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Results: We identified a significant negative association between daily average temperature and cardiac mortality among persons over 55 years of age. A 5°C increase in temperature was associated with a decrease in death rate by a factor of 0.971 (95% CI: 0.961, 0.982). Conclusion: Cold temperatures may be an important triggering factor in bringing on the onset of life-threatening cardiac events, even in regions with relatively mild winters. Public health efforts stressing cold exposure while out of doors may play a prominent role in encouraging a reduction in cold stress, especially among seniors and those already at higher risk of cardiac death. informaworld
Too bad the indications are towards global cooling; but if they are wrong, and they might be, good news on the heart attack front.
Written by jay on July 17th, 2008 with 1 comment.
Read more articles on "Global Warming" and CPC and Canadian Politics and Liberals.
Canadian Political Blogger #6! (and Good Egg) Alan McLeod comments,
Yes, it would be tragic if someone other than Ontario paid more than its fair share to maintain the Confederation.
Having friends in high places has propelled me to the #19 spot and so I was delighted to see that Lorne Gunter has responded to Alan over at the National Post:
The share of the green taxes he wishes to impose on Alberta and Saskatchewan would work out to nearly $1,500 per capita, or $6,000 per family. In the rest of the country, the load would be just $325 per person or $1,300 a family.
And it’s not as though Albertans, in particular, aren’t making a disproportionate contribution to federal finances already.
In addition to fuelling the federal budget surplus, Albertans contribute about $4,000 more per person to federal finances than they receive back in federal program spending. By comparison, the fiscal deficit Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty frequently speaks of for his province is just over $1,500 per person per year, and Green Shift wouldn’t raise that to $2,000. national post
Trust me Alan, if Dion is elected and tries to pull this stunt the anger out here is going to make NEP I look timid. And this time there is a real capacity to go it alone.
Written by jay on July 14th, 2008 with 24 comments.
Read more articles on CPC and Canadian Politics and Fiscal Policy and Liberals.
The Liberal Party’s Green Shift announced on June 19th marked the most aggressive anti-poverty program in 40 years. The ‘shift’ will transfer wealth from rich to poor, from the oil patch to the rest of the country, and from the coffers of big business to the pockets of low-income Canadians. Ken Boshcoff Liberal MP
A number of bloggers have pointed out that at least Boshcoff is honest.
It is time for the West (and Newfoundland and Nova Scotia) to make it very clear to the Boshcoffs and the Dions that this sort of a revenue grab will have a single consequence: the end of Canada as a nation. I am old enough to have been around for NEP I and I saw the anger first hand in British Columbia and Alberta. Now Saskatchewan will join the party.
Think Bloc Quebecois in Parliament and an activist, separatist, movement at a regional level. Paint this revenue grab “Green” is not going to work simply because “Green” is not selling as it did when Dion was elected leader of the Liberal Party.
There will be a lot of industry solutions to this problem: reducing investment, reducing production, using carbon sequestration as a weapon (goofy as it is as science, its costs can be passed right along to the silly buggers in Ontario in the form of higher oil prices). But there will also be a final recognition that there is really very little Eastern Canada can do for the New West save sanctimoniously claim to be raping us in the name of Green rather than Greed.
Bye guys, best of luck; hope you can do something about that air pollution problem - you know the real one not the CO2 BS. But of course you are…you are losing manufacturing jobs. Fast. And you will, of course, lose more as investment in the oil patch decreases because (you morons) nearly 50% of that investment ends up in Ontario. So no body will be able to say that the Eastern Bastards are not doing their bit to be green: they are actually hollowing out their economy….Bravo, but excuse us if we are not willing to hollow out ours.
Written by jay on July 12th, 2008 with 6 comments.
Read more articles on "Global Warming" and CPC and Canadian Politics and Liberal Leadership and Liberals and business and economics.
I had a thirty five year overdue beer with Terry Glavin a couple of nights ago. A good time was had by all as I admire his writing all the way down.
We banged away about old Vancouver socialism, sturgeon, Kevin Annett and the Vancouver Students’ Association but, at one point Glavin asked a rather good question: why are the righty blogs more interesting to read than the liberal or lefty blogs?
I made noises about just how damned intelligent we are - well, actually, no. But I did point out that it was OK for me to disagree with Kate or Kathy or Ezra. They don’t send me Christmas cards in any case so I miss nothing by supporting SSM or what have you. Glavin suggested that orthodoxy seemed to rule on the left. And he is absolutely right.
But, and here’s the rub, we have our own Society for the Supression of Vice and the Promotion of Virtue: The Blogging Tories. Now, mercifully about half the BT blogroll has not posted in the the last year but the BT in chief, Steve Taylor, for whom I have a lot of respect, has been dragging the party line far too long.
Now that Rob Nicolson has let slip the dogs of, well, a Parliamentary Committee, maybe it is time for Steve to grow a spine and start writing about free speech in Canada.
Elephant meet Steve - Steve, the big gray object over, more or less, in the corner is a Free Speech Elephant. Go nuts, tell us what you think of him. It’s safe to come out of the closet now.
Written by jay on May 31st, 2008 with 27 comments.
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Prime Minister Stephen Harper has accepted the resignation of his embattled foreign affairs minister over an apparent security breach involving cabinet documents.
Mr. Harper told an extraordinary new conference on Parliament Hill that Maxime Bernier’s controversial relationship with a woman linked to the Hells Angels was not a factor in the decision.
But the resignation came as Julie Couillard was about to go to air on the French-language television station TVA to say that her former lover was careless with classified documents.
The Prime Minister says Mr. Bernier failed to uphold his promise to protect cabinet confidences. globe and mail
Hey, it could happen to anyone…have a few pops, have the chrome sucked off your bumper, forget your briefcase…but anyone is not supposed to be the Minister of External Affairs.
Nice to see David Emerson step into the breach. Harper finally goes for clued in rather than the optics.
Written by jay on May 27th, 2008 with 17 comments.
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The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success. Two events in particular—the 2004 assassination in Amsterdam of Theo van Gogh in retaliation for his film about Islam’s oppression of women, and the global wave of riots, murders, and vandalism that followed a Danish newspaper’s 2005 publication of cartoons satirizing Mohammed—have had a massive ripple effect throughout the West. Motivated variously, and doubtless sometimes simultaneously, by fear, misguided sympathy, and multicultural ideology—which teaches us to belittle our freedoms and to genuflect to non-Western cultures, however repressive—people at every level of Western society, but especially elites, have allowed concerns about what fundamentalist Muslims will feel, think, or do to influence their actions and expressions. These Westerners have begun, in other words, to internalize the strictures of sharia, and thus implicitly to accept the deferential status of dhimmis—infidels living in Muslim societies.
Call it a cultural surrender. The House of War is slowly—or not so slowly, in Europe’s case—being absorbed into the House of Submission. bruce bawer city journal
If you want to get an idea of why fighting for free speech in Canada is critical go read Bawer’s piece in City Magazine. It is as depressing as it is vital.
We need to fight for free speech because it is an essential Western and Canadian value. And we need to fight hard because we are in very grave danger of losing the right to assert that value.
Written by jay on April 28th, 2008 with 2 comments.
Read more articles on CPC and Canadian Politics and International and Islam and culture and free speech and law.
On the eve of his retirement announcement over beer Monday night, Gen. Hillier nicely framed his military legacy in a single sentence: “We’re one of the big boys now.”
With air, ground and naval equipment upgrades on order or delivered to bolster an extended Afghanistan mission fortified with 1,000 fresh American troops, Gen. Hillier has put the force back into the military. national post
Hillier was and is a strategist. He leaves without the war in Afghanistan won but with the means in hand to win it.
He walked close to the line which divides the military from its civilian masters but he was surefooted enough to win those battles.
He took the Stanley Cup to the ‘Stan and the fight to the Taliban.
I hope his audacity, vision and intelligence are not lost to Canadians. We have a lot of work to do; Hillier is a man who has demonstrated he is a dog for work and a leader without rival in the Canadian government. He is certainly entitled to the potential corporate rewards his service has earned; but if Harper has the brains God gave a goat he will find General Hillier a place where he can continue to serve Canada.
Written by jay on April 16th, 2008 with 4 comments.
Read more articles on CPC and Canadian Bullet and Homeschooling.
Watching people galvanize around the free speech issue brought up by the CHRC’s trampling of free speech in Canada I have been struck by the consensus which many bloggers have displayed. While we have no time for neo-Nazi action, we have a great deal of time for Canadian citizens right to speak. And we have no time at all for the slimeball tactics of the CHRC’s counsel, investigators or Tribunal.
The people responding to this - while they have been characterized as Concervatives - are, in fact, conservatives; more accurately classical liberals.
Now, I wonder if we might find agreement on other issues which the CPC is too scared to address.
anti-Kyoto
mass immigration
fiscal responsibility
pro-Israel
pro-Canadian Forces
anti-additional funding for bilingualism
anti-regulation
pro-small government
I suspect there are some metrics I’ve left out. The point being that we tend to be people willing to challenge the validity of the so called Canadian consensus.
And then I wondered how we might best influence the various political parties in the direction we would like to see the Canadian conversation actually go.
One thought I had would be to rate MPs - not parties - on their relative commitment to a set of goals. We would define the goals and then build a database of MP ratings.
It would take a bit of work to come up with the ratings and the metrics used to calculate the ratings. However, I suspect it would be entirely doable. Basically we would score - riding by riding - the candidates and members based on what they have actually said.
Call it “The League of Real Canadian Voters” and endorse candidates in every riding in Canada. Given the metrics I think are important a LRCV endorsement would likely be the kiss of death in TO and Vancouver. But, in the rest of the country it might be worth several hundred votes.
So, what do you think? Good idea, pernicious nonsense and the CPC will see us through? Do comment.
Written by jay on April 6th, 2008 with 28 comments.
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The liar Kinsella is a flaming shitheel (possibly from Hell) but he is one hardcore political analyst. He runs the ten reasons why Dion is not catmeat. A few good points:
1. After many months of crappy headlines and no shortage of bad luck, the polls reveal that Dion’s Liberals and Harper’s Tories are still… tied, mostly. It’s a fair question to ask: if all of Dion’s critics are right, then why is Dion still competitive? Because voters - particularly female voters - still have a lot of a reluctance about penciling an “X” beside the Conservative candidates’ name. In politics, it’s always good to be underestimated by your opponent. The polls say [the Tory] team is underestimating Dion. Big time.
There are lots of reasons but the fact is that Harper has not been able to open up even a tiny gap.
3. Dion is no dummy. He knows the Tories want to run a campaign about “leadership” - they’ve been telegraphing that for months. So Dion need only do what Chrétien did in similar circumstances in 1993: step back a bit and emphasize plan and team. And he’s got a Hell of team: Hall-Finlay, Rae, Dryden, Ignatieff, Kennedy, and so many others. It is a powerful front bench, one with a lot of name recognition. Can the Tories say the same thing?
Even if Harper was a half decent Leader, which he is only relative to Dion and Layton, the team theme can work. Quick, name a federal cabinet minister who could take over if PMSH was hit by a bus.
4. The Tories have a message deficit. They can’t run an “outsider” campaign - they’re the incumbents. They can’t run a “scandal” campaign, thanks to Mr. Mulroney. So they will run a campaign about “leadership” - but leadership is an exceedingly woolly concept. Voters like meat and potatoes platforms (which is why Harper won in 2006, by the way). If I were Dion, I’d do a campaign on government services - making ‘em better, and not just eliminating them, the way Tories always do. Mix in some environment, some fiscal federalism, and voilà!
Yup. The problem with running a message free operation is that, well, there is no message. Dion can campaign on whatever he likes, Harper seems to be committed to campaigning on thin air.
Say what you like about PMSH, he is certainly in no danger of being called a “conservative”. He is in no danger of being called a “socon” or a libertarian. So what is he, exactly? What has he delivered? His Finance Minister has been bright enough not to derail the Martinite fiscal policy which makes Canada the envy of the OECD. Other than that, name a policy or a position which the CPC has adopted which could not have been adopted by the Grits.
9.The media remain distinctly less-than-friendly with the Harper folks. They may not love Stéphane Dion, but – during the campaign – you can expect to see them cuddling with him more than once, if only to get back at Harper’s PMO. It’ll be ugly, as love triangles always are. But Dion will benefit.
It is one thing to put the media in their place, it is quite another to run a press operation which antagonizes the media without running the other side, the end run, which marginalizes them. Harper showed willing to put the boots to the dullards in the Parliamentary Press Gallery; but he failed entirely to make the moves - on the net and in the non-MSM - which would have marginalized them. Bad advice and a very limited capacity to think outside the box.
The liar Kinsella expends some pixels on Jim Flaherty’s fight with McGuinty. It is probably important because the Harper folks think they might win a few more Ontario seats and they probably won’t as a result of this. However, the smartest thing Harper can do is to write off TO and enviorns and look to Quebec and the rest of Canada for his majority. Sadly he seems entirely incapable of ignoring “vote-rich” Ontario.
Dion, despite being possibly the worst leader the Liberals have ever foisted themselves with, could quite easily maintain the status quo and, with a couple of breaks, shift a few seats and form a government. This will not be a Dion win, it will be a Harper and CPC loss.
Written by jay on March 31st, 2008 with no comments.
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the main reason I liked the report was that it started and ended with Alan Borovoy, the head of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. The documentary showed historical footage of Borovoy being one of the founders of these human rights commissions; then it quoted him — more than anyone else was quoted, in fact — as being a very concerned critic of the commissions straying into censorship. He was set up as the neutral, father figure of the documentary — me, Lund and Awan were the partisans. Borovoy was the go-to man for analysis; he was “the expert”.
The fact that he — rather than a human rights commissioner — was set up as the arbiter of reason is quite dramatic, given how much of a free speecher Borovoy is. ezra levant
The HRCs are getting hammered. When the CBC runs a report in which Borovoy gets a look in it is pretty clear that the MSM is lining up with the speechers and rejecting the narrow claims of the censors.
This would have been unthinkable three months ago.
Free Dominion, Mark Steyn, Ezra Levant, Small Dead Animals, Keith Martin - and, yes, Marc Lemire - have, along with hundreds of us little people, begun to push back.
If the CPC could somehow grow a spine s. 13 could be toast by summer. To help with that growth, CPC dudes, you are not going to win any 416 seats…understand that and pay attention to the area codes where you might well win.
Written by jay on March 31st, 2008 with no comments.
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