Definition of merge: to blend gradually into something else …

Gradually … i.e. not pull up to the end of the merge lane and stop.

In this city, and indeed in Ontario generally, I have noticed drivers — even if I leave a space in front of me to drive into, at speed, and therefore preventing the need for our lane to stop dead — will not merge correctly.

Instead, they will drive to the end of the merge lane, then try to cut in.

Or they will stop, at the start of the merge lane, and wait for someone to let them in.

To all those drivers: please visit Montreal for two weeks.  You’ll come back with an appreciation of the merge lane as a tool to be used.

Merci beaucoup.

Check this out, and if it doesn’t restore your faith in humanity, you’re missing something quite extraordinary.

I’m not normally given to underdog stories, but I know what I like, and I love that the British audience — probably not filled with opera fans — nevertheless knew enough to know they were in the presence of true, unadulterated talent.

Bravo, Paul, and congratulations on winning Britain’s Got Talent.  I don’t buy many CDs anymore, but I’ll be preordering yours.

Hat tip to Paul Wells for this.  

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.

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.

I am an unabashed baseball fan — I think it may be the most pure game there is, and I like nothing better, on a lazy summer afternoon, than to head to the ballpark and watch the Lynx play.

Today, however, my heart is heavy for the future of the game for a very specific reason — I’m worried that Barry Bonds, should he break Hank Aaron’s home run record in the next couple of months, might harm the game in a permanent way that time won’t heal.

No matter you’re opinion of Bonds the athlete, there is no denying Bonds is bad at selling the game.  He’s always been more about Barry Bonds than about the team, or the game, and he’s been one of those athletes unwilling to realize how good they have it, etc.  In short, by all accounts he’s been graceless, tactless, and — here’s the largest condemnation — not a winner.  That’s right, there are no World Series rings on Barry Bonds’ fingers.

Hank Aaron?  World Series winner …

Babe Ruth?  World Series winner …

So, Mr. Bonds, here’s what you can do to preserve the game that has made you wealthy beyond your wildest imagination and has brought you fame and fortune …

Since the Giants finished under .500 last year, unless they are in a tight pennant race, there will be no competitive reason to carry on, so my advice, Mr. Bonds, is as follows: Tie the record, then retire.

Hit 755 homeruns, then say “I’m done.”

Otherwise, it’s an asterisk for you forever, Mr. Bonds, and every discussion of the most home runs ever will start, ” well, Hank Aaron hit 755 homeruns clean, but Barry Bonds got __ and kind of holds the record.”

You might want to ask Roger Maris how he felt about the asterisk for his whole life — particularly since his asterisk was for a much less serious transgression of the rules.

Will Barry Bonds listen?  Has he ever?

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. 

This week, I had the pleasure of promoting my colleague and friend, Aimee Deziel of 76design. 

Now I am not what anyone, particularly those who know me, would call a sensitive, emotional or coddling guy.

However, in promoting Aimee to the position of Vice-President of 76design, I really shared her excitement.

Three years ago, Aimee was the first person I hired in my now five year career at Thornley Fallis & 76design.  So (and not to sound condescending) I take pride in her success and the contribution she has made to our firm since joining us in 2004.

Her leadership has really been a driving force in 76design’s growth, particularly over the past 18 months and she will be a key element of the continued success of Thornley Fallis & 76design going forward.

Below is the email message that I sent out to staff earlier today announcing her well-deserved promotion.

On behalf of Joe and Alex, I would like to announce the appointment of Aimee Deziel to Vice-President of 76design.

 

Aimee has been with us for close to 3 years and was the first hire I made with the firm, so of course I am particularly excited for Aimee and very proud of her success.

 

We have a great team that is consistently delivering better and better work, and except for the odd March Meltdown, has fun along the way.  This is resulting in more work from existing clients and regularly winning new assignments from new clients in new sectors.

 

Aimee Deziel has been a very big and very important part of our success and growth.  She is a very smart, talented, passionate, creative and dedicated individual that brings a lot of enthusiasm to both the work we do and our office environment.

 

Originally hired on the TF side, Aimee’s advertising background eventually led her to start getting involved in more and more of 76design’s creative projects. 

 

Last year, we formally transitioned her fully to 76design.  Since then, she has been leading the design and creative team, and has been integral to 76design’s continuously growing reputation as a firm that does really creative and smart work, provides excellent service, and is great to work with.

 

Today’s announcement of Aimee’s appointment to Vice-President of 76design not only recognizes the role she is already playing, but is an indication from Joe, Alex and I, as well as Brett and Steve, that we believe her and her leadership are key to the ongoing and future success of not only 76design, but the entire firm.

 

Congratulations Aimee, you have worked hard, you have been successful and you definitely deserve this! 

Le Journal de Montréal nous annonce ce matin que la Cour d’appel confirme le jugement de Sophie Chiasson contre CHOI FM (Jeff Fillion).

Bravo.

Jeff Fillion ne méritait que cet ultime pied de nez. Une femme, de qui il est s’est permis de rire éperdument en utilisant des insultes plus basses les unes que les autres, lui remet la monnaie de sa pièce. Que dire de plus que : bravo.