Can Someone Please Sit Prentice Down and Explain to Him how to be a Conservative

Recently Telus and Bell both decided to charge for incoming text messages. I personally think it’s a poor business move on their part, but it’s a move that is entirely within their discretion. However, in a typical knee jerk reaction, Industry Minister Prentice demanded they reconsider the new charges:

Prentice moved swiftly to condemn the move, summoning the chief executives of both companies to Ottawa to discuss the matter.

On Thursday, the industry minister said he met recently with Bell Canada CEO George Cope, but has yet to have talks with Telus CEO Darren Entwistle.

Prentice knows he doesn’t have a leg to stand on - Telus and Bell can charge whatever they want for the services they provide. However, here comes the threat:

Prentice described the meeting with Cope as a “healthy exchange.” However, he made it clear the government wants the companies to eliminate the charge.

“At the end of the day, the cellular industry currently is an industry where we don’t have heavy regulation . . . That’s something that we’ve tried to maintain in Canada,” said Prentice.

This brings up a number of questions?

• Is the Conservative government going to get into the business of telling private companies what to charge for specific non-essential services?
• Is the Conservative Industry Minister going to continue to demand meetings and threaten companies every time he personally disagrees with their actions?

and finally,

• Is this Conservative government going to act like a real conservative government (one that actually applies conservative economic principles to their policies and or actions), or are they content to be just marginally right of the Liberal Party

Zimbabwe central bank printing money and causing inflation!

According to his own threats, I think Robert Mugabe should punish himself and his own central bankers:

President Robert Mugabe threatened a state of emergency if businesses profiteer from the economic crisis, a move that could give him even more sweeping powers to punish his opponents in the event that political power-sharing talks fail.

The real profiteering in this economic crisis comes from the government, the issuer of the currency.

This is beyond horrifying. The Mugabe Solution to control astronomical price inflation — which is a direct result of the government printing and printing worthless money while forcing people to use it — is to:

• change the digits on the bills
• put time limits on how much can be used
• to print more money!

He must believe in magic!

They do not believe in magic. They understand full well the economics of what they are doing and the government is using it to their advantage as much as possible. They are doing what all governments do: print money, hand it out selectively, tax and let the tax-payer pay more through consumer price increases. The outrageous inflation rates are a direct reflection of the outrageous tyranny and parasitism of the Mugabe government. Effectively, the government is forcing wealth away from the poor Zimbabwean towards the pockets of the government.

Get a load of this:

“No financial institution shall impose any fee, commission or other charge whatsoever in respect of the conversion from the old currency system to the new in terms of Subsection (9) or (10),” read the regulations.

A financial institution caught contravening the section would be liable to a fine of up to or exceeding Level 14, the highest level available.

I do not know what a “Level 14″ fine but I notice they are not denominating it in the form of a currency. I wonder why.

Historically, these disastrous hyper-inflationary episodes usually resolve themselves quickly if the printing press stops. My prediction is that once Mugabe is completely paralyzed with his own useless paper — i.e., his thugs are incapable of buying anything — a foreign country will wave a rescue package in front of him and inflation will disappear overnight. Such a rescue package will not come for free, mind you. Zimbabweans will have to concede some level of sovereignty which will likely be condemned as foreign imperialistic control when, in fact, it will all be solely Mugabe’s fault. Unfortunately, the poor Zimbabweans will continue to suffer until that day.

FDA bungles tomato industry with Salmonella scare

After tying up the tomato industry unnecessarily, the FDA now triumphs its dubious discovery of the origin of the Salmonella poisoning: a Mexican pepper farm!

This is utterly pathetic, if not fraudulent on the part of the bureaucrats. A thousand people getting sick out of millions of North Americans is no reason to stop the entire shipment of all tomatoes — even if tomatoes were the source — because consumers should be responsible for washing their own food.

Is this the best the FDA can do? It reminds me of the recent Batman movie where Alfred recounts how an entire forest in Burma was burned just to catch a jewel thief hiding within its midst.

Building what in Afghanistan? not a pipeline!

I do not believe what I am hearing from our Defence Minister today:

“We are not there specifically to protect a pipeline across Afghanistan.”
The minister said it’s incidental to the role Canadians are already playing.
—-SNIP—-
“Our primary purpose there is to build that country to the point where they can walk on their own and then we’re coming home.”

Oh, really? What exactly needs to be built, pray tell? I thought Canadian soldiers were fighting terrorists. I thought they were preventing terrorism from coming to Canada. Now, it seems more evident that we have to be a little more flexible our goals and expectations. The soldiers may as well incidentally help secure a pipeline while they are at it, I suppose.

Unwittingly, Ray Henault, Canada’s top general at the time, probably said it best a few years ago:

“This investment is one that we think will be here for us and for allies,” Henault said.

“It’s a good investment in the long-term prospects that we have for Afghanistan. And ultimately we may find ourselves back here again if that’s what government decides to do.”

Sounds pretty eery, if you ask me.

New Brunswick motor vehicle safety inspection in doubt

So, who is right? The RCMP investigators or the New Brunswick motor vehicle department? The RCMP statement is that the van would never have passed a safety inspection but apparently the van did pass a safety exam less three months before the fatal accident!

The van involved in a crash that killed seven New Brunswick basketball players in January had worn tires and brakes and would have failed a safety inspection, the RCMP said Tuesday.

——SNIP——-

A mechanic who examined it has said it would not have passed an inspection before the crash. The last time it passed one was Oct. 29, 2007.

This is all very confusing. It does not seem to offer a reason to trust the New Brunswick motor authority.

In general, I think this guy sums it up quite well:

WRONG PLACE….WRONG TIME!

I do not think governments should be in the business of safety inspection. Rather, the insurance companies should be doing it themselves and they should be held legally responsible for what happens to the vehicles they insure. As things are now, if a faceless bureaucrat lets things slip, there really is no trail of accountability and that serves the insurance companies all too well for my liking.

Ryan Sparrow’s Comments on Bullet Hole Graphic

It has been over a week and the “Dion bullet hole” graphic is still on Conservative.ca. According to Now Magazine, Ryan Sparrow, the federal Conservative Party director of communications, refuses to admit it was mistake:

But the Conservative’s director of communications vehemently denies the holes in the image are bullet holes. In an interview, Ryan Sparrow said they are just holes “like there are in Stéphane Dion’s policies.” And, in apparent unintentional irony, Sparrow framed the criticisms from blogs as Liberal partisans trying to “shoot the messenger.”

“It’s pretty evident Liberals are sensitive about bad policy,” he continued. He also said there are no plans to clear confusion about the holes.

Perhaps Sparrow has never actually seen a bullet hole before? Nevertheless, I’ll say it again, this website - including Sparrow’s comments - are an embarrassment to the party and its membership.

Update: Read here for more…

Obama’s prayer stolen and published

I find it highly despicable that Obama’s prayer was snatched from the Western Wall and then subsequently published. Shame on the people at Maariv who did this and the seminarian who stole it. I know very little about Jewish tradition but it sounds like a form of blasphemy to me. It seems like an insult to the faith.

Nevertheless, I read the prayer that was published and I think it is a most noble prayer. I could not ask for a better prayer from a politician. In fact, the cynic in me thinks this whole thing was a public relations stunt designed to give Obama a boost above his detractors who wish to paint him as an anti-American Muslim sympathizer.

Fall by-elections are NOT a test of the Liberal Green Shift

The Liberal pundits have it wrong. I can not think of anything more silly than to think the upcoming by-elections will be a test of the Liberal Green Shift.

Two of these seats are Liberal stronghold ridings and the other one was previously held by the Bloc. The Liberal candidates could run on a crazy platform of raising taxes and they would probably still get their seats. Oh, wait a minute…

Torture memo to the CIA

I wonder if they passed around check-lists or flow-charts so that the torturers could make D.I.Y. psychiatric diagnoses.

The Justice Department in 2002 told the CIA that its interrogators would be safe from prosecution for violations of anti-torture laws if they believed “in good faith” that harsh techniques used to break prisoners’ will would not cause “prolonged mental harm.”

Maybe they offered crash-courses on “How To Think You Are A Doctor 101″ too.

Immigrants send money to their homeland

Before people get their knickers tied up in a knot over the news that so many immigrants send money out of Canada, just remember: at most, it is just paper exclusively produced in Canada.

Immigrants should be free to do whatever they want with their own wealth. If foreigners value Canadian paper, so be it.

A Toronto university economics professor said this “cash leakage” has little effect on the Canadian economy, which reportedly has a GDP of about $1.6 trillion.

“It’s definitely a positive from a global social perspective because it’s allowing people in these overseas countries to have food, clothing, shelter — things they wouldn’t be able to get any other way,” York University professor Perry Sadorsky said Wednesday. “But from a Canadian perspective, it’s money that is leaking out of the country that could be spent here.”

Consumer industries such as cellphone companies, car and electronic manufacturers and restaurants are the ones that suffer most when money is sent away. Sadorsky predicts that with the direction the global economy is going, this trend of financially supporting family overseas is not going to stop.

Cash leakage? Suffering when money is sent away??? Shame on Perry Sadorsky for feeding such a myopic representation of economics. What about the welfare of the Canadian immigrants? The arbitrary accounting methods of Gross Domestic Product do not have an entry for all things that comprise welfare and value. That is why it is called Gross.

Immigrants have freely chosen to send their money away over all other choices. They have demonstrated their preferences over cellphones, cars, electronics and restaurants. Denying free choice would be bad.

You can look at things from a different way: sending money overseas is exporting inflation.

If all of that money was spent in Canada, the alleviated “suffering” of the “industries such as cellphone companies, car and electronic manufacturers and restaurants” could go hand in hand with inflated prices for the Canadian consumer!

Things could be worse: the immigrants could let their money sit in a Canadian bank account. That would lead the banks to increase lending further increasing the money supply and contributing to inflation.

Next Page »