Letter to the Editor concerning Stephane Dion

Re: “Dion’s the leader, but who’s in charge?”, by Jane Taber, The Globe and Mail, Monday April 23, 2007

I’d like to offer a view of Stéphane Dion’s management skills from a different vantage point. I once had the privilege of being welcomed into a policy session with Mr. Dion and his advisors. The meeting reminded me very much of a senior professor in charge of his research group, or a business executive running a boardroom meeting. Setting the agenda, assigning tasks, reminding people of past experiences, pushing people to make improvements and maintain high standards, reconciling disagreements, and fixing deadlines: these are what I saw Mr. Dion do. I believe that Stéphane Dion is in charge when it comes to the most important thing for Canadians: what a Dion government would do for Canada.

Letter to the Editor concerning CFLs

Bravo to the Liberal government of Ontario for deciding to ban the sale of most incandescent lightbulbs in favour of compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) and other efficient light sources. I would like to allay concerns about the small amount of mercury (about the size of the tip of a ball point pen or 1% of the amount found in the old mercury thermometers) inside CFLs. First of all, the City of Kingston accepts and safely recycles CFLs at our Household Hazardous Waste facility. Second, over half of Ontario’s marginal electricity production is from burning coal and burning coal also releases mercury. It turns out that the mercury released from burning coal to provide the extra energy needed by an incandescent bulb is comparable to the mercury inside the CFL anyways. If you accidentally break a CFL, sweep it up and open your windows for a while to let any fumes escape. Let’s use CFLs to reduce our electricity consumption and get closer to being able to shut down Ontario’s coal burning power plants.

Letter to the Editor of the Chronicle Herald

From my home in Ontario I've been learning about Central Nova in the last few days. If nothing else, Elizabeth May and Stéphane Dion have certainly been able to turn the national spotlight on this riding's voters and their concerns. While the voters of Central Nova will be the only ones who have a say on election day, I do feel the need to speak out today in favour of May and Dion's courageous decision to focus on advancing the environmental cause in Canada and on defeating a Conservative MP, rather than on the goal of running candidates in all ridings. With our first-past-the-post electoral system, coalitions have to be built before the election as well as after. It'll be a great fight and I'm sure Canadians across the country will now be paying close attention to Central Nova.

Racial ways of thinking by Canadian public figures

I was struck recently by the similarities between utterances of Andre Boisclair, leader of the separatist Parti Quebecois, and Carol Off, a host of the noted CBC radio news show As It Happens.

During the recent Quebec election, Boisclair talked about the competition from Asia and the Asian students he saw while he himself studied at Harvard. The translated quote from the National Post, March 15, 2007, was,

"The reality is these countries are not just working to create jobs in sweatshops,” he said Wednesday to students in Trois Rivières. "When I was in Boston, where I spent a year, I was surprised to see that on campus about one-third of the students doing their bachelor's degrees had slanting eyes.

"These are not people going to work in sweatshops. They are people who will later become engineers and managers who create richness. There is a ferocious competition happening in the world today. What I would like to do it equip you and equip Quebec to face [the challenge]."

The sad thing is not the "slanting eyes" language, which apparently is not a big deal in French, but the fact that probably a majority of those undergraduates he was talking about were Americans (and Canadians!). He simply assumed that they were not.

CBC broadcaster and veteran journalist Carol Off on As It Happens, April 10, while talking to a student in Georgia organizing a first black/white integrated high school prom, said, "There's more than just black students and white students. There's other nationalities at this school are there not?". (taken from CBC online audio archives)