40 bodies recovered at sea from missing AirAsia jet

Indonesian rescuers searching for a missing AirAsia plane carrying 162 people pulled bodies and wreckage from the sea off the coast of Borneo on Tuesday as relatives of those on board broke down in tears on hearing the news.

Indonesia AirAsia's Flight QZ8501, an Airbus A320-200, lost contact with air traffic control early on Sunday during bad weather on a flight from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore. 

Family members of passengers on board missing AirAsia Flight QZ8501 cry at a waiting area in Juanda International Airport, Surabaya, Indonesia on Tuesday. (Beawiharta/Reuters)

The navy said 40 bodies had been recovered as dusk fell.

The plane has yet to be found. However, the airline confirmed that the debris found Tuesday is from Flight QZ8501. The wreckage was found in the Karimata Strait, about 110 nautical miles (204 kilometres) southwest of the town of Pangkalan Bun in Central Kalimantan Province.

"My heart is filled with sadness for all the families involved in QZ8501," airline boss Tony Fernandes tweeted. "On behalf of AirAsia, my condolences to all. Words cannot express how sorry I am."

Can't see on mobile? Read the tweet from AirAsia's CEO.

The airline said in a statement that it was inviting family members to Surabaya, "where a dedicated team of care providers will be assigned to each family to ensure that all of their needs are met".

Pictures of floating bodies were broadcast on television and relatives of the missing gathered at a crisis centre in Surabaya wept with heads in their hands. Several people collapsed in grief and were helped away, a Reuters reporter said.

"You have to be strong," the mayor of Surabaya, Tri Rismaharini, said as she comforted relatives. "They are not ours, they belong to God."

A navy spokesman said a plane door, oxygen tanks and one body had been recovered and taken away by helicopter for tests.

"The challenge is waves up to three metres high," Fransiskus Bambang Soelistyo, head of the Search and Rescue Agency, told reporters, adding that the search operation would go on all night. He declined to answer questions on whether any survivors had been found.

About 30 ships and 21 aircraft from Indonesia, Australia, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea and the United States had been involved in the search of up to 10,000 square nautical miles (34,299 square kilometres).

The plane, which did not issue a distress signal, disappeared after its pilot failed to get permission to fly higher to avoid bad weather because of heavy air traffic, officials said.

Flight QZ8501 was travelling at 32,000 feet (9,753 metres) and had asked to fly at 38,000 feet, officials said earlier.

Pilots and aviation experts said thunderstorms, and requests to gain altitude to avoid them, were not unusual in that area.

Online discussion among pilots has centred on unconfirmed secondary radar data from Malaysia that suggested the aircraft was climbing at a speed of 353 knots, about 100 knots too slow, and that it might have stalled.

The plane, whose engines were made by CFM International, co-owned by General Electric and Safran of France, lacked real-time engine diagnostics or monitoring, a GE spokesman said.

Indonesian Air Force Rear Marshall Dwi Putranto, right, on Tuesday shows airplane parts and a suitcase found floating on the water near the site where AirAsia Flight 8501 disappeared. (Dewi Nurcahyani/Associated Press)

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Such systems are mainly used on long-haul flights and can provide clues to airlines and investigators when things go wrong.

Three airline disasters involving Malaysian-affiliated carriers in less than a year have dented confidence in the country's aviation industry and spooked travellers across the region. 

Malaysian Airlines Flight MH370 went missing on March 8 on a trip from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew on board and has not been found. On July 17, the same airline's Flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board.

On board Flight QZ8501 were 155 Indonesians, three South Koreans, and one person each from Singapore, Malaysia and Britain. The co-pilot was French.

The Indonesian pilot was experienced and the plane last underwent maintenance in mid-November, the airline said. The aircraft had accumulated about 23,000 flight hours in some 13,600 flights, according to Airbus.

U.S. law enforcement and security officials said passenger and crew lists were being examined but nothing significant had turned up and the incident was regarded as an unexplained accident.

Indonesia AirAsia is 49 per cent owned by Malaysia-based budget carrier AirAsia.

The AirAsia group, including affiliates in Thailand, the Philippines and India, had not suffered a crash since its Malaysian budget operations began in 2002.

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Tattoo artist creates booming business concealing scars

Samira Omar pushes back her headscarf to reveal burn scars that swirl along her face and neck. Her hands are also dotted with colourless patches where her skin was scorched.

The 17-year-old says she was the victim of a horrific bullying incident in August. She says four classmates she thought were her friends, beat her and then doused her with boiling water.

Basma Hameed before and after tattooing the burn scars on her own face (Courtesy of Basma Hameed)

"I remember I looked into the mirror when I was calling for help and I could see my skin completely hanging off me," says the soft-spoken girl. "It just felt as if I'd been through hell and back."

She thought she'd be scarred for life. But then Omar heard about para-medical tattoo specialist Basma Hameed. She didn't hold out much hope because she'd been let down before when she consulted specialists.

"It was just like, am I going to go in and just have another plastic surgeon or dermatologist tell me 'oh, you're not going to get colour back?'" she said.

But Hameed told Omar that she could restore her natural skin colour. While inspecting the scars, she said, "We'll make sure we cover all of these areas. But it will take a series of treatments."

One step at a time

Over time, Hameed will camouflage Omar's burns by tattooing them with ink that blends with her natural skin tones.

"When she told me she could actually get my pigments back and find a skin colour that could match my actual skin colour, it's just a big sigh of relief," Omar says.

Patients from around the world seek out Hameed's skills. She started her Toronto clinic in 2011 and recently opened a second location in Chicago. In addition to scar victims, she also treats people with vitiligo — a skin disease that causes loss of pigment — and breast cancer survivors who need redrawing of their nipples or eyebrows that disappeared during chemotherapy.

"I think that I'm good at para-medical scar camouflage because I was able to work on myself, and I was able to see the process of it," she says.

Hameed's painful journey

When Hameed was just two years old, she was badly burned by hot oil in a kitchen accident in her native country, Iraq. She endured more than 100 painful procedures —from plastic surgery to laser treatments. But half her face remained scarred with red discoloration from third degree burns. She was advised nothing more could be done.

'I think that I'm good at para-medical scar camouflage because I was able to work on myself.'- Basma Hameed, para-medical tattoo specialist

"I was told by my plastic surgeon that I needed to take my money and go on a vacation. For me, I felt like that wasn't the end of the road. I truly believed that something else did exist. So I did a lot of research, and of course I went to school. I made sure I knew what I was getting myself into."

What she was getting into was an emerging form of cosmetic tattooing. Hameed discovered the procedure when she got an eyebrow tattooed to replace the one she had lost from the burn. She decided if tattooing could replace eyebrows, then why not her original skin colour?

"When I started working on my face, I was extra careful. I wanted to make sure that I was going to get the right result," she says.

Patient transformation

Hameed not only transformed her own face, but she also started what is now a booming business, helping transform the lives of others.

On this day, she is treating Nafi Nzambe, who burned her hand in a cooking accident. Hameed carefully chooses the right colour to match Nzambe's skin and began tattooing the white marks left by the burn.

When asked what she thinks of Hameed, Nzambe lights up. "She's good! So I can smile now because of her."

Nzambe shows a section of the scar where Hameed has planted pigment as proof. "It's like my normal skin," she says, "So I have hope."

Artistry and empathy

Hameed is also giving hope to Omar, who she is treating for free through her charity, the Basma Hameed Survivors Foundation.

It's a big relief for Omar, who is still trying to cope with what happened to her. She says police are investigating her bullying case, which happened near London, England, her home at the time. She has since retreated back to her birthplace, Canada.

"When I hear her story, I felt like I relate so much," says Hameed. "I wanted to reach out to and help as much as possible."

She has to wait a few more months to treat Omar because the scars are still fresh. But she already has a way to help. She shows the young woman how to apply scar concealer. Hameed developed the product — again by experimenting on herself.

After, Omar stood in the mirror, smiling. "It's a great finish, honestly, thank you so much," she tells Hameed with renewed confidence.

"I am proud of myself for not giving up but what I'm mostly proud of is the reaction [I get] from people," says Hameed.

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AirAsia Flight QZ8501: How can a plane go off the radar?

It seems unlikely for a plane to just drop off the map, given today's tracking technology. But this year, two flights have disappeared while travelling over southeast Asia.

AirAsia Flight QZ8501 fell off the radar during the morning of Dec. 28, while flying over the Java Sea. The Airbus A320-200 is believed to have crashed into the sea. Rescuers began recovering floating debris and bodies on Tuesday, but the plane itself has yet to be found. 

In March, Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared while flying from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. No debris from that plane has been found, but officials believe it crashed in the Indian Ocean after someone on board deliberately diverted the aircraft from its route.

To get a better understanding of how these planes could have vanished, CBC News spoke to aviation experts about how air traffic controllers keep track of aircraft.

Primary radar

Radar was first widely adopted by air traffic controllers in the 1950s and is still the mainstay of most air traffic control systems around the world today.

There are two types of radar: primary and secondary. Primary radar sends out electromagnetic waves that are bounced off any object in their path — in this case, an airplane — and does not rely on the plane's transponder having to send any signals back.

"This primary radar can see everything no matter if the transponder is on or off, but the primary radar can't identify the object. It can just see a point on the screen," says Mikael Robertsson, co-founder of Flightradar24.com, a flight-tracking website based out of Sweden that gets about six million visitors a week.

Primary radar is generally used more for military air defence than civil aviation, which relies on secondary radar. While the transponder on Flight MH370 stopped transmitting, the Boeing 77 should have remained visible to any military primary radar that was scanning the area at the time. It's believed the radar saw the flight change course and head west toward the Andaman Sea.

It's unknown if any military primary radar picked up Flight QZ8501.

Secondary radar

Air traffic controllers who manage commercial air traffic rely on secondary radar, which also sends out electromagnetic waves, but when the plane picks them up, its transponder sends back a signal identifying the plane and giving its altitude, speed and bearing.

This signal contains a unique four-digit code, called a squawk, that corresponds to that specific flight. The code is assigned to the plane by air traffic control and entered into the transponder by the pilot.

For a plane to be detected by secondary radar, there needs to be a radar station within about 300 kilometres, and since these stations need to be on land, radar coverage is limited over large bodies of water and is also affected by geography, the curvature of the Earth and a plane's altitude.

In places such as North America and Europe, there are enough radar stations spread across the land mass that coverage overlaps, and little territory is left "off the radar," but that is not the case in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, for example.

"Unless you have that overlap and beyond that 200-mile range, you don't have radar coverage," said Sid McGuirk, a former air traffic controller with the Federal Aviation Administration in the U.S. who teaches air traffic management at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida. 

In the case of Flight MH370, the plane was still in range of ground-based radar stations when its transponder stopped transmitting over the Gulf of Thailand, rendering it invisible to secondary radar.

It's still not clear how that flight's transponder became disabled, but pilot Patrick Smith of the website AskthePilot.com points out that pilots need to have the ability to turn off transponders.

"In the interest of safety — namely, fire and electrical system protection — it's important to have the ability to isolate a piece of equipment," he says on his site. "Also, transponders will occasionally malfunction and transmit erroneous or incomplete data, at which point a crew will recycle the device — switching it off, then on — or swap to another unit."

Planes like the Boeing 777 usually have two secondary-radar transponders on board, with one serving as back-up.

ADS-B

The ADS-B system of tracking planes uses signals sent from GPS satellites and plane transponders to relay information such as a plane's location, speed and flight number to radio receivers on the ground. (Courtesy of Flightradar24.com)

A third type of flight surveillance system is known as ADS-B, or automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast. ADS-B relies on radio waves being emitted by another type of transponder, which is usually attached to the bottom of the plane and controlled from the cockpit.

The ADS-B transponder sends out radio waves containing all kinds of information about the airplane, including GPS data about the plane's location relayed by navigational satellites, but also the flight number, speed and vertical velocity, which indicates whether the plane is climbing. 

Anybody can pick up these radio waves using a cheap receiver similar to that used in car radios, says Robertsson.

"With ADS-B, you get much more data at lower cost [than secondary radar]," he says.

Although the technology is about eight years old and most major plane manufacturers already outfit their planes with ADS-B transponders, it is not yet the norm in air traffic control — in part, says Robertsson, because it takes years for the aviation industry to be convinced of the safety of a new technique.

"Australia was the first country that started to use ADS-B [for the whole country] in December last year," Robertsson says. "Any change in the aviation industry takes a very long time."

ADS-B is also used in regions of the U.S. such as Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, as well as in parts of the Middle East and will eventually become the global standard. The FAA is expected to adopt the system by about 2020.

Robertsson's Flightradar24 has 3,200 ADS-B receivers deployed around the world, most hosted by volunteers, and two of them on the east coast of Malaysia detected Flight MH370. 

"It was quite far away from our receivers, so in that area, the coverage is limited to about 30,000 feet, and this aircraft was flying at 35,000 feet, so it was within our coverage — until it disappeared," Robertsson says.

It's still unclear if any have detected Flight QZ8501.

The altitude at which ADS-B can detect planes varies by geography and the location of receivers — in some parts of Europe, where Flightradar24 has more receivers, it can be as low as 500 feet, Robertsson says.

Robertsson's organization began as a hobby six years ago and has grown into an unofficial global network that often provides up-to-date flight information to airlines and airports (but not air traffic controllers) and sells flight-tracking apps for smartphones and tablets (about four million to date, says Robertsson).

Pilot communication

Aside from being tracked through radar and ADS-B, planes also stay in contact with air traffic controllers and ground stations using radio communication and the Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System, or ACARS.

Aside from radio communication, pilots can talk to ground control using a text-message like system known as ACARS. (Bullit Marquez/Associated Press)

Pilots can talk to controllers using radio signals transmitted over ultra high frequencies (UHF) or very high frequencies (VHF) — sometimes these communications are relayed through private third parties.

When airlines want to alert pilots to something, they can also use ACARS, which relays simple, short text messages through radio signals and satellites.

"For example, in 9/11, all of the air carriers — through ACARS — sent a message telling their flight crews to secure their cockpits," says McGuirk.

ACARS also periodically transmits diagnostic data about the performance of engines and other equipment directly to manufacturers or the airline to alert them to potential problems or maintenance issues.

The pilots on Flight QZ8501 last spoke with air traffic controllers to ask permission to increase the plane's altitude to avoid bad weather. Their request was denied because of another plane's position. No distress signal was sent.

The ACARS on Flight MH370 have been a subject of speculation, with suggestions that the plane may have continued to send automated pings to the satellites that transmit ACARS data for several hours after contact with the plane was lost.

The aviation news site Flightglobal has reported that the Inmarsat satellite network has confirmed its satellites received routine signals from Flight MH370 but would not comment on when and for how long.

Aviation consultant Robert W. Mann Jr. told the New York Times that such pings can continue even after a plane lands or crashes if the system has a back-up battery.

GPS

Pilots rely on the GPS network of navigational satellites to get information on their location in the same way your car does.

"Your video map happens to show streets and highways; their video map shows airways and land masses and airports, and it has a pretty sophisticated database, so it will give them a visual of where they are," McGuirk says.

But under the current secondary-radar system used to track most large, commercial aircraft, that information is not relayed to air traffic controllers.

Some smaller planes, regional passenger aircraft and helicopters do convey that GPS information to their ground control through a system of transceivers and satellite communications that some aviation companies use to track their fleets.

Victoria-based Latitude Technologies is one of the companies that supplies such satellite tracking services and devices. Its customers, says vice-president of operations Peter Parrish, include a variety of operators around the world whose aircraft is used for everything from regional passenger transport to search and rescue, medical transport and aerial firefighting. One of its customers is the Malaysia Airlines subsidiary MASwings, a regional carrier.

"For some (unknown to us) reason, the major carriers continue to rely exclusively on old technology to track their aircraft when one of our boxes could be tucked into an out-of-the-way spot on the aircraft to report location on a continuous basis, including on an accelerated basis right up to the point of impact in the event of a crash," Parrish said in an email.

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The year in oil: What went wrong as crude dove from $107 US a barrel to $55

After five years in which oil traded in a narrow band around the $100 US a barrel mark, crude markets returned to volatility this fall.

Back in late June of this year, oil was trading at $107 US a barrel. At year end, it was headed below $55 a barrel.

The months in between tell the story of how changes in supply and demand can lead to wild and unpredictable swings in the price of a commodity.

Geopolitical tensions earlier this year had the effect of pushing oil prices to a peak. It pushed through $100 a barrel in March because of tensions in the Ukraine and then in June, ISIS moved in on oilfields in Iraq, threatening to cut off supplies. Crude hit a peak for the year of $107 a barrel for the West Texas Intermediate contract.

'After many years of being the top performers in the country, the resource-rich provinces are going to experience significantly slower growth and so the oil patch is going to suffer quite significantly'- TD  Bank chief economist Craig Alexander

But this summer, markets began to see the downturn in Europe and Japan were worse than previously realized. At the same time, emerging markets, particularly China, began to lose steam after propelling global growth for the past five years.

"We are seeing significantly slower growth in the emerging economies around the world, so the global economy isn't growing at a very strong pace and this is the initial reason why oil prices started to fall," says Craig Alexander, senior economist with TD Bank.

OPEC and supply

On the supply side, the OPEC oil cartel, which uses its production quota to manipulate prices, was keeping production level in the face of interrupted supply from some of its members, including Libya and Iraq. On Nov. 27, OPEC said it would maintain that level at 30 million barrels a day despite a world oversupply of oil.

Over the past five years, the high price of oil has encouraged investment in a lot of non-conventional sources of crude, including oilsands and offshore oil. But the biggest change was the growth of U.S. shale oil, which was being pumped at such record output that U.S. oil production hit a 45-year high.

A glut of supply and a reduction in demand are the recipe for lower prices and that's exactly what we've seen this fall, a 45 to 50 per cent drop in oil prices.

"The initial drop that we saw in oil from $100 to the low $70s was actually fully justified on grounds the world economy was so much weaker," Alexander said.

"I think the drop we've seen from the low $70s to below $60, that's actually been more of a story about the fact that we haven't seen a cut in supply."

The last such steep price drop in oil was in 2008, when the financial crisis drove down demand. Since then, oil prices have been relatively stable, despite geopolitical tensions.

Where is the bottom?

As the world came out of the 2008 recession, demand for oil grew, but supply was kept in check by disruptions in Iraq and Libya and OPEC's management of the flow of oil.

Many analysts are predicting those days are over and crude markets are returning to the volatility that had been their hallmark for decades.

Predictions for oil prices next year vary from heading still lower to the $40 range to bouncing upwards to closer to $70. No one is forecasting $100 for quite some time.

Randy Ollenberger, an equity research analyst at BMO Capital Markets Canada, says oil price volatility will continue into 2015.

Oil has dropped before

"I don't think we're near bottom yet. My view is that world prices will probably continue to get lower here just because of the fundamentals – at this point in time we need to really see a reduction in supply and we're probably not going to see that until the second half of the year," he says.

He points to historic downturns in oil prices, such as we saw in 1985, 1998 and 2009. There are similarities to 1985 and 1998 in the tension that is apparent between OPEC and non-OPEC producers.

'The best cure for low prices is low prices, but it takes some time to work its way through'- CIBC chief economist Avery Shenfeld

Some American producers have accused OPEC of being "at war" with the U.S. industry, trying to drive U.S. producers out of the sector with lower prices.

Ollenberger doesn't see it that way. He forecasts continued demand for higher priced oil as the world recovers its growth trajectory.

In the meantime, oil companies cannot cut off production on big projects quickly.

Companies still investing

Although some U.S. and Canadian producers have announced they will reduce their levels of investment next year, many are going ahead with long-planned projects..

Even with Western Canada Select, the price paid for oilsands oil, trading below $40 US a barrel, Canadian companies still have expansion plans, Ollenberger said. They're planning for the future right now, though they may review their spending plans at the end of the first quarter of 2015, when they have a better handle on where prices are going.

"If you look at the large oil companies that make up the bulk of the activity levels and employment levels — Cenovus, Suncor, Canadian Natural Resources — they're all in very strong shape, balance sheets are strong and their cash flow is underpinned by very strong assets, so they can certainly survive this downturn," he said.

That doesn't mean there's not less capital going into oil investment – analysts have predicted $1 trillion could be pulled out of the sector worldwide in the coming year.

"The best cure for low prices is low prices, but it takes some time to work its way through," says Avery Shenfeld, chief economist at CIBC.

"The loads on multi-year oilsands projects don't really affect supply in the next year or two. We will see some pullback in areas that are much more immediate – in conventional oil, but it's going to take some time," he said.

Shenfeld says ISIS is still a "wild card" that could step up geopolitical tensions and impact oil supply.

And there are signs that falling oil prices are boosting growth in Europe, which could mean more demand in the year ahead.

So while OPEC still dominates the production of conventional oil, non-conventional sources such as the oilsands and offshore oil will likely be needed in the years ahead, Shenfeld said.

"When I look at the world, they're going to need the kind of oil that Canada produces, that Brazil produces – it's expensive oil, but it will come back," he said.

Alberta's oil production has been so heated over the last few years that it's seen steep production cost rises. There is a shortage of skilled labour and housing costs are soaring.

A period of lower prices could cool that situation, though governments at both the provincial and federal level will be hurting because of lower oil prices.

"Even in places like Alberta, you've heard the finance minister reflecting that maybe it would be nice if Alberta's economy wasn't so oil-centric," Shenfeld said.

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Canadian teacher's wife calls testimonies on alleged sex assaults 'inconsistent, illogical'

Canadian teacher Neil Bantleman is hopeful he will be declared innocent of sexually assaulting children in Indonesia, his wife told CBC News after the latest session of his trial wrapped today.

"He is quite fearful of the outcome of the trial, but he is feeling a little better today," Tracy Bantleman said from Indonesia. 

Bantleman, the Burlington, Ont., native who also appeared in court last week, is accused of sexually assaulting three students while working at the Jakarta International School. 

'He is quite fearful of the outcome of the trial, but he is feeling a little better today.'- Tracy Bantleman, wife of Neil Bantleman

One of the boys involved in the alleged accusations and his mother testified via video conference on Tuesday. The child's father testified in court. 

"The child seemed to be looking to his mother throughout the testimony and looking to his mother for confirmation to his response," Tracy Bantleman said, based on information from her husband.

Accusers' stories are inconsistent, wife says

The boy's testimony was inconsistent and illogical, according to Tracy Bantleman. She says the location of the alleged assault changed in the boy's various testimonies, and that he testified his alleged attacker had a skeleton tattoo, but Bantleman does not have one.  

Tracy Bantleman believes this could be a case of child abuse hysteria, or improper or suggestive questioning of these children throughout the investigation.. 

"The children are changing their stories, and the father has been confrontational and won't answer questions directly," she said after Tuesday's testimonies.  

Neil Bantleman's wife is also urging the Canadian government to change its tactics and do more for her husband.

Five janitors at the same school have already been sentenced to lengthy jail terms in a similar sexual assault trial involving one of the same victims — a six-year-old boy.

"It is time for the Canadian government to issue a statement of concern," Tracy Bantleman wrote in a letter to the government on Sunday.

"He is innocent, and the Canadian government approach should reflect that fact."

The Canadian government didn't issue an immediate response.

Her remarks come on the heels of a powerful statement from the U.S. ambassador to Indonesia, Robert Blake, that was critical of the trial.

"The outcome of these cases and what it reveals about the rule of law in Indonesia will have a significant impact on Indonesia's reputation abroad," Blake said in a statement to CBC Hamilton.

Tracy Bantleman points out, in her letter, that her husband has been given vocal support from the U.K. and Australian governments as well. Guy Bantleman, Neil's brother, said all three governments issued vocal support back in July, when Neil was first arrested.

Canadian approach has not 'created any positive change'

The Jakarta International School is attended by around 2,400 students, many of them children of foreign diplomats, expatriates and Indonesia's elite. Prior to working in Indonesia, Bantleman was a teacher at Webber Academy in Calgary for 10 years.

The Canadian government has said it's providing consular assistance to the Bantlemans while they are in Indonesia, but it has declined to state a firm position on the court case.

"I would like to respectfully request that the Canadian government issue a statement in support of my husband," Tracy Bantleman wrote.

"While I understand that the behind-the-scenes approach the Canadian Embassy is taking is perhaps the embassy policy, the rather more robust approach of the aforementioned U.S, Australian and British embassies seems to be garnering more attention."

That "robust" approach, Tracy Bantleman said, makes a difference. She said a British ambassador was able to sit in on trial proceedings while Canadian officials were shut out. According to Guy Bantleman, no reporters or foreign officials are supposed to be allowed in the courtroom during sexual assault trials involving minors.

"Certainly, their approach provided more comfort to those of us who are at the centre of this injustice," she wrote.

"My concern is that the approach that is being taken has not created any positive change in Neil's status."

She said the Canadian government has assured her that it continues to meet with its counterparts in Indonesia, and embassy officials have highlighted irregularities with the case and called for a fair trial. 

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University student wants you to know how government spends tax money

Former House of Commons page Olivia Dorey was once one of the people hand-delivering the federal budget to MPs when the finance minister rose to deliver his speech.

That task inspired her to try to read through a budget so she knew better what it contained.

"And I couldn't. I couldn't find the numbers, I couldn't make sense of what they were trying to explain ... I'm used to doing my own personal budgets, and this book, this book was nothing like a budget to me," she said in an interview in Ottawa.

Dorey studies public administration at the University of Ottawa, and is interested in politics. But she still couldn't figure out the budget. That experience jarred her to begin a personal mission to build a website where people could key in some basic demographic information and find out how the federal budget affected them. 

Some of that information is available — specific funding for a hospital or transit, for example, or qualifications for Old Age Security — but much of it is simply not publicly accessible, or hard to follow after an initial announcement.

That's led Dorey to start lobbying MPs to build budgets differently.

"If I can't understand public finance and find the information I need, what hope do other Canadians have understanding it?" Dorey said.

She believes federal, provincial and municipal budgets should be clear enough that people like her grandparents in Bridgewater, N.S., who don't have university educations, can understand them. Her campaign led her to a strong ally: former parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page.

'Impossible to track'

Right now, there are several documents you have to read if you want to track a funding promise, including:

• The budget, the annual planning document for government spending.
• The estimates, which contain much more detailed information about spending.
• The supplementary estimates, the update to the estimates.
• The departmental performance reports, which recap how much was spent out of the amount budgeted, and staffing levels.

Even then, it can be hard to track spending if you want to go back several years. The documents sometimes offer only a few years in the same booklet, so readers have to pull numbers from older versions too.

And there are other problems.

Former parliamentary budget officer Kevin Page is supporting Olivia Dorey in her quest for more government transparency. (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press)

"These books aren't synced up in any way. They actually switch back and forth between accounting styles," Dorey said.

"It's impossible to track money through the expenditure management system, and the way that it's presented ... you can't actually see or understand how much money is being spent on a specific department or on a specific project," she said.

Page says Dorey took his public finance class a year ago and calls her very bright. Her first step, he says, will be to change the culture of government. Right now, civil servants and governing parties have little incentive for being open with information that can be used to criticize them.

Parliamentarians vote based on departmental operating and capital budgets rather than specific program activities like veteran health care or Arctic oil spill cleanup. Some programs cut across departments, which makes it even more confusing. (Committees vote on specific program lines, but usually devote only one meeting to the estimates of the applicable departments).

Dorey and Page would like to see the votes more specific to program funding instead of operating and capital budgets so the money is easier to track.

There are people in the government who have the kind of information that Dorey wants available to Canadians, said Page, who spent a decade at the department of finance and another decade at the Privy Council Office (PCO), the bureau of civil servants who work directly with the Prime Minister's Office.

"Some bureaucrats deep in the bowels of treasury and finance and PCO, we have that information, but we don't make it available," he said.

'Here's the vision'

But, he says, that insistence on secrecy is bound to change as Dorey's generation advances and becomes the new set of civil servants and politicians.

"Olivia's on a course right now to kind of create a context for change, saying this is what we want. Here's the vision, this is what I'd like my grandparents and me to get, and my generation to have, in terms of access to information. So as citizens we feel like we know how our money's being spent. We can feel more engaged."

It would be unsurprising if Page were cynical about government transparency, given the range and depth of the disputes between him and the Conservative government.

But he sounds optimistic.

"Olivia wants, and it's really her generation ... what we have now is not their future. We live in an information age and I think as Canadians, as citizens, you want to have this information and even as much you want your MPs to have this information."

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Unclear whether oil, objects found in sea linked to lost AirAsia jet

An Indonesian helicopter searching for the missing AirAsia jetliner saw two oily spots in the water Monday, and an Australian search plane spotted objects elsewhere in the Java Sea, but it was too early to know whether either was connected to the aircraft and its 162 passengers and crew.

In any case, officials saw little reason to believe AirAsia Flight 8501 met anything but a grim fate after it disappeared from radar Sunday morning over the Java Sea. Wary of bad weather, one of the pilots had asked to raise the plane's altitude just before it vanished, but was not allowed because another aircraft was in the way.

"Based on the coordinates that we know, the evaluation would be that any estimated crash position is in the sea, and that the hypothesis is the plane is at the bottom of the sea," Indonesia search and rescue chief Henry Bambang Soelistyo said.

The Airbus A320-200 vanished in airspace thick with storm clouds on its way from Surabaya, Indonesia, to Singapore.

Family members of people who were on the flight are holding a vigil in the Singapore airport where the missing jet was supposed to land, said CBC reporter Jeff Semple.

"You can see the exhaustion on their face, their bloodshot eyes just staring at the phones. (They are) waiting and hoping for some word about whether their loved one may be found alive," Semple said.

Jakarta's air force base commander, Rear Marshal Dwi Putranto, said an Australian Orion aircraft had detected "suspicious" objects near Nangka island about 160 kilometres off central Kalimantan. That's about 1,120 kilometres from the location where the plane lost contact, but within Monday's greatly expanded search area.

"However, we cannot be sure whether it is part of the missing AirAsia plane," Putranto said. "We are now moving in that direction, which is in cloudy conditions."

Air Force spokesman Rear Marshal Hadi Tjahnanto told MetroTV that an Indonesian helicopter spotted two oily spots in the Java Sea east of Belitung island, much closer to where the plane lost contact than the objects viewed from the Australian plane. He said oil samples would be collected and analyzed to see if they are connected to the missing plane.

The last communication from the cockpit to air traffic control was a request by one of the pilots to increase altitude from 9,754 metres to 11,582 metres because of the rough weather. Air traffic control was not able to immediately grant the request because another plane was in the airspace, said Bambang Tjahjono, director of the state-owned company in charge of air-traffic control.

By the time clearance could be given, Flight 8501 had disappeared, Tjahjono said. The twin-engine, single-aisle plane, which never sent a distress signal, was last seen on radar four minutes after the last communication from the cockpit.

First Adm. Sigit Setiayana, the Naval Aviation Center commander at the Surabaya air force base, said 12 navy ships, five planes, three helicopters and a number of warships were taking part in the search, along with ships and planes from Singapore and Malaysia. The Australian air force also sent a search plane.

Many fishermen from Belitung island have joined in the search, and all vessels in that area of the sea have been alerted to be on the lookout for anything that could be linked to the plane.

An Associated Press photographer flew in a C-130 with Indonesia's Air Force for 10 hours Monday over a section of the search area between Kalimantan and Belitung. The flight was bumpy at times and hovered low at 457 metres, giving clear visibility to waves, ships and fishermen. But nothing related to the plane was spotted.

The plane's disappearance and suspected crash caps an astonishingly tragic year for air travel in Southeast Asia, and Malaysia in particular. Malaysia-based AirAsia's loss comes on top of the still-unexplained disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 in March with 239 people aboard, and the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 in July over Ukraine, which killed all 298 passengers and crew.

AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes said a news conference Monday that the scenario is "worst nightmare," but also pointed to AirAsia's relatively strong safety record. (Beawiharta/Reuters)

"Until today, we have never lost a life," AirAsia group CEO Tony Fernandes, who founded the low-cost carrier in 2001, told reporters in Jakarta airport. "But I think that any airline CEO who says he can guarantee that his airline is 100 percent safe, is not accurate."

He refused to address compensation issues or any changes that may be made to the airline as a result of this incident.

"We have carried 220 million people up to this point," he said. "Of course, there's going to be some reaction, but we are confident in our ability to fly people, and we'll continue to be strong and continue to carry people who never could fly before."

Nearly all the passengers and crew are Indonesians, who are frequent visitors to Singapore, particularly on holidays.

Ruth Natalia Puspitasari was among them. On Monday, her father, Suyanto, sat with his wife, who was puffy-eyed and coughing, near the family crisis centre at Surabaya's airport.

Suyanto remembers the concern his daughter showed for the families of the MH370 tragedy. Puspitasari once told him how sad it must be for the victims' relatives who were left waiting for their loved ones with no certainty.

The search operation for Flight QZ8501 is based out of Jakarta, Indonesia and consists of personnel, equipment and planes and vessels from Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia. (Darren Whiteside/Reuters)

"Now she is gone in the missing plane, and we should face this sorrow, I can't believe it!" he said, tears rolling down his cracked cheeks. "This is too hard to be faced."

He was still sleeping when Puspitasari left for the airport with her fiance and future in-laws for a New Year's vacation. But he called her just before boarding, and she told him excitedly that they planned to celebrate her 26th birthday in Singapore on Monday.

"I don't want to experience the same thing with what was happened with Malaysia Airlines," he said as his wife wept. "It could be a long suffering."

But while authorities are pessimistic about the plane's fate, it is likely that the search will not be nearly as perplexing as the one for Flight 370. That plane is believed to have been deliberately diverted by someone on board to a remote area of the Indian Ocean where the water is kilometres deep. Flight 8501 vanished over a heavily travelled sea that is about 30 meters deep on average, with no sign of foul play.

Flight 8501 took off Sunday morning from Surabaya, Indonesia's second-largest city, and was about halfway to Singapore when it vanished from radar. The jet had been airborne for about 42 minutes.

The plane had an Indonesian captain, Iryanto, who uses one name, and a French co-pilot, five cabin crew members and 155 passengers, including 16 children and one infant, the airline said in a statement. Among the passengers were three South Koreans, a Malaysian, a British national and his 2-year-old Singaporean daughter. The rest were Indonesians.

AirAsia said the captain had more than 20,000 flying hours, of which 6,100 were with AirAsia on the Airbus 320. The first officer had 2,275 flying hours.

Relatives and next-of-kin of passengers on the AirAsia flight QZ8501 wait Monday for the latest news on the search of the missing jetliner. (Trisnadi Marjan/AP)

"Papa, come home, I still need you," Angela Anggi Ranastianis, the captain's 22-year-old daughter, pleaded on her Path page late Sunday, which was widely quoted by Indonesian media. "Bring back my papa. Papa, please come home."

At Iryanto's house in the East Java town of Sidoarjo, neighbours, relatives and friends gathered Monday to pray and recite the Qur'an to support the distraught family. Their desperate cries were so loud, they could sometimes be heard outside where three LCD televisions had been set up to monitor search developments.

"He is a good man. That's why people here appointed him as our neighbourhood chief for the last two years," said Bagianto Djoyonegoro, a friend and neighbour.

Many recalled him as an experienced Air Force pilot who flew F-16 fighter jets before becoming a commercial airline pilot.

The lost aircraft had last undergone scheduled maintenance on Nov. 16, according to AirAsia.

The airline has dominated budget travel in Southeast Asia for years, connecting the region's large cities with short routes. It highlights its low fares with the slogan, "Now everyone can fly."

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Biggest marketing fails of 2014: Apple, Coors and more

Bad luck, bad judgment and horrendous timing turned some creative marketing campaigns into PR disasters this year. Here's a roundup of some of the more remarkable ones.

Apple pays $100M to gift customers with U2's first recording in 5 years

Result: Customer fury and the need for a 'removal button.'

Apple's gift of U2's Songs of Innocence

Apple CEO Tim Cook took to the stage with Irish rockers U2 in September, announcing that all half-a-billion iTunes subscribers would be getting the band's new Songs of Innocence recording for free, as a gift.    

But Bono cheekily pointed out someone would have to pay, and it would be Apple. "We're not going in for the free music around here," he declared, while the crowd laughed.

No one was laughing a few days later when the folly of the gesture became evident. Many customers didn't appreciate that the company loaded their personal devices with unwanted music, without permission. Some young users didn't even know the band. American rapper Tyler the Creator likened the discovery of the record to waking up to a pimple or a venereal disease.

The fiasco wound down after Apple created a special button to remove the songs, and Bono apologized via a Facebook Q&A session for fans. "Oops, sorry about that," he said, sounding quite sincere and rather embarrassed.

Some analysts commented that the $100-million US pricetag was just a drop in the bucket to Apple (which had $155 billion in cash reserves at last count), but the incident surely put a dent in the company's renowned cool factor.

Coors Light search and rescue campaign

Result: Snarled traffic in downtown Toronto and nasty tweets on social media

A Coors Light publicity stunt involved leaving suitcases around Canadian urban centres, but the campaign was a bust in Toronto, when one of the packages was flagged as suspicious. The resulting police investigation caused traffic mayhem. (CBC)

​

It seemed like a good idea at the time:  a Coors Light campaign would "rescue" Canadians from a dull summer by planting prize-filled briefcases all over the country. Finders would tweet a picture of themselves and add a code to collect the loot.  

But when a police officer noticed a case attached to a metal railing in downtown Toronto, a fun marketing idea turned into transit hell. Traffic was frozen as police investigated.  

"Awesome. You're the reason it took me an extra 20 minutes to get home from work. I'll continue avoiding your beer," tweeted one peeved commuter. "How did it not occur to anyone that this might be an unwise idea?" demanded another.

Forest Kenney of Molson Coors says the company did alert local police across the country about the promotion well ahead of time, but the police officer who noticed the briefcase was off-duty, and apparently not in the loop. The company quickly moved the contest to one that could be better controlled at bars.

Kenney deemed the promotion a success in some ways. "People were excited about it," he told CBC News. "For quite a few people outside the City of Toronto, the program will be remembered in a good way."

Marketing prof tracks marketing fails 

David Soberman teaches marketing at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Business, and takes note when these sorts of marketing disasters happen. He tells his students that high-achieving companies take risks.

"If you go for the low risk, conservative approach, you do what everyone else is doing, and then your product isn't differentiated. It doesn't stand out. Marketing is all about standing out," Soberman says.

But what about when companies stand out for the wrong reasons? Can their brand be damaged?

"Most of these situations create a temporary lack of confidence and trust in the company, and usually the company has to make an effort to regain confidence of the consumers," says Soberman. "In the long term you really have to have what I would call a repeated pattern of making mistakes to do lasting damage."

Lenovo Canada mistakenly advertises a $1,400 laptop for $279  

Result: Thousands of disappointed customers complain to Competition Bureau, and term the disaster 'Lenovo-gate'

Lenovo disappointed customers after mistakenly advertising a laptop for sale for $279. The company refused to sell the devices at that price, which resulted in a complaint to the Competition Bureau. (Ron Harris/Associated Press)

It was bad enough that thousands of Canadians paid for the laptop, only to have their orders cancelled. But then the May 2014 offer remained on the website for 48 hours after it was flagged.

One disappointed buyer told CBC News at the time "considering they're a computer company, I'm pretty sure their IT department should have been able to fix this, not taken two days."  

Outrage built to the point where a formal complaint was made to the Competition Bureau. An online petition at change.org demanding that the company honour the low price drew 6,000 signatures, but Lenovo was unmoved. The most it would do was to offer an apology and a $100 discount towards the next purchase made by affected customers.  

Perhaps most galling, it was the second such pricing error of 2014 at the Chinese computer maker. In March, Lenovo's S5000 tablet had been advertised in China at 50 per cent off. In that case, the company gave 110,000 buyers the deal.  No such luck in Canada.

Malaysian Airlines' My Ultimate Bucket List Contest

Result: The most colossal what-were-they-thinking moment of 2014

An advertisement for Malaysian Airlines' bucket list contest. Many deemed the contest in poor taste as the airline company had had recently lost two plane loads of passengers. (CBC)

You'd think the marketing team at Malaysian Airlines would have avoided any association with death when designing a new promotion, given that hundreds of passengers lost their lives on two hugely publicized and tragic flights.

But no. Somehow a contest called My Ultimate Bucket List got off the drawing board and into public view. Pundits were appalled that the airline would use the phrase "bucket list," since it's widely used to refer to the list of activities people want to enjoy before they die, or "kick the bucket." The campaign was launched after the disasters. And quickly nixed.

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Air Canada Calgary-to-Heathrow flight diverted to Toronto over 'electrical smell'

An Air Canada flight from Calgary to London's Heathrow Airport was diverted to Toronto for several hours after "a slight electrical smell" was reported on board.

Flight AC850 left Calgary for England at 7 p.m. MT.

The Boeing 767 with 201 passengers on board changed its flight path on the western edge of Greenland and headed for Toronto.

Air Canada spokeswoman Angela Mah told CBC News that the diversion was done "strictly out of an abundance of caution due to a slight electrical smell detected in the cabin."

Mah said the flight landed without incident at Toronto's Pearson airport early Monday. The flight departed Toronto for Heathrow at 7 a.m. ET with a different aircraft.

The incident comes a day after two Porter Airlines flights were diverted, both because smoke in the passenger cabin was reported:

• A flight from Toronto to Sudbury, Ont., made an emergency landing at Pearson airport Sunday night. The flight originated at Billy Bishop Toronto City airport, located on Toronto's downtown waterfront. The plane landed without incident.
• A flight from Toronto to Washington, D.C., made an unscheduled landing in Williamsport, Pa. No one was injured and the plane landed safely. 

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Jun Lin's father addresses media after Magnotta verdict

Diran Lin spoke Monday morning in Montreal, nearly one week after Luka Magnotta was convicted of murdering his son, Concordia University student Jun Lin.

Diran Lin, father of Jun Lin, prepared a victim impact statement that was read by his translator at the Montreal courthouse on Dec. 23, following Luka Magnotta's conviction. (Graham Hughes/Canadian Press)

After Magnotta was handed his verdict on Dec. 23, a translator read Diran Lin's victim impact statement, which said his son's death has had a devastating effect on the entire family.

"The night Lin Jun died, parts of many other people died in one way or another. His mother, his sister and me, his friends, [former boyfriend] Lin Feng. In one night, we lost a lifetime of hope, our futures, parts of our past," the translator read.

The 33-year-old Chinese student had moved to Montreal to attend Concordia. He was murdered and dismembered by Magnotta in 2012. 

Magnotta was found guilty of first-degree murder, which comes with a sentence of life in prison and no chance of parole for at least 25 years, and other charges. 

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Play along with The House's 2014 year-end political quiz

Were you paying attention to the world of politics in 2014?

Test your recall of the political events and newsmakers in The House's year-end quiz and go head-to-head with host Evan Solomon and panellists Andrew Coyne, columnist for PostMedia, CBC National Affairs Editor Chris Hall and Radio­-Canada Ottawa Bureau Chief Emmanuelle Latraverse.

Answers appear at the bottom.

1. 2014 was a Winter Olympics year… and politics is often a contact sport, so let's combine the two for our first question. On Jan. 7, which cabinet minister helped unveil the roster of Canada's men's hockey team?

2. Mid­-February: Canadians found out the cost behind the government ads they'd already been seeing on TV. Which program did the government spend $2.5 million promoting, despite the fact that that program didn't actually exist yet?

This Conservative MP was forced to backtrack in 2014. (Flickr)

3. Lots happened on the international scene this year. On Jan. 19, Stephen Harper began his first official visit to what country?

4. Speaking of the busy year on the international stage, on Jan. 27, MPs held an emergency debate to address the crisis in what country?

5. On Jan. 29, Justin Trudeau surprised almost everyone by kicking Liberal Senators out of his caucus. How many Senators got the boot?
A. 27
B. 30
C. 32

6. On Feb. 4, the first charges were laid in the Senate expenses scandal. Who was charged with FRAUD and BREACH OF TRUST?

7. Name this key player in Canadian politics in 2014 (listen to the show for an audio hint)

8. Feb. 11, the Conservatives tabled their budget. They're still projecting a deficit, but only because Jim Flaherty included a contingency fund in his calculations. How big was that contingency fund?

9. Feb. 22, the Liberals held a convention in Montreal… Leader Justin Trudeau had to defend one of his potential star candidates in the next election. What was retired Lt­. Gen. Andrew Leslie having to defend himself over that week?

---

Poll

Justin Trudeau was in the spotlight a lot this year. He's been ahead in the polls, he's had high profile gaffes, there are ongoing questions about his policies ­­ also about his handling of the suspension of two MPs. How would you grade Justin Trudeau's performance this year?

How would you grade Justin Trudeau's performance this year?

---

10. Feb. 24, which Conservative MP backtracked from this story?

"On the mail delivery day when voter cards are put in mailboxes, residents come home, pick them out of their boxes, and throw them in the garbage can. I have seen campaign workers follow, pick up a dozen of them afterward, and walk out. Why are they doing that? They are doing it so they can hand those cards to other people, who will then be vouched for at a voting booth and vote illegally."

11. On March 12, the Canadian flag was taken down at the NATO headquarters in Kabul to mark the end of Canada's mission in Afghanistan. At the height of that mission, how many Canadian troops were in Afghanistan?

Cpl. Harry Smiley, left, and Cpl . Gavin Early, right, take down the Canadian flag for the last time in Afghanistan on Wednesday March 12, 2014, bringing an end to 12 years of military involvement in a campaign that cost the lives of 158 Canadian soldiers. (Murray Brewster/Canadian Press)

12. On March 18, Jim Flaherty resigned as Finance Minister. The next day, another prominent politician announced their resignation. Who?

13. On March 21, the Supreme Court, in a 6-to-1 ruling, rejected the government's choice of Marc Nadon as the next high court Justice. Who did the government end up appointing instead?

14. On March 30, a former director of communications for the Prime Minister was forced out of his new job as head of the Conservative Party. What was the reason behind Dimitri Soudas's departure?

15. On April 7, Philippe Couillard's Liberals win the Quebec election. How many seats did his party win to defeat the Parti Québécois?
A. 65
B. 68
C. 70

16. April 8, a major security breach forced the Canada Revenue Agency to temporarily shut down its website. What is the name of the bug responsible for all that?

17. In early April, leaks from the House of Commons' Board of Internal Economy revealed that the NDP was ordered not to use parliamentary resources to pay for staff in satellite party offices. Where were those satellites offices located?

---

Poll

It hasn't been an easy year for the NDP. No success on the byelection front, struggling in the polls, a few controversies… And that's despite Tom Mulcair getting good reviews for his work in the House of Commons. The party is entering 2015 in third place. Can they turn things around?

Can Tom Mulcair and the NDP turn things around in 2015?

---

18. On April 24, Employment Minister Jason Kenney reacted to the controversy surrounding the Temporary Foreign Worker program by imposing a moratorium on what industry?

19. April 25, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could not reform the Senate on its own. On the same day, as he was reacting to the news, the Minister of State for Democratic Reform, Pierre Poilievre also announced what?

20. In early May, an unprecedented spat between Stephen Harper and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court puzzled many political watchers. The Prime Minister had suggested that the chief justice of the Supreme Court tried inappropriately to intervene in the process to appoint Justice Marc Nadon, even though her advice came before Nadon's appointment was announced. Name the lawyer who challenged the appointment of Marc Nadon.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper, left, and Chief Justice Beverly McLachlin had an unusual exchange of public views in 2014. (Canadian Press)

21. On May 28, which well­-known senator announced his resignation?

22. On June 4, the government tabled bill C-36: The Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act ­­ the new prostitution bill. That's after the Supreme Court had struck down parts of the old law following a court challenge by three women. Name one of those three women.

23. July 17, suspended Senator Mike Duffy was charged in connection to the Senate expenses scandal. How many charges is he facing?
A. 22
B. 31
C. 37

24. On July 29, the federal government took the unusual step of pointing the finger directly at China following a cyber attack. What did the government accuse Beijing of targeting?

25. On Aug. 21, the following clip from the prime minister attracted a lot of criticism: "We should not view this as sociological phenomenon. We should view it as crime. It is crime against innocent people, and it needs to be addressed as such." What was the prime minister responding to?

26. Name the Conservative MP who apologized for responding to NDP Leader Tom Mulcair's questions on Canada's mission in Iraq in September with an attack on the NDP position on Israel.

27. On Sept. 6, Jim Prentice won the Progressive Conservative Association of Alberta leadership election ­­ on his way to becoming the province's Premier. Later that month, on Sept. 22, people of New Brunswick went to the polls. Who became that province's new premier following the  election?

28. Oct. 7, a divided House of Commons voted in favour of sending Canadian aircraft and personnel to join coalition airstrikes in Iraq against ISIS targets. Where are Canada's CF­-18s based for that mission?

29. On Nov. 5, Dean Del Mastro rose in the House of Commons and resigned his seat after being convicted for violating the Elections Canada Act. Which riding did he represent?

30. Nov. 30, former governor general Michaëlle Jean is chosen as the new Secretary General of the International Organization of La Francophonie. Where did the meeting where she was selected take place?

31. In November, following a scathing Auditor General report into his department, Veterans Affairs Minister Julian Fantino didn't respond to the criticism himself. What was the reason given for him not responding to the AG's report?

---

Poll

That controversy was one of many this government had to address this year. It's a government that's been in power for a long time. But they're entering next year having brought the country's budget back in the black — can they make people forget about all the controversies and get a second majority mandate?

Can the Conservatives win a second majority mandate?

---

Lightning round

We're incorporating a little twist this year — a lightning round!

You'll each get 30 seconds to answer as many questions as possible.

1. Which province hosted the Premier's Council of the Federation meeting this year?

2. How many speakers addressed a joint session of parliament this year ?

3. Can you name 2 of them?

4. How many female premiers are there currently?

5. How many were there at the start of 2014?

6. Heritage Minister Shelley Glover unveiled a new monument on Nov. 7 on Parliament Hill. What does it commemorate?

7. What museum had its opening ceremonies in Winnipeg in September?

8. How many CF­-18s are currently in Ukraine and Iraq on active missions?

9. Who is the Liberal MP who won the byelection in Trinity-Spadina, ­ Olivia Chow's old riding?

10. Who is the new AFN National Chief?

11. What is the fixed date of the next Federal Election?

12. What is the name of the General in charge of the mission in Iraq?

13. How many Veterans Affairs regional offices did the government close this year?

14. What is the name of the LNG company that has put its B.C. project on hold?

15. Who is the new leader of the Bloc Québécois?

16. Who is the new clerk of the Privy Council?

17. In early December, Ottawa gave the green light to a deal between which two restaurant chains?

18. Who is the only person to have been convicted in connection with the robocalls scandal?

19. Which Canadian premier spent part of the year pushing for interprovincial free trade?

20. How many Senate vacancies are there right now?

21. Which opposition MPs accompanied John Baird to a fact finding missing to Iraq in September?

22. What is the name of Canada's new Privacy Commissioner?

23. The UN Climate Change conference was in Lima, Peru this year. Where will it be next in 2015?

24. What is the name of the new U.S. ambassador to Canada?

25. In March, Joe Oliver becomes Finance Minister. Ed Holder becomes Minister of State for Science and Technology. Who's the third minister involved in that shuffle?

26. What is the English title of Justin Trudeau's biography?

27. What's the title of Stephen Harper's hockey history book?

28. Which long­time B.C. NDP MP announced in December that she wouldn't be running again?

29. Which Conservative MP is running to become the leader of the Ontario Progressive­ Conservative Party?

30. Which province elected its first Green MLA this year?

---

Answers

1. Transport Minister Lisa Raitt.

2. The Canada Job Grant.

3. Israel.

4. Ukraine.

5. C, 32 Senators.

6. Mac Harb and Patrick Brazeau.

7. Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand. He was criticizing the government's Fair Elections Act that was tabled on Feb. 4.

8. $3 billion (projected deficit is $2.9 billion).

9. It was revealed that Leslie's move from one Ottawa home to another cost taxpayers $72,000.

10. Mississauga MP Brad Butt.

11. 2,300.

12. Alison Redford, Premier of Alberta.

13. Clement Gascon.

14. He tried to interfere with his fiancée's Conservative nomination battle.

15. C, 70.

16. Heartbleed.

17. Montreal, Quebec City and Toronto ­­ preparing to open another in Saskatchewan.

18. Immediate moratorium on the fast­food industry's access to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program.

19. Amendments to the Fair Elections Act.

20. Rocco Galati.

21. Romeo Dallaire.

22. Terri­Jean Bedford, Amy Lebovitch or Valerie Scott.

23. 31 charges.

24. The National Research Council of Canada.

25. Renewed calls for a national inquiry into missing and murdered aboriginal women after the killing of 15­-year­-old Tina Fontaine in Winnipeg.

26. Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister, Paul Calandra.

27. Liberal Brian Gallant.

28. Kuwait.

29. Peterborough.

30. Senegal.

31. Fantino was in Italy for Second World War commemoration events.

Lightning round

1. Prince Edward Island.

2. 3.

3. (Aga Khan IV, Petro Poroshenko, France François)

4. 2 (two) ­ Christie Clark of BC and Kathleen Wynne of Ontario.

5. 5 (five) ­ Kathy Dunderdale of Newfoundland and Labrador resigned on Jan. 24  / Alison Redford of Alberta resigned on March 23 / and Pauline Marois lost in an election on April 23.

6. The War of 1812 Monument made its public debut. It is located in front of

Parliament Hill's East Block.

7. The Canadian Museum for Human Rights.

8. 10 (ten) ­ 6 active CF­-18s based in Iraq , 4 based in Lithuania.

9. Adam Vaughan.

10. Perry Bellegarde.

11. Oct. 19.

12. Lt.-Gen. Jonathan Vance.

13. 9.

14. Petronas.

15. Mario Beaulieu.

16. Janice Charette.

17. Burger King and Tim Hortons.

18. Michael Sona, former Conservative campaign worker.

19. Saskatchewan's Brad Wall.

20. 17.

21. Paul Dewar and Marc Garneau.

22. Daniel Therrien.

23. Paris, France.

24. Bruce Heyman.

25. Greg Rickford becomes Natural Resources Minister.

26. Common Ground.

27. A Great Game.

28. Libby Davies.

29. Patrick Brown.

30. New Brunswick, David Coon.

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Roof issues at closed Ottawa science museum date back to 2010, documents reveal

The closed Canada Science and Technology Museum had been asking the federal government for years to help fix a leaky roof whose "lifecycle had come to an end," according to documents obtained by CBC News through an access to information request.

The museum, which closed in September after leaks in the roof led to unsafe levels of mould in the air, had communicated its desire for a new roof at its 50-year-old Ottawa location as early as 2010.

In a timeline obtained through the information request, the museum said it told the Department of Canadian Heritage for four consecutive years, beginning with the 2010-2011 corporate plan, about the roof and the funding needed to fix it.

An engineering assessment in 2010 also "revealed that the Museum's roof lifecycle had come to an end and required replacement given the potential for roof failure."

Museum officials met with the department on Dec. 17, 2013, to present four options: patch the roof and maintain the status quo, partially repair the roof, completely replace the roof or build a new, angled roof over the existing one.

The museum's presentation from that day shows a recommendation for a partial replacement (at a cost that's been blacked out) that would take a minimum of 16 to 17 months. A formal request was made to the Risk Management Reserve, and approval was given by Heritage Minister Shelly Glover to get another cost estimate.

A submission to the Treasury Board was in the works for the last week of September when unsafe levels of mould caused the museum to be evacuated and closed Sept. 11.

49 distinct leaks in less than a year

That timeline was part of a package of documents dated Sept. 22, 2014. The documents also included a list of all the leaks in the museum's roof and the areas affected.

One example:

"Water leaks all weekend — closet between Connections and Innovations, 4 small leaks in Connections, Innovations, Biocomposite Plastics exhibition, Electrical Panels on south wall, in between walls of Energy and Technozone, Technozone carpets soaked," said the entry for Jan. 10-12, 2014, describing nine of the 49 distinct leaks reported from Thanksgiving weekend 2013 until the closure.

Some of those leaks meant parts of exhibits had to be closed or covered with plastic to protect them, including when the museum was open.

"The cars wrapped in plastic!! Is this a morgue?" one museum visitor said, according to a quote included in a section of the Dec. 17, 2013, presentation.

False start on roof repairs

CBC News previously reported that a roof repair project for the museum was launched in October 2013, with a budget of $3.2 million over five years to remove asphalt, add insulation and re-seal, among other fixes.

The museum's funding request said work was halted immediately after workers found "advanced deterioration of the existing roofing materials and the presence of asbestos in the crumbling cement layer" when they started the project.

Museum CEO Alex Benay and regional minister John Baird were unavailable for comment earlier this week.

Last month Glover announced $80.5 million of funding for upgrades to the museum including a complete roof replacement, upgrading the facade and exhibit space and retrofitting it to better handle earthquakes and fires.

Documents received in the request said a new building has been "contemplated" since the mid-1960s, and funding had been received in 2008 to start planning work on a new museum.

The museum is expected to re-open in 2017.

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2014: Notable people who died

Dalhousie dentistry scandal: Should free speech protect students from punishment?

The perfect brew

Black Ivory Coffee: Canadian's elephant poop coffee makes a pricey cup of Joe

Canada Science and Technology Museum asked for roof funding in 2010

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2014: Notable people who died

The House: 2014 year-end political quiz

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TECHNOLOGY

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The stinky truth about the world’s most expensive coffee

The sun rises over a branch of the Mekong River in northern Thailand that serves as bathing waters for local elephants.

Blake Dinkin, a Toronto entrepreneur, carefully watches a few of the large mammals.

"Oh, there!" Dinkin says, cringing as he points to the river. An elephant has just taken a dump and an island of feces is now floating downstream. Dinkin stares at it.

"We can't save it," he says.

Once the elephant poop is wet, Dinkin can't sift through it and recover the hidden nuggets of coffee beans hidden within. He's already lost several thousand dollars this way.

The Torontonian is the first person in the world to feed raw coffee cherries to elephants and harvest them from the elephant's deposits to make some of the most exclusive and expensive coffee in the world.

The Black Ivory Coffee is found in exclusive hotels for about $50-60 Cdn a cup or can be purchased online for around $130 for just over 100 grams.

Each elephant eats 150 kilograms of food a day. Dinkin slips a few coffee cherries into their diet, but they can be fussy about what they eat. Dinkin mixes tamarind, salt and other fruits into their food, depending on the elephant's preferences.

"It's like being a waiter in a restaurant," said Dinkin. "Some elephants like it ... a little more plain. Other elephants like it with some rice. Some elephants like it with banana."

It takes one to two days for the coffee cherries to make their full trip through the elephants digestive tract. During that time, they pick the flavours of the elephant's diet, giving the coffee a distinctive taste, says Dinkin.

To make a single kilogram of coffee beans, it takes about 33 kilograms of raw coffee cherries. Many beans are crushed when the elephant chews or lost in the river during bathing.

From civets to elephants

Over a decade ago, Dinkin was aiming to market civet cat coffee from Africa. The pricey coffee was popular several years ago. Known in Indonesian as kopi luwak, it also involves the red, ripe cherries encasing the coffee bean being eaten by the animal. 

Black Ivory's $50-a-cup coffee tastes like the diet of the elephants that digested the beans, says founder Blake Dinkin. (Shutterstock)

But he decided to move on after finding its production fraught with fraud. Farmers often would merely wipe cat feces over coffee beans to pass the beans off as digested, he says.

His quest led him to various animals and took him to Indonesia before he finally settled on elephants in Thailand.  

The key reason he chose elephants was they only have one stomach and consume a lot of food in a day. Also, coffee cherries may naturally have been part of an elephant's diet, if grown in an area where they were grazing, he says.

Dinkin works in partnership with the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation, a sanctuary for rescued elephants. It's located in the far northwest corner of Thailand where the country meets Burma and Laos, an area once synonymous with opium production.

John Roberts, who runs the sanctuary, remembers his first thought when Dinkin approached him with the idea.

"Am I going to have a lot of wired elephants on my hands? Am I going to have a lot of depressed elephants on my hands with headaches and withdrawal symptoms if we aren't feeding [them coffee]?"

Dinkin worked with a veterinarian at the Toronto Zoo to show that the caffeine won't absorb into the elephants' bloodstream. With his worries quelled, Roberts gave Dinkin the green light for production.

Roberts says if the idea takes off, he envisions herds of wild elephants devoted to the task of producing the coffee.  

"It could pay for the total upkeep of elephants and mahouts, [a person who takes care of elephants], and families and that is a goal."

Many of the elephants' handlers were destitute before arriving at the reserve he runs in association with the luxury hotel chain Anantara.

Thailand banned logging in 1989, leaving many mahouts without a source of income from their elephants. Many ended up living on the street, struggling to find a way to provide for their families and feed their elephants.

The broader impact

Dinkin knew he needed the co-operation of the mahouts for his business idea to work. The idea of feeding elephants coffee cherries and then sifting through their excrement to pick them out wasn't immediately appealing to the mahouts. 

Blake Dinkin says it took nine years to perfect the process of making Black Ivory Coffee beans. (Apichart Weerawong/Associated Press)

To motivate them, the entrepreneur decided he would need to pay them extremely well.

Nowadays, the mahouts and their wives can make the equivalent of a day's worth of pay in about an hour.

The impact of that extra cash is evident in the mahouts' small village nestled in the forest of the elephant sanctuary. Every family seems to have at least one scooter and is able to send their kids to school. One woman CBC spoke with said next year she will be able to afford a car, too.

At the sanctuary, Dinkin scoops a handful of the Thai Arabica beans that have been drying in the shade after being excreted.

He holds them to his nose. "You can definitely tell there is some elephant there," he says, describing it as a bouquet.

Perfecting the brew

Dinkin says it took nine years of trial and error to perfect the coffee. At first, it tasted horrible.

The scale of Dinkin's production is small, at about 300 kilograms a year, and the price of the coffee is steep at around $1,500 per kilogram of beans. Still, demand is outstripping supply.

"Hotels are re-ordering, and we are getting inquiries from all over the world."

As Dinkin watches the elephants dig into their coffee cherry-infused morning meal, he admits to feeling proud.

"When I first approached people with the idea, they thought I was crazy."

He acknowledges the coffee is not for everyone.

"There is always going to be people who are going to be put off by the process," says Dinkin. "This is a small niche market."

Ultimately, though, the bottom line lies in how the coffee tastes. Dinkin describes it as floral, earthy and full-bodied.

"And there are lingering notes of chocolate," he adds, with the playful glint in his eye.

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Should free speech protect Dalhousie dentistry students from punishment?

Here's one view: The students of Dalhousie University's dentistry school who are responsible for misogynistic Facebook postings about their fellow female students should not be expelled, punished, or sanctioned for their actions. 

In fact, says Mark Mercer, chair of the philosophy department at Saint Mary's University, the students should be allowed to express their views, as offensive as they may be, without fear of any kind of reprisal from the school.

"One of the things that a university should be concerned with is that everyone feels able to say what they want, that there's candour and openness," says Mercer. "Only in the context of candour and openness can views be explored fully and criticized fully.

"So I think in a university context, anything that prevents us from saying what we want to say cuts against the mission of the university."

Mercer, a free speech advocate, has staked out a position certainly at odds with many who have called for the expulsion of the students and are upset that a restorative justice process has been chosen, instead of harsher penalties for those alleged to have made the comments.

Dalhousie University president Richard Florizone has said there will be "significant consequences" and that, even with the restorative justice process, expulsion of the men involved has not been ruled out. 

The dentistry faculty at Dalhousie came under fire after CBC News received screenshots of sexually explicit posts on the so-called Class of DDS 2015 Gentlemen Facebook page.

In one of the posts, male students in the group voted on which woman they'd like to have "hate sex" with and joked about using chloroform on women.

"It doesn't matter how ugly, how vile it is," Mercer said. "Any rules against speech have the potential of blocking the road of inquiry, of preventing us from being candid and examining what we want to say."

Four members of the institution's faculty filed formal complaints under the Halifax university's Code of Student Conduct, which states that students must not engage in "vexatious conduct, harassment or discrimination that is directed at one or more specific persons" or conduct that would "cause another person to feel demeaned, intimidated or harassed."

Mercer argues that stifling speech only serves to drive it underground, or force students to speak in code, and not address the issues behind it.

In a later blog written for the Canadian Centre for Ethics in Public Affairs, Mercer expanded on his views, saying those who don't mind punishing people for the content of their public expression, "should be uneasy when it comes to going after posters in the relative privacy of Facebook, I would think.

"Or is it only behind the locked doors of our houses that we can say what we want without worry?"

University students are members of an intellectual community, Mercer said, "and such a community is destroyed when members are directed to have certain beliefs and values, rather than allowed, through investigation and critical discussion, to come to their own beliefs and values."

But John Carpay, a lawyer and president  of the Calgary-based Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, which advocates for free speech rights, said the comments made in the Facebook postings are not the ideas that university free speech are intended to defend.

He said he believes the university has a right to establish a code of conduct and have a legitimate right to discipline students for violating the code of conduct. 

"I'm a very very strong advocate for universities as being the place where you can express political, moral, cultural, social, religious — every kind of ideas. But it's the expression of ideas in the context of searching for truth. And in that context you have to allow for very unpopular ideas to be fully aired and expressed."

"What these students are talking about is so far removed from authentic academic discussion that it doesn't warrant much if any protection.

"And I say that with some reluctance, because I also say you can't censor speech on the basis of its content. But yet I think you can still qualify between what is the expression of an idea, culturally, politically, philosophically, versus just really getting down in the gutter."

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Strong winds give 35,000 Quebecers a dark Christmas morning

Weather conditions are making Christmas morning a little more difficult than most Quebecers would like.

High winds knocked out power for nearly 35,000 Hydro-Québec clients Thursday, particularly in the Lanaudière region, the Laurentians, Montreal, Laval, and to a lesser extent in the Montérégie and Outaouais regions.

By 8 a.m. ET, the number of clients without electricity had dropped from 35,000 to about 24,000. 

Hydro-Québec said it hopes to restore electricity to everyone by late morning.

Many people living in the eastern part of the province and in the Atlantic provinces are having an icy Christmas due to rain, freezing rain and winds gusting up to 90 kilometres an hour in some areas.

Motorists should take extra precautions on the road. There is a heightened risk of hydroplaning in some parts of Quebec. In other parts of the province, the roads could be icy.

Up to 60 millimetres of rain could fall on Atlantic Canada, northeast Quebec, Quebec City and the Mauricie region.

Environment Canada is also calling for freezing rain in the Gaspésie, on Quebec's North Shore and in some parts of New Brunswick.

Check Environment Canada's website for a region-by-region breakdown of current weather warnings.

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2014: Top images of the year

Stunning photos from Ukraine, Russia, Syria and elsewhere

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'He is a guest among brothers': Dad of Jordanian pilot captured by ISIS begs for release

The father of a Jordanian pilot captured by militants with the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has pleaded for his son's release.

Jordan is one of several Arab countries participating in the U.S.-led military mission to bomb fighters from the Islamist group, which holds territory in both Syria and Iraq.

First Lt. Mu'ath al-Kaseasbeh, 27, was captured after his jet crashed in northeast Syria on Wednesday during a bombing mission against the militants. The U.S. military, which commands the operation, said enemy fire was not the cause of the crash.

Kaseasbeh, who comes from a prominent Jordanian Sunni Muslim family, is the first pilot from the international coalition known to have been captured by ISIS.

The Sunni Muslim jihadist group has a history of killing enemy soldiers that it captures on the battlefield and beheading Western civilians that it takes hostage. Many of the captives it has killed are Shias or non-Muslims, but the group has also executed Sunnis for fighting alongside its enemies.

His family has pleaded for mercy.

"I do not want to describe him as a hostage. I call him a guest," his father, Saif al-Kaseasbeh, told Reuters Television.

"He is a guest among brothers of ours in Syria Islamic State. I ask them — by the name of God and with the dignity of the Prophet Mohammad, peace be upon him — to receive him as a guest of his hosts and treat him well," he said. 

Images of the pilot being pulled out of a lake and hustled away by masked jihadis underscored the risks for the U.S. and its Arab and European allies in the air campaign.

The capture — and the potential hostage situation — presented a nightmare scenario for Jordan, which vowed to continue its fight against the group that has overrun large parts of Syria and Iraq and beheaded foreign captives.

The cause of the crash was not immediately known, but the U.S. military insisted the plane was not shot down.

"Evidence clearly indicates that ISIL [ISIS] did not down the aircraft as the terrorist organization is claiming," Central Command said in a statement.

U.S. Army Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, who is overseeing all coalition military operations in Iraq and Syria, condemned the pilot's capture, saying in a statement: "We will support efforts to ensure his safe recovery and will not tolerate ISIL's attempts to misrepresent or exploit this unfortunate aircraft crash for their own purposes."

Relatives of the Jordanian pilot who was captured by ISIS after his plane was shot down congregate in front of his family's home in the city of Karak, Jordan. (Muhammad Hamed/Reuters)

A coalition official, who was not authorized to discuss the episode publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity, said the pilot was in an F-16 fighter and was able to eject.

Jordanian Information Minister Mohammad Momani earlier told the AP that the plane was believed to have been shot down.

"It is our expectation that the plane went down because of fire from the ground, but it is difficult to confirm that, with the little information we have," he said.

ISIS is known to have Russian-made Igla anti-aircraft missiles. The shoulder-fired weapon has long been in the Syrian and Iraqi government arsenals; it was used during the 1991 Gulf War by Iraqi forces to bring down a British Tornado jet, for example. More recently, militants in Chechnya have used them to down Russian helicopters.

The United States and several Arab allies have been striking ISIS in Syria since Sept. 23, and U.S. and other international warplanes have been waging an air campaign against the extremists in Iraq for even longer. The campaign aims to push back the jihadi organization after it took over much of Iraq and Syria and declared a "caliphate."

Canada has provided six CF-18s, two CP-140 Aurora surveillance aircraft and a C-150 Polaris to the mission.

This picture taken from Twitter purportedly shows a man holding the wreckage of a downed Jordanian air force plane in Syria. (Raqqa Media Center)

Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird said earlier this month that Canadian planes would only participate in airstrikes on targets in Iraq and had no plans to fly missions into Syria. 

Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates are participating in the Syria strikes, with Qatari logistical support.

ISIS has beheaded dozens of Syrian soldiers it captured around the country. The group has also beheaded three Americans and two Britons. In Iraq, it has shot down at least one Iraqi military helicopter, and the pilots died in the crash.

On Thursday, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that government airstrikes in another Syrian stronghold of ISIS killed over 21 people -- including children.

The Observatory said Syrian military aircraft struck two locations in the northern town of Qabassen, including a market, causing the casualties. The death toll was likely to rise because people were still digging through the rubble to find bodies. The strike was also reported by another Syrian monitoring group.
 

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