Last, there should be appointed a Minister of Opportunity Costs, whose sole responsibility would be to remind his colleagues around the cabinet table that nothing is free, that to favour one industry is to penalize every other. No doubt they will be astonished to hear it. Every single time.
A grasping riot of mutual pocket-pickers - Andrew Coyne - Macleans.ca (via Instapaper)
Insist that a single percent of risk is 1 percent too much when it comes to terror and American lives, and then demand that those who feel otherwise be dealt with punitively, if they won’t shut up.
How our “security” obsession costs us - National security - Salon.com (via Instapaper)
Halloween 2010
Toronto’s newly elected mayor identified that anger and the anxiety. Rob Ford fed into it and preyed on it, telling voters in the simplest terms possible that the current crop of politicians were to blame for all their problems, that there were easy solutions that required no sacrifices, that soon they would be able to pay less to their government and get better services in return.
Dalton McGuinty’s reckoning with the days of wrath - The Globe and Mail (via Instapaper)
Southbrook Pumpkin Patch
Most Canadians are simply not disturbed by the questions they are asked on the mandatory long-form census. There is no groundswell of opposition. There is not even a ripple. According to nearly everyone who has expressed an informed opinion, including two former chief statisticians at Statistics Canada, the voluntary replacement will be less accurate and hence less useful. It also costs more.
Todd Houston, Ironman
Smoothies
Lake Okanagan
Airplane
How in the world did we get to the point that filling out the long form census is just too much to ask? I frankly cannot remember if I, personally, have ever had to do the long form. I’m old enough that I probably did and I hate forms enough that I may have blocked it from memory – but it simply cannot be too great a price to pay for being a Canadian citizen and helping to ensure that all citizens share in its benefits. And my guess – the majority of Canadians would agree, even if, like me, they hate the questions.
I want to take this opportunity to comment on a technical statistical issue which has become the subject of media discussion. This relates to the question of whether a voluntary survey can become a substitute for a mandatory census.
It can not.
Under the circumstances, I have tendered my resignation to the Prime Minister.
To turn statistical methodology into a political controversy, a government has to really screw up. But to make statisticians shriek and flap their arms like wounded albatrosses, to cause policy wonks to turn purple with rage, to compel retired civil servants to dispense with a lifetime of discretion and denounce the government’s gobsmacking jackassery to reporters … Well, that’s something special.
Then we will see an economic life closer to our biological environment: smaller firms and no leverage - a world in which entrepreneurs, not bankers, take the risks, and in which companies are born and die every day without making the news.
MP Irwin Cotler, a former justice minister, says that the trial will be the first of a child soldier in modern history and that such a trial is prohibited under international humanitarian law. Any thought that something like this might cause the Harper government to reconsider is, of course, risible. These honourable men rebuff their own high court verdicts. They rebuff the will of Parliament – when not shutting it down – on Afghan detainee documents. For them, international law is of trifling concern.
In the matter of Omar Khadr, shame on us - The Globe and Mail (via Instapaper)
So, no new tax; no money flowing back to government to spend; no vast new bureaucracy springing up to burden the taxpayer (Stewardship Ontario was, until about a year ago, a virtual organization, and now has all of 20 staff), and really, a pretty smart program that is the first of its kind in Canada.
From the shock of ‘eco fees’ comes eco consciousness - The Globe and Mail (via Instapaper)
A staple of collective self-awareness, the census is our national mirror. Arbitrarily and without debate or justification, Conservatives are blurring Canada’s reflected image by poking a stick in the eye of knowledge.
Travers: Census change latest move in PM’s dumbing down of Canada - thestar.com (via Instapaper)
Rice Krispies
