overthere

Speaking of anecdotes, my nephew(an immigrant himself from Yurp) has a landscape crew that has been all -Canadian for a couple of years now. They pay well and work a ton of overtime, the season is only about 6 months. A few years back, he had a crew that was all Mexicans working on TFW visas. They are or rather were incredible workers, none of them can come here any more. It took him a whole season of hiring and firing Canadians to find a bunch that were willing to actually work for their money. Not coincidentally, that event coincided with a upturn in resource extraction layoffs. The pool expanded.

Yes still burning , but the changes in wind, humidity and of course some rain that finally came has cooled it considerably. The media presence is a fraction of what it was, and we won't be seeing or hearing anything more from anybody in Ottawa.

Yep he is an old righthander with a high WHIP and ERA, should blend right in..... Anything is worth a try and he is basically a throwaway to clear a roster spot for a really bad team in Atlanta , but it would just be so much better if he was a lefty.

Great link! The still picture in the video link is priceless, the looks on both their faces.... he may have a lot of hard work ahead to win her heart.

It will boil down to how many seats won or lost to keep or reject the supply management system in dairy, eggs and poultry. The biggest losers are in Quebec and Ontario, but I don't see loads of Liberal seats at risk in rural parts of either. Quite possible that the Libs will pre-empt Bernier and dump it. It costs Canadian consumers something like $2.5 billion extra per year. It is also possible that dumping supply management will mean that our markets are flooded with much cheaper product from the USA.

Good luck to him.

That is what I said in post 675. The story is not culminating with who gets the Iron Throne. The Big Battle for the whole enchilada is Everybody vs the White Walkers. This series started with 'Winter is Coming', and it will end with an apocalyptic battle. Before that, Brienne and Tormund the Redhead Wildling leader are going to meet behind closed doors to exchange some bodily fluids. He was giving her a wink last episode......

I meant their offseason bullpen moves, that is the context of that comment. The Jays are a .500 team, which is not acceptable for ownership. Why? Because it will inevitably be reflected in attendance. The Jays are doing well at average 36k per game, but that will not sustain unless they rise above medocrity. Toronto is not a city /team that has high attendance no matter what-. I don't care what the media says: Gibbons is on the chopping block. New President, new GM and neither has any connection or loyalty to Gibbons. He might have been axed along with AA last year, had the Jays not gone deep in the playoffs. But they are not going anywhere right now fighting to stay at .500, well behind division leaders and nowhere near a wildcard slot. It isn't early now, the season is 1/3 over. If the Jays are i the same spot in the enxt 50 games, their attendance will have dropped a lot. They can't and won't wait that long to pull the trigger on the piece of the puzzle that is most easily replaced- the manager.

Yep, there are many elements to the economy. Bromides and platitudes and empty promises from our leaders don't buy anything that matters, except votes. I want leadership that tells me straight up: we are realistically going to have revenue of $XXX dollars this year, because these YYY things will happen..... We need to fund all these govt priorities, and we are going top live within our means. Now, Canada, lets discuss those priorities within that context. There is a reason we waste so much time on the details of social issues. It is an easy way to avoid discussion of things that matter more in the larger scheme. People don't want to talk about money and our future, our realistic future and how we can actually get there. They want to talk about an MPs sore tit. I know, it will never happen but a man can dream.

The traditional view is that your best pure hitter is in the #3 spot, the guy who hits for both average and power and RBI because there are people on base, and those people are in scoring position. That is why traditional leadoff guys are a combo of speed, base stealing, hits, bunts, infield hits, slap hits, forced errors.. They can get on and get themselves moved over into scoring position.. Bautista is only there because all the other candidates were not getting it done, and the move was not managements idea but reportedly came from the players themselves. Bautistas OBP is important from the #3 slot because of who is behind him: RBI makers like EE, Tulo and now Saunders. They need to find a leadoff guy that is not named Jose. It is going to have to be Travis, because even if Carrera hits well, runs well and gets on base(all of which he has done very well this year), they don't really have a place for him in the field, and he can't bump EE from the DH spot. Oh, and when teams underachieve- and can we at least agree that the Jays are underacheiving? the normal approach to remedy that is to look at management and at players. The state of the bullpen is on Shapiro and Atkins, and they have so far done pretty much nothing about it. Their off season moves(except Biagini) have been generally disastrous. Their in season moves, much the same.... poor Aaron Loup last night, starting off just as he left- pathetic again. Shapiro is not going to fire himself or Atkins, and must be under big pressure from ownership to do something, anything. Unless the Jays start winning and winning soon- bye bye Gibbons.

The bigger and biggest issue is the economy, present and future. Wish and hope as much as we want, being diverse and resourceful just does not pay the ever increasing burden of the social contract we all have come to think of as a birthright. This country has lost its focus on how to actually achieve societal goals that ironically all of us agree are important.

Yara and Theon and pals just sailed off with the entire Ironborn fleet of mostly empty ships. Where are they headed? To pick up Dany and her expanded army of Dothraki, Unsullied and others?

Well of course that crew wants CanCon. How else would they get paid handsomely to continue to crank out turd after govt mandated(and often funded) turd, without having to worry about job security or actually getting anybody to watch it?

I've listed them all several times. In this thread. Read it or don't, I don't care. The money just is not there for the govt in the regulated and taxed weed market. They cannot possibly expect to add several layers of tax, produce poor quality product, and expect to take anything away from a long established production, distribution and sales systems selling top quality product at reasonable prices. There is no incentive whatsoever for consumers to switch. It is nothing at all like alcohol sales. Even the most ignorant partisans can see that. Or maybe not. Shrug. But Trudeau will bail out hard on this one, he has to or the poltical capital costs will be extreme.

I just call it like it is, not like I hope it is. Case in point, I don't see the Jays at this time as being 'competitive'. Competititive means winning games. Like Donaldson says' it's a get it done league, not a try hard league'. The Jays have had some pleasant surprises, or at least players that are doing better than expected: Saunders, Smoak and Barney are in this group. Happ too. Stroman is starting to look tired already to my eye. The move to have Bautista at leadoff is pretty much desperation, because(as I predicted before the season), they don't have a clear contender there because the Storen for Revere trade was more or less a disaster so far. You don't want to take a RBI producer like Bautista out of a RBI position in the order, but Pillar and Saunders just were not getting it done at leadoff. They'll be giving Travis and probably Carrerra a chance there soon enough. Their bullpen is a gong show now. They keep throwing the same mutts out hoping anybody can not walk batters, not hit batters, not throw wild pitches and above all get somebody out. Their only lefty is the shockingly bad Girodo. Cecil and Loup will be back some day, then we will really be in trouble. And I do not understand why Gibbons is still employed. Very puzzling.

Having a viable economy in Canada is partisan? Colour me guilty.

All part of the same stupid policies on energy exports. I doubt your second sentence.

CanCon requirements, that's why. Big, quota crunching lumps of Can Con. In 2016. And that is really the turd on the table: why is it that we need strict government regulation in 2016 to define ourselves as a country with an identifiable culture? I think it was Coyne who asked if the country makes the culture, or the culture makes the country?

Yes, at this point that is the much yearned for dream of Trudeau in a political sense, and of every provincial treasurer in a an economic sense. All that revenue..... Trudeau will achieve his intense need and desire to get far, far away from this mess , by changing the Criminal Code, slapping a fat federal excise tax on production and sale, and sprinting hard away from the quagmire. MIssion accomplished.. No such luck for the provinces, this is with certainty going to be a wholesale shitshow for them. Like many others, you equate this situation as being similar to other regulated substances. It is not, in several significant ways. I feel sorry for the mess about to be dumped on provinces. Go ahead, be proud of Justin .

I do admire your 'glass half full' at the slightest signs of life. Add defence to the list of concerns now.

Fact: Hitler was a weekend crossdresser. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

They are laughing. Our loss is their gain.

He is doing his very best to make sure nothing ever gets approved, no doubt about it. His specific actions since taking office point only in that direction. For example, the NEB report approving KInder Morgan was not even released when Trudeau announced yet another layer of 'consultation' was required. The he appointed three people who appear to all be openly hostile to any resource development. There will now be a THIRD round of consultation with the very same indigenous groups that just got consulted for the last three years and had more than ample time and money to do just that. Both those actions related to the NEB directly undercut the authority of the federal'approval' process. You think that is an accident? I don't, it is most certainly and without question just the latest in a series. He also just specifically delayed the federal review of a major BC LNG plant, again. Try and keep up with current events. Capital is portable, and that swooshing sound you here is corporations saying 'f**k it, BC and Canada just do not want our business. And they are correct.

I think it is much more likely he is there begging Honda and Toyota not to close their plants or reduce production. He will explain how diverse we are, which will make their business investment decisions so much easier. Good luck selling gas to Japan, Australia has long ago comprehensively eaten our lunch there as a major supplier, and Qatar has too. The US is hard on that market too. We are not even close to being ready to export anything. By comparison, Australia is going to bring perhaps 6 LNG export terminals online in the next 4 years to serve their fat contracts in Asia.. Buttering their own bread is never a problem with the Aussies. Oh, and there is that trifling matter that since we continue to dick around endlessly with out economic future, the prices for LNG have plummeted. Justin: sell low, buy high! http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2016/05/23/business/japan-pays-least-since-2005-for-lng-amid-price-slump/#.V0XdDt_2Zpp

A BA with a major in the sonnets of John Donne won't make you rich, I agree. But nobody is forced to carefully select, then invest 4 years of their lives into something entirely worthless. It is totally voluntary. I'd also point out that , assuming you buy a future career and big income stream with a four year degree, a $50k debt is nothing, really. Try and start a lifetime business on that...... Better yet, try to get the public purse to pay for that business, when anybody can get a heavily subsidized uni degree. People have choices in life, and career/debt choices are always made by adults. The facts I stated still remain as facts.