Category: Main Page

Hockey gold, a courageous bronze, and Ontario's problem with a Windsor hospital . Listen to my three-minute audio roundup of what's on the front pages of the country's newspapers plus highlights from Friday's Parliamentary daybook by clicking on the link below.

You can also get these audio summaries automatically every day via podcast from iTunes or via an RSS feed by subscribing to my AudioBoo stream. Both the iTunes link and the RSS link are at my profile at AudioBoo.fm. Lookin the top right corner of the "Boos" box.

Attention iTunes subscribers: If you had been subscribing to these Audioboos via iTunes, Audioboo has recently changed my status to be a "Featured User". That may have affected your iTunes subscription. You may wish to re-subscribe to my iTunes Audioboo feed by visiting my profile clicking on the iTunes button in the top-right hand corner

Tags: national post, globe and mail, toronto star, olympics, hockey, frechette

Olympic triumphs; a threat to Camp Mirage,  and a Windsor hospitals growing scandal . Listen to my three-minute audio roundup of what's on the front pages of the country's newspapers plus highlights from Monday's Parliamentary daybook by clicking on the link below.

You can also get these audio summaries automatically every day via podcast from iTunes or via an RSS feed by subscribing to my AudioBoo stream. Both the iTunes link and the RSS link are at my profile at AudioBoo.fm. Lookin the top right corner of the "Boos" box.

Attention iTunes subscribers: If you had been subscribing to these Audioboos via iTunes, Audioboo has recently changed my status to be a "Featured User". That may have affected your iTunes subscription. You may wish to re-subscribe to my iTunes Audioboo feed by visiting my profile clicking on the iTunes button in the top-right hand corner

Tags: National Post, Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, Olympics, Dubai, Afghanistan

One of the key prohibitions in the famous/infamous Accountability Act was an edict that any politician or political staff and some senior bureaucrats are forbidden from becoming registered lobbyists for five years after leaving office or their government job.

The law gave one slim out on this prohibition: If you wanted to become a lobbyist before that five-year ban was up, you could apply to the Commissioner of Lobbying, an independent officer of Parliament, and ask for the equivalent of papal dispensation to go ahead and become a lobbyist.

The commissioner, Karen Shepherd, was asked about this exemption process in October when she appeared in front of the House of Commons Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics.

I've blogged about this issue and that meeting before and this post updates that one with some new information.

At that meeting, Shepherd talked about the exemption process and noted that she had granted a handful of them since setting up shop (much to the disappointment of NDP MP Pat Martin). But she also noted that she had refused exemption applications for other political staffers. Liberal MP Michelle Simson wanted to know which staffers got turned down. Shepherd declined to respond saying that if Simson wanted that information, she would have to file a request under the federal Access to Information Act. Which is exactly what I did after that meeting last October.

The fruit of that request, such as it is, arrived this week. (Which is, sadly, remarkably fast for a ATI request these days).

I had asked for:

“The names of the public office holders who have applied for exemptions under the Lobbying Act since its coming into force on Jul y 2, 2008 and who were denied an exemption. Please provide the names of these individual s and public office or offices held”

Pierre Ricard-Desjardins, the Commissioner's Access To Information Cooordinator, and I had a telephone discussion about this last month and it became apparent that, under the rules of the Access to Information Act, the information I was seeking was “personal information” and, therefore, could not be released unless the individuals involved waived their right to privacy. “We therefore asked whether the persons in question would consent to the release of their names and of the public offices they held, as required under Section 19 of the Access to Information Act,” Desjardins wrote to me this week. “These persons subsequently refused to authorize the disclosure of this information. Consequently, we will not be able to release it.”

Canada wins a historic gold; the U.N. says women's equality eroded in Canada; and a foster care crisis in Saskatchewan. Listen to my three-minute audio roundup of what's on the front pages of the country's newspapers plus highlights from Monday's Parliamentary daybook by clicking on the link below.

You can also get these audio summaries automatically every day via podcast from iTunes or via an RSS feed by subscribing to my AudioBoo stream. Both the iTunes link and the RSS link are at my profile at AudioBoo.fm. Lookin the top right corner of the "Boos" box.

Attention iTunes subscribers: If you had been subscribing to these Audioboos via iTunes, Audioboo has recently changed my status to be a "Featured User". That may have affected your iTunes subscription. You may wish to re-subscribe to my iTunes Audioboo feed by visiting my profile clicking on the iTunes button in the top-right hand corner

Tags: national post, toronto star, globe and mail, rights and democracy, equality, olympics

One of the highlights of the social season in Ottawa is the annual Black and White ball, a benefit for the National Arts Centre Orchestra and Opera Lyra Ottawa. This year's event, to be held next Saturday, Feb. 27,  is co-hosted by Conservative MP Maxime Bernier and former Liberal MP  Sheila Copps. The evening features lots of other cameos and performances by Ottawa's political class. Here's more details of the lineup for this year's event:

• MP5, a singing group featuring Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl singing with Ed Fast, Randy Kamp, Kevin Sorenson, and Mark Warawa. Sorenson reprsents the Alberta riding of Crowfoot but the rest are all Conservative MPs from British Columbia.
• Justin Trudeau, Liberal MP from Papineau in Montreal
• Bob Rae, Liberal MP from Toronto Centre
• Lisa Raitt, Labour Minister and Conservative MP from Halton, Ont.

I'll bet the subject line of this post pulled you right in, right?

OK –it's hard for this subject to get, say, the attention Tiger Woods got yesterday from stock markets, but some of the points raised in a blog post by Laval University economist Stephen Gordon seem, to me, to be a good starting point for some discussions Canadians and their politicians ought to have about some of the basic operating parameters of our economy and some of the themes that a prime minister writing a throne speech this month might want to think about.

The folks providing comments to Gordon's post also make some good points. I like Angelo Melino's comment: He  makes the point that Canada shouldn't be so smug on the world stage about its system of financial regulation and banks:

The ABCP fiasco stands out as the biggest failure of Canadian policymakers during the crisis. The "General Market Disruption" clause was a purely Canadian creation that managed the remarkable achievement of being so sketchy as to get a thumbs down from the big US ratings firms, even though they had no problems rating lots of subprime mortgage junk as AAA. We still have to get to the bottom of what went wrong there and whether or not it was just a "one-off" failure.

Gordon's post is written mostly for people who are economists or almost become one but it's still written in a way that anyone ought to be able to grab the key points:

It's pretty hard to make the case that the most recent recession was caused by errors on the part of the Bank of Canada and/or the Department of Finance. And it's only slightly less hard to make the case that the recession was exacerbated by Ottawa's mistakes. But it would be a mistake to be entirely complacent about the recent experience – what lessons should we take from it?

First, Gordon reviews the Bank of Canada's longstanding target of maintaining inflation at 2 per cent come hell or high water. This review is made, Gordon notes, as the International Monetary Fund's economists begin asking around if inflation targets would work better at 4 per cent. Gordon's conclusion: 2 per cent is working just fine.

Gordon then looks at the fiscal policy response to the recession, the notion that we're all Keynesians now — even Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his band of small-government, deficits-ought-to-be-illegal supporters — and that, as such, governments were right to throw billions upon billions at the problem.

But what did this extra spending buy? In the standard Keynesian one-good framework, it really doesn't matter what you buy; all that matters is pumping up aggregate demand. But as I noted over here, employment losses were largely concentrated in the Ontario manufacturing sector: 5.3% of Canadian workers absorbed more than 36% of total job losses . . .

I'm much less sure of the efficacy of spending money in sectors and regions that were untouched by recession. It sent the worst possible signal to the usual gang of well-connected, media-savvy interest groups: "We're giving money away, and we really don't care who gets it!".  The result was a contest in which those with the sharpest elbows and the best PR campaigns won. This is not a competition in which the most marginalised elements of society do well.

My preference would be to refuse to play this game, and to focus on strengthening the social safety net for those who need it most.

As Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page has pointed out on more than occasion, Canada's famous social safety net is now full of holes and doesn't necessarily do what its original designers intended to do. The key policy tool in that social safety net is employment insurance. A well-designed employment insurance system can act as an automatic stabilizer for economies. When an economy starts to slow and people are losing jobs, a robust EI system can pump more money into the system faster and with better effect than any government program can. That's because the money tends to go to the regions and groups that need it — "the most marginalised elements of society" — and they tend to spend all that assistance and that spending can, in turn, help reinflate the economy. A well functioning EI system, then, accounts for regional imbalances and targets help to regions hardest hit. A national infrastructure plan, by comparison, has to appear to be sending money to all regions equally and, indeed, opposition politicians and journalists have made it a point of holding the government to account to ensure that one party's ridings or one region doesn't get more than another group. (I'm one of those journalists tracking that distribution).

It's a point that probably no politician can make but "stimulus money" ought to go where it's needed most and not to all regions based on some per-capita basis. Take a look at the heat Harper and Co. took for bailing out the largely Ontario-based auto sector. Gilles Duceppe and the Bloc Quebecois are still carping that Ottawa ignored Quebec to favour Ontario's car industry. (I'm not so sure Duceppe's complaint is well-founded: Ottawa has also provided significant sectoral support to the forestry industry, which helps Quebec out, and has transferred billions of federal cash to the Quebec government with no strings attached, but I digress …)

But beginning with the Liberal administrations of Jean Chretien — who, to be fair, was fighting monster budgetary deficits — Canada's employment insurance system got progressively weaker and less robust. Going into the recession, more Canadians were not covered by EI than were. A patchwork of 30 or 40 different qualifying criteria led to charges that EI was unfair. (Ironically, the Liberals in the House of Commons now led the charge to change that patchwork system and it was their predecessors in government in the last decade that introduced that patchwork.) As a result, the EI system was not ready to be the rapid-response economic stabilizer that it could have been.

The government Conservatives did make some changes — many of them temporary — to EI but, presumably, as the recession eases and everyone looks to fix things so that we're better off next time, our tax dollars may be better off spent being allocated to a robust social safety net rather than on billions in a stimulus "spend it on anything" plan. Or at least that's my take from Gordon.

Tags: employment insurance, inflation targets, bank of canada, economy, fiscal policy

The Pew Research Center's Internet and American Life Project recently released the results of their latest survey of 895 "technology experts and critics" — I was honoured to be among them — and our thoughts about where computing and telecommunications technologes are headed.

Here are some of the findings I found interesting:

• Three quarters (including me) agreed with the statement, “By 2020, people’s use of the Internet has enhanced human intelligence; as people are allowed unprecedented access to more information they become smarter and make better choices. Nicholas Carr was wrong: Google does not make us stupid."That said, there was a lot of qualifications made by those who took that view. You can read many thoughtful comments here.
• Reading, writing, and the rendering of knowledge will be improved: 65% agreed with the statement “by 2020 it will be clear that the Internet has enhanced and improved reading, writing and the rendering of knowledge.” Still, 32% of the respondents expressed concerns that by 2020 “it will be clear that the Internet has diminished and endangered reading, writing and the rendering of knowledge.”
• Anonymous online activity will be challenged, though a modest majority still think it will possible in 2020: There more of a split verdict among the expert respondents about the fate on online anonymity. Some 55% agreed that Internet users will still be able to communicate anonymously, while 41% agreed that by 2020 “anonymous online activity is sharply curtailed.” 

Tags: internet, pew internet, google, surveys

Own the Podium scorned; hockey fights — in the dressing room; and a Vimy Ridge hero. Listen to my three-minute audio roundup of what's on the front pages of the country's newspapers plus highlights from Saturday's Parliamentary daybook by clicking on the link below.

You can also get these audio summaries automatically every day via podcast from iTunes or via an RSS feed by subscribing to my AudioBoo stream. Both the iTunes link and the RSS link are at my profile at AudioBoo.fm. Lookin the top right corner of the "Boos" box.

Attention iTunes subscribers: If you had been subscribing to these Audioboos via iTunes, Audioboo has recently changed my status to be a "Featured User". That may have affected your iTunes subscription. You may wish to re-subscribe to my iTunes Audioboo feed by visiting my profile clicking on the iTunes button in the top-right hand corner

Wow. What a busy afternoon.

Gordon Lightfoot is dead and resurrected — and I am alternately pilloried and cursed for being involved in his fall and rise.

But this post is about Twitter — a microblogging network where you can tell your tale at just 140 characters a time — and how it is at the heart of this whole thing.

First here's the events as they unfolded this afternoon.

I work in the national newsroom of Canwest News Service, a wire service which has clients across North America. We're similar in some ways and different in others to Canadian Press, Reuters, and so on. For Canwest, I report on federal politics. But our newsroom in Ottawa has more than just politics reporters: It is the hub for our national operation with a national sports desk, our national entertainment desk; our national business desk and so on.

Like any wire service, the editors on those desks will move what are known as “ALERTS” to let its clients know that some big breaking news event has just happened and a story is coming. ALERTS are not “Stories we're working on” or “stories we think might happen” but are, in fact, short bursts of fact. Newsrooms in any part of the world that get an “ALERT” usually start clearing space in the papers or newscasts for the story to come.

Here's some ALERTS that Canwest has sent out recently

• ALERT – A Canadian soldier was killed Friday in Afghanistan.
• ALERT – Disgraced Montreal financier Earl Jones has been handed an 11-year prison sentence after pleading guilty last month to two charges of defrauding investors of $50.3 million.
• ALERT – Ontario police have arrested a male for the disappearance and death of Jessica Lloyd. Her family reported her missing on Jan. 29, after she didn’t show up for work.

And here's an ALERT that moved on our wire earlier today:

• ALERT – Ontario-born singer-songwriter Gordon Lightfoot has died, according to sources close to the singer.

Some short stories began appearing on the Web sites of Canwest papers, shortly after that.

Within a few minutes, our service moved another ALERT that cast doubt on what “sources close to the singer” had told a Canwest reporter (not me, some other reporter in our system) and that Lightfoot was still alive.

New stories appeared on our wire correcting that and, eventually, a story will appear explaining how all this happened.

Meanwhile on Twitter …

I have about 2,500 people that “follow” me on Twitter. Many are journalists in other newsrooms. I follow journalists myself from other organizations and we all often 'tweet' new facts, stories, etc. that we're reporting on and we figure our followers are interested in reading about.

So when the ALERT about Gordon Lightfoot's death crossed our wire, I figured my followers would be interested in this and so I sent out a tweet that looked like this:

Gordon Lightfoot has died, sources close to the singer say.

I did this because I have and continue to have absolute confidence in the 3,000 or so journalists who are my Canwest colleagues that they get stuff like this right. I've tweeted out their ALERTS before and I'm sure I will again. And, of course, on a practical level, I simply can't go around confirming for myself that “a Canadian soldier was killed in Afghanistan” or that “Ontario police have arrested a male…”. I have to trust my colleagues.

Lots of folks began “Re-tweeting” what I had just tweeted about Lightfoot. And those people re-tweeted and so on and so on. Ian Capstick calculates that within a few minutes of the first reports of his death, there were 1,400 Tweets about it. Many of those tweets, I suspect, had my Twitter name — @davidakin — on them. Lots of people – even other political journalists in Ottawa who know what I generally report on — assumed, with some good reason, that it was me, David Akin, who had personally spoke to these sources close to Lightfoot and that I was reporting his death for the first time right here. That was in incorrect assumption but it's one that, in hindsight, is an easy one to get wrong.

As our wire service began moving new ALERTS and other information I, tweeted that out immediately as well:

• A famous Cdn musician – a Lightfoot contemporary – said Lightfoot died. Now Lightfoot mgr says that's not true. Hope Mngment is right!
• Ah-Source for “Lightfoot Is Dead” story: None other than Rompin' Ronnie Hawkins to a B.C. reporter. Lightfoot alive! Lightfoot alive!   

So — and here's where lesson one may have been learned today — perhaps what I should have done was write my Tweet in this fashion:

• Canwest reports: Gordon Lightfoot has died, sources close to the singer say
• Canwest reports: Ronnie Hawkins said Lightfoot died; manager says he's alive.

Normally on Twitter, when you want to attribute what you're saying, you'd provide a link — to a news story, to a blog etc. In doing so, you essentially are saying, “This is what I heard. Don't know if it's right, but here's a link if you want to check out its accuracy. I just thought you'd like to know.”

My Tweet had neither a link — the Canwest Alert was out before the stories hit the Web — nor any other attribution and so many assumed this was me doing the actual reporting. It was an incorrect assumption to make but you can see how one could make that assumption. (I've tweeted more than 7,000 times and many of those had those kind of links so I may have assumed that my followers would simply know that I don't normally cover entertainment news.)

Twitter is still kind of a new new thing for journalists and for readers. Personally, I think it's a great new thing. I find new sources; I hear from readers; I'm a better journalist for having dived in. Still, there's lots that journalists and readers need to learn and understand when it comes to some of the things we take for granted when we see a story in our paper-copy newspaper: Who wrote this story? Who pays their bills? Are they reliable? What's the protocol for passing along information found on Twitter?

I'm up for exploring and figuring out all of these things. If you've got some thoughts, please jump in in the comments section.

Oh, and as as a former reporter for Lightfoot's hometown paper, the Orillia Packet and Times, let me offer my apologies! Good luck with the tour and we'll see you in the nation's capital!

New rules for mortgages; Toronto's costly false alarms, and debit card scam in Windsor. Listen to my three-minute audio roundup of what's on the front pages of the country's newspapers plus highlights from Wednesday's Parliamentary daybook by clicking on the link below.

You can also get these audio summaries automatically every day via podcast from iTunes or via an RSS feed by subscribing to my AudioBoo stream. Both the iTunes link and the RSS link are at my profile at AudioBoo.fm. Lookin the top right corner of the "Boos" box.

Attention iTunes subscribers: If you had been subscribing to these Audioboos via iTunes, Audioboo has recently changed my status to be a "Featured User". That may have affected your iTunes subscription. You may wish to re-subscribe to my iTunes Audioboo feed by visiting my profile clicking on the iTunes button in the top-right hand corner.