The Hitler label is regularly attached to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, as well. A Google search using his name and Hitler's turned up 81,900 hits – many of them from the blogosphere but some in the mainstream media.
Such comparisons – while now apparently legally defensible – insult the memories of the victims of the real Hitler and diminish the quality of public discourse in this country.
Paul McCartney sera sur les Plaines d'Abraham le 20 juillet
LCN
L'ex-Beatle Paul McCartney offrira un spectacle à Québec le 20 juillet prochain pour les fêtes du 400e.
La nouvelle a été confirmée lundi après-midi par les organisateurs des fêtes du 400e, qui ont pris soin de préciser qu'il s'agira d'un concert gratuit pour lequel il n'y aura pas de distribution de billets, contrairement au spectacle de Céline Dion.
Le musicien en sera à sa première performance au Canada depuis 2005.
Il s'agira également de sa seule présence sur le continent américain cette année.
On peut déjà prédire qu'il s'agira d'un des événements les plus courus de l'été dans la capitale.
A “carbon tax” in the style of Mr. Dion’s, which shields many people altogether from the price impact by various mechanisms, has nothing whatsoever to do with the Pigovian taxes economists favour as a response to negative externalities. It’s simply another way of picking and choosing.Will Canadians play willing marks to Stéphane's redistributive grift? Let's hope not.
What is more truly dear to Liberal hearts, we suspect, is the redistributive fashion in which the returned revenue from the carbon pricing will be used to re-jig the income tax system.
[...]
But the Liberals, in cutting the lowest tax bracket the most, and the highest not at all, are actually proposing to raise the already high marginal tax rates on upper-middle-class Canadians. And they’re not only writing cheques to rural dwellers to make sure they don’t belong to the carbon-priced class with us city folk; they’ll also be increasing the Northern exemption, creating another group that has non-negotiable “higher requirements” for pollution.
Liberal Party leader Stephane Dion recently asked Canadians to take part in an open and honest debate about shifting taxes from things we want more of, to things we want less of.
After months of delays and speculation, the federal government is set to unveil its controversial update to the Copyright Act of Canada Thursday.
According to a press release, Industry Minister Jim Prentice and Heritage Minister Josée Verner are set to introduce the legislation during the morning Parliamentary session. Both ministers will deliver brief statements and answer media inquiries shortly after the tabling of a bill to amend the Copyright Act.
Reports have also indicated that the two ministers will unveil the Copyright Act under the slogan "Made In Canada Copyright Reform" during a scheduled press conference.
The new Copyright Act has been updated to reflect the growth of digital media and is said to include a number of contentious provisions including:
-- A $500 fine for each illegal file shared online
-- Making it illegal to unlock cellphones or copy music from protected CDs to iPods
-- Forbidding the right to copy "time shifted" shows onto personal video recorders if flagged by broadcasters.
...institutionalized religious discrimination cannot be condoned or tolerated in this day and age.
Discriminatory practices, whether they are directed at Roman Catholics or anyone else, are simply incompatible with any nation that ascribes to itself the fundamental values of equality that we hold in such high regard.
In response to a series of controversies over abortion debates on Canadian campuses, the student government of York University in Toronto has tabled an outright ban on student clubs that are opposed to abortion.
It would be a spectacular long-term Canadian shareholder disaster, and possibly a corporate governance disaster, if the BCE takeover were to crash over the short-term interests of a relatively small group of bondholders.[...]
The role of the Supreme Court, if it accepts the appeal, would be to uphold shareholder rights and reverse Wednesday's Quebec Court of Appeal decision. That decision against BCE appears to significantly expand the subversive idea -- long a shadow over Canadian corporate law -- that shareholders are just another group of interested parties in a long list of "stakeholders."
As the appeal court put it, the BCE board of directors, and a special independent committee of the board, made a "mistake" in deciding not to make special arrangements with the owners of about $5-billion in Bell Canada long-term debt, the debenture holders. "In Canada, the directors of a corporation have a more extensive duty" than to maximize value to shareholders. This more extensive duty means the board "must have regard, among other things, to the reasonable expectations of the debenture holders, and those may be more extensive than merely respecting their contractual legal rights."
What's the point of a contract if one side is automatically forced to go beyond it?
If you look around America today, you see the Olson logic playing out. Interest groups turn every judicial fight into an ideological war. They lobby for more spending on the elderly, even though the country is trillions of dollars short of being able to live up to its promises. They’ve turned environmental concern into subsidies for corn growers and energy concerns into subsidies for oil companies.
The $307 billion farm bill that rolled through Congress is a perfect example of the pattern. Farm net income is up 56 percent over the past two years, yet the farm bill plows subsidies into agribusinesses, thoroughbred breeders and the rest.
[...]
The question amid this supposed change election is: Who is going to end this sort of thing?
Barack Obama talks about taking on the special interests. This farm bill would have been a perfect opportunity to do so. But Obama supported the bill, just as he supported the 2005 energy bill that was a Christmas tree for the oil and gas industries.
[...]
Obama, sad to say, failed the farm bill test.
Let’s play a game of You Be the Editor. Here’s the deal: the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration forces a local airline to shut down one of its seven return flights each weekday between Toronto and Newark, N.J. News? Yes. Front-page news? Of course not—unless you’re the Globe and Mail. No one has it in for Porter Airlines like the Globe. Ditto for Porter’s landlord, the Toronto Port Authority, a piddling public sector organization that, like the Freemasons, is assumed to nefariously wield much more power and influence than it does and, all told, takes up far more space and time in the city’s public imagination than it deserves.
Media piracy will always be with us. But the pirates, Mr. Bylund writes, “can be beaten — it happens all the time — but not primarily by means of legal threats and lawsuits.” Rather, he says: “You subjugate these rebels with the tools of free enterprise. Piracy is just another business model, and the pirates will lose and go away when you come up with a better model.”
Consumers make buying decisions based on three factors, according to Mr. Bylund: “price, convenience and quality.” Pirates will always win on price (free), but media companies can and do beat them on the other factors. Among the examples he cites is the cable channel Comedy Central, owned by Viacom (comedycentral.com). The Web site offers the complete archives of “The Daily Show” and makes them searchable. Hulu, owned by NBC and Fox, offers many television shows and some movies with limited (and short) advertisements (hulu.com). All are offered in high-quality video.
But it should not stop there, Mr. Bylund says. “Figure out an ad-supported model if you can, or charge less than a dollar per episode. Let people burn it to DVD or play the file on iPhones for a buck.” Eventually, “piracy will force all the big-time content producers to move in this kind of direction,” Mr. Bylund says. “Capitalism, properly applied, will beat the rebels every time.”
Soaring oil prices have not slowed China's consumption of oil as statistics show that China's apparent consumption of crude oil and refined oil products both hit record highs in the first quarter of the year.
According to statistics released Tuesday by the China Petroleum and Chemical Industry Association (CPCIA), China's apparent consumption of oil products composed of gasoline, diesel and kerosene rose by 16.5 percent year on year to 52.73 million tonnes in the first three months, and crude oil, rose by 8 percent to 91.8 million tonnes.
[...]
State ceilings on prices of domestic oil products was the major reason contributing to China's surging oil consumption in the first quarter [emphasis added].
Are insurgents affected by information on US casualty sensitivity? Using data on attacks and variation in access to international news across Iraqi provinces, we identify an "emboldenment" effect by comparing the rate of insurgent attacks in areas with higher and lower access to information about U.S news after public statements critical of the war. We find in periods after a spike in war-critical statements, insurgent attacks increases by 5-10 percent. The results suggest that insurgent groups respond rationally to expected probability of US withdrawal. As such counterinsurgency should consider deterrence and incapacitation rather than simply search and destroy missions.
The standard criticism of Conservative climate change policy is that Harper would never do anything that would hurt the Alberta oil industry. Hope this shuts them up:Oil sands face tough environmental rules
Mar 10, 2008 04:41 PM
THE CANADIAN PRESS
OTTAWA–The federal government is laying out new rules that would force new oil-sands plants to capture and store carbon and would ban the building of dirty, coal-fired power plants.
The bans would be effective as of 2012.
Mr. Flaherty believes Ontario is failing to adapt to a changing world because its business taxes are the highest in Canada. In a speech in Toronto yesterday, he offered as evidence Ontario's declining share of national GDP; its weaker than average economic growth; and, an unemployment rate higher than the national average. He said the federal government has cut corporate income tax rates from to 15% from 22.1%, while Ontario's rate is only half a percentage point lower than in 2000, "with no plans in place for further reductions."
Mr. McGuinty's response is that tax cuts are not enough on their own and that governments have to make targeted investments in troubled industries to stimulate growth.
The manufacturing sector is not doing too well in Ontario, although the rest of the country seems to be doing okay.
But isn't the auto sector the problem? Well, if we strip out transportation equipment, which includes autos....Doug Porter, deputy chief economist at BMO Capital Markets, says, nine out of 10 economists would side with Mr. Flaherty and advocate creating as favourable an economic environment as possible and then allowing the market to pick the winners and losers.What does he know? Ontario's "targeted investments" are working out so well.
In fact, a combination of the strong Canadian dollar, a slowing U.S. economy, higher energy prices and increased competition from emerging markets has left several sectors struggling. Here in the manufacturing heartland of Canada the impact has been acute. But the economic impact is in direct contrast to national economic trends generally.For instance, we are experiencing the second-longest period of economic expansion in Canadian history. Yet Ontario's share of the national nominal GDP has gone from 41.4% in 2002 to 38.6% in 2006.
Ontarians are seeing a lack of leadership, a lack of vision and a lack of economic stewardship.
Staff at The Book Room, a 169-year-old shop presently located on a corner of Halifax's bustling Barrington Street, unwittingly opened the box to discover the same titles they already had in stock -- plus an invoice from one of the big Internet booksellers.
"Somebody had ordered a bunch of books from Amazon," Charles Burchell, who managed the bookstore for more than 40 years, recounted in a recent interview. "To find that it was books we had on our shelves that they could have had in five minutes rather than five days if they'd walked downstairs ... that really made us sit up and take notice."
It was a slap in the face to the independent store that has been fighting a losing battle against book behemoths, the proliferation of literature to supermarkets and big box stores and the convenience of Internet ordering for the better part of a decade.
"It said to me that there's a group of people out there who don't want to make use of a bookstore," Mr. Burchell lamented. "We really couldn't see a future anymore."
The hands of students in Fareena Masood's Grade 3 class fly into the air when the teacher asks for the number of syllables in "communication."The question stumps a few of the young students at the Islamic Foundation School -- "Is it four?" one asks -- before another student correctly answers five.
As Masood -- called Sister Fareena by her students -- writes the answer on the blackboard, one boy whispers an excited "yes" as he checks his own page.
Next on the teacher's list, written in chalk on the blackboard, are the words "wonderful" and "school."
They're fitting words for a vocabulary lesson at the Scarborough private school which is one of 25 schools ranked first in the province by the 2008 Fraser Institute report card on elementary education. The school, which has 497 male and female students from JK to Grade 12, earned a perfect 10 score, according to the report.
Public health authorities shut down one of Chinatown's most prominent restaurants yesterday after a passerby took a photo of rats on a countertop.More at blogTOThe rats were visible through a window of the Dumpling House Restaurant yesterday afternoon, passerby Vivian Hui said.
[...]
Dumpling House, at 328 Spadina Ave., hosted a photo op by then Liberal leadership candidate Paul Martin during the April, 2003, SARS crisis. The restaurant is popular with celebrities, and has been well reviewed by various publications.
First, here is Barack Obama speaking of his opponent Hillary Clinton:"Her supporting NAFTA didn't give jobs to the American people."Hillary's defense:"I was not in the Senate at the time. I did not have a vote. I find his argument to be quite tortured. I have been a vocal critic of NAFTA starting in my campaign for the Senate in 1999."
It would not be good for Canada if either were to become U.S. president.
When bloggers first heard of the accusations against Steyn and Levant, and began mounting campaigns to "stop the CHRCs" from further stifling freedom of speech, many were encouraged by a rediscovered, then widely circulated, quotation from future Prime Minister Stephen Harper, circa 1999:
"Human Rights Commissions, as they are evolving, are an attack on our fundamental freedoms and the basic existence of a democratic society … It is in fact totalitarianism. I find this is very scary stuff."
Looks like Stephen Harper lost a few things during his move to 24 Sussex Drive. Namely, a principle or two.
My daughter was recently accepted into the Grade 9 arts program at two of Toronto's top high schools of the arts. While I have never doubted her talent, it is certainly gratifying that others see it too.
the misinformed craze for hybrid vehicles especially in the USA, and increasingly in Japan and Europe, and potentially in China, could represent a red light for more innovative technologies, such as viable fuel-cell cars that can use sustainably sourced fuels, such as hydrogen.
[...]
"There is a general convergence of strategies towards promoting hybrid vehicles as the mid-term solution to very low-emission and high-mileage vehicles," the researchers assert, "this is largely due to Toyota’s strategy of learning the technology, while building up its own ‘quasi-standard’, thanks to its high-quality and reliability reputation and its high market share on the North American market." They add that, "Such a convergence is based more on customer perception triggered by very clever marketing and communication campaigns than on pure rationale scientific arguments and may result in the need for any manufacturer operating in the USA to have a hybrid electric vehicle in its model range in order to survive."