Religious freedoms in Canada: Another hit

For at least a year now, intelligent conservatives have maintained that the Liberals’ same-sex marriage legislation represents a significant threat to religious freedoms in Canada (see here, here, and here for examples). Today we received the first substantiation of those claims:

“The B.C. Human Rights Tribunal has ruled in favour of two lesbian women who claim they were discriminated against by a Catholic men’s organization when they booked a hall for their wedding reception in the fall of 2003.”

The ruling is complex and not a complete victory for the complainants, as their weird lawyer, Barbara Findlay, points out. The tribunal ruled that the Knights, “failed in their duty to accommodate the plaintiffs when they refused the rental of the hall to them.” Which leaves one to wonder (and other complainants to test) whether the tribunal would have refused to penalize the Knights had they made more efforts to accomodate the lesbians and, if so, what the thresholds for these accomodations are. I suspect that the threshold will be of the mobile variety: the religious organizations will always come up a few inches short of the required degree. “Ooooh, so close!”

But there are other problems with the judgement. First: The Knights did make accomodations once the hall rental was cancelled. They returned the money and offered to help the lesbians find another venue, but by that point the two had already found a new hall for their reception. Findlay’s assertion that”…they took no steps to respect the dignity of my clients” is nonsense. Second, the tribunal, despite speaking in the appropriate language of compromise between two sets of rights, failed to address whether the lesbians accomodated the religious freedoms of the Knights. The lesbians claimed to have had no clue that the Knights were a religious organization (this despite extensive time in the offices of a religious organization and with its officials) and, while touring the facility and going through the preperations to reserve it, made no mention of the fact that they would be marrying one another. Those are some dicey sets of coincidences if you ask me. And ignorance hardly seems to be an excuse for potentially afronting the religious freedoms of this organization, Findlay’s snide description of “this erstwhile bingo hall” to the contrary notwithstanding.

Today, yet another protection of Canadians’ religious freedoms disappeared.

Crossposted to Rempelia Prime.

Limp Nationalism – Do you love your country?

Who loves Canada more, Harper or Martin? Perhaps the better question Canadians should be asking themselves is whether the question is a legitimate one. I mean really, how can someone love a country? Say it out loud for a second, “I love Canada” and tell me that you don’t feel a little silly doing it. Personally, I only love my family, and beyond that everyone, (and everything) falls considerable behind in terms of loving endearment. I’ve always found that those that were so quick to pronounce they love something were usually the same people who were using that statement to achieve some goal.

Because in truth, love is not a statement, it is an action – and using love as a statement to gain political points over another candidate is truly pathetic.

Later, at the campaign rally, he also took a jab at Harper’s patriotism: “This morning I am told that Stephen Harper had a little difficulty saying this, so let me say it: I love Canada,” he told party faithful to thunderous applause.

Earlier in the day Harper had answered the blunt question: “Do you love Canada?” in a positive way, but without using the words “I love Canada.”

First Election Poll: Dead-Heat

Ipsos has put out the first poll of the election campaign just hours after the Writ was dropped but following the fall of Martin’s Liberal government on Monday night.

A Snapshot Of The Political Landscape Taken In The Hours After The Government Falls Shows A Dead Heat And An Unpredictable Outcome

Toronto, ON, November 29, 2005 – According to a new CanWest News Service/Global News survey conducted by Ipsos Reid throughout the hours following the fall of the government in Ottawa by a successful loss of confidence vote, the federal Liberals (31%, -3 points from a survey conducted November 22-24th, 2005) would be in a dead-heat tie with the Conservative Party (31%, +1 point) in terms of decided vote support if a federal election were held tomorrow. Meanwhile, 18% would vote NDP (+2), and 5% would vote for the Green Party (unchanged).

This is to be expected. Falling minority governments typically drop in the polls, and so not too much hay should be made of that yet. What is significant, though, is that it took weeks into the last campaign for Tories to come nose to nose with the Liberals. This time, they’re starting more or less at the same place. This is a campaign for the Tories to lose.

Crossposted from Civitatensis.ca

Kyoto: Soon, We’ll have to pay billions

As the Kyoto-phile conference in Montreal looks forward to a post-Kyoto world when the Accord expires in 7 years, news from the EU missing targets for emissions, again, underscores the world of fantasy in which the movement operates. Canada, the conference’s host, is embarrassingly poised to increase emissions by 26% this year.

While the Canadian government has carried on public discourse internationally, it has been doing almost the contrary at home. Both the former and current Canadian Environment ministers seem to agree on the question of credibility:

“The deals made with industry was like giving away the store,” said David Anderson, a Liberal member of Parliament and former environment minister. “The increase in Canadian emissions at one of the higher levels among industrialized countries affects our credibility to discuss future targets.”

Dion said Canada still had a strong environmental reputation internationally. But he acknowledged that if its emissions had declined rather than increased, “our credibility would be stronger.”

Considering the billions that Canada has pledged to pay if the targets are not met, wouldn’t it be cheaper just to scrap the idea?

Crossposted from Civitatensis.ca

When We’re Here, We’re not Out Here, We’re Just Here

Norman Spector, former Chief of Staff to Brian Mulroney and former Canadian Ambassador to Israel, is correct in predicting that we are about to see the dirtiest election campaign in Canada. But a portion of his latest column in the G&M just rubbed me the wrong way. Here is the disturbing part:

Out West, where I live, one disturbingly often hears talk emanating from our near-Eastern neighbours that if Ontarians continue to vote for continued Liberal corruption, Canada will not be the kind of country they want to belong to. Deciding for whom to vote is a complex matter, and I would hope that Mr. Harper abstains from that argument personally and, even better, spikes it in Alberta at the first opportunity.

I live in the West, but not out of anywhere. Out West is an expression that Eastern and Central Canadians are likely to use. But to use it when you are sitting right on Vancouver Island is a little peculiar; it is indicative that Spector writes from the West but with an apparent nostalgia from the centralising perspective. That, I’d suggest, might explain his freight of his Near-eastern neighbours. He may be closer to Alberta, but he does not understand it.

Dramatic effect about disturbing talk emanating from Alberta aside, one has to ask: disturbing to whom? The argument that if the Liberals win the next election, this country will be a lesser place in which to live is not disturbing, among others, to those who did not profit from the stolen monies and the Liberal corruption. Some of the reasons seem very clear: Paul Martin sat in Chretien’s Cabinet, where according to BC’s David Anderson, the Liberal slush fund was discussed. Martin was Minister of Finance and vice-president of the Treasury Board. In addition, Martin’s riding is in Quebec –right on the Island of Montreal, where Liberals freely circulated with brown paper bags and/or envelops lining their coat pockets full of cash just diverted from the government Paul Martin had a crucial role in administering. What is more, Martin was then in full control of the Liberal party machine in Quebec. Since AdScam was an operation that overlapped party and state, Martin had front row seats to most of it, and every opportunity to know.

It may be a big IF for Spector to tell whether Martin knew of AdScam. But it does not dissolve the argument, even if Spector believes Martin, that if a man in the middle of all that did not know any of it, the man would have to be deaf and dumb. And is that the kind of man that should be running the country? What else did he miss on all those years? Either of those alternative is what Albertan near-easterners find truly disturbing. And, more disturbing still things will be if Ontarians send him back to Ottawa with a majority. True to the provincial motto, Fortis et Liber, no one is going to tell Albertans what to do or think, when to do it or think it, whether it’s one of our own or not. Albertans don’t operate that way.

If we were to turn Spector’s logic around, disturbing are also those who would choose a government mired in corruption no matter what; who would blindly ignore the lessons of the immediate past for the sake of what is now cuddly familiar to them. They are the ones in need of spiking, rather than those in Alberta and in Quebec who hope not to live in a country where their countrymen are so out of it, and so easily distracted from the real issue.

Crossposted from Civitatensis.ca

Politics and the Occult

A recent poll conducted from silent black helicopters hovering over Ontario reveals that

Twenty-eight per cent of Ontario voters now say the Conservatives have a hidden agenda and 27 per cent believe the Liberals do.

What is the obsession with the occult in this province?

Crossposted from Civitatensis.ca

Michael Ignatieff: Paratrooping Update

Colby Cosh quotes from the supposedly offensive passages in Blood and Belonging, Michael Ignatieff’s book from 1993.

It seems far too much of a coincidence that the day that Ignatieff supposedly receives a Liberal riding in which to run, that there is a significant Ukrainian population in the riding, and that his condescending attitude toward Ukrainians, which had not erupted before, suddenly shows up the same day. Daifallah may be right about a rough ride.

Is this the Martinista welcoming mat? From here, it’s starting to look a lot like a set up for the professor.

I have my copy of Blood and Belonging at work so I can’t verify, but I recall that Ignatieff didn’t have a great deal of flattering things to say about Quebec separatists either. How long before that one rushes out of the woodwork?

Cosh suggests that the PM will whip the riding into shape to accommodate Ignatieff: “wouldn’t he [Paul Martin] do so for the one man mentioned most often as a possible successor?” In public, he would. But Ignatieff better watch his six. Paul may well deal with potential successors in the same way that he dealt with his immediate predecessor.

Crossposted from Civitatensis.ca

Resistance Against Ignatieff’s Paratrooper Jump

Toronto residents with Ukrainian roots are protesting Michael Ignatieff’s bid to run for the Liberals in their riding.

[...]

Members of the Etobicoke Lakeshore Federal Liberal Riding Association claim the Liberals are trying to make it easy on Ignatieff at the expense of other contenders.

The group also claims Ignatieff has no ties to the Ukrainian community and worse, has actually disrespected the community’s heritage in one of his books.

This is curious at so many levels. The first funny thing is that Ignatieff chose Calgary to announce his [would be] candidacy. Is that going to change the intention of voters in Calgary?

Second, he makes the announcement but has no constituency in which to run yet. Would it not have made more sense to announce the news after he knew where he was going to land? –and land is the word because all the nominations had been closed in the 308 ridings. He’s a parachutist. And how should blacks, immigrants, and females in the Liberal party feel, now that Jean Augustine is being pushed out for the sake of a white guy? The announcement with no constituency sounds to me as if Ignatieff is trying to light a little fire under someone’s pants so that they get him his constituency. Tensions already? Or just incompetent timing on both parts?

On Ukrainians not being happy, I can’t say much because I have not read the book of Ignatieff’s that some Ukrainians apparently find offensive. But I could see how some pencil-neck Liberal apparatchik who heard that Ukrainians and Russians eat borscht might have thought that Ukrainians are the same as Russians.

Ultimately, it is a problem related to the one before. Liberals have made a carpet beggar of their main star candidate. Ignatieff must really want to be a Liberal MP really badly to subject himself to that kind of humiliation. And that is good news for the Liberals. They’ll have him speaking Ukrainian in no time.

Beware Space Aliens: Trudeau’s Defense Minister

Just when we thought Lloyd Axworthy is the apotheosis of idiotic Liberal foreign-defense policy thinking, along comes former Canadian Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister under Pierre Trudeau, Paul Hellyer, who warned a UofT audience last night about the dangers of ET coming to take on us earthlings in an intergalatic war:

Mr. Hellyer went on to say, “I’m so concerned about what the consequences might be of starting an intergalactic war, that I just think I had to say something.”

Hellyer revealed, “The secrecy involved in all matters pertaining to the Roswell incident was unparalled. The classification was, from the outset, above top secret, so the vast majority of U.S. officials and politicians, let alone a mere allied minister of defence, were never in-the-loop.”

Hellyer warned, “The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning. He stated, “The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide.”

Hellyer’s speech ended with a standing ovation. He said, “The time has come to lift the veil of secrecy, and let the truth emerge, so there can be a real and informed debate, about one of the most important problems facing our planet today.”

So, according to this speech which received a standing ovation at the University of Toronto, the Bush administration’s “militarization of space” is going to prompt space aliens to attack us. I don’t know what’s more pathetic. The fact someone actually gave a speech like this, or that it received a standing ovation at the UofT, supposedly Canada’s premier university.

I suppose one could argue that this is simply an extreme form of the argument that says US foreign policy brought on the 9/11 attacks. You know, blame the victim.

With the left in an uproar over the so-called “Christian millennialism” of Bush’s foreign policy (and here), one can see Hellyer’s speech as an example of the left’s millennialism. Instead of angels and archangels, the left’s apocalypse involves aliens (and Jews, of course).

H/t: Drudge

The Chretien Song

For your listening pleasure – The Chretien Gomery Song!

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