Jack's Newswatch

That eerie hissing you hear may well be the air beginning to seep out of the green energy bubble. The sound is similar to the pfffffft and sshhhhsssssp noises we heard in the early days of the dot.com bubble collapse or the subprime mortgage meltdown. If you can’t hear it, you are not alone.

While investment analysts are telling their clients to get out of solar power firms and warning about the continuing risks in wind and bioenergy schemes, Ottawa and the provinces are on a mad populist stampede to throw billions of dollars at the green energy monster. The politicians don’t seem to be keeping up with the trends. “Don’t try to catch a falling knife,” warned J.P. Morgan this week in a report that told investors the market continues to fall out of the solar panel module market. It downgraded a bunch of solar companies that have already been in a tailspin since the fist signs of a solar crash back in 2008.

Other alternative energy sectors are hitting walls. Jurisdictions with wind power regimes face continuing issues related to the fact that the wind often doesn’t blow much, turning investments in wind farms into cash-draining albatrosses. In Ontario, the 1,100 megawatts of built wind turbine capacity are often running a few megawatts at a time, and even on the best of days have trouble producing 150 megawatts.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

‘Kill the Avatar bill!” That’s the cry at this week’s annual meeting of the Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada in Toronto. Not quite in those words, mind you, but the private member’s bill in question, C-300, is based on the same lurid anti-capitalist, anti-mining fantasies that provided the psychic substructure for James Cameron’s mega-grossing but Oscar-short movie.

Activists last week bought an ad in Hollywood organ Variety to suggest analogies between oilsands development and the sci-fi epic’s tale of interplanetary resource rape and alien cultural genocide. So far, C-300’s supporters don’t seem to have followed that tack, but then perhaps that’s because they include the Catholic Church, which has condemned Avatar for its mystic eco-mumbo jumbo (I know. Pot. Kettle. Etc.)

This week, the PDAC opened a campaign to bombard MPs with letters opposing this potentially disastrous piece of legislation. The real wonder is that the bill, which was proposed by Liberal MP and NGO stooge John McKay, is still alive. In fact, having survived prorogation, it seems to stand little chance of passing a third reading, but then it was never expected to pass a second reading.

Bill C-300 would open Canadian companies to an onslaught of accusations and investigations promoted by people whose fundamental stance is that mining activity should be stopped. Those found “guilty” under this process would have government support — in the form of Export Development Corporation loan guarantees, or investment by the Canada Pension Plan — withdrawn. There is a good case that such government support should not exist in the first place, but the real threat of the bill is that of constant harassment of Canadian companies under a never-ending stream of bogus complaints.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

Slap a top hat on his head and Dalton McGuinty could have been a dead ringer for Johnny Depp in Tim Burton’s brilliant 3-D adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.

I thought I’d fallen down a rabbit hole and come face to face with the Mad Hatter during Monday’s throne speech.

To listen to the McGuinty yesterday, you’d have thought everything was ticking along nicely in this province.

The best thing about the speech was the flawless delivery by Lt.-Gov. David Onley.

To listen to all the warmy fuzzies, you’d never guess we’ve achieved have-not status, going from first to last in Confederation or that we’d lost thousands of jobs. You’d have no idea this government was wallowing in $24.7-billion worth of deficit.

Yet there was barely a passing reference to how the government plans to balance the books.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

So there was President Obama, giving his bazillionth speech on health care, droning yet again that “now is the hour when we must seize the moment,” the same moment he’s been seizing every day of the week for the past year, only this time his genius photo-op guys thought it would look good to have him surrounded by men in white coats.

Why is he doing this? Why let “health” “care” “reform” stagger on like the rotting husk in a low-grade creature feature who refuses to stay dead no matter how many stakes you pound through his chest?

Because it’s worth it. Big time. I’ve been saying in this space for two years that the governmentalization of health care is the fastest way to a permanent left-of-center political culture. It redefines the relationship between the citizen and the state in fundamental ways that make limited government all but impossible. In most of the rest of the Western world, there are still nominally “conservative” parties, and they even win elections occasionally, but not to any great effect (Let’s not forget that Jacques Chirac was, in French terms, a “conservative”).

The result is a kind of two-party one-party state: Right-of-center parties will once in a while be in office, but never in power, merely presiding over vast left-wing bureaucracies that cruise on regardless.

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Popularity: 6% [?]

The Dominion budget tabled this week (or “federal” as we now say, in emulation of the Americans) was full of restraint. We have been assured of this by every media source I’ve seen, and the notion gains additional plausibility from the mild endorsements of the Canadian Taxpayers Federation and other worthy, fairly independent monitors. “Baby steps in the right direction” was the message from another policy think tank, that focuses on family issues.

And that’s all very sweet. The ostentatious freezing of the salaries of prime minister, cabinet, members of House and Senate, will of course save very little money, in proportion to the whole. It is thus a gesture, a trick. Yet it sets the politically necessary example for what truly needs to be done: capping salaries throughout the public sector.

Which in turn is a gesture, a trick — a cover for the greater task of “downsizing” the whole cumbersome apparatus. Mechanisms are being put in place, to create civil service options: “Cut this, or cut that, your choice.” The government is approaching this as timidly as possible, for it is up against monopoly unions that can really ruin a politician’s day.

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Popularity: 4% [?]

Who can offer the most help to the desperate children of Haiti? Is it Bill Clinton, Jeffrey Sachs, the World Bank or the UN? Is it the many experts who are calling for a Marshall Plan to “fix” Haiti once and for all, or the donor nations that have pledged billions for the task?

Personally, I would choose people like Eric and Nicole Pauyo. The Haitian-Canadian couple, who live in a prosperous suburb of Montreal, have taken in eight nieces and nephews left orphaned by the Jan. 12 earthquake. “I didn’t think twice,” said Nicole, who’s 62. The Pauyos have already raised three kids of their own. One of them is at Harvard.

For Haitians, the best way to improve their lives is to leave Haiti. More than a million Haitians now live abroad, including 100,000 in Canada. Life in Haiti, meantime, has become worse. Children go hungry, and barely a third finish primary school. About a 10th are restaveks (from the French reste avec , or stay with) – virtual child slaves who are sent to work as unpaid servants in the city by their impoverished parents.

And child trafficking is alive and well. One journalist, Ben Skinner, recently flew to Port-au-Prince – just five hours by air from New York City – and negotiated in broad daylight to buy a 12-year-old girl for household and sexual services. The price was $50. “The trafficker told me that he could easily convince parents to send their children from the grossly underdeveloped highlands of southern Haiti,” he wrote in his book, A Crime So Monstrous . Some families are so desperate, they beg foreigners to take their children, no questions asked.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

Jim Flaherty’s relentlessly sunny disposition made an early March day feel like July yesterday.

“Defence spending will continue to grow [but] starting two years from now, it will grow more slowly,” the Finance Minister told MPs in the House of Commons.

“This year we will increase foreign aid to another record level,” he said, in tones as jaunty as his new hairdo. “Next year we will freeze spending at that level.”

That probably sounded quite reasonable to the military brass and non-governmental organizations that spend our foreign aid budget — at least it did until they checked the expected savings table buried deep in the budget plan.

The documents reveal that $2.5-billion has been lopped off the Department of National Defence’s anticipated budget and $4.5-billion less than expected will end up in the foreign aid budget over the next five years. The $364-million increase in international assistance this year must have seemed like a cruel joke by comparison.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

Canadian taxpayers will no doubt applaud the Conservative government’s plan to freeze MPs’ pay and bureaucrats’ budgets as a welcome move towards fiscal sanity.

The measures won’t eliminate the country’s massive deficits, but there is no doubting the popular political appeal of a government austerity program that starts with politicians and federal cheque-writers.

The unexpected Conservative plan was a rare bit of news in Wednesday’s throne speech.

The hour-long hot-air marathon we affectionately call the drone from the throne was supposed to represent the Conservative government’s new plans for the country — its so-called “recalibration” that required Parliament be shut down for almost three months.

Instead, it was simply a super-sized version of what throne speeches have always been — a compendium of platitudes and warmed-over policy not worth the trees they’re printed on.

Aside from the creation of Seniors’ Day, and an idiotic idea to rewrite O Canada, the only headline in the throne speech was the government’s plan to tighten its own belt.

Vowing to “lead by example,” the Harper government is promising to introduce legislation that would freeze the salaries of all senators and MPs, including cabinet ministers and the PM himself.

It is also putting a lid on ministers’ office budgets.

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Popularity: 9% [?]

Innovation – defined as new and better ways of doing valued things – is likely to be heavily stressed in this week’s federal budget. It is the key to improving the performance of Canada’s economy.

And what are the valued things that Canada needs to find new and better ways of doing? They include:

- The productive performance of businesses, especially in international markets;

- The cost-effective provision of essential services, especially health care;

- The responsible operation of the senior institutions of Canadian democracy – our Parliament and legislatures.

The need for innovation to restore faith in our democratic institutions has been highlighted by the recent debate over whether an often dysfunctional minority Parliament should have been prorogued.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

It must have been aggravating for Harper-haters the way the guy kept turning up in Vancouver, every time there was a limelight to hog.

He seems to have spent the entire closing weekend zeroing in on events in which Canada had a chance at a medal, securing a spot in the stands where the camera would be able to get a glimpse of him and transmit it to the audience of potential voters, catching them when they were feeling all patriotic and had their anti-Ottawa guard down.

Harper was everywhere. Lord knows what squadrons of RCMP types were required to clear the roads and ferry him from venue to venue so he could get within camera range before viewers headed off for more nachos. No wonder security cost $1-billion. In addition to erecting a border ban on every mildly objectionable academic twit who’d ever unleashed a stream of Marxist claptrap, they had to plot out moment-by-moment transport plans so the Prime Minister could get to his next seat within five minutes of leaving his last one.

No doubt it annoyed the hell out of Liberals, especially Michael Ignatieff, as he watched the game at Stornoway, sipping a stiff tea and murmuring “onward squadron!” at the tube, once he figured out which was us and which was them. (It had to be particularly grating that Jack Layton had managed to squeeze his way to the front of the bar at Gretzky’s in Toronto, so that every time CTV flashed to the inebriated crowds, there was Jack, front and centre, draped in red and grinning to beat the band).

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Popularity: 5% [?]