What can be so hard about maintaining an accurate voters list?

Today was election day in Ontario and, as any good citizen should, I did my duty and cast my ballot.

But first I had to prove my identity and place of residence because I am still not on the permanent voters list for this riding, to which I moved in 2006.

In 2007 I voted in the provincial election and completed the form to have the register updated.

In 2008 and 2011 I voted in 2 federal elections, both times completing the form to have my information updated on the federal register, which also serves as a source for the provincial register.

In 2005, ‘06, ‘07, ‘08, ‘09, and ‘10, I filed income tax returns dutifully checking off the box asking for my information to be added to the permanent register.

On 9 (count ‘em – 9!) separate occasions I have provided this information so some useless bureaucracy (bureaucrat?) somewhere can do nothing with it. And I am not confident that the 10th attempt, completed today, will be any more successful.

So, Gazebo Tony, if you want to reduce the size of the civil service there’s a real good place to start.

Ethical oil

Anyone following the latest news on the Keystone Project is aware of the heavy and very public resistance to the project in some parts of the US and Canada. To counter that resistance, the Canadian government and oil producers are advertising heavily in the US, touting the fact that Canadian oil is “ethical” and buying from Canada means the US isn’t shipping greenbacks overseas to support dictatorships, terrorism, social inequality, and so on.

It’s an interesting argument that’s gaining some traction in the US: buy from a democratic friend and you won’t have to deal with those other suppliers with questionable social standards and political objectives.

But there’s an interesting (and disturbing, if you’re a Canadian) twist to this argument.

According to Stats Canada, in 2009 Canada produced 5.4 million terajoules (890 million barrels*) of crude oil. Canada exported 3.1 million terajoules (519 million barrels) of oil, primarily to the US, and imported 1.8 million terajoules of crude oil (300 million barrels).

While Canada produces sufficient oil to more than meet its own energy requirements, our heavy export commitments to the US mean that Canada must also import oil to meet its own needs. Typically the imported oil is used in eastern Canada, while the US exports come from western Canada.

And where do we get the oil we import? Statistics Canada’s Energy Statistics Handbook lists our primary sources, in order: Algeria (18%),  Norway (15%), the United Kingdom (11.5%), Saudi Arabia (8.8%), Angola (5.4%), Nigeria (4.1%), Venezuela (4.1%), Iraq (3.2%), Mexico (2.8%), and Russia (2.3%).

Note Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Angola, Iraq, and Venezuela on the list. These are the very countries that we denounce in selling Canadian oil to the US markets, the countries that produce the “unethical oil” that we warn our American friends about, yet which constitute more than 40% of Canada’s foreign oil imports.

So in order to sell “ethical oil” to the American market, Canada imports “unethical oil” to meet its own needs. And, to my knowledge, not a single politician of any stripe, or at any level, has stood up to say there’s something seriously wrong with this picture.

* 1 terajoule is roughly the energy equivalent of 164 barrels of oil

Conservative debating tactics

I recently entered into an online Facebook discussion over the recent Supreme Court Insite decision. This person (whom I don’t know personally - a friend of a friend) opened with “Promoting illegal drug use and the spread of disease ..... are you kidding me?” And it kind of went downhill from there. She claimed Insite was “giving them fixes” and eventually stated that “the police and the mayor are against these places” (which they aren’t, not in Vancouver at any rate).

Each time a patently false statement was repudiated she would come up with something else until, eventually running out of so-called “facts” to support her position, she reverted to the tried and true Conservative technique of when faced with a reasoned, rational response to go on the attack: “I gather you don’t believe in rehab.”

That totally missed the point, and intentionally so I suspect. This has been an effective technique, honed to a keen edge by the Harper Conservatives. If you question the economic and social impacts of tossing someone behind bars for several years for growing a few pot plants, you’re “soft on crime”. If you express concerns over Canada’s treatment of prisoners in a war zone you’re a “Taliban lover”. If you question Israeli government policy you’re an anti-Semite. In other words, when you no longer have an ethical, legal, or factual position go on the offensive, no matter how specious or irrelevant the counter argument.

Which probably explains why, whenever I get drawn into one of these facts versus ideology discussions, I think of this clip and the Black Knight, no longer with a leg to stand on (pun intended), finally resorting to simply name calling: “You yellow bastard.”

 

Targeting the non-Cons

During the Harper Conservatives’ time in power they railed against the long gun registry as being heavy-handed, unfair to duck hunters and farmers. “We must stop targeting law-abiding gun owners and instead focus our resources on real criminals,” was, and remains, a popular refrain. And now they’re going to make good on their promise to abolish the registry once and for all, although not without, I expect, milking it one last time for contributions from the party faithful.

But now, instead of going after the true believers the Harper Cons have a new target in sight – the young, urban, technologically comfortable who are the very antithesis of the stereotypical Con supporter. And they are targeting them with Bill C-11, The Copyright Modernization Act.

Now to be fair, this is much to applaud with this bill, including a reduction of the maximum damages that can be awarded for copyright infringement from $20,000 to a still draconian but much more reasonable $5,000. (That is per infringement, so if you are caught with 100 pirated movies on your laptop, you could be on the hook for a cool half mil.) And the bill clearly spells out how copyrighted material can be used by educators, students, individuals, and so on for non-commercial purposes without penalty. All good stuff.

But the problem with this bill is that it allows the use of DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology to trump the rights provided elsewhere in the act. So if you purchase a DVD you are legally entitled to copy that DVD onto as many devices as you own, say onto your iPad, your smart phone, and your computer for viewing. However, if the DVD is DRM encoded by the manufacturer and you break that code in order to make copies that you are legally entitled to have, you have just broken the law.

Another example. With the proliferation of e-readers many people are now purchasing digital books. If I crack the DRM encoding in order to be able to download the same book onto both my e-reader and that of my spouse, I will have broken the law, even though had I purchased a hard copy of that same book I could share it at will, with potentially hundreds of people. (Although I read somewhere that pocketbooks are really designed – paper weight, materials, glues, etc. – to be read something like 10 or 12 times before falling apart, thus limiting the publishers exposure and ensuring additional sales.)

Like the gun registry, it is extremely unlikely that the authorities will go after otherwise law-abiding citizens for removing the DRM from an e-book for personal use. So then one has to ask why it is even necessary to enact that capability in law. Some have posited that the reason is because that’s what the Americans wanted, and the Harper Cons toned down the penalties to try to make it more palatable to the young, urban, technologically competent Canadians who are most likely to want to share files among their many devices. Perhaps. But one thing for sure, it’s not the Con base that will protest.

Politics: the art of double-speak

Dalton “Dad” McGuinty announces a special program that will provide a tax credit of $10,000 to employers to hire immigrants who are having difficulty gain Canadian experience and/or credentials. The program is limited to new Canadian citizens who have been in the country less than five years. Regardless whether one considers this good policy or bad politics the fact that the program is not available to those here more than five years, or the thousands of native born Canadians currently out of work in this province, clearly creates a different class of unemployed – a few get provincial help; most don’t.

His opponent, Tim Hudak, gets it and calls McGuinty out on this plan, calling it an affirmative action program for foreign workers that does nothing for the other unemployed in the province.

So far, utterly predictable for an election campaign. But it’s McGuinty’s response to Hudak’s challenge that shows just how contemptible politics has become. His retort? “In my Ontario there is no us and them, there's just us.” Say what? That one sentence is completely at odds with this policy which clearly treats some Ontarians (us) different than others (them). But Premier Dad is apparently okay with that; it’s just politics after all.

Justin Bieber – two words I never thought I’d use in a post

But I will make an exception in this case simply because this is so ludicrous it screams out for comment.

The intertubes and media today are awash in news of a supposed accident involving young Mr. Bieb.

The Ottawa Citizen: Justin Bieber driving Ferrari when ‘tapped’ from behind.

CTV News: Justin Bieber, Ferrari uninjured after fender-bender

Huff Post: Justin Bieber Is OK After Crash In Studio City

LA Times: Justin Bieber crashes black Ferrari; no one hurt

So what happened? According to all reports, absolutely nothing - no damages, no injuries, no citations. But that didn’t stop the LAPD from making a statement or the media wasting tons of ink and paper and tying up bandwidth (or, for that matter, me wasting a post on a soon-to-be has been.) What next, a headline breathlessly proclaiming “Justin Bieber survives; plane lands safely at La Guardia”?

The mind boggles at what the great unwashed now consider to be newsworthy.

May contain Nuts

Up at the cottage last week we were drowning worms at a furious pace in a futile attempt to entice the exceedingly rare Doe Lake walleye to latch on to a hook and hence score a position of honour at the dinner table. By midweek we were out of worms, having gone through them at a rate of about 2 dozen worms per fish caught, so it was off to town to replenish the bait supply.

The nearest town with any kind of shopping is Novar. The shopping area comprises a liquor store, an Arctic Cat snowmobile dealership appropriately named Arnie’s Cat House, a Foodland grocery store, and precious little else. The grocery store sells worms. But these aren’t just any old dew worms plucked from the greens at the local golf course before the sun rises. No, these worms “May contain Nuts”.

Think about that for a minute. The mind boggles when trying to figure out the intent of this warning.

First of all, worms don’t have nuts, so the possibility of male worms being in the package is not the reason.

Perhaps the local population has taken to supplementing their daily diet with a side plate of deep fried worms in a crispy corn meal batter. Fish stocks are down and the tourism industry is no hell this year but is it really that bad? Besides, at $3.94 a dozen a Big Mac is a better deal.

Maybe it’s about the fish. Should we be concerned about a possibly nut-allergic fish going into anaphylactic shock before we kill it? How would a fish become sensitized to nuts in the first place?

And just where would an earthworm come into contact with nuts? Does Foodland package them on the same table they use to package snack foods and other grocery items?

Or is it just some anally retentive product liability lawyer in a 3-piece suit in Toronto who wouldn’t know a fishing worm if he swallowed one (with or without a very large hook) who has dictated that every product the store sells be so labelled, no matter how stupid?

My money is on the lawyer.