Another Police Overreaction?

   Only in Canada, eh? Indeed. Other countries probably would think three times before sending a fully armed tactical team aboard a passenger aircraft returned to the ground because of a possible bomb threat.

   It happened last Friday when a Sunwing vacation jet left Toronto for Panama. It turned around over West Virginia after a young man, reportedly upset by the price of cigarettes, made ‘direct threats’ to the aircraft. It was escorted back to Toronto by two F-16 fighter jets from the U.S. National Guard.

   Once on the ground, a tactical unit aiming assault rifles stormed into the aircraft’s aisles. They grabbed the young man and yanked him off without incident, which was fortunate for the 161 people on board.

   The police action appeared to be a gross overreaction that seriously frightened passengers and could have injured them.

   I’m not alone with that opinion. John Nance, former airline pilot and ABC News consultant, said that had the man had his finger on a bomb trigger, he would have blown the plane up when the police stormed it.

   “I’m not sure this was the correct reaction,” he said on Saturday’s ABC World News.

   The incident left many questions needing answers. Whose SWAT team stormed the plane? One news report said RCMP took charge once the plane landed. Peel Regional Police took the man under arrest. Who made the decision to send combat police aboard? What are the protocols and procedures in place for such incidents? Was there an air marshal aboard?

   There have been enough bad police actions in this country (i.e. OPP killing of Dudley George, RCMP killing of Robert Dziekanski) to raise concern about the leadership decisions of our police services. 

   The Sunwing incident must be investigated and the answers to the questions it raises must be made public.

   

Movie Popcorn and Chimpanzees

   I don't buy pop and popcorn at the movies. The only reason, until recently, has been that I am a penny-pincher and the thought of the biggest part of $20 going for popcorn and pop gives me a sore stomach.

   N ow I found another reason to think twice about buying popcorn at the movies. The theatres ‘butter’ popcorn with palm oil because it is cheaper than butter and many other vegetable oils. More and more of it comes from palm oil plantations that are creating ecological concerns.

   In an article being prepared for Current Biology, researchers lay out concerns about how the increasing number of palm oil plantations will affect great ape populations. They say that almost forty percent of the distribution of great ape species on unprotected lands overlaps suitable oil palm areas.

   Palm oil has become extremely popular in the last thirty years because it is cheap. It is cheap because the trees are super productive: they bear fruit in just four years and continue producing for twenty-five. The trees are native to Africa and palm oil has been used as a cooking oil for centuries.

   Thirty years or so ago manufacturers discovered the cost benefits of palm oil and huge swaths of forests in Southeast Asia, particularly Malaysia and  Indonesia were knocked down in favour of palm oil plantations. Since then the oil is being used increasingly in everything from foodstuffs, to soap to cosmetics. The World Wildlife Fund has estimated that half of the products on the shelves of major supermarkets contain palm oil.

   The researchers reporting results in Current Biology say guidelines are needed urgently for expansion of oil palm in Africa to minimize the impacts on apes and other wildlife. The great apes, which include chimpanzees and gorillas, already are threatened by hunting and habitat loss and the worry is that palm oil expansion without controls will put them on the final stretch to extinction.

   No one is saying don’t buy popcorn at the theatre, but we all should be aware that palm oil production poses risks to the global environment if people don’t pay attention and demand controls.

   Current Biology can be found online at: http://www.cell.com/current-biology/home. More on palm oil can be found at:  http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/agriculture/palm_oil/.

The Lights Are Finally on at the CBC

The lights finally have come on in the CBC executive suites. The corp’s brain trust has accepted, very reluctantly, that CBC is dying and the life support of taxpayer dollars is running low.

   So out of the executive suites last week came A Space for Us All, CBC’s new-five year plan that details some operational changes instead of simply whining that it can’t do its job properly without more money. The plan sees CBC shifting priority to digital and mobile services. There will be less in-house production, some of its broadcasting palaces will be sold and 1,500 staff will be cut. (In fact, the ‘cuts’ will be through attrition over five years and people who retire etc. simply will not be replaced).

   The whole idea is to shake the mindset of cost cutting to survive, which has been the CBC’s main strategy for the last 10 years.

   The CBC has a long history of making governments and taxpayers feel guilty about not doling out increasing amounts of cash to maintain their most cherished cultural institution. Examples can be found throughout the corp's 78-year history. In 1947, the CBC appeared before a House of Commons committee with the statement that its level of service could not be maintained without more money. In 1974 it told the Canadian Radio and Television Commission that the CBC was pretty much perfect and “needs only more money to make it great.”

   There are reasons to be skeptical about the CBC’s planned new directions. Firstly who follows a five-year plan these days? The communications industry is changing by the minute. Mega-successful Twitter is only eight years old; Facebook 10. Five years is a light year in this digital age.

   Also, the CBC’s plan for change is dripping with syrupy language and buzz phrases. Like the CBC will be the public space for “our conversations and experiences as Canadians.” And, inspiring Canadians “to participate in the public space.” And, providing “distinctive content” to increase “and deepen engagement with Canadians.”

   The CBC also hopes to build a culture of collaboration, accountability, boldness, action and agility. You mean a culture with those attributes doesn’t already exist in one of the country’s larger businesses? Anyone opening a peanut stand would be expected to have those.

   Despite the skepticism, we all should wish the CBC luck. It was once an important part of Canadian life, and if its brain trust can restore it we’ll all be winners.

What Coach's Corner Didn't Tell You

   Television evenings for me these days are the Stanley Cup games. But between the first and second periods when Don and Ron begin their inarticulate chatter on Coach's Corner my concentration slips and my mind drifts. I get to thinking about things like: who invented that black rubber hockey puck anyway?

   I’m glad I asked. There is no officially recognized answer.

   The first recorded mention of a hockey game was made by British explorer Sir John Franklin. Sir John, who before losing his way and perishing in the Arctic, wrote that his crew members exercised by playing hockey on the ice at Fort Franklin, Northwest Territories in 1825. He did not mention what they were using for a puck. Likely it was a ball, or piece of ice or a frozen musk-ox turd.

   Vulcanized rubber was invented in 1839 but rubber didn’t enter hockey until the 1880s. Cow patties, stones, balls, lumps of coal, frozen potatoes and pieces of wood all were used in the meantime.

   Balls proved too difficult to keep in the playing area. Wood was much better. Game enthusiasts began shaping the wood into squares, then rounds easily produced by cutting tree limbs.

   The Victoria Hockey Club of Montreal began using rubber pucks in the late 1880s. The first rubber pucks likely were made by cutting a rubber ball in half, then trimming the halves.

   Today the standard puck is an inch thick, three inches in diameter and weighs six ounces. They are frozen before play, which helps reduce bounce, making for better control.

   Other non-essential information you might want to have for the remaining days of Stanley Cup madness:

-       The word hockey comes from the French word hoquet, which means shepherd’s hook.

-       Hockey did not evolve from the North American Indian game of lacrosse. It evolved from the British stick and ball games of shinty, hurley or bandy.

-   No one knows for sure where the word puck came from. Probably it is derived from old Scottish and Irish puc and poc, meaning to poke or push. Makes sense. There's much pushing and poking in the game these days.

Bring on the Revolution!

   Ontario, Canada’s most populous and once most important province, chooses a new government on June 12. It does not matter what party is elected to lead that government. Nothing will change because Ontario is a textbook example of the dysfunction and decline in the world’s democratic governments.

   Dysfunction and decline in failing governments are examined a new book published just as the Ontario politicians spilled onto the campaign trails with their wagonloads of unachievable promises. The new book is titled The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State, written by John Micklethwait, editor-in-chief of The Economist, and Adrian Wooldridge, management editor at the same news outlet.

   The book makes the case that we must change and re-master the art of governing because our governments have become too large, inefficient, and are going broke.

   In the first half of the last century people lived each day with almost no connection to government. Today, governments influence almost everything we do and are with us most hours of every day. The cost of government in our lives has become unsustainable.

   In 1913, U.S. government spending was 7.5 per cent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). By 2013 it had ballooned to 41.6 per cent of GDP. Canada’s government spending as a percentage of GDP is 41.9.

   The Europeans are the champs in this category. The European Union contains seven per cent of the world’s population, producing twenty-five per cent of the world’s GDP. Yet it accounts for fifty per cent of the world’s social spending, which has bankrupted some of its member countries.

   Fixing our broken system of government is the greatest political challenge of the next decade, The Fourth Revolution argues.

   But don’t watch for any Canadian government to lead the reform of a governing system headed at high speed toward a cliff. Canadians are second only to the Europeans as hypocrites when it comes to reforming government. We bleat like sheep about ever-increasing taxes and fees, but squawk like famished vultures for government to do something when anything goes amiss in our lives.

   Politicians and parties, who have allowed pandering for votes to become more important than doing what is right, have corrupted the political system. The political health of the party and its politicians takes precedence over what is best for the people. Making the tough choices needed for responsible, efficient government has become abhorrent.

   Voters are not blameless. Most of us are poorly informed on the important issues. We form our opinions on hearsay and spin, researching little on our own. Traditional news media, on which we once relied for facts, is collapsing and new media still has to grow up to become useful and reliable.

    A revolution in governing can’t come fast enough.

All Abuzz About Insects

Bug season has begun in my part of the world with more rehashed research on the benefits of bugs and why we need more of them. More bugs are not something anyone wants to contemplate on a cool damp morning in cottage country. Clouds of biting blackflies are gathered outside my windows hungrily waiting for me to step outside. Millions of stinging mosquitos are breeding in puddles left by the spring rains. Not to mention deer flies, horse flies, gnats, no-see-ums and many others whose sole purpose for living is to drive humans mad.

   Meanwhile news sites are reminding us of the United Nation’s report on how insects are good for our planet and good for us to eat. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization says that 35 years from now the world will have nine billion people and food production will need to almost double. Land scarcity, fished out oceans, water shortages, and climate change will make feeding the world more difficult.  Insects, the UN says, are the solution to feeding a hungry world.

   “In the future, as the prices of conventional animal proteins increase, insects may well become a cheaper source of protein than conventionally produced meat and ocean- caught fish.”

   Raising livestock for beef, pork, lamb, poultry is inefficient, and some people say, unethical. You have to grow billions of tons of grain to feed those animals, then they pass gas which adds to global warming.

   Insects are protein packed and can be reared with little technical knowledge and capital investment. They don’t require butchering; you can eat them whole. And, I gather, they don’t pass gas.

   So there it is: the solution to the spring fly season is to start eating them.

   I’ve unintentionally breathed in and swallowed my share of bugs. I have never found them tasty, satisfying nor healthful. Whenever I feel myself running low on protein I’ll vote for a hamburger or a couple of strips of bacon.