Canada is on the hunt for name-callers:

Two thousand leaflets attacking gays and lesbians have put a Christian activist in western Canada under investigation by Edmonton police for hate crimes.

“Attacking”? Like with a stick?

The flyers by Bill Whatcott of Regina refer to gay marriage as “sodomite marriage” and use graphic language to describe the alleged sex practices of homosexuals.
The handouts also used derogatory terms to describe federal Defence Minister Bill Graham.

Oh, that sort of attacking. Like what children do. Calling people names. Being rude.
Children get their feelings hurt, and run to their parents. Adults are tougher than that, and ignore the offensive person, or dish it back out. They don’t run to their…
No wait — this is Canada. We do run to mommy government:

“The material is offensive and it’s an affront on the basic tenets of our society, which is about multiculturalism, tolerance and peaceful co-existence,” Const. Steve Camp, of the Edmonton police hate crimes unit, said.
Last month, the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal fined [Bill Whatcott of Regina] $17,500 for handing out similar material.

They were “offensive” and “an affront”. Time to get the cops involved. Because an affront, which means “to insult intentionally, especially openly” must be pursued with the vigour and power of the state. It’s indicative of a bad thought that must be expunged for the good of all.
I better stop before someone comes after me for my doubleplusungood thoughts.
[Guest blogging for Kate: a slightly longer post is at Angry in the Great White North]

Continues to descend into the madness of Robert Mugabe.

CBC;

The owners of a restaurant and pub in Victoria by the Sea have been asked to pay the province $24,000 in anticipated sales tax before serving a single meal or pouring a pint.
[…]
Hunter and Storey have used their own money to set up shop on the Victoria wharf. And they have been able to avoid taking out a loan to help start their business.
Hunter can’t understand why government thinks he and his partner would run off with sales tax money.
The provincial government figures, based on projected sales, the PST for this summer will be $24,000. And it wants the money before any business takes place.
[…]
Provincial Tax Commissioner Jim Ramsey said taxpayers lose $2 million a year when businesses go under. He said new businesses that are considered high risk are asked to pay up front, and the policy is paying off.

Asking a small, self-financed business to fork over thousands before they open the doors, because they risk going under before their first tax bill comes due, sounds less like prudent departmental policy than it does self-fulfilling prophesy.
Via Stephen Taylor.

… was just on John Gormley Live a moment ago, stringing words together in virtually incoherent sentences.
(For example – he attempted to draw a link between the G7 and the Rwanda massacres, later bringing in BSE border closures.)
He was in the studio to promote his book The Collapse of Globalism.
Even though it’s radio, you can tell when Gormley opened his mouth – Saul’s cadence speeds up and his voice rises in an attempt to prevent interruption (and possible contradiction?). After a while, I stopped listening to what he was attempting to say, to concentrate on his word inflections.
(Question – how much public money has been invested in this twit’s writing career? I was tempted to call in and ask….)

CBC;

A Kelowna man who transported an unconscious man to hospital Wednesday morning couldn’t believe his ears when he was told to call 911 for help. Ralph Vogel had driven the victim to Kelowna General Hospital only to be greeted by staff that seemed unwilling to help.
Vogel says he ran into the hospital and told staff that there was a man either dying or dead in his motor home. When staff told him to call 911 and wait for an ambulance, he told them that the man was outside. He was still told to call 911.
The hospital now admits that staff made a mistake by refusing to treat the man in the parking lot. The victim was a homeless man that Vogel and his wife allowed to sleep in their motor home. But then they couldn’t wake him up.
By the time the ambulance arrived, it was too late. The man had already been dead for several hours.

It wasn’t the first time.
I know a woman who immigrated from Russia to Canada with her husband a few years ago. A dentist by profession (but unaccredited here) the medical background was probably somewhat helpful when she was forced to deliver her baby at home, unassisted, after a hospital in the “Birthplace Of Medicare” turned her away because she could not pay cash in advance.

The Greatest Canadian.
Kudos to London Fog for digging that up.

Janice MacKinnon tossed an electoral bomb into the lap of New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton on Wednesday, issuing a report calling on governments to introduce user-pay into the health care system through taxation of health benefits.

Ex-Sask. NDP finance minister proposes�user-pay tax�
A former New Democrat finance minister from Saskatchewan says Alberta should tax people for how often they use medical services.
Janice MacKinnon asks why would taxpayers want to continue to give millionaires free health care.
She says health care should be a taxable benefit based on use and income, as well as providing credit for healthy behaviour.
Alberta Health Minister Iris Evans says this is a very major change that MacKinnon is recommending that would have to be considered at a national level.� �

This is scary stuff.

Khemosabi! Khemosabi! Khemosabi!
That’s for you, Raskolnikov*.

Globe & Mail;

[T]omorrow night in the city of brotherly love, Mr. Chr�tien — accompanied by two RCMP officers decked out in their red serge dress uniforms — will receive an award as a global role model from a gay and lesbian activist group, the Equality Forum, for his support of same-sex marriage.
On Sunday, the two Mounties — one male, one female on assignment with the government-supported Canadian Tourism Commission — will accompany Kevin Bourassa and Joe Varnell, the first gay couple to be married in Canada, as they receive a “hero award” from the forum.

This is a job for juxtapose!

The United States wants to give two teams of Canadian snipers the Bronze Star, a decoration for bravery, for their work in rooting out Taliban and al-Qaeda holdouts in eastern Afghanistan, but Canadian defence officials put the medals on hold, the National Post has learned.
The five snipers spent 19 days fighting alongside the scout platoon of the United States Army’s 187th “Rakkasan” brigade last month, clearing out diehard fighters from the mountains near Gardez in eastern Afghanistan.
The Americans were so impressed by the Canadian snipers that they recommended them for medals after the battle.
Sources told the Post that U.S. General Warren Edwards had already signed the recommendation for five Bronze Stars for the sniper teams, drawn from 3rd Battalion, Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, last month.
Gen. Edwards, deputy commanding general of coalition land forces in Afghanistan, had recommended three Canadians for a Bronze Star and two for a Bronze Star with distinction.
The night before the troops were to be awarded the medals, about three weeks ago, Canadian military officials in Ottawa put the decorations on hold, according to a U.S. Army source in Afghanistan.
The Canadian military told their U.S. counterparts to wait before awarding the medals for reasons of “Canadian protocol.”
Spokesmen for the Department of National Defence would not comment on the award last night, but a source within the department said the medals are on hold while the military decides whether or not to award the men a similar Canadian decoration.
However, Dr. David Bercuson, director of the Centre of Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary, said the real reason for the delay was likely official squeamishness.

What a pathetic excuse for a country we live in.

CBC;

One man, a 55-year-old chemist, claimed he was in charge of an experiment to test the effect of deadly nerve gas on political prisoners.
“He said he was involved in the killing of two people – one who did not expire for 2� hours, and the second didn’t die till 3� hours had passed,” Cooper told CBC for a documentary airing Wednesday night on the radio program Dispatches.
Other defectors told him of “mass starvations, gruesome experimentations, and yes, as we now are beginning to learn and to confirm, gas chambers,” he said.
Soon Ok Lee, a North Korean now living in the United States, said she spent years in a political prison camp before escaping.
“When I was in jail, there was at least once or twice in the prison camp, chemical testing on humans that I witnessed,” she said.

Via NealeNews

HUMAN RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS
CHAPTER I – GENERAL PROVISIONS

1 . Every human being has a right to life, and to personal security, inviolability and freedom.

2. Every human being whose life is in peril has a right to assistance.

3. Every person is the possessor of the fundamental freedoms, including freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of opinion, freedom of expression, freedom of peaceful assembly and freedom of association.

4. Every person has a right to the safeguard of his dignity, honour and reputation.

5. Every person has a right to respect for his private life

6. Every person has a right to the peaceful enjoyment and free disposition of his property, except to the extent provided by law.

7.�A person’s home is inviolable.

8. No one may enter upon the property of another or take anything therefrom without his express or implied consent.

9. Every person has a right to non-disclosure of confidential information.

10. Every person has a right to a job at Wal-Mart

Keep this story in the back of your mind the next time someone tells you that only the state should be trusted with our fresh water resources. BBC;

India’s western state of Maharashtra has told banana and sugar cane farmers they will not get water for irrigation if they have more than two children.
The state’s water minister says the move will help curb the rising population and solve water shortages. The upper house of the state’s parliament has backed the bill and it will go to the lower house on Monday. Water shortages in the past few years have caused droughts that have led to hundreds of farmers committing suicide.
The scheme is the brainchild of state water resources minister, Ajit Pawar, who is the nephew of the federal agriculture minister, Sharad Pawar. The bill’s backers say it is needed because water resources are static while the population is continuing to rise. The bill also requires all banana and sugar cane farmers, regardless of child numbers, to use drip or sprinkling systems of irrigation within five year or lose their supply.
The bill is targeting the crops because of the large amount of water they require.
Sharad Joshi, founder of the farmers’ association in Maharashtra and the farmers’ coordination committee nationwide, said: “If the Maharashtra government is imposing restrictions on agriculture and asking farmers to implement drip irrigation, it should also make finances available, at least in the form of credit.”
If the bill is approved into law it will not apply to farmers who already have more than two children.
Maharashtra is agriculturally one of India’s most advanced states but has suffered bad droughts over the past few years.

Kind of them to allow for existing kids.
This is no totalitarian state – India is the world’s largest democracy. For all the criticism leveled at their one child rule, the Chinese at least had the intellectual honesty to simply force families to abort the surplus.

Havana (VNA) – Jack Chi-con Chow, Deputy Director of the World Health Organisation (WHO), after returning from a visit to Cuba, praised the country’s primary healthcare services as a model for other countries to employ. The WHO official highlighted the fact that Cuba’s healthcare network is intended to reach every citizen and has been kept running constantly. He said that given its encouraging experiences in combating HIV/AIDS, Cuba should make more active contributions to devising a global strategy against the disease. Jack Chi hailed the country’s regular HIV/AIDS campaigns which have drawn the voluntary participation of people from all walks of life, especially young people. One such campaign calls on people to learn to live with HIV/AIDS. He reiterated WHO’s commitment to maintain its cooperation with Cuba. While in Cuba, the delegation visited the Los Cocos health centre which provides free treatment for AIDS patients and other clinical facilities.

Photos are of El Hospital Clinico Quirurgico de la Habana.source
More, in English.

Telegraph:

France’s National Library has airbrushed Jean-Paul Sartre’s trademark cigarette out of a poster of the chain-smoking philosopher to avoid prosecution under an anti-tobacco law.
“Smoking,” the Left-wing existentialist wrote, is “the symbolic equivalent of destructively appropriating the entire world.”
And yet in its poster for an exhibition to mark the hundredth anniversary of Sartre’s birth the Biblioth�que Nationale de France decided, destructively or not, to edit out the philosopher’s Gauloise.

Via Wretchard, who notes the Orwellian nature of the sanitization.

Medienkritik on the current economic situation in Germany.

Now the most unpopular government in German history has achieved a new all-time low: Schroeder, who earlier demanded that the German people judge him on his ability to create jobs, currently presides over a nation with over 5.2 [million] unemployed citizens, the highest number since the Nazis came to power during the Great Depression. Right-wing extremists are gaining strength with every passing day, but Schroeder and his party refuse to accept any implication that their failed economic policy is a direct or indirect cause of the re-emergence of German nationalism.
So what is the SPD’s solution? German exports. Particularly arms sales. Gerhard Schroeder recently visited China and expressed his desire to lift the EU’s arms embargo on the Communist nation. The “Peace” Chancellor is currently on a trip to the Middle East where he is sealing business deals in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and other dictatorial Arab states. There too, German arms are a best seller. The same German left that can’t get enough of pointing out America’s supposed hypocricy in supporting Saudi Arabia is busily signing weapons deals with the same government.
And even the German media, which has so often towed the government line, can no longer ignore the extent of Germany’s economic tragedy. The usual excuses, that the unemployment is due to September 11 or that the numbers are due to statistical changes, now ring hollow. Even SPIEGEL ONLINE is describing the situation in Schroeder’s government as one of “helplessness, perplexity and naked panic.”

Well, Germany has always found solutions before. I don’t know that Poland is the place to look for them this time, though.

Saskatchewan Health has a website “committed to providing Saskatchewan residents with the most complete and up-to-date wait time information available”. I took a look at it today, prompted by a conversation I had with an elderly acquaintance. “Jean” is still fairly active, though she’s slowed noticably in the past few months. She lives alone, independantly.
She’s scheduled for heart valve surgery. When, is still open to question, because she first must have a diagnostic angiogram. She’s been on the wait list for the angiogram since July. She mentioned this, because she had finally become frustrated and started to call and bother her doctor about it. She was finally told she’ll recieve it in the next three weeks, but to “be thankful”, because the “normal” wait time for angiogram is a year.
Of course, she could have also looked for basic information on how many patients are on surgical (which I assume are different than diagnostic) wait lists, on the Sask Surgery “Current Information” page.
It hasn’t been updated for 5 months.
(correction: original stated angioplasty, in error)

Monte Solberg understands blogging.

Jack Layton, sans appendix, was back in the House today and received a standing ovation for ridding himself of that exploding organ. I blame it on all the tofu, alfalfa sprouts and lack of trans fats.

Entertaining writing style, a touch of irreverance, and to the point. All that, and useful information, too. Like this;

We won the vote tonight on our supply motion to have the government implement the Auditor General’s recommendations regarding foundations.

(I wrote about foundations a couple of weeks ago, for those of you who don’t know what this refers to.)

The perennial question of defining Canadian identity may have finally been answered. Canadian identity is not, as commonly thought, our socialized health care system, the Trudeaupian mosaic of multiculturalism or even a fanaticism for hockey. At one time any one of those might have been true, but no more. No, we’ve moved well past that.
Today, our national purpose might best be described as “simply to serve as a warning to the United States”.
Via Neale News;

“Please be advised that effective immediately the Ontario region of the Correctional Service of Canada is no longer maintaining an inventory for parole officer applications from the general public.,” the Feb. 19 letter reads.
“Due to staffing resources we will continue to accept applications from aboriginal and visible-minority candidates only.”
CSC is committed to having a “skilled, diversified workforce reflective of Canadian society,” the letter continues, adding that future vacancies may be posted that are open to the “general public.”

The depressing part is that a good percentage of Canadians would think this is perfectly reasonable.
Last weekend a woman who was purchasing artwork from me at the dog show began to ask about “what it was like to live in Canada”. She confided that they had to sell their house while it was “still worth something” and leave before the country was completely destroyed. Her young son’s skills made him very attractive to the military and there was no doubt he’d be drafted. She was enthusiastic about our health care system, and wanted to live in a “more socialist” country.
Sometimes I wonder that there may be some force …. (fate?) …. that places people like myself in just the right place, at just the right time. For a moment I felt a twinge of guilt in the realization that my Canadian citizenship had been twisted into cruel bait for a hapless little moonbat – like savory French cheese perched temptingly in a leg hold trap.
In the end, I let her go – shaken, but unharmed. I’ve promised to only use my powers for good. But I think I detected a stagger in her walk as she made her way back to safety.

I’ve often said that best thing that could happen for both Saskatchewan highways and health care is for the Premier to have a heart attack 80 miles from Regina. Or, as my brother points out – until every hospital patient were required to survive 2 hours on a vibrating gurney before receiving treatment, there is no such thing as “equal access” to health care in this province.
Today’s Great Moment In Socialism;

A critically ill man who needs a life-saving heart transplant was forced to travel 12 hours in an ambulance to Edmonton because no planes were available, the Regina Qu’Appelle Health Region said yesterday. On Feb. 3, a Regina man was loaded on the health region’s advanced life-support vehicle, which can transport up to 16 patients at one time.
Along with the patient were a perfusionist, respiratory therapist, surgeon, nurse and two paramedics, along with high- tech medical equipment. Twelve hours and 900 km later, the man arrived in Edmonton, where he was still waiting for a transplant yesterday.
Glen Perchie, executive director of emergency services for the health region, said they had to use the ambulance because there were no airplanes available when the patient had to be transported. Perchie added that the health region explored “every option available” with Saskatchewan Health and with other provinces.

Well, every option outside of asking if there was a plane in Edmonton that could come get him.

However, Leslie Beard, vice-president of public affairs for Edmonton’s Capital Health region, said planes are usually available.
“The bottom line is that if Regina or anyone else out there … do not have an aircraft in their community, what they do is phone (the equivalent to Alberta’s provincial flight co-ordination centre) … and we have reciprocal agreements in place, we immediately send out planes,” Beard said yesterday.
The medical team shrugged off the long bus ride.

I’m sure they did. Maybe next time they can all make the trip without being paid for travel time, and we’ll see how long the laisser faire attitude lasts.

Perchie said the patient was kept alive by the Extracorporeal Life Support machine, which is used when the heart can’t pump blood through a patient’s body. The patient’s blood goes through the pump, which transfers it to a machine which adds oxygen to it and then the blood goes back into the patient’s body.
Perchie said this is the first time the region used its vehicle to transport a patient needing a heart transplant outside the city.

No doubt. Usually they just warehouse critically ill patients in filthy wards and ignore them until they die.

News Release Jan.13, 2005;

Carol Skelton, Member of Parliament and Official Opposition Public Health Critic welcomes the announcement of a new Health Officer as initiated in her Private Members Motion.
“Following discussion with constituents, primarily Taxpayers, and consultations with lower digestive tract health professionals, I felt the time had come for Canada to have a Chief Proctological officer to monitor and assist in the improvement of anal health in Canada.� I’m pleased the government has chosen to move so quickly on my request,” remarked Skelton.�
“Lower intestinal health is administered by the provinces, but the federal government is responsible for the majority of the screwing over of Taxpayers.� It is my hope that a co-ordinated effort in the areas of research and information will benefit all Canadians.� Taxpayers often don’t have protection plans at a time when they are busy bending over the proverbial chair. Failing anal health leads to complications with other health matters.� If we improve anal health, we can better assist the fiscal health of all governments, thereby ensuring that the creation of ever more highly paid, completely useless government appointments.

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