009 – Transcript

Just Right Episode 009

Air Date: June 14, 2007

Host: Bob Metz

Program Disclaimer

The views expressed in this program are those of the participants, and do not necessarily reflect the views of 94.9 CHRW.

Audio Clip 1 (External Source)

I don’t want to hear any more of this. You’re making me crazy.

Bob Metz (Host Introduction)

Good morning London. It is Thursday June 14th. I’m Bob Metz and this is Just Right on CHRW 94.9 FM where we will be with you from now to noon. And no, not right wing, just right.

And hopefully everything will be alright from now till noon as you can join us and feel a little more centered on the right. On today’s show we’ll be talking about a number of issues including why I think the words SICKO and Michael Moore go so well together.

We’re going to be talking about Canada, US trade, Japan trade, South Korea trade, issues revolving around union issues and manufacturing climate in Canada. But first we’re going to start off on a bit of a light note. If you want to join the show at any time today, please feel free to call.

It’s 519-661-3600. I brought up this subject that I’m about to bring up on a previous show, but got caught near the end of the show. I was actually sitting in for Jim Chapman if I recall. And I went on my little diatribe about television scheduling and the way they were messing up some of my favorite programs and issues of that nature. But at the end I took a big risk and this was back in February where I gave my theory, if you will, on the whole issue of LOST, the TV series. Which is now not in reruns strangely enough because I think they’re holding back to do some DVD sales and stuff like that. But just before they went into reruns there was a lot of complaints about the way the show was handled and where it’s leading the viewers and viewers being so confused.

So much so, I found a terrific item that just started me off on this again. And this was out of the National Post. Now this had to be the last couple of weeks. I don’t even have the date on here, but it was sort of an editorial written by Rob McKenzie. Although it wasn’t written in text. It was written as a board game. And it was called Rob McKenzie’s Lost, the Board Game. And it says the following instructions were found in the vault of a medical research facility in Miami.

They appear to unlock the secrets of LOST and the show that answers the question with a riddle. And it’s a really funny board too because when you look at it, it’s not like a monopoly board where you’re going around in a square. It’s more like, if you ever had that game of life where the path you follow meanders all over the place. And that’s sort of how this board looks. And each of the spaces has its own little editorial comments on what you might say about the show.

And a few side jokes. But for example, on one of the squares, if you land on it, it says, forget the tape lost. Don’t move till recap episode. There’s another one that says, take a 14 week hiatus. No one moves for 14 weeks.

Now, if you don’t know what that’s about, that’s because when they started the show this season, they played six episodes and they took 14 weeks off and came back and they wondered why they lost so much of their audience. And then there’s a couple other squares here. What’s this one here?

What was that giant stone foot all about? That’s just what it says on one of the squares. Another one that says weather forecast.

Sun with a chance of black smoke. And here’s one that’s not really about lost, but it says, and it’s on the same path. It says, Globe and Mail, desperate for readers, begins home delivery to Ireland. Now, of course, this appears in the National Post, so they’re taking a bit of a stab. Here’s another good one.

Another square. Turns out Vincent the Labrador is one of the others. Now, if you’re wondering why I’m even getting into this, if you’re a fan of lost, don’t worry about that.

We won’t be talking about this that long. But lost represents a different type of television show, as I had mentioned before. It goes beyond what I would call the linear storytelling. And because of that, I think people run into these issues.

They’re still thinking they’re expecting a linear story out of television. Oh, it’s interesting too. The rules to this game, I didn’t read them.

That’s kind of cute. How you play lost the board game. Here’s the rules. Here’s the rules of play. Quote, Jack rolls, then Kate, then Sawyer. Repeat six times, then let one of the minor characters roll once. Characters continue to go clockwise in circles until they get bored and quit. However, if participants go more than 108 minutes without playing the game, the world might end. There is no winner.

There are only losers. Game ends in the spring of 2010. Now, if you don’t know what that’s about, that’s because, of course, the producers of lost had to actually give the viewers a heads up and say, listen, we’re going to end this show in 2010, honest.

We know you’re all lost and you’re screwed up and you don’t know what’s happening. And then, of course, they have these little places on the board for cards, like in Monopoly, where you’d have the community chest and the chance. And it says the mystery, and they call them mystery cards, okay? The mystery cards are all mysteriously blank. The solutions cards all say, if you can figure out how any of this makes friggin logical sense, call collect, followed by the phone number of the lost writer’s room.

That was in the post. Now, I had brought up the issue of lost and, if you want to stick with the show, you have to understand what it’s about. If the show’s confusing to you, you won’t like it. And so, near the end of February, I gave everyone my theory on terms of what I thought lost was all about.

What is the show really about? And since then, I said I was taking a risk. And since then, I think I’m still right on target. I haven’t seen an episode yet, right to the end, that doesn’t coincide with my theory. Now, I have to tell you, my theory is not written in stone, pardon the pun.

You could perhaps apply other things to it. So, here I go with my theory of what lost is about and what it might mean to the general television industry in general. The first thing is to understand about lost is it’s not a literal storytelling. So, a lot of shows are getting like that. And we’re finding that shows are not told in a linear line, like beginning, middle, and end. They might start, end, middle, beginning, or start in the middle and go to the beginning, go back to the end. And that confuses people, especially if you’re in a serial situation and you want to follow the story over a long period of time.

And if you miss things, naturally, you have to go back 15 spaces and wait until the recap episode. So, in any case, here’s my theory. Here’s what lost is all about. You have to think in terms of allegory and symbolic versus the literal.

Okay, so here’s how I see it. The island is not this group of people on an island rather. The island is really what I call group therapy. Okay, the island represents perhaps, could be a hospital, could be an institution, could be a prison.

We actually get some literal glimpses, I think, inside the hospital. One of the telling episodes, when dominoes all fell for me on my theory, was that episode with Hurley, where we had his imaginary friend and we find he’s in a psychiatric ward in a hospital. And sure enough, one of the people in the psychiatric ward happens to be on the island.

And so you have the island. It represents group therapy. The characters on the island are the patients.

And if you look at these patients, they’ve all got pretty extreme psychological or criminal problems. And of course, here’s the key to the show. They are lost. They have these problems they have to find themselves.

That’s what the nature of the show is. The others, you hear about the others all the time, whom they regard as the enemy, that’s the doctors and the administrators and the psychiatrists. And as strange as it might seem, and as tragic as it might seem when we watch it, as viewers on the show, my interpretation of a death on the island is when there has been a cure made, when somebody’s gotten over their problem, faced their nemesis, so to speak. And then they’re off the island, regardless of how they’re removed.

They might be killed as a character or whatever. Now, while they’re on the island, they’re in therapy. There’s a lot of scenes as well in Sydney, at the airport in Sydney, Australia, which I see as more or less it’s an analogy for the waiting room. And if you hear a lot of the language used, which I’ll get to a little later, you’ll find that the language is very consistent with what might be said in the confines of some sort of psychiatric treatment or group therapy of something like that. And of course, the flashbacks on the show are glimpses of their real lives, so to speak. Now, naturally, the patients view their therapy as a shared experience on an island, and they view their doctors as the enemy or a threat, because of course the doctors are forcing them to do things that they don’t really want to do.

Whether they’ve all been checked in there voluntarily or involuntarily remains to be seen. I remember when the show started, early predictions and TV guides and stuff like that predicted it would last five or six weeks after the novelty wore off in the first two or three episodes. And they were comparing it to other shows with the word lost in it, including Lost World.

Yeah, we’re going to have dinosaurs. I think for a while some people thought that’s what it was about. But again, I think it’s a view of this process more or less seen through the eyes of the patients in a very allegorical way and how they relate to each other.

And that explains a lot of the mysteries. You see, to me, I had to decide how does Lost work? Is it a reality show? Is it fantasy? Is it science fiction?

It could be any of the three, and we’re not really told too clearly, but there are some symbols there that could lead you to expect one or the other. But I think they’ve picked a large part of their demographic. The audience goes beyond the fantasy sci-fi demographic. They’re getting a lot of people who really only want reality with their TV, if you know what I mean. So how the writers eventually determine the whole situation I can’t predict.

But here are some of the situations. If you just look at the characters themselves and what they represent. You got Jack, Jack’s the doctor. He’s got this guilt problem and father issues.

Had a dead patient. He’s a control freak. He’s obsessed about his wife who left him. He turned in his father who had a problem in the operating room and they had that issue going on. So you can imagine the guilt and the issues involved with Jack. Kate, the same thing. She has a background of criminal behavior.

I think in the story she murders her mother’s boyfriend in a house fire or something like this. Desmond, of course, is another character. He tends to make the wrong choices. He very much believes in destiny. And I remember there’s an episode where someone told him, pushing that button is the highest thing you will ever aspire to.

That button they had to hit every, I forget how many minutes on the show. Otherwise something horrible would happen. And he also seems to have this inferiority complex with respect to his girlfriend, her father. Doesn’t believe he has choices. He’s a completely deterministic person. And then we have, of course, John Locke, one of the most interesting characters on the show, who’s got this father betrayal thing. And we find out later it’s not even his father, but another issue.

But isn’t it strange? It catches our attention right away that here’s this guy in a wheelchair who after a plane crash can get up and walk on an island, on this magical island. He’s suddenly cured. And of course, in a literal sense, sure, maybe that could happen. But of course, in a figurative sense, when everyone goes into this therapy room with all their different problems and their different issues, they tend to be equal on the island.

Whether they can walk or not, or whether they have these other problems, is irrelevant when you’re in therapy. You’re dealing on a different level. You have Hurley, for example. His problem is, part of it is his weight problem. And he associates that with his guilt about the people he thinks he killed, or that he thinks he’s responsible for. I don’t know if you recall from some of the shows. He stepped out, I guess he was describing that, he stepped out on a balcony and killed a number of people.

He had a company, etc. But in any case, you can see how all the characters end up being representative of these issues. And I think that really that’s what’s going on on the island.

And I think if you check it out and follow it through, you’ll find the same kind of thing. Just a couple things before we go back to take a break. Everybody asks about the smoke that comes on that island. My theory on that is that the smoke is reality, or truth. And it’s really interesting that in a recent episode, they said that it can’t get beyond the barriers we put up. Barriers, that’s a term you use in psychology, just as much as you do with a real fence. So, just another way of looking at a show, I think a number of shows that are out these days are very much like that. So, bear with them. I think we’re seeing quality programming here. I think this is a step up when we have shows that actually make people think. You’re listening to CHRW 94.9 FM. This is Just Right with Bob Metz. You can call in at 519-661-3600. And we’ll be right back after this. And we’ll be talking about labor issues and job issues and other such things with manufacturing in Canada.

Audio Clip 2 (Stand-up Comedy Routine)

I just watch a lot of TV. That’s my life, because you can tell I’m a fit man. That wasn’t a joke, but haha. And Canadian television is so funny. I get so brutal. It is.

It’s like, let’s be honest. God bless the States for blessing us with cable. Because if you don’t have cable, well, end it now. Because historically, what are some of the best shows? Like Rita and Friend? Let me save you the time, picture me in a dress and a bonnet.

No wind from my back or whatever it’s called and other butter-turning shows. The littlest hobo. Remember that? Don’t applaud that.

Think about what you just did. The littlest hobo. Every week some dog would show up in some random town and solve a crime.

It’s like Canada’s version of Murder She Wrote, but we couldn’t afford the old lady. I just watch a lot of TV. That’s my life, because you can tell I’m a fit man. That wasn’t a joke, but haha.

Audio Clip 3 (The Jetsons Cartoon)

Sit down, gentlemen. I have some good news for you. You’re going to have more leisure time. Leisure time, Mr. Spacely? Business hasn’t been so good. Those cheap Martian sprockets have caused a glut in the market. I’m going to have to lay you off for at least six months. Six months? Enjoy, Jetson.

Bob Metz

Yeah, we’re facing a situation in Canada where I guess a lot of people in the labor movement are seeing some bad times coming ahead with Canada’s situation in the world marketplace and its ability to compete. Welcome back to the show. It’s Just Right. I’m Bob Metz and CHRW 94.9 FM that you’re listening to.

You can join the conversation at 519-661-3600. Now, of course, in our case here in Canada, we’re not competing with cheap Martian sprockets. We’re competing with, particularly, trade with the U.S., trade in Japan, trade with South Korea. And something we tend to forget about every once in a while is trade right here in Canada, competition within the country and the number of the situations that we face in Canada with competition, because you’ll see the same kind of talk going on between competitors within a nation.

It’s a natural thing that they want to put each other down, but in competition, the name of the game is quality. Now, what’s really interesting is I have a number of articles with me here with regard to the whole situation in Canada and the labor situation in Canada. It’s interesting. When you look at what cars in Canada, for example, right now Ford just came out in a J.D. Power & Associates ratings for quality and it came out on top and beat Toyota in some cases. And I guess they’re very proud of this and you can see that perhaps they’re putting out a quality product, but is quality alone the thing that’s going to cut it? Is that what’s going to make them competitive in a marketplace?

Here’s a situation that we’re very much faced with. For example, I just heard recently that if you’re talking about the big three in the U.S., the average wages, salaries, benefits, and pensions package for each employee in the big three is about $75 an hour. Now, that’s an amazing amount. Now, and also in the U.S., but with Toyota, the same package is $45 an hour.

So you’ve got a $30 per hour difference in the relative wage package just between those two companies operating within the same jurisdiction. And of course, this begs another point. When you buy a car of quality, a lot of people will worry about what cost goes behind it. It’s quite possible that a person making $75 an hour is actually in a better position because they’re producing more.

How it ends up reflecting in the marketplace is in the price to you. You might be able to pay, let’s just say $30,000 for a car that was made by someone being paid $75 an hour, or you could buy a car for $30,000 that was made by someone being paid $45 an hour. And I guess it all depends on how much time goes into each of the factors, whether the company’s making money. But you as a consumer, it doesn’t matter what it costs the company to make a car. If it doesn’t compete with what someone else is doing out there, then no one’s going to buy the product.

It’s as simple as that. Now, of course, the big three in Canada are looking for concessions from the UAW to compete, they say, with the Asian markets. Now, I have here from the National Post June 24, 2007, very interesting chart. And it was put together by the British Office for National Statistics. So this is Europe looking around the world and seeing where investment may place their money, particularly with respect to the automotive industry and large manufacturing. And I know many people might still think of Britain in the height of its days when it had so many strikes and it lost so many days to labor. Well, you should check out this chart on June 24 in the National Post.

It’s utterly frightening. It goes from 1996 to 2005 and it shows Canada up around losing 300 days. Now, how do they work that out? The United Kingdom averaged 23 days lost in general labor relations.

You see the way down there. Canada is up around 208 days lost to labor disputes. Five times the OECD average and almost 10 times the UK average. So you’ve got this little bar one-tenth of the size of the Canadian bar of time lost to strikes. Now, think of what that must mean to a foreign investor or a big company looking at Canada and saying, wow, look at the number of days these guys go on strike. Where are we going to put our investment and put our future capital? Because, labor likes to say differently that labor is what it’s all about, but capital is labor’s best friend, as is so often said. And capital, of course, is what is necessary to make a person productive. That may be well the reason why someone can make $75 an hour and still sell a profitable product whereas someone else makes less. It could be a number of those issues.

There are other issues involved, too. I’m looking at another chart here from the June 6th, 2007, again, the National Post, which is where you almost have to go. This could be the Financial Post, sorry. And here is the issue of the Canadian dollar, of course, which is affecting international trade. With every industry, I’ve seen personal friends get wiped out overnight when the dollar dropped. And that is the U.S. dollar, particularly. Our dollar is going up relative to the U.S. Now, of course, the big reason for this is it’s very easy to trace. It is the war in Iraq and overseas that the U.S. has engaged in, and that has dramatically dropped the value of its dollar, which is how Americans are paying for the war. They eventually pay for that through the value of the dollars that they have. And the person hurting the most, ironically, are the rich and the people who have savings, because the dollars they put in there 10 years ago that were worth, say, $100 then, in those terms today might only be worth $80 or something like that. But they’re the ones that lose the most.

And so you have to understand that when a country goes to war, it better be committed, because it’s a big issue. Meanwhile, we have our own front here at home with the auto industry being attacked and having problems on a number of issues, not the least of which lately has been the Stephen Harper government giving those special incentives to buy these hybrid cars, of which some qualify, some do not. One of them is the Toyota Yaris 4-speed auto. According to this here, it retails for $14,605, and they get a $1,000 rebate on it. Well, guess what Honda did to fight back?

They offered their own $1,000 rebate on a car. Now, what if everybody did that? Would that just totally wipe out Harper’s idea and his plan, because people are going to continue to try and sell their cars and to compete with each other?

Would that be the right thing for them to do under any case? So there are the other issues as well. You’ve got general high car prices. Cars aren’t going down in price. I hear a lot of talk on various talk shows whenever they’re talking about repairs to cars and things like that. Apparently one of the big items, I don’t know if they’ve corrected this situation yet, but is airbags, the compulsory installation of airbags. If your airbag goes, it won’t replace it with a used one, for example. You have to put a new one in.

So you’re talking $5,000 just on the bottom right there. You’ve got so many environmental regulations, emissions testing. Toronto virtually has a war on the car going on, trying to do everything they can to get public transport in. So there’s a political pressure against the very automotive industry that the same politicians need to pay taxes, support the economy and things of that nature.

So you can see the problem that’s going on. We also have high insurance rates that are making it more and more difficult to get into a car legally. That’s largely an issue with no fault.

Now, whether you’re at fault or not, you get hit. Your rates can go up. And of course, need we mention, high gas prices and the like.

And of course, here in Ontario, we have another issue. The McGuinty government has just raised over a three-year period the minimum wage. Stating itself that it was going to create in the plus 100,000 people unemployment situation. Because if you’re not worth the $10.25 an hour by the time they get there, you’re going to be unemployed. So you’ve got more competition out there to compete with labor within the union and labor monopoly, if you will, because that’s really what unions are to the greatest degree.

So we’ve got all these issues. And job security, you always hear union folks talking about job security. Often that means restricting competitive labor, whether at home or abroad. But what about the security company to sell its products? What if the company is not selling to the consumer anymore? What can they do? So you can see some of the problems that the industry is facing in terms of where they can go.

And we don’t know what kind of concessions they will make, because they haven’t been talking yet. You’re listening to CHRW 94.9. This is Just Right with Bob Metz, and we’ll be back right after these messages.

Audio Clip 4 (External Skit)

All right, everyone, gather round. What now? I have an announcement to make. I’ve just been going over today’s receipts, and it’s not good. So, starting tomorrow, everyone’s salary gets cut by a third.

No, it’s not that. I’ll talk to them. It’s either that or fire half the staff.

Don’t bother thanking me. I can’t afford a pay cut. It’s either a pay cut or a lay off.

You decide. All right, everyone, let’s get back to work. I want this place cleaned up when the lights off in ten minutes. Mr.

Brethren, this is right. You can’t just cut people’s salaries without warning. Actually, I can. And I have. Look sharp now. No slouching. Remember, in unity there is strength. So be strong.

Bob Metz

Welcome back to Just Right with Bob Metz. You’re listening to CHRW 94.9 FM, where you can join the conversation at 519-661-3600. In unity there is strength. Indeed, there is. That’s how a lot of people think is the way to get through their labor disputes and issues of that nature. Just talking about unions before the break, there’s another related issue in this respect going on, particularly provincial-wide, and here in London. And that’s education. I haven’t talked about that issue very much, but briefly I just wanted to comment on one of the stories that’s been reappearing in the news lately. And that is about the Thames Valley School Board and their shortfall that they’re expecting in their budget next year because of a declining enrollment. Now, the Thames Valley School Board still wants its money from you and me, the taxpayer, despite an expected drop in enrollment by over 1,500 students in its system next year, which they say, according to the figures I heard, would represent a $9 million shortfall in provincial funding.

Now, I don’t know how accurate a figure that is, but it’s a round figure, it’s the one I heard bandied about. And if you work it out, take 1,500 students divide by $9 million, you’re going to get about $6,000 a student, which is not too far off the par of what I recall it being costing about 10, 15 years ago when I was more involved in the issue. I did once run unsuccessfully as a trustee for the City of London, so I learned a lot about what was going on inside the Board of Education. And it’s really funny, they panicked whether or not the enrollment was going up or down.

Every change in enrollment represented a huge crisis in the school system, because of course they cannot charge the student directly. That sounds familiar. Where else did we hear that problem? But what’s actually, let’s look at some of the figures here. It’s accepted that 80% of education expense is teacher salaries. So if you have, say in the London Board here, or the London Area Board, 1,500 fewer students at a teacher-student ratio, let’s assume 30 to 1 or less, because generally you don’t get them that much higher. But that would mean laying off 50 teachers or more if you were just talking 1,500 students at the prices involved, because you’ve got 30 students at $6,000 each, would equal $180,000. If that’s what the government’s paying, say, per student. So if you’re looking at a class of 30, you get $6,000 apiece, you have $180,000. Now, if 80% of that actually represents teacher salaries, that would be $144,000 for the teacher. Now, I don’t know of too many teachers that are making $144,000, at least that they say they’re taking home. Now, of course, that would really mean that that includes benefits, salaries, pensions, and all the rest of the things. I don’t know if that’s an accurate figure, but that wouldn’t be the figure you’d normally hear reported in terms of what the teacher gets.

But just using these rounded figures, that leaves $36,000 overhead per 30 students. So it’s an enormous amount when you start thinking about it, and when you also think in terms of the fact that the school union, the education union, is one of the largest in the province. And many of the education policies that they use to teach your kids with are based on union goals. And even on the goals of architects, believe it or not, who build all these open concept buildings and talk about open concept child centered and all that stuff, I remember when I was running as a trustee and we’d go to all these meetings and hear about the future changes in education, and I was expecting to hear from educators and from people who knew about the transmission of knowledge from one person to the other. But instead we heard from union people and from architects. And that was pretty, I’m being quite literal here.

That’s exactly who we heard from. I’m sitting there thinking, well, if I was a parent in this situation, what would I be thinking about my kid’s education? Sure, he’s going to be comfortable.

He might be in a nice school. My teachers are going to be comfortable, but what is actually being said about education? So of course, that’s been my experience with the Board of Education that almost any change in enrollment is a cause for crisis.

If it goes up, of course, they have the same situation. They have to pretty well run hand in hand begging to the government for money because it’s just not an automatic system all the time. Of course, government funded school boards, I think, should be abolished entirely, and the whole education monopoly should be abolished, which is an entirely separate issue from its funding. Funding, as in healthcare, it’s the same situation. If you want to help the people that can’t help themselves with education, go ahead, but you don’t have to have these universal systems that push us all into these monopolistic systems. Seeing that work abroad as well. I visited other countries in the Caribbean where they have huge public education systems spending tons of money on it, but no one, not even the relatively poor, and I’m not kidding you, poor by our standards, sends their kids there if they can avoid it.

They still send them to private schools. So it’s a situation, if you’re going to be running like a business and your customers are abandoning you, then you have to lay off cutback. It just doesn’t seem to be the general message that people in our public sector take too well. Now, switch to topics going on a little bit more, just a couple other things that have passed my desk.

I want to do a little potpourri just during this period before I get to the healthcare system of Michael Moore in the last section. By the way, you can call 519-661-3600 if you have anything to add to the conversations. You’re listening to CHRW Radio 94.9. In the, I’m very brief with this one, and I told you so, department. Got a clip here from the London Free Press, June 10th, about the University Students’ Council, which publishes the Gazette here. They’ve made some changes, just as I predicted when I talked about this issue on my first few days, where the Gazette got into some trouble over having a spoof edition, and please, it’s a spoof edition, but it created a huge controversy, and now they’ve got all these new rules, code of ethics, equity training, and all sorts of things that they have to do. Now, bear in mind, they have the right to do this. It’s the University Students’ Council. They publish the Gazette.

They pay for it, so they can make the rules, and I’m not complaining about that. It’s just that, when they say we learned a hard lesson after the publication of the spoof edition, I think the real lesson, and it’s all I have to say is that some people just don’t have a sense of humor, and I’ll leave it at that. Another thing that I found interesting, talk about switch in subjects, eh? Talk about here, again, a little bit to do with global warming, but not so much about the issue itself, but I know a lot of people don’t understand really what they mean when they say they’re going to trade in carbon markets, and you hear all this talk about trading in credits and this kind of thing. I found a very interesting article, again, under the Green Report in the National Post June 7th. This refers to the experience that Europe is having, and they’ve already been doing this. I don’t know how they’ve already figured out values for these greenhouse gas emission things, but I guess it’s basically a tax in another form.

What you see here is a debate over whether they should have just directly taxed polluters or sell them polluting rights through these emissions credits. But the bottom line, of course, is who pays? The consumer. It’s always the case that the consumers pay. But the principle of a carbon market or the tax is exactly the same, and that’s to put a price on emissions of heat trapping carbon dioxide. Now, again, I don’t believe it does that, but that’s the idea. Forcing businesses and individuals to think more carefully about their greenhouse gas emissions. I don’t know that it’s about thinking.

If you’re taking my money, I’m doing more than thinking. But the markets work by giving each country a fixed quota of emission permits, okay? If they exceed that quota, they have to buy the permits from countries that have undershot their quota. So let’s say we had a quota of 200 tons of whatever the emissions are, and we only expelled 100 tons. We’d have 100-ton credit that we could sell to somebody else who could go ahead and pollute to his heart’s content as long as he pays us money for that, okay? So what has happened, interestingly enough, is that under the European scheme, they found out that this just amounted to huge, easy profits for the utilities.

In fact, they’re amassing over 5 billion euros a year, and I guess they’re charging 20 euros per ton as their current going rate. But here’s how it worked. Under it, the government handed the utilities free quotas for the emissions. Now, remember, they give it to a free.

It’s like printing money, okay? If the utilities exceed these, then they have to buy extra permits. If they emit less, they can sell the surplus.

But the utilities use the carbon emission permits when they burn fossil fuels to produce power, but nevertheless pass on the cost to the consumer, even though they have received the permits for free. So it’s almost like a double whammy. They get this huge chunk of money. Now, the bigger picture, of course, is what they’re trying to do with these permits and the like and the whole credit system is that policymakers in both the rich and poor countries, they’re really pinning a lot of hope on the carbon markets to finance the cleanup of heavy industry in the developing countries, which is what the big problem you keep hearing about is. How are these countries that are just coming up from being almost stone age, going into an industrial age, we’re almost trying to get them to skip that period that we had to go through in North America of the more primitive technology of the more, you have to start somewhere.

And I don’t know that that is always that possible. You can just bring people right up to date with technology, and especially when the higher technology requires more education, input knowledge, and repairs, and things of that nature. They have found so often when they go and introduce high technology in low technology areas, which usually means low education, poverty, things of that nature, that it just doesn’t work out the way that they usually expected. So you can see some of the issues, again, involved with the whole carbon market. Expect people at the Global Summit to be trying to use them as leverage against each other. Here it’s going to be a new tool, and it’s just another example of how politicians have devised so many clever ways to get that dollar out of our pocket. That’s what the green movement’s really about, then.

That’s the green that they really want to move. We will be back right after this, and we’ll be talking about Michael Moore and his movie, Sicko, which premiered here in London last Friday. See you after this.

Audio Clip 5 (Stand-up Comedy Routine)

I’m just teasing. That’s what I do. I tease, and then I pull away. I make it look like it’s going to go one way, and then I go the other way. I tease, I pull back.

Ladies, are you familiar with this concept at all? I’m making any sense here. I’m just trying to explain it the best. I’m just trying to get the bad boy thing going.

That’s what I’m trying to do. Because women like the bad boys. You know that. Actually, a friend of mine corrected me. He said, women may be attracted to the bad boys initially, but they don’t stay with the bad boys. So, there’s a double benefit.

Audio Clip 6 (Yes, Minister Television Series)

You think that spending more and more money on fewer and fewer patients so that we can employ more and more administrators is a good way of spending the money voted by Parliament and supplied by the taxpayer? Certainly. This money is voted solely, Humphrey, to make sick people better. No, no, no, no, no.

It is to make everybody better. Better for having shown the extent of their care and compassion. You see, Minister, when money is allocated to the health or social services, Parliament and the country feel cleansed, purified, absolved. It is a sacrifice. You’ve learned from claptrap. And when a sacrifice is made, nobody asks the priest what happens to the ritual offering after the ceremony.

No, Humphrey, you’re wrong. The public does care if this money is mis-spent.

With respect, Minister, they care that it should not be seen to be mis-spent. That’s not true.

Look at the uproar over mental hospital scandals.

My point exactly, Minister. Those abuses had been going on quite happily for years, decades. Nobody was remotely concerned to find out what was really being done with their money. What outraged them was being told about it. Humphrey, that’s a cynical smex.

Bob Metz

Welcome back to Just Right with Bob Metz. You’re listening to CHRW 94.9 FM, where you can join us at 519-661-3600. The socialized medicine make you feel better, too? Do you feel better that you know that everybody’s being taken care of? Because I have to tell you that clip there that was actually from a television series known as Yes, Minister, made in the 1980s, a British television series, which is, I’d almost make that series required viewing in any political science program of any sort, because it just puts it on the line in a very funny and comedic way.

If you get a chance to catch it, I know some of the networks are still running the show, and you can certainly get it on DVD or buy it in your local video store kind of thing. But the stories are amazingly accurate. Even today, you would not know that they were dated in the 1980s. Of course, Britain has had a much longer experience with socialized health care than we have in Canada.

Ours has only been going 30, 40 years now. But if you recall, it was the last week or the week before, I’m not sure which, but I discussed the issue of health care for a while, and I actually read out of an essay by Dr. Leonard Peikoff called Doctors and the Police State. It’s very interesting because in the intervening time, I had a really interesting experience with hearing someone actually advocate almost in a literal way on another talk show, on another radio show, and I couldn’t help but call in to give my two bits. But there was a caller on the show that said he was a supporter of Michael Moore, who had just come to town last week Friday. And of course, if you looked at most of the coverage in the free press and stuff about Michael Moore being here, it was more about his celebrity status than it was about any issue of health care or anything of that nature. But strangely enough, one of the DJs in one of the other stations, and I can’t tell you where I heard it, but I just caught this thing while I was driving around, and Michael Moore was asked about Canada’s doctor shortage. And in reply to a question about Canada’s doctor shortage, which he did not reply by the way, he said nothing about the shortage itself, but his reply was that health care is just the vehicle I use to paint a picture of a better society. Okay, that’s, he just uses it as his overall example of something he wants to see done. And when he was asked what he saw as the problem here, he said, in Canada that is, he says, well, the problem was that the conservatives took money away from the health care system in the 1980s. And I’m thinking, well, isn’t that interesting that he hasn’t mentioned that the fact that the Liberals were in power in between that period and they didn’t get it in just very recently, but they get no blame and the system didn’t improve under them, did it?

And of course, his other issue is that it’s the me, me, me society. We’ve made money and profit. We’ve made that into the number one thing instead of looking after people. It will never cease to amaze me why anyone can even think that you can do anything for people without money and profit being there. Even if you’re the wildest communist and redistributor of wealth, you surely must realize that the wealth has to be created first. And if it’s not there to even steal from somebody, it isn’t going to be there at all.

It’s just that this is totally, seems to me, beyond the understanding of most people who identify on the left. But amazingly, Moore was very clear on his goals and what he was looking for. And here he stated them very explicitly, which I didn’t see in the papers anywhere, but basically he wants to eliminate private insurance, he wants to control pharmaceuticals, and wants to guarantee health care for everyone and to prevent a two-tier system which separates the haves from the have-nots. And while he was explaining this, he also pointed out that, in terms of doctors leaving Canada for the U.S., he says, yes, specialists get paid more down there, but the GPs don’t, the general practitioners. They actually get paid less than the Canadian doctors, rather. And interestingly, I would think he would have been in support of that because that would mean cheaper health care, but no, he’s opposed to that.

He wants to see the doctors get paid more. And I’m thinking, wait a minute, you want to save money? Do you want to spend money?

Do you want to make sure more people have health care? Which is it going to be? He’s all over the place. He’s just picking his favorites, right? He doesn’t want to make an enemy of the doctors who would really have to be the ones directly enslaved if you really wanted socialized medicine to work, and I’ll explain that in a sec. But so instead we go after the taxpayer and everything else? But interestingly enough, there was a caller who was defending Michael Moore on another radio station, and in addressing the doctor shortage, he figured he had a pretty good solution, particularly that it had been revealed that I guess there’s a shortage in some areas of the province, and actually areas of Toronto have doctor surpluses, as strange as it may seem. There’s these little pockets in the province where you might not have a problem finding a doctor and that many doctors are moving to that market. That won’t last long. If there’s a surplus there, they won’t stay that long. But nevertheless, this caller believed that they should stream doctors and make it part of their residency to work in a small town or under-serviced area. In other words, basically tell them where they have to work once they become a doctor. And the person said too at the same time that he had qualms about trying to impose that kind of thing on anybody. But, and here’s what justified it, because of the need, the humanitarian and compassionate grounds, he says he wouldn’t really have a problem doing it. I hate telling people what to do, but if it’s for, if there’s a great compassion at need, I’ll go ahead and do it.

It will outweigh my hesitation. So I just couldn’t resist, I just called in and I said, look, this is a perfect example of why, if you wanted socialized healthcare to work on its own, that you would require a police state. You really would, because doctors are free agents. They are self-employed. They go out and they set up their practices and whether they get their money from the government or from you or from an insurance company, I don’t think that’s the biggest issue to them unless, of course, interferes with their professionalism, which it often does, and all of those things can. But it really lets you know that it’s all about power when it really comes down to controlling doctors. And the idea that anyone would consider putting someone under such constraints who has gone to the trouble of getting the education, the training, putting in their own investment, being in debt and then telling them where and how they can work and at what rate is an outrageous thing. And yet that is what is necessary.

I’m not blaming that caller. He sees the sort of, not the light at the end of the tunnel, but the dark at the end of the tunnel. If we keep going in this direction, we are, again, it has to be re-emphasized. We are one of three jurisdictions in the world that does not allow private healthcare, meaning you can pay, okay, private healthcare doesn’t mean private doctors. It means private citizens that you can actually pay with your own money to get a doctor. Remember that, tax-funded enterprises are all forced to compete with each other.

And if you’ve got all this money going into healthcare that’s coming from a tax base, what’s going to happen? Remember those teachers that just wanted all that money from the government for their purpose? And then there’s someone else who wants money from the government?

If it’s all coming from the same source, the competition almost implodes on itself. Because let’s face it, the only tax limit that we can see in this country is blood from stone. If they can get it out of you, they’ll bleed it out of you.

And if they can’t, they won’t. If you think about it, there are no protections for the taxpayer in terms of what would be, at what point would taxes violate your rights to survive in that sense. We’re already roughly over 50% taxed, 59% of all tax sources in Ontario go to healthcare alone, and still the system cannot deliver in the way it should. But we had the, what was his name, Chaoulli, or Chaoulli decision in Quebec that actually said Canada’s healthcare system is a danger to people’s health. There have been more and more people, and I’m amassing files full of them who just aren’t getting the access that they should get, and they go to the states and to other jurisdictions. I mentioned one of these again last week.

I think a fellow went to India and did all that for $15,000, got a stay in a four-star hotel, his surgery, and the flight there for US, or Canadian rather, $15,000 as reported by CTV. So, amidst all the popularity and the fun with guys like Michael Moore and the shows that he’s going to get, there’s a reality of what actually works, and that’s the marketplace. That’s it for today, folks. Thanks for being with us. This is Bob Metz, and you’re listening to Just Right, and we’ll like to see you again here next week at this time. Be right, stay right, do right, act right, and think right. Take care.

Audio Clip 7 (Stand-up Comedy Routine – Closing)

They say money changes people. You think that’s true? Like, that’s the big criticism against Bill Gates right now. Richest man in the world. They say he’s got so much money, it’s starting to affect him mentally. Well, how could it not affect you mentally? The guy’s got $50 billion.

That’s not going to mess with your noodle a little. $50 billion? If anything you can imagine, you can turn into a reality, how’s that not going to mess up your perspective on things? What couldn’t you do with $50 billion? You could buy Red Deer Alberta. Just buy it. You own it now. Get out!

I guess so, man. $50 billion. I would be full bore lunatic insane. If I had $50 billion, I’d be riding down Main Street on a giraffe wearing a Vikings helmet, swinging a bag of gophers.

$50 billion!

Have that man killed and then bring him back to life and put a monkey’s head on him. I’d be off my rocker. Are you kidding? I start to go a little squirrely if I get too grand in the bank all at once, you know? Start telling people to bite me for no reason.