The Premier has a plan to pay for the structures we need to get around in Ontario — subways, roads, bridges and tunnels.  Part of her idea is to somehow or other divert $29 billion in existing provincial gas and sales taxes to the job. It’s not clear what gets short changed in that bit of legerdemain. For the rest of it, Ms. Wynne promises to reveal further “revenue streams” in the budget expected within weeks. Ontario has released a long-term economic report showing the province’s economy is expected to grow “somewhat more slowly” over the next 20 years than in the past. It isn’t surprising. Like the rest of North America, the once robust industrial heartland of Canada has taken a 40-year whipping from the low-wage manufacturing miracles of Asia. In more recent years, free trade has caused the Americans to call home manufacturing they placed here in the 60s and 70s in order to make Canadian sales. None of this is belly aching. It’s just reality. We have no one to blame but ourselves.  Millions of us decided the strategic decision to buy goods from abroad and eliminate tariffs was the right thing to do. And maybe it was. We just didn’t know how much it would hurt.

The Toronto Maple Leafs news conference Monday morning to introduce Brendan Shanahan as the team’s president and alternate governor was nice but not very informative. Who wants to explain, even if they could, why the leafs haven’t won for centuries. Shanahan, 45, will oversee all operations for the Maple Leafs, from both the hockey and business perspectives. Tim Leiweke, president and CEO of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment since June 2013, said he believed the NHL club lacked an identity and a direction. 

This year’s mayoral front-runners have backed out of a debate planned for Monday on a community radio station, citing a lack of organization, the Star reports. The debate was to be held on University of Toronto radio station CIUT 89.5. Many observers were surprised when long-shot candidate Sarah Thomson was invited but not Karen Stintz or David Soknacki. But Saturday night, the campaigns of mayor Rob Ford, Olivia Chow and John Tory issued a joint statement saying they were backing out. “After much consideration, we the under signed will not be participating in the CIUT debate planned for Monday,” the statement said. “After multiple attempts for clarification on which candidates would be attending the debate, our questions have still been left unanswered. Combined, we feel that we have been misled by the organizers of this debate. As always, we welcome opportunities to discuss the issues facing our city with other candidates and look forward to well-planned debates with transparent processes.” Station manager Ken Stowar said he learned of the withdrawal via media reports. 

The theft announced this morning of 900 social insurance numbers (SIN) from the Canada Revenue Agency computer system is a story about the Heartbleed bug, but it is also a media story. It appears clear that the theft of these numbers occurred after the enormous furore in the media alerted hackers to the opportunity for such theft, and before CRA responded by shutting down access to the machine. The whole thing occurred during a six-hour period after the security flaw was discovered. Andrew Treusch, Commissioner of Revenue at the agency, said in a statement the CRA is currently investigating the removal of other data, some of which “relate to businesses.” No other information was immediately available. The circumstances of the theft raise again the timeless question of just when the public good is actually damaged by the unrestrained broadcast of such news.  Historically, we always come down on the side of instant dissemination, and this may indeed be the right choice. But there is no doubt that the mad release of all information instantly can be a mixed blessing, related as much to making money as it is to the public good. The Heartbleed case is a good example of the former. This previous post notes how harmless the software flaw remained as long as it lay quietly unreported.  How much smarter it would have been to fix Heartbleed first, if possible, before announcing to the general public that the flaming disintegration of the cyber-world as we knew it was at hand. 

Listen, it’s alway good to take life seriously. But keep your baloney detector handy. There might be a problem — dare we say an attempt to terrify you — when the media quotes unknown experts as saying the Heartbleed bug is so catastrophic that on a scale of 10, Heartbleed is an 11. Such a useful point of reference. How about some facts. Lewis Leong, writing in Softonic, says content delivery network CloudFlare released a report which found that there have been no verified reports of the theft of private keys. CloudFlare received early notice of the Heartbleed vulnerability and patched its own servers twelve days ago. It then began testing to see if it was possible to use Heartbleed to exploit its own services. “After extensive testing on our software stack, we have been unable to successfully use Heartbleed on a vulnerable server to retrieve any private key data,” wrote CloudFlare software engineer Nicholas Sullivan. While the company says it could not exploit a vulnerable server, it does not rule out the possibility of an attack. CloudFlare does not “feel comfortable” saying the exploit won’t work but instead says it would be “very hard” to achieve. The company has set up a challenge for security researchers and hackers to exploit a vulnerable page using the Heartbleed bug. Software company Netcraft also followed up its initial report about 66% of the web being vulnerable. Of the 66% of the web using OpenSSL, only 17.5% of those sites actually use the Heartbleed extension. “Not all of these servers are running an HTTPS service, nor are they all running vulnerable versions of OpenSSL with heartbeats enabled,” writes web security tester Paul Mutton.

Jim Flaherty’s funeral will be held at 3 p.m. Wednesday at St. James Cathedral (Anglican) at 65 Church Street. Visiting will take place at the Abilities Centre at 55 Gordon Street in Whitby on Tuesday from 12:30 p.m. to 4 p.m. and from 6:30 p.m. to 8 p.m. Mourners asked that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to the Abilities Centre. 

A 66-year-old Vaughan man has been reunited with his family after going missing. York Regional Police set up a command post at Forest Run public school in the Dufferin Street and Rutherford Road area as 20 police officers searched for Samuel Adomako Saturday.

The mayor of Belleville is asking citizens to volunteer for sandbag duty as rising water and predicted rain threaten parts of the small eastern Ontario city. Melting snow has caused water levels of the Moira River to rise dramatically in the past few days. Mayor Neil Ellis issued a state of emergency on Friday afternoon. But even more rain is forecast in the next few days.  Today Ellis asked all able-bodied persons to help. CTV has quoted  Jennifer May-Anderson, spokesperson for Quinte Conservation Authority, as saying conditions in the area could deteriorate very quickly, reaching levels seen back in 2008 when Belleville was hit with a similar flood.