As most of you are aware (and if you’re not aware, you should stop reading now and go back and re-read all 66 of my articles . . . I’ll wait), I’m an expert in everything to do with rioting. Therefore, I know what Conservative MP Blake Richards is talking about in his new Bill, C-309, which would make it illegal for rioters to wear masks while rioting — offering up a penalty of 10 years in prison if convicted.

It turns out that it’s really hard for the police to identify and charge rioters if they’re wearing masks. Therefore they’d like to respectfully ask those rioters to not wear the masks while they’re breaking the law.

And I couldn’t agree more with Blakester! We need to know who these people are! Listen, every October 31st a whole bunch of unruly kids amble into my neighbourhood and start harrassing everyone for candy. And what are these kids wearing? That’s right: masks. And all I can do is run into my panic room and hide for the rest of the evening while they continue to ring my doorbell and egg my house. So I agree with Blakester — these kids need to be locked up for as long as possible. Or, perhaps, when it becomes illegal to wear those scary little masks of theirs, they’ll no longer come around.

Now, you may be wondering why any rioters (or pesky little candy fiends) would be willing to take their masks off and riot in the open. Why would people, who are already breaking the law by rioting, be so inclined to not break a secondary law?

Because they’re criminals, but they’re not dumb. You see, if you get caught for rioting you face up to two years in prison, but if you’re caught rioting while wearing a mask, you’re adding up to another 10 years. Now, I’m not mathematician, but my calculator tells me that would be a total of 12 years. Two seems a lot better than 12 (except for when it comes to beers, when 12 is always better than two  . . .  and Jim Beam is always better than beer).

But here’s where the law falls flat. They’re only outlawing the use of masks during riots, and for an incident to be considered a riot it has to be an unlawful assembly that incites fear in the neighbourhood. Which would be fine, because everything that happens in my neighbourhood incites fear in me (seriously, why are my neighbour’s blinds always closed? What are you hiding Tim?  WHAT?!), but for an assembly to be considered unlawful, it has to involve three or more persons.

Only three or more? So, what you’re telling me is that if Bill C-309 is passed, I’m only protected if three or more people show up at my house wearing masks? That if two people show up and murder me, they’ll only be facing whatever slack murder laws Canada has, and not the extra 10 year mask-wearing sentence? Why do I even bother unlocking my door?

What I propose is that we make it illegal to wear any mask, ever. Doctors, with those little mouth masks, I don’t trust them. What are they trying to hide? Skiers, with their ski masks; not on my watch, off with those too! Riot police, with their riot masks . . . you’re in a riot zone! You’re definitely breaking the law!

Listen, I think we can all agree that the only way we’ll ever live in a truly free and safe society is when it’s entirely illegal for anyone to wear a mask at anytime.

. . . Masks and hoodies. (Geraldo, I’ve got your back.)

Nathaniel Moher is a television writer living in Vancouver. This column first appeared in The Flying Shingle.

By John Klein (aka Saskboy)

How can I write this without sounding, well, paranoid? I believe the RCMP is watching too many people, and abusing its resources. There are plenty of signs this is taking place. And proliferating tech gadgets and social media are only making the matter worse.

It worries me.

The police should not be monitoring Canadians unless they have a reasonable suspicion that criminal acts are imminent or are taking place. We don’t pay them to watch all activists, especially ones who peacefully oppose prevailing political governance. Are we not a society free to disagree with our government?

Here’s an incomplete, but startling, list of reports that suggest the Mounties are getting their man by putting everyone, innocent people too, under a microscope:

RCMP spied on BC natives protesting pipeline. The Yinka Dene Alliance is not a terrorist organization.If the report had said RCMP were monitoring “Polish Canadians” (as a random example), do you think there would be more outrage?

RCMP interrogate former Conservative candidate for passing documents from anonymous source to Ethics Commissioner in Parliament (after Parliament mail room lost first submission).

A B.C. man got a visit from the RCMP after contacting the Prime Minister.

Until the 1980s, the RCMP kept a secret list of people they considered to be Communists, and were prepared to round those people up in the unlikely event of the Cold War heating up. PROFUNC was ended by accident.

The G8/G20 brought Canada’s so-called “largest ever” police spy operation down on activists whose worst members did damage comparable to unruly drunk hockey fans in Vancouver. Meanwhile, the police assigned to watch the protests ended up being charged with crimes. RCMP “abandoned policy”, and kettled protesters, which resulted in the arrests of hundreds, to possibly over a thousand, innocent people.

Since there are no laws clearly governing the use of your personal information collected by the ruling political party into their CIMS database, they could be sharing this intelligence with the Mounties. Would it change your answer to any survey or political phone call if you knew your response could end up as a detail in an RCMP surveillance watch list?

As a political blogger, I’m pretty much screwed if the government takes an active interest in me. Even though I’ve previously worked in a job for the government where people, with less oversight and more authority than the RCMP, confirmed I’m loyal to Canada (and the Queen even) and am the opposite of a threat to national security, I have little doubt that now I’m an unhappy smiley face in CIMS, and who knows what other police-state Stasi-style databases. There’s presently nothing preventing the government from using the Conservatives’ powerful partisan database.

With social networking, it’s easy to track most of my contacts. When Toews’ Bill C-30 passes, the police will be able to do legally what they’ve probably been doing since September 11th, 2001. I also carry a cell phone, so my movements could be mapped, or conversations bugged using the phone mic. Ubiquitous technology is stacked against a free, democratic Canada.

Will the RCMP maintain the peace in Canada, or bring an end to it? Will they resist the pull of pervasive electronic monitoring of every person? I know what I hope for, but the signs are pointing in the wrong direction.

OK. So I was wrong.

When Christy Clark became the latest Con stooge to denounce Thomas Mulcair,  for simply pointing out that the Dutch Disease is killing our manufacturing sector, I said it could only mean one thing.

Big Oil and its Con puppets were scraping the bottom of the barrel.

But I forgot I was living in the sinister petro state of Harperland.

Where the bottom of the dirty oil barrel goes all the way to China.

And I forgot about the Con Senate, and particularly Pamela Wailin’ . . .

“This is a cheap political ploy to pit eastern citizens against those in the West. Will Mulcair next attack the lentil business, the wheat and grain producers who have long fed the world — or perhaps the potash industry that allows the poor to bolster their depleted farmland in overpopulated areas?

“It’s time for Mulcair to act like a Canadian.”

And that like the Con turkey Mike Duffy, Wallin is capable of saying ANYTHING.

I mean can you believe that? As if Big Lentil is as dangerous as Big Oil. As if Mulcair wasn’t right. As if telling the truth was a crime.

These diatribes against anyone who even acknowledges potential downsides or side effects of the bitumen boom seem to herald a new, dangerous tendency in Canada’s political culture. Opposing a bitumen-exporting pipeline in Canada these days makes you a foreign-financed subversive. And it seems that questioning the economic effects of the bitumen export strategy makes you equally seditious. I call this “energy McCarthyism,” and it should be rejected forcefully not just by those concerned with Canada’s de-industrialization and staples dependency, but by those worried about the quality of our democracy.

As if those Cons weren’t selling us out to foreign interests. As if Albertans haven’t been screaming at those damn Easterners for 40 years over the National Energy Program. Which did to Alberta what Harper’s oil pimp policies are doing to the rest of Canada.

Which explains why the Cons and the other Big Oil stooges are attacking Mulcair like piranhas. They know a killer issue when they see one. But why is Stephane Dion joining in the feeding frenzy?

Stéphane Dion, the former Liberal leader, says he turned down a proposal from advisors to accuse Prime Minister Stephen Harper of favouring Alberta and the oil sands industry during the 2008 election campaign because he feared it would harm national unity.

He said Mr. Mulcair is effectively “giving up” on much of Western Canada and, if he forms a government in 2015, risks having little or no representation from provinces like Alberta and Saskatchewan in his Cabinet.

Oh boy. When will he ever learn…

What Thomas Mulcair understands so well. He doesn’t have to win any seats in Alberta or Saskatchewan. All he has to do is win most of the seats in Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec, and he will BURY the Cons in the Tar Sands.

Which is one of the reasons he’s looking like a winner, and thanks to people like Stephane Dion, the Liberals are going nowhere.

Liberal support in Canada is steadily slipping as the New Democrats and Tories continue to battle for the top spot, the results of an exclusive poll for Global News indicate.

While the Grits may say that their troubles lie in finding the right candidate to lead the party, Ipsos Reid’s Darrell Bricker suggests the party may be losing a distinct voice in the political arena.

“The problem they’ve got is that they’re having a hard time finding their place in a debate about economic issues,” Bricker told Global News.

Yup. Mulcair is ruthless, the kind of leader these times demand. 

He has found a mighty issue, the truth is on his side. That’s why the Cons are running scared.

For 40 years Alberta used regional alienation like a blunt weapon.

Now it’s our turn . . .

Despite Wednesday’s somewhat dampening headline, Pierre Poutine robocalls trail goes cold in Saskatchewan, the main story here is not that Elections Canada’s Al Mathews was unable to secure phone records from a proxy server company in Saskatchewan a whole freakin year after the fraudulent election calls were made.

No, the main story is:

Why did someone in the Guelph Con campaign — who would normally call RackNine to set up legit campaign robocalls directly via their Rogers IP — feel the need to use a proxy server to hide their ID at all?

Why did Guelph and Poutine both use the proxy server IP and the Rogers IP from the same computer to call RackNine for two days prior to the election?

Why did Guelph and Poutine both call RackNine from the same IP address via that proxy server exactly four minutes apart at four a.m. in the morning on election day? First Poutine, then Guelph deputy campaign manager Andrew Prescott.

Why is one of the three Constituency Information Management System reports downloaded by Andrew Prescott — phone numbers identifying supporters and non-supporters — now missing from the CIMS?

How did Poutine manage to crack the Guelph CIMS database in order to upload a list of 6,738 phone numbers to RackNine to send voters to the wrong polling stations?

And the biggie: Is Prescott, who has cancelled further interviews with Elections Canada, “Poutine” or is he being framed or is he merely the tip of a previously unsuspected and ongoing elections fraud iceberg in 200 ridings across Canada?

And so on and so on. The trail is not so much “cold” as overwhelming.

A Tale of a Boy and his TV Show is doing a breakdown of the RoboCon stories one by one. Good resource.

One of the more ridiculous logical fallacies that climate change denialists use is that carbon dioxide can’t be pollution because it can also be breathed by plant life. It’s really sweet they care so much about plants’ respiration, but I’m a little more concerned with the survivability of humanity. (Never mind that most of these same people would probably soak dandelions with chemicals that would make your newborn’s toes curl.)

Why do I bring this up? Carbon Capture and Sequestration (CCS) is hitting some tough times. Sadly, this is the “clean energy” technology that the one-basket University of Regina has most of its “clean energy” research eggs in.

Here’s why the oil industry isn’t bothering with CCS:

“Our decision was essentially based on the fact that we could not see a way to make the economics of our CCS project work as we originally intended,” said Don Wharton, vice-president of policy and sustainability at TransAlta.

He said markets for pure carbon didn’t develop as expected, and federal and provincial governments took no steps to recognize the value of reduced emissions by implementing a price on carbon, for example, or a cap-and-trade system.

In short, despite nearly $800 million in government subsidies, the company had no incentive to invest in CCS.

Let’s keep in mind that the Harper Cons haven’t merely poured hundreds of millions of dollars into CCS: they’ve done so to the exclusion of any other climate-change funding (since their initial period of poorly-feigned interest in the environment when Stephane Dion was Lib leader).

Six years later, and there’s no Made in Canada solution to climate change, as I predicted very easily. There are plenty of Made in America excuses, however. And as our society focuses on technologies that are designed to benefit the oil and coal industries, we shortchange innovation in renewable energy technology. The U of R has more than 12,000 students, yet it has one VAT windmill in testing mode on its 18 buildings, and zero production solar panels that I’m aware of. Yet it’s a world leader in CCS research. Could it be the Conservatives and Sask Party are content pretending that they are investing millions into Big Oil and Coal’s “clean energy,” while their investment will be totally useless to private [and crown] industry producing electricity?

Opportunity Cost; Opportunity, Lost. At least too much CO(2) means some healthy plants . . . somewhere. I guess human vegetables like to look out for their own kind.

As a follow up to my earlier chart showing Steve’s Margin of Victory in ridings with the closest vote margins, I’ve adjusted it to include only the seven being contested in court for voter fraud and added two columns of polling data from an EKOS research paper based on a recent phone survey of 4797 voters. It compares 106 ridings where there were no reports of suspicious activity to the seven ridings where there was a lot — election phone calls made to voters to identify who they intended to vote for followed up by a call falsely telling them their polling station had moved.

Only one of them — Vancouver Island North — had an actual polling station change.

So according to the Ekos poll, if you lived in Winnipeg South Centre, for example, where the Cons took the riding by only 1.8% of the vote, you had a 71% chance of getting a phone call asking you who you were going to vote for. And if you subsequently got a follow-up call regarding polling stations, you had a 30% chance of being told your polling station had changed even though it hadn’t.

If however you lived in one of the 106 other ridings used as a control group, you had a 44% chance of being asked your voting intention and only a 14.7% chance of later being given false polling station info.

From the Council of Canadians, who commissioned the EKOS poll and are supporting the court actions, come these other key findings:

• 16.9% of eligible voters received calls related to polling stations. Of those, 22.3% were told of polling station location changes (amounting to 3.77% of eligible voters).
• Of those who were told of polling station changes, the voter intentions were as follows: Liberals 32.6%, Greens 28%, NDP 25.6%, and Conservatives 10%.
• 42.5% of eligible voters who received calls related to polling stations had a call claiming to be from Elections Canada.

And I can already feel a chilly if friendly wind blowing from the infinitely more rigorous Alice Funke at Pundits’ Guide, who would never mix up apples and hand grenades like this in the same chart (ie., adding a polling sample onto Elections Canada Official Voting Results).

But if the EKOS poll is accurate, then up to 15% of the vote in those seven closest vote margin ridings — some 50,000 people — received phone calls deliberately intended to suppress the non-Steve vote.

Margin of victory riding data from Elections Canada Official Voting Results Table 12.

Last two columns in chart taken from data in EKOS Study

By Frank Moher

I’ll leave it to others to dissect why the PC’s ended up trouncing Wildrose in Alberta, despite all the polls and predictions. What interests me is what this portends for Stephen Harper and company.

Whether by happenstance or design, Wildrose leader Danielle Smith is a near-clone of Harper (except for her much-remarked upon charisma, which the Prime Minister is in no danger of catching). She is a field-operative for big-business, especially the oil companies, and for the Calgary School of economics, and its crash-diet approach to government. And she is a pragmatist who has separated out her party’s fiscal and social conservatism and placed the latter off to the side, where she hopes, bozo eruptions notwithstanding, it will be forgotten. It’s the latter which is a relatively new phenomenon in Canadian conservatism — this newfound recognition that separation of state and church might be a good idea after all, albeit it for strategic, not principled, reasons — and which makes her resemblance to her older sibling in Ottawa all the more striking.

And Albertans, of all people, have rejected her. Yes, I know she won her riding and led Wildrose to a total of 17 seats, up 13 from what they had before. But when an electorate turns on a party the way this one did in the last week of the campaign (and perhaps even in the last hours — it wasn’t until a Forum poll emerged on Sunday night, showing Wildrose down four points and the PCs up three, that we began to get an inkling of what might happen), then that electorate is sending a clear message: we have given you sober second consideration, and found you wanting. Sorry.

The big question is, of course, why they did so. Much emphasis will be placed on the bozo eruptions (which we chronicled here and here, while drawing attention to a longstanding one here), and on strategic voting (otherwise know as “anyone but the Wildrose Party.”) But if the results indicate, withal, a general exhaustion with Canada’s far right, it could spell a wider problem for non-progressive conservatives right across the country. Canadians have had a chance to take their measure, and increasingly, we don’t like what we see. Certainly where I live, in British Columbia, the Harper government grows more unpopular by the day, both for its aggressive pursuit of the Enbridge Pipeline and its ties to the even more unpopular provincial Liberal party. Torontonians look shamefacedly away from the ongoing bozo eruption in their Mayor’s office (and longingly towards, yes, Calgary, with its shiny, cosmopolitan Mayor). Quebeckers, of course, took Mr. Harper’s measure long ago. That’s what makes him so vulnerable to disaffection elsewhere — unlike most previous Prime Ministers, he doesn’t have Quebec to fall back on.

And so, as Warren Kinsella put it last night, “A hole has been kicked in a wall at 24 Sussex.” Or if it wasn’t, it should have been. The NDP are tied with the Conservatives in national support, even without Jack; indeed, much of their strength has to do with Thomas Mulcair’s strong showing out of the gate. Of course, all honeymoons eventually end. But as Stephen Harper looks to Alberta today and wonders, along with his fellow travellers, just what went wrong, he might also wonder how best to reconstruct his party to look quite a bit less like Wildrose than it does now. Because if Albertans are no longer buying what the far right is selling, what are the chances anyone else will?

An anonymous missive has appeared on

“Ok, RossK, I’ll bite. As a news worker at Postmedia, I think this is an interesting and important question you’ve raised about this odd shift in the commercial media.

It was McGregor and Maher at the Citizen and the National Post who picked up the rifle first, as you note, with the robocall scandal. And now there’s O’Neill. And there are more to come. The Postmedia chain has turned against the PM. Period.

There is no way to understate the importance of that shift. It hasn’t worked its way through the whole empire; you don’t immediately change the attitude or approach of the hundreds of idiots you’ve appointed to management jobs over the years. Or all the columnists, or reporters.

But it’s started.

And it’s huge. It should NOT be underestimated.

The question for us in their newsrooms is: What in the hell can the PM have done to piss off Postmedia (run nominally by the Tory-loving former managers of Canwest, but in reality owned and funded by GoldenTree, a New York hedge fund)?

Well, here’s one theory:

1. GoldenTree invested in the chain in 2010 because newspapers are high cash generators. (Usually, anyway.) Because Canada has foreign-ownership media laws, the new company and its share holdings had to be very carefully structured.

2. But maybe that wasn’t such a big deal, because Harper was making a lot of big, loud promises about opening up ownership to foreign interests. That would mean GoldenTree could unload the chain, or parts of it, in future with relative ease. Hedge funds like to get in and out quickly, and there aren’t a lot of Canadian buyers for a property that big. Quebecor was really the only competitor that GoldenTree faced in 2010 as Canwest lay dying, and Quebecor lost out because it couldn’t put together a big enough offer.

3. Foreign ownership isn’t anywhere on the apparent radar for Harper anymore. At all. Period. Unless he’s in completely secret talks that no one has heard a word about.

4. Postmedia isn’t making money, certainly not at the rate GoldenTree needs it to. As a hedge fund, it would have wanted to move in, tap the cash flow and sell it on. There are lots of more promising cash machines for GoldenTree to move on to.

5. Postmedia executives, including CEO Paul Godfrey, toured newsrooms in BC just weeks ago to announce that while the two papers in Vancouver were still clinging by their fingernails to the black side of the ledger, red ink looms with absolute certainty in the very near future. An online-only Monday-Friday edition of the Province is widely rumoured to be in the works, with staff busy working on a new design for the weekend edition. (Yes, some of this is company trash talk aimed at turning newsroom workers against pressroom workers in talks for a contract that expired about 18 months ago. But that’s not the whole story. True, newsroom workers have taken huge hits; press workers haven’t, yet. And true, pressroom costs are high, and they were high in Victoria, where the chain used them as an excuse for selling the paper there to Glacier. But it is also true that the papers aren’t making the money they should, costs aside. That’s because the company doesn’t understand its product or its readership and can’t think of any other way to fix the problem than to continually cut costs, which in fact only makes the product worse.)

6. Quebecor, which owns the Tory-worshipping SunTV, is now the PM’s best friend and only defender.

7. So should GoldenTree force a sale of Postmedia, with foreign ownership rules still in place, well, the best and maybe only positioned buyer might be  . . . ta da! . . . Quebecor.

8. Which would result in a takeover of the majority of Canada’s news outlets by a completely right-wing company.

9. Say it all together now: Hmmmmmmmm. Can this have been the plan all along?

As I say, just a theory among some of us.

But it would be fair to say that the shift in Postmedia’s Tory coverage is significant enough to have most of our newsroom radar on full alert.

And I would add one other thing, since none of us know where this ride will take us. For everyone feeling so rightly cynical about the media, you will note that there is the odd MSM reporter left who can, when turned loose, still produce. You will note that there were others at the Globe and CBC etc who joined in after the Post kicked off the robocall-fest. I would argue that the heavy lifting was still done by the blogosphere, including you and many of those in your own circle. But I think there is still a rescue-able body of journalists left should the MSM, or any portion of it, come under new ownership that actually understands it own product, readership and social contract — something that Postmedia fails entirely to do.”

By Alison@Creekside

Steve, one year ago: “I’m not opening this debate (on abortion). I don’t want it opened. I have not wanted it opened. I haven’t opened it as Prime Minister. I’m not going to open it. The public doesn’t want to open it. This is not the priority of the Canadian public or this government and it will not be.”

Yet here’s Con MP Stephen Woodworth, happily debating abortion with Choice Joyce at HuffPo.

Why?

Because the House Procedures committee, which coincidentally boasts four openly anti-choice MP guys — Scott Reid, Harold Albrecht, Laurie Hawn, and Tom Lukiwski (and do see yesterday’s  post for their particular shenanigans over robocon) — the PROC Committee has granted Woodie the right to debate his don’t-mention-abortion-I-did-once-but-I-think-I-got-away-with-it abortion Motion 312 in the House on April 26.

Woodie believes a human life begins at conception and he’s not about to allow us sluts to fuck that up for the state any longer. All he asks is for a committee of 12 MPs – 7 Cons, 4 Dippers, and 1 Lib with a Con chair all appointed by that selfsame PROC committee — to figure it out for us and let us know the answer to the question: Why doesn’t the state have legal custody over the breeding vessels any more? AKA Whatever happened to a trip to England for the rich; coathangers for the poor?

Woodie wants it all done “scientifically”: “If we accept one law that says some human beings are not human, who’s next?”

From there he makes the jump from what is human — which is not in dispute as fetuses are obviously human tissue — to what is a person, which is a legal argument. He’s pretty sure some kind of equitable agreement can be worked out that will allow two or more legal persons to inhabit one body which will be fair to both and so help me he likens it to freeing the slaves: the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1859 that blacks were not persons under U.S. law. Wouldn’t you and I have objected if we had been there?

I am outraged!  Are you guys outraged?!  That’s a stupid question, of course you are, because I’m outraged and, because I form your opinions for you based on my opinions, that means you guys are outraged too!  And that’s good, because I’m going to do something I don’t often do – vent!  (I know this is a drastic turn for a hard-hitting, investigative reporter such as myself, but I can stand by no longer!)

Now, I’m sure most of you were waiting with bated breath for the Harper Government to announce their new budget.  It’s like Christmas, only with less math (“And twelve-minus-eleven partridges in a pear tree”) . . .  and real.  And I was right there with you, sitting in front of my TV, watching whatever the Canadian version of C-Span is, wearing my new budget slippers and eating my new budget tub of ice cream, when “BAM!”, the Harper Government hits me hard and fast (and not in the good way).

Sure, they throw out some things that make sense. Increasing the retirement age – makes sense to me. I’ve always said our elderly are just a bunch of gripers. (“Oh yeah? My bones hurt too!”) Really, what have they done for me?  The Cons also throw some cuts at the CBC budget. And why not? The CBC hasn’t made anything good since “The Beachcombers.”  It looked like we were in for a pretty sensible fiscal year.

But then they did it, then the “BAM!” hit – the Harper Government is getting rid of the penny.  That’s right the old queenie, as we call it in Canada, is about to be dethroned (beheaded?).

At first I was outraged because I didn’t know how anyone was going to buy penny candies anymore – which, as we all know, is a time honoured youngster’s tradition. (“Of course there’s only fifty cents in the bag . . . no . . . no . . . it just feels like there’s a dollar’s worth in there.”)  However I was quickly informed that penny candies actually cost a nickel now (I blame the communists), and kids aren’t allowed to eat candy anymore because we have an obesity problem.  Next thing you’re going to tell me that everything at the dollar store costs a dollar twenty-five, and that there’s a slave-labour problem.  It’s a sad, sad, communist world we live in now.

Butthe real reason I’m outraged is because we’re living in a world that is on the brink of an economic meltdown (or as I like to call it, an economidown – just say it a few times, it takes some getting used to, but I swear it’ll be the next Bennifer), and our government is talking about just throwing money down the drain?  I guess, being that Harps is, in fact, a robot, he’s never had a grandma and therefore never learned the lesson, “A penny saved is a penny earned.”

What does that mean?  I don’t know; my grandma was always spewing crazy sayings like, “It’s the communists’ fault that FDR is dead.”  My grandma was crazy.  My point, however, is that Canada produces 816 million pennies a year; if you times that by .01, you’ve got yourself 8.16 million dollars.  Can we really afford to throw away 8.16 million dollars every year because Harps doesn’t like how his fingers taste like tin foil after he’s handled some pennies. (I can only assume that’s why we’re getting rid of the penny – Harps is kind of power hungry like that.)

Here’s an idea: why don’t we take all those 816 million pennies we produce a year and give them to the CBC?  That way they can start making new episodes of “The Beachcombers,” and people will actually have a reason to watch the CBC again.

I don’t know, I guess that’s just my five cents.

- Nathaniel Moher is a television writer living in Vancouver. This column first appeared in The Flying Shingle.