Casey Up To Bat

In a stunning move the longest serving Conservative MP in parliament; Bill Casey from Nova Scotia has announced he will vote against his Party and its Government over its budget, which he claims is a broken promise.

Flaherty repeated that Nova Scotia can't enjoy the benefits of a new equalization formula and its offshore accord at the same time.

This is the point that Danny Williams and Lorne Calvert have been making.

If only Alberta CEO Ed Stelmach and his PC crew could muster the indignation of betrayal that Casey has, and denounce this resource royalty grab, this unequal national transfer program, this new NEP, might well be dead.



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Not The Nations Team

Not after last nights loss. The Senators put it out there again but the problem is that they are not a 'Team'. There are a lot of 'i's on the ice but there ain't no 'i '
in Team.

It doesn't matter that by being in this years playoffs have been in more playoffs than the Leafs.

Well to the Leaf establishment and its fan base yes it does. They would like nothing better than 'that other Ontario' team to fall flat.

For example here is some so called analysis of the game. Do you detect a Leaf/Toronto bias?

History is against the Ottawa Senators in the Stanley Cup final

June 5, 2007

By: CHRIS JOHNSTON

OTTAWA (CP) - It might be time to turn out the lights on the Ottawa Senators' dream season. Only the 1942 Toronto Maple Leafs have ever erased a 3-1 lead in the Stanley Cup final and these Senators don't have the look of a team about to join them in the history books. Ottawa thoroughly outplayed Anaheim in the first period of Game 4 on Monday night before going completely flat in a 3-2 loss. "It's hard to explain," said forward Mike Fisher. Indeed, none of the Senators seemed to have any explanation for what had just happened.

While ESPN, the Americans, report the same story like this;

The victory gives the Ducks a 3-1 series lead and the opportunity to win their first-ever Stanley Cup at home on Wednesday. Of the 28 teams that have taken a 3-1 series lead in the Stanley Cup final since 1939, only one has failed to win a championship and that was 65 years ago.

There is joy in Hogtown as the Senators appear to be flaming out. Our Nations team. NOT.

Which is unfortunate but exposes the Toronto domination of Canada's Sports media. After all its not called the Toronto Sports Network for nothing.

Toronto fans should embrace the Senators after all their team has not been in the playoffs since Canada's Centennial. Forty years. F O R T Y.

Despite all their wishful thinking, simulated video game victories, and Mike Meyers best efforts.






See:

Hockey

Shane Doan

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Nessies Relative

Is this skeleton any relation to Nessie since there have been reports of that fresh water monster being seen and filmed in Loch Ness.

Whatever was filmed is a shadow underwater, which could be a large sturgeon.

This at least is a skeleton. Though how it got into an iceberg is a puzzle itself.




Scientists are puzzled by pictures that appear to show a mammalian skeleton jutting out of an iceberg that recently drifted past the east coast of Newfoundland. (CP PHOTO/HO/Department of Fisheries of Oceans)

See

Nessie was an Elephant?

They Walk Among Us

Shark

Cryptozology Part 1

Cryptozoology Part 2

Dinosaurs

Fossils

Monsters


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Ron Paul

Even the Democratic Candidates for President have not been this radical when it comes to the war in Iraq. Ron Paul is the self styled 'Libertarian' candidate in the Republican Primaries. He is not as libertarian when it comes to other issues like abortion, gay rights, or immigration.

Of course he has as much chance as the Democratic libertarian Dennis Kucinich does.

This is from the last Republican candidates debate.

Ron Paul

Voted against use of military force in Iraq. Supports withdrawing troops from Iraq, but opposed war spending bill which included a plan to withdraw most U.S. troops by March 2008. Calls for repealing authority given to the president in 2002 Iraq war authorization vote. Opposed Bush plan to increase the number of American troops in Iraq. Says military victory in Iraq is "unattainable."

You’d abolish the Department of Homeland Security in the middle of a war?

Ron Paul: We were already spending billions of dollars on homeland security prior to 9/11 and it didn’t prevent the attacks; inefficiency was the problem. Adding another huge, expensive, inefficient level of bureaucracy makes things worse.

You’re the only one on this stage who opposes the war. Are you out of step with your party, and why are you seeking its nomination?

Ron Paul: The Republican Party has lost its way. The conservative wing was always anti-interventionist: Taft was against NATO; Bush ran on a promise of a humble foreign policy, anti-nation-building, anti-global-policing; Republicans were elected to end the Korean and Vietnam wars; it’s the Constitutional position; the founders’ advice was to pursue friendship with other nations but avoid entangling alliances. We should negotiate, talk, trade with other countries; we lost 60,000 soldiers in Vietnam and lost the war, and now we invest there. We shouldn’t go to war so carelessly.

Follow-up: Is noninterventionism still a viable position after 9/11?

Ron Paul: 9/11 was a response to our previous interventions. We’d been bombing Iraq for a decade; we’re now building 14 permanent bases there and an embassy bigger than the Vatican. If China were doing this in the Gulf of Mexico we’d be upset.

Follow-up: Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attacks?

Ron Paul: I suggest we believe their reasons are what they say they are; also bin Laden says he’s delighted our soldiers are over there where they can be targeted more easily.

Giuliani intervenes: As NYC mayor during 9/11, I’ve never before heard such a shocking claim that we invited 9/11 and I ask Ron Paul to withdraw it or clarify whether he believes it.

Ron Paul: I believe the CIA is correct when it warns us about blowback. We overthrew the Iranian government in 1953 and their taking the hostages was the reaction. This dynamic persists and we ignore it at our risk. They’re not attacking us because we’re rich and free, they’re attacking us because we’re over there.

(Later on Tancredo also attacked Paul, saying that regardless of what our foreign policy was or whether Israel existed, the terrorists would still attack us because they view it as a religious imperative. Paul did not have a chance to respond.)

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Made In America Royalty Scheme

Alberta has the dubious distinction of being at the bottom of the royalty payments made by oil companies to governments. It is in good company though.

GAO: U.S. gives oil companies a big break

Revenue cut for feds from resource taking is far below states like Alaska, Louisiana

Apparently we have a made in the USA royalty scheme here in Alberta. And Big Oil would like to keep it that way.CAPP Presents to the Alberta Royalty Review Panel


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More Made In Canada Nonsense

The latest twist on the Conservatives Made in Alberta Green Plan is the position Harper and Baird will present at the G8 meeting this week;

The official who briefed reporters on Friday also said Canada will be looking for a solution that works internationally while respecting Canada's unique needs. "We're special, we're unique in the G8. We're not like Europe, we're not like the United States in all respects," said the official.

Of course we are special and unique, just like Russia, Nigeria, Mexico, Venezuela, Norway, etc., etc., and all the other oil/gas producing countries.

Irony further abounds as this is Environment Week in Canada. And Harper and Baird will not be around to celebrate it. Instead they will be shilling for the U.S. at the G8. While telling Canadians that we must pay for their Made In Canada Green Plan.

And while John Baird has said it is all about China, Sheila Copps in her column in the SUN points out that has always been the case, even when the Liberals were in power.

Merkel's environmental credentials are long-standing. As environment minister, she sowed the seeds for the Kyoto Protocol by negotiating a world consensus on greenhouse gas reductions known as the Berlin Mandate.

The United States was offside, and Canada was trapped between our significant oil revenues and a European pro-reduction consensus. Canada joined a no-reduction negotiating group including the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and Japan.

Meanwhile, Merkel's conference was about to crater. If she could not get any movement, China was threatening to walk, dooming talks.

I got a phone call from Merkel at midnight. She was desperate to turn the tide and asked if we could meet on an urgent basis for breakfast. At the 7 a.m. meeting Merkel asked whether Canada could support some reductions to keep China at the table.

I told her that Canada would be prepared to support 2% reductions. I had already explained the fluidity of the situation to economic cabinet chairman Andre Ouellet. He refused to undermine my mandate and realized the Berlin meeting would be in shambles if China bolted. He agreed that Canada should help keep the climate change agenda on track.

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The Trouble With Being Harry

Is that he promised his lads he would be with them in Basara but low and behold he is too special so he gets sent to Medicine Hat while his lads get sent to the meat grinder of Iraq.

Prince Harry training at Alberta military base

Of course there is talk that because he is at Suffield base in Medicine Hat, training ground for the Afghan mission and Canada's version of Area 51, he is going to Afghanistan. Sure, like he was going to Iraq.

Prince Harry may yet fulfil his desire to serve in a war zone - in Afghanistan rather than Iraq. Last month, military chiefs decided almost at the last minute that Harry, third in line to the throne, could not go to Iraq with his regiment, the Blues and Royals. The Army Chief of Staff, General Sir Richard Dannatt, said the prince had been the target of specific threats, exposing "not only him, but also those around him, to a degree of risk that I now deem unacceptable".

The Blues and Royals are now deploying to Iraq without Cornet, or 2nd Lieutenant, Wales. According to reports last week, however, Army commanders are considering sending him to Afghanistan instead, where he might join a small group of fellow officers training the Afghan army.

But is Afghanistan any less dangerous? Last week two British soldiers were killed in Helmand province, where most of Britain's 6,500 troops are stationed. A third, who died the previous week, was named.

As a great Brit once wrote; "All animals are created, equal but some animals are more equal than others". Especially if they are Royals.

Perhaps he could dress up for the occasion of his deployment.

In 2005 he made a most foolish mistake when he attended a private fancy-dress party in the uniform of an Afrika Korps officer with the accessory of a Nazi armband.



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CEO Cream Sour Milk for Workers

Explain this to workers laid off who do not get golden parachute and may not even qualify for EI for weeks if not months. Or those who were sold out for a sweetheart contract to improve Loblaws capacity to compete with Wal-Mart.

For those CEOs ousted for poor performance or because their companies are targets of takeovers, golden parachutes are also getting bigger, and not only because they are based on multiples of ever-increasing base pay. Loblaw Cos. Ltd. president John Lederer, who left the struggling grocery chain last fall with almost $22-million, including a $12-million payment under the terms of his employment contract.

Sometime in 2002, senior executives at the hugely profitable Loblaw Co's summoned their UFCW partners , to a high-level meeting where they announced that they had competition. Wal-Mart was coming to town with its Sam's Club warehouse stores and its Wal-Mart Supercenter's. The Supercenters sell groceries and, for this reason, must have been a major part of the selling pitch. In response to the impending invasion the hugely profitable Loblaw Co's had come up with a business strategy to make it more competitive.

It planned to launch a chain of new stores, called Real Canadian Super Stores (RCSS's) which were going to sell groceries and some department store merchandise, sort of like Wal-mart's Supercenter stores in the US. The company intended to get the RCSS's happening really soon. No more conventional Loblaws, Zehr's of Fortino's supermarkets would be opened. From here on in, it would be RCSS all the way. Some RCSS's would be newly built stores while others would be existing supermarkets converted to the RCSS format.

So that these new stores had a good shot at keeping the company hugely profitable, the guys from Loblaw Co's told the union leaders that they wanted to put the Loblaws, Fortino's and Zehr's "banners" on them. This was because the grocery-shopping public recognizes these "brand names" and is more likely to shop at the RCSS's if they think they're pretty much like Loblaws, Fortino's or Zehr's.

Doing so, however, would mean that the RCSS's would be stuck with the current contracts with UFCW Locals 1000a, 1977 and 175 and that's not what the hugely profitable Loblaw Co's wanted. Wal-Mart pays its workers low wages and provides minimal benefits. The RCSS's would be that much more competitive if they could pay low wages and provide minimal benefits too. So the representatives from the hugely profitable Loblaw Co's put a deal to their UFCW partners: We'll fork over the thousands of new RCSS workers to your bargaining units if you agree to lower wages and benefits for them. If you don't, we'll screw you and your current members and what are you going to do about it? According to President Corporon, the hugely profitable Loblaw Co's threatened to close unionized stores, throw unionized members out of work and open new non-union supermarkets.

See:

CEO Profits From Ford Failure

Criminal Capitalist Gets Honorary Degree

Criminal Capitalism Business As Usual

CN Whines

Banks Profit From Job Cuts

BMO More ATM's Less People

Golden Parachutes

Canadian CEO Blinks Earns $38,000

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Camcorder Nation

Why does Canada have to change its Criminal Code to protect the American Film Industry from pirates in the Nation of Quebec? Shouldn't that Nation take responsibility for it's citizens illegal actions?

A U.S. Motion Picture Association analysis of counterfeit discs in 2005 revealed nearly 75 per cent of all films illegally recorded in Canada came from theatres in and around Montreal, recently identified as the No. 1 city in the world for surreptitious camcording.

Kevin Tierney, the producer of the popular Canadian film Bon Cop Bad Cop, said he learned two days before his film was to have been released that a man had been found with 2,500 copies of the movie. He was selling it door-to-door in a Montreal neighbourhood along with alcohol and cigarettes.

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camcorder

Heinlein Centennial

Actions Have Consequences

When you flip flop on an important bill of rights for workers, don't be surprised when you are held accountable by those you have betrayed. Liberals Defeat Anti Scab Law

Dion heckled off stage at Ottawa labour rally

The hecklers chanted "anti-scab, anti-scab" in reference to Dion's withdrawal of Liberal caucus support nearly three months ago for legislation banning the use of replacement workers during strikes in federally regulated industries.

HAMILTON (AM900 CHML) - A Hamilton steelworker has played a lead role, in booing Liberal Leader Stephane Dion off the stage during a big labour rally on Parliament Hill.

Dion was trying to speak to several thousand unionized workers, who turned out in Ottawa to protest job losses in the manufacturing sector.

He never finished, loudly booed off the stage as Hamilton's Jake Lombardo accused him of double-speak and held him to account for the Liberal Party's stand against anti-scab legislation.

The rally comes on the heels of the closure of Hamilton Specialty Bar, and the loss of thousands of manufacturing jobs in Hamilton alone over the past year.

Lombardo adding that Dion also can't escape his government's record on the issue, insisting that the Liberals did nothing while in power.

Photos courtesy of NUPGE

See;

Anti-Scab

Dion

Buzz

Gomperism

Liberals

Unions


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Mike Harris and State Terrorism

Golf Pro; Mike Harris, created the conditions that lead to Dudley George's death, yet he remains unrepentant. After all he was only protecting a golf course from uppity natives.

The result was once again the State and its police acting against the first nations peoples,to protect property they stole.

This decision, and Harris's refusal to do the right thing, will add fuel to fire the native resistance movement that is growing across Kanada.

In an unwarranted rush to end an aboriginal protest in 1995, former premier Mike Harris made a vulgar, racist remark and "created the risk of placing political pressure on the police" hours before an officer killed unarmed protester Dudley George, the commissioner of a public inquiry has found.

Later, Mr. Harris misled the Ontario Legislature about a high-level meeting he attended, with Ontario Provincial Police officers present, before the shooting, which gave "the appearance of inappropriate interference in police operations" and thus prompted the $25.6-million inquiry, Judge Sidney Linden found.

Harris lawyer offers no apology for aboriginal protester's death

In the historical context, Ipperwash was not surrendered but the lands were taken under the War Measures Act in 1942. The land was taken to build a military camp and it was supposed to be returned immediately when it was no longer in use but the government failed to do so. During the years that followed the First Nations at Aazhoodena (Ipperwash), Stoney Point did try to get their traditional lands back. Since the military encampment was built on an ancient Indian burial ground it is only natural for the First Nations people of the area to want to put there ancestors back to rest. Especially so, considering the encampment did disturb the grounds where there ancestors slept peacefully. Also, since the bulldozing that was going on to build a golf course destroyed most of the burial site.

The claim was settled in 1998 and the land was finally returned to reserve members after more than five decades. A $26-million settlement was made and each member of the Stoney and Kettle Point First Nations reserves received a share that ranged between $150,000 and $400,000.

SEE:

Tories Crush Whistleblower

Land claim

Alcoholism Is Colonialism

Bev Oda Minister of Aboriginal Affairs

Hewers of Wood

Cardston Home of Bigots

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Power Failure

Americans are facing an increase in electricity rates thanks to deregulation.

Illinois residents have seen a jump in electricity rates recently. NewsHour correspondent Elizabeth Brackett looks at the debate over deregulation and freezing rates in Illnois.

Which of course Albertans have faced since 2001.

A number of industry watchers, including Alberta Energy Minister Mel Knight, have been forecasting higher electricity costs for Albertans even before the Ed Stelmach government announced a new $15-per-tonne tax on carbon dioxide emissions.

And that's come on top of a $4.5-billion bill Alberta consumers are being asked to pay for desperately needed new transmission infrastructure.

Hydro Quebec rated Edmonton's residential electricity rate the fifth highest out of 11 cities in 10 provinces in 2006.

Here is the irony deregulation was supposed to create competition and thus fund infrastructure expansion. Instead it has cost consumers more, reduced competition creating power oligopolies and no new transmission infrastructure has been created.

Service, well we have increasing brown outs and black outs now thanks to deregulation. Something we now share with California.

EPCOR has begun rolling blackouts, cutting power to certain areas on alternating days to help conserve energy. It's not a terrible idea, but it makes day to day living a pain. There's no official schedule anywhere, so you just kind of have to guess when power in your area is going out.

However city owned EPCOR has increased its profits thanks to deregulation.

But these profits have not benefited consumers or tax payers, they have been shoveled into an income trust created by EPCOR. This is the real meaning of deregulation;

Epcor recently acquired TransCanada Power Limited Partnership, which now operates as Epcor Power L.P. The merger included the integration of 11 new power generation facilities located in Ontario, New York, British Columbia and Colorado. The new publicly-traded subsidiary is the largest publicly-traded company based in Edmonton.

EPCOR Power L.P. (the Partnership) is a limited partnership organized under the laws of the Province of Ontario, which owns and operates a portfolio of power generation assets in Canada and the United States.

The Partnership's mission is to be Canada's premier income fund, providing a growing, stable cash distribution to unitholders. This will be accomplished by being growth-oriented while providing unitholders with reliable long-term cash flows. Superior operating and commercial management practices will be applied to a quality portfolio of energy assets.

	Stock Quote: EP.UN
		$26.12

See:

What's That Smell?

Blowing in the Wind

Citizen Klein

The Wild West Buyout

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And New York Has Rent Controls

Unlike Alberta, but once again what is good for the big Apple appears to be good for Alberta. This is what globalization looks like, the neo-con agenda writ across the globe. The current housing crisis in Alberta mirrors that of New York City.

Developmentalism in the Big Apple

Cost of living has skyrocketed in New York, but under fatcats Giuliani and Bloomberg, the working man’s wage has not

By Steven Wishnia

Rent in New York City costs 10 times more today than it did 30 years ago. Working-class wages haven't followed suit.

From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City, 1974 to the Present
By Kim Moody
New Press · $26.95

Noxious New York: The Racial Politics of Urban Health and Environmental Justice (Urban and Industrial Environments)
By Julie Sze
The MIT Press · $24.00

Thirty years ago, you could easily find a one-bedroom apartment in a middle-class neighborhood in New York City for $150 a month. Today, it would cost more than $1,500—more than what Yankees slugger Reggie Jackson, then baseball’s highest-paid player, paid in 1977. His Fifth Avenue apartment with a balcony overlooking Central Park cost $1,466 a month. And the minimum wage hasn’t gone up to $27.82 an hour.

How we got to this point is the subject of Kim Moody’s From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City, 1974 to the Present (The New Press). Moody analyzes how New York’s business elite exploited the ’70s fiscal crisis to destroy the city’s “social-democratic polity” and impose the neoliberal agenda that has dictated “restraint on social spending, privatization, deregulation, and most importantly, the reassertion of class power by the nation’s capitalist class.”

New York City Housing Bubble - 'The BIG Picture'

See;

Housing

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Molsons Strike

Excuse me but this is 2007 and the economy is booming. So why the claw back mentality of the past? Because Alberta has the weakest labour laws in Canada encouraging employers to be assholes.

Claw backs began in Alberta a decade ago when King Ralph pushed privatization and used the debt and deficit hysteria to punish public sector workers with claw backs in wages and benefits, which had been prompted by Safeway's claw back bargaining with UFCW across North America.

Class war was declared by Safeways and other employers beginning in the eighties prompted by the anti-union attacks of the neo-conservative regimes of Reagan, Thatcher, and Mulroney. It continued for over a decade across North America, as Kim Moody documented in his book an Injury to All.

Today with a provincial labour shortage, low interest rates, increased stock prices and productivity, Molsons Coors wants to go back to the past.

Todd Romanow, national representative for the Canadian Auto Workers union, accused Molson of stubbornly insisting on rolling back wages and pensions to 1980 levels for new employees.

"Beer is supposed to be for happy times, right now it is not," said Dave Wilton, picket captain with the Local 284 Canadian Auto Workers.

Employees, like Wilton, are ticked off that wages of future hires are rolled back from $29 to $22 an hour.

And while company spokesman Ferg Devins said the rollback is still competitive within the Alberta market, Wilton doesn't agree because he said the company is making a lot of profit.

The contract would also pass on some of the pension costs in a "defined contribution" of 3% of annual salary by new workers, and cut sick days of all employees from nine to six.

With the current hot Alberta economy, anyone getting paid at the proposed new rate won't be able to afford decent housing in Edmonton, he said.

Meanwhile in Calgary the climate change denying CEO of controversial Talisman Energy retires with a golden parachute.

Mr. Buckee retires with fantastic wealth, having cashed in stock options worth $24-million in 2005 and 2006. The rest of his options were valued at $52-million, as of Dec. 31, along with a $1.4-million annual pension whose total value is pegged at $23-million.

So who says class war is a thing of the past.

With the onset of the crisis, Moody's narrative becomes largely the bleak account of an even bleaker reality. He describes all the strategies devised by capital to impose the new rules on American workers: the dispersion of production to smaller units around the U.S., direct investment in production abroad, the "outsourcing" of work overseas, concentration (forcing small, isolated plants to confront big conglomerates with many sources of revenue), and the breakup of "pattern bargaining" on an industry-wide scale. By the late 1970's, business was also engaged in a new political activism capable of defeating pro-labor legislation in a Democratic congress and which, by pressure on the future "Reagan Democrats", helped to set the Reagan agenda even before Reagan. Because the UAW was the very model of postwar business unionism, Moody rightly underscores the Chrysler bailout of 1979-80 as a major turning point. To save Chrysler fom bankrupcty, the UAW made a series of concessions in exchange for such dubious benefits as a seat for union president Doug Fraser on Chrysler's board of directors. Whereas Fraser had, in 1978, denounced the "one-sided class war" being waged by business on working people, he and other labor leaders hailed this contract as a "breakthrough". It WAS a breakthrough-- for management. By the early 1980's, the precedent of the Chrysler contract had opened the floodgates for a "tidal wave of concessions" everywhere. Even companies with no apparent squeeze on their profits sensed the new balance of forces and demanded, usually successfully, the renegotiation of unexpired contracts, obtaining major concessions on wages, benefits and work rules. It was the biggest rollback for U.S. labor since the post-1929 Depression years, and it is not over. As Moody points out, the "realism" of business unionism faced with demands for concessions does not even achieve its minimum stated goal of saving jobs.

Business was way ahead of both the "business unionists" and the rank- and- file in taking advantage of the new situation. Even today, when the depth of the crisis has impressed itself on nearly everyone in both camps of capital and labor, the business unionists cling to the discredited practice of a bygone era. They have shown aggressiveness and imagination only in combating rank-and-file attempts, such as the P-9 strike in Austin, Minnesota, to break out of the suicidical "business as usual" mentality of mainstream organized labor. They have responded to the weakening of unions by complaceny, by organizing the limited constituency of middle-class service workers, by intimidation of rank-and-file insurgents, or by formless mergers of unions with little in common as a bargaining unit. Confronted with the challenge to organize the vast new proletariat in dead-end and low-paying service jobs, business unionists react wth the same condescension and lethargy that the bureaucrats of the AFL showed toward tthe unorganized mass of production workers in the 1930's, prior to the rise of the CIO.

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Writing On The Wall

Our lame duck premier Ed Stelmach continues to prove he is the political heir of Harry Strom.

a growing number of urban Albertans are unhappy with the rookie premier's performance.

Mr. Stelmach was responding to a poll in which fewer than half of those surveyed this month said he was leading Alberta in the right direction.

The poll also suggests the overall number of people in the province who felt Mr. Stelmach was leading the province in the wrong direction has tripled to 30 per cent since January.

The Cameron Strategy poll found Tory support in rural areas has increased slightly to 58 per cent, while support in Calgary and Edmonton is down to roughly 40 per cent over the last five months.

The Cameron Strategy poll provided to the Calgary Herald shows disapproval of the premier's performance in Calgary at 39 per cent, more than double what it was in January. In Edmonton, 29 per cent of people disapprove of Stelmach's performance, again, more than double what it was in January.

"It's the doubling of the disapproval that should be worrying," said pollster Bruce Cameron. "It's the first shoe dropping."

Also, more Calgarians (41 per cent) believe the premier is leading Alberta in the wrong direction than those who think he's taking it down the right path (35 per cent).

Stelmach noted that during the race for leadership of the PC party, polls consistently showed him behind the other candidates. For him, the real test is yet to come. "The big poll for me, judgment day, is the next general election."

Which is why he is afraid to call one.


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A Kat Blog

Those cheeky Conservatives have launched an attack blog against Stephane Dion apparently written by his dog Kyoto.

The polite thing to do would be to respond in kind with a Kat blog about Stephen Harper.

His cat's name is Cheddar, the blog could be called Whine and Cheese.

And since Steve is a Star Trek fan maybe the blog could feature him as a Klingon.

The country's most powerful cat lover, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, is using his official website to urge Canadians to foster pets that have been abandoned or rescued.

The web page — which is up during the Humane Society's Adopt-A-Cat month — shows a photo of a smiling Harper in a wood-panelled room at 24 Sussex Drive with two tiny kittens perched by his side.

Not shy about revealing his soft spot towards cats, Harper said he recently adopted a kitten -- an orange tabby named "Cheddar."

Since moving into 24 Sussex, Laureen Harper has been fostering stray cats through the SPCA.

"I lost my favourite cat Cabot about three years ago, who passed away in an unfortunate accident just outside of Stornaway. So I finally got over that and adopted a young kitten," said the prime minister.

"I'm not sure he knows his name yet but he seems to like everyone. He's the happiest cat I've ever seen, he likes everything and everybody."

In December, the Liberal Party elected a new leader, Stéphane Dion of Quebec. He trails Harper in polls, but not by much. Dion is a supporter of the Kyoto Protocol (which Canada has ratified) and seems to mention global warming with each breath. He even has a dog named Kyoto. This puts Harper, a cat lover and not a Kyoto supporter, in a bind.

See:

Dion Harper


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Alberta's Padrone Culture

While unions in Alberta have opposed the exploitation of foreign workers which is being promoted by oil companies and their pals in the provincial and federal governments it is also the unions that are fighting for these workers rights.

Exploitation of foreign workers is rife in the free wheeling padrone culture of Alberta.

An advocate for Alberta's temporary foreign workers says her phone is ringing off the hook with people who say they're being treated unfairly by their bosses.

They came for a brief taste of the Alberta Advantage, with each man saying he paid $6,000 to $12,000 up front for a chance to ply his trade for a better wage.

But they wound up with no job, their money gone, crammed 15 to a house in Mill Woods, with no legal right to work in Canada. They had no promise of help getting home and demands from their work agent for even more money, they say.

The agency, Worldwide Workforce, says the men are lying and that the thousands of dollars it did charge went to cover legitimate costs.

In the meantime, two other foreign workers, with a Chinese firm, died on one of the oilpatch projects the East Indian arrivals expected to work on.

Seven of the East Indian men are now working, after residents took them in and introduced them to the International Boilermakers Union, which found them placements with employers who had federal permission to hire temporary foreign workers. Three more may have work soon.

Employment and Immigration and Industry Minister Iris Evans tabled a letter
from Alberta Federation of Labour president Gil McGowan in the Legislature today
as proof that she's doing everything she can to protect the growing number of
foreign workers brought into Alberta under temporary work permits.

But McGowan says all the minister's stunt proves is that she really
doesn't understand how her own department functions and what challenges
temporary workers actually face when they arrive here.

McGowan says there are currently no dedicated mechanisms in place at
either the federal or provincial level to ensure that temporary foreign
workers are being treated fairly by employers. Instead, both governments
simply say temporary workers are covered by the same system of workplace rules
as domestic workers.

"The current complaint driven system is flawed for domestic Canadian
workers - but it's a disaster for temporary foreign workers," says McGowan.
"By falling back on the current system, the Minister is basically admitting
that she's not prepared to do anything to help temporary foreign workers. As a
result, she's helping to create a vast underclass of exploitable workers who
don't have access to the same kind of rights and protections in the workplace
as other workers in Canada."

Minister Says Don't Come To Alberta Unless You Have A Job/Home

CALGARY/AM770CHQR - Employment and immigration minister is telling people thinking of moving to the province to stay home unless they have a job and a place to live.
Iris Evans says she doesn't want anyone coming here with unrealistic expectations.
Her comments come as Finance Minister Lyle Oberg pondered tax incentives for developers to get more affordable housing built.
Oberg says his department will be looking at both tax incentives and tax cuts.

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