Puzzlepieces – tag ‘canada’

What If Everybody in Canada Flushed At Once? | Pat’s Papers - pretty neat graph

So I already knew that despite asbestos being banned in Canada (among many other places), we still export it to countries with poor health and safety regulations, which I find pretty horific. I was watching a CBC news segment on a flight a couple ago of days about it which brought it back to mind. For one thing, they pointed out that only around 500 people are employed by this in Canada. This seems like a pretty clear-cut case of us doing the wrong thing.

So I figured there must be a petition on this, so I’d just go online and find it and sign it. Not so simple it turns out. There are, and have been, lots of petitions. As recently as the last few weeks, there is a new petition, but it seems like only companies can sign it; I’m not entirely sure what the point of that is. Here is a petition received by the government in 1997 along with what I would describe as an extremely pathetic and predictable government reply. The reply basically says that we tell other countries to use it safely, and it’s not our fault if they don’t listen and die as a result.

Finally I find the Ban Asbestos Canada website, which includes a broken link to an actual petition, and I managed to figure out what the real link is supposed to be. So go this petition page and from there you can enter in a few details to send a letter to all of the federal party leaders. If I were them I would also add on the relevant cabinet ministers (Health, Trade, Natural Resources, Public Safety, maybe a few others), and the MP and MPP for the riding that includes the remaining asbestos mine.

Oh, and I checked Facebook too. There are at least seven petitiony groups on this (of course), but the largest has only 230 members.

I attended Abandoned by Canada: Torture Surviver Speaks Out tonight, run by WPIRG and AWOL. The depressing part of of it all is that not only did Canada, a supposedly decent country, violate its own basic laws, not just in turning a blind eye, but in initiating torture (by proxy in Syria, etc.), but that it continued to do it when it realized those involved were innocent, that they continue to to defend this action, suppress information about it, and that is likely continuing today.

Right to Quiet Society - Home Page - listening to Sounds Like Canada this morning and they were talking about sound pollution, something that bugs me infinitely. The link goes to a website they mentioned, for what may be the most prominent organization advocating for non-insanity on the matter. Non-insanity, of course, being defined as agreeing with me.

There are a huge number of noise problems, so I will mention some that are bugging me at the moment.

Problem unawareness - the fact that many don’t even realize that this is a problem is a problem in itself. People tend to think of tangible pollutants, and discount sound and others. Reminds me of the song Garbage.

Public music obligatoriness - restaurants, malls, stores, elevators, gyms, etc. all feel the need to be playing music 100% of the time. I suspect people buy more than they otherwise would, what with being unable to actually think things through on account of the noise. I would say that it is okay for some of these places to play music sometimes, but none of them should be playing music all the time.

The number of places where one can not have to listen to music is quite sad. I managed to forget my goggles when swimming on Saturday, meaning I kept my head above water for most of the hour-long swim. It wasn’t until then that I realized how insanely they blast music in there. A pool is a noisy place already, what with the echoing. Even good music sounds terrible at the volume they have to keep it at to hear it.

I really do not understand the concept of a restaurant or other venue in which one cannot actually hear anyone. Do people not go out to, you know, talk to each other?

Excessive volume - almost all the movies I have been to in theatres lately have been deafening. Literally painful to the ears to start with. I suppose we are on a very bad cycle these days: people listen to music/tv/etc. so loudly that they ruin their hearing, and thus much listen to things even louder, thus worsening the hearing of those and those around them, thus necessitating louder volumes…

On the subway, I can’t listen to my mp3 player, as I am not willing to turn it as loud as need to be heard over the subway itself, which is very loud. And yet I can still hear the music from the headphones of people sitting across from me. I have the maximum volume on my iPod set to a mere third of its potental maximum volume. It is hard to believe that these people will not need hearing aids quite early in life. To be fair, I do have an American iPod; it is different elsewhere thanks to the less-unenlighted France having maximum volume laws.

Noise from unnecessary tools - another thing mentioned on the radio show was leaf blowers. To me this fits into the category of tools that have no advantage over manual means (ever see anyone spend five minutes trying to move a single leaf with a leafblower?), yet produce a ton of noise.

Jarring sounds - if there has to be noise, it should stop, start, and change gradually. Abrupt changes in sound are just a bad idea, screwing up your scenses, just like lots of sharp scene changes in video.

I will have to check out quite.org now.

Tories and Liberals trade barbs over environment - it’s funny how things change. When I was in grade 4 (’93-’94), we had some group work on determining political party issues and campaign platforms, or something like that. I vaguely recall that I didn’t really know what issues were big, but I figured stuff like the environment, maybe education. Then I found that it was actually things like healthcare, which I would have never guessed.

Fast forward to 2006, and the Conservative government reduces environmental spending, and pretends that global change doesn’t exist. Now it’s 2007, and all the major parties are trying to out-green each other, or at least pretend that they are. While I’d rather have a non-Conservative party handling things, this will (and is) certainly improve matters.

Talking about the urban-vs-rural divide in Canada and the US with my roommate yesterday; today I realized I could actually demonstrate it.

I scraped data from two websites: CBC and Elections Canada, since the latter doesn’t yet have election results. So here’s what I found:

What are you seeing here? Each point is a single riding. The x-axis shows population density. The y-axis shows the votes for that party as a percentage of the votes to the four major national parties (Liberal, Conservative, NDP, Green), and the scale is different for each. The Bloc Quebecois are not considered here, since they only participate in Quebec.

As you can see, this data seems to show that the Liberals weakly correlate with high population density, and the Conservatives correlate strongly with low population density. I tried making similar graphs using the logarithm of population density, but that didn’t reveal anything differently.

There’s quite a lot more that can be done with the data I used, you can find it all in this Excel file.

I never do quizes. And political party ones are innaccurate, of course. nevertheless

• Jack Layton Leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada (100%)
• Paul Martin Leader of Liberal Party of Canada, Prime Minister of Canada (88%)
• Gilles Duceppe Leader of the Bloc Quebecois (77%)
• Stephen Harper Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada (27%)

and of course, in Canada you vote per-riding, not for the party leader (well, unless they’re in your riding). oh, and since I don’t live in Quebec, I couldn’t vote for the Bloc. Although the riding I’m voting in also has Green and Marxist-Lenninist and an independant. Via mattt

NDP talking about tax cuts… Conservatives talking about child care….

so all the parties are going to win over voters from the other parties by being more like them… that’s a good plan, right?

since there are three main parties… and the leftmost is moving right and the rightmost moving left… everyone’s a Liberal? Seems like a good way to defeat the Liberal party, uh, right?