WE ARE NOT ALONE

Often, whilst railing against the persistent stupidities of governments and their agents, we get the feeling that we are a lone voice or two howling from the cliffs into a relentless wind.

How cheering it is then to see that on occasion - as in several Arab countries at the moment - the masses rise from their slumber and "second that emotion."

In this specific case, a petition now demands the removal of His Royal Walliness from the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry.

Like many of you, we were appalled, nay struck dumb in disbelief, when this never-do-anything, always smile, smooth the duvet political Polonius was appointed to this dire and important task. We knew at once that no result would follow.

Now, native leaders, family members and other concerned citizens have said, "Basta, baby!"

"The petition urges the government to replace Mr. Oppal because he has previously defended the police investigation, argued against establishment of an inquiry and was attorney-general when Crown prosecutors decided not to proceed with 20 outstanding murder charges against Mr. Pickton."

This decorous appointment was one of the last and most cynical acts of Premier Gordon Campbell.

MEA CULPA

I am so embarrassed.

You will quickly spot in the two parts of the Bill Tieleman interview below that I incorrectly, in the excitement of starting the show, said that the raid on the legislature happened on January 28th, 2003.

Of course, I know the date is December 28, 2003.

Then, to make matters even more confusing, after Bill pointed out my error to me during the short break, I came back on camera, apologized and then reiterated January!

A senior moment live and on camera.

Oh well. Forgive me. I am working today on forgiving myself, for, as you, know I prefect and neever gret things wrong.

SHAW TV SHOW # 2 BASI-VIRK/BC RAIL

SHAW TV SHOW #2 BASI-VIRK/BC RAIL

PRAISE THE GUN PEOPLE

It is like clockwork.

The moment you suggest that guns might be a problem in a democratic civilized society, the Riflemen rise to the occasion and hasten to tell you that the American Constitution gives its citizens "the right to bare arms." Spelling is not a long suit for the gun people.

Nor is basic information or knowledge or history.

Jill Lepore, writing in the January 17th edition of the New Yorker, shares this with us:

Consider the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” Historical evidence can be marshalled to support different interpretations of these words, and it certainly has been. But the Yale law professor Reva Siegel has argued that, for much of the twentieth century, legal scholars, judges, and politicians, both conservative and liberal, commonly understood the Second Amendment as protecting the right of citizens to form militias—as narrow a right as the protection provided by the Third Amendment against the government’s forcing you to quarter troops in your house. Beginning in the early nineteen-seventies, lawyers for the National Rifle Association, concerned about gun-control laws passed in the wake of the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, argued that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms—and that this represented not a changing interpretation but a restoration of its original meaning. The N.R.A., which had never before backed a Presidential candidate, backed Ronald Reagan in 1980. As late as 1989, even Bork could argue that the Second Amendment works “to guarantee the right of states to form militias, not for individuals to bear arms.” In an interview in 1991, the former Chief Justice Warren Burger said that the N.R.A.’s interpretation of the Second Amendment was “one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."

WHY NOT THE OFFICIAL BOWLING BALL?

The Americans are mad, quite mad.

They love their guns. They believe in their guns. They worship their guns.

It matters not what mayhem contorts the streets, what horrors are brought to neighbourhoods, how many suicides and murders are added to the rolls, Americans believe in their right to bear arms...at the shopping mall, at the cinema, at the bar, at the school and playground and the beach.

And if your nutty next door neighbour or your corner dope dealer is packing, I guess it's only right that you pack too.

And nobody, nobody from President Obama on down, dare speak of this elephant in the room, because this belief system is so deeply entrenched that one risks not only one's political career, but one's very life to say otherwise.

Well, now it's official.

The sovereign great state of Utah has its state flower and it has its state bird.

Not enough, kids.

Now it is poised to adopt its official state gun.

That would be your Browning M1911 semi-automatic pistol.

It doesn't matter to the legislators in Utah that the sick bastard who shot up Tuscon, Arizona a few weeks ago was using a similar weapon - the Glock version of the semi-automatic pistol.

It doesn't matter to theses august souls that anyone can walk into a store in Georgia and buy 23 pistols and walk out the door, or that you or I can Google "AK-47" and in seconds be put in touch with hundreds of shops in America that will sell us a repeating automatic weapon of destruction for a very reasonable price and even ship it to us.

"Guns don't kill people. People kill people." is the mantra of the NRA.

Yes.

Yet, it's odd how often those people who kill people happen to have smoking guns in their hands when the killing happens.

Canada is not immune to this disease. But to date we are so far less a gun nation than the USA that one can only give thanks.

DIM BULBS

Confession.

I have taken to buying, hoarding and stockpiling incandescent light bulbs.

If I'm in Safeway or London Drugs and I'm basically buying food or computer toys, I now also throw in a few 40, 60 or 100 watters. Soon, I'll have to park on the street to make room for them all in the garage.

I think the new provincial and federal laws, which will soon see these efficient, little beauties disappear in the name of environmentalism, is wrong. Dead wrong.

Check out Craig McInnes' column in today's Sun, in which he presents cogent arguments that the politicians have even managed to get the SCIENCE WRONG.

HISTORY ON THE COURTS

Li Na broke new ground for China on Thursday, fighting back to topple world No. 1 Caroline Wozniacki 3-6 7-5 6-3 and become her country’s first grand slam finalist at the Australian Open.

Everybody had picked the entirely dull Dane to win the title.

Which made watching Li Na come back from match points down even more delicious than usual.

With the largest population in the world, China has yet to produce many serious tennis contenders. Peng Shai did very well on the women's side in Melbourne these past two weeks, but I can't think of a male tennis player who has broken through to the top ranks.

It happened in golf and it will no doubt happen soon enough in tennis.

It's hard to bet against the delightful, charming and down-to-earth Kim Clijsters (so many tennis players are certifiable flakes and nut cases, that Clijsters stands out not only for her superior play, but also for her grounded personality), but Li Na is a gutsy and talented player and she has an honest shot at this Slam title on Saturday night.

WE WERE BUSY

The RCMP have absolved themselves of blame in the Pickton case.

They do acknowledge "delays in pursuing Pickton due to other high-profile investigations."

Uh-huh.

This is interesting.

And odd, because, unlike their own investigation of themselves, the Lepard review done by Vancouver police cited "jurisdictional issues, poor management and shoddy analysis of the evidence [which] derailed the probe and allowed Pickton to go on killing for another 2 1/2 years."

In other words, thanks to the rather incomplete work done by our national police force, about a dozen more women died.

Oops.

Now to make matters even more Alice in Wonderland, an inquiry is underway. And which of the Queen's cards is at the head of the picnic table?

Why Wally Opaque, that's who.

Oh, yes. Walter to to the rescue. Here's the guy to ferret out the truth and help the grieving families of human beings who have mysteriously disappeared.

This will be real helpful, yessir.

$ame old, $ame old

We are giving $4.5 Million to Simon Fraser University to study youth violence. And another half million to...uh...study youth violence.

Many wonderful people are involved and several levels of government.

Among other things, these studies promise to "develop more effective prevention and treatment strategies."

I have been observing these marvelous announcements for 45 years now.

And I have yet to see any results.

This is what governments like to do. They like to give money to intellectuals to do studies. They would rather do that than give money to the front line workers who are striving every day - usually without adequate resources - to PROVIDE prevention and treatment programs.

You know why governments like to waste your tax dollars this way?

Because paying for studies is safe. Politically safe.

If you pay for an actual program and something goes wrong, goes wrong, goes, then your political ass is in a sling.

Of course, it rarely occurs to these cowards that doing nothing - and paying for studies is the same as doing nothing - allows everything to continue to go wrong.

Who's MInding the Store?

Dirty drinking water, filthy limited toilet facilities, tea and bread for breakfast, rotten apples, little dinner, no vegetables.

Not bad enough?

On top of that the workers are then charged $25 for their meals and accomodation - taken, of course, directly from their measly paycheques.

Ah well.

What concern is this of ours?

This must be some gulag or other in Mongolia, the Punjab, darkest Africa.

Wrong again, Bunky.

This is a reforestation camp in Golden, B.C. and a few other local sites.

Many of the workers are from Africa. Most have no idea about their "rights." Most have been lied to about opportunities.

The company in this case is Khaira Enterprises, its owners are Khaid Mahmood Bajwa and Hardilpreet Singh Sidhu.

But they are far from alone in their evils. Their kind are thriving in B.C.

And now, thanks to the work of the BC Federation of Labour in exposing these crimes, the owners must pay $229,000 in back wages to 57 workers - not very much per person for this level of mistreatment and disrespect.

Adding insult to injury, Sishu and Bajwa, the owners, have been fined $3,500 for seven violations of the Employment Standards Act.

Seven violations. $3,500.

BC Fed President, Jim Sinclair, has rightly declared this finding "a joke."

It's worse than a joke.

It's a nightmare.

It speaks to a government that will not spend the money to employ enough inspectors to enforce the rules of the land.

Think back to the women killed and injured riding that panel van in the valley a few years ago. Sitting on apple crates. No seat belts.

What has changed?

When I was a child, 60 years ago in Winnipeg, my mother worked as a bookkeeper for clothing companies and candy makers who had better working conditions than this. Let me repeat - 60 years ago.

It's all smiles and handshakes now that the egos are running for the leadership of their parties. But ask them at the next rally where they were when these workers were trying to work for six hours without a break on food rations that you might find in prisoner of war camps. Ask them what kind of province we are living in, what kind of province we would like to live in.

Crime FIghters

'We took back the city': How Williams Lake saved itself from being a crime capital

Read more: http://www.theprovince.com/news/took+back+city+Williams+Lake+saved+itself+from+being+crime+capital/4151187/story.html#ixzz1BtAetCLH

Kent Spencer, writing in this morning's Province, has given us a terrific study of how a community said, "Enough is enough," and reclaimed their citizenship.

Now, can some of these same tactics pay off in Vancouver and Victoria? I think they could and it would be encouraging to learn that some of the comatose officials in town are listening and even learning.

Sent by a Friend

Article in the “” Washington Times”” January 4th/11

Canada is quietly surpassing the U.S. as the land of opportunity

By James A. Bacon

The Washington Times

6:29 p.m., Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Illustration: Canada and freedom

Unless the Winter Olympics are on television or someone is clubbing baby seals, Americans don't pay much attention to what's happening in Canada. It's as if we live in a house with a set of quiet, orderly neighbors on one side and a bachelor pad with drunken parties, girls in the hot tub and occasional gunshot eruptions on the other. To whom would you pay more attention?

I dare say Americans could correctly name the president of Mexico (Filipe Calderon) over the prime minister of Canada (Stephen Harper) by a margin of 5-to-1. That's too bad. While we have every reason to fear the disorder spilling over from our increasingly lawless neighbor to the south, our well-mannered Canadian neighbors have pulled their act together. We could learn a lot from them.

Look what's not happening in Canada. There is no real estate crisis. There is no banking crisis. There is no unemployment crisis. There is no sovereign debt crisis. Recent reports suggest that consumers are loading up too much debt, but Canada shares that problem with nearly every other country in the industrialized world.

Among the Group of Seven nations, which also include the United States, France, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy, Canada's economic activity has come the closest to returning to the pre-recession peak. The country has recovered three-quarters of all jobs it lost. TheInternational Monetary Fund estimates that Canada will be the only country among the G-7 to have achieved a balanced budget by 2015.

Now, instead of expanding Canada's welfare state, the conservative government led by Mr. Harper is intent upon building the nation's global competitiveness. Our friends in the Great White North cut their corporate tax rate to 16.5 percent on Jan. 1 and will see it drop to 15 percent next year. That compares to the current U.S. corporate tax rate of 35 percent. That will give Canada the lowest corporate tax rate among the G-7 nations and an eye-popping advantage for businesses wondering whether to locate on theU.S. or Canadian side of the border.

The last time Canadians really caught Americans' eyes was when prime ministers such as Jean Chretien and Paul Martin, both leaders of the Liberal Party, were proving uncooperative in the realm of foreign policy. American media played up disagreements over the invasion of Iraq and Canadian participation in the American National Missile Defense Program, which made President George W. Bush look bad and confirmed the narrative that his cowboy foreign policy had alienated old friends around the world. By contrast, when Canadian soldiers under the conservative government became active combatants in Afghan-istan, the American media showed little interest.

But that's nothing new. Except to note how well or how poorly Canada's national health care system was working, Americans have paid little heed to news coming out of Ottawa. The titanic effort of both Canada's liberal and conservative parties in the 1990s and 2000s to rein in government spending largely escaped our notice. Nor did it ever occur to anyone to wonder why, with our economies so closely entwined, U.S. housing *****s were busting through the roof while Canadian houses remained so sensible.

It turns out that Ottawa's housing policies and banking regulations tempered the boom in real estate *****s. No tax deductions for mortgage interest payments. And get this: Buyers actually had to make down payments on their houses. Because there was no real estate bust, there was no banking crisis. (Indeed, healthy Canadian banks are snapping up U.S. financial assets.) Despite the lack of public policies geared toward stimulating homeownership, Canadian homeownership was 68.4 percent in 2008. That would be a higher number than in the United States, which was 67.4 percent in 2009.

Lesson to Americans: If you want affordable housing, stop promoting policies to make it more "affordable."

Meanwhile, Canada has many of the same assets that Americans like to brag about, such as an immigrant tradition that invites foreigners to live and work in the country. On a per-capita basis, the rate of legal immigration to Canada is comparable to that to the U.S. Settling in world-class, creative cities like Toronto and Vancouver, foreigners add immeasurably to the nation's wealth-creating capacity

Talented Canadians have long regarded the United States as the land of opportunity. It may not be long before Americans see our northern neighbor as the land of the future.

James A. Bacon is author of the book "Boomergeddon" (Oaklea Press, 2010) and publisher of the blog by the same name

Friends Make the Trip More Enjoyable

Our good friend Robert Werner did more than attend the taping of our first SHAW TV show. He took dozens of photos and videos.

After transferring the actual broadcast to YouTube and creating the YouTube page (DavidBernerTV) and Twitter account for the show (@davidbernerTV), Robert then tirelessly - and unasked - made the delightful little Behind the Scenes video seen below.

Robert is a fellow with an enormous range of interests and considerable skill in cyberland. He is also the soul of kindness and does tremendous work for charity - always very quietly and modestly.

Back of the Flat

'NOTHER 'NOUNCEMENT

A slight change in the viewing schedule for DAVID BERNER on SHAW COMMUNITY TV CHANNEL 4.

We will begin each week, not on Friday as previously announced, but the next week, thus keeping all of one week's shows actually in one week. Imagine.

You can see the first show below on YouTube, but to truly see the whites of our eyes on your 50" plasma, watch on SHAW as follows:

Mondays 4:30 am

Tuesdays 10:30 pm

Wednesdays 8:30 pm
Fridays 2:30 pm

A special thanks to Adrian Mastracci of KCM WEALTH MANAGEMENT, David and Mark Goodman of THE GOODMAN REPORT, Tony DuMoulin of DUMOULIN BOSKOVICH and Emily Jubb, the publisher of the VANCOUVER COURIER, all of whom have enthusiastically jumped on the bandwagon in support of the new show.

SHAW TV SHOW - PART ONE

SHAW TV SHOW - PART TWO

SHAMEFUL POLITICS

The B.C. Teacher Federation has held education in this province hostage for at least the last decade.

The union has consistently imposed its wishes on schools, students, children, parents, the government of the moment and taxpayers.

That speaks well for the power of a well run ship.

But how well does it serve the people of British Columbia.

If you think Kevin Falcon and Adrian Dix are pit bulls (and I do), you might remember David Chudnovsky during his years as President of the BCTF. Mr. Chudnovsky was until recently the NDP MLA for Vancouver- Kensington. And an able, kind, thoughtful, clever and well-spoken representative he was. But when he ran the Fed., woe be the sorry slob who got in the way of Mr. C's Zamboni.

And so it has gone with every BCTF President thereafter. No doubt all unions could profit by studying the uncommon success of this outfit.

But when did it become acceptable for the teachers or principals to dictate public policy on education. Their job is to teach. And many do that admirably. Many do not.

Did you have that many great teachers in school? I didn't. I had a stand-out few and the rest were asleep at the wheel, simply mailing it in day after day.

Now, as every year, the Union is once again at public war with the Ministry of Education.

The territory at issue?

To test or not to test that is the question.

Puleeeeeze...

Life is a test. Driving to Safeway is a test. Getting through another day with your mate or your children or your parents or your dearest friends can be a test. Business and work are testing grounds. So are the community centre, the cafe, the bar, church...

They are also fun and beautiful and lovely, but ignore that they are also a test and you are toast.

So asking our children to pass the occasional test of writing and calculating skills is abuse or a crime or a terrible waste of precious teacher DNA?

Come on, folks. Give us all a Royal Canadian break.

I look forward to the day - perhaps in my lifetime, but I am not holding my breath - when the BC Teachers Federation has something to tell us that is about teaching, something perhaps about children, something that isn't a red flag of contention, something that isn't a war.

Peace and logarithms, Brothers and Sisters...

TOO FUNNY