You can understand my surprise upon reading of your attempt to silence an elderly widow of an asbestos-linked cancer victim, Michaela Keyerslingk, using trademark law. The idea that a political party attempts to suppress free discussion of its policies by claiming it has protected status under commercial laws is bad enough. The fact that the […]
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The Sixth Estate: Conference Board of Canada Warns Tax Cuts Don’t Pay For Themselves
I regard the Conference Board of Canada with deep suspicion. It plagiarizes reports and opposes universal healthcare. Which is why I was so impressed to see an op-ed by its economist, Glen Hodgson, arguing that it is high time we started treating tax breaks like the government expenditures they really are: not spending per se, […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Everything About the Shipbuilding Plan Feels Wrong
Frequent readers will know there is no love lost between me and the professional media, but their treatment of the naval shipbuilding plan has been abhorrent even by their usual low standards. The most recent evidence for this is John Ibbitson’s column in the Globe & Mail, in which, despite the fact that we are […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Pork Barrel Update: Homeless People Should Move to Conservative Ridings
It’s been a while since I updated the Sixth Estate Pork Barrel, which I have now done. For those not familiar with the Pork Barrel, this is a list of government announcements of new funding projects to companies, cities, nonprofits, etc. It does not include development loans, “re-announcements” of existing grants, or normal government programs. […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Economist Says Money Now More Important Than Environment (Duh)
Greenhouse effect: We can always deal with it later, right? No surprise there, I suppose. Still, it was depressing to read ATB economist Todd Hirsch’s attempt at an obituary for climate change in the Globe & Mail: “debt is the new carbon.” Hirsch’s argument is that climate change doesn’t matter anymore because we’re interested in […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Patronage List Update: Nearly Half of New Government Appointments Going to Conservatives
Prior to the last election, Sixth Estate began tracking government appointments to Conservative Party insiders and donors on the Patronage List, which now stands at 750 names. The Patronage List is not necessarily an indication of corruption or incompetence or malpractice per se. Instead, it is an indication that a disproportionate number of federal appointments […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: CSIS Director Richard Fadden Is Responsible for Latest Abdelrazik Slur
The simultaneous attempts at name-clearing by Canadian citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik, who was illegally detained and tortured by the Sudanese government at the request of the Canadian government, and Moroccan citizen (but Canadian permanent resident) Adil Charkaoui, freed by the courts after being illegally arrested and held for years by our own government, has supposedly hit […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Media Blows Another Unemployment Rate Announcement
Unemployment rates, like political opinion polls, are in my opinion so useless that an intelligent media would simply ignore them. In this case the reason is because the statistics in question have been quietly manipulated beyond the point of meaningfulness by government statisticians operating with the full blessing of cowardly politicians less interested in releasing […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Being a Skeptic Also Means Ignoring (Most) Economists
This was the seeming incongruous thought which came to mind as I skimmed this dubious excuse for a think-piece by Kenneth Rogoff in the Globe & Mail, and this even more dubious arm-waving about a Ponzi scheme by a columnist in the National Post. Rogoff is a former IMF chief economist, but despite that, I […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Back From Vacation… Time to Rebuild My Readership
It’s impressive how much traffic drops off when you stop writing a political blog for a couple of weeks — and understandable, of course. I must apologize to the steadily growing readership for cutting you all off midstream. I was arranging a cross-country move and was then on vacation, all of which relegated blogging to […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: The Triumph of the Small Minded
This week America’s last space shuttle landed for the last time. There will be no genuine replacement. NASA hoped to replace the shuttle with Orion, capable of traveling to the Moon and Mars. But the Orion program was first scrapped, then revived as a spacecraft supposedly useful for low orbit and Mars, but not the […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Griffin Helicopter Inquiry Report Shows Excesses of Government Secrecy
You may have noticed in what passes for “news” the announcement that the Canadian Forces has completed its inquiry into the crash of a Griffon helicopter crash in Afghanistan in 2009, in which three soldiers died. The crash occurred when a helicopter was taking off from an American forward operating base, the overweight and overheating […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Fraser Institute’s Ethically Challenged Drug Experts Release Another BS Report
The Fraser Institute has released a new report on healthcare, and as usual, it’s a whopper. They claim that we should get rid of price controls because our system provides “no cost advantages.” As usual, this argument is plain baloney. Unusually, their own numbers show the lie this time. Not surprisingly, the summary for the […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Canadian Environment Ministers Agree: Oil is an Infinite Resource
The breathtaking inanity of Canadian energy policy can be summed up no better than the statement expressing the shared beliefs of natural resources minister Joe Oliver and all of his provincial counterparts, except Ontario minister Brad Duguid: Alberta’s oil sands are a responsible and sustainable major supplier of energy to the world. Logically, a sustainable […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Harper Regime Considering Army Officer, Spy Chief as New Head of Mounties
There will be a new chief for the RCMP named soon, and the field of candidates appears to be notably weak and controversial, at least from the scanty coverage in Postmedia. One of the people on the list is Ottawa police chief Vern White, for instance, which is good news for cops who like to […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Government of Canada Deceives Abused Telemarketers
Continuing my regular series of hopelessly bad government press releases, let me just say that if this is what human resources minister Diane Finley thinks is strong affirmative action in the face of blatantly illegal mass layoffs by American call centre company IQT falling the closure of their Canadian operations, then that is a strong […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Fraser Institute Reads Sixth Estate?
That definitely is the leading possibility, as a new report from the Fraser Institute has finally updated the listing of that group’s Editorial Advisory Board to reflect the total number of dead members, which now stands at six. The Fraser Institute, for those who are unaware, is a radical think tank which, among other activities, […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Elections Canada Suppressing “Inadvertent” Campaign Irregularities
So far only Postmedia seems to have noticed that Conservative York-Simcoe MP and Cabinet minister Peter Van Loan was caught by Elections Canada overspending his campaign finance limit in 2008. What they are downplaying so far, though, is Elections Canada’s absolutely inexcusable decision to postpone announcing his accounting irregularities until after the election, presumably so […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Canada’s Principled Stand Against the Alphabet Continues
As sort of an opening flourish to announce my return to full-time blogging, I’m happy to note that Canada’s official protest of the alphabet has been escalated to an all-out boycott, which foreign minister John “Chucklehead” Baird describes as a “principled stand.” The issue in question is the appointment of North Korea for four weeks […]
Continue readingThe Sixth Estate: Government Press Releases Now Being Written by 13 Year Olds
Or so I’m forced to conclude: New Facility to Produce Wonder Material From Forests and Farms It’s super strong, it’s green and it’s providing new opportunities for business in Alberta. It’s called nanocrystalline cellulose (NCC) and Alberta is about to become a leader in its production and study. Oh my god! Yay! The only possibly […]
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