In their never ending quest to maintain their "green" image, the federal Tories have cut funding to several wildlife programs of Environment Canada. Now I'm thinking, if you're trying to convince Canadians that you actually give a damn about the environment, cutting programs to monitor that environment might not be the action you want to be taking. However that's what the Harper Conservatives have just done. Cuts are affecting the Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Network, the Migratory Bird Program and the National Wildlife Area program. Now the Harper government is claiming the cuts are needed so they can focus on climate change, but looking into things it shows the opposite.

So the royalty review report by a panel set up by the Alberta provincial government is now out. The ink is barely dry on the report and the oil industry is already spreading gloom and doom. This, of course was not unexpected for an industry that prior to the release of the report was parading it's CEO's through Calgary spreading the same gloom and doom about any change to the royalties. I even heard a caller to the CBC morning show here in Cowtown complain that the review was just a provincial version of the NEP. All this for a non-binding report that suggests we change our royalties from giveaway levels to fire-sale levels.

Mrs. Evil and I nipped away this weekend to Victoria so that she could partake in the Titanic Exhibit at the Royal BC Museum which I'm sure she'll be blogging all about so I won't get into that aspect of our trip here. Anyhow the reason I'm writing today is that one of the things I like about Victoria are the buskers. Now in my various trips to the city, I've seen busking pipers (who are out every time I'm here), even a busker with a full drum set set up in the inner harbour. This time there was a violin player, however he wasn't just a violin player, he was dressed up as Darth Vader playing a black violin. Now there's something you don't see every day. Picture under the cut.

So we have Elections Canada allowing Muslim women to keep their faces covered while they vote. Ever on the lookout to pick up a vote, our illustrious Prime Minister has waded in by stated that "We just adopted this past sitting in the spring, Bill C-31, a law designed to have the visual identification of voters. That's the purpose of the law. That was the law adopted, I think virtually unanimously by Parliament, and I think this decision goes in an entirely different direction." This begs the question, did Harper actually read the law that he voted for not once, but twice?

...Calgary oil execs are talking to the Liberals. Hey, what did the Tories expect, the energy trusts, who are used to having Conservative Parties wrapped around their little fingers, just go along with the new tax scheme? At least at the end of the article the Federal Finance Minster tried to blame the Liberals for the issue. Nice to see consistency there.

This past week has been quite interesting in the world of politics. We have the federal Tories moving to prorogue parliament and start a new session as well as here in the land of Tory, Alberta, the provincial Tories also doing some interesting things such as annoying the oil industry.

So about a month ago I took some astrophotos as part of my project to take photos of all 110 Messier objects. Yesterday I finally got around to looking at them and one caught my eye. A shot of M94, a galaxy in Canes Venatici, caught my eye. Now if you look at the picture below, it looks like there's an object glowing brightly beside the galaxy that looks a bit like a supernova.

The events of the past couple of months has me concerned about the direction our country is taking. We have the Alberta government not just spying on Albertans but also Americans in Montana as well as police forces in Quebec using police to infiltrate protests with the appearance that the police were trying to incite a riot. In both cases, the agencies involved initially denied any such activity, only to "come clean" when forced by evidence to the contrary. Thing is, how do we know they've truly come clean?

Click here.

Well it seems that the suspicions of the landowners against a new high-voltage power line were true. The Alberta Energy and Utilities Board was spying on them. For those of you who live outside Alberta, the AEUB is the provincial government body responsible for rubber stamping energy industry (oil or otherwise) development approvals. This board, while holding hearings on a proposed power line, has done everything it can to avoid hearing the voice of the landowners affected by the development. It shut them out of the room, surrounded them with "security", and now we find out that they used taxpayer dollars to spy on taxpayers opposed to the development.