Premier Gordon Campbell with a bad case of Olympic fever.

A friend of mine recently used her Facebook status to pose the following question: Can some one please explain the harmonized sales tax in layman’s terms? The first comment she attracted was a sincere attempt to explain the details of BC’s newest tax structure without any criticism of the hike. My irritated brain immediately commanded my fingers to type – “Everyone in BC starts to pay 12 percent tax on everything. The government gives themselves raises with the extra money and the rest of it gets mismanaged on things like useless projects that lines the pockets of their friends who own big development companies.” There, I thought to myself after posting my contribution, that should incense a few people, perhaps prompting some serious discussion on the topic and awareness of how little taxpayers know of what is actually going on with their money behind the proverbial closed doors. My self-satisfaction lasted as long as it took for two more comments to appear after my own. The first one read “I like glitter and bunnies.” The second? “I like glitter and bunnies too!”
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Tar sands oil refinery

Even before acid rain, Canada and the United States have long been at odds over the issue of inter-continental pollution. The debilitating fact that our individual and shared industrial waste respects no physical boundary has become an increasingly destructive and contentious issue, which is matched only by the often impenetrable political boundaries which have prevented substantive policy initiatives from curbing the fundamentally devastating environmental impact this has wrought.

Chief among these transgressors are the Alberta tar sands.

Since 1966, development of these vast areas of petroleum manufacturing has gone full steam ahead, despite persistent and troubling data from environmental protection groups that the massively intrusive and destructive footprint of this endeavour has had disastrously long term effects on native plant, animal and human life in the region and beyond.
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For decades the growth of temporary employment agencies has had a real impact on how rural job markets are taking shape. A 2006 study highlights a consistent rise in part time, low wage jobs over the last several years. It claims that 11 percent of all rural workers hold temporary jobs. These jobs are often found through local temping agencies, which are thriving even in these difficult economic times. A recent piece of legislation, Bill 139, is long overdue. This bill includes new regulations for temping agencies, but it will not prevent all the abuses that take place, especially in rural areas.

I’ve found temping agencies can lend a hand in the short term. Some agencies do provide useful training to unskilled workers. However, abuses can occur with temping agencies that focus on providing unskilled labour to manufacturing facilities in rural areas.
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Do you have a bad roommate stereotype? For me, The Bad Roommate is constantly in a bathrobe that I’m sure belongs to me, has just, without even enjoying it, finished off the leftovers I was counting on, and isn’t sure what they did today, yet certainly created an unfathomable mess in the kitchen. Among other things, the worst part about my Bad Roommate is that they defiantly occupy an essential space in the house and aerate bad vibes while doing so.

Put another way, the Bad Roommate is a kind of angry, bathrobed, vacuum, that ironically doesn’t clean. (My apologies to any roommates, current, or fondly and formerly, who think I’m writing about them. In any case, I kid because I love).

I conjured up this image while reading reports that Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), Canada’s federally-owned and beleaguered nuclear technology company, is set to receive a $200 million bailout from the Harper government. The bailout, disclosed in the Conservative’s supplementary budget estimate, is the second the Crown-Corporation has received this year and makes the grand total of taxpayer subsidies doled out to AECL in 2009 $651 million. According to the document, this additional funding “will be used to address a cash shortfall caused by unexpected technical challenges on CANDU reactor refurbishment contracts.”
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As H1N1 sweeps across the nation, Liberal poll numbers sputter and Prime Minister Harper sashays in Bollywood while the federal Liberal brain trust is slumped on Donolo’s bench gulping much needed oxygen between periods.

The Conservative’s India inroads must be particularly galling given the long tradition of Indo-Canadians voting en masse for Liberals – particularly when it came to needing quick votes at candidate nomination meetings.

The Liberals must be working overtime to come up with a platform that rings true with voters. Meanwhile Mr. Harper systematically and strategically chips away at their storied franchise.

But Harper has chinks in his armour. Not the least of which is the ire that he inspires in long-time, loyal Liberals. Even my close Liberal friends still summarize their entire re-election strategy as “I hate Harper.” You can mobilize loyalists on hate. But the majority of Canadian voters are another story altogether.
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It's just a flu and it's just a vaccine.

Just to be clear, I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as the next person and, as I spend a good deal of time with my husband the communist and my parents, the super-liberal and the skeptic, I am also especially well disposed to a great deal of distrust for anyone who stands to make money from a negative situation. All of this considered, I would love to believe that the H1N1 vaccine is some international conspiratorial plot to either a) fill tax paying citizens with mercury and poisonous neurotoxins or b) turn out the near-empty pockets of a world economy choked by recession for those last few coins and some lint. But no matter what I read or hear, I just can’t make the leap.
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Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan

Many Ontarians are wondering: where is the official opposition in Queens Park? The Ontario Liberal government is drowning in deficit, mishandling taxpayer money, struggling to deal with the eHealth scandal, and now they seek to introduce a harmonized sales tax. These issues are political dynamite, so why haven’t the Tories jumped all over the wounded doe that is the Liberal government?

Dalton McGuinty and Dwight Duncan have made quite a pair of populist media darlings lately. They’ve been trumpeting the virtues of their new HST exemptions for coffee, newspapers, and homes under $400 000. While the Liberals are magnanimously laying these pearls before the swine, the weak response that has come from the Ontario opposition continues to descend into ineptitude.

Tax harmonization has been a pet project of Federal Finance Minister Jim Flarety for a long time. He has made no bones about his disgust for the high taxes on business in Ontario, going so far as to accuse Dalton McGuinty of administering the most severe tax regime in the entire G8 bloc. McGuinty has made it clear that without the funds and cooperation of the federal Conservatives, the HST couldn’t have happened. In effect, the Ontario Liberals have allied themselves with Stephen Harper’s federal government on this issue.
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The political means of addressing climate change are once again up for discussion.

Nostradamus was right. The year 2012 will certainly bring the end of an era.

Next month’s UN convention on climate change in Copenhagen reminds us that the Kyoto Protocol is on its last legs.

Indeed, the world’s first legally-binding legislation on greenhouse gas emission and climate change, for years battered and bruised through political conflagrations, diluted by the rhetoric of parliamentarians and spokespersons, pondered, plied and twisted through years of delay, and ultimately never ratified by the United States, is in need of a successor. And if Environment Minister Jim Prentice’s prognostications prove accurate, a definitive deal will not be reached in the Danish capital.
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Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has made a statement that Canada will not be apologizing to child migrants for our participation in the programs that shipped children from Britain. They were also known as “home children” and were forced to emigrate to British colonies, and although the programs were well-intentioned, many of the children were abused and essentially treated as slaves.

So, Australia has officially apologized for their role, and Britain has announced that they will make an official apology in 2010. And Jason Kenney, our dearest Immigration Minister, has stated that Canada will not be participating in this moral recall.
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Well, I woke up this morning, confident in the Canadian Mosaic of misinformation, misrepresentation, and general “hug thy neighbor” because they are “new” philosophies, and what happens while I’m asleep at the wheel with a half full Kokanee between my leg?

Those damn Tories went and whisked away my general feeling of political incorrectness by going and informing the teaming mass’ piling up at the gates of Heaven (you know, Custom’s and Immigration Canada) that we Canuckians aren’t perfect, we don’t always get it right, this isn’t necessarily the best place to live, and oh, by the way, we do occasionally put the Beaver hunting aside and go target practicing for terrorists when we are not consuming huge quantities of pork and beer after our little dip in the icy water.

Imagine my surprise to wake up to the newly released “Discover Canada” guide.
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