Liberal Plan: Blame the Americans for Guns

So. even though George W. Bush and the Congress have protected the gun manufacturers from lawsuits, our government still plans to try to sue them in US courts. HA HA HA. Which stupid lawyer thought this one up? I'm thinking it's a lobbyist for a private firm...

Even sillier is the request than the Americans should stop the flow of illegal weapons into Canada. Since most of these weapons are perfectly legal in the USA (and even constitutionally protected), why should Washington care? Just because Toronto is becoming the crime capital of the continent?

I think Washington's response should be "You stop the flow of drugs into the US and we might consider thinking about guns. But probably not."

I think that Stephen Harper and the Conservatives should use this issue during the election to put Paul Martin on the spot regarding both border control AND the gun registry... I can imagine the debate now:

SH: Isn't the rising crime rate evidence that your government has failed to make Canadian's safer? Isn't it evidence that your government doesn't care about guarding our borders and controlling what comes into our country?

PM: The increase in gun crime in Canada is the fault of the American gun manufacturers and the failure of the United States to keep guns out of Canada.

SH: So are you saying it is NOT the responsibility of the Government of Canada to protect Canadians from illegal weapons? Wasn't the Gun Registry supposed to protect us from guns - oh wait, criminals don't register smuggled weapons... My government would protect Canadians by increasing penalties for gun crimes and improving border security. And we would pay for it by ending the gun registry which only penalizes law abiding citizens.

How sweet it could be.

New EI rules to make unemployment more attractive

So, the federal Liberals want to make EI easier to get and more generous in parts of the country that have high unemployment. Interesting that most of those areas also vote Liberal...

This is a stupid policy because generous EI destroys the incentive to work. And we need workers, not folks sitting on the dole.

What would be more useful for the government to do would be to provide relocation assistance to the unemployed to move to places where jobs are plentiful and unemployment is low. Like Alberta. The unemployment rate in Calgary is officially 3%, but that would be about 20,000 unemployed people, and there are something like 75,000 open job positions in this city right now. Help wanted signs, including apprenticeships and free training, are everywhere. And Edmonton is in a similar situation. I wouldn't recommend Fort McMurray - kind of hard to find a place to live...

Oh wait - Albertans (including those who came from elsewhere) tend to vote Conservative. The NGP doesn't want that....

The other stupid thing about this policy is that they apparently identified Northern Alberta as a place that needs assistance?

Uhh.... Where exactly in Northern Alberta is unemployment high?

• Fort McMurray? No.
• Grande Prairie? No.
• High Level? No.
• Edmonton? No.
• Cold Lake? No.
• Peace River? No.

Ok - there MIGHT be high unemployment on some remote Indian Reserves (like Garden River in Wood Buffalo National Park).

I never thought I say this...

But Jeffrey Simpson is right. His column in the Saturday 22 October Globe and Mail regarding Alberta politics is 100% on the mark.

It is time for Ralph Klein to retire and for someone with vision to take the helm. Alberta is in a PRIME situation to remake Canada by using the funds available to experiment with new methods of service delivery in health care, to make Alberta the #1 education jurisdiction in North America (if not the world).

Unfortunately, Ralph wants to stick around until 2007. And his government is wasting money on things like duplicate hospitals in adjacent towns because they are in different constituencies (can anyone remember Don Getty????) And handing out $400 cheques to residents (and positing this will continue in future years) is ridiculous. See my previous post regarding cutting taxes further to make the Alberta Advantage even greater.

Does Dingwall think we are that stupid?

David Dingwall, the former Liberal cabinet minister, and recently resigned head of the Royal Canadian Mint, declared on Wednesday before a parliamentary committee that the money he consumed in his $747,000 expense account wasn't taxpayer funds, but was taken from the net revenue of the Mint.

Now, the Mint is a Crown Corporation. Meaning it is owned by the Government of Canada. Which means that it is essentially owned for the benefit of the Canadian people. The taxpayers.

Just because Dingwall turned the mint into a profitable venture doesn't mean the profits belong to him. The profits still belong to the shareholder - the Government of Canada, and by proxy the TAXPAYERS.

So Mr. Dingwall - you did spend taxpayers money. It may have been profits earned on taxpayer money invested in the Mint's operations, but it's STILL OURS!!!!

(Mis)-Education in Canada

One of the problems that is starting to exhibit itself in our society are the side-effects of the so-called "Self-Esteem Education Model". This is where a focus of the education system is to make students feel better about themselves under the psychological theory that students with higher self-esteem will perform better.

One problem. It doesn't appear to be a very good theory (link to January 2005 SciAm article). Now you might ask why I am posting to this some 10 months after Scientific American published this article ? Because I've recently come to observe two effects of this, at either end of the education establishment.

First, there is the case of the second grader. The student is struggling at simple mathematics such as addition, and has not yet attempted subtraction or more complex mathemetical concepts. In fact, the student does not yet understand place value. But the student gets many "checkmarks" on their work because they "complete all the assigned work". Initially the checkmarks appear to have little to do with how many of the problems are solved correctly. Later, the checkmarks are applied to only the correct answers, but there is no time limit and if the student chooses to guess they are encouraged to continue guessing until they get the correct answer.

This isn't how I learned math 30 years ago. We learned the basic mathematical axioms (ie. adding single digit numbers together), and then the algorithm for handling larger values. Of course at that time the students didn't need to know the meaning of axiom or algorithm, but it was the process. The system now appears geared toward making the student feel good about themselves and then hoping that the student eventually figures it out. Poor practice in my view.

The second example of this problem comes with the University system. I have learned from professors at my alma mater that the entrance requirement from high school into the faculty I attended is now around 90%. I would not have gotten in. Yet the professors indicate that the first year students are hopeless at structuring an idea in an essay and are asking that they be given a "template or outline" for a paper... Wait!!!! - I thought that was part of the student's job.... Also, they are finding that these students who acheived 90%+ averages in high school are struggling far more with first term calculus than did students even 10 years ago. They simply don't understand the fundamentals.

Further, these students who have never truly been challenged or faced failure are having crises when they do fail at the university level. And their recourse has been to complain about the professors' (racial, sexual, ethnic discrimination) rather than possibly admit that THEY have actually failed.

Pathethic is what it is...

Jim Roszko and the law

Today there is much on the radio and in the papers about Jim Roszko and whether the system failed society by letting this madman run loose. There are a lot of apologists for "The System" that say that the police are understaffed and that the law doesn't allow us to just lock up dangerous people.

Well that may be true, and I wish that governments would spend more money on real law and order efforts than wasting it on "supposed" programs like the Gun Registry.

My first proposal:
Canada should implement a California-style THREE STRIKES law. On your third criminal conviction you are declared a menace to society and imprisoned for life with no chance of parole. If such a law had been in place in the last 15 years, Jim Roszko wouldn't have been free to shoot four RCMP constables.

Second:
We also need to spend more on constructing prisons. Real prisons, not Club Fed style prisons. Prisons with 8×10 cells without televisions, computers or anything else. Prisons for convicts who do not need rehabilitation because they are NEVER getting out.

Faux promise from Paul Martin

So... Paul Martin and Ralph Goodale are taking a page from Klein's playbook and offering to send cheques to Canadians if they have too much money.

It will never happen. Why? Notice that they are not saying "We are going to send every taxpayer $400" like Klein did. They are saying that given the right set of conditions, we will send you money. Problem is, they know they can ensure those conditions never occur.

The primary condition they have set is a surplus in excess of $3 Billion. At which point dollars available over $3 Billion are split three ways - spending, debt reduction and cash to people. So if there is a $4 Billion dollar surplus, about $333 million dollars will be divided amongst about 23 million tax filers. Oh boy - 15 dollars per person!!! So even if there is a surplus, the payout to taxpayers will not be worth to overhead cost of sending cheques.

But the real reason it will never happen is that the surplus will never again be more than $3 Billion. We know this because it happened in 2005. The projected surplus was somewhere in the $8 Billion range - so the government INCREASED SPENDING to reduce the size of the surplus. Trust me - they will do it again. Because Liberals would rather spend your money than let you choose to spend it.