hitops

Trains are even worse though. You're going to have to deal with the fact that oil will be transported across physical space, and in doing so the infrastructure will interact with matter. Given that, pipelines would serve your stated goals better than trains. NIMBY attitudes don't really help anyone.

I'd say the most common usage of this phrase would be wrt communism. 'Done properly', it's great isn't it? If you can't apply it, how can it work? It's like saying nudity is a great dress code for work. Ok let's accept it's possible, but since your workplace will never let you actually do it, I guess not. Same story with LEAN. LEAN will never be give the freedom to deal with the most critical areas of waste in the system, so we'll never know. Not because it can't work in those areas, it just won't be allowed to touch them by the inherent design of our health care system. In the meantime, we apply LEAN to make changes that are so insignificant that the actual waste of time in administering LEAN cancels out the benefits. A US hospital by contrast, could probably make good use of LEAN.

No you said to leave it in the ground. If you're now changing to 'taking it out of the ground and send to Europe', then I agree. Not when the alternative is trains, an even larger environmental threat. The oil WILL get to market, because people need it, people just like you. If you block pipelines, it just means trains. We can't live in the stone age, we only exist in our modern way because of burning fossil fuels. Pipeline are the safest, least damaging way to move them.

You're not even trying to get picture are you? China holds it's currency down in order to boost it's manufacturing. The consequences is that the wages earned by Chinese are worth less, leading to a lower standard of living. This is the cost the citizens of China pay for policies favoring their manufacturing. Life is hard for the average Chinese person, which I guess you think is fine since the 'trade deficit' looks great. There are always costs, and I guess you will always just ignore them.

Putin has the energy genius. Russia is the largest energy exporter to Europe by far. If you leave it in the ground here, it means they need Putin more. I guess that's true. More trains wrecks, more environmental damage might help people finally clue in that pipelines are the way to go. Opposition to pipelines on environmental grounds is utter mule-headed nonsense, only hurting the environment.

What do you mean by cheap labor? Can this be defined? Understand I'm not against post-secondary education. I took over 12 years of post-secondary education and it was worth it in financial and other ways. There's no question university degree on average lead to higher incomes. But when you post stats like that, understand they are talking about the the totality of the work force. People who got degrees 30 years ago did not get the same kind as today. At that time higher education was much more closely aligned to real work relevance, and had a much smaller cohort of mainline degrees. This avoids dealing with the issue today - the constant reports of poor employment for youth. I saw a special on cbc and it was almost laughable. They interviewed 3 student concerned about 'paying back loans' and 'finding a job' after education. Oh and what were they taking? Art history, women's and native studies, and art respectively. lol Well.......ya. If you do that, your prospects are not great. And this is the problem - today universities are full of endless iterations of various arts fields. This leads your average nearly-brain dead (in terms of real world experience) student will a false impression that these are legitimate, viable options. It doesn't help that they may be trendy or cool to study. Real life bites later, and this is a disservice to these students. Get who they did not interview? Engineering, medical, computer science etc students. I guess that would defeat the message of that show. Plus it's hard to find them wandering the streets when they are planted in the library. The US is a perfect example of what's going on. They have such a huge supposed job shortage, yet they import tons of Indians every year to do technical skills jobs because Americans don't have the skills. Go and check out the kids of immigrants families in Canada, particularly of Indian or Oriental decent. They do great, and they take useful degrees. Their parents make sure of it, and this is born out in the stats.

I don't mean to say university is pointless. I have a post-graduate degree and earn a good income. While you need a degree for those 'good' jobs, there are also a ton of degrees that are close to useless, and this trend is increasing rapidly. You are dead right that many parents and school counselors don't recognize that just getting a university degree is not the key. Getting a useful one is. Many, many arts degrees will leave you way behind the guy with the 1 year community college trade cert. Absolutely. But the incentives of universities are to get as many students in as many programs as possible (paying as much tuition as possible). The value of the degree is secondary.

No industry is paying lots, that's why they can get $50-60 / hour or more. Since this is far higher than historically relative to other jobs, we call it a shortage. We can take your argument further and say that we have only 10 plumbers in the whole province. They each charge $2000 / hour. People who don't want to pay that, don't hire plumbers, and on paper everything balances out and there is 'no shortage'. We can measure shortages in other ways now. Home builders take longer to build homes here right now, due to waiting to available crews for each part of the job. All you hear about on the news is how students suffer from employment after uni. In reality there are great opportunities for income in the trades, but your art history degree won't get you there.

In the current situation, your strategy of keeping oil in the ground would strengthen the most aggressive major power currently at play, and weaken Europe. That posture means continued rapid growth of transport of oil by rail, counter-productive to your above stated goals.

Both of us know full well what they are intended to do. Only one of us knows that they don't actually do that. I think you're smart enough to get it, you just refuse to, perhaps due to ideology. Tariffs are nothing more than ways to pick winners and losers in your economy. You can indeed create winners (the industry with the tariffs), but you also get losers in your economy. Yes we can improve the trade balance number with Korea by shifting money from Canadians to the auto sector. No, that shift in money doesn't magically go away. It is a real loss in wealth for Canadian, which balances out the benefit to auto. You seem to believe that if you favor manufacturing, this is a magical panacea for your economy. China is the perfect example of why this is not true. The most successful manufacturer in the world, yet a very poor average standard of living for the citizens. They have done exactly what you want - imposed strict tariffs on imports, and had relative freedom on exports. The results are amazing trade numbers, and enormous costs to the population. If you can understand the costs to the Chinese people, you can understand the same theory applied here.

Hey, this cartoon shows only a white guy voting. You must be racist.

Ah.....what? If we ship to Europe, that weakens Putin's hand. It also lowers what he can charge. But hey let's just keep blocking those pipeline. Train derailments with their consequent explosions, deaths and enviro damage are just so much better.

We've had a labor shortage out here for probably a decade, so going back to 2008-2009 doesn't surprise me. The fact that an electrician or plumber here can routinely make $10 - $15 / hour more than a nurse, tells you there is a labor shortage. I don't begrudge them, they are appropriately charging based on the demand for their services. I feel parents and highschools have done a massive disservice to kids by mindlessly promoting university without any clear employment-related goals. The trades are looked down upon, wrongly. They take less than half the training time than a normal degree, cost probably anywhere from 1/5 to 1/10 of a degree (often nothing due to employer sponsorship), and generally result in immediate gainful employment. Meanwhile a huge chunk of degrees today come with a lot of debt and minimal market value.

'If done right', is a meaningless statement, because it is true for literally anything imaginable. The test is not whether it works in the magical fantasy perfect world of it's promoters, but whether it works generally in the real world and real situations as they are.

Quebec is no more educated than the Canadian average. The prairies are the highest by a fair margin, comparable to Scandinavian countries: http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/81-595-m/2009075/c-g/c-g3-eng.htm I'm talking about actual rates of immigrants and the real world results, not local attitudes. While Quebec may not like immigrants, they have lots. Scandinavian countries on average have far fewer. This has real effects on a society. Of cities, Montreal has third highest percentage of immigrants in the nation. It moves to 2nd place when you look at recent immigrants (2006 - 2011). http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/nhs-enm/2011/as-sa/99-010-x/2011001/tbl/tbl1-eng.cfm Quebec is also higher than Canadian average for total immigrant population http://www12.statcan.ca/census-recensement/2006/as-sa/97-557/table/t2-eng.cfm This is despite the fact that only a small minority of immigrants in the world would prefer French-speaking rather than English speaking areas. If you could correct for that, I'm sure Quebec would appear even more immigrant friendly, in policy terms. Compared Quebec's immigrant population to Scandinavian countries. On average, it is much higher, notably 4x higher than Finland, for example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_foreign-born_population

In government institutions, it's by design. There is no other kind that can flourish, almost by definition.

What I'm saying to you is that you have to compare large, diverse economies to have meaningful comparisons. Culturally and politically, provinces or states with the same country are obviously the closest comparisons and would give us the most meaningful information. Norway and Sweden are very different and have all kinds of confounding factors. They are very white, very educated, very small, and hostile to immigration. Section out that same group in Canada or the US (for accurate comparison), and you will have a group doing even better than Norwegians or Swedes. Norway also has the luxury of being a petro state with no corruption. Sweden and Norway both have sky-high taxes. All these factors change the game when comparing.

They don't. One-sided tariffs does not = hand tied behind your back. That's what you don't understand. It's not at the expense of ours. One-sided tariffs does not = at the expense of ours. That's what you don't understand. You've been told it does, and chosen to believe it. The people who say that, are looking ONLY at auto, and nothing else, and that's why what they are telling you is wrong. Our products are not kept out of foreign markets. This trade agreement will INCREASE our products going to foreign markets. It will have ZERO impact on auto exports. It will increase auto imports, and reduce domestic auto purchases. This will hurt our auto sector, and help other sectors. The strength of our dollar has very little to do with whether we are a service economy. Stop believing the theory you like and look at real life history. Track our dollar value over the last 30 years. Does this correlate to the amount of manufacturing vs service in Canada? Not even slightly. It is almost entirely dependent on how well or poorly the US is doing. We went from $0.70 to $1 with the USD while losing manufacturing. We have since fallen to $0.88 in a single year, when almost nothing changed here at home. Our own tariffs cause goods to be more expensive, not foreign ones. You've got it backwards. Cheap goods increases wealth for Canadians. With that wealth they can produce other activity in the economy. You ignore this. More wealth at home means more wealth for local investment. Forbes last year rated Canada the best place to invest in the world. Your concern is correct.......but you applied it to the wrong area. It's not purchasing power that will suffer if we have cheap goods, it's the auto sector that will suffer if we artificially protect it. Again, leave the lefty theory, and look at historical reality. Auto has been protected, and has needed MANY bailouts. You are of course not factoring the cost to our country of having to bail them out. The weakness of auto, and subsequent need for bailout, is directly as result of protected them with tariffs or otherwise. We gave the big 3 more money per capita than even the US did in the last bailout. Do you put that on the balance sheet of cost/benefit? No, of course not.

I like the analogy. This is kind of like using your computer to wash your face. Until patients become like manufactured products (where LEAN works), I can't see that changing.

That's not really fair at all. As I've clearly articulated, I am interested in improving things and I've even given you examples of how I have. I think maybe you deal with these kinds of things in your work, and maybe it's just easier for you to blame the workers for lack of buy-in for when it fails, rather than confront the failings of the program. I can give you a perfect example from just today. I was thinking about this and asked somebody in another department about it. She told me LEAN has been ongoing for a few years. One of the projects started in 2010, and she was told by our boss to start getting it going. It was a project to track the progress of a patient. I started working here last here and started doing it. I have since learned, I am the only one doing it of everyone that does the same job as me. Not only that, but when she started pushing people to get on board with it, she was actually reprimanded by the people who told her to do the project. This is because they gave lip service to it since they were expected to, but had no real interest in doing it day to day. These kinds of problems will make any LEAN project fail, and LEAN cannot deal with this. If I'm the only one in my entire department doing it, obviously the program has no power to work here. In the meantime, it adds a lot of inefficiencies to our day simply to administer it. Another example - they just lie. A major change was made 2 years ago for LEAN, and they issued a report saying x, y and z had improved. I asked the people involved, who told me no attempt whatsoever was made to confirm that those improvements actually happened, no attempt was even made to measure them. They just did it, and then claimed it helped. This is exactly the kind of crap I would expect, and exactly why I don't trust any result numbers such as those copied and pasted by spider. LEAN itself has no accountability, and no mechanism to verify whether any result it produces is anything but a made up number. It actually reminds me a little of reading Soviet history. The top says what should happen, and everyone pretends it's happening. No need for independent verification, just put on paper what the superiors want to see or hear.

So why are we doing LEAN then, if it can't touch the problems that really make us....fat? You can't stop people from getting sick. One would have to show how this would make a difference. We already naturally communicate in way to get our work done as efficiently as possible. We could add 2x more communication, but to what end? In fact we could communicate all day and do nothing as a result. Status quo is not a bad word. The point is optimal patient care, not 'do stuff different'. I mean what? What's the point if it doesn't help? Because we have different wait times. Welcome to government health care. Courtesy of your friendly neighborhood union. Now in my department, I'm fortunate to work with good people. We make jokes about LEAN, not about improvement. Improvement was happening before LEAN, and will continue after it, so long as LEAN doesn't sabotage too much along the way. Yes, but one has to be delicate. Our superiors are expected to push this, so that they can tell their superiors they are with the program, and they can tell theirs, up to Brad. Then Brad can tell the voters he's doing something about it. Meanwhile nothing changes for the patient, except maybe more waiting for staff to do the extra paperwork. Not me specifically, but nearly every other type of health care worker.

Umm nope, Alberta growth is much faster than anywhere else. More than double any other province with the exception of Sask, and not quite double Sask. http://www.statcan.gc.ca/tables-tableaux/sum-som/l01/cst01/demo02b-eng.htm Nope, but that's not Quebec's growth rate either. That's the rate over 5 years. Yearly rate is under 1%. (see previous statscan link). Quebec is indeed hemorrhaging when it comes to inter-provincial migration. This issue has specifically been mentioned many times in the run up to the Quebec election, but here's a link anyway: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/recession-like-migration-from-quebec-highest-in-over-a-decade-1.2489009 Uh ya......babies are born in every state and every state grows. Net migration is the issue, and on that issue California is losing big. http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Californias-Population-Moving-Out-182914961.html Every state by net coming and going. California losing as usual: http://vizynary.com/2013/11/18/restless-america-state-to-state-migration-in-2012/ 'As for population and job growth, from 2000 to 2012, California grew 11.9 percent. Texas more than doubled California’s growth at 24.4 percent. The U.S. population expanded 11.3 percent in that time. Much of Texas’ growth came from domestic migration, while California lost residents to other states, Texas being the most common destination;' http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/07/03/texas-v-california-the-real-facts-behind-the-lone-star-states-miracle/ Fastest growing states have conservative policies: http://voices.yahoo.com/ten-fastest-growing-states-united-states-by-12372625.html?cat=3

This is in no way a conservative policy. We should not give tax breaks to one select group (married with one person working), at the expense of everyone else. Now that said, this benefit to those with a two-parent single income, is a drop in the bucket compared to the benefits to the poor. It's not even close.

Can anyone explain what exactly the problem is to require ID to vote? Seems pretty self evident. It is incredibly easy, not to mention free, to get have some kind of ID.

Alberta is like any place with historical conservative tendencies. Prosperity results, and creates a magnet for immigration, and immigration changes the political spectrum and consequently can eat away the same policies that caused the reason they came in the first place. The converse is also true, Quebec being the prime example. They are hemorrhaging people, and those people may find themselves elsewhere, vote differently, and bring Quebec-type problems to wherever they go. In the US it's also true. California (and everywhere else) is losing people to Texas because Texas has policies that breed prosperity. Eventually the new demographics will cause voting that will probably erode that. Virginia is an example of where that process has already taken place.