Ah! Quebec’s specificity! or how the rules do not apply to us

In the Devoir on Friday, Frederic Bastien, a professor of history at Dawson College (the English language CEGEP, of all things!) published the strongest possible confirmation of the Quebec intelligentsia’s bad faith in regard to human rights, whenever these conflict with the Québecois attitudes to differences. Bastien is author of La Bataille de Londres, which alleges foul play by the Supreme Court of Canada in the patriation of the constitution.

Though the intolerance comes as no surprise, it is always slightly shocking, after all these years, to find how solid, un-selfconscious, and self-pitying the arguments are for Quebec authorities to act as bullies.

Bastien argues:

D’abord, le public ne comprend pas qu’on puisse permettre à un joueur de faire du prosélytisme religieux durant un match de sport. Le fait de porter un turban n’est pas banal. Bien plus qu’un bout de tissu, ce symbole religieux est un condensé de vérité. Il évoque une vision du monde partagée par un groupe. Ce geste ostentatoire est incompatible avec l’esprit collectif qui doit être celui d’une équipe de soccer évoluant dans une ligue.

A rough translation would be:

First of all, the public does not understand how one can permit a player to engage in religious proselytism in a sporting match. The fact of wearing a turban is not trivial. More than a piece of cloth, it is an emblem of truth. It evokes a vision of world shared by a group. This ostentatious gesture is incompatible with with the collective spirit which must animate a team playing in a league.”

In contrast to Quebec’s view that state should be laic and the public space neutral towards religions, the official religion in Canada under the charter of rights is multiculturalism, says Bastien:

Le multiculturalisme s’est aussi imposé grâce aux décisions des tribunaux. Ceux-ci ont utilisé la charte à cette fin car elle protège le droit de vivre au Canada tout en agissant comme si on était toujours dans son pays d’origine.

Cette approche a toujours eu comme finalité de banaliser le statut du Québec comme peuple fondateur….

Multiculturalism was also imposed by the decisions of courts. These used the Charter for this purpose, because the Charter protects the right to live in Canada even as people act as if they were still in their country of origin.

This approach has always been intended to trivialize the role of the Quebec as a founding people.

And further:

Tel est certainement l’aspect le plus tordu de ce débat. Pendant de longues et nombreuses décennies, les Canadiens anglais ont fait preuve de sectarisme et de discrimination envers les Canadiens français, quand ils ne tentaient pas carrément de nous assimiler. Aujourd’hui, ils se drapent d’une fausse tolérance dans le but précis de nous attribuer ce rôle d’oppresseur. En réalité, nos compatriotes recyclent la même vieille intolérance dont la majorité d’entre eux a souvent fait preuve à notre endroit.

Such is certainly the most twisted aspect of this debate. For many long and numerous decades, English Canadians have demonstrated sectarianism and discrimination towards French Canadians., when they were not trying to assimilate us. Today, they cloak themselves in a false tolerance for the purpose of attributing to us the role of oppressor. In reality, our compatriots are recycling the same old intolerance of which the majority among them have often demonstrated towards us.

We are here in the full presence of bullies caught bullying and trying the same old cry of “you are being mean to us”. The instincts of the Quebecois are collectivist. As Francis Parkman, the great American historian of the ancien regime in New France once stated, the goal was “conformity in society, uniformity in religion, and exclusion in economics”. The goals of Quebec have not changed in the least since the days of Louis XIV. The attitudes are: there ought to be one kind of steeple in the town, teaching one orthodox doctrine. Diversity is weakness, argument is divisive, we must be unified and strong to deal with our enemies, who happen to be everyone who is not us.

Professor Bastien, after four centuries of French Canada dwelling in our midst, do you really think we do not know who you are? Do you still think we are fundamentally mistaken about you? None of us are born bigots, Professor Bastien. We get that way after decades of experiencing Quebec’s Afrikaner-style intolerance for outsiders. We are not going to back off any longer calling you bullies when you act as such.

A stirring call for truly liberal tolerance

Brian Lee Crowley’s editorial this weekend in the Citizen is, on the whole, reasonable, but I find his notions of tolerance, however admirable, miss the point of Islam. His analysis of Islam is that it is essentially a religion, that it deserves toleration, and that, if a person carries out jihadist acts, he should be punished.

On the bottom line, Crowley is suitably tough-minded.

The right balance requires that occasionally we must act in ways that make us uncomfortable. We must ensure that our houses of worship, schools, prisons and other institutions are not being used to promote illegal acts, no matter what thin veneer of religious respectability their proponents may fashion for them. We must do this for the same reasons we take vigorous steps to ensure anti-Muslim extremists cannot act on their beliefs.

All well and good. But is Islam a religion as we understand the concept? Or is it more?

My contention has always been that we have as much right to call Islam a political ideology as a religion. We need to see it in its own terms, not in ours, which have been fashioned on the basis of a religious toleration we took centuries to achieve, largely because we fought ourselves to exhaustion over it in the Thirty Year’s War, and because we have learned not to care about Christian doctrines and the institutions that sustain and teach them.

Islam does not recognize a distinction between church (mosque) and state. Every word of the Koran is the word of God. If the Quran tells people how to cook their food, or what foods to eat, or how to cut their hair, or with what hand to wipe one’s ass, or the conditions under which one sets out on holy war with the unbelievers, than those statements are God’s Word for all time, and may not be altered by merely human law. Everything is religious.Everything is the Word Of God. Human law, the kind fashioned in parliaments, is by definition invalid to the extent it deviates from God’s Law.

Several important features follow from this, which make Western discussions of Islam close to irrelevant, because westerners are still trying to understand Islam in Western terms.

But when everything is God’s Law, I would argue, then essentially every action becomes procedural, religion is merely a set of behaviours one adopts. Practice the behaviours, and you are a good Muslim. When the Ayatollah Khomeini was handing down fatwas, the style of reasoning was exclusively concerned with procedural strictures: whether one should wash if you showed up at prayers with sweat on one’s forehead from running to the mosque as opposed to having just had sex. The style of legal reasoning that constitutes Islamic law is wholly procedural in that sense. If you robbed a bank owned by Christians, and arrived late at prayers, the issue is not that you ought not to rob a bank owned by Christians, but that you ought not to miss prayers, or show up sweaty. One issue – how to appear at prayers -has been ruled upon by God, the other – robbing Christian-owned banks – has not been subsumed in a rule regarding the sanctity of property of the unbelievers.

Thus when Brian Lee Crowley talks of a “thin veneer of religious respectability” for jihadist actions, I commend him. Muslims, however, do not regard the Quran’s dicta as a “thin veneer”; they regard them as the Word of God, who spake to the Prophet in the original Arabic. And that’s that.

Consequently, some of Brian Lee’s points avoid the central issue: what is Islam?

We may believe whatever we want; our minds are private and not the province of legislators or police. But we are not entitled to act on beliefs or ideas that impinge on the protected sphere of rights and personal security that we promise to all other members of society. I cannot insist on this too strongly: it is not illegal, nor should it be illegal, to be a radical Islamist, to believe that infidels are a disgrace in the eyes of God, or to believe that the Quran supersedes human-made law. What is illegal is to act on these beliefs when doing so infringes on the rights and freedoms of others.

While I agree with the nicety of the distinction between thought and action in criminal matters, the practical issues arising from this are much more complex.

Why, given a statistical propensity for some Muslims to engage in jihad in the western liberal societies to which they have immigrated,

should we not take appropriate collective measures to discourage them from immigrating?
review the contents of published sermons, fatwas, and websites for jihadist encouragements?
apply test acts to ensure that they renounce jihad before they take up public offices of significance?
deport immigrant Islamic agitators calling for jihad, and jail the Canadian-born for same?

Why should we not take preventive measures in education, immigration, and other state policies, to control, suppress, and discourage jihadists?

Do you think I am being illiberal? Try this thought experiment. Replace jihad with “class warfare” and jihadi with “communist party member”. Western powers have, at various times, deported Communists born abroad, held inquiries into their loyalty, imprisoned them for treason, required oaths of loyalty to the constitution, and kept police files on communist infiltration. Class warfare is the practical essence of Marxism, together with collective ownership of the productive resources of society. We just got through the century-long Marxist threat; now we are back at the thousand year Islamic threat, and they are here, now, living among us. That a vast majority is trying to adapt and be reasonable is good, but not the point. It is the propensity of the religion to preach war against us, and for some proportion of its advocates to betray their host society in the name of their religion/ideology. Against that, we have to arm ourselves intellectually.

As soon as we allow ourselves to lose the western fixation on Islam as a “religious” phenomenon as we understand religion: tepid, tamed, and generally benign, and see it as a religious/political/social ideology as Muslims perceive it, we will gain the necessary insights into what we are dealing with. Until then, the liberal clueless press will still be asking what occult forces caused young Hamid, Walid and Khalid and more recent converts to slaughter people on the street.

My difference with the estimable Mr Crowley, to the extent there is one, has to do with the nature of the thing we are up against. His firmness in defending the rule of man-made non-Quranic law is greatly appreciated. I could wish, however, for a broader understanding of Islam than one that tries to confine it to western liberal categories.

contemporary witches

I was going over the news today:

Detroit insolvent

Mayhem at Mother’s Day parade in New Orleans

Jason Richwine canned from Heritage Foundation for accurate descriptions of Mexican-American intelligence levels in a PhD thesis of years back

Ob ama regime con siders forbidding Christians to proselytize within US Army, and so forth;

as Western society drops its ideological and religious antibodies, declaring them to be racist, sexist, homophobic etc., and I wonder, what will fill the vacuum? Islam?

Here we are, making our societies deliberately less intelligent, and forbidding discussion of it; making our societies so tolerant we lose any sight of permanent moral realities; absorbing underclass behaviour and saying white people cause it through bad thoughts, rather than black people causing it through total lack of thoughts; dropping standards because they derive from European civilization, or because they are Christian, or because their existence implies that moral standards exist at all, or that they exclude people who would rather be ruthlessly intolerant, exclusivist, and hate-filled from full and equal participation in liberal society’s rich banquet.

Why are we doing this?

More relevant, perhaps, is the approach of the commentariat on those who would draw attention to the permanence and reality of racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, and cultural divisions. The latter are the new witches. They cast spells of racism, sexism and homophobia, and much else besides. They must cause the underperformance or bad behaviour of the groups they describe. Clearly, since all different outcomes are the result, not of any kind of innate or persistence differences among groups, but of social causes, then the people who draw attention to these moral standards, innate or persistent differences, and who refuse to believe in unqualified human equality must be causing the problem. Witches!Burn them!

The modern cultural marxist commentariat is reduced to believing in white witches, rather than change their thinking. Why should they, when the science is settled, there is only one politically correct view of anything, and they control the courts, the universities, and all the pulpits that matter.

The March of Large Stupid Ideas

The coverage of Ontario’ s energy policy in the Post today by the incomparable Ross McKitrick leads me to reflect upon the invincibility of stupidity.

Essentially, the government of Ontario has pursued an energy policy predicated on reducing dependence on fossil fuels, substituting more expensive and unreliable wind power for coal and natural gas, and paying for the lot by raising prices. Who benefits? Small groups of investors in wind farms, close to the regime. Sound like Venezuela? Who loses? Everyone but the small groups of investors in wind farms. McKitrick predicts that Ontario could price itself out of significant manufacturing and processing jobs because of higher electricity prices.

Which leads me too stupidity. The premier of the province, Dalton McGuinty, is one of the most pedestrian dullards to have ever led a Canadian province. He became convinced of this Large Stupid Idea on the basis, one supposes, of the general Opinion climate created by environmental catastrophism ceaselessly propagated in the media. Desiring to Do Something in that earnest stupid way of his, he gutted normal regulatory oversight, common sense, and economic rationality in favour of doing something for future generations, such as loading them with debt and higher prices in the name of being environmentally friendly.

The Germans have an expression for it:

Gegen Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.

Against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain.

It follows with ineluctable necessity that you cannot make people richer by raising their input costs for so basic a commodity as electrical energy. As McKitrick observes of the Ontario government’s response to his study:

This response is completely inadequate. Ontario, having already lost a quarter of a million manufacturing jobs in the past decade, is throwing away its longstanding competitive advantage in electricity prices for the sake of minuscule environmental benefits that could have been achieved in other ways at a fraction of the cost. Our information about the air pollution consequences of various energy strategies are not pulled out of thin air; we use the same data the government itself uses.

More to the point, the Minister’s (Bob Chiarelli) response is disconnected from reality. Ontario has always used coal for at least some of its electricity. So do many Canadian provinces, most U.S. states, most of Europe, China and all the other jurisdictions our exporters compete against. Even Germany, which Ontario claims to be copying in its green energy strategy, opened two new coal-fired power plants last year, will open six more this year, and plans six more after that. Ontario is ready to price our manufacturing sector out of business based on an ideologically-driven energy strategy at odds with all our major trading partners.

The environmentalist fallacy of green energy and its policy consequences are catastrophic and they go on and on and on and on.

An email to York Regional Police chief Eric Jolliffe

This was sent in relation to the threats issued by York regional police to a rabbi threatening bad things if Pamela Geller was allowed to speak at a conference at his synagogue.

Sir, if I understand correctly, your police service forced its chaplain to cancel a completely legal event under threat of dismissal after pressure from one segment of your community. If so, you have made an extremely bad decision. As a police service, you have demonstrated quite effectively just whom you intend to serve and those rights and freedoms you have decided not to protect. In doing so, I believe you have created the conditions for serious problems in the future which your service will have no choice but to confront. But you may find your officers meeting those challenges with much less support than they might otherwise expect. Good luck to them.

Blazing Cat Fur published a letter from the Canadian academic Salim Mansur on this absurd capitulation to Islamic sensitivities.

Television price increases irrelevant, says producers association

In the immortal words of Arnie Schwarzenegger, “I like you, I kill you last”.

Once more the Canadian production community is at it, seeking rents and subsidies, and regardless of the tone, much of what Mr. Hennessy says below is accurate.

GATINEAU – That broadcast distributors would increase the price of basic packages if the CRTC licensed new 9(1)(h) services is a red herring, according the Canadian Media Production Association (CPMA) told commissioners on Tuesday. “We believe that the impact of 9(1)(h) services on affordability’ is a red herring that threatens to overshadow the achievement of more significant objectives under the [Broadcasting] Act”, Michael Hennessy, president and CEO of the CMPA, said during his opening remarks.

The association acknowledges that licensing additional services with mandatory carriage orders may trigger basic package rate increases, but it says this isn’t the sole reason broadcast distribution undertakings (BDUs) raise rates,
which have been climbing steadily for years, regardless. It would be a stretch to blame consumer dissatisfaction with the price of their BDU service on your rare decisions to add new, exceptional Canadian services to basic, said Hennessy.
That may be the spin, but the reality is that the cost of basic is already heavily inflated by inclusion of the BDUs’ own services, including their high-cost sports services.”

All true. But take a look at Figure 3.1.7 below from the CRTC’s own annual statistical report. You will see that cable television costs have risen faster than the consumer price index, the price of telecommunications other than the Internet, and the price of voice telecommunications. Here it is:

Figure 3.1.7 Price indices [TPI1, BDU2 (cable and satellite, including pay television), Internet access services, and CPI]

Please note that the more the industry is exposed to competitive pressures, the less the increase of price. The broadcast distribution undertakings (BDUs, that is, cable companies acting as distributors of “broadcast” programming) show the highest price increases across the sector most regulated as to conditions of supply (Canadian content obligations and others). Internet access is a pure play of telecommunications using IP technologies, with neither legacy circuit-switching, nor public service obligations, and exposed to the operations of Moore’s Law more completely than any other sector. Voice telecommunications is largely what is covered in the line marked “TPI”. It is imperfectly competitive, but most of its prices have been deregulated.

Back to Mr. Hennessy, the television producers’ lobbyist, and a fine one indeed. He is in effect saying, don’t blame mandatory carriage of new services for your cable price increases: we are only one of a number of villains, sorry, causative agents.

I agree. The Broadcasting Act itself is the problem. It is directed to produce mediocre productions, and country houses for clever men who milk the system, at staggering costs to the Canadian consumer. We pay the approximate costs of two or three modern naval destroyers per year, every year, to sustain this regulated system. Personally I would prefer a stronger navy. We are paying for a naval expansion program already in broadcasting and film subsidies.

Statistical note:

The TPI reflects the price changes experienced by a household for a basket of telephone services. The basket of telephone services reflects a weighted-average of consumer expenditures on basic local service, other local services (such as options and features), and long distance, installation, and repair services. However, the TPI does not include wireless or Internet service expenditures.
The BDU price index reflects the price changes experienced by a household for a basket of cable television services. The basket includes both ‘Basic’ and ‘Extended’ cable services. Basic cable service is the minimum service to which all customers must subscribe. Extended cable service is the most popular package of additional channels. The index does not account for ‘bundling discounts.’

Source: Statistics Canada

Template for a terrorist attack

Or, how you can impress your liberal friends by correctly forecasting unfolding events in the next terrorist attack.

Now that people like Gov. Andrew Cuomo, are starting to refer to the random acts of violence as “the new normal“, it is important that we understand how they unfold. We have had enough terrorist attacks in the Western world to model and extrapolate this. Following is the first attempt.

1. Terrorist attack occurs.

2. A leftist politician will attempt to compensate for his limited intelligence by talking about “root cause” of terrorism, e.g. Justin Trudeau – Justin Trudeau and the problem with ‘root causes’

3. A leftist politician will blame the right-wing for the attack, e.g. Barack Obama – Axelrod: Obama Thinks Boston Bombings Could Be Related to ‘Tax Day’, and Chris Matthews - Chris Matthews, Democratic congressman suggest Tax Day tie to Boston attacks

4. A leftist columnist will try to make it a race issue, e.g. Salon.com – Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American, or an example of right-wing hate.

5. Terrorist will most likely turn out to be Muslims.

6. Articles will appear lamenting about the inevitable oncoming brutal backlash against the Muslims although this has never occurred before. BBC - Boston bombings: Muslim Americans await bomber’s ID. As an aside, notice how some of the savvier news organisations, like BBC, thread the needle on the knotty topic of terrorist identification? They don’t want to wait to write about the brutal backlash after the terrorist have been identified in case they get relegated with the slow-moving and slow-thinking print press. They also do not want to jump the gun and identify them as Muslims because that would be, oh gosh, so judgemental, so they write about how the Muslims wait for the identity of the terrorist with trepidation and are “braced for a backlash”.

7. We will be lectured by the politicians who we heard from in #3 above how we should not rush to judgement about “motivations [of]…entire groups of people” even though they were doing precisely that earlier, albeit against their political enemies.

8. The media will print heart-rending tales of how the larger society has mistreated the terrorist and attempt to rationalize, justify and mitigate the responsibility on behalf of the terrorist, e.g. NYT – Far From War-Torn Homeland, Trying To Fit In, and how we should sympathize with them.

Warwara, Harper, Mercer

Please tell me. What in the current situation appalls you more? Mark Warwara being squashed by Harper for seeking to express his views on sex-selective abortions, Prime Minister Harper for his level of control of the parliamentary caucus and of the civil service, or the following statement by Mark Mercer, chair of the philosophy department of Saint Mary’s University in Halifax?

It’s not for Parliament to voice an opinion on women’s reasons for having abortions, for human fetuses are neither in fact persons nor recognized as such in Canadian law. They are not persons for they have no interests; they lack the self-consciousness necessary for having interests.

Since they lack interests, human fetuses cannot be wronged. They cannot, therefore, be wronged by being discriminated against, not on grounds of sex, not on any grounds.

Warawa’s motion, then, makes no sense. No fetus is wrongfully discriminated against when it is aborted on account of its being female, so sex-selective pregnancy termination involves no wrongful discrimination for Parliament to condemn.

Now this is not to say that the fact that some women in Canada choose to abort fetuses because of their sex is no proper concern of civil society or even of the Canadian government.”

This is objectionable on many grounds. Assuming, arguendo, that fetuses are not yet human, we recognize and extend rights to animals not to be treated cruelly, even if we do not recognize them as humans.

Even accepting the argument that a fetus is not yet human, until birth, fetuses are at least on their way to becoming humans by reason of birth, unless they die for natural or unnatural reasons. Mercer asserts that parliament can declare what is about-to-be-born-human not human and therefore of no status in law. Just imagine attaching such reasoning to Jews, women, blacks. Or yourself. Not being human, they have no interests, and therefore cannot be wronged. Harmed, maybe, killed, certainly, but not wronged. It is a nice distinction, between harm and “wrong”, and the basis of much cruelty and state-sanctioned slaughter.

A seal has no status, and therefore cannot be wronged when it is clubbed to death. The fact that the conscience rebels against the slaughter of fetuses needs to be assuaged by Dr. Mercer, the Mengele of Canadian fetuses.

If the extension and protection of human rights has proceeded historically in western societies from a few, rich, adult white males to all adult white males, thence to women, thence to outsiders, slaves and children, what logical or moral principle is to prevent such rights on any grounds from being extended to what would become a human but for abortion or death in delivery?

I do not argue here that fetuses are human from conception, only because I think, even on Mark Mercer’s deplorable premises, an Act of Parliament could extend human rights to a fetus in the same manner as they have been extended to other classes, ages, races and sexes in western societies.

But if fetuses are human from conception, then Mercer is an proponent of murdering them on an industrial basis. I do not think it is necessary to adopt the full Roman Catholic position on abortion, however, to find Professor Mercer’s doctrines odious. The snot we blow from our noses is not of the same moral status as a fetus, and all of Dr. Mercer’s doctrines cannot make them so.

So which is more appalling, readers, Warwara’s suppression, Harper’s suppressing, or Mercer’s appalling doctrines?

The death of Paul Rose

The official face of murderous French-Canadian leftist bigotry has gone to his eternal reward. Bon débarras.

Coyne on our cognitive dissonance

Andrew Coyne asks conservatives how we can stand the current government.

Then there is the Canadian conservative movement, which seems capable of convincing itself of any number of conflicting ideas without visible discomfort of any kind. Nowhere is this particular case of cognitive dissonance on better display than at the annual Manning Networking Conference, where the movement’s core gathers every year to congratulate itself on two things: the rightness of its beliefs, and the greatness of the government of Stephen Harper.

It seems to me a healthy psyche requires one to choose between the two (or indeed neither). But to spend the better part of a weekend reiterating your profound faith in the policies of conservatism, all the while roaring your approval for the government that has repudiated them at every turn, would seem evidence of some sort of pathology.

Coyne is, as always, a serious thinker, and he deserves occasionally a serious response, because he asks something that bothers me slightly. So the possibilities seem to me to be:

conservatives in Canada are crazy
they are not concerned with deviations from ideological purity (even though they ought to be)
they are not concerned with deviations from ideological purity, and ought not to be so concerned

I favour option 3. Why? The Conservatives offer the least aggravation.

The least aggravation rule is the core of maintaining electoral support once a party has it.

Broadly speaking, most partizans of one party or another feel that the universe is not unfolding as it should as long as the party in power is not theirs. I do not care enough if the Liberals are governing well, or the Democrats are being sensible for a change. I know I should, but long ago I decided that no good could come from the Liberals and no evidence has yet accumulated that I should change my mind. It is not so much how they govern as where they want to take the country.

Take the legions suffering from Harper derangement syndrome. Are they any different from me? It does not matter to them that Harper governs well, that he is moderately committed to environmental protection, that crime is going down, that the economy is well managed. They know; they are convinced, that Harper is leading Canada to a quasi-fascist state where capitalism will run amok and the poor, the gay, the aboriginals, the marginalized, the working class, will be further immiserated. It does not matter what kind of nonsense this is, they are no more concerned with evidence than we are. They know, even when they, like us, are running on their prejudices and inclinations.

Is this an inadequate defence of why I like the Conservatives more than their rivals? By most standards, it fails because it maligns all partizans equally. But those of us who have chosen our political path -conservative – know we will never get a government more congenial to out prejudices and inclinations. We do not have to wake up every morning to some fresh outrage perpetuated by government ministers, as has happened, for instance, in the Ontario Liberal government wrecking the provincial economy with green energy fatuisms and policy disasters.

I would like to suggest to Coyne why government by Conservatives is more pleasant to me than government by Liberals or NDP. It arises from an article by George Will this morning in the same paper. It concerned some boy in a Maryland school who chewed his pastry into the shape of a gun, and went “bang”. He was suspended for all the usual stupid politically correct reasons. It then reviewed a legislative proposal in Minnesota to ban “bullying” in schools, which was rife with badly drafted over-general language that would set more cops and prosecutors onto the educational system and hapless kids who had offended some current hysteria.

Will concluded:

If this becomes law, it will further empower the kind of relentless improvers and mindless protectors who panic over Pop-Tart pistols and discern terrorism in Hello Kitty bubble guns. Such people in Minnesota will be deciding what behaviour — speech, usually — damages a “supportive learning environment.” They will be sniffing out how students’ speech or other behaviour has real or perceived — by whom? — effects on the balance of “power” between other students. And school bureaucracies will ponder whether what Sally told Eleanor about Brad’s behaviour with Pam after the prom violated Brad’s, or perhaps Pam’s, “reasonable expectation of privacy.”

Government is failing spectacularly at its core functions, such as budgeting and educating. Yet it continues to multiply its peripheral and esoteric responsibilities, tasks that require it to do things for which it has no aptitude, such as thinking and making common-sense judgments. Government nowadays is not just embarrassing, it is — let us not mince words — inappropriate.

In the choice among three political parties to govern Canada, I am absolutely sure that the reaction of Conservative MPs and cabinet ministers to George Will is the same as mine. The core functions of government are what Harper and gang are focusing on. Sometimes they try to move the jello of Canadian political opinion in the right direction, and sometimes they go with it. But I know what their first reactions are to political hysterias, before they have to put on the mask of concern before meeting the press. They are the same as mine. Until I am convinced that they have been taken over by the likes of Alison Redford, I will continue to support them.

Barrel Strength

Over-Proof Opinion, Smoothly Aged Insight

Category Archives: Canadian Politics