Quotulatiousness

June 4, 2012

BBC coverage of the Jubilee Thames Pageant nearly as bad as the CBC coverage

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:32

I was in the same room as the TV yesterday, which was tuned to the CBC’s “coverage” of the Queen’s Jubilee celebrations along the Thames River. Every time I paid a bit of attention, Peter bloody Mansbridge was committing another linguistic atrocity (HM-C-S Belfast? She’s a former Royal Navy ship, not an RCN vessel, Peter — oh, and she’s a light cruiser, not a “battle cruiser”). And aside from the Royal Barge, and the canoe from Peterborough, the boat that got the most attention was a bloody power boat that apparently was in a James Bond film. Crikey!

It seemed as though every appearance of a maple leaf had to be relayed to viewers — not, mind you, actual footage of the things they were talking about. The mandate seemed to be to keep the faces of the presenters front-and-centre all the time when they weren’t showing the Royal Barge. And on the odd occasion they’d show part of the flotilla, the CBC personalities felt the need to talk as much as possible even while they weren’t on camera.

From the National Post, Scott Stinson on the banality of it all:

Long after the royal barge had passed my vantage point near Chelsea Bridge on Sunday afternoon, I nipped into a London pub to warm up, dry off, and catch the rest of the proceedings on the television.

After the first few times someone on the BBC broadcast gushed about this or that aspect of the Thames Diamond Jubilee Pageant, I chalked it up to a mild case of homerism. The 1,000-boat flotilla was, after all, an impressive spectacle. Then I noticed how often the commentators were using the pronoun “we” when describing things, as in “we are all so anxious to catch a glimpse of Her Majesty.” So much for journalistic detachment. By the time one of the broadcasters was positively marvelling at the skill and ingenuity of the captain who was in the process of docking the royal barge, it was apparent that most of the Beeb’s broadcast team had gone right bloody native.

I mean, shouldn’t docking a boat be part of the job? Would we not expect that the person given the task of piloting the Queen up the Thames be better than decent at it? Yet, here was the commentator, oohing and aahing at the fact that the captain of the Spirit of Chartwell had pulled up alongside the dock and was now moving the boat sideways up to it for a gentle landing. “Look at that!,” he enthused. “It’s amazing!”

Jan Moir in the Daily Mail:

Turn the royal trumpets to the parp and piffle setting. Muffle the funeral drums. For on a molten grey stretch of the Thames, with a global television audience of millions watching, something died yesterday.

It was the BBC’s reputation as a peerless television broadcaster of royal events. It just could not survive under an onslaught of inanity, idiocy and full cream sycophancy uttered, muttered and buttered on thickly by a team of presenters who were encouraged to think that they were more important than the events unfolding around them.

Someone, somewhere thought that their celebrity personalities were enough to see them through this all-day broadcast. How very wrong they were.

‘I’ve just spotted my 70-year-old dad out there,’ gurgled Sophie Raworth, as barges packed with senior royals and VIPs slid by, unremarked upon. Who was in all the other boats? We never did find out.

Yes, the BBC1 coverage of the Diamond Jubilee Thames Pageant was historical — historically awful.

[. . .]

What were Beeb bosses thinking? If ever an event was crying out for a Dimbleby to dimble nimbly in the shallows, with that trademark mixture of gravitas, humour and sagacity, then this was it.

Instead, we got Sophie Raworth and Matt Baker, bouncing around as if they were presiding over the jelly stall at a chimps’ tea party, somehow managing to sound patronising about nearly everything.

Alberta’s prosperity is also Canada’s prosperity

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:28

Stephen Gordon at the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative blog on another deliberate attempt to cast Alberta’s oil sands boom as being only good for Alberta and bad for the rest of Canada:

This didn’t pass my sniff test:

    The economic benefits of oil sands development, while considerable, are unevenly distributed across the country, making interprovincial tensions understandable. While provinces other than Alberta are projected to benefit, modelling by the Canadian Energy Research Institute projects that 94 per cent of the GDP impact of oil sands development will occur within Alberta. With so much benefit concentrated in one province, one can hardly call fast-tracking oil sands expansion a nation-building project. Little wonder that the promise of benefits from oil sands development is cold comfort for Ontarians and Quebeckers as the once-dominant manufacturing sector struggles to reinvent and revitalize itself.

Did you read “94 per cent of the GDP impact of oil sands development will occur in Alberta” and interpret it as “94 per cent of the economic benefits of oil sands development will occur in Alberta”? I’m convinced that that the vast majority of the people who read that passage on the Globe‘s op-ed page interpreted it that way. And I’m only slightly less convinced that the author meant his readers to interpret it that way. Of course, that would be the wrong interpretation.

For reasons I’ll get to later, there seems to be a concerted effort to convince Canadians that almost no-one outside Alberta is seeing any economic benefits from high oil prices. For the most part, these efforts appear to be enjoying some measure of success. But the fact of the matter is that the oil sands have increased incomes across Canada to an extent much greater than that paragraph implies.

June 3, 2012

Quebec case may force common-law couples into marriage

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:00

An interesting development in Quebec’s laws relating to common-law relationships:

Somewhere in North America, there is a place where little girls don’t give the slightest thought to what kind of wedding dress they’ll wear one day. A place where young men have never heard the expression: “why buy the cow when you can have the milk for free?” — because the milk is always free. A place where no one asks an unmarried couple expecting a baby if they’re getting hitched.

This place is the province of Quebec. The French language spoken here is no guarantee for romance. Couples are practical, and lovers treasure their individuality. Quebec has become one of the least marrying places in the world, thanks to the institution known as “de facto spouses.” But now, thanks to a bizarre legal case entangling a Quebec billionaire and his de facto spouse, the freedom to un-marry is under threat. More than 1 million Quebecois in this kind of relationship may soon be automatically married by the state, against their will.

De facto spouses are defined by Quebec’s law as two people who have been living together for a year or more without being married and who check the “couple” box on their income tax statement form. Quebec’s lawmakers have deliberately chosen not to give de facto couples the same rights and responsibilities that married couples have under the Law of Quebec, to preserve the freedom of choice. Upon the termination of a relationship, “no matter how long cohabitation has lasted, de facto spouses have no legal support obligation to each other, even if one spouse is in need and the other has a high income.” Quebec is the only province in Canada where spousal support payments are not recognized by law for de facto spouses.

June 2, 2012

The end of a weird week in Canadian journalism

Filed under: Cancon, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:26

David Akin on all the unusual happenings over the past week:

I suspect Alex felt that way because he and his staff had to deal with a) the ongoing battle between students and Premier Jean Charest b) a grisly murder that forced police in Montreal to issue an international warrant for kitten-killing gay porn star Luka Magnotta c) a freak rain storm that put 70 mm of water on the ground in 30 minutes pretty much flooding most of downtown Montreal for an afternoon. But enough of that, let’s get to God using a bear to deliver God’s own brand of justice [. . .]

“The corpse of a man eaten by a B.C. bear was that of a convicted killer, officials have confirmed.”

[. . .]

“46 mm of rain in half an hour floods Montreal.”

[. . .]

On Friday, heavy rain would contribute to flooding which would end up flooding and shutting down Toronto’s Union Station on Friday causing commuter chaos

[. . .]

The Montreal flash floods occurred as Quebec Premier Jean Charest was trying to broker a deal with post-secondary students who have been “on strike” for more than 3 months because they don’t want to pay an extra $350 or so a year in tuition — over five years. Charest has been over-patient. The students have been, as they say on St. Urbain Street, “stiff-necked”. So the two sides met and then talks broke down.

All that, plus the kitten-killing, body dismembering fugitive porn star…

May 30, 2012

Inter-provincial trade in wine comes a bit closer to legality

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Wine — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:13

Gloria Galloway in the Globe and Mail:

Private member’s bills rarely make it this far. But politicians of all stripes rose to echo Mr. Albas’s argument that an 80-year-old wrong needs to be made right.

It is an issue that he says he has been hearing about from his constituents — and from wine growers and lovers across Canada — since the election campaign that brought him to Ottawa for the first time last year.

“Every single winery owner that I have spoken with supports this legislation,” Mr. Albas said in an interview with The Globe and Mail, “especially the small family wineries whose production is so low that they can’t sell through the liquor control monopoly.”

As it stands, anyone who wants to send wine from one province to another for his own consumption must route it through a provincial or territorial liquor control board and must pay the associated taxes and markups.

If a tourist from Saskatchewan visits a winery in Ontario and likes what she is tasting, she is not legally permitted to take it home with her or mail a few bottles to herself. In fact, she could be thrown in prison for up to three months for doing so.

On the other hand, a tourist from Texas could visit the same winery and send crates of the stuff back to his home in Austin.

Update: Whoops. Not so fast … Colby Cosh just sent a twitter update that makes me sad:

Did the NDP really block the wine bill? Why is this occupying more than about 30 seconds of Parliament’s time?

Oh, that’s nice. Thanks, Mr. Mulcair. Good going: that’ll show those wine-swilling Tories who’s boss, won’t it?

Update, the second: Apparently the NDP’s over-enthusiastic supporters talked out the available time to prevent the bill being voted on. This is enough to kill it for this session. Nice, work socialist horde!

The bill would have been sent to the Senate and likely passed into law, if the NDP had agreed to collapse debate and send it to a vote.

Mr. Albas thought he had a deal to do just that because members from all sides of the House were enthusiastic about amending the Prohibition-era Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act that bans wineries across the country from sending their product to another province.

But six NDP MPs were so enthusiastic about their support for the bill, they used up all the available time in an apparent filibuster and Mr. Albas will now have to wait until the fall before he gets a second hour of debate and the chance to go to a vote.

An NDP spokesman said it was an honest mistake. Really? How absent-minded of them. Perhaps they should eat more oily fish.

‘‘This is the stuff that turns most Canadians off politics. It was completely uncalled for,” said Mr. Albas. “I’m disappointed the NDP used petty procedural games, rather than supporting the B.C. and Canadian wine industry.”

Update, 8 June: Well, somehow the filibuster didn’t stop the bill after all:

Canadians will soon be allowed to transport wines across provincial borders after MPs from all parties voted to support a private member’s bill to end the decades-old prohibition. Bill C-311, from British Columbia Tory MP Dan Albas, passed by a vote of 287-0 during third reading in the House of Commons Wednesday. The bill would also allow Canadians to shop for wines online and ship them across borders. “The wine industry has had this thorn in their side for 84 years. It’s time to free the grapes,” Mr. Albas told reporters before the vote. Under the 1928 Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act, transporting wines is punishable by a $200 fine or even jail time.

May 29, 2012

The fuzzy good intentions of equalization and the bad results

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:07

Peter Holle in the National Post, outlining the economic distortions of federal equalization payments in the recipient provinces:

Equalization, viewed critically, does no favours to either the funding or recipient provinces. After 50 years, outside transfers constitute an ever larger portion of the economies in have-not provinces. In an otherwise globally-oriented, market-driven world, Canada’s equalization program has encouraged the development of locally-oriented, public-sector driven economies.

Here are just a few ways that equalization provides incentives to harmful policy, stunting economic growth in the jurisdictions the policy means to help.

  • Inflating the public sector: Equalization has allowed recipient jurisdictions to create disproportionately larger public sectors because someone else is paying the bill. Manitoba’s public sector, for instance, employs 103 people per 1,000 residents, compared to a Canadian average of 84.
  • Politicizing spending. The external funding from equalization has allowed local politicians to build up vote-buying infrastructure with little political cost, by disconnecting taxation from benefit. Quebec’s $7-a-day daycare, and university tuition at less than half the Canadian average, would be unworkable without $7.4-billion in annual equalization subsidies from the rest of Canada.
  • Incentives for higher taxes. A path-breaking study by the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies showed that equalization rewards recipient provinces for imposing high and damaging tax rates, which deter private-sector investment and job creation. Manitoba, the only have-not province in Western Canada, has the highest income taxes in the region, and also has the lowest rate of private-sector investment.
  • Artificially inexpensive hydro power. By excluding the true value of renewable hydro energy revenues from the calculation of revenue capacity, the equalization formula rewards Manitoba and Quebec for charging artificially low domestic electricity prices. Below-market prices, in turn, encourage consumers to use more resources that otherwise would be conserved in response to accurate price signals.

A review of the War of 1812 (non-Canadian-centric version)

Filed under: Britain, Cancon, History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

The DiploMad appears to be blogging again, and for proof, here’s a neat little capsule of the War of 1812 without the Canadian aspect being treated as the most significant campaigning area of the war:

The war was brought about by British arrogance and American stupidity. The British were not reconciled to an independent United States, and could not take the place and its bombastic pronouncements about liberty seriously. They basically ignored the USA’s assertion of being a sovereign state, and proceeded to treat American ships and seaman as some sort of Brits gone rogue. The USA, for its part, could not understand that the British were in what they saw as a life-and-death struggle with Napoleon Bonaparte. We did not respect that. We reckoned we could trade and make deals with France, such as the spectacular Louisiana Purchase which filled Napoleon’s coffers and served his aim of helping create a huge potential rival to Britain, without raising British concerns or provoking them into action.

[. . .]

The British, despite the war in Europe managed to put together a more than credible military and naval force against the distant United States. The Americans, in turn, showed a talent that would serve us well in future wars by getting our act together at the last minute and putting on a damn good defense of the country. The US army, however, remained plainly horrendous throughout the war with its corrupt and politicized officer corps, and its half-baked, ill-planned and even worse executed invasion of Canada. The US also set the precedent of burning York — today’s Toronto — which led to the British burning of the nascent US capital which the army failed to defend. The army partially redeemed itself in the Battle of New Orleans, under the otherwise reprehensible Andrew Jackson (Note: Why is he on our $20 bill?)

The US navy, however, proved completely different, and did an amazing job of fighting off the much larger British navy, wreaking havoc on it, carrying the war into British waters, and even eliciting a warning from the Admiralty to the Royal Navy to avoid one-on-one combat with US ships. The US navy also fought a superb campaign on the Great Lakes which resulted in the British fleet withdrawing from those waters.

Minor quibble: the Royal Navy withdrew from Lake Erie, not from all the Great Lakes. Lake Ontario was still the scene of a major fleet-building contest with vessels of up to 130 guns under construction or entering service when the war ended.

May 26, 2012

Andrew Coyne on Harper’s real “hidden agenda”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:32

We’ve been hearing about Stephen Harper’s “hidden agenda” for nearly a decade and it’s about time for some of it to finally come to light — what’s the point of having a hidden agenda if you never actually implement any of it? Andrew Coyne thinks he’s detected the real thing:

It is becoming more difficult to accuse this government of having a hidden agenda. Not because it hasn’t tried, mind you. But while it remains as obtuse as ever about its intentions, the signs of an agenda are by now unmistakable. Where before it had attitudes, or at best stances, it is beginning to sprout what look remarkably like policies.

To be sure, they are modest, even piecemeal. They are often poorly communicated, where the Conservatives deign to communicate them at all. More often they are simply dropped on the unsuspecting public without consultation, or jammed through Parliament with little debate or scrutiny, quite apart from monstrosities like the omnibus bill.

But put them together and they have all the markings of an agenda:

  • Reform of Old Age Security, not only raising the age of eligibility by two years (starting in 2023, and phased in over six years) but offering higher benefits to those willing to keep working past the standard retirement age.
  • Free trade agreements, now being negotiated with virtually everything that moves: Europe, India, Japan, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the ASEAN group.
  • Reform of immigration policy, across every category: skilled immigrants, refugees, investors, entrepreneurs, with an emphasis on recruiting immigrants with demonstrable economic prospects.
  • Reform of employment insurance, announced this week, to give repeat users, in particular, fewer excuses to refuse available work.
  • Moreover, the government is at last beginning to implement the Red Wilson report on productivity, four years after it was delivered, with recent reforms opening the door to foreign takeovers in the telecommunications sector (for companies with less than 10% of the market), and raising the threshold asset value for automatic review of foreign takeovers to $1-billion.

May 25, 2012

Ottawa assault and robbery victim spent 75 days behind bars after 911 call

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:57

The Ottawa police have promised an investigation into this weird miscarriage of justice:

Ottawa police are investigating how an elderly victim of a vicious attack in his home ended up spending 75 days in jail after calling 911 for help.

Marian Andrzejewski, 74, called 911 after two men broke into his Ottawa apartment in October 2010, robbed him and punched him repeatedly.

But instead of getting help, Andrzejewski was scolded by the dispatcher when he struggled to communicate in broken English and ended up in handcuffs himself when police finally arrived.

H/T to Mike Brock for the link.

May 24, 2012

Giving up Canadian sovereignty: RCMP “to ease Canadians into the idea”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Under proposed new rules, US law enforcement could pursue suspects across the Canadian border and exercise police powers on Canadian soil:

According to an article in Embassy Magazine, the Harper government is moving forward on several initiatives that could give U.S. FBI and DEA agents the ability to pursue suspects across the land border and into Canada.

But, according to a RCMP officer, they’re doing it in “baby steps.”

“We recognized early that this approach would raise concerns about sovereignty, of privacy, and civil liberties of Canadians,” RCMP Chief Superintendent Joe Oliver, the Mounties’ director general for border integrity, told the Senate Committee on National Security and Defence on May 14.

“We said ‘Let’s take baby steps, let’s start with two agencies to test the concept, let’s demonstrate to Canadians and Americans that such an approach might work.”

Apparently the problem of suspected criminals fleeing into Canada has become so frequent that Stephen Harper has been persuaded to allow US officials to ignore the international boundary while in pursuit. Or perhaps it’ll only be used in “hot pursuit”. Or — rather more likely — any time a US official decides to exercise the rule. Oh, and the article also mentions that aerial surveillance of Canadian territory is also on the table. One has to assume that drone strikes will soon follow.

May 20, 2012

Self-serving demands for “more diversity” in judges

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:26

Karen Selick demolishes the case for mandatory diversity in appointing judges:

Even if the composition of the bench mirrored precisely the general population, this would still not address the complaint voiced by one former judge — himself a Sikh — that minority members feel “less understood or valued” by judges who aren’t of their own minority group. If nobody can understand or value anybody else unless they are members of the same minority group, we would have to take the additional step of matching judges to the personal characteristics of defendants or litigants. Whites would have to be judged by whites, blacks by blacks, aboriginals by aboriginals, and so on. In short, we’d need complete apartheid in our judicial system — hardly a formula for societal harmony.

Besides, litigants don’t come packaged in neat compartments. What if a gay, black, francophone, atheist male sued a straight, white, disabled, anglophone, Catholic female? It would clearly be impossible to find a judge whose personal characteristics matched both litigants. Would we need to appoint a panel of eight to ensure that all bases were covered?

The idea that people are incapable of empathy, understanding or compassion toward others different from themselves is manifestly false. We cry at movies precisely because we are able to empathize with the characters onscreen, even though we ourselves have never experienced the same trials, tribulations or skin colour. If white Canadians were genuinely indifferent or hostile toward the plight of different peoples, Canada would never have adopted a clause in its Charter of Rights and Freedoms outlawing discrimination and promoting affirmative action; it would not have enacted anti-discrimination laws in every province; and The Globe and Mail would not be clamouring for more minority judges.

May 18, 2012

Reputations take years to create, but can be destroyed overnight as Toronto Police have discovered

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

Chris Selley on how the Toronto G20 protest and the still amazingly bad police response has contributed to the decline in public support for all police organizations:

On July 6, 2010, 10 days after the disastrous G20 summit, Toronto’s City Council voted to “commend the outstanding work of [police] chief Bill Blair, the Toronto Police Service and the police officers working during the G20 Summit in Toronto,” and thank them for a “job well done.” The vote was 36-0. The yeas included then-Mayor David Miller and many other left-wing luminaries. At this point in the G20 post-mortem, this seems a bit hard to believe.

We know much more now about how poorly the security operation was planned and executed: This week’s report from Gerry McNeilly, director of Ontario’s Office of the Independent Police Review, lays it out in painstaking detail. But what we knew 10 days later was bad enough: Thugs had wreaked havoc at will; 400 borderline-hypothermic people were held for hours in the pouring rain for no good reason; police cars were burned; journalists were roughed up and arrested; untold numbers of people were randomly and improperly searched and arrested.

Yet no one on a decidedly left-leaning Council saw fit to vote against the absurd “job well done” commendation (though then-councillor Rob Ford, now Mayor, did complain that the police had been too nice). One has to wonder how much longer politicians’ traditional lockstep support for police is going to last last.

[. . .]

People still call the police in hope of honest and brave assistance, and they almost always get it. But in late March, Angus-Reid asked Canadians how much “confidence [they] have in the internal operations and leadership” of their police forces. A minority of 38% had “complete” or “a lot of” confidence in the RCMP. The number for municipal police forces, taken together, was 39%. That’s about half of what it was in the mid-1990s. The respective numbers in B.C. are below 30%.

If that’s not a credibility crisis, I don’t know what is. Politicians are generally not in the habit of blindly supporting entities with those kinds of approval ratings, and police ought to be worried about that for all kinds of reasons. One of the obvious keys to fixing the problem is, simply, accountability. And it is nowhere to be found — not from the officers who witnessed fellow officers’ misdeeds, not from the commanders, not from Chief Blair, and not from the federal politicians who foisted this debacle on an unprepared and unsuitable city.

At the bottom of this post you can find a litany of complaints about the police handling of the Toronto G20 protests.

Conservative arguments for legalization of marijuana

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

Frances Woolley at the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative blog:

Milton Friedman — Nobel Laureate in Economics and adviser to Ronald Reagan — supported legalizing and taxing marijuana. Stephen Easton’s classic paper advocating marijuana legalization was published by the Fraser Institute. Why do so many right-leaning economists favour marijuana legalization?

Conservative economists typically believe that a person is a best judge of what is in his or her own interests. From this premise it follows that the government should not try to constrain or influence people’s behaviour. Yes, marijuana use has well-documented negative side effects, from memory loss to male breast growth. Yet if fully informed individuals decide that these personal costs are worth accepting for the benefits that marijuana use brings, the government should respect that choice. As Willie Nelson says “I smoke pot and it is none of the government’s business.”

[. . .]

Another reason for conservatives to favour legalization and taxation of marijuana is that they do not like paying taxes. Criminalization costs. According to a 2005 US study, legalization would save state and local governments $5.3 billion annually in reduced enforcement costs, while the federal government would gain another $2.4 billion federally. Locking up people for possession of a small amount of marijuana is a waste of resources, and good fiscal conservatives deplore waste.Taxing marijuana would be a money-maker: $6.2 billion annually, if marijuana were taxed at rates similar to those on alcohol and tobacco, according to this same 2005 report.Those revenues could be used to reduce deficits, or fund reductions in the taxes paid by conservative economists.

Conservatives have lots of good reasons to favour legalization. The people who should be fighting legalization are the small scale growers: little family-run organic pot farms wouldn’t stand a chance against industrial scale agri-business.

May 17, 2012

Iceland adopting the Canadian dollar? It’s more likely than you think

Filed under: Cancon, Economics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:18

Tristin Hopper in the National Post on the continued interest in Iceland for a currency union with Canada:

Icelanders are united on the need to ditch the krona. However, the country’s reigning Social Democrats want the Euro, while the opposition Progressive Party has been pushing for the Canadian dollar since last summer. As resource economies, Canada and Iceland’s economic cycles are more likely to be in sync, loonie proponents argue. Also, Canada is home to about 200,000 people of Icelandic descent, more than anywhere else in the world. “I see that connection helping the public in Iceland accepting a new currency,” said Mr. Gudjonsson.

So far, the loonie appears to be winning. A March Gallup poll showed public approval for the loonie easily pulling ahead of the U.S. dollar, the euro and the Norwegian krone.

The mechanics of the swap would be the easy part. A party of Icelanders officials would simply fly to a Canadian bank and arrange a $300-million withdrawal. The final pile of multicoloured bills — no larger than two photocopiers — would then be shipped across the North Atlantic and loaded into ATMs and bank vaults over a weekend. (While there is far more than $300-million in the Icelandic money system, the country currently only has $300-million worth of krona coins and bills in circulation.)

Short of imposing its own Iceland-style currency controls, the Bank of Canada has no choice in the matter. “We will do it unilaterally without asking,” said Mr. Valfells. “It’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”

Update: In a totally unrelated development, if Iceland adopts the loonie to replace the krona, we may get more interesting stories like this one from our new Icelandic friends. It’s got all sorts of elves, norse gods, and politicians. Much more fun than our current troll-versus-troll stories out of Ottawa.

Official response to UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food

Filed under: Cancon, Food, Government, Health, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:09

As you’ll know if you’ve been visiting the blog for a while, I’m not a cheerleader for the federal government and I often disagree with their policies and statements. However, I can’t find much to disagree with in this:

May 16, 2012 (OTTAWA, ON) — The Honourable Leona Aglukkaq, Minister of Health, and Minister of the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency, today issued the following statement:

Today I met with Olivier De Schutter, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food.

As an aboriginal person from the North, I was insulted that Mr. Schutter chose to “study” us, but chose not to “visit” us.

In fact, Mr. De Schutter confirmed to me that he did not visit a single Arctic community in Canada during nearly two weeks of travel within Canada.

I asked him what stance he would take in his report on uninformed, international attacks on the seal and polar bear hunt that make it harder for aboriginal hunters to earn a livelihood. I told him that I would be reviewing his final report closely, to see if he makes any recommendations to activist groups to stop interfering in the hunting and gathering of traditional foods.

I was concerned that he had not been fully informed of the problems with the discontinued Food Mail program that subsidized the shipping of tires and skidoo parts, as opposed to Nutrition North, which improves access to nutritious and perishable foods.

He made several suggestions that would require the federal government to interfere in the jurisdiction of other levels of government. It was clear that he had little understanding of Canada’s division of powers between the federal, provincial and municipal levels of government despite his extensive briefings with technical officials from the Government of Canada.

Our government is surprised that this organization is focused on what appears to be a political agenda rather than on addressing food shortages in the developing world. By the United Nations’ own measure, Canada ranks sixth best of all the world’s countries on their human development index. Canadians donate significant funding to address poverty and hunger around the world, and we find it unacceptable that these resources are not being used to address food shortages in the countries that need the most help.

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