Why does baseball open in so many cold cities?

I wonder every year why there are so many baseball games played in northern cities during the month of April.  I understand that scheduling 162 games for 30 different teams is a monumental task, but the many delays or cancellations, or poorly played games due to weather in April is a huge annoyance for a baseball fan who is excited for the beginning of the baseball season.

So far this year there has not been a series of cancellations, but it is only the first week, let’s see how many games have to be cancelled and rescheduled for later in the year by the time April is over with.  There are plenty of northern baseball teams that play in domed parks, or as in the case of Seattle a retractable roof.  Why not schedule the earliest games of the season either in domed stadiums or in southern cities where the weather is far more likely to be conducive to good baseball games than it is in the northern cities.

Conservatives should have learned the first time

I just finished reading  this article about Conservative plans to potentially re-open the constitutional debate in an attempt to garner more voter support in Quebec.  It seems that the Conservatives failed to learn from their constitutional mishaps of the late 1980s and early 1990s.  Brian Mulroney’s PC government tried, and miserably failed twice to get Quebec to sign on to the constitution.  In the process the political right fractured and Quebec nearly voted to separate from Canada.  I see that the Conservatives think that getting Quebec to sign the constitution would be a way to win a lot of Quebec seats, but that is never going to happen.  There is no way to get the other provinces to agree to special Quebec demands without giving something to them in return.

The Charlottetown Accord tried to please everybody, and when it went to the people it was resoundingly defeated.  There is no way to give major concessions to Quebec in the constitution without angering large segments of the rest of Canada, particularly out west.  Opening up the constitutional debate might yield some short term electoral gains for the Conservatives, but recent history has shown us that the short term gain for the Conservatives is a long term pain for the country as a whole.

I hope that if there is some scatter brained attempt by the Conservatives to woe nationalist Quebecers with promises of constitutional changes, that the Conservative heartland of Alberta responds appropriately by turfing a number of Conservative MPs.  I truly hope that any Conservative message getting played in Quebec gets heard in the rest of the country.  What might be gained in Quebec, should, and I think will, be lost in other parts of the country when people realize that constitutional favouritism for Quebec does not make the Canadian union stronger, but rather opens up an even bigger opportunity for Quebec sovereignty.