Used Car Prices soar, British Prime Ministers and the trials of Brutus the Swan.
October 30, 2022 Volume 3 # 30
Used Car Prices still High
A lot of used cars sell for more than new cars. It’s a hangover from the great supply chain crisis. Tim Hibrant, who runs a company called The Collection of Fine Cars in Toronto says he sells a 2020 Mazda 3 for $25,000, about the same as a new model.
“People don’t want to wait a year or more for a new car, so they buy used,” says Tim,
It is a worldwide phenomenon. “The average price of a used Ford Fiesta has soared as the production of Britain’s favourite car comes to an end,” said Friday’s Daily Telegraph. A year old Ford Fiesta is £400 more expensive than a new one.
Ford is phasing out the Fiesta and will sell only electric or hybrid electric by 2026 and be all electric in Britain and the rest of Europe by 2030. As an aside, this is an incredibly boring car. Good riddance.
Speaking of electric cars used Tesla prices are through the roof, with almost all older Teslas worth more than they were new. Here are two cars listed on Tesla’s Canadian used car site in the past few days. Both these cars cost less new.
Used Model S
2016 MS 70D for C$ 59,600
New listing - 166,485 kms - Exterior Black - Sold by Karmann Fine Cars located in York, ON
2015 MS 90D for C$ 59,999
New listing - 141,000 kms - Exterior Brown - Sold by Private seller located in Toronto, ON
Tim, Hibrant is not a Tesla fan. “You look inside the Tesla and they are piece of crap. Look inside an electric Audi and you say that’s a beautiful car. The big boys are coming to play in the electric car market, Volkswagen, Porsche, Mercedes; they will crush Tesla in a few years. Tesla makes most of its money from green credits.”
Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Bet Goes South
Mark Zuckerberg thought the world was so ready to put on reality goggles and get inside the Internet that he changed the name of Facebook’s holding company to Meta. He is either very wrong or he is ahead of the curve. Will be world catch up?
The stock market doesn't think so. Facebook announced the name change to Meta two years ago. It has dropped from $353 to $99 in the last year.
The New British Prime Minister
American papers made a big deal about Prime Minister Rishi Sunak being a `person of color’. British papers did not, though the BBC talked about it but not that much. Indian immigrants are one of the most successful groups in Britain. The British acronym for minorities is BAME, which stands for Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic. In Canada Asian generally means people of Chinese descent; in Britain it means those from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The Labour Party has more minority members than the Conservatives.
A Canadian Was Recent Runner-up to Liz Truss in British PM Longevity Stakes
Andrew Bonar Law was Prime Minister 100 years ago this month, from October 1922 to May 1923.1923. He was born in New Brunswick in 1858, son of Scottish clergyman, and only moved to Britain when he was 12.
Bonar Law was the only Canadian born Prime Minister of Britain. An online history site says “his accent retained a Canadian twang.” He died shortly after leaving office.
Solitaire
From a Subscriber in France
Essay of the Week
The Tale of Brutus the Swan.
This is a story I wrote in April of 2010 about a man who was fighting to keep a wild swan that landed on his pond.
Brutus the swan is breaking the law. As a migratory bird he should, by law, be migrating. But instead Brutus is camped out on a fishpond in Erin, Ontario, about 85 kilometers northwest of Toronto. There Brutus lives a comfortable, solitary, life nibbling on fish food and chasing away intruders, from blue herons and wood ducks to people who wander too close to his home pond.
The federal government is not happy with this situation. And so far it has spent thousands of dollars prosecuting Lou Maieron, the owner of the Silvercreek Fish Hatchery, where Brutus now lives.
“The charge is I am keeping a migratory bird without a permit. But that’s wrong. Brutus is free to leave at any time,” says Maieron, who is the only human who can come close to Brutus.
The federal government disagrees. It says Maieron is keeping a wild bird as a pet and at the very least he needs a licence. The government first took him to court in June of 2009 saying he did “Unlawfully possess a live migratory bird” thus breaking the Migratory Bird Act.
A justice of the peace dismissed the case. The feds appealed and a second judge in Guelph, Ontario, ruled the prosecution was flawed and probably a waste of time.
But in July of this year in a courtroom in downtown Toronto a judge granted the feds a leave to appeal the lower court ruling.
Lou Maieron will tell anyone who will listen that all this is a colossal waste of the prosecutors’ time and the government’s money. He say the feds only found out about it because an inspector from another government department was visiting, spotted the swan and tipped off a wildlife inspector.
Brutus (the government never uses the name) seems tame, but only to Lou Maieron. Visitors have to be wary of is Brutus, especially in nesting season. An angry swan can do a human serious damage, breaking bones with its armoured wing or strong beak. A male mute swan—which is what Brutus is—has a wingspan of 2.5 meters and weighs as much as 12 kilograms. From the tip of its beak to its tail feathers this giant white bird can stretch to 170 centimeters. It dwarfs a Canada goose and is a lot more aggressive.
“Both males and females are aggressive toward people and other waterfowl within their nesting area. Sometimes their behavior is so aggressive that they will drive other waterfowl out of areas where the swans are nesting,” says the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. “Reports of swan attacks on people, especially small children and users of personal watercraft, are common.”
While Brutus is a recent bachelor, he is big and does not take kindly to invasions of his personal space.
“He attacked a truck once and broke his leg. I had to bind it up for him,” says Maieron. Perhaps another reason Brutus has grown attached to the place and to Lou Maieron. He can come so close that he can stroke Brutus’s long neck, and the swan lets out what sounds like a purr, even though it is a Mute Swan.
The species is not native to North America but to Europe. They are pure white, large and gorgeous so they were introduced a little more than a hundred years ago in New York State to beautify the ponds of the estates of the rich. Now they are considered “…an invasive species” in New York where they drive other large waterfowl off their nests and uproot underwater vegetation.
“That’s another reason I am fighting this,” says Maieron. “This is an introduced species, not a native migratory bird. And if I have to have a permit for this bird then I have to have a permit for every bird that visits here, most of which I don’t want because they eat my fish. Some of them sometimes spend all winter here.”
Brutus first flew into the fishponds just outside the village of Erin in November of 2005 with another swan, his mate. She flew off and left him, but Brutus stayed, attracted by the fifteen fishponds at the trout hatchery that are kept open by bubbling springs all year round.
“Home of the happy fish and the pond professor,” is how Maieron answers the phone. Lou Maieron has been operating his fish hatchery since 1985, just after he graduated from the University of Guelph with a degree in Fisheries Biology. Springs at the headwaters of the Credit River feed his ponds with cold water that trout thrive in.
Many of his customers are local people who stock their own ponds with Brown, Rainbow and Speckled Trout from the hatchery. The fish are netted then put in a plastic bag that is given a shot of oxygen so the fish can breathe on the short trip to their new pond.
Brutus watches these transactions from a discreet distance unaware of the legal turmoil he has caused. While Lou Maireon waits for the date of his possible trial, Brutus lives his life, moving from pond to pond, bottom feeding, munching on floating algae and gorging on the occasional morsel of fish food.
What happened?
The Appeals Court dismissed the case for a number of reasons. Brutus lived on, for a while. “Someone was driving my tractor and Brutus didn't like that,” Lou told me this week. “He attacked it and killed himself doing it. That was 10 years ago.”