Parliamentorama

Wow, weird stuff going on in Ottawa these days. I don't usually cover federal politics per se, given we are a community paper, but I covered it in today's paper from the point of view of our local, very popular, Conservative MP. I also wrote a "comment" on the topic too pasted below.

I have another conference call with Mr. Strahl in about three hours so we'll see how this develops.

By Paul J. Henderson
phenderson@chilliwacktimes.com

The attempted move last Thursday by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his minority government, including our own Chilliwack-Fraser Canyon MP Chuck Strahl, was either one of earth-shattering cynicism or was a massive miscalculation.

The fiscal plan outlined by Finance Minister Joe Flaherty—which really was not much of a plan at all—was one thing, but to also announce the elimination of public financing of political parties was like trying to sneak an elephant in on the back of a fly.
How could they not have seen that the plan would backfire? Or did they know it would, and did they hope their party would end up looking the lesser of two or three evils?

Tough to say, but Strahl held a conference with local media on Thursday and truly seemed bewildered at the kerfuffle this caused among opposition parties.

And while the opposition Liberals and NDP were up in arms about the lack of measures in the fiscal plan, that, of course, wasn't really what they were upset about. What got their backs up was the elimination of the $1.95 per vote subsidies for political parties.

Back in September I was interested in those who promote a more representative, if possibly even more unstable, form of government in proportional representation. (This system, basically, would mean that the votes for each political party across the country would be directly reflected in the number of representatives in parliament.)

I asked Strahl on Sept. 22 about the wasted votes in his riding where he has always won handily but where on Oct. 14 nearly 18,000 people voted for someone else. At that time he said: "One of the things that has made it fair is that all political parties get some compensation for every vote that's cast on a yearly basis—$1.95 a vote per year—so it's never really wasted."

When asked by the Times on Nov. 27 about the move as a seeming election-triggering stunt Strahl genuinely seem surprised at the uproar.

"I can't say this is the issue we want to go to the people on," he said. "I can't believe anyone would say that should trigger an election. Certainly that's not our intention."

But if not, then why make a move that could do nothing but gut the three opposition parties and all but kill the up-start Green Party?

The bigger point underlying all of this is that the so-called financial crisis the planet faces is being met with a shrug from the Conservatives.

"People, and even the opposition in the House are watching too much American television," he said.

In relative terms he's probably right, just don't tell that to any Chilliwack residents who have lost their jobs. But, more importantly, what if Strahl, Harper and company are wrong? What if the economic crisis does affect Canada drastically over the coming months? Shouldn't there be a plan beyond cutting taxes and eliminating party subsidies?

The opposition parties have in response acted in a way that may only increase voter cynicism about them too. The reality is that no matter what happens in the future, the Conservatives will, like all governing parties do, either take credit or shift blame: If things work out OK for the local economy Strahl will credit his party's tax cuts and civil servant pay cuts; if things don't work out so well, the media will be blamed for killing consumer confidence.

If the latter occurs, I apologize in advance.

They're (almost) here . . .

We got a letter to the editor at the paper today from a Larry Cooper, who says he is "Zora's typist."

It was as follows:

"I am a real space alien. It’s irrelevant if you do not believe it. What is relevant are my plans for when and location on earth I will appear. My plan includes the person who will be first to welcome me. Question is, who on earth has the intestinal fortitude to step into this mystery and become the first human to welcome me to your planet earth? Welcome_space_aliens@yahoo.ca"

We decided not to run the letter as it seem a little fishy. I mean, really, would a space alien get a Yahoo account? I doubt it.

Paper stuff

Today at work our computers were down until 11:30 a.m. That proves tricky on a production day as we couldn't get anything started on any pages until noonish. I went home to file a story to the web and then brought my computer to work just to do some writing. The issue was actually a power outage in Vancouver that meant all the papers in the Lower Mainland couldn't sign in to their servers. Amazing how interconnected we are. Frightening even. Maybe we are all actually connected wirelessly to Leonard Asper's brain and he was napping this morning. The mothercorp burps and we smell it.

Stories I did today: some wanker robbed one of the corn girls at one of the corn barns in town and scared the crap out of her, probably making off with about $20; there was a pissing match at city council over some rezoning of a property for a mini-storage that was in between commercial and residential properties; then there was a call for photos for a film commission book on locations to be sent to the industry; and then, of course, all the arts crap which isn't too interesting this week–bluegrass festival, Greendale Sampler, some stand-alone photos.

But interesting stuff coming up, and that we will get from follow-ups from stories Mike did this issue such as The Vault adding strippers, a real estate agent who was "known to police" eating five bullets in Promontory. I'm doing a feature on Mexican farm workers at Rainbow Greenhouses for next week and then tomorrow I'm going to the Cheam reserve on the Fraser River for a salmon feast at noon then a sod-turning for a bridge over the highway at the Squiala reserve.

Next week will be a fun one without Ken as Mike and/or I have to take over, and then beyond work Joanne and I have to pack up all our stuff, have a walk-through of our townhouse and then move next Sunday.

On Monday we have a meeting to sign papers at the lawyer's office. Monday is August 25, our first anniversary. So the emphasis will be on the paper I guess.

Flog in the nair

I never noticed that "flog" is "golf" spelled backwards. And I gave that game a good flogging today.

Ken and I hit the mostly par three Kinkora today for a round after work in the rain. Well, it wasn't heavy rain, although it was at times, but it was moist to be sure. Kind of like golfing in a cloud, but not bad at all frankly. Are there bad days on the golf course?

A fun little round, some nice short iron work and a good whack of the balls.

What else can you ask for? I was stroke for stroke with Kenny on the front nine, but the wheels came off and he hit a 68 and I hit a 73. Whatever.

Mini-paper

I have an interview with a very cool caricaturist from Toronto tomorrow who has recently moved to Chilliwack. I sent him a photo of the mayor so I'm hoping he'll do us a freebie. His stuff is here: gobestimpression.com/Pross and this, obviously, is one of his of Freud. Cool eh?

Another production day today. The smallest paper since I've been at the Times at 28 pages, but still provides a lot of work when Mike is on holiday.

I made the mistake of trying to do something I did last year, but last year it was done fore me. That thing was a map of construction projects in the city. Given how much paving and road construction is going on I figured we should let people know what's up next. But I had to make the map in Adobe Illustrator because the city didn't do one as they did last year. Always good to learn something new, but kind of not my normal expertise.

Another story I did for tomorrow's paper, well, I didn't really do it, but took it from our news service, was a very sad one about a Chilliwack woman and her seven-year-old girl who were killed after being tossed off a boat in the Northwest Territories last week. Her 13-year-old boy survived. He was found on the shore two days later. Brutal.

But my page one story on the local woman who just reunited with her son she was forced to give up at three years old after 33 years is a nice positive one. Turns out good ol' Facebook was the connector. Oddly this guy, who has lately been a missionary in the Czech Republic, was raised by his adoptive family in Burlington next door to me and he is my exact same age. He went to Pearson. I laughed with him that if he had played junior soccer in high school I might have played against him.

One more paper until my two weeks off. Although this is a three-paper week and Mike and I are both away on Friday, so I'm going to have to do some serious extra story filing so the editor, Ken, doesn't have a heart attack all alone with Aidan our new sports reporter on Friday.

A Weekend in the 'Wack

Back to blogging and this time I'm going to keep it up. I know no one is reading this, but that isn't the point. The point is to keep myself blogging for the same reason a 15-year-old writes in a journal. And for the same reason I wrote in a journal long past 15. (Although I'll have to keep myself reined in.)

Here's our townhouse under construction in Garrison Crossing on Saturday. It is looking like it is progressing a lot every week to the point where shingles have gone up on the porch and inside crown moldings are in. But we have just had to sign something agreeing to extend our move-in date from Aug. 22 to Aug. 29. Only a week but kind of too bad. I just hope there are not any more delays. It's not like we can ask for anything extra (as in free appliances or something) because even when we signed on the Aug. 22 move-in it was always in the contract that the date could change based on shortages in labour, materials and whatever else the builder decided was causing a delay. Locusts? Acts of God? As far as we're concerned the good news is that the owner of the crap-hole (brand-new condo mind you) we are living in told me that her daughter isn't moving in Sept. 1 so we can stay as long as we want.

Phew.

Joanne and I had a pretty good weekend with a bit of a date feel to it. I did the groceries as usual Saturday, picking up some treats from our butcher shop, and some fresh Okanagan fruit from Hofstede's, our favourite fruit and vegetable spot. Superstore is always a nightmare; an anthropological study for me as I see what the sketchy people eat. And it isn't good. I'm that guy looking judgmentally into your grocery cart shaking my head at the KD, Pepsi, Chef Boyardee and potato chips. As HIV is to AIDS so to is these clowns' shopping carts to diabetes.

Then we went to Pala Lago, a relatively new restaurant in Cultus Lake on Saturday night. We wanted to walk across the street from our current home at the Newmark in downtown Chilliwack to Bravo, a restaurant that is so good and so out of place in this town. But, as I called to make a reservation I find out they took a holiday. Do restaurants normally do that sort of thing? Take a week in July off? Anyway, we went to Pala Lago and had a beautiful spot out on a nice evening on the patio. Unfortunately my meal was mediocre at best. A dry, flavourless piece of halibut covered in a bland passionfruit seed salsa. Kind of too bad frankly. But it was a nice night as we were celebrating me getting a raise after my two years at the paper.

Today we took it very easy, went to Canadian Tire and bought Joanne a $30 Roger Federer Wilson tennis raquet and we had a "game" of tennis. Had a good sweat and that's all that matters. And then we had an awesome dinner of grilled vegetable kebobs with this awesome cabernet vinegar/dijon sauce, corn on the cob with limes and a Caribbean spice mix, and she had sun-dried tomato chicken kebobs and I had garlic sauce beef kebabs. Tasty.

Back to work tomorrow and four days until we go to Ontario. It's a three-paper week because of the long weekend, which means neither Mike nor I am at work on Friday so hopefully Ken, the editor, can deal with stuff. I'm sure he'll be fine. I'll be chilling at Joanne's parents so what do I care.

Enough for now.

Jerkin' the #s

Again, haven't blogged in ages, but haven't written a column for the paper in ages either. So I whipped one off for today's paper based on a new report that used some serious statistical trickery to promote the ol' quit-taxing-us line. Tedious.

The news story I wrote on the report is here: http://www.canada.com/chilliwacktimes/news/story.html?id=4b26b5ed-2c15-42c5-b19d-bec5142b8f2b

And here's my column:

Manipulating the numbers

Paul J. Henderson, The Times

Friday, June 06, 2008

There are many expressions that make fun of statistics as a means of accessing truths, starting with one attributed to Stephen Leacock: "In earlier times they had no statistics, and so they had to fall back on lies."

The use of statistics is essential to gauge how the economy is doing, how all manner of public and private agencies and departments are being accountable, and just what's going on in our world.

I want to know that Statistics Canada exists—heck, I even worked for them at one painful time—to gather as much information about the country as possible for positive use.

Make no mistake, statistics have a definite value in many, many ways, but so do guns and knives and pharmaceuticals. We all know how things can go wrong quickly with those.

The recent Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) report on municipal spending, while valuable in some regard as a carrot/stick to municipalities to "keep their pencils sharp," as a city staffer put it to me, really is an example of the manipulation of numbers to further an agenda.

It was business professor Aaron Levenstein who said that statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.

The CFIB report selects some presumptuous starting points, cherrypicks data, and concludes that municipal spending in Chilliwack—and in virtually every city—is out of control. But to suggest that cities should be run precisely the same as fiscally tight households is beyond a stretch, it's ridiculous.

As the expression attributed to Andrew Lang goes, with this report the CFIB uses statistics like a drunken man uses lampposts—for support rather than for illumination.

Municipalities provide fire, police, water, sewer and many other services essential to everyday life. I don't want to shatter Mayor Clint Hames perception that he gets "pounded" by the media, and at the risk of appearing as a cheerleader for the city, I think the city does a pretty darned good job.

With $729 per capita in operating expenditures, Chilliwack is second lowest only to Surrey—a city with a huge business tax base—in providing services. In addition, Chilliwack has no debt and yet has managed to plan for and complete a number of major capital projects without going further in to debt. Prospera Centre and the Landing Leisure Centre just to name a couple in the past, with the Evans Road Flyover and the new cultural centre on the horizon.

It's easy to complain we all pay too much tax, but, again, as the city's director of finance put it, rarely do residents complain they want the city to do less. But if the CFIB had its way, the provincial government would legislate spending caps on municipal governments, and while maybe there are many irresponsible ones that need to be reigned in, a spending cap would eliminate a number of essential service expansions as well as important projects that, lo and behold, CFIB members benefit greatly from.

In the end, the CFIB report is useful so that we can all have the discussion about frugality and fiscal responsibility, no doubt. But as Mark Twain said, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics."

Having said that, I think what this CFIB report illustrates is really best put by Homer Simpson: "You can use statistics to prove anything, 40 per cent of all people know that."

Simply A Musing

Haven't blogged in months, but I figured I'd put up my column that appears in today's Times. Nick, the publisher, cut out Lorne Gunter's latest column from Feb. 25 in the National Post for Ken, the editor, and I to read as he often does when he finds a Post columnist debunking climate change science.

So here's my (sarcastic) response to Gunter's column (which is below mine). Haven't heard from Nick yet about my column . . . hopefully I'm still employed:

Another left wing myth

By Paul J. Henderson
phenderson@chilliwacktimes.com

The Earth is flat.

I am now absolutely convinced of it, and no one can tell me otherwise.

All my life I've had this inclination that we lived on a flat world yet all these alarmists are out there screaming, "no, no, the Earth is a sphere!" Come on, give me a break.

How do you explain spirit levels used by carpenters? Hmm? Huh? Yaaa, that's right.

How could a ball ever come to rest on solid ground? A sphere cannot be balanced on a sphere, therefore, I don't see any way this planet could be spherical? Does that not make perfect, logical sense?

But the liberal media and education system long have been convinced by these spherical world alarmists and so that's all we hear about. Well I'm here to tell you the truth: the Earth is indeed flat as a pancake.

For much of my life I had been so convinced by this spherical world conspiracy theory that I've had my flat world belief hammered out of me. But now I feel revitalized in my ability to believe what just plain seems right.

My motivation came in the form of National Post columnist Lorne Gunter who recently wrote a column (see below) decrying the claims of environmental scientists that the climate on Earth is changing and the global temperature is rising as a result of human impacts.

Gunter cites anecdotal evidence that there was a lot of snow this winter, so how could the Earth be getting warmer? Interesting logic.

He even cites a small detail pointed out by a scientist or two that suggests (not directly, but by inference) that in fact the world might be getting colder and an ice age is coming.

Sure, the vast majority of mainstream leading climate scientists have concluded through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that, "most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations"

It might be the case that all scientific evidence has been leaning towards the conclusion that fossil fuel use is warming the planet, thereby disrupting the planet's weather systems, and if nothing is done to curb fossil fuel use thing will only get worse.

Yet despite the overwhelming scientific evidence this brave neo-conservative columnist from Alberta is standing up to the facts to say , "No, global warming is a myth."

Inspired by the bravery of the Lorne Gunters and Terence Corcorans of Canada, and their counterparts, the Bill O'Reillys and Ann Coulters in the U.S., I too am standing up to the conspiracy of alarmism to say, no more of your spherical planet hogwash!

Obviously the Earth is flat, and I'm not going to kid myself anymore.

So who's with me people? Join me in my crusade to convince yet more people that the world is indeed flat as it seems, for this is only the beginning.

Next up on my list of myths to debunk is gravity: does it really make things fall?

Sounds like another left wing myth to me.

-------

Lorne Gunter: Welcome to the new ice age

February 25, 2008f

Snow cover over North America and much of Siberia, Mongolia and China is greater than at any time since 1966.

The U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reported that many American cities and towns suffered record cold temperatures in January and early February. According to the NCDC, the average temperature in January "was -0.3 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average."

China is surviving its most brutal winter in a century. Temperatures in the normally balmy south were so low for so long that some middle-sized cities went days and even weeks without electricity because once power lines had toppled it was too cold or too icy to repair them.

There have been so many snow and ice storms in Ontario and Quebec in the past two months that the real estate market has felt the pinch as home buyers have stayed home rather than venturing out looking for new houses.

In just the first two weeks of February, Toronto received 70 cm of snow, smashing the record of 66.6 cm for the entire month set back in the pre-SUV, pre-Kyoto, pre-carbon footprint days of 1950.

And remember the Arctic Sea ice? The ice we were told so hysterically last fall had melted to its "lowest levels on record? Never mind that those records only date back as far as 1972 and that there is anthropological and geological evidence of much greater melts in the past.

The ice is back.

Gilles Langis, a senior forecaster with the Canadian Ice Service in Ottawa, says the Arctic winter has been so severe the ice has not only recovered, it is actually 10 to 20 cm thicker in many places than at this time last year.

OK, so one winter does not a climate make. It would be premature to claim an Ice Age is looming just because we have had one of our most brutal winters in decades.

But if environmentalists and environment reporters can run around shrieking about the manmade destruction of the natural order every time a robin shows up on Georgian Bay two weeks early, then it is at least fair game to use this winter's weather stories to wonder whether the alarmist are being a tad premature.

And it's not just anecdotal evidence that is piling up against the climate-change dogma.

According to Robert Toggweiler of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton University and Joellen Russell, assistant professor of biogeochemical dynamics at the University of Arizona -- two prominent climate modellers -- the computer models that show polar ice-melt cooling the oceans, stopping the circulation of warm equatorial water to northern latitudes and triggering another Ice Age (a la the movie The Day After Tomorrow) are all wrong.

"We missed what was right in front of our eyes," says Prof. Russell. It's not ice melt but rather wind circulation that drives ocean currents northward from the tropics. Climate models until now have not properly accounted for the wind's effects on ocean circulation, so researchers have compensated by over-emphasizing the role of manmade warming on polar ice melt.

But when Profs. Toggweiler and Russell rejigged their model to include the 40-year cycle of winds away from the equator (then back towards it again), the role of ocean currents bringing warm southern waters to the north was obvious in the current Arctic warming.

Last month, Oleg Sorokhtin, a fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, shrugged off manmade climate change as "a drop in the bucket." Showing that solar activity has entered an inactive phase, Prof. Sorokhtin advised people to "stock up on fur coats."

He is not alone. Kenneth Tapping of our own National Research Council, who oversees a giant radio telescope focused on the sun, is convinced we are in for a long period of severely cold weather if sunspot activity does not pick up soon.

The last time the sun was this inactive, Earth suffered the Little Ice Age that lasted about five centuries and ended in 1850. Crops failed through killer frosts and drought. Famine, plague and war were widespread. Harbours froze, so did rivers, and trade ceased.

It's way too early to claim the same is about to happen again, but then it's way too early for the hysteria of the global warmers, too.