From Cork to Toronto

Apparently a tax break has been introduced by the Tories and outside of one company in Immigration Minister Diane Finlay's riding nobody can find an eligible recipient. But irrespective of the sneaking in of a tax break for a single Tory MP - WHAT THE HELL IS THE GOVERNMENT OF CANADA DOING GIVING TAX REDUCTIONS FOR PRODUCTION OF TOBACCO?! Worse still - it appears this tax break is in part to assist the MP in avoiding the fallout from the Caledonia debacle - so now federal as well as provincial taxpayers are shelling out for that particular fiasco.

It's going to be hard for the Tories to make much hay out of the allegations of attempts to keep corruption investigations in Toronto Police out of public view while Julian Fantino was chief - most Tories probably wish that Fantino, who was more or less to TPS what Lastman was to City Hall, was one of them. The investigators claim co-operation was lacking and that the stress led to many of them becoming ill . One wonders if this didn't make for a better story now that Fantino, now on his second posting under the Liberal government, is back in the policing business and getting the "law and order" types, particularly in Caledonia, all excited. Anyone know if this was previously doing the rounds?

The Secretary of State for External Affairs of Canada requests, in the name of Her Majesty the Queen, all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let or hindrance and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may necessary. This La Presse article ( Google Translate ) has caused a certain amount of stir in the blogosphere. On Vues d'ici, a blog I recently started reading regularly for its perceptive commentary especially with respect to equalisation, a post lambasted the report that permanent residents of Canada were to be denied evacuation by the Government of Canada's relief effort. The writer noted that her husband, a British permanent resident, could be stuck in Lebanon while she was evacuated. James Bow proceeded to make a similar point on his blog, having previously detailed the grief his wife got while becoming a permanent resident in the first place. There's only one problem - the La Presse article indicates (twice) that a...

Apparently the Provincial Liberals are on a war footing. Now, in most political regimes this might not be altogether surprising if you didn't know two things - 1. The Libs have a comfortable majority 2. They know exactly when the next election will be - October 2007. They know this because they passed the legislation fixing the date. At a time when the OPP have told certain Caledonia residents that they will not respond to calls, the "fiscal imbalance" negotiations, the urgent need to get the Golden Horseshoe urban development plan finished before developers like the Sorbara Group pave over everything and now the electricity plan which is taking fire from all sides, you'd think McGuinty would have to enough to worry about without taking electoral strategy sessions - especially since he's cooking the books this year to declare a miraculous budget surplus next year.

Given the disgrace that Zimbabwe has become in the last decade, with the homophobia, the de facto ethnic cleansing and the political purging of the judiciary, it's odd that the Liberal Party have only recently become aware of the situation to the extent of wanting to do something about it . Obviously they weren't briefed - it's not like they weren't in power for over a decade ... or maybe they didn't see any of the frequent media coverage. With the thousand priorities Paul Martin had - this couldn't have been one? He couldn't have publicly exhorted the South Africans and Chinese to stop sending the regime aid, probably the only thing keeping Mugabe afloat? But then the Chinese might not have bought Canadian reactors - that piece of tech that gets the Chinese Government a free pass from Canada. Instead the Federal Liberals did in that respect what the Ontario Liberals are doing in Caledonia, Ontario - standing by, mouthing platitudes, achieving nothing.