Questioning P3's

No one has been a bigger salesman for the concept of “P3’s” than British Columbia Premier Gordon Campbell.

And on paper and at the hotel ballroom dinner, the notion of Public Private Partnerships seems full of good potential.

Let’s get the crafty, knowledgeable private sector, which know all the secrets of hiring workers and buying supplies and materials to join forces with governments to build those much-needed roads and dams and hospitals.

Costs will be cheaper and more efficient and the job will get done on time, on budget and with the liabilities shared among the participants.

But, as with all issues in life, intention is everything.

And from the outset, do we really know why Mr. Campbell favors so strongly this P3 model?

Is it the alleged efficiencies and cost benefits?

Or is it, as many suspect, that P3 is a not so elaborate pea and shell game whose sole purpose is to give business to friends and supporters?

The case of care homes for seniors on Vancouver Island is worth a look in this regard.

Cowichan Lodge had happily served the community for many years. That is, until the Vancouver Island health Authority, announced out of the blue that the Lodge would be torn down and replaced by a private facility called Sunridge Place and that the residents of Cowichan Lodge would be dis-lodged and moved to the new facility.

The community was understandably outraged. Rallies were held, 12,000 locals signed a petition in protest, and the news coverage chronicled people’s angers and fears. To no avail, of course. The one was closed, the other opened and the elderly residents were moved in.

Today, we learn that the elderly at Sunridge and the families who pay their bills are finding new costs and expenses at every turn.

Pharmaceuticals cost more. Wheelchairs, mattresses and underwear are more expensive at the shiny new P3.

The managers of Sunridge Place and the VIHA have their excuses at the ready. “We don’t have anything to do with the billing,” says the Health Authority.

Well, why the hell don’t you? If your going to uproot seniors and move them across the street or across town, the least you could do is be responsible.

Or was that part of the original intention?

As David Mamet says in Glengarry Glen Ross, “You don’t sell a guy a car. You sell him many cars over 15 or 20 years!” And service and tires and CD players.

Drugs are more expensive at the new P3 because Sunridge, unlike Cowichan before ir doesn’t buy in bulk. And oddly, residents are compelled to buy from the in-house, more expensive pharmacy. Why? Why can’t they buy down the road at Shoppers or Safeway?

Cloverdale’s Zion Park Manor is soon to close, to be replaced by…well, you know.

If governments are going to enter in to contracts with private suppliers for public services, they might consider having some dominion over ultimate costs to the consumers, who are called citizens.

Unless, of course, there were other intentions all along.

Charm is Gone

Michael Rennie's Man from Space was charming.

In Robert Wise's 1951 classic sci-fi flick, Rennie as Klaatu smiled and laughed and treated all earthlings with the same kindly patience that he showed Billy Gray, the young boy who leads him to the Einstein-like Sam Jaffe character.

Now, in a huge blow-up version soon to be released, the huge movie star, who absolutely cannot act, Keanu Reeves, stares glumly at everyone and everything while stuff explodes indiscriminately.

Why not remake "An American in Paris" with Jay Leno or "Lawrence of Arabia" with Greg Kinnear?

"Quantum of Solace," the new Bond movie is the last of that Franchise that I will see.

The problem isn't so much the glum, downright miserable charmless take we get from Daniel Craig (who is in fact a helluva good actor), but the whole fiery wreck.

I have no idea what happened in this movie. The photography was spectacular, the sound was overwhelming, the fights and car crashes were in your face, but...what happened? Who was who?

And where was Sean Connery's charm?

The best fight scene in all the Bond movies came in "Fromm Russia With Love," when Connery and Robert Shaw batted each other around a train compartment. The whole affair seemed plausibly terrifying and each punch and choke hold was visceral.

A two and a half hour movie without a single joke or smile is not watchable.

By the Numbers

ITEM: Chrysler Canada is threatening to take their car plant and bolt to the US. Give us $1.6 Billion in taxpayers bounty or we will leave 8,000 Canadians out of work. Nice.

ITEM: Condo construction accounts for 60% of all new housing starts in Vancouver and those starts are down 29% over last month. Of course, it's Christmas.

ITEM: Tribune Co., which owns the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Cubs baseball team, among other gems, has filed for bankruptcy. And you thought you had problems.

ITEM: Air Canada is bleeding from its many noses as usual and its CFO said, "Later."

ITEM: Anheuser-Busch, brewers of Bud, is cutting 1,400 jobs to save $1.5 Billion.

All the news out of Ottawa is about the seat jockeying bull.

Nothing yet about the economic guillotine hanging over Canadian heads.

Fiddling while Rome burns? Is that a good enough metaphor?

Piddling and putzing while profits are punished?

Head in the sand? Head deep up your own....?

I have friends deeply divided on the Harper-Coalition noise.

This is easy for me. I am not torn at all.

I think they are all disgusting. Harper and the Liberal/NDP/Bloc have equally spit in the face of democracy.

Tell me, show me how one side or the other is blameless.

Show me a statement from either camp in the last 14 days that displays an iota of concern for Canadian citizens.

And the media is so caught up in the cults of personality that it has lost any small focus that it might have had.

Swim, Baby, Swim

The costs of building an expansion to Vancouver's Aquarium, like the costs of building anything, are soaring.

The original estimate was $80 Million. Now it is approaching $120 Million.

So what?

Build the thing.

The Park Board long ago approved this expenditure.

It's good for the City, good for kids and families, good for tourism and good for me. I like the place.

Build it and stop kvetching.

Two Letters to the Editor

Democracy on strike

RONALD WRIGHT author, A Short History of Progress December 8, 2008 Salt Spring Island, B.C. --

Eight years ago, Canadians watched in disbelief as the U.S. failed to carry out a recount in the election that installed George W. Bush. We had reason to be proud of the advantages of our parliamentary system. Now Canada has made an even more serious constitutional blunder, and it is our turn to hang our heads in shame. Modern parliamentary democracy rests on a single great principle: The government must have the consent of the governed. This consent is delegated by the people to their MPs. The government must then be able to carry the "confidence" of the House of Commons. Majority governments rarely lose that confidence; minority governments often do. When the government cannot carry the House, it falls. Suspending Parliament to dodge a vote the government fears it will lose is so deeply undemocratic, it should never have been mooted by politicians, the media or the Governor-General. The English Civil War was fought on this very issue - after King Charles I shut down Parliament when he found its restrictions uncongenial. The King lost his head. We no longer behead people in Canada, but Stephen Harper's coup d'état cannot be allowed to stand, not least because of the precedent. Any future government can now slip the leash of democracy in the same way. This is how constitutions fail.

JOY RUTTAN December 8, 2008 Gatineau, Que. --

Since Stephen Harper has refused to go to work, it would seem that he is on strike and therefore should not be getting his salary. How much strike pay is enough for a dishonourable prime minister?

What a Difference a Century Makes

1929 and Now......

Back in 1929 Financial Crash it was said that some Wall Street Stockbrokers and Bankers JUMPED from their office windows and committed suicide when confronted with the news of their firms' and clients' financial ruin. Many people were said to almost feel a little sorry for them. In 2008 the attitude has changed somewhat

Voice in the Wilderness

It is no accident that millions of people world-wide turn every day to "alternate" news services on the web and elsewhere. Journalism has long been a questionable activity, in the main being nothing less than a back-up system for whatever powers that may be. Two days ago, one of your national rags praised endlessly the Aga Khan and all his good works here in Canada and abroad. You'll excuse me if I don't leap off the table in joy. You'll excuse me if I feel at a very deep level some odd suspicions about "making nice" with Muslims and the subtle selling of Islam, which seems to be the biggest business in the polite world today.

As for that enormous fake, Deepak Chopra, mentioned below, don't get me started.

To see this dandy on CNN immediately after the Mumbai massacres, spouting drivel was truly stomach-churning.

I know, these are dreadful thoughts. But I have them.

The following article was sent to us by our friend, Robert Werner. It comes from the Orange County Register.

Friday, December 5, 2008

Mark Steyn: Jews get killed, but Muslims feel vulnerable

By MARK STEYN

Syndicated columnist

Shortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a reader of Tim Blair, The Sydney Daily Telegraph's columnist wag, sent him a note-perfect parody of a typical newspaper headline:

"British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow's Train Bombing."

Indeed. And so it goes. This time round – Mumbai – it was the Associated Press that filed a story about how Muslims "found themselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion".

Oh, I don't know about that. In fact, you'd be hard pressed from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was "linked" to any religion, least of all one beginning with "I-" and ending in "-slam." In the three years since those British bombings, the media have more or less entirely abandoned the offending formulations – "Islamic terrorists," "Muslim extremists" – and by the time of the assault on Mumbai found it easier just to call the alleged perpetrators "militants" or "gunmen" or "teenage gunmen," as in the opening line of this report in The Australian: "An Adelaide woman in India for her wedding is lucky to be alive after teenage gunmen ran amok."

Kids today, eh? Always running amok in an aimless fashion.

The veteran British TV anchor Jon Snow, on the other hand, opted for the more cryptic locution "practitioners." "Practitioners" of what, exactly?

Hard to say. And getting harder. For the Wall Street Journal, Tom Gross produced a jaw-dropping round-up of Mumbai media coverage: The discovery that, for the first time in an Indian terrorist atrocity, Jews had been attacked, tortured and killed produced from the New York Times a serene befuddlement: "It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."

Hmm. Greater Mumbai forms one of the world's five biggest cities. It has a population of nearly 20 million. But only one Jewish center, located in a building that gives no external clue as to the bounty waiting therein. An "accidental hostage scene" that one of the "practitioners" just happened to stumble upon? "I must be the luckiest jihadist in town. What are the odds?"

Meanwhile, the New Age guru Deepak Chopra laid all the blame on American foreign policy for "going after the wrong people" and inflaming moderates, and "that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster" in Mumbai.

Really? The inflammation just "appears"? Like a bad pimple? The "fairer" we get to the, ah, inflamed militant practitioners, the unfairer we get to everyone else. At the Chabad House, the murdered Jews were described in almost all the Western media as "ultra-Orthodox," "ultra-" in this instance being less a term of theological precision than a generalized code for "strange, weird people, nothing against them personally, but they probably shouldn't have been over there in the first place."

Are they stranger or weirder than their killers? Two "inflamed moderates" entered the Chabad House, shouted "Allahu Akbar!," tortured the Jews and murdered them, including the young rabbi's pregnant wife. Their 2-year-old child escaped because of a quick-witted (non-Jewish) nanny who hid in a closet and then, risking being mowed down by machine-gun fire, ran with him to safety.

The Times was being silly in suggesting this was just an "accidental" hostage opportunity – and not just because, when Muslim terrorists capture Jews, it's not a hostage situation, it's a mass murder-in-waiting. The sole surviving "militant" revealed that the Jewish center had been targeted a year in advance. The 28-year-old rabbi was Gavriel Holtzberg. His pregnant wife was Rivka Holtzberg. Their orphaned son is Moshe Holtzberg, and his brave nanny is Sandra Samuels. Remember their names, not because they're any more important than the Indians, Britons and Americans targeted in the attack, but because they are an especially revealing glimpse into the pathologies of the perpetrators.

In a well-planned attack on iconic Mumbai landmarks symbolizing great power and wealth, the "militants" nevertheless found time to divert 20 percent of their manpower to torturing and killing a handful of obscure Jews helping the city's poor in a nondescript building. If they were just "teenage gunmen" or "militants" in the cause of Kashmir, engaged in a more or less conventional territorial dispute with India, why kill the only rabbi in Mumbai? Dennis Prager got to the absurdity of it when he invited his readers to imagine Basque separatists attacking Madrid: "Would the terrorists take time out to murder all those in the Madrid Chabad House? The idea is ludicrous."

And yet we take it for granted that Pakistani "militants" in a long-running border dispute with India would take time out of their hectic schedule to kill Jews. In going to ever more baroque lengths to avoid saying "Islamic" or "Muslim" or "terrorist," we have somehow managed to internalize the pathologies of these men.

We are enjoined to be "understanding," and we're doing our best. A Minnesotan suicide bomber (now there's a phrase) originally from Somalia returned to the old country and blew up himself and 29 other people last October. His family prevailed upon your government to have his parts (or as many of them as could be sifted from the debris) returned to the United States at taxpayer expense and buried in Burnsville Cemetery. Well, hey, in the current climate, what's the big deal about a federal bailout of jihad operational expenses? If that's not "too big to fail," what is?

Last week, a Canadian critic reprimanded me for failing to understand that Muslims feel "vulnerable." Au contraire, they project tremendous cultural confidence, as well they might: They're the world's fastest-growing population. A prominent British Muslim announced the other day that, when the United Kingdom becomes a Muslim state, non-Muslims will be required to wear insignia identifying them as infidels. If he's feeling "vulnerable," he's doing a terrific job of covering it up.

We are told that the "vast majority" of the 1.6 billion to 1.8 billion Muslims (in Deepak Chopra's estimate) are "moderate." Maybe so, but they're also quiet. And, as the AIDS activists used to say, "Silence=Acceptance." It equals acceptance of the things done in the name of their faith. Rabbi Holtzberg was not murdered because of a territorial dispute over Kashmir or because of Bush's foreign policy. He was murdered in the name of Islam – "Allahu Akbar."

I wrote in my book, "America Alone," that "reforming" Islam is something only Muslims can do. But they show very little sign of being interested in doing it, and the rest of us are inclined to accept that. Spread a rumor that a Quran got flushed down the can at Gitmo, and there'll be rioting throughout the Muslim world. Publish some dull cartoons in a minor Danish newspaper, and there'll be protests around the planet. But slaughter the young pregnant wife of a rabbi in Mumbai in the name of Allah, and that's just business as usual. And, if it is somehow "understandable" that for the first time in history it's no longer safe for a Jew to live in India, then we are greasing the skids for a very slippery slope. Muslims, the AP headline informs us, "worry about image." Not enough.

©MARK STEYN

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Hello

Last Sunday, the family of Steller's Blue Jays returned to our yard.

With the massive influx of crows in recent years, other birds large and small, had been scarce.

I don't know where those yappy black devils have gone for the moment, but it is a joy to see and hear some other birds back in our trees and shrubs.

Speaking of which - shrubs - my Christams cactus is once again blooming right on time. It is quite amazing. Not only does it do this like a clock - or a calendar - every year, but, added bonus, it blooms again in January and February, helping to carry us through to spring.

Someone Somewhere is Doing Something

Below is the YouTube video of Obama's Works Program announcement from Saturday.

Here is the NY Times piece describing the largest public works construction program since the inception of the interstate highway system a half century ago as he seeks to put together a plan to resuscitate the reeling economy.

Are the Four Fools north of the border listening?

Or are they still clawing out each other's already blind eyes for their share of the windy pie?

Barack Obama Pledges Massive Works Program

HISTORY LESSON

(CNN) -- Paris, 1948. In the shadow of the Holocaust, the fledgling United Nations meets to adopt one of its first human rights treaties.

Raphael Lemkin asked, "Why is the killing of a million a lesser crime than the killing of a single individual?" [Photo] Applause shakes the room, cameras flash -- and at the center, a single, tired, unassuming man: Raphael Lemkin. It was, at last, a victory for a tireless crusader who had fought for his entire life against genocide -- and coined the term that describes the world's most heinous crime.

"This new official world made a solemn pledge to preserve the life of the peoples and races of mankind," Lemkin later wrote.

Sixty years ago this month, the U.N. voted unanimously to adopt the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It was ambitious, serious, far-reaching -- and largely the result of Lemkin's lifetime of effort.

A Pole and a Jew, Lemkin had watched in horror as Hitler nearly succeeded in his plan to exterminate the Jews. Six million Jews -- including 40 members of Lemkin's family -- died at the hands of the Nazis. Today, we call what happened at Auschwitz and the other death camps "genocide." But at the time, there was no name for the Nazis' crimes. The word "genocide" did not exist. In 1944, Lemkin wrote a book about the Nazis. In it, he combined the Greek "genos" for race with the Latin "-cide" for killing: Genocide. Lemkin had named the crime he spent a lifetime trying to prevent.

As a child in Poland, Lemkin was inspired by the stories his mother told him at the fireside -- stories of history and heroism, of suffering and struggle. As a Jew he witnessed cruelty and persecution firsthand: from the bribes his parents were forced to pay, to a pogrom that killed dozens nearby. From his mother, and from his circumstance, Lemkin developed early a strong desire to better the world and protect the innocent and the weak.

"The appeal for the protection of the innocent from destruction set a chain reaction in my mind," Lemkin later wrote. "It followed me all my life." As a teen, Lemkin learned through news accounts that the Turkish government was slaughtering its Christian Armenian citizens. The government claimed it was putting down an Armenian revolt. Over 8 years they killed a million Armenian men, women and children in massacres and forced marches. To this day, Turkey denies a genocide took place. Few of the perpetrators ever faced justice. "I was shocked," Lemkin wrote. "Why is a man punished when he kills another man? Why is the killing of a million a lesser crime than the killing of a single individual?"

Lemkin didn't have an answer to the question. But, as a young man, he devised a bold plan. He would write an international law that would punish -- and prevent -- racial mass murder. By October 1933, Lemkin was an influential Warsaw lawyer, well-connected and versed in international law. At the same time, Hitler was gathering power. Lemkin knew it was time to act. He crafted his proposal making the destruction of national, racial and religious groups an international crime and sent it to an influential international conference. But his legal remedy found little support, even as anti-Semitism was becoming Germany's national policy.

When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, Lemkin knew his worst fears were about to be realized. "Hitler had already promulgated ... his blueprint for destruction," Lemkin wrote. "Many people thought he was bragging, but I believed that he would carry out his program." Lemkin fled Warsaw with only a shaving kit and summer coat. He survived months in the forest, traveling furtively, dodging falling bombs and fighting for the Polish resistance.

He managed to reach his parents one last time -- only to say goodbye. "Do not talk of our leaving this warm home. We will have to suffer, but we will survive somehow," Lemkin said his parents told him. "When their eyes became sad with understanding, I laughed away our agonizing thoughts, but I felt I would never see them again. It was like going to their funerals while they were still alive."

Reluctantly, Lemkin left his family to their fate and became one of the lucky few to reach the United States, where a friend arranged a job at Duke Law School. Though now safe, Lemkin remained anxious. "I had not stopped worrying about the people in Poland. When would the hour of execution come? Would this blind world only then see it, when it would be too late?" Troubling letters arrived from home. His father said they were surviving on potato peels and nothing else. His mother assured him, "What counts is that we are all together, alive and healthy." "Something ... told me they were saying goodbye," Lemkin later wrote, "in spite of my parents' effort not to alarm me."

Days later, the Nazis took eastern Poland -- a death sentence for Lemkin's family. By 1942, the U.S. had entered the war, and the Germans had accelerated their deadly work. Concentration camps ran day and night, like assembly lines. At Auschwitz, more than a million perished.

Even though word of the slaughter was reaching America, it seemed of little interest to the press and politicians. Lemkin was outraged. "The impression of a tremendous conspiracy of silence poisoned the air," he wrote. "A double murder was taking place. ... It was the murder of the truth."

Lemkin tried everything he could to stop the killing, even writing to President Roosevelt. Roosevelt responded, urging patience. "Patience," Lemkin wrote. "But I could bitterly see only the faces of the millions awaiting death. ... All over Europe the Nazis were writing the book of death with the blood of my brethren."

Jewish groups pressed Washington to bomb the camps or rail lines. The Americans refused. Although Allied planes took photos of Auschwitz in 1944 as they scouted nearby targets, the U.S. didn't want to divert military resources from winning the war. Frustrated, Lemkin decided to take a different tack. He would use the Nazis' own words to prove their depravity.

Taking hundreds of pages of Nazi laws and decrees, Lemkin wrote a comprehensive book that laid bare the Nazis' brutal plans. And he invented a word for the crime the Nazis were committing. Genocide.

With the crime named, he hoped the world could no longer turn away. But no help came. Even the Nuremberg trials were a grave disappointment for Lemkin. They did little to codify genocide as an international crime -- and did nothing to prevent it from happening again. But Lemkin knew he must keep trying. He revived his 1933 proposal and set his sights on the fledgling United Nations. He hoped this new world body, born out of the ashes of World War II, could create and enforce an international law against genocide.

Lemkin put everything aside and made the passage of a genocide convention the focus of his life. He wrote and rewrote the text of the convention, lobbied delegates, wrote to leaders worldwide in their own languages -- Lemkin was fluent in more than 10 -- to gather support.

On December 9, 1948, the U.N. met in Paris and voted unanimously to adopt the Genocide Convention. [Photo] Days later, Lemkin fell gravely ill and was hospitalized. For nearly three weeks, the doctors struggled with a diagnosis. Lemkin finally offered one himself: "Genociditis," he said, "exhaustion from working on the Genocide Convention."

A decade later, Lemkin would die from a fatal heart attack, penniless and alone, having given his life to the fight against genocide.

HOW ABOUT THIS? Vivaldi's "Winter" against the City currently under water and the masks of Carnivale

We are Slowly Growing Up

It is not often that I find reason to praise the policies of Gordon Campbell, but the BC Premier and his Alberta counterpart, Ed Stelmach, deserve full marks for their pushing through a new deal in Canadian working conditions.

By spring of next year, Canadians will have full mobility in terms of working across the country without the onerous and stupid rules that have kept doctors, accountants and many others locked in one province or another.

This is a move that should have happened many years ago. We may be large on the mao, but we are a tiny country of some 35 million people and the barricades that kept people from moving their trades from Halifax to Headly were ridiculous.

Congratulations to Mssrs. Campbell and Stelmach for continuing the drive to make this new Canada a reality.

What me Worry, Part One

Canada is different. Canada is inoculated.

Puleeeze.

Read this morning's job loss story in the NY Times, then check your local rag for similar Canucklehead versions.

O.J.'s going to jail and we're losing jobs in Canada. Get used to it.

Canada - What me, Worry?

Investing Insight from Adrian Mastracci,
"Fee-Only" Portfolio Manager

"US jobs a shocker!"

For Immediate Release

Vancouver, BC (December 05, 2008):

It's a shocker. The numbers are staggering. The US jobs picture is into "ouch land".

You could say, the lights are being turned out. And the prospects are for more darkness.

Nearly 1.9 Million jobs have vanished year-to-date. And this may be an optimistic figure.

Looking at the substantial downward revisions made to the September and October figures leads me to brace for an ugly revision to the 533,000 jobs lost in November.

President elect, Barak Obama has a herculean miracle to perform. No doubt his team is burning the midnight oil trying to figure out what will resuscitate the very sick US economy.

The rest of the world is also affected in similar ways. Canada included.

Brace yourself for central bank interest rate expectations heading toward zero. Wave goodbye to the high yields of yesterday.

However, I fear that we have not learned anything from past lessons on interest rates.

I fear that investors who need income are going to take undue risks in their quest to replenish vanishing yields.

I fear that the number of banks on the FDIC watch list will increase.

I fear that more financial institutions will fail.

We have much work ahead to resuscitate the global economic prospects.

Adrian Mastracci
Portfolio Manager, R.F.P.
KCM Wealth Management Inc.
"Fee-Only" Portfolio Managers & Financial Advisors
Suite 1500, Box 1078, 885 West Georgia Street
Vancouver, BC, Canada V6C 3E8
Tel: (604) 739-4500 Fax: (604) 739-0234
E-mail: kcm@kcmwealth.com Website: www.kcmwealth.com

---

Air India Bombing

As soon as you hear the RCMP declare "There is no credible evidence or basis upon which to support such an outrageous claim.," you know you're in for a bumpy night.

Because the RCMP has been doing such a good job of late in the credibility department.

This latest statement comes in reaction from letters from the Punjab Human Rights Organization, which claims that thee are many people, whose names they provide, who are responsible for the Air India murders and that none will ever be prosecuted.

This PHRO may or may not be legitimate, but in the absence of any other information coming from the official sources, who in 23 years, have failed to tell us or the grieving families ANYTHING, this is at least worth a look.

Especially when the officials tell us to turn our eyes away.

Icky Sticky

You cheat at work. You steal from the company and the public. Your punishment?

You get one third of $825,000 in severance.

Welcome to the topsy-turvey Alice in Repairland known as the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia.

Or ICBC.

Or Icky-Bicky.

The reason you can get this "punishment?"

Well, the Corporation forgot to mention that behaving illegally and immorally on the job was a no-no.

Oops.

Checking it Twice

The BCTF meddles again.

Kids at a school in Nanaimo have been raising money for a childrens' charity.

Oh my god, the charity is "evangelical."

The Nanaimo chapter of the BCTF kvetched in typical form.

What?

You can only help "secular, non-denominational" charities?

Here's the news for the BCTF:

Kids in need are kids in need. Check their passports and bibles later, you clods.

Read the whole disgraceful mess - the height of Clouseauvian political correctness - covered beautifully, as always by the Sun's educational writer Janet Steffenhagen.

Genius at the Controls

Before I forget...

Yesterday, Air Canada gave living proof once again to how it manages to be the flakiest airline aloft.

In a half page spread, they advertised an Air Canada Vacations "special."

The destination?

Bogota or Cartagena.

Hahahaha...

That must be a real travel treat for Mom & Pop Wisconsin or Betty and Bob Oakville.

Come get caught in drug lord crossfire!

No doubt this campaign will now be featured in the first pages of Marketing for Real Dummies.

Brushes with Stardom #396

How's this for One Degree of Separation?

Watching much of "The Way We Were," the 1973 Streisand-Redford hit of 1973, I suddenly realized that I had played in a TV episode with Patrick O'Neal, one of the supporting cast of "The Way We Were."

O'Neal, who was personally chosen by Tennessee Willams to play the original role of Reverend Shannon in "Night of the Iguana" when it first appeared on Broadway, played a high powered and corrupt real estate salesman in an episode of the "J.J. Starbuck," a short lived detective series starring the former movie cowboy, Dale Robertson.

I play a very wealthy client who discovers O'Neal's shenanigans. Not a good move. O'Neal shoots and kills me.

Our scenes were filmed in an extraordinarily flashy mansion in West Vancouver and a fabulous gun cabinet filled with gun treasures was brought in from a private collector in Langley just for the murder scene.

It was great fun.

For the record, when the Streisand-Redford movie first came out, I hated it.

Now, over the years, I confess it has seeped into my bones and I love watching it. Corny, glossy entertainment beautifully done.