Calgary Herald;
Swelling numbers of drug addicted teenagers in Alberta prompted the opening Thursday of two dozen new treatment beds.
Opposition Liberals blamed the booming Alberta economy for the problem.
As we are so often reminded, there is no statistical correlation between poverty and drug abuse.
A reader urged that I give this item from Norm’s Spectator wider exposure. My pleasure, as always! (Be sure to click on the link to read his brief comment.)
Proposed by the Laval Federal Liberal Association, it reads:
Whereas the Chaoulli decision has demonstrated that, in practice, the current health care system enables the wealthy to obtain health care without the normal waiting times;
Whereas waiting times in the public health care system lead to physical and psychological illnesses; Whereas in certain cases waiting times can lead to death;
Whereas the illnesses caused by these waiting times are a violation of the fundamental principles of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms;
Whereas prohibiting private health insurance has not proven to be an infallible means of protecting the public health care system or as a provision ensuring respect for, and implementation of, our values enshrined in the Charter;
Be it resolved that the Liberal Party of Canada shall request Parliament to consider other methods of safeguarding and protecting the public health care system other than by prohibiting private health insurance;
Be it further resolved that we shall support all efforts to reduce waiting times by means that go beyond simply prohibiting private health insurance plans;
Be it further resolved that we recommend considering practices that make room for private initiatives whose terms and conditions will be supervised by the government.
Now, perhaps one of those early morning sleepyheads who surf through here from bellglobal.ca and the CBC to catch up on next week’s news will take this development further.
Who’d have guessed this glimmer of reality-based policy would break through the clouds on Planet Liberal to shine over Quebec?
Agriculture Department inspectors swooped down on four Wal-Mart stores in the Quebec City area yesterday and seized 72 plastic tubs of yellow Becel margarine with an estimated street value of $179.28.
The margarine is butter yellow, which makes it illegal for sale in Quebec.
The measure is intended to protect the province’s 3,000 dairy producers.
Andre Menard, spokesperson for acting agriculture minister Laurent Lessard, said 44 of the contraband margarine containers were seized at the Levis Wal-Mart, across the river from the capital.
Another 28 were discovered at a Wal-Mart in the borough of Beauport, he said.
“In Quebec City (proper), we think they withdrew them before we came,” Menard added.
On Thursday, Maxime Arseneau, agriculture critic for the Parti Quebecois, tabled a margarine tub in the National Assembly and charged that Unilever Canada Inc., which makes Becel, and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Canada were conspiring to bring yellow margarine into the province.
“This is serious,” Arseneau chided reporters who found the situation humorous.
Related: Hitler’s stance on margarine.
How did this story escape the notice of Canadian media?
Hundreds of French youths fought with police and set cars ablaze on Saturday in a second night of rioting which media said was triggered when two teenagers were electrocuted while fleeing police. The teenagers were killed and a third seriously injured on Thursday night when they were electrocuted in an electricity sub station as they ran away from police investigating a break-in, media reported. (Reuters)
Youths rioted for the second night in a Paris suburb torching 30 cars and fighting with police. Parisians worried that the situation was escalating:
And a third. Clichy-sous-Bois is a Paris suburb with a population of around 28,000 and the home of the first “Beurger King Muslim”. 50 percent of the population is under 25 and a quarter are unemployed. Most are immigrants from Northern Africa.
As we know, this has all happened because Jacques Chirac hates black people.
h/t Instapundit
See here, too – (thanks to Sigmund, carl and alfred in the comments).
Via China E-Lobby, who seem to have a better handle on the important developments in this province than the entire editorial staff of the Star Phoenix and Leader Post combined.
Woe Canada! Saskatchewan Premier looking for Communist oil investors: Lorne Calver, Premier of Saskatchewan, has gone to Beijing and opened up his province’s oil and uranium fields to Communist Chinese “investment.” He even gushed that the cadres “floated some ideas for the actual purchase of [oil field] properties that they would develop themselves” (Globe and Mail, Cdn.). One can only imagine what Friendly Blog Small Dead Animals (headquartered in Saskatchewan) thinks of this.
Nobody needs to be told what I think of this.
The unfortunate fact is that I would guess that fully a third of the politically bankrupt residents of this province will react with self-rightous smugness in the belief that the primary benefit of Calvert’s cozy relationship with the world’s largest one-party dictatorship is that it keeps the Americans out.
Of course, the way that the Saskatchewan NDP and the Communist Chinese do “business” makes them birds of a feather. John Derbyshire in NRO in April of 2001;
No large commercial concern in China is simply a commercial concern. To thrive, or even just to survive, an entrepreneur must establish and maintain strong political connections. “Doing business with China” means doing business, though at one remove, with Chinese politicians � the sleeping partners in the ownership of every Chinese company.
It follows that any American doing business on a large scale in China must, if he is going to prosper, at a minimum take pains not to offend the Chinese government. If necessary, he must be willing to make himself a tool of that government. This is a state of affairs quite different from doing business with other countries. If Boeing enters into a plane-making joint venture with British Aerospace, the chairman of Boeing feels no need to button his lip on such matters as Northern Ireland or the proper way to manage foot- and-mouth outbreaks. The chairman of a U.S. company doing business in China who says out loud that he thinks Taiwan ought to be independent can measure the remainder of his chairmanship in nanoseconds.
Just like Saskatchewan (pdf), except 1.3 thousand times bigger!
The same Tommy Douglas who threw the oil industry out of the province in the 1940’s must be spinning in his grave – out of frustration in not being alive today to welcome the Communist Chinese with open arms.
So who in their right mind puts a water intake pipe downstream from the sewage discharge?
The City of North Battleford, for one.
And speaking of “boil water” advisories – here is the current list for the province of Saskatchewan as of Oct.17; Precautionary Drinking Water Advisories (PDWA) and Emergency Boil Water Orders (EBWO)
It’s amusing what assumptions rest in the minds of those who have lived their entire lives within the comfort zone of large urban infrastructures (a phenomenon not limited to the safety of drinking water). The situation in Kashechewan no less tolerable than it is in any number of small rural communities across Canada who don’t enjoy millions in federal funding from the Department of Indian and Northern Affairs.
These small communities continue to struggle with the problem of funding and maintaining local infrastructure in an environment of ludicrous (and costly) government regulations, while Federal and Provincial governments boast of balanced and “surplus” budgets created in large part by offloading their responsibilities onto local municipalities in the first place.
It would be one thing if those in rural Canada could look at their take home pay with the knowledge that they were being taxed at lower rates than their comfortable counterparts in urban areas who enjoy public transit, clean water, garbage collection and paved streets. Instead, the opposite is often true. In addition to the unhealthy chunk grabbed from their paycheques, rural residents often face staggering tax increases on property values that have remained virtually stagnant for a decade, while local hospitals close, highways crumble and infrastructure decays.
Of course, that’s a lot harder to distill into an compelling television news segment than a good ol’ nasty skin rash.
See also – Blunt comments at Angry’s – the truth has a habit of being that way. We need more of this, but we need to hear it from politiicans for a change.
Now I can enjoy the Left’s ideological contortions as much as the next fellow, and I think we all know what would happen if Desjarlais was a Muslim NDP MP who opposed SSM on religious grounds – that would be just fine. Remember former Ottawa South NDP candidate Monia Mazigh (Mrs. Arar)? She is a devout Muslim who opposes abortion and that was just tickety-boo with her party (abortion policy? What abortion policy?). So we know what happens when NDP sacred cows go up against knee-jerk Islamic appeasement: lots of steak to go around.
Because as we all know, the best thing you can do for the mind of a young person is to challenge it!
From today’s Grope & Flail:
For the second time in a year, a tribunal has ordered the Ontario government to reimburse a patient for hip replacement surgery done in the United States, decisions observers say may encourage more patients — plagued by some of the longest waits in the world — to head south for the operation.
In a little-known decision earlier this year, Ontario’s Health Services Appeal and Review Board ordered the province to reimburse a Toronto woman for the surgery she paid for in Florida after it found that the 18- to 24-month wait she faced here would have caused “medically significant irreversible tissue damage.” The decision comes on the heels of a 2004 ruling, in which the province was ordered to reimburse a London, Ont., man who went to Port Huron, Mich., for a hip replacement.
The tribunal’s decisions mean more joint replacement patients might be eligible to have treatment paid for out of Canada, where they face some of the longest health-care queues.
[link — h/t: NealeNews]
That buzzing sound you’re hearing is Tommy Douglas spinning in his grave right now.
THE SCORE was produced in part because of the strong interest and financial support from Genome Canada, the national funding and information resource relating to genomics and proteomics research in Canada.
“Part of our mandate is to ensure leadership in ethical, environmental, economic, legal and social issues related to genomics”, said Dr. Martin Godbout, President of Genome Canada. “Using the popular medium of film, THE SCORE examines the necessity for an active dialogue between the public and scientists in determining what ethical guidelines will dictate the ongoing exploration of our world. For Genome Canada, The Score is a precious tool that will facilitate understanding of genomics research and its impact on society, create an interest and encourage discussion among Canadians”.
“We have been a long-time fan of the play and we requested on a few occasions that the Electric Company restage it for our genomics and bioethics forums, but restaging The Score for one representation is not an easy endeavour, and can be quite costly”, continues Godbout.
“Supporting a film version of The Score was an obvious and exciting choice for Genome Canada”.
…in the disturbingly disproportional incarceration rates of males;
37 The next question is the meaning to be attributed to the words “with particular attention to the circumstances of male offenders”. The phrase cannot be an instruction for judges to pay “more” attention when sentencing male offenders. It would be unreasonable to assume that Parliament intended sentencing judges to prefer certain categories of offenders over others. Neither can the phrase be merely an instruction to a sentencing judge to consider the circumstances of male offenders just as she or he would consider the circumstances of any other offender. There would be no point in adding a special reference to male offenders if this was the case. Rather, the logical meaning to be derived from the special reference to the circumstances of male offenders, juxtaposed as it is against a general direction to consider “the circumstances” for all offenders, is that sentencing judges should pay particular attention to the circumstances of male offenders because those circumstances are unique, and different from those of non-male offenders. The fact that the reference to male offenders is contained in s. 718.2(e), in particular, dealing with restraint in the use of imprisonment, suggests that there is something different about male offenders which may specifically make imprisonment a less appropriate or less useful sanction.
Well, not quite. That’s an exerpt from a Supreme Court of Canada ruling that I’ve amended slightly to make a point – by replacing the word “aboriginal” with “male”. For if one is to buy into the argument put forward to defend our two-tier Canadian justice system, surely affirmative action for male offenders is just around the corner.
Text of the original ruling is here. This convoluted bit of reasoning is worth a read, if only to challenge your logic centers.
What seems to been overlooked is that the majority of crimes commited by aboriginal offenders are against other aboriginals. As a result, the majority of aboriginal victims of crime receive “two-tier” justice as well. For example, the battered aboriginal spouse is more likely to see her abuser released back into the community than had the crime occured in a non-aboriginal relationship.
Star Phoenix news brief;
A former chief and two others from a Saskatchewan First Nation have been sentenced to two years of house arrest.
The men were convicted of pocketing about $1 million from the treaty land entitlement trust fund of the Saulteaux First Nation.
They also signed cheques for another $1.8 million�to friends and relatives in excess of their legitimate wages.
The Crown prosecutor had asked that the men serve three to five years in federal prison on their criminal breach of trust conviction.
Former chief Gabe Gopher, land entitlement trustee Archie Moccasin and band councillor Mervin Night have also been directed to repay a minor percentage of the “take” and put in a few hours of community service. (Moccasin defended his actions by pointing out he had only a grade 8 education.)
Isolated case? Hardly.
Then there is the on-going situation at First Nations University, where apart from the turmoil over faculty and administrative firings, a 32 member board comprised mostly of chiefs and other First Nations representatives will suck over $600K from the budget this year. ($300,000 of that for a forensic audit). Then, there’s the $100,000 “management fee” for the Saskatchewan Federation of Indian Nations.
By way comparison, the 12 member board of the U of S in Saskatoon operates at a $87,000 cost.
It is seldom that problems with First Nations crime and poverty are raised without bringing past injustices by the Canadian government to the table. Fair enough, but one would think that this history would lead to a more proactive attitude by both First Nations and the Canadian justice system in preventing and punishing current ones.
These days, the first ones to kick aside the interests of First Nations people on their way to the trough are their own leaders. So long the “wages of crime” amount to a $100K a year salary to sit around the house, that’s not likely to change.
The President of the Czech Republic V�clav Klaus has a blunt, and timely message for Europe, and by extension, for all western governments and those who elect them.
The question is what kind of ideas is favoured by the intellectuals. The question is whether the intellectuals are neutral in their choice of ideas with which they are ready to deal with. Hayek argued that they are not. They do not hold or try to spread all kinds of ideas. They have very clear and, in some respect, very understandable preferences for some of them. They prefer ideas, which give them jobs and income and which enhance their power and prestige.
They, therefore, look for ideas with specific characteristics. They look for ideas, which enhance the role of the state because the state is usually their main employer, sponsor or donator. That is not all. According to Hayek “the power of ideas grows in proportion to their generality, abstractness, and even vagueness”. Hence it is not surprising that the intellectuals are mostly interested in abstract, not directly implementable ideas. This is also the way of thinking, in which they have comparative advantage. They are not good at details. They do not have ambitions to solve a problem. They are not interested in dealing with the everyday’s affairs of common citizens. Hayek put it clearly: “the intellectual, by his whole disposition, is uninterested in technical details or practical difficulties.” He is interested in visions and utopias and because “socialist thought owes its appeal largely to its visionary character” (and I would add lack of realism and utopian nature), the intellectual tends to become a socialist.
In a similar way, Raymond Aron, in his famous essay “The Opium of Intellectuals”, analyzed not only the well-known difference between the revolutionary and reformist way of thinking but also – and this is more relevant in this context – the difference between “prosaic” and “poetry”. Whereas “the prosaic model of thinking lacks the grandeur of utopia” (Roger Kimball), the socialist approach is – in the words of Aron – based “on the poetry of the unknown, of the future, of the absolute”. As I understand it, this is exactly the realm of intellectuals. Some of us want to immediately add that “the poetry of the absolute is an inhuman poetry”.
[…]
Fifteen years after the collapse of communism I am afraid, more than at the beginning of its softer (or weaker) version, of social-democratism, which has become – under different names, e.g. the welfare state or the soziale Marktwirtschaft – the dominant model of the economic and social system of current Western civilization. It is based on big and patronizing government, on extensive regulating of human behavior, and on large-scale income redistribution.
In Canada, the “poets of soziale Trudeapia” are running amok.
Health Canada is calling for a change to the law that prevents peers and nurses in the city’s sanctioned safe injection site from helping people inject.
Health care workers can only supervise and offer medical assistance if a user hurts themselves and gets sick or overdoses.
If nurses help an addict shoot up, they could be charged with possession or trafficking.
“We need them to help,” said Ms. Tobin.
“And we need more places like the safe injection site. It’s so busy now, it’s being used all the time and people are sitting on the street, getting people who don’t know what they’re doing to inject them.”
In today’s modern, increasingly socialist democracies, nanny-state legislation (if it saves one life!) and cradle-to-grave “social safety nets” are the opiate of the middle class, while the politics of race and identity, envy, and “social justice” are the stock and trade of the economic underclass.
The net result is a society of entitlement that absolves the individual of personal responsibility and creates an illusion that consequences are made to be avoided. There is always “failure of society”, a previous generation, or corporate dynasty at whose feet the blame for personal failure lies, always someone else with more “ability to pay” to pick up the tab.
“They owe you” .
Consider a city built, unwisely, below sea level, protected by massive levies and powerful pumps provided by the state, maintained by the state, with all the apparent permanence of the state.
In the unthinkable event that those fail, experts and engineers plot strategies for worst case scenerios. They conduct disaster drills, with fake victims and fake blood. The state provides modern highways and mass transit, and communications systems and weather satellites.
Then, when the day comes that the unthinkable becomes possible, the planning and technology move into high gear. Government officials, with the assistance of private and public media, warn of a tremendous hurricane as it grows in strength. The images are available world wide as satellites track its path, and local TV records the destruction of those it has already battered.
Government officials and elected leaders urge the citizens to evacuate to save their lives. They warn of the scope of the impending storm and the potential of devastation. They mobilize and priorize. Hospital staff stay on duty to care for the sick and infirm. The doors to the largest facility available that may withstand the storm are opened in hopes that those who had no way of escaping, or somehow learned of them too late, can find refuge.
And tens of thousands ignore them and remain in their homes.
Many of them have cars parked in their driveways. Many who don’t are able-bodied and capable of walking. They ignore the warning and simply remain where they are, though they have children and elderly in their care.
With the storm passed, the waters rising faster than the heat, electricity failed and supplies running out, when the truth begins to dawn on the survivors – that the state is not all-powerful, that the mere human beings charged with coming to their aid,are, in fact, mere human beings who cannot come sweeping to their rescue like the cavalry over a Hollywood hill, that there are so many to rescue, because like they, so many have ignored the warnings – do they pool their resources?
Do they find strength in human dignity and sanctity of life? Do the strong come to the aid of the weak? Do they summon patience and resolve in the knowledge that help is on the way, if only they can find the courage to help themselves a little longer?
What is their response to this consequence that has befallen them, a consequence largely of their own making?
“You owe us” .
They take what others have failed to provide, those things required to sustain life – jewelry and television sets. And when taking isn’t enough (it never is), they devolve into predation and anarchy, abandon the weak, turn upon the innocent and each other – and all in a matter of days.
In former times entire nations found the strength to rise to the occasion, ordinary people understood that survival depended on their shared common decency and respect for their fellow citizen. That, by co-operating and persevering, they might create coping mechanisms through pooling skills and resources, and to be sure, the majority of those trapped in New Orleans will have done just that.
But, in former times, whole nations were not living in a time of entitlement, where all and any are provided for by an all-encompassing “social safety net”, funded by those faceless others with more, who have life easier, whom we have been trained to envy.
Those human failings, irresponsible and anti-social behaviors that once brought consequences in the community – shame, ostracization, and deserved personal deprivation – are today excused, assigned new and neutral nomenclature (all the better for medical diagnosis), prescribed “tolerance”, and if possible, assigned the politics of race or class, so that collective guilt may be mined to ensure that self-destructive behavior gains not only acceptance, but state funding.
The predatory violence and anarchy befalling New Orleans is not the result of a freak convergence of forces brought on by unnatural disaster.
It’s a warning.
(See also: American Spectator: Masques of Death)
Greg Staples has a translation from a reader on remarks that needs to get some legs in the western Canadian media. FAST.
…”I don’t think anyone can transform Quebec’s economy without government help,” stated Jean Lapierre. “I think the government will have to be extremely active.” Alberta’s prosperity could even be called upon, suggested the minister.”The federal government has the duty to be a real partner, especially since as a government we benefit from the West’s wealth,”he stressed.”So we have to redistribute the wealth. After all, the good fortune of the West could become a disaster for the East. That is why we need a pact that will allow us to even things out.”
This is the latest of a series of similar news stories and opinions published in the past few days.
If they keep this up, the Separation Party of Alberta will need to make twice daily runs to deposit the membership cheques.
Kay S. Hymowitz * in City Journal;
Read through the megazillion words on class, income mobility, and poverty in the recent New York Times series “Class Matters” and you still won’t grasp two of the most basic truths on the subject: 1. entrenched, multigenerational poverty is largely black; and 2. it is intricately intertwined with the collapse of the nuclear family in the inner city.
By now, these facts shouldn’t be hard to grasp. Almost 70 percent of black children are born to single mothers. Those mothers are far more likely than married mothers to be poor, even after a post-welfare-reform decline in child poverty. They are also more likely to pass that poverty on to their children. Sophisticates often try to dodge the implications of this bleak reality by shrugging that single motherhood is an inescapable fact of modern life, affecting everyone from the bobo Murphy Browns to the ghetto “baby mamas.” Not so; it is a largely low-income and disproportionately black phenomenon. The vast majority of higher-income women wait to have their children until they are married. The truth is that we are now a two-family nation, separate and unequal – one thriving and intact, and the other struggling, broken, and far too often African-American.
So why does the Times, like so many who rail against inequality, fall silent on the relation between poverty and single-parent families? To answer that question�and to continue the confrontation with facts that Americans still prefer not to mention in polite company�you have to go back exactly 40 years. That was when a resounding cry of outrage echoed throughout Washington and the civil rights movement in reaction to Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Department of Labor report warning that the ghetto family was in disarray. Entitled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” the prophetic report prompted civil rights leaders, academics, politicians, and pundits to make a momentous�and, as time has shown, tragically wrong�decision about how to frame the national discussion about poverty.
To go back to the political and social moment before the battle broke out over the Moynihan report is to return to a time before the country’s discussion of black poverty had hardened into fixed orthodoxies�before phrases like “blaming the victim,” “self-esteem,” “out-of- wedlock childbearing” (the term at the time was “illegitimacy”), and even “teen pregnancy” had become current. While solving the black poverty problem seemed an immense political challenge, as a conceptual matter it didn’t seem like rocket science. Most analysts assumed that once the nation removed discriminatory legal barriers and expanded employment opportunities, blacks would advance, just as poor immigrants had.
Conditions for testing that proposition looked good. Between the 1954 Brown decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, legal racism had been dismantled. And the economy was humming along; in the first five years of the sixties, the economy generated 7 million jobs.
Yet those most familiar with what was called “the Negro problem” were getting nervous. About half of all blacks had moved into the middle class by the mid-sixties, but now progress seemed to be stalling. The rise in black income relative to that of whites, steady throughout the fifties, was sputtering to a halt. More blacks were out of work in 1964 than in 1954. Most alarming, after rioting in Harlem and Paterson, New Jersey, in 1964, the problems of the northern ghettos suddenly seemed more intractable than those of the George Wallace South.
The essay provides an excellent overview of 40 years of the liberal, revisionist, feminist approach – and failure – towards solving the problem of poverty in the inner cities of America.
Other black pride inspired scholars looked at female-headed families and declared them authentically African and therefore a good thing. In a related vein, Carol Stack published “All Our Kin”, a 1974 HEW-funded study of families in a midwestern ghetto with many multigenerational female households. In an implicit criticism of American individualism, Stack depicted “The Flats,” as she dubbed her setting, as a vibrant and cooperative urban village, where mutual aid-including from sons, brothers, and uncles, who provided financial support and strong role models for children created “a tenacious, active, lifelong network.”
In fact, some scholars continued, maybe the nuclear family was really just a toxic white hang- up, anyway. No one asked what nuclear families did, or how they prepared children for a modern economy. The important point was simply that they were not black. “One must question the validity of the white middle-class lifestyle from its very foundation because it has already proven itself to be decadent and unworthy of emulation,” wrote Joyce Ladner (who later became the first female president of Howard University) in her 1972 book Tomorrow’s Tomorrow. Robert Hill of the Urban League, who published The Strengths of Black Families that same year, claimed to have uncovered science that proved Ladner’s point: “Research studies have revealed that many one-parent families are more intact or cohesive than many two-parent families: data on child abuse, battered wives and runaway children indicate higher rates among two-parent families in suburban areas than one-parent families in inner city communities.” That science, needless to say, was as reliable as a deadbeat dad.
That there are striking parallels in this essay with issues related to First Nations poverty in Canada goes without saying – high rates of illegitimacy, absentee fathers, the pervasive messaging that the so-called “extended” family can compensate for, or is even a superior structure to, the nuclear two-parent household.
Set aside time for it.
Via Jeff Goldstein who has additional comments on “identity politics”;
[R]ace-based affirmative action perpetuates the very problem it purports to be addressing by making color-and not all color, either (in California, for instance, Asians are excluded from “minority” status) politically operable, and so, predictably, socially foregrounded.
[…]
The failure to forthrightly address the social problems in this country out of fear that we might wound a particular identity group’s self-esteem is yet another argument for dismantling the kind of identity politics that create “group feelings” in the first place.� Which is not to say that group data, in a purely descriptive sense, shouldn’t be gathered and deployed; but rather to remind people that belonging to a particular descriptive category is a passive empirical data point and does not necessarily commit you to any kind of emotional or intellectual bond with said group.
Unfortunately, one who advocates for the dismantling of identity politics on the grounds that it acts as a foundation for an abundance of destructive social policy, is often met with charges of “racism” or “sexism” or “homophobia,” etc, from those who are able to use such faulty, anti-individualistic (and in that way, decidedly anti-American) essentialist impulses to gather and wield political power-something we see today when politicians pander to particular identity groups in order to shore up overwhelmingly large percentages of, say, “the Black vote” or the “women’s vote.”
The cycle is self-fulfilling, and it begins and extends from our fear of offending – as history continues to show us, even as we continue to ignore that history and reframe its lessons in newly evasive narrative maneuverings that do nothing but defer solutions and increase power to those in whose interests it is to keep the problems alive.
Federal Judge OKs Global Warming Lawsuit
A federal judge here said environmental groups and four U.S. cities can sue federal development agencies on allegations the overseas projects they financially back contribute to global warming.
The decision Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White is the first to say that groups alleging global warming have a right to sue.
“This is the first decision in the country to say that climate change causes sufficient injury to give a plaintiff standing, to open the courthouse door,” said Ronald Shems, a Vermont attorney representing Friends of the Earth.
That group, in addition to Greenpeace and the cities of Boulder, Colo., Santa Monica, Oakland and Arcata, Calif., sued Overseas Private Investment Corp. and the Export-Import Bank of the United States. Those government agencies provide loans and insure billions of dollars of U.S. investors’ money for development projects overseas. Many of the projects are power plants that emit greenhouses gases that the groups allege cause global warming.
Given the projected $7 billion surplus for Alberta this year, can Jack Layton and David Suzuki be far behind?
This one could get interesting… ;
Sikh truck drivers will file a human rights complaint Thursday against a rule that requires them to wear hardhats instead of turbans.
They are fighting a requirement that prevents them from driving into CP Rail’s two Toronto terminals without protective headwear. CP Rail said it is enforcing the hardhat rule because of safety concerns.
Major Singh, one of 500 drivers challenging the rule, has worked at the rail terminals for seven years. “There have been no incidents of drivers being injured,” he said.
CP Rail suggested the men could remove one of the two parts of their six-metre long turbans. That would allow them to wear a hardhat.
I can’t enter the local Agrium potash mine property without a hat, boots and safety glasses, even if I plan to remain in my truck, and that’s as a private contractor. Have they been giving a pass to Sikh drivers at CP, or have the drivers recently decided to refuse a hardhat rule they’ve been observing for years? Anyone know?
Lost Budgie expands on a Toronto Star item titled “Mixed-Race Son Can’t Fish With Dad – Licences for Band Members Only”;
Unmentioned in the article is the reason why the band’s “mixed-race” children do not have Official Native Status.
For the Ontario Government, this is a no-win situation that won’t get any better. Canada’s Indian Act racial purity laws are colliding head-on with changing demographics as the number of Official Status Native Canadians dwindles due to mixed marriages and falling birth rates.
Meanwhile, the Canadian Bar Association recently put forward a politely watered-down motion supporting race-based appointments of Native Canadians to various benches, including to the Supreme Court of Canada. The motion didn’t define how racially pure Native Canadians should be to meet the criteria for any of these juicy appointments.
Perhaps the Canadian Bar Association can issue some clarification. Will 50% native bloodline do? How about 75%? How racially pure is pure enough?
Indeed. I can’t find an independant online source, but a few years ago I recall an interview (maybe on CBC?) that mentioned that virtually all North American Indians descend from European males when one traces up the father’s side of the “family tree”. If true, not entirely surprising, given our history.
That said, these “am so, are not” methods of Indian Act identification are so 1990’s. There’s no longer any need to drag out the geneological charts and family albums to prove “racial purity”. We have the technology!
Now, I await the inevitable head explosions from those staunch defenders of Canada’s Racial Segregation Industry as they condemn the existance of a test that would quite neatly sort the “real” Indians from the watered down pretenders.
A Regina man who won a human rights decision against the city and a union local says he’s still waiting to receive a settlement.
Gary Kivela was a casual truck driver for the city.
He filed a discrimination complaint claiming he was denied a permanent job because he has cerebral palsy.
Listening to Charles Adler rant a little today about the brazen politics involved in the selection of “black Haitian immigrant who came to Canada fleeing oppression” Michelle Who?” as new Governor General – I was struck with a realization.
All of her commendable talents aside, this marks the first time in Canadian history that the most symbolic patronage appointment in government has not been bestowed on a person who has, as in the words of the late US President John Kennedy, demonstrated “what you can do for your country.”
Instead, it has gone to an individual who brilliantly showcases the new Liberal Party version of citizenship; “What your country can do for you!”
At one of her first news conferences a reporter asked Michelle Jean if she thought she was a “token”. Well, that she isn’t.
She’s a poster child.