Dissonance And Disrespect

Dominion Day

2007-07-01T08:42:00.000-04:00

WHEREAS the Provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick have expressed their Desire to be federally united into One Dominion under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, with a Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom:

And whereas such a Union would conduce to the Welfare of the Provinces and promote the Interests of the British Empire:

And whereas on the Establishment of the Union by the Authority of Parliament it is expedient, not only that the Constitution of the Legislative Authority in the Dominion be provided for, but also that the Nature of the Executive Government therein be declared:

And whereas it is expedient that Provision be made for the eventual Admission into the Union of other Parts of British North America:

It shall be lawful for the Queen, by and with the Advice of Her Majesty's Most Honourable Privy Council, to declare by Proclamation that, on and after a Day therein appointed, not being more than Six Months after the passing of this Act, the Provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick shall form and be One Dominion under the Name of Canada; and on and after that Day those Three Provinces shall form and be One Dominion under that Name accordingly.

Casey At The Bat

2007-06-06T19:00:00.000-04:00

Bill Casey is not cut from the same cloth as Garth Turner, but let's not kid ourselves into believing that he has sacrificed his political career to the dictates of conscience.

Casey's plans to retire at the next election have been an open secret for months; to grandstand on a budget vote costs him nothing except ending his career with a brief stint outside caucus.

Nor does his vote against a confidence motion make him a martyr for the cause of freer votes in Parliament: not even the most enthusiastic boosters of free range MPs have ever suggested that a government MP should be free to vote no confidence in his own government. Were it to be so, not even a majority government could survive without endlessly brokering side deals with its own caucus.

Had Bill Casey simply not shown up that night, few would have cared about his abstention after the vote, and he could have got the point across without being turfed from caucus.

Nothing turned on his vote and nothing will turn on it.

The offshore deal will fail, as have all other such deals, because the dynamic of federal-provincial relations between Ottawa and Atlantic Canada, that of grudging charity to an incessantly whining supplicant, will not change any time soon.

Bland Blue Machine

2007-06-03T10:38:00.000-04:00

Shell shocked by massive defeat in 2003, the Ontario PCs came to believe the media line that everything that even remotely appeared to have a connection to the Mike Harris years had to be purged to save the party.

Thus the election of John Tory as leader, the quintessential red Tory Toronto establishment man, with nary an idea to disturb the status quo or a word to ruffle anyone's feathers.

Randall Denley would like him to offer some. Not too disturbing, mind you. Just something to show that he's doing something other than not being Dalton McGuinty.

But Tory has no ideas of his own. He's never had to. All the positions he has held--principal secretary to Bill Davis, partner at Torys LLP, CFL commissioner, CEO of Rogers Cable--have all offered him the opportunity to show visionary leadership, and he's gotten by with being a bland if reasonably efficient manager of the status quo.

This will show on the campaign trail, to his detriment. People want a steady hand on the wheel. They also want someone who can navigate rough waters. Tory hasn't shown that he can do that. And unless he can, he'll be another nice guy who couldn't quite measure up.

Chicken Run

2007-06-02T10:04:00.000-04:00

You knew that everybody just had to be blustering about forcing an election in Quebec three months after the last one. You just knew, because there was no way you could believe it possible:

The Quebec budget passed in the legislature on Friday, saving Quebecers from heading back to the polls this summer.

Premier Jean Charest's minority Liberal government remains intact after a 46-44 vote in the national assembly.

All Liberals in the legislature voted for the budget, while the 41 Action democratique du Quebec MLAs rejected it.

In a symbolic protest, three of the PQ's 36 MLAs showed up Friday to express the party's opposition to the budget, with the remainder abstaining from the vote.

So Jean Charest lives for now, but only at the grace and favour of the PQ. What's more, with the concerted opposition of the party ideologically closest to it. As soon as the PQ can finish coronating Pauline Marois, Charest's career as the golden boy of Canadian politics is done. Forever.

Would that he had stayed in federal politics, where he might be Harper's Quebec lieutenant today, instead a saviour for a cause that no longer needed (or had passed beyond) saving.

Source: CTV

Quebec Syndrome

2007-05-29T20:33:00.001-04:00

The Quebec syndrome strikes every federal government almost from its inception. Otherwise rational and responsible men are suddenly seized with the overwhelming urge to spend taxpayers' money in the vain hope that this project or that program will stir within Quebecois hearts the loyalty and passion towards Canada which has hitherto lain dormant.

In its worst manifestations, it produces Adscam and CF-18 contracts.

Its milder outbreaks, however, are no less dangerous to the health of the Canadian body politic.

Sometimes it's a little illegal referendum spending to save the country, for what are mere campaign finance laws when the unity of the Dominion is in peril?

Sometimes it's promises of jobs, jobs, jobs, even when said jobs are merely being moved over the Ottawa River without the jobholders' spending following along.

No government, Liberal or Conservative, is immune therefrom.

The only cure would a radical Quebecectomy, but even that might be worse than the disease.

The 950 Million Dollar Man

2007-05-28T06:46:00.000-04:00

If you were wondering just why Jean Charest could be so foolish as to try to force an election three months after the last one over a tax cut even Mario Dumont says Quebec can't afford, here's why:

Under Quebec parliamentary rules the budget can't be amended in the course of debate. But a complementary financial statement could be added, giving in to the PQ insistence on increased funding for special education, seniors' care and regional development.

While PQ leader-in-waiting Marois was holding the hard line on the weekend, interim PQ leader Francois Gendron said anything that could prevent another election merits consideration. "There haven't been any discussions so far, but I'm open."

So what will be given with the right hand, will be taken back with the left.

And the most useless election call in Quebec history will be avoided, three months after the last one.

Source: Montreal Gazette

Jerked Around

2007-05-24T20:11:00.000-04:00

Some jerk with a beef at Toronto mayor David Miller threw a piece of beef jerky at him at City Hall yesterday.

This tragic event clearly underscores the need for a national dried meat registry.

Source: National Post

Railroaded

2007-05-24T19:50:00.000-04:00

You always get more of what you reward.

A year of letting the goons at Caledonia squat on their neighbours' land and a couple of railway blockades allowed to continue in defiance of court orders has only encouraged the Assembly of First Nations--presumably not the most radical of Indian organizations--to side with the lawbreakers:

Canada's native chiefs will pressure the national railways to close down for the Assembly of First Nations' "day of action" on June 29, backing it up with a veiled threat they will probably face blockades from individual native bands if they refuse.

The carrot-and-stick approach was adopted nearly unanimously by chiefs at a special conference of the AFN, where chiefs who prefer more diplomatic political efforts were pushed to adopt tougher tactics by those who want to threaten economic disruptions to pressure the government.

This is indirect extortion against the railways--shut themselves down and cost the people millions of dollars, or be shut down and cost them even more.

Not one land claim will be settled, not one job created, not one child fed, because of these threats and blockades.

But outside sympathy for the cause will be lost.

Source: Globe and Mail

Why We Fight Them Over There

2007-05-21T17:06:00.000-04:00

So that we don't have to fight this sort of bizarre reasoning over here:

Cairo's al-Azhar Islamic University on Monday suspended a lecturer who suggested that men and women work colleagues could use symbolic breastfeeding to get around a religious ban on being alone together.

The lecturer, Ezzat Atiya, had drawn on Islamic traditions which forbid sexual relations between a man and a woman who has breastfed him to suggest that symbolic breastfeeding could be a way around strict segregation of males and females.

....

The Dubai-based channel Al Arabiya quoted him as saying that after five breastfeedings the man and woman could be alone together without violating Islamic law and the woman could remove her headscarf to reveal her hair.

Even the most benighted of multiculturalists might consider this to be taking accomodation a bit too far. We think. We hope.

Source: Reuters

Right Back Where We Started From

2007-05-21T15:10:00.000-04:00

To see the latest polls showing the Tories barely ahead of the Grits, you would expect panic in the Conservative ranks, and jubilation amongst the Liberals.

The lack of such response on either side is indicative of the recognition that what's happening now is the usual mid-to-late term malaise of any government that has accomplished most of its stated priorities, faced the usual initial scandals and problems, and is now casting about to set its next election platform. Certainly no joy for the Tories, but also no joy for the Grits, who have both exhausted much energy to end up treading water.

Which is why Stephen Harper won't be taking much of a summer holiday. The summer is a perfect time to draft the next election platform, with bigger and bolder ideas, active as opposed to being merely reactive.

But such is the problem of a government that accomplishes most of its stated objectives: so much energy gets invested in doing so that there's not enough left to deal with the problems that arise almost out of nowhere.

No party can win power without a platform, but no government can just stand on its platform, either.

Source: Globe and Mail

Blocked

2007-05-17T19:14:00.000-04:00

If I block my neighbour's driveway and claim that his house is sitting on land that's rightfully mine based on a story that my great-great-great grandfather used it and never actually got around to deeding it over to anyone else, or didn't really know what deeding it over actually meant, I'd be lucky to get away with just an injunction to take the sawhorses down.

If I threatened to make even further trouble, I might find myself behind bars before long.

Indian land claim protesters, however, seem to be able to make these threats with impunity:

Court injunctions barring blockades on rail lines will do little to deter frustrated First Nations residents from staging similar demonstrations across the country, an aboriginal protester who led an eastern Ontario blockade said Thursday.

"I don't believe that an injunction changes the circumstances that people live in across this country," protest leader Shawn Brant said outside court Thursday. "I don't believe it serves to resolve those issues."

Shawn Brant's comments came after Ontario Superior Court Justice Colin Campbell temporarily upheld an injunction Thursday barring further blockades on the lines operated by Canadian National Railway.

Campbell granted the injunction last month after Brant and a group of protesters, members of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte First Nation, set up a 30-hour rail blockade near Deseronto, Ont., some 30 kilometres west of Kingston.

"This injunction or these proceedings, in fact, will bring about a reaction, and maybe an unintended reaction, that CN wasn't looking for," Brant said outside the court.

Is that so, Mr. Brant?

Perhaps his bravado will diminish after a night in a holding cell for contempt of court.

Regardless of what one might think about native land claims--and the history of conquest shows that they've been given much more consideration to their claims than most conquered peoples centuries after the fact--letting them get away with blockades only encourages more of the same, and worse.

Things got mighty quiet around Oka after the Mohawk Warriors got the point that the army could take them down.

Around Caledonia, the OPP's inaction has just kept the matter dragging and dragging on.

What will it take to show the blockaders that they'll be dealt with like any other law breakers?

Source: Toronto Star

Gulag By The Sea

2007-05-15T19:51:00.000-04:00

The horrors of Guantanamo Bay, America's very own Dachau, beside which the Black Hole of Calcutta was a stately pleasure drome, continue unabated according to the testimony of those who languish therein:

An accused enemy combatant held at Guantanamo Bay told a military hearing he was physically as well as mentally tortured there by having to read a newsletter full of 'crap,' being forced to use unscented deodorant and shampoo and having to play sports with a ball that would not bounce.

Majid Khan of Pakistan denied any connection to Al Qaeda and said he was tortured and his family hounded by U.S. authorities, according to a redacted transcript released Tuesday by the Pentagon.

Khan told an April 15 hearing called to determine whether he was rightly classified as an "enemy combatant" that he also had his baby pictures taken from him, that cleaners left marks on his cell walls and that detainees have no DVD players or other entertainment.

....

He said he has been unable to see his daughter, was denied communal recreation for 11 weeks, went four weeks without sunlight and fresh air, was deprived of basic or comfort items for three weeks, had his beard shaved twice and was forced to wear a protective suicide prevention smock.

And he complained that he was only given cheap unscented soap and shampoo, and that in the recreation room there is "no weight lifting machine, no toilet, no sink, ho hoops, and even balls them self have little air in them; they hardly bounce."

Tough. He's obviously never done time in one of Ontario's county jails, where he could only dream of balls with hardly any bounce, and getting jumped or shanked is the substitute recreation. Where people who truly don't deserve to be behind bars end up all too often. Where the weakest get introduced to the alternative lifestyle, forcibly.

He's probably cleaner, healthier and better-fed than he was running around the northwest frontier of Pakistan from cave to rock pile, dodging bombs and bullets. And in much less danger from his fellows, and his jailers, than the inmates at the county jail.

As for his claims of torture, take them with a grain of salt. Or a whole boxful. He wouldn't be the first of them instructed to lie or exaggerate for propaganda purposes.

Source: Fox News

Follow The Money, If You Can

2007-05-14T06:24:00.000-04:00

Federal child care plan:

Give the provinces $2 billion.

???

Profit:

Officials in Ottawa have few clues as to how well the cash was spent by most provinces since 2004. Provincial reports are months or even years overdue - when they're provided at all.

It's a blind spot that critics loudly warned about when past Liberal governments first started funding a national child-care system that was seen by many as encroaching on provincial social-policy turf.

....

A chart compiled by the association says reports for 2004-05 have still not been filed by Newfoundland and Labrador, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Alberta, the Yukon or Nunavut.

The federal government's own child-care reports are missing for 2004-05 and 2005-06 "for a number of reasons," said Glennie Graham, director of child and youth policy for Human Resources.

....

Just five of 10 provinces reported on federal cash for the fiscal year 2004-05, and only Saskatchewan and British Columbia have filed for 2005-06, Lysack says.

Nonetheless, another $950 million was transferred from Ottawa to provincial and territorial governments in the last fiscal year. Senior officials with the federal Human Resources Department confirmed the missing data.

With this deal, the provinces get the best of all worlds. They take the money, don't tell the feds where it's gone because it's a provincial matter, then hold out their hands for more.

For all we know, it went to beer and popcorn.

Yet another reason for the feds to stop buying their way into provincial jurisdiction.

In And Out

2007-05-13T09:21:00.000-04:00

Everybody thought that the Parti Quebecois, left broken and bloodied by a third-place finish in the recent election, its ambiguously separatist thunder stolen by Mario Dumonts's "autonomism," was begging for Gilles Duceppe to come take over and lead it back to the promised land of independence.

Everybody, it seems, except the actual party militants, who couldn't run from Duceppe fast enough:

Within 24 hours of announcing he was running for the leadership of the Parti Québécois, Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe stunned the sovereignty movement by dropping out of the race.

Mr. Duceppe's organizers quickly realized that their strategy to take over the PQ had failed miserably and that an unpredictably strong level of support had quickly moved behind former PQ senior minister Pauline Marois, the only other declared candidate in the race.

The battle of titans everyone expected will not take place. A series of events that unfolded late Friday and all day Saturday convinced Mr. Duceppe that he would do better to remain Bloc Leader in Ottawa than pursue his strategy to become PQ leader.

A poll conducted by Crop for the Montreal daily La Presse on Saturday showed a vast majority of Quebeckers — 45 per cent — preferred Ms. Marois as PQ leader over Mr. Duceppe, who received the backing of 21 per cent. Mr. Duceppe reached the conclusion he didn't have the support.

"The Crop poll clearly showed an important and insurmountable trend in support of Ms. Marois. This was not visible two weeks ago," Mr. Duceppe's chief of staff François Leblanc said Saturday.

Actually it was visible even before the race began, but most commentators, having little knowledge of the PQ's peculiar nature, completely missed it.

Gilles Duceppe's political career, his youthful Marxist follies aside, has been defined by the Bloc Quebecois, from the day he became its first by-elected MP following Meech Lake's demise. He is not now, and has never been, a real pequiste , and the Bloc has never been simply the federal branch of the PQ.

He does not enjoy the same stature that Lucien Bouchard did when he went from leading the BQ to the PQ. He did not follow the same trail of tears that Bouchard followed along with so many Quebecois, from dashed hopes in federalism to renewed commitment to independence. Nor has he been with the PQ during its early days, its glory days, and its darkest hours.

Duceppe, unlike Pauline Marois, has no real roots in the PQ. The PQ, by the nature of its vision, does not take well to mere opportunists trying to jump to the head of the parade.

Duceppe's coronation was never going to happen; once Pauline Marois stepped in, he knew it, and he was left with no choice but to quit in an embarrassing manner.

The fact that the Bloc will take him back so readily is also a further sign of the Bloc's chief weakness: it has become, for all intents and purposes, the party of Gilles Duceppe. There is no one within its ranks with the necessary stature to succeed him and surpass him.

Gilles Duceppe just came out the loser here, but so did the BQ. Now they get to stumble along together for a fifth election, unable to extract themselves from each other.

Source: Globe and Mail

Party Of None

2007-05-12T10:24:00.000-04:00

You'll all remember how the Progressive Canadian Party swept the country like wildfire right after its founding, after millions of progressive-conservative Canadians left disenfranchised by the merger of the PCs with the Alliance flocked to the one party in the land left that represented the noble vision of Joe Clark.

Or maybe you didn't.

You will also remember that glorious day when millions left no less disenfranchised by the end of the Reform and Alliance parties abandoned the Conservative Party en masse to join the revived Reform party.

Or maybe you won't.

Dissatisfaction is the foundation of many a new political party, but that alone will not support a party in the long run. Nor will hankering for a past golden age that never was.

Anarchy Now

2007-05-12T10:14:00.000-04:00

To the radical left, Jeff Monaghan, the low-level civil servant and lower-level amateur anarchist, is a hero for leaking the Conservative government's environment plans to meet (sort of) the Kyoto targets (maybe).

To hear him at press conferences, one would think he was a modern-day Daniel Ellsberg, leaking the Pentagon Papers out of pure patriotism and desire for peace and right to triumph.

And so he might be, in his own mind.

But is it not hypocritical for a self-styled radical anarchist to be in the employ of government?

Monaghan believes that there's no government like no government. The government should respect his beliefs and fire him at once.

Last Post: Dwight Wilson, 1901-2007

2007-05-09T19:14:00.000-04:00

Such was the hecatomb of the First World War that boys of 15 could make their way into armed service without their true age being discovered, even in death.

Such was the call to arms if lucky enough to be caught and discharged, many of them would try to sneak their way back into service.

Such is the difference between our time and then, that few could even think of late teenage boys trying to do the same to serve in Afghanistan, or anywhere else where Canadian men are at arms.

Such were the men, and such were the times, that permit us now the luxury of forgetting the price paid.

Do not forget.

Source: Canada.com

Frequent Flyer Continued

2007-05-09T19:01:00.000-04:00

Another cabinet minister plays fast and loose with the rules of disclosure of public expenditure:

Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon made regular use of a government executive jet last year while keeping the trips off his travel expenses, documents show.

He's the second minister this week to have his travel habits exposed using government documents obtained by the NDP through an Access to Information Act request.

It's an embarrassing lapse of transparency for a government in the midst of trumpeting new accountability legislation in the House of Commons.

Transport Canada's aircraft flight log shows at least six trips taken by Cannon in 2006 aboard a sleek Citation C-550 executive jet that do not appear in his ministerial expenses posted on the department's website, as mandated by the federal Treasury Board.

....

Catherine Loubier, Cannon's communications director, confirmed there is no distinction between "program-related business'' and departmental business.

But she said the minister can't claim for costs incurred by the department. If the Transport Canada flight was the only expense for the minister's trip, he has nothing to declare, said Loubier.

"We have nothing to hide. This is public information.''

Again, the public will not draw such technical distinctions, true as they might be. This is not a club the government can afford to have the opposition beat them with. There is no national interest at risk in disclosing the particulars of these flights. Disclose and keep this from becoming a running sore.

Source: CTV

Frequent Flyer

2007-05-08T20:34:00.000-04:00

What's the difference between a ministerial expense and a departmental expense on behalf of the minister?

Who cares?

The public aren't accountants; all they'll see is coverup:

Federal Labour Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn said Monday he can’t do his job "by bicycle" but could not explain why his ministerial travel expenses failed to disclose a penny of almost $150,000 worth of charter flights last year.

The Conservatives have made a virtue of their ministerial frugality since taking office, but opposition MPs are now crying foul saying the government is simply hiding such expenses in different books.

Blackburn used the rental planes to tour Quebec as the regional economic development minister for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. But only eight of some 25 flights appeared in his quarterly "proactive disclosure" of expenses last year, and all eight listed air fare as zero.

This government needs to come up with an election platform, and soon, to get itself and the public attention focussed on getting things done as opposed to the endless nagging pinpricks from the opposition and accumulation of minor gaffes like the one above.

No one ever won an election by saying: "We did what we said we'd do. We don't know what we're going to do next. But whatever it is, we'll do it."

Help Wanted, Desperately

2007-05-07T18:30:00.000-04:00

Even in the most rundown, yellow dog Liberal corners of Toronto, the provincial Progressive Conservatives can run competitive nomination races, if only between two no-names willing to go kamikaze in hopes of future preferment or out of the obligation of long service.

Kingston may be no less a Liberal rotten borough, but it's a sign of how bad matters are getting under John Tory's leadership that it has to run want ads for sacrificial lambs.

But perhaps this was to be expected, considering that John Tory did everything he could to block Randy Hillier from the Lanark-Frontenac-Lennox and Addington nomination and failed.

Many conservative and populist party members detest John Tory privately even as they praise him publicly, as another Toronto establishment figure, an even redder Tory than Bill Davis with none of the redeeming qualities. They'll be sitting out the October election, or going through the motions, with the hope that a second McGuinty majority will force him to take the hint.

As incompetent the McGuinty government has been, it won't be facing the most inspired opposition campaign.

At least in the 2008 provincial leadership race, the party won't have to run want ads.

Head Not To Roll

2007-05-07T07:02:00.000-04:00

Everybody has been crying for Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor's head ever since the first reports came out about Afghan detainees being handed over by Canadian forces to local authorities for certain torture.

Everybody, it seems, except the general public:

A new Ipsos Reid poll, conducted exclusively for CanWest News Service and Global National, found 53 per cent of Canadians believe it is unfair for opposition parties to call for Mr. O'Connor to step down as they have been doing almost every day recently in the House of Commons. On the other hand, 36 per cent of Canadians believe Mr. O'Connor has been negligent and should have been monitoring what was happening to the detainees after they were turned over to Afghan officials.

The Harper government has been under steady siege in the Commons since allegations surfaced in late April that as many as 30 prisoners transferred by Canadians may have been abused.

I suspect Canadians are giving Minister O'Connor the benefit of the doubt in this affair. The fact that Canadian troops themselves are apparently not involved with detainee abuse, and that it is the Afghans who are the offenders, may allow for a good measure of absolution to the Canadian contingent," said Ipsos Reid senior vice-president John Wright.

Or it may reflect another part of the confused view that Canadians have of the Afghanistan mission. It would be an unspeakable evil to have our soldiers commit torture, but our hearts bleed less as long it's the Afghans doing it to their own.

Source: Ottawa Citizen

Mission Inexplicable

2007-05-06T10:35:00.000-04:00

One of the curious notions of our age is that war not only can be fought according to plan, but that it will also actually follow one.

More curious still is the notion that striking out at those who have already attacked will actually make countries more vulnerable to further attacks, a notion put to rest by anyone who has ever stood up to a schoolyard bully.

Miseducation, cultural malaise, ignorance or naivete--whatever the cause, these notions now are about to force the Conservative government to seriously consider pulling out of Afghanistan despite a casualty count that would have been thought a merciful visitation in previous wars:

Anyway you look at it, today's SES Research/Sun Media poll on the attitude of Canadians to our military mission in Afghanistan is bad news for Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

More than half of those surveyed say neither Canada nor NATO has deployed the resources necessary for success.

More than two out of three think our presence in Afghanistan makes us more vulnerable, not less, to a terrorist attack in Canada.

More than half say if there are further casualties -- a given since we're there until 2009 -- Canada should pull out.

Finally, more Canadians (48.3%) disagree with the government's management of the mission than agree (43.9%).

Afghanistan may be the most godforsaken land on Earth, a land otherwise best left to its own strange ways, but it is now part of that no man's land running over into the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan where the sole law is the law of Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and their minions.

It will not a peaceful, democratic land in our lifetimes. But it cannot continue to be the staging area and proving ground for world-wide jihad.

If some sort of government can be left behind to effectively contain and then eliminate that threat, the mission will have succeeded.

Our NATO allies, mostly enervated by the general Western European cultural decline, and fearful of their small but growing and militant Islamic minorities, have been sloughing their responsibilities on to Canada as a result.

Now is the time to communicate to the people that Canada has been standing almost alone, and has accomplished great things in doing so, but must call on its NATO allies to remember that Canada once paid much of the price for their freedom.

Communicate all of that above, with conviction, and Afghanistan will not threaten to bleed the government to death.

Gordon O'Connor can't do that. Can Stephen Harper?

The opposition won't.

Source: Toronto Sun

Grave Robbery

2007-05-04T07:26:00.000-04:00

The greatest prime minister Canada never had is now having his legacy marred by the sort of petty squabbling that marks too many fights over prominent persons' estates:

A bitter fight over Robert Stanfield's estate has sprawled over three years, prompted legal action in two provinces, and is now robbing the former Nova Scotia premier and leader of the federal Progressive Conservatives of his headstone.

Known as "the best prime minister Canada never had," Mr. Stanfield died in 2003 at the age of 89. He was buried at Halifax's Camp Hill cemetery, alongside other prominent Canadians such as brewer Alexander Keith and Joseph Howe, a former premier.

Mr. Stanfield's gravesite has now become embroiled in a legal battle between his third wife, Anne, and his four children from his first marriage.

Ms. Stanfield had the tombstone removed last fall, reportedly with plans to install a larger monument. The move angered her stepchildren, who argue Ms. Stanfield had no right to alter their family burial plot until a larger dispute over Mr. Stanfield's estate is settled. Last Thursday, the children filed a request for an injunction at a Halifax courthouse, asking Ms. Stanfield be barred from installing a new headstone and "restore the Stanfield lot to its previous condition."

Mr. Stanfield's son, Max, previously told the CBC that he and his siblings did not believe that their father would want a larger tombstone.

The tombstone dispute is just the latest fight in an ongoing family feud. In 2004, Mr. Stanfield's children launched legal action in Ontario, contending their father was not mentally competent when he altered his will in 1998 in order to award the bulk of his estate to his third wife.

Let the wife and children fight over the estate until there's nothing left.

But a man of Stanfield's public stature should not be left to lie under an unmarked grave like a pauper. Let the province put up the memorial, if necessary.

Source: National Post

Canada's Least Wanted

2007-05-02T18:48:00.000-04:00

No doubt some people will be tempted to nominate the usual gang of notorious criminals who, horrible though their crimes may be, caused no measurable damage to the functioning of the Canadian polity.

No doubt others will name whichever prominent politician whose ideology disagrees with them, no matter their actual effect on the peace, order and good government of the Dominion.

But everybody has an idea about who the worst Canadian of all time is.

Whoever that person might be, he is likely someone whom most Canadians have never heard of, but whose influence on public policy has been especially malign.

Maurice Strong would be such a candidate, because his visions of an authoritarian world government, and his backroom influence, have had significant influence on the drafters of the Kyoto Accord, the International Criminal Court, and other such unaccountable transnational institutions and agreements.

Who else can you think of?

We're In The Money

2007-05-02T06:31:00.000-04:00

Political scientists and historians will look back on the previous Liberal government's decision to ban corporate donations as a death wish, for it turned one of their greatest strengths into a fatal weakness.

Not that Tories should be complaining:

Stephen Harper's Conservatives raised almost 10 times more money from 10 times more donors than the Liberals in the first three months of 2007.

Even the NDP — historically the poorest of the three main national parties — managed to raise twice as much money as the once-mighty Grits.

According to quarterly fundraising results, posted Tuesday by Elections Canada, the Liberals managed to raise only $531,141 from 4,365 donors.

By contrast, the Tories vacuumed up almost $5.2 million from more than 45,000 contributors. The NDP scooped up $1.2 million from almost 15,000 donors.

Bearing in mind that the Grits might have been tapped out following their leadership race, this is still a pathetic result for Canada's self-proclaimed natural governing party.

It's going to show on the campaign trail too: the public can tell an expensive campaign from a cheap one. And it will make the Liberals look even less ready to govern.

Unless they resort to loans from generous benefactors that get mysteriously written off. That would be the Liberal way.

Source: Globe and Mail

Til The Cows Come Home

2007-05-01T07:16:00.000-04:00

Slacking on the job is a chronic problem everywhere, but even this response might be taking matters a little far.

Return Of The Dauphin

2007-04-30T06:25:00.000-04:00

Sound the trumpets for the coronation of the next leader of the Liberal Party:

He insists he wants to be known now for his first name — but Justin Trudeau rode on one of the most famous family names in Canadian politics to clinch the first victory of his new career Sunday.

Mr. Trudeau, 35, the first son of former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, survived his first political test by winning the Liberal nomination in a hard-fought battle in Montreal's Papineau riding.

To supporters, the victory will bring some of the old Trudeau dazzle back to the Liberal Party. To detractors, it could hobble Liberal efforts to rebuild their shattered fortunes in Quebec.

For Mr. Trudeau, standing before supporters who had been chanting “Tru-deau, Tru-deau,” it was a moment to step away from his father's memory even while he drew attention to it.

Before everyone starts getting nostalgic for the golden age of Pierre Trudeau, remember that it has been nearly 40 years since the first incarnation of Trudeaumania.

The Canada that was inspired to fall for the father is not the Canada that is expected to fall for the son. Justin Trudeau will be running a defensive campaign on his father's legacy, one that has effectively driven out Quebec, saddled us with eternal debt and fractured us into warring ethnic and regional fiefdoms.

In that sense, his will be a backward-looking campaign.

The Conservatives just have to keep promoting the notion of going forward whenever Justin Trudeau pops up to laud his father's past achievements and the country's past greatness under him.

No politician ever inspired a people through the rear view mirror.

Source: Globe and Mail

Trop Clair

2007-04-29T16:39:00.000-04:00

Andre Boisclair's political career is dead. The Parti Quebecois may be dying. But Quebec separatism will never die:

Embattled Parti Quebecois Leader Andre Boisclair on Friday rebuffed criticism by a departing executive member by saying someone with “real courage,” would have stayed to help the party through its current turmoil.

Boisclair said slamming the door in a huff is the old PQ way of behaving, but that has to end because the public is fed up with the drama.

“The real courage is not to leave and shut the door,” Boisclair said in reference to the resignation of the PQ’s Quebec City region’s PQ president, Philippe-Edwin Belanger. “The real courage is to engage in a debate.”

Belanger quit Thursday, accusing Boisclair of being afraid to face the party rank-and-file in a confidence vote this year or in early 2008 following the PQ’s disastrous March 26 election performance.

....

He was asked about a Le Soleil newspaper report that a group of sovereignty hard-liners —_including Patrick Bourgeois, editor of the sovereigntist newspaper Le Quebecois, and movie-maker Pierre Falardeau — were planning a May 4 meeting to discuss the creation of a new hard-line separatist party.

They accused Boisclair of being soft on separatism and planning to transform the PQ into a new kind of nationalist organization that will back attempts by the other parties to leverage more power out of Ottawa.

The Parti Quebecois vision of an independent quasi-socialist state linked in some nebuluous economic union with Canada has probably passed its sell-by date. Economic dirigisme is losing favour in Quebec and the economic union was always a non-starter, and if anything, reflected a certain timidity within the separatist movement.

But centuries of history and resentment cannot be set aside as blithely as economic policies. As long as there are Quebecois, there will be Quebecois nationalism.

The PQ compromised repeatedly on the principle of Quebec independence by hedging it with qualifiers about "sovereignty-association" and "winning conditions" instead of charging ahead for independence, full stop. And having compromised the principle, it has compromised its own survival.

The prospects for an uncompromising separatist party might never be better than with the failure of the PQ. At least it would recapture the vigour that the movement needs.

Source: Canada.com

Running Interference

2007-04-28T15:12:00.000-04:00

U.S. Ambassador criticizes Liberal government's stand on softwood lumber and bilateral relations generally: usual suspects outraged at American interferene in domestic affairs.

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore denounces current Conservative government's stance on Kyoto: usual suspects offer no comment.

Curse The Darkness

2007-04-26T18:24:00.000-04:00

With carbon credits traded as modern day indulgences for the remission of sins against Gaia, and addlepated songstresses proclaiming their virtue through mortifications of their rear flesh, one is increasingly reminded of certain exaggerated elements of late mediaeval European society.

We have yet to see the strange sights of St. Vitus' dance breaking out in the streets, but we are seeing one of those sudden enthusiasms that sometimes sweeps a credulous populace: the purge of the incandescent light bulb.

Six months ago, no one in the world saw the incandescent bulb as the greatest threat to Earth's survival. Now everyone's getting in the act to ban the bulb--supposedly because of its admitted inefficiencies, but perhaps because of hysteria that fails to consider the even worse effects of some of its replacements:

How much money does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent lightbulb? About $4.28 for the bulb and labor — unless you break the bulb. Then you, like Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, could be looking at a cost of about $2,004.28, which doesn’t include the costs of frayed nerves and risks to health.

Sound crazy? Perhaps no more than the stampede to ban the incandescent light bulb in favor of compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs) — a move already either adopted or being considered in California, Canada, the European Union and Australia.

According to an April 12 article in The Ellsworth American, Bridges had the misfortune of breaking a CFL during installation in her daughter’s bedroom: It dropped and shattered on the carpeted floor.

Aware that CFLs contain potentially hazardous substances, Bridges called her local Home Depot for advice. The store told her that the CFL contained mercury and that she should call the Poison Control hotline, which in turn directed her to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.

The DEP sent a specialist to Bridges’ house to test for mercury contamination. The specialist found mercury levels in the bedroom in excess of six times the state’s “safe” level for mercury contamination of 300 billionths of a gram per cubic meter.

....

Consider the procedure offered by the Maine DEP’s Web page entitled, “What if I accidentally break a fluorescent bulb in my home?”

Don’t vacuum bulb debris because a standard vacuum will spread mercury-containing dust throughout the area and contaminate the vacuum. Ventilate the area and reduce the temperature. Wear protective equipment like goggles, coveralls and a dust mask.

Collect the waste material into an airtight container. Pat the area with the sticky side of tape. Wipe with a damp cloth. Finally, check with local authorities to see where hazardous waste may be properly disposed.

The only step the Maine DEP left off was the final one: Hope that you did a good enough cleanup so that you, your family and pets aren’t poisoned by any mercury inadvertently dispersed or missed.

This, of course, assumes that people are even aware that breaking CFLs entails special cleanup procedures.

So why the sudden enthusiasm to ban the bulb? Because it's much easier to convince the public of a threat in their own homes, now, than some abstract threat happening to someone else in the future.

Rick Mercer's "one tonne challenge" failed because people don't measure their carbon emitting activities the way they clip coupons and watch their gas gauges. Even if they could, they wouldn't, because it isn't relevant to their daily lives.

But everybody's got light bulbs.

Life Is Like A Box Of Chocolates

2007-04-25T21:01:00.000-04:00

There is, at times, a symbolism behind a man's method and weapons of attack. Sending a box of chocolates rubbed with raw chicken is rich with meaning (and flavour, and salmonella, no doubt). What meaning that is, other than simple psychosis, we may never know:

The B.C. Court of Appeal has quashed the firing of a CBC Radio reporter who sent a box of contaminated chocolates to an activist who questioned his journalistic integrity.

Bob Keating was fired in 2003 but his union, the Canadian Media Guild, grieved the dismissal and an arbitrator overturned it in favour of a three-month suspension and an agreement to take an anger-management course.

The CBC appealed the decision and a B.C. Supreme Court judge overruled the arbitrator, saying he had exceeded his mandate by considering a favourable psychologist's report on Mr. Keating made after the firing and not allowing evidence of a past angry outburst.

The ruling appears to open the door to Mr. Keating's reinstatement at the CBC, but he has found work elsewhere and has no plans to return to his former employer.

“That's not going to happen,” he said yesterday about going back to CBC.

“I've moved on . . . I made a mistake. It cost me a career . . . I want to put it behind me.”

What a bizarre, passive-aggressive way to get back at someone. And what a cowardly way, as well. I'd have had more sympathy for the guy if he'd manned up and decked the guy. Or just said nothing and let the accusation fall of its own weight.

You wonder how many other nuts are running around at our esteemed public broadcaster.

Source: Globe and Mail

Ho Down

2007-04-24T07:18:00.000-04:00

Take hip-hop "artists'" three favourite words away, and their works will end up sounding like John Cage's 4'33".

Sounds good to me!

This Old House

2007-04-23T06:20:00.000-04:00

I cannot recall who first said that one could derive the antonym of any word by attaching "social" as a prefix, but how true that is.

Consider the matter of social housing in Toronto, which does little to keep its residents properly sheltered:

A group of about 30 tenants of the Toronto Community Housing Corp.-owned building at Eglinton Avenue East and Markham Road marched into the management office Thursday with a litany of complaints that includes chunks of ceiling falling, an infestation of mice and roaches, and a week without hot water and heat.

"I've pretty much duct-taped everything, just to seal the mice and the roaches and the bugs [from] coming in," said Sherry-Ann Goordeen.

Goordeen, who has lived in the building for five years, says part of the damaged ceiling once fell on the head of her seven-year-old son.

The tipping point, however, was a week without hot water or heat that extended through the cold Easter weekend.

To keep warm, tenants used ovens and slept fully clothed. They are demanding a rebate for the week of inconvenience and that other problems be addressed.

No surprise that the city houses its poorest in a manner to rival the worst slumlords.

The city has no economic incentive to keep its housing habitable: theirs is a captive market, kept marginally alive on social assistance (another antonym) and reminded daily that it cannot survive without the city's beneficence.

And naturally, such housing tends to attract not those who have merely fallen down on their luck, but those who are fighting to keep from getting back on up it.

We will see more of these stories as Toronto continues to deny that it is on the brink of bankruptcy, as New York was in the 1970s.

And we will be told that everyone else is to blame, and to pay, for Toronto's plight.

Source: CBC

You Say You Want A Revolution

2007-04-22T09:03:00.000-04:00

No, this is not Gloria Galloway trying to stir up her much hoped for Conservative leadership revolt, but the Toronto Star musing on the prospects for same if the next election should produce another minority government:

"If he (Harper) takes the party to minority twice, there are going to be questions raised (about his leadership)," says John Wright, senior vice-president of the Ipsos Reid polling firm. Wright adds that a minority government is a very real possibility given that most Canadians don't really know Harper and, worse yet, don't completely trust him.

Wright says if the Conservatives win a status quo minority, "you got to think the party itself would be looking and thinking about getting another leader."

The next few weeks are the moment of truth on a possible trip to the polls by Canadians before summer. The Conservatives and their opponents have been primed for a possible quick election call, but if it doesn't happen soon, the likelihood is that Harper has decided to wait until the fall or possibly next spring.

And so arise the usual names:

Peter MacKay, because his superficial charm and stunning incompetence are the definition of the media's idea of an ideal Tory leader.

Jim Flaherty, because the media would love nothing more than to haul out all his supposed sins from the Mike Harris years.

Jim Prentice, because he's got the Red Toryism without the fecklessness of Joe Clark.

Maxime Bernier, because he's from Quebec, and can thus restore the unconstitutional convention that the prime minister must come from there.

Jason Kenney, because he's supposedly got an even scarier hidden agenda than the current leader.

And of course, John Baird, of whom it is diplomatically said that "it's unclear if he would want to be put under the spotlight of a leadership bid."

So there you have it, folks. Even though Lester Pearson handled two minority governments without a serious revolt and Mackenzie King handled even worse, Stephen Harper supposedly cannot survive a second minority government.

Of course, how the Liberals are expected to win one with Quebec and the West out of the picture, we are not supposed to ask.

Team Spirit

2007-04-21T11:53:00.000-04:00

Do you know how hard it is to make priorities?

The federal Liberals want the Conservative government to push for a lineup change to Team Canada at the upcoming world hockey championship because of ethnic slurs that were allegedly made by a player toward a francophone referee more than a year ago.

The allegations, which sparked two lawsuits, revolve around an incident at a December 2005 NHL game involving Phoenix Coyotes forward Shane Doan and a francophone linesman. An NHL investigation absolved Mr. Doan of any wrongdoing.

"There is now proof that hockey player Shane Doan uttered racial insults during a game against the Montreal Canadiens," said Marcel Proulx, the Liberal party deputy whip, in the House of Commons.

So why should the federal government care about a hockey player mouthing off on the ice to a ref, like thousands of players before and after him, after a bad call against him?

Mr. Proulx later said it wasn't up to him to decide whether Mr. Doan should play, but he added the government must seek explanations from Hockey Canada.

"I'm saying that the government of Canada finances partly Hockey Canada, so if they agree that there shouldn't be racism in sports they should question Hockey Canada on how they can include him in their team," Mr. Proulx said after question period.

According to a document tabled last month in Quebec Superior Court in support of a lawsuit launched by Liberal MP Denis Coderre, linesman Michel Cormier reported that "at the (end) of the third period No. 19 Shane Doan skated (by) me saying: 'F... French did a good job.'"

Mr. Coderre's suit was in response to one Mr. Doan filed against the politician in the middle of the 2006 federal election campaign.

What is the damage that has been suffered here? The linesman has surely heard far worse on the ice, and no one seriously believes that either he, or NHL referees, or even the Quebecois nation, have been defamed beyond repair.

But when there is government money involved, however tangentially, the government must be to blame.

Settle the matter on the ice and not in court or on the Commons floor. It already was when Doan took a gross misconduct penalty and the league backed up Doan.

Radioactive Man

2007-04-21T11:31:00.000-04:00

Hearken back to the good old days of the Manhattan Project, when a whole host of scientists involved in building the first atomic bombs turned out to be passing on the plans to the Soviets.

Sure, they might have been a little bit too fashionably leftish in their political views, but Stalin was an ally at the time, and all hands were needed to beat the Germans to the bomb.

What possible mitigating reasons could exist now, however, for hiring Iranian nationals at nuclear plants when Iran has been telling everyone it will build nukes and drop them on Israel and the West at the first opportunity?

A former engineer at the nation's largest nuclear power plant has been charged with taking computer access codes and software to Iran and using it to download details of plant control rooms and reactors, authorities said.
The FBI said there's no indication the plant employee training software had any terrorist connections.

Mohammad Alavi, who worked at the triple-reactor Palo Verde power plant west of Phoenix, was arrested April 9 at Los Angeles International Airport when he arrived on a flight from Iran, authorities said.

Alavi, 49, is a U.S. citizen and denies any wrongdoing, said his attorney, Milagros Cisneros of the Federal Defender's Office in Phoenix.

He is charged with a single count of violating a trade embargo that prohibits Americans from exporting goods and services to Iran. If convicted, he would face up to 21 months in prison.

According to court records, the software is used only for training plant employees, but allowed users access to details on the Palo Verde control rooms and the plant layout.

Not bomb making plans, to be sure, but something potentially no worse: how to start a nuclear power plant meltdown.

We didn't hire enemy nationals of doubtful loyalty for such sensitive positions during World War II--at least, not knowingly. There are surely enough people in the West who can work in nuclear plants without having to hire Iranians.

Not now, not as this point in history.

Source: Breitbart.com

Stormy Weather

2007-04-19T18:45:00.000-04:00

The first few weeks of spring's unseasonably cold weather may have led many to forget the first few weeks of winter's unseasonably mild weather. Oh, and the storms that knocked down a bunch of trees in Stanley Park, which were proclaimed as undeniable proof of manmade global warming's unleashing of a host of climatic plagues.

Except that they weren't:

[A couple of thoughts about the Stanley Park "devastation," after having visited Vancouver's rightly famous downtown park myself at the end of March: Even if SP has had 10,000 trees felled by two major windstorms this past winter, the park contains half a million, or more. So 10,000, while a large number, would be just 2% of the total inventory. And consider that wind has been an important natural part of forest renewal since time immemorial. Typhoon Freda, for instance, hit the park just as badly in 1962, long before the world had heard of SUVs or begun to think climate change was manmade. And Freda caused nearly $5 billion damage (in 2007 dollars), far more than the storms of 2006-07, neither of which was large enough even to warrant being named. And, finally, SP exists only because the federal government leased the land to Vancouver beginning in 1886 because the entire 1,000-acre peninsula had been logged out. Few, if any, of the trees toppled this winter were more than 120 years old. They were certainly not "old growth." Too many tree-huggers and enviro-squishes see nature as existing in a perpetual, never-changing equilibrium -- as if preserved under a dome. All change to "nature," therefore, is unnatural. So any change to SP, for instance, is proof some force beyond nature (i.e. manmade warming) is to blame. But SP is a manmade park to begin with, and wind damage there is nothing new. The level witnessed this winter is not even new in the park's relatively short history.]

The only planet climate and vegetation don't change on is a dead one.

Yet the promoters of the hyperenvironmentalist agenda rely on our short memories to conceal to divert us from this fact.

If it didn't happen before in our current memory (which grows ever more unreliable with time), it's never happened before.

Source: National Post

Senator Brown

2007-04-18T18:45:00.000-04:00

Bert Brown has been waiting behind a long line of Liberal hacks who have taken their seats in the Senate with nothing more to recommend them than the Prime Minister's desire to reward faithful service to the party or to appease some particular ethnocultural bloc.

Three times has he run for election to the Senate; twice has he been elected thereto, only to be ignored.

Though the law and the constitution did not forbid the Prime Minister of the day from appointing him to office, he was frozen out by those who did not perceive the need for Senate reform, or chose to fight against it.

Now his long wait for the Senate seat he has merited through his long efforts and championship of transforming the last wholly appointed national legislative body in any Western democracy will be coming to a well-deserved end.

Would that more politicians had the perseverance to achieve their goals this way. Bert Brown was championing a Triple-E Senate when the idea was considered mere constitutional crackpottery by the governing classes.

Now he's finally the most symbolically important step closer to it.

And the anachronism of an appointed Senate is that much closer to passing into the dustbin of history--a House of Lords without the nobility.

To Arms

2007-04-17T20:02:00.000-04:00

A timely reminder from the great Diogenes , that in spite of the crime at Virginia Tech, a society where the state does not enjoy the monopoly on protective force is still a freer society.

Naked Ambition

2007-04-16T22:29:00.000-04:00

The mutual exchange of credibility between the Liberals and Greens that has arisen out of last week's deal has reaped yet more rewards in the person of Briony Penn, who left the Greens for the Liberals out of dismay even before the deal went down.
This is Briony Penn in a less formal setting, protesting logging on Saltspring Island in B.C.

This is her timeless quote for Colombo's Canadian Quotations:

"I've got a PhD and no one listens," she declared. "I take my clothes off, and here you all are. So thank you."

No, no, thank you.

The new Red Green show will provide hours of entertainment for political junkies across the land.

World's Oldest Profession

2007-04-16T06:30:00.000-04:00

The CBC has come upon a shocking discovery that hitherto has escaped the notice of chroniclers of mass armies, gold rushes and politics alike: where there's a lot men and a lot of money, there's a lot of whores!

Green With Resentment

2007-04-15T16:43:00.000-04:00

In politics, your worst enemies are not necessarily your direct opponents, not even your ambitious colleagues, but the people trying to occupy your particular niche.

We saw it in the virulent rhetoric with which the remnants of the old Progressive Conservatives attacked Reform/Alliance while sparing Jean Chretien's Liberals.

Now we may see the same emnity between the Greens and the NDP:

Green Party Leader Elizabeth May says she's been trying for months to get the NDP to talk about ways the two parties can co-operate on shared priorities, but the party has kept the door firmly closed to her overtures.

She was reacting to NDP criticism over the announcement this week by May and Liberal Leader Stephane Dion that neither leader would run an opponent in the other's riding.

....

The NDP has called the move undemocratic, and former party leader Ed Broadbent revealed Friday that May had called former Canadian ambassador to the UN Stephen Lewis to try and get him to broker a deal with New Democrat Leader Jack Layton.

She admitted she has been frustrated with Layton's lack of co-operation, and turned to her old friend Lewis to try and open up the lines of communication.

"What the hell is wrong with Jack Layton that he can't answer a phone call?" she said on CTV's Question Period.

"I don't understand this. He talks to Stephen Harper all the time. Surely, our shared values are much closer between the NDP and the Greens."

Leave aside the petulant whining of a teenage wallflower who can't catch the eye of the high school football quarterback.

Jack Layton doesn't return her calls because the Green Party has taken the place that the NDP held for the past little while: occasional lenders of their social conscience, policy platform and stop-the-Tories votes.

Layton knows he'd just be a third wheel in the relationship.

They can't both have the same spot in Dion's affections.

Source: CTV

Sudden Jihad Syndrome Strikes Montreal?

2007-04-14T12:52:00.000-04:00

The Quebecois may not be too fond of Jews either, but gut instinct told me that these two thugs weren't likely to be named Tremblay and Pelletier:

Two Montreal men have been accused of a raft of attacks against the city’s Jewish community, including the firebombing of a Snowdon community centre that police are treating as a hate-related crime.

Omar Bulphred, 21, and Azim Ibragimov, 23, appeared briefly in Quebec Court on Friday to be arraigned on charges stemming from incidents that began last fall. Both were denied bail.

Azim Ibragimov, left, and Omar Bulphred face nine charges each stemming from events that began last fall.

The case is due back in court on Monday, at which time a date could be set for a bail hearing.

In addition to their alleged roles in a rash of firebombings, the two are accused of conspiring to commit kidnapping and armed robbery. But it’s not known who or what their potential victims were.

The Gazette could have told you of how disputes are often handled in certain regions of Russia, but this would have required making some educated assumptions, a little investigative digging, and raising uncomfortable questions about the nature of our peaceable kingdom:

Jeffrey Boro, president of the Canadian Jewish Congress, said he was told by police that the two accused are Muslims of Russian descent who were born in Canada.

“That makes it very disconcerting for those who live here,” he said. “We’re raising people here with such hatred in their hearts for people that they’ve never met or had anything to do with.”

But no doubt their attitudes were formed in their communities and reinforced every day with formal propaganda and casual comment.

The barbarisms of the Caucusus are finding fertile soil in our colder climes.

So much the worse.

Source: Montreal Gazette

Garth's Got A Secret

2007-04-14T12:26:00.000-04:00

RepoCreepo has been feeding Garth Turner's insatiable need for attention ever since he joined the Liberals over his disappointment in not having his brilliant financial mind, sense of discretion and team spirit recognized with a cabinet post.

Now we're told that the great champion of open debate and democratic process had his nomination meeting held in secret.

No doubt Turner will be screaming that his confidences have been betrayed and whoever leaked the news about the meeting should be kicked out of the party.

However, one unnamed commenter suggest that it will be all for naught:

Garth has finally reached the minimum requirements to collect his MP pension. He has served 2243 Days (6 years, 1 month, 22 days) and is now over the age of 55.

My bet is that he'll pull a Boolinda (by the beginning of summer) with the excuse that he's not going to run again because he just doesn't have to take this "crap" anymore.

Garth isn't getting any press these days and his fundraising efforts sound marginal at best. Maybe he can get a lemonade stand going soon so that he can pay for the stakes for his shiny new red liberal - strike that - GARTH signs.

But then his lemonade would be real lemons - they'd be sour grapes.

Not that Canada's greatest financial advisor needs the money. (Or so we think. Did Garth take a bath on income trusts as well?)

But frankly, he is entertaining in a strange sort of way, like certain drunks ranting on at the local bar.

It would be a shame to lose both him and Belinda this year. We need someone to kick around.

Red Light, Green Light

2007-04-13T19:37:00.000-04:00

We all knew what Jason Cherniak was going to say about the strange new coupling of Stephane Dion and Elizabeth May.

It was his brilliant idea, after all.

He won't let you forget how much foresight he had to join Dion's campaign when everybody else was boarding the Iggy-Rae juggernauts.

Beside him, Criswell was a mere piker.

Gut Check

2007-04-13T06:48:00.000-04:00

Well, at least it beats getting knocked out and waking up hours later in a bathtub full of ice and a strange scar on your stomach.

May Day

2007-04-12T20:22:00.000-04:00

The Green Party occupies a curious twilight position in the Canadian political scene: not quite a major party, but much more than a fringe party. Its previous leader, Jim Harris, hit on just the right mix of environmentalism and fiscal responsibility to make the Green Party a safe place to park protest votes for people who want clean air but can't stand hippies.

Elizabeth May is set to undo all of her predecessor's good work, by cozying up to Stephane Dion and cutting a shabby that undercuts her and her party's clean, green image:

Stephane Dion has decided not to run a Liberal candidate against Green Party Leader Elizabeth May in the next federal election.

Dion, who shares May’s environmental idealism, is expected to make the announcement today. In return, sources say May will promise not to run a Green candidate against the Liberal leader and will essentially endorse Dion for prime minister.

The extraordinary back-scratching between two supposedly rival leaders is unheard of in Canadian politics and could generate a backlash within both parties.

Many Greens are already upset with May for lavishly praising Dion’s environmental record and inferring that he’d make a better prime minister than Stephen Harper.

What does May hope to accomplish with this deal? It is by no means certain that Central Nova's Liberal voters will happily follow behind her, however much they may detest Peter MacKay.

If she wins her seat, she does so not on her own merits but as a stooge for Stephane Dion. If she doesn't, she looks doubly foolish for taking the deal, and her leadership will likely be finished.

Worst of all, she confirms the perception that the Green Party isn't ready to become a serious player, and that it's a farm team for left-leaning environmentalist Liberals.

The Green Party built up a lot of credibility by not appearing to be playing politics as usual. Now it's all about to be lost because of May's strange infatuation with Dion.

Source: Toronto Star

24 Heures

2007-04-12T17:57:00.000-04:00

Despite their endless grievances about the rest of the world doing them wrong, and their refusal to improve their situation and govern themselves responsibly, progressive opinion never fails to champion their claims of oppression and occupation of their nation by a foreign people accused throughout history of all manner of nefarious schemes.

Now they complain that they are being portrayed in the popular media with vicious and bigoted stereotypes that verge on the blasphemous.

But that's enough about the next season of 24.

Two Minutes For Holding Up Real Business

2007-04-12T06:50:00.000-04:00

Why do legislatures seriously debate trivial matters leading to irrelevant resolutions? Because they can:

The Nova Scotia legislature has unanimously endorsed a resolution chastising the NHL for its decision to schedule the Pittsburgh Penguins'-Ottawa Senators playoff game for Saturday afternoon rather than the evening Hockey Night in Canada slot.

The league is trying to accommodate the U.S. television network NBC, which usually airs NHL games on weekend afternoons.

Conservative backbencher Pat Dunn drafted the resolution. Nova Scotians are keen to see Dartmouth native Sidney Crosby in his first playoff season and a 4 p.m. faceoff makes no sense, Dunn said.

"Most Nova Scotians are very busy with their lives — out, some working, some shopping, running errands and so on," Dunn said. "Just not a good time to be sitting down watching a hockey game prior to parents getting meals ready for their children and so on."

Tough. Let the NHL and CBC find out the usual way--through decreased viewership and ad revenue--and get back to the real work of legislating.

Source: CBC

Magnanimity

2007-04-11T17:56:00.000-04:00

Given the choice between slogging away on the opposition backbenches for the next few years as an object of condescension and contempt, or between making millions as a figurehead executive in the family business with the prospect of making millions more as a figurehead auto maker CEO, which would you choose?

For Belinda, parliamentary politics was just another bauble to amuse herself with, only to be thrown away once she had had her fun with it, like her husbands and lovers.

Faced for the first time with challenges that required her merits, and not her father's money, to conquer, she withered.

Her contributions to the body politic remain as insubstantial as she; a few photo-ops, a few headlines, and a few bits of gossip.

Conservatives may rest assured, however, that her failure was their success.

Notwithstanding

2007-04-11T06:48:00.000-04:00

To the chattering classes, the notwithstanding clause is considered akin to the so-called Satanic verses in the Qu'ran, an embarrassing interpolation into a sacred text which must be ignored or explained away lest the faithful be scandalized and the faithless emboldened.

The rest of the country apparently doesn't share the same sense of shame and disgust:

More than two-thirds of Canadians believe politicians should have the power to override court decisions by having the final word on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in certain circumstances, a survey indicates.

With the 25th anniversary of the Charter approaching, the Montreal-based Association for Canadian Studies and the Carleton University Survey Centre in Ottawa polled Canadians on what they think of the controversial "notwithstanding" clause in the Constitution, which allows governments to override rights.

Sixty-eight per cent either strongly or somewhat agreed the "notwithstanding clause" should remain intact.

....

The notwithstanding clause, added to the Constitution as a deal-maker at the insistence of several premiers during negotiations in the early 1980s, has seldom been used in Canada.

Both Parliament and provincial governments have a limited power to pass laws that are exempt from certain Charter provisions for a period of five years.

Until now, it was safe to assume that the public believed, as do the elites, that the Charter is the fons et origo of all our rights and freedoms, and that to change one word within (or not to read in many words without) would lead the nation into tyranny.

But as our judiciary has been spinning out of control with interpretations of the Charter that recognize strange new rights while denigrating others, perhaps people are becoming reassured that there is a remedy to rein in the courts.

Certainly the people do not share the same faith in judicial infallibility as the elites, else they would not be calling for an elected judiciary at the same time.

Most of our constitutional protections and conventions have arisen out of the need to check the predations of the executive or legislative branches. Now, it seems, we need to check the predations of the judiciary.

Source: National Post

Leading Indicators

2007-04-10T18:05:00.000-04:00

There was a time in this fair land when SES polls did not run, and we wonder how our predecessors managed to survive without their daily fix of Nik Nanos' consistently accurate numbers.

If these numbers are anything to go by--and this being SES, they're money in the bank--Stephen Harper is demonstrating the overwhelming power of incumbency in the face of a weak opposition:

Although the Conservatives are short of the committed support necessary to form a majority government, Stephen Harper has a clear advantage over Liberal Leader Stephan Dion. Forty-two percent of Canadians choose Harper as the best PM followed by Dion at 17%, Layton at 16%, Duceppe at 7% and Elizabeth May at 4% (the rest chose none of the above or were unsure). At this point in time Stephen Harper personally may be in majority territory but his party is not.

What is emerging is a situation where one leader is ahead of his party (Harper) and another leader trails his party (Dion). Of note, Harper is the second choice as the best PM among committed Liberals, New Democrats and BQ voters and the first choice as Best PM in the province of Quebec.

The office puts a stamp on the man more than the man puts a stamp on the office. Stephen Harper never enjoyed this much of a lead over Paul Martin even as Martin's campaign was sinking; simply holding the prime ministerial office is good for a few percentage points in these polls.

Yet now he leads significantly everywhere: in all regions, in all age groups, among men and women.

The real problem in this poll, however, is that Stephane Dion is trailing Jack Layton in several key demographics: everyone under 40, men, and Quebec (Quebec!) .

Keeping in mind the significant advantages of incumbency, there's still no silver lining for Dion. A majority of his own party's supporters doesn't think he'd make the best PM--40% just doesn't cut it. He should be at two-thirds, minimum, no matter how feckless a leader he is.

Dion needs an election campaign, whether he wants one or not, because only then will he have the opportunity to overcome his current image problems.

When people aren't paying attention, it's always the guy who's got the job who looks best.

Sudden Death In Afghanistan

2007-04-10T06:30:00.000-04:00

Wars must be fought according to plan, but no war ever follows one. Lulls break suddenly into storms and death follows in their wake:

Caked with several layers of dust and fatigued from almost five weeks in the field, the soldiers of Hotel Company took to their vehicles on the afternoon of Easter Sunday knowing a warm shower and a fresh meal were only one task away.

The troops of Hotel Company, 2nd Battalion, The Royal Canadian Regiment, had been patrolling the Maywand District of northwest Kandahar province since March 6 and Sunday’s task - to escort a convoy of troops and supplies through the desert into Helmand province, as they had done the two previous days before - was to be their last before returning to base for some much-needed rest.

Not only that, but there had been no attacks on police checkpoints during the weeks they were patrolling the Maywand area and their company commander had formed strong and fruitful relationships with local leaders and elders.

Morale would have had to be sky-high.

Then at about 1:30 p.m. a LAV III carrying 10 Canadian soldiers hit an improvised explosive device (IED) that ripped through the back of the armoured carrier, killing six soldiers.

Military leaders said Monday that the bomb was laid at a choke point among a collection of deep irrigation wells - at the only place vehicles would have to drive in order to avoid a major diversion.

A few feet either way, and the bomb doesn't go off. A moment's delay or haste, and many more might have died. The difference between a routine mission and a deadly one often comes down to as little as inches and seconds.

A lesson that has to be learned again with every war: there are no guarantees on the battlefield.

Source: National Post

Iron Harvest

2007-04-09T08:23:00.000-04:00

The fields at Vimy are now lush with grass and crops, but still they bear fruits of the bitter harvest reaped ninety years ago today:

When Marcel Vion was harvesting his autumn crop of beets not long ago, the earth suddenly opened up before him, and revealed a lost tableau from 90 years before. Beneath the front wheels of his tractor, and for metres beyond, were the remains of a Canadian underground field hospital, entombed in the earth for generations.

"Sappe," the 69-year-old farmer muttered -- "tunnel" -- and hit the brakes. This was not a surprising occurrence. Two years earlier, a nearby farmhand had been knocked out cold when he'd strolled into a furrow filled with leaking mustard gas. One farmer has been killed in the past decade, and others injured, by the shells of 1916. Such is life in the farmlands below Vimy Ridge.

This town has an active munitions depot, which still receives regular, deadly deposits from the area's farmers, and its own active mine-clearing team. It contains thousands of still-lethal antiques, and its gas-leak alarm still occasionally strikes fear into the town's residents.

....

"Every time we go out with the plow, we turn up something from the war," says potato farmer Alfred Ansart, 73, taking a break from washing potatoes in the brick courtyard of his farm just outside the village. His small plot spent decades disgorging deadly shells, bombs and mines; in recent years, it has regularly churned up hundreds of fuses from shells, bayonets, bullets, and pieces of hardware and uniforms.

The metal objects tend to rise to the surface, damaging harvesters and plows. Somewhat lower in the ground are far worse things.

"We all know not to set the tines on our plows too deep," says Mr. Vion, the beet farmer. "If we go below a certain level, we start disturbing the soldiers down there."

Volumes of histories backed up with volumes of photographs and statistics fail to reveal the full scope of World War I as effectively as this: nearly a century on, men are still finding countless remains thereof.

Even today, bomb disposal experts are still defusing live shells, mines and grenades before careless tourists and visitors fall victim to them, all across northern France and Belgium.

The phenomenon has its own peculiar name: the iron harvest.

Let it be a lesson that the reminders of war cannot always be neatly packed away in cemeteries and cenotaphs.

Easter Sunday

2007-04-08T08:18:00.000-04:00

And on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalen cometh early, when it was yet dark, unto the sepulchre; and she saw the stone taken away from the sepulchre. She ran, therefore, and cometh to Simon Peter, and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and saith to them: They have taken away the Lord out of the sepulchre, and we know not where they have laid him. Peter therefore went out, and that other disciple, and they came to the sepulchre. And they both ran together, and that other disciple did outrun Peter, and came first to the sepulchre. And when he stooped down, he saw the linen cloths lying; but yet he went not in.

Then cometh Simon Peter, following him, and went into the sepulchre, and saw the linen cloths lying. And the napkin that had been about his head, not lying with the linen cloths, but apart, wrapped up into one place. Then that other disciple also went in, who came first to the sepulchre: and he saw, and believed. For as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead. The disciples therefore departed again to their home.

But Mary stood at the sepulchre without, weeping. Now as she was weeping, she stooped down, and looked into the sepulchre, And she saw two angels in white, sitting, one at the head, and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had been laid. They say to her: Woman, why weepest thou? She saith to them: Because they have taken away my Lord; and I know not where they have laid him. When she had thus said, she turned herself back, and saw Jesus standing; and she knew not that it was Jesus. Jesus saith to her: Woman, why weepest thou? whom seekest thou? She, thinking it was the gardener, saith to him: Sir, if thou hast taken him hence, tell me where thou hast laid him, and I will take him away.

Jesus saith to her: Mary. She turning, saith to him: Rabboni (which is to say, Master). Jesus saith to her: Do not touch me, for I am not yet ascended to my Father. But go to my brethren, and say to them: I ascend to my Father and to your Father, to my God and your God.

John 20:1-17

Los Angeles, Mexico

2007-04-07T08:46:00.000-04:00

While conservatives often bewail the Islamicization of Europe, not all of them have been paying enough attention to the growing problem of Mexican irrendentism within the southwestern United States and in southern California in particular.

It is now entirely possible for persons of Hispanic descent to be born, live, and die within an entirely Hispanic cultural milieu there, without having to learn a word of English or make any other accomodation to English-speaking American society.

With Mexicanization comes the call for secession and/or reintegration into Mexico: a faint cry today, limited to radical groups and their academic fellow-travellers for now, but one that will grow as it becomes clear that the United States does not have the will to defend its southern border against a mass of illegal immigrants intent on draining the milk cow dry before killing and eating it.

Gates of Vienna has links to several articles suggesting that a low-level form of ethnic cleansing is taking place in southern California as Mexican gangs turn on local black populations.

This article from the Guardian (yes, the short-sighted old Grauniad), is remarkably blunt in its assessment of the situation:

Los Angeles is where an estimated 120,000 gang members across five counties battle over turf, pride and drugs. It is a city of violence as a new race war escalates between new Hispanic gangs and older black groups, each trying to ethnically cleanse the other. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who has referred to his city as 'the gang capital of America', has launched a crackdown on the new threat.

....

They have names such as Mara Salvatrucha, La Mirada Locos and Barrio Van Nuys, and now the 204th Street gang - who made it clear that they will kill innocent girls to force black families off their turf.

Last year there were 269 gang-related killings in LA. Gang-related crime leaped 15.7 per cent last year, as most other types of crime fell. Hate crimes against black people have surged. With a rapidly growing Hispanic population, LA's gang culture is shifting. It means that being black in the wrong neighbourhood can get you killed.

That's not ordinary gang warfare: that's outright insurrection.

How many more people in the Hispanic community down there are silently supporting the gangs, not out of fear, but out of hope that they'll drive the blacks and the Anglos out?

Is the Mexican government looking on with approval? It has been using illegal immigration as a safety valve to prevent its own people from fomenting revolution from within. And it has no shame in encouraging its nationals to break American law.

Perhaps the U.S. should be sending some of that troop surge to its own borders first.

Good Friday

2007-04-06T09:05:00.000-04:00

And when they were come to the place which is called Calvary, they crucified him there; and the robbers, one on the right hand, and the other on the left. And Jesus said: Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do. But they, dividing his garments, cast lots. And the people stood beholding, and the rulers with them derided him, saying: He saved others; let him save himself, if he be Christ, the elect of God.

And the soldiers also mocked him, coming to him, and offering him vinegar, And saying: If thou be the king of the Jews, save thyself. And there was also a superscription written over him in letters of Greek, and Latin, and Hebrew: THIS IS THE KING OF THE JEWS. And one of those robbers who were hanged, blasphemed him, saying: If thou be Christ, save thyself and us. But the other answering, rebuked him, saying: Neither dost thou fear God, seeing thou art condemned under the same condemnation?

And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds; but this man hath done no evil. And he said to Jesus: Lord, remember me when thou shalt come into thy kingdom. And Jesus said to him: Amen I say to thee, this day thou shalt be with me in paradise. And it was almost the sixth hour; and there was darkness over all the earth until the ninth hour. And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst.

And Jesus crying out with a loud voice, said: Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. And saying this, he gave up the ghost. Now the centurion, seeing what was done, glorified God, saying: Indeed this was a just man.

(Luke 23:33-47)

You Can Run, But You Can't Hide

2007-04-05T06:32:00.000-04:00

Adscam adman Jean Lafleur's faulty memory suddenly recalls that he was involved in that sponsorship scandal, after all.

How much worse is life on the run in Belize than in jail in Canada, anyway?

Svend Back?

2007-04-04T06:38:00.000-04:00

Never underestimate the willingness of the electorate to be fooled by the same people again and again. Never also underestimate the willingness of any political party to recycle even its worst candidates, if their notoriety might yet squeeze out a few more votes:

Might as well plan on 20 more years of B.C. Liberal rule. Svend Robinson is thinking of running for the NDP. In their wildest dreams, the Liberals have never imagined a more encouraging future than one that involves Robinson running for the other side.

And provincial New Democrats are probably combing through their rule book, looking for some way to bar the tempestuous, far-left lightning rod from ever setting foot in Victoria.

The Province's Ian Bailey caught up with Robinson on the weekend. "When you get people coming up to you in the Safeway, in the library, in the park and saying: 'We would really like to see you represent our community,' that's something you take seriously," he said.

The current NDP caucus is a collection of earnest policy wonks, committed to moderation, civility and finding the middle ground. Inviting Robinson into that mild-mannered posse would be like bringing Britney Spears into your book club.

Robinson's political career has been one of endless public displays of narcissism, an attribute common enough amongst politicians and homosexuals, but especially flagrant in his case.

Whether it was rushing to Sue Rodriguez's bedside to stick the needle in her arm, or getting his pants torn by the RCMP at a protest, or stealing a ring for his boyfriend, Robinson always made sure that the story was about him.

What he can't stand is the relative obscurity of private life. Without a political platform, he's just another aging exhibitionist.

He'll be running for office until he dies just for the attention.

And should he be elected again, his election will reflect just as badly on the electorate as on him.

Source: Victoria Times-Colonist

Ashes To Ashes

2007-04-03T18:42:00.001-04:00

The surprise here is not that Keith Richards would try anything. The surprise is that he actually managed to outlive his father:

It may be the strangest chemical ever to alter Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richard's state of mind — a mix of cocaine and his father's ashes.

"The strangest thing I've tried to snort? My father — I snorted my father," Richards said in an interview with British music magazine NME.

Richards' father, Bert, died in 2002 at age 84, but apparently was a sanguine sort of fellow.

"He was cremated and I couldn't resist grinding him up with a little bit of blow. My dad wouldn't have cared," Richards said. "… It went down pretty well, and I'm still alive."

Stranger still is the possibility that Keith Richards' copyright may expire before he does. The man must have sold his soul for indestructibility.

Fear Factory

2007-04-03T06:32:00.000-04:00

I don't care that David McGuinty came up with the phrase. It's at least an original epithet, unlike "war room":

The expansive and battle-ready Conservative campaign headquarters was opened to journalists for a one-time-only viewing yesterday even as two cabinet ministers denied the party has any desire to go to the polls.

Reporters were permitted to stroll through the 17,000-square-foot war room before being ushered into the adjoining television studio to view the latest attack ad against Stéphane Dion, which will begin airing today.

"We've taken the big and costly step of opening this facility because [Liberal Leader] Stéphane Dion has put the country on notice," Environment Minister John Baird said at a heavily scripted news conference. "He's told Canadians he wants to go back to power as soon as possible."

Mr. Baird would not discuss the cost of renting the roomy space on the second floor of a non-descript building in a southeast Ottawa industrial park. But he said the Conservatives will keep it fully equipped and ready for action until voting day, even if that means paying the bills until 2009.

"Fear factory." Take the sting out of the phrase by making it one's own. Manufacturing fear in the hearts of Liberals everywhere.

Source: Globe and Mail

Toronto The Good Enough

2007-04-02T18:57:00.000-04:00

For some years now, it has been my oft-frustrated goal to break free of Toronto's orbit. Just recently, I finally managed to do it.

Which is why stories such as this no longer raise the same bile within me that they did even a few short months ago, as I no longer anticipate the round of smug self-congratulation that inevitably follows in the Toronto press the next day:

Toronto is the second-best city in Canada to live in, according to a global survey released today.

For the second year in a row, Toronto ranks 15th among cities around the world in overall quality of life, according to the annual review by Mercer Human Resource Consulting, which operates in 40 nations.

Vancouver is the best place to reside in Canada, the survey says, ranking third in the world – just behind the Swiss cities of Zurich and Geneva. Other Canadian cities in the survey were Ottawa at 18th internationally, Montreal at 22nd and Calgary at 24th.

"Generally speaking, Canadian cities did really well," Danielle Bushen, a principal at Mercer in Toronto, told the Star's Joanna Smith.

Toronto's traffic and muggy summers with poor air quality played a role in its ranking. The city placed 21st internationally in the category of health and sanitation.

I have always thought these quality of life surveys to be somewhat suspect in their methodology and criteria: one man's quality of life might be another man's deathly misery.

Perhaps they might be better cast as wish fulfillment surveys, akin to asking people what they might do with their hypothetical lottery jackpots.

Sure, we'd all love April in Paris, but for most of us, it's February in Brampton.

Source: Toronto Star

Power Play

2007-04-02T06:33:00.000-04:00

Some Indian chiefs and their cronies are going to get rich at the expense of the taxpayers and residents of their reserves, as usual, whenever there's an opportunity to shake them both down. And what an opportunity this is indeed:

Native leaders are sharply divided over a proposed transmission link that would import electricity from Manitoba to power-hungry Ontario, potentially throwing a wrench into the Harper government's green plan.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has earmarked $586-million of the $1.5-billion Canada EcoTrust Fund to help Ontario reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and fight climate change by building the so-called east-west link. Manitoba has an abundance of hydroelectric power, so the grid could supply Ontario with a clean source of power and help the province phase out its pollution-spewing coal plants. But the link cannot go ahead without the support of native communities in Northern Ontario because it would run through their traditional territories.

Native leaders in 19 of the 49 Northern Ontario reserves represented by the Nishnawbe-Aski Nation agreed late Thursday night to have their communities push ahead with the project and seek an ownership interest in it. But leaders of the remaining 30 communities said they could not throw their support behind the project until the Ontario government outlines its stand on broader economic development issues.

They want a revenue-sharing agreement with the government and a commitment on how the grid can become a springboard for other economic development initiatives.

And unlike the Kelowna accord, this is a gift that will keep on giving for the natives:

The project would involve spending about $10-billion to develop a 1,250-megawatt hydro dam known as Conawapa on the Nelson River in northeastern Manitoba. A high- voltage transmission line from the dam to James Bay in Northern Ontario and south to Timmins and Sudbury would cost another $1.5-billion.

The megaproject would take at least a decade to complete. But it is expected to run into stiff opposition from environmentalists, who will see the transmission line as a significant threat to the boreal forest. The project will not proceed until the Ontario government signs a long-term agreement with Manitoba to purchase the electricity produced at Conawapa. Talks are under way between the two provinces.

Which isn't to say that the Indians don't deserve their fair share for having the power lines run through their lands. They just aren't going to get it. Properly managed, the profits therefrom could lift their reserves out of poverty and into prosperity. But it never seems to happen that way.

Source: Globe and Mail

Out Of Proportion

2007-04-01T17:42:00.000-04:00

Every time there's a blowout majority government, the call for proportional representation briefly arises only to fade away on the political wind.

And sometimes, even the supporters of PR get their timing wrong.

Way wrong.

Next time, vet your press releases before sending them out.

Our Man In Iran

2007-04-01T09:31:00.000-04:00

You'd better believe that the old Pearsonian myths that have dominated Canadian foreign policy are dead now. Just consider today's announcement and ask yourself if this would have been contemplated even five years ago:

The Conservative government has come under fire from a wide range of critics condemning the recent appointment of a new Canadian ambassador to Iran as a cynical and potentially dangerous political move guaranteed to inflame tensions in the Middle East.

The Department of Foreign Affairs announced today that Fred Litwin, 51, an Ottawa-based music production company president with no previous foreign policy experience, will become Canada's envoy to the fundamentalist Islamic regime effective immediately.

Mr. Litwin is well-known in party circles for his blog, Gay and Right, in which he has expressed uncompromising support for both Israel and gay rights, and opposition to Iranian and Islamic political ambitions.

Mr. Litwin attracted media attention several months ago when he organized the showing of a controversial documentary film on Islamic terrorism, only to have it cancelled by theatre operators following protests from local activists. The film was later shown at the Ottawa public library.

An unusually broad collection of critics, ranging from peace activists to social conservatives, have come out against Mr. Litwin's appointment, calling the appointment of the openly gay Jewish music producer offensive and counterproductive.

"Appointing this man sends a signal that Canada disrespects the faith and sensibilities of the Iranian people and Muslims all over the world," said Canadian Islamic Congress President Dr. Mohammed Elmasry. "It is an act of aggression unworthy of Canada's role as a tolerant and peaceful nation, and we call on (Prime Minister) Stephen Harper to withdraw this appointment and apologize to the Islamic and Iranian communities."

Liberal foreign affairs critic Ujjal Dosanjh also condemned the appointment at a press conference in Ottawa as a shameful pre-election exercise in political posturing aimed at winning over votes from the Jewish community and socially progressive urban voters.

"This appointment has nothing to do with promoting peace in the Middle East and everything to do with promoting Stephen Harper at home," said Dosanjh. "It's cynicism of the worst kind--hiding the party's intolerance behind a token gay man."

Some commentators, however, have expressed support for Mr. Litwin's appointment, calling it a bold move that could actually raise Canada's reputation and influence in the strife-torn region.

"The Middle East is a land of symbolism, and what could be a more powerful symbol than sending a Jewish gay man to Iran?" said University of Western Ontario political science professor and Toronto Sun columnist Dr. Salim Mansur. "It demonstrates a resolve not to compromise in the face of (Iranian President) Ahmadinejad and the mullahs."

Relations between Canada and Iran have been strained over the past several years, following the death of Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi in a Tehran prison in 2003, and the arrest and subsequent release of Iranian-Canadian professor Dr. Ramin Jahanbegloo in 2006.

A spokesman for the Iranian Embassy in Ottawa called the appointment of Mr. Litwin "a matter of grave concern for both our countries" and said that the Iranian Foreign Ministry "would give careful consideration to its response."

Everybody is piling on about the appointment in the media--Gwynne Dyer, Eric Margolis, Neil MacDonald, Haroun Siddiqui, etc., etc.--and you can read a collection of selected commentary here.

Warpath

2007-03-31T10:58:00.000-04:00

The names and aims of terrorists are legion, but all draw their violent methods from the same well. Masked men in combat gear lobbing Molotov cocktails and firing machine guns from behind makeshift barricades look and act much the same, whether in Gaza, Sri Lanka or Medellin.

Or Caledonia.

But don't you dare draw such comparisons:

Radical natives are listed in the Canadian army's counterinsurgency manual as a potential military opponent, lumping aboriginals in with the Tamil Tigers, Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad.

The military is putting the finishing touches on the manual, but a draft version of the document obtained by The Globe and Mail outlines a host of measures the military might use to fight insurgents at home and abroad. The measures include ambushes, deception and killing.

The draft manual was produced in September, 2005, and recently released through an access-to-information request. A final edited version of the army manual is expected to be complete within months, but a cover letter states that the draft version was immediately circulated in 2005 to army units for military training.

Its inclusion of “radical Native American Organizations” as a potential target of military action surfaces at a time of heightened tensions between aboriginals and the federal government.

....

Stewart Phillip, the Grand Chief of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs who recently predicted “a summer of aboriginal protest” in response to the perceived lack of action on native poverty in the federal budget, said he is “absolutely outraged” by the manual.

“It's a complete attack on our political rights,” he said.

“What we're seeing,” Mr. Phillip continued, “is the deliberate criminalization of the efforts of aboriginal people to march, demonstrate and rally to draw public attention to the crushing poverty that is the reality within our communities.”

As the sun rises and sets, so do the aggrieved march and disperse; both part of nature's cycle, neither a cause for alarm. The professional protestors flatter themselves unduly with their paranoia.

The armed militants, on the other hand, have not received the critical media attention and condemnation they deserve. Their intentions and actions fit the textbook definition of insurrection. They mean what they say.

By not drawing distinctions between the two, the former appear more menacing than they are, and the latter far less so.

Glad to see that the Armed Forces, at least, can tell the difference.

Source: Globe and Mail

Back From The Dead

2007-03-31T10:55:00.000-04:00

What a time to be hors de combat : the entire Quebec election, the budget, and the continuing meltdown of Stephane Dion.

Well, the move to a better place than Toronto, and a better-paying job, is now complete.

The unwelcome silence is over.

Still Here

2007-03-10T01:02:00.000-05:00

I haven't gone anywhere.

I will, however, not be back until late March.

I hate being sidelined like this when so much is going on in the political world.

Closing For Relocation

2007-02-16T08:07:00.000-05:00

This blogger is on the move to somewhere other than the Centre of the Universe.

This blog will also be on the move to somewhere other than the Centre of the Blogosphere.

In preparation for both moves, both blog and blogger will be taking the next few weeks off, unless a federal election call should intervene, to return no later than March 15, 2007 for this blog's second anniversary.

Dinner With Lise

2007-02-15T08:19:00.000-05:00

Being the lieutenant-governor of Quebec is like being imprisoned in a luxury resort: nobody wants you around but you get all sorts of perks anyway.

Unfortunately, the current incumbent has been enjoying herself too much as taxpayer expense, perhaps to compensate for the fact that the vast majority of Quebecois don't want anything around to remind them of the queen of the maudits anglais :

Quebec Lieutenant-Governor Lise Thibault, whose spending practices have been questioned, will be replaced after the next provincial election, the Prime Minister's Office said yesterday.

The PMO said the decision to replace Ms. Thibault was made before reports surfaced about reported lavish expenses.

....

According to documents obtained by Le Journal de Montréal, federal authorities repeatedly questioned Ms. Thibault's spending practices between 2000 and 2004. A $59,000 garden party and a $30,000 Christmas party were among the expenditures that raised eyebrows.

In one case, Ms. Thibault's office refused to release the names of restaurant guests who had dined on the public dime.

The $30,000 Christmas party in 2001 had 67 guests, at a cost of $445 a person. The party included costs of $14,000 for food at the Sheraton in Montreal, $6,000 in gifts, $720 to hire three chefs and free parking for guests.

Ms. Thibault's expenses also include a 2002 bill from the Sheraton for $8,800 in food and $9,300 in beverages, including 172 bottles of wine and 59 Brazilian and Spanish coffees.

Bureaucrats raised questions about a $266.36 restaurant bill near Quebec City in April, 2004, given that there was a $286.21 food charge for the same day at a hotel in Montreal. A civil servant at Canadian Heritage told her colleagues there was "no real explanation for this one" from Ms. Thibault's office.

Well, at least Mme. Thibault has both the air of regal reserve appropriate to the vice-regal position and the evasiveness and spendthrifiness appropriate to a federal Liberal appointee to any job in Quebec.

But it's also a sign of how the vice-regal position, ostensibly the guardian of the constitutional order in Canada and the provinces, has been reduced to a chief social hostess position.

As long as you can make polite small talk at garden parties, you don't need any other qualification.

Source: Globe and Mail

Fuelling Hatred

2007-02-14T08:01:00.000-05:00

Power and prosperity always make the possessors thereof constant targets of envy and resentment from those without either. Thus the claims that America somehow deserves to have its citizens killed by terrorists anywhere, anytime, for any reason, or for no reason.

We can see a milder form of this envy and resentment expressed everyday in the media towards Alberta, whose crime has been to have oil and to attract Canadians from all over to work there for their share of the wealth.

So should Al-Qaeda's threat to attack Alberta's oil and gas facilities come to pass, the chattering classes will consider it fair punishment for Alberta's sins:

Al-Qaeda has called for terrorist strikes against Canada's oil and natural gas facilities to "choke the U.S. economy."

An online message, posted by The Al-Qaeda Organization in the Arabian Peninsula, declares "we should strike petroleum interests in all areas which supply the United States ... like Canada," the No. 1 supplier of both fuels to the U.S.

"The biggest party hurt will be the industrial nations, and on top of them, the United States," it said.

The group, the Saudi arm of Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, claimed responsibility for a thwarted February 2006 suicide attack on the world's largest oil processing facility at Abqaiq in Saudi Arabia's eastern province. The group also is believed responsible for other attacks against the Saudi energy sector.

....

Since 2000, he said, Canada's proven oil reserves have risen from about five billion barrels of oil to more than 180 billion barrels. That puts Canada in the No. 2 position as an oil reserve country, second only to Saudi Arabia and significantly ahead of other states such as Iraq, Kuwait or Iran.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has called attention to the growing role of his home province of Alberta by telling international audiences that Canada is emerging as an "energy superpower" with the sole politically stable source of growing oil production on the planet.

Industry installations in Alberta include airport tower-like control rooms for pipelines that deliver about 15 per cent of the natural gas and 10 per cent of the oil consumed in the U.S. as well as most Canadian supplies.

Such attacks would damage the U.S. economy, but they would cripple Canada's even more, and drive Alberta's into recession if not outright depression. Even if the physical damage could be readily repaired, the psychological damage to Canada would be far slower in healing--and that, more than anything, can prolong an economic downturn.

But no doubt the chattering classes would alternate between breast-beating over what we did to deserve such attacks and schadenfreude over those Alberta rednecks getting their comeuppance.

Sur L'Attaque

2007-02-13T18:31:00.000-05:00

While the Liberals and the media have been whining that the Conservative ads attacking Stephane Dion as not being a leader are unfair, they have been having an effect in the polls. Dion has been coming across as an even bigger whiner, if that's possible.

The Quebec ads have taken a different approach, tying Chretien and his old scandalous crew as millstones round Dion's neck. I am less certain that they will be as effective as the English ads, as they don't use Dion's own words and voice against him, and seem to be more backward-looking than forward as regards the scandals of yesteryear.

Judge for yourself.

Potted

2007-02-13T07:55:00.000-05:00

In a devastating setback for the advocates of legalization of marijuana, Margaret Trudeau admits she's been doing pot for decades.

So much for marijuana being a harmless recreational drug and cure for all of life's ills.

Clocked

2007-02-12T21:24:00.000-05:00

According to this very fancy, very high-tech, very expensive clock it is now three years to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver-Whistler.

The IOC could market each Winter Olympics as the last one ever because of global warming, repeat it every four years, and everybody would be foolish enough to pay even more jacked-up prices for tickets just to say they went to the last Winter Olympics before the apocalypse.

And if global warming switches to global cooling, they can take the same tack with the Summer Olympics by branding each one the last games before the next ice age.

Isn't climate change hysteria wonderful, folks?

Judgment Calls

2007-02-12T05:05:00.000-05:00

Horror of horrors!

The Globe and Mail is shocked, SHOCKED, that people with ties to the Conservative Party are now helping decide who gets appointed to the judiciary!

What's worse, even some honest-to-Gaia social conservatives are being appointed to these advisory boards as well!

The Conservative government has loaded the committees that determine who can become a judge, selecting a series of Tories including former politicians, aides to ministers, riding association officials and defeated candidates.

The influential but little-known judicial advisory committees were created in 1988 to take partisan politics out of the appointment of judges. But half -- at least 16 out of 33 -- of the people chosen by the federal justice minister as his nominees are conservative partisans, a review by The Globe and Mail has found.

And many of the non-partisans chosen by Ottawa seem to share Prime Minister Stephen Harper's oft-expressed desire to change the face of Canada's judiciary -- which he has described as a group that holds a liberal bias, oversteps its role to make social policy, and is too soft on crime.

....

The non-partisans include Rob Martin, a former University of Western Ontario law professor who argues the courts have veered from the law to impose their social preferences on issues such as abortion, assisted suicide and homosexuality.

....

Jude Gosselin, a 27-year-old social studies teacher appointed to Manitoba's judicial advisory committee, said he thinks he was chosen because of his social views, not because he is on the executive of the Conservative riding association in Saint Boniface.

Mr. Gosselin, the former youth pastoral co-ordinator for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Saint Boniface, said he was approached by a friend who worked for Mr. Toews, then the justice minister, probably because they wanted someone with "a more traditional way of looking at things."

"It's been argued by many that sometimes the judiciary seems to be possibly moving into the legislative responsibility, interpreting laws beyond what they were meant to be interpreted," he said.

Although many have spoken of a judicial conspiracy to undermine Canadian society, the reality is that the judges haven't had to conspire in their social engineering. They've all gone to the same law schools, sat on all the same law society and bar association committees, joined all the right organizations as lawyers, and therefore have almost all to a man come to share the same world view.

What's threatening to the modern-day Family Compact is that the so-cons and advocates of traditional judicial restraint have figured out how the soc-libs on the bench did it, and are using their own methods against them.

Just consider the hysteria that surrounded the appointment of David Brown to the Superior Court in Ontario--one judge as far from the mould of social liberalism as can be imagined--just one judge.

Expect the same people who once defended the entire closed-door process of judicial appointment to demand that Parliament start vetting potential judges for their ideological reliability.

Hello Constable!

2007-02-11T09:53:00.000-05:00

The Toronto Police might not be able to anything about gang shootings and home invasions, but they'll have the most colour coordinated offices and uniforms of any police force anywhere:

Toronto police were in the heart of the city's gay village Saturday afternoon hoping to further expand the force's diversity portfolio through one of many recruiting sessions aimed at members of the gay community.

The police service has made efforts to diversify its force by recruiting officers who reflect a variety of ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds found across the city.

Const. Gail Steed from the police employment unit said the information sessions for the gay community are a natural extension of that outreach.

"Our service wants to reflect our diverse communities in the city,'' she said. "We don't ask anybody to tell us their sexual preference, we just strive to get an accurate representation of the city.''

Criminals beware: some cops are going to be very enthusiastic about conducting body cavity strip searches.

Motorists beware: if you're pulled over and asked to blow into something, it better damn well be a breathalyzer.

Source: CTV News

Debtor's Prison

2007-02-10T11:37:00.000-05:00

Mankind does not become better so much as he exchanges one manner of barbarities and superstitions for another.

And sometimes he brings back old ones in a different form:

Ex-spouses who cheat on their support payments could swiftly find themselves behind bars, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled yesterday.

In a 9-0 decision, the court said that an Ontario lower court judge had acted within the law when he imposed a 45-day jail sentence on a wealthy plastic surgeon, Dr. Kenneth Dickie, who fled to the Bahamas to avoid paying support payments.

Family law experts said yesterday that the ruling gives judges a powerful tool to use against ex-spouses who try to stall or wriggle out of paying support.

Dr. Dickie's three children and his ex-spouse, Leaka Dickie, may ultimately gain little from the ruling, since Dr. Dickie lives beyond the reach of Canadian law. However, experts said that numerous other aggrieved spouses will reap the benefits of her battle.

To think that debtor's prisons had been abolished as a relic of the Victorian age!

Source: Globe and Mail

Affirmative Action

2007-02-09T08:50:00.000-05:00

Give Stephane Dion credit for this much; whenever he sets himself impossible targets that can only be met with devastating consequences, he still barrels ahead to meet them:

Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion is prepared to take "extraordinary measures" to boost the ranks of women candidates, including barring men from seeking nominations in some ridings.

During last year's leadership race, Dion promised that under his watch at least a third of the party's candidates in the next election would be women.

But campaign organizers conclude that will be impossible without intervention to secure nominations for women.

So-called green-light committees, set up to run the party's nomination process in each province, have been empowered to ensure the 33 per cent target is met. Among other things, the committees can approve or reject nomination papers from would-be candidates.

Where necessary, the committees will be able to simply refuse to allow men to run for nominations in some ridings.

What a condescending way to treat women in the party, as delicate creatures unable to compete in the rough-and-tumble of intra-party politics against men. Yet after the nomination process, they'll be expected to fight a campaign on the same terms as any other man. There'll be no special consideration for feminine weakness on the campaign trail.

At a micro level, these quotas for women represent the same problem that Dion's obsession with Kyoto emissions targets represent at a macro level: a fixation on abstract goals without consideration of concrete effects.

Source: Toronto Star

Elephants Graveyard

2007-02-08T18:24:00.000-05:00

Without global warming, Canada will be full of bored and depressed elephants, ready to burst forth from their cages in a desperate bloody rampage through our streets.

Please, think of the elephants.

Election Forecast

2007-02-08T08:42:00.000-05:00

Hysteria about climate change has now firmly entrenched itself in the public mind. If the weather outside is a little warmer or colder than usual, instead of accepting it as part of nature's usual volatility, people are now terrified that it's a portent of disaster.

If not natural disaster, then political:

A whiff of spring election is in the air, and both the Liberals and Conservatives have caught the scent.

Conservative Party workers say subtle messages drifting from the Prime Minister's Office suggest the government wants to engineer its own demise in May to pave the way for a June vote.

The rank-and-file Tories worry that a long and very hot summer, especially one that brings drought and other severe weather events, could prompt Canadians to think even harder about the environment — and could give Liberal Leader Stéphane Dion more time to establish himself as its protector.

....

One Conservative campaign organizer in Ontario, who asked not to be identified, said his party would have liked to have been into an election earlier than June “but the Quebec election was in the way.” On the other hand, he said, delaying the election until the fall would give Mr. Dion time to work the summer barbecue circuit and allow the opposition to suggest that Mr. Harper is somehow responsible for whatever weather befalls Canada over the warm summer months.

“There are some weather predictions that say we are going to go through the summer from hell here, that it is going to be hotter than Hades,” he said. “And if that happens, following after a winter that has been unusually warm, then people are going to go nuts over the summer and say ‘look, we're choking on this stuff.'”

The unnamed organizer may have failed to notice from his centrally heated office that the mild, snowless winter predicted at the beginning of January has turned bitterly cold.

Who's to say what weather will come in spring or summer?

If the temperature or precipitation varies by even a fraction of a degree or millimetre from the statistical norm, the Liberals and the media will blame the Conservatives anyway.

We can't do anything about the weather, so let's keep it out of election timing calculations.

Source: Globe and Mail

The Real Dr. Evil

2007-02-07T08:56:00.000-05:00

It isn't just the Liberals who are congratulating themselves on bringing a dangerous new recruit on board to launch incendiary attacks against the enemy:

US officials and Israel intelligence sources believe Imad Mugniyeh, the Lebanese commander of Hezbollah’s overseas operations, has taken charge of plotting Iran’s retaliation against western targets should President George W Bush order a strike on Iranian nuclear sites.

Mugniyeh is on the FBI’s “Most Wanted Terrorists” list for his role in a series of high-profile attacks against the West, including the 1985 hijacking of a TWA jet and murder of one of its passengers, a US navy diver.

Now in his mid-forties, Mugniyeh is reported to have travelled with Ahmadinejad in January this year from Tehran to Damascus, where the Iranian president met leaders of Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad and Hamas.

The meeting has been dubbed a “terror summit” because of the presence of so many groups behind attacks on Israel, which Ahmadinejad has threatened to wipe from the map.

"Bad-ass mofo" is not an official intelligence term of art, but nothing else quite defines Mugniyeh. He's been everywhere--the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut, hijacking a TWA flight, kidnapping Westerners in Lebanon, bombing the Israeli embassy and Jewish cultural centre in Buenos Aires, the USS Cole bombing-- and is wanted by everybody.

In reality, he's been more of a presence in terrorist activity than Osama bin Laden.

Iran means business if it's been talking to Mugniyeh.

Source: Times Online

Smoke On The Water

2007-02-07T08:26:00.000-05:00

Further evidence of election readiness in case the budget goes down to defeat:

The Conservative government has unveiled a new tax break targeted at a select few tobacco processors in a politically vulnerable region of Southern Ontario.

Sources said the break -- worth about $500,000 -- is aimed at the constituency of Immigration Minister Diane Finley, who is thought to be in some danger of losing the next election.

One tobacco processor that should benefit from the tax change -- Simcoe Leaf Tobacco Co. Ltd. -- is in Ms. Finley's riding of Haldimand-Norfolk. It was unclear whether any firms outside her riding would benefit.

One industry expert said Simcoe Leaf appears to be the only company that would be eligible for the tax break.

....

The tax break will go to processors who sort, grade, dry and pack leaf tobacco and must pay manufacturers' surtax on their product. The Conservatives say independent processors who are not affiliated with cigarette makers should be exempted from the tax because they aren't involved in manufacturing the end product.

"It's an issue of tax fairness," said Dan Miles, communications director for Mr. Flaherty.

There are only a handful of processors that might qualify for this reduction. It's unclear whether firms outside of Ms. Finley's riding would benefit.

Diane Finley is probably in little danger of being defeated: Haldimand-Norfolk is part of the core Tory blue belt. But it doesn't hurt to give her something to show the local tobacco farmers, the honest folk who depend on a much-maligned industry for their livelihood.

Watch for more targeted tax breaks in the weeks to come, especially in Quebec.

Source: Globe and Mail

Garth's Grit

2007-02-06T11:10:00.000-05:00

Garth Turner is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I've ever known in my life.

And now he's about to share all of those great attributes for which he is known--modesty, thoughtfulness, loyalty and discretion--with the Liberal caucus.

The Liberals have learned nothing and forgotten nothing from their previous defectors from Conservative ranks. They always pick up the troublemakers and the weakest links and trumpet their new caucus members as proof that the Conservative Party has no room for progressive, tolerant, open-minded thinkers.

And every time, the new Liberal proves to be more of a problem inside their tent than he or she was outside of it.

Let them have Garth Turner. At best, he'll be a temporary distraction from Stephane Dion's disastrously incoherent performance before the Ottawa Citizen editorial board. At worst, he'll be attacking his new boss with the same vigour that he attacked the old boss.

Despite Wajid Khan's problems, I'd still say the Tories got the better end of the trade. And that's saying something.

Quebec Votes For Sale

2007-02-06T07:40:00.000-05:00

In our curious political astrology, when a budget in the House of Commons aligns with a provincial election in Quebec, bribery is in the ascendant:

Premier Jean Charest is turning to Prime Minister Stephen Harper to deal Quebec a favourable budget next month at the height of a probable provincial election campaign to help seal a Liberal victory.

With a federal budget expected on March 20 and a Quebec election anticipated on March 26, insiders say Mr. Charest is devising a strategy with the input of Mr. Harper's Conservative minority government to demonstrate that federalism remains the most profitable option for Quebeckers.

Ottawa has already announced that changes to the equalization-payment formula will inject close to $1-billion more into Quebec's coffers during the next fiscal year. Mr. Harper has also promised to solve the so-called fiscal imbalance between Ottawa and the provinces in the next federal budget that would give Quebec billions more in additional revenues over the course of a second provincial Liberal mandate.

A spokesperson for the Premier's office said yesterday that Mr. Charest talked at least once to Mr. Harper last week, but refused to say whether the budget was discussed.

Shades of Robert Bourassa's federalisme rentable all over again. Wonder what other goodies will be in the budget bag for Quebec?

Source: Globe and Mail

Goodfellas?

2007-02-05T07:40:00.000-05:00

Once is a tragedy.

Twice is a coincidence.

Three times is a conspiracy.

The media is dancing around the first word that comes to mind when you think of ~~Wopbridge~~ Woodbridge natives getting whacked. One wonders whether it's for fear of a libel suit or finding a horse's head in their bed the next morning.

Nuked

2007-02-04T11:06:00.000-05:00

Mazel tov to Mossad for making the world a little bit safer for us all today:

A PRIZE-WINNING Iranian nuclear scientist has died in mysterious circumstances, according to Radio Farda, which is funded by the US State Department and broadcasts to Iran.

An intelligence source suggested that Ardeshire Hassanpour, 44, a nuclear physicist, had been assassinated by Mossad, the Israeli security service.

Hassanpour worked at a plant in Isfahan where uranium hexafluoride gas is produced. The gas is needed to enrich uranium in another plant at Natanz which has become the focus of concerns that Iran may be developing nuclear weapons.

But Mossad can't stop Iran from building the bomb by targeted assassinations alone. The longer Iran's nuclear program goes unchecked, the harsher our response will have to be to stop it.

Source: Times Online

Alpha Course

2007-02-03T10:15:00.000-05:00

Toronto's obsession with being a "world-class city," is symptomatic of the city's peculiar combination of narcissism and inferiority complex.

Now it is not sufficient to be merely a world-class city, but to be an alpha city, the biggest, leanest, meanest, son-of-a-bitch on the block.

As if it mattered to anyone else but Toronto.

Being Canada's financial capital should be a sufficient accomplishment in itself. But not to Torontonians, who want the world to love them as much as they love themselves.

National Energy Program: Part Deux

2007-02-02T18:34:00.000-05:00

Mark Holland has accidentally let slip Stephane Dion's hidden agenda

Perhaps Kyoto began as an honest, if misguided, attempt to deal with the effects of climate change.

Now it's become the trojan horse of the economic dirigistes and the transnational progressive elites.

Can nationalization of the Alberta oil sands to prevent their development be far behind under a Dion government?

Groundhog Day

2007-02-02T08:44:00.000-05:00

Punxsutawney Phil and Wiarton Willie join the IPCC consensus: winter will end, forever, starting today.

If Phil and Willie ever see their shadows again, they'll be shot on the spot for being global warming deniers.

Trust Threat

2007-02-02T08:10:00.000-05:00

Receiving death threats is one of the occupational hazards of being a prominent politician. Almost all of them come from crackpots armed with nothing more deadly than their big mouths. But there's no telling which one of them will back their words up:

While the governor of the Bank of Canada said Thursday the Tory government's decision on changing the tax system for income trusts was the right move to make, Global National has learned that the politician who made the announcement has now been issued a protective detail after receiving death threats.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, who made the income trust announcement on Oct. 31, 2006, has now been assigned a protective detail to provide personal security, but the government is providing little other information into Flaherty's new arrangements, and refuses to provide specifics as to when the MP began receiving the threats.

As a result of the new tax structure, individual investors are said to have lost over $20 billion, the largest ever financial loss attributed to a change in government policy.

No doubt some people had their retirement plans shattered because they put all their eggs in the income trust basket and are casting about for someone else to blame.

Their threats to kill Flaherty probably amount to little more than venting anger.

But that would be cold comfort if something did happen.

Source: Calgary Herald

Send In The Troops

2007-02-01T06:38:00.000-05:00

The Liberals warned us last year that Stephen Harper would deploy soldiers in our cities. Soldiers with guns. In our cities. In Canada. They did not make this up:

The Harper government plans to increase the Canadian Forces presence across the country with new units in 14 cities as well as shifting 5,000 regular force personnel from support and desk jobs to training and front-line missions.

Between now and 2016, the army will establish "territorial response battalions" in Victoria, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Regina, Winnipeg, Niagara-Windsor, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Quebec City, Saint John, Halifax and St. John's. The units would be designed to react to domestic emergencies such as natural disasters or a terrorist attack.

The details are outlined in the Conservative government's "Canada First" defence strategy, which has been leaked to the Citizen. No date has been set for the strategy to be released publicly. The report outlines the direction the military will follow over the next 15 years.

It's refreshing to see national defence being taken seriously again. As in defence of the national territory and interest, as opposed to sending undermanned, underequipped forces on pointless peacekeeping exercises to appear to be doing something.

Unfortunately, as with all long-term plans, carrying it out depends on the next government committing to it. I shudder to think what a Dion government will do with this plan.

Source: Ottawa Citizen

Break And Enter

2007-01-31T07:27:00.000-05:00

A burglary. Yeah, that's it. A burglary:

A brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden, who is wanted in the Philippines for alleged terror financing, was killed in Madagascar in what appeared to be a burglary, the victim's brother said Wednesday.

Jamal Khalifa, who was married to a sister of the al-Qaida leader, was killed when gunmen broke into his house in a Madagascan village on Tuesday, his brother Malek Khalifa said in a phone interview from his home in Jiddah, Saudi Arabia.

Malek, who was distraught when recounting his brother's death, said between 25 and 30 armed men broke into Jamal's house "while he was sleeping," and killed him. "They stole everything -- his computer, all of his things," he said.

Naturally. Don't burglars usually travel in packs of a couple dozen or more?

Kudos to whoever ordered this son-of-a-bitch whacked, though, even if the cover story didn't work.

Source: CTV

Cuban Party

2007-01-30T07:58:00.000-05:00

When Fidel Castro finally dies, progressives around the world will be in deep mourning for the man whose tyrannical power they wish they could have exercised against their own enemies in the free world.

Miami, however, will throw a party:

The city commission earlier this month appointed a committee — whose official job is to "Discuss an event at the Orange Bowl in case expected events occur in Cuba" — to plan the party. Such a gathering has long been part of the city's Castro death plan, but firming up the specifics has become more urgent since Castro became ill last summer and turned over power to his brother, Raul.

City Commissioner Tomas Regalado, a Cuban American, came up with the idea of using the venue for an event timed to Castro's demise. The Orange Bowl was the site of a speech by President Kennedy in 1961 promising a free Cuba and in the 1980s it served as a camp for refugees from the Mariel boatlift.

Castro "represents everything bad that has happened to the people of Cuba for 48 years," Regalado said. "There is something to celebrate, regardless of what happens next. ... We get rid of the guy."

The same people who no doubt broke open the champagne when Ronald Reagan died (and who cheered when George W. Bush was shot in Death of a President ) will be condemning the Cuban community in Miami for doing the same thing.

Source: Fox News

Political Climate Change

2007-01-30T07:43:00.000-05:00

A mild first couple weeks of winter out East and a few bad storms knocking down trees in Stanley Park, combined with a heavy dose of media hysteria, have suddenly pushed the issue of climate change to the top of everyone's agenda.

And with that change, the sudden strange bedfellowship of the Conservative government with the NDP, who are now clinging to each other for survival:

Signs of an alliance between Conservatives and New Democrats emerged Monday as MPs launched into a rewrite of the government's central climate-change legislation.

Members of Parliament returned to Ottawa Monday morning after a six-week recess, where they were greeted by a sunbathing Greenpeace activist in a polar-bear suit.

The environmental protests outside and the heated exchanges in Question Period over global warming made it abundantly clear that climate change will be the dominant issue of this winter session.

....

What is not clear, however, is if the Tory-NDP co-operation is limited to details, or whether it includes a compromise on much larger policy issues such as the Kyoto Protocol.

Mr. Baird, who wore a green tie for his first Question Period as Environment Minister, was offering few details Monday as to what changes he is prepared to live with.

The NDP's environment critic, Mr. Cullen, denied that he has struck an alliance with the Conservatives. He said he attempted to create working relationships with the Liberals and Bloc Québécois, but they weren't interested.

Throughout the 2½-hour meeting, the Tories and NDP made various proposals to fast-track the committee's workload, but faced persistent opposition from the Liberals.

So we will have the Kyoto accord in Canada, complete with complex carbon trading schemes and Rick Mercer hectoring us to meet the one-ton challenge.

What we will not have is serious adherence to the Kyoto accord. Everyone involved knows that it is an imposture not intended to be acted upon seriously. The world's industrial economies are not rushing headlong to revert to pre-industrial economies to stop the emission of greenhouse gases; the emerging industrial powers are not reversing course and heading back to agrarianism.

Kyoto is an incantation to be uttered in the hopes of appeasing the weather gods--the white man's rain dance, if you will.

Man never leaves behind superstition; he merely exchanges one for another.

Source: Globe and Mail

A Bridge Too Far

2007-01-29T07:59:00.000-05:00

The Bloor Street Viaduct used to be the most popular place in Toronto for the suicidal to jump off and end it all.

Until the city fathers had an ugly fence built around its sides to spoil the view, on the basis that the bridge, and not the mental state of the unfortunates who jumped off it, was the problem.

Now people are getting electric shocks just walking across it.

Electric shock therapy is still an effective treatment for severe depression.

If the city had known that, they could have saved themselves millions just by turning up the power at night. By the time the suicidal folk got halfway across, they wouldn't want to jump anymore.

Pre-Emptive Strike

2007-01-28T17:47:00.000-05:00

The Tories have learned a valuable lesson from the mau-mauing of Stockwell Day in 2000: attack the new leader early and often during his honeymoon and pull the rug out from under him before he can find his footing again:

The Conservatives have unveiled three new television ads directly attacking newly minted Liberal Leader Stephane Dion.

The English-language ads, which begin airing immediately and will be followed by a second series of French ads, assert that Dion is a weak leader who would take the country back to the past.

They also assert that he was a flop as environment minister, charging that greenhouse gas emissions went up and air quality went down under Dion's watch.

The ads use footage from last fall's Liberal leadership debates, including clips of Michael Ignatieff, now Dion's deputy leader, and Ken Dryden admitting that the Liberals failed to meet the Kyoto targets for emission reductions.

People deplore negative advertising in much the same way that they deplore gossip: condemn it to your face, relish it behind your back.

Now is the time to force Dion on the defensive when he has an actual record to be defensive about.

Source: CTV

Maitres Chez Nous

2007-01-27T17:08:00.000-05:00

The Quebecois may be allegedly more racist than the rest of us in English Canada. Or maybe they care more for the preservation of their identity than we do, as the village council in Herouxville has demonstrated:

The Quebec village of Hérouxville, 1300 inhabitants, has formally banned this week the stoning of women, face veils, female genital mutilation, or throwing acid at unveiled women’s faces, reports Montreal daily La Presse.

....

The nature of the Hérouxville bans suggests however that local politicians had Quebec Muslims in mind, though not a single Muslim or member of any religious or ethnic minority calls Hérouxville home. But referring to Quebec’s policy of encouraging immigrants to settle outside Montreal, Drouin says it was important to inform potential immigrants of the villages cultural norms: "We must ensure that people who come here want to live as we do", he told La Presse, "The Muslims who wanted to impose Sharia, had they known that we do not stone women here, maybe they would not have come".

In one sense, this resolution is not unlike the resolutions that municipal councils used to pass declaring their jurisdictions nuclear-free zones. Quite naive, and certainly legally unenforcable, but they did express the genuine concern people had about nuclear armageddon.

In another, however, it is a clear signal that people outside Montreal do not want to be flooded by immigrants hostile to their way of life, and will not be bullied by their supposed intellectual superiors into letting it happen.

It does not say that they can't come. It does, however, say that they can't come and turn Quebec into Qatar.

Nobody ever asked the Canadian people if they wanted to be replaced by another people. The good folk of Herouxville, however, will be roundly condemned for their impertinence soon enough.

Source: Judeoscope

Still Grounded

2007-01-26T18:46:00.000-05:00

Canada's newest millionaire will not be flying down to Vegas any time soon to beat the house:

Maher Arar’s personal associations and travel history are enough to keep him on a U.S. security watch list, says a senior State Department official.

While Washington concedes these points may not warrant Arar’s presence on a Canadian security roster, they meet the threshold for the American list, the official told The Canadian Press.

The source, who asked not to be identified, stressed the information about Arar does not justify his 2002 deportation to Syria, where he was tortured into false confessions of involvement with the al-Qaida terrorist network.

But it provides some insight into why the United States has resisted pressure from Canada to expunge Arar’s name from its lookout and no-fly lists.

....

American officials recently gave Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day a look at the information they say warrants Arar’s continued presence on U.S. watch lists.

Day insisted there was nothing to suggest Arar is a security risk.

U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins said it was presumptuous of Day to tell the United States who is allowed into its country. Wilkins was under orders from Washington to deliver the retort, said the State Department official.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper promised Friday to continue to press the Americans on the file. “We will not drop the matter,” he said.

The Americans could simply be stubbornly refusing to admit making a mistake on their end--if for no other reason than to avoid getting caught up in a similar payout. Buying off terror suspects, even exonerated ones, won't play well in the press or electorate there.

Or maybe, just maybe, there's still good reason to keep an eye on him.

Being not guilty of X doesn't mean being innocent of Y.

Source: National Post

Ten Million Dollar Man

2007-01-26T08:03:00.000-05:00

If Maher Arar is truly innocent of having links to Al-Qaeda, $10 million will hardly compensate him for the torture he suffered in Syria.

If, however, he is guilty of some other dirty business, then he just hit the jackpot.

But lost in all the controversy about Arar's treatment in Syria is that his experience demonstrates the downside of dual citizenship.

If Arar had not been holding Syrian citizenship, the Americans wouldn't have been able to decide that it was better to deport him to Syria for a little rough justice than to let him run loose in Canada.

Dual citizenship isn't always a free ride out of trouble. It can be a free ride into it.

Source: CTV

Monsieur Dithers?

2007-01-25T08:48:00.000-05:00

Stephane Dion was for the budget before he was against it. Now he's against bringing back one of the main Adscam players after he was for it:

Stéphane Dion was forced to backtrack yesterday from a controversial comment that he would allow back into the party a senior organizer who was banned for life over sponsorship-scandal misdeeds.

Mr. Dion told the Quebec City newspaper Le Soleil that he would not object to the lifting of the ban on senior organizer Marc-Yvan Côté, who admitted he distributed $120,000 in cash to Liberal candidates during the 1997 election campaign -- money diverted from the sponsorship program.

Mr. Dion's gaffe brought back a whiff of the scandal that the Liberals had hoped was behind them. Opponents seized on the remark as evidence that the new Liberal Leader has a lax attitude toward the improprieties members of his party committed.

....

Yesterday, Mr. Dion backtracked, insisting that he would have no involvement in reinstating Mr. Côté and suggesting it probably will not occur.

"I am not seeking to reopen that issue and there's not an application [from Mr. Côté] as far as I know. There is a procedure we follow," Mr. Dion said, asserting that party officials would handle any such case. "I'm not recommending anything."

Surely Dion knows better than to go digging up the Adscam past in Quebec, even if only to answer a hypothetical question.

Or maybe he doesn't. Maybe he still hasn't shed some of his old academic habits of floating every trial balloon in the knowledge that they will be punctured without affecting anything in reality.

If so, we can expect more off-the-cuff pontifications on the campaign trail, which will make derailing the Liberal campaign even easier than it was the last time.

Except on Kyoto.

He will not budge one inch in defence of the faith.

Source: Globe and Mail

PS: And neither will TVO, for that matter. The modern-day Lysenkoists aren't even pretending to be scientific any more.