jbg

No doubt. But with all governments something often goes wrong. Murphy's Law generally. They really haven't had heat on a major issue yet partly because of a weakened opposition. It is the same sort of free right Chretien had for a number of years while the Tories fought amongst themselves. They might actually govern for more time than they thought unless they engineer their own defeat, a risky proposition depending on the issue. I expect an election this fall or early next spring. I expect they will engineer a defeat (since they can't unilaterally call elections, being a minority government), seek and obtain a majority mandate.

I just did. Again, these types of articles/forecasts have come recurring starting in the early 1920's. They were very common from 1974 to the early 1980's, and appear to coincide with relatively high real oil price periods. In this case, oil shale and tar sands will come to the rescue. Also, another encouraging indicator is the lead article in today's New York Times Sunday Magazine (link), which points out that nuclear power may start "backing out" some fossil fuel use. In short, I believe that most of the people sounding the alarm are addicted to central planning, to creating problems that the government must then solve. Peak Oil is Exhibit "B"; Kyoto is Exhibit "A".

That doesn't tell me anything. Many of us have lived in crappy neighborhoods. What are the numbers? As a very great leader of a very great democracy once said: "A proof is a proof (Link) What kind of proof ? It's a proof. A proof is proof. And when you have a good proof, it's because it is proven."

Prove it. Don't tell me what you personally think. Show it to me. Don't say there are no stats. Show me why your point of view is correct. Visit any public housing project or slum in Ontario. That ought to clear your head. Ah, but that's an appeal to common sense, something that's not a) politically correct; or provable after studies costing millions.

He probably knows for experience that you keep your private religious views separate from the job you do. I am no big fan of Day but performing your job is important to me and to the country. He has learnt the truth of that from his time as leader of the Alliance. He came across as unsure of himself as leader but he seems to be able to perform a supporting role. I suspect Harper's supplying firm guidance.

Trouble with healthcare is that the potential demand is almost unlimited. There are some people that seem to live at doctors' offices and use those offices more as places to go, or people to talk to. Also, for many aches and pains, there just isn't a cure. On the "major illness" side care being totally free removes all incentive to conserve, be careful with its use.

The one now scheduled for August 22? (oh, I won't get my hopes up).

Yup, women, even in this day and age after all the strides that we've made are still living with men who truly believe they are inferior. One co-worker of mine does. He figures women should be at home raising children. Until there are no men out there that think in this antiquated manner, we will have the need for pro-women programs. After all we as a society have been programmed for thousands of years that women are chattel etc. This type of thinking is still pervasive and will not be eradicated in 2 or 3 generations. Although in another thread I said the feminist movement is finished -- its not, and that is because of men like you Geoffrey, who believe all women's groups are feminazi lesbians who hate men. That being said the next premier of BC will be a woman. Far from it. However, I work in a law firm that is now five females, four males. It has, frankly, become a junior "human rights" commission where complaints of creation of "hostile work environment" have seriously interfered wtih my ability to get my job done. Christ, someone accused me of this site being of prurient interest, and inappropriate for the work place.

How will he make waiting lists disappear? The military should be a priority. It was left to rot so badly, something had to be done. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Any system based on "free" anything cannot abolish waits. SH knows that. He has to figure a graceful way out on this. Privatization?

Rue, thank you, sincerely, for educating me. From one lawyer to another.

How long will it take people to abolish minimum wages? Should be abolished, it's a leading cause of unemloyment in many areas of Canada. You choose the price you work for, this isn't some economic depression time, it's your choice. Price controls don't work there either. I think some minimal minimum wage, say $2 per hour, should be established, simply to prevent slavery. Otherwise I agree. Naturally your post is well intended but I believe is completely off the mark. In fact for demand to be appropiately controlled at this time oil prices should be at about $182.00-barrel and gas at $7.00 per U.S. gallon. What I am talking about is the phenomenon known as global "Peak Oil". This is a very informative article and is contrary to what Canadian oil commodity experts who must be really kidding themselves if they think oil prices have peaked and our oil supply is plentiful. http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/ That phenomena has been recited, in varying versions, since the early 1920's. It hasn't happened yet and I doubt it ever will. Oil has historically fluctuated between "real", i.e. current dollar prices of $97 (back in 1980) and about $12 (1970-2, 1986, 1998-9). It may fluctuate closer to the $35 figure, on average, than the $20s in which it spent most of the late 1980's through early 2000's. Higher, but not the end of the world.

As a very great leader of a very great democracy once said: What kind of proof ? It's a proof. A proof is proof. And when you have a good proof, it's because it is proven.".

Deleted - Posted by mistake

I was last there in 1997, when my wife and I found it unpleasant enough to ditch for a three-hour ride to Algonquin (combination of her pregnancy and 33 degree heat). Is it really getting that bad though?

There is a fascinating discussion going on elsewhere on this forum about aboriginal issues. An excerpt from this discussion, quoted below, includes many recently debunked beliefs about aboriginals and the effect of their interaction with Europeans. Some time ago, Charles Mann wrote an article in Atlantic Magazine destroying many myths about aboriginals. Among those myths that he effectively demolished are: That the Europeans deliberately killed or subjugated many of the aboriginals; That there were many thriving and viable aboriginal cultures destroyed by Europeans; That the aboriginals were "light on the land" and did not effect the "balance of nature" very much; and That super-abundant numbers of buffalo, wolves and passenger pigeons (now extinct) were the natural state of affairs. Now that 1491 has come out in book form, I decided that it was time to post the entire Atlantic Magazine preview, from, I believe, the April 2002 issue. It is fascinating and definitely worth the read, even if you have to pay some money to the Atlantic Magazine website for the excerpt. Better yet, buy the book. =========================================== 1491 Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought—an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe. New evidence of both the extent of the population and its agricultural advancement leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact BY CHARLES C. MANN ..... A few years ago it occurred to me that my ancestor and everyone else in the colony had voluntarily enlisted in a venture that brought them to New England without food or shelter six weeks before winter. Half the 102 people on the Mayflower made it through to spring, which to me was amazing. How, I wondered, did they survive? In his history of Plymouth Colony, Bradford provided the answer: by robbing Indian houses and graves. The Mayflower first hove to at Cape Cod. An armed company staggered out. Eventually it found a recently deserted Indian settlement. The newcomers—hungry, cold, sick—dug up graves and ransacked houses, looking for underground stashes of corn. "And sure it was God's good providence that we found this corn," Bradford wrote, "for else we know not how we should have done." (He felt uneasy about the thievery, though.) When the colonists came to Plymouth, a month later, they set up shop in another deserted Indian village. All through the coastal forest the Indians had "died on heapes, as they lay in their houses," the English trader Thomas Morton noted. "And the bones and skulls upon the severall places of their habitations made such a spectacle" that to Morton the Massachusetts woods seemed to be "a new found Golgotha"—the hill of executions in Roman Jerusalem. *snip* Smallpox was only the first epidemic. Typhus (probably) in 1546, influenza and smallpox together in 1558, smallpox again in 1589, diphtheria in 1614, measles in 1618—all ravaged the remains of Incan culture. Dobyns was the first social scientist to piece together this awful picture, and he naturally rushed his findings into print. Hardly anyone paid attention. But Dobyns was already working on a second, related question: If all those people died, how many had been living there to begin with? Before Columbus, Dobyns calculated, the Western Hemisphere held ninety to 112 million people. Another way of saying this is that in 1491 more people lived in the Americas than in Europe. His argument was simple but horrific. It is well known that Native Americans had no experience with many European diseases and were therefore immunologically unprepared—"virgin soil," in the metaphor of epidemiologists. What Dobyns realized was that such diseases could have swept from the coastlines initially visited by Europeans to inland areas controlled by Indians who had never seen a white person. The first whites to explore many parts of the Americas may therefore have encountered places that were already depopulated. Indeed, Dobyns argued, they must have done so. Peru was one example, the Pacific Northwest another. In 1792 the British navigator George Vancouver led the first European expedition to survey Puget Sound. He found a vast charnel house: human remains "promiscuously scattered about the beach, in great numbers." Smallpox, Vancouver's crew discovered, had preceded them. Its few survivors, second lieutenant Peter Puget noted, were "most terribly pitted ... indeed many have lost their Eyes." In Pox Americana, (2001), Elizabeth Fenn, a historian at George Washington University, contends that the disaster on the northwest coast was but a small part of a continental pandemic that erupted near Boston in 1774 and cut down Indians from Mexico to Alaska. Because smallpox was not endemic in the Americas, colonials, too, had not acquired any immunity. The virus, an equal-opportunity killer, swept through the Continental Army and stopped the drive into Quebec. The American Revolution would be lost, Washington and other rebel leaders feared, if the contagion did to the colonists what it had done to the Indians. "The small Pox! The small Pox!" John Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail. "What shall We do with it?" In retrospect, Fenn says, "One of George Washington's most brilliant moves was to inoculate the army against smallpox during the Valley Forge winter of '78." Without inoculation smallpox could easily have given the United States back to the British. *snip* The question is even more complex than it may seem. Disaster of this magnitude suggests epidemic disease. In the view of Ramenofsky and Patricia Galloway, an anthropologist at the University of Texas, the source of the contagion was very likely not Soto's army but its ambulatory meat locker: his 300 pigs. Soto's force itself was too small to be an effective biological weapon. Sicknesses like measles and smallpox would have burned through his 600 soldiers long before they reached the Mississippi. But the same would not have held true for the pigs, which multiplied rapidly and were able to transmit their diseases to wildlife in the surrounding forest. When human beings and domesticated animals live close together, they trade microbes with abandon. Over time mutation spawns new diseases: avian influenza becomes human influenza, bovine rinderpest becomes measles. Unlike Europeans, Indians did not live in close quarters with animals—they domesticated only the dog, the llama, the alpaca, the guinea pig, and, here and there, the turkey and the Muscovy duck. In some ways this is not surprising: the New World had fewer animal candidates for taming than the Old. Moreover, few Indians carry the gene that permits adults to digest lactose, a form of sugar abundant in milk. Non-milk-drinkers, one imagines, would be less likely to work at domesticating milk-giving animals. But this is guesswork. The fact is that what scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas. Swine alone can disseminate anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis, taeniasis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly and can transmit diseases to deer and turkeys. Only a few of Soto's pigs would have had to wander off to infect the forest. *snip* Throughout eastern North America the open landscape seen by the first Europeans quickly filled in with forest. According to William Cronon, of the University of Wisconsin, later colonists began complaining about how hard it was to get around. (Eventually, of course, they stripped New England almost bare of trees.) When Europeans moved west, they were preceded by two waves: one of disease, the other of ecological disturbance. The former crested with fearsome rapidity; the latter sometimes took more than a century to quiet down. Far from destroying pristine wilderness, European settlers bloodily created it. By 1800 the hemisphere was chockablock with new wilderness. If "forest primeval" means a woodland unsullied by the human presence, William Denevan has written, there was much more of it in the late eighteenth century than in the early sixteenth. *snip* Guided by the pristine myth, mainstream environmentalists want to preserve as much of the world's land as possible in a putatively intact state. But "intact," if the new research is correct, means "run by human beings for human purposes." Environmentalists dislike this, because it seems to mean that anything goes. In a sense they are correct. Native Americans managed the continent as they saw fit. Modern nations must do the same. If they want to return as much of the landscape as possible to its 1491 state, they will have to find it within themselves to create the world's largest garden.

Are you saying that the Europeans were wrong to explore and allow people to emigrate? You're forgetting that 95% of the aboriginal population died before the first white man shot was fired in much of the continent; from smallpox and other diseases. These diseases fanned out far ahead of the white man and left behind wrecked, demoralized societies. The Europeans did not gain much of a toehold in Africa or Asia for the simple reason that, sharing a landmass with Europe, they had some resistance to most European diseases. The white man had little choice but to segregate and/or assimilate the few remaining natives, whose populations were no longer independently viable. I posted an Atlantic magazine article (link to another thread here where I posted the full article) which excerpted a then upcoming book, 1491, which is one source agreeing with my views. If everyone went back to where they "came from" the Great Rift Valley of Africa would be a very crowded place.

If there were more of those, the bigotry against Muslims would be over. This guy has courage and a heart of gold.

Oh really? Harper and/or Bush controls the (hostile to them) media?

Churchill, Manitoba's beaches are very nice in March. Same with Moosonee, Ontario's.

Good point, and as a Jew I personally appreciate it very much. People that equate anyone they don't like to Hitler, i.e. Bush = Hitler, cheapens the memory and lessons of the Holocaust and of that ultimate inhumanity.

It's time people stop considering what "group" they're in and vote/choose/employ on the basis of merit. For Christ's sake, I'm not demanding Jewish parity on basketball teams. And basketball players make some serious money.

More Harper-bashing I see. For a minority PM he seems to have accomplished a lot.

I was joking about the Queen ruling but count me as a closet monarchist. Of course, our Constitution forbids any title of nobiliity. Aren't you, on your other board, PA, a supporter of an independent Royal Dominion of Alberta?

I sued to post on the CBC bulletin board. In fact, I loved it so much that me and another poster, Roy Wilson, brought the board down by providing source material for a highly unfavorable National Post article about it. Anyone interested either PM, e-mail or MSN me and I'll send a PDF scan of the article.

I was in Toronto at a bookstore around when CanCon was introduced back around 1973. The store owner explained the "culture preserving" aspect of it. I subscribe to Canadian Geographic and the feature article for one of the issues was the re-introduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. The Canadian content in that article; the Alberta and BC locations where the wolves were captured for export. I hear they said "eh" when they howled.