For many, many years, Wall Street demanded and received decreased regulation. They repeatedly called for less and less government intervention into the free market. Now, having royally screwed the pooch in this unregulated atmosphere, they get saved by what? Government intervention. Does anybody else find this repellent?
I have yet to hear a clearly articulated explanation of the alternative outcome–no bailout–for the average American (not to mention the average Canadian). Yes, it’ll be bad news, but I have no sense of how bad. And, you know, I’ve been paying attention.
It must be pretty weird to live in the US these days. On top of impending (and possibly averted) economic disaster, you’re living through one of the weirdest presidential elections in history. I watched some of the US vice-presidential debate last night (and some of the Canadian leadership debate and some of the hockey game), and I continue to be shocked that Governor Palin might one day run this country. If Americans put Senator McCain and Governor Palin in the Whitehouse, they get the governance they deserve.
Via Sue, I read this CBC article about Prime Minister Harper’s plan to extend employment insurance benefits to self-employed Canadians like myself:
At Eurospa in Ottawa’s east end, the Conservative leader announced that his party will give self-employed Canadians the chance to opt in to the employment insurance system, providing them with parental leave and other EI benefits…
The self-employed business owners who choose to participate could collect employment insurance or parental benefits once they had worked enough hours to qualify, even if their business collapsed.
The article points out that this is a program aimed directly at professional women, a demographic that the Conservatives struggle to reach. After all, they did announce the thing in a spa. I wonder if the Prime Minister got his toes painted.
Sue makes some salient points in critiquing the plan:
If optional, how would you control the quality of the business owners paying into the plan. You’re much more likely to see “marginally successful” business owners paying in, because they’re the ones who expect to have to collect. That’s not going to work, because you will have far too many outputs to cover from the inputs.
If the plan is mandatory, you’re basically taxing all the successful entrepreneurs to support the unsuccessful ones. Um ex-squeeze me? Not over my dead body!! As a successful OR unsuccessful entrepreneur, a mandatory EI program leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.
I agree with Sue about the kinds of business which are likeliest to opt in. It’s hard to imagine how the plan will pay for itself in the long run.
I hope the plan remains optional (that’s how it sounds from the article), because otherwise it’s essentially a tax on the small business owner. When you become self-employed, you adopt greater risk in order to potentially reap greater reward. I’m comfortable with that, and don’t need my government to soften the blow should my business fail.
That said, I do think extending paid family leave to the self-employed is a good move. There are plenty of proven social benefits from such a program that extend beyond the individual.
As you may have heard, everybody involved in the federal leadership debates did a flip-flop, and agreed to include Green Party leader Elizabeth May in the debate. The rationales seem, well, peculiar:
Layton, who faced protesters at an Ontario campaign event on Wednesday, conceded the issue had become a “distraction,” and said he did not want to continue “debating about the debate” until the election. “I have only one condition for this debate, and that is that the prime minister is there, because I want to debate the issues with him,” Layton said.
Kory Teneycke, Harper’s director of communications, confirmed Harper had also changed his mind, telling reporters that while the Conservatives still objected to May’s participation on principle, he would no longer oppose May’s inclusion. “We don’t think she should be there, but if the NDP have decided they’re changing their position, we will not stand alone,” he said. In an interview with CBC News, Tory campaign co-chairman David Emerson said the reversal was a case of the prime minister “reacting to changing circumstances.”
May says that “tens of thousands of Canadians came to her defence, with some staging protests or telephoning the TV networks in charge of the debates”. Really? What evidence was there of a protest of this scope? I joined a Facebook group (that was the vast extent of my public dissent), and it only has 209 members. Ah, hang on, clearly I joined the wrong group. This one has 6007 members, which is pretty good for being only a few days old.
Still, you’ve got to hand it to Mr. Layton and Prime Minister Harper–way to have the courage of your convictions.
On a related note, the UBC School of Journalism created NetPrimeMinister.ca, a Netvibes-powered aggregator of social media news and commentary about the election. They asked for my feedback, so my main complaint would be the lack of RSS feeds. Obviously Netvibes doesn’t want you to consume information that way, but it’s too bad that we can’t grab, say, a mega-feed for the entire site. Then you could filter it for mentions of your local candidate, a particular issue like ‘net neutrality’ or whatever.
We started receiving these a couple of years ago. When we lived in Yaletown, I think they came from the NDP. Over the past week, we’ve received two from Conservative MPs Jay Hill and Ed Fast (do Tory MPs only get issued two syllables for their names?).
If you haven’t gotten these, they’re cheap-and-cheerful fliers (the graphic design work is sophmoric) focusing on a particular issue. They feature ridiculously heightened language (”many thugs, hoodlums and organized crime rings view these same cars as easy cash”) and a ballot, asking you to pick a party leader based on the issue. As you can see if you look at the larger version, these fliers ask “who do you think is on the right track on crime?” You fill in your details and send them back to ‘CRG-Government Caucus Services’.
I confess to being rather baffled by this particular direct marketing practice. I have a bunch of questions:
Do politicos have a particular name for this kind of direct mail piece?
Why does it originate from seemingly random Members of Parliament? I live in neither Peace River or Abbotsford–the two constituencies Mr. Hill and Mr. Fast represent.
This isn’t, in any scientific way, an actual poll or survey. These fliers feature specific criticism of the Liberals and prominent photos of Prime Minister Harper. Are they just trying to collect my name, contact details and an issue about which I care, so that they can follow up with more targeted mail? That seems to be the case.
Why is the execution so crappy? Because the parties are distributing millions of these around the country, in a kind of giant fishing expedition for more detailed information?
To me, these fliers have always seemed silly and wasteful. The rate of return must be abysmally low, and skews to the kind of people who have the time and inclination to complete and return the form. I’m guessing that that’s older supporters of the featured party.
Can some clueful, politically-minded sort explain the rationale and results associated with this old-school marketing?
UPDATE: This is why I ask questions around here–I tend to get fast and accurate answers from you, my dear readers. Wandering Coyote pointed me to his own partisan writings on the topic, as well as a Times Colonist article about these so-called ‘ten percenters’.
UPDATE #2: The Hill Times explains precisely what these fliers are:
The House spends about $7.8-million a year on printing services for MPs. MPs send out Householders four times a year into their constituencies. But they can also send an unlimited amount of “Ten Percenters,” or flyers to households across the country up to 10 per cent of their voters.
They are single page photocopied black and white flyers that the House Board of Internal Economy allows MPs to send to constituents in their own riding or in any other riding. Each Ten Percenter must be 50 per cent different from each other and, according to the Member’s Manual of Allowances and Services the MP’s name “must appear prominently on all Ten Percenters.” Once a month, however, MPs can participate in a “regrouping” where any number of MPs from the same party can send the same Ten Percenter to households anywhere in the country. The total number of Ten Percenters are not allowed to exceed 10 per cent of voters in each of the members participating in the regrouping and are coordinated through the parties whips’ offices.
The prime minister will declare that, after having met with all three opposition leaders over the last few days, he no longer has the confidence of Parliament, the sources said. As per tradition, it will then be up to Jean to decide whether to dissolve Parliament and set the election date.
I must register to vote here in Victoria.
In other news, the Green Party, in a rather backhanded fashion, acquired its first Member of Parliament. MP for the West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast-Sea to Sky Country Blair Wilson got bounced from the Liberals last year:
Green party Leader Elizabeth May introduced Wilson at a news conference Saturday morning in Ottawa, just a week after he approached the party.
“It felt like coming home,” Wilson said Saturday.
I know very little about him, but I’ve heard some fairly unflattering things about Blair Wilson. Regardless, I’m hopeful that this means that the Greens will get a voice in the TV debates in the upcoming election. They were denied by the broadcasters in the past because they’d never had a sitting MP.
I observed to somebody over the weekend that, in the event that the Green Party leader gets to participate in the debate, it’d be a bit of a pity. Elizabeth May strikes me as kind of a nerd. But, then, looking at our current crop of party leaders, they’re a pretty nerdy bunch.
In sharp contrast, that American election just gets more and more fascinating. It’s the best reality TV I’ve seen in years.
Today saw the launch of Toronto’s first scramble intersection, at the corner of Yonge and Dundas. I think of these as Tokyo-style intersections, where traffic is stopped in all four directions and pedestrians can cross in any direction, including diagonally:
Flanked by the Eaton Centre and Yonge-Dundas Square, the intersection is used by about 100,000 pedestrians a day and is the site of Toronto’s first trial run for the scramble concept, meant to make crossing safer and more efficient for pedestrians and long used elsewhere, including some other cities in Canada.
While striding through the intersection diagonally yesterday, Glenn De Baeremaeker, the city’s works committee chairman, agreed that it felt a bit naughty: “You’re looking for an Elmer the Safety Elephant to be scolding you from the side. … It’s organized chaos.”
We don’t have a TV, so I’ve hardly watched any Olympics. I’m surprised to say that I missed watching them a little. I’ve caught the highlights on the CBC’s website (live streaming still very dodgy on my MacBook), but that’s been it.
So, I have a lousy sense of Canada’s achievements at these games. They’ve won 19 medals, which sounds good, but how about a little context? How does 19 medals today compare to winning 19 medals in, say, 1968? How have the Olympics changed in the past 40 years?
I did some research on Wikipedia, and assembled this spreadsheet. In doing so, I learned some interesting stuff:
At the 2008 Olympics, Canada ended up ranking 19th in the medal standings. That’s its best performance since 1992, and (ignoring the heavily-boycotted 1984 Games) its second best performance in the last 40 years. The Canadian Olympic Committee had set a goal of a top-16 finish, which seems pretty unrealistic given history and the competition.
We can also look at the portion of the total medal pot that Canada won. They won 1.98% of these year’s medals.
I looked at some other factors, like how many medals Canada won per event or attending athlete, but I’m not sure that they’re germane.
I also discovered a couple of general Olympic stats:
Since 1968, the number of athletes attending the Games has doubled.
Since 1968, the number of events has increased by 76%, and the total number of events by 82%. I guess we can attribute the greater increase in athletes to new team sports or larger pools of qualifying athletes?
I know, I’m a big nerd. But I think we can celebrate Canada’s medal haul as a very good result. They’ve done better, but 2008 counts as above average.
To those who would accuse me of focusing too much on the medal count, I’d point you to this Globe and Mail article. In it, two-time gold medal winner and executive director of the Road to Excellence Alex Baumann talks about how much their emphasis is on winning, and funding those sports where Canadian athletes are likely to medal.
James emailed and asked why I hadn’t written about the Conservative government’s recent cuts to cultural programs. In truth, I kind of missed that whole debacle. Plus, it looks like they’ve been sufficiently raked over the coals for that one.
It’s an odd move, because up to now it seems to me that the Harper government has been relatively benign on cultural funding. I certainly remember deeper cuts from other Conservative governments. And their cuts only amounted to less than CAN $50 million. Was saving that money really worth all the grief they’ve suffered in the media? Or maybe it’s meant to be a gesture to their base?
Section 120 is a Joke
I have, however, been meaning to criticize the Harper government’s planned Bill C-10. That link goes to the CBC’s rather critical analysis of the proposed legislation. If ever you wanted an example of the CBC’s liberal bias, there it is. Here’s a summary of the problematic section of the Bill:
The issue that concerns Canada’s film and television community is Section 120, which would allow the Heritage Minister (currently Josée Verner) to withdraw tax credits from productions determined to be “contrary to public policy.”
The minister would create a set of guidelines for film and television producers. The guidelines have not yet been established but would cover violence, hatred and sexual content in film and TV productions, or anything else the minister believes should not be financed by Canadian taxpayers. Committees within the heritage and justice departments would be charged with vetting productions and implementing the guidelines.
In essence, the legislation gives the federal government carte blanche to bypass existing vetting mechanisms to deny funding to cultural works of which it disapproves. On top of infringing on free speech (even this conservative agrees with that), it will have a chilling effect on the kinds of movies which get made in Canada. Would The Boys of St. Vincent or Eastern Promises have been made in a Bill C-10 world? It’s worth mentioning that the Liberals had similar plans to restrict arts funding. It was a lousy idea then, and it’s a lousy idea now.
Poised, Disciplined and On Message
But don’t listen to me on this. Listen to the excellent interview (MP3) that Sarah Polley gave on CBC a couple of months back. If you’re ever going to advocate in the media for a cause, this interview is essential listening. Ms. Polley is incredibly poised and disciplined, articulates her position clearly and remains on-message. She never needlessly attacks the Harper government, nor does she sound like some hippie artist who’s making porn on the taxpayer’s dollar. She makes an impassioned but rationale and professional defense of her stance.
I so often see advocates of environmental and social causes on the news, and they waste their sound bite on lame, slightly nutty critcriques of whoever they’re railing against. Plus they’re frequently dressed shabbily and look frumpy. That sounds trivial, but in a world governed by televisual aesthetics, it’s not. I don’t care if you’re just back from a week of protest and bongo drumming in Clayoquot Sound. Shave, comb your hair and put on a suit before you go on TV.
“I think as Canadians there is a bit of a tiredness in seeing all American stuff,” Shaun Donnelly, president of Real Productions, said during an interview on Friday.
“There is always that thrill for something that is local and you get the sense that these are people you can meet at the supermarket.”
It just struck as the most ludicrous quote to offer. We can finally enjoy Newfy accents in our porn? Is that really a priority for Canadians?
Wow, I thought to myself, I have no idea what six out of the eight n11 numbers are for. How curious. Here’s what I could come up with. These apply to landlines only, as far as I can figure. Cell phones may treat these access codes differently. I’m not near a landline at the moment, or I’d call them myself.
311 - It’s “a single phone number for non-emergency municipal services and information, and will be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week in multiple languages.” Is it the same for every BC community, or just Vancouver?
A couple of Winnipegers are visiting us this weekend. We discussed going for Slurpees, and they unveiled their vast knowledge base of all things Slurpable. Apparently Slurpees are very popular, because it has been the Slurpee Capital of the World for nine years running:
“It’s nostalgic at this point,” said regional market manager of 7-Eleven Canada, Inc., Dale Shaw. “This is probably the only place in the world where it’s a four-season beverage.” Slurpees have been a Winnipeg staple for generations, he said.
Shaw said the best-performing store in the city is at Pembina Highway and Killarney Avenue. “For the province, it’s Steinbach,” he said. The best-selling Slurpee flavours are G-Shock Gatorade and Slurpaccino.
Really? Gatorade and Slurpaccino? That feels like new-flavour marketing to me–those are the flavours I avoid like a the semi-solid plague.
