Yachtsman Silver Donald Cameron writes: Canada's Economic Action Plan, it appears, doesn't reach Baddeck. In that picturesque village, federal agents are trying to kill an iconic small business oriented towards a US market—and that after decades of government investment and effort to strengthen and grow such businesses in chronically jobless Cape Breton. The business is the Cape Breton Boatyard, created in 1937 to serve the fleet of yachts associated with the family of Alexander Graham Bell and their friends, and owned for the past several decades by Henry Fuller. Since the beginning, the main clientele of the boatyard has been visiting yachts...

06 September, 2013

On Sunday, I posted a short iPhone video of an osprey nest next to an 800 kw wind turbine at River John, Nova Scotia, to make the tongue-in-cheek point that someone forgot to tell the osprey about the perils of infrasound and shadow flicker. The point was tongue-in-cheek in the sense that I have no way of knowing whether young birds successfully fledged from the nest, but serious in the sense that I think health arguments against wind turbines are largely spurious. Bruce Wark, former reporter, CBC radio producer, and King's journalism professor, thinks I overlooked the most obvious threat wind...

03 September, 2013

Capping and containment of the last sections of the former Sydney Tar Ponds nears completion. Looking northwest from the top of the old Sysco slag heap, this image, taken Wednesday evening, shows the mouth of the newly restored Muggah Creek. What appears to be black soil at the side of the stream is actually plastic sheeting, part of the engineered containment system for the stabilized and solidified coal byproducts below. From the same vantage point, the view to the southwest shows the Ferry Street bridge in the distance. Containment and capping of solidified wastes in the north Tar Pond, on the...

18 July, 2013

The number of "significant" natural catastrophes in North America causing more than $1 billion in losses of more than 50 deaths, 1950-2012: Number of natural catastrophes in North America, 1980-2011: For the climate change skeptics in the audience, these charts come not the Ecology Action Centre, the Natural Resources Defence Council, or the Pembina Institute, but from Munich Re, a $265-billion company that is one of the world's leading reinsurance brokers. (A reinsurer is an outfit that re-sells insurance liabilities when the risk becomes too great for a single retail firm, so it is on the front lines when catastrophic events loom.) Bear...

10 July, 2013

Here she is, speaking obvious but rarely heard truths about specialist teaching qualifications and the education system as a vast babysitting service, in a March (?), 2012, conversation with the CBC's Amy Smith: [Video link]...

03 June, 2013

In the closing moments of an excellent At Issues panel on CBC's The National last night, National Post columnist Andrew Coyne explained why traditional Question Period theatrics are so feckless when a real scandal envelopes government. [If the Opposition] would slow down and ask short simple questions, rather these kind of multiple-part grandstanding theatrics, but they don't seem to be capable of that. What sort of short questions, host Peter Mansbridge asked. [S]imple questions of fact that put ministers on the record, where you can then compare what they say on the record with what they say later. It's more in the nature...

22 May, 2013

It's always risky to opine on issues of spelling and grammar, and sure enough, several readers have objected to the graphic I posted [original source unknown] mocking a purported spelling error in the Harper Party's TV ad attacking newly anointed Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau. These readers variously argue that many dictionaries rate judgement (two e's) a perfectly acceptable spelling, or even consider judgment (one e) to be an exclusively American orthography. Arguing from the authority of recent dictionaries is a mug's game, since postmodernist lexicographers have rejected prescriptivism in favor of descriptivism. The job of a dictionary, these rubber-kneed democrats believe,...

02 May, 2013

As I said yesterday, I find the spectre of the hectoring free-marketeers at Sun News demanding government regulation to coerce consumers into buying their product hilarious. Contrarian reader Ritchie Simpson thinks I'm out to lunch: I mean really, Parker, what a scurrilous attack on Sun News, complete with quotation marks in the title to suggest that someone, supposedly [Sun News VP Kory] Teneycke, actually said that. I’m forced, in Eastlink’s basic package, to pay for all 3 major American networks, all other Canadian news channels, including the Ontario centric, slightly pinkish, tax gobbling, bureaucracy-bound CBC in several guises, two CTV channels,...

25 April, 2013

There is something deliciously ironic about free-market ideologues asking a government commission to force consumers to buy their product. [caption id="attachment_11799" align="alignright" width="250"] Kory Teneycke, former Harper flak and SunNews VP turned government handout seeker[/caption] That's what SunNews, the right-wing Canadian cable news channel, is asking the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission. SunNews has been a dud in the market. Canadians have chosen not to watch what's often called Fox News North. So the tax-and-spend hypocrits at Sun want to force-feed us by getting the CRTC to require cable companies to put them in the basic cable package, a notion called mandatory carriage. If...

24 April, 2013
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