Two great finishes. Two great teams.
It’s official: Kleibrink and Gushue will play for Canada in Torino.
Bureaucratic Build Up At Pelican
28 November 2005 – 10:41 pm
It seems that along with the silt the bureaucratic nonsense is building up at Pelican Lake. The Province of Manitoba is being prevented from opening the artificial inlet to the lake by DFO because the inlet has been classified as protected habitat. The problem is that the purpose of the inlet is to manage the lake level and therefore protect the larger habitat it represents.
Anyone who knows anything about Pelican can tell you that the level of the lake is critical to the health of the lake. I think this is true of most the lake in the area. The thing is that Pelican is most valuable as a viable fish habitat and sailing lake. Left to its own devices (i.e. with no reliable natural inflow) the lake would likely be neither. It makes no sense that the minor habitat of the inlet should dictate the management of the whole lake.
Election Season
28 November 2005 – 10:15 pm
Recent polls have come in quite strongly against an election right now. And, I agree that as things currently stand Canada is likely to come out of this with another minority government. However, I also don’t see much evidence that an election on the Prime Minister’s timeline would have produced a majority government either.
In the end I’m sort of glad the opposition decided to call out the government today. Ever since the Gomery Report and especially in the last weeks Ottawa has been in election mode. And, once that cat is out it doesn’t go back in the bag easily. So I don’t think the choice was between a holiday election campaign or one in the spring. The choice was between a shorter official election campaign now or electioneering from now until March or April.
Making Danger Illegal
I heard on the news yesterday that Opposition MLA Leanne Rowat introduced a private members bill to amend the HTA to ban passengers riding on the exterior of a vehicle. Primarily, this is intended to make it illegal to ride in a pickup box.
Over the years a number of people have been killed while riding in the back of pickups generally due to being thrown out in an accident. I’m unaware of specific statistics on such fatalities, but my intuition is that they form a relatively small part of overall traffic fatalities. However, these type of accidents tend to receive a great deal more attention than others which may lead to a perception of more significance than is warranted.
Regardless of that, I really don’t like the whole idea of this legislation. Yes, riding in the back of pickup truck is more dangerous than riding in the cab, but it is also obviously so. In other words, for a sensible person to ride in the back of a pickup it requires consciously accepting some risk. I often ride in pickup boxes, usually because I’m helping to transport items that need to be steadied. I do this well aware of the risks and in what I regard as a safe manner.
In my view, we need to apply a common sense measure to things like these. Just because someone died doing something a little bit or a lot foolish doesn’t mean that activity needs to be banned. Of course, one look around shows that we’ve gone a long way down this road already. Keeping on this way will only lead to more regulation of our lives.
This is one of the problems of having “professional” legistlators: if we pay people to make laws they will have to find things to make laws about whether such laws are truly required or not. A politician on the campaign trail wants to be able to demonstrate that they’ve done something. Creating laws to ban some kind of dangerous and foolish activity are a notably effictive way to achieve that goal.
Unfortunately for me, all indicators point to the majority of my fellow citizens disagreeing with me on this point. I can rant and rave all I want, but my view effectively irrelevant.