Wilber

Conspiracy theories simplify things. They allow people to avoid dealing with difficult issues.

Wilber, my question was serious: after a sip of beer, should your licence be suspended until you are no longer under any influence of alcohol? If so, how long should this suspension last? Good question. We have legal standards when it comes to consumption of alcohol and operating a motor vehicle. They are certainly debatable but they are not left to the discretion of the drinker. I wouldn't be opposed to a similar set of standards regarding the use of marijuana. It would certainly be better than the present situation where there are none at all. I'm sure they would be just as debatable. When it comes to aviation however, the standard is zero and that is not debatable.

I guess you didn't note that I specified "years ago". I also mentioned a difference between a buzz, and being wrecked. Hopefully this allays your fears somewhat. You probably wouldn't be comforted, however, if I told you stories of an acquaintance who enjoys flying his Cessna 132 after smoking a joint.

This is your personal experience and not neccesarily the majority feeling. Some people get drunk or stoned once and never touch drugs again.

True. I had tried to imagine how it will be like to have been the parents of those two girls killed by Homolka and Bernardo....or any parents of killed children (what more when you've learned that your child did not die a quick death, but was tortured first). As a mother my soul will be consumed by pain...I will never get over it. I would've probably waited a few years after the culprit's release....then have my revenge. There are others not related to victims but have a strong twisted desire to rid society of "evil."....or those strongly feeling that the justice system had failed them. With the frustration going around about how the criminals seem to have more rights than the victims...and the leniency of the courts...is it too far-fetched to imagine that vigilante-ism is not being fantasized by some? These monsters should have a longer prison stay without early parole. Imagine one being sentenced to 10 years...but usually getting out after serving only 4! The whole 10 years should be served! And that should be for the first offense! Once you're "pardoned"....that should be it! You should have the right to a normal life like everyone else...without fear of being taken out just because your past sin and your whereabouts are posted publicly. Not all ex-convicts re-offend. When Clifford Olsen was doing his thing, we were living in the general area at the time and our children were both in the same age group as his victims. I can still remember the fear felt by all parents in the area at that time. Sex offenders are predators. I'm not going to lose any sleep if they happen to feel like the hunted for a change.

. I did try it a few times back in the sixties. At one time I did drive under the influence and it scared the hell out of me. What you describe as focus, I felt was a severe case of tunnel vision. Not a good thing to have while driving or doing anything else that involves physical risk. I scared me enough that I refused to ever do it again. I think you and your wife are fooling yourself. If your driving is not safe when you are not under the influence what on earth makes you think it would be acceptable when you are? A paranoid driver with tunnel vision. Just great. I fly aircraft for a living and quite frankly, you scare me.

On Wednesday I was listening to an interview of David Suzuki on the Bill Good show, CKNW radio. He was asked what he thought about it. He said that although he wasn't asked for his opinion and he didn't know how green Mulroney was personally, he agreed with the assessment. He felt more environmental initiatives were taken during Mulroney's years in power than any other PM he could think of.

How about the rights of their victims, past and future?

Why should fuel be treated any differently than other goods when it comes to the GST? The feds get more revenue if housing prices or lawyers fees soar too.Furthermore, anyone who needs to use gas for business purposes gets the GST the pay on gas refunded to them so the only real losers are people who insist on buying gas guzzling vehicles that they don't really need to meet their transportation needs. I don't disagree. I am just pointing out that companies aren't the only ones who benefit from higher fuel prices. And I suppose businesses which buy gas guzzling vehicles that they don't really need to meet their transportation needs. By the way, not all goods are treated equally when it comes to GST. Take food for instance.

Alcohol is legal though it's still against the rules to fly a plane drunk. Even blasted, I have better reasoning skills than that. It's illegal to fly while impaired, period. No kidding. No one is advocating people smoke pot then fly airplanes, drive cars or otherwise put themselves or others in danger. Bubber seems to be trying to tell us that being impaired by being stoned is somehow different than being impaired by being drunk. Impaired is impaired. It may be great to go mountain biking with a buzz on and if he breaks his neck because of his resulting poor judgment, who cares but what about the poor schmuck he may end up running over? People can learn to function when subject to abnormal unrelated stresses, fatigue, or under the influence but make no mistake, while their performance may be adequate for most situations, they are still impaired and will not perform as well under abnormal situations where there are higher stress levels and good decision making is vital. Anyone who requires artificial substances to do their job is in the wrong occupation. Neither should they be involved in anything that can jeopardize the safety of others, even riding a bicycle. You can be charged with impaired cycling in the UK you know. I know someone who was.

Considering that in the 60's only whimps had any less than a 350 cubic inch engine with a 4 barrel carburetor in their vehicles, and that the whimps who settled for big six cillinder engines instead were still using up twice as much gasoline per mile as today's hot rodders .... I say gasoline is dirt cheap today. Very true. Another thing to consider when questioning who profits... much of the gas price is percentage based taxes. The government makes a killing off high gas prices. The gas tax revenues will be increased over 50% this year. When will we move to set tax prices, like 9 cents for example, instead of riduclous 14% taxes that just increase government revenue whenever prices go up, at the ordinary person's expense. If you want cheaper gas, don't call your oil company... call your MP. One of the biggest winners is the federal government. Because they charge GST on motor fuels, higher prices are a windfall for the Feds. All other fuel taxes are a flat rate except for the GST. Really. Price breakdown

August I agree with a lot of what you say, but. Quote: "The idea of taxing petrol consumption is not to provide government with extra revenues. It would be to make petrol consumers face the true cost of what they do. As far as I'm concerned, the tax revenue could be refunded to everyone making the tax revenue neutra" That would be like no government I have ever seen. The idea of all taxes is to provide government with extra revenues. How would they refund it and to whom? I'll bet they could dream up a zillion more things to spend it on before they would consider refunding a nickel. How much of our present fuel taxes go into transportation infrastructure of any kind? "Revenue Neutral" is just another one of those bureaucratic BS phrases for "give us more money". No tax can be revenue neutral because it costs money to collect and redistribute it no matter what you do with the money. Quote "That's an interesting example but a better example would be SUVs themselves. SUVs exist solely because of US regulations. They are classified as trucks and so they are exempt from fleet mileage regulations." SUV's aren't Trabants foisted off on the public by a totalitarian government. They exist because people want to buy them and they can make money selling them. There are plenty of other choices when it comes to vehicles. The cost of fuel on the open market is a far more cost effective and realistic way of influencing those choices than government. Just look at our government's abuses over the past decade, all in the name of mostly bogus social engineering. It would be the NEP in reverse.

If you artificially limit the supply of oil (shift the supply curve to the left) which is a price inelastic good (meaning people are willing to buy it at just about any price, in the short-run anyway) you can increase to price of said good. **edit** Yay, my intro to microeconomics class has paid off! How do you artificially limit the supply of oil when it is produced by dozens of different countries, processed and distributed by hundreds of different companies? OPEC is big enough to have that kind of effect on oil prices when they get their act together but there is no way one producer of petroleum products in eastern Canada can have that kind of clout. Oil companies do not own the resource, they get if from wherever they can and that tanker full of oil is going to the highest bidder.

Alcohol is legal though it's still against the rules to fly a plane drunk. Even blasted, I have better reasoning skills than that. It's illegal to fly while impaired, period.

How does producing less gasoline drive the up price of crude oil. You mean that if we build fewer houses the price of lumber will go up?

Why is giving more money to government always seen as a fix for everything? Why do some folks assume that government will always have a better use for their money than themselves. They consistently prove that to be a false assumption. If you look at the causes of inflation, government spending is never included, yet cost of government has historically increased at a far greater rate than the rate of inflation. You want to give them more. Taxing new vehicles at a higher rate based on fuel consumption will just make it more attractive to keep older vehicles on the road. I tow an RV for recreation. I use a diesel truck and get about 15 MPG while towing. I do feel the higher price for fuel. I help compensate for it by using a Jetta diesel as a daily driver which gets over 50 MPG. You're idea of picking an arbitrary number to start imposing a 100% tax would just make it more attractive for me to keep my old truck going forever, rather than investing in a newer, more efficient and less polluting one in the future. A good example of this is light aircraft. Product liability settlements in the US destroyed the manufacturing industry by making them too expensive to build and sell. It was costing Piper and Cessna more in liability insurance than the labour to build the aircraft and they are basically hand built. The result was to drive the price of used ones out of sight. An aircraft I sold in 1988 when it was 24 years old is now worth over 4 times what I got for it now that it is 42 years old. Not because it is special but because the option of a reasonably priced new one doesn't exist. You propose to do the same thing with taxation. Let the market decide the price. A nuke going off in Tel Aviv would likely mean the end of Israel. A nuke going off in Tehran wouldn't mean the end of Iran. The Israelis can't afford to wait for that scenario. If the Iranians don't understand that, they are stupid.

Wonder how many passengers on an aircraft would take comfort in the idea that the guy (or gal) flying the aircraft could be legaly stoned. Would you?

Save us from those who think the answer to everything is another tax. I can understand that but how does Isreal solve the problem of being told those nukes are going to be used to make them cease to exist? In the past they have tended to get quite pro active when presented with those kind of threats. A country that is so small it could be virtually totally destroyed by just a couple of them, doesn't have a lot of choice. It could be suicidal to assume it is just bluster. The Irving's may have some control over the local price of fuel but they buy their oil on the open market just like everyone else. They don't control the price of crude any more than you or I other than what they are willing or have to pay for it, just like you or I.

I would consider myself a conservative and I am against capital punishment. I don't really believe it is a deterrent to most people who commit murders and there are enough wrongful convictions on record to know that innocent people would end up being put to death. I am in favor of sentences for some murders where "life" does really mean life. No chance of parole, no faint hope clause. Their victims families should never have to hear the killer's names mentioned by the courts again. If you believe that killing someone unless it is to defend other lives is immoral, institutionalizing killing won't make it moral. Therefore, I don't like the idea of capital punishment, not because I care whether some of these scumbags live or die but because of what it says about a society that practices it.

I tend to agree but I think a lot of it had to do with getting elected. Many Canadians were expectiing their little golden egg and woe betide those who disappointed them. If you are going to help families with children, this program at least treats all parents equally rather than helping a particular segment of society. It gives people a choice. That at least, does fit in with a conservative ideology.

I'm high all the time but never nearly as impaired as when I have "a couple of drinks socially." That's funny.

It is the Federal government that makes the criminal code. The Federal and Provincial governments run the court system and the prisons. By downloading their responsibility to the police they are shifting the cost to the municipalities. Same scam they as use at our borders. By not arming our border personnel who are on the federal ticket, they download that responsibility to the only folks around with guns. You guessed it, the local cops who are paid for by the property taxes of the the local border communities.

Thats what he gets paid for, keeping these guys off the street, i would hope that after a few times of this guy getting arrested, spending some time in local jail until the cops sorted out what was going on ,that it would motivate the convict to get his life sorted out. What other measure do we have to make this bad guys pay thier debt for thier crimes. Perhaps adding the cost of his return to his new sentence would make sense. I asked the question, to see if his traval outside the country would be impaired as well. The job of the police is to safeguard the community not babysit criminals. We have one of the lowest number of police per capita in the western world. They really do have more important things which need their attention. That is supposed to be what we have prisons for. You are right when you say it is their job to keep these guys off the street. It seems they are the only ones who are doing their job. That's the real problem.

US passport costs $97 US or $113 CDN and are valid 10 years. Cost $11.30 per year. Canadian passport costs $87 and are valid for 5 years. Cost $17.40 per year. If you are traveling to some countries such as China or Australia they require 6 months remaining on a passport before they will issue a visa, meaning they are only good for 4 1/2 years in such cases. We are getting ripped off.

I love it when people misspell genius when they're trying to put someone down. Reminds me of this guy. That's great.