Sand in the Shorts: Trustees need to speak up

By James Phieffer - This article, in edited form, first appeared in the Intelligencer, June 25, 2011. The edited version can be found here.

At the risk of being accused of lowering the editorial standards of this fair paper by once more returning to the artesian well of local news which has been “Quinte-gate”, I am going to do just that. But I am leaving aside the issue of what happened at the prom that night, and in the days before (for the most part), to focus on what is a much more important issue – the accountability of elected officials.

Mary Hall and Dave Patterson were elected to represent the City of Belleville on the local public school board. That means they are to be a conduit between the inner workings of the board and the citizens of the city. Unfortunately, they seem to have dismissed this part of their job, as they have refused to comment on the issue of the students being excluded from their prom.

Overbay: Canadian fans not as forgiving after 1994 strike

Lyle Overbay hits it right on the nose.

And I will say, I wish him all the best. He came to Toronto, played hard, and while never a star, was a solid first baseman.

Overbay: Canadian fans not as forgiving after 1994 strike

RealClearPolitics - Acquitted of Political Incorrectitudes

By David Warren - from the Ottawa Citizen

The acquittal of Geert Wilders by an Amsterdam appeals court is a significant victory for free speech everywhere. This is the prominent Dutch politician who was charged with inciting hatred against Muslims.

Prime evidence was a documentary film he had produced, entitled, "Fitna" ("Ordeal," in Arabic). It consisted of a display of actual quotations from the Koran, visually juxtaposed with unpleasant news footage from all over the world, of terrorist acts and Muslims rioting. It concluded with scenes from 9/11. The argument was explicitly that the Koran enjoins such behaviour, and Wilders himself has repeatedly compared Islam's scriptural text with Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler.

I think this is unreasonable, but that is beside the point.

Wilders is the leader of the Dutch Freedom Party, support for which has been growing quickly in the Netherlands. Since the last election it has held the balance of power in the Dutch Parliament, and it is not entirely inconceivable that it could win the next election outright; although the consensus is that the personal popularity of Wilders, which sustains his party, has peaked. At a certain point, even supporters get sick of looking at his shock blond hair and smiling cherubic boyish face.

His ability to articulate his position, however, and his refusal to back off from controversial remarks, in the face not only of legal prosecution and media execration, but of numerous quite plausible death threats (he requires 24-hour police protection), have made him formidable.

Conservatives and the "N" Word - J.D. Thorpe - Townhall Conservative

By J.D. Thorpe - from Townhall.com

The “N” word is a deplorable utterance that has elucidated the ignorance of a certain demographic in our country for many decades. We should condemn and reeducate these individuals whenever they use this hurtful word. It is simply unacceptable in America for liberals to continue to refer to conservatives as Nazis.

Last week at a union protest in Trenton the Vice President of Communications Workers of America, Chris Shelton, came close to using this barbaric language, but exercised slightly more tact by only referring to New Jersey’s Governor as “Adolf Christie.”

But the insinuation was still evident. This type of vituperative language from the left is not uncommon. Liberals have a long and sordid history of attempting to inculcate society with the idea that American conservatism is synonymous with Nazism.

Yet ironically the philosophical origins of Nazism are much more closely aligned with the views of today’s progressive liberals. Both hold highly statist views on the role of government in society – including a vehement hatred of free enterprise.

On the opposite side, two of the main branches of conservatism – paleoconservatism and libertarianism – find the origin of their free-market beliefs in the works of economic luminaries Ludwig Von Mises, F.A. Hayek, and Milton Friedman.

Not only did these economists/thinkers espouse the polar opposite views from the Nazis; they all belonged to a religion that was not quite tolerated in Nazi Germany.

In fact, Mises immigrated to America in 1940 over concern that the Nazis would take over Switzerland where he was teaching at the time.

Despite overwhelming evidence that refutes their claims, liberals continue their mission to besmirch conservatives with this dishonest campaign.

Throughout Obama’s presidency, good-natured tea party activists – individuals who advocate for fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government – have drawn constant comparisons to Nazis.

In March, union protestors in Madison held signs juxtaposing Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s picture with Hitler’s.

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Conservatives and the "N" Word - J.D. Thorpe - Townhall Conservative

Sand in the Shorts: Special - Full text of original apology by Camille Cacnio - with Commentary Added.

Ms. Camille Cacnio was one of the rioters who helped tear apart downtown Vancouver.  She was caught on camera as she participated in the riot, entering a store whose front windows were smashed in to steal some men's pants.  The video of her actions was posted on youtube.com, and she was identifies and exposed by publicshamingeternus. Once her involvement was publicly exposed, she went to the police. Since then, she has released this letter, taken from the Vancouver Sun. It is posted here in it's entirety (including any mistakes in the item as posted in the Sun), with my commentary in bold italics.

To My Readers: Thank You for Your Interest

Thanks for the interest, especially those of you who follow from locales outside the "Great White North".  I hope I am able to provide you with both a Canadian view of events across the country and around the world, as well as a selection of articles I have found to be interesting.  Please feel free to e-mail me with any thoughts or comments, and I always enjoy reading comments on the various posts.  And, if you can (safely?), add the location you're posting from.

Thanks again,

James Phieffer

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RealClearPolitics - The Money Hole

By John Stossel - from Real Clear Politics

America is falling deeper into debt. We're long past the point where drastic action is needed. We're near Greek levels of debt. What's going to happen?

Maybe riots -- like we've seen in Greece?

We need to make cuts now.

Some governors have shown the way. You know about Chris Christie, Scott Walker, Rick Scott, John Kasich, etc. But you probably don't know about Luis Fortuno.

Fortuno is governor of Puerto Rico. Two years ago, he fired 17,000 government workers. No state governor did anything like that. He cut spending much more than Walker did in Wisconsin. In return, thousands of union members demonstrated against Fortuno for days. They clashed with police. They called him a fascist

Fortuno said he had to make the cuts because Puerto Rico's economy was a mess.

"Not just a mess. We didn't have enough money to meet our first payroll."

Fortuno's predecessors had grown Puerto Rico's government to the point that the state employed one out of every three workers. By the time he was elected, Puerto Rico was broke. So the new conservative majority, the first in Puerto Rico in 40 years, shrank the government.

What was cut?

"Everything. I started with my own salary."

The protesters said he should raise taxes instead of cutting spending.

"Our taxes were as high as they could be, actually much higher than most of the country. So what we've done is the opposite." Fortuno reduced corporate taxes from 35 percent to 25 percent. He reduced individual income taxes. He privatized entire government agencies.

"Bring in the private sector," Fortuno said. "They will do a better job. They will do it cheaper."

Fortuno's advice for leaders who want to shrink the state: "Do what you need to do quickly, swiftly, like when you take off a Band-Aid. Just do it. And move on to better things."

Canada did that years ago.

When I think Canada, I think big government. I'm embarrassed that I didn't know that in the mid-'90s, Canada shrank its government. It had to. Its debt level was as bad as ours is today, almost 70 percent of the economy. Canada's finance minister said: "We are in debt up to our eyeballs. That can't be sustained."

Economist David Henderson, a Canadian who left Canada for the United States, remembers when The Wall Street Journal called the Canadian dollar "the peso of the north." It was worth just 72 American cents. "Moody's put the Canadian federal debt on a credit watch," Henderson said.

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RealClearPolitics - The Money Hole

Rex Murphy: Climate scientists make a mockery of the peer-review process | Full Comment | National Post

By Rex Murphy - from the National Post

One of the disturbing practices revealed by the great cache of emails out of the University of East Anglia — the so-called Climategate emails — was the attempted shortcutting or corruption of the oh-so precious peer-review process. The emails contained clear declarations of how the grand viziers of climate science would lean on journals and reporters to make sure certain critics did not get the validation, the laying on of peer-reviewed hands, so critical to full participation in the great climate debate. This was most succinctly expressed by the beautiful quote from Dr. Phil Jones of East Anglia that, “We will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what peer-review literature is.”

Much of what the world bizarrely allows to be called climate “science” is a closet-game, an in-group referring to and reinforcing its own members. The insiders keep out those seen as interlopers and critics, vilify dissenters and labour to maintain a proprietary hold on the entire vast subject. It has been described very precisely as a “climate-assessment oligarchy.” Less examined, or certainly less known to the general public, is how this in-group loops around itself. How the outside advocates buttress the inside scientists, and even — this is particularly noxious — how the outside advocates, the non-scientists, themselves become inside authorities.

It’s the perfect propaganda circle. Advocates find themselves in government offices, or on panels appointed by politicians disposed towards the hyper-alarmism of global warming. On the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) boards and panels, like seeks out like. And when the IPCC issues one of its state-of-the-global-warming-world reports, legions of environmentalists, and their maddeningly sympathetic and uninquisitive friends in most of the press, shout out the latest dire warnings as if they were coming from the very mouth of Disinterested Science itself.

An early and particularly graphic illustration of this vicious circle came when the IPCC 2007 report warned that most the great Himalayan glaciers would melt by the year 2035. Not only was the claim of a massive melt the very height of ignorant nonsense — the sun would have to drop on the Earth to provoke a melt of this proportion — it was also plucked from a seven-year-old publication of the ever busy World Wildlife Federation (WWF). As the Times of London put it, the claim itself was “inherently ludicrous” culled from a “campaigning report” rather than “an academic paper,” was not “subject of any scientific review” and despite all these shortcomings became “a key source for the IPCC … [for] the section on the Himalayas.”

A scare report, seven years old, from the an environmental advocacy group, became the key document for a major report released under the authority of the IPCC, the world’s best and brightest global warming minds. Sir Isaac Newton would be so proud.

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Rex Murphy: Climate scientists make a mockery of the peer-review process | Full Comment | National Post

Isolationist? Really? « The Enterprise Blog

By Jonah Goldberg - from The American

Our own Alex Della Rocchetta wrote the other day that there’s a growing “isolationist” tide in America. In fairness, she was encouraged to use the term by the Pew Research Center and other outlets (see, for instance, this discussion of GOP politics and the opening for an “isolationist” candidate ).

I’d like to dissent from all of this. None of the GOP contenders are isolationist. The growing popular dissatisfaction with the war in Afghanistan and the skepticism toward the Libyan adventure have very, very little to do with anything that can seriously be understood as isolationism. The chief opponent of military engagement around the world, Representative Ron Paul, is not even an isolationist properly understood since he’d lower trade and (I believe) immigration barriers.

While isolationists surely want to leave Afghanistan, wanting to get out of Afghanistan is not necessarily evidence of isolationism. It may be wrongheaded. It may be dangerous. It may even be evidence of some other ideological -ism. But isolationist? No. The same goes for Libya. Indeed, the idea that wanting to pull out of Libya (not my own position by the way) is a mark of isolationism is to suggest that basically any engagement the president enters into must be carried out indefinitely lest we give in to isolationism.

Pew cites as evidence of rising isolation that larger numbers of Americans think Obama should concentrate more on our problems at home and/or that America should “mind its own business” more in the world. Now, I believe America must stay engaged internationally, but I’m at a loss as to how these views amount to isolationism. Couldn’t Americans simply be making a prudential judgment about how we should set priorities? Isn’t it in fact true that we are fiscally over-extended and in need of some house-cleaning?

Again, my objection is solely to the word “isolationist.” While Alex seems to be using it in a clinical way, as if it is merely an accepted objective term, it is seen by many as a pejorative and by others as a once lost cause worthy of reviving. Either way the term is loaded with baggage, hence it tends to distort debates rather than edify them.

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Isolationist? Really? « The Enterprise Blog

Breakaway Anglicans lose last legal avenue to claim ownership of church buildings, land | Holy Post | National Post

By Charles Lewis - from the National Post

The Supreme Court of Canada said Thursday it will not hear a last-ditch appeal from four dissident conservative Anglican churches in Vancouver that hoped to hold on to their buildings and land.

In November, the British Columbia Court of Appeal, the highest court in the province, ruled that the properties are owned by the Diocese of New Westminster, which is part of the Anglican Church of Canada. The four churches are valued at about $20-million. Their congregations have broken with the mainstream church over same-sex marriage and other issues.

“We’ve always said from the get-go that we might have to choose between our faith and our buildings, and we chose our faith,” said Cheryl Chang, special counsel to the Anglican Network in Canada, the umbrella group for breakaway Anglican parishes. “Part of being Christian is to sacrifice. In the Third World people are tortured and killed for their faith. Here they take away your churches.”

The union-owned Democrats - The Washington Post

By Charles Krauthammer - from the Washington Post

“Shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected,” observed President Obama this week, enjoying a nice chuckle about the unhappy fate of his near-$1 trillion stimulus. To be sure, Obama has also been promoting a less amusing remedy for anemic growth and high unemployment: exports. In his 2010 State of the Union address, he proclaimed a national goal of doubling exports within five years.

One obvious way to increase exports is through free-trade agreements. But unions don’t like them. No surprise then that for two years Obama has been sitting on three free-trade agreements — with Colombia, Panama and South Korea — already negotiated by his predecessor.

Under the pressure of dire economic conditions and of the consequences of stiffing three valued allies, Obama appeared ready to relent — only to put up a last-minute roadblock. He’s demanding an expansion of Trade Adjustment Assistance — taxpayer money (beyond unemployment compensation) given to workers displaced by foreign competition, something denied to Americans rendered unemployed by domestic competition. It’s an idea of dubious fairness but nicely designed to hold up ratification, while placing blame on Republican heartlessness rather than on political sabotage by Democrats beholden to unions for the millions they pour into Democratic coffers. (A deal reportedly may be near. But the years of delay have been costly. Colombia, for example, is negotiating broad trade deals with China, including a possible Chinese-built railway to bypass the Panama Canal.)

Nothing new here. In 2009, Obama pushed through a federally run, questionably legal, bankruptcy for the auto companies that robbed first-in-line creditors in order to bail out the United Auto Workers. Elsewhere, Delta Air Lines workers have voted four times to reject unionization. A federal agency, naturally, is investigating and, notes economist Irwin Stelzer, can order still another election in the hope that it yields the answer Obama’s campaign team wants.

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The union-owned Democrats - The Washington Post

Editorial: Times' Bias Shows In Palin E-mail Affair - Investors.com

From Investor's Business Daily/INVESTORS.com

No wonder last week's frenzy over Sarah Palin's old emails went as fast as it came. Not only did it turn out to be the nonstory of the year. It gave objective journalism one of its biggest black eyes yet.

We don't remember anything quite like it. The state of Alaska was releasing more than 24,000 — or 300 pounds' worth — of emails that Palin wrote during her years as governor (2006 to 2009). The documents were a matter of public record, we were told, because Palin often used personal emails to cover state business. Whatever the case, the New York Times was beside itself.

Along with other news organizations, the Times dispatched reporters to Juneau, the state capital, to begin scanning the files as soon as they were available. But it went a step further, asking readers to help with its "investigation."

"In terms of juicy reading, you can't get any better than this," said a New York Times spokesperson in an online call to action. "Since practically everything Palin does is considered news as it is, her personal emails as governor are a veritable goldmine ... .

"So if you've ever had a secret ambition to do some investigative journalism for the Times, see your name credited in the paper, or just gossip incessantly about Sarah Palin, this one is for you."

We have since learned this may be a wave of the future, a natural extension of the "citizen journalism" that has became fashionable in the Internet age. It even has a name: "crowdsourcing."

We'd call it torch-and-pitchfork reporting, evoking the posses that mustered to hunt down the monster in those old Frankenstein movies. Only the monster in this case was a woman the media just won't leave alone because she just won't play their game.

Alas, the monster got away this time. Those emails weren't as "juicy" as the Times had hoped, and the brightest nuggets in the "goldmine" showed Palin in a positive light.

"Constitution-loving, loyal, faithful, pro-life, able to cope with difficult events, and exactly what America needs" was one reader's uncooperative take-away.

"Will someone please clue me in on why we're all supposed to be hating this woman so much?" asked another.

The Times' review, by Jim Rutenberg and William Yardley, noted how critics had cast Gov. Palin as "petty, preoccupied and disengaged," but that supporters saw her as a "maverick reformer, a salt-of-the-earth true believer who bucked the establishment elite."

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Editorial: Times' Bias Shows In Palin E-mail Affair - Investors.com

Hilarious New Muppet Trailer

Lawrence Solomon: Israel’s new energy | FP Comment | Financial Post

By Lawrence Solomon - from the National Post

In the first 25 years after Israel’s founding in 1948, it was repeatedly attacked by the large armies of its Arab neighbours. Each time, Israel prevailed on the battlefield, only to have its victories rolled back by Western powers who feared losing access to Arab oilfields.

The fear was and is legitimate – Arab nations have often threatened to use their “oil weapon” against countries that support Israel and twice made good their threat through crippling OPEC oil embargoes.

But that fear, which shackles Israel to this day, may soon end. The old energy order in the Middle East is crumbling with Iran and Syria having left the Western fold and others, including Saudi Arabia, the largest of them all, in danger of doing so. Simultaneously, a new energy order is emerging to give the West some spine. In this new order, Israel is a major player.

The new energy order is founded on rock – the shale that traps vast stores of energy in deposits around the world. One of the largest deposits – 250 billion barrels of oil in Israel’s Shfela basin, comparable to Saudi Arabia’s entire reserves of 260 billion barrels of oil – has until now been unexploited, partly because the technology required has been expensive, mostly because the multinational oil companies that have the technology fear offending Muslims. “None of the major oil companies are willing to do business in Israel because they don’t want to be cut off from the Mideast supply of oil,” explains Howard Jonas, CEO of IDT, the U.S. company that owns the Shfela concession through its subsidiary, Israel Energy Initiatives. Jonas, an ardent Zionist, considers the Shfela deposit merely a beginning: “We believe that under Israel is more oil than under Saudi Arabia. There may be as much as half a trillion barrels.”

Because the oil multinationals have feared to develop Shfela, one of the world’s largest oil developments is being undertaken by an unlikely troop. Jonas’s IDT is a consumer-oriented telecom and media company that is a relative newcomer to the heavy industry world of energy development. Joining IDT in this latter-day Zionist Project is Lord Jacob Rothschild, a septuagenarian banker and philanthropist whose forefathers helped finance Zionist settlements in Palestine from the mid-1800s; Michael Steinhardt, a septuagenarian hedge fund investor and Zionist philanthropist; and Rupert Murdoch, the octogenarian chairman of News Corporation who uncompromisingly opposes, in his words, the “ongoing war against the Jews” by Muslim terrorists, by the Western left in general, and by Europe’s “most elite politicians” in particular.

Where others would have long ago retired, these businessmen-philanthropists have joined the battle on Israel’s side. While they’re in it for the money, they are also determined to free the world of Arab oil dependence by providing Israel with an oil weapon of its own. The company’s oil shale technology “could transform the future prospects of Israel, the Middle East and our allies around the world,” states Lord Rothschild.

To win this war, Israel Energy Initiatives has enlisted some of the energy industry’s savviest old soldiers – here a former president of Mobil Oil (Eugene Renna), there a former president of Occidental Oil Shale (Allan Sass), over there a former president of Halliburton (Dick Cheney). But the Field Commander for the operation, and the person who in their mind will lead them to ultimate victory, is Harold Vinegar, a veteran pulled out of retirement and sent into the fray. Vinegar, a legend in the field, had been Shell Oil’s chief scientist and, with some 240 patents to his name over his 32 years at Shell, revolutionized the shale oil industry.

Before oil met Vinegar, this was dirty business, a sprawling open mine operation that crushed and heated rock to yield a heavy tar amid mountains of spent shale. The low-value tar then needed to be processed and refined. The bottom line: low economic return, high environmental cost.

Vinegar boosted the bottom line by dropping the environmental damage. No open pit mining, no spent shale, no heavy tar to manage. In his pioneering approach, heated rods are inserted underground into the shale, releasing from it natural gas and light liquids. The natural gas provides the project’s need for heat; the light liquids are easily refined into high-value jet fuel, diesel and naphtha. The new bottom line: oil at a highly profitable cost of about $35-$40 a barrel and an exceedingly low environmental footprint. Vinegar’s process produces greenhouse gas emissions less than half that from conventional oil wells and, unlike open pit mining, does not consume water. The land area from which he will extract a volume of oil equivalent to that in Saudi Arabia? Approximately 25 square kilometers.

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Lawrence Solomon: Israel’s new energy | FP Comment | Financial Post

Hans Küng: an ageing enfant terrible going nowhere | CatholicHerald.co.uk

By William Oddie - from the Catholic Herald

How important is the personal character of individual theologians to the intellectual conclusions at which they arrive? Consider, first, the character of the Jesuit Henri de Lubac, who according to Cardinal Avery Dulles, even throughout times of great adversity,

…remained staunchly committed to the Catholic tradition in its purity and plenitude. He humbly and gratefully accepted what the tradition had to offer and made it come alive through his eloquent prose and his keen sense of contemporary actualities. His eminent success in enkindling love for Christ and the Church in the hearts of his readers stemmed, no doubt, from his own devotion, humility and selfless desire to serve.

This humble gratitude for the traditio had a profound effect on his assessment of the post-conciliar years. De Lubac, wrote Cardinal Dulles, perceived in postconciliar Catholicism “a self-destructive tendency to separate the spirit of the council from its letter … The turmoil of the postconciliar period seemed to de Lubac to emanate from a spirit of worldly contention quite opposed to the Gospel.”

De Lubac was, of course, a peritus (appointed by John XXIII to advise him personally) at the Second Vatican Council. Afterwards, he published a Vatican II diary, which contained an interesting assessment of two of his fellow periti, Fr Joseph Ratzinger and Fr Hans Küng. It is uncannily perceptive; and it enables us to look in a new way at the theological discord between them, which grew so much over the years, as being not only a difference of intellectual analysis, but as deriving also from a profound difference of character: the young Fr Ratzinger is portrayed as one whose powerful intellect is matched by his “peacefulness” and “affability”. Fr Küng, by contrast, is described as possessing a “juvenile audacity” and speaking in “incendiary, superficial, and polemical” terms. These quotations are made in a recent article by Samuel Gregg, who goes on to remind us of what happened to these two later: “Ratzinger emerged as a formidable defender of Catholic orthodoxy and was eventually elected pope. Küng became a theological celebrity [nice one] and antagonist of the papacy.” Küng had his licence to teach Catholic theology removed after he denied papal infallibility: but he is still a Catholic priest in good standing, a fact which puzzles many: I suspect he has not been forcibly laicised because it is just what he would like to happen: his claim to a liberal martyr’s crown would then be unassailable.

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Hans Küng: an ageing enfant terrible going nowhere | CatholicHerald.co.uk

Conscience rights: Emergency plan overturned

by Cristina Alarcon - from mercatornet.com

An Illinois court has struck down a 2005 measure that would force pharmacists to provide Plan B.

In 2005, the then-governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich, enacted an “emergency” measure intended to force pharmacists to fill all prescriptions for the Plan B morning after pill, regardless of their ethical or moral beliefs. The state’s “right-of-conscience” law, he claimed, applied only to physicians. Two pharmacists subsequently took the case to court, suing the state to overturn the ruling, and, after six years, they succeeded.

On April 5th this year the court struck down the governor’s measure on three counts: “as a violation of the Illinois Healthcare Right of Conscience Act, the IL Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment.”

Imagine the horror now overtaking the state: women in the wilds of Chicago frantically dashing about, unable to find a doctor or pharmacist to give them this pill. Yes, time to call on the National Guard, perhaps the Red Cross too -- surely they could navigate the treacherous byways of Springfield to reach the panic-stricken women? But wait a minute -- perhaps it’s the S.W.A.T. team we need…

Surely, the refusal by a handful of pharmacists to dispense one small product is but a small inconvenience that does not warrant emergency measures.

Strangely enough, the governor was not concerned that healthcare professionals might refuse treatment to the needy or poor of his state, as is happening amongst a growing number of physicians in the US who are refusing new Medicare patients because of low government payments. A USA TODAY survey shows that 18 per cent of doctors in Illinois restrict the number of Medicare patients in their practice.

It is interesting to speculate on what Mr. Blagojevich might have done if some Illinois pharmacists refused to provide other types of drugs or services when the customer could not pay. This has happened in Canada, where British Columbia pharmacists threatened to withdraw provision of Methadone to First Nations and Inuit peoples because of inadequate reimbursement by Health Canada. Most recently, pharmacies in Ontario have made headlines for threatening closure and reduced patient services over government cuts.

And things can always get worse. Imagine if the former governor were faced with service-disrupting protests such as those in Islamabad where over 900 pharmacists took to the streets -- presumably halting services -- in protest over unfair treatment, and threatening a countrywide movement if demands were not accepted; or if he were confronted by angry pharmacists threatening to close shop over government cutbacks, as in South Africa, in Ireland, or in Canada. What would he have done then?

Patients are inconvenienced for various reasons every day. In Staten Island, New York, pharmacies are refusing to stock certain pain-killers because of the area’s drug abuse problem, thus forcing legitimate users to go on frustrating and sometimes fruitless hunts for their medication.

Was it more likely that Illinois women would be denied access to Plan B than to other medications or health services? No. The judge in last month’s ruling said that the state provided “no evidence of a single person who ever was unable to obtain emergency contraception because of a religious objection. … Nor did the government provide any evidence that anyone was having difficulties finding willing sellers of over-the-counter Plan B, either at pharmacies or over the Internet.”

It seems that in enacting his emergency measure, Governor Blagojevich was only concerned about one thing: appeasing the birth control lobby at the expense of the conscience rights of a very small group of pharmacists.

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Conscience rights: Emergency plan overturned

Refugee claimant refused for failing to describe Jesus ‘as a person’ | Holy Post | National Post

By Douglas Quan - from the National Post

A Chinese migrant seeking refugee status in Canada on the grounds that he faced persecution back home for his Christian beliefs was repeatedly asked by the Immigration and Refugee Board last year to describe what Jesus was “like as a person.”

The man’s inability to attribute human characteristics to Jesus formed part of the board’s decision to deny his refugee claim.

The details are contained in a recent Federal Court ruling, which dismissed the man’s application for a judicial review of the board’s decision but did agree that the board’s line of questioning about Jesus was “somewhat awkward.”

Wu Xin Wang came to Canada in April 2007 on a temporary work permit and made his claim for refugee protection in January 2008.

In documents filed with the immigration board, he claimed that he had received a call from his wife in China, who told him that officials from China’s Public Security Bureau had visited their home and were investigating illegal church activities.

Prior to his move to Canada, Mr. Wang said, he had been a member of an underground Christian church and sometimes acted as a lookout during church services.

In assessing Mr. Wang’s refugee claim, board adjudicator Daniel McSweeney asked Mr. Wang: “So tell me about Jesus as a person. What was he like?

“Jesus is son of God,” Mr. Wang said.

“I am not asking who he was or what he did. I am asking what is he like as a person,” Mr. McSweeney said.

“Jesus was conceived through the holy ghost and was born in this world,” Mr. Wang replied.

The answer did not satisfy the board member. “Anybody could memorize a creed and recite the creed. I want to know what you believe and what you know of Jesus as a person.”

“In my heart he is my saviour,” Mr. Wang answered.

“That is not . . . again, tell me what Jesus is as a person and this is the last time I am going to ask you.”

“I am sorry I really do not know how to answer.”

Last August, the board denied Mr. Wang’s refugee claim after finding that he was not credible and that his professed religious beliefs and practices in China and Canada were merely an attempt to bolster his refugee claim.

The board said it came to that conclusion in part of because of Mr. Wang’s inability to answer the question about Jesus or to describe certain core beliefs of the Pentecostal Church. It also found that Mr. Wang had made several inconsistent statements.

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Refugee claimant refused for failing to describe Jesus ‘as a person’ | Holy Post | National Post

Kevin Libin: Trudeau and Liberals killed liberalism | Full Comment | National Post

By Kevin Libin - from the National Post

There was once a Canada where a vast part of the country believed deeply in the virtues of Big Government. Where the public rallied behind a man named Pierre Trudeau who promised he could, by force of will and policy, command an economy and engineer a society. Three decades after Trudeau — no doubt, in large part, because of Trudeau — that Canada no longer exists. The nation today is one where people are disenchanted with grand government schemes and large national projects, with the idea that government is good at all that much besides maintaining law and order and defending our borders. Canadians in 2011 are about as soured on Big Government as you can get.

That’s what the annual Barometer survey released Wednesday by the Manning Centre for Building Democracy suggests. Conducted in the days after the federal election, and released on the eve of the victorious federal Conservatives’ national convention, the poll offers the most helpful insight yet into why the Liberals suffered their worst defeat in history. In all their years in power, one of the Liberals’ most lasting achievements, it seems, has been to turn Canadians against Liberalism.

Already, more Canadians (about 33%) identify themselves as Conservative than at any point since the mid-1980s; fewer Canadians (20%) are willing to call themselves Liberal than at any time since election studies began tracking this in 1965.

“Party identification is more stable than votes,” says André Turcotte, the associate professor at Carleton University’s school of journalism who co-authored the Barometer report with pollster Allan Gregg. That means the Liberals’ troubles run far deeper than having a flawed series of leaders; it means more Canadians than ever see a Liberal party foreign to their values and beliefs.

The survey tells us a lot about why. The Liberals’ legacy of championing multiculturalism and group rights has become a washout: 80% of us say we prefer government to treat us as individuals than as a member of some identity group. Canadians have had quite enough, too, of the moral relativism of the Trudeau legacy, whether that’s the former prime minister’s chumminess with murderous dictators or the recent attempts by his son, MP Justin Trudeau, to argue that so-called honour killings of disobedient women in certain cultures shouldn’t be considered “barbaric”: only 18% of us agreed that “right and wrong” are merely a matter of the beholder’s eye.

Trudeau’s notions of a “Just Society,” deploying the power of government to rescue underperforming regions and individuals, has been largely lumped, as well: Though 56% of us generally agree that poor people are often victims of circumstance, and 63% of Canadians agree to some extent that we “all have a responsibility to look after those less fortunate than ourselves,” it would seem we wouldn’t readily trust that role to government.

Almost three-quarters of Canadians agree that when there are problems to be solved in this country, the government’s role is to “support individual initiatives first rather than always trying to find its own solutions.”

Nearly the same proportion believes government should focus on creating equality of opportunity — stopping at ensuring all have simply a fair shot at providing for themselves — rather than trying to engineer the equality of results, ensuring we all enjoy the same lifestyles. A majority of respondents, meanwhile, agreed that in most cases, the government’s attempts to rehabilitate criminals are doomed to failure, while fewer than a quarter of us are willing to buy that government action is the best medicine for economic problems.

Canadians’ confidence in the ability of government to fix our problems is clearly fading. Three times as many people say they’re losing faith that government can solve social challenges, like improving health care and education, or environmental issues, as those who say their confidence is growing in government remedies; twice as many Canadians report decreased confidence in the government’s ability to addressing economic challenges than those encouraged by the government’s record.

After watching time and again as large-scale government schemes are tried and fail — think: the National Energy Program; the Kyoto accord; or the disastrous constitutional upheavals that were the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords — the Canadian mainstream, it seems, has developed a strong taste for small-government conservatism, says Preston Manning, founder of the Manning Centre and the former leader of the Reform party. Two out of three Canadians say they want the government to “get smaller” and out of their way so they can do more for themselves. This cannot be comforting news for a Liberal party that has stood for so long for the power of government as an agent of good.

Far from disavowing the Trudeau legacy of meddling, the Liberals maintain him as an icon in the party, looming larger than the more restrained Laurier. Trudeau’s successors, reared on the legend, have sought largely to emulate his fetish for sweeping endeavours, whether it’s realigning the national economy with a climate-minded Green Shift, proclaiming the Kelowna accord the saviour of First Nations, stripping the notwithstanding clause from the Charter, or developing a national daycare strategy. It’s true that such bold plans haven’t only tempted Liberals: Brian Mulroney wears the blame for Meech Lake and Charlottetown. But only the Liberals — save, perhaps, Jean Chrétien, their last successful leader, who operated a notably unambitious, relatively conservative, agenda — seem yet to grasp that the population has moved on.

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Kevin Libin: Trudeau and Liberals killed liberalism | Full Comment | National Post

Climate isn’t up for debate | FP Comment | Financial Post

By Tom Harris - from the Financial Post

Alarmists refuse to take on skeptical geologists

Anyone not already familiar with the stance of geologists towards the global warming scare would have been shocked by the conference at the University of Ottawa at the end of May. In contrast to most environmental science meetings, climate skepticism was widespread among the thousand geoscientists from Canada, the United States and other countries who took part in GAC-MAC 2011 (the Joint Annual Meeting of the Geological Association of Canada, the Mineralogical Association of Canada, the Society of Economic Geologists and the Society for Geology Applied to Mineral Deposits).

The lead symposium of the conference, Earth climate: past, present, future, was especially revealing. Chaired by University of Toronto geology professor Andrew Miall, the session description starts: “The scientific debate about climate change is far from over. Some of the projections of climate change and its consequences contained in the 2007 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the United Nations’ IPCC) have been called into question. This symposium will address some of these issues and present a geological perspective on the scientific debate.”

The talks were from “climate rationalists,” defined by Australian geology professor Bob Carter of James Cook University as “persons who are critical (on balanced scientific grounds) of the IPCC’s alarmism … reflecting the primacy that such persons give to empirical data and thinking. The climate rationalist approach contrasts markedly with the untestable worlds of computer virtual reality that so many climate alarmists now inhabit.”

Leading off the GAC-MAC climate symposium was fellow Australian, Ian Plimer, professor in the School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering at the University of Adelaide. In a keynote presentation entitled Human-induced climate change: Why I am skeptical, Plimer completely dismantled the greenhouse-gas-driven climate-change hypothesis. He showed how climate has varied naturally on all time scales and how recent changes are not unusual. Plimer explained the lack of meaningful correlation between the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) and planetary warming and cooling, and how “climate models throw no new light on climate processes.” He concluded, “Pollution kills, CO2 is plant food, H2O vapour is the main greenhouse gas…. Humans can adapt to future changes.”

Following Plimer were 14 other climate presentations by leading geoscientists. Henrik Svensmark of the National Space Institute in Denmark spoke about how cosmic ray variations in the atmosphere are influencing climate by changing the microphysics of clouds. University of Ottawa emeritus professor Ján Veizer presented his research describing the role of the Sun and water vapour on CO2 and climate change. Calgary geophysicist Norm Kalmanovitch showed how satellite radiation measurements demonstrate that the “enhanced greenhouse effect” from greenhouse gas emissions has never even existed to any measurable extent. Carleton University researcher Hafida El Bilali showed how her work with paleoclimatologist professor Tim Patterson revealed that variations in the output of the Sun have had major influences on regional climate for the past nine millennia.

And so it continued. Although one speaker presented information that was consistent with IPCC claims, no other presentation in the symposium supported the UN’s human-caused dangerous global warming hypothesis. In the discussion period following the talks, climate rationalists decried the lack of media or public attention to the symposium or their research findings. In the exhibit hall, few participants seemed interested in human-caused global warming. The catastrophic messages that so overwhelm other climate-related conferences were nowhere to be found.

Where were all the other scientist supporters of climate alarmism? Did they not know that climate was a major focus of this, the largest geologic conference in the country?

They knew. According to Miall, even though some were directly invited, they either refused to participate or ignored the invitation. “The people on the ­IPCC side generally will not debate,” explained Miall. “Anything that’s brought up that they disagree with, they say has been dealt with and is no longer considered important, or is a minor effect. This is often quite wrong.”

Sand in the Shorts: Time for the Sun to Set on Federal Transfers

The time has come for the federal government to let the provinces know that transfer payment growth has seen it's day. In bringing down the new(ish) budget today, the main areas of restraint can be found in the gradual elimination of the vote subsidy and the promise to find savings totaling $11 billion over the next four years within Ottawa's $80 billion operating budget. This will allow the deficit to be eliminated by fiscal 2014-15.

That's nice. But it just scratches the surface when it comes to reigning in runaway growth in provincial transfers in order to be prepared for increased healthcare spending as Canada's population ages. As it stands, the next five years will see the national debt stop growing and even shrink, ever so slightly. But if our current fiscal health is to last through the next 50 years, there needs to be much more done.

Right now the provincial governments as a whole are tending to spend like drunken sailors, with Ontario's massive $14 billion deficit merely leading the way. The problem is that even this level is reliant upon massive federal transfers. Partly this is a result of the muddled way of funding programs which has grown in Canada over the last 50 years. It is also partly a result of the system of transfer payments which were initially meant to balance services, but instead now allow Canadians in Ontario, BC and Alberta to subsidize superior levels of service in PEI, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.

These transfers, and the confused means of federal funding for provincial responsibilities, represent the single biggest drag on federal spending – and the single biggest excuse used by provincial governments to disguise their fiscal incompetence. The McGuinty government in Ontario gives massive pay raises to government employees, along with a $7 billion gift to Samsung which will supposedly bring all kinds of wind-power equipment manufacturing to Ontario – if the stars, planets, and galaxies align, the Maple Leafs win the Cup, and Ontarians are lucky beyond belief. Then it passes a budget with a projected deficit in the coming year of $11 billion. Why? “The federal government...”

Alberta has been doing the same, ignoring it's own mismanagement of oil revenues, abortive royalty increases in the oil patch, and out of control spending. Instead the blame is laid on Ottawa. The same can be seen in provincial capitals across the country.

The means to fix this system is fairly simple, though. It starts with the Ottawa getting out of funding programs such as health and education which are a provincial responsibility, and transferring the tax points which formerly funded these to the various provincial governments. The transfer payment system should be abandoned and replaced by a new one which covers just the most basic services, with adjustments being made to reflect relative cost of living and differences in costs to the governments of providing equivalent services.

For example, if the cost of hiring a nurse in New Brunswick is only 95% of the cost in Ontario, the transfers should be adjusted to reflect that. Right now it isn't, and as a result, the level of service found in a Charlottetown hospital is far superior to that in a Belleville hospital. A dollar simply goes further in some parts of the country.

The net effect of this would be to make clear to the voter precisely which level of government is wasting their tax dollars in a given area, and thus allow Canadians to vote accordingly. It would also mean the end of Ontario, Saskatchewan, Newfoundland, Alberta and BC subsidizing Quebec's grossly over-subsidized nanny state and general fiscal mismanagement.

And if we fix this system soon, maybe we'll be able to nurse our healthcare system through the next 50 years.

Charles Lewis: Quebec’s fight against Biblical teaching is to the detriment of a common culture | Holy Post | National Post

By Charles Lewis - from the National Post

A group of Catholic and Jewish parents in Quebec has taken umbrage with the province’s ban prohibiting religious instruction in subsidized daycares and has gone to court to reverse the new rules.

The story, as reported in Wednesday’s National Post by reporter Graeme Hamilton, explained that children could learn about Noah’s Ark and the Exodus, for example, as long as divine intervention was absent from the picture.

The parents, citizens of Quebec, think there is something wrong with washing out all references to God, even when the government pays part of the bill.

This is not the first time that Quebec has had issues with religious instruction.

Last year, a judge ruled that a Catholic high school in Montreal could choose its own religious curriculum, in defiance of an order by the Quebec government. The judge even noted that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms specifically referred to “the supremacy of God” in its preamble. Quebec did not want the private Catholic school to teach ethics and religion from a Catholic point of view. The judge called Quebec’s demand on the high school “totalitarian,” using the preamble to the Charter to make his case.

Now the target is daycares and what appears to be the concern of indoctrinating young minds with something considered foreign to a “secular” society.

This scenario of pushing religion further to the margins is not a new one and is probably welcome by many Canadians. The thinking, of course, is that religion represents a set of dogmatic beliefs that should never be imposed when taxpayer money is involved.

Two things here are worth considering in both cases. The first is the most obvious: Everyone pays taxes, including religious people. Secular does not mean atheist or anti-religious or even non-religious, but rather the broad society in which all groups have a voice and a stake — not one to the exclusion of all others.

In a state that is officially atheistic it would be understandable to exclude all religious teaching from daycares. But that is not the case in Quebec, nor the rest of Canada.

In Wednesday’s story, it noted that the story of Noah’s Ark would be allowed as long as there was no God talk involved. In other words, you could say Noah spontaneously built an ark and then it just happened to rain a lot. His instincts paid off and everyone lived happily ever after. Likewise the same would hold with the Biblical story of Moses leading the Jews out of Egypt. Moses could be a really great guy who somehow slips an entire people past Egyptian guards and then everyone lives happily after. Say what you want about the original story, but at least it had drama, given God’s wrath and the plagues and all that other religious stuff with the parting of the seas and whatnot.

But this is about something more than just dropping these stories for fear of offending a vague groups of secularists. This is really about turning away from the fundamentals of Western culture that are still worth holding onto.

These stories, whether they are seen as holy or just good tales, are part of what make up the Western world and our entire thought process.

The Bible is a religious book, but it is also part of the canon of Western literature.

The King James Bible, which was first published in 1611, is the basis for much of the language we speak — from “tender mercies” to “feet of clay” to “a drop in the bucket.”As National Public Radio pointed out recently, to speak English is to speak the King James Bible. It noted that the use of biblical language can be found in Bob Dylan, Norman Mailer and Martin Luther King — just to name a very few.

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Charles Lewis: Quebec’s fight against Biblical teaching is to the detriment of a common culture | Holy Post | National Post

Student debt bankrupting a generation

By Mary Teresa Bitti - from the Financial Post

In 2006, Nereid Lake was a single mom with an undergraduate degree in French linguistics from Simon Fraser University and well on her way to a master’s degree in linguistics when Canada Student Loans informed her she had exceeded the lifetime lending limit of the federal program and would have to leave university — without her degree.

At the time, she had accumulated about $60,000 in student loans.

“Even though I had an armload of academic awards, I was forced to leave,” she says. “My aspiration was to work in the field of voice recognition cognitive science, getting computers to understand human language. Instead I had to take the first job I could, as a low-earning court clerk. Now I’m nearly 40 just barely making ends meet and still owe more than $50,000 in student debt. I naively thought student loans would be the great equalizer. Instead I’ve plunged into a student debt nightmare.”

Ms. Lake is not alone. Nearly two million Canadians have student loans. That debt is worth about $20-billion and includes federal and provincial government loans and personal debt in the form of credit cards, family loans and lines of credit all used to finance post-secondary education. And that number is only set to grow as student loans owed to the government of Canada alone increase by $1.2-million a day. At the same time, the amount of unrecoverable student loan debt now sits at $149.5-million.

“That figure is absolutely growing,” says David Molenhuis, chairman of the Canadian Federation of Students in Ottawa. “Next year even more money will have to be lent out in record amounts, while monthly deliquency rates continue to trend up.

“People are finding it more difficult to make payments, budgets are becoming more strained and we are seeing more reliance on food banks and the use of emergency bursaries offered by student unions,” he says.

“We have an entire generation of people who now more than ever have to complete some form of post-secondary education just to get a job interview, with more than 70% of all new jobs requiring some degree or diploma. We are on the verge of bankrupting a generation before they even enter the workplace.”

Part of the problem is the dramatic increase in tuition fees, which have jumped to an average of $4,724 in 2008-09 from $2,591 in 1999. This doesn’t bode well for young people financing post-secondary education. Borrowing rates have already increased to 57% in 2005 from 49% in 1995. This is set to grow as a tough job market means more young people are opting out of the workforce and staying in school.

“The percentage of youth attending school on a full-time basis ranged from 56% to 58% over the 1995 to 2009 period, but shot up to 63% in 2010,” says Roger Sauvé, president of People Patterns Consulting and author of the 10th edition of Canada Job Trends Update 2011. “I suspect that the second consecutive year of youth job losses convinced or forced students to stay in school full-time.”

In the meantime, the number of young people with debt loads of $25,000 or more when they leave university and college is also on the rise, sitting at 27%, up from 17% in 1995. By 2009, the average debt for university graduates was $26,680.

“The debt picture will only worsen due to the lower availability of part-time work for students who are attending school in the fall,” Mr. Sauvé says. “The percentage of full-time students with jobs during the October to December months declined to only 37% in both 2009 and 2010 — the lowest in a decade.”

The reality facing graduates isn’t much better. There have been many attempts to estimate what the return on investment is for students. This is a tricky game, Mr. Molenhuis says.

“The Rae review in Ontario a few years ago created a myth that the lifetime return on investment for a post-secondary education is $1-million. We find the average ROI to be closer to $20,000 — as does the OECD. A post-secondary education is not a value add any more. It is the going fare to get in the front door.”

And this points to a bigger problem, Mr. Molenhuis says. “Canada does not have a national vision for its post-secondary education system. For the billions of dollars we pour into the system, we do so without a vision for outcomes. We don’t know what it is we want to get out of our colleges and universities in order to meet the needs of the 21st century.”

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Student debt bankrupting a generation

Sand in the Shorts: Solidarity, or Suicide Pact?

This column appeared in the Intelligencer on June 4, 2011

Apparently, the Canadian Union of Postal Workers is about to grace Canadians with a6nother strike.

Now, I should first say that all Canadians ought to be appreciative of our postal workers. Unlike in the U.S., where “going postal” generally involves an automatic weapon and mass bloodshed, “going postal” here is simply a synonym for slower than molasses in January.

But returning to the news at hand, this strike is apparently motivated by a raise in base pay from $18 per hour to $19 per hour, and a mechanization process that hasn't resulted in the layoffs of any workers. When you hear about a situation like that, you can understand the posties' plight. What Canadian earning $12 an hour in a call-centre, trying to pay the mortgage while operating a small business, or wondering what they'll do to pay for their retirement wouldn't be sympathetic.

Truly, CUPW is a union on the front lines of the battle to protect employee rights. I'm sure union president Denis Lemelin sees himself as a true successor to Cesar Chavez. At least when he's not busy involving the union in Gaza blockade running and otherwise wasting union member's dues on matters with no relationship to their welfare. Robert B. Russell would be proud.

And what will this mean for Canadians? Well, that depends on where they live, as some provinces, including Ontario, will still have government cheques delivered, while other provinces are making arrangements for these to be picked up at local offices. Governments will also, along with businesses, likely look to various courier and delivery services. And email will likely become even more prevalent than it already is. Junk mail will probably be delivered by local newspapers.

Wait – but wouldn't that mean the postal service is becoming even less important to Canadians as a whole?

It is, and what a postal strike really should mean for Canada is an opportunity to end the obsolete monopoly that Canada Post has on mail delivery, and to privatize the post office.

In an era of increasing reliance on electronic transfer of documents, and where many of the traditional barriers to delivery which made government owned and operated delivery a necessity have been removed, there simply is no place for an old style government run monopoly such as Canada Post in it's current form. As well, privatization would force CUPW to become a little more realistic in it's demands, as they couldn't simply expect that postal rates could be raised to pay for whatever exorbitant demands they come up with next.

It should be pointed out that removing the monopoly and privatizing Canada Post is not a simple matter. Part of the problem is involved with Canada's geography – the area covered by Canada Post is the largest of any postal service in the world. Any process would have to take into account the need to maintain service to remote areas of the Canada – either through variable mail costs or some other option. This is one justification for the monopoly – the idea that mail sent in more populous areas is more expensive to pay for mail sent to more dispersed populations. But it is not beyond the realm of the reasonable to suggest that mail rates be linked to the actual delivery distances involved.

But the fact it would be a complex undertaking shouldn't prevent the privatization of Canada and the end of it's monopoly on light letter delivery. Throughout history, the reach to accomplish difficult tasks has benefited society. And if nothing else, it will mean Denis Lemelin will have to get a real job - and stop sponging off postal workers and irritating Canadians in general.