One in four Canadians don’t believe in God.

Fewer than three-quarters of Canadians believe in a god, suggests a new Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey…

The poll found 72 per cent of respondents said they believed in a god, while 23 per cent said they did not believe in any god.

I bet a lot of that disbelief stems from discriminatory nonsense like this.

The Vatican issued its most explicit decree so far against the ordination of women priests on Thursday, punishing them and the bishops who try to ordain them with automatic excommunication.

The wheels continue to fall off McVety’s censorship dreams.

After the screening, Siksay said he thinks the film isn’t offensive, explores some serious issues and will be enjoyed by many Canadians.

“I think it was a great film that’s going to make a lot of people laugh,” said the MP for Burnaby-Douglas, who is also the NDP’s heritage critic. “What I would find offensive is that anybody would try and enforce their own sense of personal taste to prohibit a movie like that from being made.”

Another Harper accomplishment.

Real gross domestic product (GDP) edged down 0.1% in the first quarter of 2008, its first quarterly decline since the second quarter of 2003. The economy, which had started to lose momentum in the second half of 2007 as exports declined, stalled in the first quarter due to widespread cutbacks in manufacturing, most notably in motor vehicles.

A quick note to all the “small government” conservatives out there. The number of federal public sector employees has grown by 23,000 (from 370,000 in `05 to 393,000 in Q1 `08) since PMS came to power. By comparison, the number of federal public sector employees increased by 4,000 under the Paul Martin government and decreased by 45,000 under the Chretien government.

Maybe Crock O’ the Matter should add big government to Harper’s list of accomplishments.

Strike one.

Plans showing the layout of a new building for a Canadian Forces counter-terrorism unit based in Trenton, Ont., have been found in a pile of garbage on Bank Street.

Strike two.

Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier has resigned his high-profile post after he left secret cabinet documents at the home of his girlfriend, a woman with past links to organized crime.

Anyone else see a pattern emerging?

What was Bernier thinking? The old “leave-behind” trick didn’t work out so well for George Costanza either.

I see that Connie Fournier is now going after BigCityLib’s job because he has the sheer audacity to have a different opinion. Typical fascist behaviour.

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If a 40% rise in the price of gasoline won’t reduce our consumption what chance does Dion’s paltry carbon tax have of accomplishing it?

Update: From a StatsCan Economic Year in Review for 2006.

Since 2002, the price of a barrel of oil on world markets has jumped from $20 (US) to a peak of $77 last fall, before easing to $60 at year end. Consumers in Canada mostly shrugged off the effect of rising gasoline prices on their driving habits, never mind their overall behaviour. Retail gasoline consumption has continued to increase every year since 2002, including a 0.8% rise last year. The only concession drivers made to higher prices was to switch from premium to regular grade gasoline in each year.

For the fifth straight year, purchases of trucks (which include SUVs) rose faster than car sales.

If I were the right whingers, I’d be more concerned about these people.

The History of the Christian Polygamy Movement is relatively new. (Indeed, Christian Polygamy has absolutely no connection with Mormonism - neither in its doctrinal basis nor in its history.)

The TruthBearer Mission is that of directly and pro-actively Bringing Christian Polygamy to the Churches of Christ Jesus.

The founder of the TruthBearer Mission had this to say in a Macleans article last year.

Henkel says the Christian polygamy movement, which started in 1994, is gaining acceptance in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere. It is based on a conservative, fundamentalist reading of the Bible, a veneration of Old Testament leaders and prophets, and a libertarian belief in limited government powers. There is no prohibition against polygamy in the Bible, he notes. “When you do the deep study you realize that, wait a minute, David had eight named known wives, Moses had two wives and Abraham had three wives,” he says. “If this is such a bad thing, and so evil, there is no way the holiest men in the Bible would have more than one wife.” He says the “anti-polygamy” view of one-wife, one-husband marriage is an invention of the ancient Catholic Church that was later codified into law. It’s not for governments to define the “God-given individual right” of marriage, he says. “It occurred before the invention of government and it will occur if government collapses.”

This is where the push to legalize polygamy will come from.

And it’s happening without the introduction of regressive abortion laws.

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Update: Meanwhile in Britain–where regressive abortion laws do exist–the number of abortions is on the rise.

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Anyone have a theory about this?

Here’s what the president of the Environmental Defense Fund Fred Krupp–the man who helped establish a cap and trade system to limit acid rain pollution–recently said about carbon taxes.

Why not a carbon tax?

There’s no example of an air pollution problem anywhere in the world that has been solved without a cap or legal limit on how much of that pollution can be dumped into the sky. A cap gives you that legal limit, where a tax allows people to potentially keep on paying a modest amount and keep on polluting.

Dion’s ‘pay and pollute’ scheme will not work.

How effective is Norway’s carbon tax? Not very.

A Statistics Norway study shows that: “Despite politically ambitious carbon taxes, this policy measure has had only a modest influence on greenhouse gas emissions.”

Modest indeed — it accounted for only two percent of CO2 emission reductions.

Now consider that Norway’s gasoline tax was $51 per ton of CO2 in 1999, while BC’s tax starts at $10 per ton, or 2.4 cents per litre, and rises by 2012 to $30 per ton or 7.2 cents per litre.

Dion’s foolish plan to tax away atmospheric carbon dumping isn’t even going to be that effective.

Instead of Dion’s foolish pollute as much as you can afford ponzi scheme McGuinty is beginning to implement a real solution.

A directive issued yesterday instructs Crown-owned utility Ontario Power Generation to reduce coal emission levels to two-thirds below 2003 levels by 2011…

The utility has until November to file a plan for achieving the goal, which requires reductions to begin next year…

Energy Minister Gerry Phillips said emissions of greenhouse gases – which cause global warming – from the coal plants must be 11.5 megatonnes in 2011, down from 34.5 megatonnes in 2003.

This is how it’s done. Taxing away ghg emissions won’t work. Atmospheric carbon dumping must be legislated away or in other words, banned.

The new Canadian Victoria Cross.

Take a good look, right whingers, because this is the only way any of you chickenhawks will ever see one of these.

Check out this clip on MSNBC’s Hardball. Chris Matthews exposes conservative talk radio host Kevin James’ ignorance. It’s a thing of beauty that should be repeated as often as possible when dealing with these no nothing right whingers.
Update: You can watch the clip at Think Progress.

According to Chernyuk, Dion says we should shift taxes from good things to bad things.

We will lower taxes on good things like income, innovation and investment. We will shift them to bad things like pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

What an amazing concept. I think we should apply it to all our problems.

How about a sickness tax or poverty tax? I bet you’d think twice about getting sick or being poor if it was taxed.

Once we’ve taxed away sickness and poverty we could then fire all our law enforcement officers and replace them with a crime tax. What criminal in their right mind would perpetrate a crime if all their profits were going to be taxed away.

But why stop at that when there are so many bad things we can tax away. Illiteracy: Tax it! Drug addiction: Tax it! The solution to all of life’s problems are just a tax away.

Perhaps Dion is on to something. Surely taxing all these things will make them magically disappear.

Quite a bit has already been said about Dion’s plan to implement a carbon tax but unfortunately, most of it has focused on how the plan will play with the voters. What hasn’t been talked about much is whether or not his plan is an effective means of dealing with the problem.

When it was determined that dumping mercury into our rivers and lakes was detrimental to the environment and our health the government of the day did not respond by taxing mercury. When it was determined that adding lead to paint was detrimental to our environment and health the government of the day did not respond by taxing lead.

Such measures would have been seen as preposterous and would have sent the message that it’s acceptable to endanger our environment and health providing you can pay to do so. Rather than foolishly trying to tax these things away the governments of the day instead ordered industry to stop dumping mercury into our rivers and lakes and ordered paint manufacturers to remove the lead from their product.

Yet Dion is now suggesting we adopt a foolish policy of trying to tax away greenhouse gas emissions instead of adopting the effective solutions of the past. A carbon tax won’t eliminate ghg emissions. Only ordering an end to carbon dumping into our atmosphere and ordering its removal from the products sold to us will accomplish that.

Retired General and now Liberal Senator Romeo Dallaire on Canada’s abysmal failure to protect child soldier Omar Khadr.

“The minute you start playing with human rights, with conventions, with civil liberties in order to say you are doing it to protect yourself … you are no better than the guy who doesn’t believe in them at all,” he said.

“We are slipping down the slope of going down that same route.”…

“If you want a black and white [response] … I am only too prepared to give it to you: absolutely,” said Dallaire. “You are either with the law or you are against the law. You’re either a child soldier or you’re not. You’re either guilty or you’re not.”

Well said.

The hate speechers are going to reject this conclusion but it’s true; hate speech leads to hate crimes.

After a string of violent incidents against Asian-Canadian anglers in the summer of 2007, the Ontario Human Rights Commission confirmed Tuesday that those attacks were motivated by racism in Ontario’s small towns.

The commission found that Asian-Canadians were attacked because of prevalent but baseless stereotypes about Chinese and Vietnamese anglers fishing illegally.

Oops.

Canada First?! Isn’t that the name of hatemonger Paul Fromm’s anti-immigrant site?

Yes it is.