Sidney Crosby Seals Gold Victory For Men's Hockey: Who Cares? Photo: The Star-Ledger

Canadians can now stop the hand-wringing, and finally we can hoist the red and white high towards the clouds, but how large was our Vancouver Olympic victory really? We did win more gold medals than any other country in Winter Olympic history. In terms of sporting success and country size, our victory was actually much larger than most people think. With a population nine times larger than ours (which means a much larger young population base from which to select top athletes) and with significantly larger financial resources, the U.S. won only 11 more medals, and they actually won significantly fewer gold medals than Canada. Put another way, Canada won 0.466666′ gold medals per million people (the medal some people consider the only one worth winning), while the United States won only 0.033333′ gold medals per million people. Yes, the Americans won the most medals, but they did not win 9 times more medals which their population would suggest they should. Furthermore, most of these medals were not the more prestigious gold medal category. When factoring in population and financial considerations, some small countries actually do extremely well in Olympic events, even if the medals won are few in number. So given Canada’s small stature and her gold medal record, even when considering the home-field advantage, we accomplished truly Olympian athletic feats: we actually did more than own the podium.
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Simcoe-Grey MP Helena Guergis. Photo credit: Canadian Press.

Flying can be stressful, and I suppose that being an MP is stressful as well. While most of us have experienced the former, few have the opportunity to live through the latter. In late February, Helena Guergis had the misfortune of experiencing both.

For those of you who were caught up in the Olympics and missed the news, Helena Guergis, MP for Simcoe-Grey, apparently threw a diva fit at the Charlottetown airport on February 19. The incident became public when someone sent an anonymous letter describing the tantrum to Liberal MP Wayne Easter.

According to the letter, Ms. Guergis and her aide arrived very late for an Air Canada flight. While clearing security, her footwear set off an alarm so security staff asked that she remove it. In response, Ms. Guergis allegedly removed her boots, chucked them in a bin, swore, and then declared PEI a hellhole (or shithole, depending on the source). After abusing the staff but still clearing security, she ordered her aide to fetch her boots for her. She then discovered that the glass doors leading to the tarmac were locked. She reportedly beat on the doors and tried to force her way out. Of course, the whole time the plane was being held for her. She finally boarded and left the hellhole behind.
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Team Canada wins gold in Women's Hockey (photo: AP)

The Vancouver 2010 Olympics are now over, with the nation receiving a classic showdown of hockey supremacy in the form of the men’s gold medal game between arch rivals Canada and the United States to top things off.

A little more than a week ago, with the medal count looking very different than it did at the end of the Games, Canada’s much trumpeted and controversial ‘Own The Podium’ campaign was enduring a litany of criticisms that it had failed to produce the Olympic hardware that it was specifically designed for.

‘Arrogance,’ many said, ‘unrealistic,’ ‘overreaching,’ ‘doomed to failure,’ were among the chants coming from both domestic and international skeptics for whom the program was a contentious and decidedly un-Canadian effort to dare secure more medals for this country at a Winter Olympics than ever before.
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Machiavelli: Tutoring Canadian Politicians. Photo Credit: Din Merican

“Great men are almost always bad men.”
- Lord Acton

Fortune is a woman, and if you wish to conquer her, you must beat and coerce her. And she always smiles upon the
young man, because he commands her with the greatest audacity.

The Prince
By Niccolo Machiavelli

Because the great English historian had written extensively about liberty and federalism, it should not be surprising that Prime Minister Trudeau had read Lord Acton’s work. And because Machiavelli had written his political books in the early part of the 16th century, it should not be surprising that his work contained sexist and offensive passages such as the foregoing one. What might surprise some readers is the fact that Pierre Trudeau and other prominent political and military leaders have consulted Machiavelli’s books throughout the centuries for their sage advice.
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Photo from www.draplin.com

Seemingly lost amidst the Olympic shuffle last week was an announcement by the Harper government on reaching an agreement with the United States that allowed for Canadian exceptions to the highly contentious “Buy American” regulations. The regulations, imposed last-year by the U.S. government, blocked Canadian manufacturers from bidding on almost $800-billion worth of contracts tied to stimulus spending by the U.S. government.

Given the high-profile nature of the spat and the political capital such an agreement should generate, it seems strange that the Harper government would downplay the announcement by burying it amidst Olympic fever. A closer look at the details of the agreement, however, indicate why this might be the case.
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Oil has been discovered in the waters around the Falklands. This has revived the decades-old conflict between Argentina and the United Kingdom, both of which claim the islands – and this time the rest of Latin America is united behind Argentina. Will we see the developed world unite behind England?

Given the realities of peak oil, finding more is a good thing. However, as oil becomes more and more precious as the supply dwindles – and as foolish Western governments have failed to prepare for – the potential for conflict becomes very high indeed. The United States has a massive military presence in the Middle East to protect its “national interests” there, and the United Kingdom is likely to take the same view of any oil discovered anywhere they can make any sort of claim to.
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Opening ceremony for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games (photo by Reuters)

After years of painstaking planning, construction, advertising and anticipation, the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics finally opened on Friday February 12.

Athletes, the media and sports enthusiasts from around the world gathered at B.C. place for a nearly 3 hour spectacle that showcased the unique, multicultural element these games have vowed to represent.

Unfortunately for the city of Vancouver and its Olympic Organizing Committee, the games have been subject to a slew of criticism.
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A hoop dancer performing at the announcement of the 2010 Aboriginal Pavilion. Photo from www.canada2010.gc.ca

This is somewhat after the fact, but I’ve been thinking about the Olympic opening ceremonies over the past few days, and the topic came up again at a recent dinner with friends. This was the first time we had gotten together since the start of the games, and we were reviewing our overall impressions of the festivities. The consensus was that the ceremony was technologically impressive and that K.D. Lang’s performance was the highlight of the evening.

My dinner companions and I thought that the opening ceremonies didn’t show the world anything about Canada that they didn’t already know (wheat, whales, plaid, fiddles, snow) and that it was biased toward Western themes.   As easterners – and by “easterners” I mean Atlantic Canadians, and not Ontarians or Quebecers – we felt that the east was not as well represented as it could have been.
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It takes a special kind of political acumens for a regional Canadian politician to make news headlines both north and south of the border, but Danny Williams has done it.

The Blogosphere across North America lit up a few weeks ago with the news that the Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador was heading to an undisclosed American medical facility for a no-further-details-given heart surgery last week. Canadian progressives are chastising Williams for bailing on his at-home medical options while American opponents of healthcare reform get a new scapegoat for why a public option doesn’t work.

Simplistic? Probably. Williams’ people were less than helpful when the news broke, initiating what CBC reporter Janyce McGregor called a “cone of silence” about the matter.

What we do know is that after “weeks of consultation” with doctors, Williams decided to head stateside for the surgery which was apparently unavailable in his home province. This was according to Deputy Premier Kathy Dunderdale, for whom the odious duty of informing the media fell.
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Photo Credit: media.canada.com

I read with some interest in the Globe and Mail recently of the quashing of a grassroots challenge to a sitting Conservative MP. As reported by Steven Chase, the governing body of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) took over control of Calgary West riding association a few days ago in order to do damage control. What was the damage you ask? The riding association was going to ask its members if it wanted to challenge sitting MP Rob Anders’ appointment as a candidate for the next election. Back in the spring of 2009 the national body of the CPC ruled that they would not allow any challenges to be put forth against any of its sitting MPs, stifling any dissent in the process. Upset by this tacit betrayal of classic Reform dogma, the Calgary West riding was on a path to potentially run a candidate nomination process against Mr Anders. No sooner it seems was this considered than the high ups in the CPC swooped down from their headquarters and stopped the riding association dead in its tracks.  When asked about what appears to be internal strife within the party, national council president John Walsh commented “I am not interested in commenting on internal party matters.” Case closed.
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