Good Thing None of These People Had Guns, or Else This Might've Happened

In ever-safe Canada:

A man sleeping on a Greyhound bus as it rolled across the Canadian Prairies was killed and decapitated by his seatmate as horrified passengers fled to safety in the night, witnesses and police said on Thursday.

"The attacker was standing up right over top of the guy with a large hunting knife -- a survival, Rambo knife -- holding the guy and continually stabbing him, stabbing him, stabbing him in the chest area," Caton told CBC Television.

The attack continued as other passengers fled the bus and waited for police, Caton said. He said he, the driver and another passenger desperately tried to hold the bus door closed to prevent the attacker from leaving.

"He calmly walks up to the front (of the bus) with the head in his hand and the knife and just calmly stares at us and drops the head right in front of us," Caton said.

According to witnesses, he stabbed his victim "40 or 50 times", and after dropping the head, returned to mutilate the body.

Next, They'll Cast Runes To Solve Equations

It's a popular complaint among particularly smug leftists that Americans are too religious, let religion get involved in too much of public life, and sometimes let religious dogma override empirical reality. As I like to point out, liberals do it, too. Global warming is a prime example.

More importantly, though, it's not just Americans.

An Ontario mother of an autistic girl is considering legal action against her local school board after a psychic's prediction to a special educational assistant sparked a sexual abuse report to the Children's Aid Society.

Shortly after arriving home, Ms. Leduc received a phone call from Victoria's teacher.

"The teacher said you have to come back to school right away -- it's urgent. My heart was racing," said Ms. Leduc, who went back to the school and met with the teacher, vice-principal and principal.

"The teacher looked at me and said: 'We have to tell you something. We have to tell you that Victoria's EA went to see a psychic and the psychic asked her if she works with a little girl with the initial V. When the EA said yes, the psychic said, 'Well, you need to know that this girl is being sexually abused by a man between the ages of 23 and 26.'"

The school officials then gave Ms. Leduc a list of behaviours that Victoria was exhibiting.

"You must remember that Victoria has severe autism and is entering puberty so she is exhibiting behaviours that are very common with children of this age but, being autistic and not having been taught otherwise, she will exhibit these behaviours in public," Ms. Leduc said.

"The principal looks at me and says, 'We've called CAS.' Then I got sick to my stomach.

"I challenged them and asked if the other children in the class with autism exhibited these behaviours. They said, 'Oh yes, all the time.' But they were not reported to the CAS because they didn't have the psychic's tip."

Fortunately, CAS realized they were dealing with fools and closed the case immediately, but the "educators" responsible have not apologized, maintain that they had a responsibility to report their baseless suspicion, and, as far as I can tell, will likely continue to be given power and influence over Ontario schoolchildren.

Progressive Conservative MPP Julia Munroe called the signs in this particular case "questionable."

"It seems like a rather strange set of circumstances," said the children and youth services critic. "Is someone who offers psychic interpretation part of a referral list?"

Barrie shaman spiritualist Tamare White-Wolf said the parent should have been contacted by the school first.

"We can't blame the psychic," White-Wolf said. "A psychic that gives that kind of information is obviously trying to help the child."

Why blame the psychic? Blame the dopey client.

Clash of the Canadian Stereotypes

Quebec faces a new crisis in snow rage.

One storm last weekend dumped 23 inches on the capital Ottawa and 19 inches on Quebec City, which has already received 210 inches this year.

Quebec City police said they had been called to a dozen violent disputes about snow from one property ending up on someone else's. The drifts outside some houses are 12 feet and higher.

Last Sunday, a man in an upscale Quebec City neighborhood became so upset a woman from a snow removal service was putting snow on his yard that he shouted at her and then took a shovel and hit the window of the vehicle she was driving.

"The woman apologized and returned to work ... a bit later the man opened his garage door and emerged with a shotgun, pointed it at the ground and looked at her in a threatening way," said police spokeswoman Catherine Viel.

Montreal is also having problems disposing of the snow. One massive mound is around 80-feet high and officials told reporters that unless steps were taken to dismantle the pile, much of it would still be there when next winter started.

I blame global warming.

"...and so I says to myself, why not try one out, eh?"

Ontario's Liberal Health Minister George Smitherman is really, really dedicated to his job.

So serious is he about the welfare of seniors, one of Ontario's most outspoken cabinet ministers said today that he's prepared to don an adult diaper - and use it - to satisfy himself that elderly residents of the province's nursing homes are getting appropriate care.

"I've got one of these incontinence products - albeit a new one, not the ones that tend to appear at committee - on my desk and I'm really giving this matter very serious contemplation," Smitherman told a group of wide-eyed reporters.

I'd make a joke, but why?

Electric Funeral

Hell, you've got to die of something, right?

Fired Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission president Linda Keen said the regulator was ensuring the safety of Canadians when it required a backup safety system be installed at the Chalk River reactor before it could be restarted.

Ms. Keen said that without the backup system in place, the risk of a nuclear accident stood at one in a thousand - 1,000 times higher than the international standard of one in a million, she said.

The upgrades involved connecting backup electrical systems to two water-cooling pumps that would kick in in the case of an earthquake [or, for that matter, a terrorist attack - ed]. The reactor was closed for nearly four weeks last fall, interrupting the bulk of the world's supply of medical isotopes critical for cancer and other diagnoses, and pitting the federal Conservatives against the commission.

The Chalk River reactor, which is more than 50 years old, would not be licensed today by any nuclear regulator in the world, Ms. Keen added.

She was subsequently fired by the Conservative government for failing to take into consideration the medical fallout that would occur as result of the reactor closure - a rationale reiterated Tuesday by Health Minister Tony Clement.

"There is no question in my mind that if this crisis were allowed to continue, which was certainly the desired option of that, the-then head of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, we were literally days away from huge human health impacts, not only in Canada, but around the world, that would have led to deaths," Mr. Clement told the committee.

Keen's job, however, was to make sure the plant didn't have a disaster, not to consider the isotopes. The firing of a Liberal appointee by the Conservative government has, naturally, unleashed a hell of controversy.

The reactor, a legendary piece of Dr. Strangelove-era crap with a history of questionable maintenance and one major accident (not to mention another at the same site that required the assistance of the US Navy), was restarted in December, but was supposed to have been replaced nearly a decade ago.

If the backup was online, the shutdown would be irrelevant, but that won't be happening anytime soon.

The NRU reactor at Chalk River was built in 1957 and was to be replaced in 2000 by a pair of reactors known as MAPLE-1 and MAPLE-2. Their cost was estimated at about $140 million, but they have yet to come on line and their price tag so far has more than doubled initial estimates.

One key problem is that when engineers run computer simulations, safety issues arise.

"You shut the reactor down, but the temperature in the core continues to increase," said the insider.

That is a key problem, yes, as is the reported tendency for the control rods to get stuck.

Amazingly, the Toronto Star grudgingly admits that the Liberals had a hand in this, too, but, to get the taste out of their mouth, manages to find someone who thinks this is America's fault:

A contributing factor was the refusal of the Liberal government under Jean Chretien to commit roughly $500 million to replace the Universal reactor with a super-reactor called the Canadian Neutron Facility dedicated to scientific research, and test new designs for the CANDU power reactor.

Overarching all this was the meagre funding over the past decade by Liberal and Conservative governments for AECL to remedy health, safety, licensing and security shortcomings at the sprawling Chalk River laboratories.

A special 2007 report by the federal auditor general recently made public by AECL estimated that $600 million would be needed for such urgent improvements over the next five years. Yet since 2002 Ottawa has provided just $34 million.

"We should never have got ourselves in this situation," says Bill Garland, a professor of nuclear engineering at McMaster University who worked at AECL and Ontario Hydro's nuclear division.

"Everybody knew that Canada was the chief source of medical isotopes and yet they just stood by and did nothing. Why didn't the U.S. build its own isotope reactor?"

Maybe we thought AECL was competent.

It's the rusty, dented, spontaneously combusting submarines all over again.

Great Moments In Socialized Medicine

A Canadian woman gives birth to rare identical quadruplets.

They had to be delivered in an American hospital, because there was no space available in any neonatal intensive care unit in Canada.

God help them if they had to pay for an army, too.

Moore Flensed

MTV's Kurt Loder:

One giant health-maintenance organization, Kaiser Permanente, is so persuasively lambasted in the movie that, on the basis of what we're told, we want to burst into the company's executive suites and make a mass citizen's arrest. This is the sort of thing good muckrakers are supposed to do.

Unfortunately, Moore is also a con man of a very brazen sort, and never more so than in this film. His cherry-picked facts, manipulative interviews (with lingering close-ups of distraught people breaking down in tears) and blithe assertions (how does he know 18 million people will die this year because they have no health insurance?) are so stacked that you can feel his whole argument sliding sideways as the picture unspools. The American health-care system is in urgent need of reform, no question. Some 47 million people are uninsured (although many are only temporarily so, being either in-between jobs or young enough not to feel a pressing need to buy health insurance). Moore has no use for any of them, save one.

As a proud socialist, the director appears to feel that there are few problems in life that can't be solved by government regulation.

I haven't actually had a chance to sit down and watch the entire film yet, but if Moore actually says that 18 million Americans will die this year from a lack of health insurance, the insane fraudster belongs in court. 18 million would be over six times the entire American death rate by all causes, nearly 1 in 15 Americans, and more than 1 in 3 of all Americans without health insurance. The actual number that has been claimed in some studies is 1/1000th of that number, 18,000.

In the case of Canada - which Moore, like many other political activists, holds up as a utopian ideal of benevolent health-care regulation - a very different picture is conveyed by a short 2005 documentary called "Dead Meat," by Stuart Browning and Blaine Greenberg. These two filmmakers talked to a number of Canadians of a kind that Moore's movie would have you believe don't exist:

A 52-year-old woman in Calgary recalls being in severe need of joint-replacement surgery after the cartilage in her knee wore out. She was put on a wait list and wound up waiting 16 months for the surgery. Her pain was so excruciating, she says, that she was prescribed large doses of Oxycontin, and soon became addicted. After finally getting her operation, she was put on another wait list - this time for drug rehab.

A man tells about his mother waiting two years for life-saving cancer surgery - and then twice having her surgical appointments canceled. She was still waiting when she died.

A man in critical need of neck surgery plays a voicemail message from a doctor he'd contacted: "As of today," she says, "it's a two-year wait-list to see me for an initial consultation." Later, when the man and his wife both needed hip-replacement surgery and grew exasperated after spending two years on a waiting list, they finally mortgaged their home and flew to Belgium to have the operations done there, with no more waiting.

Rick Baker, the owner of a Toronto company called Timely Medical Alternatives, specializes in transporting Canadians who don't want to wait for medical care to Buffalo, New York, two hours away, where they won't have to. Baker's business is apparently thriving.

And Dr. Brian Day, now the president of the Canadian Medical Association, muses about the bizarre distortions created by a law that prohibits Canadians from paying for even urgently-needed medical treatments, or from obtaining private health insurance. "It's legal to buy health insurance for your pets," Day says, "but illegal to buy health insurance for yourself." (Even more pointedly, Day was quoted in the Wall Street Journal this week as saying, "This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years.")

Plus, Canada's crippled economy gets access to cheap drugs through extortion (ignoring accepted international principles of intellectual property), and can avoid one of the most burdensome costs of doing business as a nation-state by using our military instead of paying for their own.

What's the problem with government health systems? Moore's movie doesn't ask that question, although it does unintentionally provide an answer. When governments attempt to regulate the balance between a limited supply of health care and an unlimited demand for it they're inevitably forced to ration treatment. This is certainly the situation in Britain. Writing in the Chicago Tribune this week, Helen Evans, a 20-year veteran of the country's National Health Service and now the director of a London-based group called Nurses for Reform, said that nearly 1 million Britons are currently on waiting lists for medical care - and another 200,000 are waiting to get on waiting lists. Evans also says the NHS cancels about 100,000 operations each year because of shortages of various sorts. Last March, the BBC reported on the results of a Healthcare Commission poll of 128,000 NHS workers: two thirds of them said they "would not be happy" to be patients in their own hospitals. James Christopher, the film critic of the Times of London, thinks he knows why. After marveling at Moore's rosy view of the British health care system in "Sicko," Christopher wrote, "What he hasn't done is lie in a corridor all night at the Royal Free [Hospital] watching his severed toe disintegrate in a plastic cup of melted ice. I have."

Then there are cases like that of George Daulat, a man who was stranded on Britain's dental waiting lists for so long, waiting for an extraction, that he eventually became immune to the painkillers and tried to remove his own tooth with a pair of rusty pliers, using vodka as an anesthetic, and the instances of people being denied care because the system has simply decided it's time for them to die, a situation not limited to Britain's health machine.

Moore's most ardent enthusiasm is reserved for the French health care system, which he portrays as the crowning glory of a Gallic lifestyle far superior to our own. The French! They work only 35 hours a week, by law. They get at least five weeks' vacation every year. Their health care is free, and they can take an unlimited number of sick days. It is here that Moore shoots himself in the foot. He introduces us to a young man who's reached the end of three months of paid sick leave and is asked by his doctor if he's finally ready to return to work. No, not yet, he says. So the doctor gives him another three months of paid leave - and the young man immediately decamps for the South of France, where we see him lounging on the sunny Riviera, chatting up babes and generally enjoying what would be for most people a very expensive vacation. Moore apparently expects us to witness this dumbfounding spectacle and ask why we can't have such a great health care system, too. I think a more common response would be, how can any country afford such economic insanity?

As it turns out, France can't. In 2004, French Health Minister Philippe Douste-Blazy told a government commission, "Our health system has gone mad. Profound reforms are urgent." Agence France-Presse recently reported that the French health-care system is running a deficit of $2.7 billion. And in the French presidential election in May, voters in surprising numbers rejected the Socialist candidate, Segolene Royal, who had promised actually to raise some health benefits, and elected instead the center-right politician Nicolas Sarkozy, who, according to Agence France-Presse again, "plans to move fast to overhaul the economy, with the deficit-ridden health care system a primary target."

Having driven his bring-on-government-health care argument into a ditch outside of Paris, Moore next pilots it right off a cliff and into the Caribbean on the final stop on his tour: Cuba. Here it must also be said that the director performs a valuable service. He rounds up a group of 9/11 rescue workers - firefighters and selfless volunteers - who risked their lives and ruined their health in the aftermath of the New York terrorist attacks. These people - there's no other way of putting it - have been screwed, mainly by the politicians who were at such photo-op pains to praise them at the time. (This makes Moore's faith in government medical compassion seem all the more inexplicable.) These people's lives have been devastated - wracked by chronic illnesses, some can no longer hold down jobs and none can afford to buy the various expensive medicines they need. Moore does them an admirable service by bringing their plight before a large audience.

However, there's never a moment when we doubt that he's also using these people as props in his film, and as talking points in his agenda. Renting some boats, he leads them all off to Cuba. Upon arrival they stop briefly outside the American military enclave on Guantanamo Bay so that Moore can have himself filmed begging, through a bullhorn, for some of the free, top-notch medical care that's currently being lavished on the detainees there. Having no luck, he then moves on to Cuba proper.

I guess we should stop giving the detainees medical care, then. Or, alternately, bill them for it.

Fidel Castro's island dictatorship, now in its 40th year of being listed as a human-rights violator by Amnesty International, is here depicted as a balmy paradise not unlike the Iraq of Saddam Hussein that Moore showed us in his earlier film, "Fahrenheit 9/11." He and his charges make their way - their pre-arranged way, if it need be said - to a state-of-the-art hospital where they receive a picturesquely warm welcome. In a voiceover, Moore, shown beaming at his little band of visitors, says he told the Cuban doctors to "give them the same care they'd give Cuban citizens." Then he adds, dramatically: "And they did."

If Moore really believes this, he may be a greater fool than even his most feverish detractors claim him to be. Nevertheless, medical care is provided to the visiting Americans, and it is indeed excellent. Cuba is in fact the site of some world-class medical facilities (surprising in a country that, as Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar noted in the Los Angeles Times last month, "imprisoned a doctor in the late 1990s for speaking out against government failure to respond to an epidemic of a mosquito-borne virus"). What Moore doesn't mention is the flourishing Cuban industry of "health tourism" - a system in which foreigners (including self-admitted multimillionaire film directors and, of course, government bigwigs) who are willing to pay cash for anything from brain-surgery to dental work can purchase a level of treatment that's unavailable to the majority of Cubans with no hard currency at their disposal.

I had been considering piecing together my own little mini-movie refuting Sicko, but it's starting to seem pointless: It's so full of obvious lunacy that it may not be worth the effort.

Be sure to read Loder's entire piece.

Why not 'March of the Black Queen'?

Hillary Clinton's campaign song has been selected, and not only is it a song written and performed by French Canadian Celine Dion, but it was written for an Air Canada advertising campaign.

You can't make this stuff up.

Well, we could've just let him die...

Canada's National Post has a piece looking at two Canadian human rights activists, who are upset about Omar Khadr, the (then) teen-terrorist (and Canadian citizen) held at Guantanamo Bay for murdering a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan.

Canada may be finally waking up to the fact that it should protect the human rights of one of its citizens held in a U.S. military prison in Cuba on terror-related charges, even though it condemns the crimes he is alleged to have committed, [according to Amnesty International Canada].

The human rights group thinks "it's not innocence or guilt, but the issue is that every one deserves to be treated in a way that respects the highest standards of human rights protection," including Khadr, Tackaberry said.

John Thompson of the Mackenzie Institute, a think-tank specializing on security and terrorism issues, said al-Qaida has exposed "a hole" in the international law, making it difficult to try terror suspects using the existing international conventions.

"An international terrorist organization was unheard of when the Geneva Conventions were being written up and that's a central problem," Thompson said.

Thompson suggested the only trial Khadr could face in Canada would be that on high treason charges, and "that has not been tested here since 1946."

Hey, I'm all in favor of trying him for murder. Also, convicting him. That said, as long as we're fighting Al Qaeda, the entity the Khadrs decided to throw their lot in with, he's pretty much out of luck: Omar Khadr is not the sad Guantanamo story leftists used to tell, of some poor old villager who got detained by mistake in a sweep for weapons. He's an Al Qaeda fighter who killed at least one American and nearly took another with him. If he's ever going to be let go, it should be because Al Qaeda surrendered, thereby satisfying the Geneva Conventions insofar as a non-state entity is able to pretend to do so, or because he served the time to which he was sentenced for his crime. Khadr was shot three times during his capture, would've died without the help of American medics, and if he ever sees Ontario again, it will be far more than he's strictly owed.

Off on a Technicality
Much to my surprise, Canadian teen-terrorist Omar Khadr, who was taken to Guantanamo Bay for murdering a medic in Afghanistan, has had his charges dropped by a military judge due to problems with the jurisdiction established by the Military Commissions Act.

The judges agreed that there was one problem they could not resolve -- the new legislation says only "unlawful enemy combatants" can be tried by the military trials, known as commissions. But Khadr and Hamdan had previously been identified by military panels only as enemy combatants, lacking the critical "unlawful" designation.

But legal experts said Brownback apparently left open the door for a retrial for Khadr, and that the Defense Department can possibly fix the jurisdictional problem by holding new "combat status review tribunals" for any detainee headed to trial.

Criminy. Canada's premier Islamist clan, the Khadr family of Ontario, is a recurring subject of interest on this blog. You can learn more here and here.

Bingo Battle
Canada's brutal bingo culture claims a life:

An elderly man died last night after being ambushed for his winnings outside a North York bingo hall by three women.

Police were called to Bingo Country on Finch Avenue just east of Milvan Drive around 11 p.m. after witnesses reported seeing the senior being robbed and beaten outside by three women. Initially, the man -- who was robbed of his $1,000 bingo winnings -- told officers he felt fine. He even refused to be taken to hospital to receive treatment for minor cuts and bruises, police said.

While he was being questioned, the man began complaining of chest pain and told officer he had a pre-existing heart condition.

An ambulance was called and the man was taken to hospital, where he was pronounced dead before 1 a.m.

Early this morning, police shut down the bingo hall for more than an hour and only let the dozens of players leave after they gave police their names and addresses.

"This place should be closed up," said one elderly woman after she was allowed to leave the bingo hall. "It's been bad for a while."

The women were described as between 25 and 27 years old. Two were described as being more than 250 pounds and the other was 150 pounds with long dark hair.

That last bit is one sad epitaph. I'm sure that, somehow, this was America's fault, along with the secret stash of biker gang corpses in Ontario.

The rural area where the bodies were found has had problems with motorcycle gangs in the past, but is generally considered low-crime compared to parts of Canada such as Quebec, where biker violence is more common.

Biker violence? Canada isn't really safer than the United States, when you think about it, it's just that their crime is about 30 years out of style. (Via Tim Blair)

Your Big Chance
Follow in the footsteps of mediocrity:

Looking for a new challenge? Why not become leader of the Liberal Party? It is possible with the Rick Mercer Report Liberal leadership kit.

Kit includes:

* Fifteen minute consultation/conference call with the RMR writing staff to craft your campaign message. (Staff includes three high school dropouts and a U of T commerce major. Photo not to scale.)

* The use of our colour printer for photos and such. Ink cartridge is running low on magenta.

That should be enough to put you in charge of what was, until recently, a major Canadian political party. So take the plunge and become Liberal leader. For more info check out the Rick Mercer Report Tuesdays at 8pm (8:30 NT) on CBC.

I'm not sure it's worth the $16,000,000 bid. Then again, that's, like, fifty bucks in real money. Heh.

The Best Things To Save Your Life Aren't Free
It's sad that socialized medicine doesn't work.

The country's publicly financed health insurance system - frequently described as the third rail of its political system and a core value of its national identity - is gradually breaking down. Private clinics are opening around the country by an estimated one a week, and private insurance companies are about to find a gold mine.

Dr. Day, for instance, is planning to open more private hospitals, first in Toronto and Ottawa, then in Montreal, Calgary and Edmonton. Ontario provincial officials are already threatening stiff fines. Dr. Day says he is eager to see them in court.

"We've taken the position that the law is illegal," Dr. Day, 59, says. "This is a country in which dogs can get a hip replacement in under a week and in which humans can wait two to three years."

The median wait time between a referral by a family doctor and an appointment with a specialist has increased to 8.3 weeks last year from 3.7 weeks in 1993, according to a recent study by The Fraser Institute, a conservative research group. Meanwhile the median wait between appointment with a specialist and treatment has increased to 9.4 weeks from 5.6 weeks over the same period.

Average wait times between referral by a family doctor and treatment range from 5.5 weeks for oncology to 40 weeks for orthopedic surgery, according to the study.

Last December, provincial health ministers unveiled new targets for cutting wait times, including four weeks for radiation therapy for cancer patients beginning when doctors consider them ready for treatment and 26 weeks for hip replacements.

Cash in now on the opportunity to invest in the spread of evil, greedy American-style healthcare in Canada: It's a good cause.

Outbreak of Sanity Suspected
The Canadian Long Gun Registry: It cost billions of dollars, hundreds of times more than was originally planned but didn't reduce the murder rate. Prime Minister Harper is therefore scrapping it and diverting the money to law enforcement and public safety.

Good call on the election, there, guys.

Oh No Kinzilla
Remember ex-Chretieniac Warren Kinsella?

Warren Kinsella is a Quebecois lawyer in Toronto and former Chretien aid. He's also a man with a blog, who describes himself as a "raconteur" and "bon vivant", and he's all ticked off. He's mad because there are people on the internet who don't like him much.

That was October of 2004, when he'd strongarmed several Canadian bloggers into pulling their criticisms of him through the threat of legal action, despite his own site carrying this enlightened commentary:

"Boy is that Matt Drudge guy ever an asshole. What a moron."

"The Internet is full of red-necked, mouth-breathing rightist poltroons - as is talk radio, and a lot of newspaper editorial pages."

"I DID NOT DIRECT ANYONE TO DO ANYTHING, EVER. AND I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH A PROGRAM THAT DID NOT EXIST. SO GO JUMP IN A LAKE. Christ, I despise Ottawa."

At the time, his site also featured him wearing one of those "Bush: International Terrorist" t-shirts, back when it was still hip.

Now, however, he locked up the belltower, switched off the safety and is ready to start shooting randomly into the crowd: He's actually suing a Canadian blogger, Mark Bourrie at OttawaWatch.

Actually, the Liberal lobbyist and self-styled political asskicker wants $600,000. Should I write him a cheque or fight this thing? Hmm... write a cheque... fight this thing??? Um, I think I'll fight it.

The basis for the lawsuit appears to be OttawaWatch's allegation that Kinsella was a significant player in Adscam, a claim which appears to be have been acknowledged as fact by the Canadian press for some time, as Andrew Coyne demonstrated during his own February 2005 exchange of fire with Kinsella. Hilariously, in his lawsuit, Kinsella also says that OttawaWatch further wronged him by publishing Kinsella's own threatening letter:

The plaintiff pleads that the Libelous Words are defamatory of the plaintiff and have brought him into hatred, ridicule and contempt...To further aggravate matters, the defendant Marls Bourrie has gone on a vicious campaign against the plaintiff...In particular, but without limiting the generality of the foregoing, Mr. Bourrie posted the notice of intended action on the Site on January 25, 2006 thus further aggravating the damage caused to the plaintiff by repeating the Libelous Words.

The Libelous Words of Doom! How could Kinsella himself even bear to peck out their horror, preparing this notice of intended action on his old Royal typewriter, sitting on the floor under a bare bulb in a room wallpapered with photos of Paula Zahn?

Momentarily setting aside the veracity of OttawaWatch's claims, if Kinsella hadn't already threatened to use his status as a law-license recipient to carry out a vendetta against everyone who ever said anything bad about him on the internet or in high school, one might think that he would have had some shred of dignity left for OttawaWatch to destroy.

He didn't. He's been in hatred, ridicule and contempt for some time. I hope Mark somehow countersues and takes his car, then drives it past his house every morning, honking and laughing with a beautiful woman on his arm.

OttawaWatch is hosted on Blogspot, for crying out loud. What's Kinsella think he's going to get out of this, other than increased publicity for "the Libelous Words"? Why can't he do like normal people when they're offended by other people's speech and go burn down buildings?

Run Away, Run Away
If we were to go to war with Canada, this is how it would look:

The incident started when two men, both murder suspects, tried to get into Canada. Officials say the two men, 38-year-old Ishtiaq Hussain and 22-year-old Jose Antonio Barajas, are now in custody. They are wanted on murder charges in California.

U.S. sheriffs say the pair managed to make it to the check point about a metre before Canadian soil.

CBC News has learned that when unarmed Canadian border guards found out the murder suspects were coming their way they left their posts at four crossings along the B.C. border. Only two supervisors were left at each crossing to protect the Canadian side.

A spokeswoman with Canada Border Services says the guards have the legal right to refuse to work if they believe they are in imminent danger.

Isn't a little misleading to call them "guards", then? In response, the Conservatives react sanely, promising to give the guards guns.

A vice president for the Customs Excise Union, which represents border guards, was pleased that Toews said the Tories would keep their election promise.

"We will never work in a safe environment," said Steve Pellerin-Fowlie. "What we've been calling for for years is the tools that will provide the maximum amount of safety possible."

Pellerin-Fowlie said that guards became resigned to the fact that the weren't going to get the protection of firearms under the Liberal government.

As it stands, border guards are supposed to allow anyone suspected of being armed and dangerous into Canada and then call police.

"In many locations, that simply means the individual has gained entry because the response times are too long, hours, if at all."

I'd just like someone to explain to me why virtually everything the Liberal government did had to be so absurd.

Ducepptive
Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe is trying to stand against the tide of history:

Bloc Quebecois Leader Gilles Duceppe made it clear yesterday that he is going to hold Stephen Harper's feet to the fire and make sure he keeps his campaign commitments to Quebec voters.

"If Mr. Harper wants to settle the fiscal imbalance, if he really wants to settle it, if he really makes a place for Quebec on the international stage, he will find the Bloc is at his side," he said. "On the other hand, if the Conservative party does not fully keep its commitments to Quebec, he should know he will have MPs in front of him determined to defend Quebec's interests."

"If Mr. Harper makes Quebec pay for the fiscal imbalance, makes Quebec pay for the environment, puts Quebec's child care system at risk ... " he said, adding "... but we're not there yet."

"We have the balance of power - which is no small thing," he told reporters yesterday. "There was undeniably a wind of change, and we resisted it very well."

Harper and Duceppe have known each other for some 15 years, and have developed a healthy respect for each other.

Both have moved to the political centre from intellectually formative ideological experiences as young men - Harper as a conservative economist and political aide, Duceppe as a Marxist and labour union organizer. They are both personally disciplined, and impose discipline on their parties. And each one respects the other's ability to make a deal and stick to it.

That relationship will be tested in the minority Parliament.

...[G]ains were more than offset by the losses in the Quebec City area.

Bloc organizers were aware that the ground was slipping out from under them in the region, and ran last-minute ads in Quebec City newspapers saying "We won't let Calgary decide for Quebec" - with a stylized cowboy hat by the word "Calgary."

It didn't work; the Bloc lost nine seats in the region, including four of five in Quebec City itself. "We will evaluate what happened," Duceppe said. "We didn't want to be offensive."

Playing up Cowboyphobia didn't work for the Democrats, either.

The funny thing is that Quebec City is, in my experience, the most culturally isolated region of Quebec. Montreal is very much an international city, but people in Quebec City often deliberately refuse to speak English, simply out of spite.

If Duceppe were serious, he'd be wondering aloud what happened to Canada's role on the international stage. Instead his interest is in trying to defend the old order where Quebec holds the rest of the country hostage. The Bloc's resurgence was a short-lived kneejerk response to the early news of scandal, and now it's fading to a more rational response. Duceppe himself sees the "wind of change" and freely admits that he wants to "resist" it. Small wonder.

(You can read more about Duceppe's background here. He basically went from the revolutionary Communist Worker's Party to a stint in the short-lived Company of Young Canadians [a federal volunteer program that was later discovered to be a front for violent Communist terrorists and eventually disbanded due to budget cuts] then on to work for the labor unions. A logical progression, I guess.)

Adventures In The Ludicrously Optimistic
I haven't said much about this on the blog, but I'm currently taking courses to finish up a business degree, something I put off (and shouldn't have).

That said, I had to select a hypothesis for a fairly open-ended research paper today. I thought about writing about my "Lincoln as Jesus" bit, or the FAIR Tax, or private space development, but instead my mind kept drifting back to something I thought about last night while reviewing the Canadian election results. Since this election was in some tiny part my fault, I decided to write a paper tentatively titled "Quebec: North America's Rubik's Cube".

It's a lot more exploratory than it is a solid prediction, but the premise is that the results, a huge surge in the popular vote for the Conservative Party in Quebec, as opposed to an expected mass defection to the Bloc Quebecois predicted by analysts and the Bloc itself, represents the beginning of a fundamental change in Quebecois cultural priorities, and by extension Canadian priorities as well.

Quebec, up to this point, has never been a mature post-Enlightenment culture, and generally remained mired in feudalism much longer than the rest of North America. They are the French, but never went through the changes of the French Revolution, nor have they had modern and firm experience in self-governance, only participating in a government that was long seen as foreign and disinterested, if not as an actual enemy. Indeed, that government did not enjoy true sovereignty until just a few decades ago, and took those steps somewhat reluctantly rather than with confident self-assertion. (In fact, their one grand attempt at doing so, the Rebellions of 1837, ended in failure, with the British uniting Ontario and Quebec in the aftermath, almost as if to punish them both.)

The past several decades of Quebecois politics have been defined by a notion of racial and cultural hostility (famously marked by de Gaulle's 1967 subtle comparison of British Canadians to Nazi occupiers of France) and adversarialism. Where the Liberals and Bloc Quebecois merely represented two different angles on the same latent separatism and isolationism at the expense of the federal system (Liberal: "We will give Quebec what they want if they shut up.", Bloc Quebecois: "We will take what Quebec wants and keep screaming."), the new jump towards the Conservatives represents the rise of a new "third position". Newly elected Conservative MP Lawrence Cannon explains:

"What a great victory," he said in French, adding he's especially proud that anglophones and francophones worked together to make it happen.

"This demonstrates clearly that the Conservative Party of Canada is a new voice for federalism in Quebec," he told the crowd.

"Tonight, old conservatives and new conservatives proved it wasn't necessary to tolerate corruption to be federalist or to be sovereigntist to defend the interests of Quebec."

"Tonight, my friends, marks the end of a federalism of confrontation and marks the beginning of a federalism of openness that will give Quebec power and pride," he said.

Quebec had power before, but it was the kind of power that Samuel L. Jackson had in The Negotiator. On the other hand, a key element of Harper's proposed reforms for Canada is to foster the concept of "Province's Rights", that local issues should be resolved by local authorities, not by an all-powerful federal entity. This terrified Liberals for obvious reasons, but appears to have sat very well with the whole lot from Quebec west, all of whom were feeling separately alienated by the Liberals' 2112-style master plan for everyone and everything, a massive, state-funded effort to manufacture an artificial unified culture and create a brand out of being Canadian!, with those who didn't like the hip new product branded as quasi-American. They tried to paint the Canadian social contract as being not one between the citizen and his government, but as one that bound citizens to each other, in what one could term a happy sort of mutual slavery, leaving the government free of a perception of wrong, since it was all a part of the Canadian! vision. To question that was an attack on Canadians.

This entire proposition is naturally outrageous to anyone who doesn't fit the plan, but when an entire society didn't fit in, Ottawa was forced to spend huge sums as a danegeld to prevent them from flipping out. That led directly to the Adscam programs and the ensuing corruption that got us here in the first place. In short, the Liberal plan didn't work. American states are often described as being as different from one another as European countries, but in the case of Quebec and Alberta, they're literally as different as France and America.

So, it stands to reason that in an open federalist system like the one Harper proposes, rather than feuding for power over minor local differences, Canada's multiple cultures will be able to thrive and prosper while collaborating toward common national goals, and, in doing so, recreate a real national identity. This requires a significant portion of Quebec's population to share the same goal, but with the Bloc Quebecois significantly weakened by the tripling of Conservative popular support, they will need to tag along in order to remain relevant. Both Duplessis and the FLQ are long gone, now even the generation that remembers them is fading off the scene, and Quebecois ideology is breaking out of a decades-old mold. When they find out that nothing bad is going to happen to the first pioneers for thinking that way and saying it out loud, more will follow. The next few decades of Quebecois culture will increasingly be defined by philosophical debate and introspection as different elements of society reopen the question of their identity, one that largely closed after the bitter notion of "French abandonment" took over, with Quebec realizing that France supported their separatism primarily for entertainment purposes only. Moreover, with the decline and eventual disappearance of France as a going concern, a modern, revitalized, and entirely North American Francophone culture unburdened by the latent Communism of past decades can develop and become the effective center of future French civilization (if French culture is to survive in a meaningful way at all).

There are a number of other historical dynamics at work that I think back up the idea, but there are also roughly as many things that could go wrong with this as there are in your average space shuttle launch. There's undoubtedly a portion who see voting Conservative as just another route to achieving separatist goals, and Harper and those who come after him have the difficult task of convincing Quebecois skeptics (who are still the great majority) that Quebec can be a normalized part of Canada and maintain their own identity, that there is no need for an "us vs. them" element of political debate. If he mucks it up and scares those who dared to put their toes in the water, traumatizing the culture again, the whole thing ends in tears. With my luck, I'll submit this paper and Montrealers will be hijacking Air Canada flights by morning.

Harper Country
Sorry for light posting today, but while I have lots of stories to write on tomorrow, the Canadian elections are clearly the big news of today, whether the media would let you know it or not.

The CBC has called it for Steven Harper and the Conservatives in a minority government. As expected, the CPC got their head handed to them in the Atlantic provinces, but as soon as votes started coming in from Ontario and the prairie provinces, it started running even and will only get worse for the Liberals from there. All in all, the campagin was a rough few weeks for the Liberals:

In the early weeks of the campaign, Martin spokesman Scott Reid said parents would spend Harper's child-care subsidy on "beer and popcorn." Later, the Ontario vice-president of the party resigned after he compared NDP candidate Olivia Chow to a dog.

Martin was also questioned about a series of attack ads, in particular one that suggested Harper would post armed soldiers on the streets of Canadian cities.

And just last week, Martin again was on the defensive, having to declare Harper's patriotism after Canadian Auto Workers head Buzz Hargrove, who endorsed the Liberals, suggested the Tory leader was a separatist.

As Martin was forced to contend with the fallout of the sponsorship scandal, his party was hit with two RCMP probes, one into a possible government leak on income trusts and another into alleged illegal spending through the now-defunct unity lobby Option Canada. Opposition parties jumped on the investigations claiming it was proof of what they called more corruption in the Liberal ranks.

In fact, if early numbers are any indication, the Prairie Provinces, where people are allegedly sane, are a bloodbath:

Early election results suggest the Tories are surging ahead in the Prairies, winning or leading in 29 ridings compared to six ridings for the Liberals and one for the New Democrats.

CBC's election data is updating live, and shows 36.2% of the vote going to the Conservatives, with just 32.85 for the Liberals. It's actually getting worse by the minute as data comes in from the west.

Update: Jeez. 36.55% to 30.33%. A handful of radical leftwingers seem to have fled the sinking Liberal ship for the crazy NDP, too, but what's really startling is that the Conservatives didn't just unseat two Liberals, they also overturned eight seats belonging to the Bloc Quebecois. That's wild. (Compared to 2004, the Conservatives have, uh, somehow managed to triple their popular support in Quebec to take over a quarter of the vote and beat out the Liberals, while the Bloc lost 6% and the Liberals 15%. The Bloc had apparently thought they'd get the runoff from the Liberals and take a popular majority.)

Also apparently being thrown out: Foreign Minister Pierre Pettigrew, trailing on his home turf of Papineau against the Bloc Quebecois and previously noted here for having an absolutely ridiculous haircut.

Don't Try Suicide: Pettigrew supporters hold back the tears.

Update: 36.50% to 30.12%. With more ridings making final determinations, it looks like the Conservative/BQ coalition government will probably have 165 seats against the Liberal/NDP's 132. With the Conservative total weaker than the NDP/Liberal combined, placating the Bloc won't be optional, but issues that return power closer to the provinces and local governments should play well across that divide. On the other hand, with the Liberals likely forced to veer hard-left to placate the NDP, they're probably going to find themselves with a lot less in common with mainstream Canada than they might've hoped for.

Heh:

Leftists who threaten to leave their home country because they don't like election results are running out of places to go.

There's always Bolivia.

Guidance Systems Breakdown
PeakTalk notes that the Canadian media has had their feelings hurt:

This week seemed to be the worst in the backlash. We have been treated to the extraordinary sight of the Toronto Star, the Liberal bastion for as long as I've been alive, treating Martin with pure venom. [The Toronto Star is sometimes known as the Red Star outside Ontario, and their own website describes their founding to give a voice to "working people" and praises how their former editor helped design Canada's welfare system. They should back it with an MP3 of Internationale. -ed.] The CBC, the voice of the government, is not letting up either. They openly question Liberal claims in nearly all their stories, and we were treated this week to the vision of Peter Mansbridge (host of the National) absolutely grilling Martin on the military ad. And of course we have the Globe and Mail endorsing Harper - unthinkable even six months ago....

I'm not the first to note that the media is no longer on the Liberals' side, but I've been thinking hard about why this is happening. I think the key is with the mentality of journalists.

Most journalists are idealists. They get into the profession to right wrongs, to give voice to those who have no other way of being heard. I say this as someone who once wanted to be a journalist. During my years at the University of Toronto, I worked at the student newspaper, the Varsity. It was considered a reasonable way to achieve a career in media - Naomi Klein was my editor, and many other Varsity peers have careers in the industry. I chose a different path, but for years I dreamed of a job at the Globe and Mail.

So I do believe that young people starting out enter the business with stars in their eyes. They dream of the big scoop, helping to change the world for the better etc. Above all journalists as professionals and human beings gravitate towards the oppressed. You see this in nearly all media stories - the formula is to determine the villain and victim. This is a non-partisan practice - both the left and right do it, but they choose different villains and victims. The journalist then sees the ongoing story through this lens. I'm not criticizing - all human beings do this. No one can claim to be truly unbiased. We all come at issues through our experiences and values.

So what happens when the journalist suddenly sees things differently? When a saviour turns out to be a villain after all? Things get ugly. No one likes to be duped. The typical human response is to be angry, and lash out.

And I think this is what's happening to the Liberals now.

For years the media saw Paul Martin as the saviour. He shepherded us through the dark years as finance minister, and was waiting in the wings to save Canada and the party from the Chretien machine. Martin was always given glowing reviews by the media. Everybody loved him. Chretien may have been the ultimate back-room politician, but Paul Martin Jr. was clean. And when he got his shot to save Canada, we'd see what he could do.

But it all went wrong somehow. Martin's team did some appalling things to get him into power. And then once he was sitting in the big chair, he was ineffectual and weak. Where was the saviour?

In 2004, the media still believed in Paul, the man who would rescue us. I think the turning point came in May 2005, when Martin held onto power by bribing an opposition member (Stronach) into crossing the floor. I can't find the link, but there was a particular press scrum where all the journalists burst out laughing at the Liberals' explanations. And all of a sudden things began to change.

Sucks to be Martin.