Me Fail English?

One of my relatives thought it would be an excellent idea to give me a three month subscription to the Toronto Star for Christmas. The reasoning behind it I later found out was so that she could get a discounted subscription. They can't even give that paper away. Sprawled out on the front page of today's Saturday Star was the headline "Race, Poverty Matter as Early as Grade 3". I didn't read the article since I cannot stand the Star but it did have a chart breaking down literacy between race and family income. The chart examined the pass rates for the grade 3 literacy test. Top performers were East Asians (Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean) with 68% pass rates. Whites and South Asians (Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Sri Lankan) tied for second place with 60%, and South-East Asians (Thai, Filipino, Malay, Vietnamese, Lao, Cambodian, Indonesian, Singaporean) rounded out third with 55%. At the bottom of the list were blacks (43%), Middle Easterners (40%) and Latinos (37%) rounded out the bottom three. For income, those with parents over $100,000 had a 66% pass rate while those with parents making less than $30,000 had a 47% pass rate.

The Star of course is trying once again to stir the race and class war pot, as social democrats are inclined to do to keep themselves relevant. There's a whole lot of arguments that can be made here, such as systemic racism by whites is keeping blacks behind while "Islamophobia" is holding Muslims back. Or that poorer people cannot afford school supples and books. I guess poor people have never heard of a library. (They loan you books, for free!) However, there is one huge problem that the Star completely misses, and that is that on average half of Toronto third graders can't read! That is alarming considering that this is a first world country with a properly funded education system. Typically, people like the Star would blame Mike Harris, despite the fact he hasn't been premier for some seven years now. When these children started school, the self styled "education premier" Dalton McGuinty had already been in power for two years. Obviously the education system is failing our students. Of course I still remember my first hand experience with this. I was never taught how to write an essay properly until grade 12 when I finally had a teacher intelligent enough to show me. Children are forced to deal with vague instruction and lack of help from lazy educators and even lazier parents. Ironically, after all those years of getting bad marks on high school papers, it turned out to be my strongest skill in university. Earlier, my weakness in math was blamed on attention deficit disorder. Of course I didn't have it, and once again poor educators were to blame. All I needed was better motivation and my parents pushed me to do better. I learned that I had to only rely on myself. When things went wrong, I was the only one to blame, and that made things easier. When I think back to my school days, I had a startling number of really bad teachers who had no business in that profession.

What about the race aspect though. Why are 20% fewer backs able to read than whites are? A lot of it has to do with culture. African-American culture doesn't exactly encourage its members to excell, just the opposite. They're fed the same old garbage that whites are always going to keep them down so therefore there's no point in trying. As much as I dislike Obama, one has to admit he is a well read individual and I have known many other blacks who are the same. Why are they excelling while they others aren't. Simple; their parents pushed them to do so. If you are constantly told you'll never make something of yourself and that's somebody else's fault, you're going to start believing that. Then again, that's what liberals do, and is why the Star is framing the story this way. According to them, when you or your children fail, it's always somebody else's fault, never yours. By using this thought process, the black community is sabatoging the future of its own youth. The same goes for Latinos and Middle Eastern kids. By the same token, there's still the issue that less than two thirds of white kids can read, yet they're supposed to be the ones in society's good graces getting the best of everything. How well one does in school has nothing to do with their race or parental income; it has everything to do with their drive to succeed. We're seeing these numbers because parents and educators are failing to encourage students to do well. Race based schools won't fix this problem, but hiring better educators who are dedicated to those they teach will. Somebody just needs to give these kids a good swift kick up the backside.

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Tracking Green Waste

My last article dealt with the huge sums of money the province of Ontario has wasted in combating climate change. It is frequently said that going green will have little to no economic impact. I'm calling shenanigans on them. So, I'm going to start tracking green waste both here in Canada and abroad to come up with a global measure of just how much governments have spent throwing good money into the AGW wishing well. I've also added a note on what useful things we could have spent the money on; such as feeding the hungry or providing educational supplies for children. You'd be surprised at just how much that money could have actually helped people had it been diverted away from chasing carbon. Total cost will be an approximation benchmarked in US Dollars. I'll update this semi regularly as I come across stories.

Government Agency: National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
Money Wasted: $273,000,000 USD
Wasted on: Launching a "CO2 Hunter" satellite to map global sources of carbon dioxide. Satellite failed shortly after launch and crashed.
What We Could Have Bought: 1.08 million tons of rice at current $250/tonne international commodity prices. Enough to feed 4.32 billion people assuming 250 gram (1/2 pound) serving.
Source: BBC News

Government Agency: Province of Ontario
Money Wasted: $4,013,000,000 USD ($5 billion CAD)
Wasted On: Green energy plan to build windmills that nobody wants, in a province where it's not windy enough to produce sufficient supplies of electricity.
What We Could Have Bought: 10 million netbook computers, enough for every school child and university student in Canada. One year's worth of university tuition in Ontario for approximately 700,000 people at an average of $6000 per year.
Source: National Post

Government Agency: Province of Alberta
Money Wasted: $1,605,200,000 USD ($2 billion CAD)
Wasted On: Carbon sequestering program for five demonstration projects to bury carbon dioxide underground. Unproven technology that is not commercially viable. Plus I get the feeling that that CO2 can't stay buried forever.
What We Could Have Bought: Clean bottled water for 1.33 billion people assuming average price of $1.50 for 500ml. Enough for all of Africa with plenty to spare.
Source: Edmonton Sun

Government Agency: City of Toronto, Ontario
Money Wasted: $111,444 USD ($140,000 CAD)
Money Wasted On: C-40 Climate Office and "Secretariat" in London, England. Toronto's mayor David Miller is the chair of the climate change organization. Money hidden in budget.
What We Could Have Bought: 50,909 trips on public transit in the city at $2.75 per ticket.
Source: CFRB's Bill Carroll Show 02/27/2009

TOTAL GLOBAL GREEN WASTE TO DATE: $5,891,311,444 USD
Last Updated: February 27th, 2008

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Wasting Green on Green

The green economy kind of reminds me of a wishing well. You throw money down it fully knowing you probably won't get anything in return. Despite this, something compels people to keep throwing their pennies in. The Ontario Government falls into this category, as do a lot of other left leaning governments across North America. The saviour of our economic woes is going green, and it has the added benefit of saving us from climate change. However, this doesn't make much sense to me, probably because I have half a brain. At best, the green economy at present represents a niche market. How many people do you know own a Prius, or any other hybrid car for that matter. In my circle of friends and acquaintances, I don't know a single person that does. Nobody in my neighbourhood owns one. Yet somehow the government keeps trying to sell me on the "fact" that the US automakers building hybrids will save that industry. It's the same thing with these idiots at Tesla Motors trying to sell luxury electric cars to people, despite the fact that a successful EV line has not been sold in North America in almost 100 years. Green cars cost more than gasoline powered ones due to the cost of the batteries. Right now, people are going to be looking for low cost cars. The reason American automakers are failing is that they've failed to build a low cost commuter car that is reliable. This is why Honda and Toyota have eaten them alive. Switching to hybrid lines, by all logic, isn't going to make a lick of difference.

The second part of this has to do with Ontario's plan to invest huge sumsof money in wind farms. Windmills are expensive and inefficient and nobody wants one near their house. "Tough luck" says Dalton McGuinty. Despite backing down on Oakridges and allowing developers to put up houses on protected land at the base of the Niagara Escapement in Halton, McGuinty is now fancying himself as an environmental crusader. This is just the latest harebrained bandwagon issue for the left. It will create jobs they say. Imagine taking an auto assembler or white collar office worker and getting them to put up windmills. They wouldn't know what to do and no amount of "retraining" is going to change that. These jobs are not sustainable and the whole concept behind them is hugely impractical. Of course, it's another example of McGuinty pretending to do something to fix the problem without actually doing anything at all. I'm surprised he hasn't blamed Mike Harris yet for the economy, though he does blame him for the energy woes the windmills will supposedly solve. What he doesn't like to remind people is how he pushed through the demolition of the Lakeview generating station without anything to replace it, simply because it was coal fired. Nothing to replace it with. Mississauga now refuses to allow any more power plants in the city, with Hazzle "Past Her Sell By Date" McCallion saying they should be built in Milton. We're in a big economic mess and pouring money into niche and dying industries is not going to solve the problem.

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Canadian Content Laws Foolishly Archaic

Flashpoint, an action/cop drama TV series was picked up by CBS before CTV did. Apparently, it's quite popular in the United States. It's also a Canadian show following a fictional group of elite Toronto police officers, filmed in Toronto, and produced by CTV. Degrassi: The Next Generation, another CTV program, is also hugely popular in the US and has been picked up by many so called "Superstation" networks. This is why it puzzles me when the CRTC keeps saying that there need to be Canadian content regulations on Canadian airwaves in order to protect Canadian media from being overshadowed by the United States. This sort of concept is just so mind bogglingly archaic in the information age. The CRTC now wants to try and project this power to the internet, an impossible task which would likely involved increased censorship online, opening up a huge can of worms if they limit what sites Canadians can visit.

Back in the 1940s & 1950s, Canadian airwaves were dominated by by American broadcasts. It was thought that these were poisoning the minds of Canadians so the CBC, the government subsidized network, was created to provide Canadians with more "highbrow" programming that was exclusively Canadian. However, laws limiting what could and could not be broadcast didn't come in until much later. They appeared in the 1970s under everyone's favourite liberal fascist Pierre Trudeau. Since then, the government mandates that media providers in Canada must be Canadian owned and must dedicate a minimum percentage of broadcast hours to Canadian programming. I do not have the data in front of me but I believe it is about 8% to 20%. Off course, these laws were created at a time before satellite TV became popular, and long before the internet became a third television medium. We claim to be a multicultural society yet we still hold onto these archaic laws. I'm sure many Canadians would love access to TV programming from their own countries without being harassed by the CRTC for it not having enough "Canadian" content. Canadians who wish to use American satellite services are harassed for buying "grey market" dishes just so the CRTC can keep Starchoice and Bell in a duoopoly.

Shows like Flashpoint have proven that Canadian content can succeed internationally in the internet age without the long arm of the government propping them up, as they do with the never ending list of bad CBC programming. Arguably, the Internet has been a powerful medium to broadcast our content through sites like Youtube. It costs very little for Canadian artists to produce their own TV series and upload them to the web. Any sort of web regulation protecting this is totally unnecessary and just another case of a government body attempting to overregulate. Forcing Canadians to watch Canadian content is no longer an appropriate way to go about things. Rather, the government should be encouraging investment in our nation's media industries to encourage them to produce more high quality content that people would actually watch. US networks have shown that Americans do enjoy our stuff as long as it's not about weird sex and snow shoes, as one movie title on the Canadian film industry put it. Lets end broadcast censorship in Canada and openly embrace the digital age as a new way to showcase our tallent to the world.

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Doing Drugs A Victimless Crime? Tell that to the Mexicans

Time and time again, you hear the same old garbage from the pro-marijuana supporters and other miscellaneous liberals spouting that consumption of illicit narcotics is a victimless crime. I always laugh at that considering how many people are tortured or murdered in the process of getting those drugs to the end user. Kelly McPharland of the National Post wrote a good article about how drug cartels are taking over Mexico, threatening to collapse the country. Since 2007, more than 7,300 people have been murdered as the direct result of the drug war that is going on there. This is a higher death toll that than that of all Coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. It has gotten to the point where police and the Mexican military are powerless against the drug cartels running amok across the country. In the northern states bordering the US, it the murder of police officers is almost a daily occurrence. Brazen criminals have hacked into police radio systems to announce their next targets, which they usually follow through on. The drug dealers are not even afraid of the 45,000 military troops hunting them down. Last month, the severed heads of several Mexican soldiers were discovered in Acapulco and an ex-general working on a drug enforcement squad was murdered near Cancun.

Oddly, what has been happening in Mexico has received next to no attention from the mainstream media in North America. Other than the Post, the only stories I've seen about it were on the BBC. I focused on Latin American history while in university so I have some idea of what goes on there However, most people are blissfully unaware of this crisis. It strikes me as alarming considering the close proximity of the United States to Mexico and how conflicts there usually tend to spill over the border. Reports have come out of cartels opening satellite operations within southern US states including California and at least as far east as Alabama. Don't think that Canada is immune to this either. In 2008, police in Halton, Toronto, and Hamilton made sweeping arrests of a violent Latino drug gang who was attempting to set up shop in the Greater Toronto Area. From what I've been told, these people make the Crips and Bloods look like naughty school boys. Mexico is also a popular vacation spot for Canadians. We've already seen several tourists die mysterious deaths in the region and it is well known that "rich" North Americans frequently call for sizable ransoms. Nobody has been immune to the violence, even children.

The question is what can we do. The reality is that much of this is our fault. North Americans seem to have an insatiable appetite for illicit narcotics, primarily cocaine which is what these cartels are trafficking. Stopping the problem is not as simple as legalizing it, as the Netherlands learned. While cigarettes and alcohol are legal and government regulated, that certainly hasn't stopped the multi-billion dollar smuggling of those items. It may seem trite to blame America. However, it's hard not to ignore that at the vary least we are contributing to the problem. This is why we need to step up the war on drugs within our own country by increasing sentences for drug possession and trafficking, as well as improving drug rehabilitation programs. The problem needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later. What is now festering in Mexico is a powder keg which threatens to overtake all of North America. It was much easier to ignore Columbia when they went through the same issues but it's much more difficult to ignore what your neighbour does.

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The Dangers of Fairness

Those following American politics might be familiar with something known as the Fairness Doctrine. The nuts and bolts of it would basically require radio broadcasters to devote equal time to differing opinions. The Democratic party is strongly pushing for this bill as they feel they are being underrepresented on the nation's airwaves. For many years, radio has been dominated by right wing talk shows. Liberal shows such as Air America have been introduced but are considerably less popular. Therefore, the Democrats feel the need to force broadcasters to give them an equal voice, or so they say. There has been a lot of talk about the Fairness Doctrine lately but it is nothing new. To my knowledge, the concept was originally introduced during the Clinton administration but was later shot down by house Republicans. Now that the Democrats, who control the executive and both houses, want to resurrect it.

On the outset, such a law would make sense as you don't want one view to have too much air time. However, it is curious in the fact that the Doctrine singles out radio. Most major television and print media in the United States has a liberal bias. The New York Times, USA Today, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, ABC are all liberal. It is commonly claimed that they are in fact Conservative despite no proof to back this up. Sean Hannity hardly anchors all of CNN alone and Ted Turner is as much a raving liberal lunatic as you can get. FOX News is the only mainstream Conservative TV news network in the country. If the Fairness Doctrine was truely fair as it claims to be, it would also apply to the liberal dominated television and print media, yet it does not. I applies only to conservative dominated radio. So I guess controlling 95% of all media is not enough for liberals and to make things truly fair and balanced, they need to control 97.5% of it. What we have here is blantant censorship by liberals to try and scilence conservatives. If it had been a case of the other way around, there would probably be mass outrage. The media is still a business and should give consumers what they want without government control impossed on it. If liberals can produce a successful program, they should fully be allowed to do so. Conservatives have done this, with hugely popular radio personalities such as Rush Limbaugh. For a group that always claims to be under attack, it seems that American liberals are the ones launching most of the attacks, and abusing their law making powers to do so. Of course this is different from political ads during elections, where a demand for balance accross all networks in regards of allowing advertising is reasonable.

Canadian media is a little different. Could this happen here? Possibly but the Canadian government has done a pretty good job at staying out of the media, notwithstanding the ludicrous "Candian content" rules.

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"Like Drunken Sailors": Cities Need to be Audited

Yesterday, Toronto released it's 2009 budget. Property taxes went up 4% but combined with other taxes the city now charges, the actual tax burden for Torontonians increased 10%. This is typical of many GTA municipalities. In Mississauga, property taxes increased about 4.4% but also came with increased service charges and transit fee hikes. Milton increased their property taxes by 6%. It's interesting to note that this is significantly higher than the rate of inflation would warrant. However, the quality of city provided services do not seem to be improving. Road building has been put on hold region wide, garbage collection is getting irregular, parks are getting dirty and untended, water quality is declining. Any resident of the GTA has to ask themselves where all this money is going if it's not being reflected upon in the services we receive.

Of course, then there's all the stuff you here about the colossal amount of waste that goes on at city halls across the region. Milton for example has spent several hundred thousand dollars to install a custom made glass wall, imported from Britain, in it's new town hall. Milton's mayor Gord Krantz jetted off to China last year on tax payer dollars to attend a conference along with other GTA mayors. Toronto's mayor David Miller takes the cake though for wasteful spending, including the multi-million dollar renovation of his own office, 70km of new bike paths that nobody wanted, 30 some odd new programs the city can't afford, a needless restoration of Nathan Phillips Square and Union Station, "green" hybrid transit buses that break down, his jet setting to international environmental conferences to push the city's green initiatives, and hugely bloated office budgets. One of this expenses included paying $80,000 for a woman to water plants in councilors' offices. I wish I had that job. Halton region uses three trucks to pick up garbage, green bin, and recycling while US municipalities use only one. Each truck is manned by two men. Toronto's NDP council has given into union demands for exorbitant wage hikes, which the city cannot afford. This equates to vote buying. The city has refused to contract out work, which would save money, and has replaced current contracted jobs with public service union ones. This is only the tip of the iceberg for questionable spending at the region's city halls.

Lets face facts here, we have a major problem on our hands when it comes to how Ontario's municipalities spend tax dollars. Every time the federal or provincial budget comes out, you hear the mayors screaming for more funding from the higher levels. It is true that cities are now paying for things that they didn't used to, such as welfare, but there is just so much waste, it's mind boggling. Right now, we are in a recession. Money is tighter than ever and yet the cities are asking for more and more tax money. Money that people just don't have. A lot of people are being forced out of their homes simply because they cannot afford to pay what the city wants. This is part of why Toronto has seen a massive exodus of residents in the last year. Housing is cheaper outside of the city.

Cities say they have a massive funding shortfall and cannot afford to pay for services, and therefore have to raise taxes by huge amounts. However, there is a great deal of questionable practices going on. It's time the Province stepped in and did something about the issue. Ontario needs to appoint a series of independent auditors and ombudsmen to dive into the books of our municipalities in order to get a clear picture of what's really going on. It's obvious that they cannot keep their own houses in order and unfortunately, this is the only way we're going to get some answers and solve the problem. Additionally, Ontario needs to repeal the City of Toronto Act to remove the special taxation powers and extended terms the McGuinty government foolishly gave to municipalities. All it has done is open the door to more mismanagement and corruption. Lastly, please, get out there and vote in your next municipal election. One of the reasons that city councils aren't being transparent to citizens is because nobody votes, so they don't care what they do. By not voting, you're basically giving these people who get in again and again free reign to do whatever they want.

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McGuinty's HST Plan Nickle & Diming

When I need to buy computer parts online, I usually buy then from British Colombia for a couple of reasons. First of all, Ontario doesn't have any decent places to buy parts. Secondly, it's cheaper, namely because I don't have to pay PST on items purchased out of province. That is, provided that my province doesn't have a harmonized sales tax. HST basically combines GST and PST into one tax that is collected by the federal government, where they then give the PST cut to the provinces. Dalton McGuinty is putting forth the idea to implement HST in Ontario. He claims it will help Ontario businesses. He is right in a sense since it will make online shopping outside of Ontario more expensive, thus forcing consumers to adopt more local means. However, I see it as just more nickle and diming from the tax obsessed premier. The tax basically implements protectionism within your own country by punishing people who choose to purchase things from another region. It all boils down to just another scheme to get more tax dollars from Ontario residents.

This is pretty typical for the McGuinty Liberals though. It is extremely easy to implement and the feds are ultimately the ones doing most of the work. Liberals like quick fix, one hour photo solutions to complex problems. Lets face it, most Ontarians are not regularly buying things out of province. It punishes a minority while not fixing the economic slump that it seeks to address. However, to more feeble minded individuals, it gives the illusion that McGuinty is doing something to fix the economy when he actually isn't. Of course he should be encouraging investment in Ontario but taxation is not a good way of doing so during a recession. The appropriate way is to launch promotional campaigns, cut business taxes, and make Ontario an overall attractive place for business; rather than nickle and diming residents and throwing huge sums of money at dying industries.

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Obama's "Buy American" Gaffe: Doing Exactly What He Said He Would

Hmm, Obama took longer than I thought he would to screw things up. I had originally figured he would do it on the first day. Still, less than two weeks later we've already had his first major gaffe. While busying himself with the all important mission to delay the DTV switchover, B. Hussain Obama came up with the brilliant economic plan now known as "Buy American". The plan basically says that resources used for projects as part of his $819 billion stimulus package will have to come from American contractors and producers only. World finance chiefs have called the plan a bad idea and Canada, a major supplier of lumber and steel to the US, is vowing to fight the plan tooth and nail. So less than two weeks into his term, Obama has already threatened to spark a trade war with America's top trading partners: Canada, Mexico, and China; plus numerous other nations. The opposition parties in Ottawa have stated they plan to put pressure on the Harper government to try and work out a deal with Washington to get the plan nixed. In this era of minority governments and coalition threats, it's hard to get all of parliament to agree on anything. This tells you just how dumb an idea "Buy American" is.

Is Obama's protectionist stance really a surprise to anybody? Though I didn't mention it in my blog, I had noted to several friends many months ago that McCain would be the better president for Canada. I believed Obama would try to invoke protectionism due to the impending financial collapse and his alliances with the big American unions. Seems I was correct. Simply put, the while Canadians may not like their social policies, the Republicans' push for free trade and free enterprise is ultimately the best for us. We rely on trade with the US to keep our economy going. If it stops, we could fall into a deep recession, or at worst the dreaded "D-word". The plan is ultimately bad for the United States as well since many corporations rely on international trade with Canada and America's other major trade partners.

The federal Conservatives were heavily criticized for "interfering" with the US election when NAFTA-gate "scandal" came to light. The leaked documents said that once in office, Obama wanted to renegotiate NAFTA. The plan was to add more protection for American producers against cheaper Mexican and Canadian goods. Remember that this was primarily what the Softwood Lumber Dispute was about. So I guess if you loose the game, change the rules for the next round to suit you. Telling Canada to buy their goods but them turning around and saying they won't buy ours is like Obama giving us a giant middle finger. Barack's supporters originally dismissed the fact that he would attempt to do this, but were intregued by the idea. The socialist left, of which Obama is a member, has always had a huge anti-NAFTA hardon. This is despite the fact that most academics I have encountered seem to agree that NAFTA has brought major benefits to all three of its members. The National Post called the "Buy American" plan "exporting unemployment", since it fails to help or even acknolwedge the global economy crisis. It only protects the big unions, which is where good deal of Democratic campaign funding comes from. While jobs might be created in the US, corresponding jobs will be lost in other countries. "Buy American" is a zero-sum game. Only two weeks into power and the world that loved him so much is now forming a united front against his stimulus package. I guess the honeymoon is over for the Hawaiian Messiah.

Updated Feb 3rd, 2009

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