My latest at Macleans.ca concerns the nine-year-old Canadian locked up in Texas. At least one law professor thinks Canada can help, despite seemingly being hamstrung by the Safe Third Country Agreement.

Officials obviously aren’t saying what avenues they’re exploring, but Citizenship and Immigration talked at me like I had three heads when I suggested the family might somehow be able to claim asylum in Canada a second time. My personal hunch, unfortunately, is that the scenario laid out by said law professor is more a theoretical possibility than it is likely to occur.

Still, it seems the family isn’t wanting for legal representation, so maybe there’s yet hope for the kid. There seems little point giving someone like him - that is, someone born in Canada to parents subsequently determined to have no viable claim of residency - if it can’t help him out of a jam like this.

I’ll confine my comments to what is clearly the most earth-shattering trade of the day, namely, the Leafs’ re-reacquisition of Yanic Perreault - a slow, soft, small, 36-year-old faceoff specialist who’s unrestricted this summer - in exchange for a serviceable young defenceman and a 2nd round pick.

While I am happy to see that John Ferguson is finally willing to put his glut of young rearguards on the market, I am dismayed to see him expend that glut with absolutely no eye even to the short-term future. This is an absurdly high price to pay for Perreault, and utterly pointless. To recap the year’s dealings with the Yotes, that’s the aforementioned slow, soft, small, 36-year-old rental, an AHL plug and a 4th rounder for a fine backup goaltender with upside, a top-6 23-year-old d-man and a draft pick higher than any used to select the actual warm bodies involved.

With the Raptors, MLSE has shown itself capable of tolerating bold-but-prudent management. Ferguson is neither of those things, and after a long career of casually defending the guy I hereby officially resign my commission. The Leafs remain on an overall upward trajectory, but JFJ has got to go, and the sooner the better. I’m sure he’ll be crushed. (Good job on the Tucker contract, though.)

Oh, and check out Mark Spector’s impeccable sportswriter logic here: “If Lowe gets Smyth back as a UFA this summer, this move is genius. If he doesn’t, he didn’t get enough.”

Actually, if you think about it very very carefully, you’ll realize that the price the Islanders paid has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the Oilers get Smyth back in the summer. Either Lowe got enough or he didn’t.

This country is absolutely gagging for some fresh voices in hockey journalism.

I’m glad the Toronto Star followed up on the story of the nine-year-old Canadian citizen currently locked up at a potentially dodgy US immigration detention centre in Texas, because at least one very reasonable blogger and a whole lot of less reasonable ones are taking way too much of this interview with the boy’s father as undisputed fact - and putting themselves at great risk of one or more blown gaskets.

The Star’s accounting of the story shows a family depserate to take another crack at Canada, having been deported in 2005 back to their native Iran. They were discovered with fake Greek passports by American authorities when their flight from Guyana - not your typical stopover on a Tehran-to-Toronto jaunt - made an unscheduled stop in Puerto Rico.

Assuming Canadian authorities would have discovered said fake passports, in other words, the parents’ current situation is to be incarcerated in an American facility when they otherwise would have been incarcerated in a Canadian facility. Anti-Yank nuttiness aside - “The bastards. The bastards. We have to stop them.” - people aren’t entitled to enter Canada, the United States or any other country with false documents, no matter how sympathetic their story.

Canada’s not unsympathetic to refugees, and if they have endured mistreatment in Iran and can expect more in the future, maybe they have a shot at getting that status this time around. Best of luck to them.

The kid, however, is very much a different story. He’s Canadian, and if his parents would prefer he be in foster care (or some other arrangement) in Canada pending a resolution of their case then I think that’s an option consular officials should be aggressively suggesting to them.

UPDATE: There’s hope. Some, anyway.

We’re focus-grouping a feature over at Macleans.ca in which I, or another of our team of professional skeptics, will examine statements that strike us as amazing, improbable, or just downright odd. The first edition explores the idea that 25% of the cigarettes smoked in Canada are illicitly obtained.

Memo to Canadian media outlets, TV news especially: A new high-tech Ontario driver’s license that the Americans might accept as a passport replacement has no capacity to help Ontario’s tourism industry. Like none. As in zero. In fact, it would make it easier for Ontarians to spend their tourist dollars stateside.

I’m going to give Dalton McGuinty the benefit of the doubt and assume that at some level, his plan to push Ontario’s newfangled license as a border-crossing document makes sense - that it has some chance of success; that it’s not a complete waste of time and money. Personally, I’m still trying to figure out why we can’t just get passports and get on with our lives, but I accept that some people really do see this as a problem.

Still, reports like Global’s make me wonder if they’ve actually thought this thing through.

Bob Tarantino deconstructs Michael Coren’s preposterous contention that “the teenage suicide in North America has increased by 5,000%” since the 1950s. Anyone who read that and considered it even remotely possible is beyond help. To wit: Bob’s tip of the hat to Kathy Shaidle, whose usual bold-text job presumably does not indicate skepticism.

I was struck in particular by Coren’s “I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true!” approach to foisting his latest absurdity upon the suspecting public:

Those much-despised 1950s were, we are told, oppressive, confining and prudish. Yet since then the teenage suicide in North America has increased by 5,000%, which is a figure so extraordinary that some of you probably think it a misprint. No, five times one thousand.

Flashback to January 2006, when David Frum painstakingly concocted evidence that the crime rate in Canada is half as great again as in the United States, and - just like Coren - protested far too much:

Canada’s overall crime rate is now 50% higher than the crime rate in the United States. Read that again slowly — it seems incredible, but it’s true.

Has Coren ever been on a Western Standard cruise? Maybe they hold strategy sessions.

You’ve got to conduct yourself properly if you’re going to play on the big stage. We’re competing now with the N.F.L., and I think ahead of most other sports — the N.B.A., Major League Baseball, N.H.L., we’re the equivalent or better. So we’ve got to conduct ourselves with integrity. That’s what they’re doing.

Who said it? National Lacrosse League commissioner Jim Jennings? Arena Football League commissioner C. David Baker? Not so. It was Eddie Gossage, president of the Texas Motor Speedway, and he was talking about NASCAR.

Gossage, you may recall, was the bloke recently tagged as a possible successor to Gary Bettman. If the Jersey weasel’s disastrous tenure hasn’t been enough to convince the league’s general managers that putting a complete outsider at the top the wrong way to go, I can only hope that Gossage’s recent comments have tipped the scales.

If you want to make your sports league more like NASCAR, the last guy you want is someone who wants to make NASCAR more like the NHL - though that doesn’t address how disturbing it is that the NHL would actually want to become more like NASCAR, or that any professional sports organization on earth would want to become more like the NHL.

It’s things like this that make me love this country. The New Pornographers cover Toronto. Toronto the band:

They say smell is the the sense most linked to memory. I knew nothing of Toronto the band when I was a kid except seeing their LPs and then CDs whiz by me as I browsed for, you know, good music. But the upshot is that whenever I think of Toronto the band, I can literally smell Sam the Record Man in its glory days. I can’t descibe that smell, but I hope a few of my dozens of readers know what I’m talking about. A package from Amazon.ca is never really going to rival the thrill of breaking open that heat-sealed plastic bag from Sam’s.

You don’t hear much top-notch humour on sports highlight shows, but Gino Reda’s assessment of setting the NBA all-stars loose in Las Vegas was genius: “Someone’s going to get eaten by a white tiger.”

The Liberals will have at least one very powerful thing going for them when next they fight an election - the enormous number of Canadians longing for a reason to vote for them. In that respect, it’s not a good idea for Stephen Harper to say things like this:

“We’re bringing forward laws to make sure that we crack down on crime — that we make our streets and communities safer,” he told the House of Commons.

“We want to make sure our selection of judges is in correspondence with those objectives.”

No doubt the Liberals were pursuing their own agendas too with their judicial appointments, to some degree or another. And nobody hates law and order. But confirmational quotes like that are dangerous in this warped universe we live in.

Perhaps there’s a media bias at work — the Globe’s “at least 16 of 33 appointees are partisan Tories” line fairly begs for such accusations. But a new government’s new way of doing something after ages of a different government doing it differently is going to be news no matter what, and the Conservatives can hardly complain that their opponents are issuing nonsensical, spittle-flecked denunciations — except perhaps in a copyright suit.

But Pablo Rodriguez’s Kyoto bill is crazy. This is big, swinging dicks. Forget for now the temerity of the authors of Canada’s Kyoto delinquency attempting to force the government to risk the nation’s economy for cheap political gain. Or… well no, don’t forget that. That’s the whole damn thing.

The fact that Harper hasn’t brought the Conservatives considerable gains in the polls since they took power is often cited as a negative. But the only reason Harper won is because Canada’s natural governing party had finally rendered itself worthy of significant punishment — as such, one might just as soon look at the Liberals’ inability to rebound massively under the un-hateable Bill Graham and under the formerly un-hateable Stéphane Dion as a categorical failure.

I have a lot of time for the idea that environmentalism has become a sort of religion, and religion is a tough thing to beat out of people. But the idea that Canada’s short-term Kyoto targets are unreachable — that’s not just a far-right construct. A lot of very reasonable people have said it. And I suspect a lot of ostensibly devout Canadian environmentalists — the kind with mutual funds and SUVs — might view this legislation a little like ostensibly devout Canadian Catholics tend to view the Vatican’s positions on birth control and abortion.

The Conservative party has yielded a lot to the centre in its 12-plus months in power. Now is not the time for statements supporting a nation of default lefties’ worst fears of a vast right-wing conspiracy. With this nutso Kyoto obsession, the Liberals risk losing an election for the very same reason the Conservatives lost in 2004: because people were reasonably happy with the status quo and irrationally afraid of the alternative.

That’s just where a political party wants to be.