I was struck recently by the lack of coverage given the 2006 census when it was released July 17th.  What struck me, in particular, was the fact that:

1. During the slowest news period of the year, the story about the aging of Canada’s population (across the board) received one day of coverage, with very little follow-on coverage anywhere, and
2. There was little national discussion about the various regional stories associated with the census and the ongoing impact that will have from coast to coast to coast in this country.

I confess, I’m a bit of a demographic buff — have been since I helped out a bit on New Brunswick at the Dawn of a New Century in 1996 and read Boom, Bust and Echo by David Foot the same year.

So, while I’ve been waiting, let’s reflect on some of the larger things the census tells us:

1. Newfoundland may shrink its way into have-province status, as young people are an ever-rarer sight in that province;
2. All of Atlantic Canada faces significant population challenges, as does Saskatchewan and Quebec outside of Montreal;
3. Alberta, BC and Ontario remain the bright lights, demographically, meaning their economies will continue to shine as well.

My fear is that the census, and indeed demographics, is becoming a story that is too big to cover, much like the challenges we face from an energy perspective or the challenges faced in reforming and reshaping government operations.

But much as the lack of coverage makes me a little crazy, what really irks me is the challenge I have talking with people who refuse to consider the impacts demographics will have on them personally. 

For example, where are pension funds investing their money, and what impact is the flight of head offices from Canada going to have on their investments?

There are literally thousands of questions that could be asked of government, of citizens, and of the corporate sector out of the census.  I guess that means I better go back to the source document itself and get reading — waiting for a national discussion on it seems like it might be too much to ask.

I don’t have a home telephone.  My wife and I decided several years ago that since we both have cells, there wasn’t much point in having three phones for two of us.

Unfortunately, we still get the occasional telemarketing call. I can only imagine how many calls people with land lines get, but I have to say getting telemarketing calls on your cell is really annoying.  Particularly the ones where they are selling home (land line) phone plans or features, when my household has already decided we don’t want/need a land line.

I usually hang up during the three second delay between the time I say ‘Hello’ and the person calling mispronounces my name.

I currently hang-up because I know the Do-Not-Call Registry is not in place.  I can’t wait to be able to stay on the line and immediately ask to be added to their do-no-call list.

Why is the CRTC taking so long to implement the Do-Not-Call Registry?

In his post today, a version also ran in the Ottawa Citizen, Michael Geist says:

The unconscionable delay is part of a larger trend of Ottawa failing to set reasonable ground rules to protect Canadians from unwanted marketing.  Not only does Canada trail badly in the creation of a do-not-call registry, but it also stands virtually alone among developed countries in not taking any legislative steps to address the mounting spam problem. Given the near-universal public support for a do-not-call registry, the existence of a law mandating its creation, and successful implementations around the world, there is no valid excuse for leaving this call on hold.

A few weeks ago I posted about the absurdness of MPs deciding that the selection of Shane Doan as Canada’s Captain at the World Hockey Championship was their business and that spending time in the House of Commons and Committee Hearings discussing it was an effective use of their time and taxpayers money.

Under Shane Doan’s captaincy, Team Canada won all 9 games they played enroute to the gold medal and outscored their competition 13 to 4 in their three playoff games.

During the tournament, Doan had 5 goals and 5 assists, and was the emotional leader of the team. In Canada’s game against Belarus, in the middle of the controversy, he scored a hat trick in a span of six minutes 25 seconds.

On the Hockey Night in Canada Coaches Corner segment after Team Canada’s win, Don Cherry thanked Jack, Jill [Gilles] and the Language Police for rallying the team behind their captain and inspiring them to bring home the gold medal.

A colleague suggested Jack Layton, Gilles Duceppe and Denis Coderre should wear Shane Doan Team Canada jerseys in the House of Commons and make statements congratulating him and Team Canada on their gold medal win.  A good idea, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for it to happen.

David Eaves, a frequent speaker and consultant on public policy, wrote an interesting piece on the banning of access to Facebook by government organizations in the May 17, 2007 Globe and Mail.

This is the kind of story that drives me crazy about Canadian health care.

Take a self-serving report (this one by the Canadian Nurses Association, but there are others published every year), then oversimplify its findings and report them to the public, highlighting another crisis in Canadian health care.

To quote the story, available here:

“The report, by the Canadian Nurses Association (CNA), says 8,000 nurses will graduate but 15 per cent of them won’t be able to find secure employment.

The CNA says the problem is resulting in 10 per cent of new graduates moving to the United States every year.

The unemployment figure is determined by looking at health-care policy studies, past trends and reports from young nursing students across the country.”

Except it isn’t entirely accurate — the key word in the report is “secure.”  A lot of professionals, when they first graduate, aren’t hired into permanent, full-time jobs. Instead, they are hired on probation, given the worst shifts, etc.  Nurses, unfortunately, are no different.

The report goes on:

“According to the CNA, Canadian governments spend an average of $60,000 over four years to train a nurse. If 1,200 of them are unable to find work ever year, that amounts to a waste of $72 million in tax dollars.”

“Smadu said that employed registered nurses are working the equivalent of 10,000 full-time jobs in overtime.

“We know that 8,000 isn’t even meeting that gap and that’s why to us it’s really very shocking that we have new graduates who still don’t have full-time employment when they graduate,” she said.

“We predict at the association that we need about 12,000 graduates a year to deal with the impending retirement of registered nurses.”

There’s that word again — full-time employment.  Does the fact that a new nurse, fresh out of university, isn’t being offered a permanent, full-time shift at a hospital or other health care facility mean that he or she doesn’t have a job?  Not necessarily, but this report is being reported as though that is the case.

The Canadian health care system is a complicated mix of public and private sector management and involvement already.  Doctors, far from being employees of the government, are self-employed business people, by and large.

There are things to be done in health care — moving new doctors to salaried positions, for example, and buying the practices of current physicians.  There are things to be done in medical education — eliminating tuition fees for doctors who agree to remain in Canada, charging the true tuition (about $100,000 per year) to those who don’t agree, and finding a mechanism to enforce that agreement, for starters.

And, yes, we’re facing a demographic challenge — but reporting the results of a study without ensuring the real questions are asked isn’t going to do it. 

So what questions would I ask?

• Are you saying, Canadian Nurses Association, that there are trained nurses in Canada who are unemployed (not underemployed, but out of work completely)?
• Are you saying these nurses, professionally trained and certified and willing to relocate, can’t find any work anywhere?  Or are you saying they can’t find guaranteed, full-time employment in the area they want, with the hours they want — because that’s different.

I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I would want those answers before I reported that “1 in 7 new nurses can’t find work.”

I think the Canadian health care system, by and large, works pretty well, and I think the proof is obvious to anyone who’s watched GM, Ford and Crysler struggle with their health care costs south of the border.  “System needs improvement,” however, isn’t the same headline as ”system in crisis.” 

C’est finalement aujourd’hui qu’André Boisclair a décidé de tirer sa révérence. En fait, il s’est clairement fait montrer la porte par son parti. Comment se fait-il que le Parti Québécois ne soit jamais satisfait du chef qu’il choisit lui-même? Bon, il vrai que c’est avec André Boisclair que le Parti Québécois a terminé bon 3e lors de la dernière campagne électorale, mais est-ce nécessaire de mentionner que c’est ce même parti qui n’était pas satisfait de René Lévesque (celui-là même qui a créé le parti) et Lucien Bouchard (celui-là même qui était admiré par une grande majorité de Québécois). Ils ne sont donc jamais satisfaits ces péquistes?!

Et qui viendra remplacer André Boisclair? Est-ce que monsieur Duceppe se lancera dans la gueule du loup? Va-t-il à ce point risquer sa réputation pour le PQ, troisième partie à l’Assemblée nationale? Va-t-il laisser le Bloc québécois qui voit récemment ses appuis au Québec diminuer considérablement? La bonne nouvelle pour nous les fédéralistes — et c’est malheureux pour mes amis péquistes — en s’entre-déchirant ils vont se détruire. Eux-mêmes.

Public Relations machine, General Rick Hillier, Canada’s Chief of Defence Staff, was at it again yesterday.This time he was on Coach’s Corner with Don Cherry and Ron MacLean between the first and second period of game 5 between the Ottawa Senators and New Jersey Devils.

The General was interviewed from Afghanistan with Master Corporal Tom Charette of the 2nd Batallion Royal Canadian Regiment about the Canadian mission as they welcomed the Stanley Cup and several former NHLers to Kandahar.

I was watching the game in a bar that went absolutely dead quiet during the interview. 

General Hillier has to be one of the most recognized, popular and respected individuals in Canada right now. He has done more with the CDS position than any of his predecessors. 

He says he’s not a politician.  By job definition, he’s not, but he’s probably the best one Canada has.

It would be a real loss if he doesn’t go into politics after his military career.

Apparently Canada is no longer at war, we have stopped climate change, we have eliminated crime, not a single Canadian is homeless or poor, no one is unemployed or underemployed, all parents have accessible and affordable child care, there is a hospital bed for every Canadian that needs one for as long as they need it, and live-saving tests and surgeries can be scheduled and performed within a week.

All these and every other social and fiscal issue in Canada must be fixed and fixed to a point where no improvement is possible.

Why else would parliament be spending their time and taxpayers money on something someone may or MAY NOT have said during a NHL hockey game?

And by the way, the NHL already investigated the incident when it happened two years ago and cleared Shane Doan of the allegations.

Is what Shane Doan ALLEGEDLY said okay? No.  Do I think it should be an issue for Parliament?  No, again.

I don’t seem to remember Zinedine Zidane’s head-butt on Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup final becoming a dominant agenda item for the French government.  And everyone in the world knows this did actually happen.  In fact, after the incident, French President Jacques Chirac hailed Zidane as a national hero and called him a “man of heart and conviction”. 

A National Post article today by Dan Barnes reports that MP Michael Chong thinks MPs should have the right to interfere with Team Canada’s decision-making.  I hope Parliament is happy with Wayne Gretzky’s roster selections for Vancouver in 2010 or I guess we’ll see the greatest hockey player of all time in Parliament defending the players he has selected to represent Canada at the Olympics.

The quotes in Pierre Lebrun’s Canadian Press article today, including some by French-Canadians, say it all:

“I stand by my original comments after our investigation,” Colin Campbell the NHL’s executive vice-president and director of hockey operations told The Canadian Press. “But I would add to it at this point in time, it’s rather embarrassing to all Canadian hockey fans we’re rehashing this again, particularly when Hockey Canada and Shane Doan are representing and working hard in Moscow right now, competing for our country. It’s ridiculous.”

“Totally ridiculous,” Canucks head coach Alain Vigneault, a Quebec City native and former coach of the Montreal Canadiens, said in Vancouver. “In the heat of the battle things get said sometimes, a lot worse than being called a French frog or whatever.  “He says he didn’t say it. Even if he did, come on.  If our politicians, French or English, if that’s the only thing right now they have to worried about… There’s a lot more important things going on right now in society. It is utterly, utterly stupid, not to say embarrassing.”

“If he says he didn’t say it, I would believe Shane Doan 100 times out of 100 times. I was front and centre that night and I didn’t hear Shane Doan say that,” said Phoenix Coyotes goaltender Curtis Joseph, who was on the ice when the alleged slur occurred.  “If I have to fly in to a court and defend him then I will, because it’s an injustice what’s being said about him.”

“It’s unfortunate,” said New Jersey Devils French-Canadian superstar goalie Martin Brodeur. “Coming from Montreal, you can understand that people don’t like that when there’s speculation over language and whatever… I know Shane really good and I don’t see him saying that. All these years in the league I never had a problem with it so for me to hear that other people had a problem, I have a hard time to understand it. But everyone has a right to react different ways about situations.”

“If you know Shane Doan, you would assume he would never make the remarks he’s being accused of,” said Ottawa Senators forward Mike Comrie, who played with Doan in Phoenix. “I played with him for three years and I never heard him swear. He’s a person people respect.”

Let’s drop this and re-focus government time and money on more important issues that impact and are of concern for all Canadians.

The last time the federal government interfered with hockey, then Industry Minister John Manley announced tax breaks for Canadian NHL teams (i.e. tax breaks for multi-millionaires).  I think we all remember how that one turned out. 

Tory blogger Stephen Taylor is the guest speaker at Third Monday tonight.

I’m looking forward to hearing more about this incident where Press Gallery officials and Hill Security removed him from Parliament Hill on Budget Day.

I was talking to a veteran journalist about this incident last week.  He had an interesting take:

We’ve seen this before on the Hill, with radio and then with TV.  This is the next form of media.

We’ve been having this discussion around the office for a few weeks now and yesterday came across this post on Joan Tintor.

Why are the Liberals wasting so much of their air time in Question Period and in the media begging the Tories for apologies?

I simply don’t understand.  They can’t possibly think they are going to get an apology, can they? 

Maybe Stephen Harper will stand up in the House, walk across the floor and serenade Stephane Dion with the chorus from John Lennon’s tune…

I didn’t mean to hurt you
I’m sorry that I made you cry
I didn’t want to hurt you
I’m just a tory guy

Would this be a win for the Liberals?

The way things have been going, Harper is more likely to walk across the floor to give Dion a wedgie.

The Prime Minister’s quip during QP, “I can understand that the leader of the Opposition and members of his party feel for Taliban prisoners. I just wish occasionally they’d show the same passion for Canadian soldiers.” is the source of one of the Liberals more recent apology requests.

Why?  Because it was clever? 

Or maybe because the Liberals didn’t foresee that by worrying about the treatment of Taliban prisoners (who last time I checked were killing Canadians) they could be said to be supporting them and now want a apology for the PM having pointed that out.