C-484 Is About Abortion - And Epp Admits It

I've said since I first saw Ken Epp's dishonest bunch of hackery called Bill C-484 that it was all about attacking a woman's rights - especially pregnant women's rights.

Over at Broadsides, Antonia Zerbisias has found some beautiful gems about the bill - straight from Mr. Epp's own writings:

"Even if people do start questioning abortion, it does not necessarily follow that they will change their minds about whether a woman should have the freedom to choose that option," Epp wrote in The Ottawa Citizen last month. "What it means is that pro-choice advocates will be in a position of having to justify abortion without relying on the illusion that the fetus is absolutely worthless.

"They will need to defend the view that, in spite of the unborn child being recognized as something of value, the woman's interests are paramount."

So, Mr. Epp, would you quit being a dishonest misogynist and admit that what your bill is really all about is feeding your festering desire to control women and create a world where male dominated "medical panels" decided if a woman would be allowed to have an abortion, or if she should be forced to carry that pregnancy to term.

As for Rona Ambrose's asinine claim that C-484 being about "an issue of protecting pregnant women ", it is such a dishonest statment it's not even funny.

By Epp's own admission, this bill isn't about protecting anyone. It's not like we have a sudden rash of people running around violently assault pregnant women these days.

Ambrose says it's Dion who's turning C-484 into a renewed abortion debate.

"I think he's taking a very partisan tack on what could be a very non-partisan issue that we could address together," Ambrose said. "I think he's fear-mongering women on this issue."

No Rona - Dion isn't fearmongering - women aren't stupid, and strangely most of them can read what's in C-484 just fine. It lifts most of its wording out of the wingnut arguments about abortion, and transplants them. If C-484 isn't about abortion, then why are you idiots in the government not adopting Bill C-543, which accomplishes the same thing without the slimy wording?

Stacking The Deck ...

The HarperCon$ are all about democracy and the will of the people ... until the will of the people runs contrary to their ideology.

Such is the case with an obscure little bill that landed before the House of Commons recently. Bill C-57 is a small bill that amends the board selection process for the Canadian Wheat Board.

The modification is innocuous enough:

3.02 (1) Four directors are appointed by the Governor in Council on the recommendation of the Minister. Ten directors are elected, in accordance with sections 3.06 to 3.08 and the regulations, by actual producers who produced at least 120 tonnes of grain in either of the two previous completed crop years. The president is appointed by the Governor in Council in accordance with section 3.09.

In fact you have to and look at the existing act and read section 3.02 before this amendment makes any sense whatsoever:

3.02 (1) Four directors are appointed by the Governor in Council on the recommendation of the Minister. Ten directors are elected by producers in accordance with sections 3.06 to 3.08 and the regulations. The president is appointed by the Governor in Council in accordance with section 3.09.

In other words the real change is that now only producers who produce a minimum amount of grain are permitted to participate in the board elections process.

Not being a farmer, I'm not sure if a 120 tonnes of grain is a huge amount - but I went off and did some investigating to try and determine just how much this is.

First, I located Alberta's Bushel-Tonne calculator - which told me that it takes some 4,400 bushels of grain to achieve 120 metric tonnes. But that doesn't answer the "how many bushels does an acre of land produce?" question - which turns out to be somewhere around 40 bushels to the acre for Alberta (yes, there's year over year variance, but I just wanted a working number to get some idea of how much land would be involved for a producer to qualify under these rules. A quick crunch turns up a number of 110 acres would have to be committed.

The amount of land doesn't sound all that big - 110 acres is about 1/6 of a section. When many farms are much larger than that, that doesn't seem to be a big deal. Until you sit back and consider the political games that have been going on around the Wheat Board. What this effectively does is cut off small producers (e.g. so-called "hobby farms" and producers who are trying to do multiple crops.

How does this fit into the HarperCon$ ambitions to dismantle the Wheat Board? Well, what it does is take out the small producers who benefit the most from the Wheat Board. In theory, larger producers have a sufficient amount of output that they would be "of interest" in their own right to buyers looking for grain from Canada.

In fact, it is the larger producers - those who have expanded by buying up adjacent farmland and consolidating it under the control of a small handful of people - who have the greatest objections to the Wheat Board. Strangely enough, they are the producers who believe that they will benefit the most from a dismantling the Wheat Board.

However, as repeated votes in the past have shown, they are not the majority of farmers. So, what is really happening here is the HarperCon$ are moving to disenfranchise the people that they find politically inconvenient for their agenda. What is particularly vile about this when you line it up against even the limited democracy that goes on with publicly traded companies, it's fundamentally dishonest. Even as a small shareholder (holding common stock), I have the right to vote for who should be on the board. That vote may not mean much alongside the massive weight that institutional investors can throw around, but it still exists. The HarperCon$ are kneecapping small farmers and telling them that their needs don't matter.

Who is next on their list? Disenfranchising women? Oh wait - they've already started on that.

[Update 19:30]
A reader pointed out that there are 640 Acres to a Section, not a quarter section as I had originally written. The error has been corrected.
[/Update]

The Boissoin Case: Remedy Decision

I've apparently been sleeping - at the end of May, the Alberta Human Rights Panel released the Remedy Decision in the Boissoin Letter case. (My comments on the ruling itself are here)

The decision itself boils down to a few basic points:

1. A joint apology for the letter, to be published along with the remedial decision itself in the Red Deer Advocate newspaper. (Appropriate, as the Advocate was the newspaper that published Boissoin's letter in the first place)

2. A "Don't Do It Again" order. Again, no big surprise here - although I can imagine that Boissoin and Ezra will be crying foul over this.

3. An order to compensate Dr. Lund to the tune of $5000, and to pay the expenses of one of the witnesses at the hearings to a maximum of $2000. (This is a "joint-and-several" liability - in other words it is up to Boissoin and CCC to decide how best to divide that up.

I had hoped that there would have been a directive in there obliging Dr. Lund to funnel whatever funds he received into programs intended to combat discrimination against GLBT people - something he has said he would do, but it would have been appropriate to request some kind of accounting of the disposition of those funds.

There are a couple of interesting asides in the decision itself:

That Mr. Boissoin and The Concerned Christian Coalition Inc. shall cease publishing in newspapers, by email, on the radio, in public speeches, or on the internet, in future, disparaging remarks about gays and homosexuals. Further, they shall not and are prohibited from making disparaging remarks in the future about Dr. Lund or Dr. Lund’s witnesses relating to their involvement in this complaint. Further, all disparaging remarks versus homosexuals are directed to be removed from current web sites and publications of Mr. Boissoin and The Concerned Christian Coalition Inc.

Essentially, this is a "cease-and-desist" order. What is interesting is the way the order itself is broader than the letter that was the subject of the complaint, and includes Dr. Lund and witnesses involved in the testimony phase. I find this intriguing because it seems at first a bit unusual, but it also reflects the surprisingly public and vicious approach taken by Boissoin's backers towards this whole affair.

Now we get to see what - if anything - happens with whatever appeals Boissoin et. al. decide to launch.

Dear Stephane: Show Us You Mean It

Okay, Stephane. You've drawn your line in the sand, now stand by it.

The voters that would naturally back you are now looking for you to show us that you have something resembling a spine to stand up for the rights of Canadian women to control their reproductive destiny and their bodies.

The question is why?

So, PETA has convinced KFC to provide vegan menu options.

The first thing that goes through my head is 'why?'. You don't go to KFC (Kentucky Fried Critter) for healthy (or even semi-healthy) food, you go there because your body is craving an oil change.

Somehow, deep fried tofu product just sounds like some evil thing you'd find at the fair grounds - being sold to you by the same evil types that sell "corn dogs" and other cholesterol-laden horrors.

The HarperCon Propaganda Machine

In the world of politics, propaganda is nothing new. The way the Conservatives go about it adds a new dimension to the picture that Canadians should be wary about.

Now we find the HarperCon$ using public resources to buff their personal images on sources such as Wikipedia. Now, I don't have a problem with adding information or even putting in a legitimate counterpoint to criticism points on Wikipedia pages - deleting anything that's even remotely critical and replacing it with glowing praise smacks of the same kind of self-congratulatory propaganda that totalitarians around the world like to revel in.

Coming just ahead of an expected re-introduction of "Canadian DMCA" (legislation which would be a disaster if it ever gets passed) changes to copyright law, this is an interesting development. To me it suggests that the HarperCon$ are worried about this piece of odious crap - so worried that they will do anything they can to squelch controversy and discussion.

Perhaps in a move that tells us still more about the utter lack of honesty in the HarperCon government, we also find Flaherty talking about providing welfare to GM after GM announced that they would close a major truck plant in Ontario. Wasn't this the party that has argued so loudly in the past about the supremacy of the market? But then, the HarperCon$ are the same idiots whose "green car" subsidy applies to full size pickup trucks, but not to a Honda Fit with an Automatic transmission.

Uh huh ... Why Don't I Buy This?

So, now several months after the Cadman Affair burst open, the HarperCon$ are now claiming that a key tape has been doctored.

There are things about this claim that I simply do not buy. First off, there's too many other parts of the story that don't line up with that claim. Even if we accepted Conservative claims that Harper wasn't directly involved, the involvement of guys like Flanagan and other "inner circle" players means that Harper had to have been aware of what was going on. His micromanagement style guarantees that Harper knew damn good and well what his minions were negotiating with Cadman - micromanagers don't give their people that kind of latitude.

Suddenly, the Con$ervatives - a party that has hardly been overly concerned about honesty and transparency since last election - are running to the courts to try and make sure the Liberals can't use this tape in election ads - this on top of an unresolved libel suit that Harper has filed. So anxious the Con$ are, they cannot even allow the due process of the court system to do its job? Really?

There's an old saw about how one "doth protest too much", which tends to suggest strongly that they are more involved than they are going to admit to. Would the power-chasing Con$ pass up an opportunity to topple the Martin government? - even if it meant stooping to bribery of some sort? I doubt it - Harper's antics at the time don't support the idea that this is a man capable of biding his time.

My challenge to the HarperCon$ on this is simple: Put your case forward in court, and let your story speak for itself. If, as you claim, Harper is lily white, then it shouldn't be too hard to demonstrate that. If that tape is doctored in some critical way, that should also be fairly easy for your "experts" to prove before the courts. Now, the other question we should be asking is if the tape you claim has been doctored is in fact the correct tape, or is it one that your bunch of juvenile delinquents that created your "Dion is Evil" website cooked up?