You either pay attention or pay through the nose. I would rather pay attention.
Michael Ignatieff has new ads out. Let’s do some math.
FROM THE AD
Hi, I’m Michael Ignatieff. Wherever I have worked, I have met Canadians that are the best the world has to offer.
plus
FACT: Michael Ignatieff worked outside of Canada for 34 straight years.
equals
Michael Ignatieff thinks the best Canadians that the world has to offer live outside of Canada.
What does that make those of us who live in Canada? Chopped Liver?
h/t “A Step To The Right” (on hiatus)
Timing is everything. And Ottawa’s museum workers have voted in a landslide to strike with a likely start date to be in mid September just in time for the new school year.
As they have been working without a contract since April 1st, the timing of this strike could not be more opportune for the union. In typical fashion, they will aim to disrupt our lives as much as possible because they know what we all know. The primary visitors to museums are school children on school trips and a strike in April and through the summer will not garner any attention or cause any disruption. But there is an added reason they waited from April to September. And it all has to do with who takes the children to these museums?
Unionized teachers of course.
Mark my words. This means that we can count on teachers complaining about how important school trips to the two museums are and that it is important for the government to settle with the strikers so classes can go on field trips. All in a show of union solidarity.
If parents don’t stand firm and make it clear to teachers that they do not feel that field trips to these museums are necessary, you can rest assured that tax payers will, once again, get OfficiallyScrewed.
Across the nation our local TV networks have been waging a war against the cable carriers, and Rogers in particular. The battle has basically been over Rogers taking the free air signals of local TV stations and broadcasting them over cable without compensating the local stations.
Well it looks like Rogers is going to up their rates by 1.5% in an effort to compensate for additional costs of carrying these free stations and people are EM AY DEE … MAD!
I blogged about our lack of priorities a few weeks ago but the bottom line is that EVERYONE should be raising their dander up and demanding A La Carte station ordering. i.e. There should be a base cost (say $10 or $15 a month) for delivery of service and then we should be able to order whatever channels we want. Why should an anglophone Canadian pay for 3 or 4 French stations to be piped directly into his home? Why should a good God fearing Christian need to pay for stations that promote Muslim or Jewish religious beliefs? Why should a piano lesson taking uber geek be forced to pay for not one, not two, but three sports stations that he/she will never watch? It simply does not make sense.
The only thing that DOES make sense is A La Carte station ordering. If I had to pay $2 or so per station, I would likely have a $40 to $50 a month cable bill.
Demand A La Carte!
Tuesday night on local Ottawa CTV news there was a piece about a small group of citizens living in sub standard housing. In the middle of the clip I hear the war cry of ACORN… “What do we want…Justice….When do we want it….Now.” And my heart sank because I knew immediately that the tentacles of the Rathke brothers and Saul Alinsky have reached into our fair nation. Up until tonight I had not heard a peep out of them. But now that has all changed.
After decades of sucking the life (not to mention billions of dollars) out of the USA, ACORN has set it’s sites on global targets and Canada is a target.
From the website of ACORN Canada.
Don’t miss a thing; enter your email address to stay up to date with ACORN Canada’s work organizing Canada’s low income communities for social justice!
The redistribution of wealth is their ultimate goal. With lines like “organizing low income communities for social justice” it won’t be long until the voter fraud starts. In the USA the name ACORN has been getting such a bad reputation that they are changing their name to avoid the negative connotations associated with being (pardon the pun) a little nuts.
ACORN now has offices in Toronto (HQ), Ottawa, Surrey/Vancouver and Hamilton.
To quote from The Fly, “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”
Many of you recall the trimming of a couple of inefficient government programs that helped pay for artists to tour the world. Well I have good news for those of us who pay our own way when we travel. Minister James Moore has stuck to his guns and will not be extending the programs as they are inefficient.
Art groups are upset the government refuses to reinstate two funds — the $7.1-million Trade Routes program and the $4.8-million Arts Promotion program — that helped with international travel and marketing.
The government maintains the programs were inefficient.
Trade Routes spent $5 million paying people to “push paper” and only $2 million went to the artists, said Heritage Minister James Moore’s spokeswoman Deirdra McCracken.
What many people should pay attention to is the addtional fact in this article that the Conservative government is not trimming arts funding. They are in fact spending over $540 million on arts and culture over two years in the middle of a recession to help these areas. What they are NOT doing is blowing cash on wasted paper pushing and free world travel.
Alain Dancyger, the executive director of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal, said he had to beg donors in Egypt this spring to make up a $250,000 travel budget shortfall for the company’s historic Middle East tour.
“It was embarrassing,” he said. Donors were asking why they should give if the Canadian government was refusing to help, he said.
Newsflash: When my daughter’s volleyball club was looking to raise funds for travel or some new equipment, the girls on the team went door to door selling maple fudge. I wonder if Mr. Dancyger has thought to try this. I am willing to bet he has not. With countless people not even travelling these days because of the recession, I am ecstatic that this boondoggle has been put to rest.
Minister James Moore gets a gold star in my grading book.
When I blogged about altering the party funding formula a couple of weeks ago, I garnered a bit of interest but not quite the wave I would have liked to see. Well it seems that I am not the only one who feels that regional parties should be marginalized.
U of T Professor Andrew Stark had a piece in the Globe and Mail today that is worth reading which also addressed regional parties like the Bloc Quebecois.
Of note, their is a Bill passing through the system now that would give Ontario and a few Western Provinces more seats while holding Quebec to 75. This would go a long way towards taking away some of the strength that the Bloc have but ultimately party funding is the way I think this issue needs to be addressed.
So we here at OfficiallyScrewed.com are going to give it to them.
Today, Liberal critic Gerard Kennedy had a few choice words for John Baird regarding stimulus spending.
Liberal infrastructure critic Gerard Kennedy said the minister was ducking from his responsibilities.
“It is politically convenient for him to say he doesn’t know why projects aren’t happening, when, in fact, the government has been responsible for all the delays until now,” Kennedy said.
So far, the federal government says $2.8 billion of the $4-billion infrastructure stimulus fund has been spent and more than 1,700 projects have been approved.
Meanwhile just tonight on Hannity, Karl Rove gave us some details on how the U.S. stimulus spending is going. The Americans have spent a mere $67.4 Billion out of a $787 Billion stimulus package.
So Canada has spent 70% of our stimulus while the Americans have spent 8.6% of theirs.
Gerard Kennedy should hang his head in shame for even suggesting that our Federal government is holding up spending.
Thank you for serving our PM with distinction Kory Teneycke. Best of luck in your future endeavours. If you pursue them with the quality with which you served our PM, you are sure to be a success.
Mark your calendars. On Friday July 24th, John Stossel has a segment on ABC’s 20/20 which looks at the Canadian Universal Health Care system. This is very timely as the Obama administration is poised to pass a Universal Health Care bill through Congress.
In an effort to educate American’s about our system, Stossel does some serious digging. In a brief preview some of the information that will be revealed is:
a) Canadian doctors earn less than 50% of what their American counterparts make, which leads to the doctor shortage.
b) towns in Canada are holding lotteries when space opens up with local family doctors to determine which family will get a doctor.
c) CT Scans, MRIs and other critical tests can get done usually next day…if you are a cat or a dog. But for a human the wait time is far longer.
If Stossel ‘s past segments are an indication of what we can expect then this segment should be eye opening for Canadians as well as Americans. I urge you all to take note and set your PVR’s. For a sneak peak, check out the early promo by clicking here.
We will also do our part and try to get the show recorded and posted to the web as we feel it is critical for Canadians to know how OfficiallyScrewed we really are.
In the Fall of 2008, PMSH toyed with the idea of cancelling the party funding formula that rewards each political party approximately $1.95 per year for each vote they received in the last election. Immediately, the three parties who squirrel away their funds in this manner cried foul and out of self interest they threatened to take the government down.
Well I have the short term solution that would a) bind the three national parties and b) spread the wealth in a manner that would minimize the threat of regionalism.
The formula for funding is below:
Funding = votes x $1.95 x (candidates that the party runs)
………………………………………………..(total number of ridings)
Thus the Green Party, the Liberal Party, the NDP and the Conservative Party would garner approximately $1.95 per vote which is about the same as the current formula. ($1.95 x (300/308) = approximately $1.90 per vote)
But a regional party, like the Bloc Quebecois, would only garner $1.95 x (75/308) or approximately $0.48 per vote. Considering the fact that Bloc is using tax dollars to promote separation, this nationalistic approach to party funding would probably go over well with the average Canadian.