A Manitoba First Nation chief is threatening to divide a reserve to resolve an impasse with community members. Some members are staging a sit-in at the band office. Buffalo Point First Nation is located near the Ontario-Manitoba border. Band administration has already...
Year: 2012
Italian judge’s anti-scientific verdict should not surprise us
Calling on people to stop asking questions leads to ignorance. Dissuading people from asking questions about scientific issues leads directly to scientific ignorance.
The purpose of scientific knowledge never has been to reach certainty and to stop questioning. While science and technology mitigate some of the uncertainty in which we live, they do not get rid of it.
No science is possible without doubts. Questions are to science what oxygen is to fire: without doubt, science is extinguished.
This is a basic lesson that an Italian court could use, having recently convicted seven earthquake scientists for their failure to predict and warn the population about the 2009 earthquake that sadly injured thousands and killed more than 300 people in the Italian town of L’Aquila.
The sentences handed out by judge Marco Billi were higher than those demanded by the prosecution, which had asked for the accused to be given four years each. The judge also imposed lifetime bans from holding public office and ordered the defendants to pay compensation of €7.8m (£6.4m).
The verdict has been called chilling and shocking. It may be easy to blame the judge for his supposed ignorance, but such blatant scientific ignorance does not exist in isolation. It has a context.
CRTC to Implement Wireless Industry Code of Conduct
The CRTC is holding a proceeding to establish a Code of Conduct for the Wireless Industry (meaning cell phones). This is unusual for the telecom industry although it has been used by the CRTC on the broadcasting side. The Broadcasting Code for Advertising to Children is one example. It isn’t traditional tariff regulation, it isn’t relying more on market forces, it is a kind of guided self-regulation, likely with penalties for violations.
Consumer anger has led three provinces to legislate provincial codes on mobile phone contracts. The big cell phone companies through the Canadian Wireless Telecommunications Association (CWTA) proposed the Code of Conduct to avoid more legislation at the provincial level and having to deal with different rules in every province. It took years to get the provinces out of telecommunications regulation and have a national market with the same rules and yet now, they are coming back into it through this path.
How did we get ourselves to this point? Terrence Corcoran takes the consumers groups to task as leftist anti-market economic illiterates here.
He claims that the figures show that the market is competitive, consumers have no right to complain if they don’t read their contracts and that the CRTC and the provincial governments should get out of the way of business and let them compete. Up to a point, I agree with this view, generally favouring free market competition as the best result for consumers.
Hydro Revenue Review Off the Table
A July presentation to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty suggesting the government is committed to a full-scale review of how it addresses hydroelectricity revenues in the equalization formula is not under active consideration, the Finance Department said Thursday.
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Military Conquest is Meaningless Without True Social Renewal
The hasty, defeatist and craven withdrawal of U.S. and NATO forces from Afghanistan in August has compelled the so-called “civilized” Western nations and their leaders to confront the failures and errors of the past 20 years, which resemble those of earlier conflicts....
What Life Looks Like Outside COVID-19 Hysteria
Travel and work over the past two years have brought me to many different jurisdictions. What continues to strike me is the way the responses to COVID-19 have been varied, arbitrary and often draconian. I look back at Canada and see raging debates over mask mandates,...
Climate Poll Asked Wrong Questions
Queen’s University Prof. John Smol is right to say that it’s “discouraging how slowly the science seems to have been translated into public policy and public opinion.” If science was driving climate policy, then we would have no carbon dioxide regulations at all since the global warming scare is so weak scientifically.
A Radical Exit From Global Financial Crisis
The most remarkable feature of the global financial crisis is its sheer duration. For five years now, developed economies have been in trouble – much longer than ‘ordinary’ recessions usually last. This is despite bountiful attempts to return the world’s industrialised economies to their previous steady growth path.
Trick Questions on Climate Change
I wish the media was much more careful about how they report this type of junk political science.
California’s Public Union Referendum: The voters have a chance to break the union hold on Sacramento.
Since voters in San Diego and San Jose overwhelmingly supported ballot measures scaling back worker retirement benefits in June, California Governor Jerry Brown has again picked up the cause of pension reform. Alas, Democrats in the legislature aren’t listening, so it looks like voters will have to use the ballot box to get the job done.
‘Climate Consensus’ Data Need a More Careful Look
In his Aug. 6 op-ed, “A New Climate-Change Consensus,” Environmental Defense Fund President Fred Krupp speaks of “the trend—a decades-long march toward hotter and wilder weather.” We have seen quite a few such claims this summer season, and Mr. Krupp insists that we accept them as “true.” Only with Lewis Carroll’s famous definition of truth, “What I tell you three times is true,” is this the case.
Want to reform government? Start with the Civil Service
Civil Service has much to learn from other countries, according to the Cabinet Office Minister. And why would Britain not want to compare itself against best practice from other countries? After all, many gold medallists are coached by the best in the world who are...
Thinking About Utility Corridors
http://business.financialpost.com/2012/08/09/canada-on-cusp-of-new-oil-era-as-heavy-crude-discounting-nears-end-canadian-naturals-laut/ If all goes according to plan, the pipeline to the west will not be required within 10 years. Instead, the need to feed...
Ethanol and Drought
would it not make sense to lift the ethanol blending mandate in the USA?
Oil Sand News
Imperial Oil has reduced production costs and reduced carbon emissions to being on par with conventional oil. What are the environmentalists going to complain about now?