Tag: News, Politics, Events

Angst At Lunch

To be quite fair the decision was reversed in about 24 hours but was everyone in the PEI Tory government asleep when this passed by their desks?

The Reuters story includes this:

“How many times, when you get upset or worried or concerned about things, is it in the middle of the day? It’s usually at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning when you wake up,” said Joan Wright, executive director of the Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention based in Edmonton, Alberta. The hotline received about 1,400 calls a year and about 50 were from people contemplating suicide, health groups said. “One of the things I was hearing is the government felt there weren’t enough suicide-related calls,” Wright said. Prince Edward Island, Canada’s smallest province with a population of about 137,000 people, is trying to tame its budget deficit. The hotline cost about C$30,000 ($24,000) a year to run. “It’s a very small amount of money in our view,” said Reid Burke, executive director of the Canadian Mental Health Association.

When there is a call for one in every hundred people a year, you would think that would be enough to keep such a cheap service going let alone raise flags. According to Stats Canada, in 1996 PEI’s suicide rate was at or slightly above (depending on the end of the range) the national average: 15/3,862 or 20/3,933. Given the cash-strapped government’s decision to become a casino site and the highly-arguable rise in suicides that follow, the original thought to cut the line could be taken as cynical as, say, cutting auditor-general funding when faced with a scandal related to government pointlessly propping up dying private enterprise.

Hopeless Harper

I zipped this off at Ben’s in response to yet another dense comment from someone other than Ben (as Ben is as bright a conservative thinker as I have come across) about how the Tories are great because the Liberals are bad…and then I thought it was rather good. It’s a list of Harper’s mishandlings of the last ten days or so:

…talk about not having a clue. Just look at his acts:

  • no reference to the policy of the CPC when the polls looked good,
  • no knocking on the door of Rideau Hall when some claimed the constitution was in crisis,
  • no stopping of Parliament just a milksop early adjournment after participating in the business of the House,
  • not even realizing your party’s edges were getting chipped away.

He blew it and yet you will call him a great leader. Why? Because he is not as crooked as the Quebec wing of the Liberals? That is a hell of a claim to fame.

Has he done anything right in the last few days? That last one is a doozie. Harper says he was speaking just a few days ago to his wife that Belinda would leave. He apparently did not share those fears with her or anyone else in the party as everyone else is shocked today.

I fear the Tories are in no mooded for reflection – it will remain good enough for them to point out the Grit’s dog is ugly rather than notice their own has got a wicked case of the mange and a funny smell as well. Wells may be right that Harper will not lose his position over this but that is likely due to the need for Tories to ride their pony into the ground publicly in a great show.

Update: One more thing, mentioned in the comments earlier. It appears that Harper’s leadership skills certainly do not make it across the country to the two remaining Tory MPs of Newfoundland, Messers Doyle and Hearn. This according to The Globe this evening:

“There are so many things happening, so I’m going to wait for a day or two before actually saying beyond a shadow of a doubt that … I’m voting for or against it,” Mr. Doyle, the MP for St. John’s East, said. “I’m just going to play those cards when the time comes around.” Mr. Hearn was more coy. “I’ve been around politics long enough to know that you never know what’s going to happen, so we’ll find out on Thursday,” Mr. Hearn told reporters Monday. Their votes assumed more importance Tuesday as news broke that Conservative MP Belinda Stronach had defected to the Liberals. The Liberal government can likely survive with the support of two Independent MPs, instead of all three. Meanwhile, Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams [Ed.: a Conservative, too] is keeping up the pressure on the two MPs in the hope they will vote with the ruling Liberals. Mr. Williams has said Mr. Doyle and Mr. Hearn should vote for the budget because it includes the province’s revamped, $2.6-billion offshore energy deal with Ottawa. “Mr. Hearn is talking in terms of a vote for Canada,” Mr. Williams said Monday. “Now, if he wants to trade off the country for his own province, then that’s his decision.”

Solid.

Tsunami Relief?

Care of Jay, I was directed to the Financial Times which ran a string of stories last week on the failings of tsunami relief. This is quite shocking:

  • May 12, 2005: “Within a week a Diageo supplier began sending the equivalent of eight 20ft shipping containers of drinking water to survivors in Indonesia’s Aceh province, the area hit hardest by the disaster. Almost five months later, that water has yet to reach Aceh or survivors. It is still sitting on the docks in the North Sumatran port city of Medan. The water is part of a daunting pile of international relief supplies from aid groups, rotary clubs and companies such as Dupont and The Body Shop, lying idle as those struggling to make new lives in Aceh continue to clamour for help. ‘We understood there might be some difficulty in getting the water out there. But it’s a bit of a disappointment when we learn it’s still sitting on the docks,’ says Ron Ainsbury, Diageo’s director of corporate affairs in Sydney.”
  • 12 May 2005: “Five months after the Asian tsunami disaster, many hundreds of containers of aid are stranded at ports in Indonesia and Sri Lanka because of bureaucratic bungling and missing paperwork. As many as 500 containers, a quarter of all aid shipped to Sri Lanka after the Boxing Day disaster, are on the dockside in Colombo.”
  • 14 May 2005: “As of yesterday morning the equivalent of 1,500 20ft containers of aid – almost a third of those that had arrived since the December 26 disaster – remained stuck at the port of Medan, the main hub for supplies heading to Aceh, the hardest hit province.”

Most importantly perhaps for Canadians is what Mark Styne wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times today, 15 May 2005:

Bolton would have no problem getting nominated as U.N. ambassador if he were more like Paul Martin. Who? Well, he’s prime minister of Canada. And in January, after the tsunami hit, he flew into Sri Lanka to pledge millions and millions and millions in aid. Not like that heartless George W. Bush back at the ranch in Texas. Why, Prime Minister Martin walked along the ravaged coast of Kalumnai and was, reported Canada’s CTV network, “visibly shaken.” President Bush might well have been shaken, but he wasn’t visible, and in the international compassion league, that’s what counts. So Martin boldly committed Canada to giving $425 million to tsunami relief. “Mr. Paul Martin Has Set A Great Example For The Rest Of The World Leaders!” raved the LankaWeb news service. You know how much of that $425 million has been spent so far? Fifty thousand dollars — Canadian. That’s about 40 grand in U.S. dollars. The rest isn’t tied up in Indonesian bureaucracy, it’s back in Ottawa. But, unlike horrible “unilateralist” America, Canada enjoys a reputation as the perfect global citizen, renowned for its commitment to the U.N. and multilateralism. And on the beaches of Sri Lanka, that and a buck’ll get you a strawberry daiquiri. Canada’s contribution to tsunami relief is objectively useless and rhetorically fraudulent.

I’ve noted a couple of weirdnesses with the tsunami relief but, if this is true, this will be explosive and, as Jay says, worth one or more Question Periods in Ottawa before, say, Thursday. I know Mark Styne is a poster boy for a certain class of crank so I will take his allegations right now with a grain or two of salt – but it is certainly time to show the accounting.

The Queen’s In Town On The 19th

Matt has pointed it out. On the day of the confidence vote, the Queen will be here in the colonies. While she is at it, touring Manitoba cheese plants and all, let’s have the old dear give us a new Parliament by taking the PM’s word up if the vote goes against him. That would be sweet and disturbed at the same time – our vestigal symbol of unmerit and anti-democratic status settling the hung Parliament.

Vatican Radiowave Crime!

You just never see a story like this every day – a cardinal convicted in a sordid shortwave radio plot:

A court in Rome on Monday convicted a Vatican cardinal and the head of the city-state’s radio station for electromagnetic pollution. They were given 10-day suspended sentences, which they have appealed. Cardinal Roberto Tucci, former head of Vatican Radio’s management committee, and the Rev. Pasquale Borgomeo, the station’s director general, were charged with “dangerous launching of objects,” referring to the station’s electromagnetic waves. Residents of the Rome suburb Cessano near the station complained they could hear Vatican Radio broadcasts through their lamps because of electromagnetic disturbances.

That is just beautiful. Sadly, it is not just funny nutty tale as the high intensity transmitters, still using shortwaves to broadcast to the globe, are a possible source of illness in the neighbouring residential area. Within the actual city, there are around 100 Kw worth of transmitters dated to the early 1950s. That is a lot less than the 1700 Kw worth of tranmitters Canada has at Sackville, NB (seen left 60 years ago when style was king) but they are surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of acres of salt marsh as opposed to Italian suburbs. This 2001 defence of Vatican Radio‘s transmitters indicates that the allegation was leukemia rates were higher and is contrary to this statement in support of the correlation between RF and leukemia. It also indicated that the district of Rome in question is not cheek to jowl with Vatican City’s walls but one called Santa Maria in Galeria where the Vatican’s transmitters pump out 2410 Kw under an agreement reached decades ago. The VR PR looks better in Italian but what doesn’t.

The defence I came across in favour of the Vatican contains one most charming argument in terms of its sensitivity to public health issues:

All the more “correct” were the observations made by the director of Vatican Radio, Father Borgomeo, who recalled that in 1951 the area where the transmitters were being installed was virtually uninhabited. The development of the area, and the construction of homes there, began only after the transmission facility was in place. So one might ask: If there is a direct link between the electromagnetic transmissions and cancer statistics, why aren’t the local builders and administrators, who allowed the residential developments in the area, called to account? For that matter, why are only radio broadcasters being investigated, and not television stations? After all, the transmission facilities of the state-owned RAI television network are located right in the heart of Rome, on Via Teulada.

Amazing and takes no responsibility for the fact that 2000 Kw of the 2410 Kw were built since 1976. No wonder they can hear the radio through light bulbs. I bet if they checked, there also would be a low instance of perms being ordered at hair dress salons as well.


“I’m on the Vatican, woe-oh, Radi-o…”

UK Election Notes

This is a great way of putting it from David Lodge in this morning’s New York Times:

The Labor Party under Tony Blair has occupied much of the center-right territory formerly held by the Conservatives, while the Liberal Democrats, who used to offer a wishy-washy compromise between those two, have moved to the left of Labor. So, as the columnist Simon Jenkins put it in The Times of London the other day, if you want a Conservative government vote Labor, if you want a Labor government vote Liberal Democrat, and if you want a Liberal government vote Conservative. Got that?

Most polls have predicted that Labor will be returned with a comfortable majority, but polls that count only respondents who say they are certain to vote make the gap much narrower. There is widespread dissatisfaction, mainly related to the war in Iraq, among people who supported Labor in the last two elections, but nobody really knows what proportion of them will reluctantly vote Labor, or register a protest vote for one of the other parties, or abstain.

It is not looking good for the Tories, especially if this poll as displayed at the BBC and released yesterday is to be believed:

Despite it being half a century since UK politics heavily influenced ours, if you compare the Canadian and UK scenes, they are not that different – exchanging Gomery for Iraq, gaelic spearation for gallic. A voting populace in flux. The centre has become the party of natural power after a harrowing experience of Tory government in the 80s and early 90s. The moderating left is being accepted as a viable alternative by the low 20s in percent. Toryism is now limited to core regional areas. One key factual difference is the acceptance of asymetrical constitutional rights for the Irish, Scots and Welsh which has diminished tension but, still, legitimized parking the vote there – each main party would love to get at that 10% of the vote…not so different I suppose in effect form the block of votes for the Bloc. Will there be any lessons in the outcome for our Parliament come Thursday evening our time?

Never fear for top reportage, however, as the Flea is on the scene for the vote and V-E day.

Unbelievable

I keep thinking I have posted my last post this Saturday morning, this is simply stunning and has to be noted:

“Ever since I was there [in 1998], there was a guy who told us that one cafeteria was for whites, one was for black.” But his eventual complaints, along with those of three other black workers, led to a damning decision recently by Quebec’s Human Rights Tribunal against Centre Maraîcher Eugène Guinois Jr., one of Canada’s largest commercial vegetable farms, located about 40 minutes southwest of Montreal. In her 32-page report, Judge Michèle Pauzé said she was “stunned, even scandalized” by the racism, neglect and segregation that took place at the 1,300-acre farm where Mr. Michel and scores of other black workers were hired to pick and process vegetables. The judge was so shocked by the case that she prefaced her decision with the phrase, “The events you are going to read happened here, in Quebec, during the years 2000 and 2001.”

While the Globe and Mail, instead of invoking the US south, could have as easily said this sad story sounded like something out of the segregationist elementary schools of forty or fifty years ago in my Nova Scotian hometown or the segregated movie theatres there then, too, the point is the same. Read the whole story and check the labels in your vegetable drawer.