“I assumed he was going to say he was suffering from some sort of illness,” Irving Abella, former president of the Canadian Jewish Congress and a history professor at York, told CBC-TV, reports the National Post Dec. 18. Abella was referring to native leader David Ahenakew’s apology for making anti-Semitic remarks. “He didn’t just burn bridges. He blew them up.”
Marketers use Net to reach children
“This is a media-sensitive group,” says Alan Middleton, a marketing professor at York University’s Schulich School of Business, in a story in the Dec. 23 issue of Maclean’s magazine on how marketers are using the Internet to reach children. “Their antennae are up and the self-developmental risk of missing something and being seen as dumb, or out of date, or not in tune with their friends is very high.”
The promise Eves had
“The promise [Eves] always had [was] that he was a more reasonable Mike Harris. I think that’s actually been submerged in the kind of apparent indecisiveness,” said Robert MacDermid, a political science professor at York University, reports CP Wire Dec. 17 in a story comparing current Ontario Premier Ernie Eves with his predecessor. “[It has] made him look a little befuddled about where the party’s going.”
Ottawa’s brain gain
“This is very much where I want to be, public policy with a strong interface with politics. I always thought I would end up in something like this, but I always thought it would be later in life,” York graduate Irvin Studin told reporter Virginia Galt in a Globe and Mail Dec. 18 story on how the Privy Council Office (PCO) lured back some of Canada’s most extraordinary exports – top scholars studying abroad. “My heart is here, my family is here,” said Studin. He is a Rhodes scholar, a graduate of the London School of Economics, an international-calibre soccer player, speaks English, French and Russian, and is proficient in German. In the summer of 2001, Studin worked in New York with investment bankers Lehman Brothers Inc. But he has always felt the call to public service, the desire “to give something back.” A policy analyst in the priorities and planning secretariat with the PCO — the top-echelon body that advises the federal cabinet – Studin, 26, provides weekly briefings to the Clerk of the Privy Council on foreign policy issues, including the situation in Iraq. “It’s a dream job,” Studin said.
On air
Bob Hanke, York University cultural studies professor, Division of Social Science, Faculty of Arts, was interviewed over the phone on CBC’s “Metro Morning” Dec. 17 about a battle over park space at the site of the Toronto Transit Commission’s Wychwood Avenue streetcar barns. Hanke is co-author of a 27-page study, Signs of a New Park, documenting the history and politics of the formation of a new city park in the midtown Toronto neighbourhood.