That, in my mind, is EXACTLY what has been happening in the Senate forever.
It was the Ottawa Citizen that dug up the Duffy story regarding his PEI “home.” Duffy was in fact appointed to the Senate to represent his home province of PEI. I believe he asked Senate leader Marjory LeBreton if he could claim his primary residence in PEI and got the OK, because that’s what Senators did. Obviously The Citizen knew that Duffy had been living in Ottawa as a CTV reporter for a couple of decades and that’s what started this whole kerfuffle.
I have thought all along that this has probably been going on forever. It appears that all of this is part of a grand scheme to reform or abolish the Senate, although why the Conservatives would throw their own Senators under the bus to accomplish this is a mystery. (Well, apart from Mac Harb.)
That’s another part of this that I’m not getting, also - I don’t for a second believe that the Conservative-elected Senators were doing anything different than any other Senators, but is the Conservative party so out of touch that they thought they could just write Duffy a cheque and he’d go away quietly when he got caught doing what everyone else was doing?
I feel the same way about the attack campaigns that the Conservatives always trot out - who is advising them to do things that their constituents don’t agree with? Is it the Ottawa lifers who have been in Ottawa so long that they haven’t got a clue what real live Canadians think and do?
I don’t like them either, but the “Michael Ignatieff: Just Visiting” ads did drive home a message and if I recall (from reading RickJay’s blog on the book) that Ignatieff himself blamed the ads as part of the reason for his defeat.
For the most part, attack ads are indeed effective, if done properly. The attack on Chretien “Is this the face of a Prime Minister?” reeeeeaaaalllly backfired on Campbell’s campaign.
A blast from the past – the presenter in the parachute segment and I were part of the writing and editing team of an environmental TV show that ran back in the late 80s and early 90s. Good times.
There is some concern down here about the outbreak, but it seems to me that the majority of people are immunized. In other words, for many, it’s a non-issue.
Still, local health authorities are concerned (and rightly so), and are encouraging anybody who has not been immunized to do so as soon as possible.
A couple of times, I stayed in a hotel near that station, and used it to get into the city. Always in summer, so I never encountered Mr. Reid. But I’m familiar with the tunnels and their acoustics. He must sound awesome, singing in there.
Maybe I should put a Toronto visit, including a trip to Appleby, on my agenda for this time next year. I’d buy a poppy from Mr. Reid.
The issue isn’t that most people are immunized, it’s that we lose herd immunity if too many people choose to not immunize; from the comments section, there are a number of people who are dangerously misinformed about the realities of immunization. And when I turn on my tv, there’s one of the culprits staring back at me - Jenny McCarthy on a new platform from which to spew her poison (“The View”).
This is the problem - 123,593 preventable illnesses, 1292 preventable deaths linked to anti-vaccination stupidity. When we lose herd immunity, people who can’t have immunizations are vulnerable. I think one death from a preventable illness is a crime; 1292 of them is unconscionable. 19 illnesses from a preventable disease is our modern society going backwards instead of forwards. That doesn’t even touch on the complications that can arise from a measles infection (including a 0.3% mortality rate for healthy North Americans) which can include pneumonia, acute encephalitis, and corneal ulceration. The mortality rate is much higher in immuno-compromised people (around 30%) - the people who depend on herd immunity to not get killed by things like measles.
The bottom line - we vaccinate for measles for a very good reason. People getting sick with measles when they don’t have to offends me. 19 cases, and every one of them contagious - how soon until someone in the Lethbridge area dies of measles?
If the Quebec government has the power to kick out the current mayor of Montreal for being against the Charter, does the Ontario government have the power to get rid of Toronto’s mayor for, well, you know, everything?
I work for the construction management company conducting that work and know a couple of the people in that piece. I was actually attached to that project as the safety guy when we originally won the bid, but by the time we got the go-ahead to start building (about a year later) I had been moved into other projects.
