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It was just a dryer.

4 cycles. 6.0 cubic feet. Egg shell white.

With a front door that stuck just a little.

But while sitting in a basement in Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia, it witnessed the making of a modern legend.

Thank you to the battered, puck-marked dryer for stopping shots that would one day prove nearly unstoppable.

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Frigate fitness: A sailor on the HMCS Regina, a Navy ship in the Indian Ocean fighting the war on smuggling and terror p.46

J U LY 2 1 , 2 0 1 4 • V O L U M E 1 2 7 • N U M B E R 2 8 5 The Editorial

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| 8 Good News/Bad News | 10 Newsmakers | 14 Interview Retired lieutenant-general and senator Roméo Dallaire Paul Wells on Stephen Harper’s counterintuitive success in Quebec; Emma Teitel on the evolution of princess culture 64 The Quiz | 66 The End John Richard Stevenson, 1945-2014

6 Letters

12 Columns

Saint Death: The cult of Santa Muerte is on the rise in Latin America, much to the consternation of the Catholic Church ............ 30

National Second-class kids: Aboriginal youth face a fate that should horrify all Canadians. The obvious fix—education—is out of reach ............... 16

Afghanistan aid: A Canadian agency misused funds, argues Ottawa .....31 Working-class zeroes: British schools fail their poorest students..... 33

Outgunned? Critics say the RCMP doesn’t protect its own .............. 20 To swear and tell the truth: A B.C. lawyer is reprimanded for profanity in the courtroom.............................................................. 21

Economy

Great returns: How Tennis Canada bred this country’s first generation of superstars .................................................................. 22

The great bull: Missing out on stock market success ........................ 34

COVER: PHOTOGRAPH BY DANIEL EHRENWORTH; INSET: WALT DISNEY CO.; THIS PAGE: PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER BREGG

Colby Cosh: A federal court justice listened to journalists? .............. 23

Lululemon’s lesson: Stray from a brand, face a backlash ................. 38 Jason Kirby: Why Quebec is closed for business ............................... 40 Econowatch: A scorecard on the state of the economy..................... 41

International

Society

Losing Iraq: The unstoppable, deadly advance of ISIS has left its

opponents terrified and demoralized ................................................. 24 The next Crimeas: Several so-called “de facto states” are turning

to Russia and believe the Soviet Union should never have ended.

Vladimir Putin is just fine with that .................................................. 28

ON THE COVER: Generation Z: They’re smarter than Boomers and more ambitious than Millennials. Watch out. ........................... 42 Life at sea: On board the HMCS Regina ......................................... 46

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Lee; the Koch brothers 56 ■ Film Watching an actor grow before our eyes 60 ■ Taste Every fish sure tells a story, don’t it? 61 ■ TV Kim Cattrall and Don McKellar have a midlife crisis 62 ■ Web How to make a living off Minecraft 63 ■ Feschuk Searching for middle-aged wisdom 65

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WorldMags.net This Week

THE EDITORIAL B.C. is going to let drivers go 120 km/h on some highways.

The rest of Canada needs to get up to speed.

N

o one quibbles about the benefits of democracy when it comes to Parliament or city hall. But what about roads and highways? Should speed limits also be set by the opinion of the masses?

Yes, as a matter of fact, they should. And British Columbia deserves national recognition for having the good sense to introduce the benefits of majority rule to its highway system.

Last week, B.C.’s Transportation and Infrastructure Minister Todd Stone announced a wide slate of changes to his province’s 9,100-km network of rural highways. The most significant and controversial of these will raise the speed limit on dozens of highways.

It will soon be possible to go up to 120 km/h on some B.C. highways−the fastest speed limit in Canada. Many routes will see maximum speeds raised by as much as 20 km/h. These changes have been met with predictable complaints from the RCMP and the B.C. Association of Chiefs of Police, who claim that higher speeds will lead to more accidents, as well as from environmental groups outraged about increased pollution. In truth, there should be no appreciable impact on safety or the environment. The changes will simply allow people to get where they’re going in a lawful and timely manner.

There’s ample evidence going back many decades that proves most drivers pick their travel speed based on driving conditions and road characteristics, rather than posted limits. Dropping maximum speeds in an effort to make roads safer has little impact on how people actually drive. A U.S. government report on the topic concluded: “The majority of motorists do not alter their speeds to conform to speed limits they perceive as unreasonable for prevailing conditions.” By the same token, raising limits doesn’t produce faster average speeds; it merely makes lawful what is already common behaviour. (When B.C. raised the speed limit on Highway 1 at Tappen, near Shuswap Lake, by 10 km/h in 2006, the average driver’s speed didn’t change.)

Road engineers agree highways are safest when the differential between the slowest and fastest vehicles is at a minimum. A large gap between drivers’ speeds is most often found in situations with artificially low speed limits and this can lead to dangerous passing attempts, unpredictable behaviour and driver frustration: all of which most certainly cause collisions. When B.C. last raised rural highway speeds in 1997−from 90 km/h to 100 km/hr−the number of serious collisions fell by 18 per cent in the following five-year

period. And this coincided with a time when traffic volumes rose nearly a third! Rather than allowing police or noisy lobby groups to impose unnaturally low speed limits, the safest solution is to simply accept the wisdom of driver democracy.

“Speed limits should be set so that they include the behaviour of the majority of drivers and provide an appropriate maximum speed,” reads the background report released by the B.C. government last week. In this regard, the most reliable engineering standard is to pick a maximum speed that 85 per cent of drivers already obey. On Highway 19 from Parksville to Campbell River, for example, government data shows the 85th percentile speed to be 121 km/h.

As a result, the speed limit is to be raised from 110 km/h to 120 km/h. In other words, drivers themselves are deciding the safest maximum speeds. Government polling data shows local support for many of the individual speed limit increases to be in the 80 per cent range.

Enforcement of the laws of the road will naturally remain important after these changes. However, the moves should free police to focus their efforts on stopping the 15 per cent of drivers who exceed accepted norms and behave in ways that are obviously dangerous to themselves and others: driving drunk, distracted driving, racing, etc. While this may prove more difficult than setting up speed traps that ensnare average drivers who happen by, it will have a much greater impact on public safety.

Another novel innovation for B.C.’s roads involves variable speed limits on certain highways. Changeable LED road signs, similar to signs that alert drivers to upcoming congestion or accidents on urban highways, will adjust speed limits based on weather or other conditions on remote or mountainous routes. Since drivers already alter their driving speeds to conditions around them, providing this sort of real-time information should further improve road safety.

By emphasizing engineering principles and trusting observed data on human behaviour, B.C. is bringing its highways into agreement with how residents already use their roads and signalling a new, lighter touch in roadway regulation. With luck, the rest of Canada will pay attention to this refreshing approach. Other jurisdictions in immediate need of enlightenment include Ontario’s 400 series highways and Quebec’s autoroutes: both of which boast an absurdly low and much-ignored 100 km/h speed limit.

Rather than allowing police to impose unnaturally low speed limits, the safest solution is to accept the wisdom of driver democracy

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WorldMags.net This Week

LETTERS From coast to coast How refreshing to read a happy story about a Canadian whose family chose Canada and their son, P.K. Subban, who is now a great Canadian hockey player for the Habs (“Why it’s great to be us,” Canada Day Special, July 7)!

One of the happiest cover pictures for a while, and may the force be with you next year, P.K.!

Karen Barteaux, Brandon, Man. I was disappointed to see that in the photo section “Canada from above” (Canada Day Special, July 7), of 14 selections, the only two images of the Prairie provinces were of the oil sands in northern Alberta. The city of Ottawa, by contrast, had two images: a beach volleyball tournament and a suburb. There is a lot more to Alberta than the energy industry. Instead, look at an aerial shot of Edmonton’s River Valley, the largest stretch of urban parkland in North America. At 7,400 hectares, it is 5.5 times the size of Vancouver’s municipal parks combined.

Joanne Pattison-Levine, Edmonton In the section “We’re No. 1” (Canada Day Special, July 7), you forgot to mention our ranking on environmental protection, according to the Center for Global Development: dead last out of 27 wealthy nations.

L.W. Bevan, Collingwood, Ont. So the most disproportionate way to die in Quebec is Alzheimer’s (“Putting Canada on the map,” Canada Day Special, July 7)? Perhaps their motto should change to “Je me souviens rien.”

Mike Rodgers, Bath, Ont. “CanLit writ large” (Canada Day Special, July 7) omitted mention 6

‘Why would someone shut down a mindfulness program in schools, and choose medication over meditation?’

Greg Cameron, Kingston, Ont.

for young Canadians who are either shut out of the market completely, or forced to take on the kind of mortgage loads that will keep them in debt for most of their working lives. A lot is said about the financial challenges facing young families compared to their parents’ generation. Much of this can be attributed to the high cost of housing, and the failure of governments to deal with this problem is a national disgrace.

Ronald McCaig, Port Alberni, B.C.

What Wynne’s win means

of Jon Klassen, a young Canadian living in L.A., who won the prestigious Caldecott Medal for Children’s Literature in 2013. Closer to home, Jon also won a Governor General’s Literary Award for children’s illustration in 2010. Kudos to you, Jon! Susan Collins, London, Ont.

The differences between the U.S. and Canada can also be attributed to the relative strength in the union movement between the two (“Middle-class thousandaires,” Canada Day Special, July 7). As unions have lost power in the U.S., so has the number of good-paying jobs that belonging to a union can provide.

“CanLit writ large” contained Marie MacKay, some unnecessary cattiness. North Vancouver, B.C. Margaret Atwood is “too divisive” because she’s not as soft Why does Maclean’s insist on porand fuzzy as, say, Alice Munro? traying the outrageous housing Munro unites the country, appar- costs in our major cities as someently, while Atwood, even if she thing to celebrate (“Houses like cured cancer, would still not hotcakes,” Canada Day Special, break into the “patriotic love- July 7)—even while acknowledgfest” category. In the same piece, ing that these are driven largely we learn that young Eitan Amos by foreign investors looking for a won the International Youth safe haven? Million-dollar “startBible Contest in Jerusalem. This ers” may be good news for real contest, we are told, is “the only estate agents, and certainly are for book contest that really mat- the banks writing mortgages for ters.” Really? twice what they might have a decIan Howarth, Montreal ade ago. But it’s hardly good news

WorldMags.net JULY 21, 2014

I’m still not sure how Ontario’s Liberal Premier Kathleen Wynne won a majority (Interview, July 7), but now we are subjected to four more years of monumental mismanagement. Urban voters opted to “forget” about the costly scandals and investigations in our bankrupt, have-not province and ask for more, especially when the most costly and deceitful scandal still flourishes: the Green Energy and Green Economy Act, dominated by the wind-turbine debacle, which has hog-tied rural municipalities and residents alike. Wynne speaks about her progressive vision for Ontario, but those living outside of her golden zone know it doesn’t include them as fundamental health and environmental protections and precautions have vaporized.

Barbara Ashbee, Mulmur, Ont. I have admired Kathleen Wynne from the moment she won the leadership. She is personable and intelligent, a mix of positivity and pragmatism. She is a class act through and through. I wish we had more politicians like her.

Lisa Hamilton, Whitby, Ont.

Everyone needs to chill out As a long-term sufferer of anx-

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iety and depression, I enjoyed “Schooled in meditation” (Society, June 23). I had been on and off antidepressants for the whole of my thirties before enrolling in a mindfulness program more than two years ago, and I have not suffered a single lapse since. These skills have proved invaluable, making me a better human being. For those who shut down a program by complaining about “perceived overtones of Eastern religion,” I have no respect whatsoever. If they would like to deprive their own children of valuable coping techniques and choose medication over meditation in the modern Western tradition then that is bad enough, but to deprive an entire group of such an opportunity is extremely destructive.

Greg Cameron, Kingston, Ont.

The victims of a ‘victimless’ crime Jason Kirby doesn’t understand the mathematics of investing if he thinks insider trading is a victimless crime (“The problem with insider obsession,” Economy, July 7). Investors buy a diversified portfolio of stocks with the expectation that some will go up and some will go down. If all the gains are captured by traders with inside knowledge, other investors are left with only the losses.

Suppose somebody with advance knowledge of tomorrow’s lottery numbers went around buying all the winning tickets at face value.

Would this still be considered a “victimless crime,” even though it is now impossible to win the lottery? I’m not saying other forms of corporate wrongdoing should be ignored or are less important.

But insider trading is an excellent example of why people are angry at current inequality: not because some are richer than others, but because there’s one set of rules for those with connections, and another set of rules for everyone else.

Thomas Awad, Montreal

than cyclists with motorized traffic, even with the provision of bike lanes (The Editorial, July 7). Permitting cyclists on well-maintained sidewalks, as is allowed in Florida, can work just fine for the casual cyclists who want to do a short trip around town for recreation. In many small communities or city suburbs you’ll hardly see a pedestrian using a particular sidewalk most times of day; there is usually space for sidewalk widening. Yet the risks of cycling in a bike lane beside fast-flowing traffic are often quite high, especially with so many distracted

closed doors, nor argue that these are isolated incidents. One needs only to look south, where many states are trying to pass bills making undercover investigations a criminal offence, to realize how urgent real transparency and change is needed. It’s time for the industry to accept that they no longer can defend the indefensible.

Gail Kreutzer, Arnes, Man. I have no respect for Mercy for Animals nor the people behind them. They are worse than the worker who mistreated the cows.

This person not only misled his

GOOD POINT There is an ever-increasing gap between what it costs to feed animals and the price one gets for these animals (and their products, such as milk). Farmers turn to confinement systems (“Gone undercover,” National, July 7) not because they are animal-hating sadists, but because they must if they are to be able to afford to produce milk and meat at the unrealistically low prices demanded by the consumers. Atrocities happen at huge farms like the Chilliwack Cattle Co. because the slim profit margins tempt the owners into hiring cheap, unscreened labour instead of trained, skilled hands. Any real farmer knows that contented animals give more milk, and well-treated turkeys grow better than mistreated, unhappy ones.

Willi Boepple, Saanich Peninsula, B.C.

employer, he showed no responsibility at all by not informing the owners at the first signs of mistreatment. He didn’t stop the cruelty; instead he allowed and accepted the continuing of cruelty Don’t be cruel for his own selfish purpose to capI commend Mercy for Animals for ture everything on camera. their investigations and the media Dorothée Beier, for providing coverage of events Saint-Cyrille-de-Wendover, Que. at Chilliwack Cattle Co., in order for Canadians to understand the Having spent 57 years so far in Sharing the road reality of factory farming (“Gone the animal industry, mostly cattle, Studies show that it is much safer undercover,” National, July 7). The I know that there is no way to justo mix cyclists and pedestrians industry can no longer hide behind tify the type of plain evil behavdrivers. Converting some sidewalks to multi-use paths should not be costly and will make better use of existing infrastructure.

Brian Dexter, Georgetown, Ont.

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iour seen at Chilliwack Cattle Co. How could that have been going on without someone knowing?

Lore Bruder, Pincher Creek, Alta.

Gay and grey I take exception to the statements made by Rinaldo Walcott, who said “queer people tend to view themselves, and their culture, as eternally youthful, without considering the possibility that growing old may mean ‘coming out again and again in old-folks homes’ ” (“Coming out again,” Society, July 7). That is a crass generalization of LGBT people.

Many of us, in middle age, have spent years planning and agonizing over pensions, retirement income and insurance. We do worry about our aging, because we know housing may pose uncomfortable issues for us. I know many aging LGBT folks. None of them would check into any place under the title “queer”! Most of us don’t even think in labels. We leave that to the younger generations.

Alison Dennis, Dawson Creek, B.C. Why is the incident where a gay man was asked not to talk loudly about his sex life in a hospital being cited as an example of homophobia? Isn’t it just possible that the patient who complained was an unwell person in need of peace and quiet? Isn’t it just possible that the nurse was justifiably concerned about the well-being of her other patients?

C.M. Wilcox, Hamilton In 25 years or so, when I’m eking out my existence warehoused in some seniors’ facility, I hope that all my roommates have the common decency to not loudly brag with their buddies about how many 18-year-olds—of either gender— they poked in their good old days.

Chuck Laidlaw, Victoria We welcome readers to submit letters to either letters@macleans.ca or to Maclean’s, 11th floor, One Mount Pleasant Road, Toronto, Ont. M4Y 2Y5. Please supply your name, address and daytime telephone number. Letters should be less than 300 words, and may be edited for space, style and clarity.

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102 years old and still kicking: Attendance at the Calgary Stampede is up, after the 2013 event was hampered by flood recovery efforts

GOOD NEWS Debt, public and private, remains a ball and chain to Canadians, but green shoots of fiscal good sense are appearing: 4½ years after the Olympic cauldron went dark, the Vancouver Organizing Committee announced that the 2010 Winter Games broke even, with total revenues and expenses just shy of $1.9 billion. Next door in Alberta, the province is back in the black, says Finance Minister Doug Horner, as higher-than-expected energy revenues transformed last year’s forecasted $1.97-billion deficit into a $755-million surplus. Easy enough for a province with oil. But it’s the principle that counts.

Fattah al-Sisi expressed regret that Fahmy and his two Al Jazeera colleagues were sentenced to at least seven years in prison on charges of defaming Egypt and aiding the banned Muslim Brotherhood Islamist group.

“The sentencing of several journalists had a very negative effect, and we had nothing to do with it,” Sisi told Egyptian media. His comments have raised hopes that Sisi will free the three men by issuing a presidential pardon.

Marc of defiance

Canada’s so-called “Prince of Pot” has finished his U.S. prison sentence, and is coming home to a changed—more rational—landscape, as far as cannabis is concerned. Marc Right these wrongs Emery was jailed in 2010 for selling marijuana Imprisoned Egyptian-Canadian journalist seeds to American buyers through the mail; Mohamed Fahmy’s future appeared a little the week he got out, Washington became the less bleak this week. Egypt’s President Abdel second state to legalize pot sales, suggesting 8

his chronic disobedience may soon be redundant. Then again, Canadian border authorities are promising to crack down on anyone bringing legal U.S. dope into the country. If Emery hasn’t lost his taste for showboating, there’s still trouble to be had.

Nerds win Is your child uncool? Were you? Don’t fret.

New research suggests belonging to the cool crowd isn’t something to be celebrated. A University of Virginia study found that teens who exhibited “cool” behaviours—like sex and delinquency—were more likely to have relationship issues, substance abuse problems and run-ins with the law later in life. Meanwhile, there are more opportunities than ever for nerds: this fall a Chicago university will begin offering athletic sponsorships to students who excel in video games.

WorldMags.net JULY 21, 2014

TODD KOROL/REUTERS

Paid in full

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War footing: Israel launched air strikes in the Gaza Strip in retaliation for Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli towns; escalation seems inevitable

BAD NEWS

IBRAHEEM ABU MUSTAFA/REUTERS

A nightmare goes on Mystery surrounding the disappearance of five-year-old Nathan O’Brien and his grandparents, Alvin and Kathy Liknes, in Calgary only deepened this week, as police questioned a man they described as a “person of interest,” yet charged him only with offences unrelated to the case. With no custody dispute under way in the family, police have no obvious clues to follow, and the few signs aren’t good: Markings on the interior walls of the house suggest at least one person was injured before the three went missing, police say. Western Canadians have been encouraged to keep their eyes peeled. The rest of us wait and hope.

tender Abdullah Abdullah claimed victory in last month’s election, despite early results showing that his rival, Ashraf Ghani, had the lead. Alleging massive fraud, Abdullah told supporters at a Kabul rally: “We will not allow a fraudulent government to take power for one day.” There had been rumours that Abdullah would declare a parallel government, possibly sparking a crisis in the country. But he insisted his goals for Afghanistan were stability and national unity. Final results, which will follow recounts, are expected July 22.

The sin of pride

The Manitoba government was right to declare a provincial state of emergency, as water levels along the Assiniboine River east of Portage Runaway election la Prairie neared levels unseen since floodAfghanistan risked slipping toward division ravaged 2011. The measure allowed Premier and civil strife this week as presidential con- Greg Selinger to call in the military to help

fortify dikes and protect homes, leading some to wonder why Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, whose province was also devastated by summer floods, hadn’t done so already. By then, estimates of the damage in that province had topped $360 million. Honestly, premier: There’s no shame in asking for help.

Keep looking A pair of potentially life-supporting planets discovered to some fanfare four years ago orbiting Gliese 581, a faint dwarf star 20 light years away, aren’t even planets at all, according to a new study. Apparently the starlightmeasuring technique used to detect planetary masses in the so-called “goldilocks zone” of distant star systems—not too hot, not too cold for liquid water to exist—isn’t entirely foolproof. The search for life out there continues, but progress seems far, far away.

WorldMags.net MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

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Two for the show: Canadian Vasek Pospisil (right) and American Jack Sock won the men’s doubles in a surprise upset at Wimbledon

NEWSMAKERS The billionaire and anti-Keystone XL pipeline crusader earned a big black mark on his record as one of America’s most influential environmentalists. The former hedge-fund manager reportedly backed a controversial coal project in Australia, slated to begin this year. Steyer vowed to sell off his investments in fossil fuels in 2012.

But a fund he founded, Farallon Capital Management, has invested in and lent hundreds of millions of dollars to coal companies, the New York Times reports. (Steyer sold his ownership stake in the fund but remains an investor.)

Critics note coal from those investments will fuel power plants in Asia while American coal jobs disappear as Steyer pushes a green agenda stateside.

Indra Nooyi The CEO of PepsiCo waded into the debate on whether women can “have it all.” Her conclusion: no, they can’t. The mother of two 10

TV host proclaimed on his show, adding that Amazon’s tactics hurt fledgling authors. He then held up a copy of California, the debut novel from fellow Hachette writer Edan Lepucki, and urged viewers to buy it at independent bookstores. Lepucki’s post-apocalyptic love story is now on its way to becoming the surprise hit of the summer. “We’re going to prove I can sell more books than Amazon,” Colbert said.

described outsourcing parenting duties to others, including her secretary. “Stay-at-home mothering was a full-time job,” she said at the Aspen Ideas Festival. “Being a CEO for a company is three full- Fabien Cousteau time jobs rolled into one. How Grandfather Jacques would be can you do justice to all?” proud: on July 2, Fabien and his small crew of aquanauts surfaced Stephen Colbert after living underwater for 31 days.

In the ongoing war over the price of ebooks between Amazon and publishing giant Hachette—among other tactics, Amazon is not taking pre-orders on the publisher’s titles—writers are picking sides, perhaps none more vocally than Stephen Colbert, a Hachette author. “We will not lick their monopoly boot,” the late-night

WorldMags.net JULY 21, 2014

(He beat Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s record, set in 1963, by one day.)

“It was amazing how much it felt like home,” he said of the underwater Florida lab, Aquarius, where his team was based. Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen is also headed for the life aquatic: as of Sept. 7, he’ll be spending seven days aboard Aquarius as part of NASA’s NEEMO mission, doing simulations that will inform future voyages to asteroids and Mars.

Harry Potter and friends J.K. Rowling’s website crashed when she released an update on her wizarding world, written as an article by the series’ gossip columnist, Rita Skeeter, at the Quidditch World Cup. Among the juicy revelations, 33-year-old Harry’s marriage to wife, Ginny, may be in trouble (or not–Skeeter’s often wrong), Ron Weasley is co-running brother George’s joke emporium and Hermione Granger is a bigwig at the Department of Magical Law Enforcement.

SANG TAN/AP; RUBEN SPRICH/REUTERS; WILFREDO LEE/AP

Tom Steyer

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It was a yard like any other.

Cedar hedges. Split-rail fence.

Small tulip garden. But every winter it became the frozen playground for a boy who would go on to reinvent the game.

Thank you to that backyard rink in Brantford, Ontario, for writing the opening chapter of the greatest story the game has ever known.

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® NHL and the NHL Shield are registered trademarks. NHL and NHL team marks are the property of the NHL and its teams. © NHL 2014. All Rights Reserved. TMSportsnet, SN & Design, Rogers & Mobius Design are trademarks of or used under license from Rogers Sportsnet Inc. or Rogers Communications Inc. All other brand names and logos are trademarks of their respective owners. ©2014 Rogers Communications.

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THE COLUMNISTS Paul Wells on Stephen Harper’s unexpected success in Quebec; Emma Teitel on what’s actually changed in Disney princess culture

PAUL WELLS

MAYBE HARPER HAS SLAIN THE SEPARATISTS There was Stephen Harper the other day, delivering his annual speech to the Calgary Southwest Stampede barbecue. What made headlines was Harper’s decision to criticize Justin Trudeau, at length and by name, for the first time at one of these barbecues.

This was indeed new. In his 2012 speech to the same event he mentioned “the opposition” three times, the Liberals once and Trudeau (who wasn’t the leader of anything yet) not at all. In 2013, he mentioned the opposition nine times, the Liberals three times and Trudeau not at all. This year he mentioned the opposition six times, the Liberals 12 and Justin Trudeau, by name, 11 times. Tom Mulcair, who actually is the Opposition leader, has never rated a mention.

Nobody should be surprised that it makes headlines when the Prime Minister uses a speech to a friendly audience in his riding to assert, in almost a dozen different ways, that the leader of the third party has “nothing—absolutely nothing—of substance to offer.” We are essentially already in the 2015 election campaign, and it’s Trudeau’s party that leads the polls, and you bet that makes Stephen Harper angry.

But blanket coverage of one part of a speech can obscure discussion of the rest.

I’m struck, for instance, by Harper’s decision to take credit for the decline of the Quebec sovereignty movement.

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Perhaps you are saying, “He did what?” as a nation in the House of Commons. He And yet it is so. gave Quebec a representative in the CanThis year marks the centenary of Sir George- adian delegation to UNESCO. He travelled Etienne Cartier’s birth, Harper said. Cartier to Quebec City to meet the Quebec premier, was one of the key fathers of Confederation, becoming, amazingly, the first modern prime the right-hand man to Sir John A. Macdon- minister to bother to do so.

All this got Harper noticed in Quebec, and ald. “How very encouraging it is that as we commemorate Cartier’s vision—his Conserva- it won him some early support. Since 2008 tive vision of a strong Quebec in a united that support for his party has almost all slipped Canada—we do so soon after an election in away. Almost any Quebecer can list irritants which the people of Quebec rendered the in Harper’s relationship with the province: most decisive verdict for federalism in four his insistence on handing senior appointments to unilingual applicants; his policies decades!” Harper said.

“Friends, the gradual decline in Quebec on the environment and criminal justice. Yet separatist sentiment throughout the stew- disdain for his government is not matched ardship of our government—a government with disdain for Canada.

That’s because he’s also done big things which has honoured Cartier’s principles—is differently from his Liberal predecessors. Jean something we should take pride in!”

Take pride? Sure. Perceive a causal link? Chrétien and Paul Martin cut transfers to the That one’s harder. How can a party that rarely provinces, then restored them only in part, scores as high as 15 per cent and only in return for subin public opinion polls in stantial federal involvement HARPER IS BORING. Quebec take credit for the in provincial decision-makrouts of the Bloc Québécois BUT THERE IS ALL KINDS ing. Under Harper, federal in 2011 and the Parti Qué- OF EVIDENCE THAT HE’S cash transfers to provinces bécois in 2014? A party that continued to grow, while holds four seats out of Que- ROBBED THE SEPARATIST conditions on those transFIRE OF OXYGEN. bec’s 75, with no guarantee fers nearly vanished. A genof hanging onto them after eration ago, the failed Meech the next election?

Lake accord was designed to limit new national And yet I think Harper has a point. If the shared-cost programs. Under Harper there Parti Québécois had won a record-high vote have been no new national shared-cost proin the spring election and the Bloc had moved grams. The intense executive federalism that from four seats in 2004 to 54 today, Harper had become characteristic since the 1960s, would come in for his share of the blame. with high-stakes federal-provincial meetings The opposite has happened; should he get almost every year, has been replaced with mutual federal-provincial indifference. no credit?

He has certainly followed his own counsel I kind of liked it the old way, when “strong on Quebec. One of his first moves, in 2006, federal leaders” were forever “standing up was to eliminate federal funding for the Can- for Canada” in near-constant confrontations adian Unity Council, which for 40 years had with Quebec premiers, both Péquiste and served as a Montreal club for well-meaning Liberal. Those were the days when a letter apparatchiks of the Laurentian elite (its last from Stéphane Dion to some PQ personalboard chairman was Bob Rae). He intro- ity could brighten the entire press gallery’s duced a motion recognizing “the Québécois” day. Harper’s way is more boring. But there

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is all kinds of evidence that he’s robbed the separatist fire of oxygen.

“Every prime minister of modern times has had to come to terms with the fact that the unity of the country can never be taken for granted,” Bob Rae wrote five months ago.

“The case for Canada has to be made every day, every week, every month.” By Rae’s lights, Harper has consistently failed to make the case for Canada. And yet the rout of Quebec separatism is nearly complete. Isn’t that one of the most surprising things that could possibly have happened on Harper’s watch? Is it not at least worth acknowledging?

On the web: For more Paul Wells, visit his blog at macleans.ca/inklesswells

EMMA TEITEL

WALT DISNEY CO./EVERETT COLLECTION

HAPPILY EVER AFTER, MINUS THE PRINCE In 2011, American child psychologist Jennifer Hartstein published an advice book for parents wishing to rid their female children of so-called “princess syndrome,” her name for the inevitable insecurities and superficial obsessions that little girls allegedly develop when they are exposed to an abundance of girly-girl commercial culture, particularly in the form of Disney princesses. In her book Princess Recovery: A Howto Guide to Raising Strong, Empowered Girls Who Can Create Their Own Happily Ever Afters, Hartstein writes that the traditional princess narrative “may be teaching your daughter everything from ‘only appearances matter’ to ‘don’t expect to rely on yourself—you’ll need a prince to rescue you.’ ” Expose her to too much Cinderella, Aladdin, or Sleeping Beauty, in other words, and your daughter may become a kind of princess herself, obsessed with beauty and uninterested in her own autonomy. The classic Disney princess is, in Hartstein’s view, not only gratuitously airy, helpless, and (save for Belle in the Beauty and the Beast) vacuous, but a threat to the healthy development of the millions of girls who worship at her pink, saccharine altar. Her theory isn’t original; it appears more or less in nearly every parenting book with a feminist bent, from Peggy

Orenstein’s 2012 Cinderella Ate my Daughter bolt, but a steady, daily love,” she writes. “And to last year’s What Should We Tell Our Daugh- not necessarily from a man, who you think will magically save you, but from a woman, ters? by British journalist Melissa Benn.

Despite its ubiquity, anti-princess dogma is who perhaps will unmagically save you just by grossly out of step with the times. The truth is having loved you, quietly, for a long time.” that fairy tales, though once ardent protectors Brave’s story takes the same maternal turn, and proliferators of gendered convention, are with Merida’s quest focused first on avoiding now, surprisingly, quite the opposite. This dec- matrimony, and ultimately on mending her ade’s most popular fairy-tale features with hero- fraught relationship with her old-fashioned ines at their centre—Shrek, Brave and Frozen, mother. And the relationship worth saving in to name a few—are actually Frozen isn’t between prince blatant departures from and princess; it’s between WHAT’S RARE the prince-rescues-princess estranged sisters.

IN ANY FAIRY TALE norm. In Brave (2012), ScotThese reimaginations are tish princess and seasoned admirable departures from IS A HEROINE WHO archer Merida sets off on a the Prince Charming-savesMAKES HER OWN quest to avoid betrothal—and the-day narrative, and proof WAY, BY HERSELF changes her stuffy medieval that little girls can get their society in the process. In the insanely popular Academy Award-winner Frozen (2013), not one but two heroines defy convention in their icy kingdom, and in this month’s Maleficent, Disney’s reimagination of Sleeping Beauty, Angelina Jolie plays the story’s infamous sorceress as a complex, intensely likeable character, whose evil doing is warranted and, eventually, rectified.

Pop culture is undeniably rife with sexual inequality, from HBO (when pink, frilly fill and self-respect, too. However, will we see some male genitalia on Game of as interesting as they are, they aren’t a great Thrones?) to reality TV (if I had a daughter I’d deal more feminist than their sexist predecesrather expose her to a century of Snow White sors. Sure, the prince is merely an afterthought than an hour of Jersey Shore), but kids’ films in Maleficent and Princess Merida’s main goal are pushing boundaries other pop-culture in Brave is freedom from a patriarchal instimedia are not. Late last month Pixar previewed tution. Yet the fact remains that both prinInside Out, their next big blockbuster hopeful, cesses are still saved in the end—not by boys, slated for 2015. It’s the studio’s first film to but by their mothers. This may be an improvecentre around a heroine who doesn’t wear a ment on the old trope (and undoubtedly crown. Riley, the movie’s protagonist, is an pleasing to the moms in the audience), but average American girl in the throes of puberty. is it ideal? After all, man or woman, a rescue (The film takes place, Magic School Bus-style, is still a rescue. What’s rare, then, in any fairy inside the girl’s brain, where comedians Amy tale isn’t a heroine who rebels against matriPoehler, Bill Hader and Mindy Kaling voice monial convention or manners, but one who animated emotions that steer Riley’s conscious- makes her own way, by herself. Ironically the ness like a spaceship.) In Maleficent, Princess Disney heroine who did this best was also the Aurora—a.k.a Sleeping Beauty—isn’t awakened least politically correct: In Disney’s extremely by the kiss of a handsome prince. Her spell is fictional account of the Pocahontas story from broken instead by the kiss of a maternal figure 1995, the princess refuses to leave her home (one I won’t name) who has been looking out and accompany her lover, John Smith, to for her discreetly since birth. It’s the film’s Europe, because beyond familial duty, she wildest departure from the original Sleeping likes her way of life more than anything else.

Beauty story, and it’s a moment that is not She doesn’t need a man—or a mom—to sing only overtly feminist, writes Joan Acocella in with all the colours of the wind. the New Yorker, but poignant too. “That is Have a comment to share? ‘love’s true kiss’: not romantic love, the thunder- emma.teitel@macleans.rogers.com

WorldMags.net MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

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THE INTERVIEW Roméo Dallaire came to world attention as commander of a tragically under-resourced United Nations mission in Rwanda when genocidal violence broke out there in 1994. Since then, Dallaire has devoted himself to causes related to violent conflict, especially in Africa. He was appointed to the Senate as a Liberal in 2005, and retired this past May.

BY JOHN GEDDES ·

Q: In your final speech in the Senate you spoke of how, for people like you, news of war in faroff places always brings back vivid memories.

“We still smell it,” you said. And you admonished, “What goes on in these conflict zones is not foreign and should never be foreign to a great nation like ours.” But isn’t it inevitable that most Canadians feel Syria, say, or the Central African Republic are foreign, distant, and not much connected with life here?

A: You’re articulating exactly the natural reaction. You do that when another town has a problem. A company town closes down, your company is still there, and you say, “That’s life.” The question is: Is that the depth of Canadians—your own self-preservation? You 14

carry on, and to hell with them? In this nation, over 150 years, we’ve been able to move that argument higher. We’ve been moved beyond our borders because we’ve bled beyond our borders. It is easy to have people think beyond self-preservation because the essence of a Canadian is there. It’s a matter of reminding them and providing some leadership.

Q: You’ve urged Canada and other countries to be more ready to try to bring peace in places torn apart by conflicts. Doesn’t history give us grounds to be cautious about that?

A: I think caution is being responsible. Leaders have to be cautious about assessing risk.

But caution isn’t the excuse for sitting on your ass and doing nothing. Inaction is an action.

[It] is a deliberate decision.

Q: You argue that Canada, as a middle power, has a role to play, especially in developing countries where the former colonial powers carry a lot of negative baggage. You also argue we need to be backed by real military strength.

A: Lester B. Pearson argued that you needed a robust military capability to back up the diplomatic capabilities and, ultimately, economic ones. It was never just: “We’re going

to be peacekeepers, we’re going to be good guys.” He believed you needed a solid military, because in extremis you will have to use them.

Q: You’re concerned these days about the Central African Republic, where bloodshed involving Christian militias and Muslim rebel groups has been horrific. The UN Security Council has established a peacekeeping operation that is to be up and running there in mid-September.

What role would you see for Canada?

A: Canada should have a battle group of about 1,600 with a helicopter capability to be able to move at least a company at a time. It should have engineering capability and extensive logistics and command-and-control capability. We can be the backbone of that UN force.

Q: But nothing like that is going to happen, right? I assume that’s a reaction to what has been experienced in Rwanda, Somalia . . .

A: There was, running through the Department of National Defence headquarters, [the idea that] “We don’t want to do a ‘Dallaire’ anymore.” But not wanting to do a “Dallaire”meant not sending a general with a couple of staff officers into a mission where we should have sent a general with a battalion,

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PHOTOGRAPHS BY BLAIR GABLE

Roméo Dallaire on Canada’s role in the world, the problem of NATO-itis, and his many plans for his own non-retirement

WorldMags.net This Week

which I asked for and never got. So there is a firm belief that if we’re going in anywhere we must put our capability on the ground. And I totally agree. There’s also still nurtured in National Defence this NATO-itis: “Oh, we don’t like how the UN builds mandates and builds its force and command-and-control and strategic planning. But we do like NATO. So if NATO’s called in, we’ll look at it.”

Q: It’s interesting to hear you putting so much emphasis on the troops. We’ve come to think of you as a humanitarian figure.

A: I believe the security side has got to be handled. My involvement with child soldiers is not because I believe it’s a social and economic problem. My interest is because it is a security problem. This is a weapons system that is being used massively. My aim is to neutralize that system.

Q: And by “weapons system,” you mean 12-yearold boys?

A: Twelve-year-old boys and girls—40 per cent are girls. Child soldiers don’t just include the boys standing there with the AK-47s and machetes. It includes those in the camps preparing food. It includes sex slaves and bush wives. For example, we’re seeing abductions in Nigeria. They’re doing forcible recruitment, indoctrinating and drugging up those kids, and they are going to be using them.

Q: You’ve spearheaded a program.

A: It’s called the Roméo Dallaire Child Soldier Initiative, based at Dalhousie University.

We do research and training for military and police forces on how they can neutralize the use of children. How do you prevent them from being recruited? We’re with military

and police in the field showing them how to make children a liability to the adults who want to use them. We’ve got a program with Sierra Leone. We’ve already trained contingents going into Somalia. We’re involved with Uganda, we’re in the Congo. The Mali force commander has asked us to go into his country. We’ve been in Botswana.

Q: What else do you have on the go now that you’re leaving the Senate?

A: My wife is expecting that response, too.

Q: We’re glad to forward this interview to her.

A: She’d appreciate that. While I was a senator, I averaged four days a month at home.

Q: Where is home?

A: Quebec City. My father-in-law commanded the garrison there, my father served in the garrison there, my son serves in the garrison there. I’m a romantic and I like the history of the fortress city. In any case, my primary work will be out of Dalhousie. We’ve been asked by police forces in Canada to look at how they handle ethnic-based gangs. I’m on the advisory board to the UN secretary-general on genocide prevention. The high commissioner for human rights out of Geneva has asked me to be prepared to deploy.

Q: They want you to go into conflict zones to assess possible crimes against humanity.

A: Yeah. So investigate or participate in whatever resolution is possible. You can see all that’s linked together. My research on a new conceptual framework of conflict resolution has been long in the making. And the veterans files—I’m still continuing [work on] strategic issues.

Reforming the New Veterans Charter. Reforming care for the severely injured. Creating a covenant between the people of Canada and the veterans.

Q: You’ve talked openly about how you cope daily with posttraumatic stress disorder.

Will you be able to do all the stuff you’ve talked about?

A: I take my pills every day and I still do therapy, because I do get, at times, overwhelmed, for a variety of reasons. Fatigue is one. Not being able to sleep because of intrusions still.

PTSD can be terminal, so I gotta watch it, I gotta take care of it. That’s what it is. It’s an injury I’m living with.

Q: You’re also working on a book.

A: It’s a memoir. All kinds of people want to write my biography and I didn’t want anybody [doing that]. So my editor and I, we sat down and I said, “Why don’t I write a memoir of 20 years with PTSD.” It won’t be a cry-

in-your-beer kind of thing. It’ll be about how you manoeuvre. I think it will be useful.

Q: Coming back to your conviction that Canada should be more active in peacekeeping in the world’s hot spots, if I’m a Canadian who thinks, “The general has his heart in the right place, but I don’t want Canadian troops dying in a jungle or a desert somewhere,” what do you say to that?

A: How long have [UN peacekeepers] been in Cyprus? Sixty years. They are not killing each other there anymore. We’re still patrolling this line in between them, and the way it’s going, it might take another generation, another 20 years. What’s 70 years in the life of a nation—if they are not killing each other, they’re building a future. So Afghanistan, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone— nations that are in tumultuous scenarios—you need to invest in giving them the ability to nurture their future. Those of us who have the capacity should be [helping] economically, development-wise, but we should also be willing to do it security-wise.

Q: You’re saying that we should make very long commitments in these places.

A: It’s dangerous, complex, ambiguous—civil war is hard to define. We went into Afghanistan for 10 years. Who said the mission was going to take 10 years? That bull is still around, particularly here on Parliament Hill: “We need very clear end-dates, very clear objectives, and we want to avoid casualties.” Well, you might as well stay home. Afghanistan needs 40, 50, 60, 70 years of assisting them.

You may not have to fight.

You’ve got to wear it down.

You’ve got to work with them to bring in human rights, gender equality, a bureaucracy, rule of law. I believe we go in, yes, to assist them, where there will be at times a requirement for security.

And, just like in this country, where there’s a need for security, there are risks. The day our police in Canada don’t need weapons will be the day we can go help people somewhere and we won’t need soldiers. That means we will spill some blood. But that’s part of building the construct of humanity. I believe that nations that have capabilities will be held accountable in history for not doing it.

‘The day our police don’t need weapons will be the day we can go help people somewhere and we won’t need soldiers’

WorldMags.net MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

To hear more of John Geddes’s conversation with Roméo Dallaire, see this week’s iPad edition of Maclean’s

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National

NATIVES

SECONDCLASS CHILDREN Aboriginal youth face a fate that should horrify Canadians. Why the obvious fix—education—remains so far out of reach.

Mike McKenzie celebrated his 21st birthday in May. For many Canadians, 21 is a milestone, an age when they graduate from university and begin their adult lives. For McKenzie, it’s something of a miracle.

Growing up in the isolated Skeetchestn Indian Band, a community of around 260 in the B.C. Interior, he spent his childhood shuffling between the school on the reserve and, when it was shut down for a time, enduring racist taunts at a Catholic high school in Kamloops. Eventually, he dropped out altogether.

His family was devastated by his older brother’s suicide in 2003, and four years ago, McKenzie decided he, too, was destined for an early grave. “I had a hard time at that time in my life, controlling my anger,” he says now. “I got to the point where I was really upset and really isolated in my community. There was just nothing there for me. I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t worth it, that I wanted to kill myself finally.”

His turnaround came after attending an Aboriginal youth conference that allowed him to meet with other First Nations teens living on reserves. He realized his struggles were hardly unique. Isolation, depression and substance abuse are rampant among Aboriginal youth growing up in remote communities. Many of the youth that McKenzie has since met have bounced in and out of foster care or jail, struggled to escape from gang violence or are grieving family and friends who committed suicide.

BY TAMSIN MCMAHON ·

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WorldMags.net Today, McKenzie has re-enrolled in school, online, and is active in Aboriginal youth organizations, determined to help blaze a new trail for future generations of Native Canadians. “I thought, there’s no point in sticking around if I’m not going to make some meaningful change,” he says. Even so, it’s been an uphill battle. On the day he speaks to Maclean’s, McKenzie has just come from the funeral of a 23-year-old Skeetchestn man who died of pneumonia. The community has buried at least one young person a year for the past four years.

Ending the cycle of poverty and violence among Aboriginal youth can seem like an impossibly daunting endeavour. After decades of negotiations, commissions and protests, including last year’s Idle No More movement and Ottawa’s recent unsuccessful attempt to reform First Nations education funding, Aboriginal children continue to face a fate that should horrify most Canadians.

Half of First Nations children live in poverty, with rates reaching as high as 64 per cent of children in Manitoba and Saskatchewan. They are far more likely to grow up in communities racked with violence, live in overcrowded housing and lack access to clean drinking water. Nine of Canada’s 10 most violent communities are Aboriginal, according to Statistics Canada’s violent crime index, as are 92 of Canada’s 100 poorest communities.

Deep poverty and domestic violence have pushed many Aboriginal youth toward a life of crime. Compared to non-Native Canadians, Aboriginal youth are seven times more likely to be victims of homicide, five times more likely to commit suicide and twice as likely to die an alcohol-related death. A rising number of Native teenagers are in custody: in 1997, just 12 per cent of young offenders in custody were Aboriginal. Today, it’s one in three.

That’s if they make it to their teenage years at all. The infant mortality rate is double the Canadian average, and Native children are at higher risk of a wide array of serious health problems, from cavities in toddlers, to substance abuse, HIV infections, tuberculosis and chlamydia. Aboriginal girls are at greater risk of sexual assault, domestic violence and teenage pregnancies. The number of children taken from their homes by child welfare authorities now exceeds the number taken at the height of the residential-school era, says Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society. Aboriginal children are 10 times more An uphill climb: Native children face a far higher risk of health problems and suicide

likely to be placed in foster care than the Canadian average and make up half of the roughly 60,000 kids in care.

So how, in one of the richest, most progressive countries in the world–where non-Native youth seem to have the world at their fingertips–is this allowed to happen? Even Ottawa has admitted Canada’s Aboriginal population has essentially become entrenched as secondclass citizens. In a federal government study comparing Aboriginal communities to the United Nations’ Human Development Index, an international measure of quality of life, Canada ranked eighth, between the U.S. and Japan. The Inuit population, meanwhile, ranked 63rd, slightly better than Libya, while First Nations reserve communities ranked 72nd, on par with Romania.

These conditions have given Canada a black eye internationally. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have both inveighed against Ottawa for the treatment of Natives, which mocks the values Canada espouses on the world stage. So has the former United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous people: “Treaty and Aboriginal claims remain persistently unresolved, indigenous women and girls remain vulnerable to abuse, and overall there appear to be high levels of distrust among indigenous peoples toward government at both the federal and provincial levels,” noted James Anaya in a report earlier this year.

No one can agree on how to even begin to address the crisis. Some blame government paternalism. Others, including some Native youth, say it’s the Native leadership that benefits from the status quo. Better education would seem to offer one solution, but many deeply distrust a system that has failed them so badly, and governments have failed to put forth an attractive alternative.

Perhaps the problem has become so big that no one knows how to tackle it. Meanwhile, Aboriginal Canadians are the country’s youngest and fastest-growing population.

Between 2006 and 2011, the Aboriginal population grew 20 per cent, compared to five per cent for non-Native Canadians. The average age among Aboriginals is just 28, compared to a national average of 41. Among the Inuit, it’s just 23. If unaddressed, the problems will only get worse.

The picture painted by statistics is bleak— more so because many non-Aboriginals have tuned out Native issues. Speak to people of influence in the indigenous population and you’ll hear words like “partnership” and “relationship” to describe the way forward

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Today, equipped with a Ph.D., he runs a company that trains teachers to work in Saskatchewan’s isolated northern communities. “We have kids coming into our classrooms hungry,” he says, voice trembling. “They’ll have been staying up all night because of things that are happening in their homes.”

John Cuthand, an addictions counsellor who works at the Yekooche First Nation in B.C., about 250 km northwest of Prince George, sees the fallout first-hand. Some 40 children have been removed from their homes in the community, he notes, where only about 100 people live permanently.

Alcohol abuse continues—though it is a nominally dry community. Prescription drug abuse is rampant because pills are easier to transport than liquor. Sexual violence, meanwhile, is a reality to which some in the hamlet seem resigned. Cuthand described cases involving girls who have been sexually assaulted, yet whose attackers continued to enjoy acceptance in the community. “To have to see the perpetrator every day, that’s very difficult,” he says. But at least some of the victims stick around: “They’re dedicated to the community. Or maybe they just don’t know anything different.”

one of the most politically charged issues for government-Aboriginal relations.

More than half of Canada’s Aboriginal population hasn’t finished high school and just six per cent have a university degree.

Many blame the federal government for spending less on Aboriginal schools than the provinces put into their public school systems. The size of the gap is the source of much debate, but an analysis last year by economist Don Drummond found the difference was as large as $8,000 per student in Ontario.

The results are palpable, especially in already economically depressed reserves. Unemployment among Aboriginals is more than twice the Canadian average. A third of the population is on social assistance, rising to more than 80 per cent in some communities. Closing the education gap between Native Canadians and the rest of the country would add more than $36 billion to the economy by 2026, according to a 2010 report from the Centre for the Study of Living Standards.

The national education statistics, however, mask a growing divide among Aboriginal communities, one that has helped fuel bitter disputes between the Native leadership over how to fix the problem. Off-reserve Aboriginals have made tremendous gains in educaNothing represents the intractable tional achievement, while those attending nature of the problems facing Aboriginal Can- federally funded schools have stagnated. By adians more than the battle over education, which remains the best way young people can Two-tier system: Only 45 per cent of on-reserve climb out of poverty and yet continues to be children graduate from high school

THIS PAGE AND PREVIOUS SPREAD: PHOTOGRAPHS BY DEREK MORTENSEN

for First Nations and the rest of the country, even as they vent anger. One is Mervin Brass, a former official with the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations who now publishes Treaty 4 News, a Saskatoon-based newspaper that covers Native communities. Yes, stereotypes still prevail among white people he hears calling open-line radio shows.

“But it’s the people in the middle I worry are tuning out,” he says. “The thinking, liberal-minded people, because they’re the ones who’ll help determine how this relationship continues.” That withdrawal, says Brass, is part of a vicious political cycle in which disinterest in Aboriginal issues makes it harder for even well-meaning non-Native leaders to get the topic onto the political agenda. “They know that First Nation, Métis and Inuit issues are not high in the voters’ minds. And they know if they take a tough stance against First Nations, it’ll increase their support in some demographics.”

The result, say community leaders, is profound misunderstanding of the despair in First Nations territories—both its scale and its causes. Almost all of the reserves in crisis are located in remote areas where no industry emerged to supplant hunting and fishing; those that succeed are located in the south and are increasingly integrated with the economic life around them.

Herman Michell grew up in one of those remote places, the Reindeer Lake First Nation, near the Manitoba-Saskatchewan boundary.

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2011, more than 70 per cent of those off reserve had graduated from high school, compared to 45 per cent on reserve. Inuit communities have been going in reverse; between 1998 and 2011, the number of students who hadn’t finished high school rose from 48 to 59 per cent.

Yet efforts to reform the First Nations education system, with its tarnished legacy of the residential-school era, continue to divide politicians and Aboriginal leaders. “The people who are letting everybody down are the governments and primarily the federal government, which continues to underfund education on reserves,” former prime minister Paul Martin told Maclean’s last year.

“The discrimination by the federal government is absolutely abhorrent, but I certainly believe that Aboriginal Canada is rising to the challenge.”

Martin’s own legacy on the issue is mixed.

Many blame him for freezing education funding to reserve schools at two per cent a year in the 1990s when he was finance minister.

That cap remains in place and hasn’t kept pace with the growth of the Aboriginal population. Yet Martin devoted his two-year stint as prime minister to negotiating the Kelowna Accord, a $5-billion funding agreement for health and education that he says was meant to “telescope 150 years of this kind of discrimination and try and eliminate it right away.” Stephen Harper’s Conservatives later scrapped the accord.

Education reform has likewise proven to be the poison arrow for Aboriginal leaders.

Before he was felled by his personal demons, former Conservative senator Patrick Brazeau angered many Aboriginal leaders by coming out against the Kelowna Accord, at one point calling it “an exercise in throwing more money at problems.” Shawn Atleo, who came to power as Assembly of First Nations (AFN) national chief on a promise to “smash the status quo,” was soon labelled an Ottawa insider for his willingness to negotiate with the Harper government, particularly when it came to education funding. He was ultimately brought down by his decision to support Harper’s proposed First Nations Control of First Nations Education Act, the Conservatives’ $1.9-billion scaled-down answer to the Kelowna Accord.

The legislation represented Harper’s most ambitious plan to reform Aboriginalgovernment relations, but it came with enough strings attached to deeply split the Native leadership between those who wanted to use it as a springboard for negotiations with Ottawa and those who felt the

bill would erode Aboriginal rights and treaty agreements. In a heated day-long meeting in May, AFN members, representing 633 communities across the country, voted to reject the proposal and demand the government spend the $1.9 billion immediately. Atleo resigned. Ottawa, expressing “disappointment,” walked away.

on in the fact that Aboriginal youth living in remote areas are often forced to leave their communities to attend the nearest high school. With few jobs back home, many never return. It has become a Catch-22.

Communities need jobs to give their young people a reason to get educated, but they need education to create the economic development that leads to jobs. “You can Division among a group as large and get an education that allows you to walk in diverse as the AFN is normal, argues Black- two worlds, the big city and your home comstock of the First Nations Child and Family munity,” says Arndt. “But the problem is, Caring Society. “To me, that’s a healthy symp- you can only survive in one.” tom of democracy.” But Mike McKenzie has a foot in both of those worlds. His Mike McKenzie, who ‘SOME OF THE attended the meeting as a father is a residential-schools CHIEFS, THEY REALLY survivor, 30 years sober. Yet delegate from Skeetchestn and was one of 60 people as a dropout himself, now DON’T WANT TO to abstain from voting, sees credits away from finSEE THE YOUTH GET three the Harper government’s ishing his high school dipUP AND SPEAK’ proposal as a flawed but loma, McKenzie worries important first step in talks about the future of the chilwith Ottawa. He worries some elders are sac- dren he sees now going to school in Skeetchestn, rificing a generation of Aboriginal children where—due to funding constraints—Grades whose schools won’t receive any new money 8 to 12 are all in the same class and studying in order to preserve the status quo. “Some on a “home school” curriculum. of the chiefs, they really don’t want to see “I can agree there’s lots of government the youth get up and speak,” he says. “It’s paternalism out there. I can agree there has like some of the people don’t want to see been hundreds of years of discrimination. change and so the dysfunction lives on.”

What I can’t agree with is justifying our behavWhile it may be gone, the residential- iour because of that,” he says. “We can’t keep school system continues to fuel the deep going like this for another three years until distrust toward education in many First we find another agreement. It’s putting us Nations communities given its history as a behind.” tool of cultural assimilation, says Laura While he’s frustrated at lack of progress Arndt, strategic director for the Ontario from both government and Aboriginal leadOffice of the Provincial Advocate for Chil- ers, McKenzie isn’t waiting around for somedren and Youth. “In my house, it is not a one else to fix the problem. He is weighing proud thing to be a university graduate. It his options to either head to university or means you’re less Indian because you’re join the RCMP. He’s involved in a handful of educated. Why would children want to get community organizations, including couna good education when they feel they lose selling young people in remote and isolated communities. The work has brought him to themselves in the process?”

Yet as the first generation to grow up with- Ottawa to meet with government officials out experiencing the residential-school sys- and ministers. In his spare time, he earned tem, many First Nations youth don’t always his certificate in basic B.C. firefighter trainunderstand what’s driving that distrust ing and served as chief of his local volunteer toward education within their own families. fire department.

“When you go into some of these communWhat Aboriginal youth need most, he says, ities, there’s an air of something but no one is to hear they’re not alone, that however knows where it’s coming from,” says Uko intransigent the present-day problems may Abara, 25, who helped launch Feathers of seem, the future is far from hopeless. “If you Hope, a forum for First Nations youth in can give young people the initiative and the Northern Ontario. “A lot of people who went opportunity to see it, it’s possible to pull yourthrough it still don’t acknowledge that resi- self out of it,” he says. “You don’t have to be dential schools happened. So a lot of the condemned from day one just because you young people growing up don’t recognize were born on a reserve.” that their parents or grandparents went Still, for so many Native children, that through this traumatic experience.” remains the harsh reality of life in Canada.

The legacy of residential schools also lives With Charlie Gillis

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National

NEW BRUNSWICK

COULD THE MOUNTIES BE OUTGUNNED? Insiders say the RCMP has been too slow in protecting its officers Unanswered questions: How did a single shooter manage to ambush so many trained officers?

The loss of its officers was traumatic enough, but a month after three Mounties were killed and two wounded during a shooting rampage in Moncton, N.B., the RCMP is moving on to a new and distressing phase of the aftermath. How, it must determine, did a single shooter manage to ambush so many trained officers? Were the members properly armed and equipped?

How did local commanders handle the crisis?

Finally, and perhaps most important: Can the RCMP answer those questions on its own?

Self-examination is never easy—especially for the Mounties. This week, the association that would like to become a labour union for rank-and-file officers called on the New Brunswick government to hold a public inquiry into the tragedy, brushing aside the announcement by commissioner Bob Paulson of a prompt and thorough internal review. “Our members and the public as a whole deserve to see and understand the full picture,” Rae Banwarie, president of the Mounted Police Professional Association of Canada, said in a statement. “Members’ safety, and ultimately the public safety, is at stake.”

Banwarie was responding in part to an email Paulson sent on June 25 to the forces’ 22,000 members announcing that Phonse MacNeil, a retired assistant commissioner from Nova Scotia, would commence his internal review immediately. It was an unusual step meant to reassure officers and the public: Typically, police wait for criminal proceedings to play out before performing in-house investigations. But the desire to handle things internally has raised concerns among some officers that any problems with RCMP policies and practices—staffing levels, training, decision-making—won’t get a full airing.

Their suspicion is born of experience. Officers waited nearly six years after the 2005 shooting of four officers in Mayerthorpe, Alta., before getting meaningful answers as 20

to what happened, and they came from a provincial fatality inquiry. The delay in that case, and the sense that senior commanders had not been held accountable for their decisions, fuelled outrage within the rank and file, playing no small part in a unionization initiative that culminated this winter in a Supreme Court challenge of laws preventing Mounties from forming an independent labour organization (a decision in the case is pending). An external inquiry is doubly necessary, the association argues, because federal regulation bans officers from publicly criticizing the RCMP’s “administration, operation, objectives or policies.” “Members want to be called into a court of inquiry, where they’re sworn,” says Rob Creasser, a retired Mountie from Kamloops, B.C., who now speaks for the group. “If they come out and are critical of the RCMP, they could be subject to discipline for simply telling it like it is.

And that, pardon my French, is bulls--t.”

New Brunswick hasn’t decided whether it will hold an inquiry: The province’s public safety department was preoccupied this week with the aftermath of a massive storm and didn’t have time to consider the matter, said a spokeswoman. But the deaths of constables Douglas Larche, Fabrice Gévaudan and Dave Ross have highlighted some pressing issues for the Mounties—not least related to firepower. Since Mayerthorpe, RCMP command has twice been warned—once by the Alberta inquiry, once by Darryl Davies, a Carleton University academic it hired to look into the issue—that its patrol officers needed access to assault rifles in the face of better-armed criminals. Paulson, then an assistant commissioner overseeing use-of-force policies, was initially skeptical, setting aside Davies’s 2010 report on the grounds it wasn’t based on Canadian studies. Then, after the Mayerthorpe inquiry, the RCMP did an about-face, approving the

use of Colt C8 carbine assault rifles, which fire .223-calibre bullets at high velocity, and include 30-round magazines.

The rollout, however, has been slow. According to insiders who spoke to Maclean’s, that’s because the Mounties chose a cost-prohibitive version of the C8 worth $4,950 per weapon, and opted for a training standard similar to that of JTF 2, the elite military special forces unit. As a result, police sources say, it costs the force about $10,000 and five working days to equip and train three to five officers on the C8s. The Ontario Provincial Police, by contrast, equips its officers with a stripped-down version of the same rifle worth about $2,800, and trains them within two days. And since funding for the RCMP C8s must come from detachment budgets, local commanders in some cash-strapped units must find savings elsewhere to bring them in. “I’ve talked to a lot of RCMP officers who have never seen one of these things,” says Kent Taylor, a retired OPP officer who trained colleagues on the C8, and who now has a son in the RCMP. “On one hand, commissioner Paulson can say: ‘We’ve got the best weapons and training course in Canada,’ and that sounds good. But there’s really a great deal more to it.”

For now, the C8 seems a sore subject with Paulson. In his June 25 email, he warned members against “superficial, easy and incomplete” analysis suggesting access to the rifle would have saved lives in Moncton. Yet he acknowledged that the Codiac detachment, which responded to the shooting, had just four members trained on the C8 and just six of the guns themselves, none of which was available at the time. Would C8s in Mountie hands have shifted the balance of power away from the shooter? Phonse MacNeil will no doubt consider the question, but even if he does, you can expect a lot of rank-and-file officers to want a second opinion.

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BY CHARLIE GILLIS ·

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of Canadian jurisprudence—eliminates all reasonable doubt.

“Obviously, we recognize that the use of the word ‘f--k’ in its various word combinations and permutations isn’t as taboo as it used to be,” reads the judgment (minus the “--”). “For good or for bad, it is not uncomA B.C. lawyer drops the F-bomb, leading to a mon to hear the word in its various forms on disciplinary hearing and a landmark ruling television or in the movies. Despite the argument that it is still ‘profane,’ we all know it is

BY MICHAEL FRISCOLANTI • As soon as the words lawyer can be so provoked that blurting out used in everyday conversation harmlessly left his lips, Martin Drew Johnson regretted a “F--k you” is forgivable? and innocuously, although one probably would not use it with one’s mother or with what he said.

The answer? F--k no.

In its ruling, released earlier this year, a Law small children in the room. It is used in “F--k you.”

A veteran criminal defence lawyer in Society “hearing panel on facts and determina- humour, literature and music. It is used when Kelowna, B.C., Johnson was at the local tion” concluded that it’s never acceptable, under one stubs one’s toe, falls down skiing, makes courthouse that Wednesday afternoon (March any circumstances, to hurl such vulgar language a mistake, or even as a form of self-depreca9, 2011) representing a man accused of inside a courthouse. Although the legal pro- tion. It is used by athletes in sports, and by assaulting his wife. During a break disappointed or excitable fans. It in the proceedings, Johnson asked has been used by presidents, prime the investigating RCMP officer if ministers, Nobel laureates and Academy Award winners. Its use he would escort his client back to the family home so he could is not going away, and nor should it. Consequently, we wish to make retrieve a few personal items.

Although it sounded like a reasonit clear that our decision is not able request, the Mountie stubmeant to deny the use of a word bornly refused. in the English language that people Before long, the two men—a may hear or use all the time, or 61-year-old lawyer fresh off hip otherwise interfere with one’s freereplacement surgery, and a six-foot dom of speech. Rather, we wish to police officer half his age—were make it clear to members of the nose to nose in the courthouse profession that insults or profanhallway. Johnson cracked first. “F--k ity, if uttered in anger (whether you,” he told the officer. using the F-word or not), directed “You don’t scare me, you bigto a witness, another lawyer, or shot lawyer,” the Mountie allegedly member of the public in the cirreplied. He then pointed to Johncumstances and the place in which son’s chest, now close enough to it was used by the respondent, are be touching his. “That’s assaulting not acceptable and can constitute a police officer.” Moments later, professional misconduct.” the lawyer was in handcuffs, being Permitting such conduct, the paraded down the hallway like so panel continued, “might well lower the reputation of the legal profesmany felons he defends.

In the end, Johnson was not sion in the eyes the public and, charged with assault (or any other arguably, bring the administration crime) but he was accused of proof justice into disrepute.” fessional misconduct and hauled Guilty as charged, Johnson in front of the Law Society of Britappeared before a second disciish Columbia. What followed was plinary hearing on June 16, where a disciplinary hearing like few lawyers for both sides argued the others—and an eloquent, almost F--k no: The F-word is not welcome in court, says B.C.’s Law Society appropriate sanction. (Johnson is nostalgic legal opinion—on the no stranger to the process, having prevalence of the F-word in modern society, fession “can sometimes be hostile, aggressive been found guilty of professional misconduct and when it’s appropriate to use it. and fierce,” the panel wrote, Johnson “had an in 2001 and suspended for one month.) A At the heart of Johnson’s case is a question obligation to ignore any ‘provocation’ by the spokesman for the Law Society said the panel most fellow lawyers can certainly sympathize witness, ‘rise above the fray,’ and act with civil- reserved its decision, and by press time, a rulwith: Is it ever excusable for counsel to curse ity and integrity in a dignified and responsible ing had not been released. on the job? In other words, does hurling a way that lawyers are expected to act.”

Maclean’s contacted Johnson’s lawyer, profanity always constitute professional misJust in case the decision isn’t clear enough, Gregory DelBigio, but he declined an interconduct, or are there rare moments when a paragraph eight of the written reasons—a gem view request—in the politest possible way.

JUSTICE

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY LEVI NICHOLSON

Do you swear, and tell the truth?

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major junior level in Rimouski, Que. The hand-picked hopefuls go to school in the morning, practise tennis for four or five hours in the afternoon, and return to their billet families in the evening. Both Raonic and Bouchard attended the Montreal centre for a few years. Tennis Canada has also set up regional With its coaching and financial support of a select training centres in Toronto and Vancouver. few players, Tennis Canada plays the long game Coaches who’ve discovered young talent aren’t always happy to see their proteges

BY JOHN GEDDES · With its champagne and strategically. Instead of just spreading the plucked into the system. “There’s been some strawberries, and the TV cameras scanning new wealth around—always a powerful friction between the clubs and the national between rallies for reactions in the royal temptation for Canadian sports organiza- centres, but it’s healthy conflict,” McDadi box, Wimbledon serves up reminders of tions striving to satisfy provincial and local says. “Competition is competition.” the tight relationship between big money interests—Tennis Canada opted “to deploy Tennis Canada’s investment doesn’t end and big-time sports arguably more overtly our resources in a laser-sharp, focused way,” when players graduate to international tours. than any other major athletic event. So the according to Kelly Murumets, the organ- After a few years in Montreal, Raonic went high-impact presence of Canadian players at ization’s president. That meant establish- to work with coaches in Spain; Bouchard had the championships of the All England Club ing a national training centre in Montreal been coached as a girl by Florida tennis guru Nick Saviano, and returned to Saviano last week raised questions beyond the skills of Eugenie Bouchard, who after her mid-teens stint under Borlost in the women’s final, and Milos figa in Montreal, her hometown. Both Raonic, who bowed out in the men’s players came from well-off families semifinal. Those questions trace able to spend heavily to hone their back to how Canadian tennis has talents. But Tennis Canada continues found a way to compete financially to support them financially, too.

McDadi says it can cost “hundreds in a game of dauntingly expensive training, costly touring and wellof thousands” a year for a player to paid entourages. stay competitive while making the transition to the game’s most rarThe emergence of Bouchard and Raonic, and the wider rise of Canefied level. Tennis Canada expects adian tennis, begins with Tennis Cana good return on its undisclosed ada’s success about a decade ago in investment in terms of promotion and profile. “It’s a really symbiotic creating two top-flight tournament relationship. It’s a relationship of facilities: Toronto’s new Rexall Centre and Montreal’s renovated Unirespect and trust,” Murumets says. prix Stadium. “That was critical,” “These athletes are proud to be Cansays Hatem McDadi, senior viceadian and proud to work with Tenpresent of tennis development for nis Canada.” the non-profit organization. “The Following their Wimbledon breaknew stadiums provide more revthroughs, Raonic rose three spots enue, greater seating, more boxes, to No. 6 in the men’s rankings and more sponsorship.” In their new Bouchard jumped six to No. 7 among homes—paid for by a combination women. “Now I believe we can use of government and private funds— these international stars to start to the annual Rogers Cup tournaments create the wave for tennis participaquickly grew into reliable cash-spintion in Canada,” Murumets says. In ners. Last year, 81 per cent of Tennis Stoking the next wave: Eugenie Bouchard spent years at the fact, that seems a natural aim for Canada’s revenue came from these national centre in Montreal her, since she was hired to lead Tenelite pro-tour events, whose men’s nis Canada only early this year after and women’s versions alternate each year and recruiting coach Louis Borfiga, who heading Participaction, the non-profit group between Toronto and Montreal. The result, formerly cultivated some of the world’s top that promotes active living for everybody.

Her predecessor as Tennis Canada’s top McDadi says, is that Tennis Canada’s spend- players in France. ing on nurturing talent soared from less than At the Montreal centre, only 10 to 12 boys executive, Michael Downey, had been lured $4 million a decade ago to close to $12 mil- and girls, typically in their mid-teens, are away to run the prestigious British Lawn admitted from across the country at any given Tennis Association—an indication that Canlion last year.

But bringing in much more money, though time. Tennis Canada has adopted the hockey adian tennis’s ambitious strategists were essential, wasn’t sufficient. Since tennis in model of having the players billeted with attracting attention from international insidthe U.S. and Europe draws on much deeper families in Montreal—just as Sidney Crosby ers even before their players became imposreserves, Tennis Canada needed to spend did, McDadi notes, when he played at the sible to ignore.

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SUZANNE PLUNKETT/REUTERS

Best return on investment

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New power brokers: Health care professionals protest cuts to refugee funding, finding fellow cause with pundits

COLBY COSH

RICHARD LAUTENS/TORONTO STAR/GETTY IMAGES

CRUEL? MAYBE NOT. UNUSUAL? DEFINITELY. Pundits like me spend a lot of time feeling powerless.

When a cabinetmaker or a farmer concludes his workday, he has got something of value he can literally point to. What does a columnist have? To use our own commonplace terminology: fish wrap— a printed object whose value deteriorates with each passing hour.

But the Federal Court of Canada has given us a miracle, an unexpected proof of our power. Hon. Justice Anne Mactavish, you may have heard, issued a ruling July 4 that reversed Conservative cuts made in 2012 to the Interim Federal Health Program (IFHP) for refugees and refugee claimants. She found, making pioneering use of Section 12 of the Charter of Rights, that the cuts resulted in “cruel and unusual treatment” for claimants who lost insurance privileges they would once have enjoyed.

As Justice Mactavish concedes, deprecating the removal of a welfare entitlement as “cruel and unusual treatment” is a fairly radical legal novelty. And a separate issue is the way in which “cruel and unusual” is defined.

This phrase is of great antiquity in the AngloSaxon tradition and is no longer held to mean only what its component words betoken.

There is a multi-part test for establishing

“cruel and unusual” behaviour. Among the questions are: Is the treatment “unacceptable to a large segment of the population”? Does it “shock the general conscience”?

Well, a judge can’t go out and hire Ipsos Reid to whip up a poll. So Mactavish looked at—newspapers and magazines! Humble organs of opinion! She noted that there were three groups of people who were clearly horrified by the IFHP cuts: doctors, who gave dissatisfied statements to the press; provincial politicians, whose luminous anger was conveyed through that same press; and editorialists and columnists, whose collective indignation, plopped on a page in haste, was compiled into a “compendium” for her perusal.

When is the last time anyone asked a cabinetmaker or a farmer to speak for the “general conscience”? It seems journalists can make law—can even, acting through an appellate judge, supersede law as made by so-called legislators.

This is pleasing to the ego, yet I am not as confident as Justice Mactavish that the Conservative cuts to the old refugee health arrangements are shocking to Canadians. One obvious problem with using pundits as an index of conscience is that people who are angry about something will write about it, and people who aren’t, won’t.

The old IFHP provided not only the health care ordinarily given free to citizens by the provinces, but also extra entitlements working Canadians typically devote part of their paycheques to, including drug coverage, vision care, dentistry and contraception.

Refugee claimants typically became eligible for IFHP immediately upon setting foot in the country—and remained eligible until they were removed from Canada, even if their refugee claims failed.

In her decision, Justice Mactavish works

hard to convince us that this situation was not unfair to Canadian citizens. She shrugs off the idea that Canadians’ obligations to low-income fellow citizens might be different from their duties to foreign visitors whose formal claims to refugee assistance have failed. But the Conservatives certainly seem to have thought there was some ethical anomaly worth exploiting. In 2012, they took “non-essential” items like annual checkups away from successful refugees, and stripped nearly everything short of treatment for dangerous infectious diseases from the unsuccessful ones.

The Conservatives admitted that one purpose of this establishment of care tiers was to dissuade refugee claims. One of the individual applicants in the lawsuit is a diabetic Afghan gentleman whose refugee claim was rejected. Canada is too merciful to forcibly return him to a dangerous homeland, and in the meantime he does not earn enough to afford insulin. The other individual is another failed claimant from Colombia: he is in Canada lawfully because his wife’s claim succeeded, but his own failed claim, thanks to a donkeylike application of principles, rendered him ineligible for an urgent eye surgery.

These are hard cases that could have been rectified by means of modest tweaks. Justice Mactavish instead threw out the whole 2012 IFHP revision, citing a further panoply of illdocumented or downright hypothetical cases in which the effects of the revised IFHP might also be “cruel and unusual.”

This procedure has met with near-universal approval from journalists. We, after all, sort of helped write the ruling. But what if the Conservatives run against it in 2015, challenging the media’s reading of the nation’s “general conscience”. . . and they win? Should we really be so sure we speak for you?

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IRAQ

‘At any moment they could kill us’ ISIS’s deadly advance has left its opponents terrified and demoralized. Iraq may already be lost. By Adnan R. Khan Last week, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) moved within striking distance of Kirkuk, the oil-rich province bordering Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region. It pushed into villages populated by the country’s Shia Turkmen minority, stopping just short of the capital and within mortar range of Taza Khurma 20 km to the south, overwhelming a force of volunteer fighters. The fighting was short but intense.

According to survivors, it was a massacre.

ISIS fighters, inured to a brutal and unforgiving brand of Islam that considers the Shia heretics, slaughtered the villagers. It’s still unclear how many lost their lives; dozens of men, women and children are still missing and bodies can still be seen scattered around the farm fields in Basheer, the town nearest to Taza Khurma, five kilometres farther south.

Sadly, the massacre could have been prevented. Locals were expecting an ISIS advance into their villages. Volunteers from the Shia Turkmen population had taken up positions around the wheat fields, supported by the well-armed Kurdish militia, the peshmerga.

“But when ISIS finally came,” says Haji Adnan Asy Musa, a 48-year-old from Basheer who commands a group of about 500 volunteer fighters, “the peshmerga ran away.”

That left the hapless Shia Turkmen irregulars to fend for themselves. Haider Abdul Hussain, 34, a slim, wild-eyed farmer, says villagers, many of them former soldiers from Saddam Hussein’s army, attempted to stand their ground, but it was futile. “They are experienced fighters with powerful weapons,” he says of the ISIS militants, from an undisclosed location in Kirkuk City where he has sought shelter. “They are fearless in a way that we cannot be. They want to die.”

That mythos has left the local volunteer 24

force demoralized—a far cry from the early days of the ISIS advance when Shia men, young and old, took to the streets throughout Iraq, including Taza Khurma.

Iraq’s most powerful Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, had commanded his followers to take up arms, as had many other religious and community leaders. Thousands heeded their calls, flooding into makeshift training centres in Najaf and Karbala. It was as if ISIS had reawakened the Shia penchant for self-sacrifice, a trait passed down from Imam Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and the third imam in Shia Islam, who refused to pledge allegiance to the caliph of the Sunnis, Yazid I, in 680 CE. He was beheaded.

The bravado and eagerness Iraq’s Shia exhibited in the early days of the ISIS offensive was inspiring, though many feared their fervour augured a new era of sectarian bloodshed. Now that zeal has melted away—as have any hopes that ISIS’s terror campaign might be stopped and Iraq pieced back together again. The militants have taken root. And a dangerous mix of fear and uncertainty remains.

“Mystify, mislead and surprise the enemy,” Sun Tzu, the great Chinese military strategist wrote more than 2,000 years ago.

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” Those words ring eerily true under ISIS’s terrifying mystique.

It infects everyone, from everyday Iraqis trying to make sense of the threat that emerged like a storm out of the western deserts to those fighting it.

ISIS moved virtually unchallenged through most of Iraq’s Sunni-dominated areas in the north and west. On June 10, it swept into Mosul, a city of some two million guarded by what was supposed to be the Iraqi army’s

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most experienced soldiers. It fell without a fight. ISIS beefed up its arsenal and then steamrolled through other parts of the country. Town after town fell.

The ISIS propaganda machine capitalized on those easy victories, claiming divine sanction and support, advertising the weapons it acquired (including a missile reportedly captured in Syria), and displaying its brutality on social media, including beheadings and summary executions. Its tactics have succeeded with devastating precision. Fear and trepidation reign the closer you approach the front lines. And here in the north of the country, the front line is never far away.

In Taza Khurma’s main Shia mosque, small groups of volunteer Shia fighters lounge, escaping the intense summer heat and the threat of mortar rounds fired daily from ISIS positions in Basheer. Posters depicting Imam Ali, Hussein’s father, adorn the walls alongside pictures of Ayatollah al-Sistani. There is a hushed silence that dominates here, and even the fighters debating what to do next do so in whispers. “We need the government’s help,” says Ali Sadiq Jaffer, a 29-year-old farmer from Basheer. “They’ve sent soldiers to Mosul, Tikrit and Diyala, but nothing here.

We are completely alone.”

Jaffer’s commander, a stalky and greying man well past his fighting prime, says that the bodies of their dead family members are rotting where ISIS militants gunned them down during the massacre. On June 30, the volunteer fighters attempted to go collect them but were driven back by mortar rounds, rocketpropelled grenades and sniper fire. “We lost 50 men that day,” he says. “Some were killed, others were captured and we presume they are dead. We’ve seen pictures of some of their bodies posted on the Internet.”

The defeat has taken whatever shred of courage that was left among the volunteers and devoured it. The group of men in the mosque, some barely out of their teens, cycle through feelings of anger and despair: anger at the Kurds and the central government for abandoning them and despair over the prospects for the future. “The Kurds only care about protecting themselves and their territory,” says Musa, a commander of Shia Turkmen. “They can taste independence and that is all they are concerned with. They have the forces to go and clear ISIS out of Basheer but they refuse to do it.”

Making the situation worse, he adds, the Kurdish leadership in Erbil, the regional capHome away from home: A Turkman fighter holds his front-line position in Taza Khurma

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been confusion in its ranks. Barbed wire and blast walls greet visitors at its Kirkuk compound. “Kimse yok!” barks an armed guard in Turkish. “No one is here! The entire leadership has gone to Baghdad for consultation.”

A representative from the Kirkuk chapter of the Iraqi Union of Journalists says the leadership has gone to meet Hadi al-Amiri, Iraq’s minister of transportation and the current head of the Badr Organization.

“They’re looking for help,” he says, requesting anonymity because he has not been cleared to talk to the media. “The defeat on June 30 was a big blow to them and they need to figure out how to proceed now.”

Amiri’s office could not be reached for comment, but if indeed the Badr Organization’s leaders are in the Iraqi capital, then something more substantial than a ragtag gang of volunteers may be in the works. Additional militiamen are unlikely considering the Kurdish stance on outside fighters entering Kirkuk. Better weapons is the probable request from the Badr leaders, though it is doubtful the Kurds would allow even that.

over assault rifles and pistols as well as nightvision goggles and body armour.

“We’re preparing ourselves for the worst,” says one potential buyer, a Chaldean Christian who says his family is terrified of ISIS taking Kirkuk and slaughtering its Christian minority. “All of my neighbours are doing the same.” The likelihood of that happening is extremely low considering how thoroughly Peshmerga forces have the city locked down, but people are not taking any chances. ISIS is generating a level of fear that borders on hysteria.

For its part, ISIS is basking in the glory of its victories. On June 30, it announced it had set up a new Islamic caliphate encompassing areas it controls in Syria and Iraq, and named its leader, Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Baghdadi abandoned his relative anonymity and took to the podium for a sermon during Friday prayers at the grand mosque in Mosul on July 4. Whether it was Baghdadi himself remains unclear, but video footage appears to show a humble if somewhat emotionless man reaching out to his followers. “It is a burden to accept this responsibility to be in charge of you,” he says, wearing all black, including the black turban usually reserved for those who claim direct lineage from the Prophet Muhammad. “I am not better than you or more virtuous than you. If you see me on the right path, help me. If you see me on the wrong path, advise me and halt me. And obey me as far as I obey God.” Locals in Mosul say the speech was a carefully constructed spectacle, with Mosul’s residents ordered to attend and prevented from leaving. Nonetheless, it sends a clear message and reinforces the sense that ISIS is in control and unstoppable.

The reality, however, is much different. The wave of militants that flooded into Iraq in early June was cloaked in a veil of rumour and hearsay. It projected an image far more grandiose than the force behind it. Since then, ISIS has been strengthened by the hardware it has amassed from the retreating Iraqi army. The militants have consolidated their positions while Iraq’s leaders have stood, dumbfounded, laying land mines and occupying key strategic positions. Retaking lost ground will be difficult. The battle for Tikrit and other parts of the Sunni heartland rages on and the standoff in Taza Khurma perpetuates the illusion that the militants are unbeatable.

Sun Tzu would be proud.

‘They are fearless in a way that we cannot be.

They want to die,’ says a farmer taking shelter from ISIS fighters.

Kirkuk is already a city bristling with weapons. When the Iraqi army retreated in the face of the ISIS advance, it abandoned the Kaiwan military base 20 km north of the city. Before the Kurdish forces could take control there, it was looted. Many of those weapons have turned up in ad hoc streetside gun markets where groups of men haggle

Safety in numbers: Shia Turkmen fighters advance during a patrol at Taza Khurma

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REUTERS; PREVIOUS SPREAD: KARIM SAHIB/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

ital, refuses to allow Iraqi army forces to enter Kirkuk, despite the fact that the province remains technically outside the Kurdistan autonomous region. But in the chaos of the ISIS advance, the Kurds quickly moved in and annexed Kirkuk, a region they have coveted for decades. Under their control, it is the Kurdish forces—the peshmerga—who rule, and they refuse to engage ISIS or let the Iraqi army come in and do it.

Consequently, Taza Khurma has turned into a ghost town. Families have fled to the relative safety of Kirkuk City. The few who have stayed behind are young men left to protect empty homes and shuttered markets, along with the local police force, whose plainclothes officers bundle off any suspicious person they come across for interrogation at one of the heavily fortified police stations.

“We feel like we’re living in a jail,” says Mustafa Yawer, a 30-year-old engineer who has remained in Taza Khurma. “We’re afraid that at any moment ISIS fighters could come and kill us. We’re surrounded by them.”

Nothing speaks more clearly of this siege mentality than the offices of the Badr Organization in Kirkuk City. The Badrists have a long history of supporting the Shia of Iraq, dating back to the Iran-Iraq war, when its brigades were set up and trained in Iran. Since the fall of the Saddam regime, the Badr militia has acquired a reputation for brutality exacted on Iraq’s Sunnis, particularly during the civil war in the mid-2000s.

But now, the Badrists in Kirkuk are also feeling the heat. Their forces were in Taza Khurma to support the local Turkmen volunteers when ISIS attacked. They could do little to beat the militants back, however, and the result has

WorldMags.net

It was a simple pitchfork.

Rough maple handle. Four cast iron tines.

But it spent summers in the hands of a left-winger lifting 100 lb. bales of hay.

Who, in turn, would go on to lift fans everywhere to their feet.

Thank you to the old pitchfork on that farm in Belleville for putting the muscle behind one of the most lethal slap shots in the history of the game.

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® NHL and the NHL Shield are registered trademarks. NHL and NHL team marks are the property of the NHL and its teams. © NHL 2014. All Rights Reserved. TMSportsnet, SN & Design, Rogers & Mobius Design are trademarks of or used under license from Rogers Sportsnet Inc. or Rogers Communications Inc. All other brand names and logos are trademarks of their respective owners. ©2014 Rogers Communications.

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International

EUROPE

CONTINENTAL DIVIDES Ukraine is not the only place that Mother Russia has its eye on.

In Europe’s ‘de facto states,’ separatists are rising.

Last month, Leonid Tibilov—the unrecognized president of the nonexistent country of South Ossetia—granted an interview to a Russian news agency. In the interview, Tibilov described himself as “inspired” by Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and expressed hope that South Ossetia, a disputed region in northern Georgia, might itself “become part of Russia”—and soon.

Shortly thereafter, the unrecognized president of the non-existent state of Transnistria, Yevgeny Shevchuk, echoed this call. Sitting in his office (which reportedly features a photograph of Russian President Vladimir Putin), Shevchuk told Euronews that Transnistria, a sliver of land in Moldova, was gunning for independence, with the ultimate goal of Russian absorption.

Meanwhile, Ukraine is in a pitched battle with its own pro-Russia breakaway rebels.

President Petro Poroshenko ended a ceasefire with separatists in east Ukraine, vowing to “attack and liberate our land.” In recent weeks, fighting has intensified between government forces and the rebels, who are supported to varying degrees by Moscow.

Ukraine, it seems, is not the only place where Russia is playing fast and dirty with national borders. Today, the region that was once the Soviet Union is home to a small cohort of breakaway states: bits of disputed land that, with varying support from Mother Russia, have rejected their national governments and sworn independence. Recent weeks show signs of escalation in Europe’s so-called “de facto states”: South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Transnistria and Nagorno-Karabakh (in Azerbaijan). There are rising fears that separatist forces, buoyed by the example of Ukraine, will up their ante. Or that Russia’s revanchist eye will turn toward Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan— and that this, in turn, will tear post-Cold War Europe asunder.

BY KATIE ENGELHART ·

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In response, the U.S. and Europe have launched a diplomatic full-court press in the South Caucasus. On June 27, Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine signed economic and (in the case of the former two) political deals with the European Union. But observers are ill at ease. Speaking of Crimea, Romania’s foreign minister recently warned of “a possible contagion.”

BACK When Soviet leaders drew borders within their eastern union, they often sliced through ethnic groupings and created minority pockets within unfriendly lands. So much the better for fuelling regional tension, which would, in turn, dampen resistance to Moscow.

In the ’80s, the Soviet Union began to crumble, unleashing a swell of ethno-nationalism and a slew of ugly territorial disputes.

In the ’90s, fighting erupted in South Ossetia and Abkhazia (Georgian territories that border Russia) and in Transnistria (wedged between Ukraine and the rest of Moldova).

There were wars and thousands of deaths and, eventually, Russia-backed ceasefires. In

2006, Transnistria, which boasts the only Soviet hammer-and-sickle flag in Europe, held a referendum in which 97 per cent reportedly voted in favour of independence. Two years later, Russia and Georgia fought a fullon war in South Ossetia, which claimed hundreds of lives and displaced almost 200,000, according to Amnesty International. (The war ended when Moscow pulled back most of its troops and declared South Ossetia and Abkhazia independent.) Russian soldiers remain in all three states, as do Russian rubles.

Russia subsidizes pensions, funds infrastructure projects and sells gas at a discounted rate.

Nagorno-Karabakh (N.-K.)—a disputed Armenian enclave within Azerbaijan—also hosted a war in the ’90s, which similarly ended with a Russian-brokered ceasefire in 1994. But NK is not itself a candidate for Russian absorption: it is an Armenian-majority region, not Russian. Moscow has used NK as leverage over oil-rich Azerbaijan and Armenia. It plays both sides of the dispute: officially backing Armenia while simultaneously selling weapons to Azerbaijan.

WorldMags.net JULY 21, 2014

WorldMags.net Battle lines: Putin has declared that Russia

will never leave the Trans-Caucasus region

warns of “strident rhetoric” along the border, with phrases like “blitzkrieg” and “total war” gaining widespread currency with military planners on both sides. A conflict in N.-K. could conceivably draw in other big players, like Turkey (which backs Azerbaijan) and Israel (which has sold Azerbaijan a fleet of drones).

While the world’s gaze is narrowed on Ukraine, dangers have lurked in these de facto zones for some time. All stand out as easy transit stops for traders of arms, drugs and sometimes human beings. In 2011, the U.S. government reported that between 2005 and 2010, authorities had intercepted 10 black market shipments of highly enriched uranium in the border region around Transnistria.

In the years since the 2008 Russo-Georgian war—which Russia won, but not as handily as some expected—Russian defence spending has nearly doubled in nominal terms, according to security analyst IHS Jane’s. That is being felt in the de facto states. “As for the TransCaucasus region, Russia will never leave this region,” declared Vladimir Putin after touring a Russian military base in Armenia in December. “On the contrary, we will make our place here even stronger.”

But what do the de factos want? In 2010-11, U.S.-based researchers Gerard Toal and John O’Loughlin conducted the first mass opinion polling in South Ossetia, Abkhazia and Transnistria. Their conclusion was that “the prospect of annexation by the Russian Federation would likely be welcomed by a plurality of residents of Transnistria, and the overwhelming majority of those remaining in South Ossetia.” In Abkhazia, the preference is for independence. In all three regions, the overwhelming majority believes that the Soviet Union’s collapse was a “wrong step.”

Three years after the poll was conducted, Toal, director of government and international relations at Virginia Tech University, says, “Crimea absolutely is contagious.” How will it kick off ? Toal’s bet is on a quick-shot referendum in Transnistria.

With respect to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, John Herbst, former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, says he can “absolutely” imagine a situation in which Russia forcibly steps in; “I wouldn’t rule out some provocation.” But Herbst also thinks that Crimea could leave the West “more favourably disposed toward

helping the Georgians and Moldovans in dealing with their Russian problem.”

The same sentiment could enliven Western efforts in N.-K. The Ukraine crisis has exposed Europe’s overwhelming energy reliance on Russia and accelerated the hunt for alternatives. In December, a group led by BP signed a $45-billion natural gas contract with Azerbaijani leaders, and the U.K. consolidated its position as the largest foreign investor in the country.

Full-scale military invasion and annexation would also be costly for Moscow. For that reason, many experts believe that Russia’s interest is in maintaining a fragile status quo: allowing the soft force of Soviet nostalgia and the sharp threat of Red Army action to feed the quixotic aspirations of the de facto states. This, in turn, would help Russia to keep Moldova, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan in line—and might discourage bodies like the EU and NATO from accepting them as members. Thomas de Waal, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment, says Russians don’t want to go war. “But I don’t see any evidence that they want peace either.”

The Eastern Partnership was meant to prevent all this. The EU launched it in 2009 when, after a round of expansion, the union found itself bordering the former Soviet Union. Through trade agreements, the project was meant to build ties between Europe and the six ex-Soviet states of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine. Between 2009 and 2013, Brussels spent more than $2.8 billion to develop it. Recently, the EU and the U.S. have backed this up with a diplomatic push in the Caucasus. In December, Brussels put Georgia and Moldova on an EU association fast track.

In February, EU foreign ministers discussed plans for a Caucasus charm offensive, which would involve “informal contacts” at venues like the world championship in ice hockey.

But Moscow has other plans for its neighbours. On May 29, Russia, Kazakhstan and Belarus signed the rival Eurasian Economic Union. (Armenia and Kyrgyzstan are set to join soon.) A few days later, President Barack Obama travelled to Warsaw and announced a $1-billion project called the European Reassurance Initiative to boost military reinforcements in Europe. Meanwhile, experts in Europe’s socalled frozen conflicts are starting to object to that very turn of phrase; conflict in any one of the de facto states is bound to heat up.

DMITRY LOVETSKY/AP

Phrases like ‘blitzkrieg’ and ‘total war’ are gaining widespread currency with military planners

Post-Crimea, Europe’s frozen conflict zones (as they are often called) have seen a ratchetingup of rhetoric and theatrics. In May, Moldovan authorities caught Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitri Rogozin trying to leave Moldova with a petition calling for Transnistrian independence, which he had secretly collected from the separatist region. The authorities reportedly seized the papers, but Rogozin later boasted that he had managed to sneak most of them back to Moscow.

This spring, Georgia accused Russia of initiating near-daily brawls along the RussiaGeorgia border, and referred to Russian troops as “Somali pirates.” In May, Abkhazia’s president fled the capital and hastily resigned after pro-Moscow opposition forces dramatically seized control of his office. The Kremlin reportedly dispatched mediators.

Around the same time, in April, Azerbaijan began large-scale military exercises near its border with Armenia. Ceasefire violations in Nagorno-Karabakh continue. The International Crisis Group speaks of an accelerating “arms race” between Armenia and Azerbaijan—and

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International

MEXICO

SKELETONS OUT OF THE CLOSET Worshipping ‘Saint Death’ is on the rise, and riling the Catholic church Sitting in a church pew, surrounded by skeleton statues, Enrique Vargas counsels a woman seeking spiritual support from an unlikely source: la Santa Muerte, or Saint Death. “Be strong. Believe in yourself,” she tells the single woman, who was belittled by her boyfriend and had her child taken away by an ex-husband. “She lacks self-esteem,” Vargas says after the session.

“Other religions instill this in you.”

Vargas is no ordinary pastor. And Santa Muerte, who resembles the grim reaper, is no ordinary saint. Yet Vargas—known at the Santa Muerte international congregation as “Madrina,” or “Godmother”—leads worshippers on the outskirts of Mexico City in what may be Latin America’s fastest-growing new religion. The Catholic Church has condemned Santa Muerte as satanic and compared worshipping her to witchcraft. But it’s a movement quickly going mainstream and being embraced by everyone from cartel criminals and kidnappers to cops and common people.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re good or bad. Santa Muerte accepts people as they are,” says Vargas. Her son, Jonathan Legaria—better known as “Padrino (Godfather) Endoque”—founded the congregation in 2008, six months before unknown assailants pumped 150 bullets into his SUV, killing him.

Santa Muerte has an estimated 10 million followers in Latin America, with most of the conversions (from Catholicism) coming in the past 15 years, according to Andrew Chesnut, author of Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint. The popularity poses problems for prelates and Pope Francis, as they try to turn the tide on the faithful fleeing the church and to confront their diminishing dominance in Latin America, an area almost completely Catholic a century ago. (Some 72 per cent of Latin Americans called themselves Catholic in 2010, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.) “So many Mexicans see 30

her as part of their folk-Catholic identity,” over to evangelize indigenous populations as says Chesnut, a religious studies professor at a personification of death. “Certain indigenVirginia Commonwealth University in Rich- ous groups made her a holy figure, which she mond, Va. “They don’t care if the Church has never was in the European context.” The condemned her.” devotion went underground for centuries, Santa Muerte is commonly associated with until anthropologists discovered women pracdrug cartels and crimes such as kidnapping. tising love magic with Santa Muerte, pleadThe Mexican government has torn down ing for help with their wayward spouses. Still, dozens of shrines—presumably, built by drug it remained secretive until a quesadilla vendor, traffickers—dotting roads running to the U.S. Enriqueta Romero, placed a Santa Muerte border, and the smash TV series Breaking statue outside her home in Mexico City’s Bad showed hitmen praying at a Santa Muerte tough Tepito neighbourhood—best known shrine. Vargas insists there are no criminals for bootlegged and counterfeit merchandise— in 2001. On the first day of in her congregation; members describe their day jobs every month, thousands of SOME DEVOTEES as mundane: maid, nurse, devotees descend on the OFFER BARGAIN-BRAND shrine. “She literally took auto painter, criminologist— to name a few.

BOTTLES OF TEQUILA. the skeleton out of the Devotees dress their Santa closet,” Chesnut says.

‘IT’S WHAT THE Muerte statues in colours The folk saint’s ascent SAINT LIKES BEST.’ coinciding with what they’re hasn’t gone unnoticed by seeking: red for love, gold the Catholic Church. for financial matters and black for harming “Everyone is needed to put the brakes on an enemy (something Vargas prefers not to this phenomenon, including families, practise). They light votive candles and leave churches and society,” Cardinal Gianfranco gifts, such as marshmallows, money and apples Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council to ward off bad vibes, at shrines. Cigarettes for Culture, told the Catholic wire service are lit and placed in the statues’ mouths, while ACI Prensa last year. He also called Santa some bring bottles of bargain-brand tequila. Muerte “the celebration of devastation and of hell.” In Mexico City, the Church encour“It’s what the saint likes best,” says Vargas.

Santa Muerte supposedly dates to pre-His- aged the expanding interest in St. Jude Thadpanic times, but Chesnut argues its origin can deus, patron saint of lost causes, who draws be traced to the Spanish, who brought her devotion from the downtrodden. Vargas

WorldMags.net JULY 21, 2014

YURI CORTEZ/AFP/GETTY IMAGES

BY DAVID AGREN ·

WorldMags.net AFGHANISTAN

Not leaving our mark How one of Canada’s high-profile aid projects fell apart amid accusations of mismanagement and wasted millions A Canadian development firm that received more than $5 million from the Canadian International Development Agency to boost economic growth in rural Afghanistan spent most of that money on salaries and bureaucracy and accomplished little that was sustainable, according to newly released government documents.

The “Kandahar Rapid Village Development Project” was a $5.26-million plan to “create rapid but sustainable economic growth in four villages of Kandahar province” between 2007 and 2009. CIDA provided the funding for the project to Development Works, an Almonte, Ont.-based organization that had previously worked in Afghanistan, including with USAID, an American government aid agency.

The project was launched at a time when large numbers of Canadian soldiers were dying in southern Afghanistan, and the government was keen to show that Canada’s engagement in the country involved civilian aid as well as combat. CIDA spent hundreds of millions of dollars in Afghanistan. In this case it didn’t get the results it wanted.

In February 2013, when Maclean’s first inquired about the Kandahar Rapid Village Development Project, a CIDA spokesman said it created short-term jobs, established a new “water and sanitation infrastructure,” improved roads, “promoted the establishment of economic facilities, like communitybased bakeries and markets” and “increased agricultural productivity” by helping to build a plastic crate factory so farmers could more easily transport produce. CIDA later said the project was not renewed because it “did not represent the best value for money from a sustainable development perspective.”

But Access to Information documents, which CIDA took more than 15 months to deliver, reveal intense frustration with what CIDA judged to be poor results, inaccurate or unverifiable claims, shoddy accounting and extreme cost overruns. “The first project was so rapidly put together that it lacked many basics for results-oriented delivery; it ended up being a very expensive and highmaintenance cash-for-work project that was

BY MICHAEL PETROU ·

Folk saint: The faithful touch the figure of Santa

Muerte in Mexico City’s Tepito neighbourhood

seems unfazed by Catholic criticism. “We’re gaining ground because [Santa Muerte] doesn’t ask for more money,” she says, repeating the complaints from the working classes of having to pay for sacraments.

Tireless, charming and charismatic, Vargas, 55, was once a devout Catholic and describes herself as a pioneer in the karaokebar business. She turned to Santa Muerte after her son’s murder. “I made a pact with her,” Vargas recalls, saying she would lead the congregation in exchange for justice in her son’s case. “I have to apologize to my son for not accepting his faith” while he was alive. She celebrates services on Sundays and the first day of each month—either at a prison (devotion is strong among inmate populations) or at a site in the suburb of Tultitlán surrounded by shrines, busts of Padrino Endoque and a 22-m-tall Santa Muerte statue.

Devotees kneel, say the Lord’s Prayer and ask Vargas for blessings. They speak of the supposed miracles supplied by Santa Muerte, but also of the folk saint’s demands. “She’s very jealous. You can’t pray to another,” says Yahel Martínez, a mother of two teenagers, who left a note at Santa Muerte shrine asking that her cheating husband return. “If you promise something, you have to come through.”

successfully marketed to visiting senators and ministers,” wrote Adrian Walraven, program manager of CIDA’s Kandahar unit, in an April 2009 email to colleagues. In a September 2009 briefing note, CIDA Kandahar Unit members said Development Works spent only $1.2 million of its budget on project activities. The vast majority of the funds went toward “salaries, fees and project management costs.” The project, they said, came “significantly short” of its development goals.

An audit of the project’s first year found that Development Works had been “over- and double-charging CIDA on a number of occasions” and that it took more than a year to pay its employees “for reasons that are still nebulous.” It also said employee time sheets were approved two years after the hours were worked, and receipts were created two years after articles were bought. It concluded that more than $200,000 should be returned to CIDA. Drew Gilmour, director of Development Works, rejects most of the accusations, including that he spent only a small portion of his budget on project activities. “I can’t conceive of another program in Kandahar that was more cost-effective than ours,” he says. “The results on the ground that we got with the investment we received from CIDA were unbelievable compared to the other things on the ground. I and the team that worked there are hugely proud of the project. We did the best that we possibly could in the most difficult place on Earth, and I think we delivered.”

Gilmour says CIDA could not properly evaluate what he accomplished because of the reluctance of agency employees to leave their fortified compound and visit the projects it was funding. “Why is Development Works getting punished because [CIDA] couldn’t do their proper field reports? The fact that they would not get their asses out of the compound because they were frightened or they were not allowed is not my fault,” he says. “We begged them to send expatriates to inspect our stuff. But very few inspections came out. How can we fake whether a well is dug? How can we pretend

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project’s work on the ground as well as serve as an example of Canada’s work in Kandahar,” reads a July 2008 report on a proposed two-year, $8-million extension.

By the following September, the scope of a potential extension had been scaled back to a 12-month, $2.5-million contract renewal.

“Were the project to end as planned on Sept.

30, 2009, with no extension, none of these enterprises will stand as self-sufficient and sustainable results will not be maximized,” wrote Nicolas Lacroix of CIDA’s Kandahar unit. Despite this, CIDA shut down the project “due to serious concerns about project performance and financial management capacity of the implementing partner.” The crate factory, which Gilmour says was viable and was receiving orders, was shut down, its machinery sold off. All the work put into building it, he says, was wasted.

Gilmour says he’s trying to move on from his time in Kandahar. He has done some consulting work for USAID and the Afghan government. He’s now focused on a new career as an artisanal chocolate maker. He crafts his product in the same small-town Ontario building where he used to plan how to bring economic development to rural Afghanistan.

Digging in: ‘Quick-impact’ projects like clearing irrigation canals were some of the success stories for Canadian aid agency Development Works 32

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STEPHANIE LEVITZ/CP

whether sewers are laid? How can we imagine good results when it focused on “quickimpact” job projects such as clearing irrigawhether a market is built?”

Gilmour admits his bookkeeping was at tion canals. Development Works was also times “sloppy” but says the final amount of praised for its willingness to operate in Kanmoney Development Works was required to dahar province, a place few firms were willreimburse to CIDA was closer to $61,000 than ing to go. But CIDA said Development Works $200,000. He says CIDA expected paper trails frequently expanded its mandate without that were not possible in Kandahar. “If any- CIDA’s prior approval. one gave a receipt with an international agency’s Such projects included a scheme to train name on it, and they got women to raise chickens, caught, they’d be killed by what CIDA described ‘WE DID THE BEST WE and the Taliban,” he says. as “illegally operating a Among the signature pro- POSSIBLY COULD IN THE medical clinic and pharjects Development Works MOST DIFFICULT PLACE macy.” Gilmour says one of launched were a bakery, Afghan employees, a ON EARTH,’ SAYS THE his crate factory and market. nurse, provided basic health PROJECT’S DIRECTOR care to local villagers as a CIDA (which has since means of fostering goodbeen merged into Canada’s Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade will. He says he paid for this service himself. and Development) described these facilities CIDA, in May 2010, described this claim as to Maclean’s as “community-based,” but “highly doubtful.” documents reveal it had reservations about CIDA spent a lot of time deliberating over whether such communal ownership was pos- whether to extend Development Works’ consible. A 2008 CIDA briefing note concluded tract. Media exposure enjoyed by the firm appears to have been a factor: “A significant that none of them was financially viable.

Some CIDA employees, including Joseph value-added . . . is the ability of the project Goodings, an economic-growth analyst, director to communicate effectively with the judged that Development Works produced Canadian and international media about the

WorldMags.net International

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

Parenting fail White working-class children in the U.K. are getting dismal grades. Is fining mom and dad the answer?

There is a cultural crisis afoot in Britain’s state school system today, but not the kind you’d expect.

A recent government report has found that only 32 per cent of white working-class children achieved a good grade—defined as A to C in five subjects—on their General Certificates of Secondary Education exam, taken by all pupils between ages 14 and 16. The dismal result stands in sharp contrast to immigrant students in the same family income bracket. Sixty-two per cent of British South Asian students achieved a good result on their GCSEs, as did 51 per cent of students of African descent. Even Afro-Caribbean children, who have long lagged behind in test scores, did better than their poor white counterparts according to the report (which defines working-class children as those whose family income level is sufficiently low for them to qualify for the government-funded school lunch program). An earlier report last year by the U.K.’s Centre For Social Justice confirms the trend.

Sir Michael Wilshaw, head of Britain’s Office for Standards in Education, said the result illustrates that low school grades are not strictly linked to poverty, but are also the result of irresponsible parenting. He went so far as to urge the government to give principals the right to fine parents who don’t read to their children every day, show up for parent-teacher nights or make sure their kids complete their homework. (The government currently fines British parents for truancy in children up to 16 and sent out over 52,000 fixed penalty notices last year for $110 each, about half of which were paid promptly.)

Reminiscing about his own days as an educator, Wilshaw told the press, “I was absolutely clear with parents; if they weren’t doing a good job, I would tell them so. It’s up to [principals] to say quite clearly, ‘You’re a poor parent.’ If parents didn’t come into school, didn’t come to parents’ evening, didn’t read with their children, didn’t ensure they did their homework, I would tell them they were bad parents.”

The government has not responded to Wilshaw’s recommendations to fine parents

DAN KITWOOD/GETTY IMAGES

BY LEAH M C L AREN ·

and seems unlikely to take his demands seriously, especially considering the opinionated bureaucrat has publicly butted heads with Education Secretary Michael Gove before.

But his airing of views comes at an interesting time, since Gove is said to be considering tougher sanctions for parents of children who repeatedly play hooky, including cutting their child-benefit payments.

On a broader social level, the issue of white working-class children falling behind is alarming for the British government, not just because of what it says about much of the country’s struggling native poor but because, overall, Britain is slipping in the international educational rankings. According to the Pro-

ary education in their country of origin, or they were brought up in a culture that values education and literacy above street smarts and toughness.

According to anthropologist Gillian Evans, author of the book Educational Failure and Working Class White Children in Britain, the challenges facing poor whites in Britain must be viewed in a historical context. Traditionally, Britain’s native working class did not place huge cultural importance on education because until late in the last century, young people in manufacturing centres (particularly in the north of England) could leave school in their mid-teens and find decent employment.

But working-class identity and culture— based around the Labour movement and strong trade unions—has been systematically eroded, resulting in a demoralized population with high addiction and welfare dependency rates. While Evans reports that most working-class people today recognize the importance of education for social mobility, for a minority, this demoralization has resulted in a rebellious anger at the system. In poor

Decline: Working-class identity and culture in Britain has been systematically eroded

gram for International Student Assessment, which compares the grade levels of students in 32 countries, Britain’s last performance was grim: its students ranked 23rd in reading and 26th in math.

But according to many educational experts, fining bad parents is not the answer. Children of immigrants often fare better at school for a variety of reasons, including the fact that their parents may have received post-second-

neighbourhoods, a defiant (mostly male) youth street culture has emerged. Kids lash out and “tend to disrupt the learning of children from working-class families who want to learn and do well at school.”

Or, as the Times columnist Caitlin Moran recently put it, “A working-class teenage girl does not want a pony—she wants a revolution.” The irony, of course, is that her best way of getting one is to get an education first.

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STOCK MARKET

Afraid to get rich?

Just how easy has it been to make money in the stock market these past five years? Consider this scenario. In January 2009 a savvy Canadian tucks away $5,000 in a newfangled Tax Free Savings Account, investing the money in a low-fee fund that tracks the U.S. market. Then he does the same each subsequent January.

Assuming all dividends were invested, he’d have roughly $40,000 today, and that’s after inflation takes its bite. That’s an annualized return of about 16 per cent. Forget beating

BY CHRIS SORENSEN ·

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the market. Simply showing up was enough to turn in a hedge-fund-sized performance.

Of course, most investors did precisely the opposite. They bolted for safety in the wake of the 2008 crash, and then stayed there, apparently content to earn a meagre quarter per cent in interest on their savings accounts, or only slightly more by locking their money into a government bond or GIC. A recent Gallup poll found just 54 per cent of Americans own stock, near the lowest level in 15 years and down considerably from 67 per

cent during the dot-com boom. The figures for Canada are even lower.

This is the great bull market almost everyone has missed. And it continues to roar. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which tracks 30 American “blue chip” stocks, recently crossed the 17,000-point threshold for the first time ever. That’s more than 2½ times its 2009 nadir. The broader-based S&P 500 is nearing 2,000 points, or almost three times its 2009 bottom. Canada’s S&P/TSX Composite Index has doubled. Even the tech-heavy Nasdaq is

WorldMags.net JULY 21, 2014

JIN LEE/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES

Many investors have missed out on one of the great bull markets in history.

Some now fear it’s a bubble about to burst. Don’t bet on it.

WorldMags.net Economy

Factor overload: This bull market is full of

mixed signals and opposing data points

within 15 per cent of its record-setting close at the height of the tech bubble. Yet another sign of Wall Street’s confidence: there have been more initial public offerings, or IPOs, of companies in the first half of 2014 than during the same period of any other year in the past decade.

Now, just as mom and pop investors contemplate jumping back in, a host of experts have suddenly turned bearish on stocks, predicting an impending correction or even a crash. They point to all sorts of red flags: swollen price-toearnings ratios, declining trade volumes, a lack of market volatility and even a rally in shares of General Electric, which, the thinking goes, is the last company in the world that investors would froth over. But mostly the analysis turns on a suspicion that this bull market is somehow too good to be true, and that good things rarely last. “The higher stocks move, the more concerned I get about a day (or days) of reckoning,” Henry Blodget, the one-time dotcom analyst who is now the editor and CEO of the website Business Insider, wrote recently.

The truth is that trying to predict stock market outcomes is next to impossible. This bull run has proved more vexing than most, full of mixed signals and seemingly contradictory data points. Share prices have soared in the face of a sluggish global recovery, the eurozone debt crisis, China’s slowing growth and pitched partisan battles over U.S. government finances. Companies are healthy but the economy itself isn’t. Things are said to be improving but central bankers continue to hold interest rates near zero, more than five years after the global financial system collapsed. This last point is arguably the biggest X factor when it comes to explaining the stock market’s performance “We see it in our client base,” says Tom Bradley, the CEO of Vancouver’s Steadyhand Investment Funds.

“The interest in buying a bond or GIC at these low rates isn’t very high. So people are almost by default moving into stocks. That’s driving markets and pushing valuations up.”

That all sounds ominous. But given all the chaos and unpredictability, there’s a steep price to be paid for overthinking things, too— namely missing out on one of the best moneymaking opportunities going. Despite the naysayers, there’s still good reason to believe it’s not over yet.

In their early stages, bull markets are often characterized by an abundance of fear. That was certainly the case with the last recession and its immediate aftermath, when it

seemed like the entire eurozone might get pulled into the abyss by a few of its more profligate members. After finding its way out of the trough in 2009, the stock market’s rebound was interrupted by a stomachchurning 16 per cent pullback in 2010 and another one in 2011. But then, suddenly, the market switched into autopilot in late 2012 .

By the end of 2013, the S&P 500 had clawed back all of its 2008-09 losses and continued to surge higher—a trend that has continued during the first half of this year. “The good things out there right now are that the big economies in the Western world look to be on a solid footing and are recovering,” Bradley says. “The big thing is that it looks like a disastrous unwinding in Europe—an ’08 or ’09 type of thing, is off the table. The relief of taking that away is helping fuel [stocks].”

Now, with the Dow and S&P 500 routinely setting new records, the fear is mostly one of reentering uncharted waters. Oddly enough, one of the measures that’s causing particular consternation is an apparent lack of concern among investors themselves. As a market approaches a peak it generally experiences more frequent price swings as investors try to get a sense of whether the ground is shifting beneath their feet. Traders call the phenomenon volatility, and the most common measure of it is the Vix, a market-volatility index created for the Chicago Board Options Exchange. Sometimes called the market’s “fear gauge,” the Vix tracks the cost of buying options on S&P 500 companies—a hedging strategy that helps investors guard against swings in a company’s share price in the near future. When the Vix is low, as it is now, it suggests investors don’t see the need to protect themselves with options. But too little volatility makes analysts nervous, too. They worry that an extended period of calm amid rising markets creates a sense of complacency among investors and encourages risktaking. Those who worry do have history on their side. The last time the Vix was at its current level was in 2007—right before the financial crisis hit.

There are other warning signs. Stock market valuations appear lofty. By one measure, the cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio, the S&P 500 index is trading well above its long-term average (26 versus 16.5 times the average of the last decade of earnings) and is right about where the market stood before the

crash in 2008. At the same time the number of shares being traded each day has plummeted from about 9.8 billion in 2009 to 6.2 billion last year, according to Bloomberg.

People tend to worry about that, because it suggests the big, so-called “smart money” such as pension funds, is sitting this most recent rally out. So if they’re not trading, who is?

Well, the dumb money, or so the thinking goes. After pulling more than $400 billion from the U.S. stock market between 2008 and 2012, there’s now evidence to indicate retail investors are finally dipping their toes back into equities as the number of commission-generating trades on discount brokerage E-Trade’s system ticked higher in recent months. Just as tech-bubble investors made ridiculous bets on untested companies 15 years ago, some are questioning all the hype surrounding social media companies, with new names and dubious business models hitting the market each week. “Most of the people buying into those securities know very little about them, but they are buying them anyway and running up the prices,” says Maurice Levi, a professor of finance at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business. “People don’t want to be left behind.”

Buy now and risk markets tanking, or wait for a market correction and lower prices?

There’s no question that some corners of the market are characterized by exuberance. But it still doesn’t come close to justifying some of the doomsday scenarios floated over the last five years. In 2012, USA Today quoted three different forecasters who all predicted a hair-raising stock market crash on the horizon. Gerald Celente, a forecaster at the Trends Research Institute, warned of an “economic 9/11.” Harry Dent, author of The Great Crash Ahead, predicted—surprise—a great crash ahead and Robert Prechter, author of Conquer the Crash, first published in 2002 and later updated in 2009, compared the contemporary economy to the Great Depression’s. Sobering stuff. And, so far, all wrong.

There are a couple possible reasons for the misfires. The first is that there are big rewards for pundits who make extreme predictions—namely high-profile interviews and, evidently, book deals. The second is that investors—including supposed experts— suffer from short memories. We’re more likely to recall the pain of the 2008 market crash, when nearly $11 trillion in market wealth was wiped out, than the U.S. econ-

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analysts polled by Reuters expect earnings growth of 6.2 per cent, returning to double digits by the end of the year. If the trend continues, it will lend credence to the stock market’s early optimism—it’s not called a leading indicator for nothing—and could even help set the stage for future rallies. After all, when the S&P 500 is measured against its pre-recession level in 2007, the market’s current spike doesn’t seem nearly as out of whack.

Wary of central bank bubble-blowing, the Bank for International Settlements, an organization made up of central banks and other international organizations, has sounded the alarm about “euphoric” financial markets.

Meantime, U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen recently dismissed the notion that she would consider raising interest rates to ward off bubbles, but nevertheless did acknowledge “pockets” of heightened risk.

In some sense, then, betting on the stock market is not only a gamble on continued economic recovery, but also that central bankers won’t take their foot off the gas.

While that might normally seem like a foolish wager when rates have nowhere to go but up, there has so far been precious little evidence to suggest it will happen soon.

Unemployment remains above the longterm average and businesses have yet to open the taps on spending. Investors can also take comfort in the fact the U.S. Fed has managed to wind down, or taper, its quantitative easing program to just $35 billion a month without sparking a stock market sell-off. So far so good, in other words,

The case for continued bullishness still comes with that all-important caveat: interest rates. Central banks responded to the 2008 crisis and ensuing recession by driving interest rates down to near zero. When it became clear that alone wouldn’t be enough, the U.S. Fed went a step further and instituted a program of quantitive easing, which amounted to printing money. At its height, the Fed was buying $85-billion worth of government bonds a month from banks and other financial institutions—effectively injecting that money into the economy. But instead of just taking cheap loans to buy new dishwashers and cars, people also borrowed money to sink into real estate (particularly in Canada, which never experienced a housThe percentage of Americans who think investing is a good ing crash) and stocks idea is at a low point, despite markets reaching new highs (the amount of money investors borrowed from 2,500 S&P 500 (left axis) brokers, known as mar90% % of Americans who, if they had $1,000 to spend, would invest it (right axis) gin debt, have hit rec2,000 ords on both the New 70 1,500 York Stock Exchange 50 and the Toronto Stock 1,000 Exchange), creating con30 cerns about new bubbles 500 in both countries.

10 That has put central 2002 2006 2010 2014 1998 bankers in both Canada and the U.S. in a tough spot, according to Chris Ragan, an associate although investors would be wise to keep in economics professor at McGill University mind that central banks have often kept and a former special adviser to the Bank of rates too low for too long in the past.

Investing has never been a risk-free endeavCanada. A roaring stock market is a predictable response to a protracted period of low our. That’s certainly the case as this fiverates, he says, and future rate hikes are likely year-old bull market continues to inch higher. to have the opposite effect, all other things But instead of fretting about whether it’s being equal. The question is when and under too late to jump in, or bemoaning all the what circumstances those rate hikes come. money already left on the table, a better “Central banks would love to get back to strategy is to sit down with a professional being boring,” says Ragan. “But we’re not and hammer out a realistic plan. And then there yet. They are goosing the system as stick to it. The trick, as every fund manager much as they can with monetary expansion worth their Patek Philippe timepiece knows, in an effort to stimulate aggregate demand, is figuring out a way to manage the market’s but they’re also hoping other parts of the darker side—not run screaming in the opposmarket don’t overheat. None of this is easy.” ite direction.

WorldMags.net JULY 21, 2014

CHART SOURCE: YAHOO FINANCE; GALLUP

S&P 500 INDEX LEVEL

A bad idea

% OF POLL RESPONDENTS

omy’s long track record of resilience during other crises, like the rampant inflation and double-digit interest rates of the 1980s.

Investors also need to make sure they don’t get so preoccupied with data points that they miss out on the bigger picture, argues Jeffrey Saut, the chief investment strategist at Raymond James. He recently told Yahoo! Finance that he still believes we are in the early stages of a secular bull market, not unlike the one that ran from 1982 to 2000. His reasoning is refreshingly simple. “What people don’t understand is equity markets don’t really care about the absolutes of good or bad,” Saut said, referring to things like GDP growth and unemployment rates. “They care about whether things are getting better or worse. I think they’re getting better.”

That doesn’t mean another correction is off the table. Far from it. But, as with 1987’s Black Monday, which landed five years into the bull market of the 1980s and 1990s, people like Saut believe it will only be a short-lived affair. Of course, history suggests that when a correction comes—and it will— people will panic again and sell stocks because they fear losses more than they relish the opportunity to make money. Sage investors call such moments—even drops of 20 per cent or more over a couple of months—a buying opportunity. That’s what makes them wealthier than most.

There are other measures pointing to more upside in equities beyond just feel-good investors. U.S. employers added 288,000 jobs in June, pushing the unemployment rate down to 6.1 per cent, the lowest it’s been since 2008.

The better-than-expected jobs report also helped erase lingering concerns about a surprise 2.9 per cent contraction in first-quarter GDP, with many economists blaming the pullback on last winter’s brutal weather. “The steady stream of positive June U.S. data continues, with the key report—hiring—the icing on the cake,” wrote Jennifer Lee, a senior economist at BMO Capital Markets, in a report. While Canada’s economic performance has been more middling—GDP growth essentially stalled in April at 2.1 per cent on annualized basis—the pickup south of the border is expected to eventually lift the fortunes of Canadian manufacturers and exporters who sell into the U.S. market. As well, corporate earnings, which are what the stock market is supposed to reflect in the first place, have also generally been on the upswing since 2009—thanks in part to the deep cost-cutting undertaken during the recession that ultimately made companies more profitable. With second-quarter earnings season under way,

WorldMags.net

It was your average dining room.

4 walls. Cut pile carpet. Stucco ceiling.

But for a time it doubled as an indoor rink.

The personal arena of a budding superstar.

Thank you to that unassuming dining room in Markham, Ontario, for serving up one of the most prolific scorers the game has ever seen.

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® NHL and the NHL Shield are registered trademarks. NHL and NHL team marks are the property of the NHL and its teams. © NHL 2014. All Rights Reserved. TMSportsnet, SN & Design, Rogers & Mobius Design are trademarks of or used under license from Rogers Sportsnet Inc. or Rogers Communications Inc. All other brand names and logos are trademarks of their respective owners. ©2014 Rogers Communications.

BUSINESS

A growing culture war Lululemon isn’t the only company being accused of selling out its principles for short-term gain Yoga is about mindfulness—the pursuit of mental clarity and a spiritual life.

B.C. apparel firm Lululemon Athletica has traded on that ideal for years, earning fans not just for its high-end athletic wear but also for its commitment to yoga’s high-minded principles. This is, after all, a company that hawks not sweaters, but “enlightenment pullovers.”

It also writes its corporate manifesto—a word map of idealistic aphorisms—on its shopping bags, with this statement at the centre: “friends are more important than money.”

That serenity stands in stark contrast to the corporate slugfest now playing out over the fate of the company. In June, Lululemon founder and former CEO Chip Wilson went to war with its board of directors, announcing he would use his 27 per cent stake in the company to oppose re-election of two board members, Michael Casey, a former Starbucks executive, and RoAnn Costin, president of a private equity firm. Never mind that Wilson

BY ADRIAN LEE ·

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left the company in ignominy in 2013 after a tactless comment that some women’s bodies “just actually don’t work” for Lululemon pants. The re-election of the board, Wilson warned, would result in Lululemon sacrificing its “product, culture and brand and longerterm corporate goals” for “short-term results.”

Judging by comments on Lululemon’s blog, a great many dissatisfied customers agree.

Wilson lost that battle—Casey and Costin were re-elected. But he got his point across.

“Our parents are fighting, and it’s awkward,” said current CEO Laurent Potdevin.

Such fights for the heart and culture of companies are becoming more common in an era when social media has made it incredibly easy for customers to engage directly with businesses, and when those customers increasingly define themselves by the brands they embrace.

Where that runs into trouble is when those ideals clash with the expectations of shareholders for higher profits and quick returns.

Lululemon is just the latest company to be accused of selling out the core principles that earned it grassroots support in the first place. In March, the cosmetics maker Tarte— founded in a New York City bedroom with a commitment that its products would be environmentally friendly and never tested on animals—was acquired by Kosé, a Japanese cosmetics giant that tests on animals. Meanwhile, the virtual-reality innovator Oculus VR paid for the initial development costs of its headset with one of the most robust crowdfunding campaigns ever, in 2012. Offering everything from T-shirts to prototypes of the technology to visits to the company’s headquarters—though no actual equity—Oculus hit its $250,000 goal in just four hours before going on to raise $2.4 million in total, with a promise to “change the way you think about gaming forever.” That do-it-yourself attitude earned it an army of loyal adherents. Four months ago, Facebook swept in and bought Oculus for US$2 billion, sparking outrage from those crowdfunders who were upset to see the company swallowed by a social media giant.

These are the challenges companies face when customers are so loyal they come to feel the business is theirs. “You love [to have devoted customers], but it can be a two-edged sword,” says Karl Moore, an associate professor at McGill University’s Desautels Faculty of Management. “You have less freedom to

WorldMags.net JULY 21, 2014

GERRY KAHRMANN/THE PROVINCE

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WorldMags.net Economy

On the mat: Lululemon’s devoted customer

base is both a blessing and a curse, say experts

change without alienating key people who may be evangelical in one sense, but also can be your worst, loudest critics.”

Such critics do more than complain; they can also impact the bottom line. Until recently, Lululemon had managed to balance culture and profit, says David Hannah, an associate professor at Simon Fraser University’s Beedie School of Business, who has studied and taught the company’s business model for years. “What’s particularly interesting about Lululemon is that it’s a capitalist success story—it’s a company that’s grown and made its founder a heck of a lot of money, but it has done so keeping up this image of being very connected to the community.” But the company has clearly stumbled. Lululemon’s once-hot stock price has plummeted, falling 45 per cent since last autumn on weakening sales. In the comments to a 2013 blog post where Lululemon fessed up to a quality-control problem with its luon yoga pants, which made them appear see-through, users raged against the company they had felt such affec-

‘I am concerned the board is not aligned with the core values of product and innovation on which Lululemon was founded and thrived’

heralded return to Starbucks after several years away from the CEO’s job. It was a time during which the company expanded rapidly yet faced complaints from diehard latte sippers that the coffee chain had lost its way. In a leaked email to senior executives in 2007, Schultz slammed the “commoditization of the Starbucks experience” and grieved the loss of the “romance and theatre” of its coffee-grinding baristas, having moved to automated espresso machines. The next year Schultz reclaimed the helm; since then, Starbucks shares have tripled in value.

But if Wilson is upset that Lululemon has lost its way, he only has himself to blame.

After all, he could have kept it private and grown the company at a slower pace and kept full control over its culture. Consider Edmonton-based Running Room, a chain similar to Lululemon. Both are devoted to a particular fitness regime, with communal workouts and loyal customer bases. But in staying private, the Running Room has taken 30 years to grow to 114 locations, whereas Lululemon’s 2007 IPO gave the company, then just seven years old, the funds to mount a hyper-expansion and more than quadruple its store count to 263. The IPO also made Wilson a billionaire;

With a booming IPO market and investment bankers courting fast-growing, private companies, it’s a challenge more businesses will face. Take New York-based Etsy, for example. The company was founded in 2005 as an online market for artisans to sell handmade wares. More than just an e-commerce site, Etsy bred a “maker culture” among its loyal community of users, who sold more than US$1 billion of jewellery, clothing and housewares last year. But Etsiers are upset by the company’s efforts to scale up its business amid rumours of an IPO. Many are disillusioned by changes to Etsy’s terms and conditions that allow vendors to outsource production to third-party manufacturers because, they say, it undermines the concept that all products on Etsy are handmade and gives an unfair advantage to those able to contract out to factories. Those controversies spawned a satirical blog-turned-book, Regretsy, which for a time ran a regular feature cataloguing items that were mass-produced.

Chad Dickerson, Etsy’s CEO since 2008, has had to try to convince vendors this is an effort to give them more opportunities. But he understands the fear in the community.

‘We want to make sure we are operating Etsy with sound principles that we can be proud of as we continue to grow’

‘We need to look into the mirror and realize it’s time to get back to the core . . . to evoke the heritage, the tradition, and the passion that we all have for the true Starbucks experience’

CHAD DICKERSON, ETSY

CHIP WILSON, LULULEMON

BEN NELMS/REUTERS; PHOTOGRAPH BY DELLA ROLLINS; CARLO ALLEGRI/REUTERS

HOWARD SCHULTZ, STARBUCKS

tion for. “I’m losing my allegiance to the only brand of athletic wear I felt I had a personal relationship with,” wrote one user. In June, in response to a post showcasing looser-fitting patterned summerwear, an effort to sell its athletic gear as street fashion, customers were incensed: “Lulu was special because it had it all—great beautiful designs, high-quality fabrics, wonderful figure-flattering fits. No more.”

What Wilson appears to be trying to pull off, with his appeal to Lululemon’s lost culture, is a repeat of Howard Schultz’s much-

according to the latest Rich 100 ranking from Canadian Business, Wilson is worth $3.7 billion. So Wilson’s complaints strike a false note. “If you go to the investment bankers and say, ‘We want to go public, sell this to the public for the highest possible price,’ ” says Roger Martin, the academic director of the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute, “then you forfeit, in my view, the right to say, ‘We don’t want to do this or that because it’s not consistent with the ethos or community spirit of the company.’ ”

“We live in a world where, for many people, everything they’ve grown to love got ruined at some point.” He still seems intent on an IPO, though: “We’ve decided no IPO this year [but] we may decide at a later date.”

As for Lululemon, it’s unclear what’s next, though going private may lie in its future. It’s been reported Wilson is in talks with private equity funds about buying out shareholders and delisting it from the stock market. That at least made shareholders happy—Lululemon’s stock price soared after the news.

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Economy

WHY QUEBEC IS CLOSED FOR BUSINESS It’s been a little more than a month since the Liberal government of Quebec Premier Philippe Couillard released its belt-tightening budget, and since then everyone from movie producers and doctors to teachers and mayors has griped about the cuts it promises.

They shouldn’t be surprised. Couillard campaigned on a pledge to fix Quebec’s “economic fiasco.” But a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute offers a stark reminder of how difficult that task will be.

The report, authored by Philip Cross, the former chief economist at Statistics Canada, shows the extent to which the economies of Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes now rely on public sector versus private sector investment for growth. Condensed version: a whole honking lot. Investment spending refers to money spent on structures, machinery and equipment, and since 2000, the report notes, public sector investment as a share of GDP has nearly doubled in Quebec to almost six per cent. At the same time, business investment—you know, by actual companies—has stagnated at seven per cent. That’s put Quebec near the bottom of the pack, alongside Ontario, and a notch above New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. “Business investment is the lifeblood of economic growth,” Cross wrote in an opinion piece. “It determines what the economy will look like years from now, and how competitive its workers will be.”

Of course, to have business investment, you’ve got to have businesses. And that’s where Quebec faces serious problems that run far deeper than any single austerity budget can hope to tackle. In December, Statistics Canada released a largely overlooked research paper that examined the rates at which new businesses have been joining and leaving the marketplace in each province. The creation of new firms and the destruction of old ones, through consolidation or closure, is key to a vibrant economy, bringing in new ideas and innovations and forcing existing businesses to pick up their game. You can probably guess where Quebec ranked, but I’ll tell you any40

way. From 2000 to 2009, no province had lower so-called “firm entry” than Quebec. In fact, in the manufacturing, retail, transportation and finance sectors, more companies went away than were created. No other province had that level of “destruction” without the customarily accompanying “creative.”

It gets worse. Another report from a few months ago, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, measured the levels of entrepreneurialism across Canada. It did so by looking at the percentage of working-age adults who are either engaged in setting up a business or who own a wage-paying business that’s existed for less than 42 months. On that front, too, Quebec came dead last, with an entre-

police. The province punishes businesses with some of the highest taxes in North America, yet it has rung up a $2.4-billion deficit and a debt load equal to half its GDP, the highest in the country. When not arbitrarily overriding the rights of shareholders to protect underperforming Quebec companies, the government has flip-flopped on its attitude toward resource development. In short, it’s an economic environment layered with uncertainty, instability and state interference.

For the longest time, the solution from the Quebec government to its stagnant business environment was more Quebec government, in the form of state-sponsored funds doling out cheques to those it deems to be worthy

18.6% 12.6%

14.0% 13.7%

10.9% 11.9%

9.6%

Stalled at the start The rate of entrepreneurialism in Quebec is the lowest in the country, a bad omen for Premier Philippe Couillard’s effort to kickstart his province’s economy

preneurship rate of 9.6 per cent, compared to 11.9 per cent in Ontario and close to 19 per cent in Alberta. Sylvain Carle, an entrepreneur in Montreal who’s started several companies, recently shared an anecdote with the Montreal Gazette that sums up Quebec’s sluggish start-up culture. While attending a conference at Stanford University, a speaker had asked how many people in the audience of 100 were starting their own companies, and 105 hands went up, since some were multi-preneurs. When Carle asked the same question to a similar-sized audience in Montreal a few weeks later, five hands went up.

It doesn’t take an advanced degree in rocketry to know why all this is the case. For decades Quebec businesses have been plagued with repeated bouts of separation anxiety and the constant irritant of the province’s language

entrepreneurs. Just this past March, the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec pension fund, that bastion of economic nationalism, joined with Desjardins Group to create a fund to pump $230 million into small and mediumsized enterprises, having already distributed $190 million to 186 other companies through an earlier fund. And yet the level of business creation is stuck in neutral.

This is what Couillard faces. He’s said all the right things about tackling Quebec’s fiscal crisis: “The time for cosmetic changes is gone,” he said in his throne speech in May. “We must act firmly and decisively. And we will.” His far bigger challenge remains to make Quebec a place where entrepreneurs would want to set up shop. The best way he can do that is to get his government out of the way.

WorldMags.net JULY 21, 2014

MATHIEU BELANGER/REUTERS; CHART SOURCE: GLOBAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP MONITOR

JASON KIRBY

WorldMags.net

ECONOWATCH

A scorecard on the state of the economy

STOCK SIGNS

Liar, liar and facing the blues • Dov Charney, founder and former CEO of American Apparel, isn’t going away quietly.

After the board ousted him following years of allegations of sexual harassment—not to mention poor returns—Charney gave his shares to a hedge fund that already owns a large stake in the company. Just the latest twist in his effort to regain control.

• Tired of rivals and critics “trying to incite fear,” BlackBerry set up a so-called BlackBerry Fact Check portal to keep them honest. “BlackBerry’s best offense is to present the facts,” one marketing exec said. Making killer devices wouldn’t hurt either.

• Every day Facebook’s algorithms “personalize”the newsfeeds its users see to keep them on the site and engaged with advertisers. But news that Facebook researchers actively manipulated posts of 700,000 users, to test the impact on their moods, created a firestorm. It says a lot about the company and the naivete of Facebook users.

• Stop us if you’ve heard this one. General Motors recalled 8.2 million more vehicles, including 700,000 in Canada, over ignition problems. The auto giant has not shown it can get ahead of the recall crisis, which threatens to cripple sales the longer it goes on.

Chart of the week:

‘It’s like paying for your dinner by selling your furniture.

Ultimately it’s not sustainable.’

—Richard Ravitch, a fiscal adviser on Detroit’s record bankruptcy proceedings, on the fact U.S. cities are selling off assets to fund their operations

BBQ costs hit record high The cost to buy eight barbecue staples, including meat, buns, cheese and ketchup, is at a record high in Canada this summer $30

THE COMPONENTS: GROUND BEEF, WIENERS, BREAD, PROCESSED CHEESE, ONIONS, TOMATOES, KETCHUP AND POP

25 PRICE IN DOLLARS

KEITH BEDFORD/BLOOMBERG/GETTY;MARK BLINCH/REUTERS; FACEBOOK/AP; MOLLY RILEY/AP; ANDREWHARRER/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES; SHUTTERSTOCK; CHART SOURCE: STATISTICS CANADA’S CANSIM; MACLEAN’S

STOCK SIGNS BROUGHT TO YOU BY QUESTRADE

20 15 10 5 1995

2001

2007

2013

*Prices are for May each year

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They’re smarter than Boomers, and way more ambitious than the Millennials.

Brace yourselves for the ultimate generational divide. Anne Kingston reports WorldMags.net

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PHOTOGRAPH BY DANIEL EHRENWORTH; PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY LAUREN CATTERMOLE

Society

Last February, 16-year-old Ann Makosinski drew applause and gasps when she appeared on The Jimmy Fallon Show. The Victoria native was showing off her invention—a flashlight powered by the heat of a human hand—on a segment with two other young inventors. It wasn’t just Makosinski’s clever adaptation of technology that wowed the crowd, it was her inspiration: the plight of a friend in the Philippines who’d failed a grade at school because she lacked electricity to study at night. Her empathy-driven ingenuity has won her acclaim and the top prize for 15- to 16-year-olds at the Google Science Fair, a place on Time’s “Top 30 under 30” list as well as a barrage of media coverage. As she exited the stage, Fallon shook his head in awe. “I’m going to work for her one day, I can feel it,” he said.

Fallon’s line may be a cliché, but it echoes a growing sentiment as the spotlight is thrust on Generation Z, the unimaginative term for the cohort following Gen Y, or Millennials.

While dispute rages over parameters, Gen Z are loosely defined as those born after 1995 and who are now 18 and under. It’s a big group: two billion worldwide, and one-quarter of the North American population.

Research, though still in beta, points to the emergence of a stellar generation: educated, industrious, collaborative, and eager to build a better planet, the very qualities exemplified

by Makosinski. In fact, in a manner typical of the need to neatly compartmentalize generations, Gen Z is already being branded as a welcome foil to the Millennials, born between 1980 and the mid- or late 1990s, who have been typecast as tolerant but also overconfident, narcissistic and entitled. Those characteristics weren’t an option for the first post9/11 generation, one raised amid institutional and economic instability, informed by the looming shadow of depleting resources and global warming, and globally connected via social media.

Much of the current chatter surrounding Gen Z has been generated by the 56-slide presentation “Meet Generation Z: Forget everything you learned about Millennials,” produced by New York City advertising agency Sparks & Honey. It found 60 per cent of Gen Zers want jobs that had a social impact, compared with 31 per cent of Gen Ys. It deemed them “entrepreneurial” (72 per cent want to start their own businesses), community-oriented (26 per cent already volunteer) and prudent (56 per cent said they were savers, not spenders). Gen Z is also seen to be more tolerant than Gen Y of racial, sexual and generational diversity, and less likely to subscribe to traditional gender roles.

Other studies paint them as the new conservatives. A Centers for Disease Control survey of 13,000 high school students released in June reported teens smoke, drink and fight far less than previous generations (though they’re more likely to text while driving).

“Overall, young people have more healthy behaviours than they did 20 years ago,” reported study coordinator Dr. Stephanie Zaza, who noted that use of drugs and weapons and risky sex have declined since the study began in 1991.

The influential author and consultant Don Tapscott is a Gen Z optimist. His 2008 book, Grown Up Digital, features a study of 11,000 kids who were asked whether they’d rather be smarter or better looking: 69 per cent chose “smarter.” So is social researcher Mark McCrindle, of Sydney-based McCrindle Research, who has been looking at Gen Z for seven years. “They are the most connected, educated and sophisticated generation in history,” he says. “They don’t just represent the future, they are creating it.”

That’s reflected in the new spate of teen celebrities, whose industry and earnestness runs contrary to Gen Y poster girls Lindsay Lohan and Lady Gaga. Teen innovators have always been with us (Braille, hip hop and earmuffs were all products of adolescent minds), but global social media combined with crowdsourcing, openplatform education and sharing have given this generation’s inventors unprecedented influence. In 2012, 17-year-old student Angela Zhang revealed a protocol that allowed doctors to better detect cancerous tumors on MRI scans; that year, 15-year-old Jack Andraka made headlines with his inexpensive, accurate sensor, able to detect pancreatic cancer.

Their defining characteristic, so far, is that they’re a new species—“screenagers,” the first tribe of “digital natives.” That’s the muchdebated term that distinguishes the wiredfrom-the-crib from “digital immigrants,” for whom the Internet is a second language.

The result could well be the most profound generation gap ever: a digital divide between parents who see the Internet as disrupting society as we know it (and making them feel obsolete) and their kids, who are not only at home with the technology—“it’s like air to them,” Tapscott says—but are already driving many of the shifts happening in how we communicate, the way we access information and the culture we consume.

Gen Z are bellwethers, says McCrindle: “Where Gen Z goes, our world goes.” What that portends is seismic social disruption and the commensurate anxiety. “This is the first time in history kids know more than adults about something really imporant to society— maybe the most important thing,” says Tapscott. “[It’s] a formula for fear.” Despite this tension—or perhaps because of it—expectations for a generation have never been higher.

Forbes has dubbed Gen Z “Rebels with a cause.”

The Financial Times posed the question: “Generation Z, the world’s saviours?” Tapscott says Gen Z doesn’t have a choice: “My generation is leaving them with a mess. These kids are going to have to save the world literally.”

The emerging thinking about Gen Z stands at a remarkable disconnect from the particular anxiety that’s long surrounded the idea of digital natives, one stoked by such bestsellers as Nicholas Carr’s Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Mark Baulerein’s The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future, and Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.

We’ve seen more than a decade of hand-wringing over declining attention spans, eroding social skills, online bullying and sexting, along with the worry that communicating in short bursts and emoticons deadens the brain’s ability to think in complex ways. There’s also the debate raging over the elimination of cursive writing from many schools, and charges that the decline in traditional forms of learning such as memorization and rote signals a drop in standards.

Even before the crowning of Generation Z, some experts were challenging those assumptions, suggesting we may have been applying 20th-century expectactions to a new matrix where they no longer apply. Amy Bastian, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University, contends that the greater the variety of things you do in the fine-motor domain, the more you improve dexterity, but refuses to declare cursive writing is better or more important for a child’s development than printing.

Where one skill is lost, another may be gained. If children are less likely to dig deep and find out the rationale behind something, or to memorize it, says pediatrician Michael Rich, executive director of Harvard’s Centre of Media and Child Health, it’s because “their brains are rewarded not for staying on task,

Some studies paint them as the new conservatives: they smoke and drink less, and have less risky sex

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self-fulfilling prophecy, our assumptions about how Gen Z is changing the world are themselves shaping a generation that will change the world as we know it. Emojili, the first emoji-only social site, is about to launch—a the perfect platform for a generation we believe to be post-literate. Publishing is increasingly embracing short reads, or “mini-books,” evidenced by Amazon’s StoryFront. Increasingly, universities are courting those high-achieving high school and even grade school students with programs offering exposure to higher learning. The University of Toronto engineering faculty, for instance, offers Girls’ Jr. DEEP

“It’s not a failing of technology,” he says.

“It’s a failing of public policy.” But the fact remains that digital connectivity has costs.

Tapscott speaks of new class lines forming between digital haves and have nots.

There are other consequences of digital life.

Sparks & Honey reports that reliance on mobile devices has led to kids having poor spatial skills and trouble navigating streets without GPS; hours spent in front of screens puts them at increased risk for obesity. And Gen Z, like every generation, has its jerks: Nash Grier, the 16-year-old Vine sensation, was recently in the news for making homophobic slurs.

If you define a generation too early, “you’re really looking at the way their parents are operating, not who they are,” says Robert Barnard, CEO of Toronto-based Decode, a company that provides data on youth. Still, he argues that the older end of any demographic tends to be an early influencer or indicator of a generation’s values. He also makes a distinction between broad “generational traits” and “life-stage traits” consistent across generations. In other words, Gen Z can be more bright-eyed about saving the world because they’re 14 years old, as opposed to being 28 and competing in a brutal job market.

However accurate our projections of Gen Z may or may not be, in what can be seen as

summer programs for Grades 3 to 8—an edge the Millennials surely wish they had had.

Entrepreneurship is also a big buzzword: in a world where full-time jobs and pensions are in decline, it’s a glossy way of saying Gen Z is on its own. According to the Sparks & Honey survey, this cohort places less value on higher education (64 per cent want advanced degrees, compared to 71 of Gen Y). In response, universities have replaced the emphasis on the now-dated corporate M.B.A. with “entrepreneurial hubs.” The Thiel Fellowship hands out $100,000 to kids willing to forgo university. Makosinski, about to enter Grade 12, expresses ambivalence about university. “There are so many choices out there,” she says. She’d like to spend her second year at 30 Weeks, a New York City entrepreneurship program.

She also has ambitions to start her own business, a YouTube channel, after she improves the efficiency of her flashlight. She has invented a game-changing tool that could eliminate the battery, but she’s smart enough to see a viable future in YouTube, a concept alien to many adults.

Technology is seen as the great generational divide here, but if there is a pan-generational leveller, paradoxically, it’s technology, and the fact we’re all equally hooked;

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LARRY BUSACCA/GETTY IMAGES; ETHAN HILL/REDUX; PHOTOGRAPH BY CHAD HIPOLITO

but for jumping to the next thing”—a useful ability in the digital era. Tapscott sees the term “multi-tasking” as an old-fogey misnomer: “What we’re actually watching is adaptive reflexes—faster switching and more active working memories,” he says.

McCrindle speaks of non-natives having to adapt to the new “post-linear” digital reality, meaning events no longer follow a traditional chronology. “People watch things when they want to watch them; learning takes place anywhere, anytime.” We’re looking at the world through glass—tablets, Google Glass—designed for images, not words, McCrindle says. This is also a “post-logical” world that emphasizes emotional reaction: “Social media is more right-brain, not left-brain,” a fact to which anyone who spends time on Twitter can attest.

Gen Z is “a global experiment,” says McCrindle. No longitudinal studies have been done on the neural mapping of a species exposed to up to 10 hours daily of multi-media screens since infancy, he says. Our enduring fascination with how toddlers interface with technology is reflected in the popularity of the YouTube video titled “A magazine is an iPad that doesn’t work.” It shows a little girl sliding her finger in frustration over a glossy fashion magazine as if it’s an iPad. So much remains unknown about Gen Z that trying to define them by a letter of the alphabet seems like a doomed effort; after all, the youngest of them are four. “Their formative years haven’t been lived yet,” says McCrindle. The survey from Sparks & Honey itself is limited in scope, based on interviews with a handful of teachers, two dozen Gen Zers and listening in on thousands of Gen Z on social media, says Sara DaVanzo, the agency’s chief cultural strategy officer. Marketing focus remains on Gen Y: “Gen Z hasn’t been fully embraced because it’s young with limited spending power; marketers don’t recognize their inordinate influence.” (Sparks & Honey advises brands to sell themselves as socially responsible to appeal to this burgeoning demographic, and to “co-innovate” products with customers.)

Defining a generation with such a broad brush overlooks the fact there will be losers, says Tapscott. He points out that while the top third of young adults in North America may be seen as spectacular compared to previous generations—better educated, with SAT and GMAT scores at all-time highs—and that the middle third is likewise more capable and knowledgeable, the bottom third are dropping out of high school due to various forces: family breakdown, pernicious cultural influences.

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adults are just addicted to older, in some cases obsolete, technologies. “Parents of Gen Z kids think their kids are using too much technology,” says Barnard, “but they’re addicted to it themselves, and don’t know how to deal with it.” The only real difference is the platform. The most active people on Facebook, Barnard notes, are 30- to 40-yearold women; their children use Slingshot or Tumblr. (Sparks & Honey noted Gen Z places greater value on privacy than Gen Y, because it chooses anonymous, ephemeral communication tools such as SnapChat, Secret and Whisper, although the bigger appeal of

‘This is the first time in history kids know more than adults about something really important to society,’ says Tapscott. ‘It’s a formula for fear.’

online magazine Rookie, whose feminist message is heralded as an antidote to rampant sexualized imagery of girls. The child savant is a hot ticket, evident in the gush over Flynn McGarry, the 15-year-old Los Angeles cooking prodigy, whose pop-up dinners are sellouts. In Silicon Valley, competition for young talent is now so intense that interns as young as 13 are scouted; Facebook flies in kids with their parents to meet Mark Zuckerberg. It’s not uncommon for some to make a year’s salary in a summer, or receive a $100,000 grant—another example of how Gen Z is vaulting over the Millennials, while simultaneously becoming a threat to Gen X and Boomers.

The new obsession with seeing youth as prophets has made 16-year-old Adora Svitak an in-demand speaker on the global thinktank circuit. The activist and author came to public attention at age 12 with her 2010 TED Talk, “What adults can learn from kids,” in which she called for “bold, childish ideas.”

The talk has had over 3.4 million views and been translated into over 40 languages. Turning to children for advice has also been institutionalized in the trend of “reverse-mentoring.” Tapscott was an early adoptor, employing a 13-year-old to head his digital

Teen superstars: (from far top left) fashion writer Tavi Gevinson; Jack Andraka, who created a

JOSE MANDOJANA; PEDEN & MUNK/TRUNK ARCHIVE

pancreas cancer test; B.C. inventor Ann Makosinski; activist Adora Svitak; chef Flynn McGarry

these technologies may just be that they’re newer.)

What is not in doubt is that the power balance has shifted to the more digitally proficient, says McCrindle. The “don’t trust anyone over 30” mantra espoused by youth in the 1960s has gone full circle: now no one trusts anyone over 20. One need only look to Vogue editor Anna Wintour’s literal embrace of Tavi Gevinson, who founded the influential fashion blog Style Rookie at age 11, in the front row of fashion shows. Now 18, Gevinson is an actor and editor-in-chief of the

team more than a decade ago. He currently has five teenage “mentors,” he says.

Ironically, one of the lessons the kids have for adults is about the perils of being defined by online behaviour. “Our whole lives can literally be centred over a little piece of metal; it’s pretty crazy,” says Makosinski, who says her parents are strict about her Internet use.

She depends on the Internet as a resource for everything, but knows when to take a break, she says: “Sometimes I’m just like, ‘I’m going to close my Facebook for a bit and detox.’ ” Speaking on Skype from Barcelona, where

she’s holidaying with her family after giving a talk in Paris, Svitak says the fact so many kids spend so much time online saddens her.

Her fondest childhood memories involved playing outside: “When you look back, you are not going to remember the emails you sent,” she says, noting that when given the choice, kids will invariably select a video game over taking a hike: “If what’s on a cell is brighter or flashier, kids will choose that.”

Adults need to exert their influence, Svitak says: “We can’t leave parenting up to the Internet.” Tellingly, even defending the value of adult wisdom and experience has fallen to youth, seen in Rookie’s popular advice column: “Ask a grown man/Ask a grown woman.”

It’s also Generation Z, demarked by the end of the alphabet as we know it, that’s calling for the end of generational segmentation. It doesn’t ring true any more, Svitak says: “It ignores a lot of the things that shape personalities and collective thinking.” It also ignores the fact characteristics are fluid throughout life. “Understanding shared Baby Boomer traits is easy because most of their lives has passed,” she says. “But anyone making generalizations about me will have to realize I will change many, many times.”

Svitak’s generation is global, one with all of history and geography at its fingertips, able to draw from all eras and places. Her friends are both older and younger, she says, naming a pan-generational list of role models that includes Hillary Clinton, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, J.K. Rowling, Olympic long-distance runner Emil Zátopek. Likewise, Makosinski cites electrical engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla and the Indian musican Ravi Shankar as inspirations.

“I’m fascinated by the 1960s,” she says.

Brands appeal to need, anxiety, aspiration.

The creation of the Gen Z brand is no different, right from the marketing report that sparked the chatter. Sparks & Honey’s quest to identify such a young demographic was spurred by client need, says DaVanzo. “Many of our [client companies] are struggling with planning for the future in a world defined by chaos, volatility, uncertainty, ambiguity and change.” The idea of a Gen Z brand has been embraced by media as a kind of talisman for our hopes and fears.

Svitak doesn’t want any part of it. She plans to write a book on generational change—one that’s introspective. “Too often it’s from a marketer’s perspective,” she says. For now, though, our understanding of her generation comes from outside, with the understanding that the way we see Gen Z reflects everyone else’s needs, as much as who they are.

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Tip-top shape: Leading Seaman Jeffery Dunlop exercises on the HMCS Regina

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Society

PHOTO ESSAY

AT HOME ON THE HIGH SEAS Photographer Peter Bregg got a rare opportunity to capture life on a Canadian Navy frigate Peter Bregg boarded HMCS Regina on a fateful day for the ship’s crew. Bregg, a former Maclean’s chief photographer who spent 18 days observing Canadian antismuggling operations in the Indian Ocean, arrived in Dar es Salaam on April 21. He left the steamy Tanzanian port city the same day Leading Seaman Brandon South, a sonar operator, died in a nearby hospital, while off-duty, of causes not yet released to the public. The next day, Daniel Charlebois, the ship’s commanding officer, informed the crew. Morale plummeted, says Bregg. “It was really depressing,” he recalls. “I stayed out of their way and put my camera away.”

During a memorial service two days later, Bregg was in a Navy helicopter that paid tribute to the late seaman with a flypast. He called the sombre service “almost like a burial at sea.” South’s death was a rare dark moment aboard Regina, says Bregg, where the 265 sailors normally kept “extremely high” spirits as they went about their business: maintenance, target practice, personal training, and the self-explanatory “Sundae Sundays.” When necessary, they transition easily between the formal chain of command and lighter moments at sea. While sailors chow down on ice cream or unload the ship, rank dissolves. Not so when alarm bells sound. Bregg witnessed the boarding of a small ship suspected of smuggling drugs.

That boat was clean, but “the first hour was tense,” he says, remarking on the sense of calm that prevailed on the bridge. The Navy took no chances with their resident civilian, however. Even Bregg was told to strap on a flak jacket. NICK TAYLOR-VAISEY For a video of Peter Bregg discussing his experience on the HMCS Regina, see this week’s iPad edition of Maclean’s

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Operation Artemis: (clockwise from left) Crew return after boarding a ship suspected of smuggling drugs in the Indian Ocean; preparing a UAV

(unmanned aerial vehicle) drone for overnight surveillance; the band Pile O Bones performs in the ship’s pub, nicknamed Bushwakker’s Club

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R and R: (top) HCMS Regina crew usually step out to the flight deck on Sundays after dinner for a cigar; (bottom) officers on the Halifax-class

frigate assess a target practice exercise in the Indian Ocean. The ship is part of a multi-national naval coalition securing the area’s waters.

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Fitness break: RCAF aviation technician Cpl.

Jesse Minigan works out with kettle bells

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TV

Oliver’s twist Not just Jon Stewart 2.0, John Oliver is mobilizing viewers with a whole new kind of comedy show Has a clone of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart finally managed to match, or even surpass, the original? HBO’s Last Week Tonight With John Oliver is a new show and, in some ways, an unformed one: The format hasn’t been worked out beyond having the British comedian sit at a desk for a half-hour and do topical comedy pieces.

But those weekly pieces have already accumulated an online audience in the millions, even when they deal with subjects such as climate change or soccer management. “We’ve seen John Oliver show-related pieces of content get very popular on Reddit,” says Victoria Taylor, director of communications for the popular aggregation site. And while using Daily Show techniques such as broad doubletakes at clips of news reporters saying silly things, he’s created a style that isn’t exactly The Daily Show—and is maybe Stewart’s first real competitor in cable comedy.

That won’t be because he was the first person to try it. After Stewart turned The Daily Show into a new kind of talk show, more satirical about politics and media than any other comedy, the last decade produced dozens of rip-offs in the U.S. alone. Most are forgotten, such as The Half-Hour News Hour, D.L. Hughley Breaks the News, and The Onion News Hour. At least Oliver had more credentials as a political comedian. He’s a British comic who never achieved much success in his native country; Ellen E. Jones, TV critic for the Independent, says that even today, “John Oliver fans in Britain are either people with a particular interest in U.S. political culture or long-term fans of The Bugle,” his satirical

BY JAIME J. WEINMAN ·

Mission improbable: Oliver’s pieces have found

an audience in the millions while tackling topics that real news shows find too boring

news podcast, launched after he moved to America in 2007. He became a popular contributor to The Daily Show, but didn’t become a star until last summer, when Stewart took a few months off and Oliver filled in for him.

He was so successful that New York magazine’s Vulture called him “The Daily Show’s heir apparent,” but instead, HBO gave him his own show—and the challenge of finding his own voice.

That was the essential thing, because a personal style may be the main thing standing between comedians and Daily Show-style stardom. Canadian comedian Rick Mercer, who has been one of TV’s most successful political comics with This Hour Has 22 Minutes (which predates The Daily Show) and The Rick Mercer Report, says the challenge of doing this type of comedy is that the comedian has to have his or her own perspective on politics, and not just make generic political jokes: “I think when shows fail is when it’s manufactured. You go out and get some funny people and tell them to read the newspaper and make some jokes. That won’t work. It all has to do with the personality and the perspective, because, at the end of the day, it’s commentary.” Most of Stewart’s imitators were not up to that challenge, leaving only The Colbert Report, a Daily Show spinoff that was more of a companion piece than a competitor. And even that show is ending soon, as Colbert moves to replace David Letterman in a conventional talk show.

That left the field wide open for Oliver, who certainly didn’t shy away from ambitious topics just because he was doing a new show: in one of his earliest episodes, he did a long piece about the death penalty, and followed that with a segment on Net neutrality, a subject even real news shows often find

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too boring to touch; viewer reaction to that for not talking about India’s elections, and I can talk about segments, and I love it.” The one may have wound up breaking the Fed- explained why Americans should find them overused term “viral video” almost seems to eral Communications Commission (FCC)’s interesting. In his Net neutrality piece, he be fresh again when applied to the way Oliwebsite. His speech on the alleged corrup- urged the “monsters” who populate U.S ver’s monologues spread online, and Taylor tion of soccer’s governing body, FIFA (“You message boards to “get out and, for once in suggests that this is partly due to his choice are hosting the World Cup somewhere where your lives, focus your indiscriminate rage in of online-friendly material: Subjects such as soccer cannot physically be played,” he com- a useful direction.”

Net neutrality are “of interest to a lot of Reddit plained about the planned 2022 match in Americans are supposed to hate being lec- community members.”

Qatar), became a serious part of the discus- tured by foreigners; that’s why Piers Morgan’s The network has also tried to distribute sion around the issue. Throw in Salon dub- CNN show bombed. But people are happy that material in a way that will maximize the bing Oliver “the media’s moral centre,” and to take it from Oliver. Ellen E. Jones thinks amount of buzz it gets. At a time when other you have a show that’s become influential the key is that “he does what he does with a TV studios are hoarding their content, trying out of proportion to the number of episodes sense of humour and an awareness of cultural to keep it on their own sites, Oliver’s produit’s aired—more so than cers have made a deliberate decision to free up True Detective.

So, what are people his routines and make getting from Last Week them as widely accessTonight that they don’t ible as possible. The day get from The Daily Show after his show airs, key segments are uploaded to four times a week? One difference may be in the show’s official account the pacing. Oliver has on YouTube. Videos from embraced the lack of that site are much more commercial breaks and popular with bloggers longer running times and content aggregators of HBO, allowing him than official website conto expand the time he tent, which is often hard spends on a topic. Stewto play and doesn’t work art rarely does a comedy in every country. bit that lasts more than That combination of a five minutes. But Oliver’s huge online presence and pieces on FIFA and Net a genuine activist spirit neutrality both ran more could make Oliver’s show than 13 minutes, time something we’ve never enough not only for jokes seen before: a comedy and silly graphics but inshow that gets results. depth explanations of the Stewart and Colbert, as issues involved. the Guardian recently Stewart has always noted, are perceived as denied being anything Fighting spirit: Last summer, Oliver (right) did such a good job filling in for two months on comics “who are adept at more than a comedian. The Daily Show, many expected him to replace Jon Stewart, whose contract is up in 2015 identifying problems but Oliver may be going in rarely cross over into agithe opposite direction from him—and more sensitivities—Piers Morgan, God love ’im, has tation.” Oliver, who once exhorted his viewin the direction of Mercer, whose trademark neither of these things.” And, she adds, Oli- ers to “seize your moment, my lovely trolls, rants are often about “something I wish people ver sometimes makes jokes about his own turn on caps lock, and fly my pretties, fly, were talking about”—by openly embracing presumptuousness in telling Americans what’s fly!” could actually use his new power to do the idea that people are getting news from wrong with them. “There’s a humility there, something more about those problems. his show. He’s even prepared to get the kind which you wouldn’t get with a more tradOliver has described his show as still a of fact-checking usually reserved for actual itional foreign journalist who decided to hold work in progress, and HBO has indicated it news; when the Miami Herald investigated forth on all the ills of the U.S.” may change the number of times a week the But if Last Week Tonight takes off and show airs. But people are already sensing one of his claims about FIFA, it received corroborating documents from Oliver’s staff, eclipses The Daily Show, it may be not just something new, and it’s possible that Oliver eventually rating the claim as “true.” because of its content, but because of its abil- can feel it, too: When PBS host Charlie Rose But Oliver doesn’t just explain the issues: ity to connect with the new Internet world of asked him about the FCC website incident, He openly chides his audience for not car- Upworthy, Buzzfeed, and other sites that find Oliver said it happened because he “told ing enough about them. A recurring theme and disseminate material. Mercer is one of them why they should be angry about it, and of his show is that Americans are too incuri- many viewers who first encountered Oliver they went in droves.” Comedians have told ous about the lies that corporations and this way: “Everything I’ve seen has been on Americans what’s going on in the world, but other organizations are selling them. On the Internet, so I can’t talk with any author- telling them why they should be angry? his first show, he mocked the U.S. media ity about the show as a complete show. But That’s different.

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PREVIOUS SPREAD: CHAD BATKA/THE NEW YORK TIMES SYNDICATE/REDUX; THIS PAGE: NEILSON BARNARD/GETTY IMAGES

Americans are supposed to hate being lectured by foreigners like Piers Morgan, but people take it from Oliver, who does it with rare humility

WorldMags.net Music

He aims to plead: Thicke debuted the song Forever Love, dedicated to his estranged wife, at the BET Awards—complete with sniffles and teardrops

Thank you for sucking Can Robin Thicke’s execrable record finally lift the spell of the breakup album?

There’s nothing blurred about Robin Thicke’s lines these days: The pop singer who owned the song of last summer is dead-set on reuniting with his wife, Paula Patton—estranged since his alleged infidelities in February—and is using every tool in his toolkit to do so. His new album, out last week, is not-so-subtly named Paula; its songs have names like Get Her Back and Love Can Grow Back. At the BET Awards, he appeared to sniffle and tear up during the debut performance of the weepy Forever Love.

Okay, so Thicke isn’t known for his subtlety.

This is the guy whose big hit veered a little close to endorsing rape and who, in the video, exulted around topless women as balloon letters exclaimed about his phallic gifts. Paula’s very first lyrics are ham-fisted (“Baby I got a feeling / We ain’t never gonna be friends”); the rest of it ventures into buffoonery (“Shine your rainbow of hope and hot pot of gold on my body”). It’s no wonder the backlash has been swift and brutal. “One of the creepiest albums ever,” The Atlantic wrote. The Guardian calls it “less like a romantic gesture and more like a plot to violate a restraining order.”

But for all the insipid music Thicke has wrought, he’s done one fairly remarkable thing: He’s snapped the long spell under which breakup albums have held listeners around the world. Take Coldplay’s latest record, Ghost Stories. There are few acts as widely disliked as the vanilla band, and the album is full of hollow sentiments (“And I can’t get over / Can’t get over you / Still I call it magic /

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BY ADRIAN LEE ·

You’re such a precious jewel”) that, by any rights, should get a critical thrashing. But Ghost Stories comes after lead singer Chris Martin and actress Gwyneth Paltrow’s “conscious uncoupling,” so some call it one of the best albums the band has ever made. It’s been called “moody” and “vulnerable.” Never mind that it was recorded over the course of two years, and that Martin and Paltrow split just two months before it hit the shelves— such is the breakup album’s power.

Great music often comes from despair, to be sure. Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear, is as searing as it is seminal; divorce court ordered him to send half the profits to his ex. For a mid-career artist, the breakup album can reawaken the creative spirit and inject a bit of relevance. Frank Sinatra resurrected his career with In the Wee Small Hours, which oozed anguish from his dissolving marriage to Ava Gardner. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors is famously turbulent, a remarkable piece of art squeezed from the stones of three different marriages in freefall. Amy Winehouse’s best (and last) record, Back to Black, was the product of a stormy on-and-off love. The rapper Nas’s most successful record since his classic debut was Life is Good; the album cover features him, nonplussed, seated with his exwife’s wedding dress on his lap. Bon Iver, Adele, Taylor Swift, Maroon 5, Justin Timberlake: All owe something to the release of a heartbreak record.

The best breakup songs refract the singer’s experience into something universal, flip a

cliché into a fresh thought, or bring exquisite pleasure from making you feel more of what you already feel. Canadian singer-songwriter Bahamas’s koan in the great breakup album Barchords comes to mind: “Overjoyed / There’s joy in feeling sad.” But the success of Coldplay’s latest record shows us we’ve started to conflate heartache with quality. Heartbreak albums can’t just be voyeuristic—they also have to be good.

As for Thicke? He’s doing it all wrong. The album may be named Paula, but it’s all about him, right down to the blood on his face in Get Her Back. It’s the equivalent of emotional hostage-taking. It’s also surprisingly impersonal: As host Chris Rock joked after Thicke’s BET performance, “He’s singing like she don’t know him.” Thicke, too, should know this kind of thing doesn’t generally have the intended effect: Lenny Kravitz’s It Ain’t Over Til It’s Over is one of the finest modern torch songs; two years later, his marriage to Lisa Bonet was, well, over.

It was going to take a catastrophically illadvised and painful album for us to fall out of love with the breakup album. By all accounts, Paula is that record. For this, maybe Robin Thicke deserves our gratitude.

WorldMags.net MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

Heartbreak never sounded so good. For an opinionated list of the best breakup albums of the past 20 years, see our iPad edition.

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WorldMags.net Books

‘The Mockingbird Next Door’: Elusive author Harper Lee grants Marja Mills a rare glimpse into her life in this part memoir, part biography

Beware the friendly journalist next door THE MOCKINGBIRD NEXT DOOR: LIFE WITH HARPER LEE Marja Mills

expensive clothing . . . have no meaning for [Lee]. All she needs is a good bed, a bathroom and a typewriter.”

The next day, Lee called Mills and suggested they meet. Relying on her sister’s recommendation, she agreed to talk on the record for a feature-length story. When the article appeared, Lee graded it a B plus—Mills got a few facts wrong—but Lee carried on a correspondence with her anyway.

It’s after this that the story takes a bizarre turn. Mills, stricken with lupus, goes on sick leave and rents the house beside the Lees in Monroeville. “I thought I could begin gathering information for a book about Mockingbird country,” she tells the sisters, even though the book Mills ultimately produced is part memoir, part biography.

Mills writes dazzling prose, but some readers will cringe when she reports on conversations in which she and Lee’s friends speculate on such matters as the author’s sexuality, temper, and alcohol consumption. It’s no wonder the feisty author is suing Mills. JULIA M C KINNELL

It’s a marvel this book exists given the press-shy nature of its subject. Harper Lee, the author of To Kill a Mockingbird, stopped giving interviews decades ago, responding to requests with either a “no” or a “hell, no!” Often she is labelled a recluse, but that’s the wrong word for her. She’s no hermit. When Mills met her in 2001, she was splitting her time between Manhattan, where she travelled around on public transit, and Monroeville, Ala., where she shared a house with her sister and attended exercise classes in town. She only stopped talking to the press when it became clear to her that “facts were no longer the journalist’s commandments.”

(Lee was mortified in 1963 when a reporter implied she was overweight.)

When the Chicago Tribune sent Mills to write about the place where Lee grew up, she didn’t expect to meet the author but knocked on her front door anyway. Lee’s 89-year-old sister, Alice, answered the door.

JULY CRISIS: THE WORLD’S “I was surprised when she invited me in,” DESCENT INTO WAR T.G. Otte writes Mills, whose descriptive skills make you feel like you’re trailing her through a We write history not just for secret world: “The interior of the house was our own times but from them. as modest as the exterior. An old plaid couch The world a century ago, with with skinny wooden arms was pushed against its shifting power centres one wall.” Alice told Mills, “Big homes and struggling for economic, military and pol56

itical influence and would-be suicide assassins aiming for symbolic targets, looks more familiar to us than it did during the Cold War, and so historians like Otte are painting a whole new picture of the origins of the Great War. Otte points to developments little noticed in the older narratives: English-language historians obsessed with an Imperial Germany hell-bent on continental domination, or of statesmen “sleepwalking” into disaster. There was growing—yes, actually increasing—co-operation between Britain and Germany that had defused Balkan tensions in previous years. As a rising power, Russia, far from being a pre-revolutionary basket case, inspired fear for the future in Germany. And as other recent histories have also done, July Crisis stresses the crucial role played by the ramshackle Austro-Hungarian Empire and its criminally reckless ruling elite.

But the best part of this virtuoso examination of the 38-day political and diplomatic crisis that stretched from the June 28, 1914, assassination of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand to Germany’s Aug. 1 declaration of war on Russia is the way Otte, a professor at the University of East Anglia, restores individual actors to where they should be: at the centre of historical events. Once it began, the First World War was so unpredictable in its course and so momentous in its outcomes— some of which, like the current Iraqi crisis,

WorldMags.net JULY 21, 2014

DONALD UHRBROCK/GETTY IMAGES

Plus a whole new look at the origins of the Great War, America’s famous Koch brothers, an unflinching look at elderly parents and a biography of Lee Grant

WorldMags.net

‘Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?’: In this candid graphic novel memoir, Roz Chast spares few details on parental aging

the world is still working through—that historians have increasingly tended to pin its outbreak on huge impersonal forces, a socioeconomic-technological horror story whose time had come. By poring over archival records and postwar memoirs (the latter with a properly jaundiced eye), Otte brings to light the calculations (mostly bad) and motivations of the handful of men whose decisions brought Europe to catastrophe.

For every ambassador who correctly read the mood in his posting and sent accurate but ignored warnings home (Germany’s man in London), there was another (the French ambassador to Russia) who misled both his own and his host government. In chanceries everywhere there were men obsessed with national prestige who knew what they were risking but who nonetheless were sure it was the other guy—also obsessed with national honour—who would back down.

Collectively, Otte judges persuasively, a century of general European peace had robbed the decision-makers of any tragic sense and the caution that might have brought. They didn’t so much sleepwalk into war as rush headlong into it, and were still astonished at what they wrought. BRIAN BETHUNE SONS OF WICHITA: HOW THE KOCH BROTHERS BECAME AMERICA’S MOST POWERFUL AND PRIVATE DYNASTY

ROZ CHAST

Daniel Schulman

There can be no question about it: Charles and David Koch are now the most despised monsters in the demonology of the North American left.

They are subjects of a level of paranoia and vilification that perhaps only Richard Nixon would be capable of appreciating. Try a Twitter search for “Koch brothers.” I find them,

in a matter of a few hours, blamed for the Iraq war, described as “evil incarnate,” accused by the press of a “plantation mentality,” and charged with “buying the Supreme Court” for the “GOP/NRA.” A supporter asks ironically if there are any Koch sisters to hate, in the interest of gender equality. (There aren’t.)

Their prominence is a bit of an accident, as Mother Jones senior editor Daniel Schulman documents in his biography of the duo who built the huge, ubiquitous conglomerate Koch Industries. The Kochs are part of a lineage of American oil-biz players with closely held fortunes and an itch for politics, but they are better known than, say, Herman and George Brown or Clint Murchison. The only reason this is so is that instead of perpetrating horrifying, untraceable crimes behind the scenes on behalf of puppet candidates, the Kochs have operated as deep-pocketed advocates of a small-government philosophy, pouring cash into intellectual organizations like the Cato Institute.

That is how it worked, anyway, for about 20 years. The Kochs have now become identified with the Republican party; the financial crisis and the “Tea Party” reaction, in Schulman’s account, pulled them into horse-race politics in sort of the way railroad timetables and war plans pulled peaceable nations into the First World War. Schulman’s book is fun as a classic American business clan story—remorseless dad constantly setting the boys against each other, mother weeping upstairs: you know the drill. But Schulman’s careful research and excruciating commitment to fairness raise the effort to another level. In his book you’ll find alleged war-lover Charles writing “Let’s get out of Vietnam now” op-eds in 1968 and being savaged by National Review in 1979. You’ll see brother David standing

as Libertarian candidate for vice-president, preaching a gay-rights, drug-legalization gospel during the apotheosis of Reaganism.

“Everything you know about X is wrong” may be a terrible cliché, but if the Koch brothers are really the devil, Sons of Wichita is their Paradise Lost. COLBY COSH CAN’T WE TALK ABOUT SOMETHING MORE PLEASANT? Roz Chast

Few topics are less pleasant to discuss than parental death in old age—the tortuous, indeterminate nature of the decay; how it forces children into a parental role; the way one is never prepared because it’s never discussed. So it’s a surprise and a relief that Roz Chast has taken it on in this raw, unflinchingly candid graphic memoir. The result is an unexpected page-turner that packs the wallop of great art.

Chast, a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker famed for her quavery, wry depictions of everyday angst, brings the same gimlet-eyed observation to her story as the only child of George and Elizabeth Chast, who lived into their nineties and died two years apart. Their lives—and eccentricities—are catalogued with fondness, exasperation and poignancy. Chast’s mother, an assistant principal with whom she had a strained relationship, was bossy and given to rages. Her father, a high school teacher, was her “kindred spirit,” Chast writes, a tentative man perplexed by the workings of a toaster. Together 69 years, the anxious couple shared a dependency that left Chast on the outside (“Aside from WW II, work, illness and going to the bathroom, they did everything together,” Chast writes).

Becoming their caregiver didn’t come nat-

WorldMags.net MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

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WorldMags.net Books

‘I Said Yes to Everything’: Lee Grant (left) tells her story of eight decades in Hollywood with humour and honesty, and less as a tell-all

I SAID YES TO EVERYTHING Lee Grant

Across a circuitous career that spans eight decades, actress Lee Grant has worked with a who’s who of Hollywood luminaries, stretching from Kirk Douglas to Warren Beatty. Grant, now 87, could have delivered a typical Tinseltown tell-all. Instead she shapes a gutsy tale, told with ballsy humour and naked honesty, of perseverance and survival.

Born Lyova Rosenthal and raised by a distant father and a supportive if overprotective mother, Grant got her start at age four in a tiny role in a Metropolitan Opera production.

At 23, she made her Broadway debut in Detec58

tive Story, playing a nameless shoplifter and earning rave reviews. Director William Wyler invited her to repeat the part on film, resulting in an Oscar nomination.

Her ascent seemed certain. But Joseph McCarthy’s showbiz witch hunt was at full gallop. Grant had married screenwriter Arnie Manoff, blacklisted for his Communist ties.

Though she never became an official party member, her name was added to the long list of alleged sympathizers in the damning tract Red Channels, and she found herself barred from film and TV work for a dozen years.

Still, Grant refused to be derailed. She freed herself from the psychologically abusive Manoff and, once the work ban finally lifted, relocated to L.A. There she found Emmywinning success opposite Mia Farrow and Ryan O’Neal in prime time’s sudsy Peyton Place, landed key roles in major films both landmark (In the Heat of the Night) and lamentable (Valley of the Dolls) and garnered three more Oscar nods, finally winning in 1976 for her bravura portrayal of a libidinous Beverly Hills matron in Beatty’s brilliantly satiric Shampoo. As she entered her fifties and decent roles became scarce, Grant reinvented herself as a director, becoming a gifted specialist in documentaries, including 1986’s Oscar-winning Down and Out in America. Along the way, she fell for plumber-turned-dancer-turnedTV-commercial-director-turned-producer Joey Feury, 10 years her junior. A half-century later, they’re still together.

Lee Grant never set out to be a fighter or a trailblazer. She simply wanted to act. Forced to progress from naive to streetwise, from demure to scrappy, she ultimately got all she desired. For better and for worse, she did say yes to everything, forging a journey not just to stardom but also to hard-won self-actualization. CHRISTOPHER LOUDON

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LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

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

WorldMags.net JULY 21, 2014

THE KOBAL COLLECTION

urally, writes Chast, who spares few grisly details: the awfulness of visiting potential “assisted living” centres; self-loathing at her worry about the hideous expense (at one point, monthly care topped $8,000); the indignities of bedsores, dementia and incontinence; and modern medicine’s ability to leave the aged in painful, humiliating, long-lasting “suspended animation”—not living, not dying.

Yet even at its most gruesome, Chast’s memoir, which is punctuated with photographs, her mother’s poetry and line drawings of her mother’s last hours, abounds with kinetic energy and humour. Even after death, her parents are with her, literally, in two urns in her closet after she rejected the suggestion their ashes be comingled. Her mother was so dominant, she wanted her father to have more space in death, she writes—“still close but independent.” Now Chast controls the narrative, sort of — taking a topic her parents refused to confront and defiantly turning it into something people are destined to talk about. ANNE KINGSTON

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WorldMags.net Film

Years in the life: Richard Linklater’s film tells the story of a young Texan boy, Mason Evans Jr. (played by Ellar Coltrane), in close to real time

A long decade’s journey into film Boyhood is a haunting look at the ‘voluptuous panic’ of adolescence and aging

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“Because it’s such a conceptual effort,” Malcolm Harris writes in the online magazine The New Inquiry, “it seems almost unfair to judge Boyhood as a narrative feature.” But arguing that Boyhood is something other than a conventional movie, discounting it as “conceptual,” glosses over what Linklater has achieved. In a film that moves without contrivance with the young man at its centre, nothing and everything happens. Characters learn lessons and grow up and go camping and shoot guns and fall in and out of love— Patricia Arquette, as Mason and Samantha’s upwardly mobile single mom, cycles through husbands, her desire for security drawing her to a string of abusive drunks. Linklater lets these things happen at the unhurried pace of time itself. He even lets plot threads develop in ellipses, suggesting micro-dramas in the spaces we don’t see, as when a teenage Mason Jr. argues with his dad about his rightful claim to a vintage GTO, promised to him (so he argues) in a scene we never see.

In films like School of Rock, Linklater has expressed a rare sensitivity to what one Boyhood character calls the “voluptuous panic” of youth. Kids are free to drink beer and smoke pot and horse around without the hand of narrative repercussion slamming down. As in Bernie, Slacker and Waking Life,

Boyhood empathizes with the oddballs that dot the periphery of a certain American adolescence: the Tourettic loners stalking the suburbs, the conspiracy theorists slumped in the booths of all-night diners, the Biblethumping backwoods Texans more commonly rendered as no-dimensional caricatures.

Watching these characters orbit in and out of one another’s lives gives a sense of actually watching people—not canned archetypes, but fully formed people—get older. Time’s movement over the film establishes an uncommon intimacy with its cast, a sense that we truly know them. It feels like a consummate work for Linklater, who has long been engrossed with the spaces people occupy, how they change over time—whether in the allnight party of Dazed and Confused or the 18 years separating Before Sunrise from Before Midnight.

He even has the indolent liquor-store clerk from Dazed reprise his role, suggesting that all his films take place in the same narrative world.

This proximity is the core of Boyhood, and it’s more impressive than managing a cast’s schedules for 10-plus years or making nine feature films while shooting it. The gimmick becomes invisible, and Boyhood feels less conceptual than classical: form and narrative in harmony. Rare is a film that’s so bottomless in its generosity and affection.

Linklater has long been engrossed with the spaces people occupy, how they change over time

WorldMags.net JULY 21, 2014

MATT LANKES/THE NEW YORK TIMES SYNDICATE/REDUX

Years ago, in a university survey of American cinema, a professor prefaced a screening of Robert Altman’s ambling epic Nashville with a bracing admonition, something to the effect of, “If you don’t like Nashville, you should have serious misgivings about what you want out of a motion picture.” Being told to like something can feel a bit hectoring. But some films just may demand that sort of line-in-thesand passion. Boyhood, the latest from American filmmaker Richard Linklater (Before Sunrise, Bernie, School Of Rock), is one. It’s a film this writer has watched, twice now, largely behind a mist of tears provoked by the film’s grace notes of fuzzy adolescent nostalgia.

Plenty has been made of Boyhood’s production. Linklater gathered his cast for a few weeks a year over the course of more than a decade, mapping the adolescence of a Texan boy named Mason Evans Jr. (Ellar Coltrane) in close to real time. The boy’s aging is marked as much by the acne flecking his face as by progressing pop cultural references (Dragonball Z, Harry Potter, Halo) and political movements (Bush’s Fallujah invasion, the Obama-Biden ticket). Imagine Michael Apted’s Up Series (documentaries that catch up with 14 British people every seven years) crossbred with Linklater’s own meandering day-in-the-life surveys (Dazed and Confused, Slacker, the Before trilogy) and you begin to get a sense of the scale of the accomplishment.

BY JOHN SEMLEY ·

WorldMags.net Taste

Hooked: It sounds like it’s out of Portlandia, but ThisFish is a groundbreaking traceability program for an industry plagued with illegal practices

Hi, I’ll be your dinner tonight Meet your fish: how it lived, how it died, the guy who caught it. Bon appétit!

At the small fish shop Hooked, in Toronto’s Kensington Market, the salesman wrapped the tail end of my wildcaught king salmon in brown paper, then jotted down a code: A432273. As instructed, I keyed it into a website called ThisFish.info.

Until that moment, I’d had the odd brief exchange with the trout fisherman at a local weekly market, but this experience was more along the lines of discovering a Melville-esque account of that night’s dinner.

It started on a personal note: “Your king chinook was harvested by Evan Martin off Kyuquot Sound and landed fresh in Zeballos, B.C.” Every fish purchased through ThisFish has a story. This one’s was that it was harvested in mid-April using hook-and-line troll, meaning it was individually hooked and hauled aboard by hand. King chinooks, I was told, typically weigh in at more than 14 kg, and have a velvety texture and an almost buttery flavour. Then there was the matter of getting to know Evan Martin, skipper of the Arctic II, who has 39 years under his belt at sea; there was a friendly photo of him, and an email. I met the processor next: 7 Seas, which merged with Pasco last year; both are committed to “a transparent approach.” The last link was Hooked, where I bought the fish, which notes that this was the first spring salmon of the 2014 season. Each category offered “more info,” but, as my appetite increased, I stopped reading and started cooking.

While it may sound right out of the hipsterparody show Portlandia, ThisFish is a traceability program that connects fishermen and

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY LAUREN CATTERMOLE

BY PAMELA CUTHBERT ·

processors, retailers and, ultimately, consumers. Using social media and videos uploaded at sea by fishermen, it’s the latest step in the movement to “know your farmer.” But, unlike the 100-mile mission, ThisFish sources its products as far away as Indonesia and Iceland. It’s a reflection of the industry, where a fish may be caught off the coast of Atlantic Canada, processed somewhere in the China Sea and then shipped frozen to just about anywhere. Most of that product has little or no record of provenance; it arrives as “fish.”

About six years ago, a group of small-scale fishermen approached the non-profit group Ecotrust Canada with an alternative. It starts with the fishermen, who identify the catch with a code or tag. Individual digital dashboards at ThisFish monitor tracing activity, such as the details of the catch.

The information is uploaded onto the website, then details are added about processing and shipping. Finally, the code goes from retailer to consumer or chef, and the tale is served up.

ThisFish supplies big and small retailers, including Sobeys, and about 25 restaurants, such as Starfish in Toronto and the River Café in Calgary, with everything from Atlantic butterfish to halibut, lobster and scallops.

Robert Clark of C Restaurant in Vancouver says in a video that ThisFish enabled him to source lingcod for his menus. “I love lingcod,”

he says, “but I didn’t have any way of being sure where it was coming from.”

The concern is not only disappearing ocean stocks; the global fishing industries are increasingly under fire for illegal harvesting and misinformation. The Guardian’s recent sixmonth investigation into the prawn business in Thailand traced shrimp carried by chains, including Wal-Mart, to conditions of slavery on fishing boats. Indefensible practices effectively keep the shrimp low-cost, it argued.

“Without traceability, it’s impossible to know where, who, when, and even what [our seafood] is,” says chef Ned Bell of the Four Seasons Vancouver Yew Bar. Last year, the environmental group Oceana found that a third of all fish and seafood sold in U.S. cities was mislabelled.

And the Marine Policy agency found that around a third of wild-caught seafood imported into the U.S. is likely illegally harvested. President Barack Obama announced a program last month to fight the problem.

If it all seems too tangled a web, ThisFish offers relief. The site’s invitation to write directly to the fishermen has proven overwhelmingly popular. Ecotrust’s Tasha Sutcliffe says, “We’ve had some challenges about the level of transparency, and some concerns about expectations, but, by far, the biggest response is ‘Thank you.’ Most everyone just wants to write in with a simple thank-you.”

My king chinook was harvested off Kyuquot Sound by Evan Martin, skipper of the Arctic II

WorldMags.net MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

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WorldMags.net TV

Wrinkles and all: Cattrall produced, and stars with Don McKellar in, Sensitive Skin, a dark comedy about a couple going through mid-life crisis

Back to the city, with a lot less sex A more reflective, wry Kim Cattrall emerges in her first television series in 10 years

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small Anglican chapel in Manhattan for the latest installation by Sophie Calle, the French conceptual artist and academic, a close friend.

In the piece, a tribute to Calle’s late mother, Monique, Cattrall recorded excerpts from the mother’s diary that echo over the art, including a photo of the contents of her coffin and a video capturing her last breath.

The losses endemic to middle age fascinate Cattrall, 57. This is when it all happens, she says, “whether it’s divorce, or a job or a parent.” Those narratives are oddly absent from TV, especially for comedies, and especially when it comes to women. Though the movie industry is slowly realizing the boxoffice power of mature audiences—the $10-million Best Exotic Marigold Hotel raked in $137 million—the small screen remains the domain of the absurdly young. “The only way I will go back to television is if I can tell a story that hasn’t been told, particularly about playing a woman my own age. I wanted to go beyond the stereotype,” she says. “Time is of the essence, not just for Davina but for me, in the stories that I want to tell. That’s where I want to spend my time.”

Focusing on a couple with wrinkles and a grown child makes Sensitive Skin “weirdly fresh,” McKellar says. The series’ seasoned talent pool isn’t limited to Cattrall and McKellar, who could get away with playing

an indie darling for some years yet, but is now 50 with a resumé that includes a Genie for Exotica, an award at Cannes for his directorial debut Last Night and a Tony for The Drowsy Chaperone. Supporting roles are filled by veteran actors including Elliott Gould, Colm Feore and Mary Walsh, while one of the best characters is the oldest: Toronto, going through its own mid-life crisis through an explosive condo construction boom. “The new developments are the new sports-car cliché for the city,” notes McKellar.

The odyssey to get Sensitive Skin made culminated with a very lean shoot last autumn, recounts Cattrall, also an executive producer: “I felt like a wife, a mother, an executive, an actor.” Most of the clothes and jewellery were her own; she spurned au courant fashions for ageappropriate designs befitting a former model. “Her delusions are in her head, not in her hemline,” she says drily.

To nail the long-term chemistry needed between characters, Cattrall brought a net and volleyball to rehearsals. “We thought, ‘Oh, this is a fun little bonding game,’ ” McKellar recalls. “It turned out to be vicious.”

Cattrall wasn’t dangerous, he hastens to add, but very serious. “It’s not like you’re going to laughingly tap the ball.” Her volleyball bonding technique worked—the proof is on the screen.

The losses of middle age fascinate her. ‘Time is of the essence, not just for Davina, but for me.’

WorldMags.net JULY 21, 2014

RHOMBUS MEDIA

After Sex and the City went off the air in 2004, actress Kim Cattrall was inundated with Hollywood pitches for her to recreate Samantha, the cougar she played on the brittle New York comedy. She turned them all down. Then she talked to a BBC producer about adapting a series called Sensitive Skin about a woman going through a mid-life crisis. “A half-hour comedy. Well okay, sure, how do you make that funny?” she recalls. “I saw the first episodes and was completely hooked.”

It’s taken eight years for Cattrall to get her North American version of the original made, but Sensitive Skin airs on HBO Canada starting July 20, with the six-part first season available on demand following the premiere. The slyly witty comedy centres around a longmarried couple, Davina (Cattrall) and Al (Don McKellar). He’s a pop culture columnist; she’s a former model who works in an art gallery.

“I say it’s about a couple—she probably says it’s about a woman—who moves downtown to revivify their relationship and it sort of backfires,” says McKellar, who also directs the series. “Is ‘happy enough’ good enough for you?” one acquaintance asks Al. For Cattrall, it marks her first return to a television series since Sex. After its finale, she returned to theatre where the roles are “especially good for a woman my age.” What followed was a series of acclaimed roles in Toronto, New York City and London’s West End including last year’s Sweet Bird of Youth at the Old Vic. This summer her voice fills a

BY PATRICIA TREBLE ·

WorldMags.net Web

Watch them play: With its old-school graphics, Minecraft has spawned an art form: videos made by players based on worlds they build in-game

There’s millions in those blocks Minecraft isn’t just a game; it’s a community and, for some players, a great living When Markus Persson created Minecraft in 2009, he did it as a side project that he hoped would earn him enough money in the short term to allow him to design games for a long time. Little did he know that five years later, it would grow to sell 35 million copies, with nearly 100 million players worldwide, spawning a subculture including YouTube stars, and far surpassing popular games like New Super Mario Bros Wii (which launched in the same year, and as of March had sold 28.6 million copies). While its success is attributed to multiple factors—nostalgic graphics, endless creative possibilities—the social community it has sparked may be the biggest.

Minecraft is neither aesthetically polished nor wholly original. Its graphics are rudimentary, albeit charmingly old-school; comparisons are often drawn to Lego. Its appeal is that building-block platform, which allows users to play in one of two modes—Creation, where you make buildings and cities, or Survival, where you explore and fight off enemies. These modes make it attractive to gamers who love to create infinite worlds, and those who like hunting monsters. A parental bonus is that kids, while in Creation mode, aren’t engaged in any violence. Remarkably, despite the game having no discernable end or goal, players both young and old can’t seem to get enough of it.

“There are multitudes of different varieties of worlds that are possible to play in,” says Alex Leavitt, a Ph.D. candidate at the Uni-

MINECRAFT

BY MARILISA RACCO ·

versity of Southern California, who has studied the popularity and production of Minecraft. “The community also adds modifications that allow features from other games to be brought in, so players don’t get bored.” Crossbreeding Minecraft with a Star Wars mod, for example, allows a player to travel through the desert or build the Death Star.

The game has “shown the power involved in not filling your product with content,” says Daniel Goldberg, co-author of Minecraft: The Unlikely Tale of Markus “Notch” Persson and the Game that Changed Everything. “It actually has more in common with social media outlets like Facebook or Twitter than it does with other video games.” Experts credit the oft-cited social aspect for its appeal.“If you give people a game where they can literally build worlds, they’ll tell a million stories,” says Luke Plunkett of the gaming blog Kotaku.

For some, those stories have translated into a living. Joseph Garrett, a 23-year-old recent university grad in Portsmouth, England—whose Minecraft YouTube channel, Stampylonghead, gets five million hits a day, more than One Direction and Justin Bieber—has been able to quit his day job and make Minecraft videos full-time.

The absurd popularity of Minecraft gameplay videos is an anomaly even in the gaming world. Other popular players like Adam Dahl-

berg, a.k.a. SkyDoesMinecraft, and Mitch Hughes, “the Bajan Canadian,” both earn from $200,000 to $2 million yearly for their game-play videos, commentary and, in the latter’s case, parodies such as a Minecraftdesigned Hunger Games spoof. Kurt J. Mac has added an altruistic aspect by raising money for Child’s Play, a non-profit that provides toys and books to hospitalized children. Mac’s video series, called Far Lands or Bust!, tracks his journey to the game’s “far lands,” an area at the edge of Minecraft’s seemingly infinite world where the terrain becomes distorted.

“I started by making normal YouTube videos but I got bored pretty soon,” he says. “Notch had mentioned the ‘far lands’ and that no one had ever walked there, so I decided to try to do that. I made the connection [that it’s] kind of like a walkathon, and I decided to start raising money.” He’s raised over $180,000. Three years in, Mac has quit his job as a web designer and lives off ad revenues.

At the end of the day, what players connect with is a feeling of belonging to a world inhabited by people who share in the wonder of creation. “Minecraft is a story about the way modern technology and the Internet have affected creativity and what it means to be an artist,” Goldberg says. With 100 million pairs of eyes watching, it’s bound to flourish for a while to come.

One 23-year-old who quit his job to make ‘Minecraft’ videos gets five million hits a day, more than Bieber

WorldMags.net MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

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WorldMags.net Challenge

4. What sport is believed to have descended

The Quiz This week, we test your trivia skills on everything from the Second World War to the TV series 24 Round 1: Honour roll

Round 3: Rhodes Scholar

The flag of what country is featured on more flags of other countries than any other?

2. What weather condition is nicknamed a zephyr?

3. What was the first movie to ever pass the $1-billion mark at the box office?

4. What is the oldest NHL team to never have won the Stanley Cup? 5. In time, what does a.m. stand for?

6. What is the name of the inn and pub in Hogsmeade frequented by Harry and his friends in the Harry Potter book series?

7. The hottest temperature ever recorded on land was 58° C. On what continent did this happen?

8. What stands as the largest seaborne invasion in history, with almost one million troops disembarking from the mission’s beginning until its completion?

9. What metal is often prescribed to treat psychiatric patients?

10. Second only to the conductor, traditionally, which instrument does the leader of an orchestra play?

1. Which famous person led the Salt March in

1930 to protest the British monopoly on salt?

2. What cartoon characters were known for wearing Phrygian caps, which symbolized freedom in early modern Europe?

3. Lake Vostok is the largest lake on which continent?

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

1. ‘You can be a racist against people who eat little red apples’ Sting

2. ‘I certainly don’t want to leave [my children] trust funds that are albatrosses round their necks’

Round 2: Prodigy 1. What natural process occurs in things known

as chloroplasts?

2. Rothschild, Kordofan, Nubian and Rhodesian are all species of which animal?

3. What is Kellogg’s most successful food item, having been invented in 1964 to compete with Post’s Country Squares?

4. In golf, “Texas wedge” is a nickname for what club?

5. In which European country is the poodle believed to have originated?

6. Which country’s flag was the first to be placed on the moon?

7. What TV series returned to the small screen this year after four years off the air?

8. Who devised the terms “introvert” and “extrovert”?

9. In the 2000 film Cast Away, how many years is Chuck, played by Tom Hanks, stranded on the island?

10. At almost 1.5 million people, what is the most populous U.S. state capital?

Lorde

3. ‘He is presumed guilty without any evidence, only hearsay’ 4. ‘I don’t see a female without clothing as a terrible influence. There are worse things.’

Nazanin Afshin-Jam

Doug Ford

ROUND 1: 1. Great Britain 2. Wind 3. Titanic 4. St. Louis Blues 5. Ante meridiem 6. Three Broomsticks 7. Africa 8. D-Day (Operation Overlord) 9. Lithium 10. Violin ROUND 2: 1. Photosynthesis 2. Giraff e 3. Pop-Tarts 4. Putter 5. Germany 6. Soviet Union 7. 24 8. Carl Jung 9. Four years 10. Phoenix ROUND 3: 1. Gandhi 2. The Smurfs 3. Antarctica 4. Tennis 5. Red Sea and Mediterranean Sea 6. Laptop 7. Vladimir Putin 8. Lewis C. Carroll 9. Grows two sets of teeth 10. Led Zeppelin ROUND 4: 1. Doug Ford 2. Sting 3. Nazanin Afshin-Jam 4. Lorde

64

WorldMags.net JULY 21, 2014

LUCAS JACKSON/REUTERS; ADRIAN WYLD/CP; SONIA RECCHIA/GETTY IMAGES; STEVE RUSSELL/CP

1.

from the 12th-century French game known as jeu de paume (game of the palm)?

5. What two bodies of water are connected by the Suez Canal?

6. The Gavilan SC, released in 1983, was the first computer described as what?

7. Which current world leader is the co-author of the book Judo: History, Theory, Practice?

8. Which children’s author is thought by some to be a suspect in the Jack the Ripper case?

9. If a mammal, like a human, is described as diphyodont, what occurs during its lifetime?

10. Which band, which had eight consecutive No. 1 albums in the U.K., never released a single in the U.K.? TERRANCE BALAZO

WorldMags.net Feschuk

Delicate etiquette: It’s hard to know what to say to the party guest who collects foil wrappers and only communicates in grunts and clicks

Maybe if I had a smoke bomb . . .

How to end a conversation at a party, and other of life’s enigmas unravelled As youngsters, we are told there’s an upside to growing older: the acquisition of wisdom. But when does the “being wise” thing begin to kick in? I’m starting to worry because I’ve hit middle age and haven’t yet answered the following questions: 1. Where should I look when I’m standing at a urinal?

I’ve peed dozens of times in my life (rough estimate), so by all rights I should have mastered this. But if anything, I’m starting to over-think it. A monologue runs through my head: “I’m peeing and I’m staring straight ahead. But there’s nothing to look at except the nooks and crannies of this cinder block.

So many crannies. Wait, now I’m having a chat with the guy next to me. Should I look at him? If I look at him, will he think I’m trying to, you know, look at him? If I keep staring ahead, will he think I’m a lunatic? Curse you for getting me into yet another mess, beer!”

Gazing stubbornly at a blank wall seems like a curious choice until you consider the alternatives. For instance, no one wants to be Stares Downward the Whole Time Guy. He looks as though he’s trying to remember how to do it right.

These days, a small minority of restrooms feature TV screens to occupy the eye. Even a local advertisement can be a godsend. Wait, Bob’s Marina now sells LIVE BAIT? I find this so fascinating that I am going to reread this

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH MACKINNON

BY SCOTT FESCHUK ·

ad again just to be certain. Yessiree, live bait!

Nice upgrade, Bob. 2. Which sign-off should I use to conclude an email?

I’ve spent way too much time thinking about this. Like many, I used “Cheers” for a while—but frankly that only works for people who can get away with saying “Cheers” in real life, which narrows the field to: - British people.

- Your friend who went to England for two weeks and, a decade later, still insists on using the word lorry.

- Beyoncé (she can do anything).

I used “Best” for a while, and “All best.” I also tried a lighthearted approach: “Some best,” “Lukewarm regards,” that kind of thing.

Inspired by the inventors of TTYL, I guess one option is to create a series of capital letters that others will be fooled into believing is an acronym so cutting-edge that they can’t hope to understand it: BYDDSXF, Scott 3. How should I end a conversation at a party?

Back in university, it was simple. Most people concluded party chit-chats by employing the surefire tactic of vomiting. Barf is nature’s conversation stopper. Those of us in middle age, however, find ourselves in an awkward place: too old to throw up publicly, but not yet old enough to adopt the technique favoured by the elderly members of my family—the hollering of: “This is boring. I’m bored. YOU’RE

BORING ME WITH YOUR FACE HOLE.” (And I’d be, like, “Fine, Grandma, but I thought you’d want to hear about me winning the science fair.”)

There are some who are naturals at this.

We’ve all seen them in action, moving freely about the party. When they want to extract themselves, they simply lure in some unsuspecting dope. All of a sudden, it’s “Scott, have you met Derek? Derek collects foil wrappers, suffers the intermittent agony of an inflamed bowel and communicates exclusively using a series of grunts and clicks.” Seconds later, it’s just the two of you.

Me: Um, how about dairy? Can you eat dairy?

Derek: [Two sad clicks.]

For years, I’ve ended such conversations by claiming to need to use the washroom.

But people are usually on to me. And even if they’re happy I’m gone, they’re still a bit miffed that I cut out before they did.

This would appear to leave only two options: 1. Smoke bomb!

2. Carry two drinks at all times. This way, I can engage in a brief conversation—then politely excuse myself by saying: “Sorry, I need to bring this drink to my wife/friend/ horse” (the latter for saloon conversations only). It seems like a foolproof escape plan.

In practice, however, it just means that I have two drinks in my possession, and then one drink, and then I’ve finished both drinks and really need to use the washroom.

And so we meet again, urinal wall.

Follow Scott Feschuk on Twitter @scottfeschuk

WorldMags.net MACLEAN’S MAGAZINE

65

WorldMags.net The End

1945-2014

John Richard Stevenson John Richard Stevenson was born on May 25, 1945, in Winnipeg. He was the fourth of six children born to John Sidney Stevenson, a real estate executive, and Mary Cecilia Stevenson, a socialite and homemaker.

The family lived in a three-storey home in affluent south Winnipeg, but the children spent little time in it. Afternoons were spent playing games outside until well after the street lamps blinked on. There was plenty of teasing and pranks. “Sibling rivalry was pretty high with the three younger ones of us,” says Richard’s sister Cathy—but it was all out of love. Dick, as his friends called him, was the more adventurous and quirky of his siblings, says Cathy. He loved the outdoors, from camping trips with Scouts Canada to summer trips to a cottage in Ontario’s Lake of the Woods.

Dick was whip-smart, says Cathy, but easily distracted in school by other pursuits or research into some new technology that fascinated him. “He was the one of us who marched to a different drum,” she says. “You admired that, but you worried for him.”

He graduated a few years late from high school (it wasn’t until adulthood that he was diagnosed with attention deficit disorder), but his trademark optimism persisted.

After graduating, he took a few different jobs, working as a CN porter, a publisher’s rep and a salesman for a photocopier company. In 1971, he implored a friend to introduce him to an Eaton’s sales clerk who worked for her named Maria Lech. Maria was from the city’s north end and was a bit intimidated by the prominent Stevenson name. Eventually, she agreed to a date, and a nervous Richard spilled red wine all over her.

He begged for another chance and, when he got one, poured a cocktail on her again. “So he says, ‘Okay, third date, I promise I won’t spill anything,’ ” says Maria with a laugh. “He had these puppy-dog eyes, and he was such a smooth talker. He would infuriate you one minute, but then he’d smile, and you’d go, ‘oh, okay.’ ” In 1973, they got married. In 1989, they had a daughter, Terra.

Richard always had big dreams and, along with Maria, launched a number of businesses. They designed cruise ship uniforms, cofounded and sold two successful ice cream shops named Dari-Works, 66

and ran a fried chicken franchise. Some of his other ideas were a bit more quixotic: His sister remembers he started a movie rental store just before Blockbuster entered the market, and his most ambitious plan was an amusement park and resort facility near Kelowna, B.C. “It was going to be our Disneyland,” says Maria. Like many of his ideas, it didn’t pan out—but his enthusiasm never waned.

When he wasn’t staying up late plotting his next big idea, he was obsessing over Winnipeg sports, in particular the Blue Bombers, for which he held season tickets for decades. His close friend Wilf Entz, who regularly went with him to games, remembers that Dick would rattle off statistics, soak up pre- and post-game shows, participate in radio call-in programs, and buy memorabilia, including a jersey of favourite quarterback Buck Pierce— not long before he was traded away, Wilf recalls with a laugh. At one game years ago, Wilf remembers the two of them left the stadium with the score seemingly out of reach for the Bombers. But as soon as they left, they heard a loud roar— a last-second turnover gave Winnipeg the upset win. Richard vowed to never leave a game early, and he never did again.

Richard was fearless. He tried everything—flying planes, water skiing, surfing, diving—and fell in love with motorcycles. There were a few close calls, including a crash that broke his jaw six years ago.

“But there was nothing that absolutely scared him,” says Maria. In recent years, he started biking to Bomber games, claiming that he had put on a few pounds. “Motorcycles, that was freedom to him—biking was a close second,” Maria says. This worried Maria and Wilf. “Watch out for motorists, and make sure you’re wearing your helmet,” was Maria’s typical refrain; “I will look out, and yes I’m wearing my helmet,” was his usual reply.

On June 9, Stevenson hopped on his bike to go to his beloved Bombers’ first pre-season game. He was riding along a busy stretch of Pembina Highway when he was struck so hard by a driver his helmet flew off. When people came to his aid, Richard was frustrated that they wouldn’t let him leave. “I’ve got a Bomber game to go to,” he said. He died in hospital the next day of his head injury.

He was 69. ADRIAN LEE

WorldMags.net JULY 21, 2014

ILLUSTRATION BY TEAM MACHO

He marched to his own drum and was full of ambitious plans.

He was fearless, and obsessive about his beloved Blue Bombers.

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