Rod McQueen's Blog, page 37

The Ghomeshi mess

After the first week of testimony in the Jian Ghomeshi trial, it’s hard to imagine that any judge could find him guilty as charged. The first two of his three accusers have clear recollections of his attacks, but they hardly avoided him afterwards. Letters, emails, photos and follow-ups of various sorts don’t paint a picture of someone who felt wronged. One even wrote a lengthy letter that concluded, “I love your hands.”

What is the meaning of consent? The alleged attacks may have come as a surprise but does desiring an ongoing relationship provide consent after the fact? Or is there is any such thing in the law as retroactive consent?

It’s equally hard to imagine that the Crown was aware of all the evidence stored on Ghomeshi’s computer, let alone the aforementioned letter he kept for twelve years. Perhaps they wouldn’t have proceeded if they’d known what the defence would be able to produce.

But beyond this specific trial, there is a far larger question. There’s been a lot of tongue-clucking about the sexual assaults in Cologne on New Year’s Eve. The events are being held up as examples of what happens when men of other cultures arrive in great numbers to a place where such activities are not as overlooked as they are likely to be in their home countries. But don’t we have an equally problematic cultural issue in North America? How many other women will come forward in the days and years ahead to reveal sexual harassment incidents? Why would they, given the reception and hearing all too often received?

I’m respectful when I get on an elevator with one other passenger, a woman. I stay quiet, in a corner. If I find myself following a woman on an empty street at night, I fall back rather than make her feel unnecessarily fearful. Women deserve better than they get from men, but I don’t see this trial bringing about an improvement anytime soon whether it’s in the workplace, a campus dorm or on a first date with a star.

End of an era

The news is in the news these days. Postmedia cut 90 journalism jobs and conjoined formerly competing newspapers in four cities. The Toronto Star laid off thirteen. The Halifax Chronicle-Herald wants to get rid of 18. And that’s just this month. I was part of the first group laid off at National Post in 2001. There must have been two thousand journalists who’ve lost their jobs in Canada in the fifteen years since. No one wants to pay to read newspapers anymore. Revenues have cratered. Costs must be cut.

But of all the recent sagas, the saddest was the announcement yesterday that the Guelph Mercury will stop publishing its print edition this Friday. The Mercury is one of the oldest broadsheets in Canada, founded in 1867, the year Canada was born. More important, to me at least, the Mercury launched my so-called career. My nine-year-old grandson was asking me just recently how I got started in writing. I told him I put up my hand when an opportunity was announced at my high school for someone to write a weekly news column in the Mercury. I earned about $5 a week but, by way of explanation, I said that was enough to take my then girlfriend on a Friday night to the movies and a restaurant after for chips with gravy and cherry Cokes. The equivalent expenditure today would be about $35-$40. Not bad for one evening’s work banging away on my Smith-Corona about tales of whatever I could remember happened that week.

Owners of the Mercury, Metroland Media Group, said that without a physical paper about 30 people will lose their jobs, including eight in the newsroom. The online version will continue but it’s not clear who will provide the content. Doesn’t sound like the sort of situation where there’s anyone left to put their hand up, let alone write a story. I weep for my profession.

Tear down this wall

It matters not a whit what the Bank of Canada does with interest rates later today – raise, lower or stand pat – the damage to our dollar has long since been done. When Stephen Poloz was appointed governor of the central bank in 2013 he forgot to take off the Export Development Canada hat he’d been wearing for the previous 14 years. Ever since he arrived at the bank the Canadian dollar has been in free fall, going from par with the US$ in May 2013 to under 69 cents today. It costs us $1.48 to buy one U.S dollar.

In the beginning I’m sure the governor thought a lower dollar was a brilliant way to create jobs through increased exports. How’s that working out? Well, our unemployment rate is stuck at 7.1 per cent while the U.S. rate is 5 per cent and heading lower.

The other cause of our economic malaise is swooning commodity prices. With one-third of our merchandise trade dependent on commodities, we continually get into these boom-bust situations as prices rise or fall for nickel, aluminum, copper and oil. When I began researching my book about BlackBerry ten years ago, I thought we were onto something. Research In Motion looked like it would become a global manufacturer, one of the few in our nation’s history. But even when BlackBerry commanded 50 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, 90 per cent of all their manufacturing was done outside Canada in countries like Mexico and elsewhere. So much for any long-term industrial benefit.

Looking ahead, there’s only one way to keep the C$ steady. Next time it gets to par, let’s adopt the US$ as our currency. We’ll be like backwater East Germany joining burgeoning West Germany. We’ll knock down the wall and get better cars, too.

Life lessons

I think you learn almost everything you need to know in life when you are young. After that it’s too late.

Here are seven things I learned before I was ten:

Never take on the bully. At least not alone.
Befriend a blind boy.
Respect your teacher.
Be independent in thought and deed.
If you want a bike, save up for it.
Be sure your sins will find you out.
Always kiss the prettiest girl.

Underground reading

My worst fears were realized on the subway this morning. I forgot to bring something to read. I’m always riven with anxiety that the train will come to a halt between stations and sit there for an hour so I usually pack in my knapsack that day’s newspaper, a section or two from the Sunday New York Times and a recent copy of the London Review of Books, just in case of such a catastrophe.

Fortunately, there were plenty of copies scattered about of a giveaway tabloid called 24 Hours Toronto, so I picked one up. As I scanned the pages, I wondered where my eyes had previously been. Here was a series of articles, most no longer than than the time it takes to breathe in and out once, on topics heretofore unknown and previously unrevealed.

First to catch my eye, as you might imagine, was a page three topless photo of supermodel Lydia Hearst breastfeeding two babies at once while dining in a posh restaurant. Then a piece on how Dolce & Gabbana is launching a new line of headdresses for the Middle East. A headline on page 5 caught my eye: Dumbest Country Alive. (Hint: they just claimed to have exploded an H-bomb.) Then a tear-jerker on how a six-year-old saves up his allowance to take his mommy out to dinner. Other grabbers included a brief on a donut that costs $1,000 for a dozen, a $200 bra that offers both exercise and support, two people I never heard of who are having a baby, how biscuits are stealing the spotlight from cupcakes, and other delights that I can no longer remember they were so gripping.

Only the one-page sports section seemed normal with scores, injuries and all-star hijinks. Three of the last five pages contained more classified ads than I’ve seen anywhere since 1988. Some of them were about jobs for which readers might first need to take an online course in order to qualify. Others were for fortune-tellers and astrologers, one of whom specialized in removing black magic jadoo, voodoo and obeya in three days with lifelong protection.

As for me, my lifelong protection will be to always bring my usual clutch of reading material. To the rest of you I say: don’t toss your papers. A small child might mistake them for something worthwhile.

My stock market advice for 2016

Do you ever ask yourself about the stock market? I don’t mean how the market works or where your money went, but why it is that so many grown men and women spend all their waking hours telling the world where the market is headed. Buy this mutual fund, says one analyst; get out of bonds, says another. Or maybe they’ll announce, as an increasing number seem to be doing this week, that the market is going into the dumper, so sell everything. “Cash is King,” they say.

I’m not against the experts. I’ve quoted many of them over the years and I read them still. But I just wonder: Why do they bother sharing their hard-won knowledge with us? If they know what stock to buy or when to convert to cash, why don’t they just use their own savvy information and get rich?

Well, the reason is simple. They have no idea whatsoever what’s going to happen next, where a particular stock is headed, or whether the market is a bull or a bear or a bust. As a result, they make more money selling their prattle than acting on it for their own pocket.

So the next time you hear some expert making a prediction, don’t believe it. If those folks were that smart, they wouldn’t be chained to a desk supposedly working for you and for me. So, here’s my advice; don’t take any advice. Happy New Year!

The distant speaking of the voices

Every December when I read or listen to A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas – “All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea …” I am reminded of the first time. The technology, of course was different. Now I can listen on my iPad, but then I was in Grade Twelve at John F. Ross C.V.I. in Guelph. My English teacher, Isobel Cowie, had lugged in from her home what passed in those days for a portable record player. With it she brought a vinyl recording of the reading by Thomas that she played for the class.

The performance ran for about 20 minutes. I was mesmerized. A Welsh poet reading his own work and so lyrical! I was hooked. It was at that point that the door to my future opened. Oh, there was one other door, when I volunteered about the same time to write a high school news column for the Guelph Mercury, but that’s another story. The door that opened that morning in Miss Cowie’s class was to the love of language and reading. What a gift she gave me.

The same Miss Cowie pointed me to a scholarship I won at Western that paid half my tuition, provided a summer job at the London Free Press and launched my journalism career. At Western, in those days, first year was general, you did not pick your major until second year. Again, I lucked out. My English 20 prof was Murdoch MacKinnon, a gifted scholar and teacher. Because the class consisted of only twenty students you had to read every title expected for that day’s seminar, take a view, and be prepared to defend it. I revelled in such surroundings and went on to graduate in Honours English Language and Literature.

A lifetime later, A Child’s Christmas in Wales still thrills me. The imagery is grand and I always hear something new. So, at this joyous season, remember someone who is no longer with you, someone who changed your life. And Season’s Greetings to my constant and faithful readers. My poor words will never approach the heights of Dylan Thomas, but they are my own.

 

A most generous heart

It’s wonderful that Seymour Schulich is getting the kind of recognition his philanthropy deserves. In recent days, half-page newspaper ads have trumpeted his gift, in partnership with Daniel Woolf, principal of Queen’s University, of 400 rare books to Queen’s. A batch of full-page ads have commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Schulich School of Business at York University.

Schulich, who made his money investing in gold, turns 76 next month and is busily giving away much of what he made. His total givings to date are probably in the $400-million range. I can’t think of anyone else in Canada who has been so generous. Among the many university recipients where his name is on a building are Western (Medicine and Dentistry), Dalhousie (Law), Calgary (Engineering), McGill (Library of Science and Engineering as well as the Music faculty), Technion (School of Technology in Israel), and Nippissing (Education). Health has also been a beneficiary: The Heart Centre at Sunnybrook.

But Schulich’s most powerful gift is the $100 million endowment that established the Schulich Leader Scholarships. Every year, 50 high school students from across Canada in their graduating year receive awards each worth $80,000. Talk about a life-changer! Cecil Rhodes did something similar with the Rhodes Scholarships, established in 1902. Schulich Leaders fall into the same category; 100 years from now they will still be celebrated. Schulich sets an example to all of us in a country where fewer than one-quarter of Canadians make annual donations to any cause.

Schulich has plenty of honorary degrees and hall of fame memberships. He doesn’t want or need any more. His book, Get Smarter: Life and Business Lessons, published in 2007 sold 120,000 copies. But he doesn’t like anyone to make a fuss. He’d rather take a brisk two-hour walk with a friend and talk about the issues of the day than stand around at some event in his honour. Still, a little praise every once in a while doesn’t hurt.

The Globe is flat

The folks at the Globe and Mail held the topping-off ceremony yesterday at their new 17-storey building on King Street East. As they prepare to move in next year I plead with them to take a close look at what their newspaper has become. Here’s what’s on page one of today’s Weekend paper: no actual stories, just blurbs and photos. Above the fold, the part meant to appeal to readers at a newsstand, the carefully curated offering includes a pointer to a crossword puzzle, the announcement of a celebrity chef columnist, top moments in the year’s culture and lessons learned from Somalian refugees.

Where’s the news? The news by definition is what makes a woman in her kitchen read a headline, drop her jar of marmalade, and say out loud, “Oh dear!” The only possible contender above the fold is a blurb on Valeant, the drug-maker, a feature sure to be a sizzler given all that’s already been said in the past few months.

Inside follows more fluff. An entire Style section built around a photo of a favourite room in a house of someone you’ve never heard of. A full-page obituary that most days has previously run in the New York Times. A trio of op-ed columnists who are tired and out of tune. Even the inimitable Lysiane Gagnon who used to provide regular insights into Quebec seems to have run out of steam.

Worst of all, Report on Business has become the catchall for hacks, flaks and other fatuous material. The editorial is regularly written by people not on staff. Too many items are one-sided arguments by organizations with an agenda. Where are the investigative articles for which Globe journalists once were so well known? Only the investment pages do what their supposed to do.

If it weren’t for Cathal Kelly in Sports, who writes like a magic man and always has some new view of the world, I’d cancel my subscription.

The book club

I can’t read e-books; my attention wanders. I’m OK reading one on my iPad on an airplane, where the only other choice is a safety pamphlet, but on the ground I need paper and binding and a bookmark. I tried in digital format Robert Caro’s latest installation in the life of Lyndon Johnson, The Passage of Power, and finally gave up. I couldn’t stomach always seeing variations of the line at the bottom: “You are on page 133 of 1,878.” I bought the hard cover with “only” 700 pages. I highly recommend it in whatever format you prefer.

I also enjoyed Margaret MacMillan’s History’s People, although I must say that portions seemed banal and dumbed down. Odd, too, was her declaration that she had chosen to refer to the native peoples of Canada as “Indians” partly because some people such as Elizabeth Simcoe, whom she quotes, used that terminology and “partly because we have as yet no single agreed designation from among the various possibilities of First Nations, aboriginals, natives, or indigenous people.” But Mrs. Simcoe lived and wrote a long time ago – in the first half of the nineteenth century. As for the second part of MacMillan’s reasoning, surely as a top-ranked scholar she should lead by setting a better example.

I laughed out loud a lot and saw myself – always a sign there’s a broad audience – in Ian Brown’s Sixty. To be sure, Brown stretched a bit at times to find things to fret about. But I admire him and have worked with him so know he can tend to the apoplectic. I can also assure him that there is life after sixty.

But of all the books I read in 2015, the absolute best was H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, an unlikely tale that combines grieving, memory, solitude and the training of a goshawk. On every page Macdonald has at least one phrase or one sentence that is so fresh and so lyrical that you’ll stop in your tracks to re-read it and taste it joyously on your tongue.