First, the revenue drop must be sufficiently significant to cause an employer to change his behavior, and second, the loss of utility (or, happiness) caused by the loss of revenue must be higher than the utility the employer gains by discriminating. I address the first below in point 2; the latter point once again assumes that an employer would act rationally when comparing utilities and ignores the special animus that one might hold toward a victimized group. That is, what if hate overpowers money? Let's say my business, Super Straight, Inc., wants to make more Very Straight Widgets, so I need to hire more people. Even though Les B. Ian can make one thousand VSWs per day, causing a 100 jump in my revenue, I would be 200 points angrier just knowing that Ms. Ian is around. A rational actor would still discriminate. But, even if the change in utilities were equal, or even reversed, a rational model assumes fungibility where some people might value their adherence to bigotry stronger than any increase in mere money.

Gay, lesbian, and bisexual employees are, on average, just as productive as their heterosexual counterparts. But, there are a lot fewer of them. This means that even assuming the veracity of the rational behavior model discussed above, discriminating against such a small minority may not have the kind of negative economic effects that would drive a discriminator to change his behavior or close up shop. In fact, in order to push a discriminator into economic ruin (or, even, a statistically significant loss of revenue or market share), the group victimized by discrimination must be large enough to have its best and brightest, a small subset, have enough of an impact. If you discriminate against women, you exclude 50 percent of your applicant pool; if you discriminate against African-Americans or Latinos, you exclude roughly 13 and 17 percent of your applicant pool, respectively. But, gays make up only about 1.7 percent of the US population. Discriminating against the 2 percent of Americans that are natural red heads is more likely to negatively impact your business than discriminating against gays.

The free market forces incentivizing nondiscrimination, therefore, do not exist with respect to small minority populations. So, even assuming the truth of the economic premise, the market fails when it comes to gays. That is the exact moment when the law should step in.

[T]he free market hypothesis discounting the need for anti-discrimination laws ignores the cultural and expressive impact of non-discrimination laws. Before discrimination against women was taboo or before discrimination against African-Americans was taboo, it may not have occurred to businesses that women and blacks could offer them competitive advantages. That is, again even assuming the truth of the economic theory, if the zeitgeist of the time accepts discrimination, the first step toward non-discrimination may only happen at the whim of a pioneering iconoclast. Equality should not be left up to such luck.

Most laws have an expressive angle. Some are simple: a law banning murder expresses society's view that your rights to do what you want end at someone else. Some are more subtle: a progressive tax regime shows that society is interested in equality and fairness.

Employment non-discrimination laws are not exclusively about ending the trappings of insidious bias in the workplace; they also enshrine a progressive society's commitment that members of minority groups are not second-class citizens. They help change the mind of society as a whole about the value and rights of those that are different. Sure, true reform may take a generation or more; but, non-discrimination laws create a background of fairness, equality, and respect in which we raise our future business owners, future workers, and future policy makers. This long run cultural impact may qualify as what economists call "social welfare," but it is absent from the free market theory in employment discrimination.

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"A study found that children living with pets were 13 to 18% less likely to miss school due to illness than children without pets." Click to Play: Laurie Berkner - The Cat Came Back

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Don't Blame Us, Says Corn Lobby
Afraid of fructose? You may have good reason to be, as an alarming new study shows that the popular sweetener can fuel the growth of cancer.

The study, conducted by scientists at UCLA, found that pancreatic cancer cells grew faster when "fed" with fructose. Study author Dr. Anthony Heaney, associate professor of medicine and neurosurgery at the university's cancer center, said it was likely that fructose would also speed the growth of other cancers as well.
The sweetener - a blend of fructose and another sugar called glucose - is found in all sorts of foods and beverages and is the most common sweetener used in American soft drinks.

The association said that overall, sugar is still the most common form of fructose in the American diet.

And don't be fooled by products which replace high-fructose corn syrup with sugar. They also contain high levels of fructose.

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The Federation of Agriculture told farmers it's up to them to educate the public on locally-grown food that ends up on the dinner table.

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Intellectual capital tends to track social and economic capital. Enfranchising only well-informed voters would have the effect of cementing into place existing inequalities. To show that I am not merely drawing on “intuitions”, let me quote a few passages from the suffrage debates. The quotations come from Selected Articles on Woman Suffrage (Minneapolis: H. W. Wilson, 1910). It is perhaps worth noting for those who don’t know the history of the women’s suffrage movement that after half a century of “agitation”, women in the US received the franchise in Federal elections in 1920; at the time the volume was published, whether women should have the vote was therefore very much a live issue. The authors I cite are against giving the franchise to women, and one of their arguments concerns women’s relative ignorance, on the basis of which the franchise ought to be withheld from them.

The first is from Charles Worcester Clark, writing in the Atlantic Monthly in 1890:

Women have, on the whole, less information on political subjects than have men. As their powers are of the domestic rather than the political sort, so their ordinary course of life is not such as to give them much knowledge of public questions or of the character of public men. They need special preparation in order to vote intelligently. So, it made be said, do men. Nevertheless, very few men do make a study of politics. The great majority, except for the questionable information furnished by the partisan press, go to the polls with only such knowledge of the issues and the candidates as comes to them in their everyday life. But, fortunately, this is considerable. It is much more than women have. The average man understands the difference in functions of national and state governments, and knows what part the candidate for whom he votes will have to play if elected. The average woman knows nothing of this. Neither has she any idea what the tariff is, though she may applaud or denounce it with all the vehemence of the party newspaper she occasionally reads. This ignorance is not discreditable to her, ‖ for she has enough to do already, but it exists. There is, of course, a large number of women of high education and comparative leisure, who are well informed on public questions; better informed, perhaps, than any corresponding number of men, except it be those whose profession is politics, and in impartiality women must be much superior to these. There is, however, no possible way of making selections from the mass. Some one has contended that all women ought to be allowed to vote, because Mrs. Julia Ward Howe is far better fitted for citizenship than is the average male voter. This sort of argument proves too much, for by the same token we would all gladly submit to a despotism—if only Mrs. Howe were to be the despot. There is no reason for believing that the average woman would take any more pains to fit herself for the duties of a voter than the average man takes; and the information which comes to her without special effort is certainly less, as is consequently her interest in public affairs, unconnected as they are with her daily life. It is very likely that on their first enfranchisement only the best qualified women would vote, as is said to be the case in Kansas [where women had had a partial franchise since 1861]; but the exigencies of party politics would never permit such a state of things to continue long. Thus, to enfranchise women would be, in the end, to diminish, if not the average sound judgment of the body of voters, at least the average information and the average interest in public affairs (209–210).

The second is from Mrs. Humphrey (Mary Augusta) Ward, one of the most famous novelists of her time, writing in Nineteenth Century (1908):

Women are ‘not undeveloped men but diverse,’ and the more complex the development of any state, the more diverse. Difference, not inferiority—it is on that we take our stand. The modern state depends for its very existence—and no juggling with facts can get rid of the truth—on the physical force of men, combined with the trained and specialized knowledge which men alone are able to get, because women, on whom the child-bearing and child-rearing of the world rest, have no time and no opportunity to get it. The difference in these respects between even the educated man and the educated woman—exceptions apart—is evident to us all. Speaking generally, the man’s mere daily life as breadwinner, as merchant, engineer, official, or manufacturer, gives him a practical training that is not open to women. The pursuit of advanced science, the constantly developing applications of sciences to industry and life, the great system of the world’s commerce and finance, the fundamental activities of railways and shipping, the hard physical drudgery, in fact, of the world, day by day—not to speak of naval and military affairs, and of that diplomacy which protects us and our children from war—these are male, conceived and executed by men. The work of Parliament turns upon them, assumes them at every turn. That so many ignorant male voters have to be called into the nation’s councils upon them, is the penalty we pay for what on the whole are the great goods of democracy. But this ignorance-vote is large enough in all conscience, when one considers the risks of the modern state; and to add to it yet another, where the ignorance is imposed by nature and irreparable—the vote of women who in the vast majority of cases are debarred by their mere sex from that practical political experience which is at least always open to men—could any proceeding be more dangerous, more unreasonable? The women who ask it—able, honorable, noble women though they be—are not surely true patriots, in so far as they ask it. There is a greatness in self-restraint as well as in self-assertion; and to embarrass the difficult work of men, in matters where men’s experience alone provides the materials for judgment, is not to help women. On the contrary. We are mothers, wives, and sisters of men, and we know that our interests are bound up with the best interests of men, and that to claim to do their work as well as our own is to injure both (259).

The argument is straightforward. It is presumed that ignorance among voters diminishes the “sound judgment of the body of voters”, and thus (by implication) the likelihood of good results from elections. Even if some men are ignorant too, nevertheless the situation of women, taken by both authors to be natural, tends to prevent their acquiring the “practical training” requisite to a wise exercise of the franchise. It is therefore reasonable to deny women the franchise.

Needless to say, in a system where males only have the vote the perpetuation of inequality—in particular the confinement of women to the domestic sphere, and thus the condition of ignorance on the basis of which they are held to be incompetent to vote—is likely.

[. . .]

The moral is that you cannot in fairness merely observe existing conditions of relative ignorance and decide on that basis who is to be granted the franchise. Those conditions are almost certainly not natural, and thus not inevitable; and to grant the franchise only to the relatively knowledgeable under such conditions will perpetuate the inequalities that have generated some, and perhaps a great deal, of the variation in knowledgeability. It seems to me that rather than return to notions whose history is checkered, to say the least, the better answer to the problem of ignorance is to agitate to improve education, the quality of news media, and so forth.

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Rated: Parental Guidance
Runs: 95 minutes
Director: Philippe Falardeau
Country: Canada
Released: 2011
Starring: Fellag, Sophie Nelisse, Emilien Neron, Danielle Proulx
Language: In French with English subtitles.
Awards: Multiple Festival award winner, including Best Canadian Feature, Toronto International Film Festival; Toronto Film Critics Association’s Rogers Best Canadian Film Award; Canada’s Oscar entry for Best Foreign Film.
Digital projection.

“Director Falardeau brings a luminous warmth to this affecting story of an Algerian emigre who finds work as a teacher in a Montreal elementary school. Bachir Lazhar, who is applying for refugee status, inherits his job from a beloved teacher who has hanged herself in her classroom. Despite that melodramatic premise, the drama is supremely sensitive and understated, as Lazhar - recovering from his own family tragedy - tries to adapt to the liberal classroom culture in Quebec.” - Brian D. Johnson, MacLeans Magazine “Falardeau captures the pulse of primary school classroom politics in this tender and touching drama.... A smart screenplay, moving performances - particularly by the child cast - and social observations free of any political agenda make this film a high achiever.” - Radheyan Simonpillai, Now Magazine. “A deserved candidate for Best Foreign Language Film consideration.” - Peter Howell, Toronto.com

Advance Tickets ~ IMDB on Film ~

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EdTechTalk21 #163
Al Pittampalli on the Modern Meeting Standard
January 25, 2012

Al Pittampalli, author of Read This Before Our Next Meeting joined us to discuss the Modern Meeting Standard. On Twitter, Al tags himself as a Meeting culture warrior. 

<Chat Trans>

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The Donald Clarey team out of the Montague Curling Club has a record of 2-1 at the 2012 PEI Men's Tankard in Cornwall. The team of Clarey, Larry Richards, David Rice and Steven MacLeod defeated Charlottetown's Mike Gaudet in the opening draw on Thursday with a final score of 9-3. The second draw saw Clarey's foursome beat Cornwall's Ron Young 8-6. In draw 4 on Friday afternoon, Clarey lost to Charlottetown's Rod MacDonald 7-4. The Montague team plays again at 6:30 in Draw 5. The winner of the Tankard will represent PEI at the the Tim Hortons Brier, March 3-11 in Saskatoon.

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Prince William helped garner positive press for the military when he piloted a Sea King helicopter during last year's Royal Tour in Canada, newly released records show.

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About 350 skaters from around the region are descending on Summerside this weekend for synchronized skating competition.

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Two Montague youths took advantage of the calm before the storm Friday. It’s not a typical activity for a storm day in PEI, but Zachary Gordon and Jordan Testawitch were enjoying an afternoon on their scooters. Students were sent home early due to an impending storm and as of 4pm eastern PEI was still waiting for the snow and freezing rain. Charlotte MacAulay photo

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Is there a better way to kick off a winter carnival than with a visit by one of professional sports most recognized trophies - the Stanley Cup?
The legendary Stanley Cup is visiting O’Leary as part of Scotiabank Hockey Day in Canada celebrations.

O’Leary residents hoping to catch a glimpse of hockey’s holy grail will have that chance on Wednesday, Feb 8 between 1-3 pm at the Community Sports Centre, the opening day of the four-day 2012 O’Leary Winter Carnival (Feb 8-12).

Tylan Robinson, the Community of O’Leary’s recreation director, says all the details haven’t been hammered out yet, but it is expected a volunteer photographer will snap photos of anyone wishing to pose next to the Cup. The images will then be sent to their email addresses.

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The linkage between NE Caucasian languages and ancient kingdoms is strongest in Caucasian Albania, a state that covered much of what is now Azerbaijan from the fourth century BCE to the eighth century CE. Like Armenia and the Georgian kingdom of Iberia, Albania was politically caught between, and deeply influenced by, the Persian world to its east and the Greco-Roman world to its west. We know from ancient Greek writers that the Albanians eventually acquired their own script, but knowledge of this writing system was lost until 1937. At that time, a Georgian scholar discovered a reproduction of the Albanian alphabet in a medieval Armenian manuscript. Subsequently, a few stone inscriptions were found that used the same script, but the language itself basically remained a mystery until the early 2000s.

The story of the recovery of Albanian writing begins in 1975, when a fire damaged a number of manuscripts in a neglected basement cell in the famous Eastern Orthodox monastery of Saint Catherine’s in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula. The heating of the manuscripts helped reveal the fact that some were palimpsests, parchment manuscripts that had been scraped over and then re-inscribed. Fifteen years later, unknown letters were noticed under a Georgian text in one of the documents. In 1996, the Georgian scholar Zaza Alexidze determined that the underlying passages were in Albanian. After several years of concerted effort, he recovered and translated the entire hidden layer of the palimpsest. What he found was an Albanian Christian lectionary, a church calendar with specific scriptural readings keyed to specific dates. Some scholars believe that this long-forgotten and thoroughly erased text, which dates to the late forth or early fifth century, is the oldest Christian lectionary in existence.

Alexidze’s translation was facilitated by the existence of a living tongue strikingly similar to the language used in the lectionary. The literary language of the ancient Albanians, it turns out, lived on among the Udi, a group of eight thousand persons inhabiting two villages in Azerbaijan. As the years passed, the Udi language diverged from old Albanian, but not by much. The surviving Udi people also retained the faith of their ancestors. Although they live in a largely Muslim area, the modern Udi belong to their own Udi-Albanian Christian church.

Christianity originally spread to Albania from Armenia. The Albanian church eventually separated from the Armenian, affiliating instead with the Orthodox Christianity of the Greek world. After the Muslim conquest of Albania in the 600s, such an affiliation became politically fraught, as the Greek-speaking Byzantine Empire was the main principal rival of the Muslim Caliphate. As a result, the Albanian Christian population was again placed under the ecclesiastical authority of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Over time, it seems, much or perhaps most of the Albanian population assimilated into the Armenian community. Those who resisted Armenian religious control seem to have evolved into the modern Udi. Yet the Udi population continued to decline, as many members adopted Islam and were absorbed by the Azeri community. Today, the Udi language is regarded as gravely endangered.

As might be expected, the Albanian heritage of the eastern Caucasus has generated a contemporary political controversy among Armenian and Azerbaijani partisans, focusing on the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh. Eastern Armenians, according to some Azerbaijani stalwarts, are not so much genuine Armenians as transformed Albanians—like much of the Azeri population. Armenian scholars charge Azerbaijani historians with greatly exaggerating the extent of Albanian assimilation, and with trying to “de-Armenianize” much of the historically constituted Armenian region.

To the neutral bystander, the issue might seem moot; ethnic groups and nations often expand by assimilation, and the mixing of peoples is more the norm than the exception over the long term. Primordialist nationalism, however, retains a strong hold on the imagination, especially when faced with intractable military conflicts. As the “frozen war” between Armenia and Azerbaijani is now going into its third decade, it is not surprising that the ancient Albanians would be recruited into the conflict.

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To prepare for writing my encyclopedia entry I went to the library to see what actual encyclopedias look like. I must say I was pleasantly surprised. As a student I spurned encyclopedias as ‘secondary sources’ and plowed through texts. As a result, I have an invaluable knowledge that can’t be duplicated by reading secondary sources, and a keen awareness of how exhausting not using secondary sources is! Reading the high-quality, professionally edited entries in my library’s encyclopedias was an eye-opener and a guilty pleasure — you could learn so much with so little effort! And you don’t have to work as hard untangling the entries the way you do with Wikipedia!

But this is exactly the problem with closed, for-profit encyclopedias: they require no work. In fact, they require just the opposite: submission to authority. The writing guidelines for my encyclopedia entry insist that there be no quotations or citations — just a short list of additional readings. Encyclopedias give us no reason to believe their claims are true except the arbitrary authority of those who write them. They are the ultimate triumph of the authoritarian impulse in academics.

Compare this to Wikipedia, which has gotten so persnickety about insisting on citations and references that much of the charm of its early days has gone. Every wikipedia entry is an argument between its composers, spilling out of the discussion page and into the entry. Accuracy and verifiablity are there on the page to see. In other words, Wikipedia is the ultimate realization of academic ideals of argumentation, presentation of evidence, probing claims to logical coherence, and the deliberative use of reason. There is no better place for people to cut their teeth on the life of the mind, or to begin to learn the fundamental skill of close and critical reading of a text.

It is this refusal of arbitrary authority that really scares encyclopedia types, not worries about accuracy. Wikipedia is a place where you must learn to think for yourself, encyclopedias are places where you are told what to believe.

Of course, there is a lot to like about the arbitrary exercise of authority if you have faith in the authority in question: the gullible are not duped, the conspiracy theorists are silenced, and the trains run on time. The down side of intellectual debate is the possibility of intellectual chaos — and there’s certainly a lot of that on Wikipedia! If you are pessimistic about the capacities of your students to know and learn then feeding them the party line is, to you at least, the best way to protect them.

But we as educators can and must believe that our students — and everyone else! — is capable of more than this. Our fundamental principles and highest aspirations lead us ineluctably to the conclusion that attaining intellectual maturity requires immersion in the rough waters of public debate, which is exactly what Wikipedia is. The real danger of Wikipedia is its use by people made gullible by a system which promises them that someone, somewhere knows The Truth, exactly the belief that college teachers try to educate their students out of rather than into. We’d have less uncritical reading of Wikipedia if there were less people trained to be uncritical readers.

[. . .]

Wikipedia is flawed, human, complex, and ultimately deeply worthwhile. It is real life, not a child-proof playroom. What sort of educators are we if we believe the latter is better for our students than the former?

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Stanley Cup heading east
By Charlotte MacAulay
charlotte@peicanada.com
That coveted symbol of hockey excellence in Canada is heading to Kings County as part of an Island wide tour during the Hockey Day in Canada celebrations from February 7-11.
Residents of Souris, Morell and Montague will have the chance to take pictures with the cup on Thursday February 9.
The first stop will be at Morell Consolidated in the morning followed by an appearance at the Wellness Centre in Montague and then the Eastern Kings Sportsplex in Souris.
It will be the first time the cup has made an appearance in any of these communities and Souris for one is adding their own touch to the event said town events coordinator Joeanne Roche.
Make sure you bring your cameras she said.
Anyone is welcome to come and take pictures of the cup but a few lucky people will get the chance to have their picture taken with it.

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Our new office has many great attributes, but being easy to get to is not one of them. After trying to describe the complicated route several times to various friends and colleagues I decided I needed to make a how-to video. So here it is:

The music is Au coin de la rue by Marco Raaphorst; video was shot with my iPad 2.

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The Tory MLA who represents the district of Souris-Elmira is questioning if a job fair planned for next week is the Liberal government's big plan to get former Ocean Choice plant employees back to work.

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FDA Approves These Dangerous Drugs Anyway!
Drug research, even from clinical trials sponsored by the federal government, is routinely suppressed, according to a new study in the British Medical Journal (BMJ), an international peer-reviewed medical publication. The study found that less than half of all NIH-funded clinical drug trials were published in a medical journal within two and a half years of the trial’s completion—with fully one-third of trial results remaining unpublished even four years after the trial. Why? Because the drug manufacturers didn’t like the data.

One example cited in the study was the FDA-approved diabetes drug Avandia, which in 2007 was found to increase heart attacks and cardiovascular deaths—even though the drug’s maker, GlaxoSmithKline, had known about the risk before the drug was approved. The BMJ study found that 35 of the drug’s 42 clinical studies had never been published, and were obtained only because a court case required the pharmaceutical company to turn over the data.

Not only does this irresponsible practice harm patients, it also increases healthcare costs. Eugene Carragee, a Stanford University orthopedic surgeon and editor-in-chief of the Spine Journal, spearheaded an unprecedented independent analysis showing that the medical device manufacturer Medtronic—not to mention a circle of orthopedic surgeons who received millions of dollars in royalties from the company—systematically failed to report serious complications with Medtronic’s bone-growth stimulating back surgery device known as Infuse. The results of a crucial clinical trial of the product were not published until nearly five years after the trial had to be halted because unwanted bone was growing around the spines of the trial volunteers.

For two years, Schering-Plough, the maker of the popular cholesterol drug Vytorin, sat on the results of a clinical trial showing that the drug provided no benefit in improving artery health. During that time, the drug was heavily marketed to consumers in TV ads; the marketing was only halted in 2008 after a congressional investigation was launched.

In 2003, a clinical trial of Multaq, a drug that treated cardiac arrhythmias, was stopped because more patients who were getting the drug were dying than those who received a placebo—though the study results weren’t published until five years later. Even so, the drug was approved by the FDA in 2009 as a treatment for atrial fibrillation in certain patients—just not as a means to reduce deaths!

Why does FDA approve drugs whose data have been suppressed by the manufacturer? Is it because FDA depends on Big Pharma for its budget—and needs drug companies to hire former FDA employees. The Wall Street Journal reported that FDA advisers, in a recent vote, said the benefits of four popular Bayer AG birth control pills outweigh the blood clot risk. What the FDA didn’t disclose is that three of the advisers have had ties to Bayer, serving as consultants, speakers, or researchers!

Despite the FDA’s bias in favor of drugs and against supplements, there are tremendous shortages of some drugs (though no shortage of supplements—so far!). This drug shortage prompts some hospitals to engage in price gouging, so a drug that usually costs $26 is being offered for $1,200. Moreover, the FDA artificially inflates drug prices—especially generic drug prices, which should be far lower than they are—as we have reported previously.

The shortage in the US drug market also makes foreign counterfeit drugs more popular. Recently, some 65 million counterfeit pills were seized in China; no word yet on how many of them had already made their way to the US.

If this is the way FDA oversees dangerous drugs, what will happen if we give them the same authority over supplements? It’s not just that the agency doesn’t have the knowledge to properly oversee supplements—they also don’t have the capacity. If they can’t keep up with the hundreds of drugs already under their purview, how will they cope with the thousands of supplements on the market? One way, of course, is for them to drastically reduce the number of supplements that can be marketed—one inevitable result of the NDI draft guidelines that we have been campaigning against.

There must be sincere and honest people working for the US Food and Drug Administration, but it is currently being run in a corrupt and incompetent way. It desperately needs to be reformed.

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Facing a council insurrection, Mayor Rob Ford isn’t budging from his plan to bury the entire Eglinton Crosstown line underground.

And he’ll only dig in his heels more when he finds out some left-leaning councillors are planning to resurrect plans for a light-rail line along Finch Avenue West.

In a Facebook message posted Thursday afternoon, Mr. Ford said his underground plan remains “doable” despite a proposal from Toronto Transit Commission chair Karen Stintz and other councillors that would place the LRT above ground from east of the Don Valley Parkway to Kennedy Road.

By avoiding tunnelling costs on the Scarborough end, the plan would cut the total Crosstown cost by about $1.5-billion.

Ms. Stintz’s faction wants to split that windfall between extending the mayor’s key transit project – the Sheppard subway – and establishing a rapid bus lane along Finch Avenue West.

“For almost 100 years, Toronto’s transit system has been based on a backbone of subways,” the mayor’s post says. “It’s time to get back on track.”

The statement (an exaggeration as the first subway line was built in 1954) is an indirect shot at Ms. Stintz’s plan, which has gained support from a wide swath of councillors.

The mayor goes on to argue that moving the line above ground would increase travel times and mark a return to the Transit City plan of former mayor David Miller. In a statistic his staff quotes often, the mayor said travel time between Laird Avenue and Kennedy stations would be 14 minutes for underground rail and 24 minutes for surface rail.

“More people will use transit when it’s faster. It can only be faster if it’s not on the surface.”

Metrolinx chair Robert Prichard said earlier this week a proposal to bring the line above ground would need the backing of council, the mayor and the TTC. But with council setting up to defy the mayor, no such consensus seems imminent.

“This has nothing to do with the mayor,” said Maria Augimeri, a TTC commissioner whose ward includes Finch Avenue. “He’ll be a bystander on this. Council is supreme. This mayor was not elected solely on a subway platform. I don’t believe he can corral the number of councillors required to defeat this plan.”

Ms. Augimeri hopes to use her sway with about 16 members of council’s left wing to revive hopes for an LRT along Finch rather than the rapid bus route being proposed. She has already asked TTC staff for a report on the feasibility of electrifying a lane, and says the Stintz plan may not get her vote unless it includes allowances for an LRT. “I don’t want BRT [bus rapid transit] as a permanent consolation for the people of Finch,” she said.

Scarborough Councillor Michelle Berardinetti, a member of the mayor’s executive, wants assurances from Queen’s Park that any savings from the Stintz plan would flow into other transit projects in Toronto, not provincial coffers.

She’s also concerned that political flip-flopping on Eglinton could put a chill on a number of large developments planned for her ward.

“Frankly, we look like a bunch of amateurs down here who can’t get their act together. That’s what concerns me. It’s not a good message to send.”

Ms. Berardinetti, who is married to a Liberal MPP, said the uncertainty is also raising questions with provincial politicians who represent the area.

“Obviously it looks like we’re really disorganized from their perspective,” she said. “It’s a concern for them with so much money on the table. We really need to get our act together at city hall.”

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Rates of sexually transmitted infections are on the rise on P.E.I., and Islanders are being reminded to use safer sex practices by the Department of Health and Wellness.

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New Brunswick musicians are among the frontrunners in the East Coast Music Award nominations announced Friday morning.

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Friday, Jan. 27, 2012
All schools in the Eastern School District will be closing 2 hours earlier
than normal today.

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Prince Edward Island RCMP are encouraging motorists to monitor local weather reports today as conditions are expected to deteriorate on roadways across the province with a mixture of snow and ice pellets.

If you are planning to travel, listen to local weather reports and check the Provincial Government website 

http://www.gov.pe.ca/roadconditions/  before heading out for an update on conditions from the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure Renewal. You may even consider delaying travel plans if road conditions are not ideal.

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Throughout the 1900s, asbestos products were common in the automotive industry. The strength and heat-resistance of asbestos made it a popular component in automotive parts. Brake pads and linings, clutch facings, heat seals, valve rings, gaskets, hood liners, insulation, packing, and numerous other auto parts contained asbestos.

When the government banned asbestos in the 1970s, most industries stopped using the substance as a manufacturing additive. However, many of the older automobiles on the road today still contain asbestos. And trace amounts exist in newer products, too.

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P.E.I. has one of the worst records in the country for retaining immigrants from the provincial nominee program, says a report from Canada Immigration.

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P.E.I. has the toughest job market in the country, with more than nine people looking for work for every job vacancy, almost triple the national rate, says Statistics Canada.

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P.E.I.'s second city is trying to lay out in black and white what is the responsibility of city council, and what is the responsibility of staff.

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The Daily Specials at Casa Mia Restaurant for Friday, January 27, 2012 are:

• Cream of mushroom soup with roasted garlic and fresh dill..4.99
• Mama Mia burger..Island beef, tomato, greens, provolone cheese, herb aioli served with sweet potato fries..10.99

Casa Mia Restaurant
131 Queen Street
Charlottetown, PE
Telephone: (902) 367-4440
Email:

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