We also found this Basilica in the town of Beaupre, near where we stayed while skiing at Sainte Anne and Le Massif. Sainte-Anne de Beaupre was easily the biggest, most impressive church I’ve ever seen. This picture doesn’t do it justice. While I’m very much not a religious person, the architecture was completely amazing.

Click each for a larger view.

This is the first volley in Harper’s efforts to turn Canada into the United States. I applaud his stubbornness to continue with a plan to spend billions to build these massive jails despite the well documented fact that crime rates in Canada have been steadily dropping for the last decade and are at a 25 year low. But, you know, it’s also well-known that he’s a fact denier and that he thinks he’s smarter than experts so, no shock there.

Oh, and that tax break for folks with kids under 18 all you Blue voters were drooling over? Yeah, good luck with that. The catch that wasn’t widely made public is that it will only take place AFTER the deficit has been wiped out. Who knows when that’ll be? Most optimistic reports are 4 years from now, more likely it’ll be much longer than that. But, the largest, richest, most profitable corporations in Canada will of course get their tax cuts almost immediately, and with no such caveats, because Harper knows that’s where his future campaign money will come from when he changes the Political Financing laws now that he has the majority. This will give the Tories a large advantage since they obviously have a huge corporate base and will be able to solicit much higher corporate donations than other parties. It will also be advantageous because there won’t be those pesky Elections Canada investigations and charges that they had to put up with before when then blatantly broke the law.

And let’s not forget the fact that women can soon forget about controlling their own bodies. Abortion will soon be outlawed. Now, this is a touchy subject for many no matter what their political leanings are, but, on a personal level, what a woman does in this regard is her own damn business and not the governments and certainly not a group of radically right-wing evangelicals who form a significant part of core Conservative voters.

I like Jack. I’m glad he was so successful in this election to the official opposition. But, I hope Jack is up to the task of mitigating some of the disaster that Harper is about to wreak on us all. I find it frustrating that 60% of Canadians didn’t want this Conservative government, and yet, here we are. There is nowhere for right wingers to vote other than the Conservative party, so their vote is always unified. Left wing voters, however, are diluted amongst four parties. There needs to be a coalition or merger of some sort in order to oust this current government. But, in spite of knowing that, I’m still in a state of utter disbelief that so many drank the Conservative Kool-Aid.

My only hope is that Harper tries to enact every change he has fantasized about in his deranged little mind for the last 7 years as quickly as possible. That way it’ll wake people up and scare the bejesus out of them (if they weren’t scared before) and Harper will be out in 4 years.

On a technical, photo-geek note, although I was mostly happy the way these turned out, it wish I had have used a third light to rim-light him and the bike from behind to separate him from the black background more. But, it was really, really cold that night and I didn’t want to take the time to set it up.

Oh, and thanks for taking all my good-natured jokes, buddy. It really is a good cause. By the way, Sam Elliot called. He wants his mustache back…

His talk in Sydney is an hour and half long (but well worth it) and the link can be found here: http://play.sydneyoperahouse.com/index.php/Talks/david-suzuki-the-legacy.html

*caveat: the video stopped at the hour mark when I watched it on my iMac (no matter the browser). However, it seems to work fine on my PC.

But, if you’ve only got a minute or two to spare you can also watch this little video where he explains quickly what the theme of his talk is and gets the point across very powerfully with an anology of an experiment I actually performed when I was taking my environmental course at college. It can be found here: http://interactive.nfb.ca/#/testtube

The book, The Legacy, “shares a lifetime of lessons learned about our impact on our planet and his hope for the future”.

Also, he has a feature movie coming out called Force of Nature. It will be showing at the Bytowne Cinema on Nov 13 (5pm), Nov 14 (7pm), and Nov 15 (2:15pm). I shall be in attendance on one of those days.