Earth Hour

The taxpayers in the City of Edmonton should be happy to know the idiots in the city administration are blowing tax dollars advertising the hell out of Saturday's Earth Hour.

Yup, they're exhorting the ignorant masses to shut off all their lights Saturday night for an hour to help curb greenhouse gas emissions and thus do a bit to save the planet.

It's all B.S. so I'm going to protest in my own way. I've set up some hi-power halogen spotlights on my house for this event so that I can consume extra electricity to help take up the slack in demand from all the soft-headed types who're planning on shutting their lights off.




How do you make yourself feel good doing nothing about climate change? Earth Hour!!!!

To hell with that shit. My lights are ON.

Saving Local Television

The actual issue is an attempt to make viewers pay for something that they've never had to pay for before. Local TV signals.

As broadcasters catch up with digital and high-definition technologies, the old style analog television transmissions will disappear.

The current campaign by Canadian television broadcasters asking viewers to demand the CRTC force Satellite and Cable Companies to pay for local stations' content is pure misdirection. The Broadcasters would have you believe that the issue is fairness; a need to make the cable companies pay for the use of the local stations they carry.

Bullshit. That's just a strawman.

1. First off, Despite their protestations to the contrary, if the broadcasters succeed in forcing the cable and Satellite providers to pay for the use of local stations, the costs will be passed directly to the consumers.
2. Secondly, the Parent companies of the local tv stations, companies like like Canwest Global and Quebecor, own a significant portion of the Cable and Satellite Providers own part of or in some cases all of the specialty channels that consumers are paying the cable companies to access. Asking consumers to pay again is almost like asking them to pay twice for the same damn thing.
3. Third, the cable and satellite companies include the local tv stations in the basic access packages they force every customer to buy before we can get access to the specialty channels we REALLY want to watch. I suspect that were some of the local stations to go under, the basic packages would remain largely unchanged, just carrying more of the alphabet networks' different regional feeds.
   
4. It's a changing marketplace. If local tv stations and their parent companies can't keep up and adjust to the new technologies, it's not fair to have the government (in the guise of new CRTC regulation) force consumers to keep the dinosaurs alive.
   

As a consumer, I gave up on local TV over a decade ago. There are perhaps twelve specialty channels I wanted when I ordered my satellite TV system. But I am forced to pay for hundreds of signals I NEVER WATCH in order the get the few I am interested in. Were the satellite and Cable companies serious about providing content choice they'd let us order the specific specialty channels we want to see.

The last thing I need is another bullshit charge added to my bill.

What should the Government do?

OK, today the federal government admitted it’s a recession. So now what?

Over lunch today my friend Richard wanted to talk about what the government should be doing to fight off the worst effects of the newly acknowledged recession in Canada

I jokingly told him that while the “American Way” now seems to be a tendency to sue, the quintessential ‘Canadian Way,’ now seems to be a kneejerk reaction that “the government needs to do something.”

Governments can only act with money extorted from the economies that support them; any and all government actions bear a cost to their supporting economies. This is not only the direct monetary price, but also the wider de-energizing effect on everyone else who must continue to function in the economy that has been stripped of those dollars. Since I became a taxpayer I’ve had a selfish interest in curbing government spending. You and I bear the cost EVERY time an elected lawmaker feels the need to justify his or her existence to the electorate by the questionable accomplishment of passing some new law or regulation. Each time this happens I am quite personally offended and you should be too.

This ‘Canadian way’ has given us bloated government ministries that consume ridiculous portions of the funds they’ve been entrusted to administer. I give you as an example the fact that size and cost of the civilian civil service that supports the Canadian Armed Forces rivals the size and cost of the military itself. Our military infrastructure is nearly half a century obsolete, our Navy is virtually nonexistent, and our Jet fighters thirty years old. Or how about Indian and Northern Affairs (or whatever the hell Politically Correct designation it’s called by this year) which has a budget that is nearly the equal to Canada’s military? My parents have chosen to live in a ‘First Nations’ community and I’ve seen the squalor in which many people there must live. Yet the department’s salaries, pensions, and other benefits are the envy of the private sector. A third example is the relatively new bureaucracy which was created to consum- I mean, administer the GST. Yes, it does in fact consume a ridiculously large portion of the tax that it administers.

One major factor that has saved the North American nations from collapsing under suffocating levels of taxation to support their growing welfare states is the lucky geographical accident that blessed both Canada and the United States with unbelievably abundant natural wealth. Naturally our society’s various Green organizations, (themselves philosophically huge supporters of government intervention and regulation) have been perversely acting against their own self-interest by working to bar access to those natural resources for most of the last 40 years.

I've said all this to point out that I fear the cost of Government action. It's a stretch for me to be willing to consider it, so that's why I feel odd directing attention at something Financial Post editor Diane Francis wrote today.

Diane Francis thinks she knows what the government should be doing, and I'd suggest that her column in today's Financial Post is worth a look.

Today I heard her in a radio interview and to my surprise, this fiscally conservative writer was advocating massive public/private partnerships to re-finance the stalled half-dozen or so refinery projects in the Alberta Industrial Heartland near Edmonton. She also wanted to include all the recently suspended new Oilsands projects in Northern Alberta. The suspension of these projects, which would have created billions of dollars of new wealth for the economy, was forced by the nearly worldwide credit drought kicked off of course, by Frannie Mae & Freddy Mac-enabled Subprime Mortgage debacle. This is the time, she said, for the Prime Minister to act.

I’ve been reading Diane’s columns on and off ever since 1990, when I had to suffer through a two-year involuntary subscription to McLeans magazine, (no- don’t ask). She’s about as good an example of common-sense, fiscal conservative thought that Eastern Canada can provide, and I think her idea is worth consideration. It certainly seems better than NDP leader Jack Layton’s vague plan to engage in a huge nation-wide Rooseveltesque road and bridges make-work program and the no-doubt additional new bureaucracy to support it.