Police thinking. Hypocritical newspapers.

In Ontario, a rash of traffic accidents and fatalities from mostly young drivers racing each other on the highway resulted in the provincial nanny state recently enacting a draconian “stunt driving” law that has some serious penalties attached to it: $10,000 fine, jail time, loss of driver’s license, etc., if you are caught going 50 kilometers an hour over the posted speed limit.

While it has been used to prosecute the people the law was intended to affect, in typical police fashion, foolish charges have been laid against those who are speeding for other reasons; such as, trying to pass a big transport truck on the highway to get to a safe lane. After a couple of these showed up in court, the judges ruled the law unconstitutional and those rulings await the appeal of a higher court.

Meanwhile an auto mechanic was charge with speeding on the express highway on his motorcycle. He was going 243 kph in 100 kph zone on a multi-lane expressway. There was no evidence of racing and the prosecutor chose not to proceed with the stunt driving charge. The man was convicted and fined about $1,400.

Accrding to a story in today's Toronto Sun, Mr. Julian Fantino, the Ontario Provincial Police Commissioner, a strong supporter of Ontario's stunt driving law, said in an e-mail: "I am disappointed that the sentence did not also include a psychiatric assessment before the individual is allowed the privilege of driving in Ontario."

If you are ever in doubt about the wisdom of letting the police mind set the public agenda, that statement should do it for you.

Anybody who has ever ridden a motorcycle knows that they cry out to be let loose on a good open road. There is no thrill to compare to cranking one of these things up to its high end to see how it can fly. That may be careless, or even reckless, behaviour, but it is certainly not abnormal.

What is abnormal is having a top police official who thinks that anybody who wants to experience the thrill of riding a motorcycle at a speed beyond the humdrum one permitted by law needs a psychiatric evaluation.

And Another Thing

There are four daily newspapers in the Toronto area market that duke it out for circulation honours and advertising revenue. The one in that regional market with the largest circulation is the Toronto Star.

In my mind, it is unique in another way. I find its rivals generally consistent in political bias. The Star, however, has no shame.

In a recent op-piece, penned by one of their editorial editors, Martin Regg Cohn, the writer pretends to be former Progressive Conservative Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, chastising the current PM, Stephen Harper, for how he is handling his international profile, particularly his relations with the American President, and comparing Harper’s allegedly dismal performance with Mulroney’s stellar one.

I am old enough to recall how the Star treated Mulroney and his government for the eight years when he was in power. I cannot recall them ever praising him for anything. This attitude was not just in the editorials, it infected every single columnist in the newspaper. Even the humour guy, the late Gary Lautens, who I thought was a genteel person who would never say the word “shit” if his mouth were full of it, wrote a serious, nasty rant against Mulroney to my complete surprise.

I recall that the government did some polling during the public discussion of the free trade agreement with the United States, then in the offing. The pollsters determined that 47% of the country’s opposition to the Mulroney-sponsored deal came from the Toronto Star.

The Star vilified Mulroney for having a close relationship with Ronald Reagan. Now they are pretending that was a good thing.

What a nest of hypocrites!

Ford really does have a better idea

In Germany, new car sales are up by 21.5% in the month of February. In fact, it is the best February for sales in a decade. At the same time new car sales in Ontario are down by over 50%.

The difference is that, in addition to the carmaker’s generous incentives, the German government introduced its own incentive package, offering 2,500 Euros towards the purchase of a new car for anyone trading in one that is more than 9 years old.

Ford Motor Company of Canada suggested that the Ontario government launch a similar program. It has also been recommended (not by Ford) that the federal and provincial governments suspend their sales taxes on new car purchases for a time. This should apply only to cars and trucks made in Canada.

I remember back in the 1980s when the Japanese motorcycle companies invaded the “big bike” market in the U.S. and Harley-Davidson, the only surviving American motorcycle company, was on the verge of bankruptcy. President Reagan imposed a 100% import luxury tax on big motorcycles and this gave breathing room for Harley to reinvent itself and come roaring back, literally and metaphorically, to financial health.

Now a tariff is the opposite of a government incentive, but the point of Ford’s suggestion and the example of Reagan is that the government has tools at its disposal that it can wield very effectively to assist industry. It doesn’t require injecting massive amounts of money into the bank accounts of the companies that pissed their money away in the first place. And it certainly doesn’t require the government to supervise an industry the way the public would expect it to do to safeguard the loans.

If it is a credit problem, then the government could provide the lenders with credit guarantees for purchasers of new cars. These government tools are not forever. They would only be employed until there was some sign the industries were out of the danger zone.

I drive an 8 year-old vehicle made in Ontario. It has more than 335,000 kilometers on the odometer. The body is beginning to show some small signs of rust, but the engine and transmission are running just fine. I am expecting it to last to at least 500,000 km without major trouble. However, if the governments suspended the sales taxes, the manufacturers continued the attractive sales incentives I have noticed when passing dealerships, and there was a generous scrappage fee, I would trade it in tomorrow for a new one.

I am looking at a replacement vehicle in the $30,000 range. With sales taxes that car would cost me approximately $34,000. The manufacturers are currently offering discounts of $3,000. If a scrappage fee were introduced at say, $3,500, and the sales taxes were suspended, the cost of the vehicle is less than $24,000. That is a $10,000+ saving, tax included, on a car that was originally priced at $30,000.

It would very hard not to bite on that one.

Flipping the bird at the Big Gauleiter

Now here is a newspaper column worth its weight in eco-friendly pulp paper. It is the incomparable George Jonas in the National Post commenting on the asinine Ontario government of Dalton McGuinty and its incremental state nannyisms.

Ontario recently passed a law that made it illegal for anyone to smoke in their motor vehicle if they were transporting a minor. This gets awfully close to passing a law that it is illegal to smoke in your own home if there is minor present. It may be dumb to smoke in your home, at any time, but under 800 years of English common law your home is supposed to be your castle.

But I digress to a dystopian future. Getting back to the cars.

A couple of weeks ago, a policeman pulled over a twenty year-old driver and issued him a ticket for this smoking offense. As they were waiting for the paperwork, the driver’s fifteen year-old passenger climbed out of the car and lit up a cigarette from her own pack. In Ontario, it is illegal to sell cigarettes to anyone under the age of 19, but it is not illegal for a minor to possess or smoke them.

Two paragraphs from Jonas’s column were spot on:

One day, historians may view our society as an anomaly. Canada fought long and sacrificed much for freedom-- then gradually adopted the philosophies and practices of the dismal societies it defeated. Canadians, who used to offer their lives for liberty, now offer their liberty for a modest increase in life expectancy: seven years, on average, for non-smokers.

But being around isn't the most important thing. The important thing is to be around as a free person. It's possible to combine the two, but unless we choose the second whenever a choice needs to be made, we won't enjoy the benefit of the first. Smoking is deadly, but it's not a patch, not even a nicotine patch, on the deadliness of tyranny.

Another reason I like Jonas is that he expands my vocabulary. There were two words he used that I had look up.

One was “gauleiter”, which, according to my Oxford dictionary, means: 1. an official governing a district under Nazi rule; 2. a local or petty tyrant.

The second was “iatrogenic”: (adj) caused by medical examination or treatment.

Winter in Canada and strange sights

There was a story in today's Toronto Star about feral cat colonies in Toronto and how they can easily survive the winter. This brought to mind something very strange that I witnessed two weeks ago.

I live in southern Ontario, on the north shore of Lake Ontario. In the second week in January there was a bit of a thaw when the temperature rose a few degrees above freezing and much of the snow melted away. I was walking my dog near the lake on a waterfront trail, on a day that was mild and sunny. Crossing the asphalt path in front of me was a caterpillar. It had a black head and tail and was kind of browny organge in the middle portion, and it was fuzzy. I have seen these before in my backyard, but always in the summer. I couldn't believe I was seeing one in the middle of January.

I have tried to identify this species on the Internet with no success. If anybody who reads this knows the name of the insect, I would appreciate hearing from you.

Mysteries of nature

There is a story in the Boston Globe about mysterious waves striking Boothbay harbour, Maine. At low tide the waves swept in and raised the water levels 12 feet, causing some damage in the harbour. They are mysterious because there was no record of seismic activity on the seabed and no offshore storm to account for them. A similar thing happened at Daytona Beach in Florida about 15 years ago and several people were injured and cars were damaged.

The story says that there have been unexplained rogue waves occurring in the Great Lakes. I can confirm that.

A few years ago, I was sailing out of Toronto harbour, south of the islands, in a 27-foot Catalina sailboat, at about 6:30 p.m. on a fine summer evening, during the middle of the week. I was the only boat in sight. The water was quite calm with only a steady ripple of wind disturbing its surface. I was dawdling along at about 3knots, admiring the clouds, when I happened to turn my gaze to the southwest towards Hamilton, 25 miles distant.

I immediately sat bolt upright. Bearing down on my beam, not more than 5 boat-lengths away, were three very large waves. They were not the 12 to 20 feet kind that hit Boothbay and Daytona, but they were large enough to throw my boat on its beam ends and probably throw me out of the cockpit into the water had they hit me broadside, undetected.

I immediately, turned my boat into them, and no sooner had I done so, than the first wave lifted my bow, and then, passing the boat, dropped it into the second wave. That one swept over the bow, up the deck, over my cabin top, into my open cabin, and swamped my cockpit. Then I was dropped into the third wave with the same result.

After I had attended to boat chores to clean up the mess, I scanned the horizon with my binoculars to see what might have caused these waves. It was clear of any large vessels. In fact, it was clear of any boat traffic.

I suppose it is possible that a lake freighter, heavily laden and moving at high speed, crossing from Hamilton to Port Weller, to access the Welland Canal to get to Lake Erie, might have been responsible, but since there was hardly any wind over all of western Lake Ontario, it is hard to imagine these waves could have sustained the energy to travel that distance to my boat.

The answer my friend may not be blowing in the wind

The Ontario government recently announced that it has lifted the moratorium on building wind farms in the Great Lakes. No doubt it was spurred on by thoughts of being left behind with wind farm stirrings on the United States side of the lakes. Can't be left behind now can we? The government is also being lobbied with tantalizing offers of establishing a wind turbine manufacturing capability in Ontario.




In real estate they say the three most important things are: location, location, location. Well, in politics it is: jobs, jobs, jobs. This is especially so as Ontario's automotive industry is collapsing around its ears.

But. There are those drawbacks. Always those drawbacks.



First, there are no current windfarms in the lakes so we have nothing to measure and determine the impacts. In Cleveland there is a modest proposal to build about 10 of these in Lake Erie as a demonstration project. Sensible.



Second, get ready to watch your wallet flying out the door with the wind. There are no wind farms of any substantial nature that have not been built without government subsidies, in Europe, the world's leading windpower area, at least.




Denmark has the most experience with offshore windpower and it has not been rosy. It keeps all its coal powered plants in full operation because wind power has a nasty habit of providing little power when demand is highest and too much power when demand is lowest. You cannot dispense with other sources of power, so there are no savings. Furthermore, there are days when the wind turbines actually draw power out of the grid. Eighty-four percent of Denmark's wind produced power is exported, and only about 3.5% ever gets used locally. On average, wind turbines run at about 20% efficiency.

Another consideration is the size of these things. They can be over 300 feet high with blades of 60 feet in length. It is more difficult to service them offshore, so the costs are higher.




So what going on in Ontario? There is a proposal to build about 80 of these things on Wolfe Island near Kingston. It started off as 20 and then grew like topsy. Now the good folks on Wolfe are getting antsy. There is another proposal to build about 150 towers 15 kilometers south of Belleville, but, ominously, the proponent has its eyes on doubling that number. Toronto Hydro wants to build 80 of them off the Scarborough bluffs. The Ontario government has identifies 64 potential sites in the lakes (presumably, mostly Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, where the bulk of the electricity consumers reside).

I have two objections. I think it is a crime to spoil a natural vista with industrial towers. I also don't believe that the net benefit (power/cost) justifies them. If the taxpayers are going to have to subsidize power generation, then let's spend it on stuff that we know will work, like nuclear.



Finally, we wouldn't even be thinking about this if the world hadn't gone crazy over this nonsense about CO2 being a problem in the atmosphere. Wrong diagnosis for a not very well-defined problem, followed by expensive and nearly useless remedies.