Child Advocate Pans Group Homes
Institutional-style group homes across the province should be replaced with more family-oriented foster care, says a new report by the province’s child advocate.
Judy Finlay, who leads the Office of Child and Family Service Advocacy, is recommending that the “family-like” system be expanded to replace the group homes, which have been operating for years with numerous complaints and no standards forcing them to give good care.
“We have to re-examine group care – it does not work,” Finlay said in an interview.
The group home system in Ontario has had long-standing and well-documented problems. There have been reports of children in group homes being tied up or restrained for emotional outbursts, police being called to handle minor disputes, and an overall structure more institutional than family-oriented. — The Star
When I was growing up I had a friend from a nearby group home. He had a new (and very fashionable) winter jacket every year. He had a new bike every year. He went to Disneyland every year with the other kids from the group home. He got to eat good food every night (they BBQed lots of steaks and chicken breasts, as I recall).
I, in the meantime, was being raised by a single, unwed mother on assistance. My “previously used” winter jacket was half silver from the amount of duct tape needed to keep the remaining down from escaping. My bike was built from other bikes I salvaged from dumpsters. I’ve yet to visit Disneyland. I remember eating puffed wheat with skim milk from powder for weeks at a time because it was the only food in the house. When we did occasionally get meat, it was usually something along the lines of pork hocks (which made those dusty three year old tins of escargot that came in the food bank hampers look pretty exotic to me).
I would respectfully suggest that when Ms. Finlay is done investigating group homes she should start investigating single unwed mothers and the effect they have on their offspring. I’m guessing that what she finds will make the whole group home thing look pretty tame.
CWB Leaving Money On The Table
A new report analyzing the value that the Canadian Wheat Board insists it delivers to Prairie farmers offers “instant absolute proof” to the contrary, says its author.
Far from maximizing returns back to producers, the board is actually leaving an “astounding” amount of money on the table, costing farmers and the Prairie economy as a whole, said Rolf Penner, the report’s author and agriculture fellow at Winnipeg’s Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
According to Penner’s “apple-to-apple” analysis, western Canadian farmers on June 14 were getting at least $1 less per bushel for their hard red spring wheat, depending on the contract, than farmers just across the border in the U.S.
For the average Prairie producer growing 200 hectares of spring wheat, the price difference translates into a minimum loss of $20,000, he said. Factored over the 6.8 million hectares of spring wheat planted in western Canada this year, that translates into an economic loss of between $585 million and $1.2 billion for the Prairie economy, Penner said. — Calgary Herald
“A blur on the radar of the British Coast Guard”
Loyalty
Looks like I’m not the only one who thinks Canada should stand by Bert Tatham in his time of need. BGen Tim Grant, Canada’s top soldier in Afghanistan, seems to think loyalty should mean something as well, and has publicly put his support in writing.
I’ll take that kind of company.
Not a CAIR in the world
Fred Thompson:
CAIR’s dues-paying membership has shrunk 90 percent since 9/11 — from 29,000 in 2000 to only 1,700 last year. CAIR’s annual income from dues plunged from $733,000 to $59,000. Clearly, America’s Muslims are not supporting this group — and I’m happy to hear about it.
Of course, every silver lining seems to have a cloud; and this cloud is that CAIR’s spending is running about $3 million a year. They’ve opened 25 new chapters in major cities across the country even as their dues shrank to a pittance. The question is; who’s funding CAIR? — ABC Radio Networks
Things that make you go “hmmm”.
Reader Tips
Reader tips here.
So much for “innocent until proven guilty”
Nice:
Cars adapted for street racing can be seized and destroyed, even if charges haven’t been laid and a race has not taken place, Ontario Attorney General Michael Bryant said Wednesday.
Bryant warned potential racers that all it takes is a tip from police to seize and destroy their cars. Car junkies who pour thousands of dollars into their vehicles to make them as fast as possible are wasting their money, Bryant said.
“If we can establish someone has parts and they’re juicing up their car — obviously for the purpose of street racing — then we can seize those vehicles,” Bryant said.
“We will seize it and you will never see it again. We will crush your car, we will crush the parts.” — cbc.ca
I miss the old days where we actually waited for someone to commit a crime before we punished them. I suppose this is to be expected in a country where we enjoy less protection of our private property than a citizen of communist China does.
2nd Annual SaskBlogs BBQ in Regina
July 8, 2007 (noon) at Goose Hill Park (Science Center).
Krydor has suggested we make an effort to “go green” this year, so even though I’ll have paper plates/cups/napkins/plastic utensils on hand, please feel welcome to bring your own reusable tableware. There may be carpooling opportunities, so if you’re looking for a ride from Saskatoon, or can offer one, leave a note in the comments here.
In that spirit, I’m suggesting we have a gopher derby – so please feel welcome to bring your guns and garden hoses!
(More details at the link.)
Comments are back — for now…
Was There An Election Last Week?
[This column originally appeared in “Knots of Thoughts” by Dave Bruha in the June 20th edition of the Consort Enterprise. It is reproduced here with Dave’s permission.]
Last week, Albertans in two provincial constituencies went to the polls to elect a new representative. Ralph Klein’s old seat in Calgary/Elbow was claimed by the Liberals with the support of 16% of eligible voters. The PCs held onto Drumheller/Stettler with Jack Hayden getting approval from 19% of the electoral count. The outcome is not all that surprising, but the low voter turnout is a dismal reflection of how self absorbed Albertans have become.
In the 1975 General Election 60% of voters acknowledged their responsibility to be a part of the process. By 2001 the numbers slid to 53% and dipped to 44% for the 2004 election. And in the recent by-election only 33% of voters in this constituency pried themselves away from “Survivor” and cast a ballot (less than ‘20% at the two Consort polls). Two thirds, 66%, the vast majority – want the rest of us to take responsibility for them. We can elect the government; we can worry about social policy and health care and the education of their children. We can look out for their well being and their pensions and be guardians of the life-style they enjoy and take for granted.
Living in one of the richest provinces in a wealthy country with a thundering economy has produced a self-centered society, which doesn’t give a damn about anything beyond their own doorstep. Taking four minutes out of their busy schedule is asking way too much! They have time to whine and give voice to their multitude of complaints: the soaring cost of gasoline, electricity and natural gas, unchecked development of the oil sands, rent controls, etc., but when given the freedom to make changes and cast a ballot they are silent.
There are now over 6.5 billion people on this planet and most of them would give almost anything to have the freedoms and rights that we are blessed with here. The apathy and laziness of Albertans would shock the billions of people who have no voice, no right to vote, and no opportunity to be heard. How can we justify our indifference to someone who has been brutally beaten or even killed for wanting what we so easily discard – the right and freedom to vote?
The tens of thousands who died fighting wars to insure our freedoms would be appalled at how casually Albertans have tossed aside their responsibility and are depending on others to carry their weight.
There is something fundamentally wrong with a society who won’t participate in one of the greatest freedoms we have. Nothing good can come about when a small minority of people elects the body that will govern over all.
—
Side note: The Consort Enterprise (established in 1912) is published weekly in Consort, Alberta. It’s a great little newspaper and its owners bend over backwards to serve the needs of their community. Kudos to Dave and Carol (the owners) for doing such a fantastic job every week.
Reasons to live in any province in Canada!
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN BRITISH COLUMBIA
- Vancouver: 1.5 million people and two bridges. You do the math.
- Your $900,000 Vancouver home is just 5 hours from downtown.
- You can throw a rock and hit three Starbucks locations.
- There’s always some sort of deforestation protest going on.
- Weed.
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN ALBERTA
- Big rock between you and B.C.
- Ottawa who?
- Tax is 6% instead of approximately 200% as it is for the rest of the
country. - You can exploit almost any natural resource you can think of.
- You live in the only province that could actually afford to be its own
country. - The Americans below you are all in anti-government militia groups.
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN SASKATCHEWAN
- You never run out of wheat.
- Your province is really easy to draw.
- You can watch the dog run away from home for hours.
- People will assume you live on a farm.
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN MANITOBA
- You wake up one morning to find that you suddenly have a beachfront
property. - Hundreds of huge, horribly frigid lakes.
- Nothing compares to a wicked Winnipeg winter.
- You can be an Easterner or a Westerner depending on your mood.
- You can pass the time watching trucks and barns float by.
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN ONTARIO
- You live in the centre of the universe.
- Your $400,000 Toronto home is actually a dump.
- You and you alone decide who will win the federal election.
- The only province with hard-core American-style crime.
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN QUEBEC
- Racism is socially acceptable.
- You can take bets with your friends on which English neighbour will move
out next. - Other provinces basically bribe you to stay in Canada.
- You can blame all your problems on the "Anglo *#!%!"
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN NEW BRUNSWICK
- One way or another, the government gets 98% of your income.
- You’re poor, but not as poor as the Newfies.
- No one ever blames anything on New Brunswick.
- Everybody has a grandfather who runs a lighthouse.
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN NOVA SCOTIA
- Everyone can play the fiddle. The ones who can’t, think they can.
- You can pretend to have Scottish heritage as an excuse to get drunk and
wear a kilt. - You are the only reason Anne Murray makes money.
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN PRINCE EDWARD ISLAND
- Even though more people live on Vancouver Island, you still got the big,
new bridge. - You can walk across the province in half an hour.
- You can drive across the province in two minutes.
- Everyone has been an extra on "Road to Avonlea."
- This is where all those tiny, red potatoes come from.
- You can confuse ships by turning your porch lights on and off at night.
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN NEWFOUNDLAND
- If Quebec separates, you will float off to sea.
- If you do something stupid, you have a built-in excuse.
- The workday is about two hours long.
- It is socially acceptable to wear your hip waders to your wedding.
—
Received by e-mail this morning from this fellow. If you somehow feel insulted by the contents of this post, yell at him and not me. 😉
UPDATE: The following were added by Hans Rupprecht in the comments and are worth appending to the main post:
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN NUNAVUT
- You don’t want NONE OF IT any where else.
- You don’t ever need to buy a freezer.
- You are never short of ice for your daquiris while enjoying your ocean
view. - Diamond mines are the jewels in the TRUE NORTH.
- Polar bears make good fishing buddies, if you are short of friends.
TOP REASONS TO LIVE IN YUKON
- Line dancers doing ‘can can’ have great gams.
- There is gold in them thar hills.
- Next to Alaska which used to be owned by the Russians, so it is kind of
like Siberia. - Summer is two weeks, so it is a great place for winter sports.
- The Dempster Highway is gravel, just like the condition of Saskatchewan’s
roads!
The Sound Of Settled Science
“The debate is over about whether or not climate change is real.”
You know, you’d think a geneticist would know better.
A massive international study of the human genome has caused scientists to rethink some of the most basic concepts of cellular function. Genes, it turns out, may be relatively minor players in genetic processes that are far more subtle and complicated than previously imagined.
Among the critical findings: A huge amount of DNA long regarded as useless — and dismissively labeled “junk DNA” — now appears to be essential to the regulatory processes that control cells. Also, the regions of DNA lying between genes may be powerful triggers for diseases — and may hold the key for potential cures.
[…]
[Thomas D. Tullius , professor of chemistry at Boston University] – “There were huge surprises; this research has upset a lot of thinking about how the genome works.”
He added in an interview: “There now appear to be thousands of places in the genome that were long thought to be useless or meaningless, but which we now see to have a functional role. But we don’t really understand what that role is.”
Most startling, according to researchers, is that some areas of the genome looming as crucial are regions that don’t contain specific instructions for making proteins. That recognition amounts to a sea change in basic biology.
Via Maxed Out Mama who notes that this isn’t really news. Evidence that so-called “junk” dna wasn’t junk at all has been mounting for some time.
Among other items, it calls into question very basic tenets of evolutionary gene studies based on gene “clocks” and it calls into severe question the statement that we share almost all of our DNA with our closest primate relatives. It’s so radical that it’s hard to construct a parallel. Something on the order of geologists holding a press conference and announcing that the world is flat after all.
It isn’t just new findings about “junk” dna that’s undermining the fashionable field of evolutionary genetics. In 2004* I pointed to this two year old item on new discoveries in mitochondrial dna, the very underpinning of these genetic “clocks” that purport to tell us, among other things, when it was that domestic dogs diverged from their wolf ancestors, and that all current humans have a single common female ancestor, a “mitochondrial Eve”.
For decades biologists have assumed that mitochondria – the cells’ power stations – are inherited solely through the maternal line.
Mitochondria in the sperm from the father were presumed to be destroyed immediately after conception, leaving behind only those from the mother. But Marianne Schwartz and John Vissing from the University Hospital Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, have discovered that one of their patients inherited the majority of his mitochondria from his father.
[…]
The researchers think inheritance of paternal mitochondrial DNA is probably very rare. But the findings will have implications for a number of branches of biology. Evolutionary biologists often date the divergence of species by the differences in genetic sequences in mitochondrial DNA. Even if paternal DNA is inherited very rarely, it could invalidate many of their findings. It will also have implications for scientists investigating inherited metabolic diseases.
Yet despite its obvious significance, this is information that aparently still manages to elude a good many in the field.
Now, why might that be?
(emphasis mine)
Against “conservative” wimpiness
First Andrew Coyne (of all people), now the FP’s Jacqueline Thrope:
“The argument has been a minority government can’t make bold moves, but bold moves a majority may make.”
Now, I’ve been railing against that and other cowardly thinking for years, but I’m neither a policy wonk nor a party hack. I’m just a nobody blogger who admits to being more interested in Principles than practicality.
Sadly, much of the “conservative” blogosphere reflects the Party’s unprincipled, unimaginative tendency. Lots of boring number crunching, and poll analysis and half-baked strategy, from bloggers with an awfully fluid/threadbare idea of what “conservative” means. It’s all about “getting elected.” It’s a game or a horse race and you just want your “team” to win. It’s like the World Cup but with neckties.
How’s that working out? We’ve now got a “conservative” PM who you know doesn’t believe in Global Warming, pretending to believe in Global Warming and pretending not to notice that we notice that he’s lying. He wants us all to buy a certain kind of light bulb now. Politicians — “conservative” politicians — are telling us how to decorate our homes, people. Hello??
But for the timid, grasping, careerist wonk bloggers out there, dying to get tapped for a Party job one day, none of that matters. (Why so many of them are male, and so many of us mouthy, outrageous, say-anything, more idealist bloggers are female remains a minor mystery…)
(I’m obliged to add, however, a word of congratulations to our boys for not going the way of so many US and UK pundits on “our” side: the popular conservative talk radio guest/author who hired a hooker to suck his toes, or to suck hers, I try to forget; the far greater author who liked to be spanked — yes, I know, he is British after all, and if he’d been the “top” I wouldn’t have cared, but the position of men in the Movement should never be prone; the presidential candidate who wanted to install his mistress in the mayor’s mansion; the other one who dumped the mother of his children, the one who kept the family together while he was in the Hanoi Hilton; the soon-to-be candidate prone to getting b-js in parking lots with other men’s wives… And remember (if you can bear it — I mean, have you ever seen Boris Johnson?) the “Sex-tator” Scandal. Thank you, one and all, Canadian boys, for keeping your pants zipped in public.)
Anyway, Jay Currie (I’ll forgive him for being a libertarian — for today) has actually come up with an ok conservative platform — one that contains actual conservatism and not the Liberal Lite pap we’re tied to now.
Not all of this is laudatory, and certainly much is as far from “conservative” as one can get (legalized drugs and prostitution — ladies and gentleman, does “doing your own thing” really sound like a “conservative” principle to you? Really? Really??)
And I’m going to pretend that Jay just forgot to credit my idea from earlier this year, of paying every status Indian in Canada a million bucks to shut up forever.
Otherwise, worth a read and a discussion.
Dogbert The Green Consultant
I’m starting to get the impression that Dilbert comic strip creator Scott Adams isn’t exactly a big fan of Al Gore.
Exhibit one.
Exhibit two.
Reader Tips
Open.
Thou shalt not idle thy vehicle needlessly
The Vatican has issued 10 commandments for drivers:
1. You shall not kill.
2. The road shall be for you a means of communion between people and not of mortal harm.
3. Courtesy, uprightness and prudence will help you deal with unforeseen events.
4. Be charitable and help your neighbor in need, especially victims of accidents.
5. Cars shall not be for you an expression of power and domination, and an occasion of sin.
6. Charitably convince the young and not so young not to drive when they are not in a fitting condition to do so.
7. Support the families of accident victims.
8. Bring guilty motorists and their victims together, at the appropriate time, so that they can undergo the liberating experience of forgiveness.
9. On the road, protect the more vulnerable party.
10. Feel responsible toward others.
— snip —
I was expecting something more along the lines of…
“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s Porsche.”
The Bane of My Existence
Global Warming Logic from Down Under
It is past time for those who have deceived governments and misled the public regarding dangerous human-caused global warming to be called to account. Aided by hysterical posturing by green NGOs, their actions have led to the cornering of government on the issue and the likely implementation of futile emission policies that will impose direct extra costs on every household and enterprise in Australia to no identifiable benefit.
Not only do humans not dominate Earth’s current temperature trend but the likelihood is that further large sums of public money are shortly going to be committed to, theoretically, combat warming when cooling is the more likely short-term climatic eventuality.
In one of the more expensive ironies of history, the expenditure of more than $US50 billion ($60 billion) on research into global warming since 1990 has failed to demonstrate any human-caused climate trend, let alone a dangerous one.
Yet that expenditure will pale into insignificance compared with the squandering of money that is going to accompany the introduction of a carbon trading or taxation system.
Rabbit-hole justice
Normally, when someone pleads to the judge “I had drugs on me by accident!” my BS-O-Meter spikes. Of course, normally the person asking the bench to suspend disbelief isn’t an anti-narcotics consultant involved in the collection and disposal of tons of illicit drugs on a daily basis.
If information surfaces next week that shows Bert Tatham was using his official position as cover to mastermind a vast international drug-smuggling cartel, I’ll eat my words. Until then, I can think of no reason that Canadian diplomats, the United States State Department, the government of Afghanistan, and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime shouldn’t aggressively intervene on this man’s behalf.
By this standard, Canadian soldiers making a connecting flight through Dubai last fall could have been charged as well, for the heinous crime of soldiering downwind.
Update: Bert’s brother comments over at my blog:
I’ll ring in. I’m his brother. He was there working on a contract through the US state dept. He was leading a team of Afghan nationals to help farmers find other crops to grow in place of Poppy. Not eradication.
He was carrying 2 year old, dried and previously lanced poppy flowers as artifacts from his work there. 0 narcotic value. In hindsight a bad idea of course.
He was on occasion called by the Afghan police to witness the burning of confiscated drugs. These burns were very noxious as one can imagine. Hash is everywhere there and passed about freely and often shows up in food even. He is baffled as to how the small chunk got on him but not hard to imagine as a mistake. He laundered his clothes very carefully prior to leaving.
…
I would also add that he regularly briefed and advised Canadian forces brass on the “bad guy” activity in the region.
so yes, he is one of our boys.