I received a press release today from Transport 2000, an organization I've belonged to for a long time. They have awarded the Lemon Prize to former Minister of Public Safety Stockwell Day, and Suzanne Hurtubise, Deputy Minister responsible for the Canadian Border Services Agency.

Here's the story: Amtrak currently runs one train in each direction per day between Vancouver and Seattle. This service is funded mostly by the Washington State Department of Transportation. An announcement was made in March, 2007 (see Good news about Vancouver-Seattle passenger trains elsewhere on this blog) that WSDOT and the government of British Columbia would put up the money for track improvements required to support additional trains, and that a second train in each direction would start running sometime in 2008.

The required track improvements were made and paid for, and WSDOT was ready to go in August. That was five months ago, and still no second train. What went wrong? A meddling Federal cabinet minister.

The Canadian Border Services Agency decided that they would charge $1,500 to clear each northbound train though Customs. Their justification for this is that expanded service would require a "new facility". This is nonsense; Customs already has a clearance facility at the Pacific Central Station on Main Street.

This is just another example of how Stockwell Day and the Conservative Party of Canada shines the shoes of the petrochemical industry at every opportunity, even if it means cancelling out investments made by British Columbia and Washington State taxpayers. There's a major reconstruction project under way at the Peace Arch border crossing. For automobiles. Who is paying for it? We taxpayers. Will the users of this improved border crossing be assessed a fee? Only the NEXUS users.

While Day and his Deputy Minister were hard at work being an obstacle, Day was unable to come up with a budget figure for security for the 2010 Olympic Games; the best he could do was "more than $400 million but less than $1 billion". That really narrows it down, doesn't it?

Day's first appearance on the national scene was as the accidental Leader of the Canadian Alliance Party, which eventually merged into the present Conservative Party of Canada. The smart money was on Tom Long for this job, but it turned out that Long wasn't actually a Canadian citizen.

After the 2000 election loss, it came to light that during Day's tenure as Treasurer of Alberta, the Alberta government was sued for libel by Lorne Goddard, a Red Deer school trustee, because Day said that Goddard supported child pornography. The suit was settled out of court, at a cost of $792,000 to Alberta taxpayers. Day later reimbursed the Alberta government for $60,000 of this.

Day was moved from Minister of Public Safety to Minister of International Trade after the 2008 election. This takes him away from responsibility for Olympics security and border crossings, but it means that he is now the point man for for whatever disputes take place between Canada and the US over "made in US" trade policies, such as for steel. How effective is Day likely to be at reminding the Obama administration that NAFTA is supposed to work both ways? Heaven help us.

The lesson we can learn from this is that PM Stephen Harper's policy toward cabinet ministers is to reward failure. It says elsewhere on this blog that Harper must go; his attempt to eliminate public financing of political parties proved that there's no telling what Harper might do when our backs are turned. It also seems that the only way to get Stockwell Day out of Cabinet is to get a different Prime Minister.

Update on Feb. 6: A report published by the Border Policy Research Institute at Western Washington University makes the case that a second Seatlle-Vancouver train would bring in $750,000 in GST revenue alone, far more that the $550,000 that Day's "drive or fly to Vancouver" tax would bring in. You can click here to read the actual report (PDF).

The author of this book, Jaimie McEvoy, is a New Westminster historian. He was heavily involved in the unsuccessful campaign to save Saint Mary's Hospital, and was elected to the New Westminster City Council in November, 2008.

This book is well written. If you're one of the thousands of people who were involved in the effort to save Saint Mary's, or one of the hundreds of thousands of people who were treated at Saint Mary's, or had a relative or close friend who was treated there, you'll get something out of this book, particularly chapter ten, "The Last Betrayal", which covers the hospital closure and the massive community effort to stop it.

What if you don't fall in one of these categories? The first chapter provides a pretty good overview of what health care was like in the early days of British Columbia, in particular the effect of the Cariboo gold rush.

Not particularly interested in B.C. history, or the Great Fire of New Westminster in 1898? The story of Saint Mary's Hospital actually started in Vancouver, WA; the Sisters of Providence who built and ran Saint Mary's originally moved west from Montreal in 1857 to build a hospital in Fort Vancouver. They put up schools, orphanages, and hospitals all over the Pacific Northwest and Montana. There is a statue of the leader of the Sisters of Providence, Mother Joseph, in the U.S. Capitol, and she is the only Canadian and only the fifth woman honoured in this fashion.

The strongest overall impression I got from reading this book was how Saint Mary's kept up with technology, and the importance that they place on nutrition and cleanliness.

As mentioned earlier, the closure of Saint Mary's by the provincial government is an important part of this story. The steps in this process and the people who made them are spelled out carefully. McEvoy draws attention to the removal of local control from B.C.'s health care system, and characterizes this as a step backward.

The profits from the sale of The Life and Destruction of Saint Mary's Hospital go to the Saint Mary's Health Foundation, the successor to the Saint Mary's Hospital Foundation. Availability is limited at this time. The publisher is Harbour Publishing, and it's possible to mail order it from their site. It's listed on amazon.ca, but they don't have it in stock. Black Bond Books at the Royal City Centre in New Westminster has it, or you can get it at Shiloh Sixth Avenue United Church, 1111 Sixth Ave. in New Westminster (phone (604) 522-3443 first).

I've been an admirer of Senator Al Franken (D-Minnesota) from the early days of Saturday Night Live, through Stuart Saves His Family, two of his books that I've read (Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot and Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, and his program on Air America Radio. I was rooting for him all the way in his Senate race, and I'm happy that he's finally in.

This clip is just a small example of why Al will be a credit to the US Senate and the people of Minnesota:

I hope that this is my absolute final post about Sarah Palin, but I discovered this at The Gazetteer, and it deserves a larger audience. This woman can really sing, and I got a laugh over the moose-antler-wearing pianist.

Click here to go to the YouTube page. Lots of comments.

The good people at Daily Kos have asked for help in spreading this around:

Palin said that she didn't know if bombing abortion clinics is an act of terrorism. In the words of Jed Lewison of Daily Kos, "Palin's answer is perhaps the single most incredible thing I've heard from any candidate during this entire general election campaign, and I don't make that statement lightly."

The Republicans are out of ammunition. The only thing they have left to talk about is William Ayers, who sat on the board of Chicago Annenberg project and the Woods Fund with Obama. Ayers hosted a coffee during Obama's first campaign. Obama read a book that Ayers wrote, and Ayers donated $200 to one of Obama's re-election campaign. Obama was only eight years old when Ayers was with the Weather Underground.

Radio talk show host and convicted felon G. Gordon Liddy is much more notorious terrorist than William Ayers. He says that he admires Adolf Hitler. He served more than four years in prison for his role in the Watergate break-in and the Daniel Ellsberg case. He has admitted that he plotted to murder journalist Jack Anderson; plotted to murder fellow Republican operative E. Howard Hunt; and plotted to firebomb the Brookings Institution. Liddy also reportedly gave advice on how to shoot agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and reportedly admitted to naming shooting targets after the Clintons. He held a fund-raiser for McCain in 1998, and has donated at least $5,000 to McCain's campaigns since then. McCain has praised and repeatedly associated with Liddy in public and in campaign settings.

Here's a story from the Huffington Post with more details on this, as well as McCain's support for another terrorist group, the Contras in Nicaragua: John McCain's terrorist connections.

In the low-income areas of Philadelphia, they have been distributing flyers telling people that if they show up to vote, they might be arrested if they have outstanding arrest warrants or unpaid traffic tickets. Here's the story from the Daily Pennsylvanian: False flyers aim to intimidate voters.

Here's an idea: let's put these same flyers on the windshields of Donald Rumsfeld, the executives of AIG and Halliburton, and Erik Prince, owner of Blackwater.