Stephen Taylor

I don’t know the exact date that this happened but CBC.ca has finally joined up with the rest of the online and syndicated world and has started to offer its news in RSS format. All of the good stuff is there including Canadian, International and local news (including Toronto, Ottawa and even the North – you can now get news updates from Iqaluit as it happens)

RSS is syndicated content that is easily read by a news reader and thus notifies you whenever new content is posted… think of instant messaging meets news.

Ahem, this would be a good time to plug my own RSS feed.

I sent CBC news an email asking for the service back in the summer and received this reply:

Following your request, it is impossible to send you any RSS feed due to our strict policy. We understand your point, but we do not send it to particulars. We hope this will answer your questions

I guess that either enough people asked for it or enough of their staff were already receiving RSS content from the New York Times or CNN… which reminds me of a tour I took of the CBC newsroom a couple of years ago… I asked a staffer where CBC gets most of their news to which she replied, “We watch CNN a lot”

Paul Martin is touring Northern Africa and meeting “a lot of leaders”… and… yes, is actually on Christmas vacation.

Yahoo News has more:

But his staff threw into doubt whether there would be more work than play during the tour. “We’re discussing a courtesy call with the king and prime minister of Morocco, but nothing is firm,” said Melanie Gruer, Martin’s deputy communications director.

She could not say what other leaders Martin was referring to, but said he would be doing a lot of reading of official documents.

Ha, sounds like a familiar excuse! Kinda like how some lawyers will mock a client at lunch and bill the account for the hour… or how some graduate students will take a day off for *ahem* “reading” (sleeping).

Have a Merry Christmas Mr. Prime Minister! Everybody deserves some time off. At least you vacation under the guise of work rather than under a cloak of secrecy as Jean Chrétien was known to do:

Jean Chretien’s staff jealously guarded Chretien’s holiday plans and never revealed them, though it was generally known he spent most of his winter vacations in Florida

Prime Minister Paul Martin was in Libya yesterday and met with its dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. Martin apparently hit it off with the man known for his role in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie Scotland as the dictator remarked, “On a personal level, we have gained a quite personal friendship. We are friends not just because he is the Prime Minister of Canada but we shall always be friends, even if he is not the Prime Minister”.

Touching.

Gaddafi even shared his vision for Canada: “Pretty soon I expect Canada to be a jamahiriya (a revolutionary socialist state of the masses led by a military dictatorship)”

Martin was in the Libyan desert for the tent summit to mark the one year anniversary of Libya’s renunciation of its weapons of mass destruction program. While this marks a good first step for the north African nation, Gaddafi still reigns over countless human rights abuses.

While Canada may have economic interests in the area, it is unfortunate that our Prime Minister is visiting with Gaddafi (given the human rights abuses and criminal past) rather than focusing his efforts elsewhere.

Belinda Stronach, the Conservative Party of Canada trade critic, questioned the focus of the Prime Minister’s priorities:

“the Prime Minister should have been spending a lot more time getting the basics of our national trade interests right first before spending several days with a known unpredictable and eccentric North African dictator … There is still no political strategy for investing political capital in our critical relationship with the United States, where the border is the Achilles heal of our prosperity. Why has the Prime Minster not toured the United States building the key and diverse political relationships so necessary to fight back the Byrd Amendment and try to prevent future Byrd Amendments at source? We need to retrieve the $4 billion in softwood lumber industry money confiscated in the United States, to open the border faster to the devastated livestock industry, which has lost $5 billion in the BSE crisis” — Belinda Stronach, Conservative Party of Canada

A particularly good question considering that I don’t remember the last time a Canadian Prime Minister has even gone on a ‘trade mission’ to our most significant trading partner, the United States.

The National Post has more details on the visit. Also, check out the Lybian news service’s account of the tent summit, it’s amusing. Quotes like “Paul Martin expressed during the meeting his country’s appreciation of the wisdom, vision and strategic analysis of the Leader and his initiatives and efforts in securing peace and stability in the world. He underlined that all of the Canadian political figures appreciate and respect the Leader’s vision, initiative and efforts at all levels.” (Sarcastic emphasis added by me) show the hallmarks of a military dictator’s grip on the media: narcissistic and editorialized news.