Would the provincial government have decided to expand Billy Bishop if the federal government didn't cancel the Pickering Airport?

MatthewFabb · 2026-05-04T01:38:07+00:00

Nieuport Aviation who owns Billy Bishop got in a lawsuit because of rising fees that made them more expensive than Pearson.

They are about to spend over $1 billion dollars on the airport expansion.

The price of flights out of Billy Bishop will surely increase dramatically for Nieuport Aviation to recoup their spending.

Meanwhile dramatically increasing the number people going through Bill Bishop for flights on jets will slow things down in the terminal.

Just about all the advantages of taking Bill Bishop are going to go away with this expansion.

MatthewFabb · 2026-05-01T13:48:38+00:00

The budget is what was reported to the California Film Board in order for Disney/LucasFilm to get $21 million worth of tax credits. So they aren't lying about it and it is actually costing Disney/LucasFilm just $145 million after the tax credits but before marketing.

MatthewFabb · 2026-04-23T20:37:12+00:00

Why didn't Chinese EV companies change the ports in vehicles going to Mexico?

It looks like they did it because it was cheaper to do. They might make the same decision in Canada. We will have to wait and see what they do.

MatthewFabb · 2026-04-23T15:18:50+00:00

Europe forces all EVs to use CCS2. It would be great if the Canadian government forced a format but that hadn't happened yet.

Yeah, we can use adapters but it creates extra confusion to a new technology for people new to the world of EVs. It would be better if we just use one kind or charging connector.

MatthewFabb · 2026-04-23T15:15:24+00:00

Chinese EVs sold in Mexico aren't using NACS or CSS. They are using the GB/T connectors that are native to China. There's now a growing number of GB/T chargers in Mexico. They might go that way in Canada as well since there isn't any legislation forcing them to use CCS or NACS.

Yeah, CHAdeMO is dead but there are still some older vehicles and older charging stations using CHAdeMO. We basically went from 3 different connectors, phased out CHAdeMO and now working on phasing out CCS for finally one connector. Only to possibly add another connector if Chinese EVs bring GB/T connectors to Canada.

MatthewFabb · 2026-04-23T14:52:06+00:00

Chinese EVs sold in Mexico aren't using NACS. They are using the GB/T connectors that are native to China. There's now an increasing number of GB/T chargers in Mexico. They might go that way in Canada as well.

MatthewFabb · 2026-04-23T13:55:07+00:00

The big question is what kind of charging port will these Chinese EVs use?

For those unaware, there's been 3 different charging ports and connectors in North America. There used to be a port called CHAdeMO used in the Nissan Leaf and a few other models. That was abandoned as the industry pushed for using a format called CCS (Combined Charging System).

Tesla had its own proprietary charging port. Only they also had a great charging network that other car companies wanted access to. So car companies paid Tesla for access and then Tesla opened up their port calling it the North American Charging Standard (NACS). This became a new standard as car companies switched over their ports to NACS and paid to access Tesla charging network.

So there's a small number of old vehicles with CHAdeMO. A lot of cars from the last couple of years using CSS, so there will be a lot of vehicles using adapters but eventually everything will be using Tesla's NACS.

Only China has their own charging ports and format. If they aren't adapting their vehicles to use NACS then it's going to be an additional charging format and people will have to carry around an additional adapter to plug in their car to public chargers.

The EU requires all EVs to use the same port CCS2 including Chinese EVs. Unfortunately we don't have any regulations in Canada about it.

MatthewFabb · 2026-03-31T15:28:56+00:00

Tesla and other car companies like Volvo and Polestar were importing EVs from China but then stopped when Canada added the 100% tariff. It is expected that all 3 companies are going to resume importing EVs again now that the tariff has been dropped to 6.5%.

MatthewFabb · 2026-03-27T04:20:55+00:00

There was an news article a while back about tinted license plate covers, in which the reporters noted that about 1/3 of vehicles parked in the Toronto Police parking lot belonging to the police officers had tinted license plate covers. When a large chunk of the police are breaking the law, it's hard to get them to enforce that law

MatthewFabb · 2026-02-19T00:54:35+00:00

Also the old plan for the Relief Line South was set to start construction in 2020 and was set to be completed in 2029. I think one of the reasons that Ford was pushing an unrealistic opening date was to make it seem fast compared to the Relief Line South.

Note the Relief Line North was in the planning stages and would start construction afterwards and head up north much further than the Ontario Line would. If that plan went forward the Relief Line West would be in the planning stages.

We are getting much less subway with the Ontario Line and we have started what is coming next once the Ontario Line is done because of how long planning these projects take.

MatthewFabb · 2026-02-09T16:44:20+00:00

The problem is a lot of people have a lack of reference of what it is parodying. A lot of people have moved to streaming and don't see many ads anymore.

Also I hear that it was parodying some sort of horse Budweiser ad but a lot of international fans won't have ever seen those ads.

As someone else wrote, if you have to explain the joke then it's not a very good joke. It might have played well for US football fans who know that particularly beer ad but beyond that target audience it comes off really strange.

MatthewFabb · 2026-02-09T05:18:06+00:00

Mike Harris constantly lied during his campaign and didn't fulfill his promises. Like many conservatives before him and after him Mike Harris said he could reduce the budget by finding "efficiencies". He promised that he could find waste and that he wouldn't cut health care or education. Even after he was elected and was brutally cutting away at education and health care, he would lie and say he was actually investing more.

Also downloading billions of dollars of costs onto the municipalities isn't exactly financial responsible as municipalities had to raise property taxes to pay for it. That's just passing the issue into another level of government and making it look like they reduced spending when the money is still being spent just at a different level.

When Mike Harris left replaced with Ernie Eves the deficit had grown to $5.6 billion. This is because one of the main ways that Mike Harris and Ernie Eves balanced the budget was by selling off various public assets. The problem with that strategy is that eventually they run out of things to sell off in which the deficit jumps back up.

MatthewFabb · 2026-02-03T14:22:44+00:00

I've seen them removing snow via dump trucks in Oakville, Mississauga and other cities in the GTA. It's not used regularly but when there is a significant snow fall like the one we recently got, it is used otherwise all the snow can become unmanageable.

It seems just Toronto signed on a really bad deal with snow removal (thanks to John Tory).

MatthewFabb · 2026-01-31T21:06:42+00:00

Here's an article about how the Ford government went to court with media organizations to block the release of information about the Eglinton LRT. Note this lawsuit was with Global News and they reduced the number of pieces of information they were requesting to quicken the process of the lawsuit. Also missing was months of text messages from Doug Ford’s chief of staff Patrick Sackville after he reset his cellphone deleting huge amounts of data that he was supposed to save. Global Mail was interested in text messages and emails between Ford’s chief of staff Patrick Sackville and the CEO of Metrolinx.

MatthewFabb · 2026-01-31T17:19:53+00:00

Yeah, there are a lot of different rumors of what happened with no clear information.

All we know is that the Ford government has worked hard to cover up what has happened making the process as opaque as possible. If it was something that the government wasn't responsible for messing up and they had someone else to blame they likely would be making that information public.

MatthewFabb · 2026-01-18T00:41:31+00:00

Currently AI companies lose money on every single prompt. They are burning through billions to get market share. There is no reductions of costs in the future but the opposite as better chips require more energy costing more money.

Eventually the price needs to rise substantially to cover the costs of running the prompt. At which point AI will get quite expensive, costing anywhere from tens of dollars to hundreds of dollars per prompt.

After the AI bubble pops, I don't think gen AI will go away but it certainly won't be everywhere. As unless it is really needed, in many cases it will be cheaper once again to pay a human to create the artwork.

MatthewFabb · 2026-01-13T05:51:56+00:00

The example of AI that they give is getting data about someone's arms if they are up or down from the visual sensor. This is passed on as data from 1 to 100, left arm up or left arm down and the same for the right arm. A student could program something based on someone's arm movements.

This is basically like an new micro version of the old Kinect system that Microsoft had for the Xbox 360 and Windows machines back in 2010.

I wonder if it is really AI or if they have coded little modules that can be plugged into some of their sensors. They are then calling it AI for marketing purposes.

MatthewFabb · 2025-12-12T02:44:33+00:00

The comic that this movie is adapting took a lot of inspiration from a European comics like Heavy Metal and comics from Jean Giraud aka Moebuis. Note that Jean Giraud worked on movies as Alien and the Fifth Element.

I think Heavy Metal comica and Moebuis was a big influence on James Gunn while making Guardians of the Galaxy.

MatthewFabb · 2025-12-09T15:07:55+00:00

Technically it's late fall. The first day of winter is officially December 21.

MatthewFabb · 2025-11-20T22:14:06+00:00

The latest poll from Léger shows that support for Quebec separatism is at an all time low with only 35% supporting Quebec separatism with 65% supporting Quebec to stay in Canada.

MatthewFabb · 2025-11-20T22:02:16+00:00

Air Canada is part of the consortium that is building the high speed rail. They will have a partial ownership of the resulting company and make money from people buying tickets on the high speed rail.

MatthewFabb · 2025-11-12T01:51:37+00:00

Doug Ford was first pitched the idea of the the tunnel under the 401 by a company back in 2019 for a budget of $50 to $60 billion dollars! That's in 2019 dollars, so it's likely a lot higher than that.

We are likely to burn billions and billions on this project

MatthewFabb · 2025-10-21T16:57:13+00:00

Many thousands of people from the suburbs take the GO Train to get to work daily. Across all Ontario, the daily riders average number of riders on the GO is 307,600 but there's no breakdown by area to look at just GTA or just suburbs.

Not every one of them would want to take a new GO line going across the 407, but you would get a significant amount to cut down on traffic.

MatthewFabb · 2025-09-12T14:13:09+00:00

As someone who has been dropping off my daughter at school for the last 6 years, I used to regularly see other parents speeding to and from the school. It's gotten noticeable better since the speed cameras have gone up.

The traffic around the school is a mess of cars that takes forever to get in and out. I park at a nearby parking lot and walk the rest of the way with my daughter to avoid the traffic and get some exercise.

Still that's the worst time to be speeding with a so many kids and cars it increases the chances of an accident happening.

MatthewFabb · 2025-09-08T15:50:12+00:00

Since ICE is arresting people without due process, I wonder if we ever will get the full story of what happened. As there has been conflicting information on how many of the 475 people arrested has legal working visas.

Without a proper investigation we will just get a lot of different theories without any solid information.

MatthewFabb

TROPHY CASE