http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/14-million-for-every-job-saved/article1158733/

Konrad Yakabuski

Thursday, May. 28, 2009 10:00PM EDT

With the projected cost of bailing out GM and Chrysler mounting by the day, the federal and Ontario governments may need to come up with a new sales pitch to persuade maxed-out taxpayers to go along for the increasingly wild ride.

Ottawa and Toronto were already asking a lot of Canadians – most of whom have no private retirement fund and earn significantly less than auto assembly workers – by allowing some of the bailout money to go toward fixing an estimated $7-billion shortfall in GM Canada’s pension plan.

But with the latest forecast pegging the overall bailout bill at as much as $13.5-billion, or more than three times the original estimate, politicians are testing the limits of recession-racked Canadians’ tolerance and financial wherewithal. The ballooning bailouts are pushing Ottawa deeper into the red, with this year’s deficit projected to surpass $50-billion.

At General Motors of Canada Ltd. alone, the rescue package could amount to a staggering $1.4-million for every job saved, with no guarantee that the bailout will ensure the long-term survival of the company’s remaining auto assembly and engine plants.

“What makes me glum about it all is that it’s extremely difficult to get around the political necessity of subsidizing employment at an extraordinarily high cost per job,” said Finn Poschmann, vice-president of research at the C.D. Howe Institute in Toronto.

Even supporters of the bailouts say governments must slap tougher conditions on the loans, starting with a demand that the companies move high-paying research jobs to Canada from Detroit.

As governments continually revise the cost of the bailouts upward and rejig their employment projections downward, critics are seizing on the forecasts as evidence that propping up the car companies was a bad idea in the first place.

“You’re not going to save jobs. All you are going to do is destroy jobs at Ford and Toyota,” said Mark Milke, director of research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Calgary.

Mr. Milke dismisses the bailouts of GM and Chrysler as “a massive transfer of wealth to companies that consumers have already rejected.” The result, he maintains, is that governments “are punishing the companies that have actually run their businesses very well.”

Besides, no matter how many conditions Canadian politicians place on the loans to GM and Chrysler, or how ironclad the guarantees may appear, governments will find themselves with little or no leverage to enforce them.

“You have no guarantee that two years down the road, they’ll say: ‘Well, this Canadian factory is not up to snuff, so we’ve got to close it.’ What are the governments going to do then?” That is what happened with GM’s car assembly plant in Quebec, which received $220-million in federal and provincial interest-free loans in 1987 only to pull out of the province in 2002. None of the money has been repaid.

For Mr. Milke, the auto bailouts are typical of political decisions that benefit relatively few people at the expense of millions. But because the risk of a cross-Canada taxpayer revolt is small compared to the potential payback from voters in hard-up communities in Southern Ontario, the decision to bail out the auto companies is an easy one for politicians.

While such crude political calculus no doubt plays a role in government decisions, most analysts say it’s been a secondary consideration for Ottawa and Ontario as they mull the alternatives to bailing out GM and Chrysler.

“Bringing orderly adjustment to what could have been chaos,” is the aim of governments here, said Glen Hodgson, chief economist at the Conference Board of Canada. The permanent stoppage of GM and Chrysler operations in Canada would devastate parts makers and lead to shutdowns at the Toyota, Honda and Ford plants in Ontario that depend on the same suppliers, Mr. Hodgson said.

According to that argument, GM and Chrysler are linchpins necessary for the continued functioning of the entire Canadian auto sector and, hence, simply “too big to fail.” Still, even if they survive, GM and Chrysler will be a shadow of their former selves. GM Canada’s work force will have shrunk to around 7,000 workers by next year from 12,000 recently, and down from about 20,000 five years ago. At Chrysler Canada, where employment peaked at more than 17,000 in 2000, the work force will drop to 8,200 in July.

Neither company has ruled out further job cuts. Rather, the Ontario and federal governments have made their help conditional on each company maintaining a certain share of its North American production in Canada, likely somewhere around 15 per cent.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a fierce opponent of corporate bailouts when he ran the National Citizens Coalition, has justified his government’s intervention by suggesting Washington forced Ottawa’s hand. President Barack Obama has signalled his intention to keep GM and Chrysler alive with tens of billions of dollars in U.S. government aid.

“Either we participate in the restructuring or these companies, which are very big in the Canadian economy, will simply be restructured out of Canada,” Mr. Harper said last week.

That argument resonates with University of Waterloo economics professor James Brox, an expert on Canada’s manufacturing sector. “If they were failing on both sides of the border, you could make a case” against the bailout here, he said. “It might have been better if Obama had said they were gone. But it’s fairly clear he’s not going to do that.”

Despite the unpalatable political optics of guaranteeing existing pension payouts to GM Canada’s 25,000 retirees – a prospect so unsavoury for Ottawa that it disputes that any of its money will go to the pension plan – Prof. Brox insists governments have no option but to allow an estimated $2-billion of the bailout money to prop up the pension plan.

“If the pension obligation could be written off, the company wouldn’t need the bailout in the first place,” he said. And because pension rules in Ontario enabled GM to underfund its retirement plan for more than a decade, the provincial government has “a moral obligation to make it up” now.

The quid pro quo, Prof. Brox said, should be a requirement that GM and Chrysler perform more research and development in Canada. A recent study Prof. Brox prepared for the Institute for Research on Public Policy showed that Canadian-based auto makers spend only 1 per cent of sales on R&D compared to 15 per cent in the U.S. auto sector.

“Clearly, there are engineers and scientists that could be hired in Oshawa and Windsor just as much as Detroit,” Prof. Brox said.

Canadian Auto Workers economist Jim Stanford counters that GM and Chrysler already do more R&D in Canada than their peers and points to the establishmentof automotive research institutes at McMaster University and the University of Windsor, which are jointly funded by government and industry.

Still, the relative lack of R&D in Canada shouldn’t colour policy makers’ decisions about whether to save GM and Chrysler assembly jobs in Canada, he said.

“Governments have to pay special attention to strengthening the presence of industries that are technology-intensive and trade-oriented. The most successful trading nations – whether it’s Finland, Korea, Germany or China – have all done that in the past couple of decades. We haven’t,” Mr. Stanford maintains. “If we don’t do that now, we will end up with two industries – one that digs stuff out of the ground to sell to other countries and another [made up] of doughnut shops.”

That, Mr. Milke said, “is nonsense. It ignores the fact that [if GM and Chrysler go] someone else is going to come in and pick up those factories and production is going to increase at Honda, Toyota and Ford.” For the politicians, the bailout sales job may have only begun.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/think-tanks-approach-to-hollywood-copy-that/article1158376/

Matt Hartley

Globe and Mail Update, Friday, May. 29, 2009 03:49AM EDT

One of Canada’s most respected research organizations has a black eye after being forced to withdraw three reports on copyright and intellectual property because they contained plagiarized information from a study by a U.S. lobby group for the entertainment industry.

The Conference Board of Canada said it recalled the reports Thursday after an internal investigation showed that they relied too heavily on – and included entire paragraphs lifted from – a document produced by the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA).

As a result, the IIPA and Conference Board reports were similarly critical of Canada’s failure to update its copyright legislation and ratify international intellectual property treaties. The two reports proposed the same solutions for the role Internet service providers should play in combatting piracy, and they both suggested harsher penalties for anyone found to be operating services that allow free sharing of files.

The IIPA is one of a number of international lobby groups putting pressure on Ottawa to update the Copyright Act, which has not changed since 1997, four years before the first iPod went on sale.

The industry wants new laws that would protect digital locks on CDs and DVDs and would make it easier to prosecute the owners of file-sharing services that allow users to download music and movies without paying.

The recall represents an about-face for the Conference Board, which initially stood behind its research after University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist on Monday accused the organization of cribbing from the IIPA in its report, “Intellectual Property Rights in the Digital Economy.”

For advocates of copyright reform, it’s more than a question of plagiarism. The incident raises fresh concerns, they say, over the influence the U.S. entertainment lobby has on Canada’s copyright debate and the objectivity of Canadian research groups tasked with investigating intellectual property and piracy issues.

And it comes at a time when the copyright debate is heating up. Heritage Minister James Moore has said new federal copyright legislation could be introduced as early as this fall.

Conference Board president and chief executive officer Anne Golden said she ordered a “line by line” review of the reports after learning of the allegations made by Mr. Geist. She made the decision to recall the documents when she discovered they did not comply with the board’s plagiarism guidelines and that they were not sent to an external reviewer before being published.

“These reports did not meet our standards,” Ms. Golden said in an interview. “I found out these did not go to an external challenger. What we produce here is always reviewed externally as well as internally, so when I found out about those violations I recalled them.”

Ms. Golden said the Conference Board produces between 150 and 200 reports every year, and that this is the first time in her eight years with the organization that it has recalled a research report.

The IIPA report is the same document the Office of the United States Trade Representative uses to create its Special 301 Report on Copyright Protection and Enforcement, which placed Canada on a priority watch list of the worst piracy and copyright infringing nations on the planet this year.

The Conference Board’s decision to pull the reports is an important first step, Mr. Geist said, but the organization needs to dig deeper for better data on piracy rates in Canada in order to paint an accurate portrait of the copyright landscape in this country. Mr. Geist also disputes the veracity of the data in the IIPA report.

“If they take the time to review the reports and conduct the kind of analysis that they say they are thinking about doing, I think they will find that there are significant inaccuracies,” he said. “I think this calls into question the validity of a lot of the claims about Canada being a so-called piracy haven. If those claims are being based on fabricated and plagiarized data, what does it say about the claims themselves?”

Reports such as the IIPA’s are part of a larger strategy designed to “embarrass and pressure” Canada into copyright reforms that are slanted in favour of the U.S. entertainment industries rather than Canadian consumers, Mr. Geist said.

Also this week, University of Ottawa law professor Jeremy De Beer said that the Conference Board commissioned him to research copyright issues in Canada a year ago and that his findings – which were largely excluded from the report – differed greatly from those found in the final product.

Although some media reports suggested that the Conference Board received $15,000 (Canadian) from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation to help produce the report, a spokeswoman for the ministry said that was not the case.

A spokeswoman for the Conference Board said the organization does take public money for some of its research but confirmed that no public money was spent on the recalled reports.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/too-smart-for-our-own-good/article1158051/

Mark Kingwell

From Friday’s Globe and Mail, Friday, May. 29, 2009 06:43AM EDT

It’s graduation time at universities across the continent and, as so often at this time of year, people ask me: “Are the kids getting dumber? Can they even write?”

This is a bit like debating the value of the designated-hitter rule: The answer says more about you than about the state of play. Answer yes and you brand yourself a bookish curmudgeon, a fogey no matter what your age. Answer no and you align with new cognitive models, social networking websites, early gadget adoption and freewheeling music download.

In other words, it’s cool versus uncool. There are even duelling books on the subject so that the sides can point to argument and evidence – although one might detect a potentially fatal irony in the smarter-kids types needing to cite books in the first place, given that books are so, like, 1780.

In fact, though, the more you look, the more it becomes clear that the dispute is about apples and oranges. If smart means clear writing, linear thought and sustained self-organization, then yes, those skills are in short supply; if it means quick-witted talent for hyperlinking, multitasking and other compound gerunds of the screen age, then no, there is no evidence of cognitive deficit – on the contrary.

Statistically, this is truistic. Any human population, plumbed for any cognitive skill, old-school or new, will show a roughly normal distribution of talent. Past academic emphasis on expository writing didn’t make for more good writers as a function of population, it just picked out the individuals who were good at writing. With a university population that was both smaller and skewed in favour of that skill, the tail – those declining away from the mean – was shorter. People wanted to be clear writers, and were punished if they were not. But in no case does it mean that kids were smarter then, or dumber now.

This is the point where the dispute typically hares off into a hand-wringing discussion of what universities are for and whether they’re any good at doing whatever that is. Socialization machine or crucible of citizenship? Job-training centre or gateway to wisdom?

Unfortunately, all the available answers are both obvious and mutually inconsistent; there can be no right answer because all the half-right answers cancel each other out. So let’s ask a different question: What is intelligence for?

The premise behind any worry that kids are getting dumber is that this is a bad thing, a development to deprecate. If Johnny can’t write (one side avers), then what hope is there for public discourse, critical diligence and democracy? If Johnny can’t tweet (the other side responds), then what hope is there for fast-moving crowd-sourced innovation and collective creativity? Each side defines intelligence in its favour because both assume that intelligence must be the governing value of human evolution.

I have a modest proposal that will resolve this tiresome debate forever: Consider the possibility that both sides are wrong. Imagine for a moment that we have reached the end not only of the book-smarts era of human civilization, but also of the entire smarts era, period. Replacing one form of intelligence with another form just obscures the baseline truth: Human intelligence has become counter-adaptive.

This might sound crazy. After all, it’s precisely the ingenious tricks of human problem-solving that have made us so successful at survival. But these same tricks have also generated large negative effects: environmental degradation, weapons of mass destruction, hedge funds, sophisticated forms of torture and the justification thereof. In the global adapt-or-die sweepstakes, humans keep scraping by, almost despite themselves, the net good effects of intelligence just outdistancing the bad.

How long can this possibly go on? In supercomplex systems, ones with multiple variables that are at once interconnected and threatened, failure is rarely incremental, the way it might be in a single-variable system. If one small part of our world fails, the larger failure is likely to be catastrophic and immediate. Just think about downtown traffic snarled by a collision, or the airline schedule during an electrical storm. Now reflect on the global food chain and energy grid – or the financial network.

It’s not that we’ve been dumb; it’s that we’ve been too smart for too long. Success breeds success – literally so in evolutionary terms. We have succeeded well past our safety thresholds. There are too many of us, and we’re too good at inventing things. Being smart turns out to be a dumb idea.

Is there anything to be done about it? Well, experience indicates that calls for restraint and sacrifice are rarely successful when people lack other incentives to change their behaviour. So I suggest we tackle the problem at the root: Let’s start selecting for dumbness. Not just in the sense of giving up on old-fashioned writing skills. That ship has sailed. Let’s go farther and invert the value scale. Let’s actively punish the clever and reward the slow and unambitious.

Maybe then, after a few generations, we will breed our way out of this mess and back into a simpler age. “Are the kids getting dumber?” my academic successors will be asked. “Yes” they will say. “It’s working”

Mark Kingwell is professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto.

http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/article/641563

Hidden in yards and on rooftops, these drinking spots are a real find

May 28, 2009 04:30 AM
Comments on this story (9)
Raju Mudhar
Entertainment Reporter

The truth about secret patios in Toronto is that they don’t remain secret for very long. Which is why some are reluctant to tell others about their somewhat private oases in the city. But we’ve done the dirty work, read the weeklies’ patio guides, scoured the message boards and, most important, sat down for a drink at some of the best hidden spots in the city.

This quest, however, was borne out of loss. For years, the Waterside Bistro, a café attached to a golf and tennis bubble on Queens Quay E., was one of the sweetest, little-known outdoor spots in the area, if not the city, with a sizable patio and a prime view of the harbour. Now all that’s left is a construction pit.

The question is, how do we define “secret”? Well, a secret patio is a lot like a mullet – business in the front, party in the back. Lesser-known rooftops also count. Beyond that, it needs to fail the awareness test: when you mention it to the average Torontonian, the usual first response is, “I didn’t know that place had a patio.”

So inside we’ve got just a few great patios from across the city that you might not yet know about, kicking off our summer Patio Patrol series. The list is by no means exhaustive – we’d like you to help us find the rest of the best by commenting on this story at thestar.com/entertainment.

CIROS (1316 Bloor St. W., 416-533-4914)

A bastion of beer and eclectic pub grub at Bloor and Lansdowne, this small backyard deck is as unpretentious as it is hidden. The door out to the wooden patio is just to the right of the kitchen at the back of the resto, easily missed if you aren’t in the know. Out back, poles with multi-coloured splotches that light up in the evening complement the plastic furniture. Nothing fancy, but it gets the job done in an area with few such escapes.

Globe Bistro (124 Danforth Ave., 416-466-2000)

In the former Café Brussels space on Danforth near Broadview Ave., the Globe’s indoor dining area is as swank as the food is delicious. Upstairs on the third-floor rooftop patio, a wood-trimmed oasis awaits. With a reasonable happy hour featuring gourmet snacks and drink specials from 5 to 7 p.m., the area is made for relaxing and drinking. There isn’t much of a view to speak of, but this private, classy patio is fuelled by good vibes and good service.

Peter Pan (373 Queen St. W., 416-593-0917)

It’s one of the oldest restaurants and one of the pioneers of the Queen West strip, but the small, back-alley patio behind Peter Pan remains a downtown gem. Again, nothing fancy, and not much of view, but it’s got a hidden-in-plain-sight allure. Even better, it’s usually pretty empty, which makes it a great spot to go if you are denied a seat or face a lineup at The Black Bull across the street, one of the city’s least-secret patios.

The Rectory Café (Ward’s Island, 416-203-2152)

For those who know this fantastic spot on the island, the yard is no secret at all. But for the many who take only the Centre Island ferry and rarely get beyond Centreville, this resto is reason enough to make the trip to Ward’s Island. On the western edge of the area where you’ll find most of the island residents’ homes, this historical building has a pleasant patio in front, but that’s dwarfed by the relaxing, tree-lined one out back. A great spot to start or end a date.

Betty’s (240 King St. E., 416-368-1300)

For those who live or work in the King East area, this is also a well-known commodity. The stalwart pub has a huge back patio that is a bit ramshackle, but all sorts of fun. With a TV or two, the concrete yard has an undeniable urban-jungle feel, but with a great crowd, nice mellow vibe and great service, Betty’s is a model for what makes a back patio great.

The Dogfish Pub at Bluffer’s Park (7 Brimley Rd. S., 416-264-2337)

Another oldie but a goodie, the pub is positioned right on the water, underneath the fancier Bluffer’s Restaurant, but it can be pretty easy to miss. East of much of the park, the restaurant is in the marina, at the end of a long line of houseboats. You’ve got to walk down the dock to get to it, but once you do, this no-frills pub provides a great waterfront view and is so close to the vessels that it will stoke a case of boat envy in just about anyone.

The Keating Channel Pub (2 Villiers St., 416-572-0030)

Most folks heading out to Cherry Beach pass by this pub that sits on what seems like its own mini-peninsula. Their loss. Technically, the patio’s out front, but hidden from the traffic that passes by on nearby Cherry St. It’s a surprisingly good pub, but the large patio is an amazing find in this overwhelmingly industrial area. It even overlooks a small canal. A perfect pit stop for cyclists on the nearby trails.

Mill Street Brew Pub (55 Mill St., Building 63, 416-681-0338)

Let’s face it, The Distillery is basically one big patio, and there’s nothing secret about it. That said, the back patio at this brewery fits our criteria (even though the courtyard next to it has been turned into an outdoor stage in years past). But the real reason that you must go is that one of the brewery’s current seasonal beers is a peach wit beer that tastes like glorious summer in a glass.

http://www.thestar.com/gta/columnist/article/642351

May 29, 2009 04:30 AM
Comments on this story (1)
Joe Fiorito

A bit of clarification:

Some people think seal hunting in the North is somehow the equivalent to the seal hunt in Newfoundland.

It is not.

The hunt in Newfoundland is secondarily a source of food, and primarily a way for seasonal workers to supplement their wages. If there is flipper pie, so much the better.

I have no opinion on the clubbing.

The hunt in the North is not seasonal. It is a year-round thing, a way to get food and clothing. Think of it as the trip you or I make to the supermarket.

In summer in the North, seals are shot on the open water. In winter, seals are speared when they come up to breathe at holes in the ice.

In the North, every part of the seal is used. The meat is eaten and the guts are dried and used as cord. The skin makes clothing and the fat is used to light lamps.

I managed the CBC station in Iqaluit from 1980-1985. Our morning show was called “Kudliq.” Our afternoon show was called “Adliq.” The kudliq is the morning lamp used by the Inuit; the adliq is the evening lamp.

Both are lit with seal fat.

I used to have a handsome pair of sealskin kamiks.

You might want to call them mukluks. That’s the name of that sort of footwear in another part of the world.

My kamiks were made by the wife of a man with whom I worked. She laughed as she traced the pattern of my feet. She had never made kamiks so big.

The small feet of the Inuit are, like their stature, an adaptation to the climate; less to freeze. My big dogs were pretty funny.

My kamiks were handsome. When I learned how to walk on the ice without falling down, I felt like I’d arrived. When summer came I was told to store them in the freezer.

I was a single man in the North. The Inuit are very big on family. A man without a wife was at a disadvantage.

When winter came around again, my friend asked if my kamiks were very stiff; they get that way from lack of use. I said I didn’t think they were.

My friend thought I was being polite. “If they are very stiff,” he said, “my wife will chew them for you.”

If you see those photos of older Inuit women taken many years ago, you will see their teeth are often worn to nubs. That’s from a life of chewing skins.

I declined the offer. I have a wife now. If I asked her to chew my kamiks, or anything else I wear on my feet, she would teach me a thing or two.

To say that the G-G ate seal in solidarity with the hunters of Newfoundland is so ignorant it is laughable. The one is not the other.

When I lived in the North, I knew people who, when they ate raw meat at home, did not dine at the table. They sat on the floor, with newspapers spread out as a kind of tablecloth, and they put their meat in front of them and cut off chunks.

You did the same if you were a guest.

The trick to eating raw frozen meat is not to chew but to swallow. All I will say is, you gulp down the lumps before they melt.

Some people were offended that the G-G’s seal was butchered right there on the ground. That’s how it is done when there is something for the whole community to celebrate.

I celebrate Michaëlle Jean.

Joe Fiorito usually appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Email: jfiorito@thestar.ca

http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/642336

Ruby Dhalla’s ex-nanny wonders why another former employer is now making allegations

May 29, 2009 04:30 AM
Comments on this story (5)
Dale Brazao
Staff Reporter

A nanny who has accused Liberal MP Ruby Dhalla of mistreatment says she can’t understand why a former employer now says she used him to get into Canada.

Magdalene Gordo, 31, one of two caregivers accusing Dhalla and her family of overwork and abuse, said she left her first job with a Milton family after a month because “I was not comfortable, and I was sick.”

“I don’t understand why they’re doing this now,” Gordo said. “I’ve never spoken publicly about this. I loved those kids and they loved me. I had no problems with the family.”

The allegations against Gordo were published this week in The Globe and Mail, which named George Roswell as her employer before she worked for the Dhallas.

Roswell’s lawyer, Shawn Philbert, said Roswell sponsored Gordo into Canada as a live-in-caregiver before Christmas 2007 only to have her quit three weeks later, leaving his four children without a nanny.

Philbert made similar accusations two weeks ago after the Star’s stories on allegations from two nannies that the Dhalla family illegally employed and mistreated them.

He made the accusations at a news conference held by Dhalla’s lawyer, Howard Levitt. At that time, Philbert would not name his client saying he asked to remain anonymous.

The Roswells treated Gordo as a family member, greeting her at the airport with winter clothes, Philbert said. They took her to Niagara Falls and gave her Christmas gifts.

“They did give me Christmas gifts, then they deducted them all from my last paycheque,” Gordo said.

A note attached to her last pay shows the Roswells deducted $100 for “coat, hat, gloves, scarf and boots” and another $10 deduction for a phone card they bought her.

“I don’t blame them,” Philbert said yesterday, noting that in the family’s view, Gordo spent the first two weeks as their guest, and was not working. “You give someone a gift and you find out they’ve been using you the whole time – the first thing you say is give it back.”

Gordo also took issue with Roswell’s claims she didn’t start work until Jan. 2, 2008 – two weeks after she arrived in Canada. “I arrived on Dec. 18 and I started work the next day. They paid me cash for those first two weeks, but they did not pay me for the holidays. I never had a day off until Jan. 5.”

“As for the trip to Niagara Falls, it was an outing for them, not for me. I was working, looking after the four children. We were seven people in one hotel room. I slept on the floor with the two youngest children.”

Roswell, an information technologist, decided to air his complaints after seeing Gordo on TV accusing Dhalla of mistreatment while she worked for the MP and her family, Philbert said. Roswell did not respond to requests for an interview.

Gordo also took issue with Philbert’s statements that his client had gone to much expense to sponsor her from Taiwan.

“I paid for my own way to Canada,” Gordo said. Documents show she paid about $4,500 in placement fees to an agency in Taiwan, plus her airline ticket, medical and police clearances, and work permit.

Gordo said she has never spoken publicly about her experiences with the Roswells, although she did tell her agency she was not comfortable at the home and was feeling ill. She never complained of overwork, she said.

Gordo’s medical records show she had surgery in the Philippines in December 2006. Under the live-in program, caregivers are not entitled to health benefits until three months after they begin working.

Her day typically began about 6:30 a.m. making breakfast for the family and sometimes ended past midnight because the family asked she do the laundry after 10 p.m. to save on electricity bills, Gordo said.

Her agency advised her to leave if she wasn’t happy, but when she tried to give two weeks’ notice, the Roswells demanded she go immediately. Two weeks later, after recovering from her illness, Gordo started at the Dhalla home.

Ruby Dhalla has denied she or her family have mistreated any caregivers employed at the family home.

http://www.thestar.com/living/fashion/article/642318

Socialite left red-faced after her cocktail ’slip’ is exposed

May 29, 2009 04:30 AM
Comments on this story (12)
David Graham
Fashion Editor

Yesterday morning a young Toronto socialite entered a boutique on Queen St. W. with her mother at her side.

They weren’t there to shop.

As the store’s owner recognized them, she burst into tears. And while the distraught mother wept nervously, the socialite bowed her head, apologized for her actions and asked the store’s owner for a hug.

For the previous 24 hours Deena Pantalone had been the target of a vicious online smear campaign among the city’s fashion community – vilified for telling a Toronto Life reporter the candy-red cocktail dress she was wearing at last week’s Butterfly Ball was vintage, when in fact it had been created by a local designer.

On Wednesday, Toronto Life blogger Courtney Shea singled out Pantalone as the best-dressed woman at the ball, applauding her for transforming a discarded vintage find with the help of an unidentified seamstress.

When Shea asked Pantalone, “Who designed your dress?” she said, “Well, me, sort of. It’s a really old vintage dress I’ve had lying around the house for years.”

At the same time, the Star published a photo of Pantalone with her mother, taken at the same event, a high society fundraising event held last week to support Boost, a children’s charity. Pantalone told the Star the dress is by Christian Dior.

But Caroline Lim, designer and owner of Champagne and Cupcakes in Parkdale, knows differently.

“I sold her that dress myself in April. It cost $159. It was between a red one and a green one, but we decided the red one had more of a wow factor,” said Lim, by phone, moments after the awkward morning faceoff.

The case of the misidentified dress got local fashion designers and consumers hot under the collar. They emailed and blogged and tweeted their wrath. But mostly they went on the Toronto Life comments section where they could let off steam anonymously.

Lim weighed in early: “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

Maria wrote, “I have this dress too – but in an electric purple … BUSTED!”

Pantalone’s misrepresentations were labelled “tacky” and “crass.”

Others saw the humour in the gaffe. “Oh the facepalms,” said Shannon.

But Richard wanted revenge. “Produce the receipt Cupcakes, finish her off.”

“It got really ugly,” says Lim, as each rageful comment fuelled another. Lim eventually put out a plea for calmer heads. “It’s nice that they want to stand up for me but some of the things they said about her were nasty.

“When I first saw the image on the blog I was hurt and upset. I remember her as being outgoing and really excited about the dress,” says Lim.

According to Lim, a friend had called her when she saw the dress on the Toronto Life site, but she was confused because she knew Champagne and Cupcakes doesn’t sell vintage. Perplexed, Lim logged on and flipped out.

“It’s not even about the dress anymore,” says Lim. “It’s about justice.”

Lim was still upset when the two Pantalones entered her store yesterday morning.

“It was an emotional encounter. She looked frazzled and told me that she wanted to apologize to my face. She told me she drove in all the way from Vaughan.”

Mostly Lim wanted to know why Pantalone would tell two very different stories about the dress – both untrue. Why did she twist the truth about the pretty red dress?

According to Lim, Pantalone said she was overwhelmed by the media attention and perhaps felt she needed to elevate her story – a fantastic vintage find she reworked to one reporter, Dior to another.

Deena is the thirty-something daughter of Rene and Rocky Pantalone. Her dad is president of National Homes in Toronto and Deena is a partner with her siblings in a local development firm.

Despite repeated attempts, Deena was unavailable for comment.

Toronto’s fashion world is not stepping up to talk publicly about the incident. And society types are keeping their distance. One leader of the pack, however, said Pantalone may hire a publicist to help her with damage control.

Fashion designers are weary of having their creativity stolen, says Jennifer Halchuk, who co-designs the label Mercy. The Toronto label recently settled with New York designer Diane Von Furstenberg, who appropriated the design of a jacket from their spring ‘08 collection.

“It’s about giving designers the credit they deserve,” she says. “Designers and consumers are really sensitive about this kind of thing these days. I’m just glad she apologized.”

Halchuk also believes Toronto’s enormous fashion industry is tired of being branded trivial.

One blogger on the Toronto Life site blustered, “The good news for everyone is it’s only fashion and not something that actually matters one iota.”

Halchuk takes offence.

So does Lim. “I have a university degree. I’ve run my own business for eight years. Fashion is an enormous industry.”

As Rene and Lim stood sobbing in the boutique, Deena was outwardly contrite. She shed no tears, says Lim.

She did, however, express a hope that this incident would not affect their relationship and a wish that she could continue to shop at Champagne and Cupcakes in the future.

The truth is, the society girl may have to get in line.

Thanks to the controversy, orders for Lim’s spirited cocktail dresses are pouring in fast – and furious.

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/642333

May 29, 2009 04:30 AM
Comments on this story (5)
Jim Coyle

Unless Christine Elliott is an Oscar-calibre actress, she would appear to be that most unusual of politicians – a leadership candidate without artifice, practised persona or much ego.

Oh, true enough. No one can run for the top job of a political party without thinking they have something special. But as showcased yesterday in an hour-long session with the Star editorial board, the MPP for Whitby-Oshawa does offer, in her bid for the Ontario Progressive Conservative leadership, a becoming humility, maturity and perspective.

Perhaps that comes from being a woman. Perhaps it’s because she’s the mother of teenage triplet boys. Perhaps it’s because Elliott, while a successful lawyer and businesswoman, has also done the low-profile work of community volunteer.

What likely distinguishes her from her three rivals is that it was that latter experience – working on behalf of children with special needs, rather than economic ideology – that was “the reason why I decided to run in the first place.”

What it adds up to is a capacity to see that much of life is conducted in the grey zones, where bumper-sticker nostrums are seldom of much use.

She understands complexity. She takes the “Progressive” portion of her party’s name as seriously as she does the “Conservative.”

Lower taxes, smaller government, the rule of law are conservative articles of faith, she said. The trickier part arises on the ledger’s other side.

What “we haven’t been speaking about a lot lately is the need to take care of vulnerable people, the need to be compassionate, and the need to give back to your community.”

And making the party more attractive to women, new Ontarians, young people depends on doing so, she said.

Her party’s “gender gap” is due in part to the “way we speak about things.” What many women hear is the aggressive verbs – the cutting, slashing, scrapping – that go with right-wing machismo.

When Elliott spoke yesterday about the complicated challenges facing a single mother in her riding – “it’s not just a matter of getting a job” – it suggests there might just be more to Ontario than leafy cul-de-sacs of middle-class families.

The ceaseless ego-levelling of family life has produced a becoming modesty in Elliott.

She wasn’t sure, she said, if the detailed plan she released for building the party from leadership vote till the next election was a product of her legal training or because organization was vital to keeping family life on the rails.

Her sons, after all, are not impressed with mom as potential party leader. “At the end of the day, it’s, `What’s for dinner, Mom?’ and `How much laundry are you going to do tonight?’”

She and husband, federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, do talk politics at home. “It would be weird if we didn’t.”

“But mostly, when we’re all together at home, we talk more about the boys, what they’re doing, their sports activities. They’re graduating from high school … Then, how they’re going to get summer jobs … which they haven’t quite accomplished yet. And then their university plans.”

All in all, a good recipe for keeping things in perspective.

And what Elliott also demonstrated yesterday was the decidedly useful political attributes of a sense of humour and ability to roll with the punches.

She acknowledged the earlier jab of a Star critic (mea culpa) that she had the uninspiring demeanour of a nice church lady.

“I actually have been a church lady,” she said. “I coordinated our Christmas hamper program at our church for a number of years.”

Pretty clever comeback.

For a church lady.

Jim Coyle’s provincial affairs column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

http://www.thestar.com/news/world/article/642352

May 29, 2009 04:30 AM
Comments on this story (24)
Mitch Potter
WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON–George W. Bush comes to Toronto today bedevilled by fresh questions about whether the former U.S. president felt the hand of God driving his wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bush, a born-again Christian since age 40, arrives for today’s paid speaking engagement at Metro Toronto Convention Centre with fellow former president Bill Clinton amid a series of stranger-than-fiction disclosures, one of which suggests that apocalyptic fervour may have held sway within the walls of his White House.

Bush, who turns 63 in July and was 54 when first sworn into office in 2001, has yet to comment on the reports. They include last week’s GQ magazine exposé into the hawkish use of scripture in 2003, when then-defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld forwarded secret intelligence memos to Bush embroidered with biblical passages.

“Therefore, put on the full armour of God,” a verse from Ephesians, and “Open the gates that the righteous nation may enter,” from Isaiah, are among the messages that adorn reports prepared for Bush by Rumsfeld’s Pentagon.

Stranger still are new accounts emerging from France describing how former president Jacques Chirac was utterly baffled by a 2003 telephone conversation in which Bush reportedly invoked fanatical Old Testament prophecy – including the Earth-ending battle with forces of evil, Gog and Magog – in his arguments to enlist France in the Coalition of the Willing.

“This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins,” Bush said to Chirac, according to Thomas Romer, a University of Lausanne theology professor who was later approached by French officials anxious to understand the biblical reference. Romer first revealed his account in a 2007 article for the university review, Allez savoir, which passed largely unnoticed.

Chirac, in a new book by French journalist Jean-Claude Maurice, is quoted as confirming the surreal conversation, saying he was stupefied by Bush’s reference to biblical prophecy and “wondered how someone could be so superficial and fanatical in their beliefs.”

It remains unclear whether Bush will be asked to shed light on the matter in Toronto today, where civil tongues are likely to prevail in what is billed as “a conversation” between political heavyweights.

But in the absence of comment from Bush himself, disturbing questions about the extent to which his administration blurred the lines of religion and war loom large.

“Speculating on what goes on inside George Bush’s head is always a bold endeavour. But the sense one gets from this is that biblical prophecy somehow factored in the thinking,” said Clive Hamilton, a visiting scholar at Yale University in a recent article for counterpunch.org.

“The most striking thing for me is in the real world, trying to get France to go to war on that basis is crazy. It is hard to imagine a better way to scare off a potential friend.”

Indeed, parts of these disclosures don’t square with previous reports of Bush’s religious motivations. In 2003, Bush reportedly told Palestinian delegates he felt the hand of God pushing him to establish a Palestinian state – an outcome opposed by hardcore U.S. evangelicals who support Israel, and campaign against Palestinian statehood on the basis of biblical prophecy.

But for many, including officials from America’s Muslim communities, one need not go deep into biblical verse to be troubled.

“Just the fact that Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon would overlay briefings to the president with biblical verses confirms eight years of suspicions,” said Salam al-Marayati, of the Los Angeles-based Muslim Public Affairs Council.

“What is so disturbing is that it is similar to the way Al Qaeda uses sacred text to support their ambitions. As a Muslim who loves America, who wants my children and my grandchildren to feel this is their home, it is the last thing we want to see in a president.”

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/from-surplus-to-deficit/article1156577/

Flaherty’s numbers
From surplus to deficit
Follow the dwindling fortunes of Canada’s coffers

From Thursday’s Globe and Mail, Thursday, May. 28, 2009 08:19AM EDT

Nov. 27: $100-million projected surplus

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was facing a deficit of $5.9-billion in the fiscal year ending March 31, 2010, according to the fiscal update he released last fall. To achieve a surplus, Mr. Flaherty pledged to reduce government spending by $4.3-billion and predicted the government would earn $1.6-billion from changes to public sector compensation and the gains on purchases of insured mortgages from banks.

Dec. 17: “There will be a deficit”

Mr. Flaherty acknowledged a surplus was out of the question. While meeting with provincial finance ministers in Saskatoon on Dec. 17, Mr. Flaherty released a revised economic outlook that said Canada’s GDP would contract 0.4 per cent in 2009, compared with his November estimate for growth of 0.3 per cent.

January: $33.7-billion projected deficit

In his January budget, Mr. Flaherty booked Canada’s first shortfall in a dozen years, saying the deteriorating economy and the government’s $40-billion stimulus program would cause four years of deficits, starting in 2010.

May 27: $50-billion projected deficit

Mr. Flaherty revised his projection again this week, citing a deeper-than-expected recession, higher-than-anticipated employment insurance payments and the rescues of Chrysler and General Motors.

Impact on the debt

Canada’s net federal debt will be $502-billion in 2009-2010, a $40-billion increase from the previous year, according to an April estimate by the International Monetary Fund. Mr. Flaherty’s revision implies that the net federal debt this fiscal year will be at least $16-billion higher, assuming the IMF based its forecast on the government’s January budget.

Plan to pay it down

Mr. Flaherty says a higher deficit this year won’t stop him from paying for his stimulus program and returning to surplus by 2014. That’s possible, according to Avery Shenfeld, an economist at CIBC World Markets, because much of the spending is one-time and the 4.7-per-cent economic growth that the Bank of Canada projects in 2011 will spark increased revenue. “When the global economy recovers and commodity prices improve, a lot of this will melt away,” Mr. Shenfeld said. Other economists are more skeptical. The Parliamentary Budget Officer said as long ago as February that there are “significant risks” that the government will fail to close the deficit by 2014.

Details to come

Mr. Flaherty says he will provide details in June about what is causing his deficit projection to balloon. About half of the $16-billion increase is the result of higher employment insurance benefits and weaker tax revenue, and the other half is attributable to the rescue packages for General Motors and Chrysler, according to people familiar with the figures