Quotulatiousness

September 29, 2011

Quebec may create its own gun registry

Filed under: Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:10

Matt Gurney examines the Quebec government’s declared intention to create a provincial gun registry:

In July, Quebec’s Public Safety Minister Robert Dutil told reporters that his government was considering a “Plan B” in the (highly probable) event that the federal Tories scrapped the long-gun registry — the creation of a provincial registry. Quebec is particularly sensitive to crimes committed by firearm, and has been more wedded than most provinces to the faulty notion that registration provides public-safety benefits. The Supreme Court has already ruled that firearms registration is a federal responsibility due to the public safety nature of gun control, but Quebec could theoretically try to establish a registry for firearms that treats them as simple property, no different than dogs, cats or boats. It would be a political stunt only … but then again, that’s all the registry has been since the beginning: A costly act of political theatre in which politicians impose burdensome red tape on lawful firearms owners and proclaim society somehow safer as a result.

September 28, 2011

Toronto: paradise of the high-profit, cellar-dwelling sports franchise

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Sports — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:11

Last year, I posted a bit of Toronto-baiting, referring to the town as the place “where professional sports go to be embalmed”. In the comment thread to that post, “Lickmuffin” set me straight about just why Toronto teams are so bad — the answer is that Toronto fans expect no more of them, and are happy to pay for mediocrity. Stephen Marche goes a few steps further on that line (largely proving Lickmuffin’s point):

It’s a given that the true fan goes to games not for the necessarily occasional thrill of winning, but for the quotidian experience of losing — a truth articulated originally and beautifully by Nick Hornby in Fever Pitch. Losing in Toronto, however, is an unremitting condition. The CFL team, the Argonauts, is so bad that when I recently found a friend of mine betting on it, I immediately wondered if it was time for an intervention about his gambling addiction. As it stands, the Argonauts are 2 and 6 3 and 9. The Blue Jays this year aren’t completely terrible, but when you’ve said that, you’ve said everything. They may be a rising power in the East, as many claim, but they sure haven’t risen yet. The Raptors are still in their post-Bosh wilderness (not that the Bosh period was a golden age), and Toronto FC currently rests at the bottom of the Eastern Conference. The Leafs, who matter to Torontonians more than all the other teams combined, have not won the Stanley Cup since 1967, and they haven’t made the playoffs in a franchise-record six seasons. The only team with a longer dry spell is the Florida Panthers. The Leafs’ major source of hope seems to be Brian Burke himself, but when the major source of your dreams is a front-office guy, you are in a dark place. Cheering a GM, to me, is hitting rock bottom.

And this in Canada’s biggest city, where hockey matters more than baseball in Boston or basketball in Indiana or football in Texas. The only other places where sports dwell so near the most profound and abiding national questions are rugby in New Zealand, which recoups the warrior culture of the Maori, and football in Buenos Aires, where the slumdog Boca Juniors battle the uptown Millonarios in a never-ending class war. Maybe Real Madrid against Barcelona could be added to that list, but nobody else. People who were surprised that Vancouver burned after the Stanley Cup playoffs last year are unaware of the history of the sport in Canada. Of the 10 biggest riots in Canadian history, six began at hockey games.

[. . .]

So who can blame Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment, the business that controls the Leafs and the Raptors, for following that oldest and truest of rules: Never give a sucker an even break? The most recently released financial reports, published by the Toronto Star in 2007 and which were neither confirmed nor denied by the privately held MLSE, suggest they run a profit margin of more than 20 percent. Before we start hacking away at the irresponsible evil-capitalist angle, however, we should recognize that the majority shareholder in MLSE is the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Fund (although they are currently looking to sell); the profits of MLSE have paid for the retirement of a lot of hardworking people, so it’s good that they’re good at business. And they are excellent business people.

September 26, 2011

Ontario election mechanics: how to decline your ballot

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

If you have as uninspiring a selection of candidates running in your riding as I do, you may feel like there’s no point in voting. You do, however, have an alternative: you can effectively vote for “None of the above” if you decline your ballot:

     53. An elector who has received a ballot and returns it to the deputy returning officer declining to vote, forfeits the right to vote and the deputy returning officer shall immediately write the word “declined” upon the back of the ballot and preserve it to be returned to the returning officer and shall cause an entry to be made in the poll record that the elector declined to vote. R.S.O. 1990, c. E.6, s. 53.

A recent article in the Ottawa Citizen explains why it may matter to publicize the number of declined ballots rather than just lumping declined ballots in with blank or spoiled ones:

Ontario’s Chief Electoral Officer is neglecting to tell voters about a crucial right to choose “none of the above” in the upcoming election, says a third-party watchdog.

The right to decline a ballot is enshrined in Ontario’s election act, says Democracy Watch spokesman Duff Conacher, but is unpublicized by the agency and its head, Greg Essensa.

Whereas spoiled ballots are rejected and considered cast by “stupid” people who “don’t know how to mark an ‘X’ in the box,” says Conacher, declined ballots are interpreted much more clearly.

They are the product of active, but dissatisfied, voters.

“Let’s assume five per cent of voters are not turning up now because they don’t support the current parties and their platform,” Conacher said in an interview. “If they did turn out and that was reported on election night, you’re going to see parties fall over themselves to find out what those five per cent want. Right now they don’t because those people stay at home.”

H/T to Jon, my former virtual landlord, for providing the links.

September 25, 2011

Police “told her she had to stay tied up until they could document the scene, which she said took five hours”

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:35

A new lawsuit has been filed in the Russell Williams case:

Laurie Massicotte was a neighbour of Williams in Tweed, Ontario, and was bound, stripped and sexually assaulted in September 2009.

The Toronto Star reported, the more than $7-million law suit filed on Friday claims police failed to provide her with any information about the identity of her assailant while he remained her neighbour for five months following the assault.

Massicottee told the Star, it was only after her assault that she heard another woman who lived on the street had been sexually assaulted twelve days before she was attacked.

She also said after she called the police, they told her she had to stay tied up until they could document the scene, which she said took five hours.

The police left a rape victim tied up for five hours? No wonder she’s suing the Ontario Provincial Police!

September 24, 2011

Canadian military: “the bureaucratic tail is wagging the Parliamentary dog”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:48

Christie Blatchford looks at the amazing ability of the military bureaucracy to frustrate, delay, obfuscate, and disobey their parliamentary masters:

Written by distinguished military scholar and veteran Dr. Jack English, it shows how the bureaucracy in Ottawa — an incestuous nest of regular army bosses with turf to protect and intractable civil servants — has consistently ignored or thwarted government directives to increase the size of the reserves.

What’s more, either those defence ministers whose pledges came to nought had the collective attention span of gnats, or they failed to grow a set of nuts sufficient to demand their instructions be followed, or they were simply shifted within Cabinet and the new fellow came in.

Any way you look at it, Dr. English says, the bureaucracy is calling the shots.

In the result, despite pledges to grow the reserves, the militia part-time head count remains still at about 16,500, or, as Dr. English wryly notes, about the size of National Defence Headquarters, or NDHQ as it’s called.

By the way, just getting the damn numbers out of NDHQ is a trick.

[. . .]

Virtually everyone who has studied the Canadian army, and their number is legion, agrees on a couple of things: The bureaucracy is obscenely bloated, far out of proportion for the size of the army; the citizen soldier, who until called up to full-time service costs only about 20% of the regular one, is a bargain for the taxpayer; the militia is more diverse, ethnically and otherwise, than the regular army.

September 22, 2011

This is why the Ontario election has been such a snooze-fest

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:56

Scott Stinson explains that there is barely any difference between the warmed-over bowl of snot being offered by Premier Dalton McGuinty and the bucket of snot that Tim Hudak’s Progressive Conservatives would like you to choose instead:

Mr. McGuinty himself put it this way: “He’s basically saying, ‘Whatever McGuinty’s doing on health care, I’ll do that. Whatever McGuinty’s doing on education, I’ll do that.’”

This is not entirely true, since there are certain differences in the way the governing Liberals and the opposition PCs would address each file — Mr. Hudak, to pick one example, vows to scrap the Local Health Integration Networks that were brought in under the McGuinty government. But on the whole, both men say they would govern Ontario, a province with a recently ballooned deficit and with a highly optimistic plan to return to balance, by spending the same amount on its most costly ministries.

This, however, does not make for a particularly compelling battle cry. “A Vote for Hudak Is A Vote For Incremental Change!” Or “Vote Liberal: We’re Pretty Much Like the Other Guy But Our Signs Are a More Pleasing Red.” And so, the leaders would much rather play up their differences.

This may be the first election since I became eligible to vote that I will not bother to go to the polls. I have the incumbent PC candidate, a Liberal, an NDP’er, and a Green. That is, centre-left, centre-left, left, and enviro-fascist. Such a choice!

Update: I’m clearly not alone in my distate for all the electoral options:

Hudak has forfeited a slam-dunk opportunity to ride that conservative tidal wave that made Rob Ford mayor and gave Stephen Harper a majority. He could’ve run on a simple “respect for taxpayers” platform, promising to axe the HST. That alone would’ve carried the day. Instead, he yammers on about chain gangs.

Come Oct. 6, I’m choosing option “D” on Ontario’s multiple-choice quiz: None of the Above.

I’m declining my ballot.

September 21, 2011

“Our existing income tax structure is nothing short of crazy”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:50

That’s Kevin Milligan in the Globe and Mail talking about the Canadian tax structure:

Here are five nuggets of information Canadians should keep in mind as the high income taxation discussion unfolds. [. . .]

Second, our existing income tax structure is nothing short of crazy. The graph shows the marginal tax rate (the tax owed on the last dollar earned) across different income levels for a two-child family in Manitoba in 2010, the clawback of both federal and provincial refundable tax credits. (Similar graphs for more provinces are here.) What redistributive goal is such a bizarre tax structure designed to achieve? A strong argument can be made that we should improve and reform our existing income tax structure before slapping more confusion on top of it.

Third, the threshold at which one reaches the highest tax bracket is exceedingly low in Canada compared to other countries. In the United Kingdom, one reaches the highest tax bracket of 50 per cent at the Canadian dollar equivalent of $234,000. In the United States, currently the highest federal rate of 35 per cent is reached at incomes of $379,150 (U.S.). In Canada, the highest federal rate is 29 per cent, reached only at $128,800. Just to reach the level of income tax progressivity observed in the United States under President George W. Bush, Canada would need to increase this high income threshold dramatically.

Tories drop “lawful access” provisions from omnibus crime bill

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:16

That’s a bit of good news on the civil liberties front:

A controversial Internet surveillance bill has been omitted from the federal Conservative party’s proposed crime legislation.

Today, Canadian Minister of Justice and Attorney General Rob Nicholson held a press conference to introduce the Conservatives’ promised omnibus crime act, titled The Safe Streets and Communities Act, which focuses on crime and terrorism. However, an expected component of the act regarding Internet surveillance known as “Lawful Access” legislation was nowhere to be found.

The set of Lawful Access bills would have warranted Canadian law enforcement and intelligence agencies the power to acquire the personal information and activity of web users from internet service providers (ISPs). ISPs would also be required by an additional provision to install surveillance equipment on their networks.

The legislation would essentially give law enforcement the ability to track people online without having to obtain a warrant. The federal NDP and Green parties, and civil liberties groups among others decried the bill as overly-invasive, dangerous and potentially costly for internet users.

That’s the good news. The rest of the bill, as Grace Scott points out, is awash with “tough on crime” noises:

The Safe Streets and Communities Act will increase penalties for sex offenders, those caught with possession or producing illicit drugs for the purposes of trafficking, and intends to implement tougher sentencing on violent and repeat youth crime. It also plans to eliminate the use of conditional sentences, or house arrest, for serious and violent crimes.

Report shows military bureaucracy defied government orders

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:34

It’s not really a surprise that the bureaucrats don’t want to increase the size of the militia, but it is surprising that they’ve been willing to ignore direct government orders on the subject:

Canada’s bloated military bureaucracy has consistently defied explicit orders from government ministers and failed to increase the size of the army militia as directed.

The accusation is made in a scorching but carefully documented report done by pre-eminent military scholar Jack English for the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute and obtained in advance of its release Wednesday by only a few media outlets, including Postmedia.

It is a “wretched saga” that Mr. English describes as marked by “sandbagging, obstruction, futile wheel-spinning, and endlessly wasted staff effort.”

Using statements made by a series of defence ministers and recommendations either from special commissions or in government “White Papers” — all of them pledging or urging that the part-time militia or reserves, whose members most proudly call themselves citizen-soldiers, would grow — Mr. English shows how bureaucrats and leaders within the regular army, who saw any move to increase the militia as a threat, stubbornly stymied the wishes of their political masters.

In the numbers game, NDHQ has drawn level with the entire militia force, and like all bureaucracies, wants to continue to grow.

September 16, 2011

No free speech, please, we’re Canadian

Filed under: Cancon, Education, Law, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:36

Ken at Popehat has a lovely summary of the “all Jews should be sterilized” fracas at York University:

Pity poor Professor Cameron Johnson at York University. He was just trying to make this fundamentally Canadian concept clear to the students in the class he was teaching by giving examples of unacceptable opinions. Really, reminding them that some opinions are unacceptable was, in the Canadian context, an act of great patriotism, akin to starting an American lecture with the Pledge of Allegiance and possibly a barbecue. In the course of being so very Canadian, Prof. Johnson mentioned that the sentiment “all Jews should be sterilized” was “unacceptable.”

[. . .]

By uttering the words, Prof. Johnson committed speechcrime. That’s a strict liability crime; intent is irrelevant. Moreover, in thinking that he could utter a series of offensive words by putting them into a specific disapproving and pedagogical context, Prof. Johnson committed a hate crime against the Moron-Canadian community, which is too stupid to grasp context, and the Entitled-Canadian community, which believes that it is un-Canadian to require them to pay close enough attention to follow context. Prof. Johnson knew or should have known that his class of 450 people would include members of the Moron-Canadian and Entitled-Canadian community.

And indeed it did — in the form of Sarah Grunfeld, a member of the Moron-Insipid-Entitled-Canadian community. Sarah Grunfeld was outraged to hear, sort of, that her professor thought that all Jews should be sterilized, and started quite a stir, complaining to York University officials and various community members. Tumult and inquisition ensued. The Canadian media acted in an appallingly un-Canadian manner, focusing on the so-called “context” of Professor Johnson’s words and the utterly irrelevant detail that he was Jewish. Grunfeld, raised by her actions into a position of leadership in the Entitled-, Insipid-, and Moron-Canadian communities, did her best to set them back on the path of right thinking

How not to run an election campaign

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:21

I’ve been referring to Progressive Conservative leader Tim Hudak as “McGuinty Lite” for a few months now. Christina Blizzard has the same nickname for him:

He wants all-day kindergarten, has no problem with Muslim prayer in schools — and won’t talk about a greater role for the private sector in health care.

Dalton McGuinty?

Nope. It’s Dalton Light — aka Tim Hudak.

The beleaguered PC leader seems stuck.

The wheels on his campaign bus just don’t have any traction.

He went into the campaign 12 points ahead in the polls. Now, nine days into the campaign, he’s fighting to stay even with McGuinty.

Yet even this, “me-too,” campaign, has been branded as “Tea Party North,” by the Liberals.

Hudak has failed Politics 101.

I have two theories to account for this (neither of which is particularly convincing). First theory: there is some really nasty surprise waiting to be sprung on the premier soon after the election, and Hudak wants to avoid being the patsy. Second theory: Hudak has become really comfortable as leader of the opposition and doesn’t want to risk becoming premier.

Either of those, or perhaps Hudak is really a sleeper agent of the Liberal Party. That might account for it . . . he’s being called a “Tea Party” candidate, but it must be homeopathic tea, as there’s no strength to it at all. It’s been diluted down to nothingness.

Ontario’s clean energy Potemkin village

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:50

John Ivison reports on a recent photo op by Premier Dalton McGuinty:

The solar energy company touted this week by Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty as a flagship of the province’s clean energy economy has halted production because of slow demand.

Mr. McGuinty was flanked by Eclipsall Energy Corp.’s workforce when he visited its Scarborough solar panel plant Tuesday, but there was no mention that the production line is temporarily shut down. When my colleague Tamsin McMahon visited the plant she found the reception desk was empty, the cafeteria was closed and only a handful of employees milling around inside the sparsely furnished building.

Leo Mednik, Eclipsall’s chief financial officer, said the production line halt is because the company has already completed its current order book. “It’s no secret that the market is slow and there have been delays. That’s part of it — part of it is logistics. Our production team went through our purchased inventory a lot quicker than expected,” he said.

Not only is the plant not working to capacity: it’s only working at all because of government subsidies:

The Liberal government’s efforts have created jobs — though the 20,000 number touted by Mr. McGuinty seems highly questionable, far less the 50,000 he says will be created by the end of next year. In addition, they are hardly high wage, high skilled jobs the Premier claims (Eclipsall pays 20% over minimum wage to its workers, who assemble glass and solar cells imported from Asia, thereby qualifying for the Liberal Green Energy Act’s 60% domestic content rule).

The question is: how sustainable are these jobs? Mr. Mednik admitted that if the domestic content rule was removed, Eclipsall and other Ontario manufacturers would not be able to survive. “Frankly, it would be very difficult for any start-up to compete” against cheaper Chinese producers, he said.

He said it is a question of when, rather than if, the 60% threshold is removed. Both the European Union and Japan have taken the FIT program to the World Trade Organization and want the local content requirements removed. They claim this Buy Ontario provision is a prohibited subsidy. The FIT program might also soon become subject to a NAFTA dispute case, after American renewable company Mesa Power Group said it would file a complaint.

September 15, 2011

Why first-gen electric vehicles will be a hard sell for Canadians

Filed under: Cancon, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

It’s not just that (at least in Ontario) we’re facing potentially huge electricity price hikes to pay for our new alternative energy strategy, it’s also that electric cars don’t handle winter weather very well:

On Wednesday, Jan. 26 a major snowstorm hit Washington D.C. Ten-mile homeward commutes took four hours. If there had been a million electric cars on American roads at the time, every single one of them in the DC area would have ended up stranded on the side of the road, dead. And, before they ran out of power, their drivers would have been forced to turn off the heat and the headlights in a desperate effort to eek out a few more miles of range.

This illustrates the biggest drawback of BEVs, which is not range, but refueling time. A few minutes spent at a gas station will give a conventional car 300 to 400 miles of range. In contrast, it takes 20 hours to completely recharge a Nissan Leaf from 110V house current. An extra-cost 240V charger shortens this time to 8 hours. There are expensive 480V chargers that can cut this time to 4 hours, but Nissan cautions that using them very often will shorten the life of the car’s batteries.

No doubt some conventional cars ran out of gas while trapped in the massive traffic jams that occurred in and around the nation’s capital the night of January 26. However, a two-gallon can of gasoline can get a stalled conventional car moving again in a few minutes. In contrast, every dead BEV would have had to be loaded on flatbed tow truck and taken somewhere for many hours of recharging before it could be driven again.

Nissan claims that the range of a Leaf is about 100 miles. However, in their three-month extended road test, Car and Driver magazine obtained an average range from a full charge of 58 miles. Cold weather and fast driving can shorten this to as little as 30 miles.

National Post headline funnies

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Education, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:19

The article discusses a day planner that was distributed to students at a Toronto primary school. The planner included a printed version of an online “Days of Significance” calendar that had references to sex workers, female genital mutilation and Palestinian solidarity. The board agreed with the complaint that this material was not appropriate for a kindergarten-through-grade 5 audience (although they did not say whether the planners were being withdrawn). The National Post headline, however conveys a slightly different message:

Sex workers, genital mutilation not suitable for children: TDSB

I should hope that sex work and FGM would be considered unsuitable!

September 13, 2011

TV ads in Canada required to tone down the volume

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 17:19

I don’t watch a lot of TV (except during football season), but I used to find TV ads in the evening seemed a lot louder than the programs they ran with. This will change:

The number of submissions was unusually numerous for a CRTC notice of comment, and 10 times higher than the complaints it received the previous three years combined.

“Broadcasters have allowed ear-splitting ads to disturb viewers and have left us little choice but to set out clear rules that will put an end to excessively loud ads,” the CRTC chairman, Konrad von Finckenstein, said in a release on Tuesday.

“The technology exists, let’s use it.”

The commission says 2009’s international standard for measuring and controlling television signals will apply to minimize fluctuations in loudness between programming and commercials.

Under the standard, broadcasters will have to ensure that both programs and ads are transmitted at the same volume.

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