Wild Bill

We've got hydro? Yeah, but like always its not that simple. We just finished a zillion dollar project drilling and boring through the bedrock at Niagara Falls. This means an extra 1.6 Billion kilowatt hours annually added to the grid. http://www.opg.com/power/hydro/new_projects/ntp/index.asp However, the grid is too old and clunky to take that power! There was a 116 million dollar project for new transmission lines that has been blocked by the natives at the Caledonia protest. http://www.thespec.com/news/local/article/495600--sparks-fly-over-caledonia-hydro-line Of course, McGuinty says we don't need the lines anyway. If that were so, then why in hell did we spend 116 million dollars, plus the Niagara Falls expansion that we can't use? Now this situation is bad enough due to politics. There are many sites in Northern Ontario that can generate electricity from hydro but the grid of transmission lines to bring that power down south is not suitable and most of them would be blocked by natives anyway. So meanwhile our provincial government pays people 80 cents per kilowatt hour for solar power, subsidizing the difference since mainstream power costs about a nickel. Wind and solar can't be relied upon to always be there and can't be stored. So when they aren't producing we buy power from the States. When we have an excess we have to dump it somewhere so we offer it to the Americans. Usually at those times they don't need it so we have to pay them to take it! It's a real dog's breakfast eyeball. The problem is that we have politicians who only care about attracting the "green vote". Since green voters tend not to be deeply technical they don't understand the technical screwups. The government gets its photo ops and really couldn't care less that the approaches have not worked and cost taxpayers a zillion dollars in total. What else is new?

Talk about yer ad hominem! Anyone who likes a newspaper you don't like must be stupid! CC, are you having some troubles lately? I have always enjoyed the Sun although I don't buy it any more. They toned down the Sunshine Girl so much over the years that I don't usually find her very attractive. More like what women think men are SUPPOSED to like rather than what we actually do. I also like the Post and the Globe. The only one I really don't care for is the Toronto Star. I find it so biased to a liberal perspective that it is totally predictable. I know what they are going to say before I even read the article. Boring! I don't mind that their slant is different from my own. How can we learn if we only read what we already agree? It's just their predictability. I find it just a big pitcher of Liberal Kool-Aid. But that's just me!

Squid, didn't you tell me that BC has been doing just fine fiscally? That there is no need for any pipeline money?

I'll give you Ignatieff. Rae however has been only a caretaker, not a true leader. He has no mandate from the people to be leader and promised he would not be next election. Ignatieff was still rather an anomaly. The Liberals were desperate and thought he was the new Philosopher King to save them, like Trudeau years before. At that time the Liberals were so desperate they would have taken a dog as leader!

True. However, this case is not so clear. Just what would you have to sell? Is the danger real or exaggerated by some who despise the use of hydrocarbons anyway and think we can switch over to wind and solar by next weekend? IOW, are we dealing with rational people or eco-fanatics? Or perhaps the pipeline company is lying? My problem is that BOTH sides have a bad history with the truth to me!

I can't speak to your experience, Max. Only to my own. I grew up between Stoney Creek and Binbrook in a rural area. I went to high school in Winona, along the QEW towards the Niagara fruit belt. Over the years what I saw is that some farmers did become richer, but only because they ended up with fewer sharing the pie. Many farms went under. Those that were in marketing boards like poultry or dairy held quota, making them worthwhile to be bought up into larger but fewer operations. Others just went fallow, renting out their acreage for cash crops like soybeans or grain. Niagara fared much worse. Not only did the family fruit farm begin to disappear but farmers could not sell their farms for other uses, due to a body called the Niagara Escarpment Commission. It's mandate was to "protect the green belt". It did this by refusing to allow farms to be sold for any other purpose but farming. This made a lot of Torontonians feel all warm and fuzzy but it meant the farmers were sitting on farms that were no longer profitable that they could not sell to get any equity. Remember, farmers get no business pension. Their equity is all in the farm. If the farm can' make money no other farmer will buy it. The NCC made sure no one else could buy it either. So the farmers mostly just cut down their fruit trees and the land lies fallow. If you want confirmation, just take a drive along that way and see for yourself. So there has been a lot of consolidation. Niagara as a fruit belt is essentially gone. There are a few family farms where the owners have second jobs and try to get by selling to the general public from roadside stands. There is an annual Peach Festival in Winona but for years now there haven't been enough local peaches so they have quietly importing peaches from the States. Binbrook is actually in much better shape. The farmers seem to be doing quite well. There are just FAR fewer of them!

Well, one thing i DO know is radio waves! If you read this article you will see that they are talking about a way to see if people are there and if they are sitting still or moving. That's it! That doesn't mean they can tell if you are passing a cigarette or a joint, a box of heroin or a package of Depends adult diapers, a bomb or a package of licorice. If I were a target already identified as a bad guy I might worry about a drone overhead. Otherwise, who gives a hoot?

Agreed! You've done better than Ontario. We are now a have-not province. It took some effort to get on the list but with our present premier, we managed! I wonder if putting a pipeline north and over across the top of BC is an option. The Yukon would surely like the money. Maybe some native reserves along the way as well. Or maybe hook into an Alaskan pipeline and give the money that was earmarked for BC to Uncle Sam. After all, if BC didn't want it then why not?

Well, we don't hear BC talking about the money! Nobody is talking about negotiating a higher rate for BC. All we hear is that they don't want the pipeline and that they don't believe it could ever be safe from leaks, no matter what safeguards are in place. Period and end of story. Doesn't matter. As I said, BC has always had excellent fiscal managers for governments. I'm sure not just you but most in that province are perfectly happy with their tax level and wouldn't mind paying more, if necessary. Must be nice not to need the money. We here in Ontario are not so lucky.

Well, BC does stand to get a considerable amount of steady money! Of course, BC doesn't need any money. Their governments are always excellent fiscal managers! Silly me. Nevermind.

Growing up, my best friend's father was like a second father to me. He came from a farm in Belleville and like most farmers of the time he was a very shrewd thinker. I still remember how he had lost a lot of respect for farmers over the years. He explained to me that for generations farmers had been deeply cynical and suspicious of government, politicians and promises. They preferred to be as self-reliant as possible. From the 60's on, things began to change. Slowly at first, the process began to accelerate. In his opinion, farmers had become to quick to accept government programs that too often proved flawed and actually hurt those they purported to help! He believed the true goal was to make farmers dependent on government, in order to ensure their votes. From my own observations over the years, I tend to agree with him.

Topaz, you need to do a little math. The oil found in Kansas is a lot of money but the amount is mice nuts compared to how much the entire USA uses every year! The US has always had oil wells. That's what built Texas, after all. They still have a lot of wells. Perhaps a third of their consumption comes from wells within their country. Here's a link with a graph: http://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx?country=us They also cannot possibly supply all their electricity from one wind farm in Kansas. Your own link, assuming you read it, says enough for 125,000 homes. That's worthwhile but there are just a few more homes than that in the USA! Most of them are in cities, where electricity must be sent in over a grid from power stations far away. They would need FAR more wind turbines, plus something to give power when the wind isn't blowing! The States will need our product for a long time to come. Even if every car was electric tomorrow, people would still need a LOT of oil for diesel fuel for trucks (we won't see electric 18 wheelers for a few decades yet. The batteries would be bigger than the rig!) And what about fertilizers? That is a HUGE chunk of the oil market! That's where fertilizers come from! If they don't buy enough crude oil they will starve. Period and end of story.

Well, you know the typical teacher. They expect people to do what they are told. That would include any politicians they back.

Boges, I guess it depends on what position McGuinty thinks he's in, and his party as well. I don't think they can be so naive as not to know they've pretty well run their course. No party expects to stay in forever. They are probably well aware that they've succeeded more from their opposition being an unattractive alternative. However, if things are to the point where it just doesn't matter and they don't expect to win next time, they might look at this as a golden opportunity to do some things that SHOULD be done, even if it would hurt their own support. I don't have a lot of respect for McGuinty's governance but I have no reason to think he not of good personal character. Once you blow away all the partisan smoke it can be surprising how many politicians are actually good people! Getting tough with the teachers might not give him the next election but it might greatly enhance his legacy in the history books!

You know, there are HUGE numbers of brand new teacher graduates who can't find work, for a variety of reasons. There just aren't many positions open to them That being said, I wonder if it would be feasible for McGuinty to emulate Ronald Reagan when he fired all the striking air traffic controllers? It would be rough at first but how many new teachers could be hired to replace the existing ones? How quickly? It might mean some larger class sizes at first but that is a bit of a red herring. Today's class sizes are much smaller than when many of us older folks went to school. They have been reduced not for any real benefit to the students. The Teachers Union just wanted more teachers hired! Just a thought. When things get to the point where some of us feel we are untouchable and entitled the only way to restore a balance is with a strong reality check.

You are correct that your views are not "solo" (didn't realize that word was an adjective! Oh well, I guess I spent too much time with rote) as long as we're talking about within the educational system. It is unfortunately true that many in the "system" think as you do. However, as far as working in the private sector, your views are an anomaly. A businessman only cares about a diploma as a means to keep the number of applicants down to a workable level and as a general guide to an applicant's qualifications. Once he or she has been hired, if he can't do the job he is let go. Nobody cares how YOU feel about it! Except maybe those of your students that can't hold jobs. If they reflect upon WHY that is so and think about how they were educated they may indeed form an opinion!

CC, I have posted in agreement with you on these points many times. I have lived exactly what you describe. That's not my point. Why should I be forced to buy crap to keep some autoworker in a job that pays far more than mine? Don't blow this off as mere envy! The fact remains that the union workers often DID make poor quality products. "Bash to fit! Paint to hide!" is one old saying. Another is "Must have been built on a Friday!" I am not arguing against jobs staying in Canada. I am arguing against certain workers exploiting their protected positions for their OWN benefit! Both management and workers have too often been totally self-centred and inept at adapting to new market conditions. When someone brings a better and cheaper product into your marketplace you should find a way to compete, not lobby the government to keep them out so you can continue to make expensive crap! I get particularly incensed when I have to deal with a service run by government. If the CUPE worker is an arrogant dolt there is nothing I can do about it. Any complaints will be handled with smoke and mirrors, just to get me to go away. Besides, that CUPE worker is also just following a system designed by moronic Luddites anyway. The reason this sort of thing upsets me more than in the private sector is that I have no other choices! If Chevrolet is on strike I can always go visit Ford. If it is a service ONLY provided by the government I'm screwed! There is nowhere else I can go. The Luddites have a monopoly! I would like to see positive solutions in making things here that are as good and as cheap as anywhere else. I am not interested in solutions that only allow some privileged workers to carry on making the same expensive and poor quality stuff they always have done.

Actually, the Liberals ALWAYS choose a Quebecer! The only change is from an anglophone to a francophone. After Ignatief, I believe it is an francophone's turn.

Good point, MB! The younger guys on this board have no idea of the way things used to be. In the early 70's the typical North American car was beat after only 3 years! Sometimes it was even worse. The "Rusty Ford Owners" lobby group was formed then over new cars rusting out after less than 18 months. I remember a neighbour having wheel wells completely rusted out in their Chevy station wagon after only 1 winter! I had a brand new 1977 Chryler van that put me in the poorhouse! Secret warrantees, catalytic converters that broke inside and then plugged up, an automatic choke that didn't work and kept the van from starting from October through May (I finally ripped it out and installed a manual control), a differential that burned out at 80k kms - the list went on and I was very frustrated. I was just a young feller starting out and these problems were a real financial hardship. Finally I sold the damn thing and bought a VW convertible. My gas costs dropped from $300 a month to less than $50! Considering my loan payment was $350 per month this was great! My girlfriend and I took it up north to a camp ground. The first morning it was parked by our tent, gleaming in the sun. A fellow came by and commented on how good it looked. As the conversation went on he began to hint around about how I should feel guilty about taking away Canadian autoworkers' jobs. Turned out he worked at a Chrysler transmission plant in Windsor. I couldn't help it, I lost it! I dumped all the problems I had with my van on top of him! I explained how the Chrysler warranty process was just a run around and waste of time. His defense was that it was all management's fault and if I had brought my van around to the back door of his plant all the problems would have been fixed for free! This was just nuts! Even if true, I had no way of knowing this and Windsor was at least a 5 hour drive away from Hamilton. I said that if they didn't make crap in the first place I wouldn't have bought a VW! Then I told him that as an autoworker he likely made at least twice the wage that I was making. I didn't see what made him so special that I was supposed to support HIS job! What had the autoworkers ever done for ME? At that point he left. The point is that imports did not take market share back then solely on price. Often it was on quality. So much of domestic product was simply crap! When customers were offered better choices, can you blame them for jumping at them?

Sorry Argus. I'm going to pick apart one of your models, which of course is irrelevant to your point! I have some roofer friends. There's more to the problem with shingles you describe. For the past decade, roofers have been installing 25 year shingles in good faith, only to have them fail prematurely. At that point, the manufacturer starts dodging and the installer gets caught in the middle. You see, we had shingles for decades and decades that would last 25 years. A bit less than 25 years ago, the eco-warriors began to attack shingle manufacturers for some of the ingredients used in their making. There was a lot of petrochemical thingies and some <gasp!> chemicals! So some of those ingredients got banned! As is the norm in these situations, the eco-warriors and the politicians who backed them took it for granted that there were substitutes. Perhaps there are, but the shingle manufacturers had to provide shingles IMMEDIATELY! The biggest problem is that there was no time to do lifetime real world durability tests. They had to do accelerated simulated testing in their labs. These are always a poor correlation to actually letting products age for the actual number of years. Guess what? A lot of shingles didn't last as long as they thought! So we have a lot of upset customers. They go for the installer first because he is the most visible but the installer has no control over the product - he didn' make it! He has to take the manufacturer's word. The manufacturer of course has more expensive lawyers! Once the whole process was so reliable that the few times they had failures the shingle company would cover the entire cost of replacement. Those days are long gone. Modern warranties are ONLY on the actual cost of the shingles and are pro-rated against how many years they were on the roof. With most failures, the actual refund to the roof-owner is only a small portion of the total cost. Most fraud with roofers is much simpler than what you describe. The scoundrels simply ask for half the money up front and then disappear!

Here we go again! OK Topaz! Show us where "the reformers have said in the past". Something else you pulled out of your butt that never happened!

I agree, punked. We have always allowed companies in Canada to get away with a protected market. The worst example is the insurance companies. They tell the government that the big bully companies from the States would wipe them out and the government caves. The government of course feels the need to protect its citizens, of course. So it tells the insurance companies that in return for protection they must get approval for any rate increases. Who approves? The government, of course! And thus we all get stiffed, particularly here in Ontario! The problem is that governments have no idea of how insurance companies should be run, or any other company, for that matter. The insurance underwriters tell the government they need a 10% increase. The government gives them 6%. They really needed 2%, perhaps even less in some years. That 10% asking figure was supposedly based on increased costs. Governments have no way of telling what cost increases are true and necessary. They cannot tell if insurance companies are inefficient and have room for cost savings. Government and efficiency are mutually contradictory at the best of times. As I have said before, my career involved the introduction of computers. I was always amazed at how certain organizations were able to dodge adopting the efficient use of computer power. The public sector was and is the worst. Many school principals still have secretaries, since they can't even open their own emails. I stood in front of a nurse at a hospital emergency and watched her put a form over my health card and rub it with a pencil to get a tracing on the form. Hell, I bought my cat's food with an ATM card! When my young daughter broke her wrist playing in the driveway, the doctor at emergency was bubbling over about their new system that would allow xrays to be scanned into their house computer system. I had been doing the same thing with business documents FIFTEEN YEARS earlier! Insurance companies have no need to be current with computer technology. They DO have good systems for the accountants to count their money but they are still primitive with work station power for frontline troopers to do their jobs. Why bother? Just apply to the government for a rate increase and after a bit of a negotiating show over how much they will get one. They have the best of both worlds. They are ostensibly a private business with public sector protection from the need to constantly modernize to compete in their market. I say that Canada is a much larger market today. Open up the doors and let all those competing companies in! I'm tired of getting stiffed!

I've been nervous for about 30 years now, Max! I started to believe way back in the early 80's that we were headed for economic trouble. I had been in the new Computer chip age for only a couple of years and we had entered a recession. Business managers began to do the business things to ride out the storm. So did finance ministers and other politicians. We saw a lot of unexpected things happen in the economy during those times. We had interest rates go through the roof - 22% mortgges! Traditional government actions toward reducing unemployment didn't seem to work. I began to see some parallels with what I was seeing in the market I served. The world was changing! We were still going through the same cycles but the details were changing. Yet the way "the powers that be" attempted to deal with things did not. I watched secretary pools disappear! The computer was eliminating a huge number of jobs. The government seemed blissfully unaware of how things were changing. They would do the same old things to try to stimulate employment but the trend for the computer to eliminate clerical jobs was fighting them and winning by a landslide! The same thing was happening with accounting. I saw this with the production line in factories, in the office staff and almost everywhere I looked. As I said, the government didn't see it. For that matter, a lot of business managers didn't either and I watched their firms go under. I was reminded of Hitler's invasion of Poland. He understood the new technology of warfare and launched his blitzkrieg. The Poles responded with cavalry - troops on horses against tanks. The same situation seemed to be at play in society and its economy. Everybody was using the tools they had used for decades if not centuries - tools that had become obsolete with the newfangled technology. "Trickle down economics" was also an old fashioned concept. Perhaps it is still true as an academic idea but new changes meant that businesses were doing different things with stimulus handouts. The trickle thus became not even a drip but just a damp seep on the ground! Government needs to understand these changes better and put stimulus money perhaps into different areas, with new strings on the money so that business has to spend it in ways that would increase that trickle! Up until the mid 70's, a politician could spend his entire life in Parliament and when he finally went home things were not all that different from when he had left. The rate of change was slower and he didn't get too out of touch. After the mid 70's he was like Bill & Ted's Napoleon, dragged into the late 20th century. He loved that water slide but he had absolutely no idea of how to build one! It took about 15 years before re-training programs not just came on the scene but were focused on jobs for the new economy. At first, they were aimed at those vanished secretarial pools! I'm pointing out a difference here Max between the validity of a concept and the way it is applied. I still believe in "trickle down", but not when it's applied by old guys, unaware of the specifics of how the world has changed and using the tools they were taught years ago, before revolutionary technologies made it not just a new ball game but a new TYPE of game!

Isn't committing a crime horribly unethical?

So its your job to use MLW, a national board, as a campaigning vehicle for your candidate in that one riding? I wasn't aware that MLW was supposed to be a campaign vehicle for anyone! When I was a Director with Reform in my riding we all thought we were supposed to hammer in our own signs and pay for our own advertising. Oh well. Live and learn. We agree to disagree. As for "more of the same from me", that is precisely my complaint! You are rude! Simply for disagreeing with you! That's why you remind me of Rush Limbaugh! I'm simply saying that we can disagree without taking it personally. The forum for that is rubble.com.