UPDATED: Lonely At The Top?

If Stephen Harper isn't 'feelin' the love,' it is a situation of his own making. Two brief excerpts from Tim Harper's column in today's Star, entitled Stephen Harper's slide into isolation, are instructive.

Tom Flanagan, former best-buddies with Dear Leader, wrote in his recent book, Persona Non Grata, this about Harper:

“He can be suspicious, secretive, and vindictive, prone to sudden eruptions of white-hot rage over meaningless trivia, at other times falling into week-long depressions in which he is incapable of making decisions.’’

Also getting in on the tell-all craze, disgraced former senior Harper aide Bruce Carson, in 14 Days, describes his former boss this way:

... a man who was prone to temper tantrums, dressing down aides heatedly, swearing at them, but also getting as good as he gives.

He wouldn’t go as far as Flanagan in describing Harper as prone to bouts of depression — something Harper’s office dismissed as “ridiculous,” — but agreed the prime minister does have his ups and downs.

As well, perhaps his claim that Harper knew all of the details of his troubled past is equally revelatory of the Prime Minister's character.

Whether the state of Harper's psyche is of personal interest or not, getting some insight into the mind of one who has been systematically unraveling so much of what is good about Canada since he first came to power is doubtlessly worthwhile. If the subject is of sufficient interest, you may also wish to view last night's At Issue discussion on these books and whether such are good or bad. Bruce Andersen seemed to be the only one with reservations, as you will see:

UPDATE: Thanks to the link provided by Anon, here is a tune by Randy Newman that perhaps puts everything in perspective:

UPDATED:I Have A Simpler Solution

The headline reads, Restaurant owners seek meeting with PM over foreign worker freeze

The group representing Canada's restaurant owners is calling for an urgent meeting with Prime Minister Stephen Harper to discuss the freeze on temporary foreign workers in the restaurant industry.

"The recent moratorium on temporary foreign workers in the food service industry has turned the labour shortage into a crisis," Restaurants Canada CEO Garth Whyte said during a news conference in Charlottetown today.

The solution proposed by Restaurants Canada is threefold:

- Lift the moratorium on the food service industry immediately.

- Strengthen the rules of the program "to ensure there is no abuse."

- Allow restaurants that can't find Canadian workers to hire foreign workers at all skills levels.

Perhaps because of their fraught condition, they have overlooked a simpler solution:

Pay their workers more instead of pressuring the government to allow them to hire cheap foreign workers.

UPDATE: In her post this morning, Alison at Creekside does an excellent job piercing the hysterical hype being disseminated by Mr. Whyte on behalf of the restaurant industry.

Putting The Climate-Change 'Debate' Into Perspective

I think John Oliver does this rather effectively:




And on a more sobering note, you might like to gnaw on this ominous nugget.

Forecast: Very Cloudy Indeed

Mike de Sousa is a former Post Media reporter now operating his own website continuing his investigative work into energy and the environment. He is well-worth paying attention to.

His latest piece, Government’s weather forecasters shouldn’t discuss climate change, says Environment Canada, while perhaps not breaking any new ground, is a potent reminder of how inimical the Harper regime is to science as it continues to ignore climate change in its mad pursuit of policies promoting and facilitating tarsands' extraction.

Succinctly expressed, Environment Canada doesn't permit its meteorologists to comment on climate change because it lacks 'expertise':

“Environment Canada scientists speak to their area of expertise,” said spokesman Mark Johnson in an email. “For example, our Weather Preparedness Meteorologists are experts in their field of severe weather and speak to this subject. Questions about climate change or long-term trends would be directed to a climatologist or other applicable authority.”

Officially, these scientists cannot be trusted to connect the dots that their years of study would seem to entitle them to do:

...the department’s communications protocol prevents the meteorologists from drawing links to changing climate patterns following extreme weather events such as severe flooding in southern Alberta or a massive wildfire in Northern Quebec in the summer of 2013.

While Environment Canada's official position is that their employees are eminently satisfied, de Sousa includes a link to a union-sponsored survey that paints an altogether different picture. Here is a snippet of the responses:

“I am outraged by the Orwellian restriction of information under the current government. I cannot see any justification for preventing scientists from speaking about publicly-funded, published research to the media. The data were paid for by all Canadians and in my view belong to all Canadians. For us to work in the public interest, we need to be able to express our findings to non-scientists through public presentations and news media.

“The development of carefully crafted "Values and Ethics" codes across government are resulting in silencing the scientific community for fear of breaching their "Duty to Loyalty" (and are becoming synonymous with gag order).”

And there is this sad surrender:

“Leaving public service for academia. Won't have a muzzle anymore.”

Writes de Sousa:

The quotes from government scientists were released in support of the union’s internal investigation into allegations of muzzling of federal scientists. Its survey found that 90 per cent of federal scientists and professionals felt they couldn’t speak freely in public about their work and that 24 per cent had been asked to exclude or alter information for non-scientific reasons.

There is much more worth reading in this investigative piece. Mike de Sousa's website is surely one worth bookmarking for regular visits.

A Timely Reminder of Young Tim Hudak's Faulty Math

While much of the media seem to give young Tim Hudak a free pass on his ludicrouse claim that he will create one million jobs in Ontario over eight years by slashing both jobs and corporate taxes, Paul Boothe at Maclean's is offering a more critical perspective:

A very surprising and, for voters, unfortunate thing became apparent last week in the Ontario election campaign. The Progressive Conservatives’ central campaign proposal, the million jobs plan, collapsed when analysts looked closely at the math. Elementary, but critical arithmetic errors in their calculations resulted in the Progressive Conservatives vastly overestimating the number of jobs their plan would create. These errors demolished the underlying economic rationale the party had put forward for its smaller-government, lower-tax plan.

It seems that a fundamental error occurred in the Tory brain-trust's calculations:

...the planners confused person-years of employment with permanent jobs. This confusion led them to vastly overestimate the effect of their proposed job-creating measures. The result was that the half million jobs the Progressive Conservatives were promising to create with their plan (base-case economic growth was expected to provide the other half-million jobs) was really only about 75,000—fewer than the 100,000 public-sector jobs they were pledging to eliminate.

Or to put it another way, as explained by McMaster economist Mike Vealle,

Mr. Hudak appears to have conflated person years of employment – how many people would be employed for a single year – with permanent jobs. As a result, he counted many projected jobs multiple times.

Tim's predictable response?

“We strongly disagree with that interpretation,” he said while touring a factory on the outskirts of Niagara Falls. “I stand behind our numbers.”

While no one has yet demanded studies to back up Tim's basic premise, that austerity and tax cuts create jobs as discussed in two previous posts, this discovery of error at least represents a good use of journalistic time.

A Mound Of Sound Guest Post: The Relentless Growth of CO2

I put this item together a while ago but I was reminded of it today while reading a report from the WMO, the World Meteorological Organization, that April will go in the books as the first month in which atmospheric CO2 topped 400 ppm throughout the northern hemisphere. Not just one nasty region here or there, the entire bloody northern hemisphere. That's change you can believe in (sorry Barack).

Scientists say emissions will need to peak by 2020 and then decline rapidly to limit warming to 2C, a target agreed at the 2009 round of UN talks in Copenhagen.

According to the UN climate science panel, the world has already used between half and two-thirds of its “carbon budget” the amount of CO2 that can be released before the 2C goal is impossible.

This got me thinking about our chances of peaking our emissions by 2020 and then slashing them rapidly after that. At that point a quiz I recently spotted in The Globalist popped to mind.

The Globalist website posts a weekly quiz and they're generally pretty thought-provoking.

A recent one dealt with automobile manufacturing in 2013. How many cars were built in 2013? How about 83-million! China accounted for 27% of global sales. More telling was the fact that it wasn't until 2010 that we reached the 73-million auto mark. That's an increase of 10-million in just three years. Even more depressing is the forecast of 100-million cars to be produced in 2018, a third of them for the Chinese market.

What does that information tell you? In eight years we're going to go from producing 73-million cars to building 100-million. That means we'll be adding another hundred million cars a year to the hundreds of millions of older cars already prowling the planet's roads and highways. Now imagine what that's going to mean in the context of oil and gasoline consumption, water consumption (it takes 39,000 gallons of water to build a car), and of course greenhouse gas emissions. Hey kids, we're so screwed!

Another Globalist quiz looked at energy rich Nigeria and how much electricity the average Nigerian consumes in a year. It's about as much as the average person uses to power their microwave over the course of a year. That's because Nigeria is a corrupt petro-state and all that oil wealth mysteriously never makes it down to the ordinary folks.

How about electricity production from renewables? Brazil is the winner in the clean power contest at 82%. Canada comes in at 63% clean electricity, mainly through provincial hydro-electric generation (no thanks to Ottawa). The United States? Under 13%, well below the global average of 20% which also happens to be China's renewable electricity level.

You can find all the quizzes, including archives, here. If, like me, you're interested in issues pertaining to globalization, you can subscribe to their daily e-mail briefing. It's as timely as it is insightful.

Nature And The Heavy Hand Of Humanity

As difficult as this is to watch, we all have a responsibility to bear witness to our collective folly:

Post by HelaNada.com - A Brand New Experience.