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MEDIA Election special: York and Campaign '06 York experts have been commenting on the election, and some grads are running. Here are selections from a week of media reports: Election at 'tipping point' The new Liberal ads are aimed at undoing the softer image Conservative leader Stephen Harper has been presenting, he told The Ottawa Citizen in a Jan. 11 story . "There are two images of Harper out there," he said. "There's the old one from the 2004 campaign and the new one. The Liberals are trying to bring the old one back into focus and into people's minds. It's a wedge strategy. They've written off people who are self-defined as socially conservative, they've written off all the gun collectors, they've written off between 10 and 20 per cent of the Canadian population who are pro-George W. Bush. They are targeting the left-wing urban swing vote and hoping to attract NDP and the soft Conservative voters – people who want to throw the Liberals out but who don't want the Conservatives in." The Liberal spots aren’t attack ads: "They're not about family relationships or personal idiosyncrasies, they are about action and ideas," he said. "These ads are no different than the Conservatives' 'entitlements commercial' with the David Dingwall quote. ['I am entitled to my entitlements.']" Two York grads vie for Danforth riding Liberal contender Deborah Coyne (left) (LLB ’79) holds the distinction of having had a daughter 14 years ago with Pierre Trudeau. She is a graduate of York ’s Osgoode Hall Law School and of Oxford University in England , and for seven years served as a commissioner of the Immigration and Refugee Review Board, helping to decide who is accepted or rejected as a refugee claimant. Poverty and tax cuts are election issues
Martin doing ‘best he can’ PM's Charter promise easier said than done Hogg said he disagrees with the Liberal proposal, which he feels would leave too much power in the hands of judges. "If the courts are always supreme over the legislature, there is going to be a tendency to want to pack the courts with your supporters," Hogg said. Osgoode Dean Patrick Monahan said the constitutional amendment could be done through a simple statute adopted by the House and the Senate, as stated in Section 44 of the Constitution Act. However, he said such an amendment could be changed as quickly by another government, once again under Section 44. Monahan also told The Ottawa Citizen Martin could eliminate the notwithstanding clause "rather easily" because his proposal deals only with the action of Parliament. "No prime minister of Canada has ever used the notwithstanding clause, so I don't think it would be a big step to say we're now going to permanently abandon the possibility of using the notwithstanding clause in the future," said Monahan, who advised the federal government on the issue. ‘Nothing criminogenic’ about drug trafficking The year the right turned pink And in other news... Osgoode best law school in Canada Rwandan hero speaks out at York Earlier, Rusesabagina told the National Post Jan. 9 he is merely "an ordinary man", and that is the message he intended to broadcast as he made his way across Canada on the four-date speaking tour that began in Vancouver and would include York University. "I believe I lived for one reason only, and that is to be a messenger. I lived to tell people about what happened," said the former hotel manager who found himself in the unexpected role of saviour, mentor and morale booster to many hundreds of Rwandans who turned to the Hotel Milles Collines in Kigali to escape massacre in 1994. MBA students rank high in competitions
Figure skater adjusts to new judging system Jazz guitarist happy to be outside mainstream Internet creates challenge for TV Prof publishes new Scarborough magazine Canada's great contemporary poet laid to rest
Playing the naming game He says that early in his career, it struck him that most businessmen are completely forgotten a few years after their death. He sees his charitable works as a way to ensure his name will live on. "Why education?" he muses. "What I'm trying to do is find things that are likely to last a couple of hundred years." But, like most donors, he is also motivated by the desire to repay a debt. "I've done OK in Ontario ," he says, "and I never would have got where I am without my MBA." Knights of Labour changed the lives of Canadian workers Should jurors have final word? It's a thorny topic, however, and the Supreme Court has previously taken "a kind of nudge-nudge, wink-wink approach to it," said Alan Young, a professor at York ’s Osgoode Hall Law School . "It's important that a judge doesn't have the power to tell a jury 'you can't do this,' " Young said. "It's an important power in [a jury's] back pocket in these morally controversial areas." A digital-age writer explores typewriting York one of few schools to recognize ASL
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MONDAY, JANUARY 16, 2006 |
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Two local candidates are exciting particular interest, both politically and personally, in the riding of Toronto-Danforth, reported the Toronto Star Jan. 12. Politically, NDP incumbent Jack Layton (right) (MA ’71, PhD ’83) draws attention as a party leader desperate not to get squeezed between the Liberals and 
Conservatives. Personally, he creates excitement as one half of an attractive power couple, with Olivia Chow, both running for the same party, she in Trinity-Spadina. 
Dennis Raphael (right), a professor in York ’s School of Health Policy & Management, wrote a Toronto Star op-ed piece Jan. 12. "Despite the House of Commons unanimously passing an all-party resolution on Nov. 24, 1989 to achieve the goal of eliminating poverty among Canadian children by the year 2000, Canada 's child poverty rate continues to be among the highest in the developed world," he began. "The appreciation of the importance of poverty by public health professionals and civil servants at Health Canada is present. So why," he asked, "is nothing being done?" Raphael reported that in 14 developed countries between 1946 and 1990, the best predictor of low child poverty rates was a high proportion of left party members in cabinet, 
or "left cabinet share". Even in Canada, the influence of the NDP on minority governments had led to "most of the progressive changes such as medicare and public pensions." He concluded: "The electoral implications of these findings are clear." 
minority linguistic groups. Hogg said Ottawa would also need the support of seven provinces representing half the population to amend the Constitution to prevent Parliament from invoking the notwithstanding clause in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms."There isn't any escape from that," said Hogg, professor emeritus and former dean at York ’s Osgoode Hall Law School . 
"There is a profound change occurring with voters across many jurisdictions," says Daniel Drache , a political scientist at York who has analyzed what he sees as a worldwide shift in the global political centre for a forthcoming book, wrote Doug Saunders in a Jan. 7 Globe and Mail column. "The centre is moving left," he says, but not in the old sense – that is, voters are not simply aligning themselves with left-wing parties. Centrist voters, he says, have become much more activist and mercurial. "The left has to win the centre to its values and agenda." Drache analyzed the 22 elections that have occurred in 11 wealthy nations since 1996. He divided parties into "market" parties – those that devoted their major pledges to cutting taxes and regulations and boosting the private sector – and "public" parties – those that mostly promised to increase social spending, rein in business and boost the public sector. In only three of those elections (Brazil in 1998, Spain in 2000, and the United States in 2004) did the "market" parties attract more votes than the "public" parties. 
The same international pressure that helped end apartheid can also be used to prevent the large-scale atrocities occurring in Africa today, says the man made famous by the movie Hotel Rwanda, reported the Toronto Star Jan. 11. Paul Rusesabagina (right) , whose heroic efforts saved the lives of 1,200 refugees when Hutu extremists began slaughtering minority Tutsis and moderate Hutus in his country in 1994, urged Canadians Tuesday to lobby political leaders, write petitions and demonstrate on the streets. Speaking to about 300 York University students Tuesday, Rusesabagina said the voices of innocents in places like the Darfur region of Sudan and the Congo , where countless people have been butchered and displaced, are calling for help. 
A new system of judging figure skating that places more emphasis on artistry suits Tyler Cochrane just fine, reported TheKingston Whig-Standard Jan. 10. "I like it," said Cochrane, 21. The Glenburnie skater – and second-year York kinesiology student – began competition at the national senior men's championship in Ottawa . "It made me have to improve everything rather than only having to focus on the jumps."Cochrane was to go into the qualifying round with essentially the same long program as the one he skated last year, when he rose one spot in the final round of competition to finish 17th. This was Cochrane's eighth national championship. 
"I like to be an outsider," says Tim Posgate. "And I always want to be challenged, to find different ways of expressing my music," he told the Toronto Star in a Jan. 12 "What’s On" item. Posgate is a guitarist. In his busy pro career since 1989, after graduating with a bachelor of fine arts in jazz performance from York where his teachers included guitarist Lorne Lofsky, saxophonist David Mott and pianist Bill Westcott, he's had a number of bands that mostly steer outside the mainstream. 
Coach calls new hoop fee a 'cash grab' 
A new quarterly magazine, 54 East, which launched in December, celebrates some of Toronto's overlooked neighbourhoods – the ones you can see out the windows of the 54 Lawrence East bus, which trundles from Yonge Street to Pickering, much of it through oft-maligned Scarborough, reported The Globe and Mail Jan. 7. Rafael Gomez, a professor of economics at York ’s Glendon College and the magazine's publisher, says Toronto 's inner suburbs have been "undervalued and underappreciated." A pedestrian-unfriendly road like Lawrence certainly has drawbacks: It's windswept and difficult to cross, and the bus can take its sweet time arriving in the dead of winter – but Gomez says the power of suggestion can go a long way. "It's hard to change your environment physically," he says. "But you can change your perception of a neighbourhood." 
Toronto is in the midst of an incredible building boom in health care, the arts and the university sector. These huge infrastructure projects offer once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for benefactors to leave their mark on the city and the country, reported the National Post Jan. 7. "There are more and more wealthy people in this country all the time," says gold-mining mogul Seymour Schulich, one of the country's biggest philanthropists. "If they want to leave a legacy, they'd better get out and get themselves a faculty while they're still available because pretty soon they won't be." Off the top of his head, Schulich can't even remember how many institutions bear his name. He's got everything from a cardiac unit to libraries. But the four university schools he endows are his babies. (They are: the Schulich School of Business at York, the Schulich School of Engineering at the University of Calgary, the Schulich School of Medicine at the University of Western Ontario and, most recently, the Schulich School of Music at McGill University.) 
In The Iron Whim, Darren Wershler-Henry argues that the typewriter defines not only how we write, but also what we write, who does the writing and how we look upon writing itself, suggested a Calgary Herald review Jan. 7. Despite the fact that typewriters have become an antiquated form of communication, replaced by personal computers, they are still icons of the writing life, part of the romantic sepia-toned image of the struggling author ensconced at his desk, surrounded by gray smoke, discarded drafts and frustration. The typewriter, however, is just as clearly associated with typing pools, secretarial positions and even speed-typing competitions. Writing The Iron Whim, which is based on his doctoral dissertation at York University , enabled Wershler-Henry to understand how nostalgia "looks back on the way that we no longer write and says that it was the correct way." 
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