The Canadian auto industry is in the midst of an "existential crisis" and government, unions and management must work together or the sector will lose its ability to compete, says Industry Minister Tony Clement. [Has he been reading Sartre again?]
The NYC Mayor's rationale "On one side was Mr. Bloomberg, who had previously and loudly supported limiting a city official’s tenure to two terms, but changed course as his other opportunities for political advancement faded last year. The mayor, citing the worsening economy, said that he was the best man to lead the city at a time of crisis" [There is your excuse, Eddie, for a third term. That plus the canal]
[Ronna Warsh, general manager of the Social and Health Services at the City of Windsor on 1200 people applying for 100 call centre jobs] "The huge turnout "indicates there are a number of people who want to work in this community" [DUH!!!]
From Councillor Hatfield "In his view, it's dead wrong to expect city staff to drop what they're doing, be it filling potholes or dealing with flooded basements, in order to respond to information requests that could be frivolous or malicious and provide fodder for "a blog that 20 or 30 people might read." [Does not look like many of then are filling potholes from street conditions]
WEAKLING Resolutions: "Council unanimously passed a series of motions that included launching a public information campaign regarding the DRIC health information, a demand for meetings with local MPPs Sandra Pupatello, Dwight Duncan and Premier Dalton McGuinty as well as an invitation to SENES -- the air quality consultant hired by DRIC -- to appear at council."
[No lawsuit here either:] "Mayor Eddie Francis, who also attended the meeting, said changes to the parkway plan can still be made even though the DRIC documents are in the hands of Ontario's environment minister."
Don Drummond, chief economist at Toronto-Dominion Bank:
"Infrastructure support should be handled cautiously. Mr. Drummond warned that some of the infrastructure spending the government is expected to include in the budget as a way to stimulate the economy is bound to be "really stupid" because the competition for funding will be determined by how fast a project can be launched.
"Five years from now, there will be bridges to nowhere, because they were ready to go," he said."
The commission is also reluctant to publicly divulge its diversification strategies to neighbouring regions, Mancini added." [If only we had known that there actually is one.]
"Palanacki decided not to send plows to side streets on Wednesday after 10 cm of snow fell, which is the threshold the city generally uses as a guide to start side-street plowing.
"It was on the margin and I made an executive decision not to go," said Palanacki, noting that every time the city's side streets are plowed it costs $250,000. [Dead men do not pump gas OR shovel and plow snow in Windsor]
[A "logic bomb" could have destroyed the entirety of the data on all 4,000 of the Fannie Mae mortgage finance company's servers] "To me, this is the tip of the iceberg," said Mandeep Khera, chief marketing officer of security company Cenzic. "If a small percentage of these IT workers are going to the dark side, they could potentially cause a lot of damage." [Not a problem in Windsor. To get FOI info here it is all done by hand at a cost of $300k!]
And how did Hank [Henry Paulson, the former US Treasury Secretary] come up with a figure of £700 billion to boost the American banking industry? “It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com, the US financial website. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”
Then, when Baird and Ontario Infrastructure Minister George Smitherman met to announce $1 billion in infrastructure spending in small-town Ontario, their "show of partnership," as Smitherman put it, was a match for anything Hallmark cooked up for Valentine's Day. "Can you feel the love?" Baird cooed at one point. [A Liberal and a Conservative: Politics makes strange bedfellows]
But name calling has nothing on an incident between then-president Lyndon Johnson and Canadian prime minister Lester Pearson in 1965. After Pearson called for a pause in the bombing of Vietnam while speaking in Philadelphia, Johnson was reportedly furious at the Canadian's criticism of U.S. policy.
When Pearson visited Johnson the next day at Camp David, the 6'3" president grabbed Pearson by the collar and lifted him into the air (or pinned him against a wall, depending on which historian you read) and yelled, "You pissed on my rug!"
"They've tainted our entire industry," said Shelly Nutt, executive director of the peanut producers board in Texas, the nation's second largest growing state behind Georgia. "Public perception is killing us."
[OMB hearing] The City Solicitor displayed admirable candour when she replied “who can say why politicians do what they do”.
Some light reading for the weekend. Here are more quotes that should be added to the list:
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