Suburbanites carry the day in Winnipeg North

Kevin Lamoureux is good at winning elections, if nothing else:

Kevin Lamoureux has formed a second beachhead for the federal Liberals in Manitoba.

The spunky former Inkster MLA won the Winnipeg North byelection Monday night, seizing a longtime NDP stronghold and giving Michael Ignatieff's Grits a big morale boost in the process.

Lamoureux earned 7,303 votes compared with 6,508 for the NDP's Kevin Chief in a race that literally went back and forth all evening. All 153 polls had reported by about 9:50 p.m., and advance votes and institutional votes were also tallied.

Conservative candidate Julie Javier finished third with 1,645 votes.

From the Free Press. Naturally Chief carried the traditional North End, while Lamoureux dominated the more suburban parts of the riding. I'm not entirely sure what it is about Lamoureux that appeals to such people, but then I don't understand suburbanites generally.

One of the more interesting things to come out of the latest batch from Wikileaks

It seems the US did some serious arm-twisting to avoid the prosecution of some of their agents in Germany:

The messages also reveal some of the diplomatic pitfalls of America's so-called "war on terror". In 2007, the US fell out with Germany over arrest warrants that were issued for CIA agents accused of being involved in rendition. A senior US diplomat told a German official "our intention was not to threaten Germany, but rather to urge that the German government weigh carefully at every step of the way the implications for relations with the US".

From the Independent. I wonder what those "implications" would have been? Perhaps new regulations such that BMW, Mercedes, and VW don't meet new safety and emission standards?

Irish bailout talks continue

The Irish government is still trying to negotiate terms for a bailout, having become overextended in bailing out the country's banks (among other things) while trying to keep taxes low (sound familiar?) The thing is, once they get a deal, they still have to get it through their minority parliament (Irish MPs are elected by multi-member single transferable vote, so majorities are virtually unknown there). And needless to say, a vote on this issue would be a vote of confidence. The government has already agreed to call an election immediately after the necessary legislation is passed, but when huge numbers of people are demanding that the government not agree to the austerity measures the EU and other backers demand in return for a €85 billion loan, one has to wonder if the government's coalition partners are going to be in the mood to co-operate. Several of them are independents, and following a by-election this past week (which was won by Sinn Fein, incidentally) the government has a majority of two seats assuming no defections.

One thing is clear - if Ireland defaults instead of accepting the bailout, things will get very interesting very fast. A lot of bondholders will lose a lot of money, of course, and unless the sky falls on the country quite a few other countries will follow their lead, compounding the situation. My money's on the sky not falling, by the way, though times will get a bit hairy for a while.

And even if Ireland doesn't default, Thomas Walkom in the Star reports that the markets aren't optimistic about two other troubled European economies:

The markets are also betting that two other euro nations, Spain and Portugal, will drop out of the common currency, default on their debts or do both.

Walkom, incidentally, thinks default is only a tiny part of the risks ensuing from this crisis:

Yet perhaps the most distressing element of the Irish crisis is the sense of déjà vu it creates.

In the ‘30s, nations faced with angry bondholders did exactly as Ireland’s government is doing now — raised taxes and cut spending in an effort to persuade financial markets of their fiscal rectitude.

Ireland is even lowering its minimum wage.

As in the 1930s, the Irish government is portraying its actions as inevitable.

As in the ‘30s, its cutbacks — by squeezing even more spending power from the economy — will only make matters worse.

And, as in the ‘30s, governments in Ireland and elsewhere will eventually find that their voters can put up with only so much.

The Great Depression boosted the fortunes of European fascism. We don’t know yet where the politics of this slump will take us.

But unless democratic governments show some imagination, the future doesn’t look pretty. Portuguese workers staged their largest one-day strike in 22 years Wednesday to protest government austerity plans. More troubles are on the horizon.

Now as hinted at above, the main beneficiary, politically, of the crisis in Ireland has been Sinn Fein. They certainly are not what most people would call fascist, though they do have a nationalist streak that bears watching. But as things degenerate in other countries, things could go very differently. Indeed, it already has in places (notably Austria and the Netherlands).

Intel on Iran has telling flaw

Every so often the prospect of Iran developing nuclear weapons comes up. How likely is it that they will develop such weapons soon? Hard to say, but it would be surprising if they aren't interested, given the deterrence that such an arsenal would give them against regime change from outside. What's interesting, though, is that certain folks don't seem to want the US to wait for real evidence:

The most important intelligence documents used to argue that Iran had a covert nuclear-weapons research-and-development program in 2003 - a set of technical drawings of efforts to fit what appears to be a nuclear payload into the re-entry vehicle of Iran's medium-range ballistic missile, the Shahab-3 - turn out to have a fatal flaw: the drawings depict a re-entry vehicle that had already been abandoned by the Iranian missile program in favor of an improved model.

The re-entry vehicle or warhead shown in the schematics had the familiar "dunce cap" shape of the original North Korean Nodong missile, an Inter Press Service (IPS) investigation has confirmed. But when Iran flight-tested a new missile in mid-2004, it did not have that dunce cap warhead but a new "triconic" or "baby bottle" shape, which was more aerodynamic than the one on the original Iranian missile.

The development of the new missile and warhead had already been under way for years by that time, according to the author of the most authoritative study of the Iranian missile program.

From Asia Times Online. Are the Americans making stuff up again, like the "yellowcake from Niger" business a few years back? Or have they been fed false information by some other party, perhaps someone who is no friend of either Iran or the US?

Has the TSA finally gone too far?

The recent intensification in US airport security has gone over extremely poorly, and with good reason. Consider what they did to this woman:



Now truth to tell, I'm not sure whether or not X-rays are actually harmful to breast milk. X-rays are a form of ionizing radiation, and not good for living tissue, but I'm not sure how much effect they'd actually have on the milk. Still, I can't blame anyone for preferring to be safe than sorry, especially if it says in the rules that breast milk doesn't have to go through the X-ray. And for trying to point out what the rules actually say, she was put through hell. And I'm sure this is far from the only example of such harassment; if there's anything unusual about this case it might be the fact that the victim was white.

The thing is, even when the rules are followed things are crazy enough. Consider this point raised by Roger Ebert:

It appears that not a single TSA agent has declined to perform a full-body pat down of airline passengers. That includes patting down small children. They're not patted down on a routine basis, but on some occasions they can be and they are. A child under 12, sometimes way under 12, may be required to remove outer clothing and be touched on such areas as the genitals.

This is so high on the WTF scale that it beggars the imagination. All this makes me wonder, though, if there might not be a silver lining of sorts to this very dark cloud. While I'm not sure I'd go so far as the Bishop of London, England in saying that flying is a sin, it is the worst form of travel from a climate perspective, and I suspect that a lot of people will start to think hard about whether they really need to fly after being submitted to indignities like this a few times. It would be interesting to track Greyhound and Amtrak ticket sales before and after the new policies came into place. Of course, if there are signs of a major shift, the airlines will start to lobby for the TSA to be put into the train stations and bus terminals too; can't have unfair competition after all.

And what will happen to tourism? Even if the Americans eventually submit meekly to this stuff, will people whose own countries don't put them through this stuff every time they fly want to visit a place like that? I certainly have no enthusiasm for flying to the US any time soon, that's for sure.

And, predictably, a lot of people are saying that the solution to this problem is to only do it to brown people.

A tale of two jurisdictions

The vital parts of the expansion of the Red River Floodway are now complete, and none too soon given what next spring could be like. At the Floodway Authority's website there's a very interesting animation posted of how a "700 year" flood might play out in Winnipeg. Now two things stand out about this animation:

1. If it is accurate, the improvements to the floodway are pretty darned impressive in terms of controlling overland flooding.
2. The animation with the improvements to the floodway omits any simulation of the effects on sewers.
   

I checked with someone in the know about this, and was told that for sewer backup, the floodway is of some use but not a whole lot; to deal with this problem you have to improve the sewers. A good start would be to replace combined sewers with separate storm and waste sewers... but that would require the city to actually invest in the future. The city's own website has some info on sewers, complete with a map at the bottom of the page showing where each type of sewage system is used. Ominously, pretty much the whole of the "old" (pre-Unicity) Winnipeg, as well as sizeable chunks of the suburbs, have combined sewers. Hopefully this will be remedied before a 700 year flood strikes; just in case, though, it wouldn't be a bad idea to pick up a back-up valve...

And if a big flood does strike, I do hope voters know who to be angry with when their basements flood... and to whom to be grateful for the fact that relatively little overland flooding occurs.

Montreal introducing car tax based on number of cylinders

Good idea I think:

Resident Montreal motorists can expect to be hit next year with a vehicle tax based on the number of cylinders they have under the hood, and that charge will be capped at an “average maximum” of $50 annually, according to documents tabled at Montreal city hall this week.

From the Gazette. Predictably, a some people are up in arms about this, but one of their objections is interesting:

“It is inequitable and unfair that in 2011 a special $50 tax on (vehicle) registrations be imposed only on residents of the island of Montreal,” Vision Montreal leader Louise Harel said in a communiqué, noting that such a tax ought to be applied to all motorists in the Montreal Metropolitan Community, an affiliation of 82 Montreal-area municipalities extending from Mirabel in the north to Richelieu in the south and including the cities of Longueuil and Laval.

Setting aside the rather obvious point that Montreal doesn't have jurisdiction outside the island, it could be argued too that people on the island have less actual need for cars. The city has excellent public transit, and is reasonably friendly to pedestrians and cyclists.

One quibble, though; it would probably make more sense to base the tax on displacement, rather than cylinders per se. If the tax goes through as described above, a GM pickup truck with a 2.9 litre Vortec four will be cheaper to register than a VW with a 2.5 litre five, which seems rather at odds with the intent of the law.