Archive for: September 2006

Well, lookie lookie, everybody. The famous Mr Dithers is still, well… as much a dithering idiot as he ever was. It’s enough to make you wonder just why the hell it is that he even bothers to open his yap anymore. Let’s face it, I like to think that I boast one hell of an inventory but even my repertiore of foot-in-your-mouth jokes has its limits. And nobody has managed to push those limits than the former PM-da-PM, Mr Dithers, King Almost, Duke of Flip and Earle of Flop, Paul Martin Jr. Our little Paulie-wally-doodle has once again been caught trying to suck and blow at the same time on matters of national policy:

“I’m the person who sent them there and I don’t back away from that one iota,”

Hey, Polly; NEWS FLASH: Once you’ve got ’em by the balls, believe me, their hearts and minds will follow. People go with the winner, just like Hitler had barely a dozen vocal critics at home after he steamrolled France but Nazis were about as easy to find as hen’s teeth when we marched into Berlin.

But our current PM, Stephen “Scourge Of the Senate” Harper (who is actually large and in charge in the PMO, unlike Martin ever was), wasn’t about to take any of that waffling crap:

“When you make those kinds of decisions as a prime minister, you have to be able to take responsibility for them and stick with them. . . The fact that Mr. Martin is unable to do that, in this and so many other cases, illustrates why he is no longer prime minister of our country.”

Damn right.

There isn’t much in the world that I consider to be beneath them but this is monumentally idiotic, even for the Grits. It seems that the idea of being accountable for how they blow our tax dollars is so foreign to the McSquinty Fiberals that they don’t even know how to respond properly when asked about it.

When quizzed on just how much of our money (yes, Dolton, OUR goddamned money) is being blown on the Caledonia fiasco is going to cost Ontario taxpayers when all the wishy-washy fiddledyfriggery is done with, it seems that the best answer that they can come up with is that it’ll “cost what it’s going to cost.”

I couldn’t make this bullshit up if I tried. This politically correct, mollycoddling clusterpluck (you all know what I meant to type) has been going on for over seven months now and we are the ones on the hook for the bill! That includes paying the cops, buying the land and oh, don’t forget the 300 grand for “negotiator” Jane Stewart’s salary. Yeah, you read that right. But according to David Ramsay (minister responsible for aboriginal affairs), the Ministry of Bullshit has “no idea” how much the occupation is costing.

Ramsay did get one thing right, though. Yes, a Fiberal got something right. It was this:

“When you’re confronted with a situation, it’s the government’s responsibility to deal with it.”

So START DEALING WITH IT, YOU GODDAMNED INVERTEBRATES!!

For the benefit of anybody who was wondering just why the CCP had to go under the axe, the National Post had the answer on page A16 of their September 8th edition in an article by Lorne Gunter. Despite all the howling that will arise from the left at the news of its demise, the fact remains that the CCP was more like the CCCP than Canada…

Kill the Court Challenges Program
National Post
Fri 08 Sep 2006
Page: A16
Section: Editorials
Byline: Lorne Gunter

The Conservative government is considering axing the Court Challenges Program (CCP). Good. The sooner the better.

Most Canadians have probably never heard of the CCP. And it’s budget is only a little under $3-million a year. Yet no other federal program or law has done more damage to Canadian democracy. No other has so fundamentally altered Canadian society without recourse to Parliament.

The CCP has since 1985 funded dozens of high-profile court cases challenging the validity of federal and provincial laws in the name of feminism, gay rights, visible minorities, refugees, prisoners and the criminally accused.

Although its funding comes entirely from taxpayers, the CCP was hijacked early on by leftist cause-pleaders at odds with the broad Canadian public on such issues as gay marriage, prisoner voting, detention of criminals and a Criminal Code prohibition on spanking children, abortion on demand, rape shield, immigration rights, prohibitions on free speech in the name of protecting minority sensibilities and the entire grab bag of fashionable causes that fall under the heading of “political correctness.”

CCP-funded groups have achieved through the courts new rights and laws they would never have been able to win democratically.

In that way, the CCP is fundamentally anti-democratic.

Ian Brodie — who is now Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Chief of Staff and part of the decision-making on CCP’s budget — was once a political science professor at the University of Western Ontario. He specialized in political influence on the courts.

In a book he wrote during this earlier career, called Friends of the Court, Mr. Brodie outlined how CCP administrators had aggressively “created networks of interest groups and encouraged new groups to pursue public interest legislation.” They doled out millions to radical organizations and urged them to start Charter challenges that targeted traditional Canadian values and laws.

“Over time,” Brodie reported, CCP managers and their interest group friends became so chummy that “these networks of groups became increasingly involved in running the program.” In effect, the organizations that stood to benefit most from the program — both in terms of funding and court decisions that sided with their causes — gained inordinate control over it.

After 1993, when the Liberals returned to power, special interests were put in charge, and their funding decisions made secret.

Not only did left-leaning interest groups want to keep CCP cash flowing into their legal departments, they understood that if they controlled the CCP granting process, they could keep groups opposed to their viewpoints from receiving equal funding, thereby giving their own causes an unfair advantage in court.

Over time, the CCP and its fundees have become a very cozy, close-knit little clan. The program almost never funds cases brought by individuals, only those supported by powerful rights-seeking lobbies, and almost always the same dozen or so lobbies.

Upwards of 15% of the program’s budget goes to finding litigants who are willing to launch cases against federal and provincial government statutes opposed by the interest groups whose directors effectively run the CCP.

One Toronto feminist lawyer, a founder of LEAF, the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund — which is CCP’s largest recipient — is frequently funded by CCP to represent other beneficiaries, such as the Canadian Abortion Rights Action League. She has also used herself as a test case. In the early 1990s, she went to court to overturn Canadian tax laws on childcare expenses and was represented by another LEAF lawyer who was paid in part by the CCP.

Ted Morton and Rainer Knopff, two University of Calgary political scientists, wrote in their book The Charter Revolution, that the CCP also “played a lead role” in the formation of the Canadian Prisoners’ Rights Network, the Charter Committee on Poverty Issues, the Working Group on Aboriginal and Treaty Rights, and the Equality Rights Committee of the Canadian Ethno-cultural Council.

The CCP was even the principal funder in 1992’s Schacter case, in which CCP-paid intervenors convinced Supreme Court judges to grant themselves “reading in” powers to create new rights in Canadian law where none were approved by Parliament or the legislatures. Not coincidentally, it is special interest litigators whose cases are underwritten by CCP who have been the principal beneficiaries of this new judicial muscle to create rights out of thin air.

The CCP, with its biases and secret agendas, has no place in a pluralistic society. Ottawa should turn off its tap.

I didn’t catch it at the time (better late than never, I guess) but last Saturday, the National Post published an article by George Jonas in which, among other things, he comes right out and gives voice so several facts that must be on a lot of minds these days:

Why do some Muslims have such an uncanny talent for proving the case of their critics? When accused of violence, they threaten violence. Better still, they engage in it. “Call us unruly and we riot,” they say, in essence. “Call us murderers, and we kill you.” Don’t they see that this makes them a joke?

Well, no, they don’t — and they’re right. Saying such things may make someone a joke in a debating society, but Islamofascists fight in a different arena. They don’t care about winning the debate; what they want to win is their Kampf, better known these days as Jihad.

Lo and behold, they’re winning it. By now the whole world tiptoes around the sensibilities of medieval fanatics. We take pains not to offend ululating fossils who cheer suicide bombers. Or raise them. We prop up rickety regimes whose sole contribution to modern times is to nurture ancient grievances and revive barbaric customs. We worry about the feelings — feelings! — of people who stone their loved ones for sexual missteps. We pussyfoot to protect the delicate psyche of oily ogres who amputate the hands of petty thieves, issue fatwas on novelists and cover up their hapless wives and sisters to the eyeballs.

The full article is here and it’s a definite must-read for anyone harbouring any delusions about being able to “negotiate” or “find common ground” with the Islamofascists of the world.

Well, this didn’t take too long. Can’t say that I’m surprised, either. Almost immediately following the ruling by the Manitoba Human Rights Commission that 17-year old twins Amy and Jesse Pasternak could play on the boys’ hockey team, boys have started signing up for girls’ sports teams.

Can you say coed wrestling, boys and girls?

But according to Morris Glimcher, executive director of the Manitoba High Schools Athletic Association, it seems that equality isn’t exactly a two-way street:

“If we get four guys or five guys going out for the [girls’] basketball team, there’s four or five females that won’t make the team — and I dare say a bunch of other ones aren’t going to compete — and we could end up with some female teams being made up of mostly men.

“We worked very, very hard to promote and build up female participation in sports,” Glimcher added.

“Everything that our organization has done … is based gender-equal. And if we all of a sudden get an influx of males participating, it could affect female participation and that would be a travesty.”

Hey, buddy, if it’s good for the goose, it’s good for the gander too. If you didn’t want girls’ teams getting invaded by boys who will be able to play better and bump a lot of girls from the lineup, things should have been damn well left the way they were.

After the resounding success of the “red Friday” rally in Ottawa last week, Toronto Sun columnist Joe Warmington now tells us in his column last Saturday that we can look forward to the same in TO next week:

Next week, it will be our turn to see red.

And even Jack Layton is invited. Every Torontonian who cares is. No politics. We’ve had all we need of that. Just support for our men and women fighting for freedom.

The only requirement (and even that is optional) is to wear something red to send a message to our soldiers in Afghanistan that Canada’s largest city cares. All of us. Left, right, centre. Canadians.

Click here for the full article.

UPDATE: Joe has more details in his article in today’s Sun.