It takes only one experiment to disprove a theory. The climate models are predicting a global disaster, but the empirical evidence disagrees. The theory of catastrophic man-made global warming has been tested from many independent angles.
Worth A Look
Average Federal Worker Costs $114,000: Budget watchdog
As the Conservative government lops thousands of jobs off the payroll, the cost of the average federal employee will continue to climb and could hit nearly $130,000 by 2015, says a report by Canada’s budget watchdog.
Northern Dams in Doubt: Province orders study of need for Keeyask, Conawapa
The Selinger government wants the Public Utilities Board rate watchdog to tell it if there’s a better alternative to Manitoba Hydro’s proposed northern Keeyask and Conawapa generating stations.
Canada, U.S. Struggling to Reach Agreement to Agree on Product Rules
An ambitious plan to harmonize product regulations between Canada and the United States has become all process, few results. But there is hope.
Featured News
Our Health Ministers Need to Take a Lesson from Hockey Coaches
Those of you who are tired of my rants about the demise of our once great health system will be pleased to know that this is my last editorial. I am retiring from the BCMJ Editorial Board; currently, I am the longest-serving member (more than 20 years). I have been a...
Zinchuk: Oilpatch Only Spending Half What It Spent in 2014
Back in the lofty, pre-Justin Trudeau government days of 2014, back when oil was booming, pipelines were planned to east and west coasts, and Alberta and Saskatchewan were swimming in money, around $81 billion was spent in capital expenditures (CAPEX) in the Canadian...
Milking Our Gullibility: Many Canadians pay twice what Americans pay
Why we pay more for dairy products couldn’t be simpler: Our dairy cartel artificially restricts supply. Now, according to economic theory, industries with literally thousands of competitors, as there are in dairy, aren’t able to form cartels. It’s too easy for members to cheat by cutting prices on the sly. Even the world’s most famous cartel, OPEC, with only a dozen members, often has trouble keeping oil prices high.
Carbon Credits Like Medieval Indulgences: Money should be spent on raising living standards, not the Kyoto Protocol
As a bishop who regularly preaches to congregations of every age and at widely different levels of prosperity and education, I have some grasp of the challenges in presenting a point of view to the general public. This helps me to understand the propaganda achievements of the climate extremists, at least until their attempted elimination of the Medieval Warming and then Climategate.
What’s Occupying Wall Street?: The protestors have a point, if not the right target.
In the matter of Occupy Wall Street, the allegedly anticapitalist movement that’s been camped out in lower Manhattan for the past few weeks and has inspired copycat protests from Boston to Los Angeles, we have some sympathy. Really? Well, yeah.
There Will Be Oil: For decades, advocates of ‘peak oil’ have been predicting a crisis in energy supplies. They’ve been wrong at every turn, says Daniel Yergin.
Since the beginning of the 21st century, a fear has come to pervade the prospects for oil, fueling anxieties about the stability of global energy supplies. It has been stoked by rising prices and growing demand, especially as the people of China and other emerging economies have taken to the road.
The Price of Anger: Killing the HST will cost B.C. 100,000 jobs
Voters in British Columbia exercised their democratic right in a referendum to kill the HST. Angry at a tax introduced only weeks after the last election, the voter’s fury has been expressed in a ballot by a margin of 55% to 45%. The HST will be extinguished and the province will return to the previous retail sales tax.
Bye Bye, Miss American Pie: In the first of five excerpts from his new book, Mark Steyn explains how bureaucrats have come to regulate every aspect of modern life — even the neighbourhood bake sale
Big Government requires enough of a doughnut to pay for the hole: you take as much dough as you can get away with and toss it into the big gaping nullity of micro-regulation. And it’s never enough. And eventually you wake up and find your state is all hole and no doughnut. Excerpted from the recently released book After America: Get Ready For Armageddon by Mark Steyn. Reprinted with permission of Regnery Publishing, Inc. © Mark Steyn 2011.
The Fall of the Midwest Economic Model: In 1970, the future seemed to belong to Michigan’s example of big companies and big unions. Not anymore.
President Obama has kicked off a three-day bus tour of Minnesota, Iowa and Illinois, where the corn is high and at least some factories are spewing smoke. He’s holding town-hall meetings on the economy, putting the unemployed back to work and “growing wages for everyone.” He won these Midwestern states handily in 2008, but he’s not taking anything for granted these days. The Midwest is the region with the largest number of target states.
The $25,000 Cow: That’s the average value of a milk quota per cow under a supply-management system
If it were proposed today to tax food—even at five per cent, never mind such punitive rates as these—it would be instant political suicide: consider the ruckus that erupts whenever some stray academic suggests the GST should apply to groceries. But because it is the status quo, and because the tax is implicit rather than explicit, and because “it’s to help farmers,” the policy is not only tolerated, it is impossible to remove. Or at least, it has been until now.
Paying For Unused Advice: When science doesn’t support political decisions on public safety, the politicians simply ignore it, writes Dan Gardner
Oh, politicians say their decisions are informed by science but that’s a fairy tale they tell sleepy children and reporters. In reality, politicians cite science when it supports decisions they want to make anyway, for other reasons, whether ideological or political. When science does not support their decisions, they ignore it.