Your daily supply of Canadian-made Pundits.
Carol Goar discusses how government bean counters can mess up good things.
But the very qualities that make St. Stephen's so welcoming and responsive, make it an easy target for government bean-counters.
"How you quantify a sense of belonging?" Regendanz asked. "How do you put a price on problems you've prevented?"
As far as bureaucrats are concerned, benefits that can't be measured and don't fit any of the categories on a standardized checklist, don't count.
Even when a program does meet all the government's funding criteria, it's not safe. Last week, St. Stephen's had to cancel its restorative justice program. Despite excellent results – it diverted hundreds of kids charged with minor offences from the criminal justice system and helped them turn their lives around – its funding was cut off, ostensibly to save money.
To get public funding, the staff of non-profit organizations devote an ever-growing portion of their time to paperwork. Every government agency (St. Stephen's deals with at least nine) requires different information, follows different rules and wants its own audit. Because the money never meets the needs, they fundraise constantly.
Jeffrey Simpson: Harper has given up on Quebec.
The Conservatives are now down and out in Quebec, and they appear to know it. The Liberals, through no serious efforts of their own, are on the rise. Conservatives don't wake up trying to figure out how to placate and impress Quebec, that game having failed. Instead, they seem to have understood that any majority will come with improvement in Ontario and British Columbia.
A more solicitous attitude has been shown by the Harper government toward Ontario, where the recession has hit harder than any other part of Canada.
John Ivison:
Life moves pretty fast, as Ferris Bueller used to say -- if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. To this point, the Liberals have been in a hurry to get the government's stimulus money flowing. But this week, they stopped, looked around and realized that giving the Conservatives a blank cheque with room for nine zeroes on it might not be the smartest political move in the book.
As a result, they introduced an opposition day motion calling on the government to detail on what and where it intends to spend $3-billion the Liberals allege is a slush fund with no parliamentary oversight.
And yet, the Liberals still gave the Conservatives the three billion with no oversight.
Hicks on Six:
Good: your wife is pregnant. Bad: it's triplets. Ugly: you had a vasectomy five years ago.
Good: your youngest son is finally maturing. Bad: he's involved with the woman next door. Ugly: so are you.
Good: your wife's not talking to you. Bad: she wants a divorce. Ugly: she's a lawyer.
Good: your oldest son understands fashion. Bad: he's a cross-dresser. Ugly: he looks better than your wife.
Good: you give the "birds andbees" talk to your 11-year-old daughter. Bad: she keeps interrupting. Ugly: with corrections.
John Doyle and Don Martin both think that the whole "Fox News blatantly insulting our troops who are fighting in Afghanistan" is much ado about nothing. Apparently we shouldn't be so touchy about Americans laughing at our brave men and women dying overseas in a war those same Americans pushed for.
Thomas Walkom believes 93% risk > 100% risk.
In essence, the deliberately complicated package works like this: The government, in one form or another, will cover 93 per cent of the cost of buying toxic securities from the banks and bear 93 per cent of the risk if those assets fall in price.
Meanwhile, private investors, such as unregulated hedge funds, will be asked to bear 7 per cent of the cost in return for 50 per cent of any profits should these securities eventually prove non-toxic.
The underlying assumption is that banks will receive more for securities based on dubious assets such as subprime mortgages than they are currently worth. Indeed, that's the reason for the plan.
If some of America's big financial institutions were required to unload their dodgy securities at current market prices, they would go bankrupt – thereby destabilizing financial markets even more.
In a more normal country, a government faced with banks that required massive amounts of public money just to stay alive would take them over. That's what Sweden did in the 1990s. And the plan worked. When Sweden's banks got back in shape, they were privatized.
John Mohan on five days of homelessness:
While other students were going about the normal campus activities -- Blaire Hamilton, Kelsey Noakes, Jeff Lloyd and Nico Villanueva closely replicated the hard and marginalized lifestyle of those who experience homelessness while still attending classes.
They could not carry money or cell phones, and ate only food given to them by kind-hearted souls. They were permitted to have a pillow and sleeping bag but couldn't shower or access washrooms outside of normal campus hours.
With no shelter, the first night was the hardest. Subsequent nights did get colder but their bodies adjusted and the resourceful students used discarded cardboard and a plastic tarp to block the wind.
Bill McKibben:
In the ideal world, we'd do everything slowly and carefully – but this planet is rapidly becoming the worst of all possible worlds, a place that before my daughter dies may well see temperatures exceeding anything since before the dawn of primate evolution. A planet facing hundreds of millions of environmental refugees as a result of rising seas, with heat waves like the one that killed 35,000 in Europe becoming commonplace occurrences.
The evidence gets worse by the day: already whole nations are evacuating, the Arctic is melting and we have begun to release the massive storehouse of carbon trapped under the polar ice. Scientists figure the "safe" level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is about 350 parts per million. This is the most important number in the world. Go beyond it for very long and we will trigger "feedbacks" that will result in runaway warming spiralling out of any human control and resulting in a largely inhospitable planet.
We are already well beyond 350 and accelerating rapidly in the wrong direction.