After six years as an online-only webseries, Pure Pwnage — that’s “ownage”, or “supreme dominance of anyone in anything“ in square-talk  — invades real television tonight when it premieres on cable channel Showcase.

A mockumentary-style series about an obsessive Toronto gamer and his entourage of equally oddball friends that began its run in 2004, Pure Pwnage bears more than a passing resemblance to Trailer Park Boys: the outrageous characterizations, the elaborate hijinks, the wall-to-wall profanity. It’s also unapologetically nerdy, and seldom stops to explain its elaborate “teh interwebs” vocabulary. And it’s a hit — millions of viewers have downloaded the episodes available for free from the website, and hundreds turn out for theatrical screenings in Toronto and elsewhere. Showcase — to me, showing a level of clue-having-ness unusual among Canadian broadcasters — has plucked the show from the web and given the creators a half-hour slot to do their thing. Whether the magic translates to a general TV audience, well, we’ll see. But there’s going to be a lot of swearing, monitor-humping, and headshots along the way.

Here’s season 1, episode 1 of Pure Pwnage for you n00bs in the crowd:

Brian McKeever qualified for the Paralympics and the Olympics, too bad his team started someone else.

Most people think that the ‘para’ in Paralympics means paraplegic, but it actually means parallel. Ironic, since for much of its history, its treatment has been anything but. In fact, the Paralympics has always been that thing that you’re vaguely aware is supposed to come after the regular Olympics, but is never seen, nor heard from unless you really are grinding it out to look.

Most audiences really get into disabled sports when they see them live, or they’re marketed with the right approach, (Remember, Murderball?) but when you combine a lack of coverage with an international community that has largely just begun to realize they should probably let their disabled citizens out of the attic, you basically get an event that looks like it was put together just to save the IOC from a potential human rights quagmire.

Yes, most able-bodied people see the paralympics as an athletic aside. The part that literally no one has energy for after the immense production of the Olympic Games, but I hope now that for the first time — things will be different.

The tickets to Paralympic events are still appallingly cheap, costing between $15 to $175 for the closing ceremonies in Whistler, as opposed to the $800 my family paid for the Olympic closing ceremonies.  A monetary value judgement that says nobody cares. With this information, what can possess me to think that this games will turn a corner?

Two things.

First, the coverage. This year’s Paralympics features 57 hours of Canadian coverage. (30 in french and 27 in English)  Sure, it seems utterly disparaging when compared against the 2,200 hours of Olympic coverage, but those 57 hours, of mostly replays, tape delays and highlight packages, are the most ever for a Paralympic games. Don’t forget the 150 hours of online coverage.  Plus, packaging Friday’s opening ceremonies with Saturday’s Canada vs, Norway sledge hockey game will give the games almost a day of exposure.

“Is it good or bad? Well, it is better than what they’ve had in the past. There wasn’t anything for the last two [Paralympics], I think, in this country,” Terry Wright, Vanoc’s executive vice-president of Games operations told The Vancouver Sun.

“We’ve certainly had an improvement. I think in general broadcasters see the importance of showing something.”

Exposure is most important because from that comes demand and from demand comes the raising of the overall international profile of the games, which allows the IPC to raise the price of broadcast rights and feed the resulting cash back to further Paralympic development.

There will be live coverage too. All sledge hockey games involving Canada will be live and all the medal rounds will be live.

Just to get two dozen broadcasters to come out for the games is a victory, since none will make any money from their efforts.

But broadcasting isn’t the only step forward, the other one began during the able-bodied games. That’s when Rick Hansen became the most prominently featured disabled athlete at an Olympic Games as one of the final torch bearers.  Sure, Mohammed Ali had Parkinson’s when he lit the torch in 1996, but he was never originally known as a disabled athlete like Hansen is.  The Man in Motion’s involvement indicated to the world that there would be no prioritizing of able-bodied athletes over disabled ones. The two games would co-exist together as two parts of the same event. In this way, Vancouver took a step towards equality that so many other host cities omitted.

Hansen was also front and centre as a member of CTV’s broadcast team in his regular ‘Difference Maker’ segment. The best of these was a profile of Alexandre Bilodeau’s brother Frederic and his impact on Canada’s first home-soil gold medal winner. It was distinctive for most because it showed how Frederic courage in dealing with his cerebral palsy motivated his brother to shoot for a higher level in Ski Aerials, but with Hansen at the helm there was also a change in presentation that’s rarely seen in mainstream media. When Hansen rolls in, we see him from top to bottom and not from the chest up to hide his chair.  Bilodeau’s CP gives him a speech impediment that would’ve been subtitled if the able-bodied media had final say, but here he can speak for himself.

Perhaps few people caught Chris Cuthbert issuing a challenge to Canada’s sledge hockey team following Canada’s gold medal win in Men’s Hockey: “Jean Labonte, get your team together.  Sledge hockey athletes, it’s your turn now.”

That mention was heard by over 94% of Canadians and though small, does wonders to instill the idea of an equal relationship between both events and their athletes.This has continued through the marketing campaign. The most popular Paralympic sports (mainly, Sledge Hockey and disabled skiing) have their athletes featured in spots narrated by Donald Sutherland just like the athletes of the regular games.

Let’s also remember that Vancouver 2010 marked the first time an athlete qualified for both the Paralympics and the Olympics. Don’t forget it wasn’t the IOC who ultimately prevented legally-blind cross-country skier Brian McKeever from doing his run, it was his own team who thought they could increase their medal chances with different athletes.

Sure the Paralympics may not have the audience numbers or the big broadcasting support, but as long as the attitude of the organizing committee, the volunteers and the media is that these are meant as a compliment to the main event and not a hastily stitched together addendum — the rest will surely come with time. After all, the entire disability rights movement has moved with baby steps, so why should this be any different?

By the way, those ridiculously cheap tickets are almost all sold-out. For all the concerns surrounding the traditional games, supporting the Paralympics means giving the world’s most undervalued minority a truly equal playing field.

Jim Flaherty, post 2009 budget

Progressive Canadians seldom get very excited whenever a Conservative government brings down a budget. More often than not, the priorities of the two groups are so wildly different that it’s almost not worth the effort to make a fuss.

Last year’s budget was a different story. Stephen Harper’s team came up with a plan of action to fight the sagging economy that was straight out of the Keynesian playbook. The massive stimulus spending pissed off hardcore conservatives and delighted their opponents. On that point at the very least, progressives were appeased.

But that was last year. This year was a different story.

Budget Day was March 4. It’s a peculiar day in Ottawa, because it’s one of the only times all year when you can find most of the city’s journalists in one place. They all gather in the Government Conference Centre, a beautiful beaux-arts structure that used to be a train station, and they pore over embargoed copies of the federal budget. It’s all very boring until the finance minister stands up in the House of Commons and delivers his speech.

That’s when the ravenous pack of journalists marches up to the Hill.

Waiting for the scribes is a group of smart people who sat in another lockup for a few hours, reading the same document back and forth for a similar amount of time. Among that group of smart people are some of those aforementioned progressive Canadians. Labour is always there, as are environmental and social justice lobbyists.

Each reads through the sections most relevant to them, so some have more reading to do than others. They come up with responses, memorize them, memorize them again, and then venture out to meet the journalists.

The chosen location: the Railway Room, which is just down the hall from the House of Commons. The two sides clash even before the finance minister sits down.

It is within this context that the progressives laid siege on the government’s plan. There was no shortage of criticism, and it came from all corners.

Sierra Club Canada’s John Bennett was among the most outspoken on Budget Day. After reading through the government’s plans for cleaning up the Great Lakes and dealing with invasive species and re-jigging environmental assessments, Bennett was furious.

“There is no intention to protect the environment,” he said. “We’re going to have environmental disasters as a direct result of this budget.”

Paul Moist, the national president of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, was happy that the stimulus spending continued. But he was disappointed on just about every other front.

“It seems to me there was a choice between investing in people and infrastructure renewal for Canada’s cities, or being fixated on the deficit. And there’s no question that they’re giving every signal that from this point forward, fighting the deficit is going to happen at all costs.”

Canadian Centre of Policy Alternatives economist David Macdonald said that compared to last year’s budget, which he called a “Liberal, verging on NDP” budget, this year’s document fails on most fronts.

“This year is a very Conservative budget,” he said. “I think this shows their longer term priorities … rock-bottom corporate tax rates, smaller government less able to plan for the future, and on the foreign policy front, it clearly means more money for defence and less money for reconstruction.”

Former Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer was clocked doing 93 km/h in a 50 zone one evening last September. At the time, police charged him with impaired driving and cocaine possession. A few months go by, and—abracadabra!—the drunk-driving and the drug possession charges disappear, replaced by a guilty plea for “careless driving”:

Crown attorney Marie Balogh told the court the initial charges were dropped because there was no reasonable prospect of conviction.

The judge, Mr. Justice Doug Maund said he could read “between the lines” of the evidence presented to him.

“I’m sure you can recognize a break when you see one” the judge told Mr. Jaffer.

The former MP was sentenced to a $500 fine.

Of course, us Canada-hating commie crybabies are all whining that Jaffer is getting a wrist-slap just because he’s a former MP, just because he happens to be married to a federal cabinet minister, and just because the presiding judge was chief of staff to a Mulroney cabinet minister.

All in all, the John Howard Society, which advocates for justice reform, seemed to have the most substantive, sensible take on the whole mess:

“It’s really easy to disparage discretion for judges — until you need it,” [John Howard Society executive director] Craig Jones told The Canadian Press in an interview. [...] Conservatives, up to and including the prime minister, have publicly criticized judges for sentences they deemed too light. Harper, unsolicited, publicly questioned the sentence handed to a Toronto terrorism convict in January. [...]

The experts say the truly perverse aspect of mandatory minimums and “truth in sentencing” provisions is that in real life they actually make the administration of justice more “surreal and bizarre and unjust,” in Jones’ words. [...] “Prosecutors and judges strike deals to preserve proportionality. But because they can’t do it in public, they do it behind closed doors.”

At the moment, this is an optics problem for the Conservatives, a few sleazy headlines and nothing more. But it does highlight a serious, pervasive inequity in the justice system, in which “respectable” people get nudges, winks, and savvy deals from prosecutors, while the destitute, the mentally few-bricks-shy, the politically unpopular and the un-snappily dressed are swallowed whole.

Winners of the 2010 Governor General's Awards for Visual and Media Arts. Left to right: Claude Tousignant, Ione Thorkelsson, Rita Letendre, Gabor Szilasi, Tom Sherman, Terry Ryan, Robert Davidson, André Forcier.

The winners of the 2010 Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts were announced today in Montreal. The winners receive $25,000 to support their work and recognize their contributions to Canadian visual art. From the press release:

Haida sculptor Robert Davidson, filmmaker André Forcier, painter Rita Letendre, video artist Tom Sherman, photographer Gabor Szilasi and painter Claude Tousignant won the awards for artistic achievement. Glass sculptor Ione Thorkelsson won the Saidye Bronfman Award for excellence in fine crafts, while Terry Ryan received the Outstanding Contribution Award as long-time general manager of West Baffin Eskimo Co-operative in Cape Dorset, Nunavut and director of Dorset Fine Arts in Toronto.

Click on any of the thumbnails below to see some of the winning works.

Michael Ignatieff greeting listeners at a speech on the environment at Laval University, November 26, 2009. Creative Commons Photo by Robert J. Galbraith

Holy déjà vu, Iggy.

Is it just me, or is this whole post-prorogue budget announcement that the NDP and Bloc aren’t supporting feeling eerily familiar?

Rewind to November 2008. Stephen Harper prorogued the government to avoid a non-confidence motion brought on by the New Democrats and Liberals. This move bought him a little time, and as Dion stepped down as leader and Ignatieff stepped up, it put the new Liberal leader in a rather powerful position. The whole country looked to him to see what move he would make—maintain the coalition, or approve a Conservative budget?

Typically, we expect the party leading the country to hold the most power, but at moments like these it becomes apparent that the opposing parties are well-positioned to get some things done, leader of the country or not.

When the budget, and avoiding a non-confidence motion, hinged last year on Liberal approval, the Conservatives made room in their plan for some modest alterations Ignatieff insisted upon. Top of mind was the recession, and the creation of a strong stimulus package.

This year, why not leverage this power once again, Iggy? Last time around recession was the issue du jour, and certainly stimulating the economy is always a smart move, but that isn’t the only issue that Canadians feel strongly about—some uncertainty around climate change has settled in, but a majority of Canadians still believe that it is a very serious issue.

This year, Ignatieff could leverage his power and suggest changes to the budget that would increase jobs, stimulate the economy, and begin to lay the tracks for a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions in Canada.  My suggestions? Start modestly, but with policies that will lay the foundation for further climate change policies in the future.

• Introduce a strong transit plan with emphasis on effective public transit routes;

• Create a regulation or carbon price that would reduce total industrial emissions by 3% annually; and

• Make a national investment in renewable energy, green manufacturing and electric vehicles.

All of these strategies require job creation, and will cultivate a new “blue/green” economy. Of course, for this to be an effective political move as well as climate change reduction strategy, it will require that all parties get on board, which is why incremental change will have to be where we start for now.

So go ahead, Ignatieff,  force Harper’s hand into a new green economy. Afterall, this opportunity seems to come but once a year—you should make good use of it.

To start: Jason Collett’s new album Rat A Tat Tat is out today, including this track, “Love is a Dirty Word,” which seems altogether too amiable for its cynical title.

Next! Ghostkeeper’s “By Morning” off their self-titled album out today. Louisiana bayou swamp folk spiked with surf rock, except from Northern Alberta, which has neither bayous nor surfing. Discuss.

Finally, The Besnard Lakes‘ “Albatross” from their new album Are the Roaring Night. A densely packed glacier of sound that’s slowly but surely crushing everything in its path.

Canada's women's Olympic hockey team pose with their gold medals after the winning game.

Guest blogger Canice Leung recently wrote in this space that Canada’s “national sport,” our beloved ice hockey, has became too elitist, too expensive and too inaccessible to maintain its position near to the top of the Canadian cultural hierarchy. Sparked by a fiery debate on Twitter the day before, her words were thought-provoking and insightful and her column provided an valuable perspective—one that those of us closely connected with the game often forget. And though I agree with the spirit of Leung’s argument, I have have to take issue with her conclusion, that hockey does not and should not represent this country.

She is right to point out that sport in Canada is a multimillion-dollar industry and that in certain respects it has become increasingly elitist and inaccessible. As Leung notes, higher-end ice skates alone can cost upwards of $600 and that’s just one piece of the bounty of expensive gear required to the play the sport at any level. Also, rinks are expensive to maintain, so ice-time is scarce and registration fees for youth hockey leagues are exorbitant. Just last week, the Greater Toronto Hockey League, the minor hockey association for the city that is supposed to the most diverse on earth, announced it would be doubling its fees next year. All the GTHL’s 512 teams will now pay $2000 to register a 16-player squad in order to cover the $500,000 hit the league expects to take with the introduction of the Harmonized Sales Tax in Ontario in July.

As Leung argued, circumstances like these make any sport—or any endeavour, for that matter—self-stratifying. Sure, there are bursaries, hand-me-downs and other equalizing measures out there. But with decreased accessibility comes increased elitism. More immigrants and second-generation Canadians may be filling roster spots in the game’s professional ranks. Yet there are also fewer opportunities for the less affluent to have a shot at playing the game at its highest level. For Leung, that means that when hockey is “put on a cultural pedestal, it demands a fairness and accessibility that befits the morals of the country it represents.”

But, for me, it’s still the national game.

The reason hockey needs to be more a more accessible and more equitable sport is precisely because it’s so deeply interwoven in our collective identity. Opening the sport to a wider, more diverse sample of Canadians will not only increase its already massive audience—10.3 million Canadians tuned in to the Olympic quarter-final against Russia; 21.5 million, nearly two-thirds of the country, for the gold medal match-up with the United States—and support other values we hold close, but also deepen the talent pool and make us that much better at, that much more connected, to our cherished national pastime.

When Leung writes that “in modern-day Canada, the idea that the sport represents us all seems anachronistic,” I think she may be missing the point. In today’s world, there is nothing that is going to perfectly represent us all. Hockey is for some, not for others. But the shared experience of sport can unite us and hockey is that shared experience for Canadians. The beauty of sport is that you don’t have to play it to take part in it—the Olympics final the perfect example of just that. It’s the overwhelming emotion and excitement coupled with hockey’s rich folklore that brings people together in one collective act. The fact that so many of us tune it on a nightly basis is what makes it ours.

Granted, it’s a shame the women’s game doesn’t get the attention it deserves—but that is true of all female sports and Canadian women’s hockey is probably in a better state than most. Plus, that culture is rapidly changing, particularly at the amateur level where more young and talented female athletes are playing competitive sports than ever before. They, too, share in the collective hockey experience and are increasingly becoming an active part in shaping it.

Of course, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t apply a critical lens to our national game, giving it a free pass simply because we love it. More access and more representation will only make our game bigger, better and more of a positive force in shaping Canada’s culture. Leung’s point is an important one and very well taken. But there’s still something distinctly Canadian about that good ol’ hockey game.

Cover of the March-April 2010 issue of This Magazine. Click to enlarge.

The March-April 2010 issue of This Magazine will be landing in subscribers’ mailboxes this week and is now on most newsstands coast to coast. (If you haven’t subscribed yet, this is a great time to do it, locking in a great price before the HST comes along. Just sayin’!) As always, the stories will all appear here on the website over the next few weeks. We suggest subscribing to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going online, following us on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook for updates, new articles and other sweet interwebby goodness.

On the cover this issue is John Duncan’s investigation into the Canadian Forces’ future plans in Afghanistan. As the clock ticks down to the 2011 date for pulling out, Duncan finds, there are plenty of reasons to doubt that deadline will be met, and that Canada’s military is quietly prepping for alternate scenarios — including the possibility of Canadian CF-18s supplementing the Nato air campaign. And Aaron Broverman finds that militarization is creeping into other aspects of our lives as well, in the form of a global geopolitical struggle to control the ebb and flow of information on the internet. As repressive regimes abroad—not to mention law-enforcement agencies here at home—look for ever more intrusive ways to monitor civilians online, a small clutch of Canadian hackers are fighting back and working to keep the lines of communication open. And while the Communist Party of Canada has long been in the political wilderness, finds Eric Rail, its leader, Miguel Figeuroa, has been busy anyway, serving as party leader for 17 years and changing Canadian electoral law in some pretty substantial ways in the process.

There’s plenty more: Ashley Holly McEachern sends a postcard from Honduras reporting on the coup that has thrown the country into turmoil; Nav Purewal uncovers the unlikely origins of a Canadian movement to ban the burka; Alison Garwood-Jones reports from January’s Interior Design Show on the designers who are planning for our post-petroleum future; Paul McLaughlin interviews Globe and Mail former Afghanistan correspondent Graeme Smith; Max Fawcett warns that Canada’s looming pension crisis is a demographic time bomb; and Susan Peters profiles the authors of a new graphic novel telling the story of Helen Betty Osborne, a Cree girl abducted and killed 30 years ago, and whose story has largely gone untold until now.

PLUS: Tara-Michelle Ziniuk on The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book; Darryl Whetter on e-books; Allison Martell on the global shipping industry; Joshua Hergesheimer on an innovative Ethiopian aid project withering for lack of funds; Herb Mathisen on cellphone tower radiation; Kelly-Anne Reiss on Craik, Saskatchewan’s new eco-village concept; Alixandra Gould on progressive religions; Bruce M. Hicks on public inquiries; Raina Delisle on the aftermath of the Olympics; Ava Baccari on a literary atlas of Toronto; Navneet Alang on the internet’s high-culture pirates; Graham F. Scott on Canada’s broken aid promises.

With new poetry by Jason Camlot; and new fiction by Jessica Westhead.

The release of the federal budget yesterday brought few surprises, but plenty of opportunity for debate.

With total spending this year of $280.5 billion, up $12.8 billion from last year, the government will run on a $49.2 billion deficit. The government hopes to curb that deficit by 2015 and bring up back to the black shortly thereafter.

Of course NDP, and Liberals have their own beefs, but neither party is prepared to trigger an election on the issue.

Here’s some of what’s being said across the internet:

• The Winnipeg Free Press gives an overview of this year’s winners and losers.
• Flaherty uses some effective misdirection by freezing the salaries of federal politicians.
• The Calgary Herald would like to see more help for struggling families.
• Despite an emphasis on becoming a “leader in green job creation” in the throne speech on Wednesday, the Conservatives gave little hope of following through on that promise.
• And contrary to some throne speech boasting, a freeze has been put on any increase in foreign aid. At least until 2o15.
• Even with Flaherty’s tight cutbacks, many people feel his projections are far too optimistic . Which means we’ll be in the red past the Conservatives 2015 prediction.
• Absent from the budget was any tinkering with arts funding, which drew mixed reactions from a community traditionally very skeptical of the Harper government.
• But if you happen to be a foreign investor, things are looking up. Amendments to the definition of “taxable Canadian property” has opened the floodgates, grab your life jackets.
• And Canada’s record breaking performance at the Olympics must have impressed someone in Ottawa because the Own the Podium campaign is getting a boost.
• Finally, the Ottawa Citizen cuts through the Flaherty fairytale and lets you know if his numbers really do add up.