Quotulatiousness

January 7, 2014

Paul Hellyer – architect of Canada’s unified forces and certified loon

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:25

To be kind, I wasn’t a fan of Paul Hellyer even before he started talking about aliens:

Paul Hellyer was Canada’s Minister of Defense in the mid-1960s. He is now a critic of the United States’ willingness to trigger an interstellar war with aliens — aliens who might give us more advanced technology if only we were less belligerent.

“They’ve been visiting our planet for thousands of years,” Hellyer told RT’s Sophie Shevardnadze in a televised interview.

“There’s been a lot more activity in the last few decades, since we invented the atomic bomb. and they’re very concerned about that, and about the fact that we might use it again,” added Hellyer, who said that a cold-war era commission determined that at least four alien species had come to Earth. “The whole cosmos is a unity, and it affects not just us but other people in the cosmos, they’ve very much afraid that we might be stupid enough to start using atomic weapons again. This would be bad for us and bad for them too.”

[…]

“I have seen a UFO, about 120 miles north of Toronto, over Lake Muskoka,” Hellyer said. The UFO “just looked like a star … we watched it until our necks almost broke. It was definitely a UFO, because it could change position in the sky by 3 or 4 degrees in 3 or 4 seconds. … There was no other explanation for it except that it was the real thing.”

The Star of Bethlehem, he added, was one of God’s flying saucers.

Moreover, the number of known alien species has leapt from “between two and 12” to as many as 80, said Hellyer, the senior cabinet minister from Pierre Trudeau’s 1968 cabinet. “They have different agendas. Maybe all of us on earth should have have the same agenda. … Nearly all of them are benign, but one or two are not, and that’s what I’m investigating now.”

January 2, 2014

National reputation rankings for 2013

Filed under: Australia, Business, Cancon, Economics, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:37

In Forbes, Susan Adams reports on the most recent reputable countries report:

Which countries have the best reputations? What does that even mean? The Reputation Institute, a global private consulting firm based in New York and Copenhagen, has just released its fourth annual list of 50 countries, ranked according to what it says is people’s trust, admiration, respect and affinity for those countries.

Topping the list for the third year in a row: Canada. Sweden comes in second, one place up from last year and Switzerland is third, up from fourth last year. (Australia slipped from second to fourth place.)

What’s most notable is how far down the U.S. ranks: 22nd place, behind Brazil and just above Peru. Several European countries that continue to battle severe economic turmoil ranked above the U.S. again this year including Italy in 16th place, France in 17th, Spain in 18th and Portugal in 19th place.

One reason the U.S. doesn’t rank higher, says Fernando Prado, a managing partner at the Reputation Institute, is that when asked what was most important to them in gauging a country’s reputation, respondents said it was effective government and appealing environment a bit more than an advanced economy. But the U.S. has been steadily gaining in each of those three categories, says Prado, which explains why it moved up one place from 23rd last year. Prado adds that the U.S. is burdened by what he calls “a negative emotional halo” that has to do with being a world superpower. Outside the U.S., people have mixed feelings about its dominant role in the world.

January 1, 2014

Browning out – the fading era of the incandescent bulb

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Government, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:40

In Maclean’s, Kate Lunau recounts the history of the venerable incandescent light bulb as new regulations kick in today to phase them out of use in Canada:

The incandescent light bulb was born on Jan. 27, 1880, when U.S. inventor Thomas Edison famously patented his “electric lamp.” Others had paved the way, including Canadians Henry Woodward and Mathew Evans, whose 1874 light bulb patent was bought by Edison. But it was the latter who perfected and would commercialize the technology.

The light bulb — in which an electric current passes through a filament that heats up and glows inside a glass bulb — yanked North America into the electric age. Before then, “all street lamps were gas,” says Anna Adamek, who curates the energy collection at the Canada Science and Technology Museum, which includes about 2,000 light bulbs. “Wealthy people could afford gas lamps for interior lighting, but most would use kerosene, oil, or candles.” In 1882, the Canada Cotton Co., in Cornwall, Ont., became the first Canadian company to install electric lights. “Edison personally supervised the installation,” she says. In 1884, the lights went on in the Parliament buildings and, by 1905, the lighting of Canadian cities was well under way. Electric light changed the way people spent their evenings, and the way businesses operated — allowing people to work around the clock. Once electric wiring was installed, manufacturers were spurred to make all sorts of new gadgets and appliances for the home, from electric irons to refrigerators.

[…]

As the ban approached, many fretted over the cost of replacing their household lights with CFLs and LEDs, as well as the small amount of mercury inside fluorescents — not to mention the loss of pleasant-coloured lighting at home. Traditionalists have responded by stockpiling their beloved bulbs. In the U.K., the Daily Mail carried a story of a 62-year-old pensioner, who hoarded enough to see her “into the grave.” Riffing on the old joke, Freedom Light Bulb, a U.S. blog, asked: “How many politicians or bureaucrats should it take to change a light bulb?” The answer: “None.” On Jan. 1, 2014, Canada’s new regulations will be phased in. Stores will sell through existing inventory; not long after, that warm familiar glow will be gone for good.

December 23, 2013

Induced aversion to a particular Christmas song

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media, Personal — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Earlier this year, I had occasion to run a Google search for “Mr Gameway’s Ark” (it’s still almost unknown: the Googles, they do nothing). However, I did find a very early post on the old site that I thought deserved to be pulled out of the dusty archives, because it explains why I can — to this day — barely stand to listen to “Little Drummer Boy”:

Seasonal Melodies

James Lileks has a concern about Christmas music:

This isn’t to say all the classics are great, no matter who sings them. I can do without “The Little Drummer Boy,” for example.

It’s the “Bolero” of Christmas songs. It just goes on, and on, and on. Bara-pa-pa-pum, already. Plus, I understand it’s a sweet little story — all the kid had was a drum to play for the newborn infant — but for anyone who remembers what it was like when they had a baby, some kid showing up unannounced to stand around and beat on the skins would not exactly complete your mood. Happily, the song has not spawned a sequel like “The Somewhat Larger Cymbal Adolescent.”

This reminds me about my aversion to this particular song. It was so bad that I could not hear even three notes before starting to wince and/or growl.

Back in the early 1980’s, I was working in Toronto’s largest toy and game store, Mr Gameway’s Ark. It was a very odd store, and the owners were (to be polite) highly idiosyncratic types. They had a razor-thin profit margin, so any expenses that could be avoided, reduced, or eliminated were so treated. One thing that they didn’t want to pay for was Muzak (or the local equivalent), so one of the owners brought in his home stereo and another one put together a tape of Christmas music.

Note that singular. “Tape”.

Christmas season started somewhat later in those distant days, so that it was really only in December that we had to decorate the store and cope with the sudden influx of Christmas merchandise. Well, also, they couldn’t pay for the Christmas merchandise until sales started to pick up, so that kinda accounted for the delay in stocking-up the shelves as well …

So, Christmas season was officially open, and we decorated the store with the left-over krep from the owners’ various homes. It was, at best, kinda sad. But — we had Christmas music! And the tape was pretty eclectic: some typical 50’s stuff (White Christmas and the like), some medieval stuff, some Victorian stuff and that damned Drummer Boy song.

We were working ten- to twelve-hour shifts over the holidays (extra staff? you want Extra Staff, Mr. Cratchitt???), and the music played on. And on. And freaking on. Eternally. There was no way to escape it.

To top it all off, we were the exclusive distributor for a brand new game that suddenly was in high demand: Trivial Pursuit. We could not even get the truck unloaded safely without a cordon of employees to keep the random passers-by from snatching boxes of the damned game. When we tried to unpack the boxes on the sales floor, we had customers snatching them out of our hands and running (running!) to the cashier. Stress? It was like combat, except we couldn’t shoot back at the buggers.

Oh, and those were also the days that Ontario had a Sunday closing law, so we were violating all sorts of labour laws on top of the Sunday closing laws, so the Police were regular visitors. Given that some of our staff spent their spare time hiding from the Police, it just added immeasurably to the tension levels on the shop floor.

And all of this to the background soundtrack of Christmas music. One tape of Christmas music. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

It’s been over 20 years, and I still feel the hackles rise on the back of my neck with this song … but I’m over the worst of it now: I can actually listen to it without feeling that all-consuming desire to rip out the sound system and dance on the speakers. After two decades.

December 21, 2013

The Ross Rifle

Filed under: Cancon, History, Military, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:46

When I was an army cadet, the weapon we trained on was the Lee Enfield, an old but highly reliable British rifle. Our cadet range used Lee Enfields with .22 adapters, but due to an odd quirk of timing, the very first weapon I ever fired was a Lee Enfield .303 … I think it weighed nearly as much as I did at 12. Interestingly, our cadet hall was adjacent to the site where the Long Branch Arsenal had manufactured Lee Enfield rifles during WW2, and the building may have been part of the factory complex.

Long Branch Arsenal site

Lee-Enfield No 4 Mk I (1943)

At the beginning of World War One, the Canadian army was supposed to be equipped as much as possible with Canadian-produced kit, including the infantry rifle. Canadian industrial development meant that we didn’t have factories that could immediately turn out bigger pieces of armament, but rifles were easily within reach. The government’s choice was the Ross rifle, which was already in production and was highly accurate but had a few disadvantages that were not discovered until the first Canadian troops were in Flanders. Wikipedia says:

The Ross rifle was a straight-pull bolt action .303 inch-calibre rifle produced in Canada from 1903 until 1918.

The Ross Mk.II or (“1905”) rifle was highly successful in target shooting before WWI, but the close chamber tolerances, lack of primary extraction and overall length made the Mk.III (or “1910”) Ross rifle unsuitable for the conditions of trench warfare and the often poor quality ammunition issued.

By 1916, the rifle had been withdrawn from front line service, but continued to be used by many snipers of the Canadian Expeditionary Force until the end of the war due to its exceptional accuracy.

The Ross Rifle Co. made sporting rifles from early in its production, most notably chambered in .280 Ross, introduced in 1907. This cartridge is recorded as the first to achieve over 3000 feet per second velocity, and the cartridge acquired a very considerable international reputation among target shooters and hunters.

Lickmuffin, who frequently posts comments here on the blog, recently acquired a “sporterized” version and produced a short video about the rifle:

December 20, 2013

You know you’ve got a viral video when you start getting multiple parodies posted

Filed under: Cancon, Humour — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:22

Most of you will have seen the Jean Claude Van Damme Volvo video, but have you seen the Chuck Norris response?

Or for Canadians, the Rob Ford version?

H/T to Christian Tucker for the links.

December 18, 2013

“For a while, I thought it was just Mayor Ford, but what I‘ve realized is Canadians are much, much weirder than any of us had any idea they were”

Filed under: Cancon, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:27

Uh-oh. I think this Kimmel guy is finally on to us…

It had been a while since the late night talk show hosts zeroed in on Rob Ford, but at least one of them poked fun at the Toronto mayor and city council Tuesday night.

On ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live, the host played a video clip of Ford and other councillors dancing during their council meeting earlier in the day.

“What the hell is going on?” asked Kimmel. “Are they all on crack?”

Ford and several councillors danced to a performance by a local jazz trio in a rare moment of fun in what has been a highly charged venue of late.

“One minute they’re yelling at each other and the next they’re dancing all around the room,” joked Kimmel, who added that the “Mayor Ford experience” has been very educational.

“For a while, I thought it was just Mayor Ford, but what I’ve realized is Canadians are much, much weirder than any of us had any idea they were,” joked Kimmel.

December 17, 2013

The purity of Quebec’s linguistic environment must be protected at all costs!

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:29

How dare these linguistic wreckers think they can subvert the official language laws by speaking another language to each other?

Two Montreal hospital workers of Haitian origin who sometimes speak to each other in Creole — and not exclusively in French — have raised the ire of the Office québécois de la langue française.

On Dec. 3, the OQLF warned the Hôpital Rivière-des-Prairies, an 88-bed psychiatric facility, to take action after an employee of the hospital complained to the French-language watchdog about the two workers.

The hospital was given until Dec. 20 to respond or face an investigation by an OQLF inspector and a fine of as much as $20,000. The two employees in question do speak French, and there appears to be no evidence that they refused to speak to patients or co-workers in French. But on occasion, they engaged in private conversations in Creole while on lunch or during some shifts in the presence of colleagues and patients.

On Dec. 10, the east-end hospital held a meeting of all the employees in the department where the two Creole-speaking workers are assigned, and reminded everyone that French is the official language of the workplace in Quebec, not Creole.

[…]

The Charter of the French Language, adopted in 1977, states that French is the sole official language of Quebec. What’s more, the charter enshrines the right of every Quebecer to be served in French, and that “workers have a right to carry on their activities in French.”

However, the law does not prohibit workers in the public sector from engaging in a private conversation other than French while on the job.

Even if a conversation between two public-sector employees “is related to work,” they can still speak in another language as long as their exchange does not involve colleagues who don’t understand what they’re saying, Le Blanc explained.

Gagnon, who is also the hospital’s liaison with the OQLF, said the government agency did not provide her with the precise circumstances of the complaint.

“We’re in a very difficult position,” she added. “It’s a very particular situation, because we don’t know the name of the person who made the complaint, we don’t know the circumstances, we don’t know the moment that the employees spoke to each other in Creole, but we have an obligation to act because we received a (letter) from the Office.

December 14, 2013

Canada edges ahead of the US in economic freedoms

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:12

Last week, the Fraser Institute published Economic Freedom of North America 2013 which illustrates the relative changes in economic freedom among US states and Canadian provinces:

Click to go to the full document

Click to go to the full document

Reason‘s J.D. Tuccille says of the report, “Canadian Provinces Suck Slightly Less Than U.S. States at Economic Freedom”:

For readers of Reason, Fraser’s definition of economic freedom is unlikely to be controversial. Fundamentally, the report says, “Individuals have economic freedom when (a) property they acquire without the use of force, fraud, or theft is protected from physical invasions by others and (b) they are free to use, exchange, or give their property as long as their actions do not violate the identical rights of others.”

The report includes two rankings of economic freedom — one just comparing state and provincial policies, and the other incorporating the effects of national legal systems and property rights protections. Since people are subject to all aspects of the environment in which they operate, and not just locally decided rules and regulations, it’s that “world-adjusted all-government” score that matters most, and it has a big effect — especially since “gaps have widened between the scores of Canada and the United States in these areas.” The result is is that:

    [I]n the world-adjusted index the top two jurisdictions are Canadian, with Alberta in first place and Saskatchewan in second. In fact, four of the top seven jurisdictions are Canadian, with the province of Newfoundland & Labrador in sixth and British Columbia in seventh. Delaware, in third spot, is the highest ranked US state, followed by Texas and Nevada. Nonetheless, Canadian jurisdictions, Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia, still land in the bottom two spots, just behind New Mexico at 58th and West Virginia at 57th.

Before you assume that the nice folks at Fraser are gloating, or that you should pack your bags for a northern relocation, the authors caution that things aren’t necessarily getting better north of the border. Instead, “their economic freedom is declining more slowly than in the US states.”

December 11, 2013

Canada Post to phase out home delivery

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 16:10

I haven’t had home delivery of my mail for the last few decades, but for folks downtown it’s going to be an unwelcome change. The decision forced itself on the crown corporation through the arcane workings of economic reality: it just costs too much money to deliver to those millions of homes (a tweet I forgot to save said it cost over $200 per year for home delivery and just over $100 for communal mailboxes). The news is not going down well with at least one member of the official opposition, as Colby Cosh pointed out in a series of tweets:

December 4, 2013

The essential unseriousness of the Chong parliamentary reform debate

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 17:04

November 29, 2013

“This bill isn’t a slippery slope. It’s a steep hill greased up with lard”

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:38

Brian Lilley is against a new bill that would provide the police with the power to demand that drivers submit to breath testing even when there’s no evidence that they’ve been drinking:

It’s the latest attempt to crack down hard on the ever-shrinking problem of drunk driving. The news release touting Bill C-556 states that, if passed, it would, “amend the Criminal Code to allow police officers to perform systematic random breathalyzer testing regardless of whether or not the driver shows signs of impairment.”

That means police don’t need a reason to give you a test.

They don’t need to see dilated pupils, smell booze on your breath or even have you admit you had a beer while watching the game.

The bill would give police a big increase in power and that’s not a step I want to take.

No one supports drunk driving, no one that I know anyway. And attempts to deal with the issue have largely been successful.

Statistics Canada is clear — drunk driving has been on the decrease for years now.

“The impaired driving rate generally declined from the mid-1980s to 2006, when it reached its lowest point in over 25 years, at 234 incidents per 100,000 population,” reads a report from the agency.

Back in the mid-80s there were roughly 600 incidents of impaired driving per 100,000 of population; in 2011 the Canadian average across all provinces and territories was 262 incidents per 100,000.

[…]

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees all Canadians are protected from unreasonable search and seizure.

This bill would shred that protection.

This bill isn’t a slippery slope. It’s a steep hill greased up with lard and those in favour of ever expanded police powers are just waiting for Parliament to step on it.

Canadians need to say no to drunk driving and they need to say no to this bill.

November 28, 2013

Colby Cosh on Obamacare’s international ripples

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:12

You’ll have guessed from the tone of my Obamacare links and comments that I didn’t think it was a good idea from the start and it’s been a great example of how not to implement a major government initiative. That said, it’s a sure bet that Obamacare will have influence on other countries as they consider their own health programs. Colby Cosh is surprised that the scandal-addled Canadian media hasn’t been paying more attention to the Obamacare train wreck as the wheels fall off in all directions:

Obamacare isn’t going to make major systemic change in either direction look more appetizing to Canadians. That’s an important Canadian angle right there. Not long ago it looked as though national pharmacare was likely to become an election issue here, quarterbacked by the NDP and perhaps the Liberals, too. The concept has plenty of support among economists and other health policy experts—the same class of kindly boffins that, in the U.S., lined up almost unanimously behind the Affordable Care Act.

For better or worse, nationalizing prescription-drug insurance seems likely to be a much tougher sell here in the immediate future. Any large, complex health care experiment will be. The more wise heads support it, the easier it will be for supporters of the status quo to shout, “Unintended consequences! Ivory-tower tomfoolery!” Indeed, political strategists may already be saying it to themselves.

American commentators are already starting to wonder if Obamacare’s difficult start and increasingly troubled prospects may end up as a victory for small-government conservatism. The problems for the program do not end with the calamitous state of the federal insurance-exchange website, or even with the nasty surprises handed to the self-employed and freelancers in the “individual market” who were falsely promised: “If you like your plan you can keep your plan.” Some Obamacare buyers are finding themselves shut out from their preferred doctors and hospitals; employers are junking non-compliant health plans; and many in the middle class who liked the Obamacare concept are facing sticker shock.

[…]

The redistributive aspects of Obamacare were undersold, and possible pitfalls obviously not foreseen. The neoliberal Democrat Walter Russell Mead put it neatly the other day: “President Obama may be the Democrat who ends up convincing millions of American millennials that Ronald Reagan was right, and that the progressive administrative state is neither honest nor competent enough to solve the problems of the American people.” If that is the case, the effects cannot be confined to the U.S.

November 26, 2013

Twenty-five years on, Canada has clearly changed

Filed under: Cancon, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:23

Richard Anderson notes the 25th anniversary of an almost forgotten Canadian crisis:

From the perspective of a quarter century the whole thing is almost inexplicable. It isn’t just that everything turned out well. The oddness of that time is how worked up people got about a trade agreement. Seriously. It’s an international trade agreement. The Harper Tories have signed quite a few, including an important deal with the EU. It’s barely headline news. But way back then it was the beginning of the end of Canada, if the good and great of the Canadian Cultural Establishment were to be believed.

Adding more distance to the passage of time is the demographic revolution that has taken place since, a revolution kicked into high gear by Mulroney not Trudeau. The Canada of 1988 was a much whiter and far more WASPish place than it is today. The Canadian WASP is an odd creature. Genial to a fault, decent, hard working and subdued in manner and lifestyle. He does, however, have one terrible weakness: A paranoid fear of the United States.

The Punjabi, the Vietnamese and the Filipino immigrant could not tell a Loyalist from a lolipop. The strange psycho-drama that has consumed the Canadian elite since Simcoe landed is now, mostly, over. The new Canadians have no fear of the old enemy America. There are no intergenerational flashbacks to the Battle of Queenston Heights. The Americans are just the loud neighbour to the south. It is not entirely coincidental that free trade was at last brought to Canada by an Irish Catholic, supported by a phalanx of Quebecois. Neither group ever really feared America. Among them there was never that nagging sense of imminent cultural absorption.

November 22, 2013

It was “as if they were debating in Toledo, Ohio not Toronto, Canada”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:02

Leslie Loftis has more on one of the odder aspects of the recent Munk Debate:

Last week I was in Toronto. I arrived just after the Toronto City Council stripped Mayor Rob Ford of his authority. In the non-stop news coverage, the local news was a little giddy that US big media was covering the story. They even excerpted part of CNN’s coverage.

The reporter’s excitement at the big US coverage reminded me of my friend’s hockey story, and that bothered me. This wasn’t about rivalry, but about us noticing them. Doesn’t the Northern US cover Canada? Down in Texas, I’m not shocked that we don’t cover Canada. We cover Mexico. (I don’t buy the internationally ignorant American conventional wisdom. We are quite big. I can hop in a car and drive west for 15+ hours and still be in Texas. The American Resident covered this point well a while back.) Regardless, it isn’t remotely cool, for CNN or Canada, that this story was getting play outside of Toronto.

[…]

But at the debate, America’s treatment of Canada came up again, courtesy of Maureen Dowd.

She spent most of her time recycling Dick Cheney and Ted Cruz insults from her columns. If the Rob Ford scandal had not been all over the news, she wouldn’t have made any Canadian reference.

Not only did Dowd not bother to find examples relevant to Canadians, but also her repeated slam against Ted Cruz, a man she clearly loathes, was to call him Canadian. I know she simply hoped to sabotage any future presidential run for the Senator from Texas, but she obviously didn’t consider how it might come off to a Canadian audience when she used their nationality as a slur.

In fact, the participants seemed completely unaware they were speaking to a Canadian audience. They kept using the royal “we” for Americans, as if they were debating in Toledo, Ohio not Toronto, Canada.

This is probably the fastest way to annoy Canadians. It is why they wear a maple leaf on their person when they go abroad. It isn’t that they disapprove or hate Americans but that they are not Americans. They have their own identity. It’s probably annoying if excusable when, say, Germans mistake them for Americans. But when Americans, who should be aware of our differences, do it, when we completely subsume their identity in our own, it is insulting and disrespectful.

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