Author: downes
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Making Canada Better
This is a response to a thread on Reddit: What’s something that Canadians should work on in order to make Canada a better country? – we need to address the creeping privatization of public health care. Governments are underfunding the current system and using this as an excuse to extend private services. – housing is […]
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An Exercise in Deception
In his newsletter Scott Galloway writes the following: The only thing that’s passed for bipartisanship over the past four decades is reckless spending. Democrats want more social spending, Republicans want lower taxes. OK, let’s compromise — do both and fuck over our grandkids. He also writes: Let’s dispense with one of the most tired false […]
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The Malaise in Ottawa
My comment in Reddit, to the thread ‘Ottawa has changed and I can’t seem to put my finger on how’. Ottawa needs to be a city but its city council is running it like a suburb. The result is that most city functions – from policing to transit to city life – have become dysfunctional. […]
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Contract Day
With all the delicacy of a sledgehammer, Doug Ford’s conservative government in Ontario has crafted an elegant solution to negotiating with public sector unions: Don’t. Instead, as a government, simply define what you want the contract to be, override any constitutional protections the union may have by using the ‘notwithstanding’ clause, and impose it on […]
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Thin Blue Line
I’ve seen a number of these images over the last few weeks, including some on motorcyclists on Anticosti Island and on this truck pictured here. As Wikipedia says, The “thin blue line” is a term that typically refers to the concept of the police as the line which keeps society from descending into violent chaos. […]
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Abortion
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade abortion has become illegal in many places in the United States. This is a key point in a long-standing campaign by the Church and right-wing conservatives to return to a state of affairs that existed prior to the mid-20th century. Here […]
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Gas Prices
There has been a lot of talk about inflation, which I address in an other post, but for now I want to focus on gas prices. First, take a look at the illustration. Notice that even though oil prices are declining, gas prices are still rising. This is known as the ‘crack gap’ and exists […]
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Tim Hortons
Tim Hortons is a chain of coffee shops founded by and named after a hockey player. It has been around as long as I can remember. I used to love the plain cruellers (and occasionally the walnut crullers) which were huge chunks of deep-fried dough. The cruellers are gone now, disappearing in the general down-sizing […]
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Ottawa
You will find Ottawa very clean, very modern and very safe with excellent schools and health care.
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The Debt
One of the incessant ‘Trudeau must go’ posts includes this feature chart. It pegs Canada’s total debt as $1,163 billion, and each individual debt as $31K. These numbers are supposed to frighten us. But what struck me is how low they are. Compare this, say, with total Canadian consumer debt of $2,200 billion. Average consumer […]