news

Gutting the endangered species act

/ ginny200 / Leave a comment

May 11, 2012 Scott Prevails with Private Member’s Bill | Laurie Scott MPP.

Yet again, the Tories show their true stripes. The Bill to amend the endangered species act draws on the same old arguments, although this time its the “bobolink in a farmer’s hay-field”, not a spotted owl in a stand of forest, but the premise is still the same: economy trumps environment.

“We are moving forward with important legislation that will bring a more balanced approach to species protection, without penalizing farmers, forestry companies, recreational outdoor enthusiasts and countless other individuals and organizations who have been negatively impacted by the disastrous implementation of the current legislation by MNR,” said Scott, who is the PC Critic for Natural Resource.

Buried in there, with the farmers and the outdoor enthusiasts is the term “forestry companies” ie: large corporations which want to exploit the land without due consideration for its ecology.

Every day, it seems, we are told that a piece of legislation, whether to ease the rules around land use, or decrease the environmental studies needed, or decrease the protection of endangered species  is needed to counteract  job losses, losses created by the decline of manufacturing and failure to expand the knowledge economy outside of the major cities, and the egregious actions of banking around the world, not the poor bobolink.

I note that Ms. Scott represents my riding, her power base is in the more agricultural areas of the riding, and her background is nursing, not one of the environmental sciences. I wonder whose science she is depending on to assist her  in her role as opposition critic for Natural Resources.

The Harper government is gutting the social fabric of this country. A Tory government in Ontario would be disastrous, if this bill is evidence of its intent.

Who’s in charge here?

/ ginny200 / Leave a comment

Tory ministers crash budget hearing, leaving little time for questions – The Globe and Mail.

The Harper government appears to think that this is very clever political behaviour. Can’t you just hear them chortling in the men’s room over the way they’re going to put one over on the committee?

But this is not adult political behaviour. The Parliament in my view has a responsibility as a whole to consider well legislation that is before it and it is the duty of the Ministers of the Crown to answer questions about legislation. The more the Harper government plays these games, the more they look like they have something to hide.

The Omnibus bill is too large, and too vague to be passed as responsible legislation. There are far too many non-budget items included and they are too ill-defined.

Today, for example they floated some idea of paying EI recipients to move to where the jobs are. This was in response to the suggestion that a person should take any job, picking tobacco for example, even if the person’s training was teaching or nursing or engineering or graphic design. What nonsense is this? It reminds me of the Chinese sending their best and brightest to be reeducated in the countryside, with a subsequent loss of knowledge and skills that took two generations to recover. This country is supposed to be about progress and opportunity, and an insurance plan is supposed to provide insurance, not a bludgeon to take away people’s right of movement.

Did we decide as a people, sometime when I wasn’t paying attention, that the only thing that matters is the bottom line, that there is no room for compassion, or art, or history or a social safety net? I don’t think we did.

I’m tired of the posturing and the lies and the games. I want  transparent, responsible and good government.
Didn’t the Harper Tories campaign on something like that?

Another sensible programme gone

/ ginny200 / Leave a comment

Prison rehab program axed due to budget cuts – Canada – CBC News.

The CBC reports this morning that the government has cancelled the rehabilitation programme that has operated successfully in prisons, helping prisoners fight addiction and return as better and safer citizens to the outside world.

This government has curious pseudo-logic — put more people in prisons so you have to build more prisons, and make sure the prisoners continue to be addicted so they will reoffend when they hit the streets, and justify the increase in prisons.

Humane civilizations treat those who fall within their care, the elderly, the poor, the disabled, the sick, and yes the prisoners, many of whom fall into the last two groups as well, with compassion. It does the country no good whatsoever to return the untreated addicted to the streets.

The more bizarre the actions of this government, and that’s without considering Peter McKay, the better Thomas Mulcair looks.

Fairness

/ ginny200 / Leave a comment

John Ralston Saul, in his book, A Fair Country, talks about Canada as an aboriginal country, with one of its principle values, fairness. When I read it I remembered my father-in-law, who arrived here as a refugee from Slovakia in 1950, telling me about hearing children say to one another that something wasn’t fair. That was what was different about Canada, he said, even children knew things had to be fair.

In today’s Globe and Mail, Michael Ignatieff discusses the current economic disaster, and notes that things now are not fair. There are too many people who are excluded from Ralston Saul’s “big tent”. What follows is one of the final paragraphs:

A politics of fairness is also a politics of growth. Fair societies are more dynamic and more innovative. In fair societies, people don’t think the game is rigged before it begins. Success goes by what you know, not who you know. And people don’t waste emotions and energy on resentment and anger. They are too busy thinking up the next big thing.

He thinks that only by ensuring that everyone gets a fair chance can we overcome the current situation.

Happy New Year

Outrage

/ ginny200 / Leave a comment

Saudi Arabia beheads woman for witchcraft – chicagotribune.com.

I am outraged by this. Capital punishment is appalling enough for capital crimes, but this, a state killing of a woman accused of sorcery. What did they think she could do, lay a spell on the ruling family?

The Chicago Tribune story goes on to explain the huge increase in executions in Saudi Arabia this year, several for “sorcery”, some even men.

The newspaper doesn’t comment, although it may have in the past, on the continued execution of people in the United States. Many of these are mentally challenged. Those convicted of killing white individuals are far more likely to be executed than those killing people of any other colour. Those killers who are women are highly unlikely to be executed. Even-handed justice? I think not.

Every country, including this one, has a number of the falsely accused, or wrongly convicted. Guy Paul Morin, Donald Marshall, Stephen Truscott. Those are the names we need to remember when politicians talk about bringing back the death penalty(for our falling murder rate) here. I don’t want innocent blood, shed by the government in my name and yours, on my hands. You can’t say sorry to a corpse.

http://freesakineh.org Please sign the petition.

Canadian Values and Prisons

/ ginny200 / Leave a comment

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/immigrants-should-adopt-canadian-values-to-settle-here-survey-finds/article2237576

Solitary confinement Kingston PenitentiaryA view inside of one of the segregation cells at Kingston Penitentiary. - A view inside of one of the segregation cells at Kingston Penitentiary. | The Canadian Press

Two articles on opposite pages of the Globe and Mail this morning. One spoke of the tremendous support for Canadian values— tolerance for others and equality—that native Canadians and immigrants supported at the same level, the other of the conditions within our prisons, in particular the plan in the Omnibus Bill to deny visitors to people in solitary confinement. The Canadian Bar Association calls that “mean-spirited and counterproductive”. The article quotes  2008 Florida study as showing that prisoners who had family visitors were less likely to reoffend. The evidence against the punitive, unyielding nature of the measures in this bill continue to mount, yet the government remains committed to an approach that is being discredited and dismantled in the prototypic programmes in the US. Even a right-wing stalwart like Newt Gingrich has spoken against this approach, mainly because it is to expensive and it does not work.

If Harper thinks that he must continue with this because he believes he has a mandate to do so, he needs to think again. Those people who supported Canadian values in the survey quoted above, a vast majority, are not likely to long support a prison run on the recommendations of jail guards and their unions alone. Solitary confinement and the punitive instincts of prison administrators led to the death of Ashley Smith in a Kitchener prison. Four years have passed and this “mean-spirited” bill is the result. How many more people have to die?

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/mean-spirited-crime-bill-would-deny-visitors-to-punish-inmates/article2237630/

http://alterwords.wordpress.com/2008/06/21/agnes-mcphail-prison-reform/

Agnes McPhail one of the Famous Five, whose statues confront the politicians every day on the Hill, led the demand for prison reform in this country. Prisons in that unenlightened time were based on principles of retribution, not rehabilitation. Are we returning to that, not only inhumane but useless, expensive and unconscionable in a time of economic uncertainty and falling crime?

Guards are afraid of prisoners’ anger and violence. Measures which increase that anger make them less rather than more secure.

I wonder if the Prime Minister should make an unannounced visit to the Kingston Pen or to the prison here in Lindsay, as Agnes McPhail did in 1935. What she saw ignited a crusade that brought down the Conservative Government of R.B. Bennett later that same year. On second thought, maybe one of the opposition leaders should be making that visit.

Famous Five on Parliament Hill

Harper’s Crime Bill according to Texas

/ ginny200 / Leave a comment

Texas conservatives reject Harper’s crime plan – Canada – CBC News.

If you missed this article on the CBC news website, have a look. According to the Texans who have “been there, done that,” incarceration on the scale Mr. Harper is planning will cost billions of dollars and won’t work. That’s right. No decrease in crime. No decrease in drug use. What works? Treatment of drug addicts, outside of the prison system.

I don’t want to pay huge amounts to build new prisons, incarcerate countless young people and have nothing to show for it at the end but regret as expressed by these Texans, Republican to the core.

“Marc Levin, a lawyer with an anti-tax group called Right on Crime, argues that building more prisons is a waste of taxpayers’ money.

“We’ve see a double-digit decline in the last few years in Texas, both in our prison incarceration rate and, most importantly in our crime rate,” says Levin.

“And the way we’ve done it is by strengthening some of the alternatives to prison.””

I just don’t get it. I can understand the Tories not being swayed by the sociological, psychological and moral arguments, but thought they would accept the economic one. I thought they were supposed to be pragmatic, bottom line guys. Just ideologues, the bunch of them.

Why do we have to go down this well-worn path to failure?

Writing

/ ginny200 / Leave a comment

I’ve started on a project suggest by James Scott Bell in his book Plot and Structure in the Write Great Fiction series from Writers Digest Books. Essentially it’s a method for internalizing plot structure. it involves reading and then analyzing the structure of six novels of a type you would like to write. It will take time away from the actual writing of the sequel to The Facepainter Murders. It’s close to completion, but will need a rewrite for the second (or 10th) draft. I tend to revise as I go along, but I think, after reading Bell’s book, that I should consider just writing, and revising with a second draft of the whole thing. That is for the next book, however.

If you’re a writer or want to be one and haven’t looked at this series of books on writing, I’d recommend it.

Our lovely fall resurgence of summer seems to be over. The temperature is falling and so is the rain. A good time to begin my reading.

Another plan is to catalogue the books in this house and they are everywhere. Fortunately, I have a program on my Mac, called Delicious Library 2, that uses the InSight camera to read the bar codes on the books and record them in a library format.

I was glad to see that the Saudi King had the good sense to rein in the driving police or whoever they are that wanted to flog that woman in Saudi who dared to ?!drive a car. How subversive. And how sad that so many countries can’t or won’t understand that they and their people will never advance while keeping more than half their population unengaged.

Sakineh is still in prison. Please sign the petition. http://freesakineh.org/

Science Advances.

/ ginny200 / Leave a comment

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/subatomic-particle-may-travel-faster-than-the-speed-of-light/article2176893/

The above article in the Globe and Mail tells us the exciting—if true—news that scientists have now created a particle that moves faster than the speed of light. For those of us who are impaired in our knowledge of physics, this news brings a sense that the world will somehow change, even as our understanding of it does. And perhaps it will. If objects, albeit at this point neutrinos, can move faster than the speed of light, what does it imply for science-fiction concepts such as time travel and teleportation. And what about weapons? It seems that every advance in pure science brings in its wake those who choose to use the new knowledge or technology to create ever more efficient ways to kill their fellow creatures.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/13/health/13gene.html?pagewanted=2&ref=general&src=mv

This article in the New York Times tells of a break-through of a hopeful sort. Scientists who used their knowledge of a killer—the AIDS virus—and used it to construct a weapon of a different sort, this one loaded with genes that will seek out and destroy cancer cells, in this case the B cells of chronic lymphocytic leukemia. The article has an excellent explanation and graphics.

I think the authors downplay the risks of the treatment. It is no small matter to have all your B cells destroyed and live dependent on infusions of gammaglobulin to fight everything from hepatitis to the common cold. On the other hand, to have these little T cell grenades, reduced in number once they have done their job, but waiting, waiting for next evil cancerous cell to appear, must be comforting. The treatment itself, once the first days of fever and racking chills while the battle ensues are over, seems benign, with no side effects save for the long range one of susceptibility to infection.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/health/27paper.html?ref=health

Another outside the box thinker. Dr. George Whitesides has manipulated the science of microtubules and miniaturization to create a laboratory on a piece of blotting paper no larger than a postage stamp. This was done with the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

This technology has the potential to put testing into the field far from the conventional laboratories and indeed into the hands of the patients and other users, i.e. farmers. Yes, farmers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/health/27sari.html

And finally a low-tech solution that any woman in a sari-wearing nation could use to keep her family safe from cholera and other water-borne illnesses. The sad part of the article is the drop-off in use over time if there is no outside reinforcement. However there was a 25% increase in those who had not been trained to use the sari now filtering their water.

This same information appeared also in 2010 http://mbio.asm.org/content/1/1/e00034-10.full

Toronto Taxes

/ ginny200 / Leave a comment

I live in a small town in Ontario, part of a so-called city. The taxes on our home are easily twice that of those homes with similar values in North York, as far as I can determine from real estate listings. So I know about paying taxes and worrying where all the money is going.

I would welcome a KPMG review in my city, especially if it found that yes indeed, all the money was needed and wasn’t being wasted, as apparently the firm found in Toronto.

What is upsetting is listening to the Ford brothers, who seem to planning to turn the city into a gutted version of itself, in order to “save taxpayers money.” Never mind that the taxpayers didn’t elect them to save money, but to eliminate the waste. The citizens seemed to like their city and their services; they just thought, because Rob Ford told them so, that it was riddled with excess.

Today, the news reports that “buy-outs” of police or library workers, will help cut this 10% the mayor is demanding from the budgets of these services. Check out this story in the Globe and Mail for the numbers.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/toronto/toronto-could-lose-400-police-officers-to-buyouts/article2158774/

It seems odd to me that first the mayor decided that there should be a 10% cut. I’m not sure why—just a nice round number I suppose—and then all the departments had to find areas to cut cost without cutting service. So I suppose that means that all the workers will have to spend 10% more time at work to make up for their lost co-workers. How likely is that? Or have the extra 10% been bone-idle all this time?

At the same time, if the Fords can find a way to spend money to help the BIG developers, and play Lego with the city—ferris wheel indeed—, then that’s the way they choose, and money be damned. If I were a resident of Toronto I’d be annoyed at having all the money spent to ensure environmentally sound and citizen-friendly development wasted because some junior politician decides that he knows better. And have to pay all that money for environmental assessments again because the plans have been changed.

Did someone elect Doug Ford co-mayor or maybe king of Toronto when I wasn’t looking? How can an official elected by just one area make decisions for the city because he’s brother of the mayor?

It’s too bad the election is so far away. Perhaps the council will decide that the emperor has no clothes in time to save the city.