Saturday May 17, 2008
Pay your voluntary carbon taxes: Move into the fashionable high-rise city
Timing is everything. Anticipating the long weekend fill-up, I realize that every hour of procrastination will only increase its outrageous cost. That leads me to wonder what might have happened had Michael Ignatieff stood up for his one best policy - a carbon tax - two years ago, when the idea needed a champion undaunted by the predictable backlash.
Being held to the sternest of tests is good - if it's applied to all
Taken together, the Law Society of Upper Canada decisions of last year, the first vindicating Sharon Shore as a person of sufficient good character to be a lawyer and the other awarding her $91,500 for legal costs she incurred defending herself at an uncommon admissions hearing, add up to 31 pages.
Why this Victoria Day should be our last
Let's all enjoy the Victoria Day weekend - and resolve that it will be the last.Not the holiday, of course, but the name: Victoria Day. Let's grow up, Canada, and take pride in what is Canadian, rather than glorifying an English monarch who died in 1901 after an admittedly stellar reign of almost 64 years.
Canada to face Russia for gold
One minute 12 seconds.That is the sum total of time Canada has spent trailing in a hockey game at the world championship - with now but a single game to play for the gold medal.
Australia has the jump on us
Why are new immigrants doing so badly? Is discrimination to blame? Or are we picking the wrong people?Everybody in Toronto jokes that we have the best-educated taxi drivers in the world. We've got doctors from Pakistan, lawyers from India, teachers from Sudan, and engineers from Bangladesh - qualified immigrants from all over the world who can't get good jobs, even though Canada is crying out for their skills.
Premier McGuinty's balancing act needs some work
Liberals love balance. It's in their blood to want to bring everyone together under one tent in a spirit of compromise.But Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty's Liberal government is finding this ideal hard to live up to on policies dealing with the exploitation of the province's vast natural resources. In two current cases, it is struggling to find the fulcrum point between entrenched views among interest groups and within government ministries. The performance of Kumbaya is on hold.
Just who's buying Vancouver's zillion-dollar condos?
The hottest ticket in Vancouver this week was not for a concert or a play, but a lunch hosted by the Urban Development Institute. And they call this place No Fun City.
Sour Cherie
The secure telephone at 10 Downing Street was on Cherie Blair's side of the bed. After she had cooked dinner, loaded the dishwasher, read the kids their stories, reviewed her legal briefs and climbed into bed, she would sometimes be awoken, in the wee hours, by George W. Bush, who paid little heed to the five-hour time difference. Groggy and not entirely pleased, she would pass the receiver to her husband, and listen to half the conversation.
DEAD END FOR FREE TRADE
Peter Durant is getting edgy. The 41-year-old Ontario trucker should be on his way to Toledo, Ohio, to pick up a load of Oreo cookies for Kraft Canada.
Watching if Sprott can handle life in the heavyweight class
On my way to a breakfast meeting recently, I walked by the ''Opening Soon' Apple store in Vancouver's Pacific Centre Mall. I know how hot that store is going to be because I was shoehorned into the Toronto outlet the week before. But I thought to myself, I'm going to see a company that's even hotter - Sprott Inc.
Some ETFs to help you catch the bull
For rank and file investors, this bull market's a drag.The SandP/TSX composite index reached new highs this week, but many investors have had barely a taste of it. Popular equity funds have been lagging the index badly of late and, anyway, lots of investors have been avoiding the markets altogether. Last week, CIBC World Markets said investors are using bank accounts and money market funds to park $45-billion that would normally be in the stock market.
STARS AND DOGS
STARSotheby'sIn a world plagued by starvation and natural disasters, it's comforting to know someone could afford to shell out $86.3-million for a painting of a headless man being devoured by vultures. With Francis Bacon's ''Triptych, 1976'' topping the list, Sotheby's pulled in a record $362-million at an auction this week, sending the stock up faster than you can say, ''My three-year-old could paint that.''
Canadians cheer decision to give double-amputee Olympic shot
The fastest man on one leg will be cheering for the fastest man on no legs this summer.Canadian Earle Connor, who has covered 100 metres in 12.14 seconds using a carbon-fibre prosthetic, was surprised and delighted yesterday to hear double-amputee South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius had been allowed to compete for a spot at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Youth movement charges into PGA Tour spotlight
Sergio Garcia's win in the Players Championship last week means golfers in their 20s have won six of the past seven PGA Tour events. Does this mean a wave of younger players is ready to challenge Tiger Woods more frequently?
World Fishing Network lands first big catch
When Brian Cooper told people he was planning to start a fishing channel on TV, they wondered if he had stayed out in the sun too long, dipping a line in the water, no doubt.
Good and bad news for Flyers defencemen
Given the alternative, Kimmo Timonen is willing to withstand de agony of de feet tomorrow, if you will forgive the hoary chestnut.The Philadelphia Flyers defenceman says he is sure he can play in the fifth game of their NHL playoff series against the Pittsburgh Penguins despite a blood clot in his ankle. All he has to do, if practice goes all right today, is put up with numbness in his left foot and a lot of pain.
A 21st-century Gutenberg
Working in a Toronto garage, Michael Torosian creates rare – and very pricey – books
Hillary and Madonna: separated at birth
They're rarely mentioned in the same breath. They've never, to my knowledge, actually stood side by side. They've certainly never been photographed together. Could it be that Hillary Clinton and Madonna are one and the same person?
Go on, track down your gym crush
Dear Mr. Smith,A woman met a man at a gym. They exchanged idle chatter and flirted. The woman did not pursue the man's attentions at that time, because she was not single. Now that she is single, she is thinking of this man, but she has no way of re-establishing the acquaintance since they no longer attend the same gym. He never gave her his phone number, but mentioned his place of work. Can she track him down and call him there, or would it smack of desperation?
WATCH: DEPARTURES: NEW ZEALAND
Wandering Canadians Justin and Scott get busy in New Zealand. Their first stop is Auckland for bungee-jumping, following by a fishing excursion to Kapity and sailing near Cheviot. To earn their keep while there, the duo try their hands at shearing alpacas.
I have seen the future of cinema, and it looks homemade
Viewing the new documentary, Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?, by Morgan Spurlock (Super Size Me), which opened yesterday, I felt like I was watching the past and the future at the same time. The past, because I was sitting in a theatre, taking in a film that had secured some big-money distribution, which everything I've read recently assures me is a system on its last legs.
I want to ride ma bicyclette
Paris is like a bicycle: old-fashioned yet modern, modest but pleasurable, classic and trendy and as clean as it is well-engineered. And like a good bike ride, a holiday in Paris is an instant crowd-pleaser for those who can manage it. The simple fact of doing it can't help but make you smile.
A half-empty cup of Canadiana
On this Victoria Day weekend, back home in Newfoundland, there will be thousands of people hustling off to cabin or pond to make a day of trout fishing and having a boil-up. Very likely it'll snow, since a snowfall is an almost infallible curse of the first long weekend of Newfoundland spring. In the old days, if there was to be a boil-up and a few trout to be fried, everyone brought along a block of Good Luck butter and three or four tins of York wieners and beans. Had to be York, had to be Good Luck.
CHILDREN'S BOOKS
TWEEDLE DEE DEEBy Charlotte Voake, Candlewick, 28 pages, $18.50, ages 2 to 5Green, a lovely spring green, is the dominant colour in Charlotte Voake's new book. Her insouciant watercolour-and-ink drawings, mostly of English oak leaves, or so it appears, accompany the text, which is a sort of cumulative round derived from the traditional folk song The Green Leaves Grew Around.
PAPERBACKS
TO THE CASTLE AND BACKBy Vaclav Havel, translated by Paul Wilson, Vintage Canada, 383 pages, $21A witty and revealing memoir from the writer who went from world-famous dissident to president of Czechoslovakia after the fall of the Communist government there.
