On Friday Justice Minister Rob Nicholson announced the government was appointing Frank Iacobucci, a former Supreme Court judge with no legal hold over them, to determine what documents pertaining to the Afghan detainee issue could be released without compromising national security, national defence, and/or international relations. The scope and terms of Iacobucci’s appointment are not known and he will report directly to Nicholson.

A number of bloggers have already weighed in on Iacobucci’s suitability to the task. Steve at Far and Wide in particular points to Iacobucci having already previously agreed to omit information — at the Minister’s request — from the public version of his October 2008 inquiry into the illegal renditioning of three Canadian citizens, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad el-Maati, and Muayyed Nurredin to Syria and Egypt where they were tortured before being deemed innocent.

In light of Prof. Amir Attaran’s explosive allegations on CBC that Afghan detainees were handed over to Afghan authorities with the precise purpose of having them tortured, and Sunday’s news that CSIS was involved in the interrogation of Afghan detainees, it’s worth looking at what was omitted from Iacobucci’s 2008 report.

What was included in the initial report was bad enough:

In September 2001, the RCMP described Mr. El Maati to Syria and Egypt as an Al Qaeda associate and an “imminent threat to public security.”

CSIS decribed him as “involved in the Islamic Extremist movement” and “an associate of an Osama Bin Laden.”

They then shared his travel plans with the CIA, who passed them on.

Mr. El Maati was detained in Syria for two months and Egypt for two years, where he was tortured with electric shock to his hands, back, and genitals, and sleep deprivation while being subjected to excruciatingly painful stress torture for days on end.

In 2003, CSIS sent Egypt a “statement of concern” about Mr. El Maati should he be released from custody.

Iacobucci said he could not stress sufficiently that these three must “be presumed innocent of any wrongdoing.”

The omitted part that Steve alludes to was released just two weeks ago as a supplement:

In June 2002, CSIS agents advised Egyptian authorities that El Maati was involved in a plan “to commit a terrorist act in Canada.” They did not say, and maintain they could not have known, that this “confession” was derived from his torture in Syria.

In December 2002, CSIS went to Egypt with a list of questions “to which it wished to obtain answers.”

While we the public were prevented from seeing this latest information till two weeks ago, Justice Iacobucci knew it all along and sought to have it made public. And yet in his summation to his 2008 report he still concluded:

“The inquiry did find that the three men were tortured in foreign prisons and that the mistreatment may have ‘resulted indirectly from several actions of Canadian officials.’

but that:

“I found no evidence that any of these of these officials were seeking to do anything other than carry out conscientiously the duties and responsibilities of the institutions of which they were part.”

And that, as I said at the time, is the most damning part of all.

I offer this blogpost just to run to ground the discussion on Iacobuccu’s suitability as a beard for the Cons. In truth, I’m with Pogge and Eugene Forsey here — Nicholson can talk to anyone he likes — it doesn’t matter. Parliament has demanded the documents. The Cons are currently in contempt of Parliament. Ultimately they must be forced to give the documents up. It’s the law here.

Where is my jet pack? It has been the future now for at least 10 years, or so it seems from the perspective of someone who was alive when men landed on the moon for the first time. Some might say that was the beginning of the future. After all the 1958 edition of an encyclopedia I grew up with promised that one day man would land on the moon. A TV show I watched as a kid, Space, 1999 predicted the existence of a large moon base in operation by 1999. And, of course, who can forget that scifi classic, 2001, A Space Odyssey which not only predicted a moon base, but domestic flights to and from it on Pan Am? (If you’re too young to remember Pan American World Airways, it was a major airline which went out of business in 1991.)

It’s 2010, and not only is there no moon base, but still nothing as seemingly simple as jet packs. So I was very interested when I saw a story on Slashdot saying that they had been developed for sale by Martin Jet Pack.

Someone should sue them for false advertising. That’s not a jet pack, that’s a small helicopter with a person strapped to the front. Seriously, the thing hovers due to the action of rotating blades. And it’s so massive, how is the hero supposed to spring into action to save the scientist’s beautiful daughter from the space monster? To do that he has to already be wearing a jet pack that’s light enough to simply be part of the costume, otherwise by the time he gets to the hangar where it’s stored, gets strapped in, goes through the helicopter start up sequence and takes off, the poor girl has already been devoured! Get real!

Juan Manuel Gallegos of Tecnologia Aeroespacial Mexicana comes closer to the real thing with his hydrogen peroxide rocket belt.

Sadly, however, it is still too heavy and has such a short range that it will be of no use whatsoever in rescuing anyone in immanent danger from space monsters.

Perhaps the reason this science fiction device remains science fiction is that we require a science fiction fuel for the rocket, something which packs a huge amount of energy into a small amount of space. Or I suppose we could go really retro, back to a time before all things nuclear were considered bad, and develop an atomic rocket pack. That could be very cool. But you know the tree hugger types would get all up in arms about people flying around with nuclear reactors on their backs, even though they would be really, really small ones. Kill joys. How much longer must I wait to be a rocket man?

“And I think it’s gonna be a long long time…”
(to skip intro, go to time index 0:52)

Sandy B clearly expected to walk home with a shiny gold man on Sunday, rocking a metallic Oscary dress and buffing her hair to a high Oscary sheen, and it comes as no surprise to the guess-makers and sayers-of-things-about-movies that she made good on her nom for Best Actress.  But as honorable a recognition as the golden KenDoll is, nothing sums up the erstwhile Miss Congeniality quite like her congenial acceptance speech at the Razzies the night before.

Sandra Bullock has always seemed nice, right?  Like you could go out for beers with her and she would lend you her shoes and tell you stories about her grandfather the rocket scientist (!) and talk you into flaming shots until you were both too drunk to sneak off with the waiter and stick the other person with the tab?  This may or may not have to do with her constantly playing characters who are exactly that person.

Because honestly, La Bull is almost completely a one-trick pony (like Hugh Grant, but winsome and clumsy instead of charming and rumpled.  Watching Two Weeks Notice was like being at the vortex of the type-cast universe).  And her Oscar win was more a Well-Careered-Actress-Has-Only-Oscar-Worthy-Role-Ever-So-If-We-Don’t-Give-Her-One-Now-She’s-Never-Getting-One-and-Come-On-Guys-She’s-Been-a-Hollywood-Staple-for-Years, because for all that The Blind Side is some two hours of tear-inducing, cockle-warming feelgoodery, no one but no one should win ANY award when they are up against Helen em-effing Mirren and Her Royal Streepness, the Meryl.

But for all that Sandra’s acceptance speech was expectedly adorable, what won my heart more by far was her SHOWING UP at the Razzies, or the Things That Blew About Film This Year awards, to pick up her Worst Actress award for the wretched All About Steve.  Her presence was a bit of a surprise — the Razzies are a fairly two-bit operation, begun by a copywriter in his house in the `80s and still joinable with a few internet clicks and a handful of dollars.  Few actors take the night off to receive their $5 golden raspberries, with good reason.

Miss Bullock not only brought her good-humored self, however, but gave as good as she got.  After gently needling the award system by suggesting that only sliiiiiightly more than half of the voters had actually seen the movie, she hauled out a wagon-load of All About Steve DVDs for everyone in attendance, claiming tongue-in-cheekily that if they just watched the film, “I mean really watch it, you know, with your eyes,“ that they’d get its magic.

I get that the Oscars are political and fairly riggy, and I doubt that Sandra was literally the Best Actress.  But if she has the good spirit to show up at a goofball awards show for kicks, then I’m more than ok with her taking also home a gold-plated doll.  I will pretend it is the award for Most Friendable.

The Olympics are over, but the memorabilia is here to stay. Vanoc reported that, by midway through the 2010 Games, it had already reached its $50 million sales goal, double the amount that merchandising brought in through the entire 2006 Winter Olympics.  Three million cute red Olympic mittens alone were sold by the Hudson’s Bay Co. A few days before the closing ceremonies, a friend of mine and I watched a woman enact a scene reminiscent of Cinderella’s stepsisters with the golden slipper. Standing by the last remaining bin of Olympic mittens, children’s size small, she desperately and unsuccessfully attempted to force her adult hand into the tiny glove. My friend commented to her, “Maybe if you chop off a couple of fingers, it’ll fit.”  The woman did not look impressed.

Maybe she later found what she wanted on eBay: on the day of the closing ceremonies, eBay had 2,154 pairs of Olympic mittens for sale.

I happened to be in Zellers on what was likely the final release day of the mittens, and so many were available that I picked up pairs for both my children (I got them the adult size small — perhaps that’s why there were so many remaining children’s sizes) and me. Then, as I’d recently had a conversation with my mom, who lives in snow-happy Saskatchewan, I decided to pick her up a pair as well.  After paying more to post them than for the mittens themselves, I was happy to hear she’d received them before the games were through.  Even better, she had walked to her mailbox gloveless and freezing in –27 degree weather, and returned in wooly warmth.  Funny: I brought mine to a soccer game this weekend and it was too warm to wear them, yet here is where the Winter Olympics are being held.  Canadian weather, eh?

Olympic pins are another rage: just ask the pinheads.  The Simpsons episode in which Lisa falls prey to pin collecting and ends up wearing nothing but as she busks in downtown Vancouver, trying to get enough money for the next pin, wasn’t far from the truth.  Lines were everywhere: six hours to get a glimpse of the Olympic medals at the Canadian Mint, another line-up for CBC Olympic pins.  High school students of mine asked a man dressed in Russian attire to pose with them, and instead walked away with memories of a strong Russian accent and a gift of Russian pins.  In their excitement, they didn’t realize until later that he’d avoided having his picture taken altogether.

Coke set up pin-trading centres in the Bay store and in a hut at the Yaletown LiveCity site.  Several pin collectors sat amidst the throngs in downtown Vancouver, calmly displaying their collections.  According to Dan Presburger, a high school history teacher from Thousand Oaks, California, pin-trading is a good way to meet people. Dan has 150,000 pins in his collection, and especially loves to trade Olympic pins. He and his nine-year old son, Aidan, walked around the streets of Vancouver in smocks spotted with pins. It was Dan’s 11^th Olympics, and Aidan’s second. And pins are worth more than one may think — Dan managed to get into the Russia vs. Latvia game by trading a handful of pins for a ticket.  I wonder how many pins it would’ve taken to pay for the final USA vs Canada game?

While I didn’t embrace pin collecting, I did have my eyes peeled for other Olympic memorabilia.  I’d read that Olympic condoms were going to be handed out by Captain Condom and other superheroes .  I hoped to press one or two into my Olympic photo album, but my high school students and I weren’t handed any, nor did we see any of Captain C’s safekits being distributed. Apparently, as with red mittens, Vancouver ran short and had to import condoms from other parts of Canada .  A look on eBay was fruitless: the best it had to offer was an Olympic shirt with five condom rings, courtesy of a creative thinker in Tel Aviv, Israel.

Instead,I was handed two Olympic pamphlets: “The Way to Happiness: A Common sense Guide to Better Living” and “Gold Rush Vancouver.”  The former is chock-full of happy advice courtesy Ron Hubbard, and the latter is from Answers in Genesis U.S.A. If “Gold Rush Vancouver” sounds appealing, I bet there are still several discarded copies of it lying where I last saw them in downtown Vancouver, a few steps from where the smiling volunteers handed them out and not far from where the Canadian Mint queue once stood.

As the Olympic athletes head home with their medals, the rest of us also have something to cling to — everything from Coke bottles that glow, Olympic wear, pins, and pamphlets, to stuffed Quatchis sporting little red Olympic mittens. Go Canada go.

Two days ago Jason Kenney’s communications director Alykhan Velshi tweeted that Con MP Tim Uppal from the inquiry panel at the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat Antisemitism will be looking for unanimous all-party approval when he introduces a motion to condemn the use of the word “apartheid” as applied to Israel in the House of Commons this week :

“That this House considers itself to be a friend of the State of Israel; that this House is concerned about expressions of anti-Semitism under the guise of “Israeli Apartheid Week”; and that this House explicitly condemns any action in Canada as well as internationally that would equate the State of Israel with the rejected and racist policy of apartheid.”

While I suspect that Uppal and friends would still condemn the protest even if the name was changed to “Israel Not Very Nice This Week,” Antonia Zerbisias at The Star pointed out :

“The moment that Israel is generally recognized as an apartheid state is the moment when the boycotts and divestments begin in earnest. Which is why Israel must fight to keep the label out of the language surrounding the Jewish state.”

Here’s the UN’s definition of apartheid. You can make up your own mind whether it fits :

United Nations International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, Article II[1] :

For the purpose of the present Convention, the term “the crime of apartheid” shall apply to the following inhumane acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them:

a. Denial to a member or members of a racial group or groups of the right to life and liberty of person
i. By murder of members of a racial group or groups;
ii. By the infliction upon the members of a racial group or groups of serious bodily or mental harm, by the infringement of their freedom or dignity, or by subjecting them to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment;
iii. By arbitrary arrest and illegal imprisonment of the members of a racial group or groups;

b. Deliberate imposition on a racial group or groups of living conditions calculated to cause its or their physical destruction in whole or in part;

c. Any legislative measures and other measures calculated to prevent a racial group or groups from participation in the political, social, economic and cultural life of the country and the deliberate creation of conditions preventing the full development of such a group or groups, in particular by denying to members of a racial group or groups basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work, the right to form recognised trade unions, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association;

d. Any measures including legislative measures, designed to divide the population along racial lines by the creation of separate reserves and ghettos for the members of a racial group or groups, the prohibition of mixed marriages among members of various racial groups, the expropriation of landed property belonging to a racial group or groups or to members thereof;

e. Exploitation of the labour of the members of a racial group or groups, in particular by submitting them to forced labour;

f. Persecution of organizations and persons, by depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms, because they oppose apartheid.

Last Thursday MMP Peter Shurman put forward a similar motion condemning Israeli Apartheid Week to the Ontario legislature, where it purportedly received support from all parties, including Cheri DiNovo of the NDP.

Shurman :

“I move that in the opinion of this House, the term ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ is condemned as it serves to incite hatred against Israel, a democratic state that respects the rule of law and human rights, and the use of the word ‘apartheid’ in this context diminishes the suffering of those who were victims of a true apartheid regime in South Africa.”

This would work better for Shurman had many Israelis and South African leaders who once lived under apartheid in South Africa not already offered their opinion that Israel does practice apartheid.

Back to Shurman:

“In fact, the values of Judaism and of Israel were bedrock values for the foundation of Canada, and those values from Judaism and from Israel date back over 3,000 years — all to say that if you’re going to label Israel as apartheid, then you are also calling Canada apartheid and you are attacking Canadian values.”

Canada does indeed have its own apartheid problems, which is why we have not signed on to the above UN Convention on Apartheid nor the UN Declaration on Aboriginal Rights.

But Shurman’s Canada = Israel equation just echoes last week’s “An attack on Israel would be considered an attack on Canada” from Junior Foreign Affairs Minister Peter Kent, and this government’s determination to defund and muzzle any Canadian NGOs which have had the temerity to suggest that the slaughter and oppression of Palestinians should not go unremarked upon in Canada. (Very good discussion as to the fairness and efficacy of using the word apartheid in comments over at Pogge’s.)

But why are the Cons pushing so hard on this?

Because it’s a perfect issue with which to divide the opposition. The Con base will just agree to the McCarthyite motions en masse; some Libs and more particularly the NDP will tear each other apart over it while risking being smeared as anti-Semitic to their ridings by the Cons if they refuse to give preference to Israel over the rights of Canadian citizens.

Stinks, doesn’t it?

Update: Well, that was quick. Iggy goes the HarperCons one better via

Skdadl: Ignatieff condemns fellow citizens, defends foreign government

For the last week, Canadians have been shaking with excitement over Canada’s triumphs in the Olympics in Vancouver. And over the past few days, I’ve found it difficult to have a conversation with anyone that doesn’t involve talking about hockey. Today at the grocery store a complete stranger cornered me in the produce section to share excitement about Canada’s gold medal win in hockey. “We won!” Her grin made me pretty uncomfortable.

“Horrible news about Chile,” I said, “just awful.” Obviously, I’m not much of a hockey fan. She hadn’t heard a thing about Chile.

On Saturday morning, an 8.8-magnitude earthquake shook central Chile causing mass devastation. An incredible 90 aftershocks, all of magnitude five or higher, have continued the devastation with over 700 dead (and the number continues to rise) and an estimated 1.5 million people affected by the quake. Less than two months after the earthquake that devastated Haiti, it’s like deja vu as I sit in my living room watching images on the news of people digging through the ruins of collapsed buildings in search of survivors. And yet I have to channel surf relentlessly to find a station with coverage of the disaster in Chile, as the Olympics hog the airwaves.

Maybe I don’t get it because I’ve never been a huge sports enthusiast: I don’t have a team or own a jersey, I’m not competitive by nature, and I can’t name name any players other than Todd Bertuzzi and Steve Moore (and that only because I read about them on CBC.ca).

I didn’t watch any Olympic events, not because I am boycotting, though I was tempted to, but because I’ve got things to do, and simply can’t devote hours of my day to curling or speed skating. My Olympic jones has largely been satisfied by reading Facebook status updates. It’s nice to see Canadians uniting and being proud of their country and its athletes, and I appreciate the history of the Olympics, but I don’t quite understand the level of emotional involvement and time commitment so many people are willing to put forth. And I certainly don’t get why Olympic coverage trumps world coverage.

“The competition is exhilarating,” a co-worker told me.

Maybe so, but there’s nothing exhilarating about a country devastated by an earthquake competing for news coverage, and losing to the Olympics.

McDonald’s is the official 2010 Winter Olympics fast food sponsor, as evidenced by their ubiquitous billboards and TV ads showing Canadian Olympians about to consume supposedly performance-enhancing food. But while games-goers may enjoy collecting the Olympic mascot toys and drinking from the official Olympic water bottle, their eating preferences are, literally, all over the map.

One of the biggest food successes is the Japadog, a plump pork sausage dressed with such unique toppings as dried fish flakes, cabbage, and teriyaki sauce. According to a local TV report, people have been lining up at Japadog stands for as long as an hour to enjoy the homegrown delicacy. Another hot item is British Columbian Chinese food. Beijing may be tops in the opening ceremonies category, but we, ironically, best them in this one. Writes Mark Schatzker in the February issue of Conde Nast Traveler: “I would say I’ve eaten Chinese food all over North America and in China and the best I’ve eaten in the world was in Vancouver. Hands down.”

Invented closer to home, though not exactly nearby, is another British Columbian favourite: poutine. A Quebecois creation, this cheese curd, french fry, and gravy delight can be enjoyed locally at most Burger Kings and Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants. Apparently, it’s now also entered New York cuisine as “disco fries.” But be warned: it can be dangerous, and not just for one’s arteries, especially if you fall face first into it.

Nevertheless, poutine has been proposed as Canada’s national food, a welcome possibility considering Canadians are unsure what else would even be in the running: is maple syrup a food? Many Olympic partiers were disgruntled to discover private downtown liquor stores closed by 7 pm on Saturday and Sunday on the first weekend of the Olympics. Maybe they’d vote for beer.

And while some British Columbians might argue that smoked salmon should own the podium, the same could be said of beaver tails, which originated in Ottawa. No beavers are injured in the making of these mini-pastries, though a lot of BCers might wish otherwise, given that the rascally rodents have a nasty habit of reproducing in large numbers and making dams. That’s why we cull them hereabouts. But maybe we should consider marketing them instead. After all, if John Burey of Australia figures he can sell that country’s nuisance cane toad to to the Chinese, what’s to stop us from convincing those partying New Yorkers that nothing goes better with poutine than a side order of beaver meat?

Canada offers such a mosaic of food offerings, we’ll probably never come up with a national food that everyone can agree upon. But that appears to be just fine with our visitors. Perhaps the best option is to join them in wholeheartedly sampling the Olympic offerings, and, as the Star’s Paul Watson does in this mouth-watering video, “eat our way around the world.”

Review by Brian Brennan

Frank Molnar, Jack Hardman, and LeRoy Jensen were three dedicated and unfashionably tradition-based Vancouver artists of the 1960s who today are largely forgotten. Because they operated outside the confines of the exclusionary and restrictive Vancouver art establishment, their contributions are known only to a handful of collectors, fellow artists, and former students. However, thanks to the efforts of a gutsy little Salt Spring Island press, Mother Tongue Publishing, the three are now getting the broader public recognition they deserve. They are the featured subjects of the second book in a brave new series titled The Unheralded Artists of BC.

I say brave because the publishers, Salt Spring Island poet Mona Fertig and her printmaker husband, Peter Haase, gambled on launching their own trade publishing enterprise when they couldn’t find a British Columbia publisher willing to take on the series. Forgotten artists, it seems, don’t sell as well as roguish ex-politicians or sexually abused hockey players.

But how good were Molnar, Hardman and Jensen? That hardly matters. The point, as Lions Bay man-about-the-arts Max Wyman notes in his introduction, is that “we now have a clearer idea of what was going on in our small corner of the world of art than we had before.” When the trendy American-influenced abstractionists like Jack Shadbolt, Gordon Smith, and Peter Aspell were getting all the public attention and the big commissions, the European-influenced representationalists and expressionists like Molnar, Hardman, and Jensen were quietly writing their own chapters into the history of art in British Columbia.

Molnar, born in Hungary and trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, never gained acceptance in Vancouver because he dared to paint nudes with pubic hair showing. He refused to create works for commercial gallery owners who wanted landscapes, trees, and lakes, and he refused to produce canvases to match the sofas and drapes of would-be art buyers. Shut out of the major galleries, suspicious of art dealers, and unable to make a living from his art, Molnar taught art for 30 years at North Vancouver’s Capilano College (now University). Today, at age 73, he shows his work by appointment only at his home in Point Grey.

Hardman was a largely self-trained sculptor and printmaker from New Westminster who taught art in London for a couple of years during the 1950s, then returned to Canada to establish himself in Burnaby, first as a high school art teacher and later as director of the Burnaby Art Gallery. When his terra cotta sculptures were first featured in group shows in Vancouver and Toronto, Hardman told reporters that teaching was his hobby and sculpting his profession. However, because his occasionally figurative work ran counter to the prevailing abstract styles, he was marginalized. Feeling neglected and unappreciated, he destroyed two of his large sculptures in 1969. Forty years later, he was finally recognized, posthumously, with a retrospective of his prints at the Burnaby Art Gallery.

Jensen, born in Vancouver and trained as a painter in Copenhagen and Paris, found it impossible to break into the cliquish art scene when he returned to Vancouver in 1955. Like his fellow outsiders Molnar and Hardman, Jensen too found his niche as an art teacher, most notably at the revolutionary Vancouver Free University. Through his association with other radicals at this now-defunct institution, Jensen eventually became one of the first members of Greenpeace, sailing to Alaska in 1971 in a converted mine sweeper in a futile attempt to stop the United States from conducting underground nuclear tests at Amchitka Island. Jensen spent the last two decades of his life on Salt Spring Island, where he painted while exhibiting his work at galleries in Victoria and Nanaimo.

The best feature of this book is the artwork. Photographers Janet Dwyer, Ingeborg Hardman, Dan Fairchild, and Ernest Vegt have done an excellent job of capturing the artists’ work on camera, and the reproduction quality is second to none. So too is the design work by Jan Westendorp and Mark Hand. This really should be a hardcover coffee table book to do full justice to the photography and design, but I suspect that would incur an unrecoverable expense for the publishers.

Less satisfying is the accompanying text. While authors Eve Lazarus, Claudia Cornwall, and Wendy Newbold Patterson have done a good job of researching the stories of their individual subjects, the storytelling lacks energy, coherence, style, and flow. It feels as if some paragraphs were deleted from a longer original text for space reasons, and that other paragraphs were moved around to fit with the book’s design concept. The end result reads more like a product of expedient editing and restructuring than a work of creative literary endeavour.

That quibble aside, I recommend this book as required reading for curators, collectors, critics, art history enthusiasts, and others interested in knowing what was happening in the rest of the West Coast art scene when all the attention was being given to the teachers and students at the Vancouver School of Art, and to the local artists whose works were being exhibited at and acquired by the Vancouver Art Gallery. Molnar, Hardman, and Jensen were quickly consigned to the scrapheap of art history before a serious evaluation of their work could take place. Now, as Wyman says, it’s time for attention to be paid.

Author Brian Brennan has published numerous biographical profiles of West Coast artists, including Gathie Falk, Joe Plaskett and Takao Tanabe.

Hmm. What is this doing on the website of our public broadcaster?

Vancouver protestors fall silent.

The article I have linked to on the CBC site is a product of its agreement with The National Post to jointly cover the Olympics. It appeared in the Post first, and from there was syndicated to the website they have collaboratively created for the games, Vancouver Now.

As a piece of reporting, it is precisely what we expect from The National Post: a commingling of news and political purpose — in this case to deride the Olympic protest movement. It does so using the usual tactics: a snide tone, imputation of motives, loaded language. (The anarchists who broke windows are “thugs” and “the rabble.”) And, of course, contained within the pages of the Post, it’s relatively harmless, as we know this is the sort of thing they do.

But does the CBC really mean, in its turn, to host an article mocking public dissent, not just of the florid kind, but in its genteel, middle-class, let’s-have-a-march-but-keep-it-polite iteration also? Bob Ages, a spokesperson for the Olympic Resistance Network and member of that well-know radical cell, The Council of Canadians, tells the Post’s reporter/pamphleteer Brian Hutchinson that the ORN has “an agreement not to criticize each other in public. That’s not to say there isn’t internal criticism, but we’re not going to dump on the young people.” This is used to suggest that the protest movement has “unravelled” and is beset by “internal dissent” (the hed on the Post article, which, mercifully, does not make it over to the CBC site).

Is this the CBC’s stance towards the exercise of democratic rights? If so, it places itself in a league with Fox News. If not, is it paying any attention any more to what ends up on its website? Of course, the CBC is just as welcome as any other news organization to host strong comment, as it does. But Hutchinson`s piece wasn`t conceived as comment, and sticking it into the Blogs section of the Vancouver Now site doesn`t make it so.

So, fellow taxpayers, your money is now being used to tell you that the next time you think about getting uppity, you`d better think twice. This probably isn`t what the CBC intends. But it is, I`m afraid, what it is doing.

On Valentines Day, 2,000 to 4,000 people marched through Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside in the annual Women’s March for Missing and Murdered Women. A memorial march — not a protest — it is organized and led by women of the DTES to remember the hundreds of aboriginal women who have gone missing or been murdered in the past two decades. With no other competing agendas represented, it is the very essence of a respectful and focused peaceful grassroots march, and only by chance coincided with the other daily Olympic protests here.

CBC’s coverage of it on “The National” notwithstanding, doubtless this is the first time many people outside of Vancouver have even heard of it.

The previous day, a few hundred people took to the streets to protest an interwoven range of complaints highlighted by the Olympics — stolen aboriginal land, environmental destruction, tarsands, corporate greed, Gordon “Red Mittens” Campbell, Harper, poverty, homelessness, etc. A couple of idiots threw a Province box through a window of Olympics sponsor Hudson’s Bay Co., while others threw paint, overturned trashcans and traffic pylons, spat on police — who showed admirable restraint throughout — and insulted onlookers. Thirteen were arrested and four charged.

The media here and around the world immediately ate it up of course, and thousands hit the “agree” button in the comments section of the CBC story, endorsing those who thought the protestors should be strung up.

Many progressive bloggers were swift to distance themselves from the vandals. They pointed out that such violence only serves to alienate potential supporters. The notoriety that comes with being a self-aggrandizing asshole will only hurt the given cause, they said.

And yet something about all this outrage directed at a few brats has been bothering me ever since. We’re talking rudeness and minor property damage here, right? They spat and broke stuff. When I walked past the broken window a few hours later, it had already been replaced.

Compare this with when Robert Dziekanski, in sheer frustration at his own helplessness, broke up furniture at YVR — it did not stop us from identifying with his plight. When the very few and vastly over-reported stories of property damage in Haiti came to light, we did not condemn the frustrated perpetrators for their actions. Indeed, we thought it remarkable in the face of being denied the basic necessities of life, displayed but refused them, that such incidents were so few and far between. So why the double standard for the Olympics vandals?

It takes hope and solidarity and strength of purpose to witness, non-violently, year after year, as do the Sisters in Spirit marchers. Twenty years now, the core of them have been waiting for action on their missing sisters. They march while waiting for the rest of us to catch up and claim their cause — which includes continuing murders and disappearances — as our own.

I think the angry hooligans from the Olympics protest just don’t think they have the luxury of that kind of time to protest peacefully while waiting patiently for the rest of us to catch up to their sense of urgency about the world. I worry that our rush to condemn them means that we imagine we do enjoy that luxury.