The Last Exile

I will admit I wanted Canadian forces completely withdrawn from Afghanistan since 2006. I knew the conflict was ‘unwinnable’ unless the Canadian government made the decision to annex Afghanistan and treat the country as another province of Canada. I was relieved when the pull-out was announced but disturbed at the high number of ‘military’ trainers left behind after the officially pull-out. Every time I hear ‘military trainer’ my mind goes all Vietnamish and what a dog’s breakfast that war was.

A week ago the elected Prime Minister of Afghanistan announced that men were fundamental and women were secondary….so I am more than a little perturbed when I read Peter Mackay, as Canadian Minister of Defense, believes Canada must remain steadfast to its commitment of training Afghani troops until 2014…of course, what no one has actually asked MacKay; is if this valuable training we are providing to Afghanis troops will play a role in the continuing oppression of Afghani women.

My money says it will and we should get out now. Lending a military hand in the oppression of women and children are not promoting Canadian values.

As the Canadian Robocall political scandal unfolds I am struck by the weirdest sense of déjà vu. I realize déjà vu can be characterized as ‘weird’ phenomena in the first place, but this sense of ‘déjà vu’ is downright Nixonian. The Prime Minister and I are pretty much the same age, and we were both young and living in Toronto during the US Watergate years.

I am fairly certain he could not have missed it, since I wanted to miss it, and I tried to miss it, but I never could manage to escape it. In those days, Toronto only had a handful of television stations whose broadcast signal was strong enough to receive on a television set and the majority of the stations on our television dials were American.

During the Watergate Senate hearings, the American stations would frequently interrupt their regular broadcasts in order to carry the hearings ‘live’ – much to the crushing joy of my young heart. At lunch, when inclement weather forced me to eat inside, I was often stuck watching John Dean’s testimony rather than the Flintstones or Bewitched. All of which makes me wonder, if Stephen Harper is the Canadian Richard Nixon, where and who, is Harper’s John Dean?

It is so downright eerie watching Stephen Harper deny any Conservative wrongdoing when he knows very well how well that went worked for Tricky Dickie – and I must say, it doesn’t seem to be working out all that well for Stevie either. In fact, if my memory has entirely failed me, I think even John Dean once tried to make a case that the Republicans broke into the democratic party headquarters to look for evidence of illegal party ‘pay-offs’.

See, even blaming the victim comes out of Nixon’s bag of tricks or making calls sliming your opposition is –
And I quote (National Post) –

Ah, yes, sliming Irwin Cotler – just because the ‘cons’ cannot beat him in a fair political fight is just as dirty and disgrace when Canadians Conservatives do it as it was when Republicans engaged in Nixon’s bag of dirty tricks. Odd, how both Harper and I could watch Watergate scandal unfold and take two entirely different lessons from watching Nixon’s fall from grace.

NB; Saskboy and Dr. Dawg have fairly good round-ups and updates.

According to this report, the Federal Government has decided to close all the Student Resources Centres located across the country in an effort to save the federal purse $6.5 Million. And why would a young person/student need help getting a job anyway….Besides, Lord knows, the conservatives need to find every penny after letting a certain Tory MP spend $50 million for Gazebos and other such nonsense.

The Globe and Mail carries an article on the high cash balances large North American corporations are carrying on their books.

Am I surprised that the US and Canada are singled out as ‘high-cost manufacturing countries’? No, this is the price to be paid for having a standard of living which elevates most of the citizenry from living 12 to a room and having to dump a bucket down a public drain twice a day.

What is galling, is that these companies (especially the automakers), demanded our governments use public funds to help them stave off bankruptcy just a scant few years ago. GM is free to build their cars in whatever country they desire, but when you suck at the public teat, then be prepared to give back.

In GM’s case, the company is mooching off the taxpayers of Canada and the US. Time to end financing and corporate tax breaks for corporate welfare bums who cannot remember where their bread gets buttered. Frankly, the entire board and executive management of GM should be tarred, feathered and run out of North America.

For a long time I have been watching terrible economic decisions being made. Decisions, whereby ‘shareholder return’ trumps the needs of country. Contrary to what many might believe of me; I do not believe free market capitalist is always the answer or the sole answer. Those free market capitalists, far too often, put profit and net return before quality of human life.

As a conservative, I perhaps better understand than my progressive peers that ‘human nature’ remains unremarkably changed as its core – despite the best efforts of our modern social engineering experts. It is almost a 100 years since the Triangle Shirtwaist fire ravaged the garment of district of New York City. This was the face, and consequence, of unfettered capitalism in action.

I doubt you could find a Canadian which would willing return to those days with its lack of labour and safety laws, and yet, we seem to be so willing to engage in trade with countries where those very same conditions that lead to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire over a hundred years ago, not only exist, but are part and parcel of the daily economic life of those nations.

The Toronto Star, last year, ran a remarkable article on the granite sidewalks of downtown Bloor Street in Toronto. The granite sidewalks should be a cautionary tale for all Canadians on the dangers of free trade with unequal partners.

The granite – named Atlantic Black and Atlantic Grey – was quarried and finished in Quebec. But it nearly came from a seemingly unlikely source: China. In what amounts to a coals-to-Newcastle yarn of astonishing proportions, granite cut and finished in China has recently taken the lion’s share of the Toronto construction market, whether it’s for pavers, tiles, wall cladding or the countertops in highrise condominiums.

Those in the Canadian industry like to joke that granite quarried in China comes in three colours – grey, grey and grey. But most of the granite materials produced by Chinese companies began as massive blocks of brightly coloured granite that were quarried elsewhere, in Brazil, South Africa and sometimes even Canada.
This stretch of Bloor might also have been paved in granite from China were it not for the pique of Radovan Kovacevic, whose Interex Marble Ltd. represents Quebec’s A. Lacroix et Fils Granit Ltee. It’s not just that Kovacevic had already lost too many bidding wars to those supplying Chinese granite. He calls this neighbourhood home. “I live here and I said, `I’m in this business and I’m not going to wake up in the morning and go on the street and see Chinese (granite),’” he says. “I wouldn’t even walk on Bloor St.”

To win the contract, Kovacevic says he essentially surrendered all of his profit and relied on Lacroix’s reputation for quality and fast service. Forget that much of Canada sits on granite, not least the great Canadian Shield that’s never far from the surface in the eastern half of the country. It’s about cost, the hard place where “buy local” slogans collide with an unforgiving market, even in the unlikely realm of granite.

Production costs are so low, and Chinese government assistance so generous, that Chinese firms can afford to buy granite from halfway around the world, ship it home, cut it into finished pieces, ship it back around the globe and still sell the resulting product for at least 40 per cent less than comparable granite manufactured here. “The Chinese are coming in and they’re cutting us here, there,” says Kovacevic. “I don’t know what the future is going to look like. Probably not very good.”

When you outsource manufacturing jobs to third world economies; your homegrown blue collar workers lose their jobs. Even worse than the loss of tax payers to a nation’s tax base is that those blue collar workers end up collecting national employment insurance. By the time EI benefits expire, only ‘some’ blue collar workers will have found work or been retrained.

When the largest demand for blue collar workers in Canada is found in industries which ask the age old question; “Do you want fries with that?” and most of those positions are currently filled by guest workers, illegals or family sponsored low-skills immigrants; what future is there for Canadian blue collar workers other than welfare recipient?

When Canadian white collar workers, who were previously employed in such places as call service centres or clerical workers have their semi-skilled jobs outsourced to third world countries in the name of providing value for ‘shareholders’– where can you realistically expect those Canadians to find employment when their Employment Insurance benefits end?

As a country, we no longer produce much of anything – other than hot air. National self-sufficiency has been sacrificed on the altar global capitalism which is all well and good except for one thing. Not every Canadian is capably of acquiring the necessary skill sets beyond their intellectual capacity, and this conservative, is rather tired to picking up the slack when manufacturers and producers take their operations to the third world and leave me footing the bill for their ‘shareholder value’.

Sure, I can buy a toaster ‘Made in China’ for a quarter of what it can be produced locally in Canada, but what good is it; when more and more of my income is gobbled up in taxes to support those Canadians who no longer can find employment which will provide them with the basics a living in Canada?

I’d much rather pay more for a Canadian made toaster and keep all three levels of government out of my pocket book and my fellow citizens working. As a conservative, I am rather tired of bailing out dinosaur industries like the automakers. As a country, we were forced to bail out those industries as otherwise there would be literally thousands of Canadians left destitute with no blue collar jobs to replace those that were lost when the big three automakers sunk under the weight of their collective economic hubris.

As a conservative, I was always thought of myself more as a ‘free-trade’ kind of gal…except how free is free trade when no distinction is made between unequal trading fields? I can understand the net stockholder benefit and net benefit to the third world ecomonies, and while the benefit to the Canadian consumer might result in initial lower product cost, but what good is lower costs; when my take home pay is slowly eroded through various taxes in order to keep my fellow Canadians on the dole? Eventually, that cheap toaster will be beyond even what I can afford to pay.

If there is one lesson to be learned from the consequences of unfettered capitalism it is that one should never rely on the moral character of any capitalist to do anything other than what increases their fiscal bottom-line. All of which is my long-winded way of saying why this conservative Canadian patriot will be taking a hard look at the provincial NDP campaign of Andrea Horwath. She seems to be the only politician who is interested in balancing the needs of Ontario citizens with the needs of business.

In a campaign swing through northern Ontario, NDP Leader Andrea Horwath vowed to stop resources mined in the province from being exported if they can be processed here.
“Companies are pulling them out of the ground and shipping them elsewhere for processing and it doesn’t have to be that way,” Horwath said Monday from Dubreuilville, Ont. “We need to be conscious about what is happening with our natural resources. It helps us put some control over how much of our resources get processed and it creates good jobs for Ontario families.” Horwath said the time to secure mining and resource jobs is now as Ontario begins to develop the Ring of Fire, a $30 billion chromite deposit nearly 500 kilometres northeast of Thunder Bay. (The Toronto Star)

In this coming provincial election, the voters need to choose, not between Conservatives or Liberals political philosophies as much as choosing their nation over idealogical economic purity.

I’m still dealing with things but I read this today and I got to ask – -am I the only one who finds it a trifle schizoid that the official Harperite position is that the long form census documents are too intrusive and far too invasive for the government to ask the citizenry to fill in but it’s just okay-dokey for the federal government to provide a foreign government the name, gender and date of birth of every Canadian travelling through ‘US airspace’ -even though their plane is not landing on US soil.

And if I fly Air Canada or West Jet from Toronto to New Brunswick to visit my mother – why do I need to be vetted by the US government just because the wings of my plane may cruise above Maine for a few minutes?

What could possibly go wrong?

And how is it that the everyone and their grandmother can defy the wishes/desires and requests of the current White House Administration but the Harperites grovel to comply?

The Toronto Star runs a rare editorial praising the actions of the Harper Brain Trust which should give all thinking people to cause to pause and re-think their positions on any issue

Canadians with debilitating multiple sclerosis are understandably expressing disappointment — even to the point of bitterness — over the federal government’s rejection of clinical trials into the controversial new “liberation treatment” for the debilitating disease.

A cure can’t come fast enough for those struggling against the neurological ravages of MS, and for their anguished friends and relatives. And rightly so. But it must be a real cure — one backed up by sound scientific evidence showing it is both safe and beneficial.

There is no such proof at hand for liberation treatment. Indeed, an expert panel convened by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research has unanimously concluded that there is “an overwhelming lack of scientific evidence on the safety and efficacy of the procedure.”

Under these circumstances, federal Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq had no real choice but to announce on Wednesday that Ottawa is not yet prepared to fund clinical trials in this controversial form of MS treatment. “To ensure that we have the evidence to support this procedure, we need to do the research,” Aglukkaq said. “And once we have that, we will proceed … with pan-Canadian clinical trials. At this point in time, we do not have the evidence to proceed.” Although heartbreaking to MS sufferers, Aglukkaq’s approach is both prudent and responsible.

There is a word weasliness coming from the traditionalists in the medical and scientific circles and its inherent in the federal government’s refusal to fund wide scale clinical trials using the so-called Liberation Treatment and it can be summed up this way. There is no evidence Dr. Zamboni’s theory is correct or this procedure is a cure for MS; ergo, why should large scale clinical trials be funded or performed?

Dr. Zamboni’s theory may be very well wrong, and his treatment may not be a cure for MS, but if a simple angioplasty procedure opening up the block veins in an MS patient’s neck could very well represent the equivalent of a daily insulin injection to a diabetic patient. It may not be a cure but any procedure which allows an MS patient to participate fully in life and offers relief from the debilitating effects of MS and the drugs used to control it - should be fully be explored and funded.

There are approximately 75,000 people in Canada suffering from MS and they spend approximately 2,000 a month using traditional drug treatment. Given the average MS patient can live a relatively long life with horrendous suffering; its the goose which lays the golden egg for Big Pharma. It appears a treatment which can be had for less than the yearly costs of MS drugs which potentially and dramatically improves the quality of life for MS suffers for a year or longer loses out in Canada. Is it any wonder the federal government’s decision not to establish and fund wide scale clinical trial is a very bitter pill for all Canadians suffering from MS?

For more information on the Liberation Treatment watch this W5 report on it.

I create characters for my stories all the time. It’s the real life characters I find un-fracking unbelievable.

The love of money is what is destroying Christian and Judea societies all over Europe and the West. Look at Bloomberg, a money-loving Jew who has sold his soul for the arabs’ dirty money. ( ‘Dodo can spell” but grammar/punctuation…)

‘Money-loving Jew’, now where have I heard that before? Speaking strictly from my anecdotal experience, I would say the modern community of Judea is actually thriving quite nicely, although it might be under siege from time to time from the neighbours – but it has absolutely nothing to do with money.

All of which explains why I never joined the Blogging Tories – it just doesn’t pay.

The Toronto Star carries this article about a You Tube video which went viral showing Canadian airline staff letting a few veiled muslim women board a plane without demanding the woman de-veil in order to compare their faces with their ID presented and suggests the Muslim community fears a backlash over the hoopla.

Go watch the video and come back.

Okay, I’ll state the rather obvious and suggest the backlash was already in play which is rather the entire point of making the video and why it went viral. Once again, I will play the dissenting conservative and point out why the airline clerk might have broke with airline procedure but in no way does it necessarily imply airline passenger safety was compromised for one simple reason. And I know this from having flown out of Montreal and Toronto airports on more than a few occasions.

The women had already been searched, inspected, x-rayed, and clear prior to entry into the boarding gate areas. No one can directly entire the gate areas without going through a rather ridiculous procedure involving x-rays, searches and having your ID scrutinized by the airport security personnel. In fact, I am not sure that the airline steward has to do more than check that the passenger’s picture ID matches the airline ticket issued. It’s not for them to play ‘cop’ and demand a public de-veiling – although I could be wrong on that point. The airline rules are draconian enough these days when literally anything tagged as a ’safety’ procedure can literally fly.

All Canadians flyers know this, and if a little common sense was exercised; we should be asking why the video-grapher felt an innate need to target veiled Muslim women with their camera in the first place.

Flying is already a horrendous enough ordeal. and if this much-ado-about nothing video results in any more ridiculous safety rules issued by Canadian airport security officials, I suggest the entire nation hunts down this video-grapher and ensures he/she spends the next 50 years chained to the wall in their laundry room and fed nothing but stale pastries.

Generally speaking, I am a law and order type but the one thing I have zero tolerance for is when agents of the state callously abuse the coercive powers of the law to subvert the law of the land. The civil suits from the G20 are going to be a horrendous burden on the taxpayers of this country because the security services acted in a fashion which put their conduct above the law they had sworn to uphold. Think I am wrong – just think Officer Bubbles. Secondly, it’s going to be very hard for the government to successfully win any of the suits brought against them considering the number of ‘legal monitors’ which were arbitrary detained among the 1100 plus arrested and detained, and then, mostly released without charge. The Hill Times Online

Civil liberties lawyers and Parliamentarians are gathering evidence they say will show Toronto police systematically violated legal and human rights as they quelled protests with the largest mass arrests in Canadian history at the G20 leaders’ summit in Toronto last month.

The evidence includes eyewitness accounts from lawyers who acted as monitors during the protests where police arrested 1,105 people, including bystanders, lawful protesters and some of the legal monitors, but released more than 900 with no charges.

Up to six lawyers who volunteered as monitors with the Osgoode Hall Law Union were swept up by police and have provided affidavit-style evidence to organizers about the abuses they witnessed in the notorious temporary prison Toronto police set up in an abandoned film studio, says Adrienne Telford, one of the organizers. The Canadian Civil Liberties Union had up to 50 legal monitors at the protests and is compiling information.

Go ahead and rant about the violent antics of the so-called Black Bloc rioters but remember this; 15,000 security officers allowed the Black Bloc to riot contrary to in downtown Toronto without a single police officer lifting a hand to stop the riot for over 90 minutes. The Black Bloc could have been easily been apprehended and stopped in their tracks, but instead, security forces chose to stand down regardless of potential threat to human lives and willful destruction to property. There were many law abiding citizens in the stores and restaurants the Black Bloc attacked but security forces chose not to intervene. Now the Toronto Police are spending umpteen hours and funds from the public purse attempting to hunt down and arrest the so-called Black Bloc. It would have been far easier on the public purse to arrest them in the act rather than harassing innocent citizens for wearing black and carrying backpacks long after the Black Bloc had disappeared much like thieves in the night.