Too Little Too Late...

Rob should have started cleaning house on Day 1 by firing, or at least putting on notice, beauracracts at Toronto Silly Hall...MY WAY OR THE HIGHWAY!

Check Back On Monday AND Tuesday...

* to see which elected officials didn't respond
* to get an insight into those elected to manage they city would do so

T.O. money, T.O. problems: city councillors on how to solve the budget gap


With Toronto's budget process just getting started, the Post asked all 44 councillors what they would do to balance the budget

What the ****ing ****??


By Kathy Shaidle on Tuesday, June 7th, 2011
No Comments

National Post:
A Chinese migrant seeking refugee status in Canada on the grounds that he faced persecution back home for his Christian beliefs was repeatedly asked by the Immigration and Refugee Board last year to describe what Jesus was “like as a person.” (…)

In assessing Mr. Wang’s refugee claim, board adjudicator Daniel McSweeney asked Mr. Wang: “So tell me about Jesus as a person. What was he like?

“Jesus is son of God,” Mr. Wang said.

“I am not asking who he was or what he did. I am asking what is he like as a person,” Mr. McSweeney said.

“Jesus was conceived through the holy ghost and was born in this world,” Mr. Wang replied.

The answer did not satisfy the board member. “Anybody could memorize a creed and recite the creed. I want to know what you believe and what you know of Jesus as a person.”

“In my heart he is my saviour,” Mr. Wang answered.

“That is not . . . again, tell me what Jesus is as a person and this is the last time I am going to ask you.”

(KEEP READING...)

Who monitors our new religious freedom monitor?


Khan: In last week’s Throne Speech, the Conservatives made good on their campaign pledge to create an Office of Religious Freedom to monitor treatment of believers worldwide and promote religious freedom as a key objective of Canadian foreign policy. MORE...

Ashley Smith And Her Family Will Not Find Justice...

...nor peace.

CHRISTIE BLATCHFORD

Lawyers blast coroner in Smith inquest
Her attempts to control counsel are ‘completely contrary to the public nature of these proceedings,’ family’s attorney tells Porter


Those who failed to protect Ashley Smith seek to protect themselves

Correctional Service of Canada has brought a motion to restrict access of the media (and the public) to prison videos, the fallback position that at the least, guards’ faces should be blurred

Is Merit Pay A Bad Thing?

NO! Not if the individual meets the criteria; "something that deserves or justifies a reward or commendation; a commendable quality, act, etc." Not recognizing this quality leads to mediocrity.

City to overhaul 'money for nothing' bonuses

By DON PEAT, City Hall Bureau

The City of Toronto's "money for nothing" merit pay system is on the way out.

City Hall's merit pay mess: Levy

By SUE-ANN LEVYCity Hall columnist

Toronto City Hall's merit pay scheme is in dire need of an overhaul.

Downside To Being Good Neighbor...

Albertan to clear snow despite ticket

By FRANK LANDRY, QMI Agency

St. Albert hasn't seen the last of Jon Cooper and his plow-equipped quad.

FMTA Has Become A Leftist Cottage Industry...

...and property owners, including landlords, are paying the freight.

Tenant gravy train: Levy


By SUE-ANN LEVY, Toronto Sun

For more than 10 years a tenant group — with strong ties to left-wing city bureaucrats — has seen its sole-source contract not only renewed, no questions asked, but its funding has more than quadrupled as well.

Fumbling Bumbling Beauracrats!

...it makes you wonder. If Building Inspectors are doing that good a job in protecting the taxpayer WHY DO WE HAVE A MIKE HOLMES.

Neil Reynolds


‘All I wanted to do is build a house’

Craig Morrison's battle with building inspectors is a profound parable of irretrievably lost independence and casually forgotten freedoms 6:15 PM EST 1

Case For Privitizing Federal, Provincial/State, Municipal Governments...

...you free to substitute the beauarcracies that "control" and spend your tax $$$ and give them a rating of 1-10!

Sunday, October 17, 2010


Wal-Mart vs. The Morons

I won't vouch for all the numbers below but the general idea has a lot to be said for it -- JR
1. Americans spend $36,000,000 at Wal-Mart Every hour of every day.
2. This works out to $20,928 profit every minute!
3. Wal-Mart will sell more from January 1 to St. Patrick's Day (March 17th) than Target sells all year.
4. Wal-Mart is bigger than Home Depot + Kroger + Target +Sears + Costco + K-Mart combined.
5. Wal-Mart employs 1.6 million people, is the world's largest private employer, and most speak English.
6. Wal-Mart is the largest company in the history of the world.
7. Wal-Mart now sells more food than Kroger and Safeway combined, and keep in mind they did this in only fifteen years.
8. During this same period, 31 big supermarket chains sought bankruptcy.
9. Wal-Mart now sells more food than any other store in the world.
10. Wal-Mart has approx 3,900 stores in the USA of which 1,906 are Super Centers; this is 1,000 more than it had five years ago.
11. This year 7.2 billion different purchasing experiences will occur at Wal-Mart stores. (Earth's population is approximately 6.5 Billion.)
12. 90% of all Americans live within fifteen miles of a Wal-Mart.

You may think that I am complaining, but I am really laying the ground work for suggesting that MAYBE we should hire the guys who run Wal-Mart to fix the economy. This should be read and understood by all Americans Democrats, Republicans, EVERYONE!!

To President Obama and all 535 voting members of the Legislature, it is now official you are ALL corrupt morons:

a. The U.S. Postal Service was established in 1775. You have had 234 years to get it right and it is broke.
b. Social Security was established in 1935. You have had 74 years to get it right and it is broke.
c. Fannie Mae was established in 1938. You have had 71 years to get it right and it is broke.
d. War on Poverty started in 1964. You have had 45 years to get it right; $1 trillion of our money is confiscated each year and transferred to "the poor" and they only want more.
e. Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965. You have had 44 years to get it right and they are broke.
f. Freddie Mac was established in 1970. You have had 39 years to get it right and it is broke.
g. The Department of Energy was created in 1977 to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. It has ballooned to 16,000 employees with a budget of $24 billion a year and we import more oil than ever before. You had 32 years to get it right and it is an abysmal failure.

You have FAILED in every "government service" you have shoved down our throats while overspending our tax dollars.

AND YOU WANT AMERICANS TO BELIEVE YOU CAN BE TRUSTED WITH A GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM?

Sorry Mom...

Credit rabble.ca

...you should have gotten a civil service job at the municipal, provincial or federal level rather than waste my time raising a family without the aid of government sponsored bribes. The fact that Dad and kids held steady jobs and their taxes paid for those civil service pensions is irrelevant.

Probably A Good Thing...

Toronto policed by out-of-towners

Suzie Fox-Vignarajah, a Toronto police officer working in Etobicoke lives in Burlington with her family including her husband Ganesha, son, Kiran, 8 and daughter Alicia, 5.

Glenn Lowson/FOR THE TORONTO STAR

 

By Daniel Dale

Fri Sep 03 2010

Almost two-thirds of the recruits who joined the Toronto police force between 2000 and 2009 lived outside the city. 

...if they did live in the City of Toronto they would be subjected to the harassment, lunacy of city workers and petty civil servants and the decisions of a council of clowns and a left wing mayor. Let's not lose sight of the fact that they have access to various weapons and know how to use those weapons and that coups around the world are carried out by people in similar situations.

Time To Issue Them Distinctive Uniforms And Jackboots...

Bureaucrats leaving a sour taste

By EZRA LEVANT, QMI Agency

One of the few thrills of working as a bylaw enforcement officer is making people cry

Too Cowardly To Rob Banks, Not Smart Enough To Be A Conman...

...then become a member of a government beauracy!

Christie Blatchford

Secretive nature of fledgling bureaucrats raises questions

Marin report blasts ‘illegal’ talks on closing Niagara ERs

Tue Aug 10 2010

Ontario’s ombudsman has slammed a Niagara-area health unit for holding “clandestine” or illegal meetings when discussing plans to close local emergency rooms.

 

Take The Time To Read...

...and possibly you will count your blessings before bitchin' and complaining about everything and possibly, slight as it might be, that you will pickup the phone, email, write and communicate in some manner with the organizations, politicians, bureaucrats, etc. that allow this type of action.

Christie Blatchford

An unkind complicatedness

Amar Patel, who is suffering from breast cancer, lies in bed in her apartment in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Patel is in a dispute with The Bank of Nova Scotia over some holdings she wishes to redeem from the bank. Deborah Baic/The Globe and Mail

What should have been a simple bank transaction required a trip from the hospital

 

From Saturday's Globe and Mail Published on Friday, Jul. 16, 2010 11:37PM EDT Last updated on Friday, Jul. 16, 2010 11:39PM EDT

 

In the end, nothing else would do for Scotiabank but that Amar Patel – 73 years old, bald from chemotherapy, in the throes of metastatic breast cancer – should drag her aching bones down to the bank’s head office in downtown Toronto.
The trip from her airy apartment above the Indian Rice Factory, the landmark restaurant she founded in 1970 and has run ever since, was an agony of no fewer than five transfers – from the hospital bed in her living room to a commode, from commode to the chair lift for the first set of stairs, from that chair to the next chair lift for the second set, from that chair to a walker, from walker to the car.
This exercise took 59 minutes and the best efforts of her son Aman, daughter-in-law Deepa and restaurant employee Chandan Sindhwal.
I should note that despite her illness and pain, Mrs. Patel, who hadn’t been out of the apartment for almost two months, was gracious, beautiful in a red-striped caftan and, but for occasional moans when the car hit a rough patch of road, remarkably uncomplaining.
All she wanted was to do was take delivery of the silver the bank was holding for her in the form of the certificates she’d bought decades earlier.
It was, or ought to have been, an uncomplicated transaction.
Another major financial institution, TD Bank, managed to handle the same transaction within a couple of days, and delivered the bullion to Mrs. Patel’s local branch for pickup.
By this Thursday, Mrs. Patel had done the following to obtain Scotiabank’s agreement to give her what is rightfully hers:
In early March, Aman, a Toronto criminal lawyer, had attended the downtown headquarters to explain his mom’s situation. He suggested that either a bank official go to her apartment to witness her signature (he even offered to pick up and drive back the official) or consider meeting his mother in the car outside the bank to save her a bit of the journey: Both requests were rejected.
On March 17, Aman faxed the silver certificates to his mom’s local Scotiabank branch and then drove his mother there; they were advised she would have to attend the King/Bay office downtown.
For a time, Mrs. Patel gave up; she was hoping she could tackle it in a few weeks or months, when she was better and had her strength back.
When that didn’t happen, she hired a Bay Street lawyer and, through him, signed a power of attorney appointing Aman as her attorney.
In early July, Scotiabank asked first to “pre-inspect” the POA, then demanded the original; then pronounced it unacceptable because it wasn’t sealed; then insisted that a notarized copy, with covering letter from the lawyer, be produced; finally, the notarized POA had to be submitted to the home branch, then the bank’s legal department.
Even with these various approvals finally in place, Aman was told (being a lawyer, he has notes of all these conversations and e-mails) that the bank could still deny the transaction if it was deemed not to be in Mrs. Patel’s “best interest.”
So she hired another lawyer, this time to help her get what was hers.
Then the bank said it had to decide if the transaction was to be for the benefit of the attorney, from a business point of view. In other words, Scotiabank would decide if the transaction made business sense – not Mrs. Patel, or her lawyer, or Aman, who had her POA.
This Thursday, having heard nothing from the bank about whether it would honour the now-approved and vetted POA, Aman called and got Judy McBride, the head of customer service at King and Bay Streets. She told him the bank would not honour the POA, and that Mrs. Patel had to come down in person.
Aman again explained how weak his mother was, to no avail.
That afternoon, Aman, his wife and Chandan managed to carry out the five transfers and get Mrs. Patel in the car.
Once they arrived downtown, Aman went in to ask, one last time, if Scotiabank would at least dispatch people outside to do the signing in the car; absolutely not, came the answer.
They got Mrs. Patel into the commode chair and into the lovely, high-ceilinged headquarters with its polished marble floors they went.
Ms. McBride asked a number of questions, in my presence. Among them, “Do you understand what this transaction is that is taking place? We’re taking your certificates and giving you the actual bullion? Why would you want to do that? It’s more difficult for you to cart around.”
At this point, Aman’s seemingly endless store of patience was exhausted and he said, mildly I thought in the circumstances, “That’s none of your business.”
Ms. McBride said that it was, that “simply putting a POA in place doesn’t give carte blanche,” that the bank had a responsibility too, and asked Mrs. Patel, “Why would you need the physical metal?”
Ms. McBride said the bank “reserves a right to ask questions” because, she said, “We need a comfort level.”
Bank spokesman Joe Konecny denied the bank ever insisted Mrs. Patel had to come in person, said they were “willing to act” on the POA, but that “a heightened level of due diligence was required for a number of reasons,” among them, bizarrely, that the transaction wasn’t initiated at her home branch, although that branch had directed her downtown.
In any case, after about an hour, Mrs. Patel finally got her silver.
But it must have been a mortifying experience for this very dignified woman to make such a trip in her bedclothes, and the whole thing struck me as a profoundly condescending and arbitrary intrusion of bank functionaries into Mrs. Patel’s and her family’s business. And what if her son wasn’t a lawyer who knew how to fight back? What if she’d had a stroke and wasn’t able to sign the documents?
If she wanted to buy crack cocaine with that silver, or sleep with it at her side, that’s her call, because it belongs to her, not the bank. The bully-boy functionaries might want to find a comfort level around that notion.

NDP Faction At Silly Hall Should Be Ticketed...

...when it comes to fiscal management  and positive issues they have been in idle for years.

Idling law far from idyllic

By SUE-ANN LEVY, Toronto Sun

In yet another chapter in their war against the car, council’s Greenhouse Gas Police have opted to give essentially anyone behind the wheel on Toronto’s roads barely one minute to idle before they’ll be slapped with a ticket.

NIMBY!

It might be interesting to see the demographics of "The Beaches" and see if that explains why Bussin so successfully manipulates the voters in the area.

Sandra Bussin under fire: Levy

By SUE-ANN LEVY, Toronto Sun

Like a deer caught in the headlights, Her Royal Speakerness Sandra Bussin sat tapping her heels in her stylish leopard pumps as a hostile standing room only crowd angrily berated her last Thursday night.

The talents of Bussin might  be more appreciated by the council of Brantford who are considering demolition of 40+ historic buildings...

Is downtown Brantford history? Vote looms on fate of buildings

Sat Jun 05 2010

Brantford council will vote on Monday and decide the fate of 41 buildings in downtown core; the bulldozers could be out as early as Tuesday morning. (7)

Breakdown The Door And Bust A Few Heads...

Give Us A List Of City Staff That Were Fired For This $3.5M Mistake...

Cost overruns heat up public works committee

Angry councillor breaks quorum, demands to defer issue for public discussion

Kelly Grant

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail Published on Tuesday, May. 18, 2010 8:51PM EDT Last updated on Tuesday, May. 18, 2010 9:26PM EDT

The financial hits keep rolling on St. Clair: One of the last contracts for the controversial streetcar right-of-way project is $3.5-million over budget.
City staff underestimated the cost of replacing a water main and rebuilding the track between Vaughan Road and Westmount Avenue, boosting the price to more than $25-million from the original $21.5-million.
St. Clair wasn’t the only over-budget project with which council’s public works committee grappled Tuesday. Members also voted in favour of an extra $4.5-million for a swanky makeover of Bloor Street, already a year behind schedule.
But it was the St. Clair overrun that sparked an outburst from Councillor Cesar Palacio, who briefly broke quorum when his colleagues refused to defer the issue so he could ask questions about it in public.
“I think that they don’t want any questions to be asked with regards to that [St. Clair streetcar] project any more because they know that project is a disgrace in every sense,” said Mr. Palacio, whose ward includes St. Clair Avenue west of Winona Drive.
Fearing legal repercussions and eager to finish the line, city staff cut a cheque to Domti Engineering and Construction Ltd. for part of the cost overrun in February. Details were made public in a report “for information” only, meaning Mr. Palacio couldn’t question staff about its contents unless it was postponed and brought back as an action item next month. He lost in a tie and stomped out of the meeting.
Councillor Gord Perks, also a public works member, chided Mr. Palacio for making a “hobby horse” out of criticizing the St. Clair right-of-way.
“It’s disappointing he can’t accept that a democratically elected body has made a decision to build a project he doesn’t like,” Mr. Perks said. “It’s further disappointing that he’s decided to act out and have a temper tantrum because of that.”
Mr. Palacio eventually returned to committee, where the item was reopened and put off until next month as he demanded.
The extra cost of the Domti contract will be split three ways: The TTC will pay just over $2-million, Toronto Water about $290,000 and the city’s transportation services department $1.15-million. The final section of the St. Clair line is scheduled to open June 20.

Hey Abbott...

If Moscoe's claims are true, which would be a first,  then this list should be made public and the "exemptions" justified and those that have knowledge and deny existence of the "book" should be disciplined including possible termination.  If it is untrue then Moscoe should be publicly censured by city council and made to perform community service; 100 hours of picking up dog poop in city parks.

Secret parking ticket exemptions costing millions

By TOM GODFREY, Toronto Sun

A secret 25-page City of Toronto booklet, containing a list of people, services and streets exempt from paying parking tickets, is costing taxpayers millions of dollars in unpaid fines and should be reviewed, says a veteran councillor.
Howard Moscoe, chair of Toronto’s licensing commitee, said he has seen the ticket cancellation book and is not pleased by its contents.
“This book is not available to the public and I am not allowed to speak about its existence,” he said.

Full Story 

Once Again The "Servant" Benefits From The "Master's" Largesse

Taxpayers hit with city’s high mileage bills

Toronto is overpaying millions of taxpayer...