Category Archive: 2002

While it’s Senate is recommending the legalization of marijuana, the Canadian Government realizes where the real money lies.  Look out drug companies, parliament is finding new way’s of muscling in on your lucrative profits as Canada seems to be spending mor_e on Royal Commissions into healthcare costs than they are spending on Health Care itself.

Flashback:  My Story of the Year for 2001, “Drug Profiteers Lose Big in Game of Supply and Demand.” Canadian Minister of Health, Alan Rock, puts welfare of the country ahead of concerns for Drug company patents/profits when he purchases Athrax vaccines from generic companies at substantially less than Bayer would have sold it to us.

Bonus Prediction: “Roy Romanov “smokes” all other candidates en route to an early Senate appointment.”

This champion of the common man (unless he gets in the way of American Oil interests by complaining about how his land, livestock and/or loved ones are being poisoned by wells that are being erected on his property without his consent) travels to New York City (!?) in order to tell the Government of Canada, “YU-GI-OH to hell and take Kyoto with you!”

We take the kids for a 3 day tour of the zoo’s and theme parks in the Eastern Townships of Quebec at time when the price of gasoline is topping out at 72 cents a liter.  Trouble is, we spend more money on bottled water (at prices ranging from $1.25 to $2.50 per .981 liter bottle) than we spend on gasoline over the course of the journey.

In a rare display of inter-regional East-West solidarity in Canada, Eastern farmers attempted to “bale” western farmers out of the throws of one of the biggest droughts to hit the area since the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression.  Notably absent from this initiative were the Federal politicians and their agencies who were late to board the gravy train (but not too late for the photo-shoots).

A Gun Registry program that was to have paid for itself after an expected $2 million start-up cost winds up costing $1 billion (and counting). Meanwhile, the Toronto police force is still at a loss as to why no arrests have been made in what amounts to an epidemic of gangland shootings – but at least they know who doesn’t own the guns that were used …or do they?

The CBC, tenaciously attacked, then Minister of Defense, Art Egg-on-his-face (who later became Minister of “Not-a-leg-to-stand-on” … some say in a vain effort to save on the cost of boots) for his failure to identify members of a top secret Canadian anti-terrorist squad from an obscure photograph. Not long thereafter some clowns at the CBC are forced to admit that the widely distributed companion book to “Canada, A People’s History – Part 2”  displayed an Australian soldier rather than a Canadian soldier on it’s cover.

It was just too close to call.   I can see Enron, Nortel and Worldcom in a pack of others including our own Canadian Gun Registry.  There is just no accounting for how much mor_e on this front will have to occur before our leaders (and/or their managers) shed (or shred) their blind abeyance to Lee Iacocca’s doctrine of, “keep the bean counters out of it, and let the managers manage.”

News Flash: Courtesy of his shrewd, albeit coincidental or extremely lucky sale of about $100,000,000 worth of his company’s stock just prior to it’s collapse, John Roth, ex-CEO of Nortel is now comfortably retired in his palatial home north of Toronto, while his ex-employees and stockholders are mostly retiring to homelessness.

A year after of the September 11, 2001 terror attack/immolation of the Twin Towers of Finance, some are wondering how many other Enrons, Worldcoms (and other associated high “hands in the cookie jar”) are thanking Bin Laden for saving them the cost of paper shredders and the additional time to cover their tracks?

In an unprecedented call to arms, English hockey fans everywhere demanded, and got (and you and I will pay for) a salary of  $500,000 for Ron MacLean to appear during one 15 minute intermission per week on Hockey Night in Canada. Now, if English Canadians could only feel so strongly about something mor_e on the lines of, say… federal elections (but, I suppose, they might if our elected officials could only stop bickering for all but 15 minutes per week).