Wild Bill

The NEP was about more than just sharing a resource with all of Canada. The Liberals at the time were perfectly willing to buy Libyan and Venezuelan oil at world price. Their deal was for Alberta to let the FEDS sell their oil at world prices, give Alberta a ridiculously low domestic price and then pocket all the difference! You might also want to ask some Newfoundlanders what they think about Quebec and the Churchill Falls hydro power deal! Somehow, "it belongs to ALL Canadians" always turns out to be code for "If we set it up so that Central Canada gets a sweetheart deal we'll buy lots of votes from the provinces with all the seats! WHO CARES if it screws the little guys? We can afford to lose those few seats!" Keep up that kind of talk and the Liberals will be persona non grata in Alberta for another 35 years!

Yes, I do know! I heard it from her own lips! They had taken a cheap Cuban vacation. She was involved in an accident on a rented "moped" and severely injured her leg. First off, her husband (my best friend) had great difficulty getting help. No ambulance service! He managed to get some help from some ordinary Cubans. It should be stressed that while the official resources were scant the Cuban people themselves were extraordinarily kind and helpful! The problem at the hospital was that her fracture was complicated. The hospital did not have modern xray equipment or the facilities to properly set the wound. Lot's of doctors but not even enough effective pain killers! She spent 2 days in severe pain lying in a bed until my friend could get things arranged to have her flown home. Once here, doctors opened up her cast and found her leg had not been properly set. They were able to correct much of the problem but she will forever have a bit of a limp. Needless to say, they have never cared to risk another Cuban vacation. As I had said, they loved the people but had never even thought about the lack of basic medical resources. Many people routinely bring "care packages" of toilet paper, perfume, toothpaste, shampoos and lots of other things to give as tips or gifts to Cubans during their holiday, knowing how difficult it is to source such things on the island. Most never think that basic medical supplies like first aid products and pain relievers are also high on the list of "wanted" items. Never forget that Cuba lives under a communist system. This doesn't mean that everything is bad or doesn't work. What it means is that everything is under central planning and priorities are often more political than practical. Communist economies are never known for being extremely flush with money. It's more normal for everyone to be "equally poor". Just as the old USSR was famous for harvesting bumper crops of vegetables only to have the produce rot in unrefrigerated railroad box cars, sitting for weeks at some station, Castro's economy had and has similar problems. Educating doctors is one thing and his government can claim credit. Keeping them supplied with what they need to PRACTISE medicine is something else! Of course, he can always blame the lack of supplies on the American embargo! Anyhow, I've always known that we Canadians seem to have some very idealistic ideas about how things are in Cuba, ideas that really are based only on the tourist areas and not on actual experience with how Cuba works "on the street". We fly down, get a tan, buy some trinkets for an inflated price, give the hotel staff a few dollars as tips, chug a few mai tai's and fly home! There's a lot more to see behind the curtain.

Yeah, Cuba has lots of doctors. Of course, they don't have any bandages and Tylenol runs about $20 a bottle on the black market! Have you ever talked to anyone who went to Cuba for a vacation and suffered an illness or an accident? Yes, Castro's system has produced a lot of doctors. They get to sit around in the hospitals with little or no resources so they can PRACTICE medicine! My best friend's wife still walks with a limp because of the primitive resources of the Cuban medical system.

Sympathy for a Somali or whoever pirate is a secondary issue. The primary issue is that those pirates are often brutally killing innocents. The reasons why don't matter. If I were captured by Somali pirates, perhaps with my family murdered while it happened, I wouldn't care a whit about their reasons why they became pirates. If they harmed me then morally I would be entitled to reciprocate! If they harm innocents then the first priority is to stop them from doing it again! Those who target innocents forego the right to be considered human beings, as far as I'm concerned. Arm merchant ships and tankers so that they can repel pirate boarders. Jonsa's idea of some RPGs was a good one. Perhaps even a couple of deck guns would be an asset. After killing those attempting to board they could blow their ship out of the water! If they are still alive after that then perhaps we can talk about aid and rehabilitation.

It's not that simple! If you google a bit you'll learn the history of this problem, at least as it is here in Ontario. Bob Rae's NDP government first instituted this policy but it's not fair to blame him. The other two parties have been in power since and must have liked the idea, 'cuz they did bugger all to change it! You see, every doctor in Ontario gets a billing number for OHIP. (I'm sure other provinces have a similar setup). Health care costs had kept rising and rising and we were in a recession back then so revenues were falling and falling. Bob's solution was to limit the number of places for medical students in Universities, limiting the number of doctors graduating and thus limiting the number of billing numbers issued. Couple that with the fact that doctors billings are all capped so that when they reach the limit they will not get paid for seeing any more patients and you have effectively put limits on how much medicare is going to take from your budget. Doctors retire and die while the government controls the number of new graduates to replace them, while also capping how much it has to pay out in billings for them. This is the reason so many Ontarioans can't find a family doctor. There aren't enough of them anyway and besides, existing doctors are not going to take on more patients than will be paid for under the billing cap! The cap of course was sold to us dumb folks as a means to prevent rich doctors from gouging us! "Every one knows..." that doctors make too much money! If I recall correctly the cap was around $450K per year but the kicker is that it is a GROSS figure for running a doctor's entire practice, not his personal income, even though that was what was implied. Nobody thought about how he had to pay rent, buy equipment and supplies while also paying salaries to his staff. Worse yet, politicians are well aware that we are experiencing a wave of high numbers of patients from the Baby Boomers. We can try to attract and process as many immigrants as is practical but it won't make enough difference to change the graph curves. All the politicians have to do is obfuscate and delay while this wave works its way through the system. After 20 years or so we will start to experience a big lessening of the numbers, as our population falls. The problem will solve itself, as far as someone like McGuinty is concerned. Of course, those of us getting on in years that NEED doctor services will have a different opinion but as I said, if they can stall us off long enough...

Michael, you're right about part of the problem but so is Jack! I've been watching this happen for years and am a victim of it myself. Change is inevitable and yes, we can't expect to keep a job making buggy whips forever. The problem today is that changes have been happening faster than many workers can adapt. Consider a 45 or 50 year old factory worker. He likely never finished high school. He is only semi-skilled, in whatever skill he performed in the factory. If that factory closes, odds are today that competitors' factories have closed as well, due to technological change. So what does he do? Job retraining is very ineffective, in the real world. Also, with his background he's starting from farther back than many younger folks. Age discrimination may be illegal but it is very hard to prove. Not many folks are successful suing their way into a new career! When you are in your 20's changing jobs is far easier than when you are in your 50's. By then, many companies won't want to hire someone like you that will be hitting retirement age soon. Besides, we've lost jobs for ALL ages! Employers are going to hire the young first for all but jobs that require experience in a specific field and we've already stipulated that tech change has been causing a loss of jobs in those specific fields in the first place! There's a tendency today to think that education and re-training is a routine function like a job factory. Schools will train people like pigeons to perform their tasks and if that job becomes obsolete just go back to school for a short time and you will be trained for whatever new jobs have been created. This may have been true in the past decade or two but it doesn't seem to fit the paradigm today. So far, the trend has been for fewer workers needed in any particular field. Nothing seems to have come along that employed the large number of workers that manufacturing did in the 50's and 60's. Here in Hamilton I watched the steel companies lay off workers through a number of economic cycles. Each time a recession ended every talking head seemed to be saying that times were good again. What no one seemed to talk about was that fewer workers were rehired each cycle than were laid off! Stelco at one time employed nearly 20,000 workers! Today they have less than a 1000. There ARE new jobs created due to technological change but they are NOT for that 45-50 year old worker! They're for that young man or woman still in school, who can see the changes happening and plan his or her education to be ready. That's assuming that young potential worker is smart enough! A certain portion of the workforce just isn't blessed with that amount of smarts! What happens to them? Are they doomed to a career of wearing big gloves and sorting out tin cans and plastics in a garbage recycling station? The world is changing whether we like it or not but I truly think the viewpoint that job change is painless is a shallow one. There are real human beings falling through the cracks. One can argue that many union workers came to take too much for granted or that people in general should pay more attention to the world around them and be proactive instead of reactive but that again is just not "real world". Large numbers of people have ALREADY fallen though the cracks! What do we expect them to do? Most of those 45-50 year old workers who have lost their jobs will never have as good paying jobs again. They will be lucky to be greeters at the corner WalMart. Job retraining programs are really just extensions for EI benefits. The economy just doesn't need many old folks who have been trained in how use MicroSoft Word and Excel for the first time in their lives. The fact is, few if any of those courses are of positive value. They train older workers to be air conditioning technicians yet business doesn't need more such technicians! The sad fact is that few areas are hiring these days, period! I don't know of any solution and as I said, the world is going to do what it will. Jack has some valid concerns but unfortunately, if he thinks someone can legislate a solution I think he is mistaken. Right now no one really knows the future so no one can make useful predictions. Perhaps in hindsight it will all look easy!

If you re-read Topaz' opening post you will clearly see that she mentions reports that a flare could not only kill up to a billion people but it could happen within 5 years! A HUGE flare could indeed wipe out much solid-state electronics, similar to an Electro-Magnetic Pulse (EMP) from a nuclear explosion. However, the odds are extremely slim of this ever happening. Again, the ionized layers in the upper atmosphere provide a great deal of protection. If they didn't, it is likely that animal life would never have evolved on the planet in the first place! The problem is that transistor devices have a very thin junction of semiconductor materials that can be perforated by a high voltage spike, even if there's no appreciable current. This means that even static electricity like the sparks from your cat's fur on a cold, dry winter morning can destroy the junction, rendering the equipment inoperative. Integrated circuits and computer chips contain thousands of transistor devices. So any equipment that uses them is vulnerable but again, no one has so far seen or heard of a sufficiently powerful flare that could cause damage. Fortunately, once such a device has been wired into a circuit it experiences a far greater degree of protection than if it is still uninstalled. That's why we don't experience constant failures with our TV sets and hi-fi units. A flare powerful enough to damage installed electronics would likely give half the world's population instant skin cancer at the same time. Not something that seems to happen every few years! Space-based electronics like that used in satellites are a different story. If you're high enough up to be outside of the protective atmosphere layers then damage can and does occur! A number of satellites were lost until engineers learned about this phenomenon and took steps to protect such electronics. Incidently, old-fashioned vacuum tube technology is all but immune to these dangers! Back in the Cold War days it used to cause many a sleepless night for American military electronics engineers. If a nuclear war started western countries that relied on modern solid-state transistor technology could be knocked back to an Amish lifestyle in the blink of an eye! The entire North American power grid would go down and computers everywhere would become boat anchors. Meanwhile, even in the early 80's the USSR was flying many MIGs that still used vacuum tube technology on board! The Russians with their old-fashioned infrastructure would have been FAR better off than us! Every morning when I have my coffee I listen to talk radio on my 1953 Zenith TransOceanic vacuum tube portable radio. It's big, clunky and weighs a few pounds but it also has a bunch of shortwave bands and I love to take it portable with me! When conditions are right I listen to the BBC service and a few other countries. If we start getting nuked at least I'll have something to listen to!

Topaz, I'm a ham radio operator. The radio community has been following solar flares for nearly 100 years. They happen all the time! It's no big deal. The one you mention in 1859 caused problems because telegraph wires were a brand new invention and nobody knew much about solar flares and how wires could pick up their energy. Once they found out flares could cause damage the problem of protecting the wires proved very simple. Since then telegraph, telephone, electricity and whatever wires have long ago had protection devices invented. I wouldn't worry about a flare powerful enough to kill billions of people. One that bad hasn't happened in millions and millions of years, if ever! There are electromagnetic layers in the upper atmosphere which shield the earth's surface from most of the solar radiation problems that come from flares. We had 3 strong ones in the past week! All they did was cause some northern light auroras and black out shortwave radio for a few hours. I really wonder what newspapers you read! Either the reporters know nothing about science or they're deliberately trying to scare the ignorant in order to sell more papers...

Obviously, those Vikings must have been hallucinating the warmer temperatures, perhaps due to some contaminants in their mead! Of course, even though they were too stoned to realize it actually was cold, their bodies would not have been able to survive. Thus, we explain how their colonies died out and preserve the myths that climate has been the same since Earth's creation, only changing when Man started his Industrial Revolution and began to seriously try to doom the planet...

Jack, I'm going through a long, dragged out divorce! I couldn't afford to move to Caistor Center! Meanwhile, minority governments don't confront me none! Just as long as the non-liberal Liberals and the "Never saw a business I didn't want to scare away" Party don't get in power things won't be all bad...

You're right, Jack! So Ignatieff and Layton have left a guy like me stuck for an alternative to Harper, who is most definitely NOT a Reformer! No Reformer would EVER have sucked up to Mulroney! He was 75% of the reason so many people quit the PCs to join Reform! So for leaving me stuck with this control freak, thanks for nothing to the Opposition! The only consolation I can take from the situation is that you will STILL be the Opposition! Just once, before I die, I'd like to vote for someone who inspired me that actually WON!

I read about something similar years ago. Apparently, when the Vikings first discovered Newfoundland and Labrador, back between 1100-1300 A.D., things were so mild that they could grow grapes! In only a few generations the climate quickly turned much colder and the colonies died out. I felt sorry for my relatives on the Rock. They've been waiting over 800 years to get warm again!

This illustrates one of the problems with more "liberal" justice systems. It's one thing when you are in downtown Toronto to expect citizens not to get involved with catching criminals and SWAT teams being quickly called to the scene of any horrific shootings. Afterwards, courts can take their time over sentencing the perps, considering their abused childhood backgrounds or whatever. One can be confident that if a sentence is too lenient at least if the perp re-offends that SWAT team would once again be quickly available. On the high seas, all of that goes out the window. There is no one around to even be a witness, let alone save you from pirates who would torture or kill you as quickly as look at you! What's more, under the present deranged interpretation of international laws, often the pirates are immediately released! Lord knows for what ridiculous reason but the fact remains, they are! There is an ancient principle to handle such situations. If you have a law which is very difficult to enforce, where few perps are ever caught, the only expedient for a state is to levy punishments so harsh as to act as a deterrent to potential lawbreakers. In other words, your chances of being caught may be slim but if you ARE caught, the punishment will be swift and severe! This is why for centuries piracy was met with instant execution. Captains of vessels of all nationalities had the right to try and sentence pirates on the spot. True, sometimes pirates were taken back to the home port to be tried there but usually there were political reasons for that. Most times, they just threw the pirates to the sharks! This of course in no way stamped out piracy but it is hard to believe that it did not mitigate the numbers of pirates, at least in some way. We appear to be trying to apply a downtown New York crime approach to piracy on the open ocean. It just doesn't fit!

Thank you for finally making things clear. Joe Clark's brand of conservativism is specifically NOT for me but I wish you well!

I wish I could follow your reasoning, GWiz. I don't think it's as black and white as you picture. Consider this scenario. The nutbar ayatollahs who rule Iran drop a nuke on Tel Aviv. Israel being such a small country, there's not much left. Why would one assume that other countries would instantly retaliate and blow up Iran? First off, such action wouldn't restore all the lives lost in Israel. Second, would some later-day Obama kill off all those Iranian civilians, who had no say at all in the actions of their leaders? Remember, Iranian citizens don't even get to vote for their rulers! Plus the problem of radiation and fallout affecting neighbouring countries. I just don't see it myself. More likely, international outrage would be so extreme as to allow another coalition to be formed to invade Iran with conventional military and replace the regime, while totally destroying Iran's nuclear and probably even conventional warfare capability. Which leads to the really scary thing - to a fundamentalist ayatollah, this might all be worth it! Sure, they would lose power, at least for a generation or two. Still, Israel would be wiped off the earth! Someday the radiation would die down and the land would be resettled, likely with Arabs! I really think that an ounce of prevention...

I think the point had to do with that shop keeper in Markham who was repeatedly robbed by a guy and finally grabbed him and locked him up in a van till the police arrived. The perp admitted in court that he was returning to rob the shop keeper again! Yet the Crown charged the shop keeper with illegal arrest and assault! So when you say it's always been legal to defend your property, still is legal and always will be...you may be technically correct but in practice that often has not been the case. It's another one of those areas where if such a shop keeper or any private citizen caught in the same predicament were to take it to the Supreme Court, he would no doubt win in a heartbeat. The problem of course is that most citizens can't AFFORD to take a case that far! So they are forced to "cave". Lately this seems to be a common tactic with some levels of government and some corporations. They know that they don't have to be in the right, when they're attacking someone who doesn't have big bucks to fight back! It's a perversion of the law but it happens, all the same. Caledonia is a perfectly good example. As Christie Blatchford documented over and over again in her book "Helpless", the rule of law was suspended in that town during the protest, because it was politically expedient for McGuinty's government. If you haven't read the book yourself then you have absolutely no idea of what went on. The suspension of law was NOT just some racist opinion! It was truly fact! I'm as cautious as you when dealing with some of Mr. Canada's claims. He's still on my ignore list. Still, that doesn't mean that some things may still be true and valid.

I'm having a bit of trouble over the word "forgery". Apparently, she had scrawled "not" on a copy of the document with a magic marker. I always thought that a forgery was an attempt to look as realistic as possible, in order to fool someone. A scrawl with a magic marker doesn't seem to meet that standard. If I drew a Mona Lisa with crayons, would you also consider that a forgery? And please, don't try to blow me off as some kind of Tory who can't see any fault with any CPC member. I've posted enough times that I'm NOT a Tory and what's more, I really couldn't care less what happens to Ms Oda.

Sounds good to me! I'm no fan of Brian, or his lame-ass son who introduces Paris Hilton clones on CTV entertainment specials. You should understand, I'm NOT a Conservative! If anything, I'm a classic Liberal (an animal which hasn't been seen in Ottawa in generations) and a populist. Hey, I got one of the first Reform memberships issued when they decided to advance into Ontario. How on earth would a guy like me be a Mulroney supporter? Actually, I did vote for him for both of his majorities. I had become disillusioned with the Trudeau/Turner Liberals and thought Brian would be something fresh and different. By the end of his second mandate I realized, like so many other Canadians, that it was a case of the "new boss" being the "same as the old boss", only slicker! I think of Mulroney and Chretien as being the two most prominent examples of successful OLD-style politicians! As I have repeatedly said, I support the present CPC only because they smell less to my nose than the alternatives. I firmly believe that Harper has turned the merged Conservative Party into a clone of the old PCs, with little or no sign of the old Reform philosophies left within it. If another Manning ever came out of the wilderness, or if the Liberals decided to actually BE classic Liberals, the CPC would lose my vote in a hummingbird's heartbeat!

We're drifting a bit here but anyway, I don't know about Martin but I am absolutely convinced that Chretien authorized AdScam! The scheme was too grandiose and complicated for the party leader NOT to be involved! Being intelligent men, party leaders well know how to shield themselves with "plausible deniability". IOW, unlike Nixon, Chretien was smart enough to wipe the tapes! Chretien had already proven how devious he could be with his land sale/golf course scandal, where he got the bank manager fired for not approving his customer, despite that customer having a very bad credit history. I'm sure he had some kind of rationalization, like the Liberals needed the money to stay in power because only THEY could save Canada from breaking up! I just can't believe that a scheme that involved so much money involved only the few low-level party apparatchiks like Gagliano, Jacques Corriveau and Joe Morselli. People forget that the findings of Judge Gomery were only what was PROVEN, NOT all that happened! He did NOT catch all the Liberals involved and the $40 million dollars the Liberals stole was NOT all of it but only what he could trace! Given the convoluted nature of the scheme and how well things were hidden the few peons and dollars he did find was the best he could do. BTW, has any one heard anything about the Liberals having returned that $40 million yet? Just because Liberal supporters want to rewrite history and sweep it all under the carpet doesn't mean that there's still not a big bump they have to walk around!

Shh, Scrib! When your opponent is about to do something that will hurt himself, why warn him?

Topaz, we saw Liberals be thieves! They STOLE money from Canadians in AdScam! Does this mean we should never again vote for Liberals? Or do you only care about Tory scandals?

Bud, the reason they continue to occupy the land is because past experience has shown that if Israel withdraws various Arab groups seize the opportunity to get a closer launching site for their rockets! I just can't understand how so many people expect Israel to just sit there and let the rockets fall where they may! Virtually nobody ever talks about providing some sort of security for the Israeli people. It's all about giving back the land and who cares if a rocket falls on a busload of orphans or whatever. I think any country that would cheerfully allow itself to be so repeatedly attacked would have to be governed by idiots! Anybody that expects them to do this would have to be a bigger idiot! What would you do if some terrorists groups were lobbing rockets into your neighbourhood every day, just for the fun of it? What would you tell someone who told you to just shut up and take it? As I've said before, I've never heard of a case where Israel deliberately targeted civilians. They've had civilians killed as collateral damage but usually that was because somebody like Hamas used them as human shields. Meanwhile, Arab groups deliberately target Israeli civilians all the time! They're actually proud of it! I have little interest in nitpicking the politics of the region. To me, things are very simple. Those who target civilians as their primary targets are terrorists, by definition. They forfeit the right to be considered human beings. Doing unto them as they do unto others is the only way to correct or put a stop to their behavior.

Good point! We still don't seem to have easy and cheap methods of storing the energy. I would have thought that New Brunswick would be putting the bulk of their investment into tidal power. I can't think of many sources more reliable than tides! Surely for the brief period between the directions of the tidal flows in the Bay of Fundy they could dam off a large reservoir to keep the turbines continuously spinning.

Waldo, I read the link and it says NOTHING about ice buildup! Lots of stuff about cold weather but apparently in this instance that wasn't the problem. In the Maritimes ice buildup can be incredible! The high humidity of air coming in from the ocean coupled with the cold means that ice can build up to incredible levels. I vividly remember how as I kid I saw a water tower for our village near Dartmouth ice up between the tripod legs all the way to just under the tank! Of course, most of that was from condensation from the cold water in the tank but still, it illustrates the phenomenon. Actually, it's milder temperatures that aggravate the problem! That area of the country, being warmed by the Gulf Stream, routinely has periods where the temperature is close to the freezing point of water, so that when moist air hits the cold material of a wind turbine one could see how it might condense and freeze. The very motion of the turbine at slow speeds might make things worse. I'm just throwing out ideas here but the fact remains, the link said nothing about ice. Are you aware of other companies or countries in a similar humidity/temperature situation that have coped with this problem? This still leaves the question of why no one predicted it happening in the first place. 'Course, they are politicians so we can't expect much from them in scientific or technical matters...

Hey Max, I still haven't forgiven Harper for ousting Garth Turner! While I do think this scandal won't have much effect on the price of eggs (Canadian scandals are always so BORING!) it does show a consistent flaw in Harper's leadership. He always seems to start off by minimizing the problem, shielding his member from the attacks. His initial reaction is to stand by his people, which I find commendable. However, if the flak keeps building and won't die down, at a certain point he will just throw the unfortunate member to the wolves! Hell, the member doesn't really have to have done anything themselves. We've seen him turf an MP because she was married to someone in hot water! That's NOT commendable! It all shows that he is not acting out of principle but merely for the political optics. When he acts like this as far as I'm concerned he might as well be a Liberal!