rfmcdonald | [LINK] Some articles from Saturday's Globe and Mail (Reply)

I'm willing to claim that The Globe and Mail of Toronto is the closest thing that all Canada has to The New York Times. Certainly the Globe's thicker on Saturdays than the NYT. Regardless, here's a few interesting articles from today's paper.

Rob Huebert writes ("As the ice melts, control ebbs in the Arctic") about how Canada's unwillingness to invest money in patrolling the Northwest Passage--a corridor between Canadian Arctic islands that will become navigable come global warming and, oh, well, "contested" Canadian territory--means that the Passage will be lost to Canada.

Mark MacKinnon ("Crisis in Georgia: How Misha messed up") writes at length about how Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili could possibly have been in a place where risking war with Russia is a good idea. The answer, in brief, seems to be an idealistic personality that succumbed much too quickly to the belief that he was the nation's saviour.

Meanwhile in the Report on Business section, Shawn McCarthy and Matthew Campbell tackle "Russia's Energy Card" for the public the question of what, exactly, the import of the pipelines crossing its territory are to the international and European oil markets and Russian oil=-based geopolitical dreams.

In another installment in the ongoing drama of controversial Canadian abortion doctor Henry Morgentaler's impending naming to the Order of Canada, Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin says that she did not vote on the Morgentaler issue despite heading up the search committees

Lawrence Martin points out that it's spectacularly hypocritical of Canada's Conservative minority government to complain about obstructionism in others when it produces 200 page handbooks telling MPs how to be obstructionist and MPs don't bother turning up to committee meetings. Ah, well, elections need to be justified somehow.

Ian Bailey commemorates the 150th anniversary of the first telegraph ever sent, between Queen Victoria and President James Buchanan of the United States. The bandwidth, though, was horrid: "'The Queen desires to congratulate the President upon the successful completion of this great international work, in which the Queen has taken the deepest interest,' said one passage in the monarch's message, which took over 16 hours to transmit in Morse code."

Jessica Leeder writes (Chinese-Canadian diaspora fostering new bond with homeland
) about how, with growing immigration and China's success, new generations of Chinese-Canadians are coming to identify more closely and proudly with China.