Today (Sunday, Nov. 25), is United Nations International Day to Eliminate Violence against Women. Creating awareness of the global epidemic of violence against women is crucial. But by taking an international perspective on the problem, as the UN has done, we risk...
Year: 2012
Evasion or Avoidance?
There's an interesting story developing in the UK where many left-wing groups, supported by over-the-top media stories, have been building up pressure against businesses that 'evade' taxes. I put evade in inverted commas there because none of the businesses being...
Higher Prices, Less Choices; Let’s Reject Cartels
Imagine you and your business partners tried to corner the Canadian market for light bulbs. You conspired to control production and divvy up the market to inflate prices. Cartels like this are illegal in Canada. And there are tough criminal penalties if you’re caught – fines of up to $25-million and 14 years in jail under the Competition Act.
Cigarette-smuggling: The urge to smurf
THE busy interstate highway that zips through Richmond, Virginia, and up to the crowded cities of the north-east has long been a conduit for handguns bought wholesale in Virginia and sold to drug-dealers in New York. Now I-95 is siphoning northwards another form of contraband: black-market cigarettes.
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A Year of LNG Royalties/Taxes from a Single Pipeline Could Pay for …
Sitting on top of one of the world’s largest and richest natural resource warehouses is turning into quite a disconcerting distraction. While much of Canada’s population – the heavily urban part for whom “rural” means Whistler, Muskoka, or Mont Tremblant – likes to...
Medical Martial Law – Never Again
The economic upheaval now roiling over the world’s financial markets, rapidly lowering living standards, and even threatening to freeze Europeans this winter, is all directly related to the radical decision most western leaders took in March of 2020., when a new...
Alberta Legislature Gets to Work
The Alberta government’s legislative agenda for the new session of the Legislature was announced this week. What should we expect from it?
The government’s plan includes an education bill (reincarnate), a bill to amend electoral law and a bill to amend municipal electoral rules as well as one with guarantees for buyers of new homes.
But it may be the subthemes in and around some of the proposed bills that are likely to dominate the debate during. The Leader of the Official Opposition, Danielle Smith, has already served notice to the Redford government, for example, that her team will be looking closely into the questions of health, finance, and ethics. In that very context, they will be watching the pension issue as well as the commission of inquiry on healthcare wait times and queue-jumping.
You are Free to be Responsible – Russell Means RIP
Anyone of integrity in the world would be insulted that their government has a department that is strictly to oversee an ethnic group. That is Hitlerlism, that is apartheid, that’s everything this country and any country should be against.
PBS Frontline climate change special cites bogus ‘consensus’
Besides the obvious bias we have come to expect from most main stream media coverage of climate change, “Climate of Doubt“, aired Tuesday night on PBS’s Frontline, committed one serious mistake that can not be left unaddressed.
Frontline repeatedly implied that there is an overwhelming consensus among climate scientists that our CO2 emissions are driving us to a global climate catastrophe. They cited 97% as the fraction of the climate science community who agreed with climate alarmism.
That number is easily dismissed. It comes from a 2009 online survey of 10,257 earth scientists, conducted by two researchers at the University of Illinois. Strangely, the researchers chose to eliminate almost all the scientists from the survey and so ended up with only 77 people, 75 of whom, or 97%, thought humans contributed to climate change.
Besides the fact that, with tens of thousands of climate scientists in the world, 77 is a trivial sample size, the survey coordinators did not ask respondents how much humans had contributed to climate change. The poll is therefore meaningless.
Regina Election Reminder
Just a short reminder that if you’re in Regina (or most of the rest of Saskatchewan), tomorrow is election day for council and local body elections. Enjoy!
Winnipeg Public Transportation: Making the Perfect the Enemy of the Good
Public transportation used to be an afterthought in mid-sized North American cities. There now appears to be a consensus that public transportation is important for moving people around the core of relatively dense cities. Unfortunately, rather than focusing on practical improvement, many politicians and transit advocates are trying to rush too far in the other direction.
Obsession with organic, local food harming developing countries
An American political scientist chastised Western food fads at an international food security conference at McGill University recently. Robert Paarlberg, A professor of political science at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, argued in his 2008 book Starved for...
Two billion dollars is “chump change”
Only in Canada would an Eastern politician refer to two billion dollars of Albertans’ hard-earned money as “chump change.”
Mitigation focus of UN climate meetings an albatross around the neck of poor countries seeking adaptation funding
Developing countries must insist that adaptation negotiations, and the agreements that eventually ensue, be totally separated from the so far fruitless mitigation wars. Not only will this greatly simplify discussions, but the chances of significant climate adaptation agreements will be much enhanced.
Alberta Fast Tracking Highway 63 Expansion
The Government of Alberta has announced that it will expedite plans to compete the twinning of Highway 63.