Archive for December, 2005

NDP Supporter uses deception to drive traffic to NDP Website

December 10th, 2005 at 2:13 pm

Police departments in several Canadian cities expressed surprise Friday that websites with similar names to their sites are taking people straight to the New Democratic Party’s main website.

“Oh boy, this is not good,” Sgt. Kelly Dennison of the Winnipeg Police Service said after typing www.winnipegpolice.ca into his web browser and getting the NDP site.

The same thing happens if users type www.reginapolice.ca, www.saskatoonpolice.ca, www.edmontonpolice.ca, and www.windsorpolice.ca. All the traffic is directed to www.ndp.ca.

Porn sites and other less reputable internet companies have been using this technique for nearly as long as the web has existed, but the odd turn of events here is that it appears thats it’s not event he NDP party who’s doing it, but rather a BC Resident.

The domain names for reginapolice.ca and the rest are registered to B.C. resident David Bedford.

According to NDP spokesman Ian Capstick, Bedford is an NDP supporter who’s trying to help. The party has asked him to provide a list of domain names that are redirecting traffic to the NDP page, but hasn’t got a response back yet, he said.

Perhaps he was inpsired by Rick Mercer’s handling of jasonkenney.org

Read More: CBC Toronto: Police names send web users on political detour

Posted in Politics | No Comments »

What 2% Means

December 4th, 2005 at 2:52 pm

Conservative leader, and Canadian Prime Minister hopeful Stephen Harper proposes to cut the GST by 2% over the next two years,

Earlier in the day, Harper announced he would lower the seven per cent goods and services tax by one percentage point immediately and by another point within five years if he becomes prime minister after the Jan. 23 vote. [ CBC News: Economists dump on Harper's GST-lowering plan ]

So what does that mean to Canadian voters? Let’s take a second here to do the math. The Conservatives are describing this tax cut in the following way:

The real choice is between tax relief for some Canadians and tax relief for all: tax relief you can see versus tax relief you never see. “This will be a tax cut that you will see every time you shop, tax relief that you experience, a tax break that no politician will be able to take away without you noticing,” said Mr. Harper. [ Stephen Conservative.ca: Harper to cut the GST to five per cent ]

Let’s take a second here to see what this actually means. The impact has been described as about $400 yearly for a family earning $60,000 a year. Mathematically, 400/60000 is 0.6%. Lets look at this from another angle… $400/12 months = $33.33, $33.33 / 30 days in a month = $1.11/day. That’s right, Stephen Harper is proposing to eliminate $4.5 billion from Government so he can buy you cup of coffee every morning (and not that fancy $2 Second Cup Coffee either, not even $1.35 Tim Hortons (at least in Ontario) coffee).

A cup of coffee a day is not worth more to me than having $4.5 billion with which the Government can use to support health-care, education, etc. See, this is one of those times where math is useful in the ‘real world’.

Posted in Op-Ed, Politics | 10 Comments »