August 18, 2008

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COVER

WHY YOU'RE STILL GETTING GOUGED

Once a month, Henry Tenby jumps in his car—just after the morning rush hour and with a tank close to empty—and makes a 45-minute drive from his Vancouver home to Blaine, Wash. After zipping across the border using his recently acquired Nexus pass, he fills up with cheaper American gas and stops off at a packaging store, Hagens of Blaine, where the aviation buff and Internet entrepreneur picks up the computer parts and memorabilia he routinely buys online from the U.S. and has shipped there under his name. By COLIN CAMPBELL

MAIL BAG

'Conrad Black is in jail because he has never tempered his ego with an ounce of humility'

THANK YOU for your article on the challenges of air travel ("Why air travel is hell," Business, July 28). My wife and I took a trip a few weeks ago that was most frustrating. When we arrived at the Air Canada ticket counter at the Ottawa airport, we were asked to print our own boarding passes, which wasted a lot of time.

INTERVIEW

'Post-1988, winning became a dirty word. There was mediocrity. It was okay just to participate. We should strive to be the best.'

Good enough was never good enough for Alex Baumann. His attitude won him two gold medals in the 200and 400-m individual medley at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. His competitive spirit also earned him enemies after he retired from competition and demanded accountability from Canada’s failing swim program.

NEWSMAKERS

A NOVEL CANDIDATE

There’s a story Tom King likes to tell. It’s about the Liberals and the Conservatives, and how they’re a lot like the pair of hotshot Romeos who used to court his mother’s friend Nora, back when King was a child, and the two women ran a beauty shop out of a converted carport. By LIANNE GEORGE

WORLD

DOES CHINA HAVE IT RIGHT?

The China as portrayed in much of the Western media is far from the China that those of us who live here as foreigners, sharing in the excitement and the progress of this remarkable and dynamic country, find so compellingly attractive. As one who has been coming to China for more than 40 years and who now spends most of his time here, I cannot help but contrast, with dismay, what see and experience here with the negative image to which so many in the West are exposed. By MAURICE STRONG

FAITH

GO FORTH AND PRAY, COMRADE

On almost any day, the scene outside Shanghai’s Jade Buddha Temple could easily be confused with a major celebrity event. Limousines compete for curb space, and sophisticated urbanites line up with tourists as well as peasants and workers from every region of China to purchase tickets. By PAUL WEBSTER

NATIONAL

HITTING GOLD ON SKID ROW

“I’ve got to be out by September,” says Joe, pointing to the Pacific Hotel, a boarding house in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Inside, rats with names— Mick and Joe are two—patrol the halls. Sometimes bugs drop from the ceiling. But for years, the Main Street hotel, with its streetlevel pub, has been home. By NANCY MACDONALD

THE BACK PAGES

HAVE SOME CHOCOLATE CHIRP COOKIES

The Vancouver Indian fusion restaurant Vij’s is a top-of-thefood-chain kind of place—cool decor, stellar reviews, discerning patrons willing to wait hours for a table. So, in June, when proprietors Vickram Vij and Meeru Dhalwala introduced cricket paratha, a flatbread made from a creature so lowly it’s often crushed underfoot, media outlets as far afield as France were abuzz. By ANNE KINGSTON

National

LESS CRIME, MORE FEAR

Crime can be a hard subject to think clearly about, especially in the aftermath of a particularly disturbing murder. Politics rarely helps to bring the real issues into focus. Asked by reporters last week about the horrific death of Tim McLean, the 22-year-old Winnipeg man who was stabbed and then beheaded by another passenger on a bus travelling a lonely stretch of Manitoba highway, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day took the opportunity to call for the case to be prosecuted “as aggressively as possible”—as if there was some reason to imagine the authorities might go easy on the killer. By JOHN GEDDES

SPORTS

TABLE TENNIS TEMPEST

Elite Canadian table tennis athletes are similar to many our imported goods: they too come from China. Four of the five athletes representing Team Canada at the Olympics were originally from this Asian superpower. At the top of our national rankings too, Chinese players dominate: they represent seven of the top 10 men’s table tennis athletes, and six of the best 10 women. By ALEXANDRA SHIMO

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