overthere

Should we as parents be happy that our kids are locked in rooms all day with rabid unionists brainwashing them? Not just locked in, but we are paying these ideologues big money to do it. Scary.

Great, leave this thread, leave this branch and no need to come back.

That is one explanation for a lack of reporting that may have several reasons. But I reject your premise that Canadians lack confidence in the criminal justice system. That confidence is at the very very heart of our lives here, it is a prime factor in why people immigrate here. They come because they can live pretty much without fear from authorities and abuse of authority. Rule of law. If you break it, there will be consequences. The police are not corrupt. Judges cannot be bought. Your financial status has no bearing on guilt or innocence. Yes, there have been and will be exceptions to those facts, but by and large we enjoy an enviable state of affairs, and a really important component in our lives.

Pope JP2 -> pragmatist Pope JP2 -> opportunist The better Vatican management teams have always recognized that the Church itself must evolve or die. It has nothing to do with dogma and everything to do with survival adn growth and control. Dogma is elastic, simply a tool.

It was 'you cannot make this shit up' laughoutloud material when the Leafs played the Bruins this week. The Toronto networks like Sportsnet and TSN had it hyped like it was Game 7. The wounds of the Bruins breaking the Leafs backs a couple years ago have obviously not healed.

Good. The number of living veterans, as noted, is dropping as WW11 and Korean war vets and their dependents die. The remaining more recent vets should have fewer needs since far fewer of them were involved in combat operations. HRDC is a bloated mess. It's an example of a lack of review of resource needs in the public sector. Another bloated one, though much smaller, is Health Canada. Another is Aboriginal Affairs which still has 4500+ employees doing who knows what in an business environment that has seen a heavy devolution directly to First Nations. Chop chop please.

Ah, the overwhelming conceit of the Left Coast rears one of its many heads, while the hand flapping endures. The former Mayor of Edmonton, Stephen Mandel, took on homelessness in Edmonton a decade ago. He reasoned that the thing most lacking for the homeless was a home. Not clean drug sites, poverty or substance abuse. A place to live. So he built a bunch of inner city developments to provide a cheap place to live. It is not a small thing in a cold climate. It has dropped the number of homeless quite a bit, and the spinoffs on other things is noted. It is really hard to get and hold any kind of job if you don';t have a safe place to sleep eat and clean yourself. You can't live there if you insist on turning your home into a crack house. There are still plenty of homeless, but it is a start.

The requiremtns for upgrading of foreign doctors relate directly to the Canadian assessments of their local training. Here, doctors trained in Western Europe, USA, and oddly South Africa are deemed to have near equivalencies and licensing is fairly straightforward. Cuba, for example, is often touted as having excellent health care, and perhaps it does- for a developing country. But compared to health care in Canada, they have no access to training on modern diagnostic equipment and techniques and are far behind in drug therapies. Their doctors are inferior in this regard. I have absolutely no interest is consulting a physician unless I am certain they are at least the equivalent of a Canadian trained doctor. This is not an area where we should make compromises or cut corners to 'help out' and immigrant.

Every private sector job I have had since leaving school- except for sole proprietorships- has had an evaulation process directly linked to a) ongoing employment career advancement c) compensation. The public sector has an evaluation process that has no consequences for the employee or the management. Its pointless. Performance flaws are not dealt with except in the rarest cases. The consequences are inconsequential when you get to keep your job, your salary, benefits and pension no matter how hard you fail to meet operational targets or budget goals. Nobody gets fired or demoted, at worst you're shuffled to the side to wait for retirement. Gee, I got another shitty performance review. Lucky you. In Alberta the teachers union act as unions normally do and as their members expect: to protect jobs at all costs regardless of job performance. The best way to ensure that is to guarantee there is no objective performance review, and they continues to succeed at that 100%. It is true that awful supply teachers rarely get full time contracts. But... if you can manage to get that fulltime contract, you'll have the complete weight of your powerful, well funded union behind you to ensure lifetime employment. Your performance is not relevant as long as you don't do anything criminal on the job.

Saw it last night, it was not bad though too long. I'd give it a solid 7. Nolan has made some turkeys, Insomnia was a snoozer. But he has done some competent and interesting work. I'd put Interstellar in that 'interesting' group. Memento, both Dark Knight movies and Inception were all decent films.

Not only that, Obama was supporting something that he had little to do with. The Cushing-to-Gulf sector of Keystone did not require his approval since it did not cross international borders.

They did take nearly what they were after in Europe: complete control of all major countries and\or effective control of the rest. By 1941 they controlled North Africa,all that mattered in Europe and had neutralized Russia. Their allies in Asia controlled much of the Pacific. The US was not at war in either Europe or the Pacific.. Britain had no offensive capability that mattered, they could not possibly mount any meaningful attack in Europe. They were being carpet bombed daily and were waiting to be invaded. The Jews, Gypsies and intellectuals were being massacred. So I'd say the Germans had already gotten much of what they wanted in Europe. Two major blunders changed all that. First the Germans opened their Eastern front, something the generals warned Hitler not to do, or to at least wait a few years.. And the Japanese at Pearl Harbour made it impossible for the Americans not to get fully engaged. That was the beginning of the end for Herr Shicklgruber.

The Germans would have done much. much better if Hitler has simply let his generals ( the real and excellent professionals, not the appointees) instead of interfering in strategic and tactical areas of which he knew nothing.

I hear this annoying, vapid bullshit every year. The armed forces in Canada is composed entirely of adult volunteers and has been forever except for a few months in late WWII. Politicians or anybody else cannot 'offer up their children'.

The US undoubtedly has most of the best universities in the world, schools that routinely crank out Nobel prize winning graduates.

You're wrong on two counts- Thais do not use chopsticks. And many Indians eat with spoons.

. I wonder if the USA will get big gains in reducing greenhouse gases the same way that Germany and Russia did a decade ago? You know, with the collapse of smokestack industries in East Germany at the time of unification, it worked wonders for instant 'reductions'. Russia has something similar happen.

IMDB gave Birdman an 8.8 rating. For that you get Michael Keaton baring his heart and soul, which was a far better experience than it sounds. Not many party tricks, but a unique, uneven, interesting two hours.

Feel free to wear a white poppy though or none, and to say and do what you wish. That's why veterans serve, so that we all can make those choices.

The term I use is 'respect'. I choose to have some, and show it.

I was pointing out that the lack of adequateperformance assessment is part and parcel of the public sector, and far less common in the private for the usual reason. Note that luckily the public sector is much smaller than the private despite the best efforts of some. In the public, it is really a failure of management since there are no serious consequnces to the managers for business failures either. No, but a gentle round of feedback is not appropriate in all cases either. Teachers are well trained professionals and it is not at all unreasonable to insist that they act accordingly. That is feedback too, and right now where I live there is really no way to apply it. The Alberta Teachers Association does all the investigating, which is perhaps why the Minister of Education was dismayed when the department could not find a single case of a teacher being dismissed for incompetence. Ever. In the whole province. How is that possible? I'll tell you: because the union has successfully managed to remove every smidgen of common sense from review processes. There are serious consequences to the students when a teacher cannot do their jobs, and not much to worry about for the teacher.. Please, think of the children.

I do not agree that Canadians are terrible at assessing performance. The problem in my province is that there is no point at all to a prinicpal(who do assess their own teachers annually) calling out a teacher for poor aptitude or performance. There are really no negative consequences for the teacher since there is almost no way to terminate or discipline them. There will be consequences for the principal who does it. Their peers are not other principals, they are the teachers they nominally supervise. If they step outside the bounds of collaboration in the school and try to act they will be mistrusted by their staff and attacked by their union. It is much easier to do nothing, and that is exactly what happens. I have worked public and private sectors, and IMO they operate very differently. In the public sector, actual performance was secondary. In the private, it was the difference between reward and unemployment.

I am going to give odds that one of the complainants is not Libby Davies Screw that. I don't want to pay for yet another wankoff Institute of Political Correctness in Ottawa, c/w executive director and many staff, all accused of partisanship. If there is criminal conduct, we have plenty of cops and lawyers already on the public teat. If it is not criminal misconduct, their own parties can deal with it. Why does Trudeau wish to abdicate responsibility for the actions of his minions by passing it off?

Have you ever wondered how France can manage to somehow get close to meeting GW targets, while at the same time driving their economy into a truly horrific abyss of debt? It's easy! Close down factories, plenty of them and move the jobs to China or elsewhere.. Instant gains on the greenhouse gas front, instant increase on the debt as the jobless increase overnight. Economics is like ...magic.

It doesn't matter what peers know, teachers and principals are members of the same bargaining unit here and absolutely would not accurately assess teachers now or then. Knowing is one thing, acting is very different. Assessors must be independent. Get this- There are always teachers with an ongoing contract(not subs or pool or occasional) who for many reasons do not have a job at the end of June. They include: teachers returning from stress or maternity or the other forms of leave available, teachers who have been laid off due to low enrollemnt at their schools(seniority rules on that), and others. There are quite a few of them, and a signifcant number are not good teachers. By September, all of them have to be placed in ongoing jobs as per the collective agreement. If that pool is finally empty, principals can hire any applicant that is certified. They usually hire the best subs as demonstrated by performance in their schoool or term teachers that are good wanting ongoing contracts or transfers of friends from other schools wanting new places working with a buddy. I know at least two principals who don't hire any new teachers until the very last minute, like the day before school starts. By doing that they can often avoid the deadweight of 'must hires' and get soembody they want. It doesn't always work.