Assorted Links: May 5, 2008

"The Angry Metis"

Why do people threaten to kill or harm Darcey?  I suspect it's because they've never met the man.  He is of slight build, moderate height and about 2% body fat, the rest of him is muscle and steel.  So are his friends.  Just not a smart idea.

I'm not sure what to say about the deluge of Sikh trolls coming onto this site and using their race as some sort of argument for advancing terrorism but I'm getting a little tired of it. Actually - I'm getting a little irritated. In white man's terms it means I'm furious and I'm doing everything I can do to control myself. You friggin idiots just pissed off a Metis who has always been fair.

Idiots in their multicultural ghettos with their heads up their multicultural enclave ghetto asses paying no attention to how their actions reflect on the rest of us or affect the rest of us need a good old time ass kicking or need a good old time airline ticket back to their precious old country  - I'm willing to provide either one.

One more threatening anonymous phonecall, one more threatening email, one more shit comment and I'll bring in a shitstorm of Metis hunters who are not as nice as me - from coast to coast.

We are the cockroaches of society and we are the original Canadians.

When you don't threaten to kill him he prefers a hug to a handshake and always offers to buy you a drink.  Just not a smart bunch these punks.  When my parents arrived in this country they were told to leave their old quarrels in the old country.  Why, again, did we stop telling immigrants this? 

The Era of Big Government

Still not over.  Not even close.

The welfare state should have peaked in the 70's, writes Business Edge's D'Arcy Jenish. However, it continues to grow. Today 3.3 million work in the public sector in Canada, more than 10 percent of the population. Technology, which allows businesses to do more with less people, failed to make the government any smaller. And, even if programs don't work anymore, they often still continue. The Fraser Institute has more on this topic here.

What on earth are all these people doing?  I ask merely for information.  Nearly a fifth of the workforce of the country works for the state.  In a country where Prime Minister Stephen Harper is considered a "far right-wing" conservative, this is only to be expected.

Falling Behind

Apropos of nothing, really, we follow a piece on the vast expansion of the public sector with news that Rogers is bringing the iPhone to Canada, one year after its release in the United States.  I'm sure the delay is the result of a terrible misunderstanding, and has nothing to do with regulatory approval or a legally enforced cable and telephone duopoly.

The hugely popular iPhone is coming to Canada.

Telecom giant Rogers announced Tuesday that it has brokered a deal with Apple to sell the high-tech smartphone north of the border later this year.

"We're thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada," said company president Ted Rogers in a statement. "We can't tell you any more about it right now, but stay tuned."

The phone allows users to listen to voice messages in the order they prefer; to select numbers by touch screen; and to watch movies in high resolution. It currently sells in the United States for between US$400 and $500.

The news came on the heels of a strong few months for Rogers, which doubled its first-quarter profits this year, reporting net earnings of $344 million. During the same period a year earlier it made $170 million.

Fun With Numbers

The pretzel logic of the equalization system reaches its climax; the richest province in the country is soon to be a "have not."

Ontario will soon be a have-not province, and is poised to start collecting equalization payments in two years, economists at Toronto-Dominion Bank say.

Ontario's economy is struggling to deal with the compounding effects of high energy costs, a strong loonie, and now a U.S. downturn, the economists note in a paper published Tuesday morning. But it's the rising prosperity of the energy-rich provinces, and not Ontario's actions, that have turned Ontario into a have-not, their paper argues.

“The change in Ontario's equalization status is essentially a story of soaring commodity prices,” say Derek Burleton, director of economic studies, and Don Drummond, chief economist. “There is much more at play here than just Ontario's economy.”

They calculate that Ontario would be eligible to receive $400-million in federal equalization transfers in the 2010-2011 fiscal year, and $1.3-billion in fiscal 2011-2012.

But Mr. Drummond is skeptical about whether Ontario would actually ever see any equalization money, even if it does qualify.

He notes that in the 1970s, Ontario was eligible for payments, and actually received some money, as energy prices soared. But support for Ontario was not politically acceptable, and so Ottawa changed the equalization formula, and retroactively clawed back Ontario's payments.

Leaving aside the envy laden terms "have" and "have not," which could have been lifted from the supposedly unrealistic dialog of an Ayn Rand villain, the equalization formula works as follows:

Equalization payments are based on a formula that calculates the difference between the per capita revenue yield that a particular province would obtain using average tax rates and the national average per capita revenue yield at average tax rates. The current formula considers five major revenue sources (see below). The objective of the program is to ensure that all provinces have access to per capita revenues equal to the potential average of all ten provinces. The formula is based solely on revenues and does not consider the cost of providing services or the expenditure need of the provinces.

In other words its not people that "have" or "have not," its governments.  Each of the provincial governments must have a per capita revenue base equal to the Canadian average, if the average goes up sufficiently, because Alberta is enjoying another oil boom, then Ontario, which is roughly speaking standing still, becomes "have not."  The system provides a perverse incentive to poorer provincial governments to expand government services beyond what is required by the needs of their people, instead to as far as other provinces can afford to subsidize them.  There is no incentive to become self supporting or to rationalize government administration.  It is a program that effectively traps much of the country into welfare dependency.

Cool Conservatism

If you're wondering what Russ Kuykendall (aka Burkean Canuck) has been up to since abandoning his blog, check out this month's installment of the Interim, featuring an obituary on WFB.

Buckley wasn’t always right, er, correct. He opposed the civil rights movement. Buckley seemed unable to distinguish between the radicalism of Elijah Mohamed and Malcolm X and the peaceful, though militant, movement led by the black Baptist preacher Martin Luther King, Jr. Although undoubtedly conversant in the Christian doctrine of the “IMAGO DEI,” Buckley supported white Southern Dixiecrats’ adherence to Southern tradition and privilege over King’s aspirations for all Americans. Buckley also opposed George Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Norman Podhoretz’s characterization of the invasion and occupation of Iraq as an installment in “World War IV.”

There were other contradictions. Bill Buckley was a devout Catholic devoted to playing the music of the Lutheran Bach on his harpsichord and who inhabited the upper reaches of a Manhattan high society created by generations of Upper East Side WASPs. He disavowed physical exercise, but was an expert sailor who navigated Atlantic crossings three times. Buckley was a mid-Atlantic “Americanist” who married a West Coast Canadian socialite, his beloved Patricia. Buckley took a formerly dour, cranky conservatism and mounted a charm offensive with a wry sense of humour and mischievous turns of phrase populated by some of the English language’s most obscure vocabulary. He gave it a better wardrobe. Ronald Reagan’s easy ways and expansiveness were the California version of Buckley’s mid-Atlantic sophistication and winsomeness. Buckley made conservatism “cool!”

While I obviously disagree with Burkean's characterization of Rand's belief's as "radical individualism," at least in the pejorative sense implied, the central point of the article is dead on:  WFB made conservatism fun and attractive.

"Deserve Neither and Lose Both"

Lorne Gunter on the impracticality of video surveillance:

Cameras aren't even all that good at helping prosecutors convict criminals after the fact. In Britain, where there are nearly five-million security cameras — almost as many as in the rest of the world combined — the Home Office admits that in 80% of cases where camera evidence is available, it is of too poor quality even to be accepted by the courts, much less have any impact on the outcome of a trial.

A test of cameras in the Berlin subway two years ago convinced the German government to suspend plans to install them throughout the subway system. Of thousands of criminal incidents committed on the monitored lines, video footage was available in only 78 cases. In only a third of those was the footage of usable quality, and in most of those the crime was minor, such as turnstile jumping.

In the 1990s, New York City made great strides in cleaning up its subway system and streets. But it did so by putting more officers on platforms and trains. Police can see what cameras cannot, and they can respond immediately, rather than waiting to be summoned by those monitoring cameras.

Cameras are a sop, a symbolic reaction that merely enables timid politicians to say, "Look. See? We're doing something."

And, or course, they subject law-abiding citizens to scrutiny by the government when they have given the government no probable cause to warrant such watching.

Cameras are expensive and intrusive and, worst of all, ineffective.

The point about visual quality in court cases is a weak one.  Why not spend billions more upgrading the technology?  It makes little difference if you try to create a panopticon society, only to refuse to punish actual criminals.  As Sir Robert Peel, the father of modern policing, among many other things, observed in established the London police force, fighting crimes requires a combination of tough but fair sentencing matched with an effective system of detection and apprehension.  If you can't catch them, and won't punish them, it makes little sense in taking digital photos of what the Victorians called the criminal classes.