Barrel Strength

In the eyes of Justice McLachlan and her co-ideologues on the nominating committee, “controversy” is a variable absolute:

McGill ethicist refused OC because she was ‘too controversial’

[...]

The Order’s receptiveness to new, taboo-breaking social mores was evident well before the Morgentaler appointment. The Order last year approved the candidacy of Brent Hawkes, a Toronto cleric who performed Canada’s first same-sex marriage. Also last year, the Order appointed writer Jane Vance Rule, lauding her specifically for “populating her novels with homosexual as well as heterosexual characters.” And when it honoured Jean Chrétien, the Order put a curious emphasis on his support for same-sex unions.

Few people, even critics of gay rights, made a fuss. I think most Canadians thought the Order was making an effort to reflect a significant current of public opinion. It’s hard to be against broad-mindedness.

Now, however, it suddenly turns out that the Order is not so broad-minded after all. It has refused admission to Margaret Somerville, the McGill University ethicist who is a leading critic of the social views that the Order welcomes.

And what does Ontario’s favourite Catholic schoolboy made good have to say about this? Don’t wait for the translation, Mr. McGuinty!

There are mornings when you feel the judiciaryneed to be taken out and given a sensitivity course, not in the sensitivity to every whiner group, no, but to an idea of what judges should never tamper with.

A little humility about the extent of their competence, about the extent to which they can never substitute their opinions for those of others. I know it goes against the entire thrust of legal training since the Constitution Act of 1982, but that is the point. Leonard Cohen predicted “there won’t be nothing, nothing you can measure any more” in his song, The Future, and he foretold the truth. What he could not tell was the role of the judiciary in politicizing the length of every yardstick.

I cite two recent examples of judicial overreach: the Quebec judge who overruled the father of a 12 year old, who was grounded, and the Manitoba judge who overuled the medical opinion that a man was brain dead, and in the process caused three physicians to resign from the Grace Hospital.

In the Quebec case, the father had grounded the daughter for disobedience about going on the Internet.

“Madam Justice Suzanne Tessier of the Quebec Superior Court ruled on Friday [June 20th] that denying the girl permission to go on the school trip was an excessive punishment. The girl’s lawyer, Lucie Fortin, said, “She’s becoming a big girl” and described the school trip as “a unique event in her life”, the Globe and Mail reported. In arguing the case, Fortin cited Sections 159 and 604 of the Quebec Civil Code, which allow minors in some circumstances to initiate court proceedings relating to the exercise of parental authority. Section 159 is used in “extreme circumstances”, such as cases of parental negligence.

“The father’s lawyer, Kim Beaudoin said that her client is “stunned by this situation. He feels like he’s lost his daughter”. He is appealing the court’s decision.”

Bravo! Judge Tessier, you are in line for a spanking from the Appeal Court.

On the Manitoba situation, the Post asks the right questions:

“Beyond judges acting with urgency, there is the unresolved question of whether court compulsion of health care workers is just. At the moment, the highest value in medical bioethics is individual autonomy and consequent respect for individual decision-making. That value was brought into doubt when the Manitoba judge questioned the physicians’ medical expertise and, at the same time, required that they continue to exercise it in violation of their professional and personal ethics. Should physicians and other health care professionals be required to choose between hurting a patient by ineffective medical treatment, and a possible jail sentence for being in contempt of court?”

Though I do not hold with a general legalized right of physicians to kill patients, they make decisions which result in the cessation of artificial support for life, nearly every day in some cases. They pull the plugs, and the equipment moves on the next person requiring care. If collectively they do this every day, should we not legalize it? Permit me some moral ambiguity here. Doctors make medical decisions, and medically you are meat, a physical being, not a spiritual one. When that meat is no longer self-sustaining, you have entered the domain of medical decision-making.  They have other people whose lives could be sustained by the attention and equipment they are spending on your parent’s comatose body. Whenever a judge deals with these matters as if it there were a right to be kept alive, they forget the costs imposed on everyone else whose fathers and mothers lie dying for the want of attention going to your parent’s soon-to-be corpse. Life may be sacred, but not to physciansin their medical capacity. They deal in death, and deathis the natural outcome of life. We have no right to the indefinite avoidance of our appointment with our Maker, particularly if that avoidance is medically useless, and a burden on the still-living in need of care.

Judges need to restrict the tendency to extend rights where rights can have no bearing, and state decision-making where the state has no comeptence.

The judiciary reminds me of a scene in Amadeus, where Mozart is infuriated that he has to submit samples of his work to a committee of Italians to get the job of music teacher to the Emperor’s niece.

VON STRACK
Mozart, you are not the only composer in Vienna.

MOZART
No, but I’m the best.

VON STRACK
A little modesty would suit you better.

A judiciary filled, at the very best,  with Salieris, Quantzes, and Telemanns, and many thinking themselves Mozarts, whose judgments are cutting-edge advances of human rights. Spare us!

I would rather be governed by 100 people chosen randomly from the telephone book than by the Canadian judiciary. I mean it. Or by the semi-random group of people assembled in the House of Commons. Hey! Parliamentary supremacy. What a concept!

 And I write this as Mozart’s finale to the Symphony #41, the Jupiter, is playing. I know the difference between talent and pretention, and so do most Canadians.

When I find the National Post getting soft I turn to the Financial Post for the really conservative market-oriented view. Its castigations of the global warming con job have been a source of amusement and great comfort. By contrast, its views on telecommunications have been economically illiterate.

The Financial Post’s  (or its lead editorialist Terence Corcoran’s) view of telecommunications has been: we have enough competition now to deregulate. Two competitors in the general area, cable and telephone, are enough, and three is a sufficient cause to leave the market alone. No attention needs to be paid to the market conditions in a particular place; it is sufficient that competitors exist in the same urban area, regardless of whether your building is served by one or two carriers. Mandated sharing of facilities, where the big incumbents must share facilities with ISPs, is just “telecom trotskyism”, in the glorious invective of Terrence Corcoran.

Thus it was with interest I read “Abolish the Canadian rail monopoly” by François Tougas in today’s Financial Post. Tougas is a senior lawyer at Lang Michener and an adjunct professor of competition policy at the UBC Faculty of Law - not a likely candidate for Trotskyism.

Tougas says:
“The best way to regulate a natural monopoly is to introduce competition by allowing others (a “guest” railway, in this case) to access the track infrastructure of the incumbent (the “host” railway) to vie for the business. Modern economies already do this with other network industries like telecom, cable and electricity and gas distribution.”

But where barriers to entry are “tremendously high”, says Tougas, railways are able to carry on free from competition. Where you cannot build a rival rail-line, the existing regulatory remedies available to captive shippers are insufficient. There is no market. Tougas recommends “running rights” - the right to pass your traffic over the lines of another railroad, using someone else’s railcars, and paying them a regulated rate for the privilege. Otherwise there occurs an unjust transfer of wealth from industries to carriers.

There is no difference in principle between “running rights” in the railway case and “access to underlying facilities” in telecommunications. Why then does the Financial Post rail at Professor Michael Geist (and by extension, all the companies which benefit from sharing of underlying facilities, such as MTS-Allstream) as Trotskyites, and Professor Tougas gets a free pass?

Are ideas made acceptable by their content, or by their provenance? Is what is good for natural resource producers in Flin Flon bad for businesses in Markham and Pierrefonds? Should the telephone companies and other carriers take a part of the profits of all electronic transactions, because they can? But railroads should not? One is tempted to think that the reason why different positions are taken by the Financial Post on the identical issue is that we can visualize railroads; we do not really have a precise mental image of networks.

For a further treatment of Terence Corcoran’s sadly mistaken views on intellectual property, see the comment by the economist Joseph Potvin on digital rights management.

I have maintained that the hostility shown by Human Rights Commissions towards Steyn and Levant comes from lawyers, some of whom drink deeply from poisoned wells on their passage through three years of law school.

The message being conveyed to the students who take courses from certain professors is that free speech is an American concept, which they are wrongfully exporting to Canada and other places through the usual instruments of cultural imperialism. Mr. Stacey of the federal branch of our human rights commissions was typical in his view that free speech was an “American doctrine”.

I cite as an example the essay found in (2003) 49 McGill Law Journal 59 by Professor Jane Bailey, “Private Regulation and Public Policy: Toward effective restriction of Internet hate Propaganda” as a pertinent example of the creeping abrogation of free speech in the name of “multiculturalism”, and “equality” that were enshrined in Trudeau’s 1982 Constitution. I argue that the consequences of that Constitution are being witnessed now in the prosecution of Steyn and Levant.

Read the rest…

On the pages of Facebook and Blogging Tories I have spotted postings by keeners on the notion of a resurrected Reform Party of Canada and actual moves to make the paper Reform Party of Ontario into something with warm bodies.

Of the latter I have little to say other than it might be wise to make good first on an attempt to take down John Tory before embarking on a twenty-first century peasants’ revolt beyond 905 and 416. If the provincial Progressive Conservative label is tainted from the last vote, I rather think that slimwhitman.on.ca is a poor choice for horse-switching.

But for the millennials who are contemplating the federal voodoo of raising Reform from its grave, I have to ask: what the hell part of seventeen years of brutal, pointless political civil war do you not understand?!

Many, including your correspondent, suffered through frustration at the ballot box, broken friendships, unbearable stress, wasted opportunities and years of needless, wanton Liberal oligarchy just to get back to square one and arrive at a winning coalition.

We were happy to achieve peace under Stephen Harper and we will not let go of it gently. Trust me, at the very least you will be wasting your time in a pointless sideshow but if you persist nothing will be spared to restore that peace. Nothing.

Do not force Cincinnatus to leave his farm again.

I don’t question the necessity of the Maxime Bernier resignation. But is that the extent of stunning incompetence amongst our parliamentarians?

Watching today’s brooaadcast on Newman’s “Politics”, I am baffled by some suppositions raised by Serge Menard and Bob Rae.

Firstly, Bloqhead Serge Menard talks about the claim of a listening device found underneath Mme. Couillard’s bed, wondering who could have placed it. If a private security firm can find it, odds are that no government agency placed it. For years intelligence and police operatives have gotten reliable voice monitoring by pinging a laser beam off a window in the target building. If true, this is the stuff of second-rate gumshoe work.

And then Menard ventures that people are more likely to discuss state secrets in the kitchen than the bedroom. WTF, M. Menard?! Would anyone take counsel from someone who appears to have no knowledge of the Profumo scandal, the Stasi archives or at least one spy thriller?

Secondly, Liberal and Great Canadian™ Bob Rae moaned about the need to preserve the honour of the post of Foreign Minister. Did he ever have a chance to talk to the man he replaced in Parliament, who coincidentally had been a Canadian Foreign Minister? To refresh his memory, it was Bill Graham, the man who also maintained a hideaway for an underage male prostitute who was his surreptious lover. Doubt it, Bob? Google “Lawrence Metherel”. Then come back to the table and talk about ministerial propriety.

Liberal Senator and command washout Romeo Dallaire pumps up the volume and keeps his rhetoric fact-free in today’s National Post:

We are permitting the United States to try a Canadian child soldier using a military tribunal whose procedures violate basic principles of justice.

Let’s parse this one.

Canadian?

Like the rest of his loathsome, misbegotten family, Omar Khadr was a willing and proud minion of al Qaeda who regarded Canada as nothing better than “the greatest hotel on Earth”, as described by that other Great Canadian™, Yann Martel. Waving a passport doesn’t trump one’s membership in a pathologically criminal enterprise.

Soldier?

In whose army, precisely, as determined by the much invoked albeit barely read Geneva Conventions? It takes a bit more than sporting dirty pajamas and shouting “Allahu Akhbar!” to be a uniformed party to a military conflict. Again, Omar Khadr has no legal status greater than that of a pirate or brigand.

Basic principles of justice?

Why should the people of the United States, particularly the families and neighbours of servicemen slain by Khadr and his fellow irregulars, be denied justice in seeing murderers punished for their crimes? And does anyone think a criminal proceeding fair to both the offender and his American victims can occur in a neo-Trudeaupia where the public utterance of the “I-Word” is being criminalized?!

What finally places Senator Dallaire firmly beyond the pale is the headline of his tract, “Who are the real criminals in Omar Khadr’s case?”. What can one say of a man who holds public office yet, clasping to his chest the faint title of “national hero” , calls an entire state and nation criminals for not attempting to free a willing servant of evil from the burden of his crimes?

Senator, you disgust me.

When it comes to reporting on the PM’s new chief of staff, Keith Boag — like his apparent mentor — has “plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are kinds of evidence.”

Click video to play.

Who wouldn’t find something better to do than see this:

Is it in fact a reverse portrait of Dorian Gray, where the subject’s stupidity grows as the picture remains constantly dim?

H/T to Halls of Macadamia

I thought the Herouxville Declaration was completely reasonable: it said that Quebecois don’t stone women, don’t want their women in veils, they eat pork and they have no intention of submitting to Islam. Immigrants should accommodate to our ways of doing things, and not natives to them, in all essentials. I agree. This is what immigrants do anyway, within a couple of generations, unless prevented by government policies. Of the Muslims we are not as sure as we would like to be, and the jury is still out. If you actually bother to read the Declaration, you will find little or nothing with which to disagree.

I am under no illusions about French Canada however. My sympathy for the reasonableness of the Herouxville Declaration has not blinded me to the general tribalism of the place. There is a completely unself-conscious racialism/tribalism/nationalism here that offers no apologies about itself. The purpose of the state is to protect the French-Canadian nation/tribe/race, however called. As an English-Quebecer, I have had my language subjected to discriminatory legislation and have seen my community reduced by hundreds of thousands of people since 1976, as we departed for better linguistic and commercial climes.

It is quite difficult for some liberal minds to adjust to the reality that their compatriots are splendid people who do not give damn for political correctness. “Les anglais” are just a richer and more educated sort of foreigner than Caribbeans, say, and possibly more useful, but neither should step out of their place. The place is run by, for and about the interests of French-Canadians, and get used to it.

My friend, the Count of Amsterdam, a Quebec-raised emigrant to Los Angeles, said he spent the winter watching the testimony before the Bouchard Taylor Commission on “reasonable accommodation”. He was fascinated by the overt racism and xenophobia of the Quebecois testifying. Having spent his working life in Los Angeles, the melting pot, he was fascinated by the witnesses’ insistence that immigrants should be exactly like the people they are immigrating towards.

Having lived here for longer, I felt inclined to defend their rights to express themselves in politically incorrect ways: it is how they feel, after all.

The Bouchard-Taylor Commission report has been leaked in advance. The reports in the Montreal Gazette indicate that the Commission believes that the burden of adjustments falls on us rather than on the immigrant.

“The main goal of adjustments is to protect minorities against flaws in the laws of the majority, and not the contrary. [The adjustments] ensure that every person enjoys the same rights. Sometimes different treatment is needed to ensure an equal right. It’s not a question of a privilege. It is a reasonable adaptation.”

Unhappily, the falsity of this position will not be exposed to the ridicule it deserves because the linguistic fascists of Quebec will also trounce the Bouchard-Taylor Commission. You don’t like them and I don’t like them, but we also don’t like the basic premise of the Bouchard-Taylor Commission, which is that we have to adapt to the “rights” of immigrants. One of the rights seems to include the right not to adapt to the host culture.

I think it s great mistake to frame discussion of cultural adpatations exclusively in terms of rights. One critic of multi-culti in Britain always used the example of the Aztec immigrants who insisted on their right to conduct live human sacrifices to the angry sun–god Huitzlilopotchli. The same blindness to the issue informs the Bouchard-Taylor Commission. The assertion of “rights” is not an unequivocal good. With every right comes a corresponding obligation on others to respect your rights. The multiplication of “rights” is the multiplication of the responsibilities of others to respect them. Just as with pollution, the “rights” are off-loaded onto the community, and the community bears the cost. The Bouchard-Taylor approach imagines that there is no cost in social cohesion, efficiency or any othe rimportant social value to paid for the expression by others of their rights to be different.

The folly of Bouchard-Taylor and their ilk is that they conflate every right with every other, without a hierarchy among them, so that by the end of this infinite inflation of rights, the value of rights is the same as German Reichsmark in the hyper-inflation of the 1920s. And you know where that led to. I see the same devaluation of rights being caused by the hyper-inflation of rights in the rights-obsessed society we are engineering in Canada

One of the continuing sources of mystery in my life has been the prominence of Charles Taylor in the liberal imagination. I cannot think of a practical or theoretical issue on which he has been right, yet his pious maunderings are received as holy gospel among certain elites. We must not confuse personal decency and high-mindedness, which he possesses in spades, with pragmatic judgment, in which he is as deficient as can be.

So the Mister Snuffalluffagus of the human rights fast-set, whingeing Senator Romeo Dallaire is in a right tizzy about our moral standing over the case of al-Qaeda youth squad star Omar Khadr.

Dallaire serves up his favourite shibboleth, the “child soldier” argument. Well, that has been smacked down solidly by your correspondent, among many others. The apple of his father’s evil eye was a willing and fervent brigand, not a coerced innocent child.

Save your tears for real victims, General, and keep a better eye on your own credibility.

the lovely and intelligent Great Canadian™, Jennifer Lynch, QC. After all, if one is seeking out political hacks without the skills to make it in truly merit-based jobs, we’ve hit the motherlode with this one.

This is the former chief of staff to Joe Clark, in his last fling at failing as PC Party Leader, who in a matter of months:

• chided staffers for not keeping up a “professional” profile since the Clark PCs were, in her words, “the government-in-waiting”
• purchased a $1000 Royal Doulton coffee service with the office funds of the smallest parliamentary caucus, because a “former Prime Minister needs to entertain guests in an appropriate fashion.”
• appropriated a high-speed network laser printer as her personal desktop printer, leaving a whole research unit without ready access to their written output.
• demonstrated her self-proclaimed skills as “a respected Alternative Dispute Resolution practitioner, with particular expertise in mediation and the facilitation of complex group processes” by allowing her office to deteriorate into outright mutiny, seeing six senior staffers resign within six weeks.

Update

The typical ethical slip is to pad a resume but it looks like Lynch’s is markedly economical with the truth:

Ms. Lynch has served as chief executive officer in both the private and public sectors: leading the international consultancy PDG People Development Global Inc. from 1998 until her appointment as Chief Commissioner;

But what of her half-year as ringmaster to the Clark circus? I guess she was sort of a CEO from December 1998 to July 1999… in an Enron kind of way.

So Denis Coderre — the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen of the Liberal Caucus — flails away at the Harper government, alleging that someone may not have undergone a proper security vetting.

I have but two words for him:

Alfonso Gagliano.

The poster child of dubious vetting for high office in Canada.

That’s all.

Two interesting points came up in today’s edition of PrimeTime Politics on CPAC:

1. Pollster Nik Nanos reports that Canadians rate Stephen Harper as the most competent leader over Stéphane Dion by a factor of more than three to one.
2. In an interview with Environment Minister John Baird, Peter van Dusen notes that his previous guest, Elmer Fudd sound-alike John McCallum, warned that his party’s carbon tax proposal was not a tax on gasoline.

Now, let’s see: a leader who is not perceived by most voters as a competent manager entertains an election plank that would vastly increase oil and coal-based energy prices for Canadians, all while Ontario’s economy is reeling from high energy costs for its industries. So his greatest concern is that his minions do not suggest a hike in gas taxes is coming. Instead, he sticks with his master plan of swinging the death blow to the economy of the most vote-rich province in Canada.

Wow.

I took a course in communications law at the University of Ottawa last year. As is usual in such courses, we had to deliver a class on a topic of our choice. One young man in the class gave his lecture on “freedom of speech”, contrasting Canada and the United States. He dismissed it as “an American concept”, alien to the concept of controlled speech which we have in Canada. He cited leftist, feminist professors of law; he repeated their views in the communications law class. I questioned him. When it got down to it, he frankly admitted that he did not trust the people of Canada to defend the right values, he had more trust in the Supreme Court and the specialized institutions of human rights commissions and state-subsidized Court Challenges program than in the electoral process and in Parliament. I told him a brilliant future awaited him in the Liberal Party. I thought him a scoundrel, another fatuous leftist whose only virtue was fthe frankness with which he disdained elected governments. He considered himself a “progressive”.

So when Mark Steyn went on Steve Paikin’s show last night, I considered the nature of the three young Canadians who are arguing with him about their rights. They are all lawyers. They are all Muslims. They seemed, from how they argued and what they said, to have learned their law from the same sources as my classmate.

Steve Paikin had to maintain peace between Steyn and his young Muslim contenders, and at times the show descended into everyone shouting at once. What was clear to me, was that the kids - I am at the age I will call them that - were unpreprared to discuss the fundamentals. One of their arguments was that, since the Human Rights Commissions are not criminal in nature, Steyn mischaracterized them when he said he had been subject to “criminal” prosecution. As if going to jail, being forced to pay a fine, and enduring years of state subsidized prosecution is somehow made better because it is not “criminal”? Well, can we agree it is prosecution for heresy?

The basis of their objection to Steyn was that they had been offended, and wanted MacLean’s to give them a mutually agreeable amount and type of rejoinder. Steyn pointed out that they had had exposure in seven Canadian major newspapers to make their point.

Paikin finally asked the question of them: do you have a right not to be offended? And apparently all the young Muslim lawyers can think about is how offended they have a right to be. They have been educated in Supreme Court rulings that have sustained the Human Rights Commission’s prosecutions of neo-Nazis. For them, there is no cultural experience of the Human Rights Commissions and hate-speech prosecutions as an exceptional novelty. This is the Canada they grew up in. They have no recollection of the Canada that existed before the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted in 1982. When Steyn talks of Trudeaupia, he is referring to a reality that I perceived last night in the attitudes of these young Muslim lawyers. I found it deeply disturbing that they were incapable of discussing the real issues - objective facts about demographics - which lead to the apprehensions we all have about the future of western societies.

Does it matter whether the take-over is peaceful or violent, in the great scheme of things? Would it be better if it were peaceful? Would it make a difference? From what perspective? From whose? The debate was not engaged.

I saw three young Canadian lawyers, accidentally Muslims, and essentially people whose sense of entitlement is so vast they would crush free speech in this country and not even know what they were doing. I have seen too many young lawyers, white, brown, you-name-it, who have no idea whatever of our pre-Trudeau British constitutional freedoms and responsibilities, and no concern that they are so ignorant. All they want is a Supreme Court and Liberal government appointing the judges. Then they and their kind can rule us forever without interference from Parliamentary institutions. Our law schools are failing us. The Sock Puppets are altogether typical of what modern Canadian legal education is producing. Thank God for Steyn for bringing them up short.