Outlaw Radio 1960

  Were we young and foolish or not older and wiser?     A great many people have asked me why I would wish to return to Ontario, specifically Toronto when with my return home in 1997 we spent thirty years very successfully raising our children and weaving our way into a tight knit rural commu nity .   With many of those we knew in Toronto gone or moved away, what would be the purpose or value of such a move. At 65 with all the change in Metropolitan Toronto would any r eason I might have bare any significant profit or experience to make it worth our while. Karen who now fears and has anxieti es about our return and is uncertain of what it all would entail being more stalworth in her resolve grows restless as with each passing day wondering as I go thr ough thoughts which become more defined and direct.   We left Toronto in June of 1997 back home to Edmonton. Nathan, Gerry, and a then very expectant Karen with E rich climbed into the station wagon in Etob...

  As the political storm heats up in Canada , the provincial premiers' fragile coalition has all but shattered, and all it took was an agreement in principle with the Alberta Government to take elbows up to head first to the bottom of the stairs,  bursting on  impact .    Green Party Leader  Elizabeth May shouts  betrayal  at the top of her lungs  federally , while Danielle Smith desperately tries to distance herself from her base, and  NDP Leader Nenshi waits in the wings as Alberta's   next Premier . Meanwhile , in Quebec, the Parti Québécois , once thought dead in the water,   is getting ready  for a transition to Government in the upcoming fall election.    T he people of Canada have woken up and , not surprisingly, have discovered that they don't  like what they are seeing .  For the most  part,  like  Elizabeth  May , they feel betrayed and angry at governments at both the f...

  With the signing of an agreement in principle between Carney and Danielle Smith over the Northern Gateway Pipeline, removal of the emissions cap, and the exploration of lifting the Tanker Ban along the Pacific Interior Passage. Carney’s hold on the left wing of the Liberal Party is meeting an abrupt end. Steven Guilbeault was the first to resign from the cabinet and will sit as a regular MP. Guilbeault was a Greenpeace environmental activist before coming to Ottawa, but his presence there brought votes from the left and the Greens to the Liberals. The fragile coalition of conservative, centrist, and left-wing liberals hasjust had the party’s foundations rocked. Mainly, this is because no one has ever done this so publicly in the party before. A great many people have always asked me why I never supported the Liberals, and Mark Carney has just defined that to me. The Liberals are still, traditionally, a party without principle. If the people’s consensus is leaning right, so goes l...

 After years of crazy, dangerously speculative real estate, the bubble has burst, and what, over the past three decades, was a facade of greed and tax sheltering is ending abruptly. The banks are now holding the bag on a fiscal disaster they helped to create. Now the spiral begins in earnest, and if we are not careful, the Canadian taxpayer will be on the hook for billions of dollars in another bank bailout to save the banks, when the Government should be bailing out the borrowers. Of Course, just as in the 1980s downturn, condos are taking the first hit, but looking at real estate sales nationwide, it is also hitting the regular housing market. Nowhere is this pain more visible than in Toronto’s far overpriced market, and condos which were designed first and foremost as offshore investment tax vehicles are not only not selling, no big investors are coming on board, so developments like the one at Cloverdale Mall are falling like houses of cards without the shovels even digging the...

  Don't  look for many changes in the upward trend in food prices at the grocery store anytime soon  , as the monopolization of both the retail market and the global supply chain runs deep and has not only a firm grip on basic commodity prices, but also on   retail pricing at the g rocery store level.   I n the retail level of the marketplace , especially in Canada, there are only four major retail giants: Weston's, the Empire Company,    Pattissons , and, recently, Walmart.  The illusion of more competition is just that  Weston's,   probably the  biggest of all  retail  groceries ,  owns Superstore, Loblaws, No Frills,  Independent, wholesale club pack,  Shoppers  Drug  Mart   and Bulk Barn.  The Empire  Company,  which is Sobeys, Safeway ,  Freshco , Foodland, IGA,  Farm Boy , Thrifty Foods, an d  Lawton's  Drug .  Pattison's  Grocery empire is...