January 2012

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Justin Bieber wants your lungs

by Jonathan McLeod on January 31, 2012

One young woman’s struggle for life has become a national (and international) story. Hélène Campbell has been diagnosed with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. Currently, she is in Toronto waiting – hoping – to get a lung transplant. She is not, however, spending her time merely waiting; she has taken to the intertubes to raise awareness for organ donation. A couple of weeks ago, she launched a #BeAnOrganDonor twitter campaign. Her friends and followers targeted Canadian IP-scofflaw, Justin Bieber, hoping that he’d help get the word out.

Two days later, he did:

@alungstory i got the word…you have amazing strenght. i got u. #BeAnOrganDonor

help spread the word for @alungstory http://www.alungstory.ca/ #BeAnOrganDonor

Hélène was on Canada AM this morning to talk about her campaign, which has already been a success. Ontario saw an increase in donor registrations of over 500% on the first day of the #BeAnOrganDonor campaign (and that was before the Bieber tweet).

This story has a personal twist for me. My wife has known Hélène since she was a child:

 Every summer of my youth, I worked up at a church camp. I met too many people to count. Counsellors, staff, clergy, families and campers. So many campers. Not only is it a residential – sleep-away – camp, entire families visit, staying in tents or trailers. Some families would come every summer. And some of those families were ones that we staff not only got to know, we got to love them. When we knew they were coming, we were very, very excited.

Because they were awesome. Because they exuded love. Because they were joyful.

And because we adored their kids.

Hélène was one such kid…

In a sad coincidence, Canadian champion freestyle skier Sarah Burke died on January 19 as a result of injuries sustained during a training run. It was the very same day as the #BeAnOrganDonor campaign.

Sarah Burke became an organ donor.

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Surprise! Another post about hockey

by Jonathan McLeod on January 28, 2012

National Post’s Joe O’Connor applauds Tim Thomas’s decision to decline an invitation to the White House:

Pros are mercenaries. They are out to win — and to make a buck — and by actually making a statement on the paralytic state of affairs in American government Thomas should be applauded, or at least, accorded a measure of respect for actually listening to his conscience and exercising his right as an American citizen by saying no to something he didn’t want to do instead of being a good hockey-sheep and saying “baa” when the White House beckoned.

And why didn’t the 2011 Conn Smythe trophy winner as playoff MVP want to tour the White House with his teammates and mug for a few photos with President Obama? Thomas posted a message on his Facebook page articulating his belief that “the Federal government has grown out of control, threatening the Rights, Liberties and Property of the People.

“This is being done at the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial level. This is in direct opposition to the Constitution and the Founding Fathers’ vision for the Federal Government.”

Bonus classy move: TSN personality Dave Hodge insinuates that Thomas is a klansmen.

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Won’t someone please think of the elderly

by Jonathan McLeod on January 27, 2012

With increased deficits and other fiscal demands, the Canadian government is ready to make some serious changes to the Canada Pension Plan. One potential change that has been floated is to raise the age of eligibility from the current 65. Writing at The Progressive Economics Forum, Andrew Jackson suggests that this isn’t the greatest idea:

Raising the retirement age from age 65 to age 67 or higher would impact all future seniors, but would especially impact those who would qualify for the GIS supplement. Many older workers, especially the single near elderly, already face very high rates of poverty.

It is often argued that we have to raise the retirement age because Canadians are living longer. But raising the retirement age by 2 years will especially impact low income older workers. People in the bottom 20% of the workforce pass away 5.6 years earlier than those in the top 20%. Half of all low income men will collect an OAS/GIS cheque for only 10 years.

It’s pretty common these days, at least in Canada, for politicians to court (read: pander to) voters at or near the retirement age. It was a common tactic in the last federal election as each party put forward proposals to protect this endangered group.

One of my co-contributors at the Commons, Max Fawcett, took issue with this phenomenon last year:

Senior citizens, after all, face the lowest levels of poverty of any group in Canada, lower than women, lower than visible minorities, lower than the disabled, and even lower than working age population. In fact, while Canada’s record on child poverty remains inexcusably poor – in a recent OECD survey the child poverty rate in Canada placed the country 13th among seventeen industrialized nations – it has done a commendable job of reducing the incidence of poverty among senior citizens. The poverty rate for households headed by a person 65 or over dropped from 28.4 per cent in 1973 to just 5.4 per cent in 1997, an achievement that has led Lars Osberg, an economist at Dalhousie University, to argue that it constitutes the major success story of Canadian social policy in the 20th century.

I won’t say that these two opinions are irreconcilable, but Max lashes out quite nicely at the “pension pushers”.

Update: In the comments, I am corrected that it is not the age for CPP eligility that is being raised, but for other, government-funded assistance programs. I apologize for the error.

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Surprise! A post about hockey

by Jonathan McLeod on January 27, 2012

My interest in hockey waxes and wanes. My interest in the NHL is currently at an all-time low, but with the NHL All-Star Weekend descending on my little hamlet, I guess there’s no point in resistance. So, in the spirit of surrender, I giver you Gary Dimmock.

Gary Dimmock is a crime reporter with the Ottawa Citizen. More importantly, he’s a damned fine writer. He maintains a blog, Crimegarden (currently residing here, but his older posts can be found here). About a year ago, he wrote about the life of Mike Danton (nee Mike Jefferson), a troubled professional hockey player who went to jail for his role in the attempted murder of his agent, David Frost. It’s a sad but riveting story of a deeply troubled young man:

Mike Danton was a mistake.

And on the day he was born, Oct. 21, 1980, his father, Steve Jefferson, got kicked out of the hospital for showing up late after a night of drinking.

In many ways, Mike’s story begins with his “real,” or biological, father, Steve Jefferson. Since his son’s arrest, trial and conviction, Steve Jefferson has been on television and in the news pages blaming Dave Frost for all of his son’s troubles.

It’s not that simple. Frost may have come to dominate Danton’s life when he was young, but sons don’t disavow fathers — or drop their father’s name as Danton did — without some compelling reason. In the case of Mike Jefferson-turned-Mike Danton, that reason might well go back to the day he was born.

You can find part one here, and part two here.

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Stephen Harper: Big government liberal

by Jonathan McLeod on January 27, 2012

Writing in Huffington Post Canada, J.J. McCullough (who maintains Filibuster Cartoons) argues that Prime Minister Stephen Harper has abandoned his conservative roots in all but one area:

Old Stephen Harper opposed big government and runway spending. New Harper has presided over a 22 per cent spending hike. Old Harper was critical of unchecked immigration and multiculturalism. New Harper brags about ratcheting immigration rates to 57-year highs. Old Harper felt no shame embracing the cause of social conservatism. New Harper couldn’t stand up for gay marriage fast enough the second the rumour mill started grinding against him.

Yet a CBC interview with the PM this week revealed that in at least one important realm Harper’s stripes have barely changed at all. Speaking of the nuclear threat posed by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Iran, the Prime Minister declared himself officially “frightened,” before lapsing into the same sort of rhetorical bluster he’s used since his days as an opposition bench booster for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Well, he’s still pretty tough-on-crime and, despite recent increases, his government has been openly hostile to immigrants and refugees, but Mr. McCullough is correct to note his transformation to a booster of big government who no longer trucks with social conservatives.

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We’re obviously cooler than you

by Jonathan McLeod on January 26, 2012

At the recent Liberal Party Policy Convention, the Grits decided to throw irrationality to the wind and embraced the legalization of marijuana. Now, we learn, six of the eight candidates for the NDP leadership support some form of legalization. Throw in our Olympic heroes who smoke weed (and don’t have to apologize for it!) and a Prime Minister who not only admitted to smoking, but also inhaling, and it’s clear that the ‘C’ in Canada stands for The Chronic.

Of course, we have a government that has fallen in love with the evidence-free “Tough on Crime” stance, so maybe things aren’t so rosy for blazers, after all.

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Speaking of diversity…

by Jonathan McLeod on January 26, 2012

When I started reading the League, it just so happened that Jamelle Blouie was posting regularly. I thought it great that a site with a potentially exclusionary name had a prominent female blogger (it’s the french influence; the -lle suffix would denote female, eg Michel vs. Michelle). Alas, I was wrong; Jamelle is very much a dude.

With that little introduction, and a propos Tod’s recent diversity post, I thought I’d share this piece at Thought Out Loud by Kate Heartfield (an editor at the Ottawa Citizen), Why aren’t more women in punditry? Ms. Heartfield argues that there is a need for more female voices, not for some sort of affirmative action tally, but because “gender is one of the element’s of [a person's] experience”.

There was a time when I was the only woman on the Ottawa Citizen’s editorial board – though that’s no longer the case. I remember one discussion about the boom in popularity of a certain yoga clothing manufacturer. (It must have been a slow news day.) There had to be some cultural significance to the tightness of the shirts, some of my colleagues thought; they figured the phenomenon was a sign of how much women would pay, or thought they should pay, to indulge their vanity. I listened for a while, trying to come up with a way to explain, in words that wouldn’t make my colleagues too uncomfortable, that if you’re a woman doing exercises in public that require you to be upside down, tight shirts are essential to the preservation of modesty – not to mention, for some of us, the ability to breathe.

The article encourages women to send in op-eds, so naturally, I gave her email address to my wife.

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He’s either a luddite or a heartless bastard

by Jonathan McLeod on January 25, 2012

The big news in London, Ontario, is the lockout of 400 workers at the Caterpillar-owned Electro Motive plant. Economist/professor/pundit Mike Moffatt takes a stab at figuring out where all the manufacturing jobs have gone (hint: you can’t blame NAFTA):

American and Canadian manufacturers are simply producing more with less. The average American and Canadian manufacturing worker produces 40 per cent more than he or she did a decade ago. Some of this is through higher levels of skills and education, but much of it comes from new technology and new investment in equipment and machinery. When we account for falling technology prices, there has been a massive increase in spending on equipment and machinery since the mid 1990s, with real (inflation adjusted) spending doubling in the last 15 years.

His analysis is pretty spot on. This observation doesn’t help those who have lost jobs or seen their income slashed, but if we don’t figure out exactly what is going on in the economy, there’s no way we’ll be able to effectively help those who are in need.

By the way, Prof. Moffatt is neither a luddite nor heartless. You should probably follow him on twitter and ask him about dodgeball (seriously).

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Copyright, MegaUpload and the Rudeness of Canadians

by Jonathan McLeod on January 25, 2012

In the never-ending quest to demonstrate that Canadians aren’t some uber-polite alien species, The Volunteer‘s M.J. Sheppard offers a great “little” rant about copyright law and the recent MegaUpload arrests (editorial discretion mine):

Hey, you know what really bothers me? When one country figures that laws passed by their legislature apply to the entire [expletive] world.

You know who the leading proponent of that idea is? The United States. That’s right, a nation that refuses to recognize the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court because it might place their citizens, soldiers and scumbag politicians in legal jeopardy has no issue whatsoever with applying its laws on foreign soil.

It started with the War on Drugs, which dovetailed nicely into the War on Terror, and now American  copyright law is being applied extraterritorally.

…What I want to point out is “who in the [expletive] is the United States to shut down a Hong Kong-based company and arrest folks in New Zealand based on the whimsy of [expletive] [expletive] like Chris Dodd, formerly the United States Senator from CountyWide and currently the president of the MPAA?” And make no mistake, this is all about the infinitely power-drunk and suicidally moronic desires of Washington’s lobbyist [expletive].

You can read the entire, expletive-ridden post here.

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Scott on the SOPA blackouts

by Jonathan McLeod on January 25, 2012

Part of my intent when launching the 49th was to link to a lot of interesting Canadian writers, thus, let’s throw a link to Original Gentleman Scott H.Payne. At one of his many blogging homes, Beams and Struts (also home to the beloved Chris Dierkes), Scott has an expository essay on the recent SOPA blackouts; here’s a taste:

Undoubtedly, many will credit Wikipedia’s blackout efforts with delivering the knock-out punch to SOPA and PIPA, just like many chalked the revolution in Egypt up to Facebook and the uprising in Iran up to Twitter. And Wikipedia deserves credit, as far as it goes. But to explain the defeat of SOPA by a game changing move by Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales is to misunderstand the much larger dynamics at play here.

The point is that when we think about game changing political moments, they’re generally initiated by precisely the kind of institutions and key players in which our trust has become increasingly eroded. By necessity, a political playing field once littered with institutional influence is now populated by average individuals working together to take matters into their own hands. And our impassioned fight for a free and open internet is both an expression and function of that shift.

We struggle to understand this shift using the signposts that have so sturdily guided us in the past, but to no avail. Those signposts point to things in which we do not ultimately believe anymore. Or, at least, not in the same ways.

As they say, read the whole thing.

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