Gregg: "Artifice is the kryptonite of public life..."

"We may all have the right to our opinions but we do not have the right to our own facts..."

More about that here in today's Great Gray Globe...

Ottawa - the place to run to

Great news for tourism in Ottawa today. Richard Lee McNair, formerly one of the top 15 fugitives wanted by US Marshalls, has praised Ottawa as one of the best places to be when on the run. [Citizen: American fugitive fell in love with Ottawa, new book reveals]

This is great news because the City can really use a new tourist demographic. We've cornered the regional market for grade eight students doing the annual tour of Parliament and visit to the Museum of Science and Technology, but let's face it, junior high school enrollment is not increasing.

Meanwhile, with the upcoming passage of the Omnibus Crime Bill and its mandatory minimum sentences, we should be seeing a huge upswing in fugitives from justice.

I'm wondering about attractions we can hold out for them. McNair rode the O-train, toured Carleton U, strolled Dow's Lake and the Rideau Canal and went for early morning jogs. It doesn't seem like museums and government buildings were a draw for him.

Any thoughts on what features of our fair town we can advertise or develop further to bolster this new tourist cohort?

[Update: I'm afraid news like this is not going to help.]

Peter Kent: Lost in the Ozone

Here I was, duct tape wadded round my snout to bung yet another frothy yowl on the political class. Although. Truthfully, dignifyin' 'em with the epithet "class" twists the facts awful hard. Screw it. Twisting fact has become their standard operating procedure.

Ergo I rant. Bear with me.

Back in Alberta, even now, remain fans of a last-century band of psychedelic rockabilly space cowboys called Commander Cody And His Lost Planet Airmen.

They're an acquired taste. And perhaps better known for other songs. But us coyotes wish to dedicate Lost in the Ozone Again to alleged federal environment minister Peter Kent.

Who didn't seem to be an idiot back when he read the news on TV. Shows what half-assed-decent research and scripting departments can do for a guy... and, whoopsy, there's my tradmark digression. Blink and ya miss it.

As a news person, Kent was about getting facts right. Now that he's federal environment minister, and so a front-row sock-puppet for the Stephen Harper Information Torquing machine, not so much.

Pete is lately pinned in the high beams of an expert advisor's memo that, ummm, pretty much negates his excuse for axing half of Environment Canada's critical ozone monitoring system. He says both parts are the same, so he'll cut one. Since Kent has so far not proven that he even knows what the hell ozone* is, this does not comfort. Especially since the actual, ummm, expert, is adamant there's no duplication: both form halves of a coherent whole.

Coherent? Can't have that! Whenever Harper Government spin faceplants against reality, the first instinct is to kill it, and the messenger, to remove any threat to his beeyootiful conservative ideomythology. It's Statistics Canada and the long form census all over again. Harperites don't seem to care how bush-league lame they look while they put the boots into reality. And citizens. And really, the whole planet.

* For the science-illiterate among our federal ministers, ozone is a type of oxygen molecule in the high atmosphere, that reflects a whole lot of the ultraviolet rays in raw sunlight. Which prevents people and other living things from suffering multiple horrible cancers whilst frying and dying from solar radiation. At least on my planet...