From Cork to Toronto

Yesterday there was a Day of Action by First Nations people which included the closing of Highway 401 and the main railway line at Deseronto by a group led by activist Shawn Brant . I'm not going to go into the specifics of the rights or wrongs of the protest in this post but rather discuss the fact that Canadian National Railway declared that $100 million dollars worth of goods were blockaded due to the protest . Presumably that's $100 million every day the line closes. 5,000 VIA Rail passengers had to make other plans. In recent years CN and CP have been allowed to abandon pieces of railway infrastructure. I don't have a problem with that per se, it doesn't matter to me who owns them, but they should not be allowed to simply be lifted or rust among weeds while the remaining lines become more and more critical. The Government of Ontario should be buying up these lines to either keep them open or to at least preserve the alignment in public ownership so that when ...

The Harper government has announced that 4,450 hectares of land expropriated to create Mirabel Airport will be sold with priority given to existing renters of the land, most of whom owned it prior to the forced sale in 1969. The mayor of Mirabel is unhappy as he was looking to expand the industrial sites at the airport but that is something he can take up with the new owners. The Kanesetake Mohawks have filed a land claim on the land - I'm going to pass over that one because I don't understand how indigenous land claims work in Canada, and the bigger problem is that it seems to me nobody else does either. Mirabel itself still exists as a cargo airport and occasionally a film set . Apparently Montreal Airport Authority covets it for flights between Dorval-Trudeau and Mirabel (a distance of 32km as a noisy old cargo plane flies) which seems environmentally dubious to put it mildly - is this the hand of Bombardier who still maintain a factory at Mirabel? The next question i...

Being left with the National Post as the only national paper that hasn't sold out or already been read earlier in the day when a 2 hour bus journey awaits is like getting the last chocolate in the box. Most of the time a sickly sweet strawberry stares up at you but once in a while a gorgeous caramel or hazelnut is to be found .

Even the ones run by First Nations will do so . This is good news as there was probably some fear that the two First Nations casinos would attract customers who preferred to smoke from Provincial casinos. The effect on cross border traffic from Windsor will be interesting, seeing that during the Detroit Superbowl so much attention focused on the strippers, Cuban cigars and gambling so readily available. Meanwhile a First Nation cigarette manufacturer is going out of business because of smuggling which the RCMP don't seem to have the appetite to deal with firmly. (Although a cigarette firm going out of business isn't usually the kind of thing that bothers me)