Tools Of The Trade

Another plank in the Tory platform has been hammered in:

Stephen Harper will promise a financial boost for training and for employers, and also tax breaks for the tools tradespeople use.

The Conservative leader will make the announcement in Hamilton on Thursday, and the proposals will form part of the party's forthcoming election platform.

....

Mr. Harper will promise to more than double — to $500 — the value of tools that can be claimed as tax-deductible each year, sources said.

Mr. Stairs would not offer further details. But other sources said the plan will include incentives for young people entering trade schools and for the businesses that hire them.

“The goal here is to get more people into the trades and to help those that are already in the trades get ahead,” Mr. Stairs said.

The Canadian Construction Association says it has spent years demanding better tax breaks for the purchase of tools, because the current $200 annual limit hasn't changed since 1976.

Skilled trades have unfairly suffered something of a stigma in recent years as somehow being less valuable than post-secondary education.

Far from it. A plumber or mechanic not only has more valuable skills than a peace and conflict studies grad, but also uses his brains more on the job than you think.

Tradesmen have to be good diagnosticians and problem-solvers and master ever-changing technologies quickly; that's more intellectually demanding than regurgitating back progressive propaganda in a liberal arts course.

I'd trust my plumber's common sense before I'd trust most liberal arts grads.

They deserve the tax breaks they're being promised.

Source: Globe and Mail

Smurf Ad Bombs

Even though everybody on the Internet has probably seen the Unicef Smurf bombing video about eight dozen times, it's still funny as hell to see the little blue bastards get bombed to kingdom come. And judging by the blogosphere buzz, I'm far from the only person who thinks that way.

If the advertisement was supposed to get people thinking about the horrors of war and the need to prevent them, it has failed spectacularly, because most people are treating it as satire.

The Smurfs are only slightly less annoying than Barney, and if that fruity purple dinosaur got blown to bits on a Unicef commercial, we'd all be laughing that up too.

Don Alfonso Returns

Alfonso Gagliano isn't letting the public disgrace of Adscam keep him out of the political arena. Fortunately for us (but not for them), it's the Italian one:

Some longtime friends recently came calling with a new challenge.

They came on behalf of Italy's Union of Christian Democrats - a moderate centre-right partner in Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's coalition government.

They asked the former public works minister, who hails from Italy, to become the Christian Democrats' campaign chairman for Canada.

"So I said, 'yes,' " said Gagliano, who is working as a volunteer.

"I know politics, I know Quebec, I know the Italian community. . . and I'm giving them a hand."

A total of 18 seats have been opened up in Italy's upper and lower houses of parliament for candidates from abroad.

Italians living in North America will have a chance to elect two members to the lower-house chamber of deputies and one member to the senate.

"This is a historic occasion and I'm giving my contribution," Gagliano said.

He plans to help two Italian-language journalists from Toronto get elected in a race against fellow Italian citizens from across Canada, the United States and Mexico.

However, the race in Canada isn't officially under way yet. Unlike the U.S. and a handful of other countries, Canada has not yet formally agreed to allow its residents to participate.

If Gagliano, as a former minister of the Crown and life member of the Queen's Privy Council for Canada, wants to get involved in Italian partisan politics, he should renounce his Canadian citizenship and take up Italian citizenship again.

I also wonder why Italy has these extra-territorial legislative seats. Can you imagine the uproar if Canada tried to create parliamentary seats for Canadian citizens resident abroad, especially in the United States?

Diplomats and soldiers stationed abroad still have to claim a Canadian residence in order to vote in elections. Why should Canadians living abroad of their own free will have the privilege of representation in Parliament when their only ties to the country may be on paper alone?

Source: Yahoo

Sinclair Stevens: Sore Loser

Two years after the new Conservative Party of Canada's founding was announced, Sinclair Stevens is still refusing to surrender, demanding that the Federal Court of Appeal undo the hard work of thousands of members across Canada:

In arguments Wednesday before a three-judge panel, Stevens' lawyer Peter Rosenthal ratcheted up the rhetoric - at one point comparing the political battle to one of the most infamous military assaults in history.

It was Dec. 7, 2003 - the anniversary of the Pearl Harbour attack - that Chief Electoral Officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley officially approved the registration of the new Conservatives, noted Rosenthal.

"It was like Pearl Harbour in a way," he told the court. "It was a surprise attack."

Rosenthal contended that Kingsley was wrong to bow to the urging of then-Alliance leader Stephen Harper and then-PC leader Peter MacKay.

The registration decision was rushed through on a Sunday afternoon to head off efforts by Stevens and other PC dissidents to challenge it, he said.

I feel sorry in a way for both Sinclair Stevens and his lawyer.

Sorry for Stevens, because he has forfeited what little claim he might have had to respect as an elder party statesman to become a pathetic laughingstock, reduced to fighting long-forgotten battles long after they've been won.

If he wants to use Japanese military analogies, his position is not unlike that of the Japanese soldiers who were still fighting in the jungles of the Philippines thirty years after the war ended.

Sorry for Rosenthal too, because he has to argue a hopeless appeal which, even if it had some legal merit, would surely be denied because of the court's unwillingness to interfere with internal party and parliamentary affairs:

Justice Robert Decary observed that, if the old PCs are resurrected and given official status once again, the Alliance would presumably have to be revived as well.

Justice Allen Linden wondered who would form the official Opposition in the House of Commons under those circumstances.

Justice Gilles Letourneau wanted to know whether all the MPs elected under the Conservative banner in the last election would now have to sit as Independents.

I bet that it wasn't Stevens' intention to revive the Alliance along with the PCs, but he can't really have one without the other. But with no one but a few aging Red Tory malcontents interested in bringing back the PCs to life, Stevens can only hope to find himself with a paper shell of a Progressive Conservative Party to fight against another paper shell Alliance.

In any event, Stevens' quixotic mission is doomed to failure, but not before wasting the party's time and money having to defend the original action and respond to the appeal.

The Court of Appeal should hit him with the Conservative Party's costs, as a lesson to those who would pursue political aims through vexatious litigation.

Source: Yahoo

A Quebec Wing And A Prayer

Gloria Galloway's jihad against Stephen Harper's leadership continues with this latest broadside from another disgruntled Quebec member:

Federal Conservatives in Quebec say the party has dithered so long in sanctioning a special wing in that province that it will be impossible to organize in time for the next election -- a gap they say will further the cause of separation.

Frustrated party members established a new Quebec wing just before the party's first policy convention in March. But the national council and the office of Tory Leader Stephen Harper have so far refused to officially acknowledge or fund the regional organization, party members said yesterday.

"Without it I am afraid the party ultimately could never win the province of Quebec and could also never win the government," said Pierre Gaudreault, who recently stepped down as the party's candidate in the Quebec City-area riding of Beauport-Limoilou.

....

Senator Pierre-Claude Nolin, a leading agitator for the establishment of a Quebec wing of the party, could not be reached for comment yesterday. Lawrence Cannon, the Conservative candidate in Pontiac, near Hull, who was named deputy chief of staff to Mr. Harper last month as the party tried to appease discontented Quebec members, was also unavailable.

Was this story so urgent that Ms. Galloway simply could not wait to get comment from a couple of actual serious Quebec organizers? Surely the problems in Quebec would still have been the same after they speak.

A formal Quebec wing would be a never-ending source of trouble for the party. It would not likely be more than a shell, and most of its members would be opportunistic former Liberals scrambling to stay on the gravy train. Such an organization would almost certainly wield influence far out of proportion to its actual size and capability, and would be constantly agitating to push the party leftwards, especially on social issues.

And it still wouldn't win us any seats in Quebec.

Why borrow trouble for so little return?

Source: Globe and Mail

Sorbara Out

Ontario Finance Minister Greg Sorbara has resigned because he's currently under investigation for fraud allegedly committed while he was a director of Royal Group Technologies:

Mr. Sorbara was initially defiant in the face of calls for his resignation, saying he had no intention of stepping down.

"I can tell you clearly and unequivocally, I am not involved in the investigation," he told reporters yesterday afternoon. "Over the past 18 months, I have never been contacted by the RCMP."

He repeatedly said he is "simply not involved in the investigation" even though the search warrants specifically cite his name in connection with the allegations.

He said he found out about the search warrant yesterday morning when someone from Sorbara Group left him a voice message but that he had not seen the document.

....

The allegedly fraudulent acts were in connection with a series of so-called related party deals between Royal Group and private companies owned by (founder Vic) De Zen and other officials.

In November, 2004, Royal Group dismissed Mr. De Zen as chairman and removed two other top executives after an internal probe by forensic accountants Kroll Lindquist Avey revealed they earned $6.5-million on a related-party transaction six years earlier.

A summary of a final report by Kroll, released last March by Royal Group, concluded that Mr. De Zen and the others were involved in more than 20 related-party transactions dating back to 1996.

Royal Group did not disclose details of the transactions, including whether the Sorbara Group was involved in one of them. Yesterday, company spokesman Richard Wertheim said Royal Group has made all material disclosures and had nothing further to add.

The search warrant on the Sorbara Group (actually a subsidiary called Sam-Sor Enterprises Inc.) mentions two property deals in Brampton that took place in 1996 and 1997.

So much for the Liberal strategy of repeated denials in the face of overwhelming evidence. Having an alleged crook in charge of the books is going to hang around Dalton McGuinty's neck like an albatross for a long time to come. The most controversial claim out of the Ministry of Finance--the $23 billion annual fiscal imbalance between what Ontario taxpayers pay out and get back from Ontario and the looming threat of have-not status--is going to look politically suspect.

Let's see if Dwight Duncan can do a better job.

Source: Globe and Mail

Veuillez Parlez Francais, Monsieur Le Gendarme

The Federal Court of Canada has ordered the RCMP to provide services in both English and French across all New Brunswick, not just where numbers warrant.

Will the same practice be mandated for the Surete du Quebec and RCMP in Quebec?

Well?

Perverts In Uniform

The thin red line of heroes may contain many a flasher, groper, peeping Tom, public wanker and porn freak, according to this Ottawa Citizen report:

Thirteen Canadian Forces members were convicted of sexual offences in 2003 and 2004, but less than half have been kicked out of the military, the Department of National Defence has disclosed.

Of the 13 soldiers convicted by courts martial in those two years, only four were let go by the military, including a former Edmonton-based soldier who was caught with more than 100 child pornography images on a barracks computer, DND officials say.

The military does not automatically discharge soldiers convicted of sex crimes. Nor does it impose an absolute ban on recruiting sex offenders, although the military's general policy states that those who have engaged in sexual misconduct "shall not normally" be hired.

The Armed Forces can't even tell the public who the worst offenders are, because of national security:

Under Bill S-39, tabled by the government in the Senate last June, military sex offenders' names, locations and other particulars would be registered for the first time in the national sex offender registry. The database helps police across Canada keep track of the current locations of sex offenders.

However, Bill S-39 would give the chief of the defence staff the power to delay registering a soldier convicted of a sex crime for "operational" reasons. Moreover, he would not have to publicly report how many sex offenders, if any, were exempted from registering.

What operational reasons could possibly require retaining a sex offender in any capacity, whatever its nature?

If there are sexual predators in the ranks, deploying them overseas only provides them prime hunting grounds for further conquests, possibly without fear of reprisal.

The United Nations has had its peacekeeping forces' reputation tarnished with reports of sex crimes by peacekeepers in Congo, among other places. Deploying convicted perverts will almost certainly add to the problem.

Sex offenders have no business wearing the country's uniform. Period.

Going To The Chapel

It's official: Scott Brison is getting married to one Maxime St. Pierre.

Which one's the bride? Which one's the groom?

Who gets to give whom away?

Will Pierre Pettigrew's chauffeur drive the wedding limo?

Will Belinda Stronach be the maid of honour?

Where's the gift registry? What do you get the happy couple? Will they be honeymooning in San Francisco?

Do we throw rice at them or government money?

Anyone have any wedding plan suggestions for these two?

Social Engineering

University administrators, ever sensitive to the need for gender parity and other considerations of identity politics, are alarmed that women aren't studying engineering.

So now they're trying some very strange expedients to make it female friendly:

In a bid to halt the growing gender gap, Ontario's 15 engineering schools held an emergency summit last winter and have launched a number of rare steps this fall:

They have changed entrance requirements this year to make them more female-friendly, by scrapping the dreaded Geometry and Discrete Math course as a compulsory requirement for engineering, and instead making it one of several options students may take, including biology, a subject girls often prefer, as well as earth science and data management.

They have banded together to host simultaneous hands-on workshops next Saturday at campuses across the province to pitch engineering to girls and their parents as a "people profession" that helps others as much as the health professions so popular with teenaged girls.

....

"We know girls are drawn to professions they see as `caring' for others, so girls who are strong in math often veer towards health sciences," said Ecsedi, whose daughter is a mechanical engineer working on ways to relieve spinal cord pain


"They need to understand that engineering is also a `caring profession' that works on ways to detect breast cancer earlier, or clean up contaminated soil or reduce malnutrition in the world through measures like fortifying salt."

Apparently the study of advanced calculus and geometry is beyond the grasp of delicate female constitutions, and they might collapse under the stress and strain.

Similar arguments were used more than a century ago to keep women out of certain fields of higher education. Educators should be ashamed to use them, and young women should take offence at them.

Moreover, it does them a disservice to let them enter a demanding academic program unprepared. If anything, loosening the advanced calculus requirements will make the study of engineering more daunting and lead to fewer women taking it.

Yet the campaign to encourage more young women to study engineering by emphasizing its so-called caring and nurturing aspects does have some basis in fact.

Harvard President Lawrence Summers was roundly condemned for making similar observations in blunter language:

"So my best guess, to provoke you, of what's behind all of this is that the largest phenomenon, by far, is the general clash between people's legitimate family desires and employers' current desire for high power and high intensity, that in the special case of science and engineering, there are issues of intrinsic aptitude, and particularly of the variability of aptitude, and that those considerations are reinforced by what are in fact lesser factors involving socialization and continuing discrimination. I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong."

If men have a greater natural aptitude for mathematics and science, they're going to be more attracted and successful as a group in engineering. Painting engineering labs pink and scenting them with potpourri isn't going to change that.

Source: Toronto Star

Who Moved My Cheese?

Many famous mysteries in Canada still continue to fascinate us, such as the buried treasure of Oak Island and the fate of the Franklin Expedition. Now the mystery of the lost cheese of the Saguenay joins the lore:

Luc Boivin's lost cheddar is passing into local legend as the Titanic of the cheese world.

The Quebec cheese maker dropped a 2,000-pound cargo of cheese to the bottom of the Saguenay fjord last year in a ripening experiment. Then he spent this summer searching for it. And now, after deploying a team of divers and an arsenal of high-tech tracking equipment, Mr. Boivin has given up the quest.

The sunken treasure of cheddar is nowhere to be found.

....

According to a company estimate, $50,000 was spent to look for the cheese. The most popular theory is that its anchoring cables got caught up in the winter ice and that the cheese was carried downriver. Still, Mr. Dufour is not discouraged.

"The Titanic sank in 1912, but it was only found in 1985," he said.

The story has captured the public's imagination. The Saguenay cheese hunt made headlines around the globe. Mr. Boivin received random reports of sightings of the errant cheese barrels miles from where they were placed.

Last month, a commander of the HMCS Chicoutimi, on a local visit, said perhaps the Canadian Forces submarine could locate the cheese. "He said he had systems that could help," Mr. Boivin said.

....

Mr. Boivin dropped 10 barrels of cheese into the Saguenay last fall after a fisherman reported reeling in a piece of Boivin cheese from a lake bottom and trying it. It was pronounced the best cheese he'd ever tasted.

This story also underscores how ill-equipped our armed forces are, when our second-hand submarines can't even find a barrel of cheese. Doesn't mean our government can't find the pork, though.

Source: Globe and Mail

Teaching Contempt

The British Columbia Teachers' Federation has been found in contempt of court for refusing to end its illegal strike:

After a rare Sunday hearing, Madam Justice Brenda Brown of the B.C. Supreme Court said citizens do not have the right to choose which court orders to obey and which to flout.

"If one may breach a court order, so may another . . . and anarchy cannot be far behind," Judge Brown told the court.

The contempt application was made by the province's school boards, which had earlier filed a cease-and-desist order from the B.C. Labour Relations Board in the Supreme Court, giving it the legal effect of a court order.

After she found the teachers guilty of contempt, however, Judge Brown delayed a hearing until Thursday to determine what penalties should be handed out.

The delay, which was strongly opposed by lawyers for the school boards, gives the teachers a few more days to consider how far they want to continue their defiance before being punished.

It also virtually guarantees no school for more than 600,000 elementary and high-school students tomorrow and Wednesday.

What exactly prompted British Columbia teachers to pull a wildcat strike?

Did the B.C. government send Pinkertons strikebreakers with truncheons into the classrooms to bust the heads of union leaders?

More than 42,000 teachers began an indefinite strike last Friday to protest against Bill 12, a government bill imposing a two-year contract extension on them, with no wage increase and no improvement in their working conditions.

The bitter dispute seems certain to produce the most prolonged shutdown of the province's public schools in more than 20 years.

Before Judge Brown issued her ruling, BCTF lawyer John Rogers argued that there was a history to the current dispute, which had seen the Liberal government restrict teachers' right to strike by designating education as an essential service and strip them of the ability to negotiate working conditions.

"In 3½ years, the teachers have gone from full collective bargaining to no collective bargaining rights," he said. "It's important to understand why they determined it was necessary to take a stand."

Mr. Rogers said the teachers' illegal strike is in the tradition of civil disobedience against unjust laws.

"This is not a defence, but civil disobedience does exist."

Two more years of some of the most envied working conditions anywhere and being declared an essential service hardly equate with being denied the right to vote or sit at the front of the bus.

In any event, the students of British Columbia are being taught some valuable lessons.

First lesson: teachers' unions are out for thir members only, despite all their rhetoric about putting students' interests and good education first.

Second lesson: you can defy legitimate authority for a bad cause and suffer very little penalty.

Third lesson: the students are probably more mature than the teachers.

Source: Globe and Mail

Happy Together

What more do Stephen Harper and Peter MacKay have to do to convince the media that they can work together without having to be bosom buddies?

Peter MacKay, for one, is tired of having to explain that he and Mr. Harper are getting along just fine, so he's explaining that fact in terms the Liberal-friendly media can understand:

"We have a good professional working relationship. This (tension) has been exaggerated," MacKay told CTV's Question Period yesterday. "This is nothing like the tensions that went on between Martin and Chretien where (Martin) was undermining him for years and engaged in a bloodless coup in his own province."

The media thrives on conflict; if none exists, they'll invent it. Not necessarily out of bias or malice, but because they've been trained to find and report it from day one in journalism school. Nothing else hooks readers quite like it.

The Chretien-Martin civil war in the Liberal Party was good for thousands of stories over the years, but with no obvious successor to Martin ready to take him down, the media's natural bias and desire to report political conflict have led them to work up a similar Harper-MacKay rift.

Too bad for them that neither man will oblige them.

Source: Winnipeg Sun

The French Stink

Not just figuratively, either, according to this poll:

The dodgy hygiene habits of the French have been revealed in a new survey.

Only one-in-10 of our continental cousins regularly uses soap and one-in-25 never takes a bath or shower.

To make matters worse, one-in-33 never brush their teeth, according to a special report by the weekly magazine Le Point, which quizzed 10,000 people.

Rather than have a good wash, many French people simply use perfume and cosmetics to mask their smell.

So one of the Anglosphere's oldest cultural prejudices about those arrogant garlic-eating pseudo-intellectual poltroons is solidly grounded in fact!

Source: Sky News

Guess Who?

This editorial critical of the nation's public broadcaster ran recently in a major national newspaper. I've removed the specific national references. Can you guess what country's public broadcaster it's referring to?

TODAY, the journalists' union launches a nationwide campaign to "take a stand for the Corporation".

In this stirring endeavour, the union is backed by the Society of Authors, the Screen Directors Association, the Writers Guild and the Screen Producers Association.

Still, many citizens might think the Corporation needs little defending. After all, with a $773 million taxpayer-funded budget, an effectively self-governing work culture and a largely tame board, it faces no perceptible threat to its existence.

....

The aim is to give the Corporation resources equivalent to those of its competitors in the commercial media. The union also wants the Government to mandate higher levels of domestic-made television content on the broadcaster.


All this and heaven too? According to the union's rhetoric, an already powerful Corporation is in fact a victim in urgent need of a good samaritan. The union last week letterboxed its members around the country with a glossy booklet painting a piteous picture of a broadcaster whose "dedicated staff" are hard-pressed by "the whittling away of [government] funding".

....

Defenders of the current Corporation management regime loudly deny the existence of any ideological bias within the national broadcaster. But the absence of market forces in the Corporation's non-ratings-driven operating environment logically means that some other factor must dominate its day-to-day working culture.


That factor is staff control. To the extent that Corporation staff culture is influenced by the narrow middle-class values of the country's secular Left, so also is the programming and content of Corporation broadcasting.


Though stoutly denied by Corporation management, this point is often registered by outsiders. The National Institute, for example, has editorialised on the theme that ideological bias strongly influences the national broadcaster, despite the Corporation's regular giving of offence to both sides of national politics.

....

If this analysis is correct, the only solution lies in teaching Corporation staff greater awareness and greater respect for the values of all citizens, including conservative ones. Corporation staff and management must come to realise that values which do not fit within a secular small-l liberal world view are indeed intellectually possible, and are in fact believed in by many of the members of the public whom they are paid to serve.

Wrong!

The correct answer is the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

Read the rest of Paul Gray's editorial in The Australian.

The moral of the story: public broadcasting is just as bad Down Under as it is in the Great White North.

Early And Often

It's not too late to vote for the Small Dead Animals Blog Awards.

Click here to vote for Dissonance And Disrespect as best new Canadian blog.

Or not.

If you don't vote, you can't bitch about the results afterwards.

Touch "Em All, Tom!

Tom Cheek, the famous radio voice of the Toronto Blue Jays since their first game in 1977, has died of brain cancer at 66.

Thanks for all the good memories of the game, Tom. You will be missed.

Hardened Veterans

The Department of Veterans Affairs has spent $4 million over the past five years providing Viagra to Canadian war veterans to help old soldiers stand at attention:

Veterans say the drug has not only allowed them more intimacy with their spouses, but has also removed social barriers to discussing sex.

It's confirmation veterans were justified fighting for it in the first place, said Cliff Chadderton, who helped lead the lobby effort as CEO of the War Amps of Canada and the chairman of the National Council of War Veterans.

....

Chadderton, perhaps Canada's most recognizable veteran after years of War Amps TV ads, readily admits he's used the triangular blue pill.

In fact, as he talked on the phone, his wife handed him a copy of a sex manual.

"When I was 30 years younger, I would never have thought of it, let alone read about it," he says.

"But the book my wife just passed me is called Sexual Satisfaction. The author is a girl who's on a television program in the states and she says it perfectly: it's not about sex, it's about love."

Gee, Cliff, thanks for sharing!

Guess you're never too old to refight the Battle of the Bulge.

Source: Edmonton Sun

The Blushing Bridegroom

The Ottawa political wedding of the century may be taking place a few months from now, as Public Works Minister Scott Brison muses about tying the knot with his new boyfriend.

One wonders why, if being out, loud and proud is perfectly natural, that Scott Brison hasn't said anything about this new man in his life publicly, not even his name.

He kept his old boyfriend out of sight whenever he went back to Kings-Hants for public events, even after he came out of the closet. And now he's keeping this supposed new love of his life under the same cloak of invisibility.

What courageous commitment to high moral principle Brison is showing by hiding his lover away! If he really believes in same-sex marriage and equal public treatment for homosexuals, he should treat him no differently than most politicians treat their opposite-sex spouses.

Show him off to the folks back home. Speak of him publicly as his greatest source of strength and inspiration. Put photos of you and him together on your campaign brochures and Christmas cards. Give him a great big kiss on the lips at the press conference where you announces your wedding plans. And have it at the Cheverie United Church, with the media on hand to take pictures for the front pages.

Be the exemplar of the new Canada and of Liberal Party values! Marry your boyfriend and have your honeymoon at taxpayers' expense!

Source: Globe and Mail

Marian The Librarian

Courtesy of TigerHawk , above is the winning picture in the American Association of Law Librarians "Day in the Life" photo contest, where real live law librarians are captured in a variety of poses.

If any of the law librarians had looked like that at my alma mater, I might have spent more time in the library, studying to become the gold medallist and get a clerkship with the Supreme Court.

Or I'd have failed out in first year.

Either way, I have never seen a law librarian that attractive, at law school or the Great Library at Osgoode Hall.

Further admiring commentary at Midwest Conservative Journal .

Spam A Lot

Every so often someone is referred to my blog through ways I cannot figure out.

Like this fellow who is cleverly offering spammers on how to get around anti-spamming laws and people's suspicions about junk e-mail, under the guise of offering legitimate business advice.

These junk blogs are clogging up comments boxes throughout the blogosphere to get around anti-spamming laws and policies that only cover e-mail.

If your blog host allows you to require commenters to type in a random password before posting, turn that feature on.

We don't need this garbage choking up the blogosphere.

Pouring Gas On Burning Lumber

When Lester Pearson spoke out against the Vietnam War at Temple University in Philadelphia, Lyndon Johnson was so enraged that when they next met, he grabbed Pearson by the lapels, shook him and yelled, "You pissed on my rug!"

Forty years later, Paul Martin has followed in Lester Pearson's footsteps:

A day after Prime Minister Paul Martin explicitly linked the softwood lumber dispute with U.S. access to Canadian energy, two Liberal cabinet ministers insisted he hadn't and the opposition parties decried the move as a political stunt.

In a speech in New York Wednesday night and in an interview on CNN, Mr. Martin warned Americans that their government's refusal to accept a NAFTA panel's ruling in Canada's favour on softwood could jeopardize energy flows.

....

"The Prime Minister did not make a linkage between softwood and energy, but he did make the point that NAFTA itself is drawn into question when NAFTA's rules are obviously ignored," Mr. Goodale said. Revenue Minister John McCallum said virtually the same thing in an interview outside the House of Commons.

Elsewhere, the speech was broadly interpreted as constituting both linkage and a threat. Reaction from business leaders was swift and negative.

"It's nonsensical," said Jack Mintz, head of the right-leaning C. D. Howe Institute. "It's right for Canada in its own interest to maximize the price at which we can sell our energy. But to settle the softwood lumber dispute, does that mean we undersell energy products?"

Anne Golden, president of the Conference Board of Canada, was equally dismissive. "The bottom line is a trade war would hurt both partners, but we're the smaller contender and we would be the biggest loser," she said. "We need NAFTA, we've done very well under NAFTA. It's not in Canada's interest to abandon it."

Paul Martin has had nearly two months to pick up the phone and call the White House to discuss the softwood lumber ruling. The time and place to talk tough is to George Bush's face, not at the Economic Club of New York.

This passive-aggressive approach makes him look feeble and foolhardy at the same time. He's talking tough to everybody else in the States except the people who can actually do something about it, before whom he falls mute.

He's raised the stakes with a threat about cutting off Canadian oil without the means to back it up.

If the U.S. ever has a doomsday energy crisis, they'll remember Paul Martin's comments, and govern themselves accordingly.

Source: Globe and Mail

Magen David Whine

Everything offends Islam these days: Piglet, Burger King ice cream, Nike Air shoes, Coca-Cola, Johnny Hart's B.C. comic strip, etc., etc.

The Star of David, it goes without saying, is right up there with the Cross as the most offensive symbol of all to Islam.

And one Norwegian school is ordering a teacher to stop wearing it:

A municipally employed teacher in Kristiansand has been prevented from wearing a Star of David around his neck. Kristiansand Adult Education Center, where the man works, ruled that the Jewish symbol could be deemed a provocation towards the many Muslim students at the school, Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) reports.

Teacher Inge Telhaug said he feels this is a violation of his freedom of speech.

"I can't accept this. It is a small star, 16 millimeters (0.6 inches) that I have around my neck, usually under a T-shirt. I see it as my right to wear it," Telhaug told NRK.

Telhaug teaches immigrants Norwegian language and culture at the education center. Telhaug is not Jewish.

"I see it as the oldest religious symbol we have in our culture, because without Judaism there would be no Christianity," Telhaug.

The principal of the school, Kjell Gislefoss, feels that the Star of David can also be interpreted as a political symbol for the state of Israel, and is afraid the star can provoke and offend students, for example immigrants from the Palestinian territories.

"The Star of David would be a symbol for one side in what is perhaps the world's most inflamed conflict at the moment. Many have a traumatic past that they have escaped and then we feel that if they are going to learn Norwegian then they can't sit an at the same time be reminded of the things they have traveled from," Gislefoss said.

If these people's sensitivities are so easily inflamed that the sight of the Star of David sends them into shock, hysterics, or rage, is it even safe to have them in the country to begin with?

They will not respect anyone who backs down to accomodate their sensibilities. To Muslims raised from birth to believe that the infidel world, the Dar-ul-Harb, must be conquered for Islam, any accomodation will be regarded as advancing the conquest.

Against an inflexible, implacable enemy, appeasement has never worked, and never will work.

Source: Aftenposten

Regular, Premium, Or Cabarnet

While gas prices keep rising, French wine prices keep falling.

Put two problems together and sometimes they make an elegant solution:

The worldwide glut of wine has become so huge that for the first time in history, France is distilling some of its higher-rated wines into fuel. It is a painful thing in a land where winemaking is a labor of love and the fruit of that labor is celebrated as much as any art.

France has periodically turned oceans of lowly table wines into vinegar and ethanol. But bottles of quality French wine have been piling up on supermarket shelves and in vineyard cellars across the country, to the point that some of it is now cheaper than bottled water.

By early this year, with some winemakers taking to the streets to protest low prices, France asked the European Union to approve the distillation of 150 million liters, or about 40 million gallons, of Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée wine. By the end of the year, 100 million liters, enough for 133 million bottles, will have been turned into crystal-clear ethanol.

The ethanol is sold to oil refineries, which use it as an additive that they mix into their gasoline, part of a European campaign to increase the use of renewable fuels. French gasoline already contains about 1 percent ethanol, mostly distilled from France's plentiful sugar beets. That percentage is supposed to rise to 5.75 percent by 2010 to meet European Union demands.

Because France exports gasoline and one of its biggest markets is the United States, by sometime next year, some Americans may be pumping their cars full of gas that includes a bit of Chardonnay or Pinot Noir.

Ethanol as an alternative fuel source has many advantages. It's easier to convert vehicles to run on it, its production doesn't finance Islamic terrorists and Latin American tinpot Marxist dictators and it burns more cleanly.

It also might make Alberta oilmen start looking over their shoulders at Niagara and Okanagan vintners.

Will Big Oil fall victim to Big Wine?

Will the new moonbat battle cry be "No blood for Merlot!"?

Bottoms up!

Source: International Herald Tribune

Driven Away

Pierre Pettigrew's chauffeur is taking a paid leave of absence to deal with a child custody battle with his ex-wife.

Was all the speculation about the minister's unusually close relationship with him off the mark?

Or could it have gone either way and still have been right?

Source: Montreal Gazette

Hush Money

M.K. Braaten is one of the more financially literate Blogging Tories and has been doing a yeoman's job covering Adscam and Techscam.

His comments on Warren Kinsella's Public Accounts Committee testimony of David Dingwall's knowledge of Paul Martin's illegal diversion of government contracts to Earnscliffe Strategy Group cut right to the central issue: David Dingwall's severance pay is hush money.

David Dingwall could bring down the government by implicating Paul Martin directly in the corruption that has been festering in this government for more than a decade.

Martin would no longer be able to claim that it was all the fault of Jean Chretien and his underlings.

Waiting for the Gomery report would become irrelevant if Dingwall were to tell all, because Martin's own corruption would become a live issue.

And wouldn't Dingwall love to, as one of the last Chretien holdovers leaving office in Ottawa?

The Chretien-Martin civil war in the Liberal Party is still being fought, because Paul Martin is still campaigning for the leadership of the party two years after winning it. Now it threatens to bring him down, and he's trying every desperate means to stave off his own collapse.

Paying off Dingwall undercuts his claims to be the great corruption fighter in Ottawa, but sweeping out Ottawa ends whenever it appears he might be swept out by his own broom.

Higher Education, Lower Politics

The fruits of two sordid political deals will ripen today:

The federal government is preparing a wide-ranging financial program aimed at helping low-income students, aboriginals and other Canadians gain access to postsecondary education as part of a multi-pronged plan the Liberals hope to introduce this month.

The money would come from a $1.5-billion two-year pot of cash earmarked for education in the budget deal agreed to by Prime Minister Paul Martin and NDP Leader Jack Layton last spring. The government hopes to introduce the measures in an economic update from Finance Minister Ralph Goodale later this month.

Human Resources Minister Belinda Stronach confirmed yesterday that the government is looking at various ways it can bolster spending for advanced education, including cash grants for low-income Canadians. She cited several other options, including the expansion of a federally funded program that helps pay tuition for low-income students, offers money for research and international education, and provides more resources for skills development.

Jack Layton gets his budget bribe to solidify the student vote, and Belinda Stronach gets some good press for playing Lady Bountiful.

Meanwhile, meaningful reform of post-secondary education gets put on the back burner while young people burden themselves with debt for degrees that may not qualify them for any real work.

Perhaps if student loans for university degrees were tied to statistical employment and income projections, students might understand better the risks associated with entering certain programs.

Women's studies majors would have to bear a greater financial risk than engineering students, but it's a life lesson young people need to learn about banking and credit.

Source: Globe and Mail

Martha Comes North

Martha Stewart's visit to beautiful, cosmpolitan Windsor, Nova Scotia will not turn into a pumpkin after all.

But she'll get to row across Lake Pesaquid in one.

Bad enough that she couldn't come for a visit while terrorists and mobsters get offered complimentary citizenship.

Worse still that a celebrity can pull rank and get in to the country just because she's a celebrity.

Worst of all, Scott Brison will try to take the credit for saving the locals' big party.

Vote Or Else

Liberal Senator Mac Harb wants your vote. Not for himself, of course, but for his party.

Or you will pay. Oh, man, you will pay:

A $50 fine is not likely to convince committed non-voters to vote any more than parking tickets convince habitual offenders not to park in no parking zones.

Nor would compulsory voting force people those who are staunchly indifferent to political matters to take an interest in public affairs. If anything, it would likely lead to a major increase in Liberal votes by default, further cementing the party's hold on power and the perception of invulnerability that helped cause rapidly declining voter turnout to begin with.

But it could be a means to intimidate lower-class or immigrant voters into voting Liberal by falsely threatening them with criminal records and the consequences thereof.

Most of all, it does nothing to remedy the deficiencies in the electoral system itself that disproportionally distort seat counts as against votes cast.

Vote no to compulsory voting.

Licence Revoked

The head of Toronto's licencing department and her younger, married boyfriend, have both been fired.

Officially, for promoting cronyism in the department by hiring friends and relatives over qualified unconnected applicants.

Unofficially, for embarrassing the city with their hanky-panky.

They don't get severance pay, either, unlike David Dingwall.

David Miller may be an effete champagne socialist, but at least he knows when to lower the boom.

Trivial sidenote: Joseph Carnevale's last name means "carnival" in Italian, is also derived from the Latin phrase "carne vale", or literally, "farewell to the flesh", representing the old Lenten abstinence from meat and earthly delights. Would that he had.

All Martin's Gall Is Divided Into Three Parts

And so will the federal surplus:

The Liberals' Surplus Allocation Act will promise taxpayers a slice of the surplus along with their income-tax return, federal officials told The Canadian Press.

"Canadians would be getting a dividend on the performance of the economy," said one official.

The legislation, to be tabled Friday, sets out a broader spending plan for the unplanned surpluses that Ottawa frequently racks up.

One-third of all unexpected surpluses will go to debt relief, one-third to program spending and one-third to taxpayers.

The government has drastically underestimated its surpluses since balancing the budget in 1997-98. In one of the most dramatic examples - 2002-03 - Ottawa estimated a $3-billion surplus that ended up at $9.1 billion. Under the proposed formula, the extra $6.1 billion would have been divided three ways, with $2 billion going to taxpayers.

Watch for surpluses to be grossly underestimated in election years while being properly or overestimated in all the other years.

That way, the government of the day--whether it be Liberal or Conservative--can claim to be vigorously fighting the national debt and saving social programs three years out of every four, and rewarding the taxpayer for its supposed frugality every election year.

Are we foolish enough to be bribed with our own money?

Of course we are, every time the tax refund cheque comes in.

Worth The Paper It's Written On

The Liberals have been insisting that the law requires them to pay hush money severance to David Dingwall even though he quit of his own accord.

The only problem is that the lawyers wouldn't commit it to writing:

The government doesn't have a written legal opinion suggesting it make a severance payment to David Dingwall, only verbal advice, Revenue Minister John McCallum said yesterday as other Liberals expressed anger that the former president of the Royal Canadian Mint is getting anything.

Mr. McCallum told the Commons he put great stock in the advice from lawyers in the Privy Council Office that the government might have to make a severance payment to Mr. Dingwall to avoid an expensive and lengthy lawsuit.

The Opposition Conservatives challenged Mr. McCallum to table the legal advice in the House, saying the fact the government won't disclose how much is being offered makes it sound like the Liberals are paying "hush money."

Mr. McCallum did not respond directly when asked to produce the legal opinion, but instead reiterated previous claims that a combination of labour law, policy and precedent are behind the government's decision to pay severance to Mr. Dingwall, a former Liberal minister.

Only when questioned later by reporters did Mr. McCallum disclose that he could not table the legal opinion. "I received the advice verbally, so there is nothing to table."

Either the PCO lawyers have forgotten the first rule of practicing law--paper everything--or McCallum is lying through his teeth.

And lawyers who want to remain lawyers don't forget the first rule, no matter where they practice. Even if you're not billing every phone call on six-minute increments in government, you paper what you've done on the file so the client or the Law Society can't come back and say you were negligent.

They wouldn't have dared give this sort of advice to the minister without having had the research done, not in government, where research is their stock in trade.

So let's ask the minister again: why didn't the lawyers put their opinion in writing?

Source: Globe and Mail

He's Staying, For Real This Time

Peter MacKay is staying in Ottawa.

Unfortunately, not to help us fight and win a fall election.

But the Grits can't keep running from their day of reckoning forever. At some point, their bag of tricks will be empty.

Besides, if they thought their poll lead would hold up and maybe even grow, why are they so intent on delaying?

Martha's Not Coming

Unless Joe Volpe can speed up some paperwork for her, the felonious domestic diva Martha Stewart will not be permitted into the country to attend the big Pumpkin Festival in Windsor, Nova Scotia.

It's a good thing.

Windsor used to be a prosperous town during the age of sail; now it's a lifeless bedroom community for commuters and senior citizens.

It doesn't deserve the further indignity of a Martha Stewart visit.

Source: CTV

St. George Crossed

English prison guards have been warned not to wear pins of England's national flag, the Cross of St. George, for fear that it will offend Muslim prisoners who associate it with its Crusader symbolism.

Chris Doyle, director of the Council for the Advancement of Arab-British Understanding, said Tuesday the red cross was an insensitive reminder of the Crusades.

"A lot of Muslims and Arabs view the Crusades as a bloody episode in our history," he told CNN. "They see those campaigns as Christendom launching a brutal holy war against Islam.

"Muslim or Arab prisoners could take umbrage if staff wore a red cross badge. It's also got associations with the far-right. Prison officers should be seen to be neutral."

Doyle added that it was now time for England to find a new flag and a patron saint who is "not associated with our bloody past and one we can all identify with."

Surrenders on small issues such as these inevitably convince the Muslim terrorists and their supporters that their enemies are soft, decadent, and unwilling to fight for what they believe in.

Banning Piglet and the Cross of St. George will not pacify people who have been taught by their religion from birth that they must conquer the infidel world for Islam.

If anything, it will encourage them to make more outrageous demands from a position of strength, and use force to obtain them if they are not met.

Suck on this, jihadi bastards!



This too, for Georgia!

A Sordid Municipal Affair

If Toronto licensing chief Pam Coburn isn't fired for screwing around with a younger married man whom she promoted through the ranks in just months, it will be evidence of a double standard favouring women who let themselves be used as the company inkwell.

If she and her lover had been in each other's roles, and he'd gone before the TV cameras to talk about he just happened to fall in love with the woman whose rapid promotions were based on her merits, and to lighten up because office flings happen all the time, he'd have been fired before the end of the press conference.

Burton Front makes particular note that we haven't heard about the wronged wife.

Did Pam Coburn ever give a moment's thought to the consequences of her actions for herself, her lover, and their respective families? Or did she think that as a civic manager, she wouldn't get fired even if she were caught?

How could she expect her lover's rapid rise through the ranks to go unnoticed and not become the topic of water cooler gossip by her employees and more serious speculation by city council?

Surely she realized that the affair could have been used for blackmail by certain unscrupulous businessmen who could have used it as leverage to get licences or prevent them from being pulled.

One wonders if one of the brothel keepers who were operating under city licences as holistic health centres knew about the affair and got a licence out of it as a result.

If nothing else, Coburn should be fired for letting her hormones get in the way of her professional judgment.

Flights Of Fancy

If expensing back a pack of gum or holiday dalliances with the chauffeur is all right with the Liberals, then what's the harm in using government planes for private business?

Cable public affairs channel CPAC reports that more than $335,000 has been spent -- since Prime Minister Paul Martin took power -- in gratuitous flights by politicians who could have used commercial airlines instead.

And since 2000, the federal government has racked up $1.6 million in extra costs using the Challenger jets, reports CPAC.

"Liberal ministers have abused their luxury jets dozens of times, spending over $1 million on unnecessary flights," Conservative MP Jason Kenny said, quoting the report during question period on Tuesday.

....

that it costs about $2,100 per hour to operate a Challenger jet.

But internal documents prepared by Department of National Defence officials, and obtained by CTV News, reveal a much heftier figure.

The $2,100 consists mostly of fuel and maintenance costs.

But the true cost of operating the Challenger, once crew charges, the capital cost of the aircraft, and other charges are factored in, amounts to $11,519 an hour, according to the documents.

Fortunately for the Canadian taxpayer, Paul Martin sets a proper example for his cabinet by only using the planes for official travel and emergencies, such as Liberal Party fundraising dinners:

Party fundraising is an emergency of sorts, I suppose, when your party is deep in debt because of your own government's restriction on corporate donations and the other party is sitting on a pile of cash.

But Before We Go, A Few Items Of Late News

Ronnie Barker has died at the age of 76.

Good night.

CBC Lockout Watch, Day 51

The CMG will begin voting to ratify the agreement reached early Monday with CBC. Barring any last minute fit of insanity from the union members, the vote should pass by a wide margin.

CBC's regular broadcasting is expected to resume completely just after the Thanksgiving long weekend, providing us with another source of leftover turkeys.

Now the question becomes: whither the CBC?

The Globe and Mail , like most news outlets and CBC fans, wants Robert Rabinovitch canned for having failed to explain where he was planning to take CBC and why he needed a lockout to take it there.

It also takes a Bell Globemedia shot at CBC with which, even considering the source, I can hardly disagree (except for the shot at George Bush):

A piece of conventional wisdom has sprung up about the CBC in the wake of this lockout that is both true and false. The true part is that the CBC is not nearly as relevant as it should be in a world of endless media choice. Smugness and pomposity run rampant at the corporation, and this is not just a management issue. The CBC is impervious to new ideas and fair criticism. It would be uncomfortable with the comparison, but its puffed-up sense of certainty is not out of keeping with the guy currently running the United States.

....

CBC Radio is not without its problems either. It tends to be shrill and narrow. Although some local programming is doing well in the face of the relentless babble of the private alternatives, too much of CBC Radio is living off a legacy handed down by programmers a generation ago.

The National Post takes up the call for meaningful CBC reform, which we hope doesn't fall on deaf ears:

The CBC now risks remaining as hidebound and parochial as it was before the dispute, as any organization gets when it cannot inject fresh enthusiasm and ideas into its ranks. Management's ability to reduce costs will be severely restricted, too. If it had held fast to its original demand for the right to contract out more work, it not only might have saved taxpayers tens of millions of dollars, it might also have broadened the staff's ideological spectrum. Canadians might finally have heard some new voices on a project-by-project basis.

But that is water under the bridge. One thing the lockout proved is that the CBC no longer holds the central place it once did in our broadcast world: At one point during the lockout, nearly nine of 10 Canadians told pollsters they weren't even aware it was going on. If nothing else, the result should be a full-scale review of the Corporation's mandate. Does it need to keep its television operations given the advent of dozens of private news, current affairs, sports, documentary and culture channels? If it does retain a TV service, should it be converted to a pledge-based funding model such as PBS in the United States? And what of its two English-language radio networks with the advent of 100-channel satellite radio?

Bill Brioux of the Toronto Sun offers a few suggestions:

- Haul network president Robert Rabinovitch before the heritage committee, as planned, and fire his ass. This dork just doesn't have a plan beyond screwing with unions.

- Stop appointing political hacks to run the place. The CBC desperately needs a savvy TV programmer with vision, not another Liberal bag man. This is no place for on-the-job training.

- Lose the army of middle managers. You don't see any of those folks getting outsourced.

- Order a thorough, independent audit. It's the only way to win back public trust. Did they really lavish millions on some American firm just to see if they could jazz up their exploding pizza logo? Does Gomery know about this?

- Move the news back to 11 p.m. That older audience, earlier newscast hustle? C'mon. If we can stay up for Lloyd, we can stay up for Peter.

- With the five new hours, buy some ratings-grabbing American shows. Back when CBC was Canada's No. 1 network, it had Dallas on its schedule. The country didn't seem any less unified. Big American hits (several star Canadians, like 24, Lost or Boston Legal) could help launch new Canadian fare.

- Lose all the British stuff. If your big boast is a full nightly hour of Coronation Street (as proudly declared on Toronto streetcars) you need to drop the all-Canadian schedule charade.

- Find out how other public networks do it. BBC has thrown open its libraries to young filmmakers who reinvent the stuff and send it back. Al Gore is trying to get young web heads to submit their webcasts to his new U.S. news diginet. CBC should be on the cutting edge of all of this stuff.

- Stick with advertising. TV is an expensive business, dammit. Stay in the marketplace and turn the dollars into more shows.

But perhaps the best suggestions offered came from a self-styled independent conservative in Calgary, who passed along his ideas to Stephen Harper and Ouimet the tea lady.

Read the whole thing; he's clearly thought it through, and perhaps just as only Nixon could go to China, only the Conservatives could make public broadcasting viable and relevant again.

Highwaymen

Tomorrow is Provincial Highway Workers' Day in Nova Scotia.

Honk to show your support for the brave souls who stand in the heat, cold and rain holding the SLOW/STOP signs while their workmates lean on their shovels.

He's Staying

Thus saith the Highly-Placed Source.

Peter MacKay's departure to seek the leadership of the Nova Scotia Tories and premiership was never as strong a possibility as the media made out. MacKay wouldn't have run unless he could have assured himself of a coronation, and he'd have had to jump almost immediately into an election before his honeymoon with the party and voters began to wear off under the heat of anger about health care and gas prices.

Provincial premiers have also traditionally failed to make the transition to prime minister; only one (Sir Charles Tupper) did, after a lapse of nearly thirty years between his tenure as pre-Confederation premier and his two months as prime minister.

If Peter MacKay believes that the federal leadership will come open any time soon, far better for him to stay in Ottawa where he will not hobble himself with an actual governing record.

None of these considerations will get much play with the media, as they're all ready to spin MacKay's staying in Ottawa as an indication that Harper desperately pleaded not to lose this so-called moderate voice of reason.

So-called, because on almost every issue, even social issues, his stand cannot be told apart from Harper's, or from most former Alliance MPs.

But a former PC can be further right than Attila the Hun and still be called a moderate in the media, while the most tepid former Reform/Alliance member is a right-wing radical by default.

Outbreak

The mysterious illness that has killed six residents of a Toronto nursing home and left dozens more sick remains unidentified.

What we do know, is that it is not SARS or bird flu, the two greatest reent pandemic scares.

While public health officials can hardly shrug it off, let's hope that they don't touch off a false panic the way they did with SARS, going on as if the second coming of the Black Death is descending on us.

Hysteria spreads and mutates more quickly than any other virus.

Justice Delayed

Two of the main players in Adscam, Chuck Guité and Jean Brault, will not be going to trial until next May to avoid even the hint of prejudice by potential jurors during the release of the initial Gomery inquiry report.

In the unlikely event of a spring election, Adscam will still get to form part of the backdrop while these two go on trial.

Still won't be as prominent a story as the Gomery report, though.

Source: CBC

CBC Lockout Watch, Day 50/50

CBC On The Line has a roundup of reaction from cheerful CBC employees celebrating what they believe to be a decisive victory over management.

The Canadian Media Guild agrees:

“We finally have established that there will be no runaway use of contract employees,” said Arnold Amber, president of the CBC branch of the Canadian Media Guild. “This was the major battle ground in the negotiations and we have won.”

The number of employees on contract will be limited to 9.5% of permanent staff. People who have been on contract for four years can convert to permanent status, including employees working in Arts & Entertainment who have been denied that right since 1996. That provision is ongoing, so that anyone on contract who completes 4 years of service during the life of the agreement will be able to convert to permanent status.

People can still be hired on a temporary basis for the purposes of relief, backfill, emergencies or to augment resources temporarily. After 18 months in the same location and media line (radio, TV or internet), temporary employees with a break of one week or less in service will convert to permanent status. CBC management will no longer have the option of hiring people on freelance fixed-term contracts.

CBC's response is notable is simply a quiet welcome back:

These last seven weeks have been very difficult for everyone throughout the Corporation, and we will work hard to overcome the challenges that this labour dispute has presented for us – our future as an organization depends on it. We look forward to seeing everyone back at work, doing what they do best: creating and broadcasting exceptional television, radio and online programming for Canadians across the country.

The question that remains on everyone's mind is obvious: how does this affect Hockey Night in Canada?

Answer: it won't. The same old doubleheader with Coach's Corner will be back as usual, though Jim Hughson will be in Chris Cuthbert's place.

A few final remarks about following the lockout:

When I started covering the lockout, I had very little understanding of the issues involved or why both sides were so committed to their particular visions of an institution that many of us on the right in Canada ignore, when we do not despise it.

Even though I still don't share either side's particular vision for the CBC, I have come away with a greater understanding of the CBC people's commitment to what they envision for public broacasting.

And I'd also like to think that those of us who by conviction are sceptical about the CBC as an institution would also have become more engaged in the debate.

Would that we were all so passionate about our chosen professions as many of the people who blogged about their joys and frustrations about working for CBC. That means you too, Robin.

Money Back Guarantee

David Dingwall won't be getting the $500,000 severance he was expecting; he'll be lucky to get away with two weeks severance, if the accountants don't start going after that as well:

The government says it will pay David Dingwall as little as it can get away with in a severance package following his departure as head of the Royal Canadian Mint.

Revenue Minister John McCallum also promised today that, if a forthcoming audit shows any impropriety in Dingwall's expense accounts, the money in question will be clawed back.

"The government will pay to Mr. Dingwall only what it is legally required to pay and not a penny more," McCallum said under questioning in the Commons.

"If the independent investigator finds that any of his expenses were inappropriate, the government will retrieve those expenses dollar for dollar."

The comments appeared to mark the first crack in the Liberal defence of Dingwall, who resigned as president of the mint last week after it was disclosed that he and his top aides ran up more than $740,000 in expenses last year.

....

He went on to announce that the mint's board of directors has appointed the accounting firm Price Waterhouse Cooper to examine Dingwall's expenses.

McCallum gave the former president something less than a full vote of confidence pending the outcome of the review.

"`I am confident Price Waterhouse will do a good job," he said. ``And we shall see whether Mr. Dingwall, according to Price Waterhouse, has indeed obeyed the rules."

David Dingwall might have to scrape by on his $77,000 a year parliamentary pension for a while, until the bean counters have finished putting the screws to one of the last Chretien holdovers in high patronage office.

Paul Martin's neverending leadership contest is a gift that keeps on giving.

Source: Toronto Star

Taking Liberties At The Licence Office

Here in Toronto, if you want to work at city hall, it's not what you know, but who you know. And nowhere is that truer than in the licensing department.

The woman in charge of overseeing the issuance of every conceivable licence at Toronto City Hall admitted today that she took a little licence with a younger married man in her office:

A suspended city bureaucrat who admitted to a romantic relationship with one of her married employees called a news conference in front of City Hall on Monday to fend off allegations of cronyism and defend workplace romances.

Pam Coburn, 45, head of the city's municipal and licensing standards department, even cited statistics on the prevalence of dalliances in the office, and suggested some office flings could be “good.”

Flanked by her 12-year-old daughter Emma and 16-year-old son Jake, Ms. Coburn addressed a throng of reporters with remarks better suited to a daytime soap opera as she admitted to a relationship with Joseph Carnevale, 33, a married man who rose quickly through the ranks to become her second-in-command.

“I, like all employees, and all citizens of this city, I'm human, and I cannot regret that I came to care deeply for another person,” she said. “I did not choose to feel this way, but it was a life event for me.”

....

Ms. Coburn and Mr. Carnevale were put on paid leave last week pending an investigation by the city's auditor general and the legal department.

One wonders how such a vapid mind full of psychobabble, Cosmopolitan articles and Oprah Winfrey repeats ever rose to such a position of responsibility.

Her rationalization of her dalliance with one of her subordinates--a married man, at that--reflects how she probably rationalized away nepotism in her department.

She probably didn't choose to feel outraged about corrupt hiring practices; they just happened, and who was she to judge what feels right to others?

She also forgot the cardinal rule against office romance: don't get your meat where you get your bread.

Source: Globe and Mail

CBC Lockout Watch, Day 50: Done Deal

Due to circumstances beyond our control, regularly scheduled programming will resume at CBC. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Here are the highlights of the agreement in principle between the CBC and CMG:

• we have a strong commitment to permanent staff as the standard for employment at the CBC.
• We have improved rights for contract and temporary employees.
• Wages will increase by 12.6 percent over the life of the contract to March 31, 2009. There will be full retroactivity for all employees on the payroll prior to the lockout, including contract and temporary employees. There will also be a $1000 signing bonus.

And for the first time for our members in the Northern Service, there will be an interpreters’ premium of $800.00 per year for those who are required to work in more than one language.

We will be meeting the minister of labour Monday morning and will continue the rest of the work for a tentative agreement.

The Globe and Mail reports that management has agreed to a cap on fixed-term contract workers: 9.5% of the number of permanent workers.

The union won the battle over casual and contract employees hands down. Forcing management to accept a hard cap will tie CBC's hands for the life of the contract and means more work for the permanent staff.

With Hockey Night in Canada back on the air this week and the likely prospect of a fall election, there was no way in hell that the Liberals were going to let this weekend pass without a deal. Let Hockey Night in Canada pass by--CBC management can worry about the ad revenue. An election without CBC setting the Liberal-friendly tone for media coverage--unthinkable!

There'll be celebratory riots in the Annex and Cabbagetown tonight.

And I can finally get back to ignoring and hating CBC simultaneously.

Further coverage when I get back from the office tonight.

Federal Sex Party

No, this is not an invitation to screw around on the taxpayers' dime.

These people are apparently serious about running on a free love platform. Which is worth what you pay for it.

The party would campaign on a platform of overhauling sex laws, including a repeal of the Criminal Code's prohibition on "immoral, indecent performance, entertainment or representation."

Candidates would also press for a national policy on comprehensive sex education in schools, more liberal laws on recreational nudity in public areas and less censorship.

The party also wants to change Victoria Day to Eros Day and would proclaim Valentine's Day as an official holiday.

Perhaps they should merge with the Marijuana Party. They both share no greater common vision than the legalization of their all-consuming hedonistic pleasure.

A Canada where people can rut like dogs while smoking pot in the park would be a
tyrant's dream. If you provide and protect unbounded sexual and recreational freedom, you can keep the people distracted as you take away all their other freedoms. Aldous Huxley illustrated this point rather well in Brave New World .

Here's a link to their party website. Needless to say, it is neither safe for work, children, or for the general moral fabric of society. I link to it for educational purposes only.

CBC Lockout Watch, Day 49

The media blackout on CBC-CMG negotiations has been extended twice today; first to 6:00 PM EDT, then to midnight.

Tod Maffin claims to have an inside source telling him that management has decided that's it "do or die" at midnight, or they'll all turn into pumpkins. Like this prize winner presented by Alison in Winnipeg:



Robin Rowland also reports that the federal mediators want the deal settled tonight. To that end, they've started discussing money for the first time and begun preparing a back-to-work protocol.

With Hockey Night in Canada's debut less than a week away, the heat is on if they want to produce a proper season opener.

Although he wasn't a CMG member, CBC Paris correspondent Paul Workman refused to work rather than cross the picket line. CBC has replaced him with David Common as a result. In a truly classless move on CBC's part, Paul Workman had to find out about it on the blogs first.

One set of fools managing another set of fools, both seething with hatred and resentment towards each other.

Even if they go back to work tomorrow, they'll sting each other to death like two scorpions in a bottle, and the CBC along with it.

In a strange way, I'd be disappointed to see CBC go. I enjoy kicking it around, if nothing else about it.

Sex On The Front Line

According to the memoirs of an American woman veteran of Iraq, she was shocked and appalled to discover that her comrades in arms did not conduct themselves like celibate monks in wartime:

"The Army is like a massive frat party with weapons and with girls there for the taking - at least some of the time," Kayla Williams writes of her yearlong war stint.

"I was stunned that guys would still flirt with me when I hadn't had a shower for weeks," she said in an interview. "Isn't there a limit?"

While the Army officially forbids sex between soldiers, it also sells condoms at base stores.

Pregnant females get sent home. "Are they careless, stupid or just cowards looking for a way out?" asked Williams.

The Army is still only 15% female, which makes it a challenge for women such as Williams who are hungry for respect from male soldiers, not lust for their tired, dirty bodies.

But the battle for equality is ongoing, she said. She once was the only woman in her platoon on a mountaintop near Syria, and watched fellow soldiers bid - unsuccessfully - $87 and a handful of M&M's to get her to flash her breasts.

All the social engineering experiments in the world will not change the basic instincts of soldiers and sailors in wartime. They were working their way through female enlistees during World War II and Vietnam when they weren't in close quarters in combat. That's when they weren't working their way through the local girls or prostitutes.

Putting women in combat quarters or on naval ships puts a pressure on women they shouldn't have to bear, and adds another strain on family relationships.

I've heard stories from family friends in the navy about how every extended cruise results in a family breakup because some sailor takes up with a crew woman on board, fights over crew women, and pregnancies taking them out of service.

Under the strains of war, with death an ever-present danger, a soldier or sailor looking for female companionship isn't going to think of his comrade's uniform; he's going to think of what's under it.

Source: New York Daily News

Lord Not The Tory Saviour

Greg Weston is beating the drums for the Bernard Lord leadership bandwagon:

The dynamo from Down East would be a formidable contender. Bright, young and infinitely engaging, Lord has a no-nonsense approach to politics and government that will surely resonate with both Conservatives and other Canadian voters.

Fluently bilingual, he inherited the best of two vital electoral worlds, born in Quebec and raised in Acadia.

To Quebecers, he is a native son. To the rest of the country, he is not a Quebecer.

Sources have told us Lord has already been promised the crucial support of the provincial Conservative election machinery in the Maritimes, Quebec, Ontario and parts of the West.

The theory is that a Conservative party led by Lord would be popular in the Maritimes, make gains in Ontario, and at least hold the West that isn't likely to turn Liberal or NDP anytime soon.

On top of it all, Lord holds the promise of giving the Conservative party something it has not seen in a very long time -- substantial seats in Quebec.

Everything that is being said about Bernard Lord now, was said about Jean Charest ten years ago. We all know how his PC leadership failed to bring the party back into contention. If a native Quebecois as charismatic and effective as Charest could only win five seats and eventually lose his four caucus mates to the Liberals, will Lord have a much better chance against a Bloc that has never been stronger?

Bernard Lord nearly snatched defeat from the jaws of victory in the 2003 election with his flip-flopping on public auto insurance and public outrage on health care funding and proposals to privatize NB Power. He is currently trailing in the polls in New Brunswick.

On the off chance that Stephen Harper lost the next election and decided to step down as leader, Lord's departure for the federal Conservative leadership would turn his government's one-seat majority into a minority ripe for collapse and a likely Liberal victory.

The media's hypersensitivity towards social conservatism would be triggered by Lord's refusal to publicly fund Henry Morgentaler's private abortion clinics in New Brunswick, the one issue upon which socialized medicine's defenders also turn into the most rabid advocates of two-tier care.

They'd also remind voters of Lord's personal opposition to same-sex marriage and New Brunswick's position as one of three provinces whose courts had not legalized homosexual unions before Parliament did.

The media is building up Bernard Lord's leadership potential now, so that they can tear it down should he succeed.

All this will be moot anyway when Stephen Harper moves into 24 Sussex Drive.

Source: Ottawa Sun

The Lesser Of Two Evils

As we speak, crosses are burning on the front steps of jewellery shops in Vancouver Centre in anticipation of the political battle of the decade: Svend Robinson vs. Hedy Fry !

My sympathies to the voters of Vancouver Centre, who haven't had a half-decent MP since Kim Campbell.

How times have changed: no Tory could ever get elected there now, not even a half-Chinese, half-Sikh cross-dressing bisexual vegan organic marijuana grower.

At least the voters will be entertained by watching a thief and a liar fight for the moral high ground.

CBC Lockout Watch, Day 48

If these are indeed the last days of the CBC lockout, as some rumours and wishful thinkers would have it, the atmosphere inside the CBC will be more poisonous than the Love Canal once normal programming resumes.

The bitterness and rancour towards management expressed by the locked-out CBCers has gone beyond the usual "stuff the bosses" rhetoric expected during labour disputes, and has passed into sheer hatred. I can't imagine how these people are going to work together after the lockout ends. I wonder how they even worked together before it began.

If CBC decides turns its guns away from Canadians who don't agree with its effete liberal Torontocentric view of the world and trains them on their fellow effete liberal Torontocentric colleagues, I'll sit back and cheer on the slaughter.

Others, however, will mourn; among them, Knowlton Nash:

Before I get any further I must note that in more than half a century of working one way or another at the CBC, I've been on contract and on staff, have been a union member and an executive, a foreign correspondent, anchor of the National and director of news and current affairs. Sometimes I've been on the picket line and sometimes as a manager crossed through it.

All that has given me a sharp sense of the impact a labor-management confrontation can have on a creative organization like the CBC. It simply tears it apart. This has been the most damaging CBC labor-management clash since the strike of Montreal producers back in 1959, which forever shattered the trust between management and producers in the French network and had far-reaching political effects.

....

There will be intensive, left-over bitterness with a machismo management -- or at least significant parts of it -- feeling the program creators are naive souls who don't understand the ferocious realities of modern, competitive broadcasting. And on other side, many key reporters, producers, technicians and other program creators feeling senior management has betrayed the whole concept of public broadcasting by trying to manage the CBC as any other business.

The 1958 Radio-Canada strike helped launch the political career of one of its most popular news hosts: Rene Levesque. Who knows what strange creature will emerge from the picket lines of this lockout to become the next threat to Canada?

The 48-hour news blackout on negotiations has been extended another 12 hours. Best guess: they're going to go through the night and extend the blackout again, with a view to having a deal on the table Monday morning.

Locked Out x2 has a profile on Elizabeth MacPherson, the federal mediator who's been brought in to help settle the lockout. If she could turn around the four-month Aliant Telecom strike in four days, could she do the same for CBC?

Of course, if there is a speedy settlement, it won't be because of the magic mediatrix or the cone of silence, but because of election season:

In the past two days, a growing number of Liberal backbenchers have publicly called on the government to end the lockout by whatever means necessary if no agreement is struck soon.

"If they don't have anything after the blackout, I want back-to-work legislation," Quebec MP Denis Coderre said yesterday. Mr. Coderre said a majority of the Quebec caucus wants the government to intervene because "it's a lockout, it's not a strike." In addition to Mr. Coderre, Ontario MPs Sarmite Bulte and Don Boudria as well as PEI MP Wayne Easter want the government to intervene immediately.

....

Heritage Minister Liza Frulla, while declining to comment on the negotiations, said pressure is intense on both sides to reach a deal.

"If they're intelligent, they'll prove that they're intelligent and they'll come to an agreement," she said. She played down the likelihood of back-to-work legislation. "It has to be a long-term agreement . . . if it's not dealt with right, it's going to have implications for next year," she said, referring to pending labour talks at Radio-Canada.

Fighting an election without the CBC News cheerleaders is inconceivable to the Grits. The other networks aren't as reliably pro-Liberal and anti-Conservative as a whole, although some individual reporters are.

When they talk about back-to-work legislation, you can be sure they see the government falling this fall, and they can't take any chances.

Get On The Phone

It's been fifty days since Paul Martin said he'd call George Bush to discuss the softwood lumber ruling. Fifty days!

The CBC hadn't even been locked out yet, Hurricane Katrina wasn't even on the radar screen, gas prices were still under a buck a litre, John Hamm was planning on a fall election instead of retirement, the Blue Jays were in wildcard contention, most people still hadn't heard of Michaelle Jean and Cindy Sheehan was a minor annoyance.

And still he hasn't called.

Tory natural resources critic John Duncan wonders if he ever will. As does the entire Canadian forestry sector.

Don't hold your breath.

None Less Honest, None More Broke

Paul Martin is talking loudly and carrying a small stick:

Canada will no longer play the "honest broker" role that has epitomized Canadian foreign policy for decades, Prime Minister Paul Martin said yesterday.

He said Canada has to have a "very active and very aggressive foreign policy" that includes leadership in areas like human rights.

"The role of traditional mediator that Canada has played consistently between great powers is not the foreign policy that I would envisage," he told a gathering of municipal politicians in Vancouver.

He was referring to the views of several Canadian governments that it was well-placed to play a mediating, or "honest broker" role, between Britain and the United States and, during the Cold War, between the U.S. and the former Soviet Union.

Alliances and aims may change, but one rule will never change: soft power diplomacy requires a hard power military to back it up.

The Senate defence committee understands this rule:

The military budget should double and the Canadian Forces should sign up thousands of new recruits, a Senate committee said Thursday.

The budget should be $25-billion to $35-billion a year instead of the $14.3-billion earmarked this year and the Forces should have 90,000 people in uniform instead of the 62,000 authorized today, the report said.

In a world of escalating disasters – both natural and man-made – the military is likely to be more important to Canadian well-being over the next few decades than it has since the Second World War, the senators argued.

“Canadians should think of Canada's military as a tool box for the government to use to fix things that are of vital interest to Canadians ... our tools are rusting.”

The peacekeeping myth would never have been born, had Canada not had the military force to contribute to Lester Pearson's novel idea to resolve the the Suez crisis.

Canada would not have had a seat at Versailles as a country in its own right, equal to Britain and the other Allied powers, had it not raised a great army in World War I.

How can we speak in defence of liberty elsewhere, if we cannot defend our own liberty properly?

Broken Communion

Paul Martin has made it clear his first faith is in the Charter, not the Church:

Prime Minister Paul Martin is standing by his government's same-sex marriage law, even though it might result in him being banned from receiving holy communion.

"I am a strong Catholic," Martin told reporters here yesterday when asked about a gathering of bishops at the Vatican, which will discuss refusing the sacrament to politicians who pass laws that violate church doctrine. But "I am also a legislator," he added.

"And, I believe in the separation of church and state and I believe that it is my responsibility as prime minister to take into account the widest perspective possible and that is what I did," Martin said after a luncheon with Mexican President Vicente Fox.

To claim, as so many self-styled Catholic politicians have, that their faith cannot guide their conscience as legislators, is to make a mockery of both their claims to religious convictions and to adherence to their conscience.

What is the point of a faith that makes no demands upon the conscience? What is the use of a conscience that ignores natural law and the faith that forms it?

A man who will not let his faith guide his conscience will be damned for acting against both.

Source: Toronto Star