Hell Must Be Freezing Over

First Flaherty introduces legislation which I can actually support.

Then we find Conrad Black pointing out what's horribly wrong with the HarperCon$ approach to crime and punishment:

This Roadmap--which was released in 2007, and which the Harper government began officially responding to in its budget in 2008, setting out a five-year plan -- turns the humane traditions of Canada upside down. It implicitly assumes that all who are convicted are guilty and have no remaining claim to decency from the state, and that treating confinees accordingly is in the interest of the legally unexceptionable majority.

The Roadmap does not mention prisoners' rights, beyond basic food, shelter, clothing and medical care, and assumes that they are probably not recoverable for society and that the longer they are imprisoned, the better it is for society. Almost no distinction is made between violent and non-violent offenders.

I won't profess any great love or respect for His Lordship - frankly I think he's no better than that great fraudster Charles Ponzi, but he is certainly much more articulate than most of Harper's cabinet seems to be.

The Roadmap holds that anything beyond the necessities for physical survival must be "earned." Traditionally, the punishment is supposed to be the imprisonment itself, not the additional oppressions of that regime, and the proverbial debt to society is paid when the sentence has been served; it does not continue as a permanent Sisyphean burden. In the interests of eliminating illegal drugs in prison, the authors of the Roadmap want all visits to be glass-segregated, no physical contact. This is just a pretext to assist in the destruction of families and friendships.

The importation of contraband by prisoners' visitors can be stopped by strip-searching the prisoners before they leave the visitors centre, as happens to us here, unless the prison staff, who have the unfathomable delight of inspecting us au naturel, are on the take, which is, of course, the problem, as correctional officers in many prisons are frequently caught smuggling, and aren't well enough trained to command higher salaries to make them more resistant to temptation. It is a problem, but it will not be solved by targeting unoffending relatives of inmates. The Roadmap also has naively exaggerated confidence in certain types of scanning devices.

No surprise here, really. Harper and his band of reactionaries are completely oblivious to the long term consequences of their actions. If nothing else, this "roadmap" is one more step on Harper's unstated agenda of making Canada into a right wing, totalitarian state. Taking the worst of prison practices around the world and through history will do nothing to improve public safety.

The whole concept of prison should be terminated, except for violent criminals and chronic non-violent recidivists, and replaced by closely supervised pro bono or subsistence-paid work by bonded convicts in the fields of their specialty. Swindlers and embezzlers, hackers and sleazy telemarketers are capable people and they should serve their sentences by contributing honest work to government-insured employers.

Hmmm...interesting. When you've lost one of the godfathers of right wing ideology in Canada, I'd say you're way off the course you should be on.

Jason Kenney - Selective Memory or Bad Liar?

Can we ever take anything that comes out from Harper's disciples?



The upshot - "Oh, it's just fine to hide political staffers from committees. We never called on them when _I_ was in the Opposition" contrasted with reality - namely some video of Jason Kenney whining about political staffers who have not yet appeared before a committee.

Here's a little newsflash for the HarperCon$ - if you hire people to work on your behalf on Parliament Hill, then those people ARE ACCOUNTABLE TO PARLIAMENT TOO.

H/T: Canadian Cynic

You Said It, Cardinal Ouelett, You Wear It

I see Cardinal Ouelett is trying to (sort of) backpedal on his recent statements about abortion in Canada.

On Wednesday, Ouellet told reporters he was "a bit surprised by the magnitude of the reaction" to his comments, which he said had been "twisted" and taken out of context.

"They took one small phrase and created a weapon … to discredit me," Ouellet said.

Ah ... the classic "I was taken out of context" defense. Coming from another one of Pope Benedict's cassock-wearing celibates, it's lacking credibility. Especially when he says this:

He called abortion a "moral disorder," but said the circumstances must be taken into account.

"I am not making a judgment on the woman ... because the woman has to take her decision in light of her personal circumstance," Ouellet said. "Only God knows all the elements of her final judgment of conscience.

Well ... he's got half of it right - the decision is the woman's. What he's got wrong is that he has any say in that decision.

In Belgium, with only rare exceptions, abortions are not performed later than 12 weeks into a pregnancy, Ouellet said.

As a result, he said, in 2007 there were 18,000 abortions in the country with a population of 10 million people, compared with more than 26,000 in Quebec, which has a population of eight million.

Of course, like most anti-abortionists, Ouellet is ignoring the fact that by far the majority of abortions in Canada (and Quebec in particular) are done in the first trimester.

More fundamentally, these clowns need to pay a little attention to the Morgentaler decision which found the last attempt at a law arbitrarily restricting abortion unconstitutional.

Since then, we've heard a lot of bleating about "fetal rights", which is nothing more than an attempt to invent a status for a being that is entirely dependent upon the woman until birth. Anyone with their brain switched on should be able to see just what a legal can of worms creating a legal status for a fetus would open. (Welcome back to the 'you're not a person' era, ladies - because suddenly your body is subject to the rights not just of your good judgment, but also of someone else's judgment on behalf of that fetus)

Irony ... and Double Standards

At first glance, I actually like the idea of creating a single securities regulator - the patchwork system in Canada is insanely complex and brutally expensive for taxpayers to maintain. It's also out of step with the rest of the developed world.

However, I don't trust the current government to create that system with appropriate checks and balances in place. Not when they've been trying to screw over anything that resembles accountability in Parliament.

Consider this: Instead of sending in the people required to testify before parliamentary committees, they're sending in Ministers - often unrelated to the topic to attack the committee.

“There is a new game being played," Mr. Hill said earlier in the House of Commons. "The tyranny of the opposition majority has turned its attention to the men and women who make up our political staff. Men and women who did not sign up to be tried by a committee – to be humiliated and intimidated by members of Parliament.

This is complete nonsense. If you work on Parliament Hill, either for the government bureaucracy or on behalf of sitting MPs, you are accountable to Parliament for your actions in the conduct of your job. Period. End of Statement. Anything less is a vile combination of dishonesty, cover-up and deceit - of Canada's government no less.

To argue that this is a "tyranny of the opposition" situation is ridiculous. It really boils down to Conservatives being frustrated because Canadians demand accountability, and they keep trying to subvert accountability ... at least when it applies to them.

Do you not see a double standard at play here? On all sorts of matters, the Con$ervatives are the "hang 'em high" party of harsh justice and individual "responsibility" ... until they get called to be accountable and then the tune changes.

So ... do I like the idea of a single regulator? Yes, absolutely - it might even be the first thing the HarperCon$ have come up with that I could consider supporting. However, in their "accountability for thee, not for me" mode of doing things, I can't trust them to come up with a system that will work. I fully expect there to be loopholes in the legislation that will let the Con$ and their corporate buddies to wriggle out from any real accountability.

Theocracy: Bloedow Tries To Mangle The Word

Over at his "Christian Government" blog, we find author Tim Bloedow giving the word Theocracy a rather brutal redefinition.

For some reason, almost everyone who thinks Christian theocracy also thinks stoning of homosexuals as though the two are synonymous. Ms. McDonald pulled this stunt in her book with an unnecessary reference to the late Reconstructionist/theonomic/theocratic leader, Roussas J. Rushdoony. She’s hardly alone in doing so.

Ummm...yes, generally speaking the concept of theocracy is a bad idea in the eyes of those who are traditionally not power holders in society - women, minorities and so on ... we'll come back to this.

And God’s law operates on a foundation of equality before the law, something which today’s humanists claim to do, but really don’t.

Let's talk about that concept of equality for a moment. Last I checked, the Bible - in particular the Old Testament, but the same themes wind their way through the New Testament as well, tends to treat women as chattel rather than as full human beings. Certainly, women are subject to some pretty harsh punishment at the hands of their "husbands" for various infractions - especially adultery, as I recall.

Equality before the law is a much broader concept today than it ever was thought to be in the days that the scripture was being written.

In other words it’s also wrong for politicians to steal. This applies to various forms of taxation as well as confiscation of property, including firearms (let alone without appropriate compensation). But these applications have been pre-determined by the left-wing Establishment as characteristics of the Religious Right, and that trumps the principle of not stealing. You see, messianic state-ism (or humanism/socialism) doesn’t take seriously the principle of equality before the law.

"Messianic state-ism"??? Where the heck did that little gem of idiocy come from? Good grief. Bloedow can't come up with reasoned arguments on anything without inventing terms can he? Since I can't even find a reasonable definition of that term, I'll have to guess that it's an invention of Bloedow's fevered imagination. Perhaps the great irony in that term is the recognition that Bloedow's own professed religion effectively views Christ as its messiah, and he wants to impose his beliefs on the rest of us.

What's really going on here is that Mr. Bloedow doesn't like the fact that there are times when his "freedom of religion" runs up against somebody else's legitimate freedoms. What he wants is to create a hierarchy of freedoms, with his religion at the pinnacle, where he can use it as a club to beat down those that he doesn't like.

Moral relativism is the ethical framework of Humanism. The rule of law historically and logically finds its best expression in the moral absolutism of Christianity. It reflects the spirit of Christian theocracy because it’s fundamental to the Biblical concept of law – God’s law. And, guess what… it’s part of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Uh huh. I don't recall seeing anything in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that recognizes any particular religion as having significance under Canada's laws. Nor, as Mr. Bloedow seems to be implying, does the Charter speak in the language of absolutes. A reasoned review of the Charter shows that it has in fact created a network of rights and freedoms, none of which is held above the others in any kind of hierarchy.

Yes, the Bible also exposes the fraud of today’s most cherished myth, that sexual sin is victimless behaviour and, yes, the Bible bans many sexual behaviours, declaring some offences to be criminal in nature. (You shall not commit adultery!) Canada only abandoned this vestige of Christian theocracy a few decades ago. And as a result, 10s of thousands of innocent unborn babies are being murdered, hundreds and thousands of our youth are being emotionally scarred and diseased, including with infertility, by STDs because today’s influential adults insist on teaching amoral sex ed. And we have a huge portion of broken homes because no fault divorce laws don’t encourage troubled couples to show some character and work at their relationship a little harder. It’s shocking to see the fear among Christians of confronting the sex cult mentality that drives so much of our public ethics as well as our child-related public policy. But that would be Christian theocracy, and we can’t have that!

Now we come to the crux of Mr. Bloedow's position - and it's the very area that I would have suspected from the start. Mr. Bloedow's idea of theocracy, as well as his cries about how the "secularists are limiting freedom of speech" are rooted in his overweening desire to legislate his moral code and force it upon all.

This is in fact the underlying problem with the Christianist political movements, whether it is the anti-abortion types, the anti-gay zealots or the anti-feminists. They want to use their religion to limit the lives of others. Whether you are a woman, a part of the GLBT sphere or just someone who wants all members of society to contribute to the best of their ability and judgment, you are the people that Bloedow and his allies would limit, imprison or worse - regardless of whether you subscribe to that particular flavour of Christianity.

Yes Mr. Bloedow, women do have the right to control their fertility - and that includes the right to access safe abortion. GLBT people have a right to live their lives in peace so that they might contribute to society as full members of that society, rather than marginalized pariahs as you would them be.

At the end of the day, Mr. Bloedow, your notion of Theocracy is not about improving Canada, it is about imposing your morality upon others - regardless of whether we subscribe to your system of beliefs.

The Federal Con$ Create Ministry of Truthiness

So, the HarperCon$ want to control the message online as well ... and they want to use Canada's taxpayer money to do it:

The next time you post an opinion in an online forum or a Facebook group message board, don't be surprised if you get a rebuttal from a federal employee.

The government is looking for ways to monitor online chatter about political issues and correct what it perceives as misinformation.

If that doesn't have enough shades of George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984, it gets richer yet.

The Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade has paid the firm $75,000 "to monitor social activity and help identify ... areas where misinformation is being presented and repeated as fact," Simone MacAndrew, a department spokesperson, said in an email.

The firm alerts the government to questionable online comments and then employees in Foreign Affairs or the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, who have recently been trained in online posting, point the authors to information the government considers more accurate.

Really? Considering the track record of the HarperCon$ for lying to the Canadian public on a host of issues, and taking every step they can to cover things up and reduce both transparency and accountability to the Canadians, this whole endeavor stinks of the government creating its own propaganda ministry - one which will inevitably step beyond dealing in facts.

Heck they might as well just call it "Pravda" ... it will be about as credible.

More From Canada's Most Unaccountable Government

Would anyone care to explain how a government that ran on a platform of greater accountability and transparency can justify the measures embedded in the budget implementation Bill C-9:

Bill C-9 contains sweeping measures that would affect Canada’s nuclear policies, pension rules, environmental assessments and mail service. Critics say it amounts to an abuse of traditional budget practices because it is crammed with legal changes that have faced little, if any, debate.

Mr. Murray, who specializes in reviewing government spending reports, said his analysis shows that at least half of the bill’s 24 main sections should be pulled out and studied as stand-alone legislation.

“It’s time to call a halt,” said Mr. Murray, who will review the bill as a member of the Senate finance committee. “No self-respecting or Parliament-respecting MP or senator should allow C-9 to go through as is.”

When Canada's government is passing legislation to take powers for itself and removes any kind of accountability for itself, it's time to remove that government from power.