But he wouldn't say whether that means the province won't bail out the cash-strapped school board at the end of the year, as it has in the past.
...This refinement in Liberal policy was discussed at yesterday's caucus meeting and emerged from a suggestion by B.C. Liberal Keith Martin that the Liberals propose hard targets, in numbers and timelines, for the development of the Afghan army, police, judiciary and correctional services. The imposition of timelines would satisfy Liberal concerns that Canada not be engaged in a "never-ending" war. But their adoption would also be in accord with Prime Minister Stephen Harper's belief that our contribution should be reviewed within two to three years...
Education Minister Kathleen Wynne fears that it will spur other cultural and religious groups to lobby for their own separate schools within a public system.
"... this is the most trumped-up, ridiculous pandering to the Conservative core who believe the CBC is part of the enemy... Unfortunately it's politicking with somebody's reputation, and that's really the worst... thing."(Can you believe it?)
"...Well publicized mistakes have been made - it's on the website.... It sounds like the opposition is going to vote this down. It appears to be a maneuver much like Greg was saying to try to keep this thing alive..."
"..try to embarrass the Liberals and the CBC - Get a twofer."
"Sure."
"...the media has got to start treating these phony leaks with a little more journalistic integrity and start checking on the facts..."
"...The phone call never happened. The Chief at the time the phone call was alleged to have happened was into about his third rum and coke on the beach in the Dominican Republic..."
"...How far does this guy (Gen. Rick Hillier) have to go from the centre of Ottawa before people stop issuing these phony trial balloons to try and create some tension between the government and the CDS? I don't get it. I've never seen anything like it before in my life!"
"...Because I venture to say that back in the Netherlands as an example, the people in the government and the opposition aren't hanging onto every word the commander says. If I was the commander in Kandahar right now, in southern Afghanistan, I'd just tell my people to SHUT UP. Why? Because no matter how the sentence comes out, no matter how it's explained to an embedded journalist or a media representative in Kandahar. . . the entrails are going to be dragged out in Ottawa, every word will be analyzed; it will become a Cause Célèbre in Question Period. Commanders have a lot better things to do than that".
"...There are detainees being taken obviously; they're being detained somewhere - and you don't want to get involved in telling the Taliban where or necessarily how many you picked up in a particular operation because that relates to success or failure and all those evaluations..."
"... So I think commanders are getting somewhat pee'd (?) off about how they're being micromanaged and micro-analyzed, and I have a lot of sympathy for them. So the answer was - Don't say anything."
"There are detainees being taken, they are being taken somewhere. I think commanders are getting somewhat teed off about how they're being micromanaged and micro-analyzed.
...If the "dominant ideology of the unborn child" is a spurious construct invented by patriarchal moralists, why does it matter if that so-called unborn child weighs one pound or five? Why strike such defensive postures against an issue that no one in the room saw fit to discuss?
The answer to this last question, I think, is that these women are not so doctrinaire as they pretend. Within their own minds, they do wrestle with these important moral questions -- as any intelligent person must. But when in public, they censor themselves. Locked in what they feel to be a tribal culture war against pro-lifers, the pro-choice camp allows itself no nuance. This is essentially the reason Canada has no abortion law: Any stirring of legislative action arouses such tribal war fury among pro-choicers as to send politicians scurrying...
...One well-placed source who spoke to The Globe and Mail Monday on condition of anonymity said that, in addition to being told that Canadian detainees were being held at Kandahar Air Force base, he understood some insurgents detained in joint Canadian Forces-Afghan National Army combat operations were being turned over to the Afghan military in a “grey zone” action.
He said he has been told that Canadians have been content in some cases to allow operations to be labelled as Afghan-led military proceedings. Thus, detainees passed into Afghan military hands with no records kept...
...Citing "operational security" and the desire not to tip their hand to the Taliban, Mr. Harper and his Cabinet refused yesterday to discuss what was being done now with detainees...
(Nobody has satisfactorily explained why revealing the status of our detainees is a national security concern, particularly when that information is released routinely by our allies. After all, the Taliban have rarely hit the massive Kandahar Airfield's outskirts with long-range mortar fire. How on Earth would they stage a rescue of their terrorist buddies from an undisclosed spot deep inside the heavily fortified base? Answer: Only if they want to die in the attempt.)
...As Alan Borovoy, general counsel for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association wrote recently, "during the years when my colleagues and I were labouring to create such commissions, we never imagined that they might ultimately be used against freedom of speech."
Censorship, he said, "was hardly the role we had envisioned for human rights commissions."
Sadly, censorship is increasingly the role they envision for themselves...
...If we as a society do not want administrative tribunals to censor the media the answer is to remove that power from human rights tribunals. MPs and MPPs get very little public input for law reform and listen carefully when voters ask for legislative change. Perhaps the legislation should change. That said, we ought not to blame those who follow the existing rules to seek redress for the wrongs they perceive as being perpetrated against them.
...Knowing Ms. Rebick's motivation and agenda, it is not surprising that she downplays the occurrence of late-term abortions in Canada stating, "a mere .04% [of abortions] take place after 20 weeks and only when the health or life of the woman is at stake." Actually, the most current data from Statistics Canada (accessible online) states that .7% of abortions take place after 20 weeks.I'm looking forward to Rebick's Counterpoint on that one.
I must also question Ms. Rebick's second claim. To my knowledge, just one study has ever explored why women seek late-term abortions. Though conducted in the U.S., the results are probably reflective of the situation in Canada. Surveying 1,900 women who had late-term abortions, researchers at the Alan Guttmacher Institute found none had undergone the procedure because of maternal health problems. Furthermore, only 2% were due to "a fetal problem diagnosed late in pregnancy." Simply put, the vast majority of late-term abortions involve healthy women and, up to the time of the procedure, healthy babies...
...In those two decades almost two million babies have been killed in what is supposed to be humanity's safest place, the womb. It has also cost more than $1-billion of public money, in that the taxpayer is obliged to finance this elective surgery. In that same period numerous necessary medical procedures have been de-funded by governments that would not dream of removing a penny from state-funded abortion, no matter how wealthy the woman who demanded the procedure...
Judy Rebick states: "The majority of Canadians support a women's right to control her own body." I think we all know that at no time is a fetus part of the mother's body, but is genetically unique in every cell from the time of conception. A woman has not only the right but the responsibility to control her own body, and if she doesn't want to become a mother, her choice needs to be made at the beginning of the process -- i.e., before she becomes pregnant.
Re: Abortion Is A Personal Matter, letter to the editor, Jan. 26.
Abortion is no personal matter as long as taxpayers are forced to subsidize it.
The majority of Canadians support a women's right to control her own body and have no moral problems with abortion. For me and thousands of other women who fought hard for reproductive freedom, this 20th anniversary of the Supreme Court decision striking down the abortion law is a day to celebrate...As Suzanne notes, there are many polls that show that the majority of Canadians actually would favour some sort of restriction on abortion. That figure likely goes even higher when talking about some kind of legal protection against violence perpetrated on the mother and her unborn child. However, many times the results of the poll depend on who commissioned it in the first place, and what kind of agenda they were pushing. And in any case, few if any politicians want to take on this explosive issue.
...CAW officials met yesterday morning with officials from Deloitte & Touche, the accounting firm appointed as bankruptcy trustee in the case, and allowed them into the plant in the afternoon to conduct an inventory of remaining assets.
The union has also talked to customers of Ledco with orders waiting to be shipped from the plant, Dias said.
He said the union had a frank discussion with Deloitte officials. They pointed out that the union is occupying the plant illegally, he said.
"The only thing that's illegal is that people with as much seniority as employees at Ledco are not getting severances. That's the only crime."
Ledco workers gave up their occupation of the auto-parts plant in Kitchener at 2:30 p.m. today after a receiver won a court order. But the workers, who want severance from the bankrupt company, say they’ll keep fighting...
"We were willing to take the pay cut and try our damnedest," he said. "I'd rather have a job and fight tooth and nail for it, even if it's for six months."
(Elgin) Dezell said he is worried he will lose his house now that he has no job...
...Reached in Ottawa yesterday, Arends said he was "very, very disappointed" that the company could not convince the Canadian Auto Workers Local 1524 to consider a plan to cut wages by 25 per cent.
Unionized workers earned an average of $25 an hour. The company also asked its unionized workers to accept a 20-per-cent benefits cut and a reduction in vacation days.
Arends said the company made it clear to its employees that it couldn't compete with U.S. competitors if the dollar continued to trade near parity.
"Customers were putting extreme pressure on us on pricing," he said. "We got to the point where the bank said, 'No more money.' "
Non-union employees had already accepted the 25-per-cent wage cut, Arends said..
...The CAW has a no-concession policy on wages and benefits...
"They said consumers would not pay for this - and now here we are, paying for it."How naive.
When the Liberal government introduced the carbon tax, it said it was targeting oil companies with deep pockets.
"We are asking them to be good corporate citizens," Natural Resources Minister Claude Béchard said at the time.
He added that the plan is based on the principle that the polluter should pay.
...JM I don’t think that this issue would be a good one for either Liberals or Conservatives to stake themselves on in an election campaign. I don’t think Canadians want partisan politics to be the focal point of this mission. I think Liberal [Foreign Affairs critic] Bob Rae has left the door open with his comments on Tuesday, and I hope the government will extend an olive branch and that a bipartisan approach to this can be forged...
The obvious solution is for the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Official Opposition to sit down like two grown men and plot this thing out. It wouldn't exactly be unique; partisanship is supposed to occasionally take a back seat when your country is at war. But it remains to be seen if either of these two have it in them, let alone both at the same time.
...All this blurring of traditional lines would certainly have caused real brand confusion issues for voters at the polls if the Liberals hadn't been quite as obliging as they've been lately.
As the Conservatives have nudged to the centre, the Liberals have gone all retro and moved further to the left, back into the territory marked out in the Trudeau era. Party leader Stéphane Dion is already calling for a return of targeted spending programs to help individuals and businesses make it through a rough patch...
...What's more, the report is clear that to withdraw from a combat role, in favour of training Afghan forces as Mr. Dion advocates, "falsely implies a clear line between training roles and combat activity; in reality, training and mentoring sometimes mean conducting combat operations with them."(Note: Wednesday's print edition has retitled the same editorial - Liberals best think again.)
Mr. Dion doesn't appear to have much wiggle room but if he was half the politician Mr. Manley is, he would clasp that statement close and say that's what he meant all along -- combat if necessary but not necessarily combat...
...Speaking at a press conference after his panel delivered its report, Manley said that Canada must stand up for the rights of individuals, "of the human security of people whose own governments can't protect them."
"There are times when we have to count, there are times when it matters ... (that) we are prepared to be out there," he continued, "and we're prepared to pay the price because that's what you expect of a country like Canada."
Carleton University professor Elinor Sloan, a supporter of the mission, told CTV Newsnet she found Manley's words to be one of the more eloquent statements on why Canada should stay in Afghanistan...
...The saddest part is that the disgrace here is bipartisan: This is not merely an indictment of Ontario's governing Liberals, but also the opposition Conservatives. In the face of Mr. McGuinty's spinelessness, the best John Tory's party could do was suggest bringing civil lawsuits to try to recover lost income. Among other things, this is a pathetic microcosm of why Mr. Tory can't win an election...At the time I thought it was a trifle harsh, but nobody seems to be taking a tough stance in this matter, so I reasoned that the criticism was warranted.
...Since the beginning of the dispute in Caledonia, my colleagues and I in the PC Party have been unwavering in our argument that the rule of law must be respected and upheld. Quite simply, actions must have consequences.
I have said repeatedly that no negotiations should be held with any person or group involved in an illegal occupation, or any other illegal activity. Otherwise, a very dangerous precedent will be set...
As a small developer in Brantford who has dealt with native protesters and their demand for "development fees," I can say that your editorial was bang on. Truer words could not be spoken than, "It is a case study in cowardice, and everyone who voted for Mr. McGuinty should be ashamed of it."(Links added by yours truly)
However, I don't agree with tarring all politicians with the same brush. While Mr. McGuinty took his firm stance on the fence, John Tory was busy visiting Caledonia on several occasions to witness firsthand what was happening. He wanted to understand the challenges and concerns many residence faced, and even accepted an invitation to sleep over at a Caledonia residence. While Mr. McGuinty was busy pitting natives against non-natives and promoting vigilantism, John Tory was the only politician who spoke for the rule of law and constantly pushed for a resolution.( . . . )
When I confronted Mr. McGuinty at a campaign stop in Hamilton to question his government's lack of resolution, he was more concerned with threatening media outlets who dared to air the story than addressing my problem. Mr. Tory, on the other hand, in the middle of his campaign, took time to talk to me and to listen to the problems I and other developers were experiencing. Mr. McGuinty attempted to stifle the subject, Mr. Tory listened and addressed the issue.
Mike Quattrociocchi, Brantford, Ont.
The result of the two decisions was to give Canada the Western world's most radical abortion regime. The mother's ownership of the pregnancy is absolute and final, and she may end it at any moment, for any reason. Neither the father of the child-to-be, nor the government, nor the child itself has any rights in the matter at all.
Almost every other advanced country on Earth grants the fetus in the womb some measure of protection.
...The federal guidelines on stem cell research urge "respect for community notions of human dignity." But the supreme arbiters of human rights in Canada have ruled that the fetus-in-the-womb has no humanity to respect.
Cures, no -- but late-term abortions, yes? How does that make any sense? It makes no sense and cannot endure...
...in 1988, 16% of pregnancies in Quebec, Canada's most abortion-friendly province, resulted in abortion. Today, 30% do. Girls are using abortion -- tax-funded and easily available -- as an alternative form of birth control. No morally aspirational society should feel complacent abetting this trend...
...And there was the Liberal leader, bragging that if it weren't for former federal Liberal governments, Toyota and Waterloo's Research In Motion would have never amounted to anything in this province. Not so. Meanwhile, Dion cheerleaders like Kitchener-Centre MP Karen Redman asked a gullible public to believe his proposed $1 billion rescue package for struggling manufacturers is the tasty little sugar pill that will set everything right. It's not...
This is all presumptuous, self-serving, partisan blather. Whatever good previous Liberal governments did, it's wrong to credit them for the phenomenal success of Toyota and RIM. Yes, the federal Liberals handed Toyota $55 million to build a second Ontario plant in Woodstock. But whether or not that corporate welfare was needed, Toyota opened its first Ontario plant in Cambridge back in the 1980s -- when federal Conservatives were in power.
...Exactly the same "baby/bathwater" cliche was used by Gordon Pape in his current Internet Wealth Builder: "Don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. In every market downturn, some investors reach a point where fear overwhelms common sense and they sell everything at any price. That happened most recently in November 2006 in the days immediately following the announcement that the government would tax income trusts. Those who blew all their trust units out the door in reaction have long since come to regret it. Don’t make the same mistake now."
Mounting fears of an impending economic meltdown are making it harder for Liberals to decide whether to force an early federal election.Does this mean the Liberals will be sitting down on the job again this spring?
Even the most hawkish Liberal MPs were suddenly pulling back from the election brink Monday as stock markets worldwide went into yet another nosedive.
“I think the economy is the No. 1 thing right now, rather than an election, I really do,” said Toronto-area MP Garth Turner...
"This isn't a 'panic', but in a thin market, with the U.S. closed for a holiday, the scale of the decline today may have been exacerbated by illiquidity — simply not enough bargain hunters around," said CIBC World Markets senior economist Avery Shenfeld...
The MSM does not see a problem with the HRC's because they know they are all stacked with people who think the same as they do. Only white people can be racist and so only those cases will be prosecuted.
...For there is something even more seriously wrong in Canada, than HRCs, when these appalling cases are getting more attention abroad than here at home.
...Early in her interrogation, she said "I always ask people … what was your intent and purpose of your article?"
It wasn't even a question about what we had published in the magazine. It was a question about my private thoughts. I asked her why my private feelings were of interest to the government. She said, very calmly, that they would be a factor taken into account by the government in determining whether or not I was guilty.
Officer McGovern said it as calmly as if I had asked her what time it was.
When she's doing government interrogations, she always asks people about their thoughts...
"Our main interest is to make everything so that the government doesn't have a majority," said Barbot, who will square off against Liberal star candidate Justin Trudeau in the Montreal riding of Papineau.
"The population never wants to go into an election, that's for sure, but it's something we have to do and no doubt they are recognizing there is a need for that now."
...Dion's language problem, in one tongue or the other, is that he still talks too much like the poli-sci professor he was before he entered political practice.
He has a tendency to speak in chapters, not sentences - never mind sound bites. Intelligent and well-meaning as he undeniably is, in an age of diminished attention spans where the seven-second clip rules the newscasts, Dion comes across like a dinosaur from the days before radio.
And he can be as incomprehensible and eyeglazing in French as in English....
...What he meant to say was that Canada should abandon the war in southern Afghanistan and NATO should take up a diplomatic war against Pakistan to persuade it to close its borders to terrorists. The Liberal leader appears oblivious to the fact such a war of diplomacy has been going on for years without any success and that if he wants to step it up a notch now, he might have to actually pick up a gun.
That clarification prompted even more criticism from the federal government and other critics who said Dion should know better, that NATO is a military alliance, not a diplomatic one.(H/T Neo)
...if Dion's going to handle our economy with the same skill he just showed in foreign affairs, it would be better if he stayed in Afghanistan.
...It is a case study in cowardice, and everyone who voted for Mr. McGuinty should be ashamed of it...
...Much as we are proud to take this issue on, we find it astonishing that it falls to a newspaper to air the grievances emanating from a patch of Canadian territory that a provincial government has surrendered wholesale to thugs.
The saddest part is that the disgrace here is bipartisan: This is not merely an indictment of Ontario's governing Liberals, but also the opposition Conservatives. In the face of Mr. McGuinty's spinelessness, the best John Tory's party could do was suggest bringing civil lawsuits to try to recover lost income. Among other things, this is a pathetic microcosm of why Mr. Tory can't win an election....
...the Conservatives have to know their shabby treatment of her, at least, will come back to bite them, one brown envelope at a time.
