So the joke around the office is, with 3 back-to-back Conservative administrations in Canada, are Republicans threatening to move to Canada if Obama wins?

Fear, mixed emotions after B.C. pipeline bombings

“However, the Mounties have brought in their terrorism unit to help the investigation because the bombs targeted the province’s infrastructure.”

Are they an Infrastructure Sabotage Unit or a Terrorism Unit? It can’t be terrorism if it targets things but not people, pretty much by definition.

Jesse Brown, former host of the former radio show “Search Engine” remains on the edge of employment at the CBC, allowed out of his blog just occasionally to file a 3 minute segment on Sunday Edition, as long as it’s sufficiently watered down and regards little of import. I guess we should all be thankful that the tax-engorged technocrats at the CEEB see fit to let little Jesse host his “website” on the corporate servers at all.

But apparently they’re going to use him on election night. He reports, in his latest podcast, that tomorrow eve he’ll be tasked with tracking national response to the results as it appears on the internets: blogs, twitter, so on. Does that mean he’s going to be on TV? I don’t know, the Search Engine site is slim on details. Or anything else. He freely admits that he doesn’t know what he’s really going to do. And let’s face it, reporting on the election when it is by definition over, isn’t that great of a gig. Although I suppose his company will be all the big name anchors engaged in the same redundancy.

It’s remarkable that a radio show which only really existed for a few months and has been off the air for almost as long as it was on still manages to rank as the 7th result for a Google search of the fairly popular term “search engine”.

It’s also remarkable that a straight-ahead internet-affairs radio show/weekly podcast makes me laugh out loud more than just about any media I come in contact with. Jesse never winks.

See?

It’s too late for hughstimson.org to endorse Barack Obama in the Estados Unidos presidential election. I picked my candidate out a while ago, and I’m sticking to him.

I am however grudgingly backing Barack Obama as the “candidate most likely to be far better than the other candidate”, now that Kucinich appears an unlikely contender. So vote Obama, if you can. He did vote against the war when that meant something, and he does have a reasonableness which seems to escape federal politics generally.

Back when I was settling on Dennis as my true champion in the American arena, Esquire magazine of all magazines did a nice job of cementing my decision. Here’s Esquire again, on why you should probably vote Obama, but probably not be too giddy about it:

Esquire Endorses Barack Obama for President

By contrast, I’m downright excited to be voting in the Canadian election for Dick Hibma of the Green Party in the Bruce-Grey-Owen Sound riding. I don’t know Dick, and I gather his chances aren’t especially good for beating the incumbent Conservative. But I gather he’s the best chance there is. And I’m told the Conservative candidate is in grand need of being beaten. The funny thing is, environment plays well in the rural counties. If you’re a farmer (and if you’re from Bruce-Grey, you probably are), you like that Lary Miller of the Conservatives is also a farmer. But you’re also concerned about development on the escarpment, about corporatization of family farms, about climate uncertainty, about regional wind power development, about the stability of fuel prices, about the fuelization of feed grains, and so on. And so apparently you might just vote Green because of it. When I mentioned to my father, some time back, that he should consider setting up for a run as the Green B-G-O candidate, he allowed that the Greens already had a strong candidate in the riding. So that’s another strong endorsement there.

All this assumes that my absentee ballot is going to show up in the mail soon. I sent in my application with weeks to go. It will come, right?

I could also have reasonably chosen to vote in Victoria BC, my other Canadian home. But I hear Denise Savoie of the NDP has become firmly established there. I hafta say, last time around it was a pleasure to vote for someone I knew and liked, and see her win. I’m glad she’s going to win again.

And with that, I am officially saturated on electoral politics. Let it all be over as soon as possible.

For Canadian political junkies (and I know you’re out there), Andrew Heard at SFU is aggregating national and provincial polls into a running graphic, as he did during the last federal elections.

He also breaks it down by region and has good visual info regarding the sources of the data. All located here.

Probably even more useful that the data itself is the extensive gloss provided on interpretation of electoral polls. Executive precis: don’t trust them.

“A fundamental problem with media reporting on opinion polls is that there is usually little indication in the initial reports of how soft the reported support is for each party, or how each polling company tries to probe for voting intentions. Polls results often loosely proclaim “40% of decided voters… etc” However, that final figure may be based on having to prod the respondents at least twice into expressing a preference: 1) “If an election were held today which party would you vote for?” and, if they say don’t know, then they are asked 2) “which party are you leaning towards voting for?” The second group are only leaning and should not be viewed as actual support, and yet most polling companies roll the leaners in with the truly decided.”

Fun. I know nothing about the race, except for this tidbit from voteforenivronment.ca:

Our Pick: Frank Valeriote, Liberal Party of Canada

This is a riding where vote-splitting could easily elect a Conservative this time but it is very tricky to call. Liberal incumbent Brenda Chamberlain is not running again and the NDP candidate is high-profile Aboriginal broadcaster and writer Tom King. The Green party with candidate Mike Nagy has also shown strongly. Based on past results, it looks like the Liberal candidate has the only chance of winning however please check back close to election day for up-to-date information.

About Thom.

Hai look, they’re treeplanting.

From Evergreen SkyTrain to take original route:

“It looks like they’ll need a strip of some property, but I’m willing to part with it - for money,” he said, laughing. “It’s more important the transit line gets built.”

Mr. Berezan also said he had some land expropriated for the construction of the Canada line, and he found the price to be fair and the government easy to deal with.

Kudos to you sir, for reinforcing the generally positive national stereotype.

Paul Watson of the Sea Shepherds is calling it an act of war. The Farley Mowat was seized by teams of “emergency response” mounties deployed in zodiacs from a pair of coast guard ice breakers. Nobody is yet saying exactly where it happened, but apparently they were somewhere in the Cabot Strait, between Cape Breton and Newfoundland. Watson says they were in international waters. The Fisheries Minister, Loyola Hearn, says they were in “internal waters”. That’s a giant difference in interpretation.

So without knowing just exactly where it went down, is either claim reasonable? At the wikipedia level of analysis, the answer is yes.

“Territorial waters” are measured from the low-tide shore baseline 12 nautical miles out to sea. Within it’s territorial waters Canada has legal sovereignty, presumably similar to the legal status of national terrestrial territory. There is an exception requiring free “innocent passage” of vessels, but I doubt if the Farley Mowat could claim they were on a mission of good order and security.

There’s something else called a “contiguous zone” which countries can optionally claim out to 24 nautical miles. Canada does, but it doesn’t seem like it has much serious jurisdiction over that zone.

Here’s what I figure for the territorial waters and contiguous zone of the area, all other things being equal:

By that measure it looks like the Farley Mowat would have had plenty of room for free sailing. Even if they needed to make passage into the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, they could have kept outside of Canadian sovereign terrority.

But as far as I can tell Minister Hearn hasn’t actually been directly quoted using the language of territorial waters. He’s talking “internal waters”. Internal waters are also sovereign territory. The wikipedia definition makes it sound like you pretty much need to inland to be internal. Interestingly, Canada makes a number of exceptional claims to “internal waters” that don’t seem to come even close to fitting that definition. Most controversial at the moment is a chunk of the newly-navigable northwest passage. Also however, the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Once again, according to wikipedia, the Gulf estuary (the worlds largest estuary!) covers the area between Cape Breton and Newfoundland. By definition, from the looks of it:

It’s worth noting that within internal waters, there’s no right of even innocent passage.

So was the Mowat attacked by mounty pirates when she was boarded, or was it an legitimate arrest? If you accept Canada’s claim that the 1000s of square miles of heaving grey Atlantic in the Cabot Strait are “internal waters”, then it looks like this a purely internal affair. If you’re dubious of that claim, then it gets interesting.

But even if it was a high-seas boarding, it won’t rank as especially crazy on the Canadian-fisheries high-seas boarding scale of craziness. Back in 1995 the Coast Guard forcefully boarded a trawler that wasn’t in internal waters, wasn’t in territorial waters, and wasn’t even in the 200 mile economic zone.

From the federal court record:

“On the 9th of March, 1995, at or about 18:15 (6:15 p.m.)[1], armed boarding parties from three (3) or four (4) Canadian vessels boarded the Spanish deep-sea freezer-trawler ESTAI (the “ESTAI”) within the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (”NAFO”) Regulatory Area, which is to say outside Canadian fishery waters or, put another way, on the high seas. The boarding parties, which may have included members of a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (”RCMP”) emergency response team, arrested the ESTAI.”

(emphasis added)

From ever-trusty wikipedia:

On March 9 offshore patrol aircraft indicated a likely candidate and several armed DFO offshore fisheries patrol boats, along with Canadian Coast Guard and navy support, pursued the Spanish stern trawler Estai in international waters outside Canada’s 200 nautical mile (370 km) EEZ. The Estai cut its weighted trawl net and fled, resulting in a chase which stretched over several hours and ended only after the Canadian Fisheries Patrol vessel Cape Roger firing of a .50 calibre (12.7 mm) machine gun across the bow of the Estai. The Canadian Coast Guard Ship Sir Wilfred Grenfell used high-pressure fire-fighting water cannons to deter other Spanish fishing vessels from disrupting the enforcement operation. Finally, armed DFO and RCMP officers boarded the vessel in international waters on the Grand Banks and placed it and its crew under arrest.

(emphasis added)

From (of course) the National Post: B.C. minister backtracks on park hydro project

“The about-face, which came a day after 1,000 people gathered in a school gym near the provincial park, shows the powerful effect of public opinion in swaying government projects. Joe Foy of the Western Canada Wilderness Committee said his group was “deliriously happy.”

But critics worry the about-face has emboldened environmental protesters in a province starving for new energy sources, showing that they can veto any proposal they dislike simply by packing into a community hall.”

What shall we call this dangerous new trend, where suspiciously large groups of citizens affect government projects by organizing and publicly expressing their opinion, sometimes in a public place? Gym-mobs? Democropacking? Rights are important of course, but there needs to be reasonable limits to people’s ability to influence their elected representatives.

Dean Bavington is a prof at the School of Natural Resources. He co-teaches one of my classes this semester. I’m not sure exactly how to describe what he studies, some kind of science studies/science philosophy thing with an emphasis on cod. Interesting guy with interesting ideas, sure enough.

His episode is available at the CBC. I haven’t heard it yet, but I started listening to earlier episodes in anticipation and they’re good, especially #1, with Simon Schaffer.

What the hell? Why did we just fire our national science adviser?

All politics, no science, for Harper — Toronto Star

And why, when somebody asked about it in parliment, did the response come from Jim Prentice, the industry minister?

Has science recently become less relevant to policy? Did having somebody around to do high-level non-partisan synthesis of policy-relevant science just suddenly seem like an expensive luxury?

Well, here’s what Minister Prentice had to, uh, say:

Industry Minister Jim Prentice rose to respond. “Under the science and technology strategy which this government has put forward, there is an intent to focus the science and technology strategy to harness more resources.”

Sweet jesus, what language is he speaking? I’m terrifed that it might be english.

Here’s Adam Bly of Seed on the topic:

Canada’s Future

To: savoie.d@parl.gc.ca
CC: Prentice.J@parl.gc.ca
Subject: pending copyright legislation

Hi Denise,

I’m informed by the internets that Minister Prentice is preparing to re-introduce his copyright legislation bill. Although details are scarce, previews suggest that Minister Prentice has succumbed to the temptation of lobby money to write a law which would entrench the obsolete business models of the music industry and other content middlemen at the expense of the production and exchange of art, culture and education.

Resistance by Canadian people has been overwhelming, despite a lack of formal public input. All of the support for the bill appears to come from international corporations and their representatives, who have purchased access to the political process. As my representative, I know I can count on you to push back against the criminalization of art, culture and innovation.

thanks much,

Hugh

Strange to see the Albertan oil boom showing up on Kottke.org as a novel topic. If this is news to people who haven’t been personally associated with the oil patch, then it’s far past time this news gets out. This should be and needs to be an major regional national and international issue.

Note that the Edward Burtynsky photographs seem to be of the smaller of the two major oil sands projects.

In the late winter of 2006 I worked as a picker at Vantreight farms, which if I remember correctly is the second largest daffodil farm in the world. At the time there was much controversy and knowing unspokeness around the farm fields because Geoffrey Vantreight Jr., the grandson of the founder, had just passed away and his sons were feuding over what to do with the property. With real estate value what it is in the Victoria region (and the Saanich peninsula being drop dead gorgeous in certain lights and from certain angles, which I had plenty of opportunity to experience bouncing out in the farm bus as the sun came up), the land the flowers are grown on is arguably worth far far more than the flowers will ever sell for. On the other hand, the land is in the Agricultural Land Reserve, which is a sort of functional greenbelt and which requires a lot of baksheesh to the Victoria City Council before you can develop in it. As I was slogging up the muddy rows of maturing daffodil stems with my pairing knife, the entire matter had landed in some sort of court or binding arbitration, and the future pre-summer livelihood of Quebecois hippies, Punjabi-Canadians, migrant Mexican labourers and the occasional aimless BSc. was hanging in the balance.

According to a slick new addition to the daffodil.com website, it appears the matter has been resolved. A fancy flash interface will show you a series of map overlays which propose a

“mixed-use housing development on land that is not farmable or in the Agricultural Land Reserve (ALR) featuring 31 single-family homes, 92 townhomes, and 141 condominium units. Net revenue generated from the proposed development of this land will be invested back into Vantreight Farms, which grows approximately 18 million daffodils per year, generating 1,500 to 2,000 jobs annually. This development is essential for Vantreight Farms to modernize and expand its operations and also to assist us in becoming economically, environmentally and socially sustainable for generations to come.”

Interesting. Judging from the amount of money they’ve spent on GIS and web development, I’d say there must be some ongoing controversy they’re trying to allay.

update: Shortly after posting this I got a call from Ryan Vantreight, grandson of Geoff Jr., who was concerned about some of what I said in this post. He offered some extra information, which I’m happy to present here (I hope this is an accurate summary of Ryan’s main points)

(I’m not too worried that modernization would mean the end of seasonal picking on the farm. I’ve watched Star-Wars-esque machines, under the control of a couple of guys, harvest an acre of California cotton in 15 minutes which would have taken dozens of pickers a day back in the day. But I have a hard time imagining how any similar machine could harvest daffodils of just the right stem length without enormous wasteage, too much to be affordable. I think.)

I’m in no position to verify or dispute any of this of course, but Ryan certainly sounded like a reasonable guy. I carry a deep and I think justified suspicion of residential development around Victoria (think Bear Mountain and shudder), and a condo development for a condo development’s sake isn’t much to celebrate. But I like the daffodil farm and remain grateful for the paid work I did there. Nor can I rule out doing some more of it. Vantreight farms is a couple of rare things — a large yet family owned enterprise, and a (so far) functioning farm. If Vantreight Hills is what’s required to keep the farm afloat, then it can at least be said that there are less justified condominium development proposals in the world.

The New York Times has an excellent article up about the problems with touch-screen and other kinds of electronic voting:

Can You Count on Voting Machines? — Clive Thompson

(It may require you to register to see it. Bugmenot has lots of NYT passwords if you’d rather not join another database.)

Among the many excellent and balanced points made, there is this:

“The earliest critiques of digital voting booths came from the fringe — disgruntled citizens and scared-senseless computer geeks — but the fears have now risen to the highest levels of government.”

If I read that right, all the people who have been concerned about evoting all these years, for mostly the same reasons as the author addresses, were senseless fringe geeks who only happened to be right in the way that stopped clocks are right once a day. Now however, the issue is blessed by the Grey Lady, and the same concern is permissible and dignified. Oh good.

I can’t help pointing out that Canada has (almost) no history of election irregularities, and generally uses a system that doesn’t even seem to be on the radar of any of the election experts the article mentions. We make an X in an O on a little piece of paper, fold it up, then put it in a sealed box which is shipped to a counting center and counted by people. What’s wrong with that, anyway? Our federal elections are regulated, well, federally, so every province and county gets equally reliable elections, instead of the county-by-county business in the US. Silly old US.

John Quiggin at Crooked Timber has a glowing judgment of the outcomes of the Bali climate negotiations.

I’m going to believe him. To believe any less would be sad, scary and infuriating.

Regrettably, the world seems to have failed to get the joke about Line Beauchamp’s wacky sidekick at the Bali climate change talks. Instead, Prime Minister Harper is somehow co-opting the agenda. The fun thing about Harper is you don’t have to pay him to behave this way: even in a world without lobbyists he would still do his damndest to give industry of the day free reign regardless of the consequences. He’s honest that way. This is just a bad time to have a colossally narrow-minded think-tanker as a national leader.

Dear Prime Minister:

I am appalled by Canada’s counter-productive and hypocritical negotiating position at the talks on climate change in Bali. If we fail to meet the emerging challenges of climatic change, the damage that will be done to Canada and the world’s social and environmental integrity far outweighs any short-term concerns about preserving the status quo for our extractive and emmissive industries. The Canadian government’s behaviour at the Bali talks is transparently an effort to stall and undermine progress towards effective reduction of climate-altering emissions.

As a progressive democracy and disproportionate contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, Canada should be setting an example to the rest of the world. It is not too late to reverse our position and begin to do so.

Yours sincerely,

Hugh Stimson

“Dear Prime Minister” is the correct way to address email to the Prime Minister (at pm@pm.gc.ca, incidentally), although a poke in the eye is an acceptable alternative in person. Charmingly, my Member of Parliament Denise Savoie’s email is savoid1a@parl.gc.ca. I think that was my email address in 1994.

The Living Oceans Society have put together an animated interactive model of hydrologically realistic oil spill scenarios on the BC coastline. It has lots of features, but it can be comprehended faster by using it than having it described, which is a great thing. You can add bird habitat, fish migration routes and the like to the map, then watch them get obliterated when the ocean currents turn the wrong way. It’s super cute, and appropriately scary.

Oil shipping, processing and extraction has been strongly regulated in BC, but a number of serious threats have been coming up in the last few years (e.g. there is a long-standing moratorium on even exploring for oceanic oil off the BC coast, but the government is now claiming that it can’t find the piece of paper where that was written down). Public opposition has been strong and will get stronger. This model contributes to that discourse with a nice mix of modeling, GIS and infoporn.

Footnotes on their data sources and processing techniques are here.

Just so we’re all clear on this point, Line Beauchamp, the Environment Minister for Quebec, will be representing myself and the other Canadians at the Bali climate change conference next week. We’re also sending Prime Minister Harper, but he’s just there for comic effect. To be a portly Canadian Shriner in a fez tootling behind the American bandwagon on a pint-sized scooter, if you will. Don’t for god’s sake take anything he says seriously, especially if it’s regarding any issue with substantial consequence, such as global warming.

Taser International, “market leader in advanced electronic control devices”, have released their inevitable press release in response to the death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport.

Taser has been remarkably good at dodging lawsuits. As far as I know, they’ve never even been stuck with a civil suit for injury or death.

Their press release, helpfully reproduced in unedited form as a news article by CNN, scolds media outlets for rushing to blame Dziekanski’s death on his being tasered. They insist that

“We are taken aback by the number of media outlets that have irresponsibly published conclusive headlines blaming the TASER device and / or the law enforcement officers involved as the cause of death before completion of the investigation. These sensationalistic media reports completely ignore the earmark symptoms of excited delirium shown in the video.”

Yes, they’re shocked. Shocked. Furthermore,

“TASER International is transmitting over 60 legal demand letters requiring correction of these false and misleading headlines and will take other actions as appropriate.”

Which suggests an explanation for the lack of successful suits against them: they spend a lot of money on their justice.

So how come people die after getting tasered? It’s the tasered’s fault, not the taser or the taseree.

“This tragic incident appears to follow the pattern of many in-custody deaths or deaths following a confrontation with police. Historically, medical science and forensic analysis has shown that these deaths are attributable to other factors and not the low-energy electrical discharge of the TASER(r).”

Cause-and-effect is a slippery thing, sure enough. When is a thing a cause of another thing, and when are they just correlated in space in time? It’s a question that has vexed philosophers and ecologists and taserologists for centuries. The RCMP are very clear in their own philosophy, as noted previously.

After watching the video of the man dieing at the same time and place as he was being tasered by police I’ll tell you this: if that man hadn’t been tasered, he wouldn’t be dead now. Therefore the taser caused his death. I’ll tell you this too: the police also caused his death.

You know who should get a tasering? The philosophy department at TASER International of Scottsdale Arizona. What’s a low-energy electrical discharge among pure intellectuals?

How is it possible that the US terrorist watch-list has 750 000 people on it, and adds another 500 every day? Are there really 750 000 terrorists cruising around the country?

Well, I suppose if one of the most proven-not-to-be-a-terrorist people in the world still qualifies for the no-fly list based on the State Department’s careful consideration of his case, then, yep, we are all terrorists and none of us should be on planes.

Reuters: Police baffled by Taser death at Vancouver airport

Canadian police are still trying to work out why an agitated passenger died at Vancouver airport after he was hit by two blasts from a Taser stun gun, a spokesman said on Monday.

Erm…

Police attempted to restrain the passenger and blasted him twice with a Taser when he refused to calm down. He died shortly after being handcuffed.

“We don’t have the … cause (of death),” Royal Canadian Mounted Police Sergeant Pierre Lemaitre told CBC television from Vancouver, British Columbia.

Erm…

Based on our review of the B.C. coroner’s service and past cases where individuals have died following the use of a Taser, what we’ve seen is they are usually due to a pre-existing medical condition or the use or abuse of legal or illegal drugs. The Tasers have not contributed to the actual death.”

Erm…

Vancouver lawyer Cameron Ward, who has studied incidents involving Tasers, told the Globe and Mail newspaper that 16 Canadians had died in the last five years after being hit by the 50,000-volt electrical charge the weapon generates.

Erm…

Or failed to come alive. Again.

The elections Ontario “live results” site went dead half an hour after the polls closed and it first went live, but when I last checked, from the first few hundred votes cast, the results stood at:

current election system: 68%
proportional representation: 32%

That’s based on the first tiny fraction of polls, but it could easily be representative. Getting people to buy into a whole new election system is a big task, and from what I could tell from this side of the border, nobody was really taking that task on. But hey, I thought, looking at the results, maybe there’s a silver lining: the particular form of PR they chose was a bit weird, and while it had some advantages, it had some real disadvantages too. The first province that brings in PR is going to be the make-or-break showroom floor model for the whole country. If people don’t love it, there would be a good chance no province would have another crack at it for decades, let alone federally. Maybe we don’t want some particularly iffy variant to carry the perpetual hopes of the Canadian electoral system.

Then I noticed that elections ontario results had an extra column, presumably intended for the actual election results but included by default in the PR referendum results: number of ridings reporting 50% + 1 results.

current election system: 28
proportional representation: 1

(Or something, the site is still down.) 32% support, 3% influence under the first-past-the-post system. Kind of says it all, doesn’t it? Screw it, we need PR and we need it now.

From Pine Beetle, Mr. Opportunity?, The Tyee

“Our forests are in transition,” said Jim Whyte, director of operations at the Provincial Emergency Program. “We’re moving from healthy green forests to dead forests.”

I often hear that, despite all the complaints about privatization and the eroding of social programs, our income is going up so it’s for the best on the balance. Then I look around and see people without much money, and without social programs anymore either. So what’s up? A new Statistics Canada report gives it away: the average income may be going up, but average is only a useful measure if the data you’re measuring fall out on a nice neat bell curve, with most things in the middle and not much at either end. Income may have worked that way in North America in the post-war era (or maybe not, I don’t know), but we’ve been dragging out the disparity between the rich and the rest of us. Nowadays, in Canada (where income is relatively more equally distributed than in the US) 1/20th of the population have 1/4 of the goods.

That disparity is growing. The current data is from 2004, in 1992 the top 5% had just over a 1/5th of the pie. And the difference between the merely really rich (top 5%) and the ridiculously rich (top 1%) grew over that time too.

And here’s another fun fact: the number of woman in the top salaries (well under half of course) is actually trending down.

Bad as that all may sound, at least we’re doing better on the fuedal index than the US:

In Canada, the top 5% of individual income recipients in 2004 had an income of at least $89,000. In the United States, this figure would not have placed them even in the top 10% (using purchasing power parity values). The 5% threshold for the United States was $165,000. Further up the income distribution, the thresholds diverged considerably. The threshold for the top 0.01% of the taxfiler population in Canada was just over $2.8 million; in the United States, it was $9.4 million.

However, these differences paled when comparing average income. In 2004, in Canada, the average income for the top 5% of the taxfiler population was $178,000; in the United States, it was 2.5 times higher at $416,000.

The differences grew even larger higher up the income distribution. For the top 0.01% of the taxfiler population, the average American income was $25.8 million, over four times the Canadian figure of $5.9 million

Office Politics: High-income Canadians poor compared to Americans

When is the ‘middle’ not really the middle?

The US:Canada differences quoted above don’t actually mean that the US has greater income disparity than Canada; if the US lower and middle classes were also proportionately more wealthy than their Canadian equivalents it would be possible for the American rich to be so much rich than the Canadian rich without it being a sign of class division. But, well, I doubt it.

So it’s good new if you’re rich, and probably don’t need good news. But if you’re in the middle or (god help you) lower classes you’ve traded away your political institutions for a deregulated/privatized environment that’s helped the rich get richer. It’s a good time to be rich, and a bad time to be poor.

When I first started schlepping my Canadian pesos to the US, they were worth 60-odd freedom cents each. As of today a shiny loonie will buy you 98.5% of a greenback, and climbing.

You can fit my macroeconomic knowledge on the head of a pin, but I’m still weirded out that something as mammoth as the US economy, with all the inertia that presumably goes with it’s size, is under such perturbation that it’s currency value would shift that far that fast. What the hell is going on down here? And why am I no longer working in Canada for my summers and bringing the money down here in the winter?

Graph boosted from the Bank of Canada website, which is hilariously located at www.bank-banque-canada.ca.

At Crooked Timber, Ingrid Robeyns has a teaser-post up announcing that she will write a longer post about the political crisis in Belgium. She mentions that most non-Belgians (or perhaps, most non-Flemish) have trouble understanding why language should be such a big deal. Canada is dutifully mentioned in the ensuing comments, and commenter Alison adds this summary of our national skills in consistency:

Re Canada:

In Quebec, even commercial signs must be in French. Outside of Quebec, commercial signs are in the language of the customers.

Document, services and signs tend to be in the languages mandated by the level of government responsible for them. The airport in Toronto is signed bilingually because of its federal connection. The calendar for municipal garbage pickup is available in many, many languages, because Torontonians speak hundreds of them, and the government wants people to put out the right sort on the right day. Provincial laws are bilingual in Ontario, but most public servants are not. The courts have the capacity to operate in French, but it is infrequent except where there is a high density of Francophones.

Clear? Our weather is in Celsius and our ovens are in Fahrenheit. Our buildings are in imperial and our roads are in metric. Our cheese is advertised in pounds, but the shelf signs are normalized for comparison in grams.

We are bilingual and multicultural. Aboriginal people belong to First Nations, but are not included in the Constitution as a founding people, like the British and French. Quebecers tend to ignore the rest of us, but most of our prime ministers (and all of the best ones) have been from Quebec.

There will be a quiz later.

It’s another video roundup.

Hipster Olympics:

This could have been a hollow concept but they flesh it out pretty well. From the scorn round: “If they only knew he was a 911 hero.” “They do.” From Poykpac, but don’t bother going to their website. It belongs to the increasingly common brand of website that has no content other than links to myspace profiles and youtube tag queries. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Outing the SQ at Montebello:

As if the Sûreté du Québec needed to build it’s profile as cynical any-means-necessary thugs, here’s some fun footage of disguised officers getting called out as agent provocateurs by union leaders at the Montebello protest. By fun I mean kind of depressing, in the same way that most aggressive cop:protester or peaceful protester:civil disobedience protester interactions are usually depressing. But it probably advances the cause, as most of these things eventually seem to do.

The SQ had a nasty rep pre Oka, and it hasn’t gotten much better since. I’m guessing the only thing they’ll learn from this is not to send their undercover types in wearing police boots (which they could have learned by watching Serpico anyway). Or perhaps the supreme court will insist they continue to wear their boots to protests as a clever scheme to balance the rights of protesters and security.

West/Galifianakis:

And if you haven’t seen the Zack Galifianakis/Will Oldham video for Kanye West’s Can’t Tell Me Nothin you best be watching that now son. You’re gonna wash out at the hipster olympics ifn you don’t and it truly ranks as one of the year’s sublime moments of hilarity. It’s also damn pretty, makes me nostalgic for grey county. I was impressed West would release it as an official video until I found out it was the alternate official video, but I’m still impressed. And if you like that, or if you don’t, Galifianakis has plenty of alternate comedy gold for youtubing. For instance:

After years of near-extinction, the whacky Rhino party is back

The two groups say they were unaware of one another’s initiatives, as befitting a “disorganized and anarchic” movement, but they plan to meet in a Montreal bar tomorrow to discuss a merger.

I for one welcome our new rhino overlords.

“It’s a de facto economic means test that discriminates against the poor,” said Mr. Salmi, a Montreal resident who has sought office on nine previous occasions, several of them in British Columbia. (Mr. Salmi has legally changed his name to Sa Tan, so his challenge in Federal Court reads Sa Tan against Her Majesty The Queen.)