Tag: Canada

Caterpillar Crawls Away

The locked-out Electro-Motive plant in London, Ontario has decided to close the plant permanently. The announcement comes just over a month after Progress Rail decided to lockout its workers citing operating costs as its main motivation. Progress Rail Services Corp., a subsidiary of U.S. construction equipment conglomerate Caterpillar that owns the Electro-Motive plant had locked out its unionized workers on New Year’s Day…

Institutionalized Graft Part II

I’m not an accountant but I can’t believe that the cost of constructing a $5 billion bridge can be done without cost to the taxpayers. Where will the initial capital come from? Who will pay for the design, materials, salaries, equipment etc? The Tories have stated that an initially two-dollar toll will be collected and that will pay off the bridge “without cost to the taxpayer”…

SOPA, PIPA, ACTA, C11 and all the other letters and numbers they can throw at us be damned! The Net’s Not Gonna Change

To paraphrase Micheal Corleone’s only noteable line in Godfather III: “Just when we thought we were out, they pull us back in!” I had to paraphrase it because I wouldn’t dare embed the YouTube clip these days and am even a little skittish about a direct quote from such a heavily copyrighted film. Yes, we all know that SOPA and PIPA got shelved in the US, thanks in large part to sites like Wikipedia going dark for a day and showing everyone just what a heavily censored and regulated internet might be like. But that doesn’t mean they’re done for good…

The good, the bad and the ugly: The Trials of 2011 in Retrospect

I know that these year in review columns, annoying though they may be, are all the rage around New Years (apologies for the lateness). Also, that they remain a cheap way for hack journalists and bloggers to basically recycle the past years work while, at the same time, attempting to pass it off as new content. So, without further ado, here are my personal top Canadian legal highlights for the year 2011 (in no particular order)…

2011 Year-In-Review: News

With revolution in the streets from the Middle East to middle America, a major power shift in Ottawa and a smattering of other events that would have stolen the headlines in any other year, 2011 will be largely remembered as the year that got the ball rolling for the future, good or bad…

BC Supreme Court draws line on freedom of religion when it comes to polygamy

The provincial government of British Columbia basically posed the following question to the court: Is section 293 of the criminal code, which prohibits polygamy.
Liberals always seem to squirm a little bit when questions of religious freedom come into conflict with other rights that they cherish (i.e. gender equality), the way they did last week when the British Colombia Supreme Court handed down its epic reference on the legality of polygamy in Canada. I suppose the situation is bound to cause…