You Can't Make This Stuff Up Dept:

This was just too funny - I posted it verboten from CBC news. Enjoy

Thieves carried off 22 pigs in compact car - CBC News

RCMP have arrested a pair suspected of stealing 22 pigs from a barn near Sussex, N.B., in a getaway that police say was likely a very tight squeeze.

Thieves took the pigs earlier this month after smashing the locks on a barn in Knightville, rented by Moffett's Farms.

The two from Petitcodiac, aged 19 and 20, are suspected to have used one small car to haul the 22 pigs, weighing 23-27 kilograms each, from the farm to the house in Havelock where police tracked them.

RCMP picked up the trail after one of the men forgot his ID at the scene of a break-in.

Const. Jim Gass said the stench from the pigs was immediately apparent to investigators, who found a small car, filled with pig droppings, as well as sacks used to transport the pigs.

"This little car they transported them in once had like 22 pigs," Gass said. "Man, it wasn't a lot of room in the car. She would have been a noisy affair, I would imagine, and quite a wild ride. Something you see in the movies, I would guess."

Police couldn't recover all of the pigs, worth about $75 each. The suspects allegedly ate one the night of the theft, Gass said. Most of the others, police said, were sold to unknowing customers.

RCMP won't release names of the suspects because the men have yet to be charged.

Both suspects are to appear in court Sept. 24 on unrelated charges.

Maybe I will be able to stay near home after graduation ...

New figures say New Brunswick is in the middle of an unprecedented job boom.

A Statistics Canada report released Friday shows the province led the country in job creation in the first half of 2007, and its current unemployment rate is the lowest ever recorded there.

Good news. Encouraging. Like to hear more of it.

The Premier is giving me free money!

Well, it appears Shawn Graham's Liberals are following through on their election promises, and giving all New Brunswick students attending university full-time at a New Brunswick public university free money. $2,000 to be precise. I'm happy ...

Serious coverage, serious event, somehow coverage verges on ridiculous

Perhaps its just the word "vomit" but this article ... it just seems funny in a deadpan "I wasn't trying to make it funny" sort of way ... here's an excerpt:

A northern New Brunswick fish plant has been fined $16,000 for dumping dead herring into Shippagan Harbour and for releasing smells so foul they caused people in the village to vomit.
...
The odour was so awful it made people living and working in the vicinity sick enough to vomit. They couldn't go for walks and had to keep their windows and doors closed to keep out the smell

(Of course, I'd likely be less amused if I lived there ...)

Forget Disneyworld, come to New Brunswick

Disneyworld may be the "happiest place on earth" but New Brunswick is the "happiest province in Canada", due to a recent survey. So, to those of you who want to get out and go West, why would you want to leave? It's happy here, and not so much out West. And, if you happen to have moved here from the West (or Nova Scotia, the saddest province in Canada), now you know why. So, come one, come all, to New Brunswick, the happy province :-D !!!

The amazing "Beast of the Field"

The "Beast of the Field" got into our garbage again last night ... my roommates and I figure its some sort of mid-sized animal - it must be a fair size to defeat all the safeguards we've put on the garbage can. The can is sealed, we have a rock the size of a large hardcover book on top, and two folding metal chairs leaned up against it on the sides that aren't covered by the corner of our deck. ... and yet, the Beast of the Field still manages to get the garbage can tilted over and open, and strews our garbage all over the deck ... if we're lucky though, the super-hot green curry my roommate tossed because he deemed it too spicy for human consumption will upset its stomach ... one can hope ...

A lot of hype, rather less substance

New Brunswick is fighting the good fight for the environment - at least in a small push on the automotive front. MLA's and their deputies are no longer allowed to buy SUVs or full-sized pickup trucks, unless they are hybrid or meet stringent emissions guidelines. However, hybrid trucks and SUVs are mostly environmental hype, with little fuel economy benefit over their standard variants. They are also shifting 20% of the provincial fleet (trucks, school buses and the like) over to alternate fuels like ethanol - this seems like a better move for the environment, but will likely get less press. (Although, it may get rather expensive ... where do you get ethanol in NB?)

The NDP are toast: Part III

Well, I've decided to make my "The NDP are toast" series a trilogy (here are Parts I and II). A recap of my first "NDP are toast" article (from Sept. 2):

My prediction: the NDP have one of the worst showings in their party history in terms of popular vote, do not elect a single MLA, and fold soon afterward.

During the election, the NDP had their worst ever showing in a New Brunswick provincial election, failing to elect a single MLA. Now, Allison Brewer has resigned as leader, saying she cannot afford to continue working full-time as a volunteer - the NDP now has no leader, next to no money, and will have a hard time obtaining either after their abysmal showing in the last election - sounds like, for all intents and purposes, they have folded ...

They are coming ....

The little Norwalk bugs are coming for us all - FEAR! One of our own UNB students has contracted the Norwalk virus and since recovered, and the University has sent out three health bulletins in the last week. On the one hand, it seems like an extreme response ... on the other, I really don't want Norwalk ... sounds most unpleasant.

Nice to see this is getting attention

Hmm ... UNB made the news again, this time for not having an accessible campus - its true - I am lucky enough not to be disabled, but I wouldn't be attending UNB if I was. There is a young man in a wheelchair in one of my classes, and he's perpetually late, likely because he probably has to go halfway around campus to find a route that uses ramps, not stairs, to get up the hill. There are large numbers of rooms that simply cannot be reached without using stairs, and many other places where one would have to go far out of their way to find a path without stairs. I would agree with the writers of the CBC article that the university could, and should, be doing more to make the campus accessible.

45% WHAT!?!?! That's nearly half!

Wow ... I just read that some estimates say that 45% of adults in New Brunswick cannot read at an acceptable level (4th paragraph of this article) And we wonder why all the youth are leaving ... if the adults currently working the jobs in NB can't read well, literacy is obviously not a requirement for their jobs ... and if basic literacy isn't a requirement for such a significant portion of the New Brunswick job market, local youth who are more educated are over-qualified for so many of the jobs in their home province, and thus go looking elsewhere for a job suited to their qualifications. In related news, New Brunswick's death rate has surpassed its birth rate - combined with the outflow of workers West, the population is declining rather rapidly. Good luck Shawn Graham, and your next few successors as well - we need a new economy here.

Fallout from the Provincial Election

Ok, the big NB provincial election is over, and besides the fact that a different party is in power, not much seems different. The NDP are toast (remember, you heard it here first :-) ) - they did not win a single seat, and the leader, Allison Brewer, was not even in contention for her riding of Fredericton-Lincoln with 17% of the popular vote. She plans to stay on as leader, but I still expect, barring any major event, that the New Brunswick NDP will wither and fold within the next three elections.
In more main sections of the news, the results of this election are almost the reverse of the last results, in 2003. Though the Tories got slightly more of the popular vote, the Liberals won a small majority of the seats, 29 to 26. Their election campaigns were quite similar though, so it shouldn't make much difference to the average citizen. Students, however, should be happy, as Liberal leader Shawn Graham pledged quite a bit of money to education, including a $2,000 bursary to first-year university students. Other election pledges were a 3.8cent/Litre cut to the provincial gas tax, money for Saint John harbour cleanup, and a more generous support formula for nursing home residents.
The main pieces of news from the PC party is that speculation of a move to federal politics for leader Bernard Lord has been re-opened, now that he is no longer Premier. He says this will be a family decision, and also that he will consult his (slightly reduced) caucus. Also, former Speaker Tanker Malley is out. Apparently the constituents of his Miramichi-Bay du Vin riding decided that his theatrics in the last legislature were more for the benefit of the former-bus-drivers-turned-MLA's in his riding than for the good of the general population. Good for them.

The NDP are Toast, Part II

As a follow up to my previous post about the state of the New Brunswick New Democratic Party's election prospects, I'd like to add another article I found today. Allison Brewer, the new leader of the party, will not participate in the French language TV debate. She is not fluent in French, and asked to be allowed to participate using simultaneous translation, but was denied. New Brunswick has a large francophone population, and this development will severely damage the NDP's chances in any francophone dominated ridings. If she cannot speak French, it limits her appeal to francophone voters, because how can she truly be expected to understand their issues if she can't understand their language? As well, if no one sees her at the debate, her already scanty press coverage (due in part to there not being much news to cover) will become even less, limiting the number of people she can reach with her platform. All in all, more bad news for the NDP.

University Funding

I was reading an article how Shawn Graham, leader of the provincial Liberals, is promising a $2,000 grant to first-year undergraduate university students, starting this month!!! I hope they win and do that - no government, at any level, does all that much for university students, so it would be a welcome change. We need it, given that tuition rates are still outpacing inflation - they rose 5.8% this year in New Brunswick, to an average of $5,328 a year for undergraduates - both those numbers, by the way, are the second-highest of all the provinces. (That article is worth reading, and has quite a few interesting statistics)

The Provincial NDP are Toast

Well, there is a provincial election going on here in New Brunswick, so I figure I should weigh in on it. It is early in the campaign yet, and not much has happened, but I can already tell, that, without Elizabeth Weir, the NDP are done. Their new leader, Allison Brewer, has had plenty of time to prepare for an election since she was raised, and yet was (and still is) behind the Liberals and the Tories in releasing her party's platform. She has spent most of her time stumping in her own riding as well, focusing on getting herself elected over her parties goals. Admittedly, she needs to get into office, but without a strong party vision, she may have trouble with that (especially because the other parties are running a very strongly leader-focused campaign). On top of this, the NDP is not even able to run candidates in all 55 ridings. I'm no political science expert, but even an armchair politics-watcher should be smelling the blood in the water. My prediction: the NDP have one of the worst showings in their party history in terms of popular vote, do not elect a single MLA, and fold soon afterward. They were, for all intents and purposes, a one-woman party under Ms. Weir, and her successor does not have the personality to pull off a similar feat. We shall see