It’s A Bird, It’s A Plane, No It’s A Non-Unionized Traffic Vigilante!

Now that is some certified quality city work right there.

This article is just hilarious. No doubt the only reason that this highly effective traffic signage as a deterrent to speeding in a residential neighbourhood was dismantled is that 100 unionized man-hours weren’t billed to it’s erection:

Ottawa residents tired of drivers using an area street as a short cut have been benefitting from fake stop signs at a key intersection for nearly a year. In July, 2008, someone installed three stop signs identical to authentic City of Ottawa signs and painted the road with the standard white lines to match. The plan went off without a hitch until an alert crew of city workers noticed the signs were not set in concrete, the way official stop signs are. And so last week, the city took them down. A criminal investigation is underway; violators of the city’s signage bylaws face fines of $5,000 per infraction. But residents are keeping mum about who they think put up the signs. In the meantime, a city committee is studying the need for stop signs at the intersection, and with departmental approval, new –and legal– signs could be up in a matter of weeks.

Yes, let’s hunt down the “vigilante” and all of his law and order traffic nuisances. Next thing you know, residents will start erecting their own infrastructure, and then where would the sole-source contracts all go? What’s amazing is that these signs almost lasted a year until “alert” city workers noticed they weren’t set in concrete. Of course instead of setting them in concrete, they spent man hours taking the stop signs down. Now, with “official approval”, the union boys will be out in a matter of weeks erecting a proper sign to accomplish the same thing that the unofficial version did.

My goodness, how did civilization survive before CUPE came along?

Global Warming In Vancouver, Manitoba Not So Much

It was -2 in Saskatoon on Friday, June 5. In Vancouver it hit over 30 degrees Celsius.

I’d like to hear the alarmists explain how these simultaneous events are tied to cataclysmic global warming.

Ah well, it didn’t stop the D-Day anniversary festivities for these veterans:

Photograph by: Christina Ryan, Calgary Herald

Liberal Scandal In Ontario Gets Summer Reprieve

Sarah Kramer, eHealth Ontario CEO, was a former vice-president of Cancer Care Ontario.

The legislature’s summer recess began yesterday just as the spending and expenses scandal at eHealth Ontario, the second provincial agency set up to create electronic health records for Ontarians, had begun outraging residents. The 14-week break might take some of the glare off of the Liberals as opposition critics are calling for the resignation of Dalton McGuinty’s cabinet Health Minister David Caplan. It is alleged the Minister is involved in a lavish and corrupt spending extravaganza at eHealth, by refusing to fire its chief executive officer at the centre of corruption allegations, Sarah Kramer.

Under the freedom of information Act, the Progressive Conservatives found that eHealth spent $5-million in untendered contracts in only the first four month of inception. The people involved in the scandal have been revealed to all be connected in some way to the dubious contracts being offered. Three of the untendered contracts, for instance, were awarded to a friend of the board chairman for eHealth at a cost of $2-million.

CEO Sarah Kramer who worked with Accenture Inc before her position, gave the company three single-source contracts worth $1.3 million. She also awarded herself a six-figure bonus within four months of starting her position, and double the maximum allowed rate, on top of her exorbitant $380,000 salary. Ms.Kramer tried to justify her illegal bonus as the result of negotiations in “compensation” for the bonus she didn’t get owing to her leaving a former position at Cancer Care.

Ontario Health Minister David Caplan backed this up, but Cancer Care CEO and president Terry Sullivan refuted that immediately:

“She would’ve received some form of bonus here, but it would have been nothing of that scale,” Sullivan said.

Consultants have also contributed to the string of scandals, with Allaudin Merali and Donna Strating each billing about $2,700 a day for their services, their regular flights from Alberta, and accommodation in Toronto and meals. The total cost of the two consultants amounted to an estimated $1.5 million a year.

It isn’t just the untendered contracts, sole-source contracts, exorbitant salaries, bonuses, questionable expenses, and expensive consultants either. It’s the ridiculous pettiness of people earning thousands of dollars a day also choosing to “stick it” to the Ontario taxpayer. The most staggering story has to be the one in which a consultant submitted an invoice for eight hours of work in which she “consulted herself.” Another consultant charging Ontarians $2,700 a day also billed Ontario for a $3.26 muffin and tea. A $300 per hour consultant charged for reading an e-health article that was given to her by her own husband who is, you guessed it, another consultant. There were also charges for watching television, and a secetary was paid $1,700 for a single day.

The scandal has not yet produced any bodies under the bus yet. The chain reaction of buck passing appears to have reached the highest levels, as the opposition has demanded that Dalton McGuinty remove Health Minister David Caplan, integral to the scandal. Mr.Caplan maintains his job, however, and has not even removed CEO Sarah Kramer or board chair Dr.Alan Hudson, despite the growing level of apparent abuse.

Although the Ontario Liberals have managed to break dozens of promises since their election in 2003, including the largest broken promise of not raising taxes when they added health premiums in 2004, they were reelected in 2007 after voters were frightened away by John Tory’s disastrous “faith-based-funding” fiasco. Now the Progressive Conservatives and New Democrats have a real scandal they can sink their teeth into. It’s still early in the Liberal majority mandate, however, and years remain for the Liberals to try and do damage control over this huge abuse of Ontario taxpayers. The Conservatives must elect a new leader who will up to task of holding the Liberal feet to the fire. The party will be selecting a new leader during their convention from June 21-25.

Liberals Lead Conservatives In Polls, But Nobody Wants Election

Photograph by: Andy Clark, Reuters

It looks as though most polling companies are showing an indication that the federal Liberals do, in fact, lead the federal Conservatives right now, and it isn’t just an aberration. Having said that, there appears little that the Liberals can do with their virtual political “capital”, as many Canadians have indicated they really don’t want to go to yet another election, and certainly not less than a calender year after the last one solved nothing. As the stalemate in Canadian politics goes through a fifth year, there is a general sense of unease with the status quo among the electorate, and yet no willingness to change it at this time.

The Conservative fortunes federally are also largely due to the shifting fortunes they have in Quebec, where according to the latest Ipsos Reid survey, they now trail even the Green Party there. Currently the Liberals are showing a 3 point lead on the Conservatives nationally, with both far and away above the NDP who are sitting at a lowly 12%. If Michael Ignatieff isn’t patient, and decides to gamble on a possible minority election, he could be risking the wrath of voters who want the parties in government to focus on the economy and stimulus budget.

“Where they are right now is in a volatile political situation,” said Bricker, CEO of Ipsos Reid Public Affairs. “Depending on the day you go out and measure public opinion, they would either win a minority government, or their major political opponent would win a minority government.”

Canadians rarely pine for elections, but according to the poll, they definitely don’t want one this summer. Sixty-eight per cent of respondents said there’s no need for an election now. By contrast, only 27 per cent of Canadians agreed that Parliament is “hopelessly deadlocked,” and an election is needed to “clear the air.”

But Parliament has been “hopeless deadlocked” for years, and another election would leave it just as hopelessly deadlocked. More interesting still, is that if the Liberals are now polling at 36%, and only 27% of Canadians want another election, we can safely assume that even a large portion of decided Liberal voters don’t want to take down the Conservatives right now. Even if the Liberals did want to bring them down, around what issue would it be centered? Employment Insurance? It’s risky to run another election on a single issue, as it was with the carbon tax, when a majority of Canadians polled still like the direction the country is headed in.

This brings us back to Quebec. Although the results of the polling are national, the 8% they poll in Quebec would certainly skew the perception that they have lost national popularity. The issue is more a regional one, and no doubt they will begin to focus on fixing the leaky ship they’re sailing in La Belle Province. If you look at the regional margin for error, they’re also noticeably high in the Ipsos Poll.

Little is different in Nanos Polling, which also shows the Conservatives trailing the Liberals 37 to 31 [a six point lead], but the regional margins for error are significant. 10% in Atlantic Canada, 7% in Quebec, and 6% in Ontario, all regions where the Liberals have dominated. Nanos also found that a significant majority, 60%, did not feel that Employment Insurance was an important enough issue to go to an election over. So while the rhetoric will in all likelihood continue from the Liberal opposition, they don’t have the consent of the people to go to an election on such a flimsy pretext, and whatever political capital they do possess right now would probably evaporate.

h/t to Paul for his comments about the margin for error in recent polls.