I’ve written before about Canada Post. Well, silly me, I trusted them again.

I’ve been stymied on a video project for a while and one of my friends agreed to help me finish it. I needed to send him 100 gigs of footage, so I cleared off one of my terabyte drives and packed it up. My studio is equidistant from a UPS store and a Canada Post outlet. I picked the wrong one.

I paid for insurance. I paid for guaranteed delivery. I was promised it would arrive last Thursday — and I double-checked this because I’m under time pressure. Today, Tuesday, it arrived… AT MY HOUSE IN TORONTO. They gave themselves a five day extension and then did it wrong anyway: CLUSTERFAIL.

This is a truly monstrous waste of taxpayer dollars. I would probably be even more upset if I paid taxes.

Naomi Klein claimed, in The Shock Doctrine, that the Right’s modus operandi is to wait for disasters and then use them as causi belli (forgive my probably-wrong Latin pluralization) to execute their agenda. Well, here’s a freebie: our economy is SHRINKING — there aren’t enough resources to go around — let’s stop delivering post in, say, the GTA. Just for a week.

I predict that people won’t notice, let alone care. If they do, either, just restart it.

But imagine: a whole week of not killing trees for paper-based spam, not having our identities and belongings stolen, and having packages delivered TO THEIR RECIPIENTS (I can’t stress this point enough — it’s really the whole key to “delivery”, as a concept, and I’m willing to pay extra for it)… Oh, what a magical land of joy our fair city might become.

And once that experiment is successful we could roll it out to the whole nation:

Seriously, though: I would rather Harper just keep the entire postal budget for himself. The money would do me just as much good, but he’d retire from politics. Maybe he could split it with Ford.

[UPDATE: THEY BILLED US EXTRA TO TAKE DELIVERY AT THE WRONG LOCATION.]

Section 47.1 of the Canadian Wheat Board Act says:

The Minister shall not cause to be introduced in Parliament a bill that would exclude any [grain]…unless:

1. the Minister has consulted with the board about the exclusion or extension; and
2. the producers of the grain have voted in favour of the exclusion or extension, the voting process having been determined by the Minister.

The Federal Court (a special federal court that rules on civil suits against the government) ruled that the introduction of Bill C-18, An Act to Reorganize the Canadian Wheat Board, violated the rules of “manner and form” introduced by the Wheat Board Act. I’d say the Speaker should have refused to allow the reading of the Bill. But given that the Bill has been passed by both Houses, what should the Governor General do?

This interesting article about British Parliament explains that it is reasonable that Parliament be bound by “manner and form”: whenever the sovereign is an entity other than an actual person, there must be rules to determine the sovereign’s will. Parliament is sovereign, and so must follow manner and form rules; and because Parliament is sovereign, they can pass manner and form rules to define their own will.

The Clarity Act is a similar piece of manner and form legislation.

If the manner and form rules have not been followed, Parliament has not actually passed an Act, they’ve just made vacuous statements. So the Governor General has no act to sign. The Governor General does not have the power to pass Acts on his own, so if he decides to sign some piece of paper that resembles an Act, the courts should ignore that piece of paper.

The government should have amended the Canadian Wheat Board Act as a separate piece of legislation and there would have been no problem.

BC has automatic roadside suspensions for drivers with a blood alcohol content over 0.05. These suspensions are in addition to penalties under the Criminal Code for drivers with a BAC over 0.08. The BC Supreme Court just found the extra penalties for BACs over 0.08 to be unconstitutional.

The judge framed the roadside suspensions as a case where the police act as judge, jury and corrections officer. Obviously the Charter protects people against this kind of informal trial. But I’d argue that it’s not the police officer acting as a judge, it’s the breathalyzer. The police are stopping motorists and administering breathalyzers as they would normally, but then instead of the breathalyzer telling the police officer to recommend charges, the breathalyzer runs the trial and tells the police officer to administer punishment.

If breathalyzers are accurate beyond a reasonable doubt, there’s no reason why their ruling would be less just than that of a jury. For other crimes, our justice system is designed so that bias can only be applied into letting people go free, but that’s still unfair to society. A police officer can decide not to recommend charges, a Crown prosecutor can decide not to recommend a trial and a judge or jury can decide that there is insufficient evidence. Automated justice is juster justice.

It’s also worth pointing out that the reason BC had to use administrative penalties rather than a normal criminal charge is that the federal government has jurisdiction over the Criminal Code. Bill C-10, the Safe Streets and Communities Act, does a lot of things, but fighting drunk driving isn’t one of them. And it’s better to let BC experiment rather than immediately roll it out over the whole country. Which is why provinces should get jurisdiction over the Criminal Code or separate from Confederation.

CRTC regulates TV commercial loudness after 30 years of nonstop consumer complaints — next on the agenda: telegrams typed in ALLCAPS, parchments that are too crackly when unfurled.

Via CBC a cool, interactive, 360° video of the riots. They don’t look that bad. I would have felt safe.

“Striking postal workers seek public’s support”? I think they’re disastrously overestimating the goodwill Canadians have towards lazy, incompetent thieves.

The NDP and the Conservatives, both, are products of industrial capitalism: the former represent factory workers and the latter factory owners. Both love factories.

The Liberals and Bloc have shit the bed so thoroughly that progressive liberalism in Canada is essentially dead. In the absence of real change I’m adjusting my long-term plans to include an eventual escape to the Eurozone. Git while the gittin’s good — before things get so bad we’re ghettoized in a post-industrial econocalypse.

Enjoy the next five years, and shame on us all.

It’s not paranoia if they’re actually out to get you. I’ve avoided “liking” politicians on the Facebooks because of 1984, and it turns out I was totally right: Harper is a cryptofascist and Facebook is a telescreen.

Heil Harper!

Just kidding, I like that Iggy is taking actual stands and scoring rhetorical points this election — he collapsed QUICK last time. The linked article, above, locked me up as a Liberal this round.

This election vote ABC — Anything But Conservative.

Idiot Toronto mayor Bob Ford was sent up by NOW, and had city custodial workers scrap the paper where they found it. Click through for story:

I am currently reporting from a secret location somewhere in The Great White North. Without going into specific affiliations* my vote cannot determine the outcome of my local race, barring outlying events.

I’m left with a party vote — my candidate can’t win. I plan to cast for Federal funding so the candidate of my choice in the riding in which I eventually settle will be better able to undo whatever damage the Conservatives are able to wreak in this next cycle.

Essentially: when I vote GreeNDP in Toronto next time I want them to be able to afford signage.

Comments on this strategy? Make sense? I figure that we’re heading for another minority — what’s changed?

* (this election vote ABC — Anything But Conservative)