RoyaltyUK: Wedding: Britain's Prince William and Duchess Catherine

Congratulations to the newlyweds:  The Prince and the Duchess, perhaps future King and Queen of Great Britain.  As far as I know, Prince William has no official standing in Canada yet.  And he will not, until some day he is crowned as the British monarch, at which time he will also become King of his dominion, Canada.  Duchess Catherine (aka Kate Middleton) will then accede as part of the package deal that Canada gets by way of maintaining the fiction of monarchy here.  Whether here or there,

we wish the royal couple and all their House the blessings of God, and a good fortune in the course of events they will face.

-- refWrite

-- posted by Politicarp for the publisher, general editor, and staff

PoliticsCanada: 2nd & 3rd parties switch: Conservs still in lead, but chance of majority very shakey

Reuters (Apri30,2k11)

Pollsters have calibrated the prospects of Canada's Conservative Party, now the governing party based on a leading minority status in the House of Commons, the party having inched back into a 38% status 3 days before the May 2 national elections.  This leaves them 2 percentage points short of the 40% threshold that ordinarily results in a majority of seats in the Commons, and thus into stable full term governance.  The Conservs had dipped to 36.4% yesterday.

These minute fluctuations come after an amazing upsurge of voters turning to the New Democrat Party, which had held a perennial 3rd place status in the total national vote and in the Commons.  One outstanding proposal tending toward greater electoral justice in the Canadian federation has been its present leader's advocacy of proportional representation; but another stand registers as on the deficit side of the goal toward stable democracy that has long been advocated by the Conservs -- namely, an elected Senate (instead of simply enduring forever the serious flaw in the repatriated Constitution that provides only for Senators by appointment of the Prime Minister).  The NDP erroneously wants to steer the country into instability by abolishing the Senate.  Still, there's the NDP's advocacy of PropRep; in refWrite's opinion, that's an advance beyond present Constitutional arrangements.

The main surprise of election trends is neither the statistical path in the polling thru-out the campaign toward a minority Conserv govt again (it woud be the third such, each time headed by Prime Minister Stephen Harper), nor the upsurge of the NDP (which is more clearly socialist than the other two left parties in the Commons), as startling as that NDP upsurge has been in the polls. But the real shocker is the now obvious degeneration of voter support for the Liberal Party at the federal level.  Two Liberal leaders now have, in succession, failed to capture the imagination of voters sufficiently to carry their party into even a minority-governing status.  Besides the long history of fraud and other scandals attached to the Liberals before the latest phase of that party's leadership by eggheads (Stéphane Dion and presently Michael Ignatieff), motivated by grandiose Green schemes, ever increasing spending and national debt (etc), there has been the recent gaffe by Iggy where he at least attempted to balance his promises of spending splurges with a resolute proposal to increase sales taxes.  He thus set himself off from Jack Layton, the NDP leader, who insists no increase in sales taxes.  The amazing thing is that Layton woud instead increase taxes on "the rich" -- and thus on those among them are the main source of job creation.

Were we only to concentrate on one factor like economic policy, we can now risk saying with reference to the latest polls that voters are leaving the Liberals in large part for New Democrats, and the country is polarizing into a clearer left vs r+t split.  But some nuances of such a judgment and forecast are necessary.  One of them being that the Liberals have always had centrist and mild-r+t tendencies among its "big tent" membership and parliamentary representatives.   Some voters for Liberal candidates are moderates or left-of-center on fiscal policy, but social conservatives on family, r+t to l+f, sexuality/marriage, transgender use of women's washrooms in public places, etc.   These voters may be trending to switch support to the Conservs, who are not the raving ideologues the left parties try to paint them to be -- the main concern of the Conservs has been to stabilize the economy, encourage investment within Canada, job creation, ease the tax burden on all wage-earners, stop the rise in government indebtedness, and actually pay down the debt to free up the oncoming generations.

In  closing, I can only note that the Green Party has not yet found a seat in Parliament.  It's 900,000 segment of the voters in the last federal election was denied representation in the Commons (Canada's constitutional flaw) due to the dispersal of its voters across the country; on the other hand, the Bloc Québecois whose voters are much more densely concentrated in one province and who had less than Greens in total votes gained over 50 seats federally for their separatist cause.  Ironically, the rise of the NDP which peaked this time around at 31.2%, and now has slipped a bit to 29.6%. The separatist Bloc Québecois, on the other hand, does not gain from the federalist Liberals in Québec where Libs are losing voters to the NDP (up to a whopping 39% there!, leading the field) and to a lesser extent to the Conservs.  It's possible that the expected 2nd (NDP) and 3rd (Libs) parties in the federal Commons will unite to try to deny the expected 1st place Conservs the role of forming the new government, altho in the electoral campaigns the NDP and Libs both parties swore each woud never enter a coalition govt with the other.  In 3 days time we'll know where all these mysteries take us.  Long live Canada!

PoliticsUN: UN War: Canada joins UN last-ditch effort at No-Fly Zone over Libya

Montreal Gazette (Mar18,2k11)

Too little, too late?


by Tobi Cohen, Postmedia News

OTTAWA - Canada's decision to send six CF-18 fighter jets to the Mediterranean may be too little, too late, a foreign policy expert said Friday as the prime minister prepared to leave for Paris to meet world leaders on the Libyan crisis.

Days before the country may be plunged into a federal election, Prime Minister Stephen Harper announced he has committed Canada to a combat mission in Libya in an effort to enforce a no-fly zone approved Thursday by the United Nations.

Before heading to Paris to discuss the looming mission with allies Saturday, Harper said Canada has pushed the idea of a no-fly zone from the start and would ``now take the urgent action necessary to support it.

more:

http://www.canada.com/Canada+joins+Libya+zone/4470418/story.html#ixzz1H2tKQhDj

-- Montreal Gazzette / Postmedia materials posted by Politicarp

JuridcsCanada: Govt of Canada endorses UN on R+ts of Indigenous Peoples

Government of Canada endorses 

the United Nations Declaration 

Rights of Indigenous Peoples

| 12.11.10

KAIROS joins with Indigenous peoples in Canada and their supporters in welcoming Canada’s endorsement of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, announced in a press release today.

 The Declaration was adopted by the United Nations on 13 September 2007 by a vote of 144-4. On that day, Canada was one of the four counties to vote against this important international human rights instrument, along with the Australia, New Zealand and the United States. KAIROS has worked for years with Indigenous peoples in Canada and around the world to ensure the successful adoption of the Declaration by the United Nations, and its endorsement by Canada.

Click on the t+mstamp to Read more ... 

Canada: Free Press: Supreme Court welcomes bloggers under protection of free speech

Globe & Mail's justice reporter Kirk Makin reports a very important decision of Canada's Supreme Court regarding journalism and the media, a judgment that eases the burdens of defense against overbearing libel accusations aimed at a reporter, or a team of reporters "on assignment."

Top court transforms press freedom with new libel defence

Updated law extends defence to new media

The Supreme Court of Canada transformed the country's libel laws yesterday with a pair of decisions that proponents say will expand the boundaries of free speech. The court ruled that libel lawsuits will rarely succeed against journalists who act responsibly in reporting their stories when those stories are in the public interest.

It also updated the laws for the Internet age, extending the same defence to bloggers and other new-media practitioners.

Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin [God bless her! and her colleagues who voted 9-0 for this protection of bloggers when they function as reporters!] said that Canada needs to keep in step with several other Western democracies that have provided greater protection to the media.

The point around which future libel-accusers are liable to gravitate are the words "when those stories are in the public interest" (this may not be the actual wording in the Court's ruling, as the reporter has the task of selecting quotes and summarizing the text -- possibly dense with legalese). In any case, in future judges of libel cases are alerted to be fair to both accuser and the reporter/s accused.

Dean Jobb, a journalism professor at University of King's College in Halifax, said that a revamping of the libel laws was long overdue.

"The court has recognized that the definition of 'journalist' is expanding in our online world," Prof. Jobb said. "Bloggers and anyone else publishing information on matters of public interest can claim the defence, provided the way they gather and present the news conforms with the ethical standards of journalists.

The vocation of journalist is definitely enhanced (what is termed "updated"), enabled to function more effectively in today's advanced-technical world with Internet, widespread blogging, and the use of other media. This reality is part of the washback problem of info-saturation that some experience in pursuing the tasks of blogging and reporting.

At the moment in the USA, an exposé-film maker, who outed the "community organizer" nationwide group, ACORN: the movie producer secretly filmed and hit a wall of govt indifference when they presented their evidence, then after being stonewalled govt, they released to national television the recorded evidence they had of the Obama-orbit org's officials counselling prostitution (this was only at one of the ACORN locations they infiltrated for the purposes of their sting opertation. The govt has the film documentation, but instead of going after ACORN's B-porn propensity and other legally-dubious actions, the bureaucrats at the FBI or some attorney general in some state capital or wherever -- instead have announced they will prosecute the whistle-blowing movie folks. Mum's the guvt's word about the sordid Obamites of ACORN. Of course, the President himself had nothing to do with the patterns of criminality that seem to plague ACORN across the country. It's a case of supporters having their own agenda, and dragging their "hero" into the mud of their own mischief.

Too bad something like Canada's recent decision hasn't already squelched the ploy of the criminal practices of ACORN in the USA, that the whistle-blowers uncovered for the whole nation to see. Many observers seem to feel that ACORN is just too big to be taken down by any functionary of the Obama administration, or even state attorneys general in that camp.

-- Lawt