BIXI

The Bixi bike

   I haven’t spend much time on this blog talking about la belle province so for all you francophones “Bonjour.”Today in Toronto they introduced BIXI which is a public bike system that had its start in Montréal.The components are manufactured in Quebec. After the recent federal election on Monday where almost all of the ridings in the province elected NDP candidates some Ontario folks said that the bikes are painted in red and tend to swerve to the left. This is definitely not true.

  BIXI est conçu pour les courts déplacements. La tarification encourage une utilisation fréquente et de courte durée. Il faut d'abord s'abonner ou prendre un accès 24 ou 72 heures pour utiliser le service. Reprenez un vélo autant de fois que vous le voulez pour 45 minutes ou moins, des frais s'appliquent pour les trajets plus longs. (BIXI is designed for short trips. Pricing encourages frequent use and short duration. You must first subscribe or pay for access to 24 or 72 hours to use the service. Take a bicycle as many times as you want for 45 minutes or less, fees apply for longer trips.) Today Montreal has 5,000 bikes and 400 stations where you can rent a bike.There is a $78 per year in Montréal and a $95 per year in Toronto subscription fee (taxes included) or $5 for access to a bike for 24 hours.

  The bikes are hybrid with a single aluminum frame construction, heavy duty tires and LED lights built into the frame. They are based on the Vélib’ pubic bike system in Paris but are more sophisticated. The cables, derailleur, chain protector, brakes and light system are built into the frame for durability and low maintenance. It also has an adjustable seat. Montréal has 500 km of bike paths and trails. Toronto has 160 km of bike paths as well as 250 km of bike lanes on streets but hopes to increase the number of bike paths dramatically. They are building a new set of paths near my home and I’m waiting for them to complete them so I’ll have more off road places to ride my bike. Green power!Here’s a video of the Montreal BIXI system.

Canadian Academics Anti- American

Nest of Socialists

A cable from a US embassy official to his superiors in Washington released last week by Wiki leaks contained remarks demonstrating that Canadian academics show a persistent anti-American bias according to an article in National Post.

“Apart from surges of solidarity after 9/11 and after President Obama’s election and — even more so, his February 19 visit (to Canada) — many Canadian politicians, pundits, and, most of all, academics at traditionally liberal universities have resorted too easily, to a shallow anti-Americanism. The war in Iraq and the detentions at Guantanamo Bay further added fuel to this fire, which is at distinct odds from the overwhelmingly friendly partnership between our nations and people,” the cable reads. (National Post)

This particular official was studying at the University of Ottawa which is well known for its left wing commie faculty. Now that Harper has a majority government we can expect a purge of this Havana U. of the north. This same institution cancelled a lecture by main stream commentator, Ann Coulter, after she told a Muslim student at the University of London Ontario to take a camel for transportation. Ms. Coulter later called the University of Ottawa bush league and I don’t think that she was referring to George Bush.

NDP comrades

Now that the NDP is the official opposition party in Canada, you’re probably going to hear a lot of B.S. in the media about the Canadian commie party especially in America. My mother thinks that they’re all mainland China and East European immigrants but I told her that those folks probably voted Conservative. The current electoral map in the Toronto area seems to bear this out. They really hold the traditional Canadian center which was the territory of the Liberal party until they decided that the electorate had shifted right so they made a strategic decision to become the soft right. They learned this election that when folks want to vote right they’re going to vote for the real Conservatives.

The socialist movement in Canada is really an American import. Between 1890 and the start of WW1, about a million American farmers immigrated from the American heartland to the Canadian prairies and they brought their populist ideology with them.  The following is a video about this story.  

Canadian Election results

Canadian 2011 political compass

  I’m glad that I bought that bottle of wine. I’m going to need it. The basic themes of the election results are a Conservative majority, the obliteration of the BQ in Quebec, the destruction of the Liberal party and the rise of the NDP. This election is the death knell of the arrogance of the Liberal Party as the natural governing party of Canada. They waited one election too many to grow out of their denial and tried to portray themselves as a center right party. If people want to vote Conservative then they’ll vote for the real Conservatives. The NDP is now in the part of the political spectrum where the Liberals used to be and folks voted for them. It’s also a bad day for immigrants, women and anyone who believes in social justice. I’ll have to take some time to analysis the election before I write any sort of serious post.

  There are a few points that I feel confident in writing. If Canadians feel it’s alright to re-elect a party that has no respect for parliamentary traditions or the democratic process then they deserve what they’re going to get. I had higher expectations. The second point is the shift of the recent immigrant vote from the Liberals to the Conservatives who, to give one example, shut down the English as a Second Language centers. This I don’t understand.  The third point is a concept derived from the book by Michael Adams titled “American backlash” which was published in 2005. Michael Adams is a Canadian social scientist who analyzes social and political trends in both Canada and the United States. I have found his work in retrospect to be very accurate. His thesis is that Canada is getting more like the States but the States is getting less like Canada faster than this country is becoming more like America. This Canadian election implies that the right wing crazies are going to take over America in 2012. If Obama tries to triangulate himself into the so called center he’s going to get creamed like the Liberals did here. I need to meet some nice Scandinavian woman and immigrate before it’s too late. The election results as of midnight are:

Conservatives      elected in 161 and leading in 5

Liberals                 elected in   31 and leading in 3

NDP                       elected in 98 and leading in 5

Bloc Q.                  elected in   3

Green                    elected in 1



Election Day

Today is Election Day in Canada. It’s illegal to sell alcohol today because of laws dating back to the nineteenth century so I bought a bottle of wine yesterday to either console myself or celebrate in the unlikely situation of a Conservative loss – a late harvest Vidal wine from the Niagara region of Ontario. It’s not a bad wine but not the greatest. I’m also cautious about what I can write because of broadcast laws which date to 1938 and were later revised to include the Internet.

Section 329: "No person shall transmit the result or purported result of the vote in an electoral district to the public in another electoral district before the close of all of the polling stations in that other electoral district."

Section 495 (4)(d): "Every person is guilty of an offence who… wilfully contravenes section 329."

Section 500 (4): "Every person who is guilty of an offence under subsection 495(4) is liable on summary conviction to a fine of not more than $25,000."

I think that it safe to say that there are three possible outcomes for the election – a Conservative majority, a Conservative minority or an opposition coalition government. The Liberals still consider themselves to be the natural governing party of Canada and have stated that they would never join a coalition to form a government although they have done poorly with a declining trend in electoral support during the last couple of elections. The question is how they would argue that a government which they brought down on a vote of contempt of parliament is preferable to an opposition coalition. Speaker of the house, Peter Milliken, made a ruling on contempt of parliament. This is the first time in Canadian history that a government has fallen due to a non confidence vote on this topic as well as in the 54 countries of the Commonwealth. The wording is as follows:

That this House denounce the conduct of the government, its disregard for democracy and its determination to go to any lengths to advance its partisan interests and impose its regressive ideology, as it did by justifying the Conservative Party's circumvention of the rules on election spending in the 2005-2006 election campaign, when the Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism used public funds to solicit donations to the Conservative Party, when the Party used taxpayers’ money to finance a pre-election campaign under the guise of promoting Canada’s Economic Action Plan, when it changed the wording in government communications to promote itself, when it showed that it is acceptable for a minister to alter a document and make misleading statements to the House, when it refused to provide a parliamentary committee with the costs of its proposals, and when it improperly prorogued Parliament.

I’ll have more to say after the election results have been tabulated.

Freudian slip

Fox news, the number one news channel in the States and bastion of fact based, accurate reporting, had a text bar on its news report last night which stated Obama bin Laden had been killed. I suppose that the text was wishful thinking on its part.

Last Rites

I was trying to get my mind off the Canadian general election tomorrow so I started to peruse some of the blogs on which I keep track from time to time. I recently posted on the foreign language educational cuts in Louisiana where I queried the motives of the administration so I checked on a blog from a Spanish professor in the state. This person’s posts from the last few days have been some of the most depressing that I’ve read in a long time.

”My larger point is this — am I the only one who thinks of academic atmospheres as violent, punitive ones, riddled with instability, menaces, and threats? I do not have this impression in R-1 environments but everywhere else the smell of danger is so rank that I have very serious trouble concentrating. Is it just me, or do you, too, find these things destructive?”

Speaking as someone who had been married to a person who at one point in her career suffered from suicidal ideation, I find these comments disturbing to say the least. It’s tough being a brilliant, feminist pioneer like my Ex – first priest in the history of the diocese to take maternity leave. My eldest two daughters were in utero when she was made priest. The joke at the time in the diocese was when the bishop was talking about the three in one (pun on the Trinity- Father, Son and the Holy Ghost) he wasn’t kidding. She did her graduate degree in what McLean magazine refers to as the top college in the country and ploughed her way into the most conservative, patriarchal organization that you can imagine.

Why do women blame themselves about situations which are the consequence of external factors? I’ve have been in some difficult situations but I never blamed myself. I accurately pointed the causative factors at the people who were responsible. A certain type of brilliant introspective woman seems to want to hole themselves up like Julian of Norwich (c. 1342 – c. 1416) - a sort of southern anchoress who acts like a hermit and engages in a form of electronic contemplative prayer. She says that even her suicide antidote, her cat, has disappeared.

Am I acting like a white sexist male? How do you say anything without sounding like a presumptuous male rescuer?