That road is pretty hairy after dark, with several cliff hanging stretches. I don’t think I’d try it myself if I didn’t have to.
But through a snowfall ? That’s when you wish you had chains.
Glad you made it through.
The CanaDoper Café (2012 edition of The great, ongoing Canadian current events and politics thread.)
I’ll tell you for nothin’, the next time I go there, I’m parking the car in Port Alberni, buying a bike at Canadian Tire and taking the ferry to Ucluelet. Or talking someone with a boat into giving me a lift. My chief memory of that trip was where the road is halfway up a cliff overlooking Kennedy Lake - there are at least two places where the warning sign says ‘Danger - 18 % grade’ and just as I’m thinking ‘There isn’t a paved road in Canada where the grade is in the double digits, is there?’ the front wheels clear, and I feel like it’s the first swoop of a roller coaster, complete with the hairpin twist at the bottom. AAAAAAAAHHHH!
I woulda stopped and kissed the ground on the nice, flat strip north of the T-junction by the ranger station, except there were all these signs warning me about the possibility of a tsunami washing across the road. By that point, I was taking all warning signs very seriously.
My Uncle Gordie made that mistake at a village in the Campbell River area. They ended up crossing to the mainland when their little motorboat could not handle the conditions. The family was freaking out for a day until he was located, but Gordie being Gordie, he enjoyed himself.
PM Harper - ‘Major transformations’ coming to Canada’s pension system. On the one hand, I applaud addressing changes to Canada’s pension system now, rather than after it is completely bankrupt. On the other hand, I’m 20 years away from retirement age - it looks like the changes will be in effect just in time to affect people of my age (i.e. people who were born just after the Boomers). Crap.
You’ve just reminded me - I have to write to get access to the statement of what’s in my CPP. Last I checked, when I retire, I’ll be getting ~ $200. a month. I’m getting used to the taste of cat food now… 
Yeah, at the tailing edge of the baby boom it seems every benefit awarded to society has been reduced by the time I need it.
Child allowance? Apparently I make too much.
Maternity leave? Well, we’ll change that to 12 months from 6 shortly after your kids are born.
Old Age Security? Wait another 2 years and forget indexing perhaps?
Even my government pension, since I joined the feds 2 years ago is now under scrutiny.
Story of my life.
I know, 1st world problems!!!11 LOL!!!111
Yeah, the Boomers are turning 65 this year, and the year named by PM Harper for the date where the age to collect Old Age Security at 67 instead of 65 was 2030. As a 45 year old, I’ll be 65 in 2031, after the Boomers have picked the system clean for 20 years. I do appreciate the head’s up; make your own retirement plans!
Invest in nation-wide discount funeral homes.
And pharmaceutical companies, and adult diaper manufacturers, and denturists…
And lawn care! Neighbourhood kids keep running across it. ::grumble, grumble::
I believe my wife might recommend planting a nice sea-buckthorn hedge around the perimeter of your yard to slow the incursions of kids into your yard. Wickedly nasty thorns throughout AND the berries are very rich in Vitamin C, so you get some bonus benefit from them on top of the defensive properties. 
Oh, not to mention free babysitting in Ontario too. (All day kindergarten.)
Do you know how helpful 12 months of maternity leave, child allowance, and free day care at age 5 would have been to us?
Hugely!
“Missed it by that much!”
Of course Dalton is currently bankrupting the province, so perhaps there’s still hope for harder times ahead.
In defence of kindergarten teachers (my mom), it’s much more than daycare. There’s entire curricula and teaching involved to get the kids ready for Grade 1.
I had full-day kindergarten, 25 years ago. Half a day in English and half a day in French. It rocked. Art, dancing and singing, nap-time after lunch (we’d get a sticker if we were quiet the whole time)…
I recently found a scrapbook of mine from October-ish in the French half, and there was writing and basic math and lots of colouring and shapes-learning and stuff. According to my mom, my primitive drawings were actually of above average quality for that age, with respect to awareness of body shapes and limb placement on people, etc. It was rather funny to have my mom re-grade my work in front of me (though she wasn’t my kindergarten teacher… mom taught me Grade 2 French!)
I wanna go back to kindergarten.
As for retirement… kind of need a job to retire from. I do expect you older-than-me people to figure out a way to stockpile the money needed to fund my retirement, though. At this rate, I’m entering the workforce alongside the super-entitled generation, so I figure I might as well take their attitude…!
I’m 61, and I’ll be okay it seems. And I feel your pain. But it seems to me that you’ve missed the bigger hits generations behind the baby boomers have taken.
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Tuition costs at university. At the University of Waterloo, early 70s, I paid around $400 a term. I paid for it myself with alternating work terms, grants and student loans and still managed to have a car and a decent social life. In the end I had a student loan of around $2400. If I had to do it again, as poor as I was, it wouldn’t happen.
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Can anyone getting out of school today(without parental support) afford to buy a single detached residence ? My retirement fund is based on overall real estate value increases that a future generation persom will have to pay for.
And my generation has lived off the federal deficit that future generations will be paying for.
Truly, we are not the “greatest generation”, we are the greediest generation.
I wonder what will happen to our health care system when the boomers pass on.
This is why I was in favour of the GST early on. You want the good schools, and good roads and the health care? Fine, pitch in a fair share and quit passing the bill down.
Don’t get too comfortable in your old age – Quebec is studying active euthanasia. The Soylent solution to cutting health care costs. 
Obama-style death panels, eh?
Come to think of it, it was Texas when Bush was Governor that instituted what the right has been claiming to be death panels. Have a boo at section 166.046 of the state’s Health and Safety Code(HEALTH AND SAFETY CODE CHAPTER 166. ADVANCE DIRECTIVES).
Sounds like somebody else makes the decision to euthanize. That’s a death panel; it bears no resemblance to what we have here in Canada.
Trust the Americans to create a black-and-white issue, where Good God-fearing, Abortion-Hating, Gay-Marriage-Hating Gun-Owning Republicans die automatically under single-payer health care; while Athiestic, Abortion-Supporting, Gay-Loving, Pro-Gun-Control Democrats get the benefit. :rolleyes:
Honestly, if it were up to me, I would (a) dispel the myth of American exceptionalism in American schools, (b) force American students to spend at least one year in another country of the world; and (c) force them to learn another language other than English from Grade 2 onwards. Maybe then, they would find their place in the world, rather than trying to make everybody accord to their view of how the world ought to be, according to them.
I have a great deal of respect for Abraham Lincoln, as a lawyer and as President. But I think today’s Americans have forgotten the lessons Mr. Lincoln taught them.
That could help with figuring out how to fund pension plans, though - if you kill everyone at, say, 90, then you could budget better.
In other news, are you people watching NLL lacrosse? Did you see the big fight between Calgary’s face-off champion and all-round scrappy dude, Geoff Snider, and Toronto’s GOALIE? They fought on and on until they were basically dragged into the penalty boxes, then they continued taunting each other in the boxes, then the goalie was ejected from the game! It was exciting!