Archive for the ‘Bureaucracy’ Category

Truck full of public money

- April 18th, 2013

Now we hear that the feds are funding a food truck in Mexico City to popularize Canadian cuisine internationally. Could a satirist have invented more convincing proof that the Harper administration believes nothing worthwhile can happen without public subsidy?

As the National Post story notes, a complication is that according to various culinary experts Canadians are such diverse and cosmopolitan people no one’s really sure what constitutes Canadian cuisine other than the inevitable poutine and maple syrup.

Might I suggest taxpayer au gratin as our signature dish?

 

News you can’t use

- April 17th, 2013

Tomorrow is the International Day of Monuments and Sites. Don’t say you weren’t warned. It’s tomorrow, not today, giving you time to prepare courtesy of the NCC which put out a press release early this afternoon on the subject.

So if you can’t get to a monument, at least visit a site.

Stuff governments say

- April 15th, 2013

The federal government has decided to stop waiving $60 gun-licence renewal fees in the hope of raising about $18 million a year. Now on the face of it the decision to collect an existing paperwork fee makes more sense than the decision not to collect it (unless you think not collecting it since 2006 was a cynical political sop to gun owners pending abolition of the long-gun registry). But the rationale is extraordinary. According to the National Post, the Canada Gazette entry says: “The government will not renew the current fee waiver in the current climate of fiscal restraint”. How is grabbing more cash “fiscal restraint”?

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Feedback on centrally planning car stereos

- April 5th, 2013

So now the Harper Tories are meddling in the private sector to the extent of trying to reengineer the gender balance of corporate boards. And why not? After all, only yesterday they were boasting of funneling money (sorry, making “a contribution”) to a firm in Schomberg, Ontario “to accelerate the development of its new automotive audio speaker”. And “conservatives” consider these to be appropriate uses of tax money because…

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Must be some strategy

- April 2nd, 2013

Did I really just get a press release from DFAIT in which our Foreign Minister John Baird and “His Highness Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Foreign Minister of the United Arab Emirates” describe Canada and the U.A.E. as “strategic partners”?

Yes. Yes I did. Must be some strategy, huh?

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