During a brief stopover in Ottawa yesterday, a gracious member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery took me for a sail on the Ottawa River, where I snapped this photo: In case you don’t recognize the building, it’s the posterior of 24 Sussex Drive, home of Canada’s Prime Minister. Even without Bruce Cockburn on board, I was struck by the wondrous want of any obvious standing on guard for Stephen Harper. Our small party boarded my friend’s sailboat at the Hull marina, just across the street from the Museum of Civilization. No one checked our ID, demanded we sign a register, or x-rayed...

Transparency International rates Canada the sixth least corrupt nation in the world in a report featuring an interactive map and several interactive graphs. Founded by a former World Bank official, the NGO relies on business surveys of transparency in business process, rather than political corruption, for its guideposts....

Where do refugees come from? Where do they go? Which countries produce the most refugees? Which countries take the most in? Christian Behrens, a German designer who studied at Concordia, answers those questions visually with a series of interactive infographics that grew out of a Potsdam University of Applied Sciences class project on mapping global tendencies. Based on the annual Refugee Report of the UN High Commission for Human Rights, the graphic lets us look at refugee flows from several different perspectives. Which country took in the most refugees in 2008? The US? Nope. Canada? Not even close. Pakistan tops the list, at...

A friend who became a citizen Friday after living in Canada for 30 years sends this email: Almost 24 hours as a Canadian, and this has what's been happening: Dreamed last night that cricket was being played with a puck, eh! Have a craving this morning for a Double, Double, eh! I keep slowing down for pedestrians, eh! My first practice swing for golf this morning was left-handed, eh! When I received my usual list of orders last night from the "trouble and strife," I actually thought about complying, eh! What's going on????...

How does a government that takes human rights obligations seriously handle warnings of detainee abuse? It would be too easy to ignore these warning signs, only to find that detainees previously held by UK have been mistreated while in Afg hands. The fallout of that, as we have seen from Canada’s experience, would, at best, be unwelcome. Read on: Source. Hat tip: Cheryl Cook via @DougSaunders...

Haligonian Warren Reed has a sobering take on our discussion about potential "cures" for people with Down syndrome: I am still stuck on the Down Syndrome thread.  As Canadians with disabilities will tell you, Canada has a medical model of disability. The approach is, "let's fix what's wrong with you," rather than, "let's fix what's wrong with us." Hence the inaccessible buses, devilish sidewalks, and antediluvian building codes. The result is a hidden and large group of people who are disenfranchised, undervalued, ignored, and sometimes abused.  See the shocking account in Monday's Chronicle-Herald. One of my big defeats was an unsuccessful complaint...

Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin told the Commons Committee on Afghan Detainees today that virtually all the prisoners Canada turned over to Afghan security forces in 2006 and 2007 were tortured. Colvin says senior Canadian military and civilian ignored his warnings about the abuse, and Red Cross officials who tried to intervene could not get their phone calls returned for three months. Here is: The Canadian Press account of Colvin's testimony. A transcript of his opening statement. Video of Bob Rae questioning Peter MacKay on the allegations in Question Period. Stories from CBC, the Toronto Sun, the Toronto Star, and the Globe and Mail. If anyone...

A mysteriously anonymous website, Herald Daily (or at least weekly), has published this intriguing graphic contrasting the population density and land mass of the Earth's 19 most capacious nations. I've included only a stub of the original, very large graphic here. Click on the image to see the whole thing. Hat tip: Flowingdata.com....

Canada fared poorly in Oxford University's second annual global study of broadband connection quality. Canada ranked 30th in download speeds, 31st in upload speeds, and 17th in "leadership," a measure that combined speed and access. The study drew on 24 million records from actual broadband speed tests conducted by users around the world from May through July 2009 using www.speedtest.net. For more depressing details see the news release, the pdf report, and the chart-filled appendix....