Quotulatiousness

March 15, 2013

The real cuts to the military budget

Filed under: Cancon, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

In Maclean’s, John Geddes examines the way budget cutbacks are being implemented in Canada’s military:

Perry’s fine-grained analysis starts by setting aside the major parts of defence spending that are, at least in theory, protected from cuts. Last year’s fiscal plan called for more than $1 billion a year to be cut from the defence department’s overall budget of more than $20 billion by 2014-15. That doesn’t seem so tough. But the Conservatives pledged to do that while keeping up the troop strength of the Canadian Forces, at about 68,000 regular members and 27,000 in the reserves, and also protecting most planned capital spending. According to Perry, that means about $12 billion a year was deemed uncuttable — leaving all the reductions to be found somehow in the remaining $8 billion that is spent on the civilian workforce and on military “operations, maintenance and readiness.”

How hard is it to achieve those savings? The clearest indication so far came from Lt.-Gen. Peter Devlin, the commander of the army, in surprising testimony he gave late last year before a Senate committee. Devlin said his land force’s operating budget has been shrunk by an eye-popping 22 per cent—a figure that doesn’t show up anywhere in publicly available defence documents. “As you would expect,” Devlin said with classic officer-class understatement, “that has an effect on people, infrastructure and training.” And he took pains to counter any suggestion that the army should be eliminating desk jobs to save field assets, stressing that administrative and head-office functions occupy only four per cent of his workforce.

[. . .]

Harper’s letter echoed the thrust of Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie’s 2011 “transformation” report. Leslie, who has since retired, conducted an extensive study of defence spending and concluded that the department must “ruthlessly focus” on reducing its spending on outside consultants and private contractors, with the aim of redistributing resources to military units. He delivered his report two years ago. Yet the latest figures available show that the defence department’s spending on professional services and consultants continued to climb to $3.25 billion in 2011-12 from $2.77 billion in 2009-10. And that increase came after a period when head-office growth outstripped the expansion of the fighting forces. According to Leslie’s report, headquarters personnel numbers grew 40 per cent from 2004 to 2010, while the regular forces grew by just 11 per cent.

March 14, 2013

Toronto school board deploys police to intimidate bloggers

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Education, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:38

Arnie Lemaire, who blogs at Blazing Cat Fur is becoming a bother to the great and the good at the Toronto District School Board. After a recent comment on his blog, the TDSB sent police officers to his door:

Can writing a sarcastic but clearly tame blog comment really land two cops at your doorstep?

It happened to Blazingcatfur blogger Arnie Lemaire Wednesday for musing “OISE and the TDSB need to be purged, or burnt to the ground whichever is more effective.”

He’s, quite rightfully, upset about it.

But, often critical of the Toronto District School Board and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Lemaire said he will not back down from efforts to “intimidate” him.

“Dear TDSB, You Can’t Silence Me,” was a headline on the blazingcatfur.blogspot in response.

But, what they clearly can do, is bring in the police to investigate.

In what can be described as more TDSB theatre of the absurd, an obscure six-week-old blog comment resulted in police visiting his home like one might see back in the day of the Stasi in communist East Germany.

Update: As Mark Steyn puts it “Nobody Expects the Toronto District School Board Inquisition…“

It seems a wee bit over-sensitive for a school board that promotes murderous goons like Che Guevara and cop-killers like the Black Panthers as role models to its young charges to get its knickers in a twist over a blog post. But, of course, for leftie social engineers, the glamor of the revolutionary aesthetic is mostly a useful cover for inculcating a bovine, unquestioning statist compliance from which no deviation is permitted. There was barely any pretense by the cops that there was a legal justification for what happened yesterday; it was just a friendly warning: “Nice blog ya got there. Would be a real shame if something happened to it.“

One of the most disquieting trends in western Europe is the state’s increasingly open intimidation of those who dissent from the official ideology. Sad to see it on this side of the Atlantic.

March 13, 2013

Garneau throws in the towel, leading to the inevitable coronation of Justin Trudeau

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:55

In Maclean’s, Paul Wells would like to welcome you all to the Justin Trudeau era, ready or not:

Marc Garneau dropped out of the Liberal leadership contest because he is not a fool. The poll numbers he released, if anywhere near accurate, would have led to futile humiliation. He would have lost badly and then been asked to rally to the new leader. He is an engineer, so he found a more elegant solution. He is rallying now to avoid losing later.

Garneau had spent several weeks trying to thread a needle he must have found annoying: remind everyone that his c.v. is superior to Trudeau’s, while not saying it so loudly that he would just get Liberals angry at him. He managed to get a fair number of Liberals angry anyway, without putting a dent in Trudeau. He must have wanted to shout it from the roofs. He earned his engineering doctorate before Trudeau turned two. He rose to high Navy rank the way one does, by putting in thousands of hours. He hurt himself in politics by doing what so many backseat drivers insist good citizens should do: put in a full life in a useful career, then move into politics when you’re ready to contribute. That almost never works. There is a reason lifers usually do better than late arrivers. Garneau first ran for Parliament in 2006, the year 13 Liberal years in power ended. His timing has not improved since.

March 12, 2013

If consumers were 10% better off … why did they call it a “disease”?

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

In Maclean’s, Stephen Gordon illustrates the classic case of burying the lede for popular economics:

    So Dutch consumers are roughly 10% better off than they would have been, but companies have been able to compete only by paring their profit margins.

    “The Dutch disease,” The Economist, November 26, 1977

Talk about burying the lede. That sentence appears at the end of the 10th paragraph of the much-referred-to but rarely read article in The Economist that coined the phrase “Dutch Disease.” In the normal course of things, a 10 per cent increase in consumers’ purchasing power would be the stuff of banner headlines, but, for some reason, The Economist chose to hide that point deep into the story and qualify it with a caveat about how hard it had become for companies to compete. (The answer to that, by the way, is: “So what if producers are struggling?” What really matters is consumer welfare.)

My take on the Dutch Disease debate can be summed up as follows: Why are we calling it a disease?

March 11, 2013

BC’s ruling Liberal party facing very long odds of re-election

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:40

British Columbia’s next provincial election is still a couple of months away, but the pundits are already making plans for what happens after the BC Liberal party is taken out to the knacker’s yard and the NDP takes power (based on recent polls and the amazing ability of the Liberals to generate bad press):

Assuming everyone and their brother hasn’t been lying to pollsters, the election is pretty much in the bag for the BC NDP. Not only is there strong “time for a change” momentum aiding the party, after three terms of the BC Liberals, but recent occasions where the Premier, Christy Clark, and her entourage only opened their mouths to change feet (e.g. “Ethnicgate”) have brought the prospects of a competitive election down sharply.

Clark’s road map for the election has never been good. As reported on Feb. 15 in your Beacon News, before the budget and Ethnicgate erupted, the absolute best case for the BC Liberals was 34 seats — a respectable loss. A roadmap today would see 25 or fewer seats if everything breaks their way.

There are 85 ridings in the province, so 43 seats held by a single party is a majority. In addition to the Liberals and the NDP, there’s also a Conservative party in BC, but it apparently acts as a role model for dysfunctional organizations:

Meanwhile, John Cummins’ BC Conservatives seem equally determined to destroy their party. The party, at the moment, is going into an election without any of its key officers: between purges run by the leader’s coterie and resignations in disgust, the party’s officers are missing in action. Riding associations are walking, as leader Cummins overrides their nominating selections to impose his own choice of candidates.

So, in the best traditions of sauve qui peut, there’s a fair bit of talk about a new party to replace the discredited Liberals and the self-destructing Conservatives:

That’s why individuals affiliated with both the BC Conservatives and the BC Liberals are starting to organize for a new party. The project is nicknamed “Free Enterprise Party 3.0″.

[. . .]

Growing a new party, goes the thinking, puts everyone on an even footing. Those key Liberals who retired rather than run again under Christy Clark’s banner might be enticed to shift over and play a role in building a new party. Riding associations would be built, with no one grandfathered in. The new party, in turn, would dump all the baggage of the past years in one fell swoop.

There’s evidently some interest from the moneyed who normally support the “anything-but-the-NDP” option in the province. They’ll top up the Liberal coffers for the election — but are looking to shift their focus after it if the BC Liberals are crushed.

Of course, while the PR fiascos are real, the polls are only a way marker. Everyone who confidently predicted the outcome of the last Alberta election is now a lot more wary of the opinion polls. Nobody wants to provide the 2013 equivalent of the famous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline.

March 8, 2013

Jack Layton biopic provokes outrage … because there isn’t a French version

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:03

I’ll let Paul Wells explain this one:

March 7, 2013

This is why I recently stopped linking to the National Post

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 15:18

Michael Geist explains:

… if someone wants to post a quote from Selley or anything else written by the National Post, they are now presented with pop-up box seeking a licence that starts at $150 for the Internet posting of 100 words with an extra fee of 50 cents for each additional word (the price is cut in half for non-profits).

[. . .]

None of this requires a licence or payment. In fact, the amount of copying is often so insubstantial that a fair dealing analysis is not even needed. Last year, the Federal Court of Canada ruled that several paragraphs from a National Post column by Jonathan Kay posted to an Internet chat site did not constitute copying a substantial part of the work. If there was a fair dealing analysis, there is no doubt that copying a hundred words out of an article would easily meet the fair dealing standard. In fact, the Supreme Court of Canada has indicated that copying full articles in some circumstances may be permitted.

I make no money from my blogging … in fact I pay money to maintain the web site. The idea of spending $150 per quotation from any source is pretty much a guarantee that I won’t be linking to that source very much at all. At about the same time the National Post brought in their pay-to-quote policy, they also launched a reader rewards program. The idea seemed to be that you log in to their site, it tracks everything you read and then you get a pony at the end of the day, or week, or month, or Baktun, or something. Or maybe not … I really didn’t pay too much attention.

March 6, 2013

Colby Cosh: “One sees what fine jokes result when the state tries to make one plus one equal fried chicken”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 15:25

In Maclean’s, staff optimist and all-around-softy Colby Cosh tries to make lemonade out of the sour Whatcott ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada:

The ruling was appalling in a number of ways, most notably in its dismissal of any possibility of a truth defence against human rights commissions who hunt “hate speech.” The court specifically insists that true statements arranged in certain ways can be officially “hateful,” conceding a total lack of interest in truth and basically handing its banner over to the commissions’ targets. For liberals who share the goals of these commissions, this is a moral disaster that can only multiply Bill Whatcotts ad infinitum. People of the Whatcott type already believe themselves to be in special possession of suppressed facts, and now the court has said explicitly that spreading falsehoods is no part of their offence.

But since we columnists are in the business of telling truth, whatever a court thinks, it ought to be admitted that, dead or alive, free speech in Canada was never in such good shape. The Supreme Court’s decision is an elaborate partial rescue of standing precedent; the constitutionality of hate policing by provincial commissions was established many years ago, and the unpleasant surprise is only that it wasn’t killed on this occasion.

[. . .]

For those of us who make a living in creative or intellectual expression, it is worth something to have the laws limiting it defined as clearly as possible while being compacted into a minimum volume. The Supreme Court has made the rules clearer, and this is not to be sneered at, even if its logic sometimes is — especially since the overall authority of human rights commissions has undergone net diminution in the process. It is just possible the chief justice wasn’t entirely asleep at the switch.

QotD: Canada Syndrome

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

It’s one of the marvels of the Canadian electorate. Show Canadians a special interest group that uses its government-granted privileges to fleece consumers, and they’ll embrace it as a “national champion,” a “uniquely Canadian way of life” or some equally vapid catch-phrase.

This is from the Wikipedia entry for Stockholm Syndrome:

    Stockholm syndrome, or capture–bonding, is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending them.

What we suffer from is the economic policy equivalent. Call it “Canada Syndrome”: a tendency for consumers to identify with the producer interests that are holding them hostage.

Stephen F. Gordon, “Our Stockholm Syndrome about supply management”, Maclean’s, 2013-03-05

March 5, 2013

Toronto the oh-so-sophisticated: riding crop sales up in Toronto, but not in the rest of the GTA

Filed under: Books, Business, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

The Toronto Star takes the opportunity to remind their readers that Toronto tastes are so much more refined than those louts in the 905 who haven’t even heard of the Fifty Shades books:

Feeling strangely sadomasochistic these days?

It turns out you’re not alone.

Just ask Concetta Tucciarone, manager of the Greenhawk Harness & Equestrian Supplies store in North York, where sales of riding crops have mysteriously doubled during the past year or so.

The question is: why?

And the answer, apparently, has nothing to do with horses but owes everything to a sexually adventurous university student named Anastasia Steele and her dark, brooding passion for the mysterious young entrepreneur Christian Grey, “a man who is beautiful, brilliant, and intimidating.”

Plus: pretty handy with a riding crop.

Or, as the Marquis de Sade once wrote: “It is always by way of pain that one arrives at pleasure.”

This is a story about pain, pleasure — and equestrian goods.

Steele and Grey, as many readers doubtless know already, are the central characters in the decadent Fifty Shades trilogy of novels, a chart-topping publishing phenomenon penned by American writer E. L. James, a woman who has brought bondage and sadomasochism — and riding crops — into the North American cultural mainstream.

The in-crowd in Toronto are apparently thrashing away at one another in the approved style, but the peasants in the rest of the GTA still haven’t clued in:

“We have not noticed an increase at all,” says a sales clerk at the Picov’s Horsemen Centre in Ajax, who identifies herself only as Diane. “I guess in Durham Region, they’re not aware of those books.”

The same seems to be true at The Equine Emporium in Mississauga.

“Generally, we just sell to riders,” says sales clerk Jennifer Babos.

Ditto Carmen Griscti, owner of Baker’s Harness and Saddlery in Markham, who hasn’t detected a recent spike in riding-crop sales, either — but wishes he had.

“I wish I was downtown,” he says. “Can you imagine? I’d make a killing.”

March 2, 2013

Chief Justice McLachlin’s “evolving” view of free speech

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:38

In the Ottawa Citizen, Karen Selick explains why the Supreme Court of Canada’s unanimous decision in the Whatcott case was so surprising:

For 22 years, free-speechers have cherished the hope that another case involving censorship and human rights legislation would come back before Chief Justice McLachlin. That’s because in 1990, before becoming chief justice, she wrote dissenting judgments in two cases, Taylor and Keegstra. Her opinion then was that the censorship sections of the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA) and the Criminal Code violated the Charter guarantee of freedom of expression, and that the violation was not justified in our free, democratic society. She therefore voted to strike down the censorship clauses as unconstitutional.

Justice McLachlin was outvoted in both Taylor and Keegstra by the narrowest of margins: 4-3. The majority of the 1990 court found both the CHRA and the Criminal Code provisions constitutional. However, Justice McLachlin penned a long and eloquent paean to freedom of expression, recounting its historical value as “an essential precondition of the search for truth,” a promoter of the “marketplace of ideas” and “an end in itself, a value essential to the sort of society we wish to preserve.”

Free-speechers hoped that, given another opportunity to exert her influence among an entirely different panel of SCC judges (she is the only member of the 1990 court still on the bench), she would be able to sway a majority to her 1990 views.

Instead, she herself has apparently abandoned those views, voting with a unanimous court (6-0) in the Whatcott case to uphold the main censorship clause of the Saskatchewan Human Rights Code.

February 28, 2013

“All rights guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms are subject to reasonable limitations”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:03

The Supreme Court of Canada demonstrated a lack of belief in the value of free speech in yesterday’s Whatcott ruling:

The very first line in the Supreme Court’s calamitous decision in the case of Saskatchewan (Human Rights Commission) v. Whatcott gives a clue to where it is going. “All rights guaranteed under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,” it declares, “are subject to reasonable limitations.”

This is a legal truism, but as always it is as important what the Court did not say. It did not choose to begin a ruling on an important freedom of speech case with a ringing affirmation of the importance of free speech, or what an extraordinary thing it is to place restrictions upon it.

Indeed, in its haste to get on with the limiting, it did not even pause to properly quote the section of the Charter that grants the state such authority. The Charter “guarantees” the rights set out in it, Section 1 declares, “subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” The limits don’t just have to be reasonable. They have to be “demonstrably justified.”

Where the Court’s view of such limits is expansive and approving, the Charter is grudging (“only”) and cautious (“demonstrably”). That’s as it should be. If we accept the bedrock premise of a free society, that government is its servant and not its master, then it is up to the state, always, to ask the citizens’ permission before it intrudes on their liberty, and to prove its necessity: it is never the citizen’s obligation to show why he may remain unmolested. That spirit is lamentably absent from the Court’s reasoning.

The headline really does say it all

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:51

Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent me a link to this article in the Toronto Star. I’m just gobsmacked:

Black police officer faces charges for not investigating racial taunts against himself
A black York Regional Police officer faces misconduct charges for his handling of a farm party turned ugly, when he was allegedly subjected to repeated racial taunts and told, “I would love to see that guy hanging from a tree.”

A black York Region officer faces Police Act charges for not investigating racial taunts thrown at him when he was called to a bush party.

Const. Dameian Muirhead, 33, is charged with three counts of misconduct for his handling of a farm party turned ugly, where he was allegedly subjected to repeated racial slurs and told, “I would love to see that guy hanging from a tree.”

Muirhead, an eight-year veteran, was charged with insubordination and discreditable conduct over the way he allegedly investigated the party on the Victoria Day long weekend in May 2011. A partygoer lodged the complaint, saying he was rudely treated — but Muirhead also faces a neglect of duty charge for failing to properly investigate the racial remarks.

A police disciplinary hearing which began Tuesday was told that Muirhead and other officers were sent to the party after a woman was seriously injured when run over by an off-road vehicle.

February 27, 2013

Parliamentary Budget Officer conducting “constitutional vandalism”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:58

Senator Anne Cools is displeased by the PBO’s ongoing legal and media campaign against the Federal government:

An independent senator says the parliamentary budget watchdog, Kevin Page, overstepped his mandate by taking the government to court in a battle for spending figures, and the Senate should force Page to withdraw the legal proceedings.

In a speech to the Senate Tuesday, Sen. Anne Cools argued that Page’s regular comments to reporters and more recent comments to his international counterparts about his battles with the government over spending figures were “provocative and inflammatory public statements” that are “intolerable and unacceptable.”

Page’s actions, Cools argued, were tantamount to contempt of Parliament, were a breach of parliamentary privilege and were affecting the Senate’s credibility to carry out its functions.

“Contemptuous and un-parliamentary,” she said of Page’s actions and comments, “they are constitutional vandalism.”

“They are inappropriate conduct from a Library officer under the direction of the Speakers of the Senate and the House of Commons. This Senate cannot accept this and should take some ‘shock-no-more’ actions.”

February 26, 2013

Budget cutting gets real in Ottawa

Filed under: Cancon, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 11:11

David Akin tweeted some news about upcoming budget cuts for various Canadian government agencies:

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