What’s the local feeling as to Idle No More blockades, etc.?
It looks like I will be making another cross-country trip to Toronto in the coming summer, and I would not like to be inconvenienced by blockades. I do not want to go through the US, as I’ll be carrying things to Ontario that belonged to my ex-wife, and returning with things that I’ve had in storage in Ontario for a while. I have no receipts for such items that I can show to Canadian Customs either way, so going through the US is pretty much out.
I’m hoping that by the time I go (July, probably), Idle No More would have either been resolved or would have petered out somehow. But threats to “close Canada for months” have me worried, especially since Ontario’s Highway 17 is basically the only route between eastern and western Canada. Can anybody in Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and/or northern Ontario give me the feeling on the ground, and advise as to whether Idle No More protests will continue in these locations into July?
Habs and Leafs tomorrow night on TV. God, they both suck. The Leafs actually do have some youth and some prospects. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. They need a goalie though.
I hate to sound contemptuous, but I would have been happy if the whole season had been cancelled. Now, my local sports bar’s TVs will be showing all hockey, all the time ('cause we’re Canadian after all, and supposed to be mad for hockey, to the point where if hockey is on, we won’t watch other sports), up until July. Yeah, I really want to watch Nashville vs. Phoenix in May, as opposed to Blue Jays baseball games.
Well, as may have been guessed, this Canadian likes to watch other sports.
Hockey is a winter sport. July is a summer month. We’re supposed to be watching baseball then, fercryingoutloud.
I’ve been away for a while but I feel the need to comment on this.
My grandma worked for the Ministry of Transportation. Apparently, people drive when they have had their licenses revoked in most cases. This is especially true for chronic offenders.
Taking away licenses does not work. We’ve discussed it at length and nothing short of locking them away (which is too severe a penalty, IMHO) is going to prevent people from driving.
Think about it, how many times in your life have you been pulled over by the police? I have been driving for 20 years and I can still count the number of times on my fingers. Chances of getting caught driving without a license are incredibly slim.
… I find the last part of your paragraph astounding. Society is HIGHLY amendable to this. I suspect that if you put this idea to a referendum, it would pass about 93-7. I have *never in my entire life *met a person who was not enthusiastically in favour of harsher, MUCH harsher, penalties for drunk drivers, even people who have driven drunk. I cannot even beging to count the number of people who feel the Criminal Code should be amended to make causing a death while drinking and driving trigger a first degree murder charge. The government could clobber drunk drivers starting tomorrow and the only problem they’d have from “society” would be dealing with the tons of fan mail.
Sorry, I should have been more clear - we went to a junior’s game (for free). I’m not planning to see another NHL game (well, not pay for it, anyway - we might see one for free with Jim’s writing career).
With regards to driving penalties, I think that goes hand-in-hand with taking driving training more seriously. I’ve posted it many times here; if you want to kill someone and basically get away with it, get drunk and use your car. We still seem to have a very laissez-faire attitude towards the damage caused by bad drivers, and that includes not taking what they do seriously enough to get tough with penalties for it.
Maybe that speaks to our attitude that driving is a right, not a privilege; I don’t know.
I know, but the rumours I’ve heard will have the playoffs extending into July this year. I can’t confirm that, but I wouldn’t be surprised it it happened.
Well, even if she were on an actual hunger strike with only water, it’s quite possible that she’d still be overweight.
I used this website to calculate basal metabolic rate and this site to calculate total energy expenditure. I made a few assumptions that seem like reasonable guesses to me: she is 50 years old (Wikipedia says she was born in 1963), and I guessed a height of 5’4" (about the average woman’s height - based on seeing her on tv I get the impression that she’s fairly short) and a weight of 225lbs. The weight is just a WAG on my part, but based on my personal experience of weighing even more than that, I wouldn’t be surprised if that were her weight.
This would give a BMR of 1700 kcal per day. Assuming she’d be completely sedentary during a hunger strike, that would give a total daily calorie expenditure of 2040 kcal (BMR x 1.2). Assuming that 3,500 kcal is one pound of fat lost, then over a period off 33 days she would lose approximately 19 pounds. And in actuality in a true hunger strike it would be less than that - the body would be starving and the metabolic rate would plummet, and as you start to lose weight then your calorie needs decrease.
So if she started out obese at 225lbs, after 33 days she’d still be at least 205lbs or even more, which is still obese. She’d look a little thinner, but based on my personal experience dieting and losing weight, when I went from 230lbs to 205lbs, I only lost one clothing size.
Of course, her “liquids only” diet isn’t really a hunger strike - there could be a lot of calories in fish broth if it’s high in fat, even assuming there’s no fish in it.
I don’t know about the protests but when I moved my worldly goods from Calgary to Toronto in a pickup and a Uhaul I had no issues going through the states. I explained at the border that everything going to the states was going back to Canada with me, none of it was staying. They had a dog sniff my truck and then sent me through, took about 20 mins.
Northern Ontario: expect blockades, but also expect them to either be delay-type rather than shut-down type, for shutting down the only road that connects the two halves of Canada (no exaggeration – the Nipigon Bridge, which was blockaded a week or two back, is the only road connection) will not be tolerated for long. It’s one thing to inconvenience travellers, but it is quite another to shut down the only road for an extended period.
Also, expect furthers delays at border crossings caused by protests (there have already been a few), so don’t expext the US route to get you past everything.
