Let’s BUILD the #KeystoneXL Pipeline, and PROTECT the Environment!

I just realized something: I think I’m an “environmentalist”.

No, I haven’t suddenly started to wander around in leather sandals and a hemp shirt (at least, not yet). But based on a recent news report, I’m fairly certain that I’m more concerned about the welfare of the environment than the folks we usually see purported to be ‘saving the planet’.

Here, I’ll prove it.

—-

A few days ago near the Quebec town of Lac-Mégantic, a runaway train exploded. The train was loaded with crude oil from North Dakota, and the gigantic explosion is estimated to have killed at least 50 people. 

But a larger point was missing from most of the headlines on this tragedy, namely: why was the oil being transported by train in the first place?

How to lose $260K: Let the Government run your Business

A story from our Canadian neighbors, courtesy of the National Post:

When the Tim Hortons at Newfoundland’s Health Sciences Centre opened in 1995, the hospital’s administrator predicted the shop would turn an annual profit of up to $300,000 and pay for seven nurses — or 11 support staff, or maybe even pay for the increase in chemotherapy drugs for cancer patients.

Instead, the coffee shop at the St. John’s hospital lost about $260,000 last year, offering what critics say is a cautionary tale of what can happen when the public sector gets involved in things better done by private enterprise.

A Tim Horton’s? The Canadian government couldn’t run a Tim Horton’s? The food is great and the service is consistently some of the best I’ve found (Ohio has them all over the place). The place is a money-printing machine: all the government needed to do was follow the existing template.

And they couldn’t, …or perhaps the better term is: wouldn’t.

“Let me tell you why [the hospital franchise loses money],” Vickie Kaminski, the authority’s president and CEO, told reporters on Tuesday. “We charge you a buck-ninety-four for that large coffee, but we insist that the staff who are pouring the coffee are Eastern Health staff, and they get paid $28 an hour. No Tim Hortons pays that.”

—-

“Somehow it became public employees running a doughnut shop,” said Lloyd Matthews, who was Newfoundland’s health minister when the location opened at the Health Sciences Centre in 1995. “It brings us all home to the issue of waste in health care …. [It] makes us all a little interested in where else money is being wasted.”

A cautionary tale, to be sure, and one that we need to keep an eye on here: the college loan industry, GM, Chrysler, and all of the crony recipients such as Solyndra.

Makes me glad to see that this is not lost on the Romney campaign.