A Bit More Detail

[LINK] "Crime down in Toronto"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:02:14 GMT

The Toronto Star's Francine Kopun has on that apper's front page an article that happens to have somewhat ironic timing considering last night's events, "Crime down in Toronto".

Greater Toronto is the safest large metropolitan area in the country, according to a report released yesterday by Statistics Canada.

Among urban areas with a population of 500,000 or more, Toronto residents reported fewer crimes per capita than residents of Montreal, Vancouver and Ottawa. Winnipeg had the highest crime rate, followed by Edmonton.

It is the first time that Toronto has scored last place when it comes to crime in the country's biggest cities. That spot is usually reserved for Quebec City, which reported the lowest crime rate of any large metropolitan area every year from 1991 to 2006. In 2007, however, Quebec City reported 4,524 crimes per 100,000 people, compared to Toronto's figure of 4,461.

The annual national crime report is compiled by the Canadian Centre for Justice Statistics, based on police-reported crime statistics.

It contradicts what seems to be a growing public perception that Toronto is rife with random violence – like the death of John O'Keefe, killed by a stray bullet on Yonge St. in January; or Hou Chang Mao, killed in gunfight crossfire a few days later in East Chinatown; or Dylan Ellis and Oliver Martin, shot dead in their SUV in front of Trinity Bellwoods Park in June.

[. . .]

The rate of violent offences in Toronto – 709 per 100,000 – puts it in the safest third of the pack of CMAs with a 500,000-plus population.

The murder rate in Toronto CMA in 2007 was 2.0 per 100,000, which was middle of the pack for the country's nine largest CMAs. Winnipeg's rate was the highest at 3.6.

But in 2007, Toronto had the most homicides of any CMA – 111 – and its highest rate since 1992.

[. . .]

The Toronto CMA, as defined by Statistics Canada, includes York, Peel, Halton and Durham and Orangeville police statistics as well as statistics from Ontario Provincial Police in Caledon, Nottawasaga, Aurora, Whitby and Mono.

[LINK] Some Friday Links

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:37:12 GMT

First, from The Toronto Star, confirmation that two people were shot, one a woman who was hit in the ankle by a bullet, the other a man who seems to have been shot in the chest. Police are still looking for the suspect. (Another, fatal, shooting has taken place in east-end Toronto, outside an apartment building where someone had gotten shot on Saturday. Guess which one will get more media attention in the morning papers.) Cultural capital, people, cultural capital.

The Lousnbury at 'Aqoul has an extended post ("Ya Rayah...Ch7al nedmou lebad l-ghafline qblek: Southern Med & Socio Economics" on the generally positive prospects for solid economic growth across most of the Middle East and North Africa.

Roger at blogTo starts an interesting conversation about bike theft from the recent arrest of a used bike shop owner for ... stealing bikes. (Double locks leave me feeling safest.)
Centauri Dreams wonders what the chances are for the discovery of life on Saturn's water-geyser moon of Enceladus and if we're already able to detect it.

Language Log's Arnold Zwicky isn't overfond of an excess of links.

Strange Maps features a am f the world as seen from Paris, originally designed by a French magazine and publicized by a Swedish journalist.

Finally, Martin Wisse reinforced from a recent annafdd comment elsewhere on the extreme subjectivity of the "race" used in "racism."

[URBAN NOTE] More street violence

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 03:51:09 GMT

The people I spoke to were right.

Somebody got shot at the By The Way Cafe in the Annex.

Six gunshots heard at 10:55 pm from outside our window. There's a crowd outside in shock.

Edit: 2 people shot and the ETF just arrived.

By the Way Café, located on 400 Bloor Street West in the middle of The Annex neighbourhood, isn't a place that I think I've ever eaten at, denizen of "Annex boulevardiers, academics and bon vivants bask in the leisurely pace of this quaint corner bistro, pleasantly conversing over Middle Eastern-inspired dishes as the Bloor crowd buzzes by" though it might be. I've certainly passed it innumerable times.

How did I get involved? I was walking west along Bloor Street West when, after I crossed Spadina Avenue, I began to hear sirens and see ambulances and police cars moving about. People were starting to crush together for a view, and I asked some people what had happened. Finally, at the corner of Bloor and Bathurst, I came across two people who saw something.

- They were standing in front of the CIBC [at the corner of Bloor and Bathurst], and they shot a guy in front of the By the Way cafe. He didn't look good, his friend who was holding him was crying.

I'm sure that we'll be hearing more of this later. Things like this just aren't supposed to happen, certainly not in The Annex. At least I was ten minutes too late, this time, to get interviewed by the police.

[LINK] "Upscale U.S. retail group buys Hudson's Bay Co."

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 20:43:10 GMT

The Ottawa Citizen is not alone in noting the latest events encountered by the Hudson's Bay Company.

Hudson's Bay Co., the Canadian retailer whose name is synonymous with the country's frontier past, was bought yesterday by the U.S.-based private equity fund that owns the Lord & Taylor department store chain, one of the oldest names in American retailing.

NRDC Equity Partners did not place a value on the deal, but said it would invest $500 million into the combined company, which also owns specialty U.S. retailer Fortunoff and Creative Design Studios.

Founded in 1670, Hudson's Bay Co. is North America's oldest continuously operating company. Its banners include The Bay, Zellers and Home Outfitters, and it has more than 580 stores nationwide.

With yesterday's deal, the combined companies will make up more than $8 billion in retail sales and employ 75,000 employees, NRDC said.

Richard Baker, NRDC's current CEO, who will serve as the head of the new holding company called Hudson's Bay Trading Co., said in an interview that the deal will allow for a huge potential in synergies.

Lord & Taylor could launch 10 to 15 stores in Canada in an effort to bridge the gap between The Bay and the more high-end Holt Renfrew. The stores would be in prime locations, either through existing HBC properties or within flagship Bay stores.

Mr. Baker said the company could take "oversized" Bay locations, such as its 900,000-square-foot store in downtown Toronto, and better utilize the space by putting in a Lord & Taylor or Fortunoff as well.

"Part of the problem The Bay has is they have too many way oversized stores in great markets, and we have the answer, we're going to solve the problem," he said.

I find a certain pathos in the fact that the HBC, at its 19th century peak a great commercial monopoly that acted as the semi-sovereign authority of most of north-central North America, is now just another department store chain facing serious problems only with nice historic blankets.

[BRIEF NOTE] Two Niue Notes

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 15:53:34 GMT

The Toronto Star carries in today's edition an interesting article "Tiny island aims to be first non-smoking nation", originally written by Kathy Marks for The Independent, concerning the New Zealand-associated Polynesian island of Niue.

Niue, South Pacific–It is the world's smallest self-governing state, with a population of just 1,400 and few resources other than fish and coconuts. But the South Pacific island of Niue believes it can set an example by becoming the first country in the world to go smoke-free.

There are about 250 smokers on Niue, a speck of coral with a GDP of barely $4,600 per person, and local officials say the cost of treating smoking-related illnesses is placing a heavy strain on the health budget.

Sitaleki Finau, Niue's director of health, is backing a bill to prohibit smoking and the sale of tobacco in public areas and private homes. The bill has been presented to parliament, but the government has not yet signed on. Finau said he expected a ban to face stiff opposition from the tobacco industry and other commercial interests. But he urged MPs to be bold and vote for it.

"Small countries are allowed to be ambitious," he said. "If a small country can do this, then big countries will start thinking. Imagine what that means."

The government would lose revenue from tobacco taxes, but that would be more than offset by savings in the health budget, he said.

[. . .]

No date has been set for a vote, which could be two years away. Niue, 2,200 kilometres northeast of Auckland and 500 kilometres from Tonga, its nearest neighbour, is a former British protectorate. Britain gave it to New Zealand as a reward for the latter's contribution to the Anglo-Boer War, but since 1974 it has been independent "in free association" with Wellington.

Those who live on the island, 100 miles square, regard it as a South Pacific paradise. Beaches are heavenly, crime is non-existent and the plentiful seafood includes crabs so large that people walk them on leashes. The locals serenade each other on guitars while watching tropical sunsets.

Despite all that, everyone is leaving. The population is in steep decline, and some believe it has dropped below a sustainable level.

They aren't joking about that last bit. As Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand notes, emigration of Niueans to New Zealand has taken on astonishing proportions.

When 150 Niuean First World War troops landed for training in Auckland in 1915, they were greeted by the few Niueans who lived there. The 1936 census recorded 54 Niue-born residents in New Zealand. It was around this time that chain migration began, where family members established themselves in New Zealand so that others could follow. By 1943 the population had increased to 200. They grouped around the Auckland suburbs of Freemans Bay, Grey Lynn and Parnell. There, well-dressed men met in hotels to speak their native Niuean and sample the vai mamali (‘smiling water’).

In the First World War, 150 Niueans volunteered for active service. The majority had never been out of the tropics or eaten palagi (western) food. They spoke no English and had never worn shoes. In 1916, after training for three months at Narrow Neck camp in Auckland, they were dispatched to Egypt and France with the New Zealand Māori Contingent. Theirs is not a battlefield story; it is one of body and climate shock – 82% were hospitalised and many died as they had no immunity to European diseases. Returned soldiers had been exposed to a much wider world, and although most settled back on Niue, some grew footloose and migrated.
When tropical cyclones battered Niue in 1959 and 1960, new houses were built with New Zealand aid. But the introduction of modern conveniences changed Niuean attitudes. During the 1960s hundreds turned their backs on villages and bush gardens: ‘whole families flew away, wrote back and encouraged the others to follow’.1 This exodus was fuelled by the opening of Niue’s airport in 1971. And when Niue became self-governing in 1974, many Niueans hurried over, mistakenly thinking that they would no longer be able to enjoy residency rights in New Zealand.

Migration only slowed as numbers on Niue dwindled. The population had peaked at 5,200 in 1966; by 2003 Niue’s government estimated it at 1,700 (others put it as low as 1,300). In contrast, there were 14,424 Niueans in New Zealand in 1991; by 2006 there were 22,476 – 75% were New Zealand born. Niueans represent about 9% of New Zealand’s Pacific population. They rarely return to the atoll, and although they can draw a New Zealand pension in Niue, few take this option.

By 1981, Niueans in New Zealand had come to outnumber Niueans in Niue. This 2008 abstract suggests that three-quarters of all ethnic Niueans in the world now live in New Zealand along with two-thirds of the speakers of the Niuean language, as a simple consequence of the lack of opportunities on Nuie and traditional patterns of movement.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the Ainu

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 23:18:16 GMT

From The Economist's 10 July issue, filed from Sapporo, the article "A people, at last" takes a look at the new recognition lent to the Ainu people of Hokkaido, the northernmost, traditionally most isolated and most recently and intensively settled of Japan's four major islands.

The Ainu’s traditional heartland is Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan’s four main islands, on which the G8 summit has just been held. Not long ago, they were also found in Sakhalin and the Kurile islands. Although there had been a Japanese presence in south-west Hokkaido since the Middle Ages, it was only in the 19th century that it was annexed to become what the West was for America: a new frontier to be opened by persecuting the hunter-gatherers already there. While the Ainu called their place Ainu Mosir, "the land of human beings", Hokkaido means "the road to the northern sea", and the Japanese settling of their new frontier was every bit as brutal as America’s.

Today only 24,000 call themselves Ainu, most of them of mixed blood. Only ten native Ainu speakers remain, while a solitary century-old woman is thought to have a tattooed lip. The Ainu’s origins are vague. Certainly, they are related to ethnic groups in Russia’s far east. But one genetic marker is shared only by people in Tibet and the Andaman Islands. Jared Diamond, a biogeographer, says their mystery makes the Ainu the world’s most studied indigenous group. One thing is increasingly clear: they are more obviously the descendants of Japan’s original inhabitants, the Jomon, inventors of the world’s earliest pottery, than are modern Japanese, who are descended from later settlers from Korea. This infuriates Japan’s racial chauvinists.

So only now—and partly because of the spotlight from hosting the G8—has Japan’s parliament passed a resolution recognising the Ainu as a people in their own right. The first law about the Ainu that was passed, in 1899, defined them as aborigines in need of assimilation. But until the law’s repeal in 1997, Japan officially denied having any indigenous minorities.

The recognition, says Tadashi Kato, head of the Ainu Association of Hokkaido, comes dangerously late. But it may encourage more Ainu to admit to their identity, having concealed it because of discrimination at school and work, and in the marriage market. Mr Kato thinks that maybe ten times more than the official number think of themselves as Ainu, even if many are of mixed blood. He argues that the parliamentary resolution is just a first step. It offers no legal protection, and carries no obligations for the state. There is little talk yet of an apology for Japan’s past treatment of the Ainu, let alone a restitution of lands or hunting rights.

As noted here and elsewhere, the long-term prospects for the Ainu people aren't that good. The Sorbs of Germany certainly have their own issues, but they not only have a well-established tradition of government recognition but a fairly elaborate system of educational, media and even governmental institutions that they can draw upon. The Ainu so far lack all of these things, and on top of this have experienced significantly more assimilation than the Sorbs, with mother-tongue speakers of Ainu being countable in the dozens. (Not, I hasten to note, that Canada is much better in this regard.) Prospects for Ainu cultural survival aside, this recognition appeals to me if only as a matter of principle. Besides, it isn't as if a population of fifteen thousand people can overburden, financially or otherwise, a nation counting a bit more than 127 million in total.

[MUSIC] "Can science explain why ABBA is so catchy?"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:04:49 GMT

Sarah Rodman at the Boston Globe came up with this widely syndicated article.

ABBA's songs continue to endure as what scientists have dubbed "earworms" 35 years after the band's first album was released. Like those little bugs, the tunes burrow into our brains and keep hitting the repeat button.

With all this renewed interest, we wondered if it was possible to break down scientifically why the music is so irresistible. Because even those who profess to dislike the cheery pop of the Swedish masterminds can't block its infiltration into their inner jukebox.

Of course, what makes ABBA songs catchy is to an extent what makes most music memorable, from Bach to the Beatles to the Bernie & Phyl's jingle. But, says Daniel Levitin, author of "This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession" and associate professor at McGill University, there are some individual factors.

"For one thing, the way their songs are performed and produced, quite apart from the underlying composition, gives them an overall catchy sound," says Levitin, a musician and former producer whose forthcoming book, "The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature," further explores the music-mind connection.

The multitracked harmonies of singers Agnetha Faltskog and Frida Lyngstad awaken the part of our brains in which our inner caveman is still enjoying a Paleolithic hootenanny with the rest of his clan.

"If you look at the evolutionary biology of the species and the chemical reactions we have to events in the world, for tens of thousands of years when we as a species heard music we heard groups singing it, not an individual and not an individual standing on a stage," says Levitin. "So the ABBA model of the multiple voices or the Edwin Hawkins Singers singing 'Oh Happy Day' is much closer to stimulating these evolutionary echoes of what music really is, fundamentally - closer than, say, Frank Sinatra or Miley Cyrus."

In other words, if a caveman encased in ice were to be thawed out, revived, and immediately given a full iPod, he would respond more immediately to ABBA or a gospel choir than, say, free jazz. He might eventually dig Ornette Coleman, too, but the presentation of "Knowing Me, Knowing You" would sound more familiar.

The glossy production and compositional patterns of Sweden's fab four (or shall we say "fabelns fyra"?) also set off different neurological reactions that have medicinal powers. In the most upbeat of the group's songs, like "Money, Money, Money," the simplicity of ABBA's lyrics makes them easy to sing along to. In addition to the fizzy melodies, that participation, says Levitin, gives listeners "an even more powerful hit of happy juice in the brain from dopamine."

With sad songs in general, and in ABBA's case specifically with tracks like the more contemplative "The Winner Takes It All," listeners' brains produce an opposite but equally enjoyable reaction.

"You get the comfort hormone of prolactin when you hear sad music," says Levitin. "That's the same hormone that's released when mothers nurse their babies. It's soothing. And sometimes it's lyrics and sometimes it's music. I think it's most powerful when the two are well matched and you get what I would call an emergent property where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts."

[BRIEF NOTE] La question belge, une fois de plus

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 15:14:36 GMT

One of Spiegel Online's more recent news roundup sfrom German newspapers was "'Belgium Is the World's Most Successful Failed State'".

The Belgian Prime Minister Yves Leterme threw in the towel late on Monday night, saying he could not force through a consensus between the Flemish and French-speaking coalition partners.

Leterme offered his resignation (more...) to King Albert II, who has so far not formally accepted it. The king is now holding consultations with lawmakers expected to last several days.

In his statement, Leterme, head of the Flemish-speaking Christian Democrats, said the "federal consensus model has reached its limits" -- raising the specter of Belgium breaking up for good. The prime minister had a self-imposed July 15 deadline to come up with an agreement on constitutional reform.

The Financial Times, The Guardian, and Agence France-Presse all have more coverage, basically boiling down to the suggestion that Leterme was frustrated by his inability to forge a workable governing coalition, and, certainly, the ongoing disputes over Brussels and its frontiers doesn't help.

A question to people in Belgium and in surrounding regions: Are there any other themes that I'm missing to all this?

[BRIEF NOTE] Omar Khadr is doomed

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 20:24:34 GMT

Listening to CBC Toronto's 3 o'clock hourly news program, I was surprised to hear excerpts from a February 2003 interrogation of Canadian Security Intelligence Service of Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who has been held at the Guantanamo Bay prison facilities since his July 2002 capture by American forces following a firefight. It made for compelling listening as, against a background of Khadr (then 16) crying, a CSIS interrogator tried to soothe him with bromides like "I understand this is stressful" and "Just relax a bit". I laughed so hard at this that I lost my breath. (Video excerpts available here at the website of The Toronto Star).

Canada, unlike other Western countries like Britain and Australia, hasn't bothered to try to retrieve Khadr from Guantanamo but has instead opted to leave him to be tried by the United States government under fairly unfair conditions. Part of this might be due to the ideological complexion of the current Canadian government under the Conservatives, although it should be noted that the first two years saw the other major political party, the Liberals, at the helm. Part of this might be due to the behaviour of the surviving members of the Khadr family, who have given interviews condemning Canada as a corrupt and evil country and have been heavly involved in radical Islamism (Omar's father died in the American invasion of Afghanistan, while his brother is now a paraplegic as a result of his involvement in that same conflict).

Regardless, the video excerpts have attracted a lot of international attention, with journalists like Paul Lewis at The Guardian and, perhaps surprisingly given that paper's sympathies, Jonathan Kay at the National Post calling attention to the matter. Kay makes the point that Omar Khadr's neglect by the Canadian government is unconscionable, given that he was a child soldier who was raised by his parents to believe in violent Islamic, that if, in fact, he actually did kill a US medic (there's some doubt on that, since it might have been another jihadi or even another American soldier who threw the grenade) he was doing so in the middle of a firefight, and that in any case denying him appropriate medical intervention or threatening him with rape aren't exactly accepted penological methods.

All that aside, Khadr has been abandoned to the wolves. The Canadian government is not going to try to retrieve him. Here's to hoping that the military tribunals transcend their reputations, I suppose.

[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Canada and France

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 14:07:29 GMT

(I would have posted this on the 14th, but Livejournal.com went down for emergency maintenance. Sorry.)

I'd like to wish France and the French and any French readers a happy Bastille Day. The fact that the French and American national holidays happen to be separated on the calendar by only ten days is one of a series of minor coincidences linking the very significant French and American republics. Both regime are universalistic republics claiming to be radical breaks with the past despite being traditional and even archaic in some ways, both have long histories of successful mass immigration that happen to be politically contentious in the here-and-now, both have long histories of military unilateralism, et cetera. That may well be the source of Franco-American antagonisms, Mon semblable, mon frère, and all that.

As I noted back on the 4th of July, Canada owes its existence to the historical tensions between the French kingdom and the British colonies that would one day become the United States. The American republic has most certainly played a critical role in the formation of an independent Canada, by creating an Other against which Canadians (perhaps, especially, insecure English Canadians) could define themselves and helping to introduce the Loyalists into what had been a firmly Francophone central Canada. The various French republics (and assorted other regimes) haven't had nearly as much influence.

A good part of this is owing to the fact that France had been separated from Canada for a good while, the storming of the Bastille occurring 26 years after the Treaty of Paris handed Canada over to the British. The quelques arpents de neige of Voltaire don't seem to have ever been treated seriously, and the assimilation of the colonists taken as a given. Thus, in 1831 de Tocqueville was quite surprised to hear hundreds of thousands of Lower Canadians still speaking French.

Afterwards, Franco-Canadian relations have consistently been led by the existence of French Canadians and the province of Québec and France's interest in both population and state. On Bastille Day in 1855, the French frigate La Capricieuse visited Québec City, the first French naval ship to do so since 1760; Napoleon III was reportedly interested in cultivating some sort of official French interest in French Canada; in 1882, just a couple of years after Sir Alexander Galt was made first Canadian High Commissioner in London, former senator and journalist Hector Fabre was selected by the Québec provincial government to be its general agent in France, this position being shared between Québec and Canada until the professionalization of Canada's foreign service led to the disappearance of Québec's representation in France. Few French (or Belgian) immigrants showed up, and certainly the constitutional ties severed in 1763 have never regrown, but by the early 20th century the expected dense networks of cultural and economic ties linking France with the largest Francophone society outside of Europe were forming.

France is a major influence in Québec, and Bastille day might mean something to Québécois. Might. In English Canada, French holidays unexpectedly don't matter at all, as an increasingly theoretical bilingualism and the steady confederalization of Canada would seem to indicate. If English Canadians (as a group) aren't interested in talking to the Québécois their co-citizens, why would they be particularly interested (as a group) in talking to the Québécois' co-linguals, and how would they exchange many cultural elements directly? That's not to say that there haven't been such exchanges--Toronto's Nuit Blanche was based on the Paris original--but they're minor. On the economic front, even though France is Canada's eighth-largest trading partner, and even though Canada (and/or Québec) and France are in some sort of talk regarding the possible, possible creation of a Canada-EU free trade agreement of possibly some value. As for politics, although France and Canada do share similar views on multilateralism in the wider world and on the protection of cultural industries, France's republican and laic traditions don't have the same resonance in an English Canada formed out of British constitutionalism and increasingly influenced by American concepts that they might have in Québec. (Not that Québec is all that "French" in this regard either: Nearly two and a half centuries of British influences tell.) It's a pity about the invisibility and all, but what, realistically, can be done about this? France just can't be as much of a cutlural or economic heavyweight as the United States or that country's various Asian partners/competitors.

Regardless, here's to France, Canada's invisible ally and traditional friend. Vive la République!

[LINK] "Lunch with the FT: David Remnick"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 22:32:31 GMT

I was going to link to the Financial Times profile of David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker ("Lunch with the FT: David Remnick") even before the recent rather unbelievable cover of the 21 July 2008 issue of his magazine. I rather like what he's done with the magazine, and I really liked his 1994 Lenin's Tomb way back when--it seemed rather evocative to me at the time, and I like his writing style. I think that I'd still like both.

Anyway, you should probably go read the profile before angry pro-Obama hackers crash the Financial Times' website.

[BRIEF NOTE] On not learning from others' histories

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 13:52:09 GMT

On Saturday, The Globe and Mail's newsboxes across Canada displayed a front page hosting an article by Steven Chase with an alarming-sounding title, "Canada takes notes from failed Soviet war".

By the time the Department of National Defence began its research project, Canadian soldiers had been fighting Taliban insurgents for nearly half a decade without subduing them, a 2007 Forces paper notes.

"Despite many successes … the insurgency against the government of Afghanistan, the U.S. troops and [North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces] persisted."

Many of the research findings are lessons that, by 2008, the Canadian Forces, NATO soldiers and Western governments had already gleaned through experience in Afghanistan and other foreign missions.

Researchers said the Afghanistan-Pakistan border is a major hindrance. The mujahedeen used the porous frontier to smuggle arms and resources into Afghanistan in the 1980s and are offering Taliban supporters the same supply route for insurgents and weapons today.

"The movement of insurgents and materiel across the Afghan-Pakistan border is a paramount strategic problem," says a 2007 memorandum by Anton Minkov and Gregory Smolynec titled 3-D Soviet Style: A Presentation on Lessons Learned from the Soviet Experience in Afghanistan.

In a separate memo that year, the same authors warn that NATO forces will never be able to stabilize Afghanistan until the country's economy is sufficiently stable and growing to allow the fledging Afghan government to cover a substantial amount of its own security and welfare bills.

"The main reasons behind the fall of the pro-Moscow regime in Kabul were not defeat on the battlefield nor military superiority of the resistance but the regime's failure to achieve economic sustainability and its overreliance on foreign aid," says a document called Economic Development in Afghanistan during the Soviet Period 1979-1989: Lessons Learned from the Soviet Experience in Afghanistan.

The paper's editors might, or might not, have been making a sly point by including in the same issue, the same section even, Paul Koring's "'It's impossible to conquer the Afghans'". Koring's various interviews with veterans of and experts on the Soviet war in Afghanistan make the expected, if still unsettling, points.

Head bowed, exhausted, the statue of a young soldier back from Afghanistan's killing fields is flanked by long, grim, lists of his dead comrades. It's a cautionary monument for Western politicians and generals who boldly boast they will succeed where the Soviets failed.

In Russia, a country chock full of heroic memorials to enormous military sacrifice, the uniquely dejected pose of the helmetless Afghan combat veteran in the Ural city of Yekaterinburg is a sobering reminder that great powers have an unhappy history of overreaching and then being driven ignominiously from Afghanistan.

"Canadians and Americans are learning the hard way. You have been there seven years and you have no prospect of early victory," said Ruslan Aushev, a highly decorated combat veteran who served two tours, totalling nearly five years with the Soviet army in Afghanistan. "We knew by 1985 that we could not win," he recalls. It then took Moscow four more years to extricate hundreds of thousands of troops from Afghanistan, while claiming victory on the way out. Afghanistan was plunged into civil war.

[. . .]

“Most Afghans still live in a feudal society, in villages far from the cities,” he said. “For them, there is no difference between being bombed by the Soviets and now being bombed by the Americans . . . and it won't succeed."

In the West, the bloody, decade-long Soviet war in Afghanistan is viewed as the last gasping failure of a blundering Communist giant, eventually defeated by the proud and fierce Afghan mujahedeen, armed and backed by billions of dollars worth of sophisticated U.S. weaponry, and jihadists from throughout the Islamic world. Tagged as the [Soviets'] Vietnam, the Afghan quagmire helped sink the USSR. But the view from Russia – tempered by experience and the passage of two decades that allowed some lessons to sink in – suggest the West may, too, have overestimated its welcome and its capacity to rebuild Afghanistan at the point of a gun.

"We could take any village, any town and drive the mujahedeen out," Mr. Aushev said, recalling his two combat tours, first as an infantry battalion commander and later in charge of a full Soviet regiment – roughly the size of the Canadian contingent in Afghanistan. "But when we handed ground over to the Afghan army or police they would lose it in a week."

[. . .]

Former sergeant Igor Grigorevich, 46, now stands watch over a tiny, seldom-visited museum, tucked away on the ground floor of a hulking building on Moscow's outskirts. Unlike the Great Patriotic War, as Russians refer to the Second World War, there is little about the Afghan war to remember proudly. Instead there are deep scars, both on the national psyche and among hundreds of thousands of largely ignored veterans.

"It's impossible to conquer the Afghans … Alexander the Great couldn't do it, the British couldn't do it, we couldn't do it and the Americans won't do it . . . no one can," said Mr. Grigorevich, still trim and determined not to let the war be forgotten. The museum began largely as a volunteer effort by veterans, although the government now provides some funding.

The exhibits are striking. If the Soviet army looks vaguely dated, the pictures of Afghan villagers would be instantly familiar to Canadian soldiers now serving in Afghanistan. So, too, would the lumbering four-engined military transports with honour guards solemnly carrying flag-draped coffins into the waiting holds on Kandahar air field. The Russians called those flights "Black Tulips."

[FORUMS] Does bloodshed make good patriotic viewing in your part of the world?

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 18:57:36 GMT

Earlier this week, thanks to lemurbuoy's generosity, I had the chance to watch Zhang Yimou's 2002 film Hero. The film's quite impressive, between its gorgeous colour scheme, its hyper-cinematic fighting styes, its actors and the plot that they all share, but it's this plot that has caused a certain amount of controversy because of its interestingly conflicted treatment of Qin Dynasty, responsible for the (bloody) unification of the Chinese states in the 3rd century BC. The possible vcontemporary political inclinations of Hero could be treated as something unique to China, as indeed I did, until I remembered the American civil war and how it was viewed (potentially problematically) in American popular culture as a positive thing, something that created the modern American nation if at great cost. We needn't talk about the War of American Independence so close to the 4th, right?

I can't say that the same applies to Canada. Growing up in Charlottetown PE ("The Birthplace of Confederation!") I learned that Confederation was initially a Maritime conference that the Canadas eventually invited themselves to, and later, about the Fenian raids conducted from the United States against Canada. I don't believe that I learned of the extent of the Province of Canada's instability even in high school, never mind the soft sympathy for the Confederacy that let things like the 1864 St. Albans Raid by Confederates based in Lower Canada on Vermont happen. The Red River and North-West Rebellions were treated relatively briefly. I do think that, at one time or another, these different episodes did appear on CBC as episodes in a series or maybe, just maybe, stand-alone TV movies. The world wars do feature prominently in the popular imagination and might have fit this pattern if they hadn't been as much divisive events (Québec's opposition to conscription, say) as unifying ones.

What trend prevails in your countries? Does war, portrayed as a positive uniting force, feature prominently in your popular culture? Or, as in Canada, is it more-or-less absent? Or do you think I'm missing something here?

Please feel free to comment. As always be polite, and if you want to post anonymously, go ahead.

[LINK] "Small Islands' Warning Went Unheeded"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 03:55:32 GMT

From Inter Press News Service's Shiraz Deen comes the article "Small Islands' Warning Went Unheeded".

When the president of the Maldives, Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, addressed the U.N. General Assembly about 20 years ago, he warned of the possible death of his tiny Indian Ocean island if steps were not taken to curb climate change.

At an expert panel discussion on climate change last week, the Maldivian Foreign Minister Abdullah Shahid asked a logical question: "Why have the warnings of the past 20 years gone unheeded?"

A nation consisting of around 1,190 individual islands, the Maldives is particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change as most of the islands are only 1-2 metres above sea level.

According to the fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), sea level rise caused by global warming is very likely to exacerbate storm surges and coastal erosion of small islands.

Such events damage the infrastructure of human settlements and have numerous adverse health and economic effects. Fresh water resources and agricultural soil is contaminated, marine ecosystems which support fisheries are polluted, and non-indigenous invasive species spread throughout these islands.

[. . .]

The Maldives have taken measures to mitigate the effects of climate change, including the construction of a 60-million-dollar concrete sea wall around the capital of Male and the construction of an artificial island that stands well above sea-level.

However, these efforts are not a permanent solution and if climate change continues to accelerate at its current pace, the Maldives may not survive.

Even before the sea level rises to the point where an entire island is submerged, islands and coastal areas can become uninhabitable due to damage to local infrastructure and frequent natural disasters.

For the Maldives, and many others similarly imperiled, the need for international aid and assistance in not only mitigating but halting climate change is paramount, experts say.

[BRIEF NOTE] The modern Québécois migrant in Maine

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 20:24:04 GMT

Long after the assimilation of the Franco-Americans, substantial numbers of Québébecois (and, perhaps, other Canadian Francophones) are still spending a lot of time in New England, in places like Old Orchard Beach. They're not migrant labourers; they're tourists, as L. Ian Macdonald's National Post article "Quebecers' home away from home" points out.

In a seasonal sense, they are following in the footprint of those French Canadians who, a century ago, migrated by the thousands to the mill towns of Saco and Biddeford, just south of Portland on the Maine coast. Long since assimilated, they are still called Canadians -- not French-Canadians, much less Quebecois.

While their forebears came here to make a living, Quebecers now come here to play, from St. Jean Baptiste Day in June to Labour Day in September.

They populate the beaches of southern Maine, from York and Cape Neddick, to Moody and Wells, from Kennebunkport and Cape Porpoise to Goose Rocks, Fortunes Rocks and Biddeford Pool. From Ocean Park and Old Orchard to Prout's Neck and Higgins Beach.

[. . .]

Seldom has there been as much French overheard on the Marginal Way, the renowned walk along the cliffs under hotels and gracious summer homes, joining Ogunquit to Perkins Cove-- which, with its pedestrian footbridge, fishing boats and shops, is a scene right out of Murder, She Wrote.

[. . .]

Only six years ago, the loonie was mired at 62¢. Today, it's at par with the greenback. Canadian exporters may not like it, but Canadian tourists sure do. Stated another way, where it once took more than $1.50 to buy a U. S. dollar, a dollar is now a dollar.

And Canadians who used to come here for a week can in many cases now extend their visit to two, as we have.

This influx of Québécois to New England worries that region's competitors in the Maritime provinces, particularly in the New Brunswick that has a large Francophone population and extensive beaches of its own, as the Daily Gleaner points out, claiming that "[m]ore Quebecers are returning to their favourite U.S. haunts of Old Orchard Beach and Ogunquit in Maine."

Michael Levenson's Boston.com article "At Old Orchard Beach, Canadians right at home" goes so far as to claim that "French-Canadians [. . .] are flooding this honky-tonk beach town like never before. Six out of every 10 visitors to Old Orchard Beach are Canadian, 20 percent more than last summer, according to the local Chamber of Commerce, [b]uoyed by the strong Canadian dollar and the easy drive (about 6 hours from Montréal)."

In many parking lots, license plates from Quebec outnumber those from Maine. French fills the bars at night. And the souvenir shops cater to Québécois with signs that read "De vraies dents de requin" -- real shark's teeth -- and "Votre nom sur un grain de riz" -- Your name on a grain of rice.

"This is like Florida for Canadians," said Megan Brown, 24, a bartender at The Pier, where about 75 percent of the clientele is French-Canadian. "That's what Old Orchard Beach is for them. It's their Daytona Beach."

[. . .]

"We expect that Canada will annex Maine soon," said Jean-Guy LaPointe, a civil servant from Quebec, laughing as he tanned on the beach. "We could exchange the Yukon for Maine."

Donald Cuccioletta's article "Are you going to Old Orchard again this year? Quebec's New England outpost", published originally in the Winter 2005 issue of Inroads, makes the point that Old Orchard's connection with Québec stems

The end of World War Il marked the beginnings of the invasion of the Québécois (or French Canadians as they were called then). The love affair between the Québécois and Old Orchard had begun. "The French Canadians, the ones with money, had always come here before the war, but after the war, they came in droves," Priscilla Gallant, curator of the Old Orchard Historical Museum, explained to me. She herself has strong French-Canadian connections - as well as Acadian and Native (Haché) heritage. Gallant's mother was a Roy, originally from the Beauce. She explained that today in Saco and Biddeford, towns just south of Old Orchard Beach, over 30 per cent of the population is of French-Canadian origin: "They came to work in the textile mills of Biddeford and some set up permanent residence right here in Old Orchard." She paints a picture of a community that has incorporated into it the French-Canadian population: "St. Margaret Catholic Church - just at the top of Old Orchard Street, the main street of the town - was in the twenties and thirties a French church, and even today on Sundays some sermons are given in French for our QuÃ©bÃ©cois friends who take their holidays here." The ongoing presence of French Canadians is indeed strong here. In Biddeford Madame CÃ´tÃ©, who works at the City Hall, greeted me in French. This former Quebecer from Sherbrooke, married to an American, described how the French-Canadian (now Franco-American) heritage was being preserved. Later at the presbytery of St. Margaret Church, I encountered Guenette Maheu, a woman in her sixties. As we conversed in French, her face and eyes lit up as she shared her reflections about the area. Speaking in her maternal language, her cultural roots seemed to flower.

[. . .]

Even though they may not know the history of their ancestors' massive immigration south to the textile mills of New England, they see traces of the descendants of some of their own ancestors who immigrated here to earn a better living on mailboxes and in the phone books. There is also a subtle but identifiable social connection - as Québécois walk the beach, everyone spontaneously addresses them in French: " Bonjour", Bonne Journée", "II fait beau aujourd'hui", "Prenez votre temps." Yet no one carries a distinguishable iTiark, sign or flag that says "1 am Québécois." As Québec historian Paul-André Linteau once remarked, "C'est le Qubéec par en bas" (It's Quebec down below). This is the informal side of a developing "Francophonie" in a region of North America that has historical, economic and now political links with Quebec.

[LINK] Some Friday Links

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 13:02:49 GMT

Over at 'Aqoul, evaluna criticizes the United States' stingy record towards Iraqi refugees and tomscud points out a new Iranian law that would institute the death penalty for blogging produce some problems, even if it is supposed to be directed towards rape-porn sites.

Over at Centauri Dreams, news comes that massive gas giants like Jupiter might actually be quite rare.
Daniel Drezner points out that if Obama gets elected, some regions of the world will react more positively than others. Surprise!

At Language Log, Eric Bakovic wonders what positive result would come from the establishment of English as the United States' official language, and Mark Liberman reports on the debate on regional languages in France and the Academy's opposition to recognition of said languages in any form by the French state.

How do you write about toothless international organizations? Alan Beattie (via Gideon Rachman) helps you out
Normblog links to Samantha Power's suggestion that anti-Mugabe elements of the international community should organize a government in exile around Tsvangirai et al.
Outsourced links to the news that various worthies have claim to have dated Odysseus' return to Penelope as occurring on April 16, 1178 B.C.. No word yet on the hour.

Strange Maps hosts a map showing rates of obesity (not overweight) in each state in the United States. The South stands out as a region with the highest rates, the northeast, California and the southwest with some of the lowest.

Surprise! Towleroad, among others, has revealed that yet another vehement homophobe is a closet case!
Tim Harford at the Undercover Economist links to an interesting study suggesting that it really do that much good if one wears a bicycle helmet.

[LINK] "Lawyers, advocates dispute Harper claim of 'no real alternative' on Khadr"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 20:15:13 GMT

From the Canadian Press, "Lawyers, advocates dispute Harper claim of 'no real alternative' on Khadr".

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is playing fast with the facts when he says the Conservative government has "no real alternative" to the U.S. legal process in the Omar Khadr case, say the Canadian detainee's lawyers.

"This is a disingenuous comment from the prime minister," says Khadr's Canadian lawyer, Dennis Edney.

"The prime minister, through his cabinet members, particularly Mr. (Peter) MacKay, have long said that they have been assured that Omar Khadr was being well treated, when in fact the Canadian government well knew that was not the case," Edney said in a telephone interview from Edmonton.

The prime minister tried Thursday to distance his Conservative government from explosive new documents released by the Foreign Affairs Department.

The documents show Canadian officials knew in 2004 that the U.S. military was depriving the then-17-year-old Khadr of sleep for weeks to soften him up for interrogation.

Khadr is accused of killing an American soldier in Afghanistan. Khadr was 15 at the time of the alleged incident.

Speaking in Tokyo, where the prime minister met with Japan's emperor and prime minister, Harper said the previous Liberal government knew about Khadr's treatment in Guantanamo Bay, yet did nothing.

"The previous government took a whole range, all of the information, into account when they made the decision on how to proceed with the Khadr case several years ago," said Harper.

"Canada has sought assurances that Mr. Khadr, under our government, will be treated humanely. We are monitoring those legal processes very carefully."

[. . .]

In July 2007, a Canadian federal lawyer dismissed concerns about the continued interrogation of Khadr, arguing that investigators had gained useful information after questioning him. That was a year after the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York issued a scathing report detailing alleged abuses and torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, including Khadr.

Human-rights advocates, opposition politicians and Britain's top law societies have all urged the Harper Tories to take urgent action in securing Khadr's release.

They accuse the Conservatives of being two-faced by refusing to act on Khadr's behalf while decrying human-rights abuses in China and elsewhere.

"It boggles my mind that this prime minister is prepared to criticize China over human rights and is prepared to lambaste Mexico for the way its criminal justice system is applied to a Canadian," said Edney.

"But when you have a young Canadian who is in Guantanamo Bay whom Canadian courts have said has been abused and tortured, our government remains silent."

[. . .]

The prime minister could have Khadr released from Guantanamo Bay with a single phone call, says University of Ottawa law professor Amir Attaran.

"Without exception, every other leader of a Western country has got their citizens out of Guantanamo," Attaran said.

"What is being done to Omar Khadr right now rests squarely on the shoulders of Prime Minister Harper," added Navy Lt.-Cmdr. William Kuebler, Khadr's U.S. military attorney.

Kuebler accused the Canadian government of knowingly hiding behind false U.S. assurances regarding Khadr's treatment in allowing him to be detained in Cuba.

[. . .]

The officials who wrote the report, but did not formally object to Khadr's treatment, should be prosecuted under Canada's Criminal Code, said Attaran.

"Canadian officials at Foreign Affairs appear to have been complicit in the torture," he said.

"And there's no doubt in my mind that they're guilty of aiding and abetting torture, criminally . . . . It is a criminal offence."

I've said before that Canada has had too many torture-related scandals of late, right?

[URBAN NOTE] I pray to God that the Zeta Reticulans will forgive us

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:15:36 GMT

First contact
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

The window display belongs to sex shop Priape, recently relocated to a new location at 501 Church Street, in the heart of the GLBT Church and Wellesley neighbourhood. The unearthly creatures surrounding and/or caressing the human mannequins are the Greys beloved of UFO folklore. The Greys are commonly believed to originate in the Zeta Reticuli system, a binary of two yellow dwarf stars quite similar to our own sun, based on the map of interstellar space famously "constructed" from the memories of famous 1960s UFO abductees Betty and Barney Hill.

[BRIEF NOTE] Such a loud roar yet such poor teeth

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:39:51 GMT

From this Monday's The Globe and Mail comes Steven Chase's article "Military showed little enthusiasm in Arctic sovereignty patrol, report says".

The Canadian Forces have come under fire in an internal report highly critical of military leaders' lack of interest in an Arctic sovereignty protection exercise last August.

Defending Arctic sovereignty is supposed to be a major priority under goals the Harper government set when it took office in February, 2006.

The report on Operation Nanook, obtained by The Globe and Mail under the Access to Information law, was written by a Forces directorate that helped organize the August, 2007, Arctic exercise.

It says Canadian military leaders didn't place a high enough priority on the operation, and it singles out for criticism Canada Command, the military organization given the task of defending this country.

[. . .]

Operation Nanook, which took place between Aug. 7 and 17 last year, is the biggest such annual exercise in the Arctic. Last year's scenarios included intercepting drug smugglers and responding to a ship's oil spill.

The report was critical of the RCMP's V Division in Nunavut for failing to devote sufficient effort to planning and staging the exercise, and blamed the Mounties' "lack of engagement" in part for problems with how things unfolded. Another hindrance was fog.

"Regrettably, V Division of the RCMP, for a number of valid reasons, tends to view ... Nanook as a distraction rather than an opportunity," it said. The report did not explain why the Mounties might lack enthusiasm for Nanook.

An RCMP spokesman blamed lower-than-normal staffing across Nunavut last August. "Human resources levels across the Division were 25 per cent below normal and ongoing operational issues and day-to-day community policing needs took precedence over the exercise," Corporal Greg Cox said.

"Senior RCMP officials were aware of the exercise and co-operated with DND and other exercise officials as much as possible."

Concerns over Canadian sovereignty in Northern Canada, particularly over the famed Northwest Passage, which might become navigable with global warming. The Canadian Encyclopedia provides a reasonably thorough and fair overview of the matter from a Canadian perspective, unlike this 2005 Canadian American Strategic Review paper that goes so far as to build up a Danish order of battle in the case of a Danish claim over, among other potential targets, Ellesmere Island. (Another Cyprus-like affair between Canada and Denmark in the High Arctic might be "interesting" but ... Yeah, right.)

At any rate, Prime Minister Harper had made multiple promises back in 2006 to secure the Arctic for various reasons as described in this 2006 Parliamentary research paper, including national prestige and potentially valuable natural resources. It's perhaps unsprising to see that Canada's own latest willing roi fainéant, content to let the provinces "take as much sovereignty as [they] can swallow", is just as unwilling or unable to do anything positive in the Arctic as in the rest of Canada.

[BRIEF NOTE] "'At least these mosquitoes don't give you malaria'"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:18:26 GMT

Michel Arsenault in Saturday's The Globe and Mail had an interesting article, "'At least these mosquitoes don't give you malaria'". The person of the lumberjack is an iconic figure to Canadians and/including Québécois have national mythos constructed, in part, around the belief that their ancestors were "hewers of wood and drawers of water". No longer. As Arsenault explains, in at least one part of Québec's forest frontier, the municipality of Dolbeau-Mitassini in the famously nationalist Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region, the old stock of lumberjacks is beginning to be replaced by African immigrants.

It's already 4 a.m., a little late for breakfast. In a fiercely lit canteen, dozens of forestry workers in oilskin jackets and rubber boots are hunched over wooden tables, siphoning coffee, ingesting protein in the shape of eggs and ham. The room is white, but almost all the faces in it are black. They are recent immigrants, mostly from French-speaking African countries, who live in Montreal but come to cut brush in northern Quebec's boreal forest in the summer.

The local forestry-management company that runs the work camp does hire some Québécois, but today is Friday and they have all left to spend a long weekend with their families in nearby towns and villages. The African-born loggers do not take weekends off. They seldom take even a day off, in the hope of piling up as much cash as they can during the summer season. It would take almost seven hours to drive back to Montreal, ruling out weekend visits to wives, girlfriends and children left behind. And none of them owns a car anyway.

This camp — in the Banc de sable (Sand Bank) sector of a public forest 90 kilometres north of the town of Dolbeau-Mistassini (and about 200 km north of Quebec City) — is run by Aménagement MYR, which hired its first African employee, a man from Ivory Coast, in the late 1990s. Word soon spread in Montreal's African community that there was good money to be made in the bush. Now, 60 per cent of the camp's 90 employees are African-born, and the company is training two dozen more. Another local company, Foresterie DLM, is also staffed mainly by African immigrants.

[. . .]

Most of them speak a polished French that indicates urban middle-class backgrounds and university educations. But those qualifications often are not recognized in their new country, and so to pursue their Canadian dreams — or simply to survive — they take on the punishing forestry jobs that old-stock, white Quebeckers no longer want to do.

Raymond Bertrand, 28, worked for a French bank in Yaoundé after graduating from a Cameroon university. After landing in Montreal in 2006, however, he found that prospective employers didn't recognize the value of his African business-administration degree. So Mr. Bertrand enrolled at the University of Quebec at Montreal to start a second undergraduate degree from scratch. For him, brush cutting is a well-paying summer job, although he has had to leave his pregnant wife behind in Montreal.

"You do it for the money," he says in French. "It's very hard work. You cannot get used to it. It's like the winter."

Not all of his co-workers agree. Mamadou Diane, a debonair-looking musician from Ivory Coast whose stage name is Isaac Roots, says he loves this line of work. "I adore nature. It's my rasta side."

Some of the loggers are refugees whose stories testify to Africa's bloody politics. Prince Yakoub Dao, a 27-year-old merchant from northern Ivory Coast, obtained refugee status after his small shop in Abidjan was torched by pro-government thugs who accused him of being an opposition supporter.

[. . .]

If Africans are more likely than others to accept back-breaking work in the bush, it's perhaps because they cannot land lucrative jobs in Montreal. Quebec's 152,200 black people are as well educated as the rest of the population (14 per cent have a university degree), but they earn 28 per cent less and are twice as likely to be unemployed than other Quebeckers.

Although Québec maintains an immigration policy separate from Canada's--as M.C. Andrews notes in the anthology Quebec: State and Society--founded on supplementing the economic requirements of Québec and maintaining the French language in wide circulation, it hasn't figured out that the non-recognition of foreign credentials is a bad idea. It isn't a racism thing, necessarily: French immigrants face the same problem as well. Immigrants across Canada face these problems, despite a federal program aimed at getting the qualifications earned abroad my immigrants recognized in this country, and despite continued talk of making things better. It'd be a pity for the lumber industry if foreign credentials were taken into account, I suppose.

[URBAN NOTE] The Orange Order in Toronto

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Tue, 08 Jul 2008 03:59:45 GMT

A couple of days ago, as if thinking of my most recent post on ethnic conflict in Canada, Torontoist's Kevin Plummer had an interesting post up there part of their Historicist series, "Orangemen and The Glorious Twelfth of July".

Nowadays, the Orange Order is thought of as a quaint anachronism, a benevolent society that marches every twelfth of July to commemorate the victory of William III at the Battle of the Boyne. But the Protestant fraternal organization once had a stranglehold on power in Toronto, and its subjugation of Irish Catholics gave the parade on every "Glorious Twelfth" an ominous undercurrent of potential violence. While Toronto's municipal affairs were never as corrupt as elsewhere, the Orange Order operated as a de facto political machine throughout the nineteenth century. Between 1845 and 1900, all but three of Toronto's twenty-three mayors and countless city councillors were members of an Orange Lodge. Protestant principles and moral order, as espoused by the Order, were synonymous with good governance and permeated the city's culture. Moreover, the city council's control over patronage ensured that fellow lodge members filled the civic administration, municipal utilities, and even, for a time, the police and fire departments.

[. . .]

The deep Protestant flavour to city life made "The Belfast of Canada," as Toronto was nicknamed, anything but hospitable to the great influx of Irish Catholic immigrants who arrived in the wake of the Great Famine. Despite their population growing from about 2,000 in the 1840s to 12,135 (or over 27% of the total population) in the 1860s, Irish Catholics could find only unskilled factory work that offered little opportunity to escape the appalling conditions of the slum neighbourhoods of Corktown and Cabbagetown. As local historian Bruce Bell described it: "To be Irish and Catholic at the height of Victorian Toronto meant menial work with no promise of advancement."

Wikipedia observes, accurately, that the Orange Order had become a major influence in Ontario's public life, managing to convince Prime Minister Sir John A. MacDonald to hang Louis Riel in 1885 on charges of treason else risk losing the Orange Order vote.

Eventually, Plummer goes on to conclude, the shift of city politics away from issues of personality to questions of day-to-day bureaucratic management, Irish Catholics no longer particularly stand out, and neighbourhoods like Corktown and Cabbagetown are fast gentrifying. Still, there's a commenter at Torontoist who defends the glorious fredeoms of the Glorious revolution against the people who respect an authoritarian pope. I guess that some thinks do manage to hang around.

[META] Blogroll Update

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:22:37 GMT

I've added Dooney's Cafe, an online forum that apparently started in real-time in the Toronto restaurant Dooney's Cafe and hosts some very interesting essays written by such people as the very respectable Stan Persky (official website, Wikipedia).

Go, read!

[LINK] "Canada gets Saddam's uranium"

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:49:35 GMT

I was not expecting to read this, in The Globe and Mail or elsewhere or, really, anywhere at all.

OTTAWA AND TORONTO -- Almost everything about the deal made for spy novel fodder: a multimillion-dollar shipment of yellowcake uranium, the final vestiges of Saddam Hussein's once-hyped nuclear program, quietly moved from Baghdad to Montreal via a controversial U.S. military base in the Indian Ocean, all done under orders of absolute secrecy.

But for all the cloak and dagger, it was a relatively straightforward transaction. "It was business as usual," Transport Canada spokeswoman Marie-Anyk Côté said of the deal that saw Saskatoon-based Cameco Corp. purchase some 550 tonnes of yellowcake, which is used to make fuel for nuclear reactors. The volatile, but often transported, cargo arrived in Montreal by ship on Saturday.

Although Cameco says the U.S. military, which helped organize the sale, asked for the deal to be done in secrecy, the Canadian government agency that monitors such transports was less paranoid.

[. . .]

With major mining operations in Saskatchewan, Cameco is the world's largest producer of uranium. Company spokesman Lyle Krahn said Cameco was contacted by the U.S. State Department "earlier this year," and asked to join in the bidding process for the Iraqi material.

Although the deal is technically with the Iraqi government - Baghdad gets the money - Washington had a significant driving role in the deal.

The yellowcake, all of which is believed to date before 1991, originated at the Tuwaitha nuclear complex south of Baghdad. Military and diplomatic officials initially considered sending the uranium to Kuwait's port on the Persian Gulf, but such a route would pass through Shia-controlled areas of Iraq within close proximity to insurgents. Kuwait was also reluctant to proceed.

After Cameco secured the contract to buy the uranium, U.S.-led crews began moving the yellowcake from corroded, decades-old compartments to about 3,500 secure barrels. In April, convoys moved the shipment from Tuwaitha to Baghdad's international airport.

It took two weeks and 37 flights in May to transport the cargo to a U.S. military base in Diego Garcia, a tiny British territory in the Indian Ocean, before it was shipped to Montreal.

Cameco would not disclose how much it is paying for the 550 tonnes of Iraqi "yellowcake," but Mr. Krahn indicated Cameco would make money on the deal. That would suggest Cameco paid less than market rates for the uranium. The spot price for the metal currently stands at $59 (U.S.) a pound while the so-called "term price" is about $80 a pound.

At $59 a pound, the material would be worth about $72-million. At $80 a pound, about $97-million.

[URBAN NOTE] My Toronto Island Lessons

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 03:59:05 GMT

Late in the afternoon and early in the evening, I was spending my time on the Toronto Islands (City of Toronto page, Wikipedia). They're beautiful, a direct consequence of the will of the inhabitants and of the City of Toronto to maintain the culture and the ecology of islands that, frankly, would have been washed into the sea by now if not for pretty extensive engineering undergirded--as I wrote 2005 and 2006--by sophisticated planning at every level.

As I discovered for myself today, sophisticated planning is also required for visitors like myself. Below are some of the lessons, both positive and negative, that I learned on my very, very brief wanderjahre.

Do remember that it can take at least an hour for me to get to the islands from where I live.

Do make sure that you bring, for lunch, foods that don't have to remain hot.

Do be thankful that as you're boarding the ferries (City of Toronto page, Wikipedia) that you had the good sense to bring enough cash to pay the $C6.50 toll for adults because their credit and debit machines were down.

Do make sure that you visit in the late afternoon and early evening, when things are at their warmest.

Do not stare disbelievingly at the obnoxious and obviously gay guy on the ferry, one bike away, who is expostulating on how God must be a lesbian because She keeps rain from falling on the Pride parade but drenches the lesbians' Dyke March so they can enjoy a wet T-shirt contest.

Do not, when you're taking pictures and wearing white shorts, sprawl on the grass.

With regards to sunscreen, do remember to put it on 15-30 minutes before you get on the beach and try not to squirt the bottle so hard that sunscreen gets everywhere.

Do not take a beach towel that's too short for you--lower legs and feet don't like too much heat.

Do keep in mind the facts that sand is magnetically attracted to welcome in the same way that cottonwood seeds and the odd feather are attracted to someone covered in sunscreen.

Do remember that Lake Ontario is still somewhat cold even in July, as befitting its glacial origins.

Do remember to bring a camera, next time, that lets you take more, much more, than a dozen photos.

In case you're wondering, it was a wonderful trip. Pictures will be up in the not-too-distant-at-all future.

[BRIEF NOTE] Here, there

r_f_mcdonald@yahoo.ca — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:01:54 GMT

I've been thinking about how, or if, to react to an unsettling news story that came out earlier this month, "U.S. deserter could qualify as refugee: court".

An American war deserter could have a valid claim for refugee status in Canada, the Federal Court ruled on Friday.

In a decision that may have an impact on dozens of refugee claimants in Canada, Federal Court Justice Robert Barnes said Canada's refugee board erred by rejecting the asylum bid of Joshua Key. He ordered that a new panel reconsider the application.

Key was sent to Iraq in 2003 as a combat engineer for eight months where he said he was responsible for nighttime raids on private Iraqi homes, which included searching for weapons.

He alleged that during his time in Iraq he witnessed several cases of abuse, humiliation, and looting by the U.S. army.

When Key was back in the U.S on a two-week leave, he said he was suffering from debilitating nightmares and that he couldn't return. A military lawyer told him that he could either return to Iraq or face prison.

Instead, Key took his family to Canada and applied for refugee status.

While the immigration board concluded that some of the alleged conduct by the U.S military included a "disturbing level of brutality," it said the conduct did not meet the definition of a war crime or a crime against humanity.

Barnes said the board erred "by concluding that refugee protection for military deserters and evaders is only available where the conduct objected to amounts to a war crime, a crime against peace or a crime against humanity."

Citing a case from the U.S. Federal Court of Appeal, Barnes said officially condoned military misconduct could still support a refugee claim, even if it falls short of a war crime.

"The authorities indicate that military action which systematically degrades, abuses or humiliates either combatants or non-combatants is capable of supporting a refugee claim where that is the proven reason for refusing to serve," Barnes wrote.

As The Globe and Mail's Tu Thanh Ha points out, this decision is strictly limited in scope to a select minority of deserters.

The ruling is one of the first in favour of U.S. soldiers who fled to Canada, following the failure last year of deserters Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey to persuade Canadian courts that they would be unfairly treated if they are court-martialed in the United States.

"While the Hinzman decision has certainly set the bar very high for deserters from the United States military," Judge Barnes wrote, it would still be possible for a deserter to prove he had tried all avenues to evade overseas duty or unfair punishment in the United States.

Having deserted while he was on furlough, "Private Key would have been deployed back to Iraq within two weeks of his arrival in the United States, the opportunity to pursue a release or re-assignment may not have been realistic," Judge Barnes wrote.

A bid for asylum, it should be noted, is a far cry from actually receiving asylum. It still unsettles me that the possibility of a successful bid for asylum by an American soldier exists and--as zibblsnrt says in the comments--be taken seriously, almost as much as I am by (say) Canada's own record in regards to casual military atrocities. (The name of the victim in Canada's own Abu Ghraib photos is Shidane Arone.)