Category: Links

Drawing a line at "stupid"

…so the slick parliamentary secretary stood to read aloud from a document which indicated that, on some matter Mr. Poilievre left unspecified, Elections Canada had at some point found the NDP to be somehow in breach.

It was unclear if Mr. Poilievre did this to pronounce shame on the opposition or congratulate them on their victory. {full article}

Aaron Wherry manages to be hilarious in his editorializing while painting a profoundly depressing picture of Parliament’s day-to-day “workings”.

Crime is no need to panic…?

The city’s homicide rate, for example, is starting to resemble a sports story, with emphasis on the setting and breaking of records, and statistical comparisons to past years and other cities. It’s also used, wrongly, as a bellwether to measure the public’s relative safety from year to year. {full article}

A strong editorial from the Winnipeg Free Press until the penultimate paragraph, where the weakening tone and endorsement of the obligatory police reaction almost sounds like capitulation to the panic and a rejection of the argument they just made.

Move your Money

But as [the New York Times] reports, the banks are looking to recoup their “losses” by creating new excuses to reach into their customers’ accounts and take those customers’ money…

Open a basic checking account in Bank of America with $100 in January and without spending a dime you’ll have a negative balance before Thanksgiving — assuming that BofA doesn’t create other new fees in the intervening months to remove those funds from the account even faster. {full article}

I’m glad to see community banks and credit unions given their due credit in the U.S.

On the other hand, I don’t agree with the portrayal of credit unions as a Mecca of no fees. I’m subject to similar fees as he describes if I don’t maintain a minimum balance at my credit union. The main difference I see between credit unions and banks is the community ownership and investment part of it — those fees and my money are going into projects I see being built and maintained down the street, not into exorbitant paycheques and into investments that have no connection to my community or my life. This is because the credit union is run by members of the community and every member has a say over how it is managed.

A credit union is a bank with a soul.