This is all over the French language news but not a word among English Canada. Maybe Anglophones are bored of this story or maybe they are too prudish? Who knows?

UPDATED: (June24th, 2008 — 9:30AM)
I have not been able to find any written online support of this but the radio broadcast says that these brothels serviced businessmen, diplomats and politicians.

Officials have called the matter to the attention of U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) headquarters in Washington, urging it to prevent any repetition of the incident.

As far as the state is concerned, the main difference solely seems to be administrative:

It is illegal in Virginia for a social worker to sign a parental consent form for an abortion.

The morality of the actions do not seem relevant.

Nobody can possibly know the motives of the people who facilitated this girl’s abortion. All we can do is respond to their actions which, in my opinion, sabotage the Church. I find this whole thing to be demonically appalling and my rage is directed at Catholics. Any and all of the Catholics who knowingly facilitated this horror should be publicly shamed.

I want to re-iterated my recommendation that the Church should stop any partnerships with the state.

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I see nothing wrong with letting them stay in Canada. These deserters claim to have been deceived about what they were expected to do. They may be right. If they were deceived, that should be grounds enough for them to break their side of the contract and there is no basis for saying they enlisted voluntarily.

Apparently, the Maple Leaf is too vile to be displayed as well.

No word yet on what exactly was so offensive about it.

A few child support orders, all from different ex-wives, enforced by the garnishing of wages.

When you have 4 exes with kids and they all come asking for $1000 a month in child support, you will be destitute.

And it will serve you right for entering into such stupidity.

Article II of the constitution states: “No person except a natural born citizen … shall be eligible to the Office of President.”

The framers of the constitution didn’t define “natural born citizen.” The phrase was added without any clarifying debate. The Supreme Court has never been asked to definitively settle the issue. And so we are left with a phrase just ambiguous enough to cause controversy.

It’s not the concept of rights that conservatives like myself hate; in fact, the United States — a country many of us neo-cons look to favorably — had natural rights embedded in its system far earlier in that country’s history. Rather, what bothers us the most with our rights is that they are so ambiguous and mailable; so much to the point that the courts could actually use the wording of the Charter’s introduction to justify locking up all Italian-Canadians…or rule just about any other reality into being just by a pronouncement. What good are rights if you can’t be certain that they won’t be written out of the Constitution 20 years from now when social culture shifts a tad, or, as today’s ruling demonstrates, the justice system we all depend on for stability is no longer in vogue over on the real estate west of Parliament Hill?

The credibility of today’s ruling isn’t also helped by the strong dissenting opinion of four of the court’s nine sovereigns. Strong language was used by Justice Rothstein in writing on the dissenting opinion, giving hope that this ruling could be overturned with a modest change in the line-up of court judges. Again, even the most partisan individual has to acknowledge that possibility and by extension, that rights are only as good as the ideologues in high courts who defend them!

Unfortunately, any change that may come down the road won’t come soon enough for the victims of violent crimes, or their families, who go on to see their perpetrators go on to receive a Happy Meal sentence, even when the crimes they commit are anything but a “diminished moral blameworthiness” act, as the court would have you believe!

As a Christian, I won’t ever own the game and highly doubt whether I’ll ever play a friend’s copy, although GTA IV did strike up some curiosity last week when speaking to one of my gaming friends who holds no allegiances to God but is pretty observant. He mentioned that the game, with fancy next-gen graphics and a deeper, longer story was different than its predecessors since, in this new, more detailed version, the wounds you inflicted were actually graphic and not fuzzy, pixilated renditions; the game code was more realistic so that people didn’t just keel over and die but actually begged for their lives, cried out in agony and added a sense of victimhood that never existed before; and the game was more open-box (a challenge given the freedom this game gave you before) where as the anti-hero, you are now charged with making moral decisions as you go about your life of crime and immorality.

Yesterday, while visiting another friend, I got a chance to see the game in action by watching a mission through which the hero, Neco, was sent to kill the biker-boyfriend of the mob boss’s daughter. The mob boss, my other friend observed while we were chatting, was messed up — there was a strong correlation between his drug habits and the deteriorating relationships he had with friends, family and *business colleagues*. Later on, during online mode, the game spit out “player 1 2nd amendmented player 2″ after the former shot and killed the latter in an airport. It seemed to me like the rumours of hidden messages in this game were true, even to the point where I now wouldn’t be surprised if I was told that Nico could get STDs from some of his dating activities that take place in the game (and which caused the infamous “Hot Coffee” affair in the last GTA game). Could it be that publisher Rockstar games is actually trying to explain to young and impressionable gamers that bad choices in life have consequences?

While it’s still a little premature to say, it might also be suggested that just by striving to give gamers that more realistic experience — right down to going to a bar to play pool — Rockstar is inadvertently making its games so life-like that the ugly side of crime, promiscuity and general ungodliness are all seeping out of the woodwork. If it is this intense, the publisher of GTA IV might have also found a way to reach out to a demographic law enforcement, governments and churches have struggled decades to make contact with. Ironically, Rockstar’s realism might just have the unintended consequences of making the acronym GTA a cultural fossil, given enough upgrades to gaming hardware.

In California the Salvation Army was forced to close down several inner city missions because officials refused to sign a document approving of homosexuality. The destitute suffered terribly as a consequence. In Britain the Roman Catholic church similarly was obliged to shut the doors of its adoption agency.

Aside from also speaking about our government-imposed unhealthy relationship between employees and employers, Coren got me thinking by phrasing the incident that sparked this whole thing in the way he did:

One employee announced to colleagues that she was a lesbian and began discussing her sexuality. Eventually she was let go. She complained to the Human Rights Commission, which fined Christian Horizons and demanded the change. Demanded, in fact, that they not be Christian.

I hadn’t considered it until reading Coren’s column, but what if we flipped this around and an employee started sharing their Christian faith with colleagues? I doubt it would end up before a HRC. And even if we buy into the secularist axiom that homosexuals are born wired to be homophilic (one that, like all such axioms on fetal tissue, the origins of life and the universe, and climate change conveniently lacks that indisputable proof that axioms usually come with), can the state successfully argue that a believing Christian isn’t just as equally inseparable from their faith and what it makes him or her? Think of the parallels: some people in churches leave to join other religions, and some homosexuals realize they just aren’t homosexuals any longer; both groups claim that their respective affiliations colour everything they do; and both groups have their affiliations protected under the current legal community’s consensus.

It’s an interesting situation: one where a group tasked with going out into all the world to spread their Good News has their constitutionally recognized right to do so repressed, while another had beneficial rights literally penciled into the highest document of the land is allowed to ignore the acronym every employee should know: NSFW (Not Safe For Work). It wasn’t the lesbian woman’s decision to become a lesbian that got her fired, it was her insistence on preaching the news to the rest of her co-workers that did. Curious that, when any Christian who pulled a similar stunt would be out by 3pm, box of belongings in hand. To use Coren’s wording, a sane nation would actually follow it’s own laws and both groups would be able to share away but that would also presume that groups like HRCs would be under the law too, now wouldn’t it?

With that said though, I think that the Harper government, keen to keep itself from acting too rational on matters dealing with our southern neighbours, lest our nation’s favourite case of racism bloom along with the other spring offerings, might have come to the right conclusion on this one, even if they still don’t have a good reason for why they did it in the first place. Consider, if you will, the wider context of this sale. Yes this was a sale between two willing organizations that was perfectly legal within the context of business and contract law and in appearances it appeared very free-trade and amicable for all parties. However, the aerospace industry and its derivatives, including satellites, is notoriously regulated the western governments involved. For MDA, this means that it cannot compete for U.S. business because U.S. law requires that contracts are rewarded exclusively to U.S. firms. In fact, if you look at why MDA wanted this deal so badly, it’s precisely because of this law — it would’ve allowed the company to compete in the massively larger, and far more lucrative U.S. ocean instead of being concealed within its present Canadian fishbowl. Not that we’re much better, screaming how any foreign interaction would be an immediate compromise to our sovereignty and national security.

At the end of the day though, if we’re going to play nice and laissez-faire, the least we owe to ourselves is to expect the same attitudes in return. NAFTA would’ve never worked for Canada if it was all give and no take. It’s also why North America’s flirtation with China is ultimately doomed in the long run as well. As soon as they actually get an economy over there, do you think the Chinese government’ll actually welcome the free flow of wealth out of its country, given the way it handles every other non-expedient situation it encounters right now? This sort of vigilance might have also given our local auto industries a fighting chance, if the union python wasn’t helping Japanese protectionism to choke it to death!

So in retrospect, I think that even conservatives will look back on the Prentice decision as one that was beneficial for a Canadian firm. Not that the man actually deserves any credit, given his willingness to invent guilt-by-association taxes to appease record labels and other blunders that indicate that Jim Prentice clearly doesn’t *get* how economies work! Of course, lost in the translation during this whole situation was the question of how MDA got into its mess in the first place; if Prentice were wise, he’d be spending the upcoming weeks with his American counterpart on that one…

“How, then, can he say that Canada will intervene with Saudi Arabia to spare the life of Mr. Kohail? How is it also possible for Canada to have legal assistance treaties with other countries — including Mexico?” Dion said.

The first problem that I have (and I would hope this should be obvious) is that the government can not rescue every single Canadian throughout the whole wide world who may be suffering obvious injustice. It is just impossible. Therefore, it seems unfair for the government to play favorites. [The irony is that governments always play favorites. Every time a government acts, it plays favorites. I wonder if the Liberals understand that.] Although, I am sure Dion only meant to ask a rhetorical question to highlight a double standard in state intervention but if that is the only way we can get intelligent commentary from the leader of the federal Liberals, so be it. On second thought, it would not surprise me if Dion’s political strategy involves the advocacy of saving every single Canadian throughout the whole wide world — I have yet to hear anything more mature come from his mouth in either official language.

[In other news, an RCMP search-and-rescue team take a few Griffon helicopters out to save a British adventurer trapped in her vain solo ski trek to the North Pole. Who pays that bill?]

Secondly, I am not too certain I want the Canadian government to have legal assistance treaties with other countries. The cynic in me fears that it is just a front for giving nation states political bargaining power for issues that have nothing to do with justice. Marc Emery is facing extradition to the U.S. for a non-crime in Canada.

I see no reason to trust a state that imprisons foreigners when they have the option of deporting and banishing them from their country. Incarceration is generally a bizarre state construct and this fact becomes more evident when we examine such inter-state or cross-jurisdictional cases. Brenda Martin said something very powerful, in my opinion:

“Right now there is so much negative publicity for Mexico, and for what? For a 51-year-old woman who allegedly received $26,000 illegally? [Someone] has to put this in perspective and simply let me go.”

She is right — unless they want something from her.

Maybe they think she can provide information to lead to further arrests. I do not know. Maybe the Mexican prosecutors just want to look tough to local Mexicans. Prosecutors love looking tough — it helps further their political careers. Maybe, like most bureaucrats, the more work they create for themselves, the more they get paid! Whatever the reason, the Mexicans can simply deport Brenda Martin to Canada and bar her from ever entering Mexico again.

Why would the Mexican authorities waste their time, effort and money on Brenda Martin? The actual fraudster, Alyn Waage, is already convicted and serving time. He insists that Brenda Martin is innocent and that they are holding her as collateral for a $500,000 bribe he was supposed to pay in exchange for his release. Sadly, that sort of corruption does not surprise me and it makes the most sense.

I have a lot of sympathy for Brenda Martin and her plight. However, I have no proof of what Brenda Martin was doing in Mexico. I am willing to give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she is an innocent woman. A friend of mine, spent a few years in North African and Spanish jails after being set up on trumped up smuggling charges. Generally, I distrust most legal systems and my distrust is greater for foreign ones.

—-

Canadians travel to Mexico all of the time. Some get scape-goated for crimes but most have a peaceful vacation or business trip. One thing I do know for certain is that I have never been to Mexico and I can not afford to go there. Maybe one day, I will.

Why should my taxes go to pay for one person’s legal debacle in a country I can not afford to visit???? That certainly does not seem fair. Even if it is fair, it certainly is no way to run a country without going bankrupt.

Beijing, China was regarded as the one to beat though as many of the delegates in the IOC thought that bringing the Olympics, with all its capitalist dollars and scrutiny, would be a vehicle to enhance the progress that China was making at that time to become a freer society. There was a columnist that wrote at the time that China’s then-leadership was probably going to be replaced by the time that the games came to the Chinese capital and that somehow a sporting event was going to usher in a push to hold free elections in the billion-strong nation. How wrong they all were.

Fast-forward seven years and aside from the blessing of the Vancouver-Whistler 2010 games — an endeavor that will at least save Ontario taxpayers a few ‘G’s for the next two decades — there isn’t much to report on in way of good news. Today it is being reported that France may boycott the games now (for once I support their auto-trigger response to surrender), and the undertones are indicating that other western nations might join in. Since Athens was the last city to host a summer games, it might be asked in the event of a large enough boycott to re-host the games although they would almost certainly be delayed at this stage until later this year or even 2009. The fact remains though that China the reality isn’t settling very nicely with the real world and it is only the IOC pie-in-the-sky types that we have to blame for what might not be a crisis, but certainly might be a disappointing disaster for the hundreds of young athletes who sacrifice almost all of their young lives to make it to the five-ring competition.

While I’m reluctant to say that the world owes anything to these talented young people, certainly the officials in the IOC do, and they’re about to let them down quite unpleasantly. The fact that boycotts are already being suggested is no surprise; if we were honest with ourselves we’d know that China has an atrocious human liberties record and is using its human capital clout to bully the world into maintaining the status quo. This might work when we are talking in terms of economics (we’ve already seen China politely threaten Stephen Harper’s government if Canada takes a hard line with it, risking the valuable trade we have with the nation), but the Olympics are at the end of the day a highly symbolic situation, wherein the only losses will be suffered by the athletes, their coaches, families and friends. Sponsors will find other events to bankroll, people will find other shows to watch, and the economy will remain virtually unaffected, aside from the Olympic emblem hat here or the torch keychain there.

Of course, China, in continuing its violence in Tibet is only hurting itself at this point. Even the Soviets back in their day knew how to look pretty when they had to , and cover up the fact that they weren’t playing nice behind the scenes. In other words, China might have finally pushed around its weight a little too much and crossed the previously-mythical line that the West had drawn in the sand. China will be set back if they have the games disrupted by this folly, both economically in the short-term and politically down the road. Who knows, maybe this’ll even start to make us here in the West serious about our feelings that Tibet should be given independence; a blessing in disguise that will bring about tremendous good in the years to come. All we can know for sure right now though is that China had put on a pretty good show in the next few weeks if it wants to keep the Beijing games intact. A word of warning to the Asian country though — watch out for the French judge, as he’s looking pretty grumpy right now!

It’s no accident that the world’s most heavily taxed industrialized countries also have the lowest fertility rates. When Canadians have to work half the year just to pay the tax man, babies become economically impossible. By the time a couple achieves financial stability, the woman has often passed her best-before-date in terms of fertility.

…

The time is past due for all levels of Canadian government to give birth to a new strategy to increase our population the old-fashioned way. Anything less is slow death to Canada’s way of life.

I was thinking about this the other day.  I was thinking about how we subsidize farmers, farms, farm equipment, how we even have special “purple gas” that is tax-free for “producers”.

Why are these offered?  Because the government, from time immemorial, has considered the production of food to be of benefit to the entire nation.

I think it is time for society to collectively get over the “overpopulation” myth.  All around the world, fertility rates are plummeting, in the first world and the third.   There is no slowdown in sight.  At current rates of decrease, the third world won’t have any surplus population to send us to make up for our own fertility shortfalls, within 20-30 years.  Then the demographic glacier that is already visible on our horizon will overtake us, and the Employment Insurance, the Welfare, the Public Health Care, the Canada Pension Plan, all these products of socialism that relies on perpetual population increase, will collapse.

My thinking is that we should start to consider families (and I mean man-woman-children families, which have already been proven to be the most cost-effective structure to produce balanced, healthy citizens) as producers.  Start giving them the same kind of preferential treatment as farmers get.  Without human resources, this nation will fail.  Having kids contributes to the entire nation’s future.  If you choose not to have kids, fine, that’s your choice, but you are not contributing to the nation’s future.  Enjoying the benefits of society now comes at a cost of supporting that society’s future.  It makes sense, then to have those who are not producers support to a degree the producers.  It makes sense to give financial benefits to producing at the lowest cost with the best results.

I don’t question that singles could have kids, or homosexuals for that matter, with fertility treatments, etc.  However, those means have a greater cost to society than the nuclear family.  Using science to make babies is more expensive than using the reproductive organs the way they were designed.  Plus, the cost of raising productive, healthy citizens is higher when a child lacks a parent of the opposite gender.  If health care costs are higher, if socialization skills are lacking (relating to both genders in a family has a greater instructional effect than only encountering one gender outside the safety of the home), that costs society, hence they should be discouraged - or nuclear families should be preferentially encouraged.  Serious thought should be given to how to encourage couple who have kids to stay together - to repair broken relationships, to live in cooperation, to think of their kids before themselves.  This produces healthier adults and healthier children.  And a healthier society.

Choose ye, liberals.  Start scaling back government now, or start encouraging families.  But get a wiggle on, eh?  I kind of like Canada, and would hate to see it go away.

Measures of well-being include life expectancy, education, purchasing power and standard of living. Not surprisingly, the top 10 [best countries for women] are among the world’s wealthiest.

(emphasis added)

The report, made by a New York-based group called “Equality Now”, also showcased a blaring absence of the United States in the Top 10, making the whole comment about wealth questionable at best.

The most stunning and obvious factor that the paper made no mention of was a commonality that all but three of the 10 worst countries had:

Afghanistan (Muslim)
Democratic Republic of Congo (Socialist)
Iraq (Muslim)
Nepal (Hindu)
Sudan (Muslim)
Guatemala (Catholic)
Mali (Muslim)
Pakistan (Muslim)
Saudi Arabia (Muslim — on steroids!)
Somalia (Muslim)

To quote Mark Steyn, there seems to be a trend here: “it starts with ‘I’, and ends with ’slam’”!

Personally, I really, really wish that MPs of all stripes would stop heckling — it does nothing to help anyone’s cause and makes the House look like a collection of baboons. That goes for Conservative MPs as well!

On top of that, I’m currently toying with the idea or value of whether the House should lift at least some of the coverage that MPs enjoy from defamation laws, such as not protecting MPs who make such statements during Question Period, or if something is defamatory, having the Speaker make the offending MP retract their question immediately. I think it might go a long way to bringing civility back into the House since it would eliminate a lot of the ridiculous statements that are embedded in QP questions (and which ultimately make it onto the evening news and broadsheets).

Finally, I think we have to take note of the fact that the Mulcair incident came from the NDP. This is criticism for my socialist colleagues, but it should be noted that I’ve seen Tories act just as shamefully (and I’m sure the Liberals do too, although I haven’t witnessed any events that come to mind) on occasion. However, the collective younger, organized (/unionized) or online New Democrats have a long and proud history of acting just as shamefully as the Outremont MP did this week.

I am not sure of what the motives truly are in each case, but it does come off to the outsider as being very self-righteous and dogmatic — terms that the group probably wouldn’t like to be associated with but frankly fit quite nicely. If you read the article about Mulcair, you’ll discover that he’s trying to protect a man that he feels is going to encounter great harm once deported back to his native land because he practices sodomy. This is a cause that, if true, I would support; no one should physically suffer at the hands of government or private citizens for such reasons and I respect Mulcair bringing this before the house. Where he goes over the line though is when he start implying that disagreeing with him not only makes one a homophobe but a racist — as he did with with the Tory MPs present. It demonstrates the lack of respect that many New Democrats have for opposing points of view or interpretations of the issue/situation in question. Read around the Liblogs or Blogging Tories; we have our faults but many of us (sadly not all) at least appreciate that other parties are ultimately trying to help the country/it’s citizenry even if we personally feel that they don’t see the whole picture or are misguided.

To suggest though that disagreeing with a political opinion automatically makes you retarded (or a “knuckle dragger”, which is the same thing in my book) or a war criminal, or anything else that the New Democrats in particular like to label opponents as is not just unhealthy for democracy but unhealthy for peace…something that many New Democrats have a heart-felt desire for.

Again, I’ll state that most of us (self included) on the Tory side are not innocent of breaking these rules in moments of weakness, however in our defence, we generally show an appreciation for the fact that not everyone thinks exactly as we do and that productive dialogue can occur if we stop making every opponent into the mindless monsters of our greatest bane.

I think we all have a strong objection to the money that we earned by our own sweat being used to fund programs that we find offensive or objectionable.
For any Christians who think that this is a step in righting the wrongs of past Liberal governments who have used taxpayer dollars for Christianophobic material is that the shoe will eventually get onto the other foot; not if, WILL! A Liberal government in the future need only redeclare the program as serving to protect minority voices and volia, feminazis will be the typical type of group getting film funding.

The same goes for those on the left who are self-professed agnostics, atheists and the like. Think of how you would feel if this program in its current form went through. Not nice to know that your money is funding ignorant, intolerant hate-speech, or whatever you’re describing religious opinion as these days, is it? As I said, the shoe will always go on the other foot in a democracy like ours, so why are we taking turns being offended when we should just let the people who make the money such programs are greased by make the decisions themselves…with their dollars?

In extension, my only hope is that now that we’ve woken up the socialites to the notion that group-specific funding can be divisive, they won’t be as hypocritical as to call for programs like the Court Challenges Program to be reinstated. Just some food for thought…

(h/t to Bene Diction Blogs On)

“We are both federal states and when you live in glasshouse you don’t throw stones.“

Yes, Mr. Ambassador, but Canadians do not torch embassies nor do they poison their political opponents. Canada is a “federation” but Canadians are different from Russians and Serbs. [I wonder if the Russian ambassador considers a bayonnet and a butter knife as being the same too, hmm???]

If Canadians want to maintain any semblance of being part of a civilized nation, they will distance themselves from the bullying arrogant rhetoric of Russian statesmen.  Canadians will align themselves with other civilized people who did not hesitate to recognize the obvious: Kosovo independence.

Meanwhile, I have a few friends in teachers colleges across the province who have reported back that specific unions have come into their classes to tell them the names of Liberal candidates in the local areas that they were expected to vote for “if you want a job after school” or how there are now classes dedicated to teaching how great a man Pierre Trudeau was (even if he were a great man, a controversial statement in itself, should we not teach the students to judge history for themselves?). As they say, your tax dollars at work.

I found this video on YouTube today that brought me back to these issues and reminded me of just how intellectually bankrupt our system is, and ethically destitute the unions which brought it about are. The United States has many good things, and many bad but one constant in the latter category has been its education system which has been a point of grief in that country since at least the time of the civil rights movement. Watching the video, it really depressed me to notice how much of the show could be cast in Ontario these days — particularly the part around the 22 minute mark. John Stossel is a personal favourite, and 20/20 (like all TV investigative journalism shows) should be watched with caution but aside from the fact that the network has a vested interest in not being sued for slander, Stossel makes his best point at the end of the show: a hope that this sparks a debate.

Martin, you see, is the lesser known defector to the Liberal Party in December, 2003 after the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative parties ratified a merger agreement, the other being former every-party leadership contender and cabinet minister Scott Brison. I think a lot of history’s forgetfulness of Martin stems from the fact that Brison hailed from the PC Party (and was therefore considered “moderate), which Martin came from the Alliance benches. In fact, I’m still puzzled as to why Martin joined the Liberals to this day since, unlike Brison, he was never offered a cabinet position in Paul Martin’s government and has largely faded into the woodwork of a caucus that supports initiatives that Keith Martin, the dark horse Canadian Alliance leadership candidate of 2000 would be cringing over.

News that Stephane Dion’s office will now ask Martin to withdraw his human rights motion for fear of upsetting the ever-restless Liberal base might trigger Martin to examine whether he should be sticking it out with the Liberal caucus or not. Again, I’m not sure what led an MP to leave a then-leaderless party but it appears that Martin’s attitudes haven’t chanced that much from when he was a CA MP and hence, he’d find more friends in the government caucus these days than he would among his current colleagues.

Basically, Shane is right that this is the beginning of something. We have crossed the line of officially recognizing the isolationist mentality that we have been acting upon for the past 40 years. Let’s not kid ourselves though, this school, John Tory’s ill-fated campaign promise, and everything that is yet to come should’ve been seen coming from a mile away. In fact, most of us still smugly endorse the culture that is allowing this transformation to take place. You see, unlike the Americans who now have 230 years of generally open immigration experience (and whose one exception happens to be the black slave case), Canada’s current model has only been going for a few decades and it is something that most Canadians like to think makes us superior to our souther neighbours.

Instead of a melting pot, we like to think our society is multicultural, where you can bring not only the food, dress, music, and language from back home but also the racism, ills, cultural norms and other attributes that most of us would personally find undesirable. When a family from the Middle East punishes their daughter harshly for not wearing a hijab, as a Mississauga father did in killing his daughter over the issue, we always see the culprits at the CBC, Libblogs and the general bleeding hearts quickly run in to caution us that it is we, the ones who have been assimilated into what used to be Canadian culture, who need to adopt sensitivity, not the individual(s) who came here to seek the better life/wealth that our culture had a large part in creating! By letting different ethnic groups go about their business, just not around my family though if you please, these newcomers who include many individuals who want to escape the ills they left behind and become truly Canadian, are marginalized. Unlike the Americans or Japanese (to name a couple), we don’t create a systematic incentive so strong that one cannot help but learn passable English within a year of landing here (I should know; my neighbours two doors down don’t speak enough English to understand me saying “hello”, but live off of the welfare program all day in their new dwelling). Nor do we create any other incentive that will make people stop saying that they’re Indian, African or Dutch, but rather that they’re just Canadian!

I know some of the people who are up in arms over this post already wouldn’t like me quoting from our Lord, but He had some pretty wise things to say that apply to all of society, not just Christians. The one that comes to mind is that “a house divided will surly fall.” As North York becomes the newest member state of the African Union, and Islam prepares to move Mississauga into a vassel dar al-Islam, we might want to step back for a moment and consider that for a bit, and maybe explore whether we’re paying a higher price to get sushi at the mall than we have to…or than we can afford!

No one has been silenced on the issue, as Barbara Kay suggested this week in her column. Dr. Morgentaler has fought province by province to ensure that the legal right to abortion is supported by medicare.

By “no one”, I presume Prof. Rebick means no one on the pro-choice side since Barbara Kay’s column earlier this week dealt specifically with university administrations and/or student governments in Newfoundland, Ontario and B.C. all refusing equal rights to pro-life groups or their apologists. That quote above is all there is; I presume that by referencing Mrs. Kay that Prof. Rebick read the work cited but seems to offer us no compelling reason to believe her statement.

Sadly, this is the habit that I have witnessed in almost every pro-abortion individual who wants to “debate” abortion; state the emotional arguments how how a woman has the right to control her own body’s functions (she doesn’t, otherwise women would have a legal right to be cured from cancer or at least to cosmetic surgery), dangerous abortions would happen if it were illegal (completely ignoring present dangers in legal procedures, not to mention the disregard of the rule of law), only women can understand and therefore speak on this issue (so what of all the “pro-life” women out there and does this mean that men should only be able to speak on issues that we feel we have special insight on?) and we’re not sure when life begins anyway (a point that actually enhances the anti-abortion arrangement since most of our laws err on the side of caution, which in this case, would mean preventing the abortion of a life at the earliest point in time that this life could exist).

The comments I made in brackets are all responses that we who feel abortion is murder (by definition, a taking of a human life) have made and have yet to hear a direct response on that isn’t a rephrasing of the original argument. Here we have a well-established academic, writing for a national newspaper, and even she cannot bring herself to confront any rebuttal to her arguments. And that, my friends, leads me to wonder if all of the “pro-choice” forces now hypocritically breaking the mantra of universal freedom of expression on university campuses are really aren’t just tactically smart after all…

Sydney’s Cardinal Pell heavily criticized an Australian medical journal for publishing a professor’s letter calling for a tax on children of $5000 per child and $800 yearly for each child after birth, as punishment for parents who have families larger than two children.

…

Dr. Barry Walters condemned Australia’s “baby bonus” program, writing that “showering financial booty on new mothers” encouraged “greenhouse-unfriendly behaviour” and that Australia should adopt population plans similar to those in India or China. Trees should be planted to negate the ecological effect of every child born, he said.

But Cardinal Pell said that anti-human environmental proposals from extremist minorities were the real cause for concern.

Sadly, extremist minorities, the likes of which we saw around here courtesy of Atheism’s American high priest, soon become oppressive majorities after they use their influence in the education system to brainwash enough young voters to militantly support the agenda in question.

Just for the record as well, it’s not like India (whose culture is known to mimic ancient Rome’s and prefer male babies while slaughtering its daughters — feminists? feminists?!) or China export there excess human capital to other nations like our grande immigration scheme in this country likes to imagine. The bodies pile up pretty fast.

This professor’s letter also begs the question of what would happen if expectant parents aren’t able to pay a sickening carbon tax on newborns. Does the state then empower itself to violate the mother physically and abort the child? (Feminists? Feminists?!) The only crime that I can see the armies of The Left truly convicting this professor of is demonstrating modern liberalism’s true agenda of pursuing a Utopian world (which won’t work under real-world circumstances) through means that would make Hitler, Stalin, et al blush in jealousy. At least the ancients, as primative as I’ve been told they were in comparison to our highly evolved brains and culture, were honest enough to admit when all they wanted was a good old genocide to appease their blood-thirsty gods!

I’m sorry that they feel that their people got a raw deal from Confederation and in a perfect world, yes, the treaties negotiated over a hundred years ago (and gifts for that matter) were done in bad faith, but a Native today has no more right to rule over this land than an immigrant, a native-born Euro-Canadian or anyone else for that matter. Canada is a U.N.-recognized, politically sovereign entity which calls the shots in its territory. In all fairness, what have any of these mobsters or terrorists now crying crocodile tears done to deserve the very generous tax exemptions, government programs and hand-outs that they get besides winning the genetic lottery? Have all of those perks been considered by these people or should we subtract all of the tax money behind them from the total we are to pay this band for the Grand River territory (IF we even owe it to them post-negotiations!), because it might just turn out that the Natives owe us a nice big fat cheque along with the apology!

Oh wait, when its liberals/Christianophobes doing the talking, it’s only “ridicule”, not hatred, right?

Ben Stein, first made famous in the celebrity world through Farris Bueler’s Day Off, staunch Republican and former speech writer for Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, is staring in a new documentary called “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed” that will be out in theatres this February and tackles the dogma of evolution that is not only harming free speech in our society but also has led to many of the disasters of the 20th century with the greatest death toll. I have searched and haven’t seen any evidence that it will be carried by Canadian chains, but I hope this is just because the movie is still at least a month away from release.

Anyway, watch the trailer here since it’s actually a pretty powerful and moving piece. I hope that everyone who considers themselves to be truly open minded to all the possibilities of science watches this too. As for the commentators on this blog who will simply dismiss both this post and this movie as blind faith, I offer the challenge to you that Stein implies in the above-linked movie: watch the movie, listen to the criticism and respond accordingly. Otherwise, it really begs the question on whether you are really comfortable with your faith in what you have heard about evolution (studies, evidence of, arguments for), or are just paranoid that someone if challenged with a rival theory like intelligent design it will come crashing down. For the trolls (and you know who you are!), I simply offer the original title Darwin gave to his book,

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

,and ask you to explain how such a social (and Holocaust-endorsing) statement can be classified as the title of a purely scientific work — until I get a direct answer to that, I will not respond to any of your inquiries as I haven’t seemed to get much of a response on mine and think I’m overdue!

With that said, let the acid start flying…!

Among the more reasonable explanations that I’ve been offered are that if the roles were reversed, the U.S. would be laughing right through the primaries at the thought of turning one of its citizens over to a foreign nation to face a criminal charge that it is not willing to make itself, and that Emery is just being used as an example; there are many B.C.-based websites that offer the same service that Emery has, but the U.S. law enforcement agencies aren’t even recognizing their existence.

There are problems though, even with these justifications. First, while it’s true that the U.S. would be more keen on keeping its own safe, I seem to recall many examples wherein the country is willing to extradite American citizens to Europe, or Canada to face charges such as fraud, murder or theft; if I’m not mistaken, many of the recent business scandals that have been recently rocking the U.S. financial world involve execs in just this situation. Irregardless, two wrongs wouldn’t make a right; everyone, including Emery, agrees that he willingly provoked the States and is now facing the consequences. Canadian law is quite reasonable in this case, giving discretion to the Minister of Justice, Rob Nicholson, who has the ability to veto a citizen’s transfer to a foreign country to face charges if he feels that there is the potential that that individual’s basic rights (to a fair trial, to life…) would be violated or that the crime stated is unreasonable (eg. if you are a woman charged with walking down the street sans a male escort). This allows our nation’s officials to get a glance at the situation and make a judgment call. As for why Emery is being singled out, I understand that he’s particularly provocative and even if he isn’t the biggest or more dangerous seed seller out there, it’s the U.S. government’s freedom to decide who and who they will not contact Canada about wishing to prosecute.

Marc Emery will certainly face a steep sentence if he is convicted in the States, make no doubt about it. However, he knew the risks going into the situation and figuratively thumbed his nose at America’s right to authority as he did so. To cry foul now that the tables are turned is to completely disregard every step he’s taken up until now!

On the latter note, we’ve seen such bright lights as a ban on two-garage houses and on pellet guns here in Kitchener recently (with another wise-guy idea to ban windows that open more than a foot wide to prevent saps like me from falling out of apartments on the way, although balconies are still perfectly legal…), now it’s Hamilton’s turn to show that they too can take their stupid pills with the best of them! Tonight, Hamilton city council is debating a motion to limit garbage to one bag per household. As my 16-year-old sister quickly pointed out, there’s some very nice fields around Hamilton (seriously, they exist!) that can and will become insta-landfills if this bylaw goes through — memo to councillors: Captain Planet would be proud!

But while Hamilton’s representatives are debating whether they should limit garbage to one or two bags, clear or black plastic, coffee, tea or Sega, might I also point out that we’re talking about Hamilton here guys! The poor performance of the local football team this year is only a reflection of the malaise that engrosses this city; that is why many, like yours truly, simply leave at the first opportunity! I did come back though to enjoy the expressway that the city finally managed to build, after only 50 years of trying too!

Back to the garbage issue, I ask what is stopping the limit from backfiring with, say, students at MacMaster University and Mohawk College who would see piling garbage on the street curbs regardless of whether it gets taken or not as part of their duty to add to Hamilton’s breathtaking (literally) charm? Are we really so certain that these young citizens, known for their loud house parties, poor house maintenance and minimal loyalty to the larger community will so giddily comply with such a restrictive law, especially when they live with 5-6 other adults typically?

What is also stopping someone from, say, dumping some trash in somebody else’s pile? Or just on the street as is. I know the environazis and eggheads down at City Hall have to think that this is sheer brilliance but as soon as you lower the limit to something ridiculously low unless you’re single or a very clean couple then grey areas will start to appear among the green. On that note, speaking of green that is, I must’ve missed council’s debate over the tax reductions 500,000 Hamiltonians will see next year now that they’re having a major service cut back!

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?

The German news media hasn’t yet shown much interest in Schreiber’s headline-making activity in Canada in recent weeks.

What really surprises Germans is how Schreiber has managed to avoid extradition from Canada for so long, he said.

“I just know that everyone is confused by the Canadian procedure.”

In other words: Germans think that Canada has no cajones. They would be right.

Canada, the country that invented multiculturalism more than 30 years ago, has been consumed with another doctrine in recent weeks. Canadians call it “reasonable accommodation of minorities”. Translated into Australian, the question becomes: at what point should we tell minorities “You’ve had a fair go, pal, now stop asking for special favours”?

…when a small town in Quebec does the talking, it is depicted as insular, racist hicksville by Canada’s left-leaning media. When respected academics such as Francis Fukuyama say more or less the same thing, even keen multiculturalists will slowly nod their heads and concede there may be something to this argument about realigning the unruly rights debate.

There’s a cheap solution, which Canada has actually excelled at, which is simply to import your brains. As the son of an Englishman who came to Canada to teach math, the Gladwells [and myself] are part of that earlier cheap solution. So that’s one route, and we can continue to do that, there’s nothing stopping us. And Canada will not become less desirable over time; I suspect that 10 years from now, Canada will be an even more desirable location for lots of people from less-developed countries.

Of course, mass immigration is not always a picnic, as the residents of British Columbia’s Lower Mainland are currently discovering. But, man (!), couldn’t Gladwell pose as a bureaucrat in Ontario’s teaching bureaucracy? Sure, sell out public education to the teachers unions, which promise the greatest possible expense to graduating the dumbest possible students. Then make up for the resulting moron gap by “importing brains.”

But even Gladwell realizes that low education standards are not sustainable in the long term:

But you can’t keep doing that forever. At a certain point you have to address what’s going on with the people who are already here.

And you do that by breaking these. Or at least it’s grip over Canada’s provincial governments.

“Organizing and aiding entry into Canada is an offence under Section 117 of the (act).”

Yet too complex for the Liberal Party:

Liberal justice critic Marlene Jennings said she believes using the legislation required federal consent.

“That means that Rob Nicholson, the Attorney General of Canada, authorized it, and that’s a clear misuse and misinterpretation of the law,” she said.

In other words, Canada’s official opposition is committed to condoning human smuggling into Canada under the proper circumstances and to undermining Canada’s regulation of the refugees it admits.

I know!: Stephane Dion should pose for a campaign photo with Omar Khadr.