Author: The Mound of Sound

Thanks to Senator Hugh Segal, the opposition parties have a wonderful opportunity to do something useful over the summer recess – they can rally to the defence of Canadian labour and every working man and woman in the country. Segal has reportedly infuriated the Harper regime by introducing an amendment

Alberta is facing three immediate and potentially lasting problems – the prospects of frequent, severe floods; the likelihood of extended periods of severe drought; and the Carbon Bubble that hangs over the provincial economy like a Sword of Damocles. By some accounts, the Carbon Bubble dilemma worsened yesterday with president

Foreign Policy magazine and The Fund for Peace have released their 2013 Failed State Index. Nations are rated by five categories, Critical, In Danger, Borderline, Stable and Most Stable. Not many countries achieve the Most Stable rating – Canada, the Scandinavian countries including Iceland, Australia and New Zealand, that’s it.  

When employers can’t find workers at a time of high unemployment, we’ve got a problem.   Filling those vacant spots with guest workers is a low-cost fix, one that does nothing to solve our problem, perhaps even rendering it more intractable. Currently, more than 330,000 workers live and work in Canada

Chain of Fools A little warming goes a long way.  That might be the real message from the floods that have wracked Alberta over the past week. It’s a message much of the Third World has known, and endured, for quite a while but we really never much listened to

It’s a newspaper so far right that, to steal a line from Lawrence Martin, it should be delivered in a holster.   A couple of weeks ago the Calgary Herald scribes treated climate change as the delusions of the loonie left.  That was then, this is now. The Herald is now

President Obama has said the Keystone XL pipeline can only go ahead if it doesn’t “significantly increase” U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.  There’s enough wiggle room in there to delight almost everybody. Define “significantly.”  There you go.   What does it mean if you export the really filthy petroleum coke or petcoke

Recent throughts from The Tweet of God: Well I’ve lost faith in you, too. Sorry, rest of the world, Junior and I can’t help you now. We’re too busy helping some loon cross a canyon on a piece of floss. “Atheist” is an anagram for “eat shit”. Advantage, Me. Paula

Sad Dog Diary

The F-35’s reputation for being over-priced, under-performing and overdue is etched in stone at this point.   For an aircraft that’s been in development for a dozen years, no one still knows what it will eventually cost nor how well it will actually perform when it’s ready to enter service. Now

It’s not like the Conservative ranks, federal and provincial, are short of miscreants who deserve a long stretch behind bars. Yesterday the fellow who was in command on the bridge of the BC Ferry, Queen of the North, was sentenced to four years in prison for criminal negligence causing death

“This is Pacific Northwest U.S. weather we’re getting and we’re not built for it. We didn’t design our cities, our floodways, our flood maps, anything for this. ” – John Pomeroy The deluge that caused such massive flooding throughout southern Alberta has brought other impacts that will remain long after

Sylvio Berlusconi has been sentenced to 7-years in prison for paying for sex with an underage prostitute.  He’s also banned for life from holding public office. Sly, you old dog, sounds like they’ve got you this time. Berlusconi’s lawyer is of course filing an appeal.   When your client is 76,

America does not abide insubordination and the defiant often find themselves on the receiving end of U.S. firepower. Washington is practically seething over the ease by which fugitive Edward Snowden keeps eluding America’s grasp.   First he made it to Hong Kong.  When American authorities tried to move on Snowden there,

Sorry, Calgary, but when once-a-century floods begin turning up once-a-decade (or even less) you need to realize that either climate change is very real and here to stay or that God just really hates you.  Okay, or both. Calgary is, of course, Canada’s oil town which I suppose lends a

Decades of neglect have left Canadian infrastructure vulnerable to severe weather events of the sort now ravaging southern Alberta. The World Council on Disaster Management kicked off its annual conference this morning in Toronto, itself the scene or recent heavy flooding. “How prepared are we? One way of answering that

 Maybe it’s time to treat Pierre Trudeau’s, and all Canadians’, Charter of Rights and Freedoms as a work in progress to be updated periodically but only for the purposes of enhancing its effectiveness and meeting threats to rights and freedoms not contemplated at its inception. We may sometimes have to

This may come as a jaw-dropper to you, but the country our Conservative leadership so wants to emulate is a pretty impoverished state. This chart gives median wealth, by nation.  It is based on the net value, in 2012, of assets minus liabilities per adult person in each given country. 

Iraq’s outlawed Baath Party has claimed responsibility for executing the masked man (in the blue shirt) who placed the noose over Saddam Hussein’s head. The hangman, identified as Mohhamed Nassif al-Maliki, was apparently tracked down to a city southwest of Baghdad and then killed. After hanging Saddam, the man was