The Liberal Mafia vs. the Conservative Punks

When the mafia comes to your town, it's organized crime. They hit you up for protection money, do you a favour, you owe them a favour. Sure, it's crime and it's bad, there's no question. But there's also no question that it's organized.

And so it was with the Liberals and their Sponsorship Scandal. The Scandal was a well organized scam within the silliness of the Sponsorship program. Money was syphoned away. Kickbacks were attained. The government and the people were ripped off, but you had a sense that the thing had been carefully planned.

When a bunch of illiterate teenage punks comes in to your town, they like to swarm old people, mug children, beat up old ladies, set things on fire and generally vandalize your life for kicks.

That's how the Conservatives are. One of them leaves secret documents at his girlfriend's house. The other ones leaves other documents at a broadcast studio and then, infantile, the whole things gets blamed on an underling. Then they start selling off silver that doesn't even belong to Canada but to Buckingham Palace.

I get the vague impression that our government is being run by a bunch of juvenile jackasses slowly vandalizing our country. Given the choice, I'll take the previous criminals and their well organized, quiet, respectful thievery.

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Harper: "You're On Your Own"

I think it's important to know, as a Canadian, whether or not your government has your back. It's important to know if the Prime Minister who flew a photographer to Cyprus to show off his generosity is actually anything more than an opportunistic hypocrite.

And the results are in:

According to the "federal factum" written by our government:

"States do not have a duty to protect citizens held by foreign countries."

"The judge erred by transforming obligations to respect the rights of children within Canada into a new duty to protect Canadian children subject to mistreatment by foreign officials outside the territory of Canada"

So now you know. If you're caught up in some foreign country, snared or framed by some local con artist, stuck in a jail cell and being punished by some third world warlord, being handled by some archaic, disreputable farce of a justice system ... well, now you know that your country does not have your back.

Someone should probably add that to the international travel advisory.

"Canadians traveling to all other countries are advised that their government will abandon them to any kangaroo court that kidnaps them. Please use caution when visiting the world."

h/t Galloping Beaver.

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All the Bad Things I've Ever Thought About Conservatives

All of them are coming through.

I've always believed that Conservatives create deficits in order to force austerity on the population, reduce services and get people to expect less for their taxes. The goal is to get poor and middle class people to hate taxes as much as the rich do, even though poor and middle class generally benefit from our level of taxation.

And while they're doing this - racking up record deficits - they sell off public institutions to make the budget appear balanced while ensuring future austerity via a lack of public assets.

As well, I've understood the strategy of mismanaging public institutions on purpose in order to denigrate them. Remember Mike Harris and his Tories in Ontario, slowly destroying our public education system and health care system so that they could shrug their shoulder and say, "What do you expect from government? Government sucks. Let's do private schools instead."

And now we see this happening in our federal government.

You remember that reactor that produces medical isotopes for the entire world? The one run by AECL? The one whose shutdown they blamed on "Liberal appointee" Linda Keen, whom they subsequently fire?

Well, the Conservatives are in charge now, having ordered the reactor activated over the safety concerns of the people charged with protecting our health. And the reactor is, as one would expect, malfunctioning and shut down with no prospect of a quick turn around.

So what's the Conservative solution?

Let's sell the reactor to a private organization.

I kid you not. Put the world's major source of medical isotopes in the hands of the profit-driven private sector. Give a private company a virtual monopoly on our health. Claim the sale price against the deficit so it doesn't look so bad. Hide the perpetual cost of this move in the distant future of rising health care costs.

It accomplishes everything the Conservatives could ever want: rising deficit; austerity measures; weakening public institutions; private profit. Some things just never, ever change.

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It's time to talk Capital Punishment

This happens every time an innocent person is killed in a stupid, callous or malicious manner.

This time the victim is an 8 year old girl named Victoria Stafford. Do the details matter? 8 year olds are, by definition, innocent of anything that could possibly deserve such a fate. Does it matter how she was led away by a person she recognized? Does it matter what was done to her? She was innocent. She was treated horribly and now she is gone.

And so it begins.

Let's kill the murderers!

I suppose I'd agree to capital punishment under two conditions:
a) we can be absolutely sure we have the correct guilty party
b) killing the murderer would bring the victim back to life

Because as I understand it, we can not achieve "justice" for Victoria Stafford with our present technology. The innocent eight year old is gone and we can't get her back. Even if you could, beyond any doubt, establish who killed her, what benefit is there to putting killers to death?

You can trot out all the arguments you want: not wanting to pay for the housing and feeding of the murderers while in jail; the deterrence factor for future potential killers; preventing these murderers from striking again.

None of those arguments (even though only the last holds up under scrutiny) make anything but a mash of the concept of justice. There can't be justice for Victoria Stafford. Nor for Kristen French or Leslie Mahaffy.

And what we have in this country is a system of justice, not a system of revenge. Other cultures have had revenge based systems. An eye for eye meant malice was answered with malice and the descent to madness was ensured.

Killing these murderers wouldn't accomplish anything except to demonstrate that we can kill them. We would not be a safer nation but a more brutal one. We would be a nation admitting that we can't defeat dangerous people except by sinking to their level. We would be surrendering to our bloodlust and bankrupting our moral fiber in the process.

Why shouldn't we put Victoria Stafford's murderers to death?

Because we're better than they are. That's reason enough.

Don't let an innocent child be an excuse for barbarism.

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Sanity with Bullying

There's never been a good system for dealing with bullying. Out of sight and out of mind until the victim fights back is the current policy.

So I was glad to see that the Asian kid who was suspended for fighting back against a racist bully has had his suspension canceled.

Victory, of sorts, although I think this is the funniest part:

He also would like to know why the school board sent a letter saying it would recommend the 15-year-old be expelled [from all regional schools], only to say three days later that the letter was sent in error.

Error? What kind of error is that?

"We meant to say that your son could be smelled from all schools in the region. Hygiene issue. Simple spelling error."

Or maybe: "We send out so many of these Regional Expulsion Letters that they go out by accident to the wrong people on occasion. Our bad."

One could only hope that they frequently come down this hard on actual bullies, but I doubt it.

Meanwhile, I dance the Happy Victory Dance. Hurrah for justice.

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Systems for Bullies

The way we handle bullying in schools has always been archaic. In the rest of our civilization, we are not expected to put up with threats of violence. Threats of violence are considered "assault" and the perpetrators can be arrested and jailed. In school, though, local authorities have long expected victimized students to simply suck it up. Victims should either roll with the punches (i.e. capitulate to violence) or stand up for themselves.

Of course, they'd better not stand up for themselves too much, because then they get arrested. For example, we have this 15 year old Asian kid in Keswick, Ontario. He faced off against a racist bully. The bully punched first. The Asian kid punched last, breaking the bully's nose.

It'd be as well at this point to explain why I'm taking the story at face value. Why do I believe that, as written, the white kid was an aggressive, racist bully? Why do I believe that the Asian kid acted with the absolute minimum force at the last reasonable moment? Because I read the story. Keswick has a racism problem with documented assaults. 400 students came out to protest the Asian kid's suspension. The Asian kid has a 90% scholastic average. All relevant implications lead me to believe that the story is accurate.

I also believe the story because it is absolutely par for the course.

As far as authorities - police as well as school administration - are concerned, bullying is not a problem. The bullies only perform their assaults and batterings out of sight. There is rarely obvious bloodshed or broken bones. The victims are frightened in to silence. If the victims don't fight back, authority can blithely pretend that there is no violence in the school, that any rumours are just boys working things out for themselves, and fill out reports to that effect.

When the victims fight back, the problem is different. It is rarely effective for a smaller boy to wrestle or idly punch at a bully. Small amounts of pain are rarely a deterrent to large, aggressive people. To stop a bully, you have to stop a bully. And at that point, you often have blood, a broken bone or a concussion. Now the administration's "boys will be boys" ignorance falls on its face. They have an obviously damaged kid and another who damaged him.

So punish the kid who did the damage. Ignore all historical facts, torment and accumulated damage in the opposite direction. Wipe your hands and walk away. Done.

So that's what they did. They not only suspended the victim, they also had him arrested for assault. How ignorant is this? Let us take the punch completely out of context. Let us pretend that this Asian kid just whaled on the white kid for no reason. The Asian kid isn't bleeding, right? His nose isn't broken. So it must be his fault.

Kudos the kids at the high school for walking out and protesting on his behalf. I never saw the likes of that when I was growing up. If there's hope for the future, it's those 400 kids right there.

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McGuinty: Chrysler's Problems are the Union's Fault

Early Friday morning, a letter was published in which the Chrysler executive demanded, in public, that the union accede to its demands in order to save the company. As I explained, the real problem was that Chrysler had never put aside any money for the pensions it had promised its employees. Instead, it now includes the cost of those pensions as part of the current employees' labour cost.

The effect is to make the workers seem expensive relative to those at neighbouring plants when, in reality, they make about the same amount of money.

Now the Premier would like to chime in with this helpful comment:

“I'm not going to provide specific advice to the union, except to say we all have to find a way to come to the table and make some sacrifices."

Now once you've read Chrysler's original letter and the article linked above, don't you ever, ever try to tell me that the Globe and Mail is a left wing newspaper. Never.

We all have to make sacrifices, Mr. Premier? What sacrifices are the executives making? Are they giving up their life insurance? Have they already surrendered semi-private hospital coverage? Have they acknowledged the "reality of the time" by nixing their own extended health care coverage?

That the newspaper has not answered these questions is answer enough. If the executives had made such sacrifices, it would have been written. That the newspaper fails to point out that the executives are not so heroic tells me all I need to know about the Globe and Mail.

Yes, Mr. McGuinty, you corporate stooge, please refrain from giving the union advice. Why don't you go advise the executives on how to take a cut? Why don't you advise the executives on how to properly protect their workers' pensions?

Your comment, sir, that we "all" have to make sacrifices, is entirely disingenuous. "All" - to you - clearly means "the union". "All" clearly does not include the upper class people. What would happen if those people lost their gold-plated benefits? What horrors? We need top talent in the executive! We just have to overpay them! Don't you all understand!

If the executive of Chrysler want to keep their wonderful jobs, they first have to admit that they blew it. And by "it" I mean "the workers' pension fund". Then they have to volunteer to make the same sacrifices in terms of benefits that they ask of the workers. It won't mean as much, what with their salaries being so much higher, but it would look better. After that, they can admit that including the pension cost in the current labour cost is the height of hypocrisy

Then, with all of that admitted, perhaps the union and the executive can sit down and find a fair way to keep the plants open.

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