A 46-point plan

Help! I'm drowning in red tape!

Or I would be, if I were a student applying for a summer job with Canada's federal government.

First, there's the acronym FSWEP.

That's the Federal Student Work Experience Program. Rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?

Then there's the helpful guide for university student applicants published by Parks Canada. The opportunities in this department sound exciting, and I'm sure they will be well paid.

But a 46-point guide?

My favourite point is 45: "YOU'RE FINISHED!"

That's a snare and a delusion. There is indeed a Number 46. It refers you back to the beginning of the process.

Check it out.

Parks Canada

Riding Mountain National Park of Canada

Guide for university student applicants.

Applying for employment at Riding Mountain National Park through the Federal Student Work Experience Program (FSWEP).

1. Go online to http://jobs.gc.ca.

2. Click on “English”.

3. Click on “Students” on the left hand side.

4. Click on “Federal Student Work Experience Program (FSWEP)”, the second bullet point.

5. Click on “Apply on-line”, the fifth bullet point.

6. Click on “FSWEP Campaign 2009-2010”

7. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on “Apply Online”.

8. You are now on a page called “Login to your File”. Since you haven’t got one, click on “Create Account”.

9. Fill in the personal information requested. (The PRI is for internal usage; you can leave it blank.)

10. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on “Continue”.

11. Fill in your home address information. To be screened in for Riding Mountain National Park indicate that your Area of Residence is in “Central & Northern Manitoba”.

12. At the bottom of the page, click on “Continue”.

13. Fill in your work address or other address information. If you don’t have a secondary address, leave everything blank.

14. At the bottom of the page, click on “Continue”.

15. Select a password and a security question and click on “Continue”.

16. Write down your Applicant Number and password (it will allow you to access your file again at a later date) then click on “Continue”.

17. Select “I confirm” and click on “Continue”.

18. Click on “View My Jobs File”.

19. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and you’ll see your My Jobs file. You’ll have to complete all sections marked by a red X before submitting.

20. To do that, start by clicking on “FSWEP Criteria”.

21. Answer the questions on that page and click on “Save”. Complete both dates, when you will be available for full time work and when available for part time work.Note that many of our jobs will have a “part time” component to them either at the beginning of the term or at the end. We strongly encourage you to select a date for which you will be available for part time work or your application will be screened out of our job searches which have a part time component to them.

22. Click on “Résumé”.

23. Copy your résumé and paste it into the box provided. (Don’t worry too much about the formatting; the content is what we need to see.)

24. Click on “Save”.

25. Click on “Work Location”.

26. Select “Manitoba” and click on “Continue”.

27. Select the areas of work in Manitoba that you’d be interested in. Riding Mountain National Park is listed as such

28. Click on “Save and Continue”.

29. Click on “Back”. This will bring you back to your My Jobs file.

30. Click on “Education”.

31. Select your highest level of education, whether you’ve completed it or not. (Ex. If you are currently finishing your first year of university, click on “University”.)

32. Click on “Add”.

33. Fill in the information requested. Under “Academic Level”, select “University Credits” if you are in university but do not yet have a degree.

34. At the bottom of the page, click on “Continue”.

35. Select your Specialization Groups and click on “Continue”.

36. You are now on a long page of specialisations. Don’t be intimidated! Just pick (at most) four specializations that match your strengths. If you pick more than four, the system will ask you to get rid of some until you have only four. Please note that we do not screen by Specialization when selecting candidates.

37. Click on “Save”.

38. Click on “Back”. This will bring you back to your My Jobs file.

39. Click on “Languages”.

40. Fill in the requested information about your language proficiency. Click on “Save”.

41. Your file is now complete! IF YOU CHOOSE, you can complete the final three sections, “Employment Equity”, “Skills” and “Departmental Programs”.

42. If you do not want to complete these extra sections (or, after you are done with them), click on “Submit Application”. This is very important! Nobody will ever see your application unless you click on “Submit Application”!

43. Click on “I Agree”.

44. Click on “Continue”.

45. YOU’RE FINISHED! If you would like to review your file, you can click on “View”.

46. You can always access your file and make changes by using your username and password, selected at the beginning of the process.

Crawl out from under your rock

I usually don't agree with judges who order news media to reveal their sources.

But I do support a ruling that Internet anonymity is not absolute, made by a judge of the Supreme Court of Nova Scotia on April 14, 2010.

The judge ordered Google and The Coast, a weekly newspaper, to reveal to Halifax firefighters the identities and IP addresses of seven people who allegedly defamed them in anonymous comments on The Coast's website.

Whether or not a court finds that any comment in this case was defamatory, the ruling highlights the unfairness of anonymous comments.

Why should I be able to publish online any opinion of you that I feel like, and then hide under my rock of anonymity?

In a broadcast or print format I would have to identify myself, and rightly so.

And no, I still don't think news media should be forced to reveal their anonymous sources.

There is a clear distinction. Battles over anonymous sources involve facts that the sources provide, which are then checked by journalists before broadcast or publication.

Most anonymous web comments are notably fact-free. They are opinions, often breathtakingly ignorant ones.

Unlike mine, of course.

Why I don't read Yann Martel

Yes, I know I would be a better person if I read Yann Martel: Life of Pi, What is Stephen Harper Reading? and now Beatrice & Virgil.

And I'm not exactly sure why I don't.

Something about the topics, maybe? Animals on a raft ... sarcasm about a surly leader ... a writer trying to publish his latest book.

Nothing wrong with a little postmodernism. (Can you be a little postmodern? Or is it like being a little pregnant?) Anyway, what could be more fascinating for an author than writing about his writing?

I wish you all the success in the world, Yann. May you increase in wealth and fame. Not that you're doing badly in the fame department already.

It's just that I often go for stuff over which the news media fawn a little less. Stuff I can decide on for myself.

In the last couple of weeks, for example, I have read and enjoyed Kaspoit!, a crazed piece of fiction that consists almost entirely of dialogue, with few descriptions and almost no verbs. Oh yeah, it's about a serial killer on the Lower Mainland of British Columbia.

Want postmodern? Look closely at the signs in the cover picture.

Then there was Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker-in-Training by Tom Jokinen, a hilarious tale of a few months the author spent working at a Winnipeg funeral home -- incidentally, the place that arranged my parents' funerals.

And A Quiet Flame by Philip Kerr, who has received his share of adulation, and rightly so. This is Kerr's fifth novel featuring Bernie Gunther, an anti-Nazi German policeman and member of the SS who somehow survives the Second World War and flees to Argentina.

Gorgeous description and dialogue in all five. I expect to revel in more of the same when I read the sixth, If the Dead Rise Not.

I also zipped through 88 Men and 2 Women, an anti-capital-punishment memoir by a former warden of San Quentin prison.

Then, for a break from crime and death, I read a couple of Dashiell Hammett stories.

So Yann, as the human resources departments say when you don't get the job, it's not personal.

I'm just going in a different direction.

P.S. Not all reviewers worship Beatrice and Virgil. Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times of April 13, 2010, for example, scorns it as "misconceived and offensive" and as "this disappointing and often perverse novel."

Maintiens le droit

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have apologized to the mother of Robert Dziekanski, who died after Mounties attacked him with a Taser at Vancouver airport in 2007.

It's about time. Dziekanski's unjustified death has damaged the reputation of the RCMP and our country.

Let's applaud Paul Pritchard, whose video of Dziekanski's death kept the issue in the public eye and prevented a coverup.

It's funny to recall the debate over the video two years ago. CBC invited me on air to discuss the burning question: Should broadcasters air the video? It wasn't shot by a journalist!

The answer then and now is: Of course they should. It's news.

Get used to it, journalists.

Upholding the law.

You have arrived at your destination

The Ghost Writer, Roman Polanski's not-so-love letter to America, contains a couple of creaky plot devices and extended product placement.

But look past those, and the usual goofs, to the movie's use of the GPS system in the Luxury European Automobile driven by Our Hero, the ghost. The GPS, apparently living in the past, re-creates a recent trip.

The ghost tries to make his own way but eventually submits to the route advocated by the nagging, unflagging monotone. And discovers ... OK, no spoilers.

How long before the talkative GPS becomes a movie cliche?

Perhaps it will outlast the technology. After all, some movies still feature pre-digital, pre-call-display telephone answering machines that play messages while they are being recorded.

Come to think of it, that device is too handy to abandon just because it's obsolete.

Cameras in inquests: Eventually, or maybe never

No cameras in Manitoba inquests, the judge says.

Manitoba Provincial Court Judge Tim Preston announced on March 19, 2010 that he will not allow broadcast or online streaming of the inquest into the death of Brian Sinclair.

Why not? Because he doesn't have to, for one thing. "The broadcast of an inquest is not something that is reasonably necessary to accomplish my mandate as a judge sitting at an inquest" (paragraph 61).

And besides, judges from the three levels of Manitoba courts will "eventually make decisions in this regard" (paragraph 33).

So until "eventually," people who cannot afford to take time off work or school to travel to downtown Winnipeg and compete for the limited number of seats in the courtroom will have to wait for the coverage in the traditional news media -- TV with no pictures from the courtroom, radio, newspapers.

Maybe they still will, even after "eventually."

Cameras in inquests: A no-brainer

A judge in the Western Canadian province of Manitoba will announce on March 19, 2010 whether he will allow televised coverage of an important inquest.

This should be a no-brainer. Cameras belong in inquests and courts, just as Canada allows them in public inquiries.

Local media outlets are seeking permission to broadcast and live stream coverage of the inquest in the case of Brian Sinclair, whose death after 34 hours in the emergency ward of a large hospital has raised all sorts of issues.

Cameras aren't allowed in inquests and other court proceedings basically because the rules were created before television was invented. But hey, TVs have been in almost everyone's home for more than half a century, long enough to be made almost obsolete by online live streaming and recorded coverage.

Journalists are already covering judicial proceedings on Twitter.

The nurses' union says it fears that disclosing identifying information would endanger some nurses.

Simple solution: if the union can persuade a judge that this is true in any case, the judge can simply ban the disclosure of that information -- just as the courts routinely protect the identities of undercover police and victims of sexual assault.

Judges should leap at this chance to get on camera, and not only because it would allow wide public access to judicial proceedings.

Televising judges at work would shatter myths, perpetuated by tabloid columnists, open-mouth radio hosts and their yappy acolytes, that judges are arrogant high-paid fatcats isolated from reality.

Canadian judges are serious to the point of being boring in court. They are very concerned about fairness and proper procedure.

Oh, and they really don't like people wearing hats in court.

Television coverage of this inquest and trials in general would demolish a couple of other misconceptions created by television dramas, many of them American:

Canadian judges never bang their gavels. They don't have gavels.

And perhaps more important, many Canadian judges are women.

Sit in a a Canadian trial court and you will witness the increasingly female face of justice. Not just the judge, but many of the lawyers and the court clerks and other officials are women.

We have lots to learn and nothing to fear from allowing cameras into this inquest, and into courts in general.

We can even wear hats while watching.