If you're already homesick for an outdoor farmers' market, check out this video

It's by the Journal's photographer and videographer, Ryan Jackson. The video, shot at the downtown farmers' market,  captures why it is that we look forward to Saturdays in summer.

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Rocky Mountain Wine and Food Festival Ticket Giveaway

We've got two tickets for the Rocky Mountain Wine and Food Festival to give away. The festival is at the Shaw Conference Centre on Nov. 5 and 6. E-mail your contest entry to mailto:livingwell@edmontonjournal.com Put wine and food festival contest in the subject line and please put your name and day time phone number in the body of the e-mail. The tickets will be left for the winner at the Will Call office at the Shaw Conference Centre. The contest ends on Friday Oct. 29. For information on the festival go to Rocky Mountain Wine and Food Festival.

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A cautionary tale for the liberal interventionist

Margaret WentePublished Thursday, Oct. 28, 2010 5:00AM EDTLast updated Thursday, Oct. 28, 2010 9:36AM EDT207 comments

The main revelation in the latest cache of documents from WikiLeaks is not the collateral damage inflicted by American troops on innocent Iraqis (although there’s plenty of that). It’s the damage inflicted by Iraqis on one another. The liberation of Iraq from Saddam Hussein and his chamber of horrors turned the entire country into a chamber of horrors. Of the 109,000 deaths recorded in these newly released U.S. military documents, which span the period from 2004 to 2009, the vast majority were Iraqi civilians murdered by other Iraqis.

It’s a classic case of doing bad by trying to do good. And it’s a cautionary tale for any would-be peacekeeper or liberal interventionist – if there happen to be any left – who thinks we can rescue people from themselves.

I was a liberal interventionist back then. In my defence, I was in the best of company – Michael Ignatieff, Christopher Hitchens and Andrew Sullivan, among others. Liberal interventionists believed that the Iraqi people (to say nothing of the rest of the world) would be a lot better off without Saddam. I’d met Iraqis in Canada who showed me the torture wounds they’d acquired in Saddam’s dungeons. I knew about the gassing of the Kurds and the ethnic cleansing at Hilla, where Saddam’s thugs would take people out at night to dig their own graves, then shoot them. I wasn’t an imperialist, I was a humanitarian.

When I went to Iraq a few months after the war, it dawned on me that the road to freedom from tyranny might be longer than I’d thought. I met many people, especially in the U.S. military, who were valiantly trying to do the right thing. I met brave Iraqis and earnest democracy promoters who were endeavouring to teach the locals the ins and outs of fair elections. Optimism was in the air. But the retaliations had already begun.

Kidnappings and revenge killings had become routine. The police were corrupt and feared. Society was tribal – people identified first and foremost with their clan, whose network of enemies and allies was impossible for outsiders to figure out. Millions of angry young men couldn’t find work. Iraqis were incredibly conspiracy-minded and superstitious, and many of them believed in genies. I came to believe that the U.S.-led invasion had let the genie out of the bottle, and not necessarily for the better.

Later, people blamed the ensuing chaos on the Americans’ lack of postwar planning and the decision to disband the Iraqi army. I think the chaos was inevitable, no matter what.

These WikiLeaks documents (released last week to a handful of international media outlets) are important because they show just how disastrous Operation Iraqi Freedom really was. As Der Spiegel explained, they show how the struggle between Shiites and Sunnis unfolded, how society became brutalized, and how kidnappings, executions and prisoner torture became part of everyday life.

The abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison were mild compared with the atrocities inflicted by Iraqis on each other. The Shia-controlled Interior Ministry ran secret jails in which inmates, most of them Sunnis, endured the same kinds of torture as those inflicted by Saddam. They were burned with boiling water, had their fingers amputated, and had electroshock applied to their genitals. When U.S. forces discovered the brutalities, they simply filled out incident reports and forwarded them to the local authorities.

As the distinction between insurgents and government employees became increasingly fuzzy, militias operated in the open, under the eyes of security forces. IEDs were planted everywhere. Al-Qaeda forces planted bombs in corpses, babies’ cribs and teddy bears, as well as on live children, who were known as “paradise boys.” Not surprisingly, U.S. troops tended to shoot too early rather than too late.

Afghanistan, by contrast, is supposed to be a “good” war. But it’s hard to fight a good war in a violent society with bad guys on every side. And I fear that those Canadians who long for the good old days, when our military served virtuously as “peacekeepers,” are just as deluded as I was back in 2003. The world’s conflict zones don’t look like Cyprus any more. They look like Iraq and Afghanistan – ugly, violent places where high-minded moral interventions are often futile, or worse.

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Canada's 2010 health spending predicted to inch up to $192-billion: report

Total health-care spending in Canada this year is predicted to reach almost $192-billion, up almost 5 per cent over 2009, says a report by the Canadian Institute for Health Information.

The 155-page report, released Thursday, says that figure translates into about $5,600 for each man, woman and child in the country.

“Over the last 10 years, we've seen the growth in health-care spending over and above population growth and inflation,” said Chris Kuchciak, manager of health expenditures for CIHI. “However, what's different this year is that the growth rate in 2009 and 2010 seems to be decelerating.”

Taking inflation and population growth into account, actual per-capita health-care spending is expected to rise by just 1.4 per cent this year, Mr. Kuchciak said from Ottawa.

“The growth rate of 1.4 per cent is actually the lowest growth rate in the last 13 years.”

Mr. Kuchciak said a number of factors are likely behind the shrinking growth rate in health spending, including belt-tightening by provinces in response to the 2009 recession.

A similar squeeze on spending occurred during the mid-1990s, a period of restraint when the growth in health spending was either flat or negative, he said, noting that the trend was reversed in the late ‘90s when governments made a concerted effort to boost allocations to health.

“So there were significant investments in health care. But now fiscal positions have changed and we see that growth rate decelerating.”

The report shows health-care spending is expected to account for 11.7 per cent of Canada's gross domestic product in 2010, down from 11.9 per cent in 2009, but above the 10.7 per cent share of the GDP in 2008.

Mr. Kuchciak said hospitals, prescription and over-the-counter drugs, and doctors' services remain the three biggest-ticket items.

Hospitals are still the largest at 29 per cent, he said. “That's actually declined over the years. Twenty-five, 30 years ago, hospitals accounted for over 40 per cent of health-care spending.”

“What we've seen over time is a growth in the share attributable to drug spending – that's been growing – but also in the last four years, physician spending has actually outpaced the growth of drugs and hospitals.”

This year, drug costs are expected to carve out 16 per cent of the health-care spending pie, while physician services are predicted to take up almost 14 per cent.

“Yes, physician spending has grown faster than the other two categories,” Mr. Kuchciak said. “We know there are more physicians today than there were years ago. There's more demand for the use of physician services as well as compensation.

“Those are factors that could play into that increase in spending.”

The report also says government spending on health care this year is expected to reach $135.1-billion, while private-sector spending – which includes both private insurance and out-of-pocket expenses – will reach an estimated $56.6-billion.

For more than a decade, public- and private-sector health spending in Canada has been growing at about the same rate, with the public sector accounting for about 70 per cent of the total health-care bill and the private sector for the rest.

While Canadians over the age of 65 account for less than 14 per cent of Canada's population, CIHI found they consume almost 44 per cent of all health-care dollars spent by provincial and territorial governments. In 2008, the latest year for which data is available, the provinces and territories spent an average of $10,742 per senior, compared with $2,097 on those aged one to 64 years old.

For Canadians age 80 and older, health spending averaged $18,160 per person, more than three times the roughly $5,800 spent per senior under the age of 70.

However, the report shows that the share spent on those 65-plus has not changed significantly over the past decade.

“While it is true that care is costlier for people who are 65 and older, we have not seen a rise in the proportion we spend on seniors,” said Jean-Marie Berthelot, CIHI vice-president of programs. “An aging population may have an impact on health-care spending, but so far the average expenditure on seniors has not risen faster than for younger Canadians.”

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Harper foreign policy merely a ‘mild negative,’ poll finds

Posted on Thursday, October 28, 2010 11:58AM EDT93 comments

Pollster Frank Graves has some advice on how Stephen Harper’s Conservatives can turn their humiliation on the world stage into a win: Blame it on the elites.

A new EKOS Research survey, released Thursday morning, shows voters “are underwhelmed with Canada’s actions on the world stage.” Asked whether they disapproved or approved of the Harper government’s foreign policies, 37 per cent said they disapproved compared to 21 per cent who approve and 35 per cent who don’t care either way.

“The data seems to suggest that the Tories don't have huge problems on foreign policy,” Mr. Graves told The Globe. “Wins like Haiti and losses like UN net out as mild negative.”

But the more troubling finding for the Conservatives is the perception the Harper government’s foreign policies are affecting the country’s international credibility.

“On that front there is a clear lean to seeing the net impacts as clearly corrosive to our reputation,” Mr. Graves aid. “This is something many Canadians care about. We have a narcissism of insecurity about how we are seen outside our borders and this could become a significant problem.”

In the EKOS poll, 45 per cent of respondents said Tory foreign policy had a negative effect on Canada’s global reputation, 22 per cent said it had a positive effect and 21 per cent said it had no effect at all.

So how do the Conservatives deal with these results? Mr. Graves has a suggestion.

“The government needs to keep Canadians focused on how things are pretty good and we can't risk the adventure of change,” he said, pointing to the Tory message track that a change in government would mean a coalition of Liberals, NDP and Bloc.

More than that, though, the Tories should play up the anti-elite phobia that’s out there – a phobia that seemed to come through in the election of conservative Rob Ford as mayor of Toronto.

“They will also need to sharpen case that many of these incidents are the vanity preoccupations of the elites and not the bread-and-butter issues of ‘ordinary’ Canadians,” the pollster said.

For fear of being accused of only giving advice to the Conservatives, Mr. Graves also has some thoughts for Michael Ignatieff’s Liberals.

“The challenge for opposition is to fit all of the indigo incidents such as prorogation, census and UN embarrassment into an overall thematic that doesn't wax and wane as the individual issues do,” he said. “And they need to make that narrative simple and emotionally resonant. For example, the government's know nothing-ism approach is producing rule by belief rather than reason and lampooning our previously stalwart international brand.”

The poll of 1,312 Canadians was conducted between Oct. 20 and Oct. 26. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.

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How George Smitherman’s dead-end run for Toronto mayor went wrong

Published Thursday, Oct. 28, 2010 4:04AM EDTLast updated Thursday, Oct. 28, 2010 11:25AM EDT362 comments

In late August nothing was going right in George Smitherman’s bid to become mayor. The papers were full of scandalous stories of Rob Ford’s arrest for drunk driving and drug possession, but his popularity only seemed to be growing.

The Smitherman camp had invited Liberal pollster Michael Marzolini, architect of Premier Dalton McGuinty’s majorities, to diagnose what ailed the troubled campaign. During one Marzolini focus group, a middle-aged woman explained that she would overlook personality failings in a mayor – as long as he didn’t waste her taxes.

“It was the most powerful thing I’d ever seen,” recalls campaign manager Bruce Davis. “People knew [Mr. Ford] had these character flaws. They knew all that …”

And, by all appearances, they didn’t care.

This revelation should have been an omen of what was to come: the felling of Ontario’s powerful former deputy premier by an unlikely municipal renegade wielding a simple message.

From the start, Mr. Smitherman’s team suffered from being a “big tent” affair with myriad advisers from across the political spectrum. His strategists knew the election was fast becoming a referendum on Mayor David Miller’s approach to governing, set against a backdrop of economic uncertainty and irritation over tax hikes and political perks. Polling data showed the city was deeply split over Mr. Miller’s record. But Mr. Smitherman and his brain trust couldn’t decide which side of the urban divide they wanted to win over. When they finally placed their bets, it was too late.

In many ways, Mr. Smitherman put himself at a disadvantage from the outset, says Ryerson University politics professor Myer Siemiatycki: He played a quiet, cagey campaign early on, let his opponents set the agenda and failed to adequately set himself apart afterwards.

“He needed to more pointedly and directly try to puncture the assumption that the city was totally broken down and in need of a major overhaul. Because once he conceded that, he could not win ... He could not sell himself as the better fixer.”

CAMPAIGN BEGINS

On a flight home from Florida in early January, Mr. Smitherman took out a pad of paper and started scribbling ideas about what he wanted to do as mayor.

The famously combative, intensely partisan Liberal had first hinted at a run during last year’s garbage strike, with a showy bid to clean up the city. A few weeks later, Mr. Miller announced he wouldn’t seek re-election, leaving the field wide open. Before long, a clutch of Mr. Smitherman’s long-standing advisers – including Tory strategist Jaime Watt, Liberal adman Gordon Ashworth and NDP pollster Bob Penner – began meeting. It was late November, 2009, and most observers expected he would be taking on radio host John Tory.

Upon his return from Florida, Mr. Smitherman arranged to meet Bay Street lawyer Ralph Lean, a top political fundraiser, at the King Edward Hotel on Jan. 8. Mr. Lean, who had planned to back Mr. Tory until he pulled out, was now looking for a place to park his support. Over breakfast, Mr. Lean told Mr. Smitherman he had two major concerns – spending and transportation – and that he’d be interviewing Rocco Rossi later that morning.

The two men had history: In the mid-1990s, when Mr. Smitherman was former Toronto mayor Barbara Hall’s executive assistant, they’d butted heads over the Air Canada Centre (Mr. Lean represented the Raptors). “For two years I worked with him, fought with him and yelled at him,” said Mr. Lean. They emerged from that encounter with a mutual regard.

After breakfast ended, an emboldened Mr. Smitherman marched up to City Hall and, with the media looking on, registered to run. Afterward, he took what looked suspiciously like a victory skate on the rink in Nathan Phillips Square.

Through the early spring, Mr. Lean and his network had little trouble generating cash for the campaign among Liberals and downtown Tories.

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Gold Medal Plates is in Edmonton again this week

Wednesday, I’ll be judging at the event, a sold-out fundraiser for the Canadian Olympic and Paralympic teams. Many fit athletes are expected at the Shaw Conference Centre for Gold Medal Plates, including Adam van Koeverden and Alex Bilodeau. To date, Gold Medal Plates has raised some $4 million for the Olympic movement in Canada.

Follow me on Twitter (@eatmywordsblog) as I join forces with Edmonton food and wine judges including Nathin Bye of Wildflower (last year’s winner and one of the 10 chefs pictured at right competing in the 2009 event). I’ll announce the 2010 Edmonton winner on edmontonjournal.com at the evening’s end. Here are the chef competitors: Tracy Lydster of The Dish, Shane Chartrand of L2 at the Fantasyland Hotel, David Omar of Zinc, Jan Trittenbach of Packrat Louie and Daniel Costa of Red Star. Returning favourites are Paul Shufelt of Hundred, Michael Brown of Pradera at the Westin, Paul Campbell of Cafe De Ville, Andrew Fung of Blackhawk Golf Course, and Susan Kellock of Skinny Legs and Cowgirls.

The event has been such a huge success that organizers decided to push it past the original goal of collecting funds for the Vancouver 2010 games. Now, it’s a yearly competition. Edmonton is the first city in the Canada-wide contest, which culminates in the national championship Feb. 18 and 19, 2011, in Kelowna.

 Go to goldmedalplates.com for more information.

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