Terri Schiavo dies
Read
the story in the Globe and Mail. I hope now the family members can put aside their battles with each other and let the healing process begin. Something tells me that won't happen, though.
Priceless quotes from Michel Leblanc
"We have to act responsibly. There's a good management team and there's a good fleet."
A good management team? Based on what? His track record certainly doesn't support that statement.
"the silver lining from the bad publicity for Jetsgo is that Canadian consumers know the brand instantly".
Talk about rose-coloured glasses. People also know the Pinto brand pretty well, does that mean they would buy a Pinto today?
Fool me once...
Jetsgo founder Michel Leblanc is
planning to resurrect his recently-defunct airline with a detailed plan to sell the company's owned planes and start flying just leased planes.
After running three airlines into the ground, the most recent event stranding thousands of passengers and causing 1300 people to lose their jobs, how can Leblanc think anyone will trust him enough to buy tickets from him again? Sadly, because people are stupid and have very bad memories. He'll likely convince people to start buying his tickets again by slashing prices yet again, leading to an unsustainable business model yet again, resulting in yet another bankruptcy and failed airline. I give him 2 years before he's back in the media crying foul, blaming Nav Canada, Air Canada and WestJet for bringing him to his knees - yet again.
There should be some sort of 3-strikes-and-you're-out rule for services offered to the public. If you can't make this thing work, you're not allowed to just keep trying ad infinitum - for the good of the people.
Deathbed Conversion - The lesson of Tom DeLay's mortal hypocrisy.
Great dissection by William Saletan on Slate of Tom DeLay's hypocrisy in his position on the Schiavo tragedy. It seems that when faced with a similar decision back in 1988, DeLay chose to be a good son and a good human being and
pull the plug on his father despite the lack of a written, signed preference. Today, he
chooses partisan politics over humanity.
A poem...
...for Kiran Gautam, 2/4/1991-3/22/2005
Peace, my heart, let the time for the parting be sweet.Let it not be a death but completeness.Let love melt into memory and pain into songs.Let the flight through the sky end in the folding of the wings over the nest.Let the last touch of your hands be gentle like the flower of the night.Stand still, O Beautiful End, for a moment, and say your last words in silence.I bow to you and hold up my lamp to light you on your way.- Rabrindranath Tagore
Save Toby!
This is absolutely bloody hysterical. Some guy has set up a web site called
Save Toby. You have to check it out, but only if you have a slightly sick, depraved sense of humour.
Tory convention: Riding representation issue just a ruse?
The Conservative party wrapped up their first policy convention this past weekend with mixed results. I'm quite surprised at the positive spin that the media is putting on the outcome of the convention, claiming that the party is now more united than ever and now looks like a single party instead of two separate parties mashed together. Read the Globe's
take on the convention, as well as CANOE's report on the party
moving forward from their roots.
The thing that is really confusing me, though, is the motion brought forward by Stephen Harper's right-hand man in Ontario, Scott Reid, to change the party's founding policy of equal representation by all ridings, regardless of size. Critics have wondered, given Reid's closeness to Harper, if this motion was really something that Harper wanted to push through in order to give the west coast arm of the party more power.
I submit a more cynical interpretation: I think Harper asked Reid to push this motion, knowing it would be soundly defeated, in order to create a uniting event that distracted the delegates and, more importantly, the public, from the dissent within the party. After all, this is a party that has members that cover almost the entire social spectrum. While that sounds very inclusive, in reality it makes it very difficult to form a coherent platform. Divisive issues such as same-sex marriage, abortion, two-tier health care, and the gun registry are bound to create dissent within the party.
At this point, vocal dissent would be very harmful to the party, since it would create the impression that they are still not ready to lead this country. It's natural, then, that the leaders would have wanted something to draw the entire party together, and I think that this issue of riding representation was innocuous enough to do it. Is it any wonder that Peter McKay responded so vehemently to the motion? And the way I see it, the mainstream media fell for it, hook, line and sinker.
Easing the regulatory burden
The federal government is moving to reduce the red tape involved in regulatory hurdles faced by Canadian industry, including the drug approvals process. Read
more on the Globe and Mail site.
I applaud the government for tackling this thorny, sensitive issue. Unfortunately, the article didn't have much detail on the area I'm most interested in - approval of new pharmaceutical products. The Globe reported that the process will be reduced by up to six months, but didn't give any additional information. If anyone knows where I can get a copy of the report referred to, please drop me a line.
Conservative Party's collapse
It was only a matter of time. The Conservative Party of Canada, brought into existence based on lies and deception, has started its downward spiral. The convention that should have solidified the party and brought together the two sides of the country is instead highlighting the differences between the members of the two founding parties. First, Peter McKay, one of the architects of the merger
goes on the attack against the extreme right-wing members from the Alliance who are trying to force their social agenda on the party as a whole. Then, the leader of the party, instead of dealing with the issue at hand and trying to mend the fracture, decides to
attack the Liberals.
This tactic might have made sense if it wasn't such a blatant attempt to distract the public from the deep-rooted problems in the Conservative Party. At this point, it looks like it's only a matter of time before the party completely falls apart and we see the re-emergence of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.
According to the latter article, major portions of Stephen Harper's speech were "designed to remind warring factions within Conservative ranks about their true enemy", meaning the Liberal party. Big mistake. Parties can fight general elections by defining themselves as not the ruling party. But at internal policy conventions, political parties need to define who they are, not who they're not. As long as Harper and the Conservative Party refuse to hold any sort of serious discussions about their policy positions, they can never form a strong, coherent party that stands a real chance of being elected as the government of this country. And that's a shame, because as good as the Liberals have been for this country, we need a strong second party.
CTV.ca | Victims' families shocked by Air India verdict
From
this report from CTV:
"Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan met reporters in Edmonton Wednesday afternoon and said it was too soon to comment on the possibility of a public inquiry.
'It is way too soon for me at this point, or anyone else in the federal government of Canada, to say anything about whether there would be any use, 20 years later, of a public inquiry.'"
I think it's pretty clear from this statement that there will be no public inquiry. I'm not alone in believing that we all deserve one. If CSIS and the RCMP made mistakes in the investigation, we should damn well look into WHY those mistakes were made, and try to be sure that it never happens again.
The Globe and Mail: AIR-INDIA VERDICT: BOTH NOT GUILTY
The Globe and Mail: AIR-INDIA VERDICT: BOTH NOT GUILTYI'm sick to my stomach. Twenty years. Twenty fucking years. And absolutely nothing to show for it.
Spam blocking software run amok
A colleague of mine sitting next to me just sent an email to someone at a large charity organization, and the email was returned to him immediately as non-deliverable - it had been blocked. The return message claimed that his email had been blocked because he had a disallowed word in there. The word: "cia?is" is how the return email listed it. Makes sense, right? So many of us receive a dozen spam messages a day touting the virtues of this ED drug and offering it for sale, cheap, that I'm not surprised email servers are now filtering out messages with this word in it.
The trouble is, his email was legitimate and he had not typed the word "cialis" into it anywhere. It turns out that his email signature contains his title, and his title has the word "Specialist" in it, which has the letters "c i a l i s" in the middle.
I think it's time to take a step back and re-evaluate our obsession with blocking spam. Let's let our users use some personal judgment in deciding what to read and what to throw out unopened.
NHL as a leveraged buyout play
Slate has in
interesting discussion today on the National Hockey League as a classic case of a leveraged buyout target. I could list a number of reasons I don't think it really fits the model, but for now I'll just say that I'm offended at the lack of mention of any major Canadian cities in this article. Yes, I know, the major US cities are bigger markets and have more revenue potential, but still - it's our game, damn it, we should at least be mentioned.
Reason from an unlikely source
Peter Worthington of the Toronto Sun wrote one of the first truly
reasonable discussions on the RCMP's recent tragedy that I've yet seen. I'm not generally a fan of his work (tends to be very right-wing) but I think he's bang on here. The killing of the 4 RCMP officers had very little to do with the fact that James Roszko had a grow-op, and everything to do with the fact that Roszko was a disturbed, deranged, paranoid individual. Despite his violent and criminal background, his behaviour in this case was not really predictable and to look for one reason that can explain it is to open ourselves up to the crazies on the far left who would put unnecessary restrictions and limits on our freedoms.
Ivey and value investing
My alma mater has announced the creation of the
Ben Graham Chair in Value Investing, to pass on the teachings of the legendary Benjamin Graham and his disciples to future classes at
Ivey.
The Triumph of Socialized Medicine - Right [t]here in the USA
Slate has a
piece today on private vs. public healthcare delivery in the US. The problem as he sees it is in unwillingness on the part of private providers to invest in expensive modern information technologies that would make for better care for the patient, but would provide little or no short-term benefit to the providers themselves.
He cites the example of the VA hospital system in the US, which is run by the Department of Veterans Affairs - one administrator for all the hospitals - where investments in IT systems appear to be paying off. That, according to Noah, is strong support for socialized medicine.
If that were true, however, the hospital system in Canada - or at least Ontario - would be the best in the world. The IT systems in hospitals here are among the most advanced, all the hospitals are essentially run by the provincial government, and there really isn't a problem of hospitals having to worry about attracting only the greviously ill patients, since the government decides which hospitals will specialize in what fields and funds them accordingly. So why isn't it working? I wish I could answer that one.
Lloyd Axworthy's take on the missile defence decision
Former minister of foreign affairs Lloyd Axworthy submitted an
open letter to Condi Rice in which he attempts to explain Canada's decision not to take part in Bush's missile defence program. If only our current diplomats were able to be so blunt in their dealings with the Empire.
Ontario committing more huge sums to auto manufacturing
Ontario just committed $235M in support of GM's investments in its Ontario plants, and has plans to woo other manufacturers with similar incentives.
I look forward to the day when Ontario is spending this kind of money on biotechnology and other information-based industries that have greater long-term potential and benefits than simple manufacturing.
Wow
Read the
story. Watch the
ad. Buy their
stuff. No, I'm not paid to shill for overstock.com, but wow, what an ad. It made
me go to the site.
More on Lafleur
According to the Globe and Mail, Lafleur's
salary the year before he started receiving the government contracts was $108,000. Two years later, and just a year after the contracts started pouring in, his salary jumped to $2.4M.
Lafleur Communications' revenues were much more dependent on the government than earlier mentioned, as well. In 1997, 96% of the revenues came directly from the government's coffers. From 1996 through to 2000, 76% of the revenues were from the government.
The brashness of the AdScam execs
According to
this report from CP, Jean Lafleur, the head of one of the firms implicated in the
AdScam scandal that saw the government spend $100M on absolutely nothing, gave himself and his family $12.1M in salary between 1994 and 2000. That amounts to a whopping 36.7% of all the money his firm received from the government during that period, with the government money providing 48.3% of his firm's total revenues. If we're very generous and assume that half of Lafleur's salary came from revenue from his other customers, then
17.7% of the government's money went
directly into his pockets. Somehow, I doubt that's the case; I don't think he would have had $6.3M in salary if the government contracts didn't exist, which means that close to 36% of the government's money went into Lafleur's accounts.
Lafleur's defense: it wasn't all in salary - some of that money was business profits. Talk about trying to obscure the issue. What does it matter what form the skimming took - it's still skimming money off the top, and lots of it, at that.
What gets me is the brashness with which Lafleur did this. You'd think he would have gone to at least
some trouble to hide the money in slush funds and fake expenses before sending it to the Khayman Islands. But no, he was so confident in his Liberal friends' power and hegemony that he just took it straight off the top. Disgusting. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if even more of the government's money - our money - is indeed sitting in an unnamed account somewhere offshore, and that this $12.1M was just a small part of Lafleur's take.
Monkey Business: Swinging Through the Wall Street Jungle