- Last summer, to much fanfare, Halifax officials declared their harbours safe for people to enter "after decades of closure due to high coliform counts" (aka: too much ass bacteria). Today the mayor has confirmed that the city's raw sewage is being pumped into the water once more. Their sewage treatment plant broke in January, and they are still not functioning, so feces, condoms, tampons, and everything else that enters a toilet is once more flowing freely into the harbours. What a disgusting embarrassment.
- In other raw sewage news, Barack had this to say today; "So cyberspace is real and so are the risks that come with it." Thanks for the breaking news. Cyberspace is real. Who knew? Barack was speaking about a new White House office that will work in tandem with a new military command "to conduct both offensive and defensive computer warfare". Did anyone tell the President that although cyberspace is real, you can't put soldiers in it?
- Minister Fletcher also spewed some raw sewage today in his bid to limit Senate terms to 8 years. He argues that if left unchecked, Senators could do their jobs for as long as 45 years. Now, I definitely agree that Senators should be required to be present for bill readings and not be permitted to take large chunks of the year as vacation, but this is as far as my support for Senate reform goes. The idea that a person who amasses a few decades of experience in a job, presumably becoming more adept at it, is valued less than a new employee is flabbergasting. When a person retires from an organization and can say that they have been there for 45 years, they are generally applauded and celebrated for this. The organization is pleased to have retained them and their skills and knowledge. Only a backwards Conservative government would consider this a bad thing. If a Member of Parliament came into your workplace, where you are firmly ensconced in your career, and told you that 8 years was enough and that you'd have to leave, would that make sense to you? It's an extremely flawed argument, so I wrote the Minister Fletcher to tell him that I have yet to see a compelling reason to agree with his reforms. Oh, and it's also unconstitutional for them to try to change it.
- Finally, more government raw sewage: the ridiculous GM bailout means we are paying $1.4 million for every job saved in Ontario. And this number continues to grow. How exactly is this responsible, effective, or helpful? In any way? Especially when you take these things into consideration:
1. "“You're not going to save jobs. All you are going to do is destroy jobs at Ford and Toyota,” said Mark Milke, director of research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy in Calgary.
Mr. Milke dismisses the bailouts of GM and Chrysler as “a massive transfer of wealth to companies that consumers have already rejected.” The result, he maintains, is that governments “are punishing the companies that have actually run their businesses very well.”"
2. "Besides, no matter how many conditions Canadian politicians place on the loans to GM and Chrysler, or how ironclad the guarantees may appear, governments will find themselves with little or no leverage to enforce them.
“You have no guarantee that two years down the road, they'll say: ‘Well, this Canadian factory is not up to snuff, so we've got to close it.' What are the governments going to do then?” That is what happened with GM's car assembly plant in Quebec, which received $220-million in federal and provincial interest-free loans in 1987 only to pull out of the province in 2002. None of the money has been repaid."
3. "...the auto bailouts are typical of political decisions that benefit relatively few people at the expense of millions. But because the risk of a cross-Canada taxpayer revolt is small compared to the potential payback from voters in hard-up communities in Southern Ontario, the decision to bail out the auto companies is an easy one for politicians."
Time to write another letter.
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