Pie Palace

CBC’s Canadian doctors should face regular testing: medical school head is a great example of poor journalism. The gist of the article is simple: a doctor has recommended that Canadian doctors should be periodically recertified. The journalist has found another doctor else who says “No! doctors shouldn’t be retested.” Without talking to the journalist, we can’t tell if that was to create a sense of conflict, or to make the story more “balanced.”

There are three problems here:

1. The No doctor’s statement:
   

   What we do every day is not really a book learning thing, [...] To say, in fact, that because you pass an exam makes you a good physician every 10 years is absolutely wrong.

   is exactly refuted by the CMAJ editorial:
   

   In Quebec, investigators found that family physicians’ scores on their certification examination and Medical Council of Canada Qualifying Examination were related to provision of quality care after 4–7 years in practice. More recently, Holmboe and colleagues found that physicians’ scores on the American Board of Internal Medicine’s Maintenance of Certification examination was associated with higher rates of performance in care for Medicare patients.

   which goes on to cite the studies in question.
2. The Yes doctor, Wendy Levinson has qualifications as a medical instructor, and appears to study how patients interact with their doctors and is a chair at department of medicine.
3. Meanwhile, the No doctor, Howard Conter does not appear to have any any relevant publications or appointments.

News stories like this are important. They get people to think about how healthcare is delivered in Canada, and how that can be reformed. It’s a pity that the story took the form of “she said, he said” instead of dipping into the empirical studies behind the editorial.

All throughout the US election, Canadian news outlets kept running stories that featured Americans saying things like “I just can’t bring myself to vote for someone with a name like Obama, it sounds too Muslim,” or “I don’t think Obama was raised with Christian values,” or “Should we really elect someone with the middle name Hussein?”

Don Miller has written a brief blessay that may explain this mind-numbing xenophobia. It gybes nicely with Jesus Camp and The Assault on Reason: essentially stating that the unicorn chasersreligious right is born out of a horribly segmented and alienating society.

The same election that made Obama president also denied marriage to millions of Americans. California, Arizona and Florida voted to ban gay marriage. Arkansas banned same sex couples from adopting children. I can’t fathom how the same people who would elect a black man as president would deny consenting adults from making long term commitments to each other. I guess that shows what kind of community I grew up in.

Link to Don Miller via Matthew Helmke.

Let’s get this over with: W is a terrible movie. It’s like a really long “This is Your Life,” showing select scenes from George W Bush’s life: his frat hazing, him losing his first bid for congress, him meeting his wife; while kinda, sorta, almost showing the lead up to his invasion of Iraq.

The documentary portions are boring. It skips over the more tawdry (hence interesting) parts of his life, in favour of showing W’s conflict with is dad. Who cares? The interesting bits are glossed over: why did Laura, a Democrat librarian, decide that W was worth her time? How did W act during his father’s presidency? What did he do as governor of Texas?

There is the occasional jab: Bush and his posse of advisors get lost on his ranch while discussing their plans for the war; the scene where W’s advisors try to convince Colin Powell that the Iraq invasion is diabolical. The movie would have been much better if it had given up on trying to be serious and presented itself as an over-the-top comedy: when W says that god has told him to run for president, it should have been a musical number; Carl Rove should have had devil horns and a tail; W should have had nightmares about choking on an Iraq-shaped pretzel.

If you’d like to see an interesting commentary on the current president, rent Homecoming. It’s weaker on current events, but it’s no less insightful.

The election is over. The NDP and Conservatives gained a few seats. The Liberals lost a few. The Greens doubled their percentage of the popular vote (6%, up from 3%). The only way I can describe the the last 35 days is as a waste of time. The next time Steve-o decides to call an election, Governor General should look to the other parties to form a government.

I really shouldn’t be surprised:

The Green Party isn’t being included in the debates because three of the four establishment parties don’t want the Greens there. I’m surprised that they cared enough to threaten to pull out.
(Update: Edited for style)

The election has begun. And we’re already being let down by our media and our current Prime Minister. Let’s consider a line of questioning on CTV Newsnet coverage (around the 7:30 mark).

Let’s consider the exchange from two angles:

First, there’s the consistency angle. As much as Harper dislikes the Senate, he happily appointed Conservative insider Michael Fortier to the Senate in 2006, and then appointed the unelected Fortier to his cabinet. If Harper feels so strongly about the Senate, why is he appointing unelected people to the senate?

Second, let’s consider Tom Clark’s response. Instead of calling the Prime Minister to task on his inconsistency, he happily skates over the statement and instead asks Harper about hypotheticals (and later asks Harper to promise that he won’t get personal).

It’s easy to see why voters become cynical. The Prime Minister has ignored the spirit of his 2006 election platform, and isn’t being held to task for it. In a rare interview, a journalist has the opportunity to take him to task, but opts instead to drop the name of his media outlet, and ask an essentially meaningless question. Reporters have a responsibility to their viewers – they shouldn’t let a politician get away with this kind of dishonesty.

This is going to be a long election.
(Update: Fixed spelling mistake in title)

Bother.

The city is facing a $70 million shortfall. So city councilor Steve Desroches is proposing that the city license out twenty sites for billboards. Those 20 billboards will net the city $200,000 a year. Sure, they’ll be ugly; city staff will waste time (and money) ensuring proper zoning; and a few trees might have to be cut down to provide decent sight lines, but thats TWO HUNDRED BIG ONES!

Here at PiePalace, we believe in economies of scale. So we’re taking Steve’s idea and SUPER SIZING IT! That’s right. With seven thousand billboards, we could make up the entire shortfall! Sure, most of the city will disappear under a wall of McDick’s ads and signs shilling Timmies’ latest treats, but think of the taxes that will be saved!

(Update: Fixed calculation) Photo credit: Billboard Liberation Front, used without permission.

I was going to post about the street social in support of Ottawa’s Gay Village, but Picasa ate the photo of the poster that I wanted to use. Why did it eat them? Because I saved them to C:\Documents and Settings\Erigami\My Documents\My Pictures\temp which happens to be the directory Picasa uses to temporarily store stuff to the local disk before copying it to the target directory. Doh.

Fixed election dates stop leaders from trying to manipulate the calendar…
Unless we’re defeated or prevented from governing, we want to keep moving forward to make this minority parliament work over the next 3½ years.

Stephen Harper uttered those words less than two years ago. But times have changed. The opposition parties haven’t brought the government down – they’ve cooperatively supported the government on confidence motions. Most importantly, we’re heading into a recession, and voters tend to punish the party in power when a recession hits.

When Steve-O says he is “going to have to make a judgement in the next little while as to whether or not this Parliament can function productively,” he wants you to forget that the opposition parties have tacitly supported his government for the last two years. He’s hoping that you won’t remember that Parliament hasn’t even been sitting for the past few months.

When an election is called later this week, it’s going to be for all the wrong reasons: self-interested politicians making a power grab before the economic shit hits the unemployment fan. We’re going to foot the bill for Steve’s (and Stéphane’s, and Gilles’) power games. At the end of it, we’re going to see a House that looks very similar to our current Parliament (hopefully with a few more Green MPs).