Peterborough Marijuana HQ

Thursday, October 19, 2006

Good News For The Party

A recent court case that pitted the Marijuana Party with 6 other smaller party against THE MAN has ruled in favour of the Marijuana Party. This was a court challenge against the 2% law which says that a political party recieves 1.75 dollars per year every year untill the next election but only if you get 2% of the vote. With this ruling any party getting any amount of the vote will get some money. Money will be awarded retroactively. So the Marijuana Party stands to gain 175,000 dollars retroactively. And 60,000 dollars a year until the next election. Congratulations Peterborough Marijuana Voters your 455 votes have put 796 dollars per year into our coffers.

Here is our leader Blair Longely's reaction on this news:

We now have a material incentive to nominate as many Candidates and get as many votes as possible ...
Roughly speaking, my first guesses as to what we will do with the $175,000 (if we get it soon) is to set aside about $100,000 to pay our Candidates' deposits, and spend the rest in ways that we think might best increase our number of Candidates and votes,during the next elections ...
However, I am determined that promoting radical truth is the first priority, & thus we will not sacrifice it merely to be popularand get more money.
Meanwhile, we finally will be able to make and mail nice new membership cards to all of our members ...and, do many other things, that were impossible before.
We always used to have more good ideas than money.Now, we will have to pick the best ideas to actually spend money promoting more.

Woot!!! Looking forward to those membership cards.

Good News For The Party

A recent court case that pitted the Marijuana Party with 6 other smaller parties (Christian Heritage Party, Canadian Action Party, Marxist-Leninist Party of Canada, Green Party, Progressive Canadian Party, and Communist Party of Canada) against THE MAN has ruled in favour of the Marijuana Party. This was a court challenge against the 2% law which says that a political party recieves 1.75 dollars per year every year untill the next election but only if you get 2% of the vote. With this ruling any party getting any amount of the vote will get some money. Money will be awarded retroactively. So the Marijuana Party stands to gain 175,000 dollars retroactively. And 60,000 dollars a year until the next election. Congratulations Peterborough Marijuana Voters your 455 votes have put 796 dollars per year into our coffers.

Here is our leader Blair Longley's reaction on this news:

We now have a material incentive to nominate as many Candidates and get as many votes as possible ...
Roughly speaking, my first guesses as to what we will do with the $175,000 (if we get it soon) is to set aside about $100,000 to pay our Candidates' deposits, and spend the rest in ways that we think might best increase our number of Candidates and votes,during the next elections ...
However, I am determined that promoting radical truth is the first priority, & thus we will not sacrifice it merely to be popularand get more money.
Meanwhile, we finally will be able to make and mail nice new membership cards to all of our members ...and, do many other things, that were impossible before.
We always used to have more good ideas than money.Now, we will have to pick the best ideas to actually spend money promoting more.

Woot!!! Looking forward to those membership cards.

Garth Time

So the big news yesterday was the purge of Garth Tuner from the Conservative caucus. This man had the nerve to break with the ideological rigidity of the Glorious Canadian Fatherland Conservative Party. This is certainly big news- but it could become a whole lot bigger and this was hinted at in today CBC's news. He is getting courted by Elizabeth May. What if she entices him into her party. He does seem to hold somewhat progressive environmental beliefs compared to his former party's environmental party. His moderate fiscal conservative position fits well within the Green Party. This will also expose the Green Party as a conservative party in many respects which May might want as to make her party seem more accessible to right wingers. I cling the belief that Green Party is not as conservative as the Liberals but time will tell.

Garth Turner is well liked in his riding now esp. since he picked up a lot of support by publicly denouncing Emerson's defection. I'm sure a lot of people within his party weren't too stoked that Garth did not get a cabinet post. After all he was one of 2 conservatives MPs that has previous federal cabinet experience. On that alone he should have had a spot but Harper doesn't care about that as he's more concerned about Garth’s ability to think independently.

I think that if Garth switched to the Green Party he would be easily re-elected in his riding on personal popularity alone. The day before his Night of the Long Knives Garth talk highly of his meeting with Elizabeth May and said that the next 48 hours will show whether Rona and the government can put together a comprehensive plan against climate change.

Well that 48 hours are almost up Garth but you can still change that Green movement in Canada forever if you become it's first MP. If he turns green I guarantee you that the Green Party will win seats in the next election. Godspeed Garth.

As a Postscript read Garth's account of that day- its awesome how the CPC went around to eliminating that garthcancer in their midst.
As a Post-Postscript dont you think that Garth Turner and Bill Blaikie were seperated at birth.

Garth and Bill

Sunday, October 15, 2006

Get In The Game Jack

So I was reading this interview of Jack Layton for the Simon Fraser University newspaper. The interviewer is the owner of the right wing Filibuster Cartoons website which I frequent because I generally like his work. I thought the interview was pretty good for the interviewee and the interviewer. Jack had some pretty interesting remarks- you can tell he is mulling over announcing a plan to put our natural resources (i.e. oil and gas) under public ownership again. But I think he just slipped one question- this one was asked as a follow-up to a previous Afghanistan question:

OP: But don’t you think that the people who are attacking would oppose the
presence of any foreigners at all? For terrorists, they don’t see it as a matter
of soldiers versus humanitarian workers, they just see it as foreigners, and
foreigners have to be blown up and killed. So regardless of whether or not we
are fighting or just building hospitals or whatever, the people who want to kill
them will continue to attack, so long as any foreigners of any sort- no matter
how well-intentioned- are in their country.

Jack goes on to say he disagrees with this and talks about how complex Afghanistan is and ends up with some point about the Russians. Weak Sauce!!!! weak sauce Jackie boy. Ok so here the interviewer sees a bunch maniacal frantic terrorists who hate us for our freedoms in Afghanistan. Its pretty easy to demolish this misconception with one well placed counter example:
Médecins Sans Frontières have never pulled out of a country before. In fact they were in Afghanistan during the brutal 10 year Soviet occupation, and the slightly less brutal 10 year civil war between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. This was at time (if you follow logic cause the Taliban controlled 90% of the country) when evil Taliban terrorists were the most numerous and powerful. And there was no problem. Because humanitarian organizations don’t pick sides but then when the US army rolled in they started changing the rules:

“The violence directed against humanitarian aid workers has come in a context
in which the United States-backed coalition has consistently sought to use
humanitarian aid to build support for its military and political ambitions. MSF
denounces the coalition's attempts to co-opt humanitarian aid and use it to "win
hearts and minds." By doing so, providing aid is no longer seen as an impartial
and neutral act, endangering the lives of humanitarian volunteers and
jeopardizing the aid to people in need. Only recently, on May 12, 2004, MSF
publicly condemned the distribution of leaflets by the coalition forces in
southern Afghanistan in which the population was informed that providing
information about the Taliban and al Qaeda was necessary if they wanted the
delivery of aid to continue.”

In the same press release they annouce that they are leaving Afghanistan after five of their colleagues were in a clearly marked van and executed by Taliban. This never happened before but you think it would if the Taliban were crazily bent on killing every white person they saw. And it seems the Taliban's justification for the murders would further prove MSF's contention that having the US military coflating themselves with humanitarian organizations does no good-

"Organizations like Médecins Sans Frontières work for American interests and are
therefore targets for us."

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Elizabeth May Speech

As you can guess from the title I saw Elizabeth May speak- she is the brand new leader of the Green Party. I was pretty impressed with her speech. Keep in mind I'm not the greenest guy as I'm all about using the land because I learnt to love the outdoors from ranchers and loggers. And in high school half my friends were NDP like me and the other half were Conservative and we would all rag on the one green guy (that’s you tbooth). But her speech was full of substance (unlike any of the other party leaders) and made me look at climate change in a completely different way.

I know the Green Party tries to be like we are more than the environment but May's entire speech was about the environment with slight detours into the Environment Ministry's bureaucracy and a bit about nuclear proliferation. She was focusing mostly on her progress in getting heard in the House of Commons (she scored a tight diplomatic seat) and a lot about Rona Ambrose's recent environment announcement. She thinks Rona is the worst environment minister mainly because she is smart so she’s effective at misleading people. On several areas she completely lied how credits were used in Kyoto she is being called back to the committee to account for them. I liked it how Rona talks smack about those "Liberal targets" but no this is an international binding treaty not some sort inept evil Liberal ploy to eat your babies and give money to French people.

A couple things about climate change stuck with me. One was that Conservatives try to separate Smog from Greenhouse gases which makes no sense- why not hit two birds with one stones. Perhaps more importantly Canada doesn't need a Clean Air Act (Harper announced he will introduce one in after a year of consultation) because we already have the tools to crack down harder on smog thru Mulroney era legislation. She also made the important observation that Kyoto is just the first baby step. And how we can't make 6% of 1990 levels even with loopholes while Europe and Japan can make 8% and hell England is close to 20%. California is saying screw you Bush and is aiming for 80% by 2030. She gave us a great statistic- all the people in California had to switch to energy efficient fridges recently- this saved more power than that which is produced by every American nuclear reactor put together. Even more striking was when she described climate change not as a dial getting progressively worst but rather as a switch. She talked about the possibility of in twenty years the Gulf stream shutting down or Greenland's ice sheets melting which would rise sea level by 7 meters because we are just making the world hotter but rather changing the chemistry of the atmosphere. Both of these events would be devastating and fundamentally alter the way we live (imagine every costal city on Earth under water or no more food in Europe cause its too cold).

She also has good points about getting rid of the new (10 years old) corporate culture in civil service and restore competency to the bureaucracy especially in science related areas. She had a good point about the NDP and Bloc bashing only the Liberals last elections- corruption is a big deal she said but it doesn't affect my child's future like climate change.

This was all really interesting and impressive- I went from being very skeptical about the Green Party to thinking seriously about joining the party. One thing almost ruined it for me. You see whenever I hear a politician (doesn’t matter what party) speak I'm like that’s bullshit. This didn't happen with May until her last paragraph when she mentioned North Korea and Nuclear Proliferation. She goes on to say that Canada is part of the problem because we gave nuke reactors to Pakistan and they gave them to North Korea.

What a huge piece of bullshit- if that was true it would be on the cover of every paper in this country. Ok we gave CANDU reactors to India and they promised they wouldn't use the weapons grade plutonium byproduct for nuclear weapons- they were lying. Now they certainly didn’t give it to Pakistan or North Korea. And before tonight I've never heard any person claim Pakistan gave nuke related stuff to North Korea. This is how North Korea works out:

1994: Cut a deal with Clinton so IAEA inspectors come into their nuke plant where the plutonium fuel rods are pulled out.

2001: White House claims without proof that North Korea has been enriching uranium.

Jan. 10 2003: Amid massive Iraq build up NK serves notice that they are pulling out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

March 17 2003: Eve of the highly illegal butchering of Iraq, NK kicks out IAEA and sticks in plutonium fuel rods.

2004: They invite Siegfried Hecker the former director of Los Alamos to check out their nuclear program. They proudly show him enough plutonium to make over 10 bombs. When he asks to see their alleged uranium enrichment program they tell him they have no reactor for it, no materials, no funds, no scientists and therefore no program.

2006: NKs drop the Bomb and somehow the world is surprise. Hell I wasn’t because I knew in 2003 that Kim has taken advantage of Bush being in Iraq cause he told us. I knew he had weapons grade material because he told us and showed us.

So that kind of pissed me off but I can let that go cause I know she doesn't have a staff to check things out and I cannot use that one misconception to ignore her very very valid and pertinent message on Climate Change. I got to meet her as well- I just managed to mention that I ran against her party as a Marijuana Party Candidate but that her party's Marijuana policy was the best of the four major parties. (I don’t like how in their scheme marijuana remains a federal matter and how it would be taxed- hell it should be completely a health issue instead of justice so it would be under provincial control and people should just be able to grow it on their own without having to go to some bullshit government store.) She seems very genuinely happy to meet me and I thanked her for the great speech. She was very accessible had a lot of integrity although personally if she gets any seats she will start getting corrupted and compromise her principles. Happened to the CCF/NDP and the Green parties of Europe.

But if you can go see her then please by all means go ahead- you will not think the same about the environment again.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention when May was talking about how biggest problem with meeting Kyoto targets was the Alberta Tar sands. A guy in the front was like what would you do about the Tar sands and she bravely tackled the question head on and said she agreed with Peter Lougheed (Former P.C. Alberta Premier) and the Fort McMurray city council that there should be a moratorium on Tar sands development because Alberta is not necessarily benefiting from it- certainly not as much as it can be. There is the obvious example of Fort McMurray which is a living testament to every wrong with the Alberta boom- no housing, high crime, pollution and rampant environmental destruction. Then there is the simple fact of the sweet heart deal for the oil companies. Up till very recently Alberta had the smallest royalties in the entire world- a mere 1%. The Federal Government also gives the companies a 1.4 billion dollar tax break. That’s right every Canadian subsidizes the Alberta Tar sands and Albertans still manage to be against equalization. Also these oil companies don’t pay for water rights. The Athabaska is already at record lows and Alberta is going to feel a water shortage in 30 years. And of course there is the obvious fact that oil development is not particularly good for the environment especially when the Alberta Tar Sands pollute not only Alberta but also Saskatchewan and Manitoba. Since I always unreservedly thought that the Tar sands were the best thing since sliced bread these revelations certainly got me thinking differently about this.

Monday, September 25, 2006

Woot Back in Action

Finally getting things together for the new school year. Recovered after working the summer treeplanting in Thunder Bay, Ontario and in Rocky Mountain House, Alberta. Topped it all off with some urban restoration in Brampton. Getting back into the whole politics gong show. I just read for example that the Cons are doing some cutting in the spending department. And to my delight John Baird's example of wasteful spending was a 4 million dollars gift to research medicinal marijuana.

Personally, I think that a great move- why the hell should Canadian taxpayers spend 4 mil so we can find out something we already know. The Courts have repeatedly demanded that Health Canada start providing medicinal marijuana because people need it. Health Canada responded with stonewalling and putting together a terrible program that hardly a 1000 people joined. Come on now, California has 100,000 people in their program. Many American States have a much better program then any jurisdiction in Canada.

But personally I think medicinal marijuana is bad compromise because I like many Canadians believe that every person in Canada should have the right to smoke marijuana without the fear of persecution.

But don’t stop at a 4 million dollar cut Baird, how about you stop persecuting marijuana smokers and you'll save 400 million dollars at the minimum. Possibly you'll get 1.5 billion dollars back. And if you regulate and tax this 7 billion dollar industry you could net a cool 2 billion dollars. (Though mind you I would prefer if people could just grow their own without it being taxed to death.) But given that the Cons are big government type people, they would love to get their hands on that tax base- too bad their brains are fried with half century old reefer madness propaganda.

Monday, April 24, 2006

Goodbye For a While

Moved into a new place in Peterborough so it is pretty damn hectic. I going to swing by BC with my girlfriend for a week to see my bros and hopefully some old friends. Than after that I got a summer full of tree planting for Brinkman- first in Thunder Bay, then Alberta and then back to Ontario to get the summer plant. My T-Bay contract is unionized so I'm stoked for that- 10 dollars a day in camp fees instead of 25 and min 9 cents per tree which is also pretty good. Should be pretty damn hardkore stylez.

I'm sure the news of the Canadiens winning the Stanley Cup will reach the North at some point. Although this season I'm not planting in Hearst where those francophones would probably all be Habs fans.

Peace out

Friday, April 21, 2006

Playoffs Tonight

Now the team that will win the Stanley Cup is now playing tonight but it should be interesting to watch the Sens play the Bolts and the Flames play the Ducks. I guess I wont be able to see the Oilers destroy the Wings but I'm sure I'll read all about it.

But without further ado the team that will win the Stanley Cup:

With that Frenchman Heut in net we can't lose since the Canes like to give up a lot of goals while Heut doesn't. He's even a real Frechman- the only one in the NHL. And we got Ryder- easily the best newfie to play since ... ever. And Kovalev, Koivu, Markov and Higgins will be on top of their game with Peterborough boy Bob Gainey coaching them.

That may be a bit optimistic of course but I think a Canadian team will win the cup. Why am I so confident you ask? We have a Conservative government- you may not think it matters but let's look at the data:

1980-1983

Stanley Cup winners: New York Islanders all 4 times

Government: Majority Liberal

1984