Kathleen Wynne and her call for CPP reform

Vincent J. Curtis

 

30 Dec 2013

 

 

I never cease to be amazed at the naiveté of the news media, especially at times when their favored causes are at stake.  Were a touch of H.L. Mencken to overcome them, their political favorites would be crushed.  Then again, Mencken played no favorites.

 

At issue this time is an editorial of my hometown newspaper, entitled “Pension reform is no longer a sleeper issue.”  The editorial supports Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s contention that the Canada Pension Plan needs to be enriched.  The editorial observes that CPP provides pensioners with $12,000 a year, and Old Age Supplement adds another $4,000 to a pensioner’s income.  Apparently, this sum is not enough for old people to live at the level the editors think they ought, and about half of Ontario’s pensioners have no pension plan other than the CPP.

 

Why Kathleen Wynne would get out of the provincial lane and start driving in the federal lane was never considered.  Let me help.  The reason is that an election is coming, and Wynne’s government is awash in scandal, waste, and concerns about tax increases.  The polls at this stage show a minority NDP government in the offing.  Wynne is trying to divert attention from her problems and rally opinion behind her as she takes on those heartless Conservatives in Ottawa.  She is also on the look-out for new sources of revenue so that she can build mass transit infrastructure in the Greater Toronto Area.  Finally, my hometown newspaper from time to time exhibits zombie-like behavior in respect of a Toronto newspaper which has served as the unofficial organ of Wynne’s party for over a century.

 

Let’s deal with the merit of the case immediately before us.  What Wynne is proposing is a massive transfer of wealth from the young to the old.  Not the old poor, but the old in general.  Rather than call for an enhancement of the OAS or some other means-tested form of welfare so that only those in need receive it, Wynne calls for even the old and rich to get a raise in their CPP.  Being a pension plan, everyone who contributed gets a pension, even if they are worth millions.  Not just the old-poor would benefit from Lynne’s forced contribution from the young.

 

For an increase in the CPP to be actuarially sound, an increase in pension benefits cannot be given to the current crop of retirees, i.e. those in currently in need.  An increase has to be phased in, and CPP payroll deductions have to begin long before a planned increase is actually given.  All this requires that money be taken out of consumer consumption and put into investments instead.  Therein lies the economic problem.  If the Federal government were to increase payments to the current crop of retirees by say, $6,000, it would blow a massive hole in their budget and create a new and unfunded liability for future Federal governments.  And blowing a hole in the Federal budget to aid in her provincial reelection effort is exactly what Wynne wants.

 

The CPP was never intended to enable the retiree to live the lap of luxury.  It was intended as a forced savings plan that would provide a minimum level of income sufficient to survive.  It was intended to work with company pensions and tax-favored savings schemes such as the Registered Retirement Savings Plan.  If a retiree today has nothing but the CPP-OAS to live on, that is the consequence of a lifetime of choices and habits to live for the moment and not to set aside anything for retirement.  The working young of today are supposed to pay for the foolishness of the old, and to give money gratuitously to the old who were not foolish.

 

The economic problem of dealing with poverty of the old is that if the solution is to enrich the CPP, that means more in payroll deductions.  Less money would be available to the young for consumer spending, and less would be available for private investment.  Ontario needs investment in order to pull itself out of the economic doldrums in which it lies from a decade of mismanagement by Wynne’s predecessor.  A more vigorous economy in Ontario would generate the tax money the Federal government needs to close its own budgetary deficit.

 

Canada’s Finance Minister Jim Flaherty prefers innovative ways of tax-favored saving schemes outside of government management.  These methods (such as the Pooled Retirement Pension Plan) put the pension money into private sector investments and indirectly force the government to put those deferred taxes into retirement plans, rather than spend the money now and recoup it later in taxes as happens with the CPP.  Flaherty's method of keeping money and control out of the hands of government is not acceptable to those, like Wynne, who believe in BIG GOVERNMENT.

 

Wynne would like to build mass transit in the GTA, and she can’t find the money in Ontario’s $130 billion budget.  She has floated the idea of “green bonds,”  but these only are a means of finding capital now.  And Ontario would be on the hook alone for it later.

 

If the CPP were enhanced, that would provide the Ontario government with a pool of capital from which it can borrow on the promise that it will be paid back by taxes later.  And Ottawa would be on the hook for it.

 

And the beauty of this all is that the political bill for all of this will be paid by Wynne’s successor.  Just as McGuinty stuck Lynne with the gas plant cancellation scandal, so she will still her successor with a crippled Ontario budget and economy if she succeeds in her spending plans.

 

Young people of today should not be taken in by Kathleen Wynne’s call for an enhanced CPP.  They are being asked to give money to every old person for the foolishness of some of them.  Charity is not the wellspring of Wynne’s call, but serious political calculation.  She wants the Federal government to blow a hole in their budget to aid in her reelection effort.

 

But there is nothing the media love more than the smell of fresh red herring.

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DNA from Neanderthal toe links ancestors to inbreeding

Vincent J. Curtis

21 Dec 2013

 

Nobody seems to have noticed, but the article which described the findings from a 50,000 year old toe bone contained a rebuke to the Darwinist theory of how life began on earth.

 

The story said that genetic researchers gathered nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA from human-Neanderthal tissue.  The researchers were able to distinguish between nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA because the cellular structure which contains them both was still intact after all that time.

 

Think of it: all the matter necessary for life was present in this tissue and present in a structure necessary for life, and existed in that state for 50,000 years, and nothing happened.

 

The Darwinist theory of the origin of life on earth holds that somehow DNA formed out of the inert matter of the primordial soup that was the earth’s oceans billions of years ago, and somehow a cellular structure came into existence in which that DNA could reproduce both itself and the structure, and somehow the two came together, and voila, life began.  Yet, here is a case where such a situation did obtain, and the inert matter remained inert.

 

Clearly, something other than matter arranged in a particular way is necessary for life to exist and for the reproduction of life, which is a crucial sign of life, to commence.

 

Something else, some divine spark, is necessary to animate otherwise dead matter. There is nothing either in Darwinist theory or in biology in general which can account for the requirement of this divine spark.  Yet a requirement is seems to be.

 

Darwinists are committed materialists.  Yet when those material conditions exist, as they did in this case, life necessarily does not.

 

Every advance in genetic research contains a disproof of Darwinism.  The very existence of a science of genetics is a disproof of Darwinism.

 

A pleasant thought especially at this time of year.
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Duck Dynasty, Lockheed-Martin, and LGBTQ Thuggery

Vincent J. Curtis

 

20 December 2013

 

 

In the news this week are the kerfuffle over the wildly popular reality TV show Duck Dynasty and the announcement by Lockheed-Martin that it would join United Parcel Service and computer chip maker Intel Corp. in denying charitable donations to the Scouting movement of the United States.  What is in common between these two seemingly unrelated events is the thuggery anticipated from the so-called LGBTQ community.

 

My hometown newspaper has a Lesbian-in-residence who writes a column every week.  The theme of practically every column she writes is the angst of the LGBTQ community.  LGBTQ stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer.  The last term is added by the writer-in-residence to the more usual LGBT designation as a means of reclaiming the term for this community.  This term is used within the community itself in the same way as the term Ni**er is used within the black community to refer to its own members.

 

Now, there are two theories for the acquisition by a person of LGBTQ behaviors.  These behaviors are either: (a) a ‘life-style choice’ or (b) they are the product of a genetic predisposition in the same way, for example, that some women are genetically predisposed towards developing breast cancer.

 

These are the only two explanations extant for LGBTQ behaviors.

 

If the cause of LGBTQ behaviors is personal choice, then the maker of that choice is responsible for it.  Presumably that choice was made in light of the consequences of that choice, which would include knowledge of the response that that choice would evoke in the heterosexual community.  We all make choices; and not all the consequences of those choices are entirely happy ones.  One may grumble about the unhappy consequences of a choice, but in the aggregate we make that choice because of the happiness it brings, or the lesser unhappiness that it entails.  The nature of LGBTQ behaviors is such that the choice can be changed at any time.  If LGBTQ behaviors bring one unhappiness, then they can and should be changed.

 

If LGBTQ behaviors are the consequence of genetic predisposition on the other hand, then treatment may be a way of correcting it.  A person, in general, is not held responsible for being sick, but they are held responsible for not seeking treatment if they are sick.

 

Be it choice or be it the consequence of genetic predisposition, the writer-in-residence never fails to blame others for the pain she feels.  She either, (a) made the choice and is sticking with it, or (b) recognizes that she is sick but refuses to seek treatment for her sickness.  She blames others for the pain she feels that are consequence of her choices.

 

The LGBTQ community reject the assumption that LGBTQ behaviors are not normal.  What they fail to distinguish in making this mistake is the difference between normal and common.  Colds are common; but to be sick with a cold is to be not in a normal condition.

 

That which is normal is also normative.  Human beings have to be heterosexual for the species to continue into the next generation.  If human beings were normally homosexual, the species could not continue.  Heterosexuality is therefore the norm for human beings and homosexuality is not.  It cannot be normal however common homosexuality appears to be.

 

Over the last forty years, the LGBTQ community has responded to the pain they feel by attacking others who accuse them of being in the wrong.  They do so in a very public fashion and with a considerable degree of viciousness and vindictiveness.  The long history of these attacks have served gradually to intimidate the public at large, which is not organized to meet the attacks of a tightly coordinated community that is capable of harassing private individuals and even corporations unmercifully.

 

There is something to be said about not creating legal obstacles to the routine enjoyment of life by people thought to be sick.  Laws prohibiting discrimination in general against people who exhibit LGBTQ behaviors are reasonable within the general context of ordinary life.  Within the last twenty years, the LGBTQ community have pushed to have their behaviors accepted as normal rather than common both by the community at large and in law through such initiatives as gay “marriage.”

 

Now, “marriage” is the name of a specific kind of relationship that obtains between a man and a woman.  It names not just any relationship between a man and a woman, but a specific one; and it is associated with a licit conjugal relationship, not an illicit one.

 

So important , however, is marriage to the community that in common law a man and a woman living illicitly together in a conjugal relationship for a long period of time are deemed to be married, even though no formal recognition of a marriage by an act of law or of religion was ever made between the two.  It follows then that the expression “gay marriage” seems to mean something contra-factual in the ordinary sense of the word and meaning of “marriage.”  It would be like trying to conceive of a square circle.

 

Nevertheless, it became the object of the LGBTQ community to have some of their relationships that also involve conjugal relations recognized as “marriage.”  To select some other word to specify that relationship was not good enough for them as it would signify that that relationship was somehow different from a specific heterosexual relationship.  The very fact that one relationship is heterosexual and the other homosexual in nature is held to be of no consequence by them, though of course it is and must be.  Their persistence amounts to viciousness.

 

Other examples of viciousness are found in the need to destroy those who uphold that difference on religious grounds.  Thus we have seen the spectacle of the Catholic organization the Knight of Columbus sued because they would not rent their hall for the reception of a gay couple.  A team of photographers were sued for refusing to photograph a gay wedding because of the religious beliefs of the photographers.  A company which made cupcakes was forced into receivership because the owners declined an offer of business for a gay wedding on religious grounds.  Respective judges found in favor of the gay couples in these cases, and the defendants were subject to heavy financial penalty.  One could surmise that religious beliefs held no weight with the judges because the judges themselves were afraid of the retribution they might get from the LGBTQ community if they found in favor of the defendants, or they had simply lost their common sense.

 

The Lockheed-Martin decision, along with that of UPS and Intel, was made against the Scouting movement in the United States because the latter decided to continue to refuse to permit persons known to exhibit LGBTQ behaviors from the ranks of those permitted to supervise Scouting activities.  Lockheed-Martin and their executives do not need the harassment which the LGBTQ community is capable of, and made the decision to protect their business and themselves.  They might honestly believe that they are acting from the best of motives, but I doubt it.  The decision was made to appease adults, and harms the kids.

 

The decision of the Scouting movement was made with the best interests of the movement in mind.  It is only heterosexual couples who send children and adolescents into Scouting.  One of the aims of the Scouting movement is to develop in their charges good character.  Rightly or wrongly the members of the LGBTQ community are believed by the heterosexual community to be of a greater proclivity towards pederasty than the members of the heterosexual community.  If homosexuals were readily admitted to supervisory positions in the Scouting movement, the movement might well find itself with plenty of supervisors and nearly void of scouts.  Between this fear and the belief that LGBTQ behavior is not an example of desirable conduct and good character, the Scouting movement made the decision it did.

 

Rather than accept the decision of the Scouting movement as it is and move on, the LGBTQ community has made the decision to force itself visibly into the movement regardless of consequences.  Pressuring the movement indirectly by attacking its sources of funding is one tactic by which the Scouting movement will be forced to submit or be destroyed.

 

In the case of Duck Dynasty, one of the cast members, Phil Robertson, called the patriarch of the family, made unkind comments about LGBTQ behaviors in an interview with GQ magazine.  Mr. Robertson asseverated his religious belief that those who exhibit LGBTQ behaviors would burn in hell, or some such.

 

If you believe in Christianity or at least the Old Testament, that conclusion is rational and supportable.  But if you don’t believe in either, then the conclusion is simply non-sense since hell does not exist.  His statements amount to an expression of gibberish.  However, the transgression here is not that Mr. Robertson expressed gibberish; he expressed a dislike and downright disapproval of LGBTQ behaviors.  In contrast, Pope Francis has expressed merely disapproval of LGBTQ behaviors, but holds that we must nevertheless not, on that basis alone, dislike those who exhibit LGBTQ behaviors.  “Hate the sin but love the sinner,” in other words.  And the LGBTQ community has so far withheld its opprobrium from Pope Francis.  Where Mr. Robertson and Pope Francis may differ is on the prior dislike of those who exhibit LGBTQ behaviors.

 

But dislike is one of those behaviors evoked in the heterosexual community by LGBTQ behaviors.  And those who exhibit LGBTQ behaviors know it, or should have known it, before they made their lifestyle choice or chose to forego treatment, whichever theory one subscribes to.

 

Duck Dynasty was subject to a preemptive strike by A&E, the network which televises the series.  Mr. Robertson was banned by A&E from appearing on any future shows, out of fear of retribution by the LGTBQ community.

 

A&E can make whatever decisions it wants, and this may turn out to be a bad business decision given the popularity of the series and the likelihood of the show moving to another network.  If A&E suffers in consequence of its decision to ban Mr. Robertson, it deserves to.  One hopes the shareholders make known their displeasure of the executives who made the decision, and that they be made to pay for what is widely regarded as their act of cowardice.

 

The LGBTQ community has become so forward that it expects the heterosexual community to fall on all fours and prostrate itself whenever LGTBQ behaviors are thrust in its face.  Such is the power of its hubris and past successes that the heterosexual community now seems to police itself whenever LGBTQ community thuggery seems likely.

 

It is said that a personality can be destroyed if the person suffers constant, long term physical pain.  Perhaps the same is true of a person suffering psychological pain.  And there is no doubt that the response of the LGBTQ community to disapproval is one of pain.  Its drive for the recognition of gay marriage and the otherwise complete acceptance of homosexuality as equal to heterosexuality is an attempt to assuage the pain they feel, and perhaps to inflict pain on the heterosexual community that rejects them.

 

Such pain as they feel in the LGBTQ community is, as shown above, the consequence either of a choice they made in full consciousness of the disapproval they would encounter, or the choice not to seek treatment for the behaviors they exhibit.  That members of the LGBTQ community choose to inflict pain on others is perhaps another indication of the morbid psychological condition they suffer from.

 

The LGBTQ community demand tolerance and yet exhibit profound intolerance themselves.  They require that free speech be silenced if they don’t like what was said.  They demand freedom from being bullied, yet bully mercilessly themselves.

 

Regardless of the amount of thuggery the LGBTQ community can get away with, no degree of acceptance which it can obtain or extort from the heterosexual community is going to assuage the pain they feel.  The problem which gives them pain arises in them.

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Look at the flock of turtles!

Vincent J. Curtis

18 Dec 2013

Like trout rising to the bait, the media are covering Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s agitation to improve the Canada Pension Plan as if it had merit.  It does not occur to the media that she is engaged in a ploy to change the subject from her own government’s problems as an election looms.  The media love the smell of red herring.

In acting like Wynne’s stenographic pool, the media are being reeled in.

The universe of Canadian pension planning includes not just the enforced savings method of the CPP, but also RRSPs, tax-free savings accounts, tax favorable investment instruments in addition to the OAS and company pension plans.  The CPP was never meant to keep the pensioner in the lap of luxury, but to keep them at a minimum standard of living should all else fail.

Since inflation has not been a problem for the last decade, the CPP should not be inadequate according to the terms in which it was conceived.

By mounting a hue and cry over, of all things, the Canada Pension Plan, Wynne hopes to gain sympathy with the low-information Ontario voter (whom she regards as a segment of her base) prior to an election, and divert their attention from the manifold problems of her government, awash in scandal, waste, incompetence, and mismanagement.  She can’t balance the Ontario budget, and defers a decision on road tolls or higher taxes as means of paying for the decongesting of Toronto.  Mismanagement of the energy sector and a bad case of regulation-itis by her predecessor has left Ontario’s economy languishing.  The Federal government cannot balance its own budget despite booming oil revenues because the Ontario economy is not performing as forecast ,and hoped for.

So Lynne gets out of her lane and makes a stink about a Federal matter, and the media just report on the spectacle as if what she said made sense.  If Lynne had pointed to the sky and said, “Look at the flock of turtles!” the reporters covering her would turn to where she was pointing.  Seeing nothing, they would report that "Kathlene Wynne saw a flock of turtles."

 

It never occurs to anyone in the media that Wynne might be trying to create a fund from which the Ontario government can borrow at discount rates in the same way the Canadian government borrows from the CPP.  That money collected ostensibly for a pension plan is a way of paying for the infrastructure needed to decongest Toronto.  The collection of a pension contribution would not be a "tax" or a "road toll."

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The tax expenditure concept misapplied

Vincent J. Curtis

17 Dec 2013

 

Brian Hinkley is a former city councillor for my hometown.  He was, and likely still is, a member of the New Democratic Party, a party of the left.  Yesterday, he had published a letter in my hometown newspaper which began by decrying government waste.  Included in the "waste" were so-called "tax expenditures" by which taxes were "deferred" on churches.  Hinkley argued that waste would end in that quarter if churches were taxed, especially those churches which were politically active against abortion and gay marriage.  One wonders whom he meant.

 

Below is an unpublished reply.

 

Brian Hinkley answers his own question.  He began with a list of examples of money being squandered by government.  Well, therein lies the answer.

If you give government more money, they simply have more to squander.

As a former politician, Mr. Hinkley was taught to look upon money as belonging to the government first.  Anything not taxed was considered to be a “tax expenditure”.  A "tax expenditure" is merely an accounting convention which easily lends itself to Mr. Hinkley's unwarranted moral conclusion.

 

Something which a government accountant thinks could be taxed and is not, is regarded by him as a "tax expenditure."   Since church properties are not taxed, that non-tax is considered a "tax expenditure" of the government by the political class.  Any money the government could take but does not is susceptible to becoming money the government should take and presently does not by the tax grubbers of the political class.

Mr. Hinkley thinks churches should be taxed and are not, consequently, this “tax expenditure” is money being graciously given by the government to churches.  By Mr. Hinkley’s reasoning government is subsidizing churches.  A direct subsidy or a deferral of taxes are equivalent things in the “tax expenditure” view.  Mr. Hinkley concludes that government is subsidizing religions. 

Taxpayers are not subsidizing religions (disregarding the difference between religion and churches).  Taxpayers are paying the government to run its operations.  A church going taxpayer gives money to his church to run its operations and fund its services.  From the taxpayer’s perspective, his church provides him certain necessary services just as government does, those services simply being different in kind.  Unlike government, his church takes only voluntary contributions since it does not have the coercive force of temporal law behind it.

From the church-going taxpayer’s perspective, taxing his church is simply another way by which government taxes him.  Turning Mr. Hinkley’s question around, why should church going taxpayers pay more in taxes than non-church goers?  Why should government take advantage of one taxpayer’s concern and charity towards his church, and exempt the non-church goer.  Perhaps non-church going should be taxed just to keep things equal!

Taxpayers, whether church going or not, need to be wary of the political philosophy which, in the face of wasted tax dollars, concludes that more tax dollars needs to be collected.
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The Eight Principles that Make Cities Great

Vincent J. Curtis

 

14 Dec 2013

 

 

Jennifer Keesmaat is the Chief planner of the city of Toronto.  Recently, she spoke at a dinner organized by the Chamber of Commerce of Hamilton.  Her speech was about the eight principles of great cities.  After laying down her eight principles, she outlined how Hamilton either met or violated them.  She concluded that Hamilton stood to become great if they followed her guidance.

 

In the course of reading the eight principles of great cities I tried to imagine how they might apply to Paris, London, and New York – all admitted to be great cities.  Quickly, I concluded that they could not be.  Keesmaat’s speculative theory turns out upon analysis to be something like the eight principles of good taste.

 

Of course, there is no accounting for taste – one likes what one likes and dislikes what one dislikes.  There is no point, or example, in two people discussing whether French cuisine or Italian cuisine is better.  You like what you like, and laying down a set of principles to explain why your likes are better than another person’s likes is to create a counterfeit of logical analysis.  It is an elaborate waste of time.

 

I am quite sure that Ms. Keesmaat got to her position as Chief Planner because other people have appreciated the good taste she exhibited in city planning.  Other people have liked her work.  But trying to express the origins of that good taste in the form of a priori general principles is like Vincent van Gogh laying down the principles of good painting.  Even if one grasps the principles intellectually, there is something in the execution that is essential to the matter, to say nothing of the style in vogue.

 

The audience enjoyed a good dinner, and appreciated the optimistic forecast for the city of Hamilton.  The city will muddle through the future as it has the past.  Cities decay and die when they cease to make economic sense, and the state of the city of Detroit is an instructive example.

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Dialectical Analysis of a Defense of Faith-Based Schools

Vincent J. Curtis

 

13 Dec 2013

In response to the attack on the Separate School system in Ontario by Michelle Zimic, Dr. Richard Shields had published a rebuttal in my hometown newspaper.  Dr. Shields teaches theology at the University of St. Michael's College of the University of Toronto.  Below is an analysis of the dialectics employed by Dr. Shields in his article.

The rebuttal to Michelle Zimic’s attack on separate schools written by Richard Shields was certainly interesting in its approach.  It started by positing an alternative reality and then tackled the essential parts of Zimic’s thesis from that new perspective.

 

Richard Shields and I are in agreement on the conclusions that he reaches.  However, the “alternative reality” approach as a means of reaching those conclusions leaves one a little unsatisfied.  It failed to meet Zimic’s arguments on their own ground, and Shields is forced into making statements that are, in their own way, as dubious as Zimic’s were.

 

The advantage to the “alternative reality” approach is that it is less violent than a direct head-to-head confrontation on the issues and merits.  For that reason, it may fail to convince those who accept Zimic’s view of reality and do not accept Shield’s view.  As you probably are aware, I prefer the violent, head-to-head confrontation as a method because it guarantees that the issues are truly joined.  It is clear that the debate is about the same thing in its details, and not simply arguments moving like ships passing each other in the night on the way to different destinations.

 

The “alternative reality” approach of Shields begins with the statement that we do not have two systems, but one system made up of several systems.  This certainly is true, though Zimic implicitly rejects it.  The “system of systems” view lays the groundwork for easily refuting Zimic’s contention that Separate Schools do not belong in Ontario since it is a component system of Ontario's system of systems. The system of systems view makes easy to see the unintended consequences of abolishing Separate Schools, namely, what happens to the students and the properties that presently belong to the Separate School system?  They cannot just be taken over by the province because it lacks both the legal and constitutional authority to appropriate the properties and the students of the Separate system.  Abolishing Separate Schools would create a tangled legal mess far beyond anything Zimic imagines.

 

The “alternative reality” approach gets Dr. Shields into trouble when, to join issue with Zimic, he has to make questionable arguments himself.  Such as, there “being no proof” that faith-based schooling is a source of division.  Of course there is no proof of that, but there is no proof of the opposite either,  To argue that one of Zimic’s contentions has “no foundation in fact” is not quite the same as saying they are false and imaginary.

 

The citing of educational research as undermining of another of Zimic’s arguments, superficially, is effective.  However, social research is plagued with scientific problems, and the conclusions of social research frequently amount to nothing but common sense generalizations or the opinions of the reseachers dressed up as scientific findings.  It would be better to simply say that, in this instance, Zimic merely expresses a hope or a wish and not a forecast, and that she fails to appreciate the hostility and upheaval that the adoption of her alleged remedy to a non-problem would cause.

 

Shields devotes four sometimes wooly paragraphs to dealing with Zimic’s argument that Ontario is a secular society and so should offer only secular schools.  It would be better to simply point to the Constitution Act 1867, and say, “That’s the deal.”  Zimic’s opinion about the structure and nature of Ontario society notwithstanding, black letter law and the facts on the ground say otherwise.  And if one is prepared to open up the constitution in order to extinguish minority rights in the teeth of that minority’s opposition, what other rights might be susceptible to such treatment, the right of women to vote?

 

Shields was most effective when he took on the speculative opinion that amalgamation of Ontario schools would save money, pointing out that amalgamations of hospitals, school boards, and municipalities have demonstrated otherwise.  Indeed, the very idea that a government monopoly saves money is laughable in some quarters.

 

Richard Shields effectively refutes Zimic’s opinion piece, but does so by positing a competitive view of reality.  That method, in general, fails to ensure that issues are truly joined.  Shield’s method works in this case because his view of reality better accounts for the facts.

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On the Abolition of Separate Schools in Ontario

In an article published in my hometown newspaper, Michelle Zimic authored a piece which called for the abolition of the Separate School System in Ontario.  She gave various arguments, one of which was remarkable for the counterintuitive conclusion she reached.  Another was that the Catholic Church in Ontario would actually benefit from the loss of Separate Schools.  Others were rehearsals of old complaints.  The gist of her arguments can be discovered below.

Zimic was described as 'living in Hamilton.'  However, a search revealed that a Michelle Zimic was employed as a teacher of language in Barton Secondary School of the Hamilton Wentworth District School Board.  I strongly suspect the writer of the article is this teacher.  The obvious conflict of interest of a teacher from the public board calling for the abolition of the other system went unmentioned in the newspaper piece as published.  What Zimic the writer seeks to remedy is the poor performance of the public system, and thinks this can be achieve by putting money presently spent on Separate Schools into the public system.  Zimic the writer, in short, is criticizing the poor management of the public board and is offering a possible remedy.  That the public school trustees should be replaced at the next election does not occur to the writer as a possible remedy.



Vincent J. Curtis

10 Dec 2013 

In her article, Michelle Zimic rehearses the usual arguments for the deprivation of a religious minority in Ontario of rights guaranteed in the Constitution of Canada since 1867.  One would have thought that in this day and age of cultural sensitivity, when new rights are discovered such as gay rights and the right to gay marriage, the right not to not be bullied, and when even dubious treaty rights of natives are scrupulously respected, that a long standing black letter right of a minority would not be attacked.  However, it happened here.

 

What is remarkable in her piece is that Zimic posits the superior education afforded by the Separate School system as a reason for it to be abolished.  If true, then the majority are put at a disadvantage and this should not be permitted, or so she argues.

 

Actually, that is an argument that Ontario’s public school system should be placed in the care of the Catholic Church.  The bishops, by Zimic’s posit, produce superior results!

 

The more commonplace arguments for abolishing the Separate School system include that a government monopoly is better than a government duopoly, that it would be beneficial to the Catholic Church for Separate Schools to be abolished, and that the poorly managed public system would benefit from the extra money and that taxpayers would be relieved of the burden of carrying two school systems.

 

Whenever I hear the argument that one is better than two, I am reminded of the political slogan of Germany of the 1930’s: “ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuhrer!”   The advantage of two over one in this case is that Ms. Zimic would not even be aware of the allegedly poor performance of the public system but for something quite similar to compare it to.

 

To suggest that the Catholic Church would benefit by the abolition of Separate Schools is to betray complete ignorance not only of the Catholic Church’s history in education but also its mission in the world.  If Ontario were to abolish the Separate School system, tents would be set up on the grounds of Catholic Churches as schools to educate Catholic youth, and the bricks and mortar schools which presently house Catholic students would lie empty.  So much for the economic advantage of abolishing Separate Schools and the system by which they are managed.

 

If, as Ms Zimic proposes, the public system is badly managed then she should be working assiduously to replace the School Trustees that manage the public system, which in Hamilton is the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board.  A fish rots from the head down, and the leadership of the public system is where she should be looking for solutions to mismanagement.

 

The advantage that the Separate Schools enjoy over the Public system is that the trustees of the Separate system are forever conscious that they, to some extent, live upon charity.  They do not presume that they have a proprietary right to the contents of the public purse.  If public trustees were held to greater account, then the mismanagement which Ms. Zimic sees in the public system might be abated.

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Unpublished: Tories care about oil exports, not steel jobs

Vincent J. Curtis

5 Nov 2013

[Written in response to an Op-ed piece of that headline in my hometown newspaper.  The thesis of the piece was that Canada was suffering from the "Dutch Disease," a phenomenon in which manufacturing is made uncompetitive through the rise in value of national currency from booming oil exports.  The writer alleged that United States Steel was shutting down its Hamilton operation as a symptom of Canada's suffering from "Dutch Disease."]


Writer and activist K.S. is obviously no economist, nor has he ever run a business.

Canada is making tons of money exporting oil and not much money these days making steel.  So his solution to this apparent problem is to make less money exporting oil in the hopes that the steel industry will make more money.

This is not how an economy or a business works.

Money from the selling of oil goes to make up for the losses being suffered by not selling a lot of steel.  'What you don’t make on the apples you make up on the bananas', is one homespun piece of economic wisdom.

Mr. S. fails to explain why steelmaker ArcelorMittal Dofasco continues to do well.  He fails to account for the mismanagement of the Ontario economy through ten years of Dalton McGuinty.

His voting for the NDP was a foregone conclusion.  But still, hasn’t he noticed what great hair Justin Trudeau has?
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Unpublished: Fixing the Indian Problem

Vincent J. Curtis

18 July 2013

[This piece was written in response to a story which originated out of the Toronto Star.  The story critized those who from the 1940s through the 1960s provided education and accommodation to native Indians.  At the time, this was regarded as helping natives integrate themselves into the larger world.  It was "progressive," in other words.  Some instances of abuse smeared the reputation of the entire program.  The underlying article to the commentary below accepted the smear of the entire program without discriminating between the good and the bad.]



The article on "Fixing the Indian problem" was a strange one for the Toronto Star to write.  They seem quite unconscious of the fact that those who instigated the programs that are now deplored were the liberal-progressives of their day.

Those who developed and ran the programs exhibited the same ideological commitment, the same know-it-all intellectual arrogance then, as their lineal descendants do now.  Those lineal descendants are those white people who today condemn the experimentation done on natives for their alleged betterment.

Liberal-progressives have no shame as they have no memory.

It is also strange that the Toronto Star, for a century practically an organ of the Liberal party, would casually remark upon "Such paternalistic ethos of Canada's administration of aboriginal people during the postwar period."  Well, the Liberal party under Mackenzie-King and St. Laurent were the government in those postwar days.

Not a word of regret or introspection concerning the Star's role in applauding such things back then.  Such lack of introspection the Star would hang like a canard on a conservative.

How silly, they have no memory!

Well, next time liberal-progressives get into high moral dudgeon about something conservative Canada ought to do but isn't doing, they should recall such things as this. And eugenics, another great progressive invention for the betterment of man.

Except they have no memory and no shame.
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Unpublished: Worthy of Obama

Vincent J. Curtis

10 Apr 2013


In asking the business community to help get the right thing done, Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne has embarked on a course of reasoning worthy of Barak Obama.

The "right thing" in this case is building support for a large expansion in public transit.  Wynne in a parenthetical way offered specious, unproven assertions and straw men as reasons why a large expansion in public transit was good in itself, and therefore the "right thing" to do.

What was not said in the speech was that support for public transit translates in her mind into support for the means by which the large expansion in public transit will be funded: road tolls, sales tax increases, and higher taxes on gasoline.

What also was created by that speech was the basis for proceeding as she sees fit.  If business will not support doing the right thing, they are manifestly on the side of evil and Premier Wynne will force the province down the path of righteousness in spite of the obstacles placed in her path!

Truly Obama-like in technique.

Proving that it takes a lefty to beat a lefty, Ontario NDP leader Andrea Horwath outed the Premier (so to speak) on the regressiveness of the funding methods.  Road tolls and higher taxes are the same for everyone, regardless of income.  Premier Wynne is asking business to work with her to raise the cost of living on the employees of those businesses.  Meanwhile, Wynne is offering businesses a $1.3 billion tax break each year for managing the harmonized HST.  The elimination of that tax break would go most of the way towards paying the cost of expanding public transit.

Well played by Horwath.

The fact is that Ontarians are already taxed to the hilt.  Any increase in taxes results in a noticeable drop in the standard of living.  The average Ontarian will simply have less money to spend because the government took it.

The government is not a good steward of the resources they are given by the taxpayers, and the proof of that is all the money, license fees, road taxes, gasoline taxes, and so on that go into the general revenue fund in excess of that spent on transportation.  David Peterson once promised that a $5.00 per tire tax would be used to fund the disposal of old tires; and his successors over the last twenty-five years have cheerfully taken the money but not fulfilled the promise.

The vast sucking maw of medicare and education will continue to take money from all tax sources like an ever-expanding open pit mine consumes the town the miners lived in.

There is no point whatever in giving government more taxes.  It already tries to do too much.  And giving the government leave to expand public transit will only make matters worse.  The Ontario government is running out of other people's money.
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Unpublished: (AP) A New Study Shows the World in a Weather U-Turn

Vincent J. Curtis

11 Mar 2013


I know this was written by the Associated Press, but you know and I know it is a piece of rubbish.  By journalistic standards it failed to report the contrary opinions of scientists who don't share the opinions of the global warming hacks, a.k.a. the 'balancing view'.  The piece even mentioned uncritically the so-called "hockey stick" graph which, having been shown to arise from sampling and mathematical chicanery, ought at least to have been qualified as 'controversial.'  The article does nothing more than advertise the opinions of certain people with a political agenda, without mentioning that other people think there is this agenda.

Let me enumerate some of the most obvious flaws in the article.  First, the headline confuses weather with climate.  What is changing is supposed to be climate, not weather.

Second, the author of the underlying paper admits that his fossil records conflict with thermometric measurements taken in the overlapping period.  He prefers actual thermometric measurements over fossils.  Well, then what stock can be put into the fossil records?

Is he claiming to be able to measure "average global temperature" (whatever that means) to within one one-hundredth of a degree by fossillometry?  He must be, since the article quotes a 1.25 degree increase in temperature recorded by his fossils over a 7,000 year period.  I can't do that with my mercury thermometer, yet he prefers actual thermometric measurements over fossil measurements!

The article mentions temperature reversals at the end of the ice age, another towards cooling at 6,000 years ago. snd finally the claim that the earth was actually warmer 125,000 years ago than it is now. Well, contrary to the conclusion then, the world is not in uncharted territory!

The article fails to mention the medieval warm period and the more recent little ice age, or explain them.  The article fails to mention other explanations for the observed phenomenon.

The article leads one to make value judgements.  But, if mankind's use of carbon fuels has postponed the onset of another ice-age, as is bruited at the end of the piece, that's a good thing, right?  Akin to deflecting an asteroid before it hits the earth.

None of these people appear to know the purpose of the use of carbon dioxide in greenhouses.

What this piece from AP establishes is that the next onslaught of pious nonsense about global warming is going to concern the alleged implications of fossil records.
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Unpublished Letters: Sandy Hook and the 2nd Amendment

Vincent J. Curtis

21 Jan 2013


Some Canadians seem shocked that in the wake of tragedies such as occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary school in Newtown Connecticut, that a comprehensive gun ban should be opposed by anyone.  However, there are good and sound reasons in American history and culture for the protection of gun ownership by its private citizens.

The reason the 2nd Amendment is in the United States Constitution in the first place is because in 1773 the British tried to suppress the brewing American revolution by first requiring the registration of firearms and then trying to confiscate those firearms belonging the the Colonists.  The framers of the Constitution wished to assure the anti-Federalists (those Americans opposed to the adoption of the newly-written Constitution) that the Federal government would never be so strong as to possess over-awing authority.   In view of the experience of the revolution and the cost of maintaining a permanent military on the charge of the state budget, the prossession of firearms capable of military use by the citizenry was sensible and specifically protected as an individual right of the citizen in the new constitution.  As Justice Scalia said in the Heller decision, the right to keep and bear arms was seen as the continuation of a right to self-protection that existed prior to the Constitution.  The right to employ arms for self-protection is mentioned in the 1689 Bill of Rights of England, and is discussed in Blackstone's Commentaries on the Common Law.

The right to keep and bear arms by individual citizens is thus grounded in American history and law, and any effort on the part of government to infringe upon those rights is seen as an effort for the government to become overawing.

To Canadians this may seem strange.  However, the U.S. Constitution begins with "We the People..." and is a document which proposes limited government.  Nowadays, limited government is respected more in the breach than in the observance, but the sentiment is that the people created the government, and they can change it as need be.  The government is a creature of the people, and an attempt by elected officials to deprive the people of necessary means of ultimately keeping the government in check is seen as a dangerous movement towards tyranny.

The business of personal protection, a common law right which antedates the formation of the United States, is also widely and highly regarded in America, as evidenced by the number of states with conceal carry permit laws.  Every man (and woman) has a right to defend himself, and the attitude of many of Americans is that if even a few of the teaching staff at Sandy Hook had availed themselves of this right the tragedy at Sandy Hook would not have been what it was.  It would be the story of a deranged man who was killed for breaking a school window.

American history is not the same as Canada's.  The incidents of massacres on the frontier, as the white, American civilization moved into Indian territory, are numerous.  The settlement of the American "wild West" was indeed wild in comparison to the settlement of the Canadian west.  Thus massacres are not as shocking to Americans as to Canadians.

The history of gun control in America began in the aftermath of the Civil War, when whites tried to deprive Blacks of the means of defending themselves against lynchings.

All things considered, there are many sound reasons why efforts to throttle gun ownership and possession in America should fail.  These are grounded in the American experience, of which Canadians often have little awareness and could care less about.

But if you want to understand why gun control will fail in much of the United States, rather than simply lament about it, one ought to review the recent decisions of the United States Supreme Court on the Second Amendment.
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Unpublished Letters: Gwynne Dyer and the Gaia Proposal

Vincent J. Curtis

18 Dec 2012


In a previous email, I suggested that columnist Gwynne Dyer was one of those people who believed that the world was over-populated with human beings, and that since the human species was merely one among many, the planet earth would be better off if a substantial portion of the human population died off.  This is the essence of the Gaia philosophy, and was the reasoning behind the Zero Population Growth movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

In today's article, Mr. Dyer confessed.  He concludes: "...the astounding total of seven billion human beings, on our way to nine or ten billon.  That's far too many for this finite planet, and a rapid decline in the birth rate, even to below replacement level, would be a Good Thing."

Since Mr. Dyer's position is that the human race is too numerous on earth, how does that inform the other positions he has taken, on global warming, on energy generation for example?  Does he advocate in his columns what is best for humanity, or what is best for Gaia, the "mother earth" which he says is overpopulated with human beings?  Mr. Dyer evidently believes that the interests of Gaia and of humanity are in conflict, and that to bring the interests of the the human race and Gaia into harmony, the human herd needs to be culled, just as we cull the deer in the Dundas Valley Conservation Area.

Mr. Dyer may not come right out and say that six or seven billion people need to die without replacement within the century, but that is what he means.  A loss of 80 % or more of the human population within a century would count as one of those catastrophic die-offs which are said to have happened in earlier earthly epochs.  If we merely held the human population to ten billion, if the earth were to prove that it could sustain seven, eight, or ten billion people by the end of the century, then poor Mr. Dyer's theory of the limits of Gaia - the mother earth - would be called into question.  Mr. Dyer needs to advocate a die-off if he believes his own theory.

The theory of Malthus has been proven wrong every time it has been proposed, and the theory of Malthus is what Mr. Dyer evidently believes.

The sincere motives of Mr. Dyer's advocacy of one position or another are now in question.  Does he advocate what he thinks is best for humanity, or is he secretly advocating the culling of humanity because it is best for Gaia?  To Mr. Dyer, the benefit to the human race of culling the herd is that by the culling of humanity, the human race  would be brought more into harmony with Gaia.

I thought the 20th century had seen enough of such monstrous beliefs.  Eugenics, racial superiority, abortion, birth control, and now Gaia.  They are all of a piece.
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The Alan Alda Challenge: What is Time?

Vincent J. Curtis

14 Dec 2012

[An unpublished letter to my hometown newspaper.]

 

 

The world is all a-twitter today with a question posed to scientists by non-scientist Alan Alda.  The question is:  What is time?  Please be able to explain it to an 11 year old.

What is time?  How clever is that?

 

How dumb is that!!

In the first place, the answer to the question was given by Aristotle in his work Physics more than 2300 years ago.

In the second place, the question is not answerable by science, because “what is time?” is a philosophical question, not a scientific one.

It is the nature of the departmental sciences that they assume the existence of the things they need to begin.  A scientist can measure length just as he can measure time, but a scientist qua scientist cannot say what length is.  A scientist qua scientist can use time and he can measure time, but he never asks himself what time is.  Such questions are philosophical, not scientific.

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