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Debate: Should men and women compete on different slopestyle courses?
by Henrik Lampert
One year ago, Kristi Leskinen along with fellow competitors Sarah Burke and Kaya Turski drafted a survey; the contents of the survey revolved around the state of slopestyle courses—notably the size of jumps, and the idea of building separate courses for men and women—and was sent to many of the top slopestyle skiers around the globe.
Kaya Turski competes at the Euro X Games in Tignes, France. P: Shay Williams.
Last week, Leskinen discussed the findings of the poll with ESPN. According to Leskinen, the survey "shows that men and women would benefit greatly from having separate courses in competition." In the days following the release of the survey results, many competitors—both skiers and snowboarders, male and female—have opened a debate on the subject. While some advocate for separate courses and in turn, smaller jumps for women, others argue that separate courses threaten to stifle the progression of women's skiing and snowboarding.
We want to hear your thoughts on the matter. To see the results of the poll, as published on ESPN, follow this link. To see a more detailed version of the survey results, visit the AFP website, here. To hear from athletes on both sides of the argument, refer to the following blog posts:
Spencer O'Brien, professional snowboarder: https://frsk.me/265
Kaya Turski, professional skier: https://frsk.me/266
We encourage you to read up and post your thoughts in the comments section below. Or, join the conversation on Twitter; tag @Freeskier and engage the athletes themselves.
Tagged: Debate, park, slopestyle
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Feature / February 2007
Once Upon a Country
In Stéphane Dion the Liberals have a new narrator and perhaps a hero. All now depends on the story he tells and how the Canadian everyman reacts. A walk through the streets of the Liberal imagination, where fortunes rise and fall and Stephen Harper lies in wait, ready to pounce
February 12, 2007 July 28, 2016 - by Don GillmorDon Gillmor
Illustration by Lars Arrhenius Updated 15:22, Jul. 28, 2016 | Published 4:22, Feb. 12, 2007
At the moment of Confederation, Montreal controlled two-thirds of the country's wealth and despite John A. Macdonald's tipsy, heroic efforts at national unity, it remained a city of brilliant divisions: French and English; Protestant and Catholic; the Scottish commercial aristocracy and the Irish labourers who worked in their factories and mills. The Scots lived in the impressive, architecturally eclectic stone mansions of the Square Mile that were built with fortunes made from furs, shipping, flour, and beer. These were tough, often uneducated, ingenious men who imagined the new country with a mixture of nobility and larceny. Down the hill, on the regularly flooded streets of Griffintown, amid outbreaks of typhoid and violence, the Irish saw it merely as refuge. To the east were the francophones with their churches and history, who saw the country as a missed opportunity.
Montreal has the natural divisions of a political convention, and a marvellous political pedigree. It was the scene of the Pacific Scandal that brought down Macdonald's government and the sponsorship scandal that sank Paul Martin. Montreal is where Brian Mulroney's team went to the Old Brewery Mission and signed up a busload of addled, homeless supporters in exchange for free beer—and finished twenty-seven votes ahead of Joe Clark as a result. Former Quebec premier Maurice Duplessis distributed jobs, whisky, appliances, fear, and salvation to the working poor of Montreal for almost two decades, getting out the vote with the dark zeal of a missionary. Montreal has seen Drapeau's folly, Trudeau's patronage, and an army of bagmen exiting the Ritz-Carlton's Maritime bar into the night, a town where politics has the collective memory of a killing floor. It was Montreal that D'Arcy McGee was pining for in 1868 after giving a midnight speech in the House of Commons on the merits of Confederation, minutes before he was gunned down in front of his Ottawa boarding house. Mulroney retreated to Montreal after decimating the Conservatives and became a bagman himself, leaving the Queen Elizabeth Hotel with Karlheinz Schreiber's cash. If it was no longer the most powerful city, it remained a seductress, the locus of deals and good times, and Quebec remained the political prize, the key to a majority.
The Montreal to which the delegates came in the last days of November was basking in record temperatures and jokes about global warming. The candidates came with their separate versions of what the Liberal Party was. The listless tenure of Paul Martin hung like low smoke in the hills, his leadership largely indistinguishable from middle management and tainted by the sponsorship scandal. Jean Chrétien had overseen the country with great cunning and little imagination, a folksy, ruthless caretaker who had slain the deficit and maintained power. The greatest political strength of the party had been the profound disarray of the conservative movement. The Liberal Party has always been a lucrative middle ground, so lucrative that the Liberals campaigned on the notion of the happy medium in the last election, offering unpalatable opponents as the central reason to vote for them. In Montreal they were assembling the Liberal Frankenstein, stitching new ideas onto salvageable party history.
Inside the Clockwork Orange architecture of the Palais des congrés, with its wide white hallways and oversized graphics, there were banners of past Liberal leaders hanging from the rafters like hockey heroes, starting with Alexander Mackenzie, the prudent former stonemason who had quit school at fourteen, a teetotalling Presbyterian to offset Macdonald's excesses; then Edward Blake, who wasn't elected prime minister; then the first giant, Wilfrid Laurier; and Mackenzie King, no giant, but made large by history and sheer numbers—prime minister for twenty-two years, leader of the party for twenty-nine, his innate loopiness balanced by a light but sure hand on the tiller; the avuncular Louis St. Laurent; another giant in Pearson; followed by Trudeau, who got the loudest cheers at the convention; then Turner, in office three months, a casualty; and Chrétien, a leaner, meaner King. And finally Martin, his two years in office already undone by Stephen Harper and the Conservatives (the national daycare program, the Kelowna Accord), he is remembered more fondly as a finance minister. It was clear that the salvageable history lay in Laurier, Pearson, and Trudeau, but it was unclear what would be tacked on to it.
The north foyer, a large open space that stared upward to long escalators, was the initial battleground, the place where the high-school tribalism of convention politics was first staged. In the first few days, amid perspective plenaries, statutory-compliance workshops, and fundraising sessions, the different tribes occupied the foyer in loud, demonstrative shows of support and the first preenings of mating: we are the strongest, come and join us. Stéphane Dion arrived, buoyed by his supporters, shyly basking in the adulation as they pumped their placards and chanted his name. He looked genuinely surprised that it was all for him.
Dion's slightly weedy academic mien had grown on the electorate in the months leading to the convention. He was being tentatively embraced in Quebec and had enjoyed fleeting moments of genuine statistical possibility, but he came to Montreal in fourth place. I had interviewed Dion in September, after first watching him on television, a medium that squeezes his intellect into unsnappy catchphrases. Dion whipped through his Three Pillar plan—economic prosperity, social justice, and environmental sustainability—as the host pleasantly admitted he would never vote for him. Afterwards, Dion sat down and expanded on his views in professorial detail, explaining his virtuous circle, a sustainable government for the twenty-first century: the forward-looking environmental policies would stimulate industry to respond with innovative technology to produce less-polluting products, and the health-care system would, in time, benefit from fewer patients as the chemicals and toxins that haunt our every step were reduced and removed. If he was without charisma, there were flashes of wit. He was shouldering a little of the baggage from the previous administration, was its chief advocate ("We made the difficult decision to put the fiscal house in order") and occasional critic ("We could have done more"). In the leadership debates his passion tended to sound shrill, and his meticulous policies were received as hectoring rather than deliverance. But who has the most experience, he asked; who has the best policies, and who has had to make the fewest apologies?
Gerard Kennedy's people had white kerchiefs with GK on them and they stood around their leader in the north foyer chanting those initials, prompted by a designated maestro. Kennedy spoke to them in brief snippets about renewal as Justin Trudeau flanked him, a Kennedy scarf around his neck.
Kennedy came as a potential kingmaker and as conciliator, mending rifts in the party he hoped to inherit, a diplomat who was treading carefully toward a New Liberalism. Hanging back, he let Dion and Bob Rae tear at front-runner Michael Ignatieff. While campaigning, Kennedy had gone to Ryerson University in Toronto to talk to business students, celebrating his relative youth among the future managers, moguls, and hustlers, who on that day were slouched in low-cut jeans, Tibetan symbols tattooed on their lower backs, checking their BlackBerries and observing Kennedy with a sense of discovery. Voter turnout in the eighteen- to twenty-one-year-old bracket was 39 percent in the 2004 election, and statistics indicate that the tendency not to vote becomes ingrained and follows young voters as they age. They remain a politically lethargic but coveted group. The media outnumbered the students, the event less about reaching out to students than showing the televised image of reaching out to students. Kennedy told them that the New Liberalism embraced an entrepreneurial culture and that Canada needed to embrace it as well or risk being left behind. He was forty-six years old and appeared content to stare at his political future shimmering on the horizon like Mecca. Michael Ignatieff had courted Kennedy and left disappointed. Dion dined with him, and they fashioned a tentative pact. Dion was a francophone Quebecer; if he won, following Liberal tradition the next leader would be an anglophone from outside the province. Kennedy was of the West, where money and power were shifting. As he reminded delegates, it was time to stop spotting the Conservatives eighty seats west of Kenora every election. He put forth little policy that could be attacked and concentrated on being a statesman, a leader-in-waiting.
Bob Rae's supporters, like Rae himself, were the most subdued. Rae brought the sensibility he had displayed as premier of Ontario, a sensibility he had dragged through the towns of Ontario like a cross, though in nostalgic memory Rae's compassionate confusion fared better than Mike Harris's Dickensian putsch. His candidacy was one of faith rather than policy: he is a decent ethical man and he will lead a decent ethical government. In political terms, Rae was reminiscent of Jimmy Carter, a good man who magnified the complexities of governing an ungovernable country and who aged visibly under the burden, frightening Americans, who quickly retreated to the calming void of Ronald Reagan.
But on the road to Montreal, it was Michael Ignatieff who was the centre of the play and, like Hamlet, a presence even when offstage. His ideas were publicly challenged, his commitment questioned, his citizenship in doubt, his liberalism mocked. Like Hamlet, Ignatieff was given to grand speeches, was at times contradictory, a prince who wondered if he was a man of words or a man of action. He was the early choice of 30 percent of the delegates. "He's lov'd of the distracted multitude," the king said of Hamlet, "who like not in their judgment, but their eyes." Ignatieff had all the qualities that make a prince attractive: he is articulate, with a certain loftiness, and a sense of political destiny that occasionally, and cautiously, evoked Trudeau. Ignatieff had lived in a dozen places, a citizen of the world, self-contained, but he was now, he said, looking for home. "O God," Hamlet laments, "I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams." And Guildenstern answers, "Which dreams indeed are ambition."
"I don't think Michael knows who he is," a Rae delegate told me. If he doesn't, it isn't from a lack of searching. Some of his books (The Russian Album, Scar Tissue, Blood and Belonging) deal with the notion of self and sense of place. And finding Canada's place, a staple of Liberal conventions, was voiced at the Palais in the Hamlet-like lament: who are we in the world?
"Traditional Canadian peacekeeping met its Waterloo in Rwanda," Ignatieff had told a crowd in Saint John, New Brunswick. The truth is, we are a middle power with an underfunded military. He added an international realpolitik to the softer Liberal line. "To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils," he had written in the New York Times Magazine, engaging the issue of terrorism as a public intellectual and finding relatively few voices willing to join the debate. On the Stop Iggy website, disgruntled Liberals warned that Ignatieff would "destroy much of what constitutes the core of Liberal Party policy for the last century" though it could be argued that Liberal success rests in the absence of a core, in the Mackenzie King-like ability to co-opt and adapt and float toward a shifting centre.
Ignatieff's occupation of the north foyer was Roman in its pomp and in its numbers. Phalanxes of supporters milled at the base of the long escalators, signs at the ready. Down the escalators, in waves, came supporters in different-coloured T-shirts—green, sienna, pink, and red—followed finally by Michael, descending to the masses, waving and smiling as they chanted, "Mi-chael! Mi-chael!"
Ignatieff's muscular Liberalism was refuted by Dion and criticized by Bob Rae as "Harper lite." Former Liberal cabinet minister Lloyd Axworthy obliquely accused Ignatieff of being an apologist for the Bush administration and its "borrowed and failed ideologies." Ideology itself was in bad favour. In an interview Rae said, "I don't think the country can afford to have deeply ideological parties. I find that ideology is usually a pretty lousy foundation for governing." He criticized Harper for having the most ideological government in the country's history, a divisive and Darwinian administration that ate the poor. Rae advocated openness and flexibility. Instead of ideology, then, a narrative.
There was much talk of narrative in the Liberal camp. They had paid one of Bill Clinton's main strategists, James Carville, a rumoured $50,000 to come to Toronto and confirm to 1,200 Liberals that voters don't want a litany; they want a story. In that Louisiana drawl, Carville offered George Bush's story as example. " 'I was a drunk, I was transformed by the power of Jesus Christ… and I'm going to fight the terrorists in Iran and the homos in Hollywood.'" The Liberals hadn't needed a story for some time, borne as they were by benevolent historical forces, by their populist appeal to everyman, and by the splintering of the conservative vote. But now the Conservatives had a narrative. "Mr. Harper's narrative is a bad story for Canada," Ignatieff said. "Beating Mr. Harper means defeating his narrative."
The Harper narrative is a mélange of dense policy, simple gifts, and rigid ideology. There is a little of George Bush's America (the emphasis on national security, decisiveness, secrecy, and hints of theology), a bit of Don Messer's Jubilee (the retro sensibility of his child-care solutions, reopening the debate on same-sex marriage), as well as a reluctant Western populism.
His narrative is tightly controlled; he chooses the story and the way to tell it, and to whom it is told. And what of the narrator? Harper is a putative Westerner, his ideas and adult self formed there, though he doesn't fit the mould of the Western politician, lacking the polished frontier presence of Peter Lougheed certainly or Don Getty's rugged athleticism or the extended happy hour of Ralph Klein. No, Harper looks distinctly Central Canadian. He looks like the planned community of Don Mills: meticulous, efficient, and sterile. As a narrator, he is stiff and he has kept to the background, letting the story unfold in carefully presented pictures—his tough-on-crime bill delivered in the company of police officers; his clean-air act presented with mountains as backdrop; a ceremonial Last Spike given to James Pon after awarding compensation to the victims of the Chinese Head Tax. He has kept a tight lid on information coming out of his caucus and limited access to the national press, a relationship still marked by pettiness and an air of regency. His story comes out in Barthesian semiotics, a Western story of stolid morality, the new sheriff riding in to clean up the town.
In 2000, Harper wrote that Alberta and the rest of Canada were embarking on "divergent and potentially hostile paths to defining their country." Alberta was choosing the "best of Canada's heritage—a combination of American enterprise and individualism with the British traditions of order and co-operation," while Canada was "content to become a second-tier socialistic country… led by a second-world strongman." After Harper lost the 2004 election, elements of the story were toned down to court the soft liberal middle. The anti-abortion elements and attacks on bilingualism were absent. He retooled the Alberta Advantage slogan to Advantage Canada, and the Western narrative was blown up into a national one: Canada, Harper announced, would be the Energy Nation.
So the spectre of Harper was there at the Palais des congrés. The brittle visionary, the controlling, decentralizing, hidden-agenda, End Days, strangle-Kyoto, Reform Harper hung from the ceiling as a Liberal piñata. Interim Liberal leader Bill Graham kicked it off on opening night, directing his geometrical rectitude—the squared body topped by a rectangular head—toward Harper. "I sit in the House, two sword lengths away from the prime minister, and there have been days when, if I had a sword…." Harper, he said, had betrayed history and democracy and those who had invested in income trusts.
Harper had been a surprise, seizing power with the appetite and some of the strategies of Huey Long. Who knew that this blue-eyed, corn-fed Christian child of the suburbs had it in him? He was, if nothing else, finally interesting. In May, a Strategic Counsel poll showed that 55 percent of Quebecers thought Harper was doing a "good job." Only 6 percent felt he was doing a "poor job." Through the summer and fall, Quebecers began their habitual drift back toward the Liberals. Still, Montreal was wide open, as the gangsters say.
"If you want to know what Harper is going to do next week," Scott Brison noted in a practised campaign sound bite, "just look at what George Bush did last week." If Bush made poor decisions as president, he made a virtue of decisiveness itself and reminded people regularly that at least they knew where he stood. For most of his tenure, this single attribute was seen as more valuable than wisdom, compassion, an ability to negotiate, or even a clear grasp of the issues. He made the tough decisions. This was the spin. That others had made Bush's decisions wasn't important; it was the image of a tough-talking Texan that sold them. Harper is the opposite: an ambitious architect and awkward shill.
Harper has two narratives: one is ideological; the other is designed to retain and expand power, to make the Conservatives what the Liberals had been—the natural governing party. The Liberals, who have held power for 80 of the last 110 years, lost seats in 1997 and 2004, and the government in 2006. They are vulnerable. Harper approached the election with the military energy of Sun Tzu ("In the practical art of war, the best thing of all is to take the enemy's country whole and intact"). He usurped Liberal symbols, and in seducing David Emerson and appointing Liberal MP Wajid Khan as his special adviser on South Asia and the Middle East, Harper co-opted actual Liberals. He offered a few crude gifts, notably the 1-percent cut in the gst, an economically woolly idea, though one with broad, simplistic appeal. Like many politicians, he found a flexible place within the triangle formed by principle, pragmatism, and opportunism. When Harper was granted only a few minutes with the Chinese president, he declared that the cause of human rights had triumphed over the "almighty dollar."
At the Palais des congrés, there was talk about the conservative id, the Reform heart that still beat below the Conservative surface. But after a year in office, Harper looks, if not entirely comfortable, then at least recognizable: a middle-aged man in khakis and a polo shirt, a little soft around the waist, a bit uncomfortable in groups, a church-going hockey fan. The Liberals are still hoping that Harper's natural petulance will irk voters, that his fragile alliance will fray, that his evangelical roots will frighten, or that Maurice Vellacott will fall down on the floor of the House of Commons and speak in tongues. But Harper has developed the necessary cynicism to hold onto federal power. Perhaps his decisions have had Shakespearean consequences, the soul tortured by the actions of the man. Maybe Harper has spent nights rereading the Book of Matthew ("For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? ") and weeping tears of apostasy. But he is the equal of Jean Chrétien as a street fighter, which makes him dangerous and, on occasion, fascinating.
One of the most critical election issues, one upon which the Conservative and Liberal narratives will clash with the greatest noise, is the fundamental shape of the nation. Trudeau had wanted a strong federal government to prevent the country from becoming "a confederation of shopping centres." Harper, in turn, described Trudeau's federalism as "state corporatism" and has begun the process of decentralizing power, granting more money and autonomy to the provinces, re-sketching the lines of Confederation. In a 1994 speech, Harper said, "Whether Canada ends up as one national government or two national governments or several national governments or some other kind of arrangement is, quite frankly, secondary in my opinion." If as a vote-getter the issue of national unity is the equivalent of a rotting fish sitting in the nation's sock drawer, for Liberals, it must nevertheless become, once again, the Big Issue.
Arthur Meighen, the articulate, unloved Conservative prime minister after World War I, concluded that Canada's problem was essentially "spiritual," the problem of "getting all our people to see that we have not a collection of unrelated sections." Yet ninety years later, we appear to have a collection of unrelated sections. The Conservative narrative accepts this and lays out a program of efficient administration rather than a binding story. Harper's five priorities (child care, hospital waiting lists, government accountability, tax relief, and strengthening the justice system) are pragmatic chores, concrete and measurable. His budget priorities are to lower taxes, pay down the debt, and appeal to the nation's wallet. The Liberals, by contrast, are selling a larger picture, one that is abstract and less measurable. "The great function of political leadership," Ignatieff said, "is to make people feel that great visceral feeling in your gut that we are a great people." Dion said, "Above all, we need a Canada more united than ever." The Liberals engage ancient metaphysical challenges: unity and citizenship. But is there still an audience for the Big Idea? Or is the country content to devolve into regional blocs, and conceivably, in the coming decades, into a handful of city states? The view that Canada is "a community of communities," as Joe Clark modestly opined, will be tested in the next election. One reason for the Liberals' dominance in federal politics is the successful marketing of a binding dream, but as the country evolves it isn't clear that it wants or needs to dream.
A nation, Ignatieff has written, is an imagined community. In the aftermath of the election, Canada will be reimagined in ways it hasn't been for more than a generation. When Ignatieff declared that Quebec was a nation, it raised the spectre of constitutional talks and sank the hearts of millions. Perhaps it was apathy as much as antipathy that was at play, the threat of climbing back into constitutional waters as appealing as putting on a wet bathing suit on a cold day. Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe took the opportunity to say that Quebec would be an independent country by 2015.
Harper's statement that "the Québécois form a nation within a united Canada" (with the qualifier "united" suppling the escape clause the country seems to need) gave him an aura of decisiveness, and launched the familiar semantic parade. A Bloc MP brought three dictionaries—two French, one English—into the House and read out the definitions of "nation" with a discouraging sense of urgency. British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell argued for nation status for First Nations, and pundits pointed out that the Quebec National Assembly had recognized eleven separate aboriginal groups as "nations," bringing the provincial total to twelve, with grumpy Montreal Anglos lining up to be thirteenth. A few days after the convention, Ed Stelmach, a former farmer of Ukrainian extraction, now the unlikely premier of Alberta, started muttering about nation status for his province. The country's narrative, which in recent years has slouched toward the Seinfeldian—if not about nothing, then about free health care, tolerance, and the promise of tax relief—presents fresh challenges.
In Montreal, an anticipated storm front arrived from Alberta, and it was suddenly cold. Amid the detritus of the recent Liberal legacy and Harper's deft democratic vandalism could be felt the ghost of John A. Macdonald. In 1864, while hammering out the terms of Confederation, Macdonald argued eloquently for a strong central government and was found later that evening drunk in his room, wearing a nightshirt, a rug thrown around his shoulders as he recited Hamlet in front of a mirror. A few years later, he observed the new country's disarray (as well as his own) and noted, "We are all miserable sinners."
By Thursday night at the Liberal convention, the delegates had abandoned the soft sell—"Hi, Michael wanted me to ask you if there is anything you want to talk about, any questions you might have"—for a harder line: "Do you want to beat Harper? " After forty-eight hours of heartfelt platitudes, self-congratulation, and repeated calls for unity, weary delegates retreated to the salons of their respective candidates.
Dion's party was at the Hotel Place d'Armes, where 150 people had wedged themselves into a meeting room off the lobby. It had the atmosphere of a small-town wedding. Dion had raised the least amount of money among the front-runners, and his campaign was a clever, earnest shoestring operation. There was one free drink per person, and a woman marked every hand with a red felt pen to ensure no one got two. The deal with Kennedy was coming together: the fourth-place finisher would support the third. Dion's campaign organizer for Ontario said some of Ignatieff's ex officios were going to Dion after the first ballot. She said the Ignatieff people were drifting. Forty percent of the delegates still hadn't committed to a second choice. Dion arrived to cheers and announced that their chances were good. "What do you think about that?" he asked, his schoolboy face beaming.
Two blocks away, a crowd of several hundred waited for Ignatieff in the ersatz streetscape of the long, nine-storey atrium of the InterContinental Hotel. This was the hippest-looking crowd, youthful, dressed darkly, laughing brightly, drinking wine as a band played on stage. Ignatieff descended a stone staircase, narrow-shouldered, well-tailored, his natural stoop in check, shaking hands as he moved toward the stage. "What you feel is momentum," he told his delegates. "What you feel is confidence. And what you feel… is happening. The momentum is with us. But you have a job to do. You have to get out of the tent. Get out. Get out. Don't stay with the true believers. You've got a job to do. You've got to go out there and talk to all of them. To those who support Bob. To those who support Stéphane. To those who support Gerard, and you've got to persuade them that this is their chance to beat Stephen Harper. C'est nous. C'est nous! You can go to them and say we're in the same family of faith, the same family of hope, and you can tell them that there is one candidate who can take them over the top!" It was a military speech, delivered by a general who was hampered by a cold and who was aware that his numerical advantage was fragile. Others were massing against him, but on this night he looked like a man of action.
In the bars afterwards the young delegates mingled and tried to dissuade one another from their various positions. They floated through the night on a wave of free drinks, remembered under-graduate rhetoric—"Politics is organized corruption, live with it"—and free condoms. When the morning came, not much had shifted.
Friday was the first ballot, and Ignatieff 's people took early control of the north foyer, a thousand strong, their placards pumping, wearing red Ignatieff scarves and T-shirts with Michael's face repeated in Warholian colour washes. Three hours later the other, smaller armies moved onto the abandoned plain, chanting and marching ("Kennedy, Canada, Kennedy, Canada!"). Scott Brison's surprisingly large group chanted, "We want Scott!" a cry that was co-opted by Kennedy's people, who responded, "We want Scott!" Dion's people took the high ground, marching up the escalators and descending the wide staircase in a continuous circle of red T-shirts. It went on for ninety minutes while they waited for the ballot-room doors to open, a rhythmic pulse where all the chants finally blended and it was difficult to move.
The speeches began, with each candidate retailing his or her vision for the New Liberalism. Had there been Surtitles, as at the opera, that showed the subtext of every speech, they might have shown that Martha Hall Findlay was positioning herself for a run at a federal seat and a possible cabinet post, that Volpe and Dryden had miscalculated, that Kennedy was positioning himself as the next leader, that Rae was offering cabinet positions to Brison and Dion if they came over.
Stéphane Dion began his speech by invoking Laurier and reciting his own commitment to public service, though he knew, as every circuit preacher knows, that God brings them into the tent but the devil is where the money is. Three minutes into his speech, he told the delegates, "Something is wrong… Canada has a prime minister who thinks that the United States is not only our ally, but also our model…. We have a prime minister who thinks that child care is delivered through the mailbox… a prime minister who tore up our climate-change plan." Dion outlined Harper's flaws to great applause but was careful not to linger. "To win," he cautioned, "we must offer our own project to Canadians."
He outlined his environmental plan and stressed national unity. His delivery was efficient but without drama, and he was cut off before the end of his speech, denied the rousing finish. In Academy Awards style, music swelled, giving him the signal, and he moved to bring it home, but his microphones cut out, and there was that earnest face, with a look of anger and betrayal blown up on the giant screens, his lips moving, the sound of an anonymous orchestra playing.
Seated in front of him was Jean Chrétien, the purest politician the country has produced in three decades, an instinctive fighter who had delivered three majorities and who looked, in the unflattering, changeable light of the convention room, darkly reptilian, his limbic self revealed as he watched his creation onstage. He had plucked Dion from academia to use him as an attack dog for unity. Dion was not a natural politician, and ten years later he still isn't. He is the antithesis of Chrétien, a shy, rigorous thinker. A reporter asked Chrétien what a good leader was. "A good leader," answered the pragmatist, "is one who wins elections."
Bob Rae was the closest to Chrétien in terms of presenting a purely political campaign. His most thorough policy document had only arrived that day, the first concrete glimpse of what he would do after eight months of campaigning. He eschewed the lectern and wandered the stage with a hand-held microphone, a life coach telling us of his troubles and how he overcame them. Liberal ideas were easy to find, he told us; his colleagues had good ideas, there were ideas on the Internet, the Google Liberalism approach. What was needed was a politician, an experienced leader who could implement them. He was politics.
After Rae came Ignatieff 's patrician speech, polished, safe though with a bit of fire, the most prime ministerial, and, in the homely hearts of the assembled, the most presumptuous. He was a divisive force in a still-divided party and he tried to bring everyone together tonight. "Tous ensemble!" he repeated. "Tous ensemble!" He outlined his Canada and its specific greatness. Ken Dryden had already given the crowd the grassroots Canada that he had seen while driving across the country, staying in people's guest rooms, and visiting folk festivals and methadone clinics. Scott Brison sketched the Canada of Big Dreams, Dion the country as environmental world leader. Everywhere there was a sense of scope and grandeur. In a Maclean's article a month earlier, Ignatieff had described Canadians as "less than the sum of our parts," perhaps the fairest assessment, but not one for this night.
On Canada Day, as the Liberal leadership candidates were flipping hamburgers and smiling wilfully at picnics and barbecues across the country, I was standing with sixty or so people in the shallow water of Mary Lake, north of Toronto. Lumpy and pale, we stood with our children and their inflatable toys, squinting across the water. There was a microphone set up on the dock beside the public beach, and a local politician said a few words about the greatness of the nation and then introduced federal Health Minister Tony Clement, who owns a cottage nearby. Clement was on a swing through Muskoka that day, spreading good cheer, and this was his first stop. He reiterated our greatness to a few cheers and then walked among us, handing out small flags. I doubt that a dozen people recognized him. He went back to the microphone and said goodbye and waved. "Thanks for the 1 percent!" a sunburned man yelled, clutching his flag.
Canada is more easily defined in literary than political terms, an act of faith and imagination that is separated by familiar forces (language, geography, ethnicity) and bound by tolerance. The few sustaining mythologies are diluted through successive generations and through the general lack of interest from immigrants. The Dominion Institute, founded in 1997 to address "the erosion of a common memory and civic identity in Canada," provides disheartening statistics on how little knowledge is shared. Only 5 percent of Canadians surveyed could name the 1873 Pacific Scandal as the event that brought down Macdonald's first government, and more than a quarter identified US general Douglas MacArthur as a Canadian war hero. Do we know who we are? Is the country a collection of short stories or is it an epic novel?
"As a cultural ideal," Ignatieff wrote in Blood and Belonging, "nationalism is the claim that while men and women have many identities, it is the nation that provides them with their primary form of belonging." Oddly, non-white immigrants arrive in Canada with a greater sense of belonging than whites, but that sense diminishes in the second generation, while the white immigrant's sense of attachment increases. This suggests that multiculturalism remains more successful as an idea than a reality. A recent poll showed that second-generation immigrants felt less attached to Canada than their parents do.
There is an innate need to belong, to attach oneself to something. The global consumerism that optimists felt would eventually displace nationalism—an idea that reached its apogee in Thomas Friedman's Golden Arches theory that no two countries with a McDonald's had ever gone to war—has proved incorrect. Tribalism isn't easily supplanted by common economic interests, and it remains a stubborn, visceral force.
In 1968 Trudeau wrote, "By a historical accident, Canada has found itself approximately seventy-five years ahead of the rest of the world in the formation of a multi-national state and I happen to believe that the hope of mankind lies in multinationalism." Though multinationalism, like globalization, can erode national identity, Canada is staring at the middle game of pluralism. And what is the endgame? There is a danger that the combination of regional alienation and the lack of attachment that immigrants feel will turn the country into a vast abstraction, a cross between a larger, less lucrative version of Hong Kong and John Lennon's "Imagine," a postmodern experiment rather than the world's most successful multinational state.
The idea of national greatness is a common political theme, whether it's Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, Mao's Great Leap Forward, or Bush's tenuous empire. Canada's greatness lies in its potential—as an exemplar of a working multinational state; as an enviable, global model of diversity; and, more pragmatically, as the owner of increasingly coveted resources. The country continues to stumble toward greatness, aided by the relative failure of other nations to deal with multinationalism.
All societies have fears about breaking down because all societies eventually do break down. What kills them, ultimately, is a lack of meaning. The search for meaning has been long and hard-won, and it isn't encouraging that 140 years into official nationhood, a Member of Parliament is reading aloud the definition of "nation" in both official languages with a sense of genuine purpose. With a sovereigntist party in the House of Commons, Canada is faced, daily, with the means to its end.
The civic nationalism that is Canada's—bound by laws and shared rights rather than ethnicity—nevertheless has themes that resonate through much of the population. According to recent figures from the David Suzuki Foundation, 90 percent of Canadians said, "It is very important for national identity that Canada be a leader on world environmental issues." There is the perception among Canadians that the country is an environmental leader, yet in a ranking of thirty industrialized nations Canada sat twenty-eighth, ahead of only Belgium and the United States. Other rankings are equally dismal. In terms of per-capita carbon dioxide emissions, Canada produces 19.05 tonnes per year, compared with France's 6.8 and the UK's 9.5. Along with the US and Australia, Canada is the environmental equivalent of a soccer thug. Its 33 million people consume as much energy as the continent of Africa with its 900 million. "You think of yourselves as a liberal and enlightened people," scolded British writer George Monbiot in his book Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, "but you could scarcely do more to destroy the biosphere if you tried."
Last spring and winter were the warmest since Environment Canada began tracking mean annual temperatures. Nonetheless, Harper has cancelled Kyoto Protocol initiatives and cut funding to climate-change programs by 80 percent. Alberta, Harper's political base, is the country's largest producer of hydrocarbons, and the oil sands are one of the most concentrated sources of global pollution. It was left to Environment Minister Rona Ambrose to explain the government's isolationist position, and she stayed on message with the tenacity of the early Ronald Reagan; she was vilified by the left for incompetence and by the Liberals for idiocy. In the House, and in tentative trips abroad, she had an air of the sacrificial, like the first to go in a horror film.
The environmental policy outlined by Dion addressed the country's perception of itself as an environmental leader ("Canada on the podium of the sustainable economy"), while Harper, with his attenuated and cleverly named Clean Air Act, went with what Canada is: the Energy Nation.
It was the second ballot that would tell where the movement would start. The delegates walked in tight circles and talked on their cellphones. They worked on the enemy, pointing out glaring weaknesses—character, electability, language—questioning whether they were truly Liberals.
Finally the results: Ignatieff up little more than two percentage points, a disappointment; Rae up four points, Dion narrowly ahead of Kennedy. Then Kennedy went to Dion, a surprise. He could have stayed for the third ballot and perhaps edged Dion out, but suddenly it was a three-way race with a new set of unanticipated equations.
When Rae got bumped off the next ballot there was a dark rumour that he would declare for Ignatieff, that the months of polite hostilities between the two would be forgiven, that the old roommates would unite. This unlikely but dramatically tantalizing scenario hovered for fifteen minutes, as the cameras followed Rae's movements through the crowd. Would he go to Ignatieff or to Dion? In the end, he sat down beside a man in a turban and chatted comfortably, as if he were at a cocktail party, a man of words. It was down to Ignatieff's smooth, forceful Liberalism and Dion's green tutorial.
Toronto MP John Godfrey walked by, declaring for Dion. "The environment," he said, shrugging. Former Ontario premier David Peterson, who had backed Ignatieff, stared at the wreckage of the third ballot. "We've lost," he said.
What happened in the heads of the delegates who chose the leader on the final ballot? Was it momentum? The environment? A backlash among the delegates who couldn't recognize themselves in Ignatieff? He had raised Quebec and Israel, two topics that divided opinion, good news for an intellectual, but less so for a politician. Perhaps he should have stayed with his original statements, not waffled. Now he looked, once more, like a man of words. The camera stayed on him, searching for cracks in his facade while waiting for prime time before announcing the results, which were foregone. Dion was unglamorous but familiar. There were a hundred men at the Palais who looked like him, wearing practical shoes and glasses and warm fleece vests. The delegates—veterans of 1968, the retired, the young, the ideologues, the single-issue bores, religious lobbyists, groupies, and academics—herded toward Dion.
After the last ballot but before any announcement, Jean Chrétien addressed the crowd. To watch Chrétien is to see the essence of Liberalism, that mixture of voodoo and instinct and machinery that carried them for more than a decade. Consider his gifts: linguistically eclectic, intellectually indifferent, politically astute, a mixture of the sinister and the avuncular. Yet when he spoke, he roused his people. "Harper was watching earlier. Maybe he is still watching. Stephen, Stephen—can I call you Steve, like George W.? " His appeal is difficult to define. Perhaps voters accepted his sweet, fraudulent mythology, le p'tit gar de Shawinigan, or maybe it was the grudging respect accorded survivors. Or the unknowable alchemy that is the successful politician.
Ignatieff was gracious in defeat and Dion conciliatory, if uninspiring, in victory. Renewal had been one of the great buzzwords of the convention, a buzzword at every convention, where the contrary notions of change and tradition are trumpeted in arbitrary rhetoric. In the end, a Liberal compromise: both change and renewal in the form of a ten-year veteran of the government, but one who wasn't associated with the establishment. The old order, the remnants of the machines that had delivered Chrétien and Martin, and the machines that had wanted to deliver Ignatieff or Rae were effectively gone. Dion came in with few obligations, the people's choice.
Who else was at the convention? The ndp were there, Olivia Chow circulating, sociable and elegant. The Conservatives were there, observing and distributing buttons, one of which read "Go for Bob—Go for Broke," a reference to Rae's economic record as premier of Ontario, an uncharacteristic flash of wit. Notably absent were the Americans, weary veterans of federal politics, Margaret Dumont to Canada's Marx Brothers, who have attended past conventions as a cultural threat, occasionally as a military entity, and always as the economic bully waiting outside in the parking lot. Macdonald had had to deal with them on the issue of protective tariffs in the 1878 election. Laurier was still dealing with free trade in the 1911 election and lost because of his support of it (unwisely characterizing it as a "commercial union"). Free trade has polarized Liberals and Conservatives since Confederation, with each party periodically changing sides. Even Mulroney, the modern champion, was against it as late as 1983. In 1957, Diefenbaker thundered that Canada was in danger of becoming "a virtual forty-ninth economic state in the American union." Dief was elected, in part, because of the anti-American sentiment in the country, but once in power he quickly signed the North American Air Defense agreement, putting the country's air security under joint Canadian-American control and offending the electorate. After being elected, Harper expanded norad's role, though without the protest that Dief encountered. There has been a fundamental shift in the anti-American narrative. There is periodic protest, but it is muted.
The turning point was shown on the big screens of the Palais, the 1988 showdown where Liberal leader John Turner told Brian Mulroney that the Free Trade Agreement would reduce Canada to an American colony, and that once the economic levers were ceded, the political levers would follow. The electorate didn't agree, or it didn't care. Since then, and especially since 9/11, ties with the US have accelerated dramatically and include energy, security, the sharing of intelligence, regulatory harmonization, and commercial alliances. This increasingly deep integration hasn't come about in big, debated gestures like nafta, but in smaller, less-publicized ways. The political covenant that has been in effect since the first elections in Upper Canada—protect us from the US—has largely dissolved.
The genial menace of America was replaced in Montreal by Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont and presidential hopeful, celebrated screamer, and now chairman of the Democratic National Committee, who delivered a keynote speech in which he told delegates that the Democrats and the Liberals shared principles and values. They also share a sense of purposelessness of late, and both are searching for a galvanizing idea. Dean spoke a little French to great applause.
Last year was one of record sales of Canadian companies: in the second quarter of 2006 alone, there were 480 deals worth a total of $86.1 billion. Some of this is the natural result of freer global trade and it is offset by the purchase of foreign companies by Canadian firms. But 2006 also saw the sale of iconic Canadian companies (Hudson's Bay Company, Molson) and other significant names (Domtar, Dofasco, Vincor, Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, and Intrawest, owner of Whistler Blackcomb, site of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games), all of which passed with little comment.
The softwood deal gives Washington unprecedented control over Canada's lumber industry and revealed the weakness of nafta, its impotence in the face of American will. Roughly half of Alberta's oil industry is controlled by American interests, and under the terms of the Free Trade Agreement 60 percent of Canadian oil and gas has to be exported to the US, even in times of domestic shortages. It isn't clear if water is covered by the Free Trade Agreement. Not since the seventeenth century have Canada's resources been so coveted. Once more the world is coming to our shores, looking to get fat.
The political approach to this has been bifurcated: the private acknowledgement that there isn't enough investment capital in the country to develop its resources, and that there is a net economic benefit to foreign investment/ownership, is combined with a sense of righteous indignation at election time. While foreign investment creates jobs, the best jobs—research and development, planning—are reserved for the head offices. At its growing number of branch plants, Canada supplies only labour and middle management. And there is the environmental impact of industry; the locals, as is so often the case in the Third World, are left to clean up the mess. There is less public concern now about the implications of foreign ownership, about continentalism, and closer ties to the US, and less need for manufactured government outrage. Whether this is due to a maturing of economic thinking or is the result of collective ennui isn't clear. Perhaps novelist Yann Martel is right: Canada is essentially a hotel.
A week before the convention Stephen Harper became the unlikely protector of economic sovereignty, announcing a pending bill to limit foreign investment when it isn't in the "national interest." Finance Minister Jim Flaherty clarified: "For example, foreign investment by large, state-owned enterprises with non-commercial objectives and unclear corporate governance and reporting may not be beneficial to Canadians" (though the list of Canadian companies with unclear corporate governance and reporting is a long one). The policy was aimed squarely at China, though it had already been shut out of a deal to buy Noranda, and Falconbridge and Inco had recently been sold to Brazilian and Swiss companies respectively, leaving less to buy in the mining sector. The Chinese had also, surprisingly, pulled back from Alberta oil-sands negotiations (while retaining investments by Sinopec Group and China National Offshore Oil Corporation) and taken their business to Iran in the form of a $100-billion oil deal.
The Conservative announcement had little practical effect but held some political value. It curried favour with the US, which views China's presence in the oil sands as a security issue, and Harper's timing was exquisite. He ran a campaign alongside the leadership race, stealing pieces of the Liberals' traditional agenda—human rights, raising the flag about foreign ownership, even multiculturalism—while offering recognizable Tory gifts such as less tax, less debt, less government.
After Dion's victory speech, delegates headed toward the exits of the Palais, dehydrated and hungry, relieved and confused. They weren't leaving with their fists pumping, war cries ringing through the halls, thirsty for Tory blood. Perhaps there was already a slight twinge, a feeling they had made a strategic mistake, that they had voted their conscience rather than for victory. Was this the champion to slay the beast? Dion was unloved in Quebec and a hard sell in the West. As we lined up for takeout sushi in the bowels of the Palais, the cashier warned the assembled: "You have taken a big risk. A very big risk. Dion can't win in Quebec. Jamais."
In preparing for the election the two sides have begun to claw their way toward the middle. Forty years ago, Trudeau wrote that the main distinction between the conservative and the progressive is that "the progressive will tend to overestimate the people's desire for justice, freedom and change, whereas the conservative will tend to err on the side of order, authority and continuity." At the moment, the electorate appears to have a limited appetite for freedom or order (which it feels are reasonably assured) but it is ravenous for change and authority.
There is a Through the Looking Glass aspect to federal politics that goes something like this: The ndp borrows the occasional idea from the Green Party, but feels it is a marginal group (ndp Pat Martin said the Greens functioned primarily as "a big catch basin for wing nuts who would otherwise gravitate to our party"). The Liberals poach ideas from the ndp (former ndp head David Lewis was called the best policy chairman the Liberals ever had) and feel, in the words of Martha Hall Findlay, that they "have good ideas but are unable to implement them—just ask Bob [Rae]." The Conservatives have contempt for the Liberals, but strategically Harper can be a Liberal himself—his chemicals-management plan, built on a Liberal initiative, has the added benefit of stealing back the environment from Dion.
Canada isn't the only country where the definitions of liberalism and conservatism are being refined, colliding in a slow-motion car crash. In Spain, the Socialist Party introduced radical social legislation but also embraced free-market economics and lowered income taxes by 6 percent. In Britain, Tony Blair used a combination of fiscal conservatism and Labour rhetoric to hold onto power for a decade, and now British Conservatives, who have learned from Blair, are championing bicycle paths and the environment. In the US, Bill Clinton was described as the best Republican president since Eisenhower. The Liberals have long been accused of campaigning from the left and governing from the right, and traditional lines continue to blur in the rush for the centre. The ndp is "tough on crime," the Conservatives celebrate diversity, Ignatieff favours Canada's continued military presence in Afghanistan.
The Liberals have Laurier and Mackenzie King and Chrétien as models for finding and holding the middle ground, while Harper has Mulroney and Diefenbaker. Mulroney's massive majority is tainted by his scorched-earth legacy: leaving two seats and years of chaos. Diefenbaker trounced Lester Pearson but was undone by his inability to carry Quebec (in a moment of Shakespearean drama, Dief 's political death was initiated by his then-protegé, Brian Mulroney). If Harper fails in the election, his model could be Arthur Meighen, a bright, arrogant man who was prime minister from 1920 to 1921, and then again for a few months in 1926, a leader who couldn't have found the middle ground if it was nailed to his head. If Harper is successful, however, his energies will go toward securing that middle ground, then to testing its rightward borders, to make Liberalism irrelevant.
In the House on the Monday after the convention, the two Steves faced off, policy wonks, both a bit rigid, unhappy in crowds, but with each other happily combative. The Liberals tore into Harper's Clean Air Act, and the Conservatives savaged Dion's environmental record. In the new narrative, Harper will try to convince voters that Dion will deliver a green, expensive, and paralyzed Canada. Dion will try to convince them that under Harper Canada will become a version of Bush's America, with its quietly eroding rights, its lack of government transparency, and its belief that poverty is God's judgment.
In 1983, Gore Vidal, no fan of Richard Nixon, wrote, "We are Nixon; he is us." The same may be true of Harper. He is awkward, shy, conniving, the physical embodiment of the suburban middle class. That he is using Alberta as a model, a wonderful, largely vision-free province that has recently been governed by the principles of a drunken lottery winner, isn't necessarily cause for celebration. Dion is the new face of Liberalism; bespectacled, shy, with more steel than is first suspected. Harper will govern the country as he sees it: a colony to be efficiently administered. Dion will govern it as it exists in the Liberal imagination.
Don Gillmor
Don Gillmor (@dongillmor) published his latest novel, Long Change, in 2015.
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Greaves draws capacity crowd at BSBDC event
Created: Aug 26, 2011 11:01 PM
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By Marina MelloInternational publishing executive and entrepreneur Magnus Greaves was a major draw for last night's annual Bermuda Small Business Networking Event.
Mr Greaves, the founder of 100 Urban Entrepreneurs, Doubledown Media and MYMAG, was the guest speaker at the event.
The Canadian-born former financial trader was named one of Black Enterprise's top 40 businesspeople under age 40.
BSBDC acting general manager Erica Smith said yesterday the event at the Fairmont Hamilton Princess, which was free to the public, was "oversubscribed".
She said over 200 people had signed up with the BSBDC originally anticipating around 100 to 150.
Ms Smith said interest in the event was high because many people wanted to hear Mr Greaves' speech, and in this economy, many small business owners and entrepreneurs wanted the opportunity to network or find out how to go about getting a business off the ground.
"I think given the economy business owners are wanting to take every opportunity to network and positions themselves for success," Ms Smith said. "Or people may be out of work and have a hidden desire to become an entrepreneur. I think our event provides the opportunity for people to find all those resources in one place."
Nearly 40 vendors were on hand for "speed-dating" networking with small business owners and those interested in starting a company, offering advice on finance, Government, insurance/pensions, legal, marketing, management, and information technology.
All three banks had a presence, along with local insurance, media and advertising companies, small business IT experts, law firms, telecoms providers and an airline that's starting a small business rewards programme.
Ms Smith said many people were interested in Mr Greaves's non-profit 100 Urban Entrepreneurs initiative that provides $10,000 in start-up grants and business mentoring to selected young entrepreneurs.
Mr Greaves has been quoted in the media as saying: "There's a one-in-100,000 chance that a kid will become successful as a rapper or athlete, but a one-in-10 chance that he'll become successful in business with the same effort."
The entrepreneur left college early and moved to London in 1994 to work in the financial sector.
He went on to co-found MacFutures, which seized on the global shift toward electronic trading.
He eventually sold his firm and got into publishing luxury-lifestyle and personal celebrity magazines including Trader Monthly, Dealmaker, Corporate Leader, Private Air and The Cigar Report.
Words of wisdom: Young Bermudian entrepreneurs got some advice from Magnus Greaves (back row, far right) yesterday lunchtime
Small Business Networking Event held at the Fairmont Hamilton Princess Hotel last night. (Photo by Akil Simmons)
Small Business Networking Event held at the Fairmont Hamilton Princess Hotel last night.(Photo by Akil Simmons) August 25,2011
Overseas purchases soar as online buying jumps in October
Welcome to the new year of your future
Retailers pin hopes on record cruise callers
Shoppers still absent amid sluggish retail sales
Published August 26, 2011 at 11:01 pm (Updated August 26, 2011 at 11:00 pm)


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Harris Teeter doesn't have a whole lot of Starbucks hours to give, so I'm working less than I have been recently. Yesterday, for example, I got out of work while the sun was still up. I haven't seen the sun a whole lot recently. It seemed like such a big thing. Once got home, I changed out of my work clothes, into some casual clothes, then put on some walking shoes and took a walk.
I spent most of the walk thinking just how amazing it was that I was able to take this walk. Then, after a while, I found myself thinking that this would be more fun with a dog. But for now, I should just be happy to walk. The peak of fall had already hit, so I was looking at a lot of bare trees. But the temperature was nice. The sun was making everything gold. Work had been thoroughly dull — they have so few hours available for Starbucks that I had spent the whole day training in Pizza. Once you get over the initial excitement of oh my gosh pizza!, the actual work of pizza is quite dull. As soon as you get one pizza out, you turn around, beat a new piece of dough into shape, spread the sauce, and sprinkle on the sauce and toppings, and then bake it and get it out. Repeat ad finitum. But my whole head felt clearer after just a 30-minute walk.
This morning, I was able to sleep in until 9:00. Actually, I didn't even sleep that late. I spent the last hour just lying in bed thinking how nice it was that I didn't have to get up if I didn't want to. I'm closing the pizza bar tonight, so I don't have to do anything until 2:00. Technically, James asked me to finish cleaning the kitchen, since he would only have a little time to attend to it before he had to leave for work. I had said I would. But that wasn't, like, pressing.
I ate breakfast and read Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for an hour and a half, before admitting to myself that it was now 11:30 and I really should get ready for the day. Once I did all that, I went and got all my schedules figured out and entered into my calendar and synched up to my phone.
I have Friday 5 off. I somehow got a random day off. James and I will be Christmas shopping that day. I was finally able to sign up for the ACT workkeys test that I need to finish applying to Wake County Schools. It's, uh, tomorrow. My tests are tomorrow. Huh.
If all goes according to plan, I should be leaving for DC on the night of Thursday 11, and then I'll leave either Sunday night or Monday, depending on how my work schedules line up.
James and I spent Thanksgiving with his aunt Lynette and her family: husband Jeff, kids Paul and Alicia, and granddaughter Aiyana. We showed up only about twenty minutes before dinner was served, so we sort of got right into the whole feasting thing right away. Unfortunately, Alicia wasn't feeling well and was upstairs for most of the night.
Before we ate, we did the usual what-are-you-thankful-for thing. Jeff went first. I was sitting on Jeff's right, and therefore assumed that I would go last. In my family, we pass everything to the left: dishes, responsibilities, etc. However, in this family, they pass to the right. So instead of having four people recite their gratitude before me, I was thrown on the spot before I could come up with a list, much less compose it into something nice. I sort of sputtered out something about how I was glad the economy was recovering, realized that sounded cold and political, and decided by saying that I was grateful for how supportive and understand James is while I've been getting on my own two feet, financially speaking. James in turn said that he was grateful for the opportunities he's had at work this year (getting into the management training program), and that he was glad he finally got to have me around all the time. Apparently James' family had been experiencing a lot of health issues this year; they were grateful to still have each other, and were hopeful for a better next year.
We asked Aiyana what she was grateful for. She stared at us over the apple she had started eating. We laughed.
Conversation flowed pretty well. James was pretty quiet, but he perked up after he drank some water. Obviously we all overate. I had made the decision this year to only have one piece of turkey, since I always regret having a second (I got the drumstick! They gave me the second drumstick to take home!) I had planned to, instead, have two helpings of all the side dishes I liked.
After dinner, James passed out on the couch. I stayed out of the way while Lynette and Jeff cleaned up. I sat with James on the couch and started drawing in my sketchbook. James put his arm around me and straight-up fell asleep, so that I couldn't move. Eventually James woke up, and we headed out with leftover turkey and the cheesecake James had made, thanking Lynette and Jeff profusely for dinner.
When we got home, it was time for Christmas. James turned on his Pandora Christmas station: the first song of the Christmas season was Bing Crosby's "Let it Snow". All was well.
So James' side of the bed is always nice and neat, while my side is a tangled mess of random-looking blankets. I toss and turn for a while, sometimes using a heating pad to warm up just my stomach or feet.
James decided to spend part of his bonus check on new bedroom decor for us. We had finally settled on everything, and it all showed up while I was working a double shift on Wednesday.
James set it all up as a surprise for me. He rotated the mattress, bought new pillows and a mattress cover, washed all the new linens, and set it all up. It was apparently all worth it to see me jump up and down in excitement when I saw it. It was just so pretty!
We went to bed around 11:00, and I got frustrated around 4:30 because I was so hot and tired and unable to sleep. I had even tried pulling the sheet and quilt out from the edges of the bed and sticking my feet out to cool them off. I had tried a heating pad to lure me into relaxation. I stuck extra blankets on my shoulders. But the mattress pad seemed to absorb all the heat and turn everything into an oven. The new pillow was so fluffy that I couldn't breathe if I lay on my belly, which is how I normally sleep. Nothing felt right.
Finally at 4:30 I took one my normal blankets and my HP Lovecraft book out into the living room (I'm in the middle of The Dreamquest of Unknown Kadath, where the biggest thing to fear is all the blatant racism). I turned myself into a cocoon and read until I couldn't hold my eyes open anymore.
At 5:30 James woke up to go to work. He woke me up from my spot on the couch. I'm not entirely sure what words were said. But when he got into the shower, I crawled into bed. I tossed the new blankets onto his side of the bed and put my small, thin blanket over top of me.
I felt cold, so I decided to pull the new blankets from James' side of the bed back. I pulled them onto my shoulders. That was fine. I rolled onto my side and fell into a weird sort of sleep, because I was sleeping on my side. I woke up again and felt cold, so I pulled my heavy quilt over top of me and fell asleep again.
On my first day off in about five weeks, I got about five hours of light sleep. But I figured out how to make the new blankets work for me. They just can't be my primary blankets, that's all.
Even today, as I write and draw this panel, I have no guarantee that anything exists outside of what my five sense report to me. I've never been to Morocco, but I take it on faith that there is a Morocco!…All of us perceive the world as a whole through the experience of our senses. Yet our sense can only reveal a world that is fragmented and incomplete. Even the most widely travelled mind can only see so much of the world in the course of a life. Our perception of "reality" is an act of faith, based on mere fragments. As infants, we're unable to commit that act of faith. If we can't see it, hear it, smell it, taste it or touch it, it isn't there! The game "Peek-A-Boo" plays on this idea. Gradually, we all learn that even though the sight of Mommy comes and goes, Mommy remains. This phenomenon of observing the parts but perceiving the whole has a name. It's called closure.
…Comics panels fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality.
…Every act committed to paper by the comics artist is aided and abetted by a silent accomplice. An equal partner in crime known as The Reader. I may have drawn an axe being raised in this example, but I'm not the one who let it drop or decided how hard the blow, or who screamed, or why. That, dear reader, was your special crime, each of you committing it in your own style.
This particular part about closure blows my mind every time I read this book. I found myself pondering it on my way home from Petsmart today. I parked, got out of my car, walked up to my front door, put my keys in the lock, turn the key/lock, opened the door, walked inside, and closed the door. I then wondered how much of that sequence would I need to show, in, say, a comic, for a reader to understand what I was doing. My exact thought was "how much would a movie show?" which was not at all in the mood of where I learned this concept, but whatever. It's what I thought.
Okay, but can I make it shorter?
What is the shortest I can make this without completely losing the meaning?
On Saturday, I did some volunteer work for Wake County Animal Shelter. My plan had been to go to Southpoint Mall afterwards, eat lunch, and wander around the mall looking at different bedding options. As I was driving back towards the West side of Raleigh, I got a phone call from my boss at Harris Teeter. Apparently another Harris Teeter needed someone to close that night. So I agreed to take the shift, although I gave myself some time to grab some lunch, eat the lunch, and change clothes.
James got home around 4:30. I wasn't home, but as I had told him I intended to go to the mall after volunteering, he didn't worry. He sat and vegged on his computer for a while. Around 7:00, he realized that I still wasn't home, and gave me a call. My phone rang, lonely in my car, and the call went to voicemail. He contemplated what to do next; he decided that if I hadn't contacted him 9:00, then he would start contacting my family to see if they knew anything was up. I called him at 8:30 and explained what happened. He was extremely relieved.
We went out to dinner, to a local burger chain, where he ate a burger and I ate hot wings and a salad. We mostly discussed an exam he had to take for his managerial training program. But it felt like a date night. We were out and about, there was good conversation, we were silly with each other.
At home, we snuggled together on the couch and flipped through pictures of comforters together. We discussed our future. We discussed our visions of home. We were warm and happy. He had worried about me. But now we were just together. There was nothing easier in all the world.


text:
Veterans Against The War
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About Face: Veterans Against The War
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Krystal Two Bulls- Food For Thought This Thanksgiving
By About Face
Today on Thanksgiving, I wanted to take a moment to further introduce myself and a conversation that drives the work I do. I am an Oglala Lakota and Northern Cheyenne woman and veteran. I was born on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and raised on the Northern Cheyenne Indian Reservation. Being a Native American veteran is a complicated identity for numerous reasons, but especially because of the traumatic relationship between the US military and Native People.
The winter months and holiday season are a very traumatic time for my People. Winter has always been the time when the US military brutally attacked and massacred the Peoples of the Plains. The Sand Creek Massacre, Dakota 38 + 2 Hanging, Wounded Knee Massacre and Fort Robinson Outbreak are 4 that my family and my partner's family were personally involved in. These are only 4 of many massacres and attacks of brutal violence enacted by the military on my People who were unarmed and peace-seeking.
From the forceful removal of Native Nations from their traditional homelands, to the strategic placement of military forts, to the introduction of alcohol at said forts, the US military has always been the primary tool of colonization of the original Peoples of this land and the land itself. So, being a Native American, it seems counterintuitive to enlist in the military. Yet, Native People enlist at a higher rate per capita than any other ethnic group. We have served in every war since before the United States was even a country.
I believe we enlist because we come from a Warrior culture. Our Warriors were tasked with preserving, protecting, and providing for our People and our way of life, especially our most vulnerable: women, children and elderly. When our People were forced onto reservations, the roles and responsibilities of our Warriors were stripped from them. They were no longer able to protect, provide or preserve. So, when there came an opportunity for our men to reclaim that Warrior role through military service, they reclaimed it.
As we all know, there are many other reasons why we all enlist. I enlisted because I was always taught to serve my People. When that Army recruiter pitched me the line about serving my country, I believed it was my chance to do so. Through my military service, I learned the difference between a soldier and a warrior, is that a soldier will follow orders no matter the consequence. A warrior, however, will do whatever is necessary for the wellbeing of their People. I had to learn how to heal from the indoctrination of the army, and then learn to utilize and translate my military skill sets in ways that actually protect, preserve, and provide for my People and our way of life.
I share this because the use of the US military to invade and colonize lands started with my People. Today, we see this play out all over the world through the many facets of the military industrial complex. I truly believe that, as veterans and because of our unique experiences, we are more equipped to protect and provide for our own communities. We are game changers. My vision is that through the Drop the MIC Campaign and Tour, this conversation will continue and we will provide the political education, training, and community-building necessary for our members to transform their military skills and to feel empowered with the confidence to take action.
The work About Face does has been an extremely important part of my healing and reconciliation with this identity. So today, I am thankful for partners like you who understand the importance of having the tough conversations and then doing the work to do whatever is necessary for the wellbeing of ALL People. Please help us take this work to the next level for all of our wellbeing.
Krystal Two Bulls
Drop the MIC Campaign Co-Director
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Isabella Borshoff
isabella@thewire.media
Isabella Borshoff is a staff writer based in London. Previously, she worked as a climate policy adviser in Australia's federal public service. She earned her Master's in Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School. Her writing has been published in POLITICO Europe.
Is China Losing its Luster for Direct Investment?
By Isabella Borshoff - January 8, 2023
China says no, but a new report suggests otherwise.
Among Western countries, Germany has long had a unique relationship with China, both economically and politically. But with cracks emerging in the historically powerful pro-engagement alliance between German politicians and business leaders — and the tension increasingly spilling into the public arena — some say...
China Moves into the Gulf
By Isabella Borshoff - December 11, 2022
With Xi's recent visit, China is competing strongly for influence in the Gulf region.
Global Change of Heart
By Isabella Borshoff - November 13, 2022
Has foreign investor sentiment towards China changed for good, or can potential policy changes restore confidence?
The Steel Trap
No other sector has quite embodied China's rise from a poverty-stricken agrarian state to a modern industrial powerhouse more than the steel industry. It has quite literally undergirded decades of China's growth. But China's economic model now needs to shift its reliance away from property...
Coal Comeback?
By Isabella Borshoff - October 16, 2022
Following a summer of power shortages, Beijing is sending mixed messages about the role of coal in China's energy mix.
China Goes Nuclear
By Isabella Borshoff - September 25, 2022
China is poised to be a leader in next generation nuclear power.
Seed Savior?
Agribusiness giant Syngenta is unique on the world stage: it is a state-owned Chinese firm with an American CEO. After ChemChina's historic purchase of the company in 2017 — the largest ever purchase by a Chinese company overseas — Syngenta is now ready for its...
China's Bot Boom
China became "the world's factory" in large part due to its demographics: a tidal wave of young, hungry workers drove growth by churning out low value goods. But between rapidly changing demographics and rising wages, those days are over. For China to maintain its reputation...
Trading Truce
By Isabella Borshoff - August 28, 2022
A landmark agreement between U.S. and Chinese regulators could stave off further financial sector decoupling
Chips and the Open-Source Secret
By Isabella Borshoff - August 7, 2022
Can China develop chip self-sufficiency with RISC-V International, a nonprofit that promotes open-source semiconductor technologies?
Powering Utah, with China's Help
By Isabella Borshoff - July 24, 2022
Even the new poster-child for domestic energy innovation relies on critical inputs from China.


The NCCAA Mideast Regional Alice Lloyd College Lady Eagles opened up softball play on Tuesday when they faced the NAIA's University of Pikeville Lady Bears. Due to the recent weather, the Lady Eagles have not been able to practice on their field. Despite that setback, Coach Nathan Hall seized an opportunity to finally allow his squad the chance to play outside and face some spirited competition. He welcomed a tough challenge that should benefit his squad down the road. Following are recaps of each contest.
The visitors scored two in the opening inning, added one in the third, and spread four more runs the rest of the way. McKenzie Brewer and Sam Sturgill each smacked doubles for the home squad, but the Lady Eagles were unable to string a few hits together.
The Bears outhit Alice Lloyd 10-2 in the win. Pitcher Hannah Skaggs earned the victory, allowing just one hit while striking out seven. Caitlynn Wyatt took the pitching losses. Wyatt allowed seven runs on 10 hits with one strikeout.
A bright spot for Alice Lloyd defensively occurred in the third inning when the Lady Eagles pulled off one of the rarest feats in softball: a triple play.
UPike's Megan Claypoole pitched a no-hitter as the visitors controlled game two from start to finish.
Claypoole played a brilliant game as she struck out eight batters and also smacked a home run.
Morgan Albury took the pitching loss as she gave up 13 earned runs on 15 hits with four strikeouts.


I hope you all had a wonderful week. I had the day off today because it's "Youth Day" in Palau. I'm not sure exactly what I was supposed to be celebrating, but I got to go kayaking with some friends. At one point we got incredibly close to a snake that was climbing a wall. I may have freaked out. As it turns out, I can move VERY fast in a kayak. I can also scream very loudly. I don't want to talk about it any further.
On a boat to Pelelui to see some WWII stuff.
Daniel made a, like, 9 layered jello. It took several hours and he can't stop talking about it.
Jelly fish we spotted in one great spot while kayaking today.
The strangest thing on the entire Internet. Thanks, Tyffanee.
Children around the world with their most prized possessions. Thanks, Matt.
For those who haven't seen it, still one of the funniest things on the whole Internet.
I love looking at pictures of the water....WAY much better than the Gulf of Mexico that I am so lucky to live close too...hehe.
So random not related to this post, but related to a previous one. My roommate and Daniel are conspiring about this leaving eggs out thing! I would say we should get them together because they are both single and awesome people but then they would spread egg diseases everywhere with their obvious lack of respect for the seriousness of leaving eggs out. The other day I made cookies and we had a bunch of people over and I forgot to bake the very last of the dough and it got left out on the counter for several hours. Raw dough with raw eggs in it! So I was just going to throw it away, but my roommate was very adamant about not throwing it away, she really loves those cookies and didn't want to waste it. I finally agreed to put it in the fridge so we could bake it later on one condition, that she promise she wouldn't eat the dough raw. I know her too well and I know that if there is raw cookie dough around she will eat it. (I was hoping she would forget about it and in a few days I would throw it away). The next day she told me that she had wanted to eat the cookie dough so bad when I left for work and the only reason she didn't was because she promised me!!! The only reason! geesh!
You and Daniel have the cutest little bromance ever. That kayaking picture proves it.
I have a friend that makes that jello too. Just like the eggs, it must stay refrigerated...just saying.
My only critique of the Jello is that it appears there are no shredded carrot contents. Alright, I lied. What demented soul thought Jello and carrots would be a good combination?
There are some things I just wish I could unfind. The bathtub site is one of them. Why are some of the people severely missing teeth?
I might have nightmares resulting from the first link.
The link to the Shannon/David emailing was hysterical! I'm glad I read that.
I'm obviously the only follower with ocd because the jello salad has 11 layers. I know that because, yes, I actually counted them.
Love the Lutheran potluck comment!! Bahahaha!!!


Do you remember when "unicorn food" was popular? Yes, I'm talking about those rainbow snacks and sparkling sips that everyone posted about for a solid year or two. Well, it looks like the magical trend is coming back in 2019 — because Unicorn Tears rosé wine by Gik Live! is an actual drink. What's that, you ask? Oh, it's only wine "made with unicorn tears." (Seriously, that's how the company describes it.) So, if you've ever wondered what it'd be like to pour yourself a glass of real magic, read on for details.
Let's get back to the whole "made with real unicorns" thing. I wasn't kidding when I said that, because that's exactly how Gik Live! described its beverage. On the bottle's product page, the company wrote that it's "made with real unicorn tears in an undisclosed location." (If you know where unicorns hang out on the reg, then you might know where the wine is made.) In all seriousness, though, the rosé was created in Navarra, Spain by a husband and wife duo — so you can thank them for the magical drink.
I mean, let's face it: Based off the wine's pretty pink hue, it's hard to believe that it didn't actually come from IRL unicorns. Who knows, though. Maybe the couple is hiding magical creatures at their winery. I wouldn't be surprised.
Regardless of whether or not the wine was actually made from real unicorns (a girl can dream, can't she?), it sounds delicious. According to Gik Live!, the beverage is an authentic and natural pink rosé with an ABV of 12 percent. With that being said, it's the perfect bottle for a girls' night in or a springtime gathering. If you end up buying Unicorn Tears, drink responsibly.
Speaking of purchasing the bottle, I have some upsetting news. According to the wine's product page on Gik Live!, Unicorn Tears isn't currently available in the United States. However, it does say that it'll be available in the U.S. soon — so cross your fingers that it doesn't take too long. If you live in the European Union, you can order a few bottles of the magic on the company's website right now.
Before making your orders, you're probably wondering how much a bottle of Unicorn Tears costs. According to its product page, three bottles of the pink stuff costs about $45, which means each bottle will probably set you back $15. That's pretty cheap for actual unicorn tears, am I right?
However, based off Gik Live!'s website, it seems like you can't purchase each bottle individually. Instead, the company gives customers three options, which include three bottles, six bottles, and twelve bottles. Based off of the website, half a dozen bottles will set you back about $80, and one dozen will cost about $135. I don't know about you, but I definitely want to stock up on Unicorn Tears when the rosé is available stateside.
While you're waiting for its U.S debut, try a bottle of Gik Live!'s blue wine. Sure, it might not be as magical as pink Unicorn Tears — but it's just as pretty.


I had no issues with the product itself. Our logo was printed in front and it was just the way we saw it online. Great fit as well!
the rep is very friendly, helpful, courteous, and prompt. We enjoy ordering from AnyPromo. I liked the entire product.
Good reliable product with the right cost.


"The Indo-Pacific region will account for 60 per cent of world's GDP very soon and this will have an impact on global power politics", Centre for Policy Alternatives, New Delhi Chairperson and distinguished Economist, Dr. Mohan Guruswamy has said.
Speaking at the international conference on Changing Security Dynamic in the Indo-Pacific, organised by the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER) here yesterday, Dr. Mohan Guruswamy noted that the number of people in the productive age will keep growing, which may enable India to grow as long as there is political stability and policy environment. He went on to add that India should engage with East Asian countries to generate capital for its infrastructure projects.
Dr. Jayaprakash Narayan, General Secretary, Foundation for Democratic Reforms, observed that the new powers should not demonstrate callousness towards global norms, and, instead, should recognise that playing by rules will have a long-term benefit. He noted that India's emergence as major power will be determined by greater democratisation, especially in the realms of increased access to education, development of robust infrastructure and empowered local governments that facilitate robust collective action at the grass roots.


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Held from 24th - 26th November, 2017 at the Namgay Heritage Hotel, the Eco-tourism edition of Techstars Startup Weekend Thimphu in Bhutan, for aspiring startup eco-entrepreneurs, supported by the UNDP of Bhutan and Youth Co:Lab, won the hearts of many people in Bhutan last weekend in Thimphu.
The eventful weekend saw 130 keen people in attendance, of which 56 pitched ideas. This was the fifth time that such an experiential learning method was implemented in Bhutan to teach entrepreneurship first hand.
For three dynamic days – enthusiastic young participants and experienced industry leaders spent many sleepless nights, in a marathon-like quest to incubate ideas, brainstorm solutions, identify open untapped markets and discuss key innovations that might shape the future of the tourism industry in Bhutan.
13 teams went on to develop projects that were pitched in front of His Excellency the Prime Minister of Bhutan, Tshering Tobgay.
Who are the organisers of the Techstars Startup Weekend?
First of all, it is essential to introduce Techstars, which is a worldwide network of industrial leaders that helps entrepreneurs succeed. Through the Techstars Worldwide Entrepreneur Network, founders and their teams connect with other entrepreneurs, experts, mentors, alumni, investors, community leaders and corporate partners to help their companies grow.
This organisation also allows entrepreneurs to accelerate their pace of innovation and achieve more productivity in a shorter span of time.
The Techstars Startup Weekend is the brainchild of a global network of entrepreneurs and leaders (www.startupweekend.org) whose purpose is to gather the most passionate and enthusiastic people under one roof, for a powerfully charged weekend of incubation of entrepreneurial ideas, mutual assistance and collaboration, and active brainstorming.
The main intention is to start and fund the next best start-up with the help and guidance of industry experts and mentors.
So far, the Techstars Startup Weekends have hosted entrepreneurs to build start-ups through more than 1,000 such events per year, covering more than 150 countries. The group has also went on to create the Techstars Startup Weekend and the Techstars Accelerator.
The Youth Co:Lab is the Asia-Pacific Youth Entrepreneurship Initiative faction of the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP). It provides support to an alliance of local actors in Bhutan such as the Thimphu Tech Park, Techstars and Youth Co:Lab.
Focussing on international, regional and local nexus, the Youth Co:Lab brings a diverse set of expertise together to support participants in the development of their projects.
Through national dialogues in over 14 countries across the Asia-Pacific region from 2017-2018, the Youth Co:Lab has successfully connected young social entrepreneurs with leaders, businesses, incubators and accelerators to develop ideas and business models for substantial social impact in their communities.
The project specially targets youth-driven social entrepreneurship as a legitimate development agent. Niamh Collier-Smith, the Deputy Resident Representative for UNDP Bhutan, shared her thoughts on the huge potential of youth in Bhutan.
The young participants proved their worth by displaying great passion and motivation during the event, suggesting that the Techstars Experiential Method really worked. It has productively helped to spur more start-up development practice, as well as brainstorming on ecotourism related themes that may work.
And the fruit of their three days of intense labour culminated in the highlight when the top three winners were announced.
The top prize went to Miniature Bhutan – a sustainable souvenir manufacturer, followed by Happy Paper, a paper recycling firm and the third prize was awarded to an incense-development start-up.
Their prizes included workstation positions and incubation support from the Bhutan Innovation and Technology Center as well as stays at luxurious hotels of Bhutan.
"Every time we organise a Techstars Startup Weekend, we come out inspired and fully energized by the passion of the participants though we have to work over the weekend with no rest. This is the third Techstars Startup Weekend that Thimphu TechPark has helped in organizing and we are so happy with the number of passionate participants we got. I am positive that the future of entrepreneurship in Bhutan is going to be great".
The consortium of organisations behind this year's Eco-Tourism edition of the Techstars Startup Weekend Bhutan is confident that the start-up ecosystem in Bhutan is sprouting. They believed that the backing provided by the Royal Government of Bhutan and the Thimphu Tech park, among many others, had been instrumental in realising their aims.
In fact, with the huge success of last weekend's event, Techstars and UNDP hope to work hand in hand to taking this to the next level. They want to speed up and strengthen the skills and training within Bhutan by organising more of such incubation events in the coming months. Stay tuned for an even more exciting 2018.
Written by Zann Huizhen Huang for the New Bhutan Times.


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