R.I.P. Antonio Lamer

Civitatensis:

Former Chief Justice of Canada’s Supreme Court Antonio Lamer has died. No one understood the power that judges were receiving in 1982 better than Lamer, who referred to it as “a revolution.” Lamer sometimes bragged about his newly found ability to change the country though his power on the bench.

As perhaps the most important activist judge in the Charter era, Lamer was instrumental in saving Canadians from the darkly totalitarian world* they inhabited prior to the Charter:

“Thank God for the Charter! [People] just don’t realize what it would be like if we didn’t have those rights.”

Thank God for the Charter. To be inscribed on Justice Lamer’s tombstone.

* Oh yeah, “darkly totalitarian” means dudes couldn’t marry each other (!). Thank God for the Charter!

A Happy Night In Football

The Saskatchewan Roughriders win the 95th Grey Cup! I believe my last post has been vindicated. Great game by both teams; they both deserved to be there tonight and they should both be proud of their accomplishments, including a certain young quarterback for Winnipeg!

Sunday Directives from Toronto

Residents of rural areas, towns, small cities – heck, anywhere that isn’t Toronto – should pony up to pay tribute to Canada’s multiculturalism capital.

Hell, who even needs that weird set of rules called federalism? To listen to Granatstein and the other assorted band of professional editorial whiners from the centre of the universe, one would think that bureaucrats from Ottawa should be surveying potholes on Yonge Street and shoveling the asphalt themselves. Maybe Flaherty should be donning the fluorescent orange himself?

Some advice from a non-loser province: In Alberta, we have a bloated, badly managed, money-sucking civic entity known as the City of Calgary, ably represented by whining urban columnists just like Granatstein. Except that here, editorialists in non-Calgary Alberta protest the idea that taxpayers from  Didsbury should have their taxes continually raised to lavish “infrastructure improvements” on the big city. So where are these editorialists in non-Toronto Ontario?

Go ‘riders Go!

Counted over 30 people dressed in green yesterday for the big game when I was walking around Toronto after work yesterday. Just saw 3 from Winnipeg on Thursday, one in a *Jets* shirt; looks like the Rider Nation is alive and well and ready to cheer the best CFL team onto victory!

Recommended for your next flight into Vancouver

*

And just in case you have a generally non-compliant dog:

Protecting Transsexuals: The NDP tackles the big issues

The NDP on exporting “Canadian values“:

On Nov. 3, the NDP’s federal council adopted a new policy on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and transsexual rights…

The policy…seeks legal protection for transgendered and transsexual people and demands that the Canadian government work for their rights in other countries.

Five Multicultural Obstacles to Civic Betterment

Just as the most recent findings of Robert Putnam regarding trust and ethnic diversity were first becoming public, Steve Sailer wrote about the difficulties of fixing up a public park in a multicultural neighbourhood. Many of us like to see this sort of anecdotal flesh added to the bones of quantitative studies like Putnam’s:

Fifth problem: the fundamental difficulty in making multiculturalism work, namely, multiple cultures. Getting Koreans, Russians, Mexicans, Nigerians, and Assyrians (Christian Iraqis) to agree on how to landscape a park is not impossible. Yet it’s certainly far more work than fostering consensus among people who all have the same picture in their heads of what a park is for.

For example, Russian women like to sunbathe. But Latin American women want to stay in the shade, since their culture discriminates in favor of fairer-skinned women. So do you plant a lot of shade trees or not?

Hard-Headed Atheists Strike Again!

Mark Shea describes the cool rationalism of one of our atheist friends, Matthew Parris, in refusing to accept the story of a nun who was cured of Parkinson’s:

The great disadvantage under which the atheist materialist invariably places himself is that, in despising the supernatural, he refuses to look and see if it does, in fact, occur. Instead, he fools himself with self-deluding sleight-of-hand. He points to the false miracle and pretends that it stands for all miracles. Or he adopts a mocking tone of voice and pretends that it substitutes for a rational argument. Or he links an honest nun with a crazy fundamentalist political theory. Or, in this case, he simply clamps his eyes shut, plugs his ears and screams “Noooooo!” at the top of his voice while declaring that he is the cool rationalist who follows the evidence wherever it leads.

And then distinguishes the joyous believer from the grim, joyless atheist:

Meanwhile, the nun who no longer has Parkinson’s continues to exist and praise God for her healing, in defiance of the loudest shouts of some ignorant dogmatic scribbler that “He didn’t!”

Which reminds me: One of the more comedic blogspheric developments of late has been these little stylized “A” emblems, a merchandising innovation of “academic” Richard Dawkins that allows atheists to “out themselves” on their blogs (you can also buy the pin – not kidding).

As if to provide a living, breathing example of the archetypal hard-headed rational atheist, one of our more subtle atheist bloggers has posted his little “A” along with a relentlessly empirical reference to the “crap bible” and a dispassionate call for “religion to be destroyed.” Not to mention some other bits. Oh to be so guided by reason over emotion!

Richard Warman v. Jessica Beaumont

Doesn’t that kind of remind you of the rocket club nerd reporting the faux rebellious goth smoker to the principal?

Yes, the CHRC ruled that citing a verse from the Old Testament condemning homosexuality constituted hate speech. Yes, that is mildly annoying. No, it’s not surprising. No, I will not enter into mind-numbing discussions over context and blah blah blah (Believe me, I excuse myself from more than enough such discussions amongst “experts” in real life). And no, I will not get excited about the decisions of this dustbin collection of fringy buffoons, “empowered” nerds, and their legal profession enablers whose entire substantive impact in the real world has been zippo.

I mean, really. Jessica Beaumont? Who is next on Warman’s shit list? I’ll bet there’s lots and lots more unemployed teenage girls out there that the CHRC could totally make an example out of. And more neo-nazis. After all, these people are too stupid to even make a living or hold their marriages together. Clearly they and their unemployed teenaged electro-propagandists constitute an immense danger to our well-being and must be crushed by our saviors in the CHRC!

Want to gain lifetime immunity from the wrath of the CHRC and its Jerry Springer jihad? Then make some money. Or marry someone with money. Hell, even Malcolm Ross has been able to elude human rights authorities for the entirety of his genuinely anti-semitic book writing career merely by the fact that he has never lost his salary as a teacher.

Or better yet, go get a law degree. Richard Warman will run screaming from you.

Run for the Hills – We’re Killing the Universe!

Forget about global warming, we’re destroying the universe… just by looking at it!

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