Oh hell yes, the Chicago Blackhawks do have a very real, very serious problem. Tom Benjamin, bless his soul, is right about this. And in case he hasn't made it clear enough, it is surely irrelevant to the status of the contracts of the players in question whether the team's qualifying offers were filed on time with the league office, the NHLPA office, the Commissioner of Baseball, the Flat Earth Society, or the Emperor of Ice-Cream. These guys are pretty clearly free agents. And their official representatives need to ignore the conflicting interests of their other clients and obey their fiduciary duty. Hello, that's why it's called that!

[as found here]

Rick Moranis Really, Rick? Really? You used to be one of the deadliest satirists alive, now you can't recognize a sputum-covered cliché wriggling on the ground immediately after you've thrown it up? "We sing about the Queen, except we don't anymore! We have moose and beavers on our coins!" It's not even a moose, jagoff. Grade: D

David Rakoff "There is no contest about what I miss most about Canada. It is universal medical coverage. Just thinking about it, and its absence here, can send me into complete despair." Yeah, I got so upset I almost thought about packing my shit and going home so I wouldn't be in complete despair anymore. It's not like Canadian medicare is related to the risk-averseness, deference to authority, and cultural grayness that makes all the funny creative people leave, right? Grade: D

Sarah McNally "I miss the pride and simplicity of a national literature, which probably wouldn’t exist without government support." That's right. Without government support, nobody in Canada would ever write down words with any kind of attention to their order and meaning. Bonus demerits for "My expatriate sorrow is that the weather has become warmer and the government colder since I left." Everybody watch for Sarah's forthcoming novel, Cry, The Beloved Country (From A Suitable Distance). Grade: F

Melissa auf der Mar Student mentioned "Canadian mosaic": would recommend firing squad, but Miss auf der Mar's eternal Grade 7-ness is essential to her earning capacity and should not be discouraged. Grade: D

Sean Cullen "Back home, hockey highlights lead off SportsCenter. That is the height of civilization." A wholly correct, succinct statement. Grade: A-minus

Bruce McCall A trenchant, lively criticism of a civilization that cannot make sense of the Coffee Crisp chocolate bar. I don't eat them all that often myself, but it is nice to have the option for when I go off my usual feed of Caramilks. Grade: A

Malcolm Gladwell "What I miss most about Canada is getting the truth about the United States." Yeah, cute, but c'mon, Malcolm, it's not like every undergraduate in the lower 48 isn't given Howard Zinn along with their cafeteria meatloaf and chocolate milk. If Canada is the place where you get the truth about the U.S., where do I go to get barbed critical insights about Canada? St.-Pierre and Miquelon, maybe? Grade: C (with a circled "Could do better")

Kim Cattrall Nihil obstat. There's always one cheerleader on the squad who's just a little cleverer than the others. Grade: B

A.C. Newman Canada as land of excellent Asian food and terrible pizza. Now there's some news you can use if you're ever visiting (seriously, he's right on the money with this). Grade: A

Lisa Naftolin Did someone give you the idea that this was one of those six-word Hemingway competitions? Grade: Incomplete (see me after class)

Tim Long: "Why do we live here?" "Because it's where people love you." However, there is a magical land far to the south where even more attractive people will love you! Grade: B-minus

I guess people are expecting me to write something about the Heatley thing? I find myself with the exact same thoughts I had after the Oilers' Nylander fiasco. If J.P. Barry's account of what transpired is at all accurate, Bryan Murray committed a fraud on the Oilers and inflicted objective harm on them, and if the NHL weren't being run by blind idiot children some recourse would presumably be available. Of course, all the evidence suggests that Barry is either unable or unwilling to provide the most rudimentary protection for Dany Heatley's reputation and marketability—I had understood this to be part of an agent's job, and indeed a particularly significant part of that job in a world of controlled salaries—so who knows whether he has the story straight. And the Oiler front office can only whine that it has been a victim of unfair dealing so many times before the fan says "You know, fellas, maybe the problem is that you're just really crappy negotiators?" (Not that there was any reason to doubt this in the first place.)

A name that, in the wake of this weekend's NHL draft, all Edmonton is suddenly trying to figure out how to pronounce. I'd like to hear a Finnish person say the word (the player is Swedish, but the name belongs to his Finnish maternal grandfather), but as far as I've been able to cobble together myself, the äs are simple short a-sounds (in terms of English phonology) like the ones in "badass"; the stress is on the first syllable; and the whole thing should probably be spoken with a four-syllable cadence, PAH-ah-yar-vee. I am hopeful some expert will instantly be along to correct me in the comments. We had it easy with Kurri and Tikkanen, guys—let's try to get this right.

Also, I don't know what "Pääjärvi" means in Finnish, but I'm hoping it translates to something like "a taller Markus Naslund".

My column for today's Post is about what went wrong with pandemic planning in northern Manitoba communities: Health Canada's internal argument about sending ethanol-based hand sanitizer to places where ethanol is (unwisely) outlawed was a legitimate one, but it should have happened in, y'know, the actual planning stage. (Tuesday's poorly-focused rant about warrantless disclosures of internet-customer information is here, if you missed it.)

One. Two.

I serve a tiny slice of Gladwellism in today's Post column about breech births. Of course I'm referring to the old, good Gladwell, before he got into the whole corporate-entertainment business.

My Tuesday National Post column is a workmanlike attempt to set context for Alberta's controversial (and inevitably Supreme Court-bound) tort reforms on soft-tissue injuries. Like much of my work, it is not a polemic for or against a particular policy, just an effort to encourage straightforward thinking about it. It is odd that when it comes to healthcare, the Canadian right has sometimes been quick to embrace the "judicial activism" it ordinarily laments, and the Canadian left often seems willing to let individual rights stand in the way of central planning for efficiency (which is the opposite of the inherent logical premise of medicare). And I'm not sure my own thinking about tort reform is any more coherent through-and-through. But as the column indicates, I am reluctant to regard the right to sue for wholly subjective pain-and-suffering damages (which, unlike pecuniary damages, could conceivably be multiplied or divided a thousandfold without impinging on their supposed rationality) as anything but a historically contingent policy choice that governments should feel free to reverse.

A disclosure note I couldn't work into the text: the lawyer for the plaintiffs is Fred Kozak, who is a dominant figure in Canadian media law and has fought on the side of press freedom in many if not most of the important recent cases, including ones to which the National Post was party. He is someone journalists should be naming their children after, and fully deserves to be on any hypothetical shortlist for "Greatest Living Edmontonian".

An observation concerning recent history from economist Scott Sumner, placed here for the benefit of readers situated within yanking range of policy levers:

What has so amazed me about the worldwide supply-side revolution is the way that it has been dismissed by the left in the US, even the moderate left. The Reagan/Thatcher tax cuts were viewed as a sort of right wing plot to help the rich. I don’t know if liberals are even aware of the fact that all countries, including Sweden, were doing the same thing at the same time. This revolution would have occurred even if Reagan and Thatcher had never been elected. Rather they reflected a change in the intellectual atmosphere surrounding public policy formation. A change in what you might call the zeitgeist. Pragmatic policymakers all over the world (on both the left and right) looked at the evidence and reached a consensus that high [marginal] tax rates for the rich were counterproductive. That they didn’t meet the utilitarian criterion. (BTW, a similar worldwide change is now occurring vis-a-vis corporate marginal tax rates, and once again many American economists seem rather oblivious to what is going on elsewhere.)

And who provided the intellectual ammunition for that policy revolution? It wasn’t economists at elite Ivy League schools, and it wasn’t even monetarists at the University of Chicago. In the late 1970s it was the supply-siders, of whom Arther Laffer was the most influential.

Sumner goes on to point out that Austan Goolsbee, an Obama economic advisor (well known to Canadians) who has been cast in the role of Great White Hope by various species of free-marketer, has been sounding an awful lot like someone who was in a coma over the last 25 years. (This palace-intrigue anecdote spotted by Tim Cavanaugh—"the government should not run a car company": no shit, guys—shows why Goolsbee has something of a popular following.)