

sian tanks, artillery and troops reportedly crossed into Ukraine—prompting Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to declare that the region was “close to a point of no return: full-scale war.” Two days later, Putin addressed an exuberant crowd at a pro-Kremlin youth camp near Moscow. He reminded his supporters: “Russia is one of the leading nuclear

International Battle-ready: British forces participate

in a NATO exercise near Sangaste, Estonia

SEAN GALLUP/GETTY IMAGES

the Ukraine crisis as a “wake-up call” for the alliance. At the summit this week, NATO leaders are expected to agree, for the first time, on significant military deployments to new bases in eastern member states: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Poland, which are pleading for NATO boots on the ground.

NATO leaders are also expected to discuss a re-establishment of large-scale military exercises in central and Eastern Europe.

powers”—and warned everyone else: “It’s best not to mess with us.” The Ukrainian government responded with an announcement that it will reinstate mandatory army conscription throughout the country.

While Ukraine is not a NATO member, NATO leaders have responded. On Monday, officials announced that the alliance will create a “spearhead” rapid reaction force, comprised of up to several thousand troops, that could be dispatched to an Eastern European conflict zone in as little as two days (rapid reaction forces currently take five days to arrive on site)—and would be supported by military equipment stockpiles, stored at alliance bases in the region. The unit, said NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, would “travel light, but strike hard.” Days earlier, Britain and a coalition of six NATO allies agreed to create a “joint expeditionary force” of at least 10,000 soldiers (as well as air

It was not supposed to be this way. In 1997, less than a decade after the Soviet Union crumbled, the newly emerged Russian Federation struck a deal with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—the alliance set up after the Second World War, in large part, to contain the Soviets. Under the 1997 NATO-Russia Founding Act, each side agreed not to “consider each other as adversaries.” For its part, NATO went a step further, promising no “additional permanent stationing of substantial combat forces” in the former Soviet sphere.

For nearly two decades, this “geopolitical quarantine” held.

But a new battlefield Europe has been taking shape. On Aug. 27, Finland—which shares a long border with Russia, but which has never joined NATO—signed an agreement with the alliance that will make it easier for NATO to station troops on its soil. That same day, Russia’s permanent mission to NATO promised— vaguely, and via Twitter—that Moscow will react “with a view to ensure its security.”

Some critics contend a NATO ramp-up will only inflame Russia and make things worse and naval units), which would boost NATO’s in Europe. Others doubt the alliance’s abilpower in the event of a crisis in the region. ity to maintain a credible threat posture visMeanwhile, angst mounts in what Russian à-vis Russia—especially given falling defence officials often term their “near abroad.” In expenditures in most NATO member states.

August, Polish Prime MinisAn August report by the ter Donald Tusk told reporHouse of Commons IF UKRAINE GETS FULL U.K. concludes: “NATO is curters that he had “reason to NATO MEMBERSHIP, rently not well-prepared for believe that the threat of a direct intervention” was grow‘WE WILL GET A NEW a Russian threat against a ing. Nearby, the Baltic states member state.”

COLD WAR,’ SAYS ONE NATO of Estonia and Latvia—which “The Western response BRITISH OFFICIAL boast large Russian-speaking overall has been slow, small populations—worry about and late,” says John Herbst, falling victim to the so-called Putin Doctrine, the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, in by which Russia claims a right to protect eth- an interview with Maclean’s. Western leaders nic Russians it deems threatened, in whatever “set what seem to be red lines, but when Putin sovereign nation they might live. As Polish For- crosses those red lines, they’re sidelined.” eign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski once famously Despite belated NATO manoeuvring, says observed: “Russia has never actually invaded Herbst, Putin clearly “feels emboldened.”

Others still lament that while Ukraine was Poland—instead it always ‘came to help.’ ” NATO’s Rasmussen last week described the inspiration for NATO’s push to mobilize, MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

31

International NATO heavyweights like the U.S. have thus $720 billion. “We have seen the Russians far refused to offer military aid to Kyiv. Last improve their ability to act swiftly,” acknowweek, U.S. President Barack Obama restated ledged NATO’s Rasmussen, in August. “They his “unwavering commitment to Ukraine can within a very, very, short time convert a and its people”—but affirmed, “We are not major military exercise into an offensive miltaking military action to solve the Ukraine itary operation.” Even those who believe that problem.” Instead, NATO leaders will discuss Putin lacks the chutzpah to invade a NATO the possibility of further economic sanctions member fear Russia’s adeptness at launching against Russia. Depending on one’s view of cyberattacks, propaganda campaigns and its things, Obama’s reticence is either a wise dis- ability to funnel support to pro-Russia rebels. play of caution or an abandonment of Ukraine and, in turn, an indication that NATO will The strength of NATO is rooted in Artibe more tempered going forward than its cle 5 of the treaty, which says that “an armed rhetoric suggests. attack against one or more [members] shall The issue of Ukraine’s relationship to the be considered an attack against them all.” Yet alliance is all the more pressing following over the years the goal of collective defence Friday’s announcement from Ukrainian changed and NATO became more political Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk that it will in orientation. It began to busy itself in conseek full NATO membership. In that case, flicts far and away, like Bosnia and Afghan“we will get a new Cold War,” says Lord David istan. In 2002, the NATO-Russia Council was Owen, a former British foreign secretary and created to facilitate “consensus-building, and a former EU peace negotiator in Yugoslavia. alliance leaders began to speak of Moscow as “But it will be a very different Cold War this a “strategic partner.” time.” No longer so isolated, Russia, he adds, The alliance grew to 28 nations, with a is finding it easy to work with China, Japan large influx in the late ’90s after a long and and Turkey. Owen is in favour of EU mem- tense debate within NATO about the wisbership for Kyiv, but thinks admitting Ukraine dom of admitting former Soviet states. In into NATO is against the alliance’s strategic 1999, the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary signed on. In 2004, interest. “Wars are started when people feel beleaLithuania, Latvia, Estonia, AN ARMED EUROPE guered and encircled. That’s Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia WON’T BE EASY. JUST and Bulgaria joined too. All the history of the 1914 war and we ought to understand FOUR NATO MEMBERS the while, a wary Russia that.” watched on. In 1995, RusNATO members have, REACHED THE DEFENCE sian President Boris Yeltsin SPENDING GOAL. nevertheless, taken steps to warned that “when NATO fortify the alliance’s defence comes right up to the Rusposture. On a trip to Poland in early June, sian Federation’s borders . . . The flame of Obama announced plans for a nearly $1-bil- war could burst out across the whole of Eurlion European Reassurance Initiative (ERI), ope.” When Ukraine applied to join NATO’s which would enable a bigger U.S. military “Membership Action Plan” in 2008, Russia’s presence in central and Eastern Europe. The deputy foreign minister called the possibilannouncement capped off an active spring ity “a huge strategic mistake that would have season. In May, some 6,000 allied forces par- most serious consequences.” Membership ticipated in “Steadfast Javelin 1,” a military talks were shelved in 2010. drill in Estonia designed to repel an attack on Today German Chancellor Angela Merkel the Baltic region. Around that time, NATO heads NATO’s hold-back lobby. Merkel—who tripled its Baltic Air Policing Mission, began speaks Russian and has reportedly spoken to aerial surveillance flights over Poland and Putin dozens of times since Russia entered CriRomania and deployed two new NATO mari- mea—has continued to oppose talk of buildtime groups to patrol the Baltic and Mediter- ing new bases in Eastern Europe. (The only ranean seas. (On Monday, Canada’s Air Task NATO base east of the old Iron Curtain is on Force joined the Baltic Air Policing mission Poland’s Baltic coast, in the city of Szczecin.) with four CF-188 Hornet aircraft and over 130 But Merkel can hardly silence calls for help personnel from the Royal Canadian Air Force.) from Russia’s ex-satellites. When the three This is surely in recognition that Russia Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania has spent the last few years bulking up its achieved independence in 1991, they were left own military. In 2010, Moscow launched a with virtually no military capability. Their forces massive 10-year weapons modernization remain small—and so, in their view, Baltic terscheme, estimated to cost a staggering ritorial integrity remains uncertain. In June, 32

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

Lithuania’s president told the German magazine Focus that Russia had offered to reduce gas prices in Estonia and Latvia if the countries agreed to ditch their NATO membership.

But if Europe is to become battle-ready, it will surely happen first in Poland. Poland, too, has renewed calls for a permanent NATO presence, recently requesting that two NATO brigades (about 10,000 soldiers) be deployed forthwith. The request was denied. In the meantime, Warsaw has been steadily acquiring military equipment as part of a modernization scheme that will reportedly cost $45 billion by 2020.

It is speeding up its planned purchase of 30 attack helicopters and reportedly working to acquire a new cache of long-range attack drones.

Warsaw has no shortage of motivation to act fast. The Russian threat is real and close to home. On Monday, Kyiv reported that pro-Russia rebels had made significant gains in the eastern Ukrainian city of Luhansk, where government forces were forced to abandon the airport. Ukrainian military spokesperson Andriy Lysenko claimed that the rebels were supported by “a Russian tank battalion.”

Western analysts estimate that over 1,000 Russian troops are fighting alongside Ukraine’s pro-Russia separatists in a conflict that has, since mid-April, killed around 2,600 people.

Last weekend, retired U.S. Army general Wesley Clark, who served as NATO’s supreme allied commander in Europe from 1997 to 2000, referred to the Wales summit as “the best, and perhaps last, opportunity to halt aggression in Europe without major commitments of NATO forces.”

SASHA MORDOVETS/GETTY IMAGES

Still, if Rasmussen has his way Europe will soon be a changed continent. His supporters believe the NATO chief will follow through on his tough talk—and will find a way to bring detractors like Germany around. One possibility is that NATO leaders will not use the vocabulary of “permanent” forces—but will instead pledge “temporary” and rotating forces whose terms of use are as-of-yet unlimited. “The bottom line,” says Rasmussen, “is you will, in the future, see a more visible NATO presence in the East.”

Olga Oliker, a senior international policy

two dozen personnel to NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), assigned six fighter jets to regional air patrol missions, provided non-lethal military aid to Ukraine, dispatched the HMCS Toronto frigate to the Mediterranean Sea and offered Kyiv $220 million in loans and loan guarantees.

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird recently declared that he will push for “additional measures” against Russia. (He declined to elaborate on the nature of those measures.)

The U.S., by contrast, carries far more than its weight, contributing more than 70 per cent

analyst at the Rand Corporation, argues there are some substantive differences between “permanent basing” and this lesser step. For starters, “it doesn’t send the same signals,” both to Russia and to its ex-satellites. Moreover, temporary basing might be easier for NATO leaders to sell to their electorates. Either way, it seems likely that former Soviet states will soon enjoy a wash of NATO troops and equipment.

Divided: Russia’s Putin, Belarus’s Lukashenko and Ukraine’s Poroshenko meet in Minsk, Belarus

Intentions or language aside, the formation of an armed-and-ready Europe will not prove easy. For one, it’s expensive. Last year, just four NATO members reached the alliance’s target defence-spending goal of two per cent of GDP. Canada was one of the alliance’s biggest defence cutters, slashing spending to just over one per cent of GDP, down from 1.4 per cent in 2009. Last week, Reuters reported that Canada planned to block NATO’s appeal for member states to increase defence spending. Canada has thus far dispatched

of NATO’s defence spending, up from 63 per cent in 2001. (NATO’s International Security Assistance Force [ISAF] is sometimes jokingly referred to as “I Saw Americans Fighting.”)

There’s also the complicated issue of economic interdependence between Russia and Europe. Russia needs European export markets while a number of European states are energy-reliant on Moscow. Over a third of the EU’s oil is of Russian origin. Russia supplies the vast majority of natural gas consumed in Slovakia, Hungary and Poland (84, 80 and 59 per cent respectively). And more than half of Russian gas transports to the continent arrive via pipelines through Ukraine.

Meanwhile, the fundamental question remains: will NATO growth thwart Russia or merely prod the bear? In a widely read article in Foreign Policy, international relations scholar John J. Mearsheimer argues that crisis MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

in Europe “is the West’s fault.” In this view, NATO has boxed Russia in. Mearsheimer cites not only hard military expansion, but also Western civil society projects that seek to “spread Western values and promote democracy” in post-Soviet states. By this logic, NATO would be better advised to back away from the former Soviet Union. Other critics warn that Moscow’s co-operation is urgently needed in other areas of NATO and U.S. concern: namely, Afghanistan and Iran.

The counter-claim to Mearsheimer’s is that if NATO had acted sooner, the crisis in Ukraine could have been averted. John Herbst, the former Ukraine ambassador, believes that NATO has consistently failed to meet Russian aggression with sufficient fortitude. He points to 2007, when Estonia fell victim to a large-scale cyberattack that is widely believed to have originated in Russia. And 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia. And March 2014, when Russia’s annexation of Crimea was quickly accepted as a fait accompli. Sanctions earlier on, argues Herbst, “might have averted the shoot-down” of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17.

Much of the debate around Ukraine has focused on how Russia might be contained or cajoled, but Britain’s Lord Owen argues that NATO must also take a firm line with Ukraine’s leadership. He is not alone in arguing that tumult in Ukraine will only cease if Ukrainian President Poroshenko agrees to form a devolved government in east Ukraine— a federal structure that goes “as far as Quebec” and incorporates strong Russian-language protections. Russia has called for full-scale devolution, but Poroshenko has thus far resisted.

On Tuesday, 48 hours before the Wales summit, Russia hinted at a policy shift. Mikhail Popov, a Kremlin adviser, told Russian state media that NATO was “aggravating tensions with Russia”—and that its enlargement plans posed “existential threats” to Moscow.

Though he declined to offer details, Popov vowed that Russia, too, would adjust its military doctrine in the central and Eastern European region where it once ruled supreme.

Perhaps Moscow is already fine-tuning that doctrine with its border ally Kazakhstan.

Before a small audience in Russia on Friday, Vladimir Putin called Kazakhstan’s statehood into question—and referred to the country as “part of the large Russian world.” The comments echo those made by Putin in 2008 when, at a summit in Bucharest, he told former U.S. president George W. Bush that “Ukraine is not even a state.” He seems more intent than ever to prove his point.

33

International

COLBY COSH

DON’T BOTHER PRAYING FOR RAIN

You often hear from farmers, environmental Jeremiahs, and amateur economists that the wars of the future will be fought over water. This is almost certainly balderdash. Turn the pages of history, and you will find confirmation that largescale human conflicts usually begin in religion, ethnic unpleasantness, dynastic strife, or ideology. Rarely do they flare up over some specific strategic object or resource. (The most brutally contested part of the Middle East is, notoriously, just about the only part of that region that has no oil.)

People may occasionally kill each other over water, in the context of a military siege or a tribal dispute over an oasis. Peoples rarely do. After all, full-fledged civilizations don’t grow up in the first place where there is no drinking water or access to arable land.

But perhaps there is one great near-exception: the state of California, that grand human contrivance founded on reservoirs and aqueducts.

It is perhaps not easy to be sanguine about the ultimate sustainability of California as we know it—especially when one thinks of its immaculate lawns, its endless burbling fountains and its lush orange groves. From top to bottom, nothing in California seems to resemble the hydrographic austerity taken for granted in Arizona or New Mexico.

California is in Year 3 of a drought of nearly unprecedented harshness and extent. The U.S.’s National Drought Mitigation Center operates a “drought monitor” that currently describes 58 per cent of California’s land area as being in a state of “exceptional” drought.

Eighty-two per cent is either “exceptional” or “extreme.” Throw in “severe” and we are up to 95 per cent.

As a consequence, farmers are tapping deeper than ever before into the state’s ground34

water supply. This is a problem because nobody is sure how large the supply is and how readily it can replenish itself. NASA has twin satellites that measure tiny changes in local gravitation to create a sort of X-ray of what’s happening underground. These clever gadgets tell us the groundwater in the American West is dwindling, but they don’t know the total volume of the various aquifers, and they have only been aloft since 2002.

Water levels in the state’s major reservoirs are characterized as “low,” with some at 20 per cent or less of their capacity. Emergencies have been officially declared in 25 different California counties and 13 cities, including Santa Barbara. In March, the state government passed a funding bill approving $687 million for accelerated anti-drought SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

projects, most of it going to upgrades to the various water-engineering systems that keep California looking fresh and green. In late July, the state zapped homeowners with an emergency regulation outlawing the use of hoses on sidewalks and driveways. (You can still wash the car, but only if the hose has a trigger nozzle that shuts off automatically.)

There is wide agreement that California’s drought problem is man-made. As you would expect, liberals think the problem is insufficient regulation, and conservatives think it’s a matter of badly designed markets failing to deliver price signals. Both are probably right.

California, almost uniquely among western U.S. states, does not regulate groundwater use at the state level. This can lead to a tragedy of the commons during dry years. If you

JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES; JAE C. HONG/AP; MARK BOSTER/LOS ANGELES TIMES

California’s water woes are entirely man-made.

And so is the solution.

Parched: (clockwise) San Jose gardeners paint

a dead lawn; a ditch runs between farms near Santa Cruz; Huntington Lake’s docks dried up

own a vineyard, you have an obvious incentive to pump like crazy before your neighbour gets the same idea.

The California state constitution of 1879 specified strong, unconditional public control of overland water resources, but it also immortalized the water rights already held at that time by various landowners and communities. Some of those rights date back to Spanish overlordship of California. The system is a legendary snarl of complexity, made worse by each new generation of judges, and about equally likely to make a lawyer rich or insane.

California’s Democrat-dominated assembly, bestirred by the drought, is trying to pass bills that would allow for state-level groundwater regulation, exercised through local water

authorities. But it will probably always be cheaper just to drill for groundwater on one’s own land than to get explicit permission.

There are water markets in California that do a little to steer water toward higher-valued uses. Farmers growing crops that can be produced in water-richer states (or countries) can let fields lie fallow and rent water rights to neighbours who have orchards or vines.

That offers hope for worried Canadian consumers who favour almonds, lemons, or garlic. California growers will naturally cut back— are already cutting back—on rice or hay in order to protect the state’s most irreplaceable crops.

The problem here is that California does have water markets—plural, not singular. The complexities of environmental and property law surrounding water make long-distance in-state transfers of water all but impossible.

And the local markets that do exist are highly informal, with no central exchanges.

For a coastal state, methods of drought defence are pretty easy to enumerate. The first and most natural idea, a perennial favourite of Republicans, is to build dams to trap more of the freshwater running down to the sea. The last major new dam built in California was the New Melones in the Sierra Nevada hills, polished off by the Army Corps of Engineers in 1978. That’s the same Sierra Nevada that gives the Sierra Club its name, which pretty much sums up the problem.

The dam was built only after a fantastic struggle, which included oodles of litigation, occasional sabotage and, most famously, threatened human self-sacrifice. Mark Dubois, a kindly six-foot-eight river guide and rafting enthusiast, chained himself to a boulder in the valley of the Stanislaus River as the Corps was filling it. That got president Jimmy Carter’s attention, and he ordered the Corps not to drown Dubois. The canyon of the Stanislaus was eventually filled (more by Mother Nature’s will, as it happened, than any official’s). But the principle that one determined person can hold up a water-storage project nigh on indefinitely was established.

Dam opponents point out that most of the best sites were snapped up anyway in the hydrological building boom that followed the Second World War. The New Melones Dam, for one, proved to be a disappointment, never living up to its projected storage capacity except when it was inconveniently overflowing into the spillway. CaliforMACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

nia voters will be asked in November to approve $7.5 billion in water-related borrowing, including $2.7 billion for new storage. (There’s another hint at the man-made nature of the drought problem: In California, the inevitable strife over new infrastructure projects doesn’t even kick off until statewide voters consent to the spending in the first place.)

Local water authorities are already lining up at the offices of the state water commission with blueprints in hand. But even if the bond is approved and all the money is spent, the new water might not balance out even one per cent of California’s freshwater consumption.

So if you can’t trap more water, maybe . . . use less? Right now, California Gov. Jerry Brown is combining moral hectoring with emergency regulation in order to get city dwellers to cut back on water usage. But despite appearances, California’s total urban water usage has remained steady for 20 years, even as the state added seven million souls. On a per-capita basis, the progress has already been remarkable. (Things would be worse in California without those awful modern eco-friendly toilets.) And the same more or less applies on the agricultural side.

That leaves California with one other obvious option: Look left, to the ocean.

Desalination of seawater, like solar power, is becoming less of an impractical sci-fi fantasy every year. Australia, which spent most of the first decade of this century in the throes of an extended drought, is a popular model for Californian water thinkers. Its government invested desperately in desalination, with the usual cost overruns and experimental bungles, but four large plants now produce nearly a billion litres of freshwater a day.

(Urban California is thought to use on the order of 30 billion litres a day.)

Desalination facilities are extremely energyhungry, but their locations make them a good fit with renewables like wind and tidal power.

Perth, the Western Australian city that is one of the driest on the planet, gets half its drinking water from a desalination plant paired with a wind farm. Is it expensive? Yes. Is it exactly the sort of thing that forward-thinking, big-dreaming California, starved of better alternatives, might try in the long run?

Who can doubt it?

To view before-and-after scenes from California’s drought, please see this week’s iPad edition of Maclean’s

35

International

FRANCE

What a croque With restaurant standards slipping and fast food sales soaring, France is struggling to save its culinary image

36

per cent) and growth this year has been stagnant. French consumers are feeling the pinch.

Second, after holding out for longer than most, France has finally succumbed to the homogenizing effects of globalization. Fast, convenient, widely available and cheaply sold food is difficult for any squeezed middle class to resist, and the French, it seems, are no exception.

As the New York Times restaurant critic Mark Bittman lamented recently on his blog, “Restaurants in the home of la grande cuisine have become much like they are elsewhere.

If you want a meal out featuring great ingredients prepared fresh and with skill, you can find one, but you have to be very diligent,

Sole food: Restaurants must now use a logo on menus to indicate food is made on-site

very lucky or willing to spend big; the vast majority of restaurants disappoint.” Meredith Erikson, a Canadian-born, London-based cookbook writer who often travels to France to eat and drink, agrees. “There’s been a shift in their food culture, definitely,” she says, “but that doesn’t change the fact that, at the very high end, no one does it better than France.”

In response to the general malaise, the French government has introduced a controversial new restaurant regulation. As of this SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

While the decline of French cooking has been lamented in restaurant circles, Erikson takes a sympathetic view of the situation.

“I understand the frustration of McCafé’s replacing independents. But I also get why a Happy Meal looks pretty good compared to pot-au-feu at the end of a workweek,” she says. “It’s strange that we, living outside this country, place a sort of imperial expectation on what it should be culturally. France will be what France will be.” Vive la République (with or without good cheese).

JEAN-SEBASTIEN EVRARD/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

At the weekly open-air food market in the Provençal town of Cavaillon, France, the olive sellers, bakers and cheesemongers are hawking their wares with a smile. British and North American voices can be heard in the crowd of mostly local shoppers, and even the maître d’ at a local café waves from his terrace at passing tourists. “We must be friendly to tourists now,” one baker says while packing up a quarterloaf of rustic sourdough. “It’s no longer enough just to sell bread.”

His resolve is shared by the French government, which has recently introduced new legislation in an attempt to resuscitate the declining quality of French food. Culinary tourism—once an economic mainstay of the French economy—has been declining steadily. For serious foodies, France is no longer the European gold standard in restaurants— the twin result of legendarily chilly service combined with slipping standards. Last year, the U.K.’s Office of National Statistics reported that British tourism to France (the nation’s biggest draw) had declined by a fifth in four years, while journeys to Spain, Italy, and even Belgium and Norway, had been on the rise.

It’s no wonder. A new study of French restaurants found that nearly half the country’s restaurant food is not prepared on-site, while the Union of Hotel Skills and Industries reports that up to 85 per cent of French restaurants use some form of frozen or vacuum-packed food. A separate survey last year found that fast-food chains now account for 54 per cent of restaurant sales in France. In fact, the French reportedly eat more McDonald’s per capita than any nation outside the United States. And the French romance with Le Big Mac shows no sign of abating. Over the first seven months of the year, French sales were up 4.8 per cent, making 2014 the best year ever for McDonald’s in France (a nation where beef farmers were so offended by the chain’s presence when it first arrived, they protested violently in the streets).

So what exactly has changed? First, the French economy has suffered during the euro crisis. Unemployment is high (more than 10

BY LEAH M CLAREN ·

summer, any French restaurant that serves food made on-site will be asked to indicate as much on the menu with the help of a new government-approved logo. The “fait maison” (homemade) symbol looks like a saucepan with a roof (get it?) and, as of next January, it will be compulsory for all menus to specify with the logo which dishes on their menu are, in fact, “faits maison.”

French officials say they hope the new regulation will create a “virtuous circle,” in which restaurateurs will be inspired to improve quality in the hope of attracting tourists, who will in turn look for the logo before booking a table. But critics (including Bittman) complain it may have the opposite effect. At most high-end, Michelin-starred restaurants, the logo will be easily and liberally applied. But at lower-end restaurants, it could persuade chefs to take homemade fare off the menu entirely. Imagine, for instance, if there was only one house-prepared dish in a list of otherwise pre-made fare. A proprietor would be understandably tempted to replace it with an industrial version to avoid highlighting the restaurant’s limits.

Economy

SENIORS

OLD AND LOADED Why are we doing so much to try to help seniors when they’re already the wealthiest generation in history?

At age 89, Larry South would have been forgiven if he had chosen to retire on a sunny beach in Florida. Instead, the former MPP from Kingston, Ont., recently embarked on a political battle to overhaul the municipal property tax system. South had been growing increasingly concerned that elderly homeowners on fixed incomes were struggling to cope with rising property taxes because of the soaring value of their homes, while at the same time he fretted that young workers, with their stagnant wages, were being shut out of the housing market. And so South proposed replacing property taxes with a tax equal to 4.5 per cent of a homeowner’s yearly household income. Doing so would make it easier for young workers to afford the cost of owning a home, while struggling seniors, he believed, would be the biggest beneficiaries.

But in his quest to change the tax system, he has come across an unlikely foe—his elderly friends. Like South, a former engineer who estimates he earns a retirement income that’s 30 to 40 per cent above the $86,000 household average in Kingston, many of his friends also pull in six-figure retirement incomes. Thanks to their high earnings, many would end up paying more in taxes under South’s plan than they do under the existing property tax system. Some, he says, resent the idea of paying more in tax than their younger, lower-income neighbours. “There’s not many that would have an income much less than $100,000, so their taxes will go up,” he says. “But they shouldn’t expect to be subsidized by the poor.”

South’s struggle to reform the property tax system, and the resistance he’s found among his affluent elderly friends, underscores what 38

GETTY IMAGES

BY TAMSIN M C MAHON ·

has been a remarkable shift in the nature of wealth in Canada. Seniors have long been considered society’s most vulnerable citizens, fragile pensioners on fixed incomes in need of a financial helping hand from both government and agile younger workers. That was true decades ago, but not anymore. Thanks to stock market booms, economic growth, a soaring real estate market and a major expansion in both private and government pension plans, today’s seniors are arguably the wealthiest generation in history. The changing fortunes of the elderly have been both swift and profound. In the 1970s, nearly 40 per cent of Canadian seniors lived in poverty. Today it’s five per cent, half the poverty rate of the working-age population and one-third the rate of poverty among children.

Seniors have seen their wealth quadruple since 1984, according to a Bank of Montreal study released last month, far outpacing the growth of wealth among younger Canadians.

The stunning transformation of the balance sheets of the elderly is thanks to a combination of financial discipline, public policy and good timing. Many of today’s seniors were the babies born in the aftermath of the Great Depression who learned to abhor debt and save aggressively. (The average Canadian senior has a debt load equal to just five per cent of their total wealth, compared to a 99 per cent debt-to-wealth ratio for their Boomer children.) At the same time as they were socking away their hard-earned money, seniors got a major boost from the introduction of public benefits like Canada Pension Plan, Old Age Security and taxpayer-funded health care, which has helped push the poverty rate among elderly Canadians to one of the lowest in the Western world. Many benefited from decades of economic growth while being spared the brunt of the 2008 meltdown because they had already shifted their savings into low-risk investments when they retired, says Goshka Folda, senior managing director of research firm Investor Economics. During the depth of the recession in 2009, 86 per cent of retirees told Statistics Canada researchers that they weren’t financially stressed and were living better in retirement than they had expected.

Not everyone is benefiting from these changes, however. The fortunes of younger Canadians haven’t improved nearly as much as they have for the elderly. In the 1980s, the typical senior was four times wealthier than the average 20-something. Today’s seniors are now on average nine times richer than their Isn’t that rich? Seniors have seen their wealth

quadruple since 1984, according to BMO

Millennial grandchildren. In fact, many of the trends and policies that have worked in favour of seniors have come at the expense of younger generations. That’s led some to warn of a coming generational war if public focus and resources aren’t shifted away from seniors to younger workers who are struggling far more than their parents ever did.

“This seems to be the golden age of seniors,” says Roger Gibbins, who retired as the head of the Canada West Foundation think tank in 2012. “Not in the advertising sense like life begins at 55, but in the sense of economic circumstances that have come together that make it a pretty good time to be old in Canada.”

the description of pensioners living on fixed incomes anymore.

Seniors’ incomes have jumped 40 per cent since 1984, says the Bank of Montreal, compared to 21 per cent for Baby Boomers and just three per cent for younger Canadians.

Today, the average Canadian man aged 65-plus earns $45,817 a year compared to $42,160 for men aged 25 to 34. More than 40 per cent of Canadian millionaires are 65 and older. The median net worth of seniors has similarly jumped 70 per cent since 1999, but hardly risen at all for those younger than 35. Meanwhile, those under-35s have seen their debt rise almost as quickly as their grandparents’ wealth. Retirement savings accounts have Forget fears about a retirement crisis shown the same troubling divergence. Since in Canada—the one where cash-strapped 1999, the proportion of seniors who have seniors will outlive their savings and suck the RSPs has grown 30 per cent, while it has fallen government coffers dry. Seniors may even- five per cent among younger Canadians. tually become the only thing that drives the Despite their affluence, seniors remain diseconomy. Canadians age 75 and older make proportionately the beneficiaries of government up less than seven per cent of the popula- subsidies and tax breaks. German think tank tion, but control more than Bertelsmann Foundation has a third of all financial assets Canada among the IT’S THE ‘GOLDEN AGE called in the country—roughly $1 “least intergenerationally trillion worth of stocks, OF SENIORS. ECONOMIC just” countries in the world, bonds, mutual funds and CIRCUMSTANCES MAKE with a troubling large gap cash, says Folda. That figure between the poverty rates doesn’t even include the IT A PRETTY GOOD TIME of seniors and children and a money locked inside their TO BE OLD IN CANADA.’ strong “elderly bias” among homes, which have more government programs and than quadrupled in value since the 1980s. tax systems. It found we spend nearly four Far from running out of money, many sen- times as much on support for seniors as we do iors actually continue to save well into their on children and have roughly $250,000 worth golden years. Malcolm Hamilton, one of of government debt for every child, an indicaCanada’s foremost experts on retirement, tion that future generations will be paying for has estimated that senior couples save or give the excesses of previous ones. away an average of 18 per cent of their From seniors-only tax breaks to free transit incomes—rising to 30 per cent for the wealthi- passes, Canadian governments now spend a est families. That certainly makes them gen- collective $45,000 a year per senior in Canada erous, but does it mean they should continue compared to $12,000 for those younger than to get seniors-only discounts or qualify for 45, says Paul Kershaw, a professor at the University of British Columbia who founded government benefits like CPP and OAS? The dramatic change in the fortunes of Generation Squeeze, an organization that seniors, from the impoverished pensioners advocates for generational equity. Most of the of yesterday to today’s wealthy retirees, is difference comes from big-ticket items like among the greatest policy success stories in health care, along with CPP and OAS. But Canadian history. Yet there’s a dark side to governments also spend an average of $613 the success, one that threatens to spark an per senior on tax breaks for housing, comugly generational crisis, in large part because pared to $354 for similar housing tax breaks governments continue to focus so much of for younger Canadians, and offer seniors their resources on supporting the plight of another $1,123 in age-related income tax credeconomically fragile seniors at the expense its. The federal government is increasing its of their far more fragile children and grand- spending on seniors at a rate of $12 billion a children. “We are mistaking physical frailty year, Kershaw says, while adding very little for financial frailty,” says Fred Vettese, chief new spending for younger Canadians. actuary of Morneau Shepell and co-author “We developed a sort of mythology of senof The Real Retirement. He estimates that iors as being very dependent or very vulnerfewer than 10 per cent of seniors actually fit able,” says Gibbins, 67. “I think to some degree MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

39

Economy

40

workers has flared up in the United Kingdom, where youth advocates have called on the government to scrap its discounted transit passes for seniors, arguing that the country now spends nearly $130 million (71 pounds) to help seniors to commute to work for free while unemployed young workers have to pay the full fare. It’s only a matter of time before similar generational conflicts over the workplace emerge in Canada as young people fight with their grandparents for the same jobs.

ing has kind of created this generational tipping point for an inequality in wealth that is playing out,” says Kershaw.

Like many his age, Martin Petter sees his children graduating from university into a vastly different world than he experienced in his youth. Armed with a Ph.D. from Oxford University in the 1970s, Petter had little trouble finding an academic job at McGill University with a salary that easily allowed him to afford to buy a house and interest-free government student loans that cost $15 a month to repay.

When it comes to the tensions between Now 71 and retired as vice-president of North young and old, however, there’s no greater Island College in B.C., he worries about the fact that his daughters, both educated and battlefield than the housing market.

THE GENERATION SPENDING GAP

$45,000

The Canadian government spends:

per citizen 65 and older

$12,000 per citizen 45 and under

$232 pension income credit

$141

$296 pension income splitting

$160 parental leave

$487 recreation and culture $595 age tax credit $613 housing tax breaks $3,181 RSP subsidies

$215 workers’ comp $234 other children’s tax credits $303 child care, kids under 6 $354 tax breaks

$4,033 RPP subsidies

$472 Employment Insurance

$6,169 other

$487 recreation and culture

$7,694 Old Age Security

$535 Canada Child Tax Benefit/ National Child Benefit Supplement

$8,942 CPP/QPP $12,758 medical care

42%

OF CANADIAN MILLIONAIRES ARE 65 OR OLDER

Incredibly, the age gap is growing even when it comes to housing. Despite low interest rates that have allowed legions of young Canadians to qualify for large mortgages, it’s seniors who have experienced one of the biggest increases in home ownership of any age group. In 1981, just 66 per cent of those over the age of 70 owned their homes. Today it’s 72 per cent.

Meanwhile, over the same period, the home ownership rate has actually gone down slightly among Canadians in their 30s and 40s. “HousSEPTEMBER 15, 2014

$1,886 other $2,241 post-secondary $2,635 Grade 1-12

ambitious women in their 30s, have amassed large student debts in order to find jobs. His youngest has recently gone back to university to train as a physiotherapist, and Petter helps her pay her student loans.

“The thing that particularly concerned me was hearing them talk about being able to one day buy a house and their almost fatalistic feeling that this really wasn’t something their generation could hope for,” he says. “I felt, why shouldn’t it be reasonable to hope

SHUTTERSTOCK

that image of seniors living in unheated apartments eating cat food has been maintained almost as a way to protect a group of people who are actually doing very well these days.”

Many point to changes in the economy that are working to effectively shut out younger Canadians from the economic windfalls of their parents and grandparents. Increasingly, the retirement dreams of younger Canadians are resting on the foundation of an economy that is shifting toward low-wage service jobs— many of them for services catering to their affluent grandparents. “I go for my Starbucks every day and I can afford the price to keep that part of my lifestyle going,” says Gibbins. “But I need young people who are prepared to work at Starbucks for a pretty low income. It makes me feel a bit uncomfortable in this advantaged situation. I’m not sure it reflects my own hard work; it reflects the demography.”

Younger Canadians will inevitably be working longer than their parents and grandparents, given the age to qualify for CPP and OAS is rising from 65 to 67. Folda points out that more than 40 per cent of existing private sector defined pension plans, which have guaranteed a secure retirement for thousands of today’s retirees, are now largely closed off to new employees. Vettese thinks the longer working life won’t be an undue hardship for future generations since they’ll be living longer. But it will reverse a long-standing trend that has seen the median retirement age in Canada actually fall by two years since the 1970s. The idea of having to delay retirement is still likely to come as a surprise to young Canadians, a third of whom told researchers from the Bank of Montreal that they plan to retire before the age of 60.

At the same time, the end of mandatory retirement means more and more seniors are working long into their golden years. The employment rate for seniors has more than doubled since 1988, from 6.7 per cent to 13.2 per cent. That’s fine for those who need the extra income, but there is evidence that many seniors aren’t working because they need the money. While the share of seniors in the workforce has gone up, the share of those working full-time has actually gone down over the past 25 years, suggesting that many seniors aren’t staying in their jobs longer, but are instead turning to part-time jobs in retirement. Last year, the Municipal Retirees Organization Ontario studied public servants who continued working in retirement despite earning government pensions. More than half said their main motivation was to get out of the house. Just 16 per cent said they worked because they needed cash. Anger over the growing legions of older

for?” Every generation of young people faces challenges starting out in the world, he says, “but I think the hurdles I faced were much more surmountable and much more dependent on one’s individual ability than the current generation. So many of the things they face are beyond their ability to change.”

The fact that many young people are now digging themselves deeply into debt to buy a home is also engineering a massive transfer of wealth from young buyers to older sellers.

Last year, University of Toronto geography professor Alan Walks mapped out a detailed geography of household wealth and debt in Canada. Walks found that cities with a high

has helped push home prices sky-high, particularly in mild-weather cities in B.C. “Wealthy seniors have been able to externalize much of the costs related to their stimulation of local housing demand onto the entire metro housing market,” he wrote, which has helped foster what he called “a new dynamic of generational inequality” that has transferred the financial risks to younger buyers while shifting the wealth to older ones. “Efforts on behalf of policy makers to maintain high real estate values in this context thus work to enlarge generational disparities,” he wrote, “as seniors are then able to cash out at elevated values while new

POVERTY RATE IN CANADA

PERCENTAGE OF SENIORS RECEIVING INCOME FROM:

Poverty among the elderly is far lower than the working-age population, according to the Conference Board of Canada

35.2%

1976

2013

CPP/QPP*

92.1% 10.5 11.1

13.4

15.1

35.2%

6.7

INVESTMENTS Seniors (65+)

Working age (19-64)

Children (<18)

MEDIAN NET WORTH (All figures expressed in 2012 dollars, adjusted for inflation)

54.3% 45.3% PRIVATE PENSIONS AND RSPs

AGE 65+

63.0%

$270,700 $460,700

24.0%

$354,200 55-64 $533,600

EMPLOYMENT EARNINGS

$244,100 45-54 $378,300 35-44

CHART SOURCES: STATISTICS CANADA; CONFERENCE BOARD OF CANADA; GENERATION SQUEEZE

<34

17.2%

$124,800 $182,500 $23,300 $25,300

22.6%

*Seniors who retired before CPP started in 1965, or never worked, didn’t qualify for payments 1999

2012

proportion of seniors also had higher levels of household debt. But when he looked closer, he found that it wasn’t the seniors who were deep in debt, but their younger neighbours, some of whom had debts worth more than 300 per cent of their incomes.

Far from trading in their suburban houses for quiet retirement communities, Walks found wealthy seniors have instead been competing with younger homebuyers for homes in the same sought-after cities. That

1976

2011

families have to take on unsustainable debts to become homeowners.”

Eric Swanson knows that phenomenon all too well. Recently, he and his wife made an offer on a small house in Victoria, a popular destination for Canadian retirees who have been flocking to Vancouver Island from oilrich Alberta. “There are a lot of retirees also looking for small houses on small lots, so it’s making it a bit more difficult,” says Swanson, 31-year-old executive director of Generation MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

Squeeze. Growing up, Swanson’s parents, both working professionals, seemed to have little trouble buying large houses close to downtown. It’s a different world today. “There’s a big part of us that feels we’re assuming a lot more risk than we may be able to handle down the road compared to the experiences of our parents,” he says.

Others argue that the fact that many seniors have amassed sizable real estate wealth is less important than it seems since it means that plenty of seniors have become millionaires on paper, but with no way to cash out their housing wealth. Retirees who sell their suburban homes are often moving to the city, where they’re paying equally high prices for urban houses and condos with high maintenance fees, says Folda. “What we’ve seen really in the past decade is that the strategy of downsizing from grand houses to condominiums actually released very little liquidity to finance retirement,” she says.

But the fact that some seniors have trouble cashing in their real estate windfalls pales in comparison to the issues facing young workers trying to afford their first home, says Gibbins. “I’d much rather be in the situation of trying to squeeze some financial gain out of a property than be somebody just starting out with a young family and trying to buy a house in Vancouver.”

When it comes to housing, governments may be exacerbating the tensions between young and old. Several provinces offer property tax credits and subsidies that are only available to seniors. Earlier this year, Alberta launched a program that allows seniors to defer their property taxes until they sell their home or die—when the back taxes can then be taken out of their estate.

Such preferential treatment isn’t limited to property taxes. Politicians of all stripes compete to promise new programs and tax breaks for seniors, while programs that would benefit younger Canadians, such as tuition and daycare subsidies, are considered too expensive for cash-strapped governments.

Even programs that have proven uncontroversial when introduced for seniors can spark a political battle when governments try to expand them to younger Canadians. The Harper Conservatives introduced pension income splitting for seniors back in 2007, and heard no one object. But income splitting became a political nightmare when the government tried to expand it to families with children. Just as the proposal was seen to be supporting rich couples at the expense of poor single moms, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives estimates that income 41

Economy

It’s easy to blame seniors for stacking the deck in favour of their own generation. But in many ways, says Kershaw, it’s actually younger Canadians who are to blame for the lack of public support for their issues. Turnout among younger voters is notoriously low, so politicians naturally target their campaigns to the seniors who actually show up on election day. Many young Canadians also seem to support the idea of boosting spending on seniors—even at the expense of their own generation. Kershaw has polled Canadians, both young and old, asking them which age group should be the top priority for government. Not surprisingly, 70 per cent of seniors said politicians should focus on them. But he found that younger Canadians were just as likely to say governments should prioritize seniors as they were to say they should help their own generation.

“Younger Canadians, like older Canadians, believe the stories about who is most vulnerable still in society,” says Kershaw. “These stories are increasingly outdated because they’re based on the big policy challenges of the past Maybe later: Home ownership rates have declined among Canadians in their 30s and 40s and a failure to recognize that the situation has really changed.” organization is taking directly from Carp is a or CPP and OAS to a “means test”—a sliding However, institutions that have tried to shift membership card that would offer discounts scale based on income. Today, a couple can spending away from older Canadians often on products and services, sort of a seniors earn a combined retirement income of face a fierce public outcry. The B.C. govern- discount for the under-45 set. Unlike Carp’s $140,000 and still qualify for full Old Age ment sparked protests when it announced membership card, which offers deals on things Security. They can earn as much $230,000 it was scrapping the seniors discount on its like home insurance, fitness plans and travel before those benefits are clawed back entirely. ferry service. Seniors complained bitterly ear- discounts, a Generation Squeeze membership In a study last year, the Fraser Institute prolier this summer when Mount Allison Uni- could include discounts on youth-friendly ser- posed that lowering the clawback threshold versity in New Brunswick vices like car-sharing pro- for OAS benefits to $102,000 for a couple said it would start charging and “mixer mort- (or $51,000 per person) would free up $730 ‘MANY BELIEVE THE grams them to attend university gages” that allow friends million in federal cash every year.

STORIES ABOUT WHO and roommates to co-own a The idea of also clawing back CPP for highalongside their tuitionpaying grandchildren. CalIS MOST VULNERABLE house. By boosting the mar- income retirees might seem inherently unfair gary Mayor Naheed Nenshi ket clout of younger Can- given that those seniors paid into the system has said he’s opposed to a IN SOCIETY, BUT THESE ada, the organization hopes when they were working. But it wouldn’t be plan by the city to scrap a STORIES ARE OUTDATED’ to force governments and the first time affluent Canadians have paid discount that allows lowcorporations alike to start more in taxes than they’ve received in beneincome seniors to pay $15 a year for public catering to their needs. fits in order to support the less wealthy. “If transit even though younger low-income But for there to be any meaningful change, we can just change that focus of vulnerabilresidents pay $44 a month. “I can still not governments will likely need to rethink the ity from the old to the young, I think we understand why someone living on $1,500 a perks they give to their elderly voters and would really have accomplished something month should be treated different if they’re instead tailor their programs to those who important,” says Gibbins.

The battle over how cash-strapped govern55 or 65,” Calgary alderman Jim Stevenson really need the help, regardless of age. Gibbins thinks wealthy seniors may need to start ments should divvy up their limited resources told council during the vote.

Kershaw’s answer to the growing genera- covering more of the cost of their own health between young and old is only likely to heat tional tensions is to try to turn Generation care to free up government resources for up as the biggest wave of Baby Boomers enters Squeeze into an organization for young Can- struggling younger workers. Despite the retirement over the next decade. But it’s a adians that can rival the powerful seniors’ inevitable political blowback, governments battle worth waging—unless we want today’s lobby group Carp (formerly the Canadian may also need to start subjecting sacred sen- seniors to be the last generation of Canadians Association of Retired Persons). One idea the iors’ benefits like pension income-splitting living in retirement bliss.

42

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

JASON ALDEN/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES

splitting for seniors has disproportionately benefited the wealthiest retirees—allowing them to qualify for an extra $250 million in Old Age Security payments next year.

T

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Economy

JASON KIRBY

THE RED FLAGS RAISED

BY THE SINOFOREST CASE

44

Out on a limb: ‘These events did not take place on Bay Street or even in rural Ontario.’ No kidding.

ously called it “a pile of crap”—things continued to fall apart. Promises from the company that it would reveal the identities of the intermediaries through which it sold vast tracts of forest land never panned out, and a special independent committee set up by the company’s board failed to answer many questions about its dealings with third parties. By spring the following year, Sino-Forest had filed for bankruptcy protection and the OSC had levelled its fraud allegations at Sino-Forest, allegations which have yet to be proven and which the executives deny.

Which brings us to the case unfolding in one of the regulator’s hearing rooms. If the Ontario Securities Commission is right, the executives at Sino-Forest orchestrated a web of self-dealing and “deceitful conduct” that bilked investors out of billions of dollars.

But if lawyers for the executives, including former CEO Allen Chan, are correct, mistakes may have been made, but they didn’t add up to a fraud.

Now here’s the kicker: Chan’s lawyer, Emily Cole, told the OSC tribunal on the first day of the hearings that everything that transpired at Sino-Forest happened in China, where the business culture is different than in Canada. “These events did not take place on Bay Street or even in rural Ontario,” she said in her opening remarks. “The panel should not draw conclusions about them as if they did.” Cole even promised to deliver an expert witness to guide the tribunal in understanding “the unique business and cultural requirements of operating in mainland China,” as one news report put it.

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

It’s not clear what Cole’s expert witness will say, exactly. But one reality of operating in China is that the country remains an economy with no transparent oversight or legal framework for resolving disputes. It is instead a market where graft and bribery are so rampant, despite the current government’s efforts to stamp it out, that corruption, by some estimates, costs China as much as 10 per cent of its US$9-trillion GDP. It’s remarkable that, three decades after China’s great experiment in free markets was first put in motion, after globalization brought East and West together, this still bears repeating. And yet, just this week, a survey released by the American Chamber of Commerce in China revealed 60 per cent of U.S. companies operating in China feel they are being unfairly subjected to opaque rules and the selective application of laws.

Meanwhile, Canadian and American stock exchanges continue to court Chinese companies to list their shares here. Sometime in the next week or so, one of the largest initial public offerings in U.S. history will take place, the debut of Alibaba, China’s answer to eBay and Amazon. Many others will follow. Analysts, along with Wall Street and Bay Street investment bankers, love them, because they can be pitched to investors as stories about China’s economic miracle, while brokerages and the exchanges themselves love them for the additional trading fees they generate.

But before investors get too carried away by the next red-hot Red China play, they might spend some time following the SinoForest case. It could be the smartest investment they ever make.

QILAI SHEN/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES; GETTY IMAGES; REUTERS CHART SOURCE: COMPANY REPORTS

Before a hearing into fraud allegations at Sino-Forest Corp. even got under way this week in Toronto, it was clear the outcome—whenever it eventually arrives and whatever form it takes—will bring satisfaction to absolutely none of the alleged victims. Investors in the massive Chinese forestry company, which was valued at $6 billion when it collapsed in 2011, will never see more than a few pennies on each dollar they lost. And because the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) has pursued Sino-Forest’s executives in a tribunal hearing, and not in court, there’s no chance—if the tribunal finds that fraud did occur—of a guilty verdict or of anyone going to jail.

That shouldn’t stop anyone from paying attention, though, because, as the case unfolds, it promises to offer valuable insights into why China has been such a confounding and tortuous experience for so many Western businesses and investors over the years. SinoForest is a cautionary tale for everyone hoping to cash in on China’s rise.

First, a quick recap for those who haven’t been following along. In mid-2011, Sino-Forest was a darling of the Toronto Stock Exchange and the most valuable forestry company in Canada. Investors couldn’t get enough of the story of the Chinese company that operated hundreds of thousands of hectares of tree plantations, ripe for the harvest to supply that country’s booming construction sector.

Then, in June of that year, Carson Block, a little-known short-seller from the American research firm Muddy Waters, issued a report comparing Sino-Forest to a “multi-billiondollar Ponzi scheme” that “massively exaggerates its assets.” The analysts who’d adoringly followed the company—all seven Canadian analysts on the file had “buy” recommendations on Sino-Forest shares—rallied to its defence. And while they poked some holes in Block’s analysis—one analyst, Richard Kelertas, formerly of Dundee Capital, fam-

ECONOWATCH

A scorecard on the state of the economy

STOCK SIGNS

Shoot, the economy’s better • The U.S. economy has stabilized and apocalyptic fears have subsided. Great news, unless you’re a gunmaker. Sales of firearms have been slowing, hitting gun stocks like Smith & Wesson hard. Its shares have fallen sharply on lower earnings forecasts.

• Get ready to be inundated with all things “i.” With Apple’s stock trading near an alltime high, the company is set to roll out an array of new devices sure to generate hype, from a wearable wrist computer to new version iPhones and iPads. The company sent out a cryptic invite to a Sept. 9 launch event that reads only: “Wish we could say more.”

• The Saskatachewan uranium giant Cameco is locking the doors at the world’s largest uranium mine over a dispute with workers who are set to go on strike at the McArthur River mine. The news sank Cameco’s stock price but boosted uranium prices to their highest level in more than two years.

• Bloomberg news has crowned Jack Ma, the founder of e-commerce giant Alibaba, as China’s wealthiest man. That’s thanks to anticipation for Alibaba’s IPO in New York, which in valuing the company at $154 billion would be the biggest in U.S. history.

STOCK SIGNS BROUGHT TO YOU BY QUESTRADE

‘Will get back to you shortly on #ALSChallenge, but right now too busy working on BIG deal with another investment banker’

Chart of the week:

A really, really big bank Sometime in the next year one of Canada’s banks will top the trillion-dollar mark in total assets for the first time. Who’ll be first?

THE TRILLIONDOLLAR MARK

—Carl Icahn, via Twitter, to Jefferies Group CEO Rich Handler’s request that he have a bucket of ice water dumped over his head in the name of charity

TD BANK $921 billion ROYAL BANK $913 billion SCOTIABANK $792 billion BMO $587 billion CIBC $405 billion MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

Society

SCIENCE

OVER OUR HEADS What scientists have to say about clearing our cluttered minds If the world feels like it’s getting more complicated, that’s because it is—in ways both large and small, and with discombobulating speed. In 1976, the average supermarket stocked 9,000 different items. Today, its shelves are packed with 40,000. The spread of TV, video and computers—at work, at home and in our pockets—means that the average person now takes in the information equivalent of 175 newspapers each and every day, a fivefold increase since 1986. The amount of science produced over the past two decades surpasses all of the theories, experiments and discoveries ever created in the preceding 100,000 years. The flood of knowledge, choice and distractions never slows.

“We are faced with an unprecedented amount of information to remember and objects to keep track of,” writes Daniel J. Levitin in his new book, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload. Yet, “in this age of iPods and thumb drives, when your smartphone can record video, browse 200 million websites, and tell you how many calories are in that cranberry scone, most of us are still trying to keep track of things using the systems that were put in place in a pre-computerized era.”

Our compulsion to be organized runs deep.

It’s a combination of ancient imperatives— Can I eat this mushroom? Where was that watering hole? Is this the cave with the bear?— and desirable modern outcomes, including educational attainment, workplace success, robust health and longevity. But evolution hasn’t kept pace with the information revolution. And Levitin, a musician, record producer and McGill University neuroscientist, is sounding the alarm about the consequences 46

of spreading ourselves and our attention too thinly. “It brings on a real phenomenon called decision fatigue,” he told Maclean’s in a recent interview. “Every decision you make requires resources. Neurons are living cells with metabolisms. When they work, they need to replenish themselves with glucose, and that’s not in unlimited supply in the brain. So, whether you make a tiny decision or a big one, you’re using up those resources. The amount of choice we have in a place like a grocery store can be overwhelming. And, later in the day, when you have to make some important decision at work, or about your pension, you’ve depleted those neural resources selecting a gluten-free cereal.”

Focusing on what really matters is difficult at the best of times. But as our daily lives have become busier, we have paradoxically incorporated all sorts of new distractions, from SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

email to texts to social media, into our routines. Multitasking is addictive, Levitin concedes. “We’re a productive species and we have an evolutionary history that finds pleasure in accomplishing things. So, every text message you send, every email you reply to, every Facebook update you post, makes you feel like you’ve crossed a task off your mental list.” In turn, that triggers the brain’s reward system, which releases dopamine and other neural chemicals that induce feelings of contentment and happiness. “You get this pleasure-reward loop going,” he says. “It’s the same chemicals that are responsible for people becoming addicted to cocaine and heroin.”

What those good feelings mask is the reality that all our busy work doesn’t amount to much. “People think they are multitasking and getting a whole lot of stuff done, but what they’re doing is rapidly switching from one

ADRIANNA WILLIAMS/CORBIS

BY JONATHON GATEHOUSE ·

task to another. It’s a cognitive illusion,” says Levitin. All that refocusing eats away at both our time and our energy. “People don’t realize the loss of productivity because they aren’t measuring it.”

(To combat the phenomenon in his own life, Levitin now sets aside a certain period each day to answer emails or tweet. At all other times, he tries to remain unplugged and locked-in on the task at hand.)

There’s also a growing body of evidence that suggests our “smart” devices are, in fact, making us dumber. As search engines and databases have proliferated, we have come to rely on them for the kind of basic facts and figures—phone numbers, loved ones’ birthdays, the year Samuel de Champlain first sailed up the St. Lawrence—that we used to carry around in our brains. (To save you checking, it was 1603.) As our comfort level with

such “outsourcing” grows, we seem to retain less and less information. In one well-known 2011 study, a group of Columbia and Harvard scientists asked participants to type bits of trivia into a computer. Half were told the information would be saved on the hard drive, and the other half that it would be erased.

Quizzed afterward, those who were convinced they wouldn’t be able to revisit the factoids at the click of a mouse proved significantly better at recalling them. Other studies indicate that we seem to absorb less information off a screen than a printed page. Researchers at Norway’s Stavanger University tested the emotional effect of a disturbing short story consumed on paper versus an iPad, and found that the print readers were drawn in more deeply, and had greater empathy for the characters. In a follow-up experiment with a Kindle, published last month, the same team MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

Drain: The brain’s evolution hasn’t kept up with

the information revolution, says one expert

found that those who read on devices were “significantly” worse at recalling details, characters and settings in a short story than those who were given it in paperback. It may simply have to do with location. After reading a book or magazine, we can more easily visualize where events occurred on a page, and where they fit in relation to other details, allowing us to more easily reconstruct plots or events.

Levitin doesn’t necessarily see that as a problem. One of his keys to coping with information overload is to “externalize” our more mundane memory tasks by making lists or using prompts, such as taking the empty carton with you when you need more milk. But what that electronics-induced inattention does necessitate, he argues, is the creation of 47

Society

48

A new University of Illinois at Chicago study of depressive young adults, released last week, came to a similar conclusion. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine the brains of both depressed and healthy 18- to 23-year-olds, scientists found that those with a history of mental illness seemed to be “hyper-connected,” with significantly more cross-flow between the emotional and cognitive networks of the brain.

The heightened activity indicates that those with a history of depression spend more time ruminating on their emotions, wrote the researchers, a “not very healthy way” of working through problems.

Of course, there is also an emotional component to our need to be organized. In his

breathing and space and being able to function,” says Kumar.

Levitin is a strong believer in creating systems at home and at the office, sorting items into labelled drawers, plotting out detailed work and social calendars, and organizing our digital desktops. Yet he also preaches the virtues of balancing it all with unstructured time, including periods dedicated to daydreaming, when we are free to think nonlinearly, innovate and problem-solve.

The biggest challenge facing our disorganized, overrun society, he says, is teaching our children how to deal with the wired world we have bequeathed them. “There’s been a dramatic shift in the last 20 years. We used to train people to acquire information; so much of

Endless scroll: The average person takes in the information equivalent of 175 newspapers every day

book, Levitin references a survey that says three-quarters of Americans report that their garages are too stuffed with junk to fit a car, and another inventory of a typical household that counted 2,260 visible objects in just the living room and two bedrooms. All that clutter creates stress—particularly in women, he says—and the release of the hormone cortisol, which, in turn, can lead to cognitive impairment, fatigue and even a suppressed immune system.

Clare Kumar, a professional organizer who runs her own productivity consultancy in Toronto, says her clients are often in severe distress when they reach out for help. “Their environment is screaming at them,” she says.

“They feel stifled.” But after a thorough decluttering, and being taught some basic strategies to put their lives and homes in order, most find that their productivity and happiness suddenly spike. “It has to do with SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

school was about cramming your head full of facts and telling you where to find more of them if you ever needed to follow up. Now, everybody has instantaneous access to any fact they want,” says the author, “but we haven’t been teaching people how to use those facts creatively and intelligently. I think that’s how education needs to change at every level, so that from a young age, children are taught how to be critical thinkers.”

The dangers of continuing down our current path are more than apparent. This week, Baylor University in Texas released the results of a student survey that found that female undergraduates now spend an average of 10 hours a day interacting with their phones, and males eight hours. All the texting, surfing, online banking and listening to music isn’t leaving much space for anything else, the school warned.

It’s high time to start getting organized.

TILL JACKET/GETTY IMAGES

a kind of triage system in our daily lives to separate out the things that are really important to remember. “One technique is to be consciously aware, and focus your attention,” says Levitin, and to find a way to associate the task, item or insight you need to keep top of mind with an emotion. “As a rule, the things that have the most impact on you are the things you remember best. If you really care about something, you’ll remember it.

So, even if you have to steel yourself and manufacture that caring, it helps,” he says.

The strong link between our memories and our emotions has long been recognized by scientists, especially when it comes to fear: From an evolutionary perspective, we are hard-wired to recall the threats and hazards we encounter in order that we might learn from our mistakes and survive. Happy or sad events are also more likely to be permanently etched in our minds, in particular, those we experience in our formative years. That “reminiscence bump,” as researchers term it, peaks around the age of 20 and explains why a first kiss or teenage breakup might still be vividly recalled even decades later.

Forgetting is also important, however.

Brian Levine, a neurologist and senior scientist at the Rotman Research Institute at Toronto’s Baycrest Hospital, notes that most things we encounter or do on an average day aren’t really worth remembering. “If all that information was stored or encoded in the brain, we’d be overwhelmed,” he says. Most people have a fairly decent recall of what has happened in the past 24 hours, but, beyond that, things rapidly begin to fade. “We evolved to think of today and tomorrow, basically,” says Levine. “Contingencies and circumstances change. It doesn’t make biological sense to retain all that information.”

Interestingly, emotion as a memory aid does have its limits. This past month, Levine and his colleagues published a study of passengers who were aboard a 2001 Air Transat flight that ran out of fuel and nearly had to ditch at sea, before the pilot miraculously glided into a safe landing at an air base in the Azores islands.

About half of those who participated in the project had developed post-traumatic stress disorder after their brush with death, and the researchers had anticipated that their memories of what occurred that day would be sharper than those of passengers who had fully recovered from the shock. But the amount of detail both groups were able to recall was essentially the same. What that suggests, says Levine, is that PTSD has more to do with how people process their memories than how they experienced the trauma is the first place.

Information Supplement

Help Your Eyes Age Gracefully Blurred vision and headaches may be caused by a naturally occurring aging process called “presbyopia.”

EYE EXAMS NEED TO BE REGULAR Routine eye exams by a Doctor of Optometry not only ensure good vision and eye health, but peace of mind.

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Having to wear glasses for the first time due to presbyopia turns out to be a natural part of aging for most of us. But the stress and anxiety experienced by one woman while trying to have its symptoms diagnosed is not.

“A Doctor of Optometry in our office saw a female patient who had disabling headaches and blurred vision,” says Doctor of Optometry Richard Kort. “She first went to a family physician, who ordered a series of tests, including a CAT scan, to rule out a brain tumor or aneurysm. Months later she came into our office for a comprehensive eye exam. A simple pair of reading glasses got rid of her symptoms. But the entire process took months and seriously affected her quality of life.”

Dr. Kort says the unnecessary anxiety the patient experienced drives home the importance of seeing a Doctor of Optometry if you are experiencing blurred vision or headaches – symptoms that can be related to vision problems, such as presbyopia (literally “aging eye” in Greek). Doctors recommend that adults under age 65 have a comprehensive eye exam every two years, and seniors annually.

Other symptoms of presbyopia include eye fatigue, difficulty reading in dim light, and having to hold reading material at arm’s length. People with a history of good vision are typically the most surprised when symptoms of this naturally occurring process begin, usually around the age of 40.

But while eyeglasses are an inevitable fact of life for most of us, not all glasses are created equal. Buying “cheater” lenses – the inexpensive glasses often purchased in drug stores without a proper prescription – may be tempting, but other factors need to be considered for proper vision care. Cheaters don’t take into account the wearer’s preferred reading position and angle, or that most people need different magnification strengths for each eye to avoid eye strain and fatigue.

“Using cheaters may reduce the amount of time someone can read comfortably, compared with prescription reading glasses,” says Dr. Kort. “Prescription reading glasses don’t have to be expensive.

The important thing is that, if you’re having difficulty reading, you should see a Doctor of Optometry.”

Adults 20-39 `LHYZ VSK ZOV\SK OH]L HU L`L L_HT L]LY` [^V [V [OYLL `LHYZ Adults 40-64 `LHYZ VSK ZOV\SK OH]L HU L`L L_HT L]LY` [^V `LHYZ Those over age 65 or WLVWSL ^P[O KPHIL[LZ VY H OPZ[VY` VM L`L KPZLHZL PU [OLPY MHTPS` ZOV\SK OH]L `LHYS` L_HTZ VY HZ YLJVTTLUKLK I` H +VJ[VY VM 6W[VTL[Y`

Visit doctorsofoptometry.ca to find a doctor and book eye exams for you and your family.

Society

ACADEMIA

Of poison pens and profs Cyberbullying is well documented, but research is just beginning on students who abuse teachers online

50

bullying as students face immense competition and pressure to succeed, coupled with an increase in the use of technology in classes and the ability to instantly communicate with faculty. Some students may feel powerless against the professors who determine their marks. It’s mostly student-to-student aggression, but some students are lashing out at their instructors on RateMyProfessors, official end-of-term evaluations and email. One prof who took part in Blizard’s study claims his class was cancelled as a result of the content posted anonymously on RateMyProfessors. The website could not be reached for comment. But according to the site guidelines, posters should “be honest and objective” and avoid personal attacks against professors.

At Simon Fraser University, a major national study on postsecondary cyberbullying in Canada, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, surveyed more than 2,000 people at four universities. In July, the research team finished analyzing the data on faculty: about 25 per cent of the 330 faculty members who responded to the survey reported cyberbullying by students at least

The new school: Students are increasingly lashing out against university faculty online

PHOTOGRAPH BY LAURA MILLS

Lida Blizard, a nursing instructor, was two years into her research on students cyberbullying professors when a high school student found an unsavoury comment about Blizard on RateMyProfessors.com, a website where students can rank and discuss professors anonymously.

After the student notified her, Blizard got website administrators to take the comment down. A teacher at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in Surrey, B.C., she will not repeat it verbatim; she will say it described parts of her body in “a sexually derogatory way.”

It was similar to the way one of her former students responded after being confronted about cheating and plagiarism. “It was disturbing to think that this student had graduated and was out in the workforce. Are they still behaving like this?” The post came down within 48 hours, but most professors aren’t so lucky—it’s rare for site administrators to respond to such requests. Blizard, who recently completed her Ph.D. in educational leadership at Simon Fraser University, had been able to brush off offensive emails from disgruntled students in the past, but this was different. A couple of days later she gave a presentation in front of colleagues using the experience as an example; she realized just how much it had gotten under her skin. “There was a burning in my throat and tears in my eyes. The power of the pain when I described the words overwhelmed me,” she recalled. It was a pivotal moment. “Although it really hurt, I channelled that into determination to find answers.”

While Blizard’s study sample of 36 faculty members is small, she says the negative effects of cyberbullying are nonetheless striking. Twenty-five of the professors who filled out her survey anonymously reported being fearful of teaching and of students, and saw a drop in their productivity; 21 felt depressed, nine had thoughts of retaliation, and one had thoughts of suicide. In many cases, the professors reported having more than three effects simultaneously (with some experiencing more than 10), which is in line with the American Psychiatric Association’s criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder, Blizard said.

Campuses have become hotbeds for cyberBY RACHEL BROWNE ·

once in the past 12 months, and 42 per cent said it was through RateMyProfessors. Twenty per cent reported feeling suicidal after being cyberbullied.

Like Blizard, one of the lead authors has also been on the receiving end of cyberabuse. In 2010, just before the study began, SFU professor of education Wanda Cassidy started receiving a barrage of long, threatening emails from a student who was angry about her mark. “The emails said what a horrible professor I was, that the course was horrible,” she says. “I knew who it was so that I could deal with it.” But she says it’s almost impossible for professors to deal with defamatory remarks on RateMyProfessors. “You keep hoping others will come to your defence, you can’t do it yourself. And that’s one reason why it’s so horrible.”

At the University of Alberta, the main targets are female faculty, especially if they teach in the gender or sexual minorities departments, says the university’s ombudsperson, Natalie Sharpe. She says cyberbullying has been steadily increasing since 2009, but there aren’t specific provisions about cyberbullying in their code of conduct. “I would like to see something more as it relates or gives examples to this kind of behaviour,” she said.

Cassidy’s research team examined codes of conduct at 75 Canadian universities and found gaps in policies. She would like to see mandated courses that teach students how to interact respectfully online. They also recommend incorporating cyberbullying into the class discussion, the way plagiarism is addressed at the start of most courses.

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

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Yours for $10: A long-tailed macaque monkey

had its tail injured by Indonesian poachers

Society

PHOTO ESSAY

THE WITNESS

BY ADRIAN LEE · Patrick Brown still remembers the time when, in a gun-laden frontier town near the border between China and Burma, he stumbled upon a market that sold animal parts: he saw a pair of dismembered bear paws, atop a cage with rabbits in it. “But then I went further into the market, and I found a bear pelvis, and I saw that it still had the meat on it,” said Brown, 45, in an interview from Bangkok. “Not the fur.

Just the meat.”

It’s been a long journey for Brown, who has lived in the U.K., the Middle East, Africa, Canada and Australia, all before the age of 15, and who started his career doing dance photography. More than a decade ago, two authors approached him to provide photos for a book on the animal trade. He was aware of the issue, but didn’t know of the scope: it’s one of the largest illegal trades in the world.

“I was naive. To me, it was little trinkets sold in market stalls, the occasional tusk. But then I realized—it was all connected. That’s when I said, ‘I need to document this as far as I can push it.’ ” He’s curated the raw and sometimes beautiful shots exposing this “cruel reality” in a new book, Trading to Extinction—photographs that required him to travel to remote places and work amid tense situations. Originally, he attempted to take his photos furtively, but he drew suspicion from people who “weren’t happy” with what he was doing.

So these days, he goes undercover: “I just wore a loud tourist T-shirt and a hat and played the dumb Australian tourist,” he said.

“I led them to believe that I didn’t know what I was doing, so I was no threat to them.”

Despite that, he’s still been in tough spots— he’s been beaten in Vietnam, pistol-whipped in Indonesia. But he doesn’t see himself as an animal activist per se, he said. “What’s happening to the animals is the story in my eyes. It’s not animal cruelty I’m going after.

I’m exposing the subcultures that surround the animals.”

For more of Patrick Brown’s startling images, see this week’s iPad issue of Maclean’s

Animal market: (top) Burmese locals sell animal parts on the street, including a buffalo head, a tiger’s penis and a bear’s gall bladder; (bottom)

THIS SPREAD, PREVIOUS SPREAD AND NEXT PAGE: PATRICK BROWN/PANOS PICTURES

a pangolin—or ‘scaly anteater,’ considered a delicacy in parts of Asia—is intercepted at Bangkok’s airport as part of a crackdown on trafficking

Private parts: (top) Tiger cubs in Thailand compete with piglets to suckle from a sow, who is a surrogate mother to the cubs. The tigersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; mother will

be bred again soon; (bottom) tiger penises, prized in traditional Chinese medicine, sell for $124 (HK$900) for 100 grams at a chemistsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; in Hong Kong

Heads up: A Nepalese ranger holds a rhino

skull; skins and other parts are worth $750,000

Society

MEMOIR

Driven to ecstacy A near-death experience isn’t enough, it seems, to keep someone from the EDM club scene Growing up in Montreal—a city designed for coming-of-age rites, where the drinking age is 18 and marijuana is just a whiff away—it’s easy to fall under the pressures of living in the moment. Perhaps it is this “you only live once” mentality—YOLO, Drake sang—that pushes people in my circle to their limits. It’s evolved from an inspirational catchphrase, to a trendy tattoo, to a one-word dare, to a hashtag tossed around to excuse bad behaviour and poor decisions.

Today’s twentysomethings are the first generation in the modern era to have a higher poverty and unemployment rate, and lower personal income, compared to the previous two during the same stage of life, according to the Pew Research Center. When you have four months off from school and head home to raid your parents’ fridge, and your only concern is to wake up for a part-time job, parties and summer festivals become your priority. Every weekend is an opportunity to do something epic, to outshine the Saturday before. And June 22 last year was no different.

“I was depressed and I felt like my organs were shutting down,” remembers my younger sister Veronika’s friend Sophia (who asked that her name be changed) after a night of tequila and MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy. “I literally felt depressed because I was on such a high the night before.”

While Hugo Pierre Leclercq, a.k.a. the young French DJ Madeon, was busy setting up his equipment at New City Gas, the two girls were getting ready for a night out there. New City Gas isn’t like most clubs in Montreal. The 150-year-old historical landmark reopened its doors in May 2012, leading the electronic dance music (EDM) scene in the city and inviting DJs from around the world. The EDM culture has evolved slowly from its beginnings in the disco era through ’90s raves to becoming a mainstream North American phenomenon over the past five years, with DJs such as Calvin Harris, David Guetta and Sebastian Ingrosso earning up to six figures for one night.

As on most Saturdays before heading out, Sophia started off with a couple of beers at home. “You got to open up the system,” she says. The girls and the rest of their group of

LUIS SANTANA/TAMPA BAY/ZUMAPRESS/KEYSTONE PRESS

BY STEPHANIE LA LEGGIA ·

25 met in the parking lot across the street from the club, waiting for some to finish their joints while others hid their MDMA pills in their shoes and bras. Ninety-dollar tickets in hand, they gathered by the VIP entrance for the usual frisking. The welcome frisk is a safety protocol; security confiscates any drugs they find. Once settled in the club’s best booth—a balcony overlooking the stage and the people below dressed in crop tops and neon rave shades—the group ordered their usual 10 bottles of tequila, vodka and Jack Daniels that they paid with their part-time salaries; a minimum $1,500 tab required by the club to reserve the VIP booth.

“I started my night with tequila like I always do. Then I took two mollies at around mid-

ing to the beat. At 1:30 Sophia took two more mollies and an hour later, with still half a bottle of tequila to polish off, she took her fifth. “At a certain point I just had to go outside and that’s when I knew I wasn’t okay because I couldn’t stand by myself. When I got in the car, I was just kind of dozing off,” she remembers. “When my friend checked to see if I was okay and grabbed me, she realized I was dead weight. So she started freaking out.”

Sophia wasn’t breathing. They stopped on the side of the road and tried to revive her for 10 minutes. “I woke up the next day, with a mark on my face, because that’s how hard they were hitting me.” Once she came to, Sophia’s friends drove her around for two hours. “They didn’t feel comfortable letting me go home because if that happened again, no one would be there to revive me. My mother was sleeping.” The next morning, she drove to work for her 9 a.m. shift at the mall.

Sophia is an upper-middle-class university student with a 4.0 GPA. She has a loving family and great friends. At school, she keeps herself busy with classes, a part-time job, and the occasional coffee and joint with her friends.

So what is it that pushes a young adult like her

YOLO: The electronic dance music scene has become a mainstream North American phenomenon

night, and took it down with tequila shots,” says Sophia. Molly is known to be the purer form of MDMA and is referred to as the weed of pills. “Mollies make you feel like everything is enhanced. It makes you feel like the music is flowing through your veins,” she says. Before that night, Sophia had taken three at most in one evening. But as the deafening music swallowed them whole and the LED show hypnotized them into a trance, shots were refilled and empty baggies fell to the floor. The warehouse shook with hundreds of people jumpMACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

to the brink? It’s easy to blame the club scene, the recession, or parents that may or may not have spoiled them. “A lot of people hate and mock the term, but whether they like or not, they’re subconsciously living their lives by it.

We’re Generation YOLO.” When I asked Sophia if she’s taken mollies since her neardeath experience, she answers, “Of course.

Every EDM event. Honestly, I like to test my limits. I don’t know, it’s challenging, YOLO,” she laughs. “Now I know that five, that’s my limit, I can do anything below that.”

57

M A C L E A N ’ S BOOKS: Atwood, in brief P.61

TV: Directors get their day P.62

ART: Os Gêmeos in Vancouver P.64

FILM: TIFF

Black Beauty November 2013

Vogue 2013

Glamour November 1980

Ladies Home Joural May 1963

Holiday April 1963

Frank March 1999

The Gentlewoman Spring 2010

Harper’s Bazaar September 2005

Hello!

December 2011

Vogue Italia December 2003

Teen Vogue November 2013

Vogue Italia April 2000

58

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

B A C K vs. the world P.66

P A G E S

BOOKS: Gatsby’s secret history; Ian McEwan; jaguars P.68

TASTE: Is it nuts to eat almonds? P.71

Bazaar

Out of the closet Three new books lay bare our intensely personal, emotional relationship with the clothes we wear A decade ago, the appearance of a chronic illness changed my relationship to everything in my life. As much as anything else, it changed my relationship to clothes. I love clothes. I have never thought personal style to be a frivolous pursuit, but rather, something that tells us a lot about who we are and why we are that way. You’d never catch me walking down a street in sweats.

Then, suddenly, I was wobbling around in much worse: It was sweatpants, a veal-coloured elasticated brace, a fibreglass cane, and disgraceful, pneumatic orthopaedic shoes.

There were days when I would catch a reflection of myself in a shop window and, for a split second, think I was seeing an old woman I should run to and help. My life was barely in my hands. And yet, I spent a surprising amount of time thinking about my shoes.

Mainly, I thought about how I hated my new shoes and loved my old ones, about how, if I got better, I would buy the thinnest-soled ballerina flats, and that would be my prize.

That would be the sign that not just life, but my life, had been returned to me.

Ten years later, a decent portion of my former mobility—and my former shoe collection—is again available to me. My look has adapted (although I have an alternative, much more lovely wardrobe, both in reality and in my mind’s eye: what I would wear to the library or on my errands if I didn’t so often need to have jogging sneakers on my feet). The decade-old memory, though, of how being badly dressed made me feel like less myself than even death-baiting illness did, has been transformational. It made me

BY MIREILLE SILCOFF ·

Harper’s Bazaar March 2009

Harper’s Bazaar U.K. September 2008

Vogue: In the new book Women in Clothes, I-D Summer 2010

actress Zosia Mamet of HBO’s Girls strikes poses from iconic fashion magazine covers MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

see that all clothing—even elasticated medical corsets—are, in a fashion, fashion.

In a way, this epiphany—which sounds so simple as to be idiotic—brought me in line with some of the newer and, it must be said, fashionable thinking about clothing. It is not so fashionable to be head-over-heels into fashion now; it hasn’t been since the early 1990s. It is better to be into style. It is the shmatte version of “spiritual, not religious.”

Nobody wants to be seen as religious. The Internet has, over the last decade, ripped the supremacy out of entities like Vogue, replacing editorial didacticism with something much more personal, dialogue-based and openended. The street fashion shot by The Sartorialist, Scott Schuman, and the stylish, often kooky old ladies photographed by Ari Seth Cohen for his blog Advanced Style, anticipated this ethos of appreciation for the interesting over the merely beautiful, the subtle qualities of age over the sheen of the new-new-new.

This season, words finally catch up to images.

It was the lameness in fashion books that led Toronto author Sheila Heti to come up with the idea for her new, gigantic book about dressing, Women in Clothes, produced in collaboration with author and illustrator Leanne Shapton and the author Heidi Julavits, who is also a founder of The Believer magazine.

Heti writes that she’d always had an indifferent relationship to clothing, and then began living with a man who cared about clothes: “I had never, up close, seen what that looks like.

I’d always assumed the well-dressed just happened to be that way—not that it was an area of life people excelled in because they applied thought, attention and care to it . . . One day, I just decided: Today is the day I’m going to figure out how to dress.”

Ever the bookworm, Heti—author of 2012’s 59

Bazaar truly genre-busting How Should a Person Be? A Novel from Life— took herself to a bookstore instead of a department store, and found only “books about Audrey Hepburn or books filled with pictures from Vogue . . . I thought: I’ll have to make this a project. I decided to begin by asking some of the women I knew the very questions I’d hoped to find answered in a book.” The quest seems to be a kind of de-pedestalization. Her questions included: “Is there a dressing thing you wish women would stop doing?” and “What are some dressing rules that you wouldn’t necessarily recommend to others, but which you follow?” The seeds of these queries turned into a shape-shifting bolus of a book, a text-heavy mix of interviews, essays, surveys, lists, art and how-to guides, which, astoundingly, includes contributions from more than 600 women.

Clearly, in its making, this handsome book took on a life of its own. Women in Clothes

that is, among the beautiful people, most admired these days. So this is a connoisseur’s book; a confirmation for those who already know—or are very, very close to knowing—that if it’s only Isabelle Marant, you might do well to cut out the tag so that it could be confused for something more intriguing.

In Worn Stories, the Brooklyn-based writer and editor Emily Spivack may get at something more universal. Spivack created the Smithsonian’s Threaded blog and the online

Heti asked women questions like: ‘What are some dressing rules you [might not] recommend but which you follow?’

a giant bite out of his childhood home, leaving his father’s closet exposed to the world.

A stitch that connects all of these books is that clothes are storytellers that reveal their richness through time and memory. To think of clothes as just fashion is missing most of the life in their fabric. It is an idea that runs counter to everything our era of dress will be most remembered for: fast fashion, cheap sweatshop labour, seasons of style being diced into ever smaller segments to keep consumers buying year-round, rather than what was once traditional: a couple of times a year.

The Toronto-based illustrator Sarah Lazarovic takes her own chisel to this norm in the upcoming A Bunch of Pretty Things I Did Not Buy. Based on a soulful online visual essay of the same name, where Lazarovic drew and painted the clothes she desired for a full year, instead of buying them, her book expands on the idea of not consuming fash-

is full of small gifts; a highlight is a memoir

by Julavits about a brown and yellow mitten that went missing and her increasingly perplexing, even humiliating, obsession to find it. Though, I don’t know if the end result does justice to the book’s humble root question: “Dressing: How do you do it?” A problem may be that such a question attracts experts, and capital-E experts in style may be the very types you get the feeling Heti, Shapton and Julavits were originally trying to get away from in crafting their book. So it can sometimes feel like crashing an elite party attended by those who deeply understand the value of vintage Comme des Garçons and also that a new $1,200 Isabelle Marant dress is nothing to boast about: women who specialize in the kind of covert, “Oh, this old thing?” glamour 60

project Sentimental Value, where she collected the stories behind second-hand things being sold on eBay. Her latest project collects the narratives behind single, evocative garments or accessories from a wide range of people— tattoo artists, former soldiers, handymen, and more famous names, including artist Marina Abramovic, actress Greta Gerwig and country singer Rosanne Cash. In one piece, a washed-up game-show announcer opens his heart about a red tuxedo jacket, his former costume. You get the impression he’d wanted to talk about this red jacket since his last show was cancelled in the ’80s. One story, given by a Queens-born lawyer named Ross Intelisano, made me cry: He tells of the neckties made by his Sicilian grandmother that were flapping in the wind after hurricane Sandy took SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

ionable items while being consumed by wanting to consume fashionable items. Next to a summer dress with a cross-strap bodice, she writes of the kind of hedonic pre-consumption that most of us can recognize: “Every once in a while, my rules bug the hell out of me. I see a dress that makes me imagine the million lives I could lead in it. I worry I’ll never see something so perfect again.” Her advice: Wait until the craving passes, or until something you have comes back into fashion. As all stylish women know, eventually, absolutely everything does. This season, fashion magazines are showing pencil skirts and peglegged dress pants with pneumatic-looking jogging sneakers. Years ago, I’d have rejoiced.

I’d like to think that these days it no longer matters to me.

PREVIOUS SPREAD: GUS POWELL THIS PAGE: WORN/DRAWN & QUARTERLY

Evocative garments: In Worn Stories, single clothing items, including the purple shirt (right) belonging to Rosanne Cash’s father, have tales to tell

Books

‘Old age is not for sissies’: Even the murder weapon in the title story of Atwood’s new collection has a history; it’s 1.9 billion years old

An era for ‘torching the dusties’ In her new book, Atwood returns from the future to this moment—with a vengeance After a decade primarily devoted to the near future timeline of her MaddAddam trilogy, Margaret Atwood is back in the present. With a vengeance. The nine short stories of Stone Mattress have varied origins—three, including the tale of ingenious murder that is the title piece, have seen print before—but the new ones add up to a strong reminder that Atwood will turn 75 this fall. And that she is evidently an adherent of the Bette Davis “old age is not for sissies” school of thought: even the murder weapon in “Stone Mattress” is 1.9 billion years old.

Not that Atwood thinks mere chronology is anything to make a fuss about. “Consider the alternative,” she says dryly in an interview.

“No, old age is not for whingeing, but it’s probably better than being 21, which is also not for sissies, and where a lot of moping goes on. I don’t think old people do a lot of moping.”

Certainly not the characters in the three linked stories that open this collection.

Some parts have an up-to-the-minute setting: the Toronto area’s Christmas ice storm makes an appearance, with one 70-ish woman pouring kitty litter on her slippery front steps.

“Oh yes,” laughs Atwood, “I did that too, just like everybody else in the city, with the stores sold out of salt. Then we learned it takes forever to get it off; that stuff turns to clay.” But the characters are tied by their youthful experiences in the Riverboat Coffeehouse, Toronto’s mid-Sixties hotspot, where Gordon Lightfoot and Neil Young played. When one dies, the funeral for the “badly behaved poet”—as his

PHOTOGRAPH BY LIZ SULLIVAN

BY BRIAN BETHUNE ·

fond creator calls Gavin (a less enamoured character prefers “big dick metaphor”)— becomes a witty portrayal of the way time changes everything, and nothing. “What is dying anyway?” Atwood says. “It’s just another form of living until you’re actually dead.

Everyone is dying, or conversely we are all living—my characters, maybe especially Gavin, who’s one of my favourites, are getting the most out of it while they can.”

Lest anyone read any more autobiography than ice-storm coping mechanisms into the tales, the author notes that her characters are not her contemporaries. “A little younger, actually. I’m pre-Riverboat, sorry.

Before that was the Bohemian Embassy”—that would be the early Sixties Toronto hotspot— “which is the one I remember. It later morphed into the Harbourfront Writers’ Festival, the first freestanding writers’ festival in the world.”

It’s harder to determine the age of Wilma, who lives in Ambrosia Manor old folks home and suffers from Charles Bonnet syndrome. (Her significant visual loss has led Wilma to experience recurring hallucinations of tiny dancing people, as good a metaphor for not seeing what is actually right in front of your face as can be imagined.) She’s the main protagonist of the most quintessentially Atwoodian tale in the book, the wickedly funny and discomfiting

“Torching the Dusties,” in which the “dusties” are the elderly and “torching” means exactly what it says. Mobs of younger people, their faces hidden by baby masks, and chanting, “Our turn,” and “Move over,” are blockading homes for the aged and setting them on fire.

With the aged inside. Now they’ve arrived at Ambrosia Manor.

“Oh? And why do you think that?” is Atwood’s arch response to admiration for the story. Asked what put it into her mind, she crisply replies, “Arithmetic.” Neither society or government is prepared for the coming surge of the elderly, she says. “Government will back off its commitments there, just as it will back off its resistance to assisted suicide.” Baby Boomers, says the writer, won’t stand for even the possibility of being trapped in horrific pain; that individual choice might not be the only factor in changing the law is the satirical implication of “Torching the Dusties.”

Then again, Atwood soothingly insists the tales in Stone Mattress are just that—tales— and not short stories. The latter term implies a high degree of realism, but the former indicates “something you might tell rather than write, something closer,” she adds in reference to “I Dream of Zenia with the Bright Red Teeth,” to “a dead person being reincarnated as a dog.” Or to a bonfire of the elderly.

Mobs of younger people, their faces hidden by baby masks are chanting, ‘Our turn,’ and, ‘Move over’

MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

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TV

Change of plan: Allowing a director like Soderbergh (The Knick) to direct an entire season has entailed changes to the way dramas are made

Cut, cut, cut Long a writer’s medium, television is finally letting (a few) directors run the show

62

“prove that TV isn’t just a writer’s medium,” but most of its examples are episodes that look almost the same as other directors’ episodes. That’s because, when it comes to the basic look, directors copy the style of the pilot.

“In terms of colour, tone and whether a show looks dark or bright, that’s largely the cinematographer’s area,” Girotti says.

All of that can make TV directing a less than creative job. “Only the showrunner has a sense of the overall narrative arc,” says Alex Epstein, author of Crafty Screenwriting: Writing Movies That Get Made. “The director is generally trying to figure out how to make this week’s show look amazing.”

But feature directors such as Fukunaga and Soderbergh weren’t content to put their visual stamp only on the pilot, and that meant changing the way dramas are produced. Instead of writing episodes one at a time, a show with one director needs to be approached as a movie, with most of the writing done in advance. “The script is over 500 pages long,” Fukunaga told Forbes magazine in explaining how True Detective was written. “You can imagine the mammoth effort prepping that.”

The effort seemed to pay off by resulting in shows that received more than the usual praise for their directorial touches, rather than just the writing: The most famous scene in True Detective was a long tracking shot Fukunaga

created for the fourth episode, the point where most shows would have a guest director coming in to do something less ambitious.

This kind of acclaimed visual work could have a trickle-down effect on TV, making life easier for directors who have to take orders from someone else. Girotti says many shows are starting to include “a so-called producing director,” who works with guest directors and concentrates on the visual storytelling. “It feels like they’re asking for my A game instead of just demanding that what’s in the script gets covered,” he says of these shows.

But the only way for a director to truly be equal with the showrunner is to direct every episode, and Epstein doesn’t think True Detective or The Knick necessarily justify the extra work and expense. “They have strong visual styles. But so do, say, Mad Men, True Blood, Penny Dreadful or any number of cable shows.” And giving too much power to one director may be a problem if he or she leaves: Fukunaga is not returning for the second season of True Detective, which is expected to use multiple directors. But, if future shows want to get directors of Soderbergh’s stature, it might not be enough to give them the pilot; once directors get a taste of full power, they may keep demanding it. A guest director is a hired hand, but “a director who shoots an entire series,” Girotti says, “is a co-creator.”

‘Louie,’ where Louis C.K. directs all episodes, relies on images, not words, for its best moments

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

HBO CANADA

True Detective is an edgy cable cop show and The Knick is an edgy cable doctor show. But the edgiest thing they’ve done has been to change the way directors work on a TV drama. The whole first season of True Detective was directed by Cary Fukunaga (Sin Nombre), who won the series’ only major Emmy award. And The Knick’s 10 episodes were all directed by Steven Soderbergh, who will return for the second season of the period hospital show. It used to be impossible to have one director in charge. It’s still hard— but it’s now possible.

One of the reasons TV is considered a writer’s medium is that, the way shows are made, the director can’t have much creative input.

Pilots can attract prestigious directors, such as Martin Scorsese on Boardwalk Empire or David Fincher on House of Cards, but, after that, they’re replaced by guest directors. Ken Girotti, a Canadian director who has directed episodes of shows such as Rescue Me and Vikings, says the number of days it takes to prepare a drama episode is “equal to, or more than, the number of shooting days,” so it’s common to have a director working on the next episode while the current one is being shot. Louis C.K. is able to direct every episode of his comedy Louie, thanks to its low budget and fast shooting. But a big-budget drama needs to rotate.

Under this system, no director after the pilot can have a huge amount of say in how the show looks. The Atlantic recently published an article about TV directors who

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Art

Massive attack: The Brazilian artists Os Gêmeos will take over six concrete silos at Vancouver’s Granville Island as part of the city’s ongoing Biennale

Art you can’t avoid Brazil’s art stars Os Gêmeos fit perfectly with the spirit of Vancouver’s Biennale

64

tradition—believe they came from, and where they will return when they die.

There’s little ego to the workaholic 38-yearolds. They’re shy. They don’t drink. They’ve spurned Vancouver’s famed foodie scene for its anonymous Chinese dives. Their closest friends are their childhood pals from Cambuci, the inner-city neighbourhood now home to their sprawling studios. They’re obsessed with making art more “democratic.”

This makes them a perfect fit for the Vancouver Biennale, conceived to give contemporary art a wider audience, sometimes by placing it on popular walkways, where it literally cannot be avoided. Try, for example, to get your kids off the giant, technicolour jellybeans on the city’s Seawall, the work of filmmaker Cosimo Cavallaro.

At Spanish Banks, Hugo Franca’s chimerical, driftwood furniture begs to be sat on. “Art isn’t an elitist game. But it’s become that,” laments Biennale founder and president Barrie Mowatt, an art world player with working-class roots.

“We’ve isolated people from great art.”

The Biennale, which will drop dozens of sculptures in the Lower Mainland over the next two years, has sparked some of the city’s more lively artistic conversations. In the first three weeks of its 2010 run, Miss Mao Trying to Pose at the Top of Lenin’s Head, by China’s Gao brothers, prompted a news story every

single day. In it, a tiny Mao Zedong, sporting a lovely pair of breasts, walks atop the grotesquely large, seven-metre chrome head of Lenin. The controversy was tame compared to what Dennis Oppenheim’s upside-down church (Device to Root Out Evil) stirred in 2008.

Mowatt, who launched the Biennale a decade ago, began collecting in his twenties.

While hitchhiking Canada at the height of Trudeaumania, he sought out A.Y. Jackson and A.J. Casson in Kleinburg, north of Toronto; Mowatt talked them into selling him two paintings apiece, which he paid off in $25 installments. He never looked back.

He and his partner, lawyer Don Buschlen, launched an eponymous gallery from their West End Vancouver apartment. BuschlenMowatt, in a city saturated with paintings of mountains and trees, charted its own course, importing major American abstract works. Their meteoric rise was cruelly interrupted in 1992. Buschlen, just 34, died from AIDS-related complications. Mowatt, in a grim twist, was fighting colon cancer at the same time: “We battled for our lives together. I got to be the lucky one,” Mowatt says, choking back tears.

Three years ago, he sold the gallery to focus on the Biennale, which grew from a sculpture project honouring Buschlen’s memory. To its growing legacy, Os Gêmeos will soon add their candy-coloured mural.

‘Art isn’t an elitist game. But it’s become that. We’ve isolated people from great art.’

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

ROAMING THE PLANET

The Brazilian artists known as Os Gêmeos (“the twins” in Portuguese) haven’t touched the Walkie-Talkies provided them in Vancouver. They never will. When painting, Octavio and Gustavo Pandolfo, identical twins from São Paulo, communicate without speaking, a kind of telepathy. They never work apart, and move as one across their concrete canvas, with no plan, no design. Their kaleidoscopic, high street art style hits Canada for the first time this month, with a massive, four-storey mural over six concrete silos at Vancouver’s Granville Island, part of the city’s ongoing Biennale, on until 2015.

The Pandolfos are bona fide art stars in the tradition of Jean-Michel Basquiat, with brand collaborations with Nike and Hennessy, gallery projects from London to Tokyo, and legendary quirks. Their roots, however, lie in graffiti and their hearts belong to the form.

Encouraged by artistic parents—their first cans of spray paint were gifts from their mom—they became obsessed with graffiti after seeing the seminal book Subway Art. They photocopied every page, labelling the colours on the copied black-and-white-pages so as not to forget.

Their fantastical counterpoint to São Paulo, the sprawling, concrete megalopolis of 20 million, is a mystical realm they call Tritrez.

There, the rivers are multi-hued, the fish “have colours and lights,” and “you can touch whatever you want,” they explained as they worked on their Granville Island piece. This shared, Seuss-like dreamworld is where the twins—magic realists in the Latin American

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Film

Hit the fan: Joseph Gordon-Levitt greets the crowd at the TIFF premiere of Don Jon in 2013. This year’s fest is proving to be a more contentious affair.

Who owns the road to Oscar?

TIFF’s new selection criteria have set off a hullaballoo far beyond Toronto

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been flocking to Telluride in recent years, and snap judgments and Oscar handicaps hit the web instantly, all before a single frame of film screens in Toronto. “Telluride likes to position itself as this sleepy little festival that slides under the radar, but, in the expanding world of the Internet, there is no flying under the radar,” says Indiewire’s Anne Thompson.

Studios noticed, and the Oscar race that TIFF was so famous for sparking suddenly had a new starting point. “The ‘sneak peek’ at Telluride is no longer sneaky, and you end up with half a dozen journalists screwing the pooch for Toronto,” says writer David Poland of Movie City News. “When you give a small group the power to determine how a film is perceived, before it’s seen by the majority of people, you create a situation where the bloom is off the rose.”

TIFF responded with its much-debated new policy. “We could no longer in good conscience get up on stage and introduce a world or North American premiere if there had already been mountains of comment or opinion online,” says TIFF’s artistic director, Cameron Bailey. The move was directed at Telluride as much as it was at movie bloggers, who reacted to the edict with barely contained glee, with In Contention’s Gregory Ellwood mocking TIFF’s scheduling threat succinctly: “Gasp! Not after Wednesday!”

Yet the debate is not just about the state of

TIFF, but a fast-paced industry increasingly obsessed with Oscar bullion, and who—if anyone—can control it. “I heard this statement from TIFF that shocked me: ‘We want our festival to take ownership for the big movies going to the Oscars.’ I didn’t know the festival owned movies,” says Tom Bernard, co-president of Sony Pictures Classics, who adds that TIFF’s “baffling” move “hurts films, and hurts filmmakers.

It goes against the celebration of the movies.”

Even other festivals have jumped into the fray. “I don’t like the idea that world premieres have become a label of quality that determines our criteria in the selection process,” says Alberto Barbera, director of the Venice Film Festival, which, like Telluride, runs just before TIFF. “Festivals should support filmmakers, not compete amongst themselves.” Despite the high rhetoric, though, 54 out of Venice’s 55 selections this year are world premieres, including presumed Oscar front-runners Manglehorn and Birdman.

Bailey, for his part, is not backing down, and insists 2014’s lineup—which includes world premieres of The Riot Club, Nightcrawler and Bill Murray’s St. Vincent, among 143 others— proves the policy works. “There’s still a lot of space to showcase great cinema from all over the world,” he says. “That’s the point at the end of the day.” That, and what ends up at the Dolby Theatre’s podium in six months.

‘I didn’t know the festival owned movies,’ says one film exec, who is ‘baffled’ by TIFF’s policy

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

MICHAEL TRAN/GETTY IMAGES

For the past two decades, the Oscar race started with the Toronto International Film Festival. Movie critics and pundits would spend the weeks before Labour Day poring over TIFF’s massive lineup, cherrypicking the prestige dramas that would find a spot at the Academy Awards podium come February. Yet, this year, the gossip isn’t about which ticket is hotter in Toronto—but which pictures are MIA. Both Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice and David Fincher’s Gone Girl are skipping TIFF for New York, while Jon Stewart’s Rosewater, the Reese Witherspoon drama Wild and the Benedict Cumberbatch thriller The Imitation Game will be at TIFF, but only after premiering at the Telluride Film Festival last weekend. Thanks to a set of disparate circumstances—the rise of social media, an increasingly aggressive movieblogging community, the growing chutzpah of the Academy-friendly Telluride Film Festival and TIFF’s own ultimatum that only world or North American premieres would be admitted into its buzzy first four days—the awards race is no longer TIFF’s to control.

TIFF’s problems crystallized last fall when Telluride—an insider-centric confab in the Rockies famed for attracting Academy voters—announced a rash of high-profile, lastminute screenings. Several, including 12 Years a Slave, Dallas Buyers Club and Prisoners, were set to have their “world premieres” at TIFF. The “award-season blogging mafia,” as Hollywood Elsewhere’s Jeffrey Wells jokingly christened himself and his comrades, has

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Books

‘So We Read On’: Corrigan reminds us why The Great Gatsby, if not its 2013 film adapation, is the only ‘Great American Novel’ to deal with money

The death and rebirth of ‘Gatsby’ Plus a bracing novel from Ian McEwan, the jaguar’s wondrous journey, a memoir of operating on children, and a juicy account of the Diamond Necklace Affair

Maureen Corrigan

Don’t worry. Maureen Corrigan didn’t like The Great Gatsby when she read it in high school either. It’s the first thing she lets us know in her book about Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, where Corrigan makes an enthusiastic case for Gatsby as the Great American Novel.

The author has been teaching Gatsby for years, has read it over 50 times and is amazed she always uncovers something new. Readers will be amazed too, not just that so much detail can be extracted from such a slim volume, but that at nearly every page they are tempted to throw Corrigan’s book down and return to their dusty paperback copy.

Corrigan reminds us Gatsby is the only candidate for the Great American Novel to deal with class and money (surprisingly after 2008, still taboo subjects), as opposed to race (To Kill a Mockingbird, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) or vast physical geography (Moby Dick, On the Road). She then dives headfirst into the world of Gatsby and his creator, going everywhere from Princeton’s Fitzgerald archives to a tipsy boat tour off Long Island Sound, where the Tom Buchanans have given way to Bill O’Reilly and the rumoured presence of Adam Sandler’s parents. She leads us from an astounding low (Asheville, N.C., in 1936, 68

where a debt- and self-doubt-ridden Fitzgerald is trying to dry out while his wife is hospitalized with schizophrenia) into the remote past (Fitzgerald’s class-conscious upbringing in Minnesota) and through the golden years (New York in the Jazz Age, the French Riviera, the completion of Gatsby). Corrigan does a wonderful job following both the book and Fitzgerald into obscurity, doing some literary sleuthing to uncover how the book went from neglect to required reading to branded jewellery for Tiffany and Co., and back to neglect— we are led to Princeton’s ivory towers, where the novel is non-existent in literature classes.

The book’s strength lies in the way Corrigan reads Gatsby in numerous contexts. Her reading of Gatsby as proto-noir—underworld figures, femme fatales, fast cars—is invigorating. Her excavation of Gatsby’s water symbols takes the story to new depths. A trip to her old high school finds her sitting with students reading the novel. Corrigan is surprised that a group she considered ill-fit for Gatsby is able to offer her new readings of this masterpiece. Her journey into the past, like Gatsby’s own, is uncanny—the ethnic makeup of her school in Long Island City has changed, the kids are freer, the teachers more colloquial.

But Gatsby still resonates, asking questions about American life that it refuses to answer, questions that these new readers will carry with them as they wade into the 21st century and try not to be swept away. SIMON GADKE SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

THE CHILDREN ACT Ian McEwan

The curtain rises on a wellappointed London flat. Fiona Maye, a 59-year-old High Court judge, lies on a chaise longue downing her second Scotch and water while contemplating a third.

The alcohol is a shock absorber; Fiona’s husband of 35 years, a professor named Jack, has just upended their solid, if dull, marriage by telling her he wants to have an affair.

The small scene of domestic disquiet, at odds with McEwan’s tendency to virtuoso, suspense-laden first acts (as seen in A Child in Time and Enduring Love) sets the stage: Jack exits to pursue a 28-year-old statistician as the narrative shifts to microscopic examination of Fiona’s work in family court adjudicating divorces, custody battles and the occasional King Solomon-like decision. The judge, who prides herself on bringing “reasonableness to hopeless situations,” is unmoored by personal crisis as she faces one of the most complex decisions of her career: a hospital petition against Jehovah’s Witness parents who refuse a life-saving blood transfusion for their 17-year-old son. Emotion colours Fiona’s judgment after a hospital visit to assess whether the boy, Adam, is competent to refuse medical care. The scene is a tour de force: a childless judge questioning her life decisions spars and then bonds with a brilliant, confident

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SO WE READ ON: HOW THE GREAT GATSBY CAME TO BE AND WHY IT ENDURES

‘An Indomitable Beast’: Rabinowitz, one of the world’s leading experts on big cats, offers a fascinating primer on the remarkable history of the jaguar

boy over music and poetry. Fiona’s decision on Adam’s fate sets in motion a cascade of quietly catastrophic, unpredictable events knit into a masterful conclusion.

It’s instructive that the title of McEwan’s 16th novel is taken from legislation stating that “when a court determines any questions with respect to the upbringing of a child, the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration.” The life-and-death decision at its core provides a springboard for erudite discussion of religious dogma, secular dogmatism, as well as the limits of law and love. It’s gripping stuff, elegantly tackled.

Yet a clinical detachment prevails, one not aided by the fact that Fiona, the novel’s most fully developed character—a woman with a “powerful grip on what was conventionally correct”—is a bit of a bore, even at her most self-revelatory. Still, McEwan offers an intellectually bracing dive into a deep, cold, crystalline pool only murky at its very bottom. Any similarities to reading brilliant and compassionate, if bloodless, legislation is clearly intentional. ANNE KINGSTON AN INDOMITABLE BEAST: THE REMARKABLE JOURNEY OF THE JAGUAR

STEVE WINTER/GETTY IMAGES

Alan Rabinowitz

Remarkable it has been, the trajectory of the jaguar from its Asian origins to its long, slow infiltration of the Americas beginning about one million years ago. Over that time the jaguar remade itself into a smaller, more opportunistic and efficient predator, writes Rabinowitz, uniquely capable of “shifting its behaviour between that of a big small-cat or a small big-cat, as circumstances required.”

Undeniably a big cat, the third-largest after the tiger and lion, the jaguar is the greatest

generalist of them all: as happy in water as a tiger, as good at climbing as a leopard, and with a bite, when reckoned on a pound-forpound basis, more powerful than a lion’s.

The author’s own story is eye-opening too.

One of the world’s leading experts on big cats, co-founder of Panthera, a non-profit organization dedicated to preserving wild cats, Rabinowitz was born in Brooklyn in 1953 with a stutter so severe he would twist and spasm whenever he tried to speak. Unable to talk to other children or teachers, he took solace in the company of animals, never happier than when his father brought him to the lion house in the Bronx Zoo, where one particular cat attracted him. He recalls promising them all, but particularly the jaguar, that should he ever find his own voice he would use it to speak for them.

Rabinowitiz has been the driving force behind the Jaguar Corridor, a still-in-progress, 18-nation, linked system of refuges running from the United States to Argentina. The enormous political and socio-economic barriers had to be faced, he writes, because of the recent discovery, via molecular genetics, that what were once thought to be eight jaguar subspecies were, in fact, all one species.

Jaguar gene flow had never been interrupted.

Individual cats travelled thousands of kilometres in search of mates, prey and territory; they even swam the Panama Canal. If habitat destruction was allowed to break up refuges, the jaguar would be on its way to extinction.

The science and the political struggles are interesting, but not nearly as much as the human-jaguar relationship Rabinowitz describes. He realized the corridor might be achievable because of the profound regard the native peoples of Latin America had for their lands’ apex predator. It was the barely visible, but still very much alive, jaguar “culMACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

tural” corridor, says Rabinowitz, that made it possible to reach agreement on setting aside land for the physical passage. BRIAN BETHUNE SMALL: LIFE AND DEATH ON THE FRONT LINES OF PEDIATRIC SURGERY Catherine Musemeche

Operating on infants is not as simple as learning how to sew in miniature, explains Musemeche in this fascinating, often hair-raising account of the state of pediatric surgery.

Musemeche has been working in the field for three decades and writes with the kind of drama that feels as visceral as viewing a documentary. Be warned that some of the passages aren’t for the faint of heart.

Babies aren’t just small adults: they’re fragile in complicated ways, she writes. Their paper-thin skin loses heat rapidly, requiring surgeons to operate in rooms that feel like cauldrons at 80° Fahrenheit. Infants born eight weeks premature are the size of kittens with organs like Jell-O that barely hold together.

Often surgeons are operating by the seat of their pants. “We patch what can be salvaged, taking out dead and malformed pieces. When we are short of parts, we rearrange and make do. Then we sew it all back together with a needle the size of an eyelash.”

In pediatrics, the correct positioning of a breathing tube is measured in millimetres.

Musemeche recalls a critical moment during her training when the breathing tube on a baby boy slipped down too far. Within seconds, his oxygen level dropped and his heart rate slowed. The anaesthesiologist disconnected the ventilator and started bagging the baby by hand to inflate his lungs, but in a panic to correct the problem used too much force.

“The pressure blew out both lungs like they 69

Books

‘How to Ruin a Queen’: Beckman explores the scandal that captivated France years before Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, were toppled

HOW TO RUIN A QUEEN: MARIE ANTOINETTE AND THE DIAMOND NECKLACE AFFAIR Jonathan Beckman

Three years before revolutionaries toppled Louis XVI and his Austrian-born wife, Marie Antoinette, France was mesmerized with a different tumult. Cardinal Louis de Rohan, scion of one of the nation’s grandest families, was in court, accused of stealing a famously expensive necklace from jewellers who’d created it . He claimed he’d acted at the behest of the queen, who then reneged on paying for the gaudy 2,800-carat piece. The resultant scandal solidified Marie Antoinette’s 70

reputation for unbounded extravagance.

Yet, as Jonathan Beckman, explains in a masterful new account of the diamond necklace affair, nothing is as it appeared. There are fake royals, forged letters and disappearing gems as well as kidnappings, trysts and even a duel involving poisoned pigs. If the tale was fictional, it would be dismissed as an overwrought fantasy, yet in Beckman’s hands, its machinations unfold as an audacious caper that will enthrall readers much as the original events captivated Europe.

At the book’s heart are two misfits. Jeanne de Saint-Rémy is a dirt-poor descendant of a Valois king. Lineage, however royal, can’t be eaten. She starts climbing the ancient regime’s rigid class hierarchy early. At six, she’s begging on a country road when her antics grab the attention of a passing marquis and his wife. Soon she’s ensconced in their family chateau. By 1782, after using and discarding a series of patrons, she lands at the royal court of Versailles.

Jeanne’s life at the heart of French power amounts to little until she latches onto Louis de Rohan. Regarded as an intelligent dilettante, the gullible aristocrat earns himself Marie Antoinette’s enmity by ridiculing her mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria.

Desperate for royal favour, he falls for Jeanne and her scheme—he’ll covertly buy the expensive necklace that he believes the queen secretly covets, then hand it to Jeanne, who he has been led to believe is Marie Antoinette’s confidante. Jeanne gets the necklace but can’t sustain the elaborate scam. The resultant scandal ruins the lives of all involved.

While Jeanne de Saint-Rémy escapes to London where she writes a self-serving account of her life, her most famous victim is trapped in Paris. In 1793, Marie Antoinette is marched to the guillotine. PATRICIA TREBLE SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

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2. THE GOLDFINCH Donna Tartt

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3. THE LONG WAY HOME Louise Penny

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4. WRITTEN IN MY OWN HEART’S BLOOD Diana Gabaldon

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6. SWEETLAND Michael Crummey

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7. THE MAGICIAN’S LAND Lev Grossman

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8. ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE Anthony Doerr

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9. THE BOOK OF LIFE Deborah Harkness 10. THE SILKWORM Robert Galbraith

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2. A SPY AMONG FRIENDS Ben Macintyre 3. HARD CHOICES Hillary Rodham Clinton

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4. THINK LIKE A FREAK Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner

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5. VILLAGE OF SECRETS Caroline Moorehead

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ON THE WEB: For book reviews, feature articles, interviews and recommended reading by celebrities, check out our books page at macleans.ca/books

MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY

were dime-store balloons,” writes Musemeche in her adrenalin-producing style. She and her colleague started CPR using two fingers—the weight of a hand would’ve compressed the newborn’s heart. “We incised both sides of the chest with our scalpels and slid small drainage tubes between ribs as thin and pliable as Q-tips.” Air drained from the boy’s chest cavity and his lungs re-expanded.

Today, vast improvements have been made thanks to innovators like Canadian-born James Fischer, a surgeon who invented a better way to keep intestines alive when a child is born with the contents of their abdomen on the outside. His Bentec bag is now used in every major hospital in North America.

“The days when pediatric surgeons had to operate with one hand tied behind their backs struggling with adult-sized instruments are coming to a close,” writes Musemeche. Now there are cameras small enough to see inside salivary gland ducts, and biopsy tools as tiny as a speck of dust. What remains the same is the skill, and mental fortitude, required of the surgeons. JULIA M C KINNELL

Taste

Shell game: The California land mass devoted to growing almonds is being blamed by environmentalists for contributing to three current crises

Big, bad almonds They may be everyone’s favourite healthy snack, but environmentalists hate them Who doesn’t love almonds?

Salted and roasted with just enough olive oil to make them glisten, they’re a perfect snack.

Plus, they’re low in saturated fats, high in fibre and packed with protein. No wonder demand is on the rise—from emerging markets in China to Canada, where we rate as one of the highest per-capita consumers. Once a treat for special occasions, they’re sold at Whole Foods and 7-Eleven, raw or roasted or processed into milks and butters.

But now, a growing movement is asking: Is it nuts to eat almonds? Native to the Middle East and Asia, almonds are today the product of intense monoculture in California’s Central Valley, where more than 80 per cent of the world’s supply is harvested. In the past 10 years alone, the crop has doubled to almost two billion pounds; the landmass devoted to almonds now accounts for nearly 323,700 hectares. Both are being blamed by some environmentalists for contributing to no fewer than three current crises: the killing of huge colonies of honeybees, the deaths in droves of wild salmon, and record-breaking droughts.

Almond trees need three basic things to thrive: warm, temperate conditions in winter; plenty of water, especially during summer; and bees to pollinate the blossoms—each nut we eat has been kissed by a honeybee.

That’s all fine and well in a Mediterranean valley with a naturally diversified landscape that might include small farms, other fruit trees and vegetable crops.

But, in the Central Valley, where orchards

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY LEVI NICHOLSON

BY PAMELA CUTHBERT ·

were first planted more than 100 years ago, the scene is more like something out of a highconcept Luc Besson flick than a Van Gogh landscape. Save the absence of frost, the entire process is manufactured. California’s almond trees have always needed heavy irrigation—a problem, given shortages of aquifers and reserves.

Natural waterways that once sustained plentiful fish stocks have been diverted for almond groves. Reports of dead salmon floating in shallow rivers prompted a late-August emergency measure to divert water to the Klamath River, where the fish spawn. They’re saved this year, but it’s an ongoing battle between fish and farmers for available water. In its last annual report, the powerful Almond Board of California acknowledges “the mind-bogglingly complex ground and surface water challenges,” and maintains that water usage has declined significantly with new strategies. Still, there clearly isn’t enough to go around.

Perhaps the oddest situation, and the one with the most far-reaching consequences, takes place each year around Valentine’s Day, when more than a million honeybees—over half of the U.S.’s tame (as opposed to wild) population—are transported into the Golden State to pollinate the blossoms. They’re fed a highoctane sugar diet to do the unnatural Herculean task, which lasts weeks. The simple reason: The valley has no honeybees. Without

other crops, there’s nothing for them to eat the rest of the year.

Beekeepers call it the “bee bordello.” Michael Pollan, who has campaigned against the almond industry, underscores concerns that chemical exposure makes bees prone to disease; in 2013, as many as 25 per cent of the insects were found damaged or dead on the job, according to the USDA. Questions are being raised about whether the pesticides being used are the source of destruction.“There are mites, funguses, viruses, parasites, diseases,” says David Suzuki Foundation’s Jode Roberts, a beekeeper on the side. “All of these different stressors on bees have come about, largely because we’re intermingling all these hives.”

“The problem with the honeybees is a monoculture problem,” Pollan said in an email interview, noting that we depend on bees for one in every three bites of food we eat, and citing the almond industry specifically.

Yet, not only are almonds California’s top agricultural export, the price keeps rising.

Add to this the trend for almond milk as a dairy or soy alternative. In his column “Lay off the almond milk, you ignorant hipsters,” Mother Jones columnist Tom Philpott writes: “Given that it takes 1.1 gallons of water to grow a single almond in California . . . drenching the finished product in yet more water seems insane.” Peanuts, anyone?

Beekeepers call California’s Valentine’s Day orgy of pollination a ‘bee bordello’

MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

71

Challenge

The Quiz This week, we test your trivia skills on everything from Archie comics to fast-food icons Round 1: Honour roll

9. The Java Trench is part of which ocean?

1. Cobalt is a shade of what colour?

10.

2. Who directed the 2011 film adaptation of

Xenia Onatopp, played by Famke Janssen, is the villain in which James Bond film?

The Adventures of Tintin?

3. What current Canadian capital city, once

Round 3: Rhodes Scholar

known as Pile of Bones, was the capital of the Northwest Territory from 1883-1905?

4. Sprint, long jump, discus and javelin were all events in the Ancient Greek Pentathlon.

What was the fifth event?

5. The Whirlpool Rapids Bridge connects which two countries?

6. Buffalo, Bermuda, fescue and carpet are all types of what?

7. What technology company manufactured the ill-fated Betamax videocassette?

8. For which film did Tom Cruise receive his first Oscar nomination for best actor?

9. The Hubbard Medal, whose past winners include Louis and Mary Leakey, Charles Lindbergh, and the Apollo 11 crew, is awarded by which society?

10. Who is Moose Mason’s steady girlfriend in the Archie comics?

1. The 1985 fi lm Commando, starring Arnold

Round 2: Prodigy 1. Who was the fi rst Spanish actor to win an

Schwarzenegger, was originally written for which rock musician, with the script being about a retired Israeli Mossad agent now living in the United States?

2. The Anatolian Peninsula comprises most of which modern-day country?

3. Which famous London museum was established at the Baker Street Bazaar in 1835?

4. “Air and Style” and “X-Trail Jam” are annual competitions in which sport?

5. What famous harbour is contained within Port Jackson?

6. In terms of total area, what is the largest Pacific island east of New Zealand?

7. What fast-food chain was opened in 1964 by the Raffel brothers, Forrest and LeRoy? 8. In ancient Rome, what was a gladius?

9. Fluoxetine, an anti-depressant, is sold under what brand name?

10. The Greeks, Assyrians, Egyptians, Persians, Roman Empire, Byzantines, France and England have all controlled which European island? TERRANCE BALAZO

Round 4: Quote, unquote Match the correct sound bite to the correct newsmaker:

Mitt Romney Nicki Minaj

Academy Award? tries of Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam?

3. What 1969 gathering was originally advertised under the name “An Aquarian Exposition”?

4. In 1979, which Hall of Fame pitcher became the fi rst baseball player to sign a contract paying him $1 million per season?

5. In 1988, a Discovery Channel program called Caged in Fear started what annual television event?

6. The snow leopard and the cheetah are the only big cats that can’t do what?

7. What modern country was formed in 1859 w it h t he joi n i ng of Moldov ia a nd Wallachia?

8. “The Bump,” “Penguin,” “Watergate” and the “Robot” were all dances in what genre of music?

Mario Balotelli

Al Sharpton

ROUND 1: 1. Blue 2. Steven Spielberg 3. Regina 4. Wrestling 5. Canada and the United States 6. Grass 7. Sony 8. Born on the Fourth of July 9. National Geographic Society 10. Midge ROUND 2: 1. Javier Bardem 2. Indochina 3. Woodstock 4. Nolan Ryan 5. Shark Week 6. Roar 7. Romania 8. Disco 9. Indian 10. Golden Eye ROUND 3: 1. Gene Simmons 2. Turkey 3. Madame Tussauds 4. Snowboarding 5. Sydney Harbour 6. Vancouver Island 7. Arby’s (RB’s) 8. Sword 9. Prozac 10. Cyprus ROUND 4: 1. Al Sharpton 2. Mitt Romney 3. Mario Balotelli 4. Nicki Minaj

72

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

REUTERS; GETTY IMAGES

2. What did France collectively call the coun-

Feschuk

Double-double lovers: If you drink your coffee with two creams and two sugars, you might as well pour a mug of instant—or much worse

Okay, Canada, it’s time for the hard truth About Tim Hortons, a chain of doughnut shops—several of which have working toilets

Have a seat, Canada. Are you comfortable? Good, that’s good.

I noticed you’ve been in a downward spiral since Burger King announced its plan to buy Tim Hortons for $12 billion—or roughly $1 for every Tims on Yonge Street in Toronto.

You’re worried about what the takeover will mean for your morning coffee—and for the corporation that is traditionally depicted in our media as adored, iconic and able to cure hepatitis with its doughnut glaze. (I’m paraphrasing.)

I’m here to help. This is a safe place, Canada. I want to see you get through this. Which is why I need you to listen to me closely. These words will be painful, but it’s important you hear them: Tim Hortons is not a defining national institution. Rather, it is a chain of thousands of doughnut shops, several of which have working toilets.

Tim Hortons is not an indispensable part of the Canadian experience. Rather, it is a place that sells a breakfast sandwich that tastes like a dishcloth soaked in egg yolk and left out overnight on top of a radiator.

Tim Hortons is not an anti-Starbucks choice that makes you a more relatable politician or a more authentic Canadian. Rather, it is a great place to buy a muffin if you’ve always wondered what it would be like to eat blueberry air.

There is no shame in having been caught

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH MACKINNON

BY SCOTT FESCHUK ·

up in the Hortons hype. It happens. Just last week, a columnist in the Toronto Star likened Tim Hortons to a precious vase that’s about to be juggled by its new owner, a monkey. (I was so irate at this irresponsible journalism that I wrote a letter demanding the Star issue a retraction. Everyone knows monkeys juggle only coconuts.)

Meanwhile, the NDP’s Peggy Nash—who, by all accounts, is an actual person and not a fictional construct of The Onion—gravely warned of the potential consequences of the Tim Hortons brand “falling into foreign hands.”

Yes, imagine the consequences. Maybe these madcap foreign owners will go so far as to alter the sandwiches so they taste like . . . something. Preferably like sandwich, but, at this point, most of us have stopped being picky.

Am I getting through to you, Canada?

While we’re on the topic of hard truths, there is something else that needs to be said.

Canada, you sure do like your doubledouble—or, as it is by law referred to in news reports, the “beloved double-double.” But here’s a newsflash for you: If you drink your coffee with two creams and two sugars, the quality of the coffee itself is of little consequence. You’d might as well pour a mug of instant coffee or sip the urine of a housecat mixed with a clump of dirt from your golf spikes. It’s all basically the same thing once you bombard it with sweet and dairy. You’re really just wasting your . . .

I see from your reaction that I’ve crossed MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

a line. I hereby withdraw my defamatory comments about the double-double and kindly ask that you return that handful of my chest hair.

Sit back down, Canada. I want to tell you a story.

There is a Tims located a few blocks from where I live, which is to be expected, given that my house is not on the moon. This outlet happens to be close to a major intersection.

Every morning, the lineup from the drivethrough extends down to the edge of the street.

Confronted with this situation, a sensible driver would grasp the inherent hazard in blocking a thoroughfare and simply keep motoring on. Does anyone do this?

Of course not.

Instead, everyone stops and idles. IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET. Other drivers come whipping around the corner and must execute Cannonball Run feats of two-wheeled stunt-driving to avoid ramming these pastryseeking asshats. Horns honk. Tempers flare.

And still no one moves. Sure, I got a debilitating case of whiplash, and the nice lady in the Subaru lost the use of her legs, but on the upside TIMBITS NOM NOM NOM. My point is this, Canada: It’s fine to enjoy Tim Hortons. Some may even say it’s fine to be like my Dad and insist on the old-fashioned plain, the only doughnut that delivers both the flavour and texture of a memory foam mattress.

But don’t get weird about it, OK? Follow Scott Feschuk on Twitter @scottfeschuk 73

The End

1972-2014

John Craig Lowe John Craig Lowe was born Oct. 28, 1972, in Oakville, Ont. His father, Don Lowe, was a consulting mechanical engineer and his mother, Jacquie Finan, was an interior decorator who gave him his first job: filling holes in a wall with spackle to prep them for her painters. Craig, as he was known, was a mischievous child whose life was full of scrapes and bruises, whether it was riding his bicycle full-tilt down a driveway straight into the side of a moving car at age four, or building rockets and firing them off in the field behind his house.

“He was a holy terror,” Jacquie says.

As a teen, Craig would spend hours in the family basement learning how to play bass and guitar, passions he’d later put to use in three different bands. He also followed up on his childhood chores, painting homes for Penwood Painting, a summer job that continued as he enrolled in a business program at Sheridan College. After stints selling cellphones and working for a record company, Craig returned to the skill he’d always loved, and started his own business, Lowe Painting, in his early twenties.

In 1995, Craig and his older sister, Kristi, embarked on a threemonth biking trip across Australia and New Zealand. There, they learned to scuba dive on the Great Barrier Reef. The following year, his parents became scuba divers as well. At first, Craig loved the feeling of doing something different and exploring the underwater world. But as he grew to be a more proficient diver, Kristi says, his focus turned to treasure hunting. “He’s an adventurer. It’s the adventure of finding things,” she says.

A few years later, a contractor named Mike Holmes contacted him about working together on a job. He’d heard about Craig, the best painter in town, from his regular clients. The two began a long-lasting working relationship. When, in 2001, Holmes needed a painter to appear on the pilot of his new TV show, Holmes on Homes, he called Craig, who jumped at the chance. Craig painted almost every home featured on the show before it ended in 2008, and continued to work on other Holmes productions, including Holmes Makes It Right. “He could brush a straight line like no one I’ve ever seen,” Holmes says.

Eleven years ago, a 34-year-old accountant named Kaley Gray hired 74

Craig to paint her Mississauga, Ont., home—the job was supposed to take a week. “When it was over I realized I wanted him to come back and keep painting. I started to think maybe I should extend the job,” Kaley says. She asked him out, and they hit it off. They often hiked to Oakville’s Sixteen Mile Creek with Craig’s black lab puppy, Griff.

“He came with a puppy—he was a package deal,” says Kaley, who was a package deal herself—she had twin daughters, Alexa and Sydney, who were three years old when the pair started dating. The couple moved in together, and eventually added two more daughters to their brood, Ryley and Lainey, immediately incorporating them into their active lifestyle. They’d push the girls in a double stroller through the Mississauga Marathon 5K until they were old enough for the family to run the race together. When Ryley turned four, she won first place in her age category by default—she was the only runner. Craig, meanwhile, ran a half-marathon without training and could finish five kilometres in 20 minutes flat. “I’m the turtle and he’s the hare,” Kristi says.

Craig wanted to wait until their children could take an active part in their wedding, so the pair married on July 28, 2012, in the backyard of Gray’s parents. Ryley and Lainey were flower girls, while Alexa and Sydney walked their mom down the aisle, all five barefoot. Craig wore his usual cargo shorts. “You’d only catch him in pants if there was snow on the ground,” Gray says.

Craig had been all over North America to dive: Florida, B.C., Mexico. But in August he returned to Cape Breton, to a French shipwreck called the Auguste that fascinated him. It was his favourite site, and he’d done nearly 20 dives at the location, often bringing home trinkets such as silver coins or old musket parts for his daughters. This time, Holmes says, he was searching for a cannon buried with the ship. On Aug. 2, as Craig’s day of diving came to a close and his friends readied to pack it in, he decided to go back in to take one more look, embarking on a shallow solo dive. Although the weather was calm and the water was clear, Craig didn’t return to shore and was reported missing. After a short search, his body was found, still wearing his gear, in the water just 13 m from his boat. He was 41. KATHERINE LAIDLAW

SEPTEMBER 15, 2014

ILLUSTRATION BY TEAM MACHO

A talented handyman, he found fame on the small screen. But he craved outdoor adventure, and became an expert scuba diver.

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