A Clear Lack of Planning

If you've been in Alberta for the past week, you will have no doubt heard about the disastrous fiasco that has been the H1N1 Vaccination Program.

As of this morning, the vaccination program has been suspended.

Let's see - we have a flu virus running around that in its most serious cases kills otherwise healthy people extremely quickly, the government at both the Federal and Provincial levels has been blitzing the media for weeks telling the public to get vaccinated, and the government opens "mass vaccination" clinics in the major centers. They expected what kind of turnout?

Then we get Liepert blaming the general public for turning up for vaccination - amid stories of supply problems and other issues. If this is the kind of wonderful planning we can expect out of our new Health Superboard, it's no wonder that Albertans are skeptical of this government's ability to tie its own shoelaces, much less actually govern.

People are scared - with good reason. When this virus kills suddenly, can anyone blame parents for fearing for their children's health? When the week that vaccinations began, a thirteen year old hockey player in Ontario got sick and succumbed to this flu within 24 hours, one can only imagine that parents got worried - and rightly so.

While I give full marks to the staff working at those clinics for their efforts to keep things calm and orderly, the Alberta Government, and Alberta Health Services in particular, get a big fat goose egg for their planning and execution. Four clinics in the city of Calgary? Please. Winnipeg has 12 clinics for a population half that of Calgary.

Calgarians were standing in lineups for upwards of 5 hours, and then getting turned away. This is a complete fiasco - the governments made it plenty clear that we should get vaccinated, and then they tell us that we shouldn't get vaccinated? No. Wrong.

Liepert screwed this up monumentally - and he gets to wear the fallout. Don Braid explains how badly Liepert and Stelmach have bungled this rollout.

But even if supplies were ample, the public health officials were on the edge of a crisis they created. They simply didn't supply enough access points to meet the huge demand they completely failed to anticipate.

In hindsight, it's almost beyond belief that they only set up 10 clinics for two million people in Calgary and Edmonton.

B.C., by contrast, will have dozens of smaller clinics when H1N1 vaccination starts for the public (high-risk people are already getting shots). So B.C. looks smart by holding back vaccine. I'm not sure it should; people surely have a right to the vaccine as soon as it's available.

Trick Or Trout!

You know that the Vatican's lost their marbles when they start echoing the fundamentalist nutballs:

What millions around the world consider a harmless tradition bound by unconvincing costumes and mountains of teeth-rotting sweets is, according to the Catholic Church, riddled with a dark undercurrent of occultism and is "absolutely anti-Christian".

But the Church's hypocrisy gets even richer - as they descend into the depths of stupidity:

Earlier this week, the Catholic Church in Spain also condemned the growing popularity of Halloween, saying it threatened to overshadow the Christian festival of All Saints' Day.

We don't need to spend too much time reflecting on the fact that much of the modern Christian calendar is based on conveniently placing holy celebrations at times which conveniently coincided with various pagan counterparts ... in a deliberate effort to overshadow the pagan celebrations.

Coming from an organization that claims the Pope has some kind of ultimate holy conduit to God that the rest of us can never possibly hope to share in, it seem particularly ironic that they worry about "occultism" - as little could be more occult than claiming to be in direct communication with the supernatural.

Stelmach Needs To Take A Long Walk Off A Short Pier

What is it with Alberta's governments and their incessant idiotic approach to anything resembling human rights issues?

The most recent outrage comes in the form of collecting and analyzing all prisoner communications.

Superficially, one might think "what's so bad about that?", after all they're in prison which means they are convicted of something, right?

The proposed changes to Alberta's Corrections Act broaden what provincial prisons can monitor, allowing for any technology inmates might access in the future, such as video or computer communications. Databases will be created, and, given "reasonable grounds," prison directors can search what inmates have said or written.

Well - there's a bit of a problem here. Someone being held in a remand facility is not necessarily convicted of anything - they may be facing serious charges, but they have not yet been convicted of them. Last I checked, this violates the fundamental principle of our justice system - the presumption of innocence.

Second, it arguably violates a key tenet of Canada's Charter of Rights:

8. Everyone has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure.

Please note the lack of exclusions in S. 8 and the surrounding areas regarding someone who has been incarcerated, so presumably S8. applies just as much behind bars as it does on the outside. Around the clock surveillance and recording of all communications arguably constitutes an unreasonable search.

I just love how the bureaucrats are going to invent their own rules for "reasonable grounds" to use this accumulated information. This isn't going to be written in law - it's going to be at the whim of politicians and bureaucrats. I just can't imagine how that could go wrong, can you?

But, this isn't just about what can happen to you behind bars. It's about what the Conservatives from Alberta actually understand about human and civil rights. To them, it's all conditional. Are you conforming to their ideal little worldview? If not, then you don't deserve to have any rights, and they think they can arbitrarily revoke your rights at their whim.

Alberta's doing it, and make no mistake about it, Harper would do the same and worse if ever granted a majority.

That Would Be No Loss

So...CanWest is threatening to shut down the National Post.

Somehow, for a paper that has focused more on being partisan than doing actual journalism, I just don't feel like there's much of a loss involved here.

National Post was started because Conrad Black had a snit with Jean Chretien - it wasn't started because the country needed - or would benefit from - another newspaper. It was started to foment a campaign against the governing party. When the Aspers acquired it (as Conrad Black's empire was crumbling), they proceeded to drive the whole thing off the deep end of partisan extremism.

If ... and I think it's a remote if right now ... CanWest does shut down the NP, we will have simply lost another media source that overplayed its hand - not unlike the former "Alberta Report" publication which tried to go national.

You Can't Have It Both Ways

I could have predicted that this was going to happen after the Tsuu T'ina band rejected the last agreement with the City of Calgary to build a ring road across Tsuu T'ina lands.

In an Oct. 2 letter obtained by the Herald, Big Plume says the tribe has the right to be consulted on "any and all actions or decisions that impact on the Treaty and Aboriginal Rights of Tsuu T'ina Nation. . . . Any interference by the City of Calgary of Tsuu T'ina Nation's rights to enter and leave its lands at any point along Tsuu T'ina Nation boundaries constitutes a breach of our rights under Treaty No. 7."

I have a newsflash for the Tsuu T'ina band - Calgary has a problem, and they're right smack in the middle of it. Negotiations have been ongoing with the Tsuu T'ina for decades over the alignment of a ring road. Every attempt the city has made to negotiate an arrangement has been nixed at one stage or another.

Now they're whining because the city's doing something "on their doorstep" without their consent? Too bad. The Tsuu T'ina band's commercialization efforts - whether it's the casino, the monster eyesore billboards along Glenmore or the Ashphalt plant (which does a lovely job of polluting the air in areas of Calgary that lie just west of the Band's land) have all been slammed in on the premise that the Tsuu T'ina don't have to play ball with Calgary (or Alberta, for that matter).

Calgary needs to take steps to correct the traffic flow at 37 St. This is not optional, nor is it something we can afford to sit around and "discuss" for another ten years.

The city will continue to provide the tribe legal access through the Anderson Road and 37th Street intersection, he added.

"We are moving forward with the detailed design for an interchange at 37th Street and Glenmore Trail," Bronconnier said.

This should come as no surprise to anybody on the Band council - or within the band overall. Calgary has to deal with its issues - and if the Tsuu T'ina aren't prepared to be a constructive participant in the conversation, then they have nothing to complain about when the city moves forward without them.

Is This Cost Just Early Development?

I think Jeffrey Simpson makes some interesting points about the costs and estimated effectiveness of recently announced Carbon Capture/Sequestration projects.

We get, at best, a reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions of 2.1 million tonnes. “At best” because the announcements were tempered with hedging words such as “could” achieve and “up to one million tonnes.” Therefore, something less than 2.1 million tonnes might actually be captured.

Let's be generous and assume the two projects costing $1.6-billion do in fact bury 2.1 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, the most-prevalent gas contributing to global warming. Such a reduction would mean a per-tonne carbon-reduction cost of about $761 – staggeringly, wildly, mind-blowingly higher than any other conceivable measure designed to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Want a contrast? Alberta has a piddling carbon tax on emissions over a certain level that companies can avoid by paying $15 a tonne into an technology fund.

Now, superficially, Simpson's argument makes a lot of rational sense - these are seemingly very expensive projects with minimal impact.

The question that I find myself musing about is whether this is simply the cost of developing a new technology. In the WWII era when the first computers were being developed for code cracking and other similar tasks, the computers did very limited work and cost huge amounts (especially on a per unit of work basis). Today I can walk into the local computer store and walk out with more computer power for a bit of pocket change than those hugely expensive specialty devices some six decades earlier.

So ... are we just seeing the baby steps of a new technology that will overwhelm us with its capability in a few decades, or is the technology a dead end - one which we are already so close to the practical limits of simply be some well known laws of physics and chemistry?

It's an interesting question to mull over - one which I certainly do not have the answers for. As taxpayers, we are ultimately the investors paying the freight for these projects. We should be paying close attention to the progress of these efforts, and insistent that there be measurable results - not just "smoke and mirrors".

Well... Perhaps That Explains The Weather

Someone at the Calgary Herald actually a story criticizing the HarperCon$:

The picture was of grinning Nova Scotia MP Gerald Keddy, handing a constituent an oversized cheque for a local ice rink, emblazoned with the Conservative Party logo. The giant prop cheque was even signed by the Nova Scotia MP, making it look like the $302,620 gift was courtesy of the Conservative Party, bankrolled by Keddy when in fact it was a federal stimulus grant.

This is an abuse of taxpayer dollars for partisan purposes and personal gain and raises concerns about how the program is being administered and if the government grants are being awarded disproportionately more to Conservative ridings.

... and points out:

As it is, the Conservative government is spending millions in public money blitzing the airwaves, spending five times as many dollars promoting its economic plan than raising public awareness about the flu pandemic.

Considering that this is Calgary - about the safest place in Canada for Harper, that's a stinging rebuke.