Winnipeg Free Press

Winnipeg Free Press (Newspaper) - February 11, 2014, Winnipeg, Manitoba C M Y K PAGE A7 L ATELY, the headlines have focused on Maui, which had eight shark attacks - two fatal - last year. Never mind that swimming in Hawaii's ocean is safer than driving the roads, tourists and natives alike have emptied store shelves of anti- shark devices despite their dubious effectiveness and reports that a great white shark ate one. Luckily, ferocious sharks are rare and the devastation of a shark attack even rarer. But still, every summer since 1987, the Discovery Channel has capitalized on shark fears with its annual Shark Week, a video carnival of teeth, lunging predation and more teeth. But why are we so fixated on sharks when the oceans contain so many other fascinating, wild and intense species? Perhaps what we need is an Un- Shark Week to introduce viewers to some of the sea's truly extreme animals and help viewers get over their shark obsession. Is it speed you're after? The fastest fish in the sea is not a shark. Sailfish hold the unofficial record at 97 km/ h, and welldocumented speed trials have clocked both tuna and wahoo at nearly 80 km/ h. By contrast, the most celebrated human swimmers train their whole lives to manage 10 to 11 km/ h. Billfish such as marlin and sailfish hunt at such high speeds their cold- blooded senses struggle to keep up. In response, these fish have evolved heaters in their brains and eyes, supercharging them to perceive prey flashing by and gulp them down at highway velocities. You want ferocious? The deep sea's most epic battles don't involve sharks. They feature two of the world's largest creatures, sperm whales and giant squid, and their combat happens in near total darkness. The hunting whale's sharp lower jaw slices into the squid's lean, rubbery muscle. At the same time, countless sharp " teeth" on the squid's tentacles gouge wounds into the sperm whale's expansive head. We can tell the species of squid from the scars it leaves: circular saw marks for the giant squid and razor- straight claw marks for the colossal squid. We also know who tends to win because the hard beaks of these squids end up in the stomachs of sperm whales all over the world. The ocean's deadliest predators are as un- sharklike as can be imagined. The slender, demure cone snail grows a maximum of 7.6 centimetres long, but it can kill a human with a single jab from its small, harpoon- like tooth. These snails specialize in hunting fish, and they have evolved a potent venom that shuts down nerve and muscle function in an instant. Lurking beneath the sand, with its chemical- sensing proboscis sniffing the water like a tubular snake, a cone snail waits for a fish to venture near. The proboscis rears up and shoots a hollow harpoon, lancing the fish's flesh and pumping it full of venom for a near- instant death. Humans are rarely deliberately attacked, but when an acquisitive diver pockets a live snail, things can turn deadly. The snail's harpoon, it turns out, can penetrate swimsuit lining. If it's size you want, the planet's largest fish is indeed a shark: the languid, plankton- grazing whale shark. But the oceans' great mammals are far bigger. The blue whale, in fact, is the largest animal that has ever lived on the planet. Travelling the oceans with an efficiency shipwrights envy, these goliaths live serene lives that may stretch for centuries. They can live longer than any other mammal and probably longer than any shark on Earth, but they cannot claim the title of the ocean's longest- lived creatures. This honour goes to colonial organisms such as cold- water corals off the coast of Hawaii or the glass sponges that build titanic works of architecture below the waves, tending their quiet cathedrals over thousands of years. It should come as no surprise that sharks grab so few superlatives: fastest, deepest, deadliest and so on. After all, they compete for those titles alongside millions of other ocean species, all just as driven to win the game of life. These species thrive in places that have demanded amazing adaptations - such as hydrothermal vents where the water is heated above the boiling point. Or they live in familiar habitats in startling ways. The abundance of attention has been a double- edged tooth for sharks: We may understand them better, but we fear them more. They'd benefit from sharing the limelight with some of the other amazing ocean creatures. Let Un- Shark Week begin. Stephen Palumbi is a professor of marine biology at Stanford University and senior fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment. Anthony Palumbi is a novelist and video- game writer. They are the authors of the forthcoming book The Extreme Life of the Sea . - The Los Angeles Times Winnipeg Free Press Tuesday, February 11, 2014 A 7 POLL �� TODAY'S QUESTION What do you think is the best way to help kids avoid obesity? �� Vote online at winnipegfreepress. com �� PREVIOUS QUESTION Are you satisfied with Canada's performance so far at the Olympics? TOTAL RESPONSES 4,781 Winnipeg Free Press est 1872 / Winnipeg Tribune est 1890 VOL 142 NO 92 2014 Winnipeg Free Press, a division of FP Canadian Newspapers Limited Partnership. Published seven days a week at 1355 Mountain Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba R2X 3B6, PH: 204- 697- 7000 BOB COX / Publisher PAUL SAMYN / Editor WFP JULIE CARL / Deputy Editor SCAN TO VOTE ON TODAY'S QUESTION U NTIL last week, many political pundits and journalists in Ottawa had predicted that Patrick Brazeau had the best chance to escape criminal charges from an RCMP investigation into the Senate expenses scandal. Conflicting evidence about Mr. Brazeau's primary residence in Quebec and his comments that he welcomed any investigation all lent credence to that opinion. Mac Harb, a former Liberal senator who resigned from the upper house last summer, and Mr. Brazeau, a former Conservative senator who was suspended from the Senate last fall, face one count each of fraud and breach of trust in relation to their travel and living- expense claims. If police think they have sufficient grounds to lay charges against Mr. Brazeau and Mr. Harb, then it's almost certain that charges are pending against P. E. I. Sen. Mike Duffy and Saskatchewan Sen. Pamela Wallin. Both Conservatives were suspended from the Senate last fall while RCMP investigate allegedly fraudulent expenses claims. Also being investigated is Nigel Wright, who was Prime Minister Stephen Harper's chief of staff. He gave Mr. Duffy $ 90,000 to reimburse the Senate, and it is that payment which has complicated the Duffy case, as the RCMP are investigating allegations the two men engaged in fraud, bribery and breach of trust. It's been a most tumultuous past 14 months for Mr. Duffy. He was dogged by expenses and residency issues throughout 2013, gave two startling speeches in the Senate in an effort to save his job and then was given the boot from the upper chamber for two years. Mr. Duffy is recovering from heart surgery late last fall and was too ill to travel to Charlottetown for his sister's funeral just before Christmas. Canadians are left wondering just how far afield charges will go from this whole sordid affair. Court documents suggest more than a dozen others, including staffers in the Prime Minister's Office, at least four Conservative senators and Conservative party officials were involved or knew about the payoff deal between Mr. Wright and Mr. Duffy. Meanwhile, the charges against the two senators might just be the start of more black marks against members of the upper chamber. Auditor General Michael Ferguson is looking at each senator's expenses and has promised to name anyone found to have made improper claims and refer the cases to the RCMP. It would be a supreme irony if additional senators do face charges and include those who sat in judgment and voted to suspend three of their colleagues. V ANCOUVER - Justin Trudeau is to be congratulated for his bold leap into the Senate reform debate and for promoting a reform option that does not require constitutional change, and need not await permission from the Supreme Court. Trudeau has undoubtedly hit the political sweet spot in a very messy debate, winning kudos from across the board, including the dean of political journalists, Jeffrey Simpson, and the Canada West Foundation. In the short term, of course, the expulsion of senators from the Liberal caucus will have no impact. The existing Liberal senators have been Liberals since they crawled out of the egg, and they will remain Liberals until they die. Although they will now be called independents, they will continue to support the Liberal party in every possible way and will oppose the Conservative government in every possible way. If you think this assessment is too extreme, imagine the response if Prime Minister Stephen Harper were to follow Trudeau's lead and declare, from this point on, that Conservative senators would be independents. We would likely say " pull my other leg," concluding that dressing up Conservatives as independents would make them no less Conservative or conservative. Trudeau warrants no less cynicism. The proof of the Trudeau pudding will rest on two points. The first is a firm commitment that if he wins the 2015 election, no new Senate appointments will be made until a new appointments process is in place, and that his role thereafter will be purely formal, taking advice from the new process as Harper has pledged to accept advice from provincial senatorial selection processes where they exist. This commitment should be relatively easy for Trudeau, given that whatever he does, the Senate would remain firmly in Conservative hands for at least his first term of office. The second is the truly daunting task of designing a selection process, and here Trudeau's initiative may lead us into the worst of all Senate reform options. The selection mechanism that is most closely associated with Trudeau's proposal is the one used to select inductees to the Order of Canada. Sounds good, except the process is extremely secretive and operates with necessarily opaque criteria. However, do we want senators, who would exercise real power, to be selected in secret through a star- chamber approach? And who will select the selectors? Presumably it will be the prime minister who will inevitably lean towards individuals who are ideologically aligned with his own priorities and agenda. They may not be big- L Liberals but they would certainly be small- l liberals who would seek out ideological soulmates as senators. The litmus test in the selection process would not be partisanship, but it would be ideological, much as is the case with Supreme Court appointments in Canada and the United States. The problem is compounded by the reality that true independents are very hard to find and, if found, may not be individuals we want exercising political power. People with a passion for the national interest are generally caught up in the fray of partisan politics. Do we want power exercised by individuals who are detached from the " real world" of party politics, who bring very idiosyncratic and personal agendas to the policy process? Trudeau has brought new life to a gridlocked debate and Canadians should be grateful. He is now obligated, however, to convince Canadians they should put aside any commitment to democratic principles in favour of a secretive, unaccountable and ideologically charged process. I'm not convinced that we would be well- served in the long run. Dr. Roger Gibbins is former president and CEO of Canada West Foundation. - troymedia. com M AYOR Sam Katz's libel suit against the publisher of the University of Winnipeg student newspaper, the Uniter, and the author of an article the mayor says implies he's a crook is on a collision course with the law's latitude to express outlandish, even unfair views. The object of Katz's legal ire is a short but rambling Dec. 4, 2013 Uniter article by volunteer writer Josh Benoit. It was published under the headline The Local Political Blunder. It invokes, in rapid succession, Rob Ford, Bill Clinton, Martha Stewart, the Sage Creek fire hall, Katz, local property- development company Shindico, insider trading, former city CAO Phil Sheegl, a book of the New Testament and rapid transit. It also concludes with an imagined conversation between Katz and Sheegl. Following the filing of his lawsuit, the mayor said in interviews that he'd settle for a retraction of the allegedly libelous comments, coupled with an apology. So far, neither the publisher nor the writer has retracted the purportedly offending parts of the piece. The University of Winnipeg itself was also sued. But its position is that it was erroneously made a party to the action. The first line of defence to a libel action that targets an opinion piece like Benoit's is what's called the right of fair comment. To raise fair comment as a defence, you don't have to prove the truth of the opinion. You just have to establish it was made in good faith on a topic of public interest. This wouldn't be hard to do in the case of Winnipeg's fire hall- land swap debacle. It was the subject of a scathing Ernst and Young audit commissioned by the city and released last October. The repercussions of building a fire- paramedic station on land the city doesn't own are still being played out at city hall. Fair comment also requires the opinion be made without malice - meaning it wasn't made simply to spread scandal or destroy reputations. Again, not an impediment here in light of the public notoriety of the fire- hall controversies. Canadian defamation law of recent vintage has generally tilted in favour of free expression over protection of reputation. And in a landmark 2008 decision, the Supreme Court of Canada further expanded the fair- comment defence. The case was a Canadian cause c�l�bre . It featured controversial British Columbia radio shockjock Rafe Mair and his employer, WIC Radio Ltd., as defendants. In a 1999 radio broadcast, Mair likened prominent B. C. anti- gay activist Kari Simpson's comments at a public rally to Nazi Germany, the Ku Klux Klan and U. S. segregation- era southern governors. Simpson sued. She argued Mair's on- air comments suggested she condoned violence against gays. The Supreme Court, relying on the doctrine of fair comment, absolved Mair. In doing so, it made a policy decision - that in a democracy, free speech merits the broadest possible protection. The court's clear message was that protection of reputation must generally yield to freedom of expression. In exonerating Mair, the court forged an extraordinarily flexible fair- comment defence. It also went out of its way to underline that though the Charter of Rights and Freedoms didn't apply to the lawsuit - because it didn't involve government action, but rather private parties - it wanted the modern law of defamation ( which includes libel) to mirror what it termed " charter values." The Supreme Court also unanimously ruled expressions of opinion don't have to be fair. " We live in a free country where people have as much right to express outrageous and ridiculous opinions as moderate ones," wrote Justice Ian Binnie on behalf of the court. " Public controversy can be a rough trade and the law needs to accommodate its requirements." Extravagant opinions, figurative speech and even hyperbolic language are therefore permissible. But precisely how far journalists or commentators can go in expressing unfair opinion isn't absolutely clear. Whether fair- comment law protects fictive larcenous conversations between real people like Katz and the city's ex- CAO is anybody's guess. What is certain, however, is that the mayor's libel claim against Benoit and his publisher is now tougher to prove in a Canadian courtroom than it was just six years ago. Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer. By Stephen R. Palumbi and Anthony R. Palumbi Faster, deeper, deadlier The Charlottetown Guardian OTHER OPINION More senators likely to face expense charges Libel has become much harder to prove DOUGLAS JOHNSTON Trudeau's Senate worst of all options ROGER GIBBINS SEAN KILPATRICK / THE CANADIAN PRESS FILES James Cowan, flanked by other newly declared Independent senators, speaks following the announcement they had been removed from the Liberal caucus. Yes 67% No 5% I don't care 28% A_ 09_ Feb- 11- 14_ FP_ 01. indd A7 2/ 10/ 14 8: 15: 27 PM ;