-
-
— Reposted by Politicarp, refWrite Frontpage politics columnist
Follow @Owlb
general editor, refWrite Frontpage politics columnist
------------------------
Pie-graph (below) by Autostraddle (May2,2k11), a Lesbian cultural blog furiously declaring that haters/critiquers of Prime Minister Stephen Harper include "all Canadian women." Hopefully the remark is only tongue-in-cheek, as the "Girls-on-Girls" faction (as they characterize themselves) is at least astute enuff to show how Globe & Mail has endorsed Mr Harper for a third term (along with National Post, and UK's Economist); while Toronto Star has shifted from the Liberals to the most-socialist party, Jack Layton's New Democrats, skipping over the most-enviro radical party, Greens.
The Bloc Quebecois have been endorsed by Le Devoir. They currently have 5.8% support, which is down from 10.1% at the beginning of the campaign period. The Bloc really only happens in Quebec, and with a lot of that support shifting towards the NDP, this drop isn’t really a surprise.Bloc support is rather exclusively found in Québec, the only province where this Federal separatist party is on the ballot. The quoted "10.1%" nationally translates into 38.1% of the vote in Québec. "...[V]oters have flocked to the NDP, principally at the cost of the Liberals and Bloc Québécois," says G&M:
“The separatist BQ on Monday will be dealt a resounding rebuke from Quebeckers registering their worst showing in BQ history,” pollster Nik Nanos predicted.
The precedent of 2008 suggests that, while Mr. Harper will win a strong minority government, he will not obtain the majority of seats without which, he has repeatedly warned, his government will be unseated by the other parties in a matter of weeks.But Mr. Nanos observed that in 1997, “with similar results, Jean Chrétien [a previous Liberal Prime Minister of Canada] did manage to form a majority government.”
I'll be up late, I guess, watching these fascinating results of an election campaign that started slow and gathered steam as the NDP sucked up Green, Bloc, and Liberal votes (other Lib votes have drained off to the Conservs). Meantime, the Conservatives have been moving from a minority-only govt to an increased number of parliamentary seats (still however in a minority status) with Harper begging voters for a majority .... and he just may get it in today's vote.
He did it by sweeping ridings across Ontario thanks to a divide on the right between the Reform and Progressive Conservative parties.Whether the NDP surge in this election splits the votes on the left, allowing the Conservatives to capture a clutch of ridings in Ontario and win their majority, is unknowable.“It all boils down to the distribution of support,” Mr. Nanos observed.
“We will fight right to the last minute to get out the vote,” Mr. Duceppe said in a speech that branded the New Democrats as contemptuous of Quebec. He dwelled on the fact that some NDP candidates in Quebec struggle in French and have barely set foot in the ridings where they are running. “This nation [Québec] has a language, the language is French, and we are proud of it,” he said. “How can we accept that people who don’t even speak our language are asking for our confidence? It is contempt.” (National Post)And it is a humiliation to Duceppe and the separatist Bloc in the Federal Parliament, because so many francophones have shifted away from the BQ to the English-language based NDP.
Yes, it's been some months since the Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, announced the appointment of a new Governor General, representing her Dominion of Canada's Queen, Elizabeth II. Here Governor General Johnston reviews the trooops, all festooned with poppies in remembrance of the fallen of the World Wars. And subsequent armed struggles -- up to the Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan wars today. Canadians have veterans of all these conflicts, where some gave their last great all in sacrifice of their lives to the struggle for freedom thru-out the world.
-- Politicarp
The Primate of Canada's Roman Catholic Church, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, Archbishop of Quebec, called fire down on his head by sharply contrasting govt's funding of abortion clinics, while not funding agencies for care of women ambiguous regarding their pregnancies and the prospect of childbirth. The fire descended two weeks ago, when the Primate welcomed the Prime Minister Stephen Harper in regard to a then-recent move. Ouellet praised Harper for cancellation of the govt's "funding abortions in the developing world." But Harper did not acknowledge a symmetry of attitudes (a govt can always claim that a particular cancellation of funding is exclusively a budgetary consideration).
Be that as it may, today the Cardinal made additional comment: "Governments are funding clinics for abortion," said Marc Cardinal Ouellet, according to Canadian News via Evri (May 26,2k10).
"I would like equity for organi[zations] that are defending also life."The Quebec govt quickly moved to oppose the French-speaking prelate, not least of all because he advocates for completing pregnancy to birth even in cases of rape. For that single deliberated remark perhaps, the pastoral Ouellet had to pay dearly. Not only Quebec's political establishment (Liberal Party) flamed the Roman Catholic leader, but so did the wide range of Quebec editorialists, pundits, and intellectuals. They put the nonplussed Ouellet in Quebec's political Hot Seat. He wants a renewed debate on abortion and care for stranded women who do not choose to abort, even were they to give the newborn to adoption. That procedure shoud be a civil r+t, with at least equal standing to a woman's freedom to choose death for her unborn baby (oops!, unwanted fetus).
On Wednesday, Ouellet urged the federal government to take concrete actions at home, such as supporting women who decide to keep their child.
"If they do not want to fund abortion abroad and they do not bring at home more help to women to keep their child, I think they are incoherent," he said.
Ouellet said the ultimate responsibility for deciding to have an abortion is a matter of personal conscience.
He insisted he is not judging women who have abortions and said he would help them afterward.
"If we have equity in funding those instances to help women I think we would make lots of progress in Canada.
Canadian media published an orgy of self-praise from an array of lawyers, law journalists, and judiciary elites on the occasion of the 25th Anniversary of the Canadian Charter of R+ts and Freedoms (Apr17,2k7). Meanwhile, Prime Minister Stephen Harper laid low, disagreeing with at least two major courses of judgment chosen by the Supreme Court and lesser jurisdictions, pathways to injustice that arbitarily read into the Charter the elite crowd's own fanciful low-calibre decisions that had emanated from its monocultural philosophy of law, representing an uncritical but dominant worldview in that field. When the hullabaloo of self-praise for monominded Charter jurisprudence and the accompanying hen-pecking at Harper by politicos and press had subsided, the Prime Minister made his move to break precedent and establish a federal Canadian Museum of Human R+ts in Winnipeg, Manitoba, by covering the operating costs year by year, as the Libs had failed to do year by year when they were in power.
Also, the Lib policy of funding only Museums in Ottawa, the national capital city, killed Winnipeg's chances for many years. The Feds now will also pay part of the construction costs to get the Museum functioniing by 2010-2011. The operating costs will include transportation of 20,000 schoool children from other locations in Canada.
The new institution, brain-child of Lib contributor Izzy Asper (now deceased) who funded the concept and was strongly supported by Manitoba Premier Gary Doer and the City of Winnipeg (which will finance building expenses by $40 million and $20 million respectively, is bound to foster a more critical law-history and philosophizing of law plurally in Canada than the present practioners of boosterism for the seriously-flawed r+ts decision-makers, could ever produce. Here's an overview of some CLN sources:
From Canadian Lawyer, Jim Middlemiss contributes "Charter angst" (Jan4,2k7). Editor, Canadian Lawyer.
Canada has now had a quarter-century of living under a Constitutional democracy governed by an entrenched Charter of Rights and Freedoms. After 25 years, the groundwork has been laid, but the real fight over rights and freedoms has just begun.
The Criminal Code aside, no single piece of legislation has impacted the practice of law like the Constitution Act,T 1982, which introduced the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But the Canadian Charter of Rights has done more than that — much more. In 25 short years, it has changed the face of the nation.
On April 17, 1982, with the stroke of a pen then prime minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau and the Queen repatriated the Constitution and entrenched the Charter as the supreme law of the land. It changed the nature of our judicial system and ushered Canada into the forefront of constitutional change and human rights law, giving rights the teeth that the [older] Canadian Bill of Rights couldn’t [when Canada was still a juridical colony - L].
This month Canadians celebrate the Charter, which has been studied as a model for nations around the world. ...
If it was change people wanted, that’s certainly what they got. During a quarter-decade — a blink in the continuum of time — Canada’s Supreme Court has been called on to interpret the Charter on everything from same-sex marriage to Sunday shopping, abortion, private health care, and criminal law issues. The Charter has left virtually no policy stone unturned, and dug right at the heart of the values, principles, and social policies that drive this nation.
“It’s definitely shaped society,” says Eugene Meehan, an Ottawa litigator at Lang Michener LLP who practises before the Supreme Court. ... ” ... [But don't get the idea that the Charter is atheist.] Meehan, for example, notes that the Charter’s preamble says it was founded upon the supremacy of God and the rule of law — words that have yet to be interpreted. Just whose God is not clear. ...
From September 1980 to February 1981, we found that Canadians saw through the political process arguments of elites, who at the time were focussing their attention on the issue of unilateralism rather than on substance. Canadians did not want a weak Charter.
Aboriginal Canadians, women’s groups, representatives of people with disabilities, survivors of Japanese-Canadian Second World War relocation camps, members of multicultural groups, and many others made powerful and often emotional representations that resulted in a strong draft of the Charter that emerged from the committee, and which Trudeau eventually accepted.
One of the most important clauses that came from the committee hearings became s. 15 or the “equality” section of the current Charter.
The constitutional deal of 1981 was therefore made possible not only because of the negotiating skills of Trudeau, Jean Chrétien, Roy McMurtry, Roy Romanow, Bill Davis, and Peter Lougheed during the first ministers meeting of November 1981. It was possible because the Canadian public was ready and wanted a Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
While the ultimate constitutional agreement required the insertion of the famous “notwithstanding clause,” the massive support of Canadians for an entrenched Charter that was so evident in the early 1980s has remained so strong that no government today would risk the electoral consequences that the use of the notwithstanding clause would bring. The clause itself is a victim of the popularity of the Charter with Canadians.
Our criminal justice system is no longer just about whether guilt has been proved. Courts also insist on maintaining fundamental Charter standards of fairness respecting policing, prosecution, trials, sentencing, and release from custody.
The judicial assertion of entrenched Charter standards since 1982 has constituted the only real check against the lure of law-and-order politics by politicians of all stripes and the consequent unremittingly legislative trend to toughen the criminal law. There are no votes in being soft on crime. Politicians fall over each other to be tough even though criminologists have made it very clear that toughening penalties in the United States and elsewhere has had no effect on reducing crime.
The Charter of Rights and Freedoms has helped ensure that we have a balanced criminal justice system of which Canadians can be proud. The Charter protects minority rights against the tyranny of the majority. This includes rights of those accused of crimes, which tend to be unpopular until the moment we ourselves get charged.
Especially through the work of the Supreme Court of Canada, important and minimum standards have been put in place. Accused cannot be punished without a finding of fault. This is even so for most provincial offences. An accused can no longer be sent to jail for life under constructive murder provisions under which a killing during the commission of certain listed crimes was automatically murder even though the killing was accidental or even by someone other than the accused. There is no evidence that this has affected the murder.
Can you imagine a minister of justice ever saying it would be just to be softer on murderers? ...
It is difficult to imagine our legal system without the Charter. It has reconstructed the working of courts, legislatures, and the executive.
It has transformed the content of our laws, altered our election processes, reconfigured basic features of our educational institutions, and restructured many features of our daily lives. It shapes public deliberation on the widest array of issues.
The early Charter challenges brought forward “patently unjust laws,” in the words of my colleague, Michael Code. Parliament had neglected much needed reforms in criminal law. All legislatures had failed to respond to the increasing diversity and secularization of Canadian society. The courts had repudiated the Canadian Bill of Rights.
The Supreme Court’s early case law was remarkable, but perhaps the cases were too easy. The court could lay down its methodology in clear and forceful terms.
Government departments and legislatures learned how to Charter-proof. An era of better law making arose. The clear and forceful approaches of the first methodological formulations have now been contextualized. The court is more deferential to laws and practices that our political representatives have deemed consistent with the Charter. ...
Many new issues seem poised for litigation. My colleague, Sujit Choudhry, anticipates litigation working out questions based on minority identity. Such cases might call for the determination of the precise accommodations available to religious minorities, both groups and their members. In addition, we can anticipate cases addressing charges of state discrimination based on race or national or ethnic origin, e.g., racial profiling. The heavier weighting of rural votes against more diverse city voters also raises Charter concerns. ...
Oddly enough, the likelihood of a steady stream of Charter cases may depend on the fortunes of the Conservative party. A Conservative majority after the next election might well find itself defending various elements of its law-and-order agenda in the Supreme Court of Canada.
Forgive the interruption to the non-stop celebrations of the 25th anniversary of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. There’s nothing interesting there — of course lawyers love it. The Charter made lawyers, law professors, and judges the new political class in Canada, but without the accountability hassles of a legislature. Who needs question period or elections to pass controversial legislation? Just become a judge.
So rather than go to the Charter’s loving chorus in the bar associations and the law schools, let’s do something different. Let’s ask the men who actually wrote and approved the Charter what they think of their creation, 25 years later. It’s an impossible inquiry in the United States, the last of whose constitution’s framers died more than 150 years ago. But in Canada, many of our Charter’s authors are still alive.
And they don’t like what has been done to their baby one bit.
Labour and employment law is one area that has seen some of the most frequent attempts to use the Charter to advance a client’s cause, like discrimination and picketing, but what lies ahead?
In the famous trilogy of labour cases addressing freedom of association under Charter s. 2(d), the Supreme Court of Canada in the 1980s ruled that the right to associate did not protect the right to strike or to bargaining collectively. However, a recent case on reserve at the Supreme Court — Health Services and Support-Facilities Subsector Bargaining Association, et al v. British Columbia — could change that and freedom of association may once again become a live issue for unions.
It’s part of a slow erosion of the original trilogy of cases which have been criticized by many legal commentators and unions.
[Weinrib also discusses manadatory retirment, aboriginal law, and privacy r+ts.]
Now, almost a full generation of lawyers has lived and practised law under the Charter. It’s permeated the fabric of our society and changed the face of our nation, but has it made it better? Or has it simply driven a wedge deeper into a fractured country?By clicking-up these articles and reading them in full you can give your self an education in how the Charter has been ripped from its original purpose, how its been used for good and ill in these last 25 years. And, if you're sensitive to the bias boiling often unstated, you may get a glimpse of the tragic lack of truly critical law philosophy, able to cope with what should be its own plurality of schools of jurdical thawt and jurisprudential practise.
For more than 200 years, Americans have rallied around their constitution and Bill of Rights and looked upon it as a unifying event. Yet, since passing the Constitution Act, 1982, Canada has never been closer to disintegration, following referendum votes in the 1990s.
And there are no signs of that separation anxiety going away anytime soon, as the Bloc Québécois remains strong federally and the separation mandate remains part of the Parti Québécois’ platform provincially. Shouldn’t a Constitution and Charter draw a nation closer together? (The fact Quebec was left out at the end of the day is a historical tragedy, but that’s another editorial.)
The Charter has also come at a great price and great societal expense. The costs to the criminal justice system are likely into the hundreds of millions of dollars, as police forces and Crown law offices respond to court decisions such as Askov and Stinchcombe.
Corporations, too, paid the price with a rise in rights related to the workplace and now drown in human resource policies and red tape. The Charter set the standard for provincial human rights legislation and workplace accommodation now threatens productivity in industries such as manufacturing.
The Charter has also led to a much sharper-toned debate and growing row over the role judges play in society, which, rhetoric aside, is probably a good thing. While judges didn’t have much say in the changes foisted upon the judiciary by the Charter, the fact is that they have been appointed arbiters of constitutionality and with it the responsibility to uphold or strike down the work of elected Parliamentarians. It’s a big responsibility.
Some argue the judiciary has become more interventionist — a charge that judges find offensive. But the reality is their job is to intervene on a greater scale than they could pre-Charter.
The irrepressible publisher of the China e-Lobby's email newsletter, JD Maguire offers some astute remarks on Communist China's now-leading role in worldwide pollution.
Whatever one may think of the Kyoto agreement, the fact that it exempts Communist China, has long been a chief argument of its critics against the deal. Proponents have argued that Communist China's emission levels wouldn't challenge America's for years to come.
Well, that line of argument has passed its best-by date, literally. New figures from the Communists themselves (of all people) have revealed that the United States will fall behind Communist China in carbon-dioxide emissions as early as this year. In fact, emissions from Communist China have nearly doubled since 2001 (San Francisco Chronicle). Or, to put it another way, "China's greenhouse gas emissions have recently been growing by a total amount much greater than that of all industrialized nations put together."
Even those who fervently believe in man-made global warming must now agree that Kyoto is useless without including what will soon be the largest carbon emitter on the planet. All it will do is allow the Communists to continue to rapidly overdevelop, destroy its ecology, build up its military, and arm or otherwise aid terrorists without any qualms while the free world geopolitically handicaps itself.
Far more than previously acknowledged, the battle against global warming will be won or lost in China, even more so than in the West, new data show.Maguire also puts us on to a telltale graph accompanying Collier's article but on another page. The graph makes clear that China has well-surpassed Europe, has rapidly risen to American levels, and is now a rapid projectile that is moving without check either to protect its people, air, water, and cities; but is becoming a menace to the whole world.
A report released last week by Beijing authorities indicated that as its economy continues to expand at a red-hot pace, China is highly likely to overtake the United States this year or in 2008 as the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases.
This information, along with data from the International Energy Agency, the Paris-based alliance of oil importing nations, also revealed that China's greenhouse gas emissions have recently been growing by a total amount much greater than that of all industrialized nations put together.
"The magnitude of what's happening in China threatens to wipe out what's happening internationally," said David Fridley, leader of the China Energy Group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
"Today's global warming problem has been caused mainly by us in the West, with the cumulative (carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases) in the atmosphere, but China is contributing to the global warming problem of tomorrow."
New statistics released in Beijing on Wednesday by China's National Bureau of Statistics show that China's consumption of fossil fuels rose in 2006 by 9.3 percent, about the same rate as in previous years -- and about eight times higher than the U.S. increase of 1.2 percent.
While China's total greenhouse gas emissions were only 42 percent of the U.S. level in 2001, they had soared to an estimated 97 percent of the American level by 2006.
.
Toronto's Globe & Mail 
worldview in which opinon-making marinates itself in statist Canada. These are also the chief enemies of free-enterprise broadcasting, which has besetting problems of its own in Canada. But the needed inner reformation of f-e broadcasters does not offset the even more drastic necessity of reforminfg the CRTC, CBC, RC, and certain practices of pay-for cable TV carriers like Rogers (which owns the cable TV district I live in, thankyou, CRTC).
The Harper government will attempt to fill as many as seven seats on the 13-member Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission — including the chair — in the next year, and industry officials say the Conservatives are likely to reshape the regulator with appointees who take a more market-oriented view.North America > CanadaSome government and industry officials are suggesting that the Conservatives will also use the openings to add different types of people to the commission — perhaps a consumer advocate or small-business owner — instead of filling it with more veterans of the telecommunications and broadcast sectors.
Some Conservatives, including Industry Minister Maxime Bernier, believe the commission is too close to the two sectors it regulates, and that previous commissioners have been appointed largely because of their experience in at least one of those industries.
“Harper won't call central casting for this,” said one industry official who follows the CRTC closely.
Seats on the commission are considered plum posts because they can pay more than $135,000 a year for up to five years and don't attract great scrutiny.
In filling the vacancies, the government will consider traits such as gender, race, ethnicity, language and region, similar to constructing a mini-cabinet. In the past, six of the seats have been reserved for each of the country's main regions, with about half of the commission coming from each of the two sectors.
But that could all change.
The chair's job came open at the start of the year and the Prime Minister's Office has already rejected the two leading candidates — Fernand Bélisle, a former CRTC vice-chairman of broadcasting, and George Addy, a former Telus Corp. executive who was once head of the federal competition watchdog — because, it is widely believed, each was considered too much of an insider who would be unlikely to lead an overhaul.
Sources say the government is also looking for outsider candidates to fill the two existing commissioner vacancies, but a government official said finding non-insiders who have adequate expertise isn't easy.
The Conservatives would also like to use the CRTC appointments to change the commission's view of its role, particularly toward the broadcast sector. Mr. Bernier was able to force the commission last year to take a more market-oriented approach toward the telecom sector, but changing the regulator's role in thorny broadcast issues such as Canadian content would be much more politically dangerous. With a minority government, overhauling broadcast legislation is considered highly unlikely.I've been waiting for Bev Oda to make her move, waiting ever since she was appointed to the Ministery, a ministry whose very name exposes just how much CBC/RC is a statist enterprise. But even more, it's obvious that placing the entirety of the programs and fields under CRTC admin, the entire mixed-bag dumped idiotically into the single category of "Heritage" -- obviously all that is ideologically motivated.Many in the broadcast and telecom industries, meanwhile, are concerned that the government will weaken the CRTC by appointing people who simply lack the background to do a good job.
“It's supposed to be a body with specialized expertise,” a broadcast executive said.
Established in 1968 to regulate broadcasters, the CRTC is widely credited with helping foster the domestic television and radio industries, as well as the artists and others who create content.
David McKendry, a consultant who once sat on the CRTC, said the commissioners' role shouldn't be taken lightly. “I think it's very important — we're talking about Canadian culture.”
With seven of the commission's 13 seats either already vacant or scheduled to become so by the middle of November, the expected change in direction comes at an important time. The commission is poised to weigh such tough issues as foreign ownership of a major broadcaster. Alliance Atlantis Communications Inc. agreed last week to be sold to CanWest Global Communications Corp. and U.S.-based Goldman Sachs Group Inc. for a proposed $2.3-billion.
The CRTC is also trying to rebound from one of its most difficult periods and prove that it's still relevant in the digital age. Key industry voices and many analysts have said in recent months that the commission is having difficulty adapting to a world where technology has left national borders more porous. The commission has also had to contend with the introduction of Internet-based telephones, satellite radio, and the emergence of foreign-based broadcasters such as Rai and Al-Jazeera.
A spokesman for Heritage Minister Bev Oda wouldn't comment Friday on the CRTC vacancies.
What the very name tells us , first of all, is that there is in Canada actually no general Communications Ministry, a telltale fact that illuminates both the technically retrograde mindsets of the CRTC political appointees -- these all being drawn from the ranks former CBC/RC employees and their supporting bureaucracy -- and a blockage point thru-out the previous federal governments in regard to the development of a ministry effectively grappling with the implications of the rapid advance in all sorts of means of communications via the airwaves and satellites, mobile phones and traditional phones. Traditional phones?--don't get me started. I live in the miserable demi-world where your own name can be put on a commercial list for annoyance calls to y0u, against your will, courtesy of Bell Canada and a business practice approved by the CRTC--unless you double-pay your own way out!
The CRTC package is the dirty little secret behind the "Heritage" concept as the left-Libs handed it down in their dynastic self-replacements (replacements arranged not least of all by scams and scandals). But a misnomered "Heritage Ministry" is what we've got. If we are to retain a statist broadcast system, then, at least let it be devoted to the many heritages of Canada, a history and ethnomosaic broadcasting system perhaps still maintained at federal state expense.
But many other initiatives toward a genuine pluralism of the governing and the regulation of communications according to the principle of public-legal justce for all (worldviews) is an urgent requirement of our day in Canada.More Info:
