Werner Patels — The Alberta Pundit

In his own words:

I went to Ottawa in two elections to represent Canada. I’m a federalist, a nationalist, a member of the country’s Parliament.

Sure, Garth, and in your warped reality you will protect the federalist and nationalist causes by insulting Quebeckers and Albertans as “losers” and by calling for Alberta’s wealth to be sucked to your have-not province, Ontario, which is nothing more than a basket case, with Toronto being one of the worst cesspools in the Western world.

Yep, I can see how that would work …

It has often been said that the ultimate authority in Canadian politics, as far as the media are concerned, is The Economist. It doesn’t matter what any of the Canadian media print or broadcast; any verdict or assessment passed by the venerable British “newspaper” is what matters in the end.

When Paul Martin was still prime minister, The Economist branded him “Mr. Dithers”. It was then that it became clear that Martin’s chances of being re-elected were dwindling fast. Then, just two or three weeks before the last federal election in January 2006, the magazine’s editors decided to endorse Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party. Right there and then, the Liberals’ fate was sealed.

In the current U.S. election campaign, The Economist was among the first to write off Hillary Clinton early on. The editors have done a poor job at hiding their support for Barack Obama, and even though they still hand out free advice to John McCain on what he needs to do to have at least a fighting chance (translation: to avoid going down in flames), it is very plain to see that their verdict as to who the next occupant of the White House will be has already been written in stone, as it were.

Now, The Economist has done it again:

Fans of “Yes, Minister”, a 1980s British sitcom, will recall that whenever Sir Humphrey Appleby, the emollient civil servant, labelled a brainwave by his minister “courageous”, a climbdown was inevitable. That is the adjective being used by many of the supporters of Stéphane Dion, the leader of Canada’s opposition Liberal Party, to describe the plan for a national carbon tax that he unveiled with campaign-style fanfare in mid-June.

Despite a slightly wimpish image, Mr Dion, a former academic, certainly does not lack courage. On July 4th he was due to head for Alberta, Canada’s oil patch, to spend the weekend at the Calgary Stampede endeavouring to sell a tax expressly designed to curb energy use.

This doesn’t look good for Dion. Being called a wimp, despite the added comment about him being courageous enough to venture into the oilpatch, is about just as destructive to his future prospects as the “Mr. Dithers” moniker has been for Paul Martin. Being compared to characters and situations from Yes, Minister isn’t exactly a compliment either.

Looks like Dion’s fate has been sealed, courtesy of The Economist.

I have just come across some nice looking photos: Sydney and Singapore.

I really loved this bit in the Sydney entry:

The city - Sydney is perfection. [...] The whole city has a very relaxed, upbeat vibe, and there’s a classy, cosmopolitan sophistication to the city - moreso than Toronto, which at times feels very gritty and industrial. Sydney just feels richer, more white-collar - more of a world city than Toronto.

[...] The minorities seem educated and well-integrated - they do a good job of screening immigrants and only letting the good ones in.

In other words, everything that Toronto is not. Canada has a lot to learn from Australia in everything from A to Z.

Former Conservative and now Liberal MP (what will come next?) Garth Turner is a consummate expert when it comes to putting his foot in his mouth. On his dinner plate, therefore, he finds a good portion of crow almost every day.

Here’s his latest demonstration of his foot-in-mouth disease:

As for Dion, he will move from Calgary to Edmonton, where he’s to have an open, Town Hall meeting on his climate change plan. You might not agree with everything the man says, but you have to admire this about him. He stood up once to the self-aggrandizing, hostile, me-first, greedy, macho, selfish and balkanizing separatist losers in Quebec. I guess he can do it again in Alberta.

“Apologies” don’t mean anything and won’t be accepted after such a sorry display of idiocy. His comments were not only hurtful to Albertans but also to Quebeckers. (Also see report in Calgary Herald)

There’s nothing wrong with being a “shock jock”. Some of them are raking in the big bucks. But as politicians they won’t get very far. Garth will have to make a decision soon: Does he want to be a politician or a foul-mouthed pundit? He can’t be both, because sooner or later any party he may belong to and represent will give him the boot.

Don’t get me wrong. I can understand Garth’s fight for a carbon tax. Many intelligent and high-profile conservatives want one, such as David Frum. And I have argued before that a carbon tax, if implemented, must come with a complete and full overhaul of our income tax system – that is, by switching the whole system to a flat tax. Unless the system is implemented exactly in this way, it will be nothing but the usual ideological rubbish that springs from Dion’s oddly wired brain.

But since Garth has taken to attacking provinces and regions and calling them names, let’s put something else out there. Natural resources belong to the provinces and not the federal government. Therefore, it can be argued, and rightly so I believe, that Ottawa does not even have the right to implement a federal carbon tax that would attach to provincial property. If a province, like British Columbia, wants to slap a provincial carbon tax on its own resources, that’s fine and well within the constitution and law. But the federal government has no dips on provincial resources, which means that it cannot tax them either. Any federal carbon tax, therefore, is automatically unconstitutional and poses unlawful interference with provincial rights.

It’s not surprising that Dion, in all his limitations, didn’t think that far, but Garth should have considered that – unless he is already plotting the overthrow of Canada’s provinces to create a centralized über-state in Ottawa.

Update: A reader on this blog has left a great comment (with a bit of editing for spelling):

You will know when we’re gone when you see the American weather map has a funny bump on the top. Ontario & other regions of course as usual will not be on said map.

That “bump” cannot come soon enough, and thanks to intellectually challenged people like Garth and Stéphane, it will happen sooner rather than later.

Alberta has “suffered” an economic boom due to its oilsands projects for years. As a result, Albertans experience high rates of inflation, and employers have a hard time filling vacancies. It makes sense, therefore, for the province to recruit much-needed workers from around the country and, increasingly, from overseas. For this purpose, the government of Alberta has put in place a system to fast-track work permits for foreign workers.

Translators and interpreters listed with the Association of Translators and Interpreters of Alberta (ATIA) probably know more about this than most other people, because it is they who have to reply to several inquiries every day from people who need to have their personal documents (driver’s licence or a birth certificate) translated or who need an interpreter for a certification examination.

I have had a recent experience with one woman who has been calling me and sending emails incessantly. She seems to have an Eastern-European background, judging from her accent, and is married to a German man who does not speak any English, which is why she has to act as his facilitator with the outside world, despite her own extremely poor English. Her husband is a heavy-duty machinery operator and was lured to Alberta by the province’s oil boom. From the bit of information I have learnt, he was required to take a licensing exam in order to qualify as a heavy-duty machinery operator in Alberta. It was for that exam that she tried to find an interpreter for her husband. She also mentioned in one of her emails that if he did not pass the exam, his temporary work permit would be revoked and they would be sent back to Germany.
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This is not good PR for Toronto Dominion – be sure to watch TD’s share price tumble on Monday when the stock markets come back online:

Toronto-Dominion Bank, Canada’s second-largest lender, said one of its traders in London incorrectly priced credit derivatives, costing the bank about C$96 million ($94.3 million) in pretax earnings.

The employee linked to the pricing error, a senior male trader, left TD Securities on June 23 when the mistake was discovered, bank spokeswoman Simone Philogène said today in a telephone interview from Toronto. She declined to name the employee.

“We are very disappointed that this has occurred,” Chief Executive Officer Ed Clark said in a statement. “Our company has a strong risk culture, and we deeply regret this incident.”

Ken Chapman is an “odd chap” (no pun intended?). He loves and supports Alberta premier Ed Stelmach, and has wet dreams about Stéphane Dion. Yes, he supports the provincial Tories but votes Liberal federally.

If you think this is odd, just keep in mind that the provincial Tories are not conservatives but social engineers and lefties of the worst kind. In fact, both the provincial Liberals and NDP are somewhat further to the right on many issues than Stelmach and his goons (for proof, see one of Stelmach’s most recent “ideas“).

But a recent remark by Chapman about the potential candidates for the leadership of the Alberta Liberals is quite interesting all the same:

For my money you can keep your charismatic politicians as leaders. They create more problems than they resolve.

What a joke – and how hypocritical – coming from someone who loves Dion to pieces. As a matter of fact, all the Alberta Liberal contenders are more charismatic, knowledgeable and intelligent than Dion (they also all speak English). As a commenter immediately noted:

LOL. And you chose Stephane Dion!?!?

The commenter then earned some infantile abuse from Chapman.

If there is a single reason I had to choose for not voting for the Alberta Tories ever again (or the federal Liberals), it’s the fact that people like Chapman are among their supporters (and he’s more than that: he’s a party insider, with a long slippery trail of something indefinable leading straight to Stelmach’s office).

Liberal leader Stéphane Dion lives in a world of his own. In fact, a recent article published somewhere in the media suggested that he suffers from a condition that prevents him from taking in feedback from his surroundings (including the people around him) and reacting to his environment accordingly. Since his election as party leader, Canadians have indeed seen ample evidence of this diagnosis.

When Dion set out to design his carbon-tax plan, which was after he boldly announced during the party’s leadership campaign that he would never implement a carbon tax, he came up with a name for it: Green Shift. He had probably seen the website of a company of the same name and figured that as a Liberal he was free to take other people’s property and/or infringe on their rights, and so he decided to take the name, one to one, and slap it on the front page of his plan.

The company protested against such brazen infringement and potential damage to its reputation right from the start, emphasizing that their business was the environment and not politics, which is why they didn’t want to be associated with any political party. Needless to say that the company issued a cease-and-desist order, which Dion and the Liberals have ignored, as is their wont. The company is now threatening legal – and ruinous – action.

Dion, afflicted with the aforementioned condition as he is, doesn’t get it:

Liberal leader Stephane Dion says he doesn’t think the Green Shift environmental company is being hurt by his party’s use of the same name for its carbon tax policy and “it will be OK.”

According to one company spokesperson:

Ms. Wright said yesterday that many of her clients — companies and institutions that sign up for her “green shift” program to use environmental goods, services and practices — don’t want to look like they’re endorsing a political party platform.

Dion denies any commercial harm to the company, but (a) the company has made it very clear that it doesn’t want to be associated with any political party and (b) any association or affiliation with the Liberals, and Dion in particular, is bad for business – something even many Liberals have acknowledged. In Québec, the list of future candidates to run for the Liberal Party in the next federal election has been kept a secret, because those on the list have expressly demanded not to be outed just yet. They say that any disclosure of their identities would cause them serious harm in their current professional activities if their bosses or business partners learnt of their Liberal aspirations.

In other words, the company has a good case to bring before a court and should actually be encouraged to do so. The Liberals have been acting like a Third World country that thumbs its nose at copyrights and other proprietary rights held by Western countries. Therefore, the Liberals need to be taught an expensive lesson, also to serve as a deterrent to others.

On the sidelines of this case, Dion himself has revealed some surprising truth (emphasis added):

Mr. Dion hinted he would be hard-pressed to give up the “green shift” label as the carbon tax is the first Liberal policy that he says has captured the public imagination since he was elected leader in December, 2006. He announced a renewable energy initiative and other plans, but the green shift is “the first time that we have something that is helping people to pay attention to what the Liberals have to propose.”

So, Dion has admitted that between December 2006, when he was elected party leader, and now, he has not done anything worthwhile at all, as the Green Shift plan, in his own words, marks the first time he has come up with anything useful at all for the party. That means that up to the presentation of his plan, he had failed to do his duties as party leader.

If Dion slacked off for a good year and a half while he was supposed to be working hard for his party, can anyone expect him to put in even the minimum amount of work for all Canadians when the effort for his own Liberals brothers and sisters was already too much of a strain for him? Clearly, no.

As the Calgary Herald noted today (emphasis added):

The fact that the Liberal leader has so little understanding of (a) the western psyche or (b) our visceral distrust of any attempt by Ottawa to grab more of our resource revenues than the feds are already entitled to, is a sorry — but pointed — reminder of why his party must not be allowed back into power.

Amen to that.

Actress and activist Mia Farrow decries George Bush’s decision to attend the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics.

Meanwhile, the venerable German teddy-bear company Steiff has decided to move its production from China back to Germany due to concerns over quality control. It was just a matter of time before companies would catch on to the ills of outsourcing. Let’s hope more will follow soon.

And speaking of human rights violations, Christopher Hitchens has treated himself to an experience of waterboarding.

Huffington Post has an entry celebrating The Ten Hottest Men and Women From Canada.

On the women’s side, we have Shania Twain and Lost’s Evangeline Lilly, who hails from Alberta.

The hottest Canadian men include Bryan Adams and – shock, shock, shock, Tom Green.