I dunno; that’s a fairly brilliant strategy for a politician. 
The CanaDoper Café (2012 edition of The great, ongoing Canadian current events and politics thread.)
What is wrong with these people?
You’d think successful businessmen would understand
“a stitch in time saves nine”, wouldn’tcha?
So whatever little amount of funds they saved all these years by not bothering to keep their operations in the sanitary upper-echelon of the industry, they will lose, and far, far more besides when the lawsuits begin.
Not to mention the harms done to the community having a large employer shut down.
I don’t understand how this sort of industrial practice can still continue, in this age of government watchdogs. Where were Alberta and Canada all these years? Shouldn’t a food-processing plant be extremely-closely monitored?
Bizarre. Speaks volumes about the management team.
Organizational ineptitude. If you don’t have the right systems in place every individual can be smart, but the sum total of their efforts can be sensationally idiotic. There’s a thousand ways a system can break down without any one person being evil or an idiot, and if nobody has the competence to understand the systemic problems beyond their own role, it’ll grind a company right into the ground. God knows I’ve seen it.
Some workplaces are safe and some are less safe, and what’s fascinating is that every workplace thinks it’s safe enough. I have worked in hundreds of workplaces and I can swear on the life of my family that I have never, ever, encountered a business that I believe actually made the deliberate decision to put people’s safety and health in danger for the sake of more profit. I have, however, seen lots of businesses that were not as safe as they should have been because they either didn’t know what the hell they were doing, or just didn’t understand that they were not encouraging the right behaviour. I could tell stories all day.
If you include Joe Clark’s blip, you should probably include Arthur Meighen’s blip too.
I missed Meighen’s hiccup, entirely an error.
Yeah, but Joe’s hiccup was for the better part of a year, while Meighen’s was only three months, most of which was taken up with an election. Rounding error. 
So, not too much mention of ‘Iron Balls’ McGuinty stepping down, or rather planning to step down, as leader of Ontario. I understand that bashing Liberals in Ontario goes over about as well as bashing Conservatives in Alberta, but seriously… I am amazed that they won a minority in the last election, but has more to do with the sad state of opposition in Ontario than anything else.
In the last year or two what ‘good’ things have the Liberals done for Ontario?
- Cancelled 2 power plants in ridings that the Liberals wanted to win, to the tune of $230 million, if the taxpayers are lucky.
- Let Deb Matthews off the hook for the on-going bumbling with healthcare, especially around ORNGE.
- Engaging in some good ol’ fashioned union busting with Ontario teachers. If I were a Liberal, this would probably be the most egregious thing he has done.
- Proroguing the legislature. McGuinty says he is doing it so he can negotiate with the teachers unions. Is there anyone who actually believes that?
If a PC government had done any of these things, people in Ontario would be up in arms about it. The plan to step down was hatched one day after McGuinty was outed as a liar in the parliament- when 20,000 pages of documents about the closing of the 2 power plants were released after weeks of insisting that all documents had been released.
Many people seem to think that Deb Matthews and Chris Bentley will run to take McGuintys’ place. I hope so. I’d love to see how they can spin the crap they have gotten away with.
Easy, all together now :
[QUOTE=Deb Matthews and/or Chris Bentley]
The Premier made me do it
[/QUOTE]
I think this is probably it right there. I guess XL Foods was playing the odds, and they and all of their customers lost (as well as all their employees and the whole town of Brooks).
Hee hee - “Joe Clark’s blip.” 
Same way politicians always do, blame it on the previous government leaving a mess.
Even if that government is from over a decade ago. :rolleyes:
I mostly remember John Turner in two ways:
[ul][li]The punchline of a schoolyard joke (What do you call a guy who tips over outhouses?)[/li][*]An antediluvian gentleman I used to sometimes see in the elevator when I worked at Scotia Plaza (his law firm is in the same building)[/ul]
We lost Lincoln Alexander today . He meant something to me beyond being the first black taking a seat in the House of Commons and all his other accomplishments. I was on a bus in Hamilton going north to work at Jackson Square in the autumn of 74. It was on one of the two main drags, Main St I think , when Lincoln climbed aboard and sat right next to me. Immediately he engaged in lively discussion with all those excited commuters around him. He was extremely charismatic.
I agree my Facebook feed has been remarkably free of outrage, but
- People don’t care about provincial politics as much, and
- It’s never as fun the second time.
But yeah, a lot of it is about the party. You live in the GTA, where the biggest newspaper is effectively an arm of the Liberal Party. The Star ran several commentaries about how for all his faults McGuinty could be proud of his many “accomplishments.” For the life of me, I can’t think of a single one. Well, it’s now the law that a restaurant must allow you to bring your own wine. I don’t know why on earth the provincial government would feel they had to do that, but it’s something they did and so technically it’s an “accomplishment.”
I should be frothing at the mouth for all of Dalton McGuinty’s scandals over the last 9 years. I should be pointing out mismanagement in Green Energy/Feed in Tariff and the associated logarithmic increases in electricity charges along with Smart Meters, ORNGE, eHealth, power plant cancellations, contempt of Parliament charges, health care premiums (tax), all day kindergarten, and taking Ontario from a “have” province, to a “have not province.”
I’m not frothing though. I was frothing years ago. Now I’m just depressed.
I live in a rural area without natural gas. I have a forced-air electric furnace. When I bought this place in the mid 1990s my electricity costs ranged from $40 in August (I don’t have air conditioning) to $300 in February. I am now on an equal billing program of $300 a month, every month.
McGuinty is a Liberal politician who makes decisions based on votes from urban areas and has no respect for rural dwellers. This is why Conservatives win in rural areas. None of the programs or promises that are made benefit people in rural areas at all. This is sad.
Boy, you’d hate me as Premier, then, inasmuch as one of the first things I’d do is get rid of the silly 10% electricity rebate and starting jacking up rates.
The worst thing the McGuinty government did, by far, was its handling of the province’s power business, and the worst thing about it is that they charge people less for electricty than its costs to produce. They then compunded this through insane programs that paid people ten times the market rate to PRODUCE electricity with solar panels and other such things; I know a guy who’s got a deal locked in for something like 20 years at over 80 cents per kilowatt-hour, and is making crazy profits to just cash the cheques. No, we need to really jack the ol’ power prices up. It’s murdering the province’s finances.
I am not a native Ontarian and I had never heard of Mr. Alexander until the reports of his death. Wow, what a loss. It sounds like he was a leader by any and every definition of the word.
Well, here are the latest poll numbers since Dalton McGuinty’s resignation and prorogation of the house. Not surprisingly, there isn’t a lot of support for his last few moves.
I was very surprised at his support within the party; he got the approval of 85.8 % of the party membership in September. I’m only a Federal member, not an Ontario member, so I didn’t get to vote against him, but oh, how I wanted to… I don’t really care if the door hits you in the ass on your way out, Mr. McGuinty.
First snowfall of the year tonight. They’re calling for 10 to 15 cm (at least they were earlier today). I guess we can’t ease into it with a light dusting; it’s gotta be a dump.
I was out tonight, from about 6:00 to 10:00, and while it was dry when I arrived at my destination, there was maybe an inch on the ground when I left. My route home was short–normally about ten minutes of driving–but it goes down into a river valley and up the other side. Just going through the valley, I saw police and tow trucks cleaning up two collisions (one of which was a chain collision, involving perhaps eight vehicles). I took it easy and didn’t push my car beyond its limits, and I made it okay.
But I’m thinking about those collisions. Be careful in the first snow of the year, folks–it’ll take a while to get back into practice in winter driving.
Our first dump was twelve days ago. Here’s a pic of the first snowy owl of the season, made while I was waiting for the highway to re-open.
