You're right Capitalism your idle speculation is almost certainly wrong. The reasons people go to university are far more nuanced. But really for an accurate measure of the impact of various streams of education they should factor in the damage certain degreed streams do to the environment and to social capital.

Business/Engineering - universities should be judged on the number of white collar criminals produced and the negative economic effects of their graduates outsourcing jobs offshore while they enrich themeselves. On more the engineering side there is the damage to the environment as the result of the creation and production of polluting technologies.

Science - much the same holds as in business and engineering, but perhaps on a smaller scale, although in the medical professions there is the damage done by greedy physicians intent on privatising healthcare.

Arts - A rather large and varied area, but the production of Hollywood tripe, not to mention the endless amounts of advertising or advertising disguised as cultural product along with dumbed down speculation that takes away from informed understanding and instead pushed addictive behaviour. Let's not forget economists and lawyers who also come out of this stream.

:)

Tyee editors, can't you do better than to get the author of a report to write the article extolling its virtues? Is there not someone else who could have reported on the study quoted here? Talk about self-serving journalism!

The debate between universities as better-job factories and institutions of higher learning isn't a very new one. More than 25 years ago, Robertson Davies wrote in The Rebel Angels, set in a thinly-disguised version of Kingston's Queens University that a university should not be treated like a river in which one fished, but an ocean in which one bathed. The modern view, stated by Capitalism above, is simpler: why spend all that money on a degree that doesn't qualify you for a job?

Nowadays, with technical institutions gaining in prestige and university degrees becoming a dime a dozen, perhaps the time is coming for arts faculties to openly embrace the liberal arts and even market themselves to potential students as the place where you get prepared, not qualified. The new private university opening up here in Squamish next year, which will focus exclusively on liberal arts, will be an interesting case study.

I'm certainly biased since my own liberal arts degree did absolutely nothing to qualify me for work in my field, but certainly did prepare me for it.

Heaven forbid someone write about the research they've done, boondocker.

As to the article:

As it is, most institutions can lay claim to the majority of responsibilities cited in the article; for example, UVic, subject of much recent discussion, has its vision. Of course most institutional goals are non-specific and adonyne — for example, improving eduction using innovative techniques. And the process of setting and communicating those goals is only grudgingly public — no thanks of course to involved faculty and students, who unable to address the central concern of education, in the face of hot button issues like environmentalism, tuition, and gender equality.

University serves many purposes. Helping students find a job is just one of them. How many 17-year-olds move in to residence dreaming of a 100K salary and career stability? I'd say they're more interested in how to get a keg into their dorm room without getting noticed. University is about growing up, finding independence and learning about the world. Obviously, some programs are more practical than others, but it's safe to say Arts and Science grads alike (excluding the 1 or 2% who actually get into law or med school), are equally unprepared for the rigors of looking for employment (unless they want to be a lab tech or a teacher).

The Macleans survey is a lark. It's like ranking the 100 greatest songs of all time.

squishy - thanks for the insight!

i do agree - i remember reading an article about how UBC (where I went) trailed SFU and even BCIT - when it came to recruitment for business related jobs.

UBC is recognized as a very good school. However, it may have become too difficult and competitive to get in. I hear the student base has absolutely no personality, or spirit. This is a far cry from the party school I attended in the early 90s.

Technical schools are gaining and more functional schools (i.e. SFU and Waterloo) are really succeeding.

There is certainly a place for Liberal Arts programs. However, the faculty of Arts has evolved into a place where trust fund kids go to make their parents feel better about them attending University. You don' need a crummy sociology degree to prepare you for the real world!

I absolutely agree with the philosopy of the new squamish school, however I would never attend it.

Perhaps if cappy took a few more arts courses, he would have some sort of capacity to reason.

Liberal Arts no longer teach Reason - they teach ideology and have been since the late '60s / early '70s. Some of the smartest people I know are actually people who re-routed themselves out of university in the early nineties and into polytechnical programs after their first year. They're the ones who caught on (unlike me, until too late) that universities were selling a false bill of goods.

These are the autodidacts - also called automaths - of which there are clearly a handful on these threads. Self-taught self-motivated people from all walks of life who are driven by their own curiosities.

The larger research universities already have full coffers. It's the smaller undergraduate universities that need the boost.

Adamw - I agree with your comment on Maclean's ranking of universities being similar to ranking the greatest songs of all time - both are highly subjective. But you have to admit that the Tyee is no peer reviewed academic journal, and touting your own research in this fashion is bit like blowing your own horn to attract attention - something any self-respecting author should be reluctant to do. I stand by my previous comment that Tyee editors are being lazy by allowing this to happen.

The University of Calgary has been steadily dropping year after year in the Macleans survey so it is no suprise they looked for an excuse to stop participating.

sez Cappy.

You only need to ask someone like Cappy who went there.

Martha Piper has turned UBC into a joke.

Agreed, I've always wanted the Tyee to write an article outing Piper for the travesties that have taken place at UBC on her watch.

All I can say is good riddance and I hope her replacement can clean up the mess she left behind. Ironically, her main problem is she cares so much about such clearly inadequate ranking systems (like Maclean's) that she's lost sight of the fact the university is increasingly failing to actually be an effective teaching institution.

Squishy - good post, but the Rebel Angels is set not at a thinly-disguised Queen's but at a thinly-disguised University of Toronto. The College of St John and the Holy Ghost is Trinity College (whose image appeared on the dust jacket of the first edition) and Ploughwright College is Massey College (named for the family of tractor makers)...

Are you kidding? She's set UBC up to become one of the major research meccas in the world over the next decade or so. That wouldn't have been possible without her. No comparison between her and her predecessor, Strangway. In fact, she's created something of new paradigm for the new breed of international university president.

boondocker:

Yes, the Tyee is not peer reviewed, but nor is it supposedly objective — and objectivity is a crap pretention anyhow. Really, all this journalism stuff is research articulated and published; for example, articles on water by a guy that researches water. Print is a venue for ideas, and sometimes, I guess, the writer is faced with a choice: get his ideas out there, or wait for someone to discover them.

In the case of this article, I suppose the Tyee could have had a third party assess the paper, but why bother — the article links to the orignal document, and the reader is free to guage the merits of what is presented. No subscriptions required.

I think Nightbloom makes an important and valid point. So is it really appropriate to continue considering "university" as a learning institution? Research isn't just humanistic, it's big business.

And UBC is good at that all the way down its spending demographic: it functions like a well-oiled capitalist wonder-child. Go have a bevvy at one of the three Starbuck's' on campus. Peruse, if you're so inclined, the opportunities to buy a condo at one of the many new development sites. If you wish, put up a wall partitioning the 20x15 box on the first floor of your new condo so you can rent it to an incoming student at $800 a month. Don't feel guilty: that student probably pays their own tuition (from what I hear, a LIKELY scenario). So relax and enjoy your beer at Mahony n' Son's while you chomp on your not-as-cheap-as-McDonalds burger (or, if you need to, go to McDonalds - it's right down the street).

An institution carrying the description "univerisity" cannot be so easily thought of in terms of its historically humanistic roots. Some don't (can't?) function like that anymore. Tuition isn't necessarily about education. But it is always a purchase. And in this culture, it is the buyer who spends and is left with whatever they bought. So don't expect institutions like UBC to be truly worried about whether or not you like your History prof.

But if you do, and say so, you can bet that will be harnessed as best as it can for some great (free?) advertizing in MacLeans.

UBC is the same place that removed water fountains from its campus - to force people to buy Dasani, because of its contract with Coke!

I think it is exciting to walk around UBC these days. It is a beautiful campus, new buildings - but I hear there is nowhere to park.

Martha Piper did a great job of turning it into an international school. However, our students at home are being replaced by foreign students. We cannot even get into our own Universities anymore!!

More spaces - and lets cap the foreign enrollment to where it is now!

That's pure B.S. It's another example of the skewed interpretation of basic humdrum realities that a few mobilized campus groups are pleased to disseminate (invariably campus groups of the radical Left, I might add), who don't let mundane reality trouble their blinkered perceptions. The origin of that myth was the protracted state of disrepair of the Buchanan Arts complex. No one denies the place was getting atrocious. A few broken waterfountains had been 'bagged' while UBC's Land & Building Services waited for the provincial government to renew a program which subsidized physical plant rehabilitation on BC university and college campuses. The Administration was simply waiting until a ministry-funded refit of the entire complex could be undertaken rather than take money out of the classrooms for piecemeal repair projects in advance of a full-spectrum building assessment.

Sounds pretty routine, but that's just reality. There's plenty of water fountains at UBC.

Last time I was at the SUB (Student Union Building) at UBC I purchased a sandwich and then I asked the cashier for a glass of water. Even after I had purchased a sandwich from her the cashier refused to give me a glass of water stating that she was not allowed to because of university protocol. This is so memorable because it is not everyday that someone refuses to give a paying customer water although in some countries it is illegal to refuse to give someone water.

nightbloom
They were 'waiting' for funding to provide access to potable water?

This is same institution that will sell and /or lease land to anybody and his dog if the profits in the deal are sufficiently high. Martha Piper has done her very best to ruin a university I was once proud to attend.

Give yourself a break man. I see you managed to bring your general critique of the left into this debate too.

Martha Piper has turned UBC into a joke. A moneymaking joke and a very bad one. Good riddance to her and her rubbishing of what was once a fine institution and is now nothing more than a moneygrubbing whore.

Capitalism:

I agree, though Waterloo is only succeeding in the engineering and cs fields.

I agree with this as well. Arts students are big source of income for many universities.

nightbloom:

Like who? Capitalism?

Cap:

You are right! That should have been taught extensively and across the board in grade school. After all, who wants an illiterate physicist.........?

Alcibiades, that's a little harsh...but it's an attitude I've encountered a lot. Everyone likes to bash UBC because it's been extremely effective in pursuing this new paradigm. That's all well and good - people know what it's all about, and can pick and choose their school. So I don't think anyone denies that UBC is the most "student unfriendly" campus among the big Canadian universities. But if you're an up and coming researcher in Life Sciences, Biotech or Partical Physics who's trying to get connected to the global communities of leading-edge professionals in your field, then UBC is one of the few universities you can attend north of the 49th parallel.

UBC is obscene. It's trickle-down academia — put all you're resources into coddling the intellectual creme (whatever that is) and some of that knowledge will trickle down. The best part is that taxpayers fund the entire assinine operation.

But I guess it looks nice, because nobel prizes and top-tier "researchers" make a more concrete symbol of success than, say, a generally well educated populace.

Taxpayer generosity sees the university with funds. In return for this generosity — as well as a probable payment of tuition — taxpayers should demand and expect a facility which foremost is designed to educate; and this education should be for all citizens, to enhance their intellect, making them better participants in democratic society, as well as better and more efficient worker, amongst other things.

Taxpayers should not expect their monies to fund career students, academic pet projects, excuses to look busy researching the same meaningless crap, top-heavy administrations, and so on. And they should should be right pissed that they're funding institutions which not only fail to meet their expectations, but make a good deal of money doing so.

adamw - taxpayers can't make the claims on universities that they once did. Their slice of the pie has been diminishing for a while now. A lot of the major capital expansion projects on the larger campuses now (like UBC) are privately funded, usually at a rate of between 50 and 80 percent, with the government either matching the funds or simply providing the top-up.

Unfortunately, post-secondary education is a 'service' in name only (if that). We're all consumers now.

Nightbloom: The so called new paradigm is nothing more than an obvious and feckless search for corporate sponsors. Universities are only useful and effective institutions in so far as they are 'not' part of the bigger corporate and governmental picture.

Martha Piper and her pandering are/were a bloody disgrace. It's lucky she didn't sell/lease/give away the whole damn campus.

If you have an ounce of gumption you'll acknowledge what an utter disaster she and her administration have been. We not have the spectacle of an old colleague of mine, Martin Zlotnik, going cap in hand to see if he can get UBC's sports teams into the NCAA. Utterly shameful and pathetic.

No doubt there’s money in it.

We’re not consumers – we’re whores.

should be we 'now have the spectacle' not 'we not have the spectacle'. This issue makes my blood boil.

It is merely the natural and logical result of the rape of the universities during the Culture Wars. The bulbous bag of hot air which contains the accumulated falsehoods of the academic Left have collapsed, but like termites they have eaten away at the ancient beams that were really holding up the superstructure all along. The logical result of Left 'liberation' is absolute full-spectrum exploitation. You should be proud of 'your' accomplishment - it has come to fruition on campuses across North America.

nightbloom
You're priceless.

The sell out of the academy has absolutely nothing to do with the left. When it comes to accumulated falsehoods the corporatists who now run the place have all sold their birthright - and our future - for a mess of pottage. Not my accomplishment nightbloom. I was once at a meeting in the United States with the same M. Zlotnik who now prides himself on the idea of selling 'sports' as an American style commodity at a once great institution. At that time he had the temerity and spunk to stick up his hand when it was suggested the organization to which we both belonged would soon stoop so low as to admit left-handed Jews. Marty raised his hand and said he was a left-handed Jew. In those days he stood for something and was willing to stand up against the status quo.

Not any more. And the so-called institution of higher learning we both attended is much the poorer for the sell out, not an iota of which is the 'responsibility' of the left. It is a corporatist sell-out hook, line and sinker

We're agreed that there has been a sellout - a betrayal of fundamental ideals - but we disagree on its root cause. From the mid '70s onwards, the current trends that now dominate the larger university campuses had become all but inevitable. There are a host of reasons for that, but the issue I raised played a pivotal role in undermining the sacrosanct status of the university classroom.

I think not.

Just a few steps back up this thread you were acting as Martha Piper's chief tout. The one thing you can always be counted on is to make some kind of connection which redounds negatively upon progressive institutions and radical critiques of mainstream politics.

You can't have it both ways. Too much military thinking I guess. The root cause of what's destroying our society and many of its pivotal institutions is not the left. Never has been.

In fact, for more than a hundred years it has been the left that pointed (in a frequently mistaken and often flawed way it is true) to another set of possibilities which did not guarantee the preservation of a small elite class of over-men who make the rules for the rest of society and suck up most of its material benefits in the process.

What is happening at UBC is no different.

I suppose one should applaud at least the fact that you finally acknowedge that a 'sellout' has taken place.

This issue makes my blood boil too.

Taxpayer funding and undergrad tuition are still the biggest portions of the academic feed; however, it's not the direct doling of cash it used to be.

I don't want to encourage nightbloom, but I think he has point — even if he's not hitting it. The academic caste has been eroding its integrity, with boundless enthusiasm, for the last 40 years. (I wouldn't call it the "left".) And not merely re: selling out to the corpratists; the philosphy and culture of academia is degenerate. Over-specialization and a cynicism by which research and teaching are viewed as much as a tasks as an interests — these should rank with crass attitudes and superstar professor bling when diagnosing the academic condition.

Agreed adamw.

Some of the biggest sellouts are in the business faculties. Every time I see a paper from a commerce student I am more thoroughly disillusioned about how bad things can actually get and still these students get their degrees. Not that many basic arts students are much better. What counts for scholarship in the universities I'm familiar with these days would barely get a passing grade in high school 50 years ago.

SFU’s little ‘private university’ and UBC’s welcome mat for ‘paying students’ without the slightest grasp of English is only part of the problem.

What universities are doing is selling a "product" what they aren't doing is teaching critical, independant thought process.

I agree with this as well. Arts students are big source of income for many universities.

Likewise business faculties and similar pseudo-academic fields, where the degree is merely a job ticket and whatever garbage is inculcated during study is quickly forgotten afterwards. Universities as a cash cow has little to do with faculties of Arts, which typically are poorly funded, rarely intellectual in the old sense, and have to take the brunt of anti-education snipes. The implication in both your comments that Arts is just a cash cow obscures the reality that a university education used to primarily BE arts (other than music, medicine and natural science, which were the other part of the old curriculum).

"Arts" has been downgraded to little more than a superfluous department in what are now just overblown business-polytechnics meant to churn our corporate staff, bureaucrats, engineers and dutiful research scientists. A degree for kids who can't do maths, maybe, but that's the problem: the concept of a DEGREE, rather than an education in the old sense. Shockingly there's even a directive within the SFU Humanities department that research into the classics has to be PROFIT-DRIVEN. Huh?

The big mistake, as Jane Jacobs has pointed out among many others, is that "credentialing" has become more important in education than actual CONTENT. What you're left with are soulless number crunchers, aspiring marketing and management executives, and shills for the big machine (engineers, software/hardware, research science).

And for what it's worth, it's not Arts students I see driving expensive vehicles and living in condos and the other accoutrements of those-born-to-money.

Side thought on this: those who ARE in the money are not learning anything about civilization, which was the old point of university (believe it or not); they're learning how to run businesses or technical operations of one kind or another. That the inherited wealth of this world is more concerned only with more wealth, and their own security, rather than using the available resources to enrich themselves educationally as much as possible is truly tragic for what's left of our culture. Higher ideals? Out the window along with higher education - a phrase which used to mean a lot more than how to be a bean-counter or sales manager.

...which all translates into the simple unfortunate reality that universities have become apt reflections of the society from which they are derived. Society and culture invest such things into institutions (like universities)...not the other way around.

Excellent point, Skookum1 - those who can afford to send their children to university generally want them to get a "real job" and continue the profiteering down the generations. The problem is that the foundations of this new society are so obviously unsustainable. Meanwhile, there are an amazing number of "educated" people who have a mentality akin to hiding their heads in the sand when it comes to solving larger problems than how to improve profit margins in the next quarter.

So instead of universities teaching students to think critically, and challenge the prevalent norms for the greater good, they are producing people with qualifications merely to buy into a system they should be working to improve.

I actually did some research, long ago, on academic literature relating to the conversion of universities into large-scale public education from their older universitas quality and the "deep education" common in university graduates from the "old order"; the non-credit, non-course nature of European-style university education as derived from the scholastic colleges established either as an adjunct to the church, or by private (noble, usually royal) patronage. Aside from the broad curriculum, the foundations of which were usually attained even before entry to the baccalaureate program (notably classics and all those surprisingly useful dead languages), the older system did not have separate courses, timetables, or assignments. What there was instead, as still in the European system, is the dreaded multi-day examination in the spring, where all your assembled knowledge in a bewlidering range of fields is put to the test in a series of written (not multiple-choice) questions. This did specialize into departments - where the broad range of topics is within one main, or general, field or combination thereof, depending on which school at which college you were at (e.g. history/economics, or literature/poetics/philosophy). But the concept is the same - broad, intense education compounded by a need to write cogently on questions posed. How much attention you paid or input at the various seminars, lectures, colloquiums and student-life discussion would determine what you might be able to answer; but the old exam system puts your ability to reason and articulate to test. The education is in how to think, not what to think.

It was the success of people who were taught this way that led to the idea that a university degree led to a better job, a better station in life, and the idea offurthering it to the masses required changes to make it quantifiable, with shared standards that could be measured. Quantifiably NOT qualifiably (if those are words?). And new fields and new professions wanted university accreditation, or implicitly needed it (as with the advance in physical sciences and medicine), and fields not directly related to the desired profession of someone enrolling became looked on as "electives" or dross, as they still are by most techno-commerce students (and faculty).

One of the main themes literature was the derivation of the system of credits and hours and separate courses for various chunklets of information. The quantification of knowledge into separate, marketable chunks, with grades determined by point scores rather than quality of thought or ability or knowledge. Writing skills and discursive skills were set aside by the modern lecture-tutorial system and the loosey-goosey standards in writing quality. In more recent times this has become compounded by ideological tub-thumping and demands that students learn rote the proper way to think about a given issue, and an over-generalization and base simplification of the past; an ossification of doctrine and the re-tooling of the public thinking box. "This is what we want you to think NOW, don't argue with us." Students who do get the rare professor who encourages them to speak their minds make the mistake of attempting to do so in classes where that's the last thing that's wanted. And if you want your grade - your numerical, quantifiable proof of education - you'll agree.

It's all box-think now. Lateral thinking, general knowledge, education for education's sake, is all anatheman and looked down upon not even as old-fashioned by as useless. And at BC universities (SFU more than UBC, and apparently less so at UVic) the old sense of on-campus life and community and the intellectual/experiential life of studenthood has been pushed aside by a harsh technocratic work ethic and a physical environment more reminiscent of a large corporate office-cross-community college type buildings than of the halls of academe. There is no sense of ferment, of community, of student life; there is instead a long commte after a day of crowded hallways and lecture halls, and some time for homework in between jobs (unless you're one of the many kids with the Lexuses etc). SFU was already going this way back in '77-'81 when I was there before, but there was still a sense of intellectual and cultural space about the place, and people talked to each other and there was a lot of cross-disciplinary socializing, including the profs (who usually drank at the pub like everyone else; not now, but no one drinks at the pub anyway). People are getting degrees, but they're not getting an education, nor the old flavour of the student life and the emergence of adulthood and sophistication that implies. Now these places are just big high schools, with not much more of an advanced mentality or sociality.

But as you say, universities reflect what society puts into them. Garbage in, garbage out, as the saying goes.

Postscript while waiting for 60 sec delay on 2nd post: lately there was that big fete of Arthur Erickson's legacy - at the VAG? Expected to see something here from Helena, I guess, on his work; all the more to lay into the disaster that is the design of SFU, for all the architectural accolades it's gotten over the years. All the grand architecture - the rotunda, the mall, the quad - is for show; the spaces are useless and life (such as it is) is forced indoors; and the actual student space is a warren of complicated corridors without any of the grand views that you would have expected the university design to have used to great effect. Yeah, the offices get the views, for sure....one of the proposed designs was seven ziggurat-style sem-conical pyramid-towers (er, something like that) linked by battlement-style walls, with outward-facing windows on all sides. The other designs for SFU, if you ever get a chance to see them, are all very interesting and make you wonder what the selection panel was thinking...

Good stuff Skookum1, only wish I had more time. Keep it up. btw, did you see the little blurb in the G&M at the weekend about whom has been named as the 'other woman' in the Tie Domi divorce action?
Let me give you a hint, it's a former paramour of Peter the Prostrate.

One thing about Belinda, you can't fault her taste in beefcake....if only the Trudeau boys weren't so young, huh? Well, y'never know I guess....thing is if this were the States that wouldn't have been in the G&M, it would have been on Entertainment Tonight and in every single one of the 40 different supermarket tabloids. Canada is so disappointingly discreet about the lurid stuff. I mean, if you're going to wallow in the filth why not toss it around a bit, too?

Sudden vision of a Stronach 34 Sussex: the female apposite to Trudeau's reign of petty lechery...handsome dates in and out of the porte-cochere like kids getting on and off a carousel, stylish get-aways to Jamaica, Whistler and Maui (where presumably the party is at Fred and Kathy's place), the occasional romp through the Canucks dresing room, shaking hands with the nude Sedins a la On Any Given Sunday, late-nite snooker games with the Senate, and the Opposition calling her the Whore of Babylon and worse, and people returning her majority after majority because of her escapades (again a la Trudeau). Peter by then, of course, will have married Condi and will be happily living as a consultant in D.C....

Love it!

You should get to work on a script - nobody in Canada would buy it but Papa Frank might finance a stateside version. Somehow I can't imagine the Sedins 'nude' though - eating Swedish meatballs and drinking lingonberry juice at IKEA - that's a distinct possibility though.

I see Condi has been bearing her soul on US TV too. Missed it, wonder if she had anything to say about the great white north?

Well, she did say how much she liked sleeping in the Atlantic breezes, and how rested-up she was. I expect we'll see more of Condi, if not overtly in Pete's hometown, but certainly on a discreet basis; and only just up the road and across the boundary from Kennebunkport, too (if GW even hangs with his Dad, that is).

As for the Sedins I just picked their name out of the air; I'm not enough of a Canucks fan (if at all) and barely know the roster; whomever has the suitable build (and aplomb) for a full frontal, shaking hands with the exec lady who comes "backstage" during the game. Would have said Bure "back then", wouldn't have a clue now.

An affair with Steve Nash, come to think of it, has genuine star-struck possibilities. w/wo being Prime Minister that is (girl's bound for glory, or thinking of it, once Kennedy/Ignatieff/Rae/Dion tube out, as they may very well do if the whiff of scandal around Volpe is any hint to the overall tone of the new Liberals. What new Liberals? Exactly. In fact, half the just-listed roster of candidates are "new Liberals", as also Belinda. Well, Iggie's been a Liberal in exile for a long time - certainly not part of the machine, though backed by at least some of it....hmmmmm......but less so than Dion, don't know about Kennedy. And can you imagine how the White House is going to feel if there's a Kennedy at 34 Sussex?

Belinda and Kyle Washington....now there'es a fit....

as well as a corporate merger, big-time. If Kyle was from BC I think he'd be eventual Premier material. Only guy around here with vision, and he's a Yank....as ever it was, if you'll forgive me (present company accepted).

And they'd sure have good-looking kids...

Actually I think he's married (as is Nash), but apparently that didn't stop her with one Tie Domi (sp?), huh? On the other hand, Kyle's brother Kerry is definitely single, in a big way.....too much of a party animal, by all reports, to be First Husband, though....

I didn't see you post till this morning Skookum1 so I missed the Belinda report.

Wasn't she once married to an Austrian ski racer of international fame?

From WikiNews:

Stronach was previously married to Olympic speed-skating champion Johann Olav Koss of Norway, then divorced in 2005.

Merci, Skookum1, I think they've been split for much longer than that, haven't they? Funny where I got the notion it was a skier from Austria - not even close!

I think she had an earlier marriage to a guy called Walker too, he's the father, ostensibly, of their two kids.

A bit more on Peter McKay's love life here:
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:rnHYKzKKR3oJ:www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/index.cfm%3FPgNm%3DTCE%26Params%3DM1ARTM0012776+Belinda+Stronach+first+marriage&hl=en&gl=ca&ct=clnk&cd=5

Capitlaism,
With your posts, here, I think you are truly more suited to live in the USA. I suggest that you would be much happier there, and the people, here, much happier if you were to go. The thing that I love most about Canadian society is that most people get it, "Life is not all about money." I think that rather than continually trying to change other people's opinions and being so contentious, you should really look into moving to the USA.

We'd be happier without Cappy too, SharingIsGood. Excellent advice and Cappy could get to Vegas more often.