John Chuckman

COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN THE TORONTO STAR

This is the dumbest, most Daltonesque stunt yet by McGuinty’s successor.

Unions are private organizations whose job is to get concessions from employers.

The teachers’ unions are already well endowed because their members are well endowed, thanks to taxpayers.

Paying the unions money because you change the way negotiations are conducted is an idea straight from cloudcuckooland, and it should make clear to everyone in what a sad state of affairs we find ourselves. Quite possibly, the original change in the structure of negotiations was itself a hare-brained idea.

But then I must remember the Premier and her Education Minister are both former teachers.

God, will no one ever make a serious effort to get control over public education?

It is simply out of control.

Teachers who’ve left the classroom run the entire thing from principals to directors and to the Education Ministry.

Not only is the average public school teacher not skilled at management, many of them aren’t even very good teachers because they have no special knowledge or strong motivation.

Unions belong in steel mills and plumbing shops, if anywhere, and not in schools. The very fact that they are there and function the way they do supports the previous observation about teachers’ skills.

The proof is in the pudding: Ontario’s schools are not overly successful, and they are not even close to world-class. They are so-so, but they cost a fortune to run, almost all of it in the form of salaries and benefits.

Our teachers often can’t use a computer, and computers have not been integrated into how we educate children. There are computer programs which should have replaced paper exercise sheets and even text books long ago, but Ontario doesn’t exploit their learning strengths and cost reductions. Self-correcting programs designed by really capable people expert in their fields will beat the average drone teacher hands down in communicating a subject. They also can provide greater challenges to brighter students while allowing slower ones to go at a suitable pace.

We only get fraudulent reforms from our government such as making teachers’ college a two-year program. Twice as much of nothing is still nothing, and it costs everyone twice as much. All this “reform” did was grandfather a lot of college staff who would have lost their jobs under mandated reduced student enrolments, itself a simple management housekeeping task which should have been done years ago. Teachers’ colleges are where to go if you want to witness junk-science being taught as professional-level material. Moreover, they are staffed, again, with teachers who have left the classroom. Ridiculous.

We are backward in our public education, but the people responsible for the fact are never accountable and only ever want more pay and privileges, and our silly government is always ready to give it to them, sometimes even in elaborately disguised ways.

There are no checks or controls over the quality of our public education. No one assesses our teachers for their knowledge, curiosity about what is new, classroom demeanor, or methods at any point in what may be some forty years of exposing young minds to them. The only assessment ever is the fiasco that goes on in the teachers’ colleges. Their superiors, the principles, are only ex-teachers who’ve taken additional piles of academically-undemanding courses at a teachers’ college. They know nothing of management except by accident.

There are no able managerial people handling public education’s vast resources. None. If you have been exposed to a number of board superintendents and directors, you know how just how ineffectual a bureaucrat can be. They pretty much beat anything in all the old jokes about government agencies.

Local curricula for the most part are just nonsense because there is only a world curriculum if you want to be competitive.

Our public education today is a one-way trip to nowhere.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

AN EXTENSION OF COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

I am not a Conservative, but already it is apparent that Kathleen Wynne, the new Liberal leader, is a disaster as premier.

She has exactly Dalton McGuinty’s smarmy instincts and political ethics.

One of the only worthwhile things done in his decade as the most irresponsible and inept premier in memory was his reminding the teachers of the fact that they are employees of the public at a time of fiscal difficulty.

This woman has wiped out the effort entirely.

And just look at her other acts over so brief a time as premier.

The investigation she launched into the cancer-drug scandal was genuinely McGuintyesque, a way to delay and put-off while appearing to do something. Any good private investigator could have got to the bottom of the matter in 3 days.

Her recent initiative on wind farms represents virtually no change from McGuinty’s high-handed ways. In Britain, for example, the government is giving local municipalities a veto over them.

Wynne has done nothing of substance about McGuinty’s several scandals of mismanagement.

No changes at e-Health beyond McGuinty’s last appointment resigning and getting a Golden Handshake for solving nothing at the troubled agency.

No changes in our forgotten air-ambulance scandal.

Her recent change in teacher education requirements are leftover initiatives of McGuinty.

The cutting of places in education colleges was something which should have been done years ago. It’s just basic housekeeping never kept up with, not reform.

The new two-year requirement for graduates is backward. Many other jurisdictions have realized that “teachers’ colleges” are ineffective. Putting well-educated and motivated young people – or indeed, not-so-young – into class rooms is what we need. Learn-by-doing under, say, two years of mentoring by experienced teachers is the reform we need.

Teachers’ colleges are staffed by teachers who dropped out of the classroom, who promote unscientific, and even plainly silly, theories about how things are done, and who use language which calls a spade a manually-operated excavating machine. Any intelligent young person will learn how their skills best serve teaching during a couple of years practicing, not the 80 days now proposed for teachers’ colleges and certainly not the present standard of 40 days.

Hasn’t our government learned anything about education? The previous director of TDSB was hired by people who clearly did not know what they were doing. He was likely awarded his doctorate by an education faculty who also did not know what it was doing.

Ontario schools are by no measure outstanding. Our public education is a leader in nothing. We don’t even compare to the world’s most successful systems. The computer hasn’t yet been integrated with many teachers unable to use them and our schools not supplying them to all students, a longstanding practice in a number of jurisdictions.

But this government can tell young people if they just spend more time in education faculties and waste more resources, adding costs and debt, they’ll be able to do a better job. Nonsense.

If “found money” – money supposedly suddenly discovered in declining enrollments – went anywhere, except applied to the deficit where it genuinely belonged, it should have gone towards obtaining computers for our students, but then we still have many teachers who cannot use a computer. Many jurisdictions put lap-tops into each student’s hands, but not Ontario, bastion of teachers’ union interests and second-rate education.

I’m going to vote Conservative for the first time in my life at the next provincial election, and I’m not even attracted to the leader, Mr. Hudak. A decade of McGuinty was enough, and Wynne shows every promise of being even worse.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

What a dishonest piece of legislation.

It does nothing about guns or guns being on the street or the criminals who carry and use guns.

It is a political lollipop for communities who have a high incidence of not looking after their own children.
______________________________________

“The Globe story quoting an ex-gang member who said handguns can be got for $100 a pop…”

I doubt this story seriously.

There are what are called “Saturday night specials” in the U.S., cheap little revolvers that can be had there for less than a $100.

But a decent quality gun is expensive even in the United States.

In Canada’s restricted market, its value of course multiplies.

Guys carrying 9-millimeter automatics are carrying hardware likely worth $1500 in Toronto.

In any event, the fact that we do not have a good fix on the quality and quantity of handguns in the city again is a reflection on our ineffective police.

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Cops and social programs?

Please, both are pretty much a waste of time and money.

When in the history of the planet was a cop on the scene to prevent a murder?

It never happens.

The problem here is unmistakable: the murder culture of Jamaica (on the order of 30 times the murders of Toronto every year, and a place of about the same population) has been imported along with the drugs and guns which are behind much of this depravity.

Handguns are clearly coming into Ontario at record rates, as are drugs.

And please tell me what “social programs” do for violent young men who think it’s just fine to go to a party with a loaded gun in their pockets and whip it out at the first provocation?

Such events never occurred before the last couple of decades in the peacefulness of Toronto, but they have been matter-of-fact in Detroit, New Orleans, Houston, Atlanta, and other places for time immemorial.

It really is not poverty at work here. We see young drug dealers living a high life, driving costly cars, wearing gold jewelry, carrying very expensive pistols. Men demanding things their education and skills could never provide.

Does anyone believe they would trade that for a menial-labor job or work as an amateur basketball coach?

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

The Ontario Liberal Party should pay the bill for closing and removing it.

Only when politicians are genuinely responsible for what they do will we get better government.

I have trouble seeing any difference between a stunt like this and a kid who steals an expensive car, smashing it into a wall.

And I do not mean to be understood that only Ontario Liberals do these things.

To whom do we have to turn to get rid of the unpleasant McGuinty?

The nasty gnome the Ontario Conservatives offered up? The guy who wants chain gangs in the parks?

Do we even get one senior politician with a working brain and a set of ethics?

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL EDITORIAL

Exactly what genuine information do voters get from the Globe’s fawning political endorsements?

Only a single important fact emerges from all of them: if the Globe endorses a candidate, you know he/she/it is about as poor for the job as it gets.

The criteria for these endorsements reside in the dark shadows of the editorial offices, in a place where what is good for the Globe in its day-to-day business and government contacts determines the nominee.

Consider the egregious example of that dark bulk, Harper.

Does anyone who doesn’t work for the tar sands or belong to Christian Right or is both blind and deaf believe he was a quality candidate?

Now we have Dalton the Magnificent joining the line-up of usual suspects:

http://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2009/06/01/dalton-the-magnificent/

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_NtgXlrcvXZA/TOVYXM0ywwI/AAAAAAAApJA/C4mOoDa8zAI/s1600/CHUCKMAN%2B-%2BMCGUINTY%2B-%2BMARIE%2BANTOINE

_________________________________

Well, we really do not have much of a choice, do we?

There’s Hudak who has utterly made a fool of himself with chain-gangs, publishing former sex-offender addresses, and now miming Harper’s idiocy about coalitions, something that any good high school student knows is legal and proper in parliamentary government.

There’s Dalton the Magnificent who has made a fool of himself more times than you can count but, more importantly, has put Ontario’s future energy competitiveness and consumers’ household budgets in serious danger with inefficient and costly and ugly windmills.

He lacks even the courage to build the gas-fired base-load plants, needed to back-up the inefficient windmills, in the jurisdictions where they are needed.

Then there’s Andrea Horwath, an intelligent woman, who unfortunately belongs to a party that will see every teacher and civil servant getting record pay settlements.

What’s the big deal about democracy with this kind of choice?

______________________________

Our choice is precisely between two bad jokes and a union ideologue.

_____________________________

“Time for a change” is a mighty ill-considered slogan.

It was Richard Nixon’s campaign slogan.

______________________________

“Well, there’s that steady hand at the tiller reasoning again.

 “Stevey and now Dalty.”

I do love those immortal cliches of which editorial writers are so fond.

Remember, Chairman Mao was called the Great Helmsman.

 

 

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSES TO A COLUMN BY TIM WEIS IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Coal makes sense from every meaningful point of view.

It is plentiful and not too costly and coal-fired stations provide base-load (on-call 24 hours a day) power.

We have nothing else to compare. We do not have plentiful natural gas, as is foolishly asserted in this article, an assertion which makes one wonder whether the author even knows much about his subject. Natural gas is being used rapidly now and prices are rising.

With Dalton McGuinty’s insane energy policies, we are going to see a lot more demand on natural gas and rising energy prices.

Because the Great and Mighty Dalton has declared windmills a job creator, they are going to cover our landscape with their visual ugliness and noise pollution and migrating-bird killing.

They also are not ever going to to provide base load power. They cannot.

That’s why McGuinty is running around building gas-fired plants as back-ups for the clear and proven failure of windmills. That’s what they’ve had to do in Europe. And the new demand for gas will cause home-heating costs to rise, the electricity costs already rising steeply because of windmills.

Closing Ontario’s relatively efficient coal plants only means that with increases or spurts in demand Ontario is buying extra energy from the dirtiest coal plants in the Midwestern United States, thus increasing pollution, not decreasing it.

There are clean-burning coal technologies today, and more are on the way.

A province that doesn’t want to bankrupt its citizens with energy costs will use them.

By the way, when McGuinty is through with his windmill-jousting and boastfully-ignorant closing of coal plants, energy costs in Ontario are going to be uncompetitive for the acquisition of new industries or even the retention of expanding old ones.

How do you think a McGuinty will solve that? You guessed right if you said he would heavily subsidize new industry’s costs to attract them.

And how will he subsidize them? You guessed right if you said he’ll raise residential rates through the roof, even worse than the other, above-mentioned causes of rising rates will do.
_________________________
“For the people who don’t understand why we can’t rely on wind and solar energy to power the grid here is the answer. Solar energy doesn’t occur at night or on cloudy days. Wind energy doesn’t happen on calm days.”

Yes, indeed, but there are even more reasons.

For windmills we’ve now started accumulating data on their weaknesses and failures.

Windmills in at least one jurisdiction froze still during a bad cold spell.

Windmills in another location were blown over and destroyed in a high-wind storm.

And in a case on the west coast of the United States, there was a blade which flew off and landed a good distance away, a serious hazard.

The “white noise” of windmill farms has literally driven some people living near them crazy. There have been quiet, behind-the-scenes settlements given. We have no long term data on the effects here upon people. It may well be more threatening than the electromagnetic energy of cell phones or power lines.

And windmills are ugly. They must be built in huge masses, generally in places like near shorelines or on hills. They are simply visual blight.

But the bottom line is cost. Windmill energy is costly, and it is only happening in Ontario because of heavy subsidies to the providers, courtesy ultimately of customers.

People loosely use the term “renewables” to describe and encompass all these alternate forms of energy, and it leads to great misunderstanding, as though they were all benign and equally important, but they are not.

I strongly suspect that the long-term answer to energy is going to be decentralization: instead of big stations and power lines, we are going to have individual power plants in our homes. They may be solar – improved solar – or they may be things like power cells and new light storage batteries.

Another coming revolution will be power lines which are closer to perfect conductors, making instantly all of our power plants effectively double to triple their output since so much is lost today through transmission.

Meanwhile, the renewables-crowd mostly has no idea of what it is talking about.

Electricity, which in a knowledge-based society is a fundamental need, is going to be made horribly costly and inefficient through their efforts.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY NEIL REYNOLDS IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Aesthetics are not unimportant, especially when you propose dotting the landscape with homely objects.

But I disagree with you, almost completely that only aesthetics count here.

The problem is not just aesthetic.

Windmills have serious economic problems.

They do not provide base-load (always available) electricity.

Indeed, they can sit still, generating nothing, for days at a time.

We have seen recently in other jurisdictions that very high winds can destroy windmills and that extreme winter can disable them.

At best windmills can supplement the energy mix, and a rather small supplement at that.

Already in Germany and in Britain, they have had real disappointments with the energy-generating capabilities of windmills.

Windmills also are a hazard to migrating birds, especially when huge farms are built.

And they do generate a kind of “white noise” that drives some people living near them almost crazy. This potential health problem has not been adequately examined.

McGuinty has stupidly over-invested in these inefficient monstrosities because of all the people who think anything involving wind or water is automatically “green.”

It is the same crowd who thinks the narrow and crowded streets of Toronto should all have bicycle paths, something that will only be possible when we limit the traffic going into the city, either through tolls or fees.

Gas plants are economically hazardous in any quantity because our gas supplies are dwindling, and prices will sharply rise.

No one likes nuclear right now, of course.

Clean coal generation is one of our best bets for the near-term, but I know there’s no convincing the “bicycle path” crowd.

Few in the general public also seem to understand how foolish McGuinty’s closing of Ontario’s coal-fired plants is. Ours are among the cleaner plants, and they could be made even cleaner with not a huge investment.

Meanwhile the relatively dirty coal plants in the American Midwest – scores of them – not only continue to send their pollution to Toronto, but as McGuinty closes our plants, when he needs additional electricity – as for peak air-conditioning – he will be buying, at premium prices, from those same American stations, and he will be causing them to generate even greater pollution.

You really want to be green? Stop sending fleets of garbage trucks daily down 401 Highway taking Toronto’s NIMBY trash to Michigan. And put a limit on the cars choking the city. And put a stop to hideous inefficient urban sprawl.

But politicians like McGuinty will do none of things.

No, he will continue playing a game of peanut-and-shells with our energy supply and patting himself on the back before the “bicycle path” crowd.

 

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED COMMENT TO A COLUMN IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

Oh my, what a surprise.

People are tired of inappropriate policies and frequent flip-flops, not to mention the downright lies.

The man is pathetic.

Windmills to replace base-load electricity?

Nothing wrong with peak-load pricing as we now have, but someone with a brain would have figured out that 9:00 pm is not peak-load, and neither is 8:00 pm, his flip-flop change.

This man is seriously endangering Ontario’s energy future.

Then throwing the HST on top of his poorly considered peak-load periods for electricity prices?

And, please, people of Ontario, you should understand that future industries and business are not going to pay windmill electricity-prices. To prevent us from becoming completely uncompetitive in energy, I guarantee that McGuinty would in future shave industry prices and dump the excess, another big burden, on consumers.

What I cannot forgive McGuinty is the complete dishonesty of his last election campaign, and I am a small “l” liberal.

First, he had every ministry in the province running huge numbers of ads for the right weeks. In other words, he used the public purse to finance his campaign.

Even worse, he gave Ontario a bribe with his holiday, something costing many tens of millions of dollars to Ontario business and just thrown out, ill-considered, as a bribe for votes.

Then he has the bad taste to call it “Family Day,” a name which richly rings with right-wing Republican campaign rhetoric.

It doesn’t get much shabbier than that.

Although, I must say, McGuinty’s handling of the situation in Caledonia has been poor. No one wants someone killed, as happened under Mike Harris, but there is something between being brutal and letting chaos reign.

As for genuine green programs, McGuinty has a terrible record. Trucks packed with garbage from Toronto burning down 401 day after day for years. Toronto’s thousands of high-rises having no recycling programs worth speaking of.

The man is hopeless.

 

JOHN CHUCKMAN

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY ADAM RADWANSKI IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

What’s green about McGuinty’s energy policies?

His policies remind me of all those manipulative marketers who make naïve people feel good by slapping pink-ribbon images on their products.

McGuinty’s policies are in fact a threat to our future.

He is closing efficient coal-fired plants, which means that in future when we need extra power, the economic situation now helping keep demands down, we’ll buy it from the very people who actually cause Ontario’s air-quality problems, the scores of less-efficient coal-fired plants in the American Midwest.

The closing of those plants won’t change Ontario’s air in any serious way, except possibly making it worse when we need to buy extra electricity, at high rates, from those Midwestern plants.

Not only that, but those coal-fired plants provide what is called base-load power, available twenty-four hours a day.

Windmills are not base-load power. They provide only intermittent power, and at very high cost per unit of energy.

New base-load gas-fired plants are in the works, but Western Canadian gas is not so plentiful as it once was. There are big exports and a huge current, and even bigger future, use in extracting and upgrading the tarsands. Gas prices will rise.

But even there, McGuinty shows his unpleasant blundering in acts like his recent NIMBY backing-off from building a new gas-fired plant in one area.

Ontario’s energy costs are being driven needlessly higher by McGuinty’s short-sighted policies, and we’ve only seen the beginning.

Industry always gets preferential rates, so how is Ontario’s future high-cost electricity going to lure industries to locate?

Simple, they’ll be given preferential rates subsidized by even higher bills for ordinary consumers.

McGuinty’s energy policies are aimed only at buying votes, the votes of those ready to embrace anything labeled as “green” even if it is far from the truth.

It is the same kind of smarmy thinking he did in getting re-elected last time: give people holiday, which cost us hundreds of millions of dollars, and let every department in the government run stupid ads at public expense for six weeks.

McGuinty green? God, the guy has tolerated the spectacle of years of fleets of diesel trucks rumbling down 401 every day to dump Toronto’s garbage somewhere else.

He has contributed nothing to the shameful fact that Toronto’s thousands of high-rises do not even have recycling programs.

And if he wanted genuinely to improve Toronto’s air quality as well as lessening great waste and ugliness, he would do something to stop suburban sprawl and daily long-distance commuting.

McGuinty is a green phony.

JOHN CHUCKMAN

 

POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY MARGARET WENTE IN TORONTO’S GLOBE AND MAIL

There are not many matters over which I could agree with Ms. Wente, but this, by and large, is one of them.

McGuinty’s energy policy is little short of madness.

He decided, quite arbitrarily, to close Ontario’s coal-fired stations. The fact is that Ontario’s coal-fired plants are among the more efficient of those in the central continent, a crucially important fact generally ignored in discussions.

The problem with air pollution from such plants – and I mean the problem in Ontario – is the dozens of inefficient plants in the U.S. Midwest: the prevailing winds bring their heavy pollution here.

When you close a relatively efficient plant and then experience a surge in demand, as for summer air-conditioning, Ontario buys power from the U.S., often from the very plants which are the genuine problem. So you close an efficient plant and buy from an inefficient plant, creating a net effect of increased pollution.

None of the renewable energy sources, and certainly not wind power, is capable of coming even close to replacing what is called base-load power, the power ready to be called upon twenty-four hours a day.

Wind turbines can go for days in some locations producing nothing or close to nothing. They are also a visual blight on the landscape, a serious source of noise pollution, a threat to migrating birds, and the electricity they generate is very costly.

Wind power was embraced in Northern Europe in large part owing to the fact that people already lived in a high-cost energy regime, gasoline going for far greater prices than people in Ontario have ever seen. If all energy is already high-cost, it is less noticeable to add slices of still higher-cost energy to the mix.

But even then, there has been a good deal of disappointment in Europe with the actual performance of wind turbines. They appear, under conditions of mass use, to be even more inefficient and costly than we thought.

Now, Ontario is very concerned about jobs and its manufacturing base. What do you think will be the effect on luring industries to Ontario of high-cost electricity?

Either the industries will go elsewhere, or McGuinty will allow them to be subsidized at the household consumer’s expense. Not only will households pay for their own higher-cost electricity, but they will pay for industry’s higher-cost electricity.

And, as a further thoughtful gift from McGuinty, we’ll pay HST on the whole big increase.

Investmants in further upgrades to the coal stations would have been an infinitely better choice.

McGuinty wants to play the eco-hero, but he has made the wrong call on every aspect of energy policy, threatening the future competitiveness of Ontario.

Maybe us “Eastern bastards” will indeed end up “freezing in the dark.”