Thought of the Day

This is a comment that came from the Winnipeg Free Press site on an article by Colleen Simard, and my rebuttal of that post.

Original Comment from an anonymous person:

Ms Simard, this column seems somewhat superfluous. Just another excuse to pick.

I agree there should be adequate education funding on the reserves.

But I don't agree we(government) should have to replace houses every time your people destroy them. We don't live in them, they do. If I destroy my abode, nobobdy's going to replace it for me.

Opportunities? Can nobody think on those reserves? Has nobody (aboriginal) got any ideas? How about building houses?

I agree there should not be a delay in implementing something as basic as hand sanitizers, but from what I've heard and read, even some of your leaders were concerned about the alcohol-based products being abused.

But let's just call a spade a spade. As far as you/your people are concerned, we(whites)/they(government) will never get it right.

I read a very interesting opinion a while ago, and I wondered why more isn't made of it. It was to the effect that first nations in fact don't (never did) 'own' this land, and shouldn't be demanding anything, treaties or no treaties. Why? Because, like us, their forefathers were settlers who immigrated from somewhere else too.

My Response:

Uh, nameless one? Do you really want to argue that First Nations have no right to this land because their forefathers settled here from somewhere else? All peoples from all nations settled their lands from somewhere else (except the very founding tribes of the human species who were themselves evolved from other pre-human groups). If you advance this opinion you are saying in essence that none of us has any right to our land.

Even without a written history of from where indigenous tribes originated and who (if anyone) their ancestors needed to battle in order to claim this land the fact is that THEY WERE ALREADY HERE when Europeans came to the Americas to resettle them. These First Nations possessed their lands as surely as any European nation owned theirs (although they mostly viewed this "ownership" to it in a completely different way).

This BS rationalization that you find "interesting" is untenable at it's very core and something only someone who wants to promote a racist agenda would dream up. It is bereft of reason and makes no logical sense, which is why no one has made anything of it and no one ever will.

A comment made on the WFP site

This is a rebuttal to an earlier comment I made on the WFP site here. My handle, in case it's too hard for you to figure out, is rck.

paket: The notion that the road is more yours because you pay for gas and licensing is ridiculous. First of all a lot of cyclists own cars and therefore pay for licensing (which in any case is used to pay for the bureaucracy of licensing and MPI, not, as far as I know, for infrastructure). As far as gas taxes go, some of them do pay for roads, but keep in mind that your vehicle is much heavier and therefore creates significantly more wear and tear than a bike. Cyclists are also tax payers and have the same rights to the road that you enjoy--the extra amount you pay for the privilege of driving is your choice, but does not entitle you to more of the road. If you are in a single passenger vehicle and I am one man on a bike we are, in my view, equals. I will do my best to speed you on your way, but I'm not willing to put my life at risk so you can beat me to the next stop light.

Like Diskdoctor I believe bike paths should be cleared year-round on a fairly regular basis. There are more and more Winnipeggers out there every winter who realize that it's not as impractical as it first appears to ride year-round (unless it is during or just after an intense snowfall). I've been doing it for years and see no reason to stop. Encouraging this behavior lessens the pressure on car traffic and crowded transit routes. An extended river trail would make particularly good (and cheap) sense because it is entirely free of traffic (and a wonderful ride!)

T-Rev: I too hate to see cyclists abusing the rules of the road because it gives people like you justification for taking my life lightly. Just try and remember that we are all people, but when we are on bikes we are especially vulnerable people. The games you play out of vengeance may end-up killing or mauling someone who was a courteous cyclist or otherwise innocent human, someone who may have children, or at the very least other living people who love them as much as you love the people in your life. Next time you feel the need to aggressively cut someone off to teach bike-rider-kind a lesson please ask yourself if it is really worth risking that person's life for.

Also: Bikes on sidewalks are much more likely to collide with vehicles because they don't stop at every street crossing and cars don't always either—it's a very dangerous and impractical solution, even in the absence of pedestrians. Bikes belong on roads, and until this city gets its act together to make safety a priority we are going to have to learn to live with each other.

Opinion on the Dominion Institute

This is a letter to the editors I submitted in response to today's Editorial "Manitoba among best of a bad lot at teaching history." The Dominion Institute is an organization that believes Canadian History should be a mandatory subject in Canadian high schools; every year it publishes a report grading the provinces on their curriculum based on a very loose set of standards.

I'm not sure that by not teaching Canadian History in high schools we are "putting our country's future in jeopardy." It is an assumption made by this report without any substantial quantification. Clearly it is important to know some of the details of how Canada came to be, but it is equally, if not more, important is to know where it is going. I think a province that chooses to teach civics, and/or courses that take World History into as much consideration as Canadian History is probably as well off (if not better) than one that only mandates secondary instruction in Canadian History.

The methodology of this survey is flawed, and its annual, almost universally unchallenged presence in the Canadian media is regrettable. Does it really matter if people can identify the year of our confederation or Canada's first PM? Is it not more important for example that they have an understanding of our charter and the historical movements and ideas that gave birth to it rather than the dates and personalities of Confederacy?

Buying into GM a Huge Waste

The government’s plan to buy a significant percentage of a dying auto maker strikes me as a most irresponsible and idiotic gesture. GM has been proved, in the fierce arena of the Free Market, to be a loser—an arrogant loser who made cars people didn’t want and dumped workers to enhance profits. Their end has been long predicted, and many analysts already speculate that the money our government has so wantonly promised is only a brief stay to GM’s ultimate demise.

In the final analysis the government made a decision to bail out this fallen Goliath because of all the people who would be crushed beneath its weight. But the billions they tossed after the broken business model, in an attempt to resurrect this giant, would have been better directed retooling the car dependent economies of Southern Ontario.

Prime Minister Harper said: “I wish there were an alternative but the alternative to what we're doing today would be vastly more costly and more risky.” Perhaps, but this is a situation that calls for a bit of risk and some creative thinking. The problem with the government’s stance on this matter is that it is based expedience and political necessity neither of which will serve the interests of GM or Canada in the long run.

We are betting a very scary chunk of our future on the hope that GM will be able to restructure itself after decades of indolence. The government is confident that the cobwebs be cleared from the boardroom, inefficiencies fine-tuned out of the designs and malaise swept from the factory floor. But before such things come to pass, if they do at all, the government’s mandate may well have expired, and we’ll still be paying for this grand experiment in social capitalism.

What this decision exposes to me is the knee-jerk instincts of governments who’s primary objective is to keep winning elections. Mr. Harper said the decision to pay GM’s ransom was “regrettable but necessary.” I say a leader with real vision would say: “We are very sorry to the families and communities who depend on this industry, but it is now as dead as the dinosaurs. We will spend $6 billion (plus another $3.5 from your provincial coffers) to develop new industries. While GM spins its wheels down south trying to become more “environmental” we will fund solutions that are not wasteful exercises in want over need…” or some thing to that effect.

GM has contributed greatly to our spendthrift North American lifestyles. It created vehicles with shelf-lives in order to ensure new orders. It created demand for fuel guzzling behemoths even as “energy security” was becoming more of an issue for its national government. I hate to say it, but it deserves to die. It should be sold off to the sharks and the uneatable parts should be recycled into something that will serve the national interest to a greater extent than the gas-sucking, break-down buggies so cleverly marketed by the magnates in Michigan.