Quotulatiousness

April 24, 2012

Colby Cosh on the “Alberta surprise”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:53

From his most recent column at Maclean’s:

An Alberta astronaut returning from Titan and seeing the result of last night’s election would say “Meh, so what else is new? The PCs carried 61 of 87 seats? Kind of an off year for them, I guess.” Yet the ostensibly boring, familiar outcome wrong-footed much of the media and absolutely all the pollsters. Even PC insiders, correctly detecting a last-minute shift away from the Wildrose Party heirs-presumptive, envisioned a much smaller vote share than the 44 per cent Alison Redford’s party achieved. The public polling firms all botched the job, with none forecasting anything but a Wildrose majority even on the final weekend.

The Wildrose Party’s final count of 17 seats must surely leave its braintrust, heavily stocked with Conservative Party of Canada veterans, obliterated with horror. The CPC has built a pretty good electoral machine, but as old Ralph Klein hand and Wildrose supporter Rod Love reminded CBC, the Alberta PC brand is the most successful in the country. He probably could have gone even further afield if he wanted to. (On August 24, 2014, the PCs will officially become the longest continuously serving government in the annals of Confederation.) In 1993 the PCs were in trouble late, but succeeded in outflanking a popular Liberal opposition and running against their own record. They did it again in 2012. Redford succeeded in making herself the “change” candidate — though not without help from the Wildrose insurgents, who suffered late “bozo eruptions” of the sort the CPC itself has long since succeeded in extinguishing.

Update: Even Colby can’t seem to avoid the “Ten things” meme:

1. Proportional representation just won itself a whole passel of new right-wing fans.

2. Alberta Liberal morale remained high throughout an election in which pollsters warned continually of disaster. And the pollsters proved to be almost exactly right about this (if nothing else). Yet even as the mortifying results rolled in, Alberta Liberal morale still remained high. Then their egomaniac not-really-Liberal disaster of a leader, Raj Sherman, won his seat by the skin of his teeth. This means he will not have to be replaced unless an awful lot of people smarten up fast. Alberta Liberal morale after this event? Easily, easily at its highest point in ten years. “Please, sir, may I have another?”

[. . .]

5. Those who did boycott the Senate election seem awfully proud of themselves, because it was a “meaningless” election. Why, one wonders, does it have to be meaningless? The “progressive” parties could have agreed on a single Senate candidate in advance; if they had done so, that candidate would certainly have ended up first in the queue, and provided an excellent test of Stephen Harper’s integrity, which I am told is much doubted.

The problem is that Harper might pass the test, you say? Then what’s the harm? You get some smart, popular left-wing independent speaking for Alberta in the Senate? That’s bad for “progressives” how?

I’m still waiting for the definitive post-election analysis of why all the polls were so far off: I didn’t see a single poll in the last two weeks of the election that didn’t have Danielle Smith’s Wildrose Party in clear majority territory. Nobody was predicting another PC victory in that time period (or if they were, the national media wasn’t picking it up).

April 21, 2012

“Alberta appears headed for its fourth change of government in its 107-year history”

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:18

Lorne Gunter in the Edmonton Sun on the last public opinion poll numbers before Monday’s election:

Alberta appears headed for its fourth change of government in its 107-year history. The Tories’ 41-year rule seems set to end on Monday.

Wildrose still leads the Tories by 10 points, 41% to 31%.

Wildrose has fallen five points since last week – not surprising, perhaps, given the battering the party took early in the week when two of its candidates badly fumbled issues of gay rights and racism.

What is perhaps surprising, though, is that the Tories have not been the only beneficiaries of Wildrose’s tough week. While Premier Alison Redford and crew rose two percentage points between Week 3 and Week 4, so too did the Alberta Liberals under Raj Sherman. The NDP under Brian Mason also climbed a point.

April 19, 2012

The (richly deserved) end of the Tory era in Alberta

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:53

Unless all the polls are way off, the election in Alberta will see the eternal rule of the Progressive Conservatives finally come to an end. But as desperate times call for desperate measures, the Tories have unleashed the last of their secret weapons to hold back the Wildrose barbarians — perhaps the most embarrassing political video ever posted. David J. Climenhaga saves you the pain of watching the video:

If you have any doubts left there are only four more sleeps before the end of the Progressive Conservative Era in Alberta, look no further than the video and website called “I never thought I’d vote PC.”

Whether or not the PCs under Alison Redford had anything to do with this vain effort to encourage hip, edgy young people to vote for the clapped out Conservative party in a last-ditch effort to prevent a Wildrose Apocalypse, there could be no surer sign of the imminent demise of the once mighty Tory dynasty.

I mean, really, telling young voters you understand why they’d “rather gouge their eyes out than vote Conservative” in an effort to get them to vote Conservative is just … embarrassing.

[. . .]

After this pathetic excuse for a Tory campaign, the tattered remnants of the Alberta Conservatives have less dignity left than Saddam Hussein when he was hauled out of his hidey-hole in Tikrit by the soldiers of the U.S. Fourth Infantry Division! This little video squib is just the final excruciating evidence before our eyes notice that the moribund Conservatives’ best-before date has passed.

I’m not kidding about the quality of the video — I couldn’t make it past the first minute before feeling too humiliated on behalf of the folks who made it and I had to shut it off. If you want to watch it in all its cringe-inducing glory, David has it embedded on his site.

April 9, 2012

The Royal Canadian Mint: now they’re just poking fun at US espionage agencies

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:44

Remember the last time that a Canadian coin was the subject of an espionage warning from the US Department of Defence because the poppy appeared to be “filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology”? The Royal Canadian Mint may get a radiation warning for their newest coin:

The image of a dinosaur whose remains were discovered in Alberta’s Peace Country will be featured on our newest quarter — the first Canadian coin with a glow-in-the dark picture.

The quarter, being released by the Royal Canadian Mint April 16, features Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai, a large herbivore whose bone fragments were discovered by Grande Prairie, Alta., science teacher Al Lakusta in 1974.

He plans to pick up one of the new coins for his 10-year-old grandson.

“I think almost anybody who reads about it thinks, ‘We can’t wait to try this,’ ” he said Sunday from his Grande Prairie home.

April 7, 2012

“[Dalton] McGuinty … has led Ontario from the commanding heights almost to the low-rent district of the Canadian economy”

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

Conrad Black, on the dangers of regional politics played out at the national and international level:

One of the points I was trying to make in last week’s column, in general support of Pierre Trudeau’s efforts to make both official languages present in all parts of the country, was that in any federal state, some concessions to particular regional concerns are necessary or the country will fall apart, or even atomize. In a little over a century, this fate has split Norway from Sweden, Singapore from Malaysia, Bangladesh from Pakistan, the Czechs from the Slovaks and, most painfully, the Sudanese and South Sudanese.

This was what made the Quebec separatist threat so dangerous; though there was never much prospect of heavy violence, there was a danger of the permanent diminution of the country after a prolonged and immobilizing constitutional crisis. Of course, the separatist leaders greatly and treacherously underestimated the complexities and problems of any such step, and aggravated the problem with trick referendum questions about seeking authority to negotiate sovereignty and association with Canada: Simultaneously to eat and retain the same rich cake.

[. . .]

The Copenhagen Environmental Conference of 2009 was probably the most inane and redundant international conference in all history, as every climate alarmist capable of crawling to a television studio or buttonholing a journalist (except perhaps for Canada’s inimitable Gwyn Dyer), competed in foreseeing the imminence, almost literally, of the fall of the sky. But more demeaning by far at Copenhagen was the spectacle of the premiers of Canada’s two most populous provinces, Dalton McGuinty and Jean Charest, attacking Alberta’s oil sands in that over-suggestible ideological environment infested by kooks and charlatans.

The oil sands must be developed, and a pipeline built either into the U.S. or to the West Coast to transport the oil to market. These projects must be managed with great care for the environment. But Canada’s manifest destiny as an energy exporter cannot be held hostage by eco-terrorists, nor by the economic growth of one Canadian region being stunted by the slovenly dependence of other regions on an artificially depreciated Canadian dollar. Intra-Canadian partisanship and regional rivalries must end at the border and the water’s edge.

The antics of McGuinty, who has led Ontario from the commanding heights almost to the low-rent district of the Canadian economy, blaming the prosperity of Alberta for raising the value of the Canadian dollar and inconveniencing Ontario, is an outrage. The new federal NDP leader, Thomas Mulcair, has been uttering something perilously close to the same inexcusable flimflam. Alberta, per capita, has done more than any other province to carry the cost of federalism, including oceanic largesse to Quebec. And all Canadians should rejoice at the prospect of Canada becoming a world energy giant, especially as it entails the prosperity of Newfoundland after centuries of economic struggle, and also the flowering of the hydroelectric wealth and technical sophistication of Quebec.

February 18, 2012

The skeleton of Eugenics rattles in the socialist closet

Filed under: Britain, History, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:22

In, of all places, the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland discusses the attraction to Eugenics for mainstream socialists in the 1930s:

It is eugenics, the belief that society’s fate rested on its ability to breed more of the strong and fewer of the weak. So-called positive eugenics meant encouraging those of greater intellectual ability and “moral worth” to have more children, while negative eugenics sought to urge, or even force, those deemed inferior to reproduce less often or not at all. The aim was to increase the overall quality of the national herd, multiplying the thoroughbreds and weeding out the runts.

Such talk repels us now, but in the prewar era it was the common sense of the age. Most alarming, many of its leading advocates were found among the luminaries of the Fabian and socialist left, men and women revered to this day. Thus George Bernard Shaw could insist that “the only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man”, even suggesting, in a phrase that chills the blood, that defectives be dealt with by means of a “lethal chamber”.

Such thinking was not alien to the great Liberal titan and mastermind of the welfare state, William Beveridge, who argued that those with “general defects” should be denied not only the vote, but “civil freedom and fatherhood”. Indeed, a desire to limit the numbers of the inferior was written into modern notions of birth control from the start. That great pioneer of contraception, Marie Stopes — honoured with a postage stamp in 2008 — was a hardline eugenicist, determined that the “hordes of defectives” be reduced in number, thereby placing less of a burden on “the fit”. Stopes later disinherited her son because he had married a short-sighted woman, thereby risking a less-than-perfect grandchild.

Yet what looks kooky or sinister in 2012 struck the prewar British left as solid and sensible. Harold Laski, stellar LSE professor, co-founder of the Left Book Club and one-time chairman of the Labour party, cautioned that: “The time is surely coming … when society will look upon the production of a weakling as a crime against itself.” Meanwhile, JBS Haldane, admired scientist and socialist, warned that: “Civilisation stands in real danger from over-production of ‘undermen’.” That’s Untermenschen in German.

I’m afraid even the Manchester Guardian was not immune. When a parliamentary report in 1934 backed voluntary sterilisation of the unfit, a Guardian editorial offered warm support, endorsing the sterilisation campaign “the eugenists soundly urge”. If it’s any comfort, the New Statesman was in the same camp.

Lest Canadians get smug about those evil Brits and their morally dubious theories, let us remember that our own sainted Tommy Douglas, first leader of the NDP, wrote his Master’s thesis on the subject of eugenics:

Douglas graduated from Brandon College in 1930, and completed his Master’s degree (M.A.) in Sociology from McMaster University in 1933. His thesis entitled The Problems of the Subnormal Family endorsed eugenics.[16] The thesis proposed a system that would have required couples seeking to marry to be certified as mentally and morally fit. Those deemed to be “subnormal” because of low intelligence, moral laxity or venereal disease would be sent to state farms or camps while those judged to be mentally defective or incurably diseased would be sterilized.[17]

Douglas rarely mentioned his thesis later in his life and his government never enacted eugenics policies even though two official reviews of Saskatchewan’s mental health system recommended such a program when he became premier and minister of health.[17] By that time, many people questioned eugenics after Nazi Germany had embraced it to create a “master race”.[18] Instead, Douglas implemented vocational training for the mentally handicapped and therapy for those suffering from mental disorders.[19] (It may be noted that two Canadian provinces, Alberta and British Columbia, had eugenics legislation that imposed forced sterilization. Alberta’s law was first passed in 1928 while B.C. enacted its legislation in 1933.[20] It was not until 1972 that both provinces repealed the legislation.)[21][22]

February 10, 2012

Lorne Gunter: Toronto Star imagines oil just “bubbles up out of the ground and we Westerners just run out with buckets to collect it?”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:30

Lorne Gunter in the National Post:

As I read the Toronto Star’s editorial about Statistics Canada’s recently released 2011 census population data, it was hard for me not to imagine a plump, aging diva reclining on a brocade-covered chaise wailing, “I’m still beautiful! Really, I am.”

Entitled, “Census shows a fading Ontario? Don’t count on it,” the editorial makes the argument that it is “too simplistic” to claim “Ontario’s day is over.”

No one is making the case that Ontario can be dismissed as an afterthought. That is a concern without a cause.

[. . .]

But before anyone jumps to the conclusion that I, an Albertan, am pleased by Ontario’s decline, I’ll add that any trend that bodes ill for Ontario, eventually bodes ill for the country as a whole.

Canada needs a strong, prosperous, confident heartland. The West may be the new engine of the national economy, but that doesn’t mean the country can afford to have the old engine — Ontario — be idle.

The Star insults the West’s ingenuity and determination when it scoffs that “it’s relatively easy to grow based on resource extraction. Ontario does not have the luxury of sitting on gas and oil fields, so the task here is much harder.” Really? Have the paper’s editorial writers ever tried to find, extract, transport and refine oil and natural gas? Do they imagine the stuff bubbles up out of the ground and we Westerners just run out with buckets to collect it?

January 20, 2012

Paul Wells on the shady characters behind “Ethical Oil”

Filed under: Cancon, China, Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:09

He pretty much blows the lid off this conspiracy to sell Canadian oil to unaware, easily duped foreigners who don’t realize how evil the conspirators are:

In hindsight, Stephen Harper’s new fight against the world’s oil sands detractors was a long time coming. Last November in Vancouver, the Prime Minister gave a local television interview in which he warned that “significant American interests” would be “trying to line up against the Northern Gateway project,” Enbridge’s proposed $3.5-billion double pipeline from near Edmonton to a new port at Kitimat, B.C.

“They’ll funnel money through environmental groups and others in order to try to slow it down,” Harper told his hosts. “But, as I say, we’ll make sure that the best interests of Canada are protected.”

In early November, U.S. President Barack Obama announced he was putting off final approval of TransCanada’s $7-billion Keystone XL pipeline until after this November’s presidential election. Harper has long viewed Obama as an unsteady ally. Now he’d had enough. “I’m sorry, the damage has been done,” he told CTV before Christmas. “And we’re going to make sure we diversify our energy exports.”

January 18, 2012

Stephen Harper “[C]ertain people in the United States would like to see Canada be one giant national park”

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:06

Investigative blogger Vivian Krause discusses American environmental groups’ interference in Canadian affairs in the Financial Post:

For five years, on my own nickel, I have been following the money and the science behind environmental campaigns and I’ve been doing what the Canada Revenue Agency hasn’t been doing: I’ve gathered information about the origin and the stated purpose of grants from U.S. foundations to green groups in Canada. My research is based on U.S. tax returns because the U.S. Internal Revenue Service requires greater disclosure from non-profits than does the CRA.

By my analysis and calculations, since 2000, U.S. foundations have granted at least US$300-million to various environmental organizations and campaigns in Canada, especially in B.C. The San Francisco-based Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation alone has granted US$92-million. Gordon Moore is one of the co-founders of Intel Corp. The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation have granted a combined total of US$90-million, mostly to B.C. groups. These foundations were created by the founders of Hewlett-Packard Co.

[. . .]

The Great Bear Rainforest is a 21-million-hectare zone that extends from the northern tip of Vancouver Island to the southern tip of Alaska. Environmentalists now claim that oil tanker traffic must not be allowed in the Great Bear Rainforest in order to protect the kermode bear (aka the Great Spirit Bear). Whether this was the intention all along or not, the Great Bear Rainforest has become the Great Trade Barrier against oil exports to Asia.

Speaking on CBC last night, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said, “But just because certain people in the United States would like to see Canada be one giant national park for the northern half of North America, I don’t think that’s part of what our review process [for the Northern Gateway] is all about.”

January 14, 2012

Making the War on Drugs even more dangerous

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

Colby Cosh points out that the recent spate of deaths from ecstasy overdoses in western Canada is at least as much a result of the way the so-called War on Drugs is being prosecuted:

In recent weeks, it seems, adulterated ecstasy (MDMA) has left Alberta and B.C. with a sizable heap of young corpses. A tragedy has thus come home to roost in the West: namely, the tragedy of policy that incentivizes adulteration of drugs that, if manufactured in the open and checked for purity, would kill hardly anybody. Pure MDMA has a larger “therapeutic index” — a wider safety margin for overdose — than alcohol. It would probably make a pretty reasonable substitute for alcohol in many settings if we were to sit down and rebuild a drug culture from scratch. But over the past ten years or so, both Liberal and Conservative governments have worked to increase penalties for and monitoring of the flow of “precursor chemicals” used in the manufacture of MDMA.

It has been their goal to make pure MDMA more difficult to manufacture; when precursors are seized it is hailed as a triumph. But illicit drug factories never do put out the follow-up press release announcing that they’re putting less MDMA in their “ecstasy” and replacing it with other party drugs that have much smaller safety margins, or with drugs that interact dangerously with MDMA. And when rave kids die as a result, the RCMP chooses not to pose imperiously alongside the body bags giving a big thumbs-up. They are eager to take credit only for the immediately visible results of their work.

[. . .]

The debate over “harm reduction” in Canada has, for the past year or so, revolved around the Insite clinic in East Vancouver. That debate has been fraught with as much confusion and misinformation as drug moralizers could possibly create, but the core message, I think, has gotten through to Canadians, and certainly to the gatekeepers of their media. The message is this: we have only meagre power to stop people from abusing heroin if they are determined to do that. We do have, however, significant ability to protect people from the problems of a poorly-titrated or actively adulterated supply of heroin. The morbidity and mortality burden from the actual addiction itself, compared to the burden resulting from the drug’s illegality, is both modest and intractable. Insite is basically designed to yield the benefits that allowing heroin to be issued by prescription would bring.

Canada is apparently too under-equipped with libertarians to see that the logic extends to ecstasy, which about a million adult Canadians have used at least once. Yet rave-scene users have already been implementing “harm reduction” philosophy on the dance floor for decades. They react as best they can to adulteration risks by sharing information about dealer reliability, and they mitigate the most important medical peril of MDMA — the possibility of hyperthermia, i.e., internal overheating — by making sure ravers have access to cool rooms and plenty of fluids.

No government of any ideological stripe has ever successfully kept intoxicants away from eager customers: not the US government in Prohibition, not the Soviet government (on-the-job drunkenness was endemic), not even modern day prison authorities (drugs are plentiful behind bars). The “War on Drugs” has — predictably — failed. The question should be how to minimize the harm to drug users and society at large, because drug prohibition is a massive failure.

November 6, 2011

The “shale gale” blows away Canada’s illusions of being an “energy superpower”

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

Terence Corcoran pours cold water on the notion that this is the moment for Canada to become a major player in the world energy markets:

In recent weeks, Canada — a self-proclaimed global energy superpower — has been trying to throw its weight around over the Keystone XL pipeline, TransCanada Corp.’s $7-billion project to ship oil sands production from Alberta to Texas. In Houston on Tuesday, Natural Resources Minister Joe Oliver let the Americans know that Canada had other options. “What will happen if there wasn’t approval [of Keystone] — and we think there will be — is that we’ll simply have to intensify our efforts to sell the oil elsewhere.”

Canadian oil executives, who have a lot invested in the superpower notion, are also issuing aggressive-sounding statements aimed at the United States. A headline in The Globe and Mail Friday sounded like a threat: “Oil patch to U.S.: OK pipe or lose our oil.” The story didn’t quite back up the headline, but the sense was that Canada was developing alternatives and that China is the big alternative.

[. . .]

While Canadian government and industry officials have a lot invested in the idea of energy superpowerdom, few outside observers share the vision. Canada barely rates a mention in The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World, Daniel Yergin’s new book on the world energy market. A few pages are devoted to the oil sands, mostly to review the high costs and technical difficulties. “As the industry grows in scale, it will require wider collaboration on the R&D challenges, not only among oil companies and the province of Alberta, but also with Canada’s federal government.”

Far more impressive for the world’s energy future will be the impact of shale gas and shale oil. The “shale gale,” as Mr. Yergin calls it, has already transformed the U.S. gas market and shale oil could be next. Since Mr. Yergin’s book was written, the shale revolution has swept Europe and is about to transform China’s energy market.

November 1, 2011

Alberta’s policy to help small breweries has unintended consquences

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:20

When governments try to rig markets to achieve certain goals, they often end up getting results they didn’t foresee:

The Alberta Gaming and Liquor Commission presumably had good intentions in mind when it brewed up a policy to lend a helping hand to small breweries. Namely, beer companies qualify for substantially reduced beer tax rates on the first 200,000 hectolitres sold in Alberta. The explicit aim was to help small players compete against industry leviathans such as Molson and Labatt. And, implicitly, the tax break would entice craft breweries to set up shop in the province.

However, eight years after the reduced beer tax rates—estimated by one analyst to total about $200 million in savings—were first implemented, little in the Alberta beer business has worked out the way the AGLC envisioned. Only five small breweries have opened for business in Alberta since the policy was implemented. And in that time Alberta has, in fact, become a market characterized by discount beer. And at least one of the breweries taking advantage of the AGLC policy doesn’t even brew in the province, let alone Canada.

[. . .]

Alberta’s small brewer system would appear to be yet another case of the law of unintended consequences—especially when a government agency tinkers with the free market economy. From a dearth of craft brewers to a helping hand for American jobs, the AGLC’s beer tax policy is enough to drive a teetotalling Albertan to drink.

October 13, 2011

Canadian liberty: “The entitlement to consume milk, raw or otherwise, is not a Charter-protected right”

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:31

Karen Selick reports on a recent court decision that shows just how far Canadians’ liberties are constrained by the judiciary:

Dairy farmer Michael Schmidt has been campaigning to legalize the sale of raw (unpasteurized) milk for 17 years. In 2010, he was acquitted on 19 charges by a justice of the peace who ruled that “cow sharing” was a legitimate way to provide raw milk to informed consumers who don’t live on farms.

On Sept. 28, a judge reversed portions of that decision and found Schmidt guilty on 13 charges.

But the judge ventured beyond the subject of raw milk, saying: “The entitlement to consume milk, raw or otherwise, is not a Charter-protected right.”

The implications are far reaching. If the judge is right about this, future courts could similarly declare that you have no right to eat meat, poultry, seafood, fruit, vegetables or grains, even if government approved. In short, you may have no right to eat anything at all.

[. . .]

In one very technical sense, the courts’ statements are accurate: There is no specific reference to milk, or indeed, any food in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms or the U.S. Bill of Rights. But both documents are equally silent about any right to get out of bed in the morning, to stretch, to brush your teeth, to use the bathroom, to put on clothes. If constitutions had to enumerate every single thing that North Americans normally consider themselves free to do, they would be a zillion pages long.

Instead, the people who drafted these constitutional documents used a simple shortcut to eliminate the zillion pages. They said that people had the right to liberty.

The Charter was, after all, designed to rein in government, not to rein in individuals. It did not purport to grant us our rights or freedoms; rather, it recognized that those freedoms already existed. It guarantees in its very first section that the state may not infringe on our freedoms except by “such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

August 13, 2011

Colby Cosh digs up the story about the discarded contributions for Slave Lake

Filed under: Cancon, Economics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:59

After an amusing look at the economics of Christmas (in short: it’s just a modern version of Potlatch), he finds out how those charitable contributions ended up in a landfill:

The containers were labelled with the name of energy company Total E&P, whose employees had gathered clothing and toys for the victims of the fire. “Employees had held a month-long drive to collect donations for Slave Lake victims,” notes the CBC. “They carefully packed up the collection and addressed it to the Red Cross, and called their internal courier to take it away. The Red Cross, though, does not accept items for donation, only cash…”.

So while the packing was “careful”, the research…? Not so much. Someone located another Calgarian with good intentions, Melissa Gunning, who was gathering material to be sent to Slave Lake fire victims. Unfortunately, she didn’t have the means to get all the nice things she accepted to the scene of the fire, and by that time, the brave people of Slave Lake hadn’t the slightest use for any of it.

[. . .]

I fear Paul Nielsen, the appalled discoverer of the items in the landfill, unwittingly saw straight to the heart of the matter. Someone went to a clothing store, bought a bunch of cute outfits for somebody’s else’s children, and “had the foresight to throw something in for the mother”, without the much less impressive foresight required to ask “Hey, will the Red Cross actually take this crap?” This is a “someone” who probably thought herself very clever in finding a absolutely bulletproof excuse for a shopping excursion, perhaps even on company time. The value of her “aid” turned out to be significantly less than zero, but that was surely beside the point to begin with. If it weren’t, the incessant entreaties of professional charitable organizations everywhere — “Please stop showing up with bundles of blankets and cans, and just give us cash already” — would actually have had some effect by now.

July 13, 2011

Anonymous decides they’re against Ethical Oil

Filed under: Cancon, Environment, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:13

I guess all the popular targets have already been hit, so the rumour is that Anonymous is going to be going after companies working in the oilsands:

In related news, Anonymous said it planned to attack oil firms and banks supporting the controversial extraction of oil from sand in Alberta, Canada. Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, Canadian Oil Sands, Imperial Oil, and the Royal Bank of Scotland have been put on notice that they are likely to be targeted in Anonymous’ latest operation, dubbed Project Tarmageddon.

Anonymous began with attacks on the Church of Scientology in early 2008 before it made headline news last year with attacks on financial service firms that blocked donation to WikiLeaks following the release of controversial US diplomatic cables. Another long-running campaign has targeted entertainment industry firms that hassled file sharers or console modders, most notably Sony.

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