Posts

Showing posts from June, 2011

#PAB2011

I attended my first PAB last weekend. Even though it is in Ottawa, I hadn't heard of it until the folks at DyscultureD started to mention it. My initial thought was to crash the party a bit to meet with them while they were in Ottawa, but after looking at the schedule I decided to sign up and attend everything. It also turns out in hindsight that people wouldn't have been happy if I had crashed. I'm not a PODcaster, and that is beyond the fact I think the term is too closely associated with my political opponents at Apple. This is an artist conference, and I'm not really an artist: I've been invited on Netcasts, I take pictures (moving and still), record audio, and I blog (really?), but I do it primarily as a form of political expression rather than artistic expression. I have attended a number of conferences in the last decade that were artist focused, and have learned quite a bit which is helpful in understanding how others see the area of policy and p

Why I'm changing my vote for the upcoming Ontario election.

There is an election coming up in Ontario on October 6, 2011 . In the last Ontario election I voted for Dalton McGuinty. I like his brother David, and I thought : why not. This election the issue that is most on my mind for provincial politics is the HST. I think it is wrong to have added tax to labour in the form of adding HST to services which previously only had GST and not PST. There are many reasons, some simply relating to job creation and others relating to sustainability, why a tax shift from labour onto other resources such as energy is appropriate. I have been a long-time supporter of the Green Tax Shift, before there was a Canadian political party that also supported it (Greens, and temporarily the federal Liberals). An increase in the cost of services means that purchasing products that may replace services (replace rather than repair, etc) becomes comparatively cheaper, a policy that heads us in exactly the opposite direction to what we should be doing if we had any th