The Organic Box Burgeoning

Even as we spoke, Danny Turner, who started the organic food delivery system with his wife Miranda back in April, had to run because a shipment of beets, shallots and onions from two family farms near Coaldale (near Lethbridge) had just arrived, and his unloading guy had gone home for the day.

With some 500 regular customers (people ordering shipments to their home at least every two weeks), the business is very nearly to the point where the owners can give themselves a salary. Danny expects to hit 400 weekly deliveries this month. Last April, when first we spoke, the business had 120 customers.

"Momentum is starting to carry us," says Danny of the unexpected growth. "It's word of mouth."

Danny and Miranda Turner are thirtysomething parents of two small boys who wanted to build a business that would both support their family and an organic food delivery system. For roughly $50 a week (including a charge for a sustainability fund to purchase emission offsets), customers of the Organic Box can pick  from among a number of organic items to be delivered year-round.

Where possible, those products are local (they have a dozen local producers), but the Turners also carry things like organic oranges and bananas, and try to find those nearest to home. For instance, the oranges come from California, not Florida. The Turners strive to have all products certified organic, but also have some producers who use organic practices, but aren't certified.

The Turners were inspired in their effort by their time living in San Francisco, where the local food movement has been big for years. Plus, Danny's thesis for his master's degree at Oxford University in England examined a business model that is now the backbone of the Organic Box.

For more information, go to theorganicbox.ca,or phone 780-469-1900.

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Crunch the numbers: Crime rates are going down

Greenspan and DoobPublished Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2011 5:00AM ESTLast updated Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2011 7:13AM EST66 comments

Everyone wants to reduce crime and use resources effectively. But the Conservative government’s “tough on crime” agenda would have you believe that crime is increasing and can only be reduced by using tougher penalties. This assertion is wrong, as is a study by an Ottawa-based think tank that reviewed the 2009 Statistics Canada report on crime.

The study, by former Alberta Crown attorney Scott Newark for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, suggests that violent crime is increasing, contrary to the Statscan report and all reasoned examinations of existing data. Mr. Newark’s study is filled with problems: It compares figures that can’t be compared. It presents figures that are inaccurate. And it ignores evidence supporting the conclusion that crime is, in fact, decreasing.

Mr. Newark criticizes Statscan for not including crime rates for all criminal offences. This information is available to anyone in the world on Statscan’s website. The figures clearly show (see Column 1 of our table) a substantial decrease over time. It’s no wonder Mr. Newark only chose to criticize, rather than present the numbers.

The violent crime rates presented in Statscan’s report are reproduced in Column 2 of our table. It shows that, since 2000, the violent crime rate went down each and every year. Mr. Newark’s study offers only three figures (of numbers of crimes, not rates, thus not correcting for population increases) for 1999 (291,000), 2004 (302,000) and 2009 (443,000). The 2009 figure corresponds to current Statscan data; the 1999 and 2004 figures use a narrower definition of violence.

— The Globe and Mail/Statistics Canada

Mr. Newark’s 2009 figure includes an additional set of offences – criminal harassment and uttering threats. These two newcomers to the category of violence constituted 22 per cent of all violent offences. Mr. Newark makes it clear that he’s aware of the change in definition, but ignores it in his table and doesn’t refer to the data that we have reproduced in Column 2 because it doesn’t support his erroneous conclusion.

It’s easy to make crime look as though it’s going up if one provides numbers that are wrong or misleading. Mr. Newark offers what he calls “youth violent crime” for three years and shows “rates per 100,000” for these years: 956 (for 2001), 1,498 (for 2004) and 1,887 (for 2008). He then concludes there’s been a 100-per-cent increase in youth violent crime.

The data from the Statscan report he’s critiquing are in Column 3. Mr. Newark’s starting point (2001) is clearly wrong; he says in his table that the number is 956 (rather than 1,957, the true number), thereby supporting his erroneous conclusion that there’s been a large increase in youth violent crime. Had he reproduced the correct figures for these years in his table, one couldn’t conclude that the youth violent crime rate had gone up.

There are other problems. In an attempt to explain away the fact that homicide rates have unambiguously decreased since the mid-1970s, Mr. Newark suggests that “homicides are arguably decreasing because of the increased quality of medical care,” presumably turning murders into attempted murders. Although he must know, as a former Crown attorney, that attempted murder doesn’t require life-threatening injuries or, indeed, any injury, he still suggests that medical care is a likely cause for the failure of homicide rates to increase. For this to be true, there should be an increase in attempted murder rates. Column 4 shows no overall increase in homicide rates in recent years, and Column 5 shows no consistent trend in attempted murder rates.

It appears that for people such as Mr. Newark, Statistics Canada is never wrong as long as it reports that crime rates are increasing. If it says crime is decreasing, then it’s never right. The fact of the matter is that crime rates have nothing to do with tougher laws or harsher sentencing. The fact is that crime rates go up and down. In recent years, they’ve gone down.

Edward Greenspan is a Toronto criminal lawyer. Anthony Doob is a professor of criminology at the University of Toronto.

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Baking Bread...Still

Learning to bake bread reminds me of having a baby. For one thing, there is  small, soft, beautiful smelling bundle to fuss over. But also, there is a fairly rigorous schedule to be maintained, and my bread can't be left alone for very long. Indeed, I feel guilty that I went out for supper, and didn't get to proofing my bread until a bit too late. Now, it's 9 p.m. (my bread is yawning and rubbing its eyes) and I've just divided my dough (which has been rising for four or five hours) into two loaves.  It's proofing in my slightly-warm oven, a.k.a. the nursery.

Thanks to the readers who offered me malt - I ended up finding some at Bosch Kitchen Centre.

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Hmmmm. Not sure about my bread...

Well, I just took my bun out of the oven. It looks less like a loaf of bread than a skull, something hunched in a kidney pan after an autopsy. Clearly bread, like a baby, has a life of its own.

Here's hoping it tastes better than it looks, but it certainly didn't puff out like the Rustic Sourdough I made during my NAIT class did. Hmmm. Hard to imagine which of the many steps involved in this process was not quite right. Was the proofing not long enough? Kitchen too cold? Oh no, did I forget to burp after nursing?

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Province to table bill on making TTC an essential service

Published Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2011 10:23AM ESTLast updated Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2011 10:36AM EST20 comments

Transit workers in Canada’s largest city face losing the right to strike as the province moves decisively toward declaring their work an essential service.

The McGuinty government will introduce legislation on Tuesday, banning Toronto Transit Commission workers from walking off the job.

The proposed bill, which will receive first reading in the legislature on Tuesday afternoon, follows a request by Toronto Mayor Rob Ford to ban transit workers from striking. In December, city council voted 28-17 in favour of making future strike action by transit union members illegal.

“We have received a proposal from Toronto city council. We have listened to them. We have talked to representatives of the workers as well and of course we have heard from many Torontonians,” Premier Dalton McGuinty told reporters on Tuesday morning, shortly before the legislature begins its spring session. “Whatever we do, it’s all about helping the people of Toronto, ensuring that their needs are being met.”

More than 100,000 Torontonians rely on public transit to get around the city every day, so when workers walk off the job, as they did briefly in 2008, commuters are left stranded and the economy loses an estimated $50-million a day.

Time is of the essence in introducing the legislation. The first of three collective agreements with unionized transit workers expires on March 31. Union leaders have promised not to strike during the upcoming round of talks for a new agreement.

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Brygette of Bamboche World Cuisine at Northside Italian Centre

Those of you familiar with Brygette McNamara's line of dips, seen at the City market throughout the season, will be pleased to learn that Brygette's products are now available at the Italian Centre on the north side. (That's at 10878-95th Street 780-424-4869.) The dips for sale are Fetaterranean (a feta cheese based dip), the Shiraz with Portabello (my personal fav) and Parmigiana Reggiano. You might have seen Brygette demonstrating the products in the store over the last few months.

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Environmental standoff threatens traffic on St. Lawrence Seaway

Next year, commercial shipping could disappear from the St. Lawrence Seaway, devastating the Great Lakes economies and throwing thousands of people out of work, thanks to an obscure regulation passed by the State of New York.

“As it stands right now, they have a regulation that comes into play in Jan. 1, 2012 that ships won’t be able to comply with,” Tim Meisner, director-general of marine policy at Transport Canada, said in an interview.

“So unless there are some changes to their rules or regulations, it’s a reasonable possibility” that much of the economic activity on the Seaway will shut down.

No one really thinks it will go that far. But New York and the shipping industry are locked in a game of environmental chicken, and no one as yet seems ready to blink.

It’s all about ballast water. Ships whose holds are not full take on water (ballast) to maintain stability. When they approach port, they flush the water out.

But in flushing, species picked up in one body of water can enter another. That’s how the zebra mussel and more than 180 other invasive species made their way into the Great Lakes.

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) has imposed rules that require ships to flush their ballast water out at sea. But the New York state government thinks the new rules are too lax. So back in 2008 it set its own standards, which are far, far tougher than the IMO rules. They go into effect on Jan. 1.

You can’t enter or leave the Seaway without transiting New York waters, so New York has the power to effectively shut the Seaway down.

The shipping industry protests that the technology doesn’t exist to meet the New York rules. But environmental organizations maintain that the ships’ owners are dragging their heels.

“Our theory is, let the standard be set, and that will drive technology that will figure out how to meet that standard,” said Marc Smith, policy manager for the National Wildlife Federation. Governments have been doing exactly that for decades with fuel-emission standards.

Mr. Smith dismisses any notion of the Seaway being shut down, saying that the regulations have numerous “off-ramps” to exempt vessels in the event the technology doesn’t catch up in time.

Besides, he points out, New York in any case would have trouble enforcing the new rules because the state lacks the authority to board and seize ships.

But the ship owners are emphatic that their vessels will not enter New York waters if they cannot comply with the ballast water standards because they would lose their insurance.

“Seaway traffic will stop,” if the regulation is implemented, Terence Bowles, president and CEO of Canada's St. Lawrence Seaway Administration, warned recently. “New York is being unreasonable on this particular issue. All the carriers are extremely concerned about it.”

The regulation survived a legal challenge – states, like provinces, have the right and duty to protect water quality within their borders –so the best hope now is to get New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, to set aside the regulation. The problem is that the governor is a big supporter of the new rules.

Nonetheless, Mr. Meisner is optimistic that a way will be found around the impasse. The consequences simply don’t bear contemplation. The iron and steel industry and agricultural exports, to name just two, couldn’t survive without the Seaway. The Canadian government is lobbying heavily in Albany to get the new rules postponed.

The Council of Great Lakes Governors, of which the premiers of Ontario and Quebec are full members, has done fine work in recent years in protecting the water quality of the Great Lakes.

Wisconsin would also like to see stricter ballast-water standards. If New York temporarily suspended the new regulations, the council could look at setting a Seaway-wide standard, with Ottawa and Washington ratifying whatever was agreed on.

Here’s hoping all sides figure something out. Fifty million tons of shipping annually depends on it.

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Edmonton gets a new farmers market

Edmonton is going to get another farmers market, this one in the southwest. In the planning stages for months now, the market is to be located in the parking lot of Lillian Osborne High School, 2010 Leger Road. It will likely be held on a Tuesday or a Wednesday between 4:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., depending on what the vendors collectively decide. The exact date for the new market kick-off is yet to be determined, but odds are it will be sometime in late spring or early summer. Watch this space for details as they emerge.

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More Soup Stories from Food Section Readers

I'm learning something about soup during this series. You wouldn't believe how many people don't use a recipe. I am virtually helpless without a recipe for most things, but it's true that soup does allow one to be a bit loosey-goosey about ingredients, and that's a good thing.

Here is a little story from Food reader Bev Mills about the soup she makes for her grandchildren:

"Funny I never reply to things like this but often when I read the Food section of the paper it invokes some memories of times gone by…as did the soup article. I make homemade soup often and of course have my favorites…hamburger soup, taco soup, broccoli/cheese.   But the absolute best and the one that is made the most is good old chicken soup, the cure all for all ills.  I remember my own mom creating chicken soup and turkey soup, especially if we had been sick and the same holds true in my home over the years.

I can never see a chicken or turkey carcass go to waste and have even dragged them home from church turkey suppers .  I am even so bold as to save the deli chicken carcasses and simmer them. Nothing in my mind is better than homemade stock and homemade chicken stock is soooo easy.

Take a stock pot, the bones, water, a few carrots rough chopped, celery and onion.  Pepper, maybe a little thyme, some chicken base powder and bring to boil. Simmer  30 minutes .  I freeze it and bring it out when I have the yen to make soup.

With all the flu that went around our family this past month I have made good old chicken soup several times, it seems to bring comfort and is easy on the tummy.  My grandson, after last week's bout of flu, gave me the ultimate compliment. He's five. "Your soup is awesome Nana and it makes me feel good."

 Nana’s Chicken Soup

Homemade chicken stock

Chopped carrots, onions and celery

Bits of cooked chicken

Season to taste

Noodles are optional (and of course the grandkids like the alphabet ones)

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Mississauga eyes 8-per-cent tax increase in proposed budget

Mississauga’s long-term business plan is calling for a host of ambitious city-building projects at the same time as revenues from new developments are tapering off, prompting city staff to float the possibility of an 8-per-cent tax increase in this year’s proposed budget.

While the talk in Toronto is of cutting bus routes and freezing property taxes, the city to the west is looking to increase public transit and build new bicycle lanes.

The contrast is something of a role-reversal for the GTA’s two largest municipalities. Mississauga was once alternately lauded and disparaged for what was seen as a simple, pragmatic approach to governance, avoiding tax increases but doing little to stitch its freeway-separated subdivisions into a greater civic whole.

Now that the city has almost exhausted the available land to expand on, the fees from developers that used to fill municipal coffers have dried up and planning has shifted inward.

By the end of 2012, a series of guideways and dedicated lanes will allow buses to travel the length of the city from east to west unimpeded by traffic. The city also wants to add more than 300 kilometres of bike lanes and trails.

The city foresaw its current situation, to some extent, in the 1990s, when it set aside budget surpluses to make up the shortfall when development charges tapered off. The money, however, is running out, and some politicians say they didn’t anticipate costs would rise so much.

Councillors, however, remain adamant they can improve services while keeping tax increases far below 8 per cent, and have begun examining the budget in detail.

“Every position staff is asking for, we’re scrutinizing and looking at if it’s something we need or if it’s something we can do without,” veteran councillor Pat Saito said.

The challenge, she said, is finding surgical cuts to make, as opposed to slashing and burning. For instance, council rejected a blanket hiring freeze in favour of a plan to hire new staff on contracts.

“Being a business person, I’m not going to just sit and take what comes through on the agenda,” said councillor Ron Starr, who is looking for more detailed breakdowns on where departments are spending money.

The city has also seen lively public input on the budget, much as it did with its city-building strategic plan. Many of the locals who pushed for an ambitious strategy for developing the city have also spoken out against large tax increases.

Dorothy Tomiuk of the citizens’ group Miranet suggests city hall consider going into debt –something it hasn’t done since the late 1970s – to find the money for its projects. She argues that, when times were better and the city froze taxes, it simply deferred the inevitable rise in costs. Now, it must take a long view and show how the year-to-year budget fits with its long-term goals.

“We want to see alignment between the budget and the strategic plan,” she said. “We don’t just want to see a budget that keeps the lights on.”

Other GTA municipalities, meanwhile, have watched Mississauga and taken note.

“We are very mindful of the fact that we will be facing, in the future, aging infrastructure that will need to be repaired or replaced,” said Vaughan mayor Maurizio Bevilacqua, whose city is socking away money in a reserve fund and undertaking a review of its services this year.

The new mayor has provided a list of questions councillors and staff must consider about each budget item, ranging from whether the city can partner with private business to deliver the service to whether there is enough money to fund it at all.

These efficiencies may help the city whittle down the 5.4-per-cent tax increase proposed in its operating budget, closer to the higher end of projected increases in the GTA this year. On the lower end, Brampton is eyeing an increase of a little more than 1 per cent and Markham’s budget chief said the town is likely to break its two-year run of frozen taxes with a modest increase.

In Mississauga, meanwhile, politicians are clear about the challenges ahead, facing them with some of the city’s well-known pragmatism.

“We are doing more with less, but at some point, you reach a saturation point of the efficiencies you can get,” councillor Saito said. “And we’ve pretty much reached that point.”

Mississauga’s budget committee is next scheduled to meet in early March.

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Snowmobiler dies in avalanche near Smithers, B.C.

Published Monday, Feb. 07, 2011 12:19AM ESTLast updated Monday, Feb. 07, 2011 12:37AM EST3 comments

A snowmobiler is dead after a weekend avalanche in northern B.C.

Barry Finnegan of Bulkley Valley Search and Rescue says his group was called Saturday afternoon to an area about 20 kilometres south of Smithers.

Mr. Finnegan says it appears two people were snowmobiling on a popular trail known as The Microwave when one of them climbed up a slope, triggering the slide.

The avalanche buried a snowmobiler below, who Mr. Finnegan says was apparently stopped to snap some photos.

Mr. Finnegan says the snowmobiler who triggered the slide was able to dig out his friend, but that person, whose name hasn't been released, died at the scene.

An increased avalanche risk and poor weather prevented search-and-rescue crews from recovering the body during the weekend, but Mr. Finnegan says they'll try again on Monday.

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Celeb Chef David Adjey in E-town for The Opener

Celebrity Chef David Adjey is shooting  a segment of his Food Network show The Opener, which follows newbie restaurateurs as they open their brand new eateries. He's working with the as-yet-to-open Edmonton restaurant, Pampa, a Brazilian steakhouse at 9929-109th Street.

"It's very showy, it's very entertaining," says Adjey of Pampa. "They've got outfits and they come out with swords and they've got this marble salad bar that holds a hundred items that (the owner) drove up from Brazil. I think he's got something really unique.

"But he's in way over his head, he's out of dough...I've got to help this guy, get him ready."

At the helm of Pampa is grill master Oscar Mauricio Lopez and Brazilian chef Joao Antonio Dachery. The restaurant was scheduled to open in February, but Adjey says that will be tough to achieve without the paint on the walls still being wet.

The Opener's Pampa episode is the last one in the second season of this Food Network show, which airs every Wednesday at 9 p.m.

"We're going out with a bang on this season," says Adjey. "This young guy has (invested), with his family and friends, a million dollars and a million is a lot of money to lose. There is a lot of stuff on the line for this guy, and that's why I'm here."

That's Adjey at right in this photo supplied by Food Network Canada. You will also know him from his popular program, Restaurant Makeover, also on Food Network.

Stay tuned. I'm going on the set of The Opener this week to watch as Adjey counsels Pampa owners on how to get this project off the ground.

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Ontario Tories rescind pledge to keep health-care premium

Published Monday, Feb. 07, 2011 12:56PM ESTLast updated Monday, Feb. 07, 2011 1:20PM EST23 comments

The Ontario Progressive Conservative Party has flip-flopped on a key plank in its campaign platform for the upcoming provincial election, and retracted a pledge to keep the health-care premium.

Progressive Conservative Leader Tim Hudak repeated his mantra that “all tax options” are on the table when asked by reporters on Monday about the controversial measure that costs Ontario taxpayers up to $900 each per year.

“We are considering all tax options and how to give families a break,” Mr. Hudak said. “We will be discussing in the time ahead what’s going to make the most sense for Ontario families.”

His vague pronouncements were at odds with a statement released by his own party last Thursday, a statement that was reinforced by Tory MPP Sylvia Jones.

“Ontario PC Leader Tim Hudak has been very clear,” the statement said. “If elected premier, he would not cut the health tax or Ontario’s health care budget.”

The Tories issued the statement, titled “Minister of Health Lies to Nurses,” in response to a senior Liberal cabinet minister’s campaign-style speech on Thursday morning. Health Minister Deb Matthews insisted in her speech to nurses that Mr. Hudak has every intention of eliminating the health-care premium if he gets elected. Abolishing the premium, she said, would slash the province’s $46-billion health budget by $3-billion and lead to massive cuts in front-line care.

For a brief time last Thursday, it appeared that Ms. Matthews’ speech had the effect of forcing Mr. Hudak to give Ontarians a peek at his campaign platform.

He does not plan to release to document until late April and has been vague about what kind of tax-relief measures he has in mind, including his plans for the health premium introduced by Premier Dalton McGuinty in 2004.

“It is just nothing short of astonishing that they clearly don’t have a plan,” Ms. Matthews said on Monday.

Ms. Jones, the Tory MPP, was initially just a coy as Mr. Hudak during a media scrum last Thursday, where she refused to discuss the fate of the health premium if her party wins the election on Oct. 6.

But 45 minutes after her media scrum ended, officials in Mr. Hudak’s office had Ms. Jones make a series of telephone calls to media outlets, including The Globe and Mail.

“Getting rid of the health-care premium is not an option,” Ms. Jones declared in an interview. “We have no intention of getting rid of the health-care premium.”

Mr. Hudak would not comment on what appeared to be an unequivocal pronouncement sanctioned by his office. The policy flip-flop marks a rare misstep for the Tories under his disciplined leadership. Mr. Hudak is renowned for staying on message.

“When you’ve got the sandbox politics of McGuinty and Hudak,” said New Democratic MPP Peter Kormos, “increasingly Ontarians are saying a pox on both their houses.”

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Tories tread carefully on immigration policy

The federal Conservatives are bringing in record numbers of immigrants, while clamping down on illegal refugees and the wearing of the veil, in an effort to placate their socially conservative base and yet still woo immigrant voters.

The key, for the government, is to inject a socially conservative tone into the multicultural debate, while not tampering with the fundamentals.

David Cameron in Britain, Angela Merkel in Germany and Nicolas Sarkozy in France have all declared that multiculturalism is a failure in their country, leading to large, estranged, racially and religiously defined subcultures.

But in Canada, which has been able to control who comes into the country more successfully than its European counterparts, support for immigration and multiculturalism remains robust, according to recent polls. The Harper government, which has embraced immigration as a driver of the Canadian economy, has announced that 280,636 immigrants came to Canada in 2010, the most in 57 years.

“This government is focused on the priorities of Canadians, which are economic growth and prosperity,” Immigration Minister Jason Kenney told the House of Commons on Monday. “We need more newcomers working and paying taxes and contributing to our health-care system.”

Afzal Syed, a Pakistani-born accountant who lives in Mississauga, says he generally votes Liberal. But the Tories’ emphasis on bringing in more economic-class immigrants might be enough to make him change his mind.

“[Mr.] Kenney is steering the wheel the right way and trying to meet the country’s economic needs,” he said.

But Sharry Aiken, an associate dean at Queen’s University’s law faculty, is concerned that this economic emphasis comes at the expense of family-class immigrants, whose numbers have been reduced.

Being able to bring over family members “is the underpinning of successful integration” of immigrants into Canadian society, she maintained.

The Conservatives are also supporting a private member’s bill that would force voters to show their faces when casting ballots in federal elections.

Mr. Kenney said it is “entirely reasonable” to ask people to show their faces at a polling booth. But Justin Trudeau, Liberal Immigration critic, pointed out that Elections Canada does not require voters to produce photo identification.

“All they’re doing is further ramping up division and fear and inciting mistrust around a problem that honestly doesn’t exist,” he said.

The move has upset Rajini Tarcicius, a Toronto immigration settlement worker, who says the prospect of such a policy has created a great deal of sadness and confusion in at least one family she works with. She is also concerned about recently announced cuts to settlement agencies tasked with helping immigrants integrate into Canadian society.

“Stephen Harper’s party is not immigrant-friendly,” Ms. Tarcicius said.

But it is of a piece with previous Conservative policies of encouraging immigration but on the government’s terms. Mr. Kenney brought out a citizenship guide that promoted a more forceful approach to the responsibilities of new Canadians.

And while the Conservatives have kept government-sponsored refugee levels steady, they have already passed a bill that would accelerate the process for expelling false claimants, and have introduced legislation to intern claimants who arrive en masse.

Arash Abizadeh, who teaches political science at McGill University, considers the proposed refugee law “outrageous,” because it punishes people who have already been victimized by human smugglers. “It’s a violation of the standards of a liberal democratic society,” he maintains.

But Mr. Kenney insists immigrants themselves are the first to complain about refugees claimants who jump the queues they waited in.

How successfully the Conservatives calibrate their policy of maintaining a high migration intake while circumscribing but not undermining the fundamentals of multiculturalism could well determine their success in an election in which new Canadians dominate many of the suburban ridings where parties' fates are decided.

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Surrey man charged in death of girlfriend

Published Monday, Feb. 14, 2011 8:48PM ESTLast updated Monday, Feb. 14, 2011 10:08PM EST0 comments

A 48-year-old Surrey man is facing manslaughter charges in connection with the death of his girlfriend.

The RCMP said they have arrested Harvey Frank Bracken, following the death of Jennifer Ferguson, 40, whose body was found wrapped in plastic in a park in North Vancouver on Feb. 2.

Mr. Bracken was arrested on Feb. 10. He made his first appearance in court Monday morning and is facing a charge of manslaughter, RCMP Corporal Dale Carr said Monday.

Police said they will wait until the trial begins to disclose how Ms. Ferguson died, but Cpl. Carr said she was likely killed in Surrey and then moved to North Vancouver.

North Vancouver RCMP, Surrey RCMP, Coquitlam RCMP and RCMP Air Services located and monitored Mr. Bracken across several municipalities, police said. He did not stay at his Surrey residence over the past weeks. The police arrested him Thursday in Burnaby.

Police said Mr. Bracken rented a house with Ms. Ferguson in Surrey; investigators believe the couple were in a common-law marriage. Mr. Bracken was employed as a construction labourer in North Vancouver at the time of the arrest.

Corporal Carr said Mr. Bracken was not known to police. “He’s not someone that has a regular name on the police blotter,” he said.

Ms. Ferguson was last seen by her relatives on Jan. 22 and reported missing to the Surrey RCMP on Jan. 30. Police investigators are trying to narrow the timeline of her disappearance.

People with information are asked to call the IHIT tip line at 1-877-551-IHIT.

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B.C. budget designed for ‘maximum flexibility’

Published Monday, Feb. 14, 2011 9:00PM ESTLast updated Monday, Feb. 14, 2011 10:50PM EST13 comments

The budget Finance Minister Colin Hansen introduces Tuesday comes with all the trappings of a real one – PowerPoint presentations, stacks of spending plans and a lockup of media and stakeholders to allow time to digest the news.

But Mr. Hansen’s budget will escape the usual weeks of detailed scrutiny and debate in the legislature this spring.

The Liberal leadership contest, now in its final two weeks, means that the government will swiftly bring in a supply bill to tide government over while the party sorts out who will be the province’s next premier. The New Democratic Party opposition has agreed to cut the session short – just four days this week – because it is in the midst of its own leadership race.

The next premier will likely want to put his or her own stamp on government with a new budget later this year.

“Probably,” said leadership hopeful Kevin Falcon. “I assume so,” echoed Christy Clark. George Abbott went a step further, saying he would aim for a fall budget only after the future of the harmonized sales tax has been determined in a referendum.

The main attraction of this budget likely will be the window it provides on the province’s economic state: The deficit for the year just ending will be smaller than predicted, thanks to a relatively robust economic recovery in 2010. Mr. Hansen will be cautious about the economy in 2011, with his forecast council predicting softer growth to come.

“There is still a fair amount of volatility,” Mr. Hansen said in a recent interview as he put the final touches on the budget that he must deliver by law on the second Tuesday of February. “There’s not as much fiscal room as we’d like there to be.”

On his desk was a recent CIBC World Markets forecast which notes that the rebound in the United States is especially good news for commodity-dependent B.C. That same report explains Mr. Hansen’s caution: The key indicators are all over the map; housing starts are forecast to drop, for example, even as consumer confidence improves.

Mr. Hansen said the budget he presents on Tuesday, designed to create “maximum flexibility” for the next premier and cabinet, could stand up for the year. It will be based on the status quo mapped out in the previous budget, which included ambitious targets to rein in cost increases in health care.

The single biggest uncertainty, however, is the fate of the HST. Outgoing Premier Gordon Campbell has promised a binding referendum to let voters decide if they want to keep the controversial tax.

The leadership candidates have proposed moving that vote up to June, and Elections BC is preparing for that likelihood.

Mr. Hansen said the HST cannot be untangled quickly, even if the public rejects it, but his ministry has been discussing a plan with Ottawa on how that might work.

The fiscal challenge is that Mr. Hansen has already collected $1-billion from Ottawa as part of the agreement to move to a single tax. Another $600-million is due to B.C. and is already counted as part of the formula that allows the Liberal government to promise to balance the budget by 2013.

De-harmonization of the provincial sales tax and the federal GST would make balancing the budget in two years a tough prospect. Last week, Ms. Clark said she would not institute any major new tax cuts or spending programs until the budget is balanced. Candidate Mike de Jong has also made eliminating the deficit a central plank in his platform.

Mr. Hansen said the budget could be balanced in 2013 even if the HST is axed – and B.C. is forced to return Ottawa’s cash incentive. But it wouldn’t be easy. The choices are to run more deficits, raise other taxes or impose major spending cuts. None is an easy option for a new premier facing an election in 2013.

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Sears Canada warns of potential car seat safety problem

Published Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2011 12:29AM ESTLast updated Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2011 12:42AM EST0 comments

Sears Canada Inc. says it has been advised by Dorel Distribution Canada of a potential safety matter relating to certain Cosco, Safety 1st, Eddie Bauer, and Maxi-Cosi branded child restraints.

Sears says in a statement released late Monday that there is a potential for the harness adjustment strap to loosen during use, meaning a child may not be fully protected in a motor vehicle collision.

So far, there have been no reported injuries associated with this in Canada.

Sears says customers should not return their travel system, but should visit the Dorel Juvenile group website to get a free repair kit.

Some of the affected restraints were sold at Sears Canada retail stores, online and through the Sears Canada catalogue.

The car seats and travel systems were manufactured between May 1, 2008 and April 30, 2009.

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My Artisanal Bread Making Class at NAIT Continues

Our homework, until we meet again on Tuesday, is to feed our levain, or bread starter. This means taking 40 grams of starter and combining it daily (twice a day if you're a keener) with 100 grams of water and 100 grams of flour every day for a week.

For this I need a scale, as weighing ingredients is at the heart of baking, as much a science as an art. So far I've been using an old Weight Watchers scale, and it's tippy at best. Thinking about upgrades. Still, it seems to be working as daily, the yeasty smell increases. "Wild yeast" from the air is settling into my flour and water mixture, making is all goopy and sweet.

I really enjoyed my class this week, when we made a "ladder" bread, studded with cheese and hot peppers. But, as usual, I am the least talented in the bunch (this is my fifth NAIT course since I became food writer three years ago and I am now used to my bottom-rung position - these are extreme foodies, don't forget). Still, I amuse myself, always the key. Check out my ladder bread dough, more Edvard Munch than Peter Reinhart.

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Naval commander warned of Somalia's ‘collusion’ with pirates: Wikileaks

Published Sunday, Feb. 06, 2011 10:18PM ESTLast updated Sunday, Feb. 06, 2011 11:32PM EST51 comments

A Canadian navy commander claimed three years ago to have found evidence of “collusion” between Somali pirates and the transitional Somali government that’s being backed by the West, according to a newly leaked U.S. State Department cable.

The cable, released by WikiLeaks over the weekend, recounts what a Canadian frigate commander told diplomats in London after he worked at escorting food-aid ships off the coast of the Horn of Africa.

Navy Captain Chris Dickinson is said to have been warning officials that lines between government, pirates and terrorists were blurring in Somalia.

“The vessel’s commanding officer noted that there is clear evidence of collusion between Somalia’s transitional federal government (TFG) and pirates in Somali waters,” reads the November, 2008 cable.

The remark is significant because it shows that experts were privately despairing of the TFG – a loose-knit coalition of Somali leaders who run a government in name only – even as many Western leaders were taking steps to prop it up as the war-torn country’s last-ditch hope.

In recent months, the TFG has ceded much of what little power it has had to al-Shabab, an Islamist militant movement that’s sweeping the country in a manner similar to Afghanistan’s Taliban during the 1990s.

A U.S.-based Africa expert said in an interview Sunday that the new cable is revealing and significant.

“Certainly it bears credibility,” said Peter Pham, of New York’s National Committee of American Foreign Policy think tank.

He said Somali pirates have long been known to kick up a portion of their profits to both local government officials and terrorist leaders. “A lot of people would say that without the TFG, you have nothing,” Mr. Pham said. “My argument would be consider that what you have is nothing – and nothing is nothing.”

In what was known as “Operation Altair,” Canadian Forces frigates helped the U.S. military patrol coastal waters to protect food shipments from Somali pirates. The goal was to protect the United Nations World Food Program (WFP) vessels sailing from Mombassa, Kenya, to Mogadishu, vessels that were helping feed millions of hungry Somalis.

In the fall of 2008, the HMCS Ville de Quebec was led by Capt. Dickinson, who briefed Canadian diplomats in London. They, in turn, briefed U.S. counterparts there on what he said.

“Dickinson told the Canadian High Commission staff that there was clear evidence of collusion between the TFG and the pirates,” the cable said.

It adds that “Dickinson also said clear links between the pirates and established terrorist networks exist. In many cases there are the same people using the same routes. Most commercial maritime operators in the area are surprised that the international community does not do more to disrupt the linkages.”

The State Department cable says the Canadians kept some intelligence from their American counterparts. They “did not offer details on the relationship between the pirates, the TFG, and terrorist networks, saying the information was classified ‘Canadian Eyes Only,’ it says.

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SPCA gets access to workers' compensation files in dog cull case

British Columbia's workers' compensation board must give the SPCA documents related to the slaughter of as many as 100 sled dogs in Whistler last year, a provincial court judge ruled Monday.

The SPCA is leading the investigation into the slaughter, which came to light after a decision awarding a worker financial compensation for post-traumatic stress was leaked to the media.

The worker detailed a gruesome scene in which he claimed to have killed between 70 and 100 dogs last April, shooting them or slitting their throats before dumping them in a mass grave. The worker alleged he was pressured to cull the herd after business slumped following the 2010 Winter Olympics – something parent company Outdoor Adventures insists is not true.

The SPCA sought a court-order for WorkSafe BC's file on the case, but the board challenged that request in court, arguing disclosing the documents would violate the worker's privacy rights and discourage others from coming forward if they feared prosecution.

A provincial court judge rejected those arguments, concluding the public interest in ensuring a full investigation outweighs any privacy concerns, and noting the documents themselves may not be inadmissible in court, anyway.

Still, Judge Joanne Challenger limited the production order to only include information related specifically to the dog cull, including statements from the worker, his employer and any witnesses.

“At this stage, the court is asked to release documents to assist in an investigation and not to rule on whether those documents are admissible to prove the guilt of a worker in any subsequent proceeding,” wrote Judge Challenger.

“In my view, the public interest in having this potential criminal offence investigated outweighs the public interest in maintaining confidentiality over the information provided by the worker involved,” she added later.

The SPCA did not request medical records related to the file, so they won't be part of the package that is eventually released.

The SPCA's lawyer, Chris Rhone, said the animal-welfare agency believes the documents will help them piece together what happened and identify witnesses that need to be interviewed.

“There was that leaked decision and it quoted at length from a statutory declaration that the worker had made,” Rhone said in an interview.

“Of course, that decision didn't contain any names, so common sense would indicate that looking at that statutory declaration could further the investigation.”

The case has prompted international headlines, and, at times, vitriolic public outrage that has boiled over into death threats. The RCMP have launched a separate investigation looking at those threats.

The dogs were owned and cared for by Howling Dog Tours, which provided tours for Whistler-based Outdoor Adventures.

Outdoor Adventures had a financial stake in the company, but says it didn't control Howling Dog's operations at the time of the cull. Outdoor Adventures did take full control of Howling Dog Tours in May 2010 — the month following the cull.

Outdoor Adventures has also insisted it had nothing to do with the decision to cull the dogs, and said Howling Dog general manager Robert Fawcett informed the company that about 50 animals needed to be euthanized because they were too old and sick to be adopted.

The company has rejected any suggestion that the slaughter was related to the Olympics or a decline in business.

In the meantime, Howling Dog's operations have been suspended indefinitely until the various investigations are complete, and Outdoor Adventures is not currently offering dogsledding tours.

The provincial government has also launched a task force to review what happened and examine whether changes are needed to regulate the dogsledding industry. The group is expected to prepare its report next month.

The Canadian Press

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BC Place Stadium to be ready by Fall

Published Monday, Feb. 07, 2011 1:21PM ESTLast updated Monday, Feb. 07, 2011 1:25PM EST0 comments

Renovations to BC Place Stadium should be complete by Sept. 30, 2011, BC Pavilion Corporation (PavCo) said Monday.

PavCo, the provincial crown corporation overseeing the $563-million renovation, had been hesitant to specify a date in its public comments, and routinely referred to “late fall” when asked about completion. But according to a press release Monday, the 36 masts and compression beams that make up the steel superstructure are now in place, and that the support system for the new retractable roof is now being installed.

“Our September 30th scheduled completion is also dependent on weather or other factors beyond our control,” PavCo chairman David Podmore said. “While we will do our level best to be ready on that date, we will, of course, always put the safety of our talented and dedicated workers ahead of any other consideration.

“Nonetheless, construction at BC Place is progressing so well, that we are now at a point where we can confidently set the re-opening date.”

The Canadian Football League’s BC Lions, and the Vancouver Whitecaps FC of Major League Soccer will both call the new stadium home, and both clubs had been waiting for a firm completion date to finalize their 2011 schedules.

The MLS regular season ends on Oct. 23, while the CFL season concludes on Nov. 6. Should the stadium be ready for Sept. 30, both teams will be able to host games in their new digs.

The sides have already held a coin-toss to determine which team gets to host the opening event at BC Place.

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Innovations could drastically reduce seniors’ fall-related injuries

Roy Atamanuk vividly remembers his last big fall.

It was U.S. Thanksgiving and the 73-year-old retired lawyer from St. Catharines, Ont., was visiting his daughter in Buffalo, N.Y. He recalls waking up at night, walking toward the bedroom door on his way to the washroom. And then he hit the floor.

“It’s kind of bewildering,” he said, thinking back to the Thanksgiving fall, the bathtub fall last summer and the Florida vacation fall before that. “You’re laying there and wondering what happened, what’s going to happen and how bad it will be.”

Diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2002, Mr. Atamanuk’s balance has steadily failed in recent years.

“It worries me,” he said, “but what are you gonna do?”

A group of Simon Fraser University researchers may have the answer. Determined to break the impact of seniors’ falls on Canadian society, the Injury Prevention and Mobility Lab team say “gerontechnology” can drastically reduce the rate of fall-related injuries among seniors. Innovations such as bouncy flooring can reduce hip fractures and slash the Canadian government’s $3-billion annual bill for fall-related injuries, they say.

Serious fall-related injuries such as hip fractures account for thousands of Canadian seniors being bedridden and dependent on care-givers every year. Often, a hip fracture is “the beginning of a cascade of events that often results in death,” said Fabio Feldman, SFU researcher and the Fraser Health Authority manager of falls and injury prevention.

According to the B.C. Ministry of Health, one in five Canadian seniors who suffer a hip fracture die within a year of the injury, and more than half of seniors with hip fractures never fully recover.

“It’s a major issue in Canada because of the aging population and the consequences of falls,” Dr. Feldman said, “so we’re trying to provide interventions to prevent injury.”

Last year, doctors referred Mr. Atamanuk to the Niagara Safety at Home initiative – part of the Ontario government’s four-year, $1.1-billion Aging at Home strategy to relieve pressure on hospitals and care homes. The Niagara home safety program provides seniors with free home assessments and fall prevention tips.

A Safety at Home co-ordinator visited Mr. Atamanuk’s home in January with an extensive home-safety checklist. Touring the house, the co-ordinator encouraged him to throw away scatter rugs and install grab bars near stairways.

Stephen Robinovitch, lead researcher at the SFU lab, criticized the home assessment program, a widely promoted practice and a major element of the Canadian Public Health Agency of Canada’s best practice guide to reducing the risk of falls. He calls it just plain “common sense.”

“People focus on that because it’s easy,” he said. “There’s no research to prove that this type of intervention actually reduces falls.”

Instead, SFU researchers – partnering with the Vancouver Centre for Hip Health and Fraser Health – are pushing for a shift in dialogue from fall prevention to injury prevention, Dr. Feldman said.

“It’s okay for seniors to fall but we just don’t want to see injuries,” he said. “That’s our focus now.”

According to Dr. Robinovitch, preventing fall-related injuries must include bone strength, fitness and good diet. But the team of researchers also encourage high-tech gizmos like the SFU-designed hip protector – a horseshoe-shaped foam pad – to help seniors bounce back.

The team is now looking beyond hip protectors to energy-absorbing, bouncy floor products. It’s “the way of the future,” Dr. Feldman said.

The biomedical engineers tested 14 floor coverings, looking at each product’s energy absorption capacity and how floor softness affects balance. Some soft floors can negatively affect seniors’ balance and mobility, Dr. Feldman said.

Researchers narrowed their study to SorbaSHOCK and Seamless Attenuating Technologies, two U.S.-made cushioned flooring. According to SFU tests, both floors can absorb up to 50 per cent of the energy of a fall, compared to 25 per cent absorbed by most hip protectors.

Dr. Feldman then introduced the Seamless Attenuating Technologies floor to two long-term care homes in the Fraser Health region. The floor, able to bounce a raw egg, was traditionally used to reduce fatigue among workers required to stand for long periods of time.

According to a Public Health Agency of Canada report, nearly half of all long-term care residents in Canada fall each year and one in ten of those falls result in serious injury. Results from the SFU floor-testing study state that bouncy floors could reduce hip fractures by more than 80 per cent.

Dr. Feldman, hoping to introduce the floors to more private and public healthcare facilities, said that installing a bouncy floor costs about three times as a normal floor, but costs would balance out in the long run given the enormous price of fall-related injuries.

For Mr. Atamanuk, there’s no future for injury-preventing bouncy floors in his house.

“It sounds expensive,” he said. “And besides, I’m not that bad.”

Instead, he’ll continue to fight his failing balance with a therapeutic exercise class held every Monday afternoon.

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Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms coming to Edmonton

Anybody familiar with Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma will know Polyface and  Joel Salatin. He's a, hmmm, well, how to describe Joel? He's a food activist, and devoted to organic, small-scale farming that respects animals and the environment. There. He's here to be a keynote speaker for the Canadian College and University Food Service Association conference at the end of June. Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

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San Francisco Chronicle Posts Another Great Story

This is a really  good read about brining a chicken in pinot noir, something that would not have occured to me (often the case - every day's offerings, a lovely surprise pour moi).  But the thing I love about this story is the really great explanation of why brining chicken or turkey is a good idea in the first place, and why it should not be relegated to Thanksgiving. Go San Francisco Chronicle!

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Windmill foes are full of hot air

MARCUS GEE 58 comments

When not-in-my-backyard groups fight to kill a garbage dump or a gravel pit, it is at least possible to see where they are coming from. When they kill something like an offshore wind farm, designed expressly to help the environment, things are getting weird.

Last week, the government of Ontario quietly announced it was placing a moratorium on building wind farms in the Great Lakes. Well-organized residents groups have campaigned tirelessly against the idea. The transparently political decision, taken just months before a provincial election, douses Toronto Hydro’s hopes of erecting a complex of wind turbines off the Scarborough Bluffs.

Environment Minister John Wilkinson insists the decision was motivated purely by concern for the health of Ontarians. Unlike most wind farms around the world, he said on CBC Radio, Ontario’s would be built not in the sea but in fresh water lakes. What if they affected our drinking water?

“The cautious thing to do is to say no,” he said. “That’s a lesson we learned from the Walkerton inquiry.” The reference, of course, is to the tragedy in which several people died and hundreds became very ill from polluted water in the town of Walkerton, Ont.

This is exactly the sort of scare story that the lobby against wind farms has been spreading. John Laforet, president of Wind Concerns Ontario, told me that building wind turbines in Lake Ontario could stir up toxins in the lake bed and pollute Toronto’s drinking water. There are “time capsules of toxins down there,” he said. “The environmental disasters of the past have been buried in the sediment.” Really? If so, it’s a wonder we aren’t all poisoned when dredgers dig in the lake bed, as they do regularly at harbours around the lakes.

He also said that offshore turbines are cleaned “basically with helicopters spitting solvent at them;” that the spinning windmills “change the direction of the wind;” that the vibrations they make could erode the fragile Scarborough Bluffs; and that windmill noise carried across the water could carry damage the health of people on shore – even though government rules decreed the windmills would have been at least 5 kilometres from land.

The fact is that windmills are a safe and clean way of generating electricity (though whether they are a cost-effective way is another question). A number of studies have debunked the idea that they harm human health. Last year Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer of Health found that, although some people near windmills complain of headaches or insomnia, the scientific evidence does not show a link “between wind turbine noise and adverse health effects.” An Australian-government study last July came to the same conclusion: “There are no direct pathological effects from wind farms.”

Offshore wind farms have been running for 20 years in Europe, which has 39 of them from Belgium to Denmark to Britain. Studies have shown minimal effects on bird and marine life.

If no one has studied whether wind farms might pollute the water of freshwater lakes, it may be because the idea is plain silly. Wind turbines, like piers, are usually built on piles driven into the lake bed. After that, they just sit there spinning.

Even if they did cause some small harm, it would have to be measured against the harm caused by coal plants, nuclear plants and other energy sources. The forces of NIMBYism never make that kind of calculation. That is what we elect government to do: to weigh options against each other and choose one – not the one that annoys the least number of people, but the one that evidence says is the best for the common good. So much for that.

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Military revising domestic strategy after Olympics reveal huge flaws

The Canadian military is revising the way it handles domestic operations, after realizing there are gaping holes in the existing strategy.

Newly released documents show the 2010 Winter Olympics were an organizational nightmare because the military lacked what they call domestic doctrine. Doctrine provides rules and protocol on how to handle different types of operations.

“The absence of adequate, or up-to-date, domestic operations doctrine and policies resulted in excessive debate and distracted from the real task of planning and executing Op Podium,” the after-action report on the military’s contribution to Olympic security says.

Military planners were stymied by matters ranging from what jobs they were and weren’t prepared to do at the Games, to how to get all the soldiers they needed for the plan.

Legal authorities that govern military activities at home are also flawed, the report suggests.

“Many constraints imposed reflect pre-9/11 rationale and are not truly reflective of the types of tasks and unique CF capabilities routinely requested by our security partners,” the report says.

The report was obtained by The Canadian Press under Access to Information.

“It is not to say that we’re not ready at home, we are ready at home,” Colonel Sean Friday, deputy chief of staff for plans at Canada Command, said in an interview.

Canada Command, the branch of the military responsible for domestic operations, was set up in 2006 precisely to co-ordinate domestic and continental operations.

“But the kind of operation we did with Podium is not one that we’ve done frequently in Canada,” Col. Friday said. “A major task force in our own country? This is not normal for us.”

More than 5,000 soldiers took part in the three-month Olympic security operation, which was led by the RCMP.

The overall budget was $900-million, and the Defence Department was allocated $212-million of that. But that budget covered only the incremental cost to the military of participating in the Games. Documents posted to the vice-chief of defence staff’s website suggest the total cost was actually around $473-million.

While the Olympic and Paralympic security effort was considered a success, the report outlined eight areas where the military could have done better.

All have their roots in the lack of an overarching domestic strategy and include the need for better systems for finding the needed soldiers, managing personnel and contracting for supplies and services.

Similar problems were encountered at the G8-G20 summits last summer, Col. Friday acknowledged.

“The doctrine that existed was equally applicable to all types of scenarios and what we’ve found is that doctrine is insufficient,” he said. “We need to have a standalone doctrine manual just for domestic operations, rather than a chapter in overall operations … across defence, security and safety.”

He is leading a team focused on getting the new manual ready by July.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the military doesn’t have a robust domestic plan already, some observers say.

“It’s not needed,” said retired colonel Chris Corrigan, the executive director of the Royal Canadian Military Institute. “We have sufficient policies in place and rules, orders-in-council, on how domestic operations take place in the country between the military and civilian agencies.”

But there is a difference between calling in the military to help with a snowstorm and using its capabilities to secure international events, others say.

The reality is that military doctrine over time has developed with a focus on overseas operations, said Elinor Sloan, a professor of international relations at Carleton University.

The last time the Forces were really used to deal with a security issue at home was during the FLQ crisis in 1970.

“It’s never been something that the Canadian Forces has actually focused a lot on because there hasn’t been a threat to address in the homeland,” she said. “And now, of course, we look at internal security threats an awful lot more because of the terrorist threat.”

But others question why the military hadn’t seen an operation like the Olympics coming.

In the post-9/11 era, militaries around the world have become involved in domestic security for major events, such as the Super Bowl, Phillipe Lagasse, a professor of international affairs at the University of Ottawa, noted.

“The CF knows that it’s involved in security detail and so forth during major summits,” he said. “They should have then foreseen the next logical step of getting involved in a major sporting event.”

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Here's another Soup Story, and a Yummy Recipe for Chowder

Reader Liv Vors, who is also an Edmonton food writer, sent in her Soup Story to be included in my collection of tales about the meaning of soup (closely allied with the meaning of life).

"Easterners are know to remark that a damp, humid -10 is far worse than a dry -30, because, "at least you can bundle up against a dry cold." The word "dry" is, of course, emphasized as a pointed barb in east versus west competition. I have lived in both eastern and western Canada and will profess this debate remains open. Raw, pervasive dampness is certainly not preferable over the flesh-flaying bite of a winter prairie wind. There exists an ideal antidote to this cold, regardless of humidity level - soup.  How clearly I recall a miserable January day in Peterborough, Ontario, wondering what to make for supper but not wanting to venture outside. I decided to be creative, assembled a pot's worth of orphan ingredients from the fridge, and invented Veggie Smoked Salmon Chowder. The ensuing aroma and flavour earned this hodgepodge a spot in my permanent repertoire. Enjoy."

Liv Vors' Veggie Smoked Salmon Chowder

1 medium sweet potato, peeled and cubed
1 1/2 cups (375 mL) chicken broth
1/2 cup (125 mL) fresh or frozen corn
1/2 small onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 1/2 cups (375 mL) fresh spinach, torn
1/2 cup (125 mL) flaked smoked salmon (but don't use lox or other cold-smoked salmon)
1 tablespoon (15 mL) cornstarch
1/2 cup (125 mL) milk
1 tablespoon (15 mL)  minced fresh cilantro
dash pepper

In a large saucepan, combine the potato, corn, onion, garlic and broth. Bring to a boil. Reduce heat, cover, and simmer for approximately 10 minutes or until potato is tender. Add the salmon and spinach, and cook until spinach has wilted (approx. 2 minutes). Combine cornstarch and milk until smooth. Stir into chowder. Bring to a boil, cook and stir for two minutes or until thickened. Garnish with cilantro and pepper. Serves 2.

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Victoria police chief censured over 'joke'

For the second time in recent years, a joke by Victoria Police Chief Jamie Graham that fell flat has landed him in hot water. And this time, his purported witticism has prompted a disciplinary finding of “discreditable conduct” against him by the Victoria Police Board.

Chief Graham’s quip that an undercover police officer was driving a busload of anti-Olympic protesters to a demonstration in 2009 was no laughing matter, according to the board.

Though the chief claimed later that he was just kidding, the real undercover people, charged with providing security at the 2010 Winter Olympics, were upset.

An officer with the RCMP-led Integrated Security Unit for the Games, whose identity was blacked out in the investigative report, said the ISU was concerned by Chief Graham’s observation, worrying that it could have had “dire impacts … [on the] security/safety of personnel.”

The incident follows an earlier attempted foray into humour by Chief Graham that also backfired.

In 2006, when head of the Vancouver Police Department, Chief Graham left a bullet-riddled shooting target on the desk of then-city-manager Judy Rogers, with a handwritten note that read: “A bad day at the range is better than the best day at work.”

Ms. Rogers reported the incident to Sam Sullivan, mayor at the time, who passed the issue on to the Police Complaints Commission.

The matter was subsequently closed after the Vancouver Police Board accepted an apology from Chief Graham, who said he left the target, a silhouetted form of a human head, on Ms. Rogers’s desk as a joke.

The cop-on-a-bus joke was made by Chief Graham at an international security conference, just after anti-Olympic protesters, including many from Vancouver, briefly disrupted the first day of the Olympic torch relay in Victoria.

The chief mocked the protesters during his speech: “They were not that organized on the ferry over. They all came over on a [rented] bus. … And there was a cop drivin’ the bus.”

After reading about Chief Graham’s remarks, photographer Bruce Dean filed an official complaint, arguing that he had “disclosed the identity of an undercover officer to the general public.”

The first investigation, by RCMP Chief Superintendent Don Harrison, appeared to concentrate more on Mr. Dean’s background and possible motivation than Chief Graham’s behaviour. The complaint was dismissed.

However, the B.C. Civil Liberties Association then intervened and petitioned successfully for a second, external police probe into the incident.

This time, RCMP Chief Superintendent Rick Taylor concluded that it was inappropriate for police to comment publicly on investigative techniques, despite Chief Graham’s assertion that he had no idea whether an undercover police officer was driving the bus.

“[My] comments were intended to be humorous, to poke fun at the organizational efforts by certain protest groups. … It got laughter in the audience,” Chief Graham explained, according to Supt. Taylor’s report.

“It is the conclusion of this investigator that Chief Graham made spontaneous, unscripted, off-the-cuff remarks … without considering their impact and weight,” wrote Supt. Taylor. “The comments were highly inappropriate ... and a very poor attempt at humour on Chief Graham’s part at the expense of members of a protest group.”

The Victoria Police Board has proposed handing out a written reprimand to the chief. All parties will have a chance to respond before the board makes its final decision.

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Man accused of killing Tori Stafford appears in court

Published Monday, Feb. 07, 2011 12:43PM ESTLast updated Monday, Feb. 07, 2011 1:23PM EST0 comments

The man accused in the abduction and death of Grade 3 student Tori Stafford appeared in a Woodstock, Ont., court Monday.

Michael Rafferty, dressed in a dark grey suit and tie, and cleanly shaven, watched the proceedings quietly.

Tori’s mother and father also were on hand to see the accused in person.

Mr. Rafferty is charged with first-degree murder in Tori's death.

The pre-trial proceedings remain under a sweeping publication ban before Ontario Superior Court Justice Thomas Heeney.

Mr. Rafferty's co-accused, Terri-Lynne McClintic, previously pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and was handed a life sentence.

Tori was abducted as she left her school on April 8, 2009.

Ms. McClintic and Mr. Rafferty, 30, were charged more than one month later and Tori's remains were found in a field more than 100 kilometres north of Woodstock.

Last April, Ms. McClintic, 20, pleaded guilty.

The plea was only reported in December after a Supreme Court of Canada decision meant the veil could be partially lifted on a sweeping publication ban in McClintic case.

Some details of her plea remain under a publication ban, in order to preserve the constitutional rights of Mr. Rafferty.

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Police collecting cabbies’ DNA in Highway of Tears probe

Published Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2011 12:50AM ESTLast updated Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2011 1:08AM EST0 comments

Police in Prince George, B.C. are collecting DNA samples from cab drivers, reportedly as part of their investigation into the dozens of murders and disappearances of women in the northern part of the province.

Since the late 1960s, more than two dozen women have been killed or have gone missing in the area, many of them along the remote stretch of Highway 16 between Prince George and Prince Rupert, which has been dubbed the Highway of Tears.

The RCMP has been investigating 18 of the cases under the name Project E-PANA.

In an effort to generate leads, police have been taking DNA samples from taxi drivers in the city, but declined to discuss the practice late Monday evening.

“There’s more to it than that,” said Corporal Craig Douglas of the local detachment. “I can’t say anything without checking with the right people – I want to make sure I’m not compromising someone’s investigation.”

A dispatcher with one cab company, who declined to give her name, said police had also been taking fingerprints from the company’s drivers.

“It’s been going on for a little while here,” she said.

Police have previously said they were looking to see if new technology in DNA analysis could generate fresh leads on the old cases.

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Drivers who owe $30,000 in traffic fines due in St. John’s court

Published Monday, Feb. 07, 2011 9:30AM EST0 comments

Two drivers who owe more than $30,000 in outstanding fines between them are expected in a St. John's courtroom on Monday.

The Royal Newfoundland Constabulary says they were nabbed during routine traffic stops.

A 30-year-old man, who owes more than $22,000, has been charged with breach of probation and having no valid driver's licence or insurance.

The other driver, who owes more than $10,000, was charged for operating a motor vehicle with no driver's licence, insurance or registration and also breach of probation.

Both men remain in custody pending court appearances.

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Fed up with Harper, Liberals launch social-media cri du coeur

Posted on Monday, February 7, 2011 12:51PM EST49 comments

Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals have launched a new campaign attacking the Conservative government that Justin Trudeau hopes will become “a viral cry from the heart.”

The Facebook-driven effort is built around the phrase “pucapab” – a contraction of “plus capable.” It’s aimed at telling Tories that Quebeckers and other francophone Canadians are “fed up” with Stephen Harper’s leadership.

“It’s designed more to be a rallying cry to sort of pull people together with the facts,” Mr. Trudeau told The Globe. “Listen, it’s not personality attacks. It’s highlighting the fighter jets, Harper’s musings about the death penalty, money for prisons rather than families, the shutting down of democratic discourse.”

Mr. Trudeau said these Harper policies are anathema to many Quebeckers. “That’s one of the reasons we didn’t brand it with the Liberal logo anywhere. .... It’s not designed to be a big partisan attack.”

The Liberal Party only merits mention at the end of the pencil-sketch YouTube video the campaign is built around. It’s meant, Mr. Trudeau added to be a “highlight of a whole lot of people fed up with a Canada being run by someone who does not reflect values French-speaking Canadians.”

The video is set to a bouncy pop song illustrated by drawings of fighter jets, a gallows, the padlocked Parliament and a sketch of the Prime Minister that resembles a Most Wanted picture from the Wild West. The lyrics were penned by Turbo Marketing's Marc-André Rivard with music by Serge Laforest.

“It’s basically just something we want people to be sharing with each other, emailing each other, developing a sort of catchy sense of ‘Okay we’re all in this together, that we’re just fed up, that we can’t do this anymore with Harper’,” Mr. Trudeu said.

The key to good advertising, he suggested, is not always trying to sell someone something new. “You’re trying to respond to something they already feel ... and that’s exactly what this campaign is doing.”

The campaign has been in the works for several weeks, and Mr. Trudeau noted the expression “pucapab” has come up not only in focus groups but and in MPs’ conversations with constituents.

“Fundamentally, Gilles Duceppe’s message in the last election, in 2008, was, ‘Vote for us and we’ll keep Harper to a minority.’ Well, that’s exactly what happened,” Mr. Trudeau said. “But now what we’re saying to Quebeckers yeah, but you know what? Harper as a minority is still Harper as Prime Minister and that does not reflect Quebeckers/ values.”

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Dad's classic Oyster Stew a meaningful memory

I've been getting lots of feedback on the Food section's latest series, Soup Stories, and I've been asking readers to write in with their own stories and recipes about favourite soups.

This one comes in tribute to a departed father, Tom Kocourek,  who had a great recipe for Oyster Stew (like a soup, really) that became a Christmas classic for his family. Originally, the reader sent an e-mail with a scanned copy of the recipe in her Dad's writing, penned in December of 1990. He died in 1991. It made me think of the recipes that I have, written in the hand of the late creator, that mean so much to me, including Alma Zimmerman's Chocolate Brownie Pudding.

Here is Tom's Oyster Stew:

Ingredients:

1/4 cup (50 mL) flour

1 teaspoon (5 mL) salt

1/4 teaspoon (1 mL) pepper

4 teaspoons (20 mL) Worcestershire sauce

2, 8 ounce (250 mL) cans oysters, liquid drained and set aside

1 quart (1 litre) half and half cream

1 quart (1 litre) milik

3 tablespoons (50 mL) butter

Method: Blend flour, salt, pepper, Worcestershire sauce, liquid from oysters and one half cup (125 mL) water to a smooth paste, like a roux. Add to cream in saucepan. Cok over low heat until thickened. Add oysters and continue cooking until edges of oysters curl. Add milk and butter. Heat, and serve with ordinary crackers, or if you're Norwegian pretend it's lutefisk and serve with flatbrod.

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If you were wondering what you MUST know to be a chef

Here is a list of 10 techniques that you should have mastered if you are a chef. See how many you can do even if you are not a chef. I, boastfully, can do, uh, exactly three of them. Four, tops.

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EU trade deal could cost Canadian drug plans billions

Provisions in a new trade deal being negotiated between Canada and the European Union could add about $2.8-billion a year in costs to Canadian drug plans if implemented, a new report warns.

The estimate includes $1.3-billion more for public drug plans and $1.5-billion for private drug plans.

“This will create a huge hole in provincial budgets in particular,” Aidan Hollis, a professor of economics at the University of Calgary and co-author of the report, said in an interview.

Ontario alone could see drug costs jump $500-million, Quebec $412-million and B.C. $101-million annually, according to the new analysis.

Drugs, both prescription and over the counter, accounted for $31-billion of the $192-billion in health spending in 2010. Drugs have been the fastest-growing component of health-care spending for a number of years and the provinces have responded with a number of measures including tightening up drug formularies and sharply reducing the price they would pay for generic drugs.

Generics account for 54 per cent of prescription drugs and brand-name drugs 46 per cent.

In the negotiations, the Europeans have asked for three substantial changes in the laws and regulations that govern intellectual property protection related to brand-name drugs:

Extending the term of patent protection by up to five years if drugs are stuck in the regulatory approval process;Lengthening the period of data exclusivity, which prevents generic companies from using data from clinical trials to create similar drugs, from eight years to 10 years or more; andStrengthening notice of compliance regulations, which ensure that generic companies are respecting patents, by adding an appeals process.

“The reasonable inference is that these changes are designed to allow innovating pharmaceutical firms to charge monopoly prices for a longer period,” Prof. Hollis said.

In other words, they are designed to delay the arrival of copycat generic drugs on the market and, in turn, encourage brand-name companies to invest more in research and development.

According to the report, the proposed provisions would delay the arrival of generic drugs on the Canadian market by an average of 3.5 years. Some blockbuster drugs are set to come off patent, which is why the impact would be in the billions.

Generics cost roughly 25 to 50 per cent of the equivalent brand-name drug.

Intellectual property laws are extremely complex but, in brief, brand-name drugs have a 20-year patent in Canada; in the real world, that translates to about nine years of exclusivity on the market before generic companies can produce similar drugs. Virtually every drug goes through a lengthy legal battle before a generic actually hits the market.

Brand-name drugs are one of the leading exports from the EU to Canada. In 2009, Canada imported $5.3-billion in pharmaceutical products from the EU and exported $1.3-billion to European countries.

The 69-page report, entitled “The Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic & Trade Agreement: An Economic Impact Assessment of Proposed Pharmaceutical Intellectual Property Provisions,” was commissioned by the Canadian Generic Pharmaceutical Association. It will be released Monday in Ottawa.

Prof. Hollis and his co-author, Paul Grootendorst of the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Pharmacy, stressed that while the paper is commissioned, it is not designed to promote the point-of-view of generic manufacturers.

Prof. Hollis said their role was simply to examine the potential economic impact of the trade provisions and they do not take a position on whether the provisions are good or bad.

The Canadian Chamber of Commerce, for its part, strongly backs the new provisions, saying Canada risks losing out on the next wave of lucrative pharmaceutical investment and jobs unless it matches tougher patent protection for drug makers in the U.S. and Europe.

“The world has continued to move on. We haven’t,” said Chamber president Perrin Beatty.

The new report, however, calculates that the EU proposals would cost Canadians $2.8-billion extra for prescription drugs annually, but generate only $345-million of additional investment in pharmaceutical research and development in Canada.

“If the goal is to increase R&D, you have to wonder if extending exclusivity is the way to do it,” Prof. Hollis said.

Negotiations toward a Canada-EU trade agreement – which is designed to reduce tariffs and trade restrictions in a variety of sectors – have been under way since 2009. International Trade Minister Peter Van Loan has said he hopes to conclude a deal by the end of 2011.

The negotiating positions of each side are supposed to be confidential but the EU position on pharmaceutical-related provisions was leaked and has circulated broadly. It is not clear if Canada has made a counter-proposal.

Canadian spent $25.4-billion on prescription drugs in 2009, the most recent year for which detailed figures are available. That includes $14-billion in private spending and $11.4-billion in public spending, according to the Canadian Institute for Health Information.

Russell Williams, president of Rx & D, the organization that represents brand-name drug companies, said he could not comment on the specifics of the new report but insisted that updating Canada’s intellectual property regime – as is being proposed in the new pact – is essential.

“If we want to attract innovation dollars and the good jobs that come along with them, we need a globally competitive regime and we don’t have one now,” he said.

Mr. Williams also said he found it a bit hypocritical that generic manufacturers seem so concerned about drug costs when “we’ve been overpaying for generics for the past 20 years.” (Canada had, until recently, some of the highest generic prices in the world.)

He also noted that “without R&D, without innovative drugs, there will be nothing for generics to copy.”

PROPOSED PLAN'S IMPACT

Under the provisions of an EU trade deal, Canada's annual drug-plan cost increases would be:

Alberta: $211.5-million

British Columbia: $249.1-million

Manitoba: $79.8-million

New Brunswick: $52.2-million

Newfoundland: $46.4-million

Northwest Territories: $2.6-million

Nova Scotia: $95.0-million

Nunavut: $1.7-million

Ontario: $1.2-billion

Prince Edward Island: $10.4-million

Quebec: $772.6-million

Saskatchewan: $72.3-million

Yukon: $1.9-million

Total: $2.8-billion

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Here's a Leftover Lasagne Soup by a Food Reader

This recipe, part of our Soup Series running Wednesdays until the end of February, comes care of Annette Smith, and it's a hit with her colleagues and friends in the schools in which she has taught. If you've got a soup story and a recipe, feel free to share. Here's Annette's story:

"I am a junior high teacher and about 20 years ago I started making soup and dessert for my staff. The first soup I brought to the school was made from leftover lasagna and ever since I have made a large variety  of soups from leftovers. It is a great way to use any type of leftovers such as chili, stew, veggies, roast beef or pork, baked beans, even certain appetizers work well. Over the years I have discovered you can make soup from just about any leftovers and a little imagination.

The soup is prepared at home first then I put it in a slow cooker in our staffroom. The staff looks forward to soup at lunch, especially when it is a bitter cold day. It has now become a tradition which I hope to keep going until I retire.

I have been asked to create a cook book! Maybe it can be a retirement project!!!"

Leftover Lasagna Soup

leftover lasagna, chopped up

1 can of tomato soup or diced tomatoes

½ can of red wine

I garlic clove chopped

1 small onion diced

½ cup (125 mL) of sliced mushrooms

1 tablespoon (15 m) of Italian mix spice

1 tablespoon( 15 mL) hot dried hot peppers (optional or you can put less)

Cut up the leftover lasagna and place in a slow cooker. Add all the other ingredients. Cook on high until it boils (this usually takes about two hours in the slow cooker). Reduce heat to low and let simmer for a couple of hours.

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Fight over Oakville heritage home goes before OMB

A historic Oakville home, once owned by an industrialist behind the doomed Avro Arrow, is at the heart of a fight over heritage and development.

The lakefront property was once inhabited by Fred Smye, erstwhile vice-president and general manager of Avro Aircraft Ltd, whose state-of-the-art interceptor was infamously scrapped by the Diefenbaker government.

A well-known local developer has been trying to redevelop the Smye property, while city council, led by recently re-elected pro-heritage mayor Rob Burton, has been trying to shut him down.

To Mr. Burton, heritage is synonymous with Oakville. Last year, the Heritage Canada Foundation gave the city an award, its second recognition in as many years. In the coming term, council aims to marry much of its downtown into a single heritage district.

The mayor isn’t opposed to development. He just wants it on his – and council’s – terms.

“I like to tell developers: if you want to work in our town and accord with this town’s vision of itself, we’ll be the best partner you’ve ever had,” he says. “And if you want to fool with us, we’re going to try and make it interesting.”

Things have certainly been interesting for Anthony DiCenzo, president and major investor with 394 Lakeshore Oakville Holdings Inc., which owns the Smye property. In 2009, the company bought the 9.5-acre estate at 394 Lakeshore West. Back then, it was listed under Oakville’s Register of Properties of Cultural Value or Interest, and in December, it was designated under the Ontario Heritage Act.

In December, 394 Lakeshore was designated under the act, and Mr. DiCenzo’s plan for a 23-unit condo development is clashing with Oakville’s penchant to make things interesting. The result is a sticky conflict between Mr. DiCenzo, who has developed in the tony lakefront area before, and council, who in various incarnations, has approved his projects. The current relationship has been one of applications, denials, and subsequent appeals that the Ontario Municipal Board will begin hearing this week. Most recently, Mr. DiCenzo applied to have the house demolished. He was denied, and the resulting OMB appeal could overturn the designation – though not necessarily result in the destruction of the house.

“They’re using the heritage designation to frustrate development,” Mr. DiCenzo says.

Council also sees heritage value in much of 394 Lakeshore’s natural features, including views and trees. (The great white oak on Bronte Road – the 300-year-old tree that is provincially designated – stands as a reminder that Oakville’s notion of heritage is not limited to buildings.) And aside from its association with Smye, the house and lands are said to have historical value, the former for its architecture and the latter for their landscaping and relationship with Lake Ontario.

But all these features are hidden at the end of a private road. In his original plan, Mr. DiCenzo wanted to use the Smye house as the central unit in his layout, cutting down some trees, opening public roads, and making a public donation of the beach.

“I would think the Heritage Act is meant for a public purpose and a public interest,” says Mr. DiCenzo. “Otherwise, what would the purpose be? How can you say the individual who has the house is the only person who can enjoy it?”

The mayor, who will not speak about 394 directly, says there is no public dimension in the Heritage Act. According to Brian Emo, vice-president of Southwest Central Oakville Residents Association and member of the Heritage Oakville Committee, public access is not a significant factor in heritage evaluation.

“As far as I know, there’s no great tradition of making designated properties open to the public’s enjoyment,” he says. “Over 90 per cent of the properties designated remain private properties, and the people who enjoy them are the people who live in them.”

Mr. Emo says intensification is a larger concern.

“I think the community would like to see the town come up with a plan to develop the remaining developable lakefront properties in the area,” he says. “At the moment, this is more of an infill development issue.”

Meanwhile, Mr. DiCenzo says he’s been harassed by the town throughout the conflict, including an incident in which a councillor sent Halton police to 394 for unsightly vehicle complaints.

Heritage activity in Oakville is on the rise. There are 936 properties in the town’s registry, up from 559 in 2009. Over half are protected under the act.

Currently, five heritage matters have been appealed with the province. Some developers, like the Bob Finnigan, president of the Ontario Home Builders’ Association, say tussles are likely to continue as intensification takes over planning agendas.

But Mr. Burton takes that opinion lightly.

“I don’t see the two as related.”

Special to the Globe and Mail

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