Shorter Stephen Harper: We need to give the police more powers to do the job they’ve already done without them.
Lapsed anti-terror provisions — extraordinary measures the Conservative government has been trying to revive — might have been useful in the current effort to round up suspects in an alleged bomb plot, the prime minister hinted Wednesday.
I’d laugh if there weren’t so many people in this country that will nod their head in agreement while swooning over how magnificant a job PMS is doing protecting them from the horde of dusky hued terrorists lurking under their beds.
According to our Minister of Immigration, Jason Kenney, the European Roma that have been desperately trying to come to Canada are just a bunch of queue jumpers with nothing to fear back home.
Hungary’s leading far-right party said on Wednesday that Roma who are considered a threat to public safety should be forced from their dwellings and placed in highly-controlled camps, some of them for life.
Yup, life is just peachy for them there. Good call Kenney.
I see that some of my fellow dippers are quite upset by the latest concerted attack on the NDP by the Liberals and libfloggers over the upcoming gun registry vote. I would just like to point this out to them. Think back to the last concerted attack on the NDP by the Liberals and libfloggers that occurred a year ago.
Do people remember;
a) that the Liberals maneuvered Jack Layton and the NDP into supporting the Conservatives in a confidence vote.
b) that Ignatieff declared he was going to pull the plug on the Harper Conservatives only to watch in horror as the plug was pulled on the Liberals’ polling numbers.
I bet almost everyone remembers b.
The Liberals have tried this nonsense repeatedly over the past few years and every time they do it accomplishes nothing. So chill out and let them flail away. In the end they’ll only end up hurting themselves again because they still haven’t learned one simple lesson; the Conservatives, not the NDP, are in power.
From Aaron Wherry comes some good news for fans of a coalition government.
“If we have one duty to this country, it is to make sure a Liberal, NDP, Bloc Québécois coalition can never govern this country,” Harper told a crowd of a few hundred at the Deer Creek Golf and Banquet Facility…
“The next election will be a choice between a coalition government of the Liberal, NDP and Bloc Québécois, or a stable Conservative majority government for this country,” he said.
So basically if Harper fails for the third time to win a majority in the House of Commons he’s admitting the people will have chosen a Liberal, NDP, Bloc coalition to govern this country. Thank you very much Mr. Harper for legitimizing a coalition government.
Harper will be spending nearly a billion taxpayer dollars to host a couple of useless meetings that will address tackling the soaring worldwide deficits. Meanwhile, in the crazy corner of the blogosphere, right whingers and libertoonians are outraged! about the billion taxpayer dollars they claim were wasted on the gun registry…um, 15 years ago.
Three years after announcing $2 billion in subsidies for the biofuels industry, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government has decided to probe whether the so-called renewable fuels might actually be harming the environment.
So who helped foist this $2 billion boondoggle on taxpayers?
Harper’s former director of communications, Kory Teneycke, led a team of industry stakeholders that successfully lobbied the government to promote biofuels, before he joined the prime minister’s office.
And here you have the very essence of conservanomics; a perfect storm of conservative incompetence and ideological ignorance fueled by corporate greed.
Driving the Porcelain Bus has put together a very long documented list of Harper’s numerous assaults on our democracy. I’d add his anti-democratic assault on the Canadian Wheat Board to that list.
On the second day of Proroguemas Harper gave to me:
Two silly talking points.
Silly talking point number one:
For the first time in twenty years, Conservatives will have a plurality in the Senate of Canada. Our parliament is a bicameral body consisting of a lower and upper house. While its activities may not be conducive to the lust of the cut and thrust of politics for the average Ottawa watcher — and who called whom “fat” on Twitter in committee this week — the Senate is constitutionally important to the parliament of Canada. When a new plurality exists in the lower House, the Governor General asks the party leader that can lead a stable government to form a cabinet. When a new plurality exists within the Senate, the government’s opponents accuse the Prime Minister of politics when the Prime Minister asks the Governor General for a chance to reset parliament so that its committees and functions may represent the new reality.
The case for prorogation is constitutional.The case against it is political.
The call for a new Throne Speech to launch the 3rd Session of the current Parliament is routine. The average Parliament comprises three or four sessions (and three or four Throne Speeches); some Parliaments have heard as many as six or seven Throne Speeches.
One key reason Harper prorogued Parliament is to allow the Senate committees to be re-shuffled in his favour. So lets deny him that by convincing the independent, Progressive Conservative and Mulroney and Martin appointed Conservatives to join the Liberal Senators. Here are their email addresses.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper will ask the governor general to prorogue Parliament today until early March, CTV News has learned.
[Updated story-ed] Prime Minister Stephen Harper asked the governor general to prorogue Parliament Wednesday and plans to begin a new session with a throne speech on March 3, his press secretary says.
By now you’re undoubtedly familiar with the details of the failed Christmas Day terrorist attack on Northwest Airlines flight 253. You’re probably also aware that conservative pundits are calling for the resignation of Janet Napolitano on the grounds that her incompetence allowed Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab to board the plane despite warnings from his father and other sources about the danger he posed.
I agree with them. This incident was a monumental failure that demands the people in charge of our security be held accountable. But this failure is not Napolitano’s alone. Flight 253 passed through Canadian airspace and would have crashed in southwestern Ontario–possibly killing many Canadians–had Abdulmutallab successfully carried out his terrorist attack. For that failure, Canada’s Minister of Public Safety, Peter Van Loan should also resign in disgrace. We cannot afford to let Van Loan’s incompetence continue putting the lives of Canadians in jeopardy.
One asks: I am curious to see the intellectual, financial and social contribution these newly arrived [Somali] immigrants will bestow up on Sweden.
One responds smugly: Of course any one that comes to Sweden is not allowed to constitute a nuisance to the economy, that was why the government established the SFI for migrant to learn the Swedish language first, and from there go to some vocational schools…
Right:
Which costs the rest of you money, dipshit!
Why not just save the money in the first place and not let them in? Which is what Canada should do.
Clearly Shaidle must believe that natural born workers spring from holes in the ground. In the real world that’s simply not the case. Before a natural born worker begins paying taxes they actually rack up a rather large bill at the taxpayer’s expense.
First of all, there’s the cost of delivering them into this world. Then there’s the hefty price tag attached to providing 12 years of basic education. Additionally, a natural born worker spends the first 18 years of their life using all manner of government services without contributing a dime in payment for them. To top it all off, the parents of our natural born worker also get in on the action with generous reductions in the amount of tax they pay along with assorted government stipends.
An immigrant on the other hand typically requires only a few years of education and training before they become a tax paying worker. Clearly immigrants are the most cost effective source of new labour and Shaidle’s nativist economics would end up costing taxpayer’s money rather than saving it.
Here’s a couple new videos. The first is Peter Sinclair’s latest Climate Denial Crock of the Week and the second is another video from potholer54 that addresses the lie that climate scientists are silencing climate change deniers. The last item is a cartoon that perfectly captures the insane mindset of climate change deniers.
Germanwatch and the Climate Action Network have released their 2010 Climate Change Performance Index and here’s where Canada ranks on the list of 60 nations.
I showed up there and noticed Steve Kelly, Prentice’s chief of staff, having a raised voice exchange with a member from the U.S. delegation. The problem was the U.S. delegation hadn’t given the green light for a photo-op, just for closed bilateral meeting between the two.
Over the course of 10 minutes, Kelly repeatedly asked the U.S. delegation official to reconsider, to which the U.S. delegation official replied, negative. When Kelly asked for this to be taken up the chain of command, the U.S. delegation official replied “it came from pretty high up. It’s not going to happen.”
Thanks to the Conservative Party’s inaction on dealing with climate change Canada is now an international pariah.
A common bit of collective wisdom recited by nearly everyone is that the crime rate can be reduced by increasing the number of police in our nation. Is that true? Perhaps not. Today’s StatsCan release on police personnel and expenditures in Canada has this graph showing the number of police officers/100,000 people since 1962.
Although the number of police/100,000 people increased significantly from less than 150 in 1962 to more than 200 in the mid 70s, the crime rate continued to climb and didn’t peak until a decade and a half later in 1991. Additionally, even though the number of police/100,000 people steadily declined in the 90s, the crime rate also steadily declined during that entire period. One other item of note is that the two provinces (Manitoba and Saskatchewan) with the highest number of police/100,000 people are also the two provinces with the highest rate of crime.
A few statistical comparisons alone do not prove that the addition of more police has no effect on reducing crime but it does provide strong evidence that the widespread belief that crime can be reduced simply by increasing the number of police may be little more than just another bit of collective wisdumb.
Just when you thought Torturegate couldn’t get any more scandalous..
A former governor of Kandahar who is accused of personally torturing Afghans might have been removed from office as far back as 2006 if Canadian officials hadn’t defended him, according to diplomatic memos that have never been made public by the Canadian government.
Hoo-boy, the skeletons are leaping out of the closet now.
