More wonderful weather

Tomorrow’s weather forecast, according to Environment Canada:

Thursday: Cloudy. Snow beginning early in the afternoon changing to ice pellets mixed with snow in the afternoon. Snow and ice pellet amount 5 cm. Wind east 40 km/h gusting to 60. High minus 1.

Thursday night: Ice pellets changing to freezing rain in the evening then to rain later in the evening. Wind east 50 km/h gusting to 70. Temperature rising to plus 3 by morning.

In other words, it’s a good old-fashioned Southern Ontario slop storm. By Friday morning, all major intersections will have about a foot and a half of water at sidewalk’s edge. What fun!

The Conservatives’ plan to extend two provisions of an anti-terrorism bill has been defeated, and naturally the Tories are blaming the Liberals for this, even though the other opposition parties also opposed the bill. Critics of the Tories, including deputy Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff, also pointed out that the government has had five months to respond to a House committee report recommending changes to the Anti-Terrorism Act, but hasn’t done anything. This suggests, once again, that Stephen Harper is more interested in attacking the Liberals than legislating.

Good idea, bad tactics

The lead story in today’s Toronto Star reports on a request from Toronto mayor David Miller: Canadian cities should be given one cent of the GST. The city has created a web site, OneCentNow.ca, devoted to this very subject. (Its front page features a penny slowly rising in the east like a bright red sun.)

The statistics presented on this site are quite convincing, and sometimes even startling:

• Toronto faces an annual $1.1 billion infrastructure gap: in other words, this is the amount of money the city needs in order to run effectively.
• Toronto is $2.4 billion in debt. (The federal government, you may recall, is running huge surpluses.)
• The main source of revenue for Toronto is property taxes. But a 1% increase in property taxes only raises $18 million for the city. A substantial increase in property taxes would drive many homeowners on fixed incomes, such as seniors, out of their homes.
• PST and GST revenues collected from the city have each increased $100 million each year.
• For every dollar in federal, provincial and municipal taxes Toronto pays, the city only gets eight cents back.
• Toronto pays more than $750 million on programs formerly paid for by the province.
• The city has already laid off more than 1400 full-time staff since amalgamation, despite having to administer programs formerly handled by the province.

Other Canadian cities are facing similar problems.

Given that the federal government has reduced the GST once, and is considering doing so again, there may well be tax room that can be given to the cities. But I am convinced that, by focusing on Toronto, the “one cent of GST for cities” movement is making a tactical blunder. Mayor Miller deserves credit for developing a broad consensus on this issue: mayors from all across Ontario and from as far away as Halifax were present at his news conference. But Mr. Miller may have forgotten one important fact: nobody outside Toronto cares about what happens to Toronto. If the one-cent GST movement becomes perceived as a way to primarily benefit Toronto, it stands no chance in hell of gaining any momentum.

Now that a number of mayors and business leaders have stepped forward and declared their support for more stable funding for cities, it’s time for the mayor of some other city to take the lead role. Ideally, this somebody should be the mayor of a Conservative stronghold, such as Calgary, or a potential swing riding, such as Markham. (Both mayors have declared their support for more reliable funding measures.)

By the way, sometimes a picture says more than a thousand words: does it look like Stephen Harper is happy to be attending this press conference?

Becoming opening act clad

Somebody should be collecting the best of the random text included with spam, as some of it reads like poetry. Here’s an example, from today’s intake:

Joining nsync becoming opening act clad.

Find clips info stats join our newsletter receive, news.

Next month favorite, poprock received, out vocal sarah, shortlived.

Grace david dateline nbc discuss.

Checkup clear, visit welfare officials sheriffs deputy automatic.

Numerous corporate charity functions ask renault, levis!

Gets enters extratvcom access locks?

Now those yeah, thats, picture!

Search wizard holly terababes twisted abc met art.

Joining nsync becoming opening act clad.

“Holly Terababes” would be a great name for the femme fatale in a Bond movie.

And I also got spam today from “Gene Chandler”. Woo-hoo! The Duke of Earl!

Oh, for heaven’s sake

Today’s Globe reports that Stephen Harper entered the House of Commons on Thursday flanked by six relatives of victims of the Air India disaster. Is it just me, or is it a bad idea to use long-suffering relatives as props in a partisan political battle? Why shouldn’t he go all out and dress them up in Getting Things Done For All of Us T-shirts?

A recent Globe article on the CN strike pointed out that CN CEO Hunter Harrison took home $56 million in pay in 2005 while pushing his company to constantly become more efficient and competitive. I’m beginning to think of this as the beehive theory of capitalism: the worker bees all slave away, producing royal jelly, which they feed to the queen bee, who becomes ever more fat and bloated. I’m reasonably certain that this isn’t the best way for the economy to work.

Whatever it takes

The latest controversy in Canadian politics is that Prime Minister Stephen Harper (referred to as PMSH for short in some blogs) suggested yesterday that the Liberals are reluctant to extend anti-terrorism measures because the father-in-law of Liberal MP Navdeep Bains is on the list of people that could be questioned about the 1985 Air India disaster. (The Globe and the Star have reports on this story.)

Harper tried to read the text of a Vancouver Sun article on the subject, but was immediately drowned out by the Liberals, who were accusing him of being willing to tarnish the Bains family’s reputation in order to play partisan politics.

In other news, Canada’s judges are concerned that the Conservatives’ method of appointing judges is biased towards their law-and-order agenda. According to the Globe, a majority of the members of the advisory committees that deal with judicial appointments have been appointed by the Tory government. Harper’s response to the judges’ criticism was to say, “We do not want the judicial appointments process to become a private club of judges and lawyers. That is why we included voices as diverse as victims and the police.” (One could argue, of course, that crime victims and police are most likely to favour tougher sentencing laws.)

Everybody has an opinion, so here’s mine. When Harper was elected a year ago, I was prepared to wait and see – perhaps he would actually be willing to be more of a moderate than he was in his National Citizens Coalition days. Now, I’m convinced that he has not changed. He acts as if he is fighting a war, with the enemy being leftists, liberals, or anyone who disagrees with his radical conservative views. For this reason, he is prepared to do whatever it takes to gain and hold power. He wants to change the face of Canada, even though most Canadians don’t agree with him. For this reason, he should not be allowed to get the majority government he so desperately hungers for.

(What Canada really wants is a Liberal-style government without the Liberals. But that option, sadly, is not available: Brian Mulroney killed the old Progressive Conservative Party, and the Reform Party ate it.)

Canadian pills

Okay, now my spam is just getting bizarre. Here’s one I got this week:

Pills from Canadian pharmacy is the real deal – good ingredients, 100% guarantee, good effect! Canadian pills have been proven to work, and use only the highest quality ingredients available anywhere.

Don’t waste time, join the millions of men already benefiting from using pills from Canadian pharmacy. Why be average when you can be the elite?

Here are just a few of the thousands of positive responses we have gotten recently:

“I Couldn’t believe the change…“
“Gentlemen, I took the plunge and ordered a 120 day supply of Canada based pills. All I can say is THANK God I DID! Using the measuring guide in the free en1argement exercise section I can proudly tell you that I have gained over 1.8 inches in length and 1.6 inches in girth, AGAIN thank you!”
Ka’Sandra, Arkansas

“I have been using Canadian pills for 3 months now and I must say I’m simply amazed. I really didn’t think the product would have this many benefits. I really only bought the pills to help the reliability of my erections. But to my surprise every aspect of my penis and sex life has improved. I have 1arger, harder erections easily, and I can really satisfy my girlfriend fully now.”
LYNDA, Chicago

Ka’Sandra? Lynda?

How do you think Canadians get through long, bitter winters? Pills, that’s how.

I demand you don’t pay me now

So I got my cellphone bill in the mail. They gave me a $100 credit, so I now owe them $-68.42.

I wonder if they’ll send me a second bill, demanding the $-68.42 and threatening to turn my account over to a collection agency if they don’t pay. The agency will then phone me and, in an extremely hostile and angry voice, demand that they pay me the money right away. Maybe they’ll charge themselves interest on my unpaid debt.

Life in Upside Down Land is fun.

Okay…

I seem to recall people saying that, thanks to El Nino or climate change or something, this winter was going to be very mild. Can we point these people out so that we can laugh at them or something?

Mind you, the Toronto forecast for Tuesday calls for a high of 1. That’s 1 without a minus in front of it. Of course, they’re expecting drizzle.

Never surrender

The CBC reports that neither Prime Minister Stephen Harper nor former Finance Minister Ralph Goodale plans to apologize to the other over the income trust scandal, in which a senior Finance Department bureaucrat was charged recently with breach of trust. This isn’t surprising, really – if one side were to give in and say sorry, the other side would throw it back at them:

[Name] Party admits wrongdoing in income trust scandal!

It’s like when you’re in a car accident: they tell you never to admit liability, as anything you say will be used against you.

So I paid a visit to the Conservative Party website again this morning; perhaps my blood pressure is too low, or something. Of course, there is the usual attack on the opposition, this time with Stéphane Dion’s face cropped at about the halfway point. But there were two new things on the site that fascinated me: a link to a Political Training Conference, scheduled for March, and a link to a cBoutique.

The Political Training Conference features seminars on Candidate Training, Campaign Manager Training, Outreach Training, and other ways to Stay On Message At All Times. Sadly, registration is only open to people who have been vouched for. It would be fun to sneak in and learn some of the Conservatives’ secret inner strategies, but, of course, that is why registration is monitored: to ensure that softheaded, vaguely liberal Torontonians like me can’t snoop.

For some reason, I love the very idea of a cBoutique. Perhaps it’s the clash of images in my head: “Conservative” and “boutique” are concepts that don’t normally go well together. And there’s got to be at least one old-school knuckle-dragging ex-Reformer out there who is miffed because his party is using a French word on the Conservative web site.

What I tell you three times is true

Today’s Globe reports that Stephen Harper has accused Stéphane Dion of being soft on terrorism. I’m wondering whether Harper actually thinks this, or whether he and his strategists have identified crime and terrorism as a wedge issue, and are trying to associate the Liberals with softness.

I think I’ve finally figured out another of the things that is bothering me about the Tories’ tactics. I’m no expert on psychology, but I seem to recall reading that the human brain tends to operate on the “what I tell you three times is true” principle: if you hear or see something over and over again, your brain tends to absorb it whether you like it or not. It’s why advertisers run the same commercial several times in an hour, and it’s why propagandists throughout history have used short, repetitive phrases to get their message across.

To put it another way: let me try an experiment. Read the following (which may or may not be true):

Stephen Harper likes to eat way too many blueberry pancakes.
Stephen Harper likes to eat way too many blueberry pancakes.
Stephen Harper likes to eat way too many blueberry pancakes.
Stephen Harper likes to eat way too many blueberry pancakes.
Stephen Harper likes to eat way too many blueberry pancakes.
Stephen Harper likes to eat way too many blueberry pancakes.
Stephen Harper likes to eat way too many blueberry pancakes.

Now, think of Stephen Harper. What are you thinking of right now? And what if I were to do this over and over again, every day, in a variety of print and visual media? There’s no way you’re going to be able to ever think about our sitting Prime Minister without thinking about blueberry pancakes, right?

This is what the Tories are trying to do with their chosen wedge issues, and it seems unfair to me.