[LINK] On gender and Canadian governance

james_nicoll makes an interesting observation: "Since Confederation, Canada has had 96 years with a female head of state and 45 years with a male head of state. Although the men had 1/3rd the time to screw things up, the time spent under male heads of state was notable for two world wars and a great depression, events not suffered under the female heads of state."

Does this mean, he asks in his post's associated poll, that Canadians should prefer female heads of state whenever possible?

[LINK] "Zombies!"

drood writes about how he and some others decided to enliven their World of Warcraft game.

A group of thirty of us gathered up, opened up boxes and breathed in deep lungfuls of infected grain, and then evaded helpful healer-types and took flights to the coastal town of Southshore, reassembling in an empty field. When we all suddenly succumbed to the disease and died at once, we rose up from the remains of our bodies and began marching to the Horde town of Tarren Mill.

Now, zombies had very limited abilities. We could move. We could bitch-slap stuff. We could temporarily ‘lurch,’ which would make our group move twice as quickly as the slow plod that is the zombie’s normal pace. And we could also ‘retch’--I know, quite lovely--which would make us spew a pool of green vomit that would slow down the living and, if we stood in it, heal ourselves. So as a group we lurched and retched our way around the quaint town of Tarren Mill, turning everything within it into zombies that shambled around with us. Then, just to prove we were equal opportunity zombies, we turned around and lurched over to the Alliance town of Southshore, munching on every brain we saw.

[LINK] "Immigrants sought to fill vacancies in food industry"

In Alberta during the recent economic boom, Tim Horton's coffee shops offered signing bonuses in the form of scholarships to new workers, in a desperate attempt to secure a workforce. This attitude, The Toronto Star reports, is soon to hit Ontario with interesting results.

Frantic over looming Alberta-like labour shortages in Ontario, particularly at places such as Tim Hortons, the food industry has been lobbying Ottawa hard to let it bring in more immigrants on work permits.

It has been working, says Justin Taylor, vice-president for labour and taxation at the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association.

By 2015, the food service industry will need 181,000 more workers at the same time that demographics are taking away their prime labour pool--teenagers and young adults, who make up 44 per cent of their workforce.

Immigrants brought in on short-term work permits have plugged many of the gaps in Alberta, British Columbia and Saskatchewan already.

In Alberta alone, the number of temporary foreign workers, to fill such jobs as construction work, fast food counter help and hotel maids, has already zoomed past the number of immigrants brought in as permanent residents.

"We need to stop saying all we need is engineers and doctors" who've been through the points system screening, said Taylor. "We don't need doctors working in quick-service restaurants."

The crunch is just creeping into Ontario, said Taylor; 38 per cent of restaurants and fast-food places told the association this summer that they couldn't fill one or two positions.

The only thing that he anticipates an economic slowdown doing is taking their minds off the shortage, briefly.

[. . .]

"All industries will suffer from this labour shortage, but the outlook for the food service industry is particularly grim," she said.

"More than 483,000 of our employees are 15 to 24 years of age. Projections suggest that by the year 2025 the population of 15- to 24-year-olds in Canada will actually decline by 345,500."

Nothing can go wrong with guest worker schemes, I guess.