There’s much talk lately about the need to reduce red tape. We live in a country in which people are swimming in it, just trying to keep afloat.

The latest red tape report from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) says that small businesses estimate that dealing with red tape costs $11 billion a year.The report also says that regulation from our three levels of government – federal, provincial and municipal – cost $38.8 billion in 2020. The total amount of time spent on complying with government regulations by all Canadian businesses was 731 million hours, the equivalent of 375,000 full-time jobs.

CFIB says the smallest businesses are hurt by red tape more than larger ones. The smallest businesses pay roughly $7,000 a year per employee to comply with government regulations. Larger businesses, CFIB reports, pay $1,237 annually per employee. So, being able to spread regulatory costs over more staff give the larger business a competitive advantage over the smaller ones.

Red tape is defined as excessive bureaucracy that slows getting things done and creates unreasonable costs to people and business.

We’ve all seen or read about examples: for instance some authorities requiring kids to have a business licence for lemonade stands. Or, the frustration and time lost trying to navigate government websites that are long, and complicated. 

And, most of us have seen those Taylor Swift-like lineups at Service Canada locations where people try to do business with the federal government, often for passports.  In 2022 people reported bringing lawn chairs and sleeping bags for day-long waits in Service Canada lineups.

The City of Toronto once decided that people wanting to obtain a new business licence could do so only on paper, in person and at one location.

Thankfully, reducing red tape is being recognized by governments and many jurisdictions are taking action to eliminate costly and time-demanding processes.

The federal government passed a Red Tape Reduction Action in 2015. The law requires that for every new regulation introduced, one existing regulation must be eliminated. That means every new regulation imposing an administration burden on business must be offset by a decrease in administrative burden.

The feds have reviewed the one-for-one rule and say it is working. However the review, published on a Government of Canada website, is roughly 3,000 words long, hopelessly bureaucratic and very difficult to understand.

A new study into why fewer Canadians are starting new businesses estimates there are 100,000 fewer business owners than there were 20 years ago. Only 1.3 individuals out of 1,000 started a business in 2022, compared with three out of 1,000 in 2020.

There are increasing calls to free small businesses from red tape and tax burdens. CFIB says that small businesses estimate that the burden of regulations could be reduced by 28 per cent without harming any public interests, which regulations are designed to protect.

A strong campaigner for removing the roadblocks that prevent creation of more small businesses is Frank Stronach, founder of Magna International Inc., one of Canada’s largest companies.

Stronach says that as of 2021 Canadian small businesses employed more than eight million people, close to 70 per cent of our total private sector workforce.

“We’ve placed so many obstacles in the way of small businesses and burdened them with countless regulations and rules that it’s no wonder so many small business don’t survive more than a few years after opening their doors,” he has written in a number of publications, including the Minden Times.

Governments are concerned about small business and have brought in numerous support programs to counter rules and regulations that are impairing small business growth. But Stronach says the way to help small business is to get out of the way: slash all the red tape and let small businesses take off and soar.

Sounds like a good idea. Most governments do seem concerned about lack of small business growth. 

Concern is not enough. We need real action from all forms of government. Red tape is a sickness that is weakening our economy and the only way to cure it is to eliminate it.

 Try as you might, it’s hard to ignore television commercials. Especially when you arewatching a lot of sports, as many of us were during the World Series and now the NHLhockey season.

Between all the exciting plays, the ads keep coming at you. You finally start to pay
attention to them.
I started paying attention to the ubiquitous burger ads. You know the ones where some
guy stretches his mouth open impossibly wide to bite into a large and luscious looking
hamburger offered by one of the many burger joint chains like Burger King,
MacDonald’s and Wendy’s.
Those TV burgers must be four to six inches thick when stacked with
beef patty, onions, tomato, lettuce, bacon, onion rings and whatever other condiments
the makers throw in. The only mouth big enough to handle that kind of a load belongs to
Donald Trump.
Those burgers are not what you get served at your favourite fast-food joint. They are
highly juiced up in elaborate ways to make your mouth water and send you out the door
to buy one.
The juicing up is done by “food stylists” employed to make burgers look drool-worthy in
advertisements. They use a variety of clever techniques, and some inedible products, to
make a burger look perfect for the camera.
When a burger is just lightly roasted it stays raw and without the 25-per-cent shrinkage
that comes with full cooking. It is big and juicy, but red. So a food stylist brushes it with
brown shoe polish to give it the fully cooked look without the shrinkage.
The fully cooked burger you get at the fast-food place is much smaller and less
appetizing looking. Most are just under 115 grams (four ounces) with less than half of
that being the actual meat patty.
That doesn’t mean the fast-food burger you get is not good. It’s just not as big, fresh
and appetizing as food stylists make them look for advertisements. And, that has
created some controversy.
A 2018 study by Cancer Research United Kingdom reported that teenagers exposed to
TV fast-food advertising eat up to an additional 350 calories a week in food high in salt,
sugar and fat. That’s 18,200 extra calories a year.

Also, dissatisfied customers have filed lawsuits against some major fast-food outlets,
claiming the companies make their menu items look bigger and better in advertising
than they really are.
A judge in the U.S. recently ruled in one case that there is no proof that McDonald’s and
Wendy’s sold burgers that were smaller than advertised. The judge ruled that the fast-
food companies’ efforts to make their burgers look appetizing are no different from other
companies who use “visually appealing images to foster positive associations with their
products.”
There are other cases still before the courts, including one against Burger King,
Burgers are not the only food that gets juiced for advertising. Glycerin is sprayed on fruit
and salads to make them glisten and look appetizing.
And, how tempting is an advertising photo of a plate of fluffy pancakes smothered with
warm maple syrup?
Looks delicious, but maple syrup is not used in photographing pancakes for advertising.
Maple syrup can heat up and become runny under photo lights and gets quickly
absorbed into the pancakes. So motor oil is used instead because it it is thicker, glistens
nicely and does not get absorbed by the pancakes.
Those ads featuring a milkshake parfait or slice of pie with dollops of whipped cream
don’t use real whipped cream, which melts and gets runny under hot lights. So
photographers use shaving cream, which doesn’t melt and is easily shaped to give the
desired look.
Ads can be deceptive and manipulative but fortunately we don’t have to eat what the
photographers are serving up.
The ads do encourage people, notably children, to eat the wrong things and various
jurisdictions around the world have discussed ways of restricting TV and online food
adds.
Sweden and Norway banned all ads to children in the early 1990s. Quebec also has
banned advertising to children during programs geared to kids.
Canada’s federal government has updated its code for food and drink ads that reach
children under 13 but little else.

“Politics will always break your heart,” Catherine McKenna once tweeted on the social media platform now called X.

She should know. She suffered a barrage of verbal attacks as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s environment and climate change minister, and lead minister on the contentious carbon tax. 

She resigned from cabinet and politics in 2021, saying she wanted to spend more time with her children, and working on climate change from outside politics.

Well, politics certainly broke a lot of hearts when Trudeau announced recently that heating oil will be exempt from the carbon tax. Other heating fuels such as propane and natural gas will not be.The exemption for home heating oil applies to all Canadians. However, most Canadians do not use it to heat their homes. Statistics Canada says that in 2021 only three percent of households nationally used home heating oil.

Most of Canada’s home heating oil users live in the Atlantic provinces – the Liberal stronghold that has helped to keep the Trudeau government in power. Two in five Prince Edward Island homes, one in three Nova Scotia households and one in five Newfoundland and Labrador homes use furnace heating oil.

The heating oil tax exemption is estimated to save each homeowner using heating oil $250 a year.

So is it possible the heating oil exemption is designed to encourage Atlantic voters to keep supporting the Liberals? You bet it is.

Proof of this shameful political bribery was provided by one of Trudeau’s cabinet ministers. Rural Economic Development Minister Gudie Hutchings told an interviewer that if Westerners, who have complained that Atlantic voters are getting an economic benefit they are not, want similar benefits they should elect more Liberals.

More proof that politicians continue to get bolder, and dumber.

It’s not news that politicians favour their own party’s ridings, and swing ridings they believe they can win. But it’s not often that you see a politician blatantly telling voters to vote the right way or be left out of getting the goodies.

Making it worse this time was that Gudie seemed to do it with insulting contempt for western Canadians.

Trudeau has denied that the tax relief heavily favouring the Atlantic is about saving Liberal seats there, but even some of his own Liberals have scoffed at that. At least two cabinet minister are known to have opposed the exemption.

Just two days before Trudeau announced the exemption, Housing Minister Sean Fraser told the House of Commons that exemptions would make pollution free again. A month earlier, Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault said it would be unfair to carve out exemptions that would benefit only Atlantic Canada. 

Liberal support in Atlantic Canada has been plunging. In early 2022 polls showed Liberal support in the Atlantic was more than double the support for Conservatives. Polls this fall show a huge reversal with the Conservatives with 39 per cent and the Liberals 30 per cent.

More and more Canadians are beginning to agree that climate change is real and requires immediate action. There is less agreement on how to reduce climate change.

Putting a price on carbon changes – in other words a carbon tax – is considered by many to be a good approach. However, there is hardly universal agreement and the topic is destined to be a controversial subject for some time to come. It likely will be a key issue in provincial elections and the next national vote scheduled for 2025.

The Liberals hold a minority government kept in power by the New Democratic Party. Not much is expected to change that, but in politics there are no guarantees.

One way or another there will be a federal election sometime in the next two years. Many political commentators say the carbon tax, and the way Atlantic voters were exempted from it, will kill the Liberal government.

But there are two scenarios that the commentators say could save it. One, Trudeau will kill the tax for all Canadians, And two, Trudeau will resign as prime minister to allow a new leader to give the party a new look that will be acceptable to more Canadian voters.

We’ll just have to wait and see.

There is much controversy over whether mental illness is a significant cause of mass shootings, which are becoming a common occurrence, notably in the gun-crazy United States of America.

Whenever another mass shooting occurs, many conclude that mental illness was to blame.

Two of last week’s most horrific mass shootings – one in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario and the other in Lewiston, Maine are examples. When you read about a Sault man shooting to death a woman, his own three children, then himself how can you not think ‘this guy was mentally ill.’

Or the Maine massacre in which a man went on a rapid-fire rampage in a bowling alley, then a bar. How can someone kill 18 people, wound another 13 and not be mentally ill?

The Maine killer had been treated for mental illness earlier this year, but the Sault rifleman was not known to have anything wrong with him mentally except a bad temper.

The general public tends to link mental illness with mass shootings and other violence. Psychiatry experts, however, say severe mental illness is not a key factor in most mass murders.

A study by Columbia University in New York reports that only five per cent of mass shootings are related to severe mental illness. The experts, however, have a much narrower definition of mental illness than the general public.

The experts consider severe mental illness as schizophrenia or psychotic disorders and not lesser problems like depression and substance abuse. Most of us think anyone acting beyond what we consider normal as a bit crazy. Our federal government also has a wider definition of mental illness, reporting that one in three Canadians will be affected by mental illness in their lifetime.

Mental illness is a major problem worldwide. The World Health Organization (WHO) says that roughly 450 million people currently struggle with mental illness. It is considered to be the leading cause of disability worldwide.

But all the talk about it being a major factor in mass killings is a red herring that takes attention away from the real issue – guns. Without mental illness there would still be mass shootings. Without guns there would be no mass shootings.

Soldiers, law enforcement, hunters and sport shooters are the people who should be allowed guns. There is no need for anyone else to have one. And there are plenty of rules and regulations to ensure that those allowed to have them use them safely and responsibly.

Instead of debating how much of a factor mental health is in mass shootings we should be discussing how mental illness is affecting so many other aspects of our lives. 

Numerous surveys and studies report that world unhappiness has increased to record highs. They point to a growing trend in which negative feelings such as worry, sadness and anger rose by 27 per cent around the world between 2010 and 2018.

WHO estimates that one person dies by suicide every 40 seconds. More than 4,000 Canadians kill themselves every year – an average of 11 a day.

Canadian medical authorities say drug overdoses now account for more deaths than automobile accidents.

The overall problem of mental illness – not just how it might affect mass killings – needs to become a No. 1 priority for our society. What’s making the world so unhappy and how do we change that?

The role of digital media is a good place to start examining the problem. Time on the Internet, gaming, texting and social media have taken us away from two key elements for creating happiness – exercise and being with friends.

Too many people spend more time in front of screens than on exercising or having face- to-face contact with friends. Also, digital media gives us more contact with the negative and destructive side of humanity than with the good things happening around us.

People say things online that they would never say in person. Things that often lead to hurt feelings, bullying and other nastiness that feeds mental health issues.

We need to become more informed and thinking intelligently about all these issues if we don’t want to live in a world that falls deeper into despair.

I’ve never been a fan of cats. I find them self-obsessed and neurotic.

If I was a cat fan, however, I certainly would not be dressing up as one. Some people are, putting on cat masks and tails, meowing and purring and rubbing up friends while referring to themselves by the pronoun it.

It’s a fad that has been around for a while. Some people say it is harmless: if some people think they are cats, that’s their business.

Folks who do this often are referred to as furries, a subculture that dresses as cartoonish animals as a sexual fetish, or simply for fun. 

Harmless enough, I guess, except it has created a blizzard of damaging flimflam designed to confuse and deceive, and it continues to grow.

Two years ago in Prince Edward Island a rumour spread that litter boxes were being placed in schools to accommodate students who identify as cats. It spread to other provinces, while appearing in school districts in several U.S. states.

Far-right politicians and media personalities promoted it as a real life issue and made it a topic in election campaigns. Last year in the U.S. at least 20 conservative political figures claimed that schools are putting litter boxes in schools for students who want to identify as cats. 

Scott Jensen, a Republican who campaigned unsuccessfully to become Minnesota governor last fall, raised it in his campaign, saying:

“Why are we telling elementary kids that they get to choose their gender this week? Why do we have litter boxes in some of the school districts so kids can pee in them, because they identify as a furry? We’ve lost our minds.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene, the controversial Georgia Republican, told reporters outside a Donald Trump-campaign event that schools are putting out litter boxes for students. J.D. Vance, another Trump-backed Republican, also has said schools are doing this.  

No evidence has been found anywhere that any school administration has put litter boxes in schools for students identifying as cats.

Cat litter is purchased by some schools but not for use as student toilets. Some schools use it to prevent slipping on icy walkways. Others, in the U.S., store cat litter and pails to use as toilets in the event of an active-shooter lockdown. 

The flimflam hoax is believed to be backlash to gender non-conformity in schools. Some politicians and activists say protections for gay and transgender students have gone too far.

Untrue as it is, the litter box flimflam is causing considerable alarm among parents and much grief for schools administrations in Canada and the U.S.

“This claim as well as many others are simply false and are causing unnecessary stress to students and staff,” Norbert Carpenter, PEI director of schools, said in a statement denying the litter box rumours. 

Last spring a Quebec school district was forced to publicly deny it has placed litter boxes on school properties and that its students are being led about on leashes. It made the statement after being flooded by questions and complaints from alarmed parents.

The statement warned that anyone spreading the rumour could be subject to legal action.

School boards in Renfrew and Durham regions also have had to issue similar public denials.

Spreading the litter box hoax is the work of unintelligent people. It is putting stress on and wasting time of teachers and school administrators who are being distracted by nonsense that is making their jobs more difficult. 

It is shameful and says much about what our society has become – a society in which anyone can say anything about anyone (most often on social media) without challenge or retribution.

A lesson from the litter box scam is that we need to challenge everything that we hear these days. I’m getting to the point that if someone tells me it is raining outside, I’ll go to a window to see for myself. To be totally sure I’ll stick my arm out the window to see if it gets wet.

It’s a shame but truth and trust are giving way to tribalism. Truth today often is whatever a particular group promotes as truth as a means of reshaping the world into what they want it to be.

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I’ve tried to ignore all the hype about artificial intelligence (AI). How it will transform work and reinvent business. How it will replace me as a writer.

Any little attention I have given it has been with a great amount of skepticism. 
Until now.

I’ve just watched a ‘60 Minutes’ television news program in which CBS reporter Scott Pelley took a look at Google’s new piece of artificial intelligence named Bard. Pelley typed Bard a request asking it to produce a story based on six words. The six words were:

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.

In shockingly quick time Bard composed and spit out the following story:
“he shoes were a gift from my wife, but we never had a baby. They were sitting in the closet, collecting dust, and I knew they would never be used. So I decided to sell them.

“I put an ad in the paper, and I got a few responses. But the one that stood out was from a woman who said she had lost her baby a few months ago. She said she would love to have the shoes as a way to remember her child.

“I met with the woman, and she told me how she had been trying to conceive for years. She had finally gotten pregnant, but she had a miscarriage. She said she was devastated, and she didn’t know how she was going to go on.

“But then she saw my ad, and she knew she had to have the shoes. She said they would give her some comfort, and they would help her to remember her child.

“I gave her the shoes and she was grateful. She said they meant the world to her. 
“I’m glad I was able to help her and I’m glad to find a good home for the shoes.”

A human story, written by a computer using artificial intelligence!
A shocked Pelley said:

“It created a deeply human tale with characters it invented. I am rarely speechless, I don’t know what to make of this.”

As an aside, the six words Pelley gave to Bard to create a story have a history. Back in the 1920s, author Ernest Hemingway is said to have bet some other writers $10 that he could write a novel in six words. So Hemingway wrote: For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn. And won the bet.

The fact that artificial intelligence could produce a real story from those six words is amazing, and alarming.  

Some people are concerned that AI, while increasing productivity and efficiency, will eliminate thousands of human jobs. There also is concern that AI-produced fake news will create chaos in many fields, from law enforcement to politics.

Geoffrey Hinton, a retired Google executive who has been called the Godfather of Artificial Intelligence, worries that AI has the potential to one day take over from humanity.

“I think my main message is there’s enormous uncertainty about what’s going to happen next,” he said in an interview with Pelley. “These things (AIs) do understand. And because they understand, we need to think hard about what’s going to happen next. And we just don’t know.”

It’s certainly important that further development of AI not be left solely to huge tech companies like Google. Many different segments of society need to be involved to ensure the benefits of AI are promoted safely while potential harm is controlled by regulations, and laws that punish abusers.

Said Google CEO Sundar Pichai in an interview last spring:

“This is why I think the development of this needs to include not just engineers, but social scientists, ethicists, philosophers and so on. . . . I think these are all things society needs to figure out as we move along. It’s not for a company to decide.”

Certainly AI is scary because even the experts don’t know its full capabilities, or where it is going next. Hinton expects that within five years AI models like ChatGPT may be able to reason better than humans.

So if in the next while you notice this column reads a bit differently – perhaps lacking its usual human flair and spark – you’ll know that I have been replaced by a computer.

 Baseball broadcaster Buck Martinez said the Toronto Blue Jays’ 2023 season would be a disaster if they could not advance past the first wild-card playoff round.

 

They didn’t. Their season ended. And yes, it was a disaster.

The Jays, a World Series prospect at the season’s start, were swept by the Minnesota Twins in the first playoff round. They scored only one run in two critical playoff games.

It’s the third time in four years the Jays made it to post regular season play. In those three playoff years they did not win one game.

The season ended much the way it had progressed: consistently inconsistent.

There is plenty to blame for the Jay’s disastrous season. Most of it rests with the club management, which needs a complete shakeup.

Despite denials, the club’s front office was behind the Game Two decision to pull pitcher Jose Berrios after a leadoff walk in the fourth inning. Berrios had thrown only 47 pitches and had struck out five batters in three innings. He was definitely on his game.

Things went downhill from there.

General Manager Ross Atkins says the decision to pull Berrios was manager John Schneider’s and not influenced by the front office. I don’t believe that for a minute. The Jays’ front office has been too involved in on-field play and must accept much of the blame for a disastrous season.

Atkins and others in upper management are not baseball people. They are moneyballers who stare into their laptops and make decisions based on statistics and math.

Their laptops told them the team needed more defence so they traded away dynamic hitters Teoscar Hernandez and Lourdes Gurriel, plus outstanding young catcher Gabriel Moreno, who had a 285 batting average and 50 runs batted in this season.

They needed that extra offence, plus they needed a manager who could inspire young hitters like Bo Bichette and Vladimir Guerrero. Neither πlayer provided much in the abbreviated playoffs, except a couple of errors.

The redo of the Rogers Centre, the Jay’s home stadium, provides more insight into a fairly good ball team misdirected by a moneyball management. The renovations turned the place into a Party Palace focussed on gulping beer and chewing pizza, taking eyes off the real entertainment, which is supposed to be the game.

The Jays biggest problem on the field was their inability to move runners in scoring position (RISP). They ranked 24th in moving RISPs. 

They ranked 16th in runs scored per game, a miserable drop from fourth in 2022 and third in 2021.

“We didn’t score runs,” Bichette said following the beating by Minnesota. “Can’t win without scoring runs.”

No kidding.

The Jays had an okay 2023 pitching staff, although not as good as the broadcasters and other homer commentators would have you believe. Some of the opposition pitchers they faced in late season were just as good, if not much better.

When they did get good pitching the Jays hitters simply did not provide the scoring support.

Bichette provided the only honest appraisal of what the club needs before next season. Much more honest than the public relations fog provided by management.

“So, I think there’s a lot of reflection needed, from players but from the organization from top to down,” Bichette was quoted by Sportsnet last week.

From top down is the key phrase here. 

The reflection needs to result in a cleaning out of management, including on-field manager Schneider, who follows front office orders instead of playing his own game.

The Jays have some really good individual players but the moneyball management restricted them from playing together as a top-flight team. You could see the problem on the grim faces of frustrated players in many games throughout the season

Baseball is a game played by people, not computer algorithms. It is an art in which every move by any player has can have many outcomes.

If you want computer baseball, then replace the umpires with laptops that call balls, strikes and base running outs. Fans then don’t have to watch the game so closely, and can spend more time and money in the beer and pizza lounges.