air conditioning in buildings. (Roast in hell you damn conservatives!)
•Educate citizens to better understand planning jargon. (Huh?)
•Create municipal facilities where people can get together and cook. (I am not making this up, I swear. The return of potlatches.)
•Provide healthier ways of getting to work. (Free mittens and ear muffs for everyone biking to work at minus 30 degrees!)
•Support an aboriginal peace and healing centre on Victoria Island. (A great place for a smoke shack.)
And finally this one that tops them all.
•Population must be controlled to allow sustainability. (China’s one-baby-per-couple policy works very well. Just ask any of the 30 million female-deprived males.)
All of this nonsense apparently is the best that 200 of our leaders could come up with. And you can be absolutely certain there was not a conservative in the bunch! Please note that at no point was there ever a mention of how we are supposed to pay for all of these wonderful ideas, nor do I see a suggestion of who exactly would be in charge of controlling the population, although you can be certain it wouldn’t be you or me.
Two hundred of the finest brains the left can produce and they didn’t come close to the one idea that every conservative knows would make our homes, our communities, our cities a heck of a lot more sustainable and our people really, really happy.
All together now, conservatives, tell these lefty fruitcake Zumba-dancing goofballs the answer to real sustainability and happiness:
Lower the damn taxes, you bozos!
Louder! I can’t hear you!
Lower the damn taxes, you bozos!
That’s better. Thank you. If I send this message out to you written on a cutout paper maple leaf, will you post it on a tree someplace?
Chapter 6
Of Plastic Bags and Polar Bears
Got a call not long ago from a guy with a very interesting question. “I had to pay five cents for a plastic bag to carry my groceries home yesterday,” he said, “I understand that, but can you explain why they charged me an extra cent for the HST? I thought this five-cent thing was a charity. First of all, one cent on a five cent purchase is a 20 per cent tax, and secondly, I didn’t think charitable donations were subject to tax of any kind!”
Coming up with answers to those questions took me the better part of a week and countless calls to various accountants, Revenue Canada and the Ontario Ministry of Revenue.
I couldn’t get anyone to provide a reasonable answer as to why stores are allowed to charge one cent HST on a five-cent item, which is, as my caller pointed out, 20 per cent. One woman at Revenue Canada had probably the best answer to that conundrum when she chuckled and pointed out that, “It’s pretty hard to find two thirds of a penny these days!”
The broader question however: “If it’s charity, why are we charged any HST?” is much more difficult to get clarified. What it seems to boil down to is that the five-cent charge for a plastic bag is not a charitable donation even though part or even all of the money goes to a registered charity. As an accountant pointed out, when you pay that five cents you are making a purchase—a plastic bag—and thus the HST applies. The money goes to the store, and must be declared to Revenue Canada as revenue. If the store then donates those five cents or any portion of it to a registered charity then it is the store that gets the credit for making a charitable donation. There is no law dictating that the money must go to charity. (Whew, I hope you understand all of this!)
But yes you are perfectly correct, when you insist that both the federal and provincial governments are making money off what (in some cases at least) is in effect a charitable donation. In other words folks, we’ve been bagged!
The real scandal here is the fistful of lies we’re being fed by various so-called environmental groups and individuals in order to justify the five-cent charge.
You may recall when these charges were first implemented we were expected to believe a fantastical story about a huge “island of plastic” somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. This island, we were told, is evidence of the terrible damage plastic is doing to the planet. We were absolutely assured that this five-cent charge will discourage people from using plastic bags, thus saving the planet from a horrible fate. Not only that but the money will go to help save polar bears, Blanding’s turtles, spotted owls, wood chucking woodchucks, coyotes, and other assorted “endangered” species such as beaver and Canada geese.
At first we were told this island was twice the size of Texas. Then, before you could turn around, suddenly the “garbage island,” as it is now called, becomes twice the size of the continental United States. And growing! Some reports claim the island threatens to engulf the entire planet!
Fortunately conservatives, with our superior intelligence, don’t fall for this sort of nonsense, but the intellectually challenged “progressives” are thrown into such a tizzy that they ride off in all directions shouting, “Send money to Gore/Suzuki!”
To give you an idea of how crazy this whole thing is here are just a few paragraphs of a story written by Kathy Marks and Daniel Howden that appeared in an environmental publication called The Independent. This wonderful bit of fiction and many other stories that are even more like fairy tales appear widely today on the Internet and are read and apparently actually believed by tens of thousands of incredibly gullible people. (Conservatives, as you know, lack gullibility.)
Here’s the story—as fanciful as anything the Brothers Grimm ever concocted:
A “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.
The vast expanse of debris—in effect the world’s largest rubbish dump—is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting “soup” stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the California coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.
Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the Great Pacific Garbage Patch” or “trash vortex” believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam is circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr. Moore founded, said yesterday:
“The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size of the continental United States.”
The “soup” is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the junk—which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags—is thrown off ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.
It is perhaps one of the most incredible stories of the past century and it all stems, not from reality, but from the very fertile brain of a guy who grew weary of his woodworking business in California and decided to go after the really big bucks.
His name is Charles J. Moore. He now calls himself Captain Moore and, as you can see from the Independent story, he is now being described as an oceanographer. He is no such thing. He’s a woodworker who has a sailboat. At least he had a sailboat when he started all of this Alice in Wonderland stuff. He’s probably got a lot more toys today.
Moore claims that in 1997 he took a shortcut in his sailboat from Hawaii to California and suddenly discovered what he then described as a “giant island of plastic” floating in the Pacific.
Astonishingly, during the several hundred years man has been sailing in those waters