Please Sponsor Me
This year I'm participating in two fundraising charity bike rides.
The Friends For Life Bike Rally is a six day 600KM ride from Toronto to Montreal to raise funds for the Toronto People With AIDS Foundation. I need to raise a minimum of $2200 to participate in the Bike Rally.
Please Sponsor me here:
Friends For Life Bike RallyThe Cycle for Sight is a one day 140KM ride from Toronto to Collingwood to raise funds for the Foundation Fighting Blindness. I need to raise a minimum of $500 to participate in the Cycle for Sight.
Please Sponsor me here:
Cycle for SightLabels: AIDS, Bike, Blindness, charity
Speech from the Throne
Here is a review of today’s speech from the throne.
When governments can't spend – they regulate. Here todays throne speech:
“Jobs and growth remain the top priority” (completing the Canada’s Economic Action Plan)
- Wind down stimulus spending & restrain federal program spending
- Freeze salaries & office budgets of the PM, Ministers, MPs and Senators
- Freeze dept operating budgets (salaries, admin and overhead)
- Eliminate unnecessary appointments to federal agencies, boards & commissions
- Work to create a national securities regulator (Need provinces to agree)
Regulations:
- Close unfair tax loopholes
- Strengthen laws governing intellectual property and copyright
- Expand investment promotion in key markets (including reduced restrictions for uranium mining)
- Open doors for venture capital and foreign investment in key sectors (Satellite, telecommunications industry)
- Reduce regulations for energy resources and replace with “simpler, clearer processes” for improved environmental protection and “greater certainty to industry”
- Restructure Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd
- Remove regulations for small businesses
- Regulate a new biometric passport
- Regulate judicial tools to fight terrorism and organized crime
- Regulation to allow EI for military families
- Reform regulations to support the Mackenzie Gas Pipeline
- Shut down unscrupulous immigration consultants
- Comprehensive reforms to the Refugee System
New spending
- Bolster Science and Tech strategy
- Launch a digital economy strategy
- R&D of new space-based tech, especially in support of arctic sovereignty
- Allow sole parents to qualify for the $100/mth child care benefit
- National strategy on childhood injury prevention
- Build on the creation of more than 85,000 sq/KM of national parks and marine conservation areas
- Create a high arctic research station
- Bolster the Action Plan on Clean Water
Legislation on:
- Fisheries Management
- Children’s food, medicine and toys
- increase penalties for sexual offenses against children
- strengthen the sex offender registry
- crack down on white collar crime
- new police investigative powers
- cut the number of “long, drawn-out trials”
- unpaid leave for employees of federally regulated industries who are victimized by crime
- safe drinking water and waste water treatment on reserves
- address gender inequality under the Indian Act (this is to comply with a court order)
- revoke citizenship of those who conceal war crimes
- Reintroduce drug trade legislation
- support legislation to repeal the long gun registry
- Increase the number of MPs in Ontario, BC and Alberta to represent the growing populations
Trade:
- Work with Forestry, Agriculture & Livestock for increased trade & markets
- Free trade agreements with Peru, European Free Trade Association, Columbia, Jordan & Panama
- Continue trade negotiations with EU, India, Korea, Caribbean & Americas
Things that don’t cost much:
- Legislate a Seniors Day
- Establish a prime minister’s award for volunteerism
- National day of commemoration on April 9 for the last veteran from World War I
- Plans to celebrate the war of 1812
- Ask Parliament to examine the wording of the national anthem to be gender neutral
- Establish Pier 21 in Halifax as Canada’s National Museum of Immigration
- Participate in the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington in April
- Supports a National Monument to the Victims of Communism
- Supports legislation to establish a national Holocaust memorial
- “take steps to endorse” the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples
- Internationally advocate for global security and human rights
- “additional action” on the unsolved murders of aboriginal women
Labels: conservative throne speech
