New holes in Justin Trudeau’s abortion declaration

By Kelly McParland - from the National Post (May 21, 2014)

Not for the first time, Liberal spin-doctors are out with little nets, rounding up words spoken by party leader Justin Trudeau and re-organizing them into something more suitable for public consumption.

This time it’s about abortion. When Mr. Trudeau declared recently that all future Liberals would be required to support abortion, he didn’t mean what he appeared to say. According to the Liberal clean-up crew, Mr. Trudeau merely intended to note that a 2012 policy convention affirmed “Women’s Right to Reproductive Health Services,” and, in future, Members of Parliament would be expected to reflect that fact in abortion-related votes.

We’re told he did not mean to suggest there was a ban on Liberals voicing opposition in caucus, or on raising troubling aspects of the position, such as the fact Canadians overwhelmingly oppose sex-selection abortion. According to Maryanne Kampouris, Liberal policy chair, “All Canadians, including Liberal Members of Parliament and candidates, are free to express their deeply held beliefs, and, more specifically the Liberal Party of Canada does not discriminate against current or potential candidates because of these beliefs.”

Anyone who thinks Mr. Trudeau said something else must need to get their ears cleaned. Or perhaps they fell victim to unspecified “misrepresentation” of Mr. Trudeau’s words. “The record should be set straight,” says Ms. Kampouris.

Okay, so here are Mr. Trudeau’s words, exactly as he spoke them: “For current members, we will not eject someone from the party for beliefs they have long held,” Trudeau said. “But the Liberal party is a pro-choice party, and going forward, all new members and new candidates are pro-choice.”

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George Jonas: Canada, a police state? No, but heading that way | National Post

-from the National Post By George Jonas (May 17, 2014)

A society drifting into a police state displays some early warning signs. They’re not too subtle and I very much doubt if they  require previous exposure to tyranny to detect.

Ironically, one is a demand for more freedom and democracy, along with a wider distribution of political power and human rights.

In the jungle screeching birds and chattering monkeys trace the route of a predator on the prowl. In our neck of the woods, scholarly and media voices perform the same function. It begins by academic thinkers discovering rights and freedoms nobody knew existed, or rather everybody knew they existed, but not that they were rights and freedoms. They were viewed as legitimate ambitions at best, and at worst as sins and vices, or even crimes. Still, now that they’re known to be rights and freedoms, i.e. constitutional values in a democracy, they have to be given their due.

All right, so go ahead and implement them, you might say — but here’s the rub: Often such newly minted rights and freedoms run headlong into freedoms and rights established much earlier and regarded as fundamental. They include freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of association, freedom of religion, freedom of conscience and so on. They remain on the books as freedoms, but their exercise in a direction not approved by the state now becomes known variously as sexism, racism, homophobia and Islamophobia, along with other phobias and isms that have been reduced from philistine norms to hidebound, antediluvian discriminatory practices, very likely human rights violations, possibly criminal offences, and arguably psychiatric conditions, at least in some cases.

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