Angel >> Government-appointed bodies that support the decriminalization of marijuana Twenty-five years ago, the LeDain Commission called for the legalization of marijuana in Canada; the government promptly shelved the report. This time, it's the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse (CCSA), which issued a report last week recommending the same thing. The CCSA report is filled with good old-fashioned common sense: among other things, the report notes that, since everyone who's gonna smoke weed already does, decriminalization "would lead to considerable cost savings without leading to increases in cannabis use." This time, maybe the government will have the common sense to implement the recommendations.

Insect >> Aerospace companies glutted with public funds A retired Industry Canada bureaucrat has just revealed that high-ups in the department approved million-dollar loans throughout the '80s and '90s to profitable defence and aerospace companies--which have repaid only laughably small fractions of them. "There was a bit of nudge-nudge, wink-wink going on with all the countries involved," the bureaucrat told the Globe and Mail. "You pretended you were not subsidizing, but in fact you were." We recommend the medicine thousands of infinitely poorer Canadian students taste each year: give the government access to those aerospace and defence company bank accounts and snatch that public money back. With interest.