Forty-two Canadian organizations and their estimated one million plus members collectively filed a letter of complaint with the Canadian Judicial Council on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 about federally appointed Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin for conduct that breaches the high standard of behaviour required to be a member of the judiciary. The complaint is based on six counts of violating the Constitution of the Order of Canada (an act of Parliament) and its regulations and one count of compromising the Supreme Court of Canada.
The Iranian seizure of 15 British naval personnel is an outrage - and an opportunity. Iran invaded Iraqi territorial waters, attacked British naval personnel enforcing resolutions of the UN Security Council and committed an act of piracy and kidnapping.
Iran then displayed its captives on national television and compelled them to read coerced political statements. It forced the captured female sailor to wear the Islamic hijab, a violation of her Geneva Convention right to practice her own religion.
Every government must from time to time adopt policies solely to obtain or maintain power. Pandering to voters is part of the game.
So while I oppose the Conservatives' recent orgy of "green" spending - a total of nearly $1.5-billion in the last month to Toronto's public transit, Alberta's carbon sequestration pipelines and British Columbia's greenhouse-gas emission-reduction strategy - I can see the political necessity of it. Voters were proclaiming themselves eco-friendly and questioning the Conservatives' commitment to the environment. So the government felt compelled to do enough to appease the public's vague disquiet over global warming and pollution.
Thank God for liberal clergyman. Because if they didn't exist we would have to make them up. The stuff of humour for generations, one of the most amusing of the gang is Michael Ingham, Anglican bishop of New Westminster in Greater Vancouver.
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher used to say that she was happy when her opposition resorted to attacking her or her colleagues’ character. It meant, she said, that they (her opponents) could not win the battle of ideas.
On July 7, enviro crusader Al Gore will host "Live Earth" concerts in seven cities around the world to raise awareness of global warming.
Over 100 top groups have already pledged to perform, among them Red Hot Chili Peppers, Foo Fighters, Keane, Snow Patrol, Snoop Dogg, Bon Jovi, Duran Duran and Kelly Clarkson.
Doctors at Seattle Children’s Hospital recently admitted that they surgically removed a six-year-old girl’s healthy uterus, breast buds, and appendix, and then subjected her to two years of high-dose estrogen injections to keep her from reaching adult stature. And they did so at her parents’ request. Sounds like a clear case of child abuse, doesn’t it?
One of the most disappointing things in this dismaying budget is how, well, dishonest it is. This is a perennial problem, of course: From the Mulroney government's absurdly optimistic economic forecasts to Paul Martin's experiments in fiscal time travel, shuffling spending backwards and forwards between years to make the surplus rise or fall as needed, successive Canadian finance ministers have taken what ought to be a solemn annual reckoning with the taxpaying public and turned it into a game of three-card monte.
Witnesses in a legal trial are sometimes compelled to answer questions that have little or nothing to do with the subject they are testifying on in order to determine whether or not their word can be trusted in the absence of incontrovertible, corroborating evidence. If it can be shown that the witness is a liar, then the veracity of their testimony can, and should, be called into question.
In forcing a bill through Parliament that gives the Harper government 60 days to come up with a detailed plan for fulfilling Canada’s commitments under the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, the three opposition parties are simply playing Canadians for fools. The leaders of these parties know full well that no government - not even one led by them - could possibly meet this absurd deadline.
News that the Conservatives might be taking a more cautious approach to Kyoto and climate change could not come at a more appropriate time. The science behind the idea of man-made global warming, always theoretical and often speculative, appears set to receive another blow. A report in New Scientist magazine (click here to download article) chronicles the work of a crew of scientists who forecast a new wave of global cooling brought on by a decline in activity in the sun.
Last week, university students from coast to coast took a day off from classes to participate in street marches and rallies protesting what they characterize as high tuition fees and high levels of student debt, and demanding lower tuition rates and increased government funding.
Here's a tale of two Canadian liberties. The first involves the right to own property. Over the past quarter century, this right has become steadily more firm and secure. Stocks, bonds, houses: Canadian capital assets of all kinds have soared in value. The stock of foreign investment in Canada has quadrupled since 1990. Lenders entrust money to Canadian borrowers at rates as low as 2.5%. Investors may worry about Canadian competitiveness - but fears of Trudeau-style expropriation have all but faded away.
Canada's ideological left, confident of its control of academe, the Supreme Court and the federal Liberal Party, appeared this month ready to declare war on its most formidable enemy of all, namely conservative Christian churches that refuse to make their teachings conform to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms as defined by the Supreme Court.
The city of Washington DC was recently graced by actress Eva Longoria, the sultry star of ABC's Desperate Housewives. Addressing an audience of Latino business leaders, she explained the wide appeal of her show: "Everyone on Wisteria Lane has the money of a Republican, but the sex life of a Democrat."
It seems that negative attitudes toward people with disabilities have recently grown from the theoretical ideas of Peter Singer, of Princeton University, that it is acceptable to kill disabled infants, into the actual practice of allowing infants with disabilities to be euthanized. In any other time in history this was known as the crime of infanticide. It is now becoming viewed as "dying with dignity."
Here is proof positive that the international drive to legalize assisted suicide/euthanasia is not really about terminal illness. The World Federation of Right to Die Societies has reissued its "Manifesto." Here it is in full. I will discuss the italicized portions of the Manifesto below:
The lib/left federal opposition threw a hissy-fit over $5 million lopped off the radical feminist Status of Women program’s erstwhile $23 million budget in the Harper government’s recent spending reforms, but the modest cut is a bitter disappointment to many conservative Canadians who had hoped to see the federally funded activist lobby eliminated.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper correctly observed last Thursday that it is too soon to start political fights over how shootings by another deranged lunatic at Montreal’s Dawson College might have been prevented.
Perhaps you saw the images in your newspaper or on television.
"A Lebanese man counts U.S dollar bills received from Hizbollah members in a school in Bourj el-Barajneh, a southern suburb of Beirut, August 19, 2006. Hizbollah handed out bundles of cash on Friday to people whose homes were wrecked by Israeli bombing, consolidating the Iranian-backed group's support among Lebanon's Shiites and embarrassing the Beirut government. REUTERS/Eric Gaillard (LEBANON)"
A Canadian soldier recently posted an intriguing e-mail - widely circulated in the blogosphere - entitled "The Battle of Panjawai" – a battle Canadian troops fought in Afghanistan from July 7 to July 21. The unnamed officer describes the battle in great detail. He mentions that Canadian soldiers outshone their British and Afghan counterparts in defeating the Taliban and decries the fact that Canadians are unaware of the battle. "...the media can't find the time and effort to report what we are doing..." he writes.
An old aphorism declares that "truth is the first casualty of war," and that's certainly been the case with some news coverage of the recent Israeli-Hezbollah conflict in Lebanon by the heavily liberal-biased Western media.
Had enough of regulated gas prices yet? Now, to be fair, even without regulation we (in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia) would be paying in the neighbourhood of $1.20 per litre this week. It's summer; there's war in the Middle East and insurgency in Nigeria; the Chinese economy is growing rapidly and guzzling oil commensurately; refinery capacity hasn't recovered from damage wreaked by Hurricane Katrina last summer, and it was already marginal before that.
Here's what we don't know: We don't know whether Hezbollah anticipated the strong Israeli reaction to its kidnapping of Israeli soldiers.
That means we don't know whether Hezbollah intended to trigger a major regional war or whether it complacently assumed it could pressure Israel into a 400-to-1 prisoner exchange like the one Hezbollah extracted in 2004.
Whatever one thinks of his politics and policies, only the most hidebound of Liberal, NDP, and Bloc partisans would deny that Steven Harper has enjoyed a pretty successful first half-year or so in office, surprising many, including, I would guess, a fair few of those who voted for him.
As prime minister, Harper has proved anything but "scary," except to perhaps a parliamentary press gallery, and no one else paid much mind to their hissy fit over Harper's imposing more structured and controlled media access to himself and his cabinet.
A little past midnight in the early morning of Sept. 9, 2001, a Maryland state trooper spotted a car driving at more than 90 miles an hour on I-95, the busy interstate that connects Washington to New York and Boston.
A little past midnight in the early morning of Sept. 9, 2001, a Maryland state trooper spotted a car driving at more than 90 miles an hour on I-95, the busy interstate that connects Washington to New York and Boston.
Last Friday. May 26 Dr. Charles McVety, President of Canada Family Action Coalition and Canada Christian College, was asked to participate in a televised debate with MP Garth Turner on the twin topics of muzzling MPs and the Conservatives opening the nomination process.
Winston Churchill once remarked that the poor response of the free world to the emergence of Nazi Germany told much about the profound "unteachability" of mankind. Can a more appropriate commentary be made regarding our own handling of contemporary Iran?
Last week, the President of Iran published an 18-page letter to the President of the United States. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's epistle tells us a lot we don't especially need to know: It tells us that he believes that the Jews faked the Holocaust, and the U.S. faked 9/11; that Jesus would have supported today's Islamic extremists and that the Iranian nuclear program represents a triumph of free intellectual inquiry (never mind that the hard bits were all imported from China, via Pakistan).
In the real world, when someone says he's going to kill you, it's a good idea to pay attention. But first you have to hear the threat. My question is: have Christians recognized that they are among those targeted by radical Islam?
The bioethics committee at St. Luke's Hospital in Houston, Texas has decreed that Andrea Clarke should die. Indeed, after a closed-door hearing, it ordered all further medical efforts to sustain her life while at St. Luke's to cease. As a consequence, Clarke's life support, required because of a heart condition and bleeding on the brain, is to be removed unilaterally even though she is not unconscious and her family wants treatment to continue.
On April 7th Canada’s Assistant Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs David Mulroney circulated a memo to departmental staff announcing the formal creation of the Muslim Communities Working Group Operational Unit. The unit had been operating informally since summer 2005 and has been responsible for producing speeches, briefing notes, and "managing emerging issues such as the recent Prophet Muhammad caricatures issue." The memo also announced an official role for the unit as a "clearing house" within the department for all things related to the Muslim community worldwide.
Man, in his effort to keep himself alive and prosperous, has had an impressive record of success. Although serious misfortune or even extinction has, now and in the past, accrued to this or that individual community, man as a species has survived and survived remarkably well. He has progressed far from the primitive, naked hominid who cringed before nature and his imaginative representation of it -his gods; and now one of the few characteristics he still has in common with his half-human ancestors is his imagination. But it is an imagination no longer satisfied to remain simply the spinner of fanciful myths, but rather, through discipline, has become a highly efficient manufacturer of ideas pertinent to man's success and well-being.
In 2000, The New England Journal of Medicine reported that patients being euthanized in the Netherlands sometimes experienced significant side effects (apart from death, that is), such as nausea, convulsions, or coma. This belied the assertion oft made by euthanasia proponents that being killed by a doctor necessarily provides the euphemistic "gentle landing" of euthanasia lore.
Russian President Putin has invited the leaders of Hamas to come visit him in Moscow. Direct talks with France and Turkey are likely to begin soon. Hamas representatives are touring the Arab and Muslim world, including Saudi Arabia, which promised the United States three years ago to stop funding the Islamic terror group.
The voters of the Palestinian Authority (PA) have just delivered Canada's incoming Harper government its first test.
The Conservative position on Palestinian terrorism is clear: They condemn it--and they certainly oppose the Canadian taxpayer being asked to subsidize it.
Ian Wilmut, the creator of Dolly the sheep and newly appointed director of Edinburgh University's Centre for Regenerative Medicine, wants to experiment on dying people with embryonic stem cells - even though he admits that such potential treatments "have not been properly tested."
The story is told of a rabbi who was recognized to be the world’s foremost authority in a particular area of Jewish law at the time someone was suing a certain Jewish institution. It was not surprising then when he was called to testify at the trial.
During his examination, the rabbi was asked by one of the lawyers whether it was in fact true that he was the foremost living expert in this area of law, to which he responded: yes.
A European at this Christmas season must feel a little like a Roman enjoying one of the last Lupercals of the pagan era. The old religion still fills the public space of society. It still possesses its old wealth and the great temples in the centers of towns, and national leaders still profess their adherence to its teachings.
If I had my druthers, I’d prefer that the federal government butted out of day care entirely, leaving its regulation and funding a provincial or local responsibility. However, if the feds must be involved, I think Stephen Harper’s plan to provide $1,200 a year in direct transfers to parents for every child under age six beats the pants off the Liberal pipedream of a national, $11-billion universal day care program and attendant bureaucracy. For one thing, the Tory proposal is a lot more equitable. Every family with preschool age children would benefit, whether they are among the minority (currently about 23 per cent) that actually uses day care, if they opt for the privilege/sacrifice of one parent staying home to care for young children, or prefer to make arrangements with a relative or other non-institutional child-care solution.
In a recent op-ed piece, Globe and Mail columnist Shira Herzog offered her readers an in-depth analysis of the relationship between Jews, particularly those who have a more conservative outlook on life, and Evangelical Christians.
The government of Canada has been pursuing a radical agenda of late. It has changed the definition of marriage, a Parliamentary Committee is set to recommend legalize prostitution, Bill C-407 threatens to legalize assisted suicide and the Liberal Party voted at its last convention to legalize marijuana. Millions of Canadians are shaking their heads with disbelief asking “what can we do”?
Is America or any coalition member country’s university campuses Al Qaeda’s next ‘soft target’ in the War on Terror?
With Ramadan moving on and a rumored Al Qaeda ‘Ramadan offensive’ already underway, events on university campuses in the United States have drawn attention and concern. These events have almost certainly drawn the watchful eye of Al Qaeda, its affiliates, ‘copycats’ and sympathizers.
We have heard it stated so often it has become a media mantra: Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) offer the greatest hope for cures; adult and umbilical cord blood stem cells have far less potential; the Bush administration's embryonic stem cell funding restrictions have caused America to fall behind in the great international race to develop effective ESC treatments.
Compassion, literally defined, means, "to suffer with another." That is why I have always found the monopolization of that word by proponents of euthanasia and assisted suicide so discordant. Euthanasia isn't about suffering with anybody. It's about using someone's suffering — and the pity it evokes — as a justification to kill.
G. K. Chesterton once famously observed that his attitude toward progress had passed from antagonism to boredom, remarking that he had “long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.”
