Contrarian reader and tech fixer Mike Targett points out that Guardian columnist George Monbiot, whose blistering denunciation of Canada's climate change policies appeared here yesterday, was in Toronto to take part in a Munk Debate Tuesday. One of a series sponsored by Aurea Foundation, the debate considered this proposition: "Be it resolved: climate change is mankind's defining crisis, and demands a commensurate response." Monbiot and Elizabeth May took the affirmative; Bjørn Lomborg and Lord Nigel Lawson the negative. Audience polls taken before and after the debate showed the con side to be slightly more persuasive. My reading is that Lomborg and Lawson...

03 December, 2009

The rhetoric is over the top, but the facts are only somewhat overstated in a UK Guardian column that foreshadows complaints Canadians can expect hear as the Copenhagen climate change summit approaches: After giving the finger to Kyoto, Canada then set out to prevent the other nations striking a successor agreement. At the end of 2007, it singlehandedly blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding targets for industrialised nations. After the climate talks in Poland in December 2008, it won the Fossil of the Year award, presented by environmental groups to the country that had done most to disrupt the talks....

02 December, 2009

Several Globe and Mail reporters who looked looked at the leaked Colvin emails that fueled Christie Blatchford's recent philippics against the diplomat came up with a very different picture. To begin, here's Paul Koring: The Harper government has blacked out large sections of relevant files handed over to the independent inquiry probing allegations of transfer to torture of detainees in Afghanistan, despite the fact that its investigators have the highest levels of national security clearance. The heavily redacted documents...

01 December, 2009

In a follow-up to her screed against diplomat Richard Colvin, Globe and Mail columnist Christie Blatchford resorts to a full-blown bucket defence. According to Blatchford: There is no evidence Afghan security forces abused prisoners Canada turned over to them: "This is not akin to officials knowing that Afghans were being tortured." Everyone knew Afghan security forces abused prisoners Canada turned over to them: "[It's] obvious that Afghanistan is a brutal country where cruelty, hardship and physical violence are a way of life. No one with a lick of sense would expect that Afghan prisoners would live in comfort or ease." Colvin never actually...

01 December, 2009

In the PMO War Room, columnist Christie Blatchford must have seemed an inspired choice. She can turn a purple phrase with the best of them. She stands foursquare for troops, widows, and orphans. She's against plummies, toffs, and pointyheads. She's long on guts and glory, short on assay. She has an ego as big as the Ritz, and fragile as a Gruyère Soufflé. To receive a document drop on a Matter of National Importance would be sweet validation. So the Harper Government—someone in the Harper Government—got the brilliant idea of handing Blatchford a trove of Richard Colvin's long-sought emails from Kandahar,...

29 November, 2009

The National Post ferrets out a Canadian army officer's surprisingly critical master's thesis on Canada's handling of Afghan detainees. In an exhaustive critique, the author concluded Canada's decision to hand over suspected insurgents to Afghan authorities with a history of abuse violated Canadian ethical values, could turn ordinary Afghans against foreign troops and likely increased the stress of this country's combatants. The policy might even have contributed to the alleged mercy killing of a Taliban fighter by a Canadian soldier, she wrote. Major Manon Plante's thesis, completed this year as one of the requirements for a master's degree from the Canadian Forces...

28 November, 2009
"Oil," a major exhibition by Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky, is currently on display at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. in Washington, DC. The exhibit includes horrific photos of the Alberta Tar Sands: Burtynsky-06-s [Click images for larger view - links fixed.] Burtynsky specializes in sweeping, often eerily beautiful views of landscapes altered by industry: mine tailings, quarries, scrap piles. James Fallows, of the Atlantic, which features another of Burtynsky's images this month, writes:
The impact of the exhibit as a whole is, well, hard to convey in words.... [V]ery few people have seen the range of oil-industry artifacts that he has captured in his wall-sized and incredibly-detailed photos. Extraction and refinery operations around the world; the industries oil has made possible; the indications of the end of the oil era. Hard to forget.
The exhibit moves next to The Rooms Art Gallery in St. John's, Newfoundland, where it will be on display from May 7–August 15, 2010. It will continue to travel through 2012. More photos and a video after the jump.
28 November, 2009

The CBC's Kady O'Malley brings prescient analysis—and that rarest of journalistic qualities, a political memory—to the Conservative scheme to fabricate a dastardly opposition "refusal" to hear diplomat David Mulroney rebut fellow diplomat Richard Colvin's account of how Canada turned a blind eye to Afghan security officials' torture of detainees our forces turned over to them. Here's the plan: Refuse to turn over documents bearing on Colvin's testimony. Invoke national security, of course. Have Mulroney show up, uninvited, and demand to be be heard immediately, before MPs have any opportunity to prepare for his testimony, let alone see the documentary evidence bearing on...

24 November, 2009

A Contrarian reader writes: If only it were true that they were back peddling. In tonight's news, MacKay is heard sinking to new depths of loathsomeness by accusing Colvin of impugning the integrity of Canadian troops. He obviously hoping Canadians will turn against Colvin if he can be made to look as if he's attacking the military. How much more cowardly and disgusting can you get than using the military as a red herring to draw attention away from your own behaviour. I'm beginning to feel slimy just being in the same country with...

23 November, 2009

Contrarian is relieved to report that whoever kidnapped Stephen Maher and published Saturday's bizarre column under his byline has released him. His column this morning offers a useful reminder of the circumstances under which Richard Colvin went to Kandahar in the first place. In January 2005, Canadian diplomat Glyn Berry, the political director of the provincial reconstruction team in Kandahar, was killed in a suicide bombing that wounded three Canadian soldiers. After Mr. Berry’s death, while the Foreign Affairs Department was struggling to find diplomats to serve in the dangerous and challenging country, Richard Colvin volunteered to go to Kandahar to do...

23 November, 2009
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