Parliament keeps suggesting ways to help the poor,
But Mr. Harper isn’t inclined to help, he’s very sure
By helping the rich getter richer, poverty’ll be beat,
Leavings from their tables are what the poor’ll eat.
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It is not that they really want to appear cheap and mean but Babel council came close last Monday. They were meeting as general committee and after a series of confusing amendments to a staff report, they voted down an amount of $100,000 in the budget for distribution to charities that could meet some criteria set by staff.
Staff had gotten involved in this question because, God forbid, some councillors claimed, these should be political decisions. Maybe they were worried that they might be confused with M.P. Brown who has never met a charity that he did not want to use for self promotion. All in all, it makes Brown look crude and city council look silly.
The council position was explained under the cliché that if the citizens of Barrie were not willing to pay for something a charity needs, what right has city council to use their taxes to pay for it. There is a very simple answer to that: Because there are things that council can do on behalf of the taxpayers that council can do better. There are many examples of this opportunity.
An obvious aspect of what the city can do is to provide charities with assistance in using city services. This includes many services where recipients are charged by the city for the service. In serving their purpose, there are charities, for example, that use transit services, both regular buses and accessible services. The city is best able to make sure that charities in need of this service are looked after. That means that citizens know that that service is properly looked after by the city. That is the city’s job, is it not?
There are charities that really need access to community facilities such as swimming pools. Why should they pay full rate for the citizens who are really most in need of these facilities? And these citizens are happy to use the facility when it is least used.
Whether our Member of Parliament needs free access to the Molson Centre to promote himself and his party on the back of a charity is an entirely different matter.
The point is that the criteria the city needs to use is whether the city can make sure its facilities and services are used effectively to serve those citizens in the greatest need for them. Our city councillors need to better understand their job.
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The Speaker of the House told the Tory gang,
I sure don’t like the song that Bev Oda sang,
You’ve dissed the House, you told many a lie,
Let’s have an election, see if voters let you by.
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It has always been an axiom that good writing starts with good research. It was when we ran across some research we had done on Italy of the late 1920s that a chilling thought came to mind. By no stretch of the imagination would we want to suggest that Prime Minister Stephen Harper is a fascist but we found some aspects of fascism with which he might agree.
Mind you, saying that Stephen Harper is not a fascist is not entirely good news. It just makes him harder to understand. As a neo-con, he is a little of this and a little of that. He flies somewhere out there on the extreme right of the political spectrum. From that position, as an economist, he could embarrass the late Milton Friedman.
A reputable academic, Friedman would never buy into a sham such as the Fraser Institute that is so basic to Harper’s western support system. Friedman would have had difficulty tolerating the dishonesty of the institute’s positions. It hires academics to support its preconceptions, not to do any of the necessary research. Harper and the Fraser Institute share some difficulties with letting people know the truth.
Harper would be intrigued with the corporations that were the unique aspect of Italian fascism of the 1920s and 1930s. These corporations were part of the Italian government. It was like giving the tar sands exploitation companies the government portfolio for the environment. And while under Mussolini, Italian trains did run on time, the Italians were not all that happy with the cost.
One of the interesting aspects of giving corporations control of the Italian economy through the 1920s and 1930s was that they proved themselves more corrupt, venal, inefficient and incompetent in that role than any civil servants could have been. It is like the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission giving control of CTV to Bell Canada. That is some propaganda arm to give Harper’s friends at Bell.
That is one of the many differences between Stephen Harper and the late Pierre Trudeau. When Prime Minister, Trudeau used to despise the shallowness of the news media and he would tell them what he thought of them. Harper has decided they might be useful to him and looks for ways to ingratiate himself.
Harper is no Mussolini but he seems to agree with the Italian leader that parliaments are a noisy inconvenience. Mussolini was much more thorough about proroguing them than Harper has been.
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I asked a regular reader: Which do you prefer to read?
A couplet about a current event or info to fill some need?
Answer: It’s best when you babble on and plant a seed.
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It came as a surprise. It might have been developing for some time but when you get the full impact, it comes as a surprise. We are talking here about the fine art of customer relations. This changes with time as do all things in life. It seems that in this modern age, the handling of customer relations is based on the assumption that the customer is not of sound mind.
There was a time when we knew that we were fully capable of handling customer relations people. We did until we met one that reminded us of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That was the 1975 movie that starred Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher. Nicholson played the fun-loving lunatic and Fletcher played the chilling psychiatric nurse Miss Ratched. Nicholson’s character is always playfully ahead of her but the anti-hero, Ratched, wins in the end.
It was a series of conversations with a woman from Bell Canada that left me feeling lobotomized. We had used the time-honoured approach of taking our complaint to the president of the company. This woman was one of the guardians of the castle keep at Bell Canada Enterprises’ executive office. Her approach was not that we were wrong but that we had not considered all the possibilities. She proved conclusively—to herself—that all the charges in the original bill were correct. This was the bill that caused the dust up because it was for three times the contracted price.
To give the devil her due, this woman was not only good at her job but she was determined. She would take the most miniscule items in the bill and make sure they were thoroughly discussed (by her). She must have spent more than ten minutes just on the charge for 911. It was affirmed to her many times that there was no disagreement with paying 18 cents per month for 911 emergency service.
We actually got to a point where both parties agreed that a bill of between $140 and $150 for the total period would have been reasonable. The sticking point was that the company wanted $192. Somewhere in the long list of charges and credits, Bell Canada must have made a computing error. It was not one that this woman from the executive office was willing to admit. The problem, she told us, was that we were not following her in the item by item recap of all the charges. Being from Quebec, she even insisted that Ontario Retail Tax, Goods and Services Tax and Harmonized Sales Tax should all be paid. She was not interested in our claim that HST had replaced GST and ORT.
Another problem left unresolved was the matter of the satellite receiver box for which we had paid $111 (including HST). She dismissed this as though Bell stores where in no way connected with Bell Canada. Take it to the store again, she advised.
She was generous though. She said she understood our confusion and concern and was quite willing to cancel the late charges—provided we paid promptly now that we understood the billing. We are waiting with baited breath for the new billing to arrive and the nasty telephone calls from Bell’s bill collectors to cease.
But I would really like to see her try that argument in front of a judge!
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Every year at about this time, the Leafs fan feels a stir,
Lord Stanley’s Mug is up for grabs—again we’ll demur.
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This first ran January 22, 2010. It still seems appropriate.
He stood alone on the side of the road in a blue blazer and grey pants.
He was not a person to whom you would have given a second glance.
Nodding his head as each car goes by, it appears that he is counting,
You also assume from the crowded road, the total must be mounting.
.
Life today is at such a hurry-scurry pace, nobody even bothers to ask,
Why would anyone stand there in place, undertaking such a big task?
The weeks, in sun and rain, in snow and sleet, in winds, he carries on,
It is so many months, through-out many hours, he still is counting on.
.
Finally I could no longer contain the concern about this unusual sight,
I pulled my car off the road for safety and went to ask if he was alright.
His jacket is neat, his pants fresh pressed yet his face drawn and pale.
He looked at me from sunken eyes and said, ‘May I tell a terrible tale?
.
‘I once was a young believer in what the liberal politicians used to say,
They said they held the centre left and the needs of people held sway.
After many years of believing, they sent ambassadors to seek me out,
You are a famous reasoning, smart person, of that there is little doubt.
.
‘They offered me a seat in Parliament, I heard words about leadership
And they handed me that on a platter, I did not have to leave a tip.
It really was fun for a while, Liberals cheered me wherever the event,
When I asked where they wanted to be lead, I was told to just invent.
.
‘I called for a thinker’s conference to take a look at our liberal future,
I was hoping to find an idea for Canada, an idea for liberals to nurture
But the ivory towers of the business elite said it wasn’t going to work,
We will get another dumb green tax, like we got from Dion, you jerk.
.
‘I made a deal with those financiers that I will find out how many care,
I came to stand at the side of the road to count voters who’re aware.’
I said to Michael before I drove off that it really did not sound like fun,
But I heard him say, before getting in the car, his count is now at one!
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In the words of the British anthem, God Save the Queen, we often wonder from what it is that God is supposed to save her. If it is to keep her around a little longer, God has already done a damn fine job. If she lives as long as her mother did, Queen Elizabeth II is good for quite a few more years. If she can just outlive her successor, she might give the monarchy a chance for a couple more decades.
At 84, the woman is going strong. Her minders are very careful of her and it is quite unlikely that she will inadvertently get run over by a wayward lorry in the Buckingham Palace parking lot. As boss of all the royals in England, she rules them by giving them just enough rope to hang themselves but never enough to besmirch the entire clan. As a betting person (horse parlays a specialty) she has placed her confidence in the kids—particularly grandson Bill and his intended, Kate.
She is planning on their wedding being a smashing fete and a world-wide television coup. After the nuptials and before Kate gets into her breeder role, they are being sent on a tour of the Commonwealth. This is to take the pulse of the colonials and to try to block some of the unrest caused by Charlie and Camilla’s first rights to the throne when Elizabeth passes into history.
After all the gushing over the dear young couple by the Americans, Canadians will hardly be rude to them. Besides, they are staying well away from any parts of Canada where they might be dissed or, heaven forbid, ignored. They will do the required walkabouts and baby kissing. The news media in Canada will be sure to be quite ga-ga over the charm of Princess Kate and her cute husband.
This could cause another 20 to 30 years of the foolishness of the monarchy in Canada. What the monarchy really does is to put off a properly structured constitutional conference. As long as the monarchy is around, it is blocking Canadians from having the type of government that can lead Canada into a clearer and more promising future.
We are being left today in a form of constitutional stasis. We keep exchanging one bad government for another bad government because we lack the checks and balances in how it is structured. What we need is continued tensions between status quo and liberalization. We need the challenges that lead to better government and a better life for all our citizens. We need an elected Senate or some sort of second house with the power needed to be a place of sober second thought. We need a supreme court that is not just appointed by the current Prime Minister. We desperately need a House of Commons we can respect.
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