Pateris

Simply increasing mortgage rates to 7-8% would have the same effect.

You cannot legislate technological advancement. If battery technology does not dramatically improve (to energy densities approaching that of chemical fuels), with improved safety (high density batteries tend to have significant fire risk, thus far), this will need to be rescinded. Further, the source of the electricity must be on demand, so intermittent solar/wind won't work. Without fossil fuels, the only option will be massive expansion of nuclear power. Unfortunately for Germany, they have shuttered their nuclear plants. It is much like the US government legislating the use of cellulosic ethanol in gasoline, even though no one has figured out how to make cellulosic ethanol at scale.

Ethanol as fuel has driven up food prices. Much of the corn acreage in the US is now feeding ethanol production, and the price of corn based products has risen dramatically. This has been well documented for the impact it had on Mexico, because the price of tortillas doubled after the RFS came into being. Feed for animals also got more expensive, so the price of beef and pork rose quickly too. Ethanol is also not a net CO2 reduction, vs. Gasoline. The energy input to make fertilizer, fuel for machinery, losses in fermentation, etc, and the lower fuel economy (since the heating value of ethanol is low), results in a breakeven, at best, on CO2 emissions. In the US, the RFS is largely a subsidy to corn farmers.

The issue is that they said teaching these things is not a crime. Therefore, nothing to see here. Unless I had evidence of an IMMINENT terrorist act, there is nothing they can do. The fact these schools are creating a generation of potential terrorists is perfectly legal in Canada.

Funny thing happened in Washington after the city of Seattle raised the minimum wage (which went to US$13/hr in 2016 and will rise to US$15/hr in 2017): https://www.scribd.com/book/321992619/Seattle-Minimum-Wage-Final-Report Interesting. As expected, higher minimum wages increase unemployment.

Funny that. I did contact the RCMP. The response I got was essentially "we don't investigate these claims because we might be seen as discriminating"

If you spoke Arabic, try attending a mosque in Canada or a madrassa where many muslims send their children on Saturdays for "education". The imams and teachers regularly tell the people (and the children) not to associate with infidels, and to work to impose Sharia law in Canada. They tell them to be patient and have many children and petition for immigration. They tell them it is forbidden (haram) for women to have sex out of marriage, but fine for young men - in fact they tell them to "practice" on infidel girls but do not marry them. My wife and I pulled our children out of a Saturday Islam school BECAUSE of these mindsets. The teaching materials are all published in Saudi Arabia and provided free of charge to the schools.

Diluted bitumen is not a semi-solid slurry. It is a liquid. It is diluted so it is a pumpable liquid at ground temperature. Without the diluent (which is basically unrefined gasoline) it would be nearly solid at these temperatures. A filter placed in diluted bitumen does not collect the bitumen - it might collect a little sand (crude oil is allowed to contain up to 0.5% water and solids - and that is ALL crude oil). As for toxicity... well, bitumen contains a number of chemical species that are toxic. But so do gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel, mineral spirits, charred meat, fried potatoes and the pits of apricots. We are surrounded by toxic chemicals all the time. Diluted Bitumen is no more toxic than other crude oils. Bitumen has been naturally leaking into the Athabasca river for millennia, just as crude oil leaks into the Gulf of Mexico from natural seeps on the sea floor. And the world survives.

In the 19th Century, Britain got rich while much of Europe did not, largely because Britain opened it's borders to trade, in many cases reducing tariffs unilaterally. Bastiat comments on this in his essay around 1850 as France put up more and more walls to trade, yet the people got poorer and poorer. Just look up Bastiat's petition in support of the candlemakers: http://bastiat.org/en/petition.html. This is a ridiculous basis, but it clearly shows how protectionism does not help a country.

But since "renewable energy" is not stable, scalable or economically viable, oil is must be!

It's worse than that - 1% of 90,000 is only 900, not 9,000.

Inflation from 1950s to 2010s is about that. So in real terms, the cost of concrete has not gone up that much. Labour has gone up, largely because of labour shortages and unionization. The fact we struggled in North America to convince young people to go into the trades instead of seeking university degrees in useless fields is part of the problem. We made blue-collar work "unattractive". A bigger problem is labour productivity - the on tool time for workers on large project sites has fallen from 50% to 20% in the last 25 years. There are numerous reasons for this, but many major construction sites have lots of people standing around waiting for instructions or materials. It is unfortunately that industry has gotten so bad at planning how to execute major capital projects, but the asset owners bear a lot of the blame.

The number of people hoodwinked into supporting the Council of Canadians is irrelevant. Millions of Germans joined the National Socialist German Workers Party too. You believe the economy should be controlled by the government? As if that has worked anywhere it has been tried.

That was his problem. Anti-americanization. He had a nearly fictional view of what Canada was and where we came from. He fully bought into the post-war socialism of Tommy Douglas, Lester Pearson, Pierre Trudeau and others. He and Maude Barlow first became voices in the political scene after Mulroney was elected, because they couldn't stand the idea of the free market.

The Chevron GORGON LNG project in Australia has cost somewhere between 56-70 Billion dollars. So it dwarfs these costs. Nuclear plants should be cheaper than they used to be - because the technology has improved. But regulatory timelines make it impossible to be economic. Think about it. Right now, if you wanted to build a nuclear plant in North America, you'd better plan on 12-20 years to startup, and construction won't start for 7-14 years. Why? Regulatory requirements. The first nuclear reactors built at Hanford were designed, constructed and started up in about 18 months between 1943 and 1945. And those were done when we weren't even sure how it would work... Hanford was a horrendous design, to be sure, but it worked. A lot of the construction can be automated - this is already happening in other industries. Materials haven't gotten more expensive. It's all about time to market and the amount of money wasted to do paperwork. All because people get "scared" of something they don't understand. Only two nuclear plants have had catastrophic accidents that affected the environment outside the fenceline. One was a bad design with bad operators (Chernobyl), the other was a decent design with a couple of flaws exposed by a natural disaster (Fukushima). Nuclear SHOULD have a far great ROI than it does, but it falls down because the time to first revenue is too far away.

If you want another great, but short, book, get a hold of The Law, by Frederic Bastiat. Written the 1840s, still and excellent discussion of the place of law in democratic society.

This new plan to force SCOC jurists to be bilingual will dramatically reduce the pool of candidates. If you look at the recent history of Supreme Court justices, many very good ones were unilingual when they came to the court, and very few every became bilingual enough to work without translation. This change will basically drive out every lawyer that didn't grow up in Quebec, the Ottawa Valley or Acadia. Bilingualism is a NICE TO HAVE, not a necessity on the SCOC. Competence is the number one priority (regardless of region, language, gender or ethnic background).

I won't miss Mel. His creation of the Council of Canadians was nothing more than nationalist, socialist commune where those who didn't understand economics ranted and raved about the evils of America and business people.

But provinces can impose trade restrictions on other provinces, which US states cannot. In the US, interstate trade is clearly controlled by the feds, and other than some product regulations (i.e. California does this), states can't prevent the import of services or materials from another state. In Canada, we have dramatic restrictions on the movement of goods, services and labour internally. It is often easier for a business in one province to trade with the US than it is to trade internally.

Of course, being that the Gospels were written long after the death of Jesus, Mary and Joseph, and with limited first hand accounts, it is likely that much fiction was added for "flair".

And no, it wouldn't be the first. The Epic of Gilgamesh predates it, from cuneiform tablets found in Mesopotamia. The Rig Veda also predates it, but we don't actually have documentary evidence of it's age - but there are various circumstantial pieces that would place it well before the Hebrew Torah. Finally, the Egyptian Book of the Dead reads very much like Fantasy or Science Fiction, and it is also extremely ancient.

When I went to middle school in the 1980s (in Saskatchewan), I remember one year of social studies being largely about the United States. We learned how it was settled, the Revolutionary War, the Constitution, the War of 1812, the Civil War and US involvement in the 20th century. As I recall, there was also a lot of comparing with Canada about how the two nations differed and how they were the same.

Having done business in China, there is already a push to find cheaper labour, and automation is starting to happen in China because it is cheaper than paying workers. Recently, a major contract shoe manufacturer in China, who makes products for the major western brands, invested $2B in building a factory in Ethiopia because they could hire workers cheaper than in China and because the factor is closer to markets in Europe. I am involved in work being done in a few Asian countries, and wages there are rising extremely quickly, particularly for skilled labour. Much like manufacturing moved from America and Japan to India and China, the move now is to lower cost places like Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Africa. Technology will also shift some of this back to Western Countries, but without the associated jobs. 3D printing technology will allow bespoke manufacturing closer to the consumer, but the only jobs associated with be programmers and printer maintenance, which are both high skill jobs.

The website you point to is a bit of a stretch on the description of creation. Two points - plate tectonics started well before the development of the water cycle - the world was far too hot in the first few hundred million years for liquid water to exist. This is why many believe water came from comets falling to earth. Another point is that whales didn't start in the oceans - no mammal did. Mammals arose on land - the cetaceans moved from the land INTO the sea. So the Bible claiming they came first would be wrong. The only evidence you have for your belief is the Bible itself. There is no corroborating evidence.

Jacee - the linguistic views of Sapir have largely been discredited in the last 100 years. Recent indications are that some North American indigenous languages are related to central asian and Siberian languages. Genetics, which wasn't even understood a hundred years ago, clearly relates the native American peoples to those of Asia, and it supports the idea that multiple migrations happened. However, genetic drift data indicate that the earliest humanity came across the Bering Strait (either via land or coastal water) was about 18,000 years ago. The Americas were in fact inhabited only by animals until that time. There is NO archaelogical evidence of human occupation in the Americas until that time. This, coupled with the genetic data, discredits the idea that the Americas were populated at a similar time as south-east asia, or that Asia was populated from the Americas. Your concerns, and those raised a century ago about the linguistic differences between the Americas and Asia are easily explained by the existence of Basque - and language with no linguistic neighbours. Linguistic changes are not as well understood and the idea that there is a constant rate of language drift as imagined in the 19th century, is crap.