Wild Bill

Argus, what the hell is going on? You quoted a post that I never made! Has someone cracked my password and is pretending to be me?

Of course there are, Michael! There is always the official line and then what happens in the real world. Most likely, the Mounties get nowhere near the full quota of applicants. Since they already perceive they have an imbalance of women and minorities, this would mean that they must fill women and minority quotas FIRST! Folks involved in the process would know this so it makes perfect sense to tell the young lad not to bother. They know that it takes time to process and hire newbies. They know that the overall quota is ALWAYS larger than they actually will take! The odds are that they just won't get around to hiring Scriblett's son. Just searching for enough women and minorities will take all the time and resources. Particularly when the assumption is likely wrong that they even get enough women and minorities applying in the first place! Those groups historically don't seem to be attracted to the RCMP. To assume that there are thousands of disadvantaged people applying every day to be a Mountie and walking away unhappy due to discrimination is a bit of a stretch.

Even if that were true it doesn't excuse the Star, Michael! This is typical of what they've pulled many times over the years. It's the reason why I've never had any respect for that newspaper.

Well, I already covered CFLs. In a couple of posts! Thanks for actually reading before responding. As for windows and appliances, I doubt if there's many people left who haven't done so, except for those who just can't afford it. You probably didn't read my point about how we've been at this for at least 25 years, either. Still, you just go on! Some of us live in dream worlds and some of us in the real one. Anyhow, you don't have to convince me. The issue is rapidly building into an election one. We'll see how many voters agree with me or with you, next year.

No, I'm saying most people CAN"T conserve enough to make a significant saving on their electricity bill. You seem to think that they can - that it's just a matter of choice and will. I'm saying they can't. It's a matter of physics and mathematics. If you want to convince someone that they CAN save significant money on their Ontario electricity bill then perhaps you might want to try mathematics and physics to prove it. Anyone can make a wish! "Let them eat cake!"

Everyone I know has been conserving for at least 10-15 years. My washer and dryer are 25 years old. They still have the "Energy Star" sticker on their sides! So that proves we have been conscious as consumers about our electricity consumption for at least a quarter of a century.It's not like we've been wasting like mad and only heard about conservation last Saturday! How much more room to conserve is left? As a techie, I am well aware that first off all, CFLs can never cut your consumption by more than a few percent. That's because lighting was never a bigger chunk of your bill in the first place! Power is measured in watts. The average old lightbulb consumed 60 watts an hour. An electric stove preparing supper uses up to several thousand watts! Banning old lamps and using CFLs does mice nuts for the consumer! The only one to benefit is the Ontario Power Corporation! The savings may be trivial for the individual but the power company sees the total improved efficiency. This means they don't have to build more generators. The big draws are burners and motors. There's burners in your clothes dryer and motors in your furnace, refrigerator and freezer. Your daughter's hair dryer uses about as much power 15 hundred watt light bulbs! It is physically impossible to make a motor or a heating element that will be more efficient enough to cut consumption by enough to give consumers a significant break on their bill. Not because we can't or won't improve their design. The Law of Conservation of Energy is the limiting factor. A motor today may already be 90% efficient. If it takes 1000 watts of power to rotate a dryer drum that motor may only lose 100 watts in doing the task. It cannot draw less than the power needed for the mechanical result! So frankly SmallC, your suggestion seems rather mean-spirited! "Let them eat cake!"

I did read up on it! Perhaps you should broaden your references. I still can't follow your reasoning. True, we are increasing our military budget but the world has not seen all the results yet. They have seen us decline as a military power for decades. No one is going to take the time to investigate if we are finally turning that around. They look at what we are today and what we have been for some time. As for Portugal, the same points apply in reverse. It will take some time for the world to note they have shrunk as a military power. The Security Council seat is up for grabs TODAY! How can you consider a country to sit on the Security Council if it does not have the resources to actually help deal with security issues? You might not expect it to take the lead but certainly you would expect a country to be able to give a significant contribution. A few JTF sharp shooters, admittedly perhaps the best in the world, are of marginal use when you face thousands of ships, tanks, planes and artillery. They have a very useful role at times but not usually a pivotal one. For some decades now Canada has been like the one relative who, when it is being decided who is bringing what to the family picnic, always brings the salad while others bring the steaks!

First off, the "benefit in their pocketbook" is the problem! McGuinty instituted the smart meter billing. The cheapest rate is after 9:00 pm. However, this is still a penny or two higher than the former rate! So even if you only consume ALL of your electricity in the nighttime you still pay more than before. A saving is impossible. Add in an overall rate hike, the HST, some bumps in the transmission carrying charges and other extra fees and we are seeing increases of as much as 50% in one jump! Even with frantic conservation measures the average person is still getting hit with perhaps 20%. Also, if you have a family it is a hardship to wait till after 9:00 at night to put a load in the washer and stay awake to take it out later and put it in the dryer, to have the clothes dry in the morning as the kids head out to school. Elderly people on fixed incomes find the scheduling to be a PITA as well. This just isn't a "positive reinforcement" method to encourage conservation! What's more, most citizens don't believe that they are energy pigs who deserve to be forced to conserve. They remember all the political scandals about the Bruce Penninsula Nuclear Reactors being used as a slush fund trough for political appointments and skyhigh labour costs until the debt hit over $30 BILLION dollars! They are also aware of lost opportunities for erecting new transmission line arteries to Quebec and Manitoba. We have had two province wide blackouts in the past few years, one of which lasted most of a weekend. Citizens believe we are paying so much not to encourage conservation but because of political ineptitude! This hurts fostering the idea of conservation, due to disrespect for the "official line" as to the reason for the need. As for Churchill Falls, you don't have to convince me. You have to convince not just Newfoundland but the rest of the world! Check out this link: http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/story.html?id=17f52755-7ede-45a5-8b2f-6a8b7d004957 "Churchill Falls deal probed The infamous Churchill Falls hydro agreement - giving Quebec long-term access to discount-priced power from Newfoundland and Labrador - was not only a bad financial deal for Newfoundland, it was also signed under coercive conditions, which may raise "substantive questions of business ethics and law," according to newly released research on the 1968 deal. By The Gazette (Montreal) December 20, 2005 Be the first to post a comment The infamous Churchill Falls hydro agreement - giving Quebec long-term access to discount-priced power from Newfoundland and Labrador - was not only a bad financial deal for Newfoundland, it was also signed under coercive conditions, which may raise "substantive questions of business ethics and law," according to newly released research on the 1968 deal. A new study, by two professors at Memorial University in St. John's, says the Newfoundland company that developed the massive hydro project signed the extraordinary contract because Hydro-Quebec, after years of negotiating in goodwill, chose at the last minute to exploit inside information that the developer would go bankrupt without a deal. Economics professor James Feehan and historian Mel Baker have written a 25,000-word analysis of how the Churchill Falls deal was done, based on historical documents and memoranda unearthed in Quebec, Newfoundland and at the National Archives in Ottawa." The article is much longer and a good read. Hopefully you will consider a Quebec newspaper to be a credible source. A simple google will turn up page after page of sites that all seem to agree that Newfoundland got screwed. It was NOT a simple case of their needing Quebec to get the power to market. In the words of so many of those sites, it was a swindle plain and simple. What's more, these professors may have proven the deal to have been criminal!

Portugal has as much or more of a military as we do. Perhaps more, considering we usually have more than half of our navy in port because we lack the manpower and the budget for fuel to have them at sea. They have at least as much right to that Security Council seat as we do, perhaps more! Also, I think you miss my point. Are we the laughing stock of the world? In what context? My comparison is between what we have today and the position we had before. We are not a laughingstock but we are NOT counted as big a player as we used to be! That's only common sense.

Dave, after WWII Canada was a respected member of the Allied countries. We had the 3rd largest navy in the world and a respectably manned and equipped army and air force. We had hit well above our weight and at the UN we were well respected. That was then and this is now! We're the guys that send the token force. Highly trained and often with specialized skills, but relatively few of them. Nothing to speak of with our navy but a few frigates. No destroyers and certainly no aircraft carriers. A few old helicopters that are in maintenance hangers many more hours than they actually fly. When the balloon goes up our F-18s can't fly combat missions because the electronics are so old they can't be counted on to have secure scrambled communications from the enemy and so we can't participate with our Allies. We send a couple of our frigates and a "coffee truck" supply ship. Actually, our supply ship is so old it is due to be decommissioned very shortly. Why the hell should we have a permanent seat? Maybe if we had the military of France we would be respected enough to have a seat like they do! Remember, this is the Security Council seat we're talking here, not the "nice guys who give us lots of foreign aid" council!

Thanks, Max! It's nice to have someone not dismiss what I personally witnessed as anecdotal and imaginary.

I tried a google but couldn't find anything. It all came up with percentages supporting the BQ in an election, which of course was not the question. I really don't know if anyone has asked how the ROC feels towards the BQ and the PQ, at least not in a publicly funded poll that would be freely available on the Internet. You can believe they are traitors to Canada without getting all het up about it. You can also at the same time respect Gilles Duceppe for how well he represents his province. That doesn't at all change how you may feel about his mission. Once again, I am going by personal experience. Perhaps others have found that people in the ROC love the separatists and think they are good Canadians! I have only my own opinion.

I worked with a guy once who was an avid hunter. He took home a lot of venison and such for his family. He refused to feed them store-bought meat, as he was convinced it was full of chemicals and additives that weren't good for them! Apparently, Topaz is perfectly happy with the store-bought meat...

Once again August, I think you are showing the introverted perspective of a person living in Quebec. You see, Meech failed because TROC did not trust it! I agree it would have done wonderful things for Quebec. The problem was, Mulroney had overplayed his hand. To English Canadians, he had given the perception of making different promises in French than in English. To TROC, the deal seemed unfair to other provinces (and AGAIN, Quebecers virtually always think of the rest of Canada as one big Anglais bloc, rather than 10 other and very different separate provinces!) and perhaps even sneaky and underhanded! Because of these factors, I fail to see how Mulroney can escape being called a VERY divisive PM!

There you go again! Same old, same old. "My brudder did it too, Ma! So let me off the hook!" If Harper had pulled off his attempt he likely would have experienced a similar backlash. The only extra factor he had at the time was AdScam becoming the next major election issue. Too bad for you he didn't get away with it, although I doubt if it would have been enough to save the Liberals during that scandal. Eventually however it surely would have come back to haunt him! The popular feeling in the rest of Canada has always been that the Bloc are traitors! On the political level the players can't say that and the legal definition is also moot but as far as the man in the street is concerned, that's how he feels! Joe Lunchbucket may understand that he has to put up with the Bloc but he will NEVER trust them to do anything that's good for anywhere but Quebec! Any coalition that includes the Bloc would be poison at the ballot box anywhere else in Canada!

I don't believe you have a clear perspective on that, August. After all, you live in Quebec which has FAR more hydro electric supply than Ontario! Your electricity rates are MUCH cheaper! No one has used electricity for heating their houses in Ontario for years. It's just too expensive compared to oil or natural gas. We also have a higher population and a LOT of heavy manufacturing! Do you have any idea how much more electricity is used by a steel or especially an aluminum smelter than for residential use? I'm willing to bet that the Falconbridge plant in Northern Ontario uses more electricity than the entire area of Montreal and its suburbs! Ontarioans have practiced conservation up the ying yang, for little or no savings to themselves. Old-fashioned light bulbs are a rarity these days since we all switched to CFLs but of course as any techie knows, lighting is the SMALLEST portion of your electricity bill! It's big motors and burners like your stove or your furnace motor that draw expensive amounts of power. The CFLs did help the Ontario Power Corp from having to build more generators but it did "mice nuts" to reduce your granny's electricity bill. You think it's US who waste electricity? When we visit friends or relatives in Quebec, we are shocked to see electric baseboard heating! The popular opinion in Ontario has been that it is QUEBECERS who waste electricity, since they have so much cheap supply they take it for granted! Let's not get into how Newfoundlanders feel about Quebec and hydro electric prices, after the Churchill Falls swindle years ago. It was the eastern equivalent of the NEP!

I too remember those days! I'm just not sure we have a true parallel. Davis had stepped down,leaving the contentious issue of Separate School funding a fait accompli. Miller was nowhere near as popular a leader. It seems to me that there was already a trend away from the provincial conservatives. So when Petersen with the NDP seized the reins there wasn't as much resentment as you would think. A significant chunk of the electorate might have voted Liberal anyway, if the election had been a few months later. Right now federally we seem to have some very strong core percentages for the parties, with perhaps not as much of a swing vote as the Petersen example. Certainly, there seems no strong trend developing towards the Liberals so that if they formed a coalition there would be a large group of Tory voters that were going Ignatieff's way anyhow! For such reasons I think there would be much more negative feeling towards such a coalition but I could be wrong. Perhaps so many Canadians have become heartily sick of the lot of them that nobody would care!

Minority governments and such accords have an important difference. In a minority government the Party that got the most seats takes power. They don't have enough seats to hold a majority so they are vulnerable to being voted down in a confidence vote at any time. So they make a deal with one of the other parties who can bring them enough votes to sit in a majority situation and thus we have a stable government. In that situation the important factor is that the party that received the most popular support DOES govern! They of course are beholden to a partner but it does appear that the party with the most votes won, even if it wasn't a majority. The coalition proposed during Dion's reign and perhaps after the next election is very different! Even though the CPC had or would have the MOST seats they would NOT get to take power! The Liberals, the NDP and perhaps the Bloc if necessary would band together. The Liberals would likely hold the most seats of the 3 and they would take power, propped up by the others. In such a case, the party with the most seats does NOT take power and the party with less does! The coalition is formed of parties who ALL did not win more seats than the Tories! This is what I mean by a strange situation. Your party can win the most seats yet not take power. Your party can receive fewer seats yet still take power! To the average voter, the question would be "Oh, its weird I guess but if its legal, what the heck!" versus "This is a lawyer's trick to seize power over the will of the majority!". I almost would like to see it happen, just to see how my fellow Canadians would act! We might see the start of a new common practice in our elections or we might see the most energized anti-Liberal and NDP reaction in our history!

Oh, well! If they both do it I guess it must be all right! Forgive them both and bless them! Let them commit that particular sin all they want since after all, they both did it! What a marvelous defense! If I ever do something that fails to pass the "smell test" all I have to do is get someone else to do the same thing and we're both off the hook, forever!

You have to remember, such a coalition would mean the Liberals would be the senior partner and would essentially be back in power. The Liberal Party has historically shown on many occasions that they have a fierce lust for power. They don't call them the "Natural Governing Party" for nothing! It might seem wrong to many Canadians for such a Bloc to happen. The two parties with lesser number of votes taking power, ousting the one with the most votes. We are used to minority governments but a Lib/NDP coalition, both with less votes than the CPC, would be strange to most of us. It would likely be perfectly legal but we'd be in uncharted waters as far as how well the Canadian people would accept it. We might get upset and thrash the coalition parties next election or we all simply might yawn! Or a combination of the two. It would be Ignatieff and Layton who would be taking the big risk. Whatever, I'm just saying that the Liberals just might not be able to resist!

I never quarreled about that! The answer is obvious - it won't! We've always agreed on that one! My point is more simple. If you can't protect yourself from a "wingnut" (or are not allowed! Sometimes it seems that if you carried a gun to protect yourself and had to use it the courts would punish YOU far worse than the person who threatened or even TOOK your life, family and/or property with a gun!) then why bother instituting programs that do nothing and eat up money? I'm the "Utilitarian", remember? If it doesn't work, don't bother! Robbing us of taxes that could be better spent elsewhere just to fake a "do nothing in reality" approach to reassure the simple is just a hypocritical waste, IMHO. The gun registry was just another "Liberal Solution", where "It doesn't have to work! It's enough to say we've got one!" I would have been much happier if the money had been spent to tie all the provinces' police computer systems together, so that if a felon on the run is picked up in BC for jaywalking it will flag the computers in PEI, where he is wanted for murder. For guess what? Right now, the computers don't talk to each other at all! There is no shared database. That murderer on the run would just pay his jaywalking fine and continue on his merry way! It happens every day! Frankly, the inanity of it all often just makes me sick! If someone doesn't support doing something FOR REAL then I wish he would just get the hell out of the way!

Now wait a minute! For years now I've been watching folks like David Suzuki on the Discovery Channel explain to me how frogs have been rapidly disappearing, going extinct because "human beings are BAD!" Now you tell us they are all on the Island. They aren't going extinct at all! They've just migrated! Thanks for clearing that up!

After the Liberal gun registry is gone perhaps the CBC should be the next target! Certainly, they have no right to be surprised that they are losing friends in the CPC. If you kick a dog you're a fool to complain if it bites you.

So why don't you defend your specifics? Tell me HOW my objections are wrong and HOW your specifics actually will work! Isn't that how debate is supposed to work? Do you expect to just toss some ideas out and if someone pokes holes in them you just walk away?

Eyeball, could you give us a gun control plan WITH SPECIFICS that would WORK to prevent more wingnuts like Lepine? So far all we've heard is wishes and things that obviously won't work, given that anyone who wants an illegal gun can get one all too easily. Or that just would not be practical and cost-effective. I still think you're asking for the impossible.