New Media

Was a Muslim prevented from getting on a plane the victim of racial profiling at a Vancouver airport?

Anything’s possible. The complainant says he is “just as in the dark, with no tangible answers from Air Canada, now as I was three years ago”. Well, then, it must be racial profiling.

Or, just possibly, maybe, perhaps, it was the result of the bad luck of having the same name as someone on a US no-fly list that Canadian airport officials were using unofficially at the time. (We now have our own no-fly lists, just like many other countries.).

Racial profiling gets a bad rap. Virtually every plane hijacking in recent memory has been carried out by Muslims, so one would think it might even be a better idea at airports. But it probably wouldn’t be all that effective in practice: Muslims (like Buddhists, Jews and Christians) come in all colors, shapes, sizes and both genders – and of course, discrimination on the basis of religion just looks pretty bad coming from a country that practices religious freedom. Screening everyone is still the only way to go.

It’s a spirit bear! No, it’s an orca! No, it’s… Miga?

I may not be the target market for the VANOC plush doll manufacturers, but the 2010 Vancouver Olympic mascots just seem kind of dumb.

Incorporating elements that make us think of BC was a no-brainer, and the designer was undoubtedly inspired by our local wildlife and First Nations legends.

But sadly, two of the characters – Miga the spirit bear/killer whale and Sumi the Thunderbird/killer whale are such a mishmash that no one can really tell what they are without a mascot marketing cheat sheet from the VANOC committee. Ah, well. At least Quatchi the Sasquatch seems sort of cool.

In a post-9/11 world, how do Canadian border agents just lose track of a man for 11 hours inside a secure section of Vancouver International Airport?

Canada Border Services Agency have finally apologized to the family of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski one month after the man’s death following the now notorious police tasering. Now we have a timeline of Dziekanski’s last hours, but still no real answer to the question of why not one single border agent, security officer or YVR manager intervened to prevent what seems to be a perfectly avoidable tragedy.

Talking to associated lefties, NDP bigwig Jack Layton says Canada needs more “green collar” jobs to help move Canada into the new “energy economy”.

Notwithstanding the leftist leader’s transparent sloganeering and grandstanding, the theme is definitely a good one: business owners and unions (in that order) ought to take the initiative to train their workers in environmentally sustainable service delivery whenever applicable.

It would be a good thing for everyone if all aspects of our modern-day life were run with sustainability principles in mind. Nothing wrong with saving money and helping stave off climate change for another century.

Paraphrasing Vancouver City Hall Climate Change protection manager in my feature in Granville Magazine’s latest issue, small steps are the key to meeting environmentally-friendly objectives. If everyone in Vancouver reduced their greenhouse gas emissions just half a ton, we could meet Vancouver’s 2012 GHG reduction target.

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Raven and Jason is a Globe and Mail documentary about a couple living under horrific conditions in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (Thanks to Beyond Robson for the link).

The documentary shows their lives intimately, including scenes of them shooting up drugs. The exercise clearly gives them little pleasure, other than deadening their senses to their plight.

The documentary brought to mind a recent Economist article highlighting some experimental research that poked a big hole in the longstanding theory of drug addiction. The research implied environment had far more to do with addiction than the drug itself.

Oft-quoted studies on individual rats in little empty cages showed that when given a choice between cocaine-laced water and regular water, the rats invariably chose the toxic water.

But in the study highlighted in the Economist, rats living amongst their kin in spacious and stimulating environments (essentially Vancouver’s West End for rats) almost always rejected the drugged water.

Even a group of rats fed drugs to create dependency rejected the poison when later given the opportunity, despite the discomfort of withdrawal.

Given the despair of the Downtown Eastside, it’s certainly easy to see how the Economist study would apply.