Canada Agog at Security Price Tag for Summit – NYTimes.com. The Battle of Seattle only caused $3M in property damage. So zero police presence probably would have kept the “anarchists” at bay and even if they caused $30M in damage we could have easily saved several hundred millions in costs.

California on verge of system failure’ – The Globe and Mail. oy yoi yoi.

Why A Salad Costs More Than A Big Mac – The Consumerist. nice infographic of subsidy versus nutrition.

amazon in canada

Amazon.com has applied to open and run its own fulfilment center in Canada. Currently, Amazon outsources all inventory control and delivery to Canada Post because of existing rules on foreign ownership of “book publishing and other cultural industries”. For those who don’t know, Amazon.ca has a very limited item selection compared to Amazon.com and pricing is higher. There’s also no fancy features like Amazon Prime. According to a Globe & Mail article it looks like the Harper government might approve the application. Unforunately, both book publishers and book sellers aren’t crazy about the idea. If Amazon lost its application the only winner would be Chapters/Indigo (which probably owns 90% of the bookstores in Canada) and places like BestBuy.

Personally, I can’t wait. Online retail in Canada is a certified wasteland. The only exception to that is Well.ca.

Jim Flaherty blasted for $3,100 flight – thestar.com. He took a private flight to London, Ontario to do a photo-op at a Tim Horton’s and talk about controlling government expenses. How many press conferences does the government need to do at Tim Horton’s? And there wasn’t a Tim Horton’s in Ottawa available?

‘Special’ EI benefits for self-employed to begin in 2011 – thestar.com. at first i was like “what group possibly lobbied for this?” then the article mentions that farmers are considered self-employed. via josh.

Real estate fees could be slashed – Yourhome.ca. the Competition Bureau might be making the CREA has to list homes on MLS without a listing agent.

Nation’s First Open Source Election Software Released | Threat Level | Wired.com. a guy from that organization spoke at gogaruco. it was a really impressive talk.

Montreal Mafia controls 80 per cent of road contracts, whistleblower says – The Globe and Mail. corruption in montreal? i can’t believe it!

globeandmail.com: Tory defeated in by-election. wow, that’s a pretty big defeat for Ontario Conservatives.

Bill Moyers Journal : Simon Johnson | PBS. planet money regular Simon Johnson on the banking bailouts and how to get around the political lobby on the banking industry.

Canada denies entry to former U.S. anti-war activist with Obama ties. Seems Bill Ayers flew in on Porter and got rejected on the island. He said he’s been to Canada about 20 times and if you listen to the As It Happens broadcast it turns out his brother used to work at Bloor Cinema.

Maryland police and their weird war on ‘terror’ – CBC. just about everyone was being monitored as terrorists under this thing including Nuns and people who complained about electricity rate hikes.

A Hyundai Is Car of the Year

I think we can all remember when Hyundai cars were considered a joke. That era has definitely ended as the Hyundai Genesis was named the North American Car of the Year. The comment in the article that caught my eye was about Hyundai’s CEO:

“He’s the guy who singlehandedly built Hyundai’s first engine,” Mr. Krafcik said, referring to the Alpha 4-cylinder that was built in 1991; prior to that, Hyundai licensed engines from Mitsubishi. “He’s had a hand in every engine that the company has built.”

So you’re telling me that these guys didn’t even make motors 17 years ago and now they make the best car in North America? I think the Federal government should ask for their bailout money back.

globeandmail.com: The first Liberal step: Replace Dion. op-ed by John Manley.

canadian vote

If you haven’t already heard, we had an election and ended up in pretty much the same spot. What is interesting is how poorly “first past the post” vote counts did in representing Canadians. Here’s an excerpt of a newsletter sent out by Fair Vote Canada this morning…

The chief victims of the October 14 federal election were:

Green Party: 940,000 voters supporting the Green Party sent no one to Parliament, setting a new record for the most votes cast for any party that gained no parliamentary representation. By comparison, 813,000 Conservative voters in Alberta alone were able to elect 27 MPs.

Prairie Liberals and New Democrats: In the prairie provinces, Conservatives received roughly twice the vote of the Liberals and NDP, but took seven times as many seats.

Urban Conservatives: Similar to the last election, a quarter-million Conservative voters in Toronto elected no one and neither did Conservative voters in Montreal.

New Democrats: The NDP attracted 1.1 million more votes than the Bloc, but the voting system gave the Bloc 50 seats, the NDP 37.

Had the votes on October 14 been cast under a fair and proportional voting system, Fair Vote Canada projected that the seats allocation would have been approximately as follows:

Conservatives – 38% of the popular vote: 117 seats (not 143)
Liberals – 26% of the popular vote: 81 seats (not 76)
NDP – 18% of the popular vote: 57 seats (not 37)
Bloc – 10% of the popular vote: 28 seats (not 50)
Greens – 7% of the popular vote: 23 seats (not 0)

It’s really a shame that we don’t have instant run-off elections or some amount of proportional representation. I realize that Ontario tried and failed on the proportional representation referendum but I think that was more an issue of a poorly promoted idea than the rejection of the idea by the public.

Canada posts C$9.6 bln budget surplus in 2007-08 | Reuters. Our debt is $550 billion. In contrast, the bailout package in the US is for $700 billion.

house rejects bailout


From this graph, I’ll let you guess when the U.S House of Representatives rejected the Wall Street bailout.

This American Life – The Audacity of Government. “Stories of the Bush Administration, its unique style of asserting presidential authority, and its quest to redefine the limits of presidential power.” via ram.

22-year old with history of domestic abuse reportedly was awarded $300m Pentagon contract to supply Afghan troops | guardian.co.uk “Efraim Diversoli, 22, supplied stock that was 40 years old and rotting packing material.” damn, what were you doing when you were 22?