fellowtraveller

This is really going to throw a wet blanket on rowdy Halloween parties

and you should know that Alberta also had the highest or second highest agricultural revenue in the country, and significant forestry until that collapsed. It was not all oil and gas by any means, there was plenty of hard work and austerity at times.

They did that for quite a while. were the 1st seeded team played 16th seed, 2nd vs 15th and so on. Attendance suffered as there were few natural or regional rivalries that resulted in matchups.

Haven't prisoners that work and earn wages inside been charged a portion for room and board for decades? I thought Toews was increasing the rent, not beginning the rent.

Iceland, eh? I marvel at their ability to build fires without a speck of vegetation anywhere. I also noted that they are swathed in heavy furs, yet have no hats or face coverings and you can't see their breath. They need a winter consultant on set and I want it noted that I offered first.

Don't let facts get in the way of your bigotry. The price of a barrel of oil in 1965- when Albertans first started paying equalization to la Belle Province- was $3. It was $12 as recently as 1998. They balanced their provincial budget when oil was at $15. They have the lowest welfare participation in the country.I doubt you'd know much about work effort, the best examples of work ethic left Quebec for the Rockies long ago, out of necessity.

Can we somehow rationalize the savage beating of a policeman into those civilzed people?

They also have one of the lowest post secondary attendance rates in the country, or so says Andrew Coyne. and of course we must keep repeating that the tuition hikes planned for PQ have no affect on low income students, they pay nothing now and pay nothing after the hike.

Haven't read any of the books, I've bought two but the Old Trout has nabbed the first volume before I could get to it. I an enjoying the show more lately, it is hard to keep track of whos who from episode to episode. Every episode I marvel at the sets which are often epic particularly the castle and waterfront scenes which do not look to be CGI enhancements. I need to do some reading on GOT film locations, no doubt there will be a mini-industry for travel tours when the series ends, if it ever ends. I know Malta and Ireland were two of the lcoations.

Did anybody answer this yet? I'll have a crack at it. Yes, pretty much. It used to be oil/gas and manufacturing. Manufacturing of course is fleeing the Land of McGuinty as fast as they can lock up the front doors, and natural gas no longer has any value in North America and we have failed to build the necessary infrastructure to sell it where there are profits to be made, like Asia. Countries like Australia and the Gulf States beat us to those natural gas markets by a few years and have locked up some prime customers in long term and extremely profitable deals.. So, oil it is.

so by 'pick up the pace' you would have us bypass Parliament? Is your middle name Stalin?

ah, no. Greece is utterly f**ked if they abandon the EU and Euro and resume with the drachma. They won't get one penny from anybody in loans to maintain their social contract unless they agree to repay those loans in hard currency or gold, and they can't do that because they won't have any hard curency or gold. No lender will give them anything if it is to be repaid in completely worthless currency like the drachma. If Greece leaves the Euro, they are in deep trouble immediately both internally and externally. The real problem in Greece has nothing to do with Euro or Europe, they are floundering in large part because they have a culture of not paying income taxes. Tax evasion is the norm there, at al levels of society. They need to get really , really harsh about tax evasion there and a lot of friends of the govt will have to go to jail to turn it around. But all of that misses a whole side of the equation, which is the question of who profits from a Euro currency that is a bit weak compared to others like the dollar, pound, Swiss franc? Not surprising, it is Germany that makes out like a bandit from a low value Euro. Germany is a major exporting country and they get a lot more Euros for their exports when the Euro is at a lower value. If the Euro ad EU collapsed, the value of the new German mark would skyrocket and Germany would be uncompetitive overnight. That would spark a German recession that they have avoided, Germany has low unemp[loyment and is doing very, very well. If part of amintaining that is propping up flyweights like Greece, it is a relatively small price. The juggling act ahead is to keep that Greek illness from spreading too far.

No, public attitudes in France are dramatically different overall than they are in Canada. The levels of expectation/entitlement from the social contract is well, an ocean apart, and that influences everything there. Running a small business in France is an institutional nightmare, the level of government disincentive is Orwellian. The old joke that 'entrepreneur' is both a French word and a foreign concept is , well, no joke. The state serves two masters: itself and big business, anytthing else is really not welcome. And I speak from personal and recent experience.

Of course, Toronto cannot levy income taxes because they have no taxation authority beyond property tax and user fees. They have been blubbering and whining for years that they need the same taxation powers that the province and federal govts have now. Nothing prevents them from rasing as much as they like through existing taxation powers except political cowardice.

well, for that process to occur we'd have to abrogate all existing alliances and treaties that require our action since it would take about 2 years to get any proposed involvement to a ballot, what with Parliament yakking it up, politicians of all stripes posing and preening, committees and subcommittees holding hearings, Elections Canada gearing up to spend a couple hundred million on the referendum. Then of cvourse it would take the miliatary another six months or so to gear up, since they culd not spend a penny in advance on a political issue. In World War Two, we'd have gotten to the assistance of our allies about mid-1947 with a boatload of German-English dictionaries to aid the new Teutonic regime in London.

our military is 100% volunteers. The terms and conditions of employment are not secret. But.... just like any workplace injury, ongoing physical or mental trauma suffered on te job should be covered, as it would for a workers comp[ensation case.

did you know that Evian, that very pricey French water, is 'naive' spelled backwards?

After hundreds of years of democratic experiments and several different models, the current system for making national is what we have chosen to be reasonably representative and reasonably efficient. or do you see government-by-referendum as being somehting other than a cumbersome mess fraught with pitfalls?

I have a friend who won $3million about 8 years ago. It didn't change him but like this guy it changed a bunch of other people. He was plagued by shysters, golddiggers and particularly by 'friends' harassing him for money. He keeps a lower profile now than he did when he was not well off, and he pretty much was obliged to move across the country. I know he would rather be rich than not rich, but it was a mixed blessing.

hours or days, but first it HAS TO BE BUILT because wind/solar cannot be relied upon at any time, much less high demand times.

Yes, redundancy does have to be built to account for variable supply sources because the peak demand is a pretty firm number while supply is manufactured. There are two variables in your dreamworld, both of which require redundancy: variable supply sources such as wind/solar, and contingency for planned and emergency dowtime at conventional generators. Before the advent of wind/solar, there was need only for redundancy for the latter. They all need downtime for maintenance, and sometimes the downtime is unplanned. There are no options for redundancy to provide complete system reliability 24/7. Time frames to wind up conventional power sources, redundant or not? Hours to days, depends on the individual plants. The turbine is not spinning, The boiler is not running. The water for hydro may not be sitting waiting. The time frames for nuclear, coal, gas can be long. You're used to flipping a switch on the wall and having a light bulb come on, it doesn't happen that way where the juice gets squeezed.

Cansdisns do decide when to send their troops abroad. We call them Members of Parliament. They then instruct our 100% volunteer military on what it expected of them. Let me guess, the Council of Canadians could write the questions and grade the tests after?

They do have these referendums every four years, but they call them 'elections'. Would you support every cop and soldier voting before every shift on what they plan to do that day? It would only be fair after all.

This is where you provide evidence of current storage capacity for generation of wind and solar. The only storage capacity in power grids is hydro, the rest is potential capacity in the form of offline generators. And none of it can be started instantly to respond to demand. But it still has to be built and maintained. Power generation capacity has always ahd a requirement for some redundancy in reliable generation, wind/solar make very little difference to that equation. You are confusing operation of the grid with the necessity of redundancy, which is expensive but critical. Dead reliable electrical supply is the cornerstone of every industrialized society. Of course you can incoprorate wind/solar into daily operations, but you absolutely have to have reliable sources to meet 100%+ of demand. Wind/solar displaces virtually none of that essential element.

Who doesn't yearn for the fabled times of Chretien and Martin, when we could strip our military of funding and send them into harms way armed with rocks and sticks? Ah, the good old days.