My Friends, I Assure You That I Have Nothing To Do With Running This Province That I Run

By his own admission, Doug Ford believes that the Liberals’ use of the Emergencies Act during the freedom convoy was the right thing to do. “Stood shoulder to shoulder with the Prime Minister” on it, he said. So why, then, is he fighting so hard to avoid testifying at the inquiry? What does he personally or his government as a whole have to hide? It must be something pretty awful, because it’s not every day that making yourself look guilty as sin of anything anyone can possibly dream up to pin on you should strike you as being a better political outcome than just answering a few simple questions in your capacity as leader of the province.

And what nonsense his reasoning is, too. Yes, the inquiry was triggered by a decision made on the federal level. But had it not been for situations taking place at a busy border crossing and in a gigantic city both in Ontario in which municipal and provincial police from Ontario were heavily involved, that decision would never have been made. Saying that Ford or Sylvia Jones or anybody else had no communication with anyone on any other level of government or policing at any time and nothing to do with what decisions were made and when is laughable. In case he has forgotten, Ford and his government kind of run the place. I don’t blame him, I’d like to forget that myself. But if I want to forget it, no one important will care. No one is counting on my input and leadership on matters of provincial concern. Not so in Ford’s case. If he was a real leader, he would cut the parliamentary privilege and court silliness and be accountable for both the decisions he made and the ones he didn’t. Even if you’re a Ford supporter, I’m not sure how you see this as anything but the complete and utter cowardice and shadiness that it is.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford defended his decision against testifying at the public inquiry into the federal government’s use of the Emergencies Act in the provincial legislature Tuesday, saying the inquiry is not a provincial issue.
Opposition members grilled Ford repeatedly in question period about his refusal to testify — their first chance to do so, after he did not show up on Monday.
“This is a federal inquiry into the federal government’s decision to use the federal Emergencies Act,” Ford said in response to a question from New Democrat leadership hopeful Marit Stiles. “For Ontario, this was a policing matter, it was not a political matter.”
Ford’s comments came as he fights a summons to testify at the inquiry, which is examining the federal government’s use of the Emergencies Act to end the so-called Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa and Windsor, Ont., last winter.

He Died Doing What He Loved

A sad so long to Florida lawyer Ron Smith, who spent much of his legal career fighting against and ultimately helping to overturn the state’s motorcycle helmet law. He was killed recently when…do I even need to finish this sentence?

Smith didn’t like being told what to do and valued his independence, said Dave Newman, who met the attorney through an American Legion post in Old Town where they were both members.
“He thought everybody should have their own choice,” Newman said.
In 2000, Smith’s aspiration was realized when the Florida Legislature passed a law allowing motorcyclists over 21 to go without head protection as long as they had $10,000 in insurance coverage for motorcycle accident injuries.

In August, Smith and his girlfriend, Brenda Jeanan Volpe, were riding a motorcycle on U.S. 19 in Pinellas County. They were headed to a memorial service for another biker who had died of cancer.
Smith crashed the bike as he tried to slow for traffic ahead of him. Both he and Volpe were killed.
Neither was wearing a helmet.

The cause of death for both was listed as blunt head trauma.

Obviously we can’t say for sure whether or not helmets would have saved their lives, but they certainly couldn’t have hurt.

Let’s Get Together…For a Breath Test

You’ll never guess what a woman who handed the cops an LCBO gift card instead of her driver’s licence during a traffic stop was arrested for. Either that or it’ll be about as easy as the collar itself. Who can say?

An Orangeville-area female was arrested for impaired driving in Guelph Friday morning after handing over an LCBO gift card when asked for her driver’s licence.

A vehicle was observed to be driving erratically on the University of Guelph campus approximately 2:35 a.m. and was stopped. While producing the LCBO card the driver denied she had been drinking, however officers could detect an odour of alcoholic beverage.
The driver registered a fail on roadside screening device and was returned to the Guelph police station where further testing confirmed she had more than the legal amount of alcohol in her system.

Her actual licence was suspended for 90 days and her car was impounded for 14. The fate of the gift certificate was not reported, although one can surmise that it too was impounded.

Get Off My Lawn! Like Literally, Get Off The Lawn

Totally with Gill on this one. We have the same problem in our neighbourhood. We’re in very close proximity to a Walmart, plus there are several other grocery stores within reasonable walking distance. So because people are energetic enough to take a walk but too lazy to carry things and/or too cheap to buy their own buggies, there are often shopping carts every damn where. On the sidewalk, on the lawn, blocking the crosswalk, now and then one will wind up in the street…it’s ridiculous.

I’m not sure how you solve this problem (a GPS enabled electrified geofence to keep the carts on store property sounds satisfying but leaves too much room for innocent victims), but I hope someone figures it out one day. It’s just so inconsiderate. I don’t expect that the kind of person who does this spends much time caring about the needs of anyone with a disability, but on the off chance that I’m wrong, please just wheel the friggin things back where you got them if you must bring them home. Everyone in a walker or wheelchair and anyone with bad vision will thank you. Or better yet, we won’t even need to know you exist.

For the love of all things decent and holy, please put your grocery or shopping buggies back where they belong!  I don’t know how many times I have been out taking a stroll when there has been sometimes as many as four carts on sidewalks or some other higglety-piglety place.  So please just put them where they belong, those parking places are there for a reason.

Question

What boils your potatoes when it comes to shopping malls, supermarkets, and department stores?

The Pheasant Plucker British Pub

Looks like Gill went to another restaurant.

At 20 Augusta Street in the heart of downtown Hamilton sits a pub that is partly homage to the working class neighborhoods that were once the main landscape of Hamilton, partly trendy little hole-in-the-wall British establishment.  One might be a little discouraged or think of stereotypes of dimly lit pubs with harried servers, but this is not your grandpa’s pub.

Food

Like I mentioned, this has the atmosphere of a mid market pub you would see in London or Dublin. Prices ranged from $15 to $30 for decent sized portions.  You could have anything from a traditional British Yorkshire dinner, roast beef, Yorkshire pudding, to chips (fries) and curry.

What I had

I had the chicken tenders and fries, and noticed that portions related more to European sizes, so slightly smaller than North American sizes.  The chicken tenders were about a 7 out of 10, but the fries were an 8.

Fun Fact

Normally they run trivia Monday nights starting at eight, but I guess there weren’t enough people to make a go of it when we were there.

We Voted Today…We Hope

Well, we voted. The experience was, to put it mildly, a complete clown show. Let’s break down what happened, shall we?

  • The nice fellow at the registration table had no idea what an audio voting machine was or even if they had one. This in spite of the fact that it was clearly stated in multiple places that they did. Thankfully though, he said he’d figure it out. This lead to…
  • A nice lady walking up to me and asking who the woman that Carin and I walked in with was. I said she was a stranger and we just happened to arrive at the same time. This is not what she wanted to hear. It’s never good when a poll worker looks at you and says “dammit!” She was quite clearly hoping that they weren’t going to have to sort out accessible voting for us and could just get her to mark everything instead. Note to future poll workers: Even if I did know her, that’s not happening. These machines exist for a reason, and that reason is my independence.
  • This begat a confab between a few of them, which ended up with them getting somebody who I believe was from the voting machine place on the phone.
  • At this point we all learned that they absolutely had a machine, but that it was neither hooked up nor was the main tabulator set up to handle it if it were. Why this wasn’t done at the start of voting I do not know, but it was going to be done now and that meant that they had to shut the entire system down and take 10 minutes to boot it all up again. Good times.
  • While all this was going on, at least three of them had to figure out how to load the ballot into the printer. The machine came back online before this was accomplished. But in their defense, a guy from the machine company showed up and he wasn’t quite sure how to do it either.
  • At long last, they finally got everything in place and the audio working. Good god, the audio. I’ve been using these audio voting systems since they first became a thing, and I have never heard a worse audio implementation in my life. If you tried to speed up the voice, it would stop and start every few seconds as though it was buffering, the processor wasn’t quick enough to handle anything or perhaps the machine had a short in it. But worst of all, the names of the candidates were not recorded by a person the way it’s usually done. They were spoken by a synthesized voice that I’m pretty sure came straight out of whatever predated the Speak And Spell. It sounded awful, and to top it all off they all had this hissing noise behind them that sounded like either FM radio static or an electric fan. Some of the names were extremely quiet and difficult to hear.
  • Then there was the machine itself. It was your standard one with all the buttons on it, but it had clearly been through some things. You had to hammer on most of the arrows to get them to respond. If you pressed them normally, half the time it would just sit there doing nothing. Once I figured out how to deal with all of these things, it was mostly smooth sailing. For poor Carin though, not so much.
  • The whole thing crashed on her when she was nearly done voting and lost all of her choices. This would be annoying on a good day, but this is a municipal election where you’re potentially having to vote for 11 people while scrolling…through…every…candidate…individually…on a machine…that is fighting…against you at every…turn. So needless to say, her having to do it all over again didn’t make anyone happy.
  • All of this was made even worse by the realization that they only had one tabulator for the entire station. So while Carin and I were monopolizing it for what felt like a day and a frigging half, they couldn’t scan any other ballots. People could vote, but the workers were going to have to run all of those other people’s ballots through later on. Knowing that you’re the only accessible location in the entire ward, how do you overlook something that obvious? That’s just piss poor planning on every conceivable level.
  • Speaking of piss poor, I don’t know who trains these people, but maybe next time he should try actually training them. God bless them, the workers were all lovely people. But they didn’t know anything. They knew nothing about accessible voting. There was mass confusion over who was allowed to talk to who when issues came up. One of them seemed completely befuddled by the concept of someone asking to vote in the parking lot. Even I knew you could do that, and I spent zero seconds in the four hour training session one of them told me they were given. If they weren’t learning about any of that stuff, what were they doing?

When it was all said and done, it took us nearly two hours to drive a kilometre, vote and come back home. And after all that, we left unsure of whether or not our votes were even going to count because the process was so ridiculous. These machines are supposed to be removing that doubt, not making it worse.

Again, every person we dealt with was extremely nice. But in a lot of ways it felt as though they were being thrown to the wolves. Just completely unprepared for anything that was at all abnormal.

Why is all of this still so hard? It’s been decades now. There’s no excuse anymore. At the polling station, all of the workers repeatedly thanked us both for our patience. I’m happy to be nice to people because that’s just what you do, but honestly, my patience with the lack of emphasis given to something so important is wearing pretty damn thin.

Have A Super Spectacular Earworm

A few days ago, somebody posted a link to this mystery record from Mad Magazine. I guess it had eight different endings, and depending on how the needle hit the record, a different one would play. Apparently, some of them were really hard to trigger.

Actually they posted this version where the beginning played again and again.

I think I can identify with this song. See Bobo, honk on.

But ever since I heard it, every morning, I wake up, and the song is playing in my head. I wonder if the same will happen to you. Mwa ha ha.

Our Deepest Apologies To The Flu Trucks Clan

I missed posting this one the first time around, but with the Emergencies Act inquiry in full swing it suddenly feels relevant again.

I don’t live in Ottawa and wasn’t visiting while all this was happening, but basically everything I read, saw and heard has me questioning whether or not this really is a fake story. Ottawa Police issue apology to protesters for any inconvenience they may have caused

OTTAWA – The Ottawa Police Service issued a statement apologising to the protesters that descended on the nation’s capital this past weekend for any trouble their presence may have caused to members of the convoy.
“While it may seem from early reports that demonstrators were able to act with total impunity, we want to express our regret if any of our officers got in their way.”
“These demonstrators are concerned citizens who are worried for their safety and well-being, unlike the residents of Ottawa who keep reporting complaints to us,” said Cst. Alvin Leapyear. “For the time being, this demonstration against lockdowns is why we are advising all residents to stay at home and for businesses to remain closed.”

Asshole Angers Bigger Assholes

I think I may have to take Doug Ford’s side on something. And it looks like I’m defending him against…*checks notes*…other conservatives. Huh.

Some Conservative MPs are fuming over Doug Ford’s comments supporting Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act, suggesting ongoing tensions between the federal party and the Ontario premier.
“It’s unfortunate,” Conservative MP Karen Vecchio said when asked about Ford’s vocal support of Trudeau’s decision to deploy the act to bring an end to a massive protest against pandemic measures that tied Ottawa in knots for nearly a month last winter.
The London, Ont.-area MP said she thought Ford should have waited to comment until the public inquiry into the federal government’s use of the Emergencies Act had finished its work. She said she believes the Public Order Emergency Commission won’t agree with Ford’s assessment.
Other Conservatives refused to comment before the cameras. Privately, however, several told CBC News they were unhappy with Ford’s public support for Trudeau. They offered comments ranging from “not great” to “brutal” — and two Conservative MPs said they were “pissed off” by the premier’s words.

None of the MPs were willing to attach their names to their remarks.
On Monday, while Ford attended an unrelated media event in Ottawa with Trudeau, a reporter asked the premier whether he agreed with the federal government’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act.
Ford responded that he “stood shoulder to shoulder with the prime minister” on that decision and described the protest’s disruption of international trade and the lives of Ottawa residents as “unacceptable.”

You can say a lot of things about the Ford government. I’ll start. A good 95% of everything it does is based on either bumbling ineptness, wanton cruelty or a combination of the two. But every now and then, it does try. Often that trying is half assed, day late and a dollar short stuff that only happens because it screwed things up so profoundly initially that even its own supporters are starting to get annoyed, but sometimes it’s more about where you finish than where you start.

Whatever his reasoning, Ford had no choice but to say that Trudeau did the right thing. When your entire shtick is that you’re pro little guy and pro business, a group of lunatics holding one of your province’s largest cities hostage for weeks, terrorizing its citizens and blocking millions of dollars in economic activity from taking place there and at its border crossings in the process is a pretty bad fuckin’ look.

If there’s one thing we know about Ford, it’s that he wants to be liked. He’s got a weird way of showing it a lot of the time, but it’s pretty obvious. That’s why you’ll find him doing things like acting as if he’s the aww shucks mayor of a small town while making sure the big city media knows all about it. And if you’re going to be liked or at least tolerated, you have to maintain just enough of your credibility. Even if you want to, you can’t appeal to the most ridiculous fringes of your support base and risk alienating literally everyone else in the name of whatever dumb ass shit that stupid truck business thought it was going to accomplish. Yes, you can read that as don’t do what the federal Conservatives are doing, by all means.

Like him or not and regardless of whether you thought he was too slow to act (I don’t and he was), Ford eventually got where he needed to go. That the Conservatives either can’t see that or aren’t allowed to admit it is frightening. Every day, the lines that separate the CPC from the PPC blur a little more. That’s not a compliment. It’s a warning. One that even Doug Ford was smart enough to take to heart.