Feds to Fund CBC ‘Cause They Can

From this morning’s Globe and Mail:

An Ipsos-Reid poll shows that 47 per cent of Canadians think the Prime Minister and his Liberals deserve to be re-elected. This represents a jump of 18 points since the question was asked during last spring’s federal election campaign, which saw the Liberals reduced to minority status.

But Martin cannot break into the Parliamentary majority range – the Liberals at still stuck at 37% nationally according to this poll. Given that the Tories are still mired in the 20% range due to…hmmm…the fact that they stand for so many things the vast majority of Canadians do not want, they cannot afford to force an election to try to push Martin out. Catch 22.

So that means in the impending Liberal budget, we can expect a well-deserved payback for twenty years of restraint, cuts and downsizing – things Canadians want and have paid for. What has got me excited? More for the CBC if it is spent on radio and regional broadcasting. The cuts have left the CBC in an awful state. One has to only listen to the morning radio to be bombarded by blandness and repetative broadcasts of the same show: another panel on the future of short story writing on the Prairies anyone?

I am hopeful. Hidden in a CBC Feburary 2005 presentation is the idea of a CBC radio station for Kingston. Right now we get the Ontario wide rural morning show, and the excellent but a little irrelevant Ottawa drive home show hosted most days by the formidible Brent Bambury. Given the catchment of about 350,000 from Belleville to Brockville up to highway 7, a station is due here. It would cause a shake up for sure as a local morning and afternoon show would add 15 or more hours of news to the local market every week driving well-paid, quality journalists to find the story, shaking up the venerable but could be shaken Whig-Standard newspaper as well as region-covering CKWS-TV along the way. Too bad it is set for a 2007-08 opening but that means it will be in place in time for the next NHL playoffs.

Hockey Pool 2005

Given the collapse of NHL/NHLPA talks on uncancelling the cancelled season this afternoon, we have to move on. We have to show the NHL that we don’t need their stinking hockey and show that we know our own hockey. Since 1997 when it began on a Kings College ’80’s alumni Idle Crows email loop, I have operated [with the help of computer wizards more wizardly than I am] an internet NHL playoffs hockey pool in the spring and by jumbo I am going to do a pool of some sort again this year. But what rules? I think we have to pick the winners of the Memorial Cup, the World Hockey Championship, Swiss League, Swedish league, the NCAA tourney…that sort of thing. As these competitions would exist otherwise, this is not a scab picket-crossing sort of pool but it will take a bit of research and edjification so any ideas?

Hockey At Work

Saturday sees hockey on the rink built over the last two weeks on Market Square behind work. From the tenuously linkability of the Whig:

Confirmed for Saturday’s Limestone Classic tournament, from 10:30 a.m. to 4 p.m. on the ice at Market Square, are: hockey hall of famer Dale Hawerchuk; retired Toronto Maple Leaf legend Wendel Clark; Joe Nieuwendyk of the Maple Leafs; Brenden Morrow and Marty Turco of the Dallas Stars; Mike Keane of the Vancouver Canucks; Matt Bradley of the Pittsburgh Penguins; former Leafs Dave Gagner, Nick Kypreos and Dave Ellett; former New Jersey Devils John MacLean and Joe Cirella; player agent and onetime Boston Bruin Mike Gillis; Hockey Night in Canada personality Ron MacLean, and Gord Downie, Gord Sinclair and Paul Langlois of the Tragically Hip.

Who would I like to say hi to? Wendel.

I Really Do Not Understand This

Presuming the alleged facts are as reported and as set out in the Statement of Claim, this will be a most interesting case to follow, as reported in The Toronto Star:

Romanian-born Alexandra Austin, who was adopted by an Ontario couple but sent back five months later to poverty and deprivation, has launched a $7 million lawsuit against her adoptive parents, the Canadian and Ontario governments and Swiss International Air Lines…[A]fter five months in the Austins’ Ancaster home, Alexandra was driven to the airport and put on a plane for return to Bucharest. Shortly afterward, the Austins adopted a Romanian baby girl…Canada had accepted her as a landed immigrant when the adoption was approved. But as she left the country before her adoptive parents filed a citizenship application, she never became Canadian.

The parents who adopted her are no longer in Canada, this person and her child are effectively stateless and Canada should be ashamed. How could such a thing occur? It is interesting that no reference to this case I have read, including the link above to the Star‘s full article, references the Criminal Code section that pops immediately into my mind and might have had similar wording at the time the one-way ticket to no one bought and used:

215. (1) Every one is under a legal duty

(a) as a parent, foster parent, guardian or head of a family, to provide necessaries of life for a child under the age of sixteen years…

(2) Every one commits an offence who, being under a legal duty within the meaning of subsection (1), fails without lawful excuse, the proof of which lies on him, to perform that duty, if

(a) with respect to a duty imposed by paragraph (1)(a) or (b),

(i) the person to whom the duty is owed is in destitute or necessitous circumstances…

218. Every one who unlawfully abandons or exposes a child who is under the age of ten years, so that its life is or is likely to be endangered or its health is or is likely to be permanently injured, is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years…

I hope this sad case finds this person some meaningful remedy. Fortunately we have courts that allow for redress where these parents, these bureaucrats and all other adults involved failed if the facts prove out – but how could they not given she was nine?