1 IT’S ALL OVER, BACK TO WORK The Tea Party monkeys never stopped screaming from their libertarian fantasy trees, but human politicians nevertheless voted to raise the debt limit and the United States has a government again. Hard to believe this happened because conservative extremists fought to scrap a health care law.
2 TELL IT TO THE JUDGE Canada’s Supreme Court will hear labour’s appeal of Saskatchewan’s anti-union labour law changes. I hope SFL lawyers have the audio of that 2007 campaign trail quote by Brad Wall in which he agrees with an interviewer’s suggestion that government would “go to war” with unions.
3 THREE COMPANIES WILL BID ON REGINA’S PRIVATELY BUILT AND MANAGED SEWAGE PLANT CONTRACT And one of them, ironically, is the City of Edmonton.
4 WORK WILL NOT NECESSARILY SET YOU FREE A British government study says it’s not always possible to work your way out of poverty in Britain. No kiddin’, really? There’s no doubt the same findings apply here. This whole “work hard and you’ll have success” opinion you frequently hear is garbage. Raise the minimum wage to $20 an hour and then maybe that line will have some validity. FOOTNOTE 1 : the author of the report also says teacher pay should be “performance related”, which is a line you often hear from conservatives. It sounds like a great idea but the problem is in determining a way to measure “performance”. Teachers lucky enough to work in schools with socially and economically advantaged students, who will on balance perform better than less fortunate students, will have better test score outcomes, right? It’s hard if not impossible for performance pay rules to take this into account. FOOTNOTE 2: Yes, I did tastelessly Godwin this item’s headline, thanks for noticing! And you’re you’re welcome.
5 HPV VACCINE CONTROVERSY Doctors want Edmonton voters to elect Catholic School Board trustees who won’t try to block the human papilloma virus vaccine in Catholic schools. Because some Catholic school board candidates would try to block vaccinations. The issue is controversial for the Catholic church because the Church (unlike a lot of actual Catholics) says that people aren’t supposed to have sex unless they’re married, monogamous, heterosexual and not clergy.
6 BALANCED BUDGET LEGISLATION? Sounds good, never works.
13 MORE SLEEPS UNTIL HALLOWEEN! In honour of the new issue of Scary Dog that comes out today (and will be online in a few hours), here’s a trailer for a new horror movie. Looks great! (Hat tip to Street Scare’s Cassie Ozog.)