The Apology

Stephen Harper was right and brave to make the apology to aboriginals for our sins of cruelty.

Chretien, who after all was Indian Affairs Minister for many years, didn't rise to the occasion. Nor did Martin or Ryan Baloney.

I believe the Prime Minister's apology to be sincere and real and important.

I also believe that it is time for aboriginals - while never forgetting - to press on into the future and stop the endless kvetching.

Bring up your children with pride. Let no child fall to drugs or alcohol or bad marks in school. Expect only the best from one another.

The Freedom to Offend

VANCOUVER, British Columbia — A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article’s tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States do not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.

Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.

Two members of the Canadian Islamic Congress say the magazine, Maclean’s, Canada’s leading newsweekly, violated a provincial hate speech law by stirring up hatred against Muslims. They say the magazine should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their “dignity, feelings and self-respect.”

The British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, which held five days of hearings on those questions here last week, will soon rule on whether Maclean’s violated the law. As spectators lined up for the afternoon session last week, an argument broke out.

“It’s hate speech!” yelled one man.

“It’s free speech!” yelled another.

In the United States, that debate has been settled. Under the First Amendment, newspapers and magazines can say what they like about minorities and religions — even false, provocative or hateful things — without legal consequence.

These are the opening paragraphs taken from this morning's coverage in the NY Times of an obscenity that was going on here in town last week. For the full NY Times story, read here.

Several bloggists alerted me to this story when I returned from holiday. They, and I, have been surprised by how puny the media and public reaction has been to this nightmare.

Maclean's magazine and Mark Steyn have both said publicly that they hope they lose this case so that the merits can be argued in a real court, not the quasi-judicial farce of the Human Rights Tribunal where the sacred cow is HURT FEELINGS, for god's sake.

The people in this case who are claiming hurt feelings, by the way, have had no problem characterizing Jews as rats and vermin who need be exterminated.

This is both a simple and an extremely complex matter.

But let me say this:

I am a Jew.

The Holocaust is a central and abiding through line in my mental and emotional life. It rears its ugly head unbidden on average once a week and has for a great many years.

One of my favorite Rabbis says about the Holocaust, "Forgiveness is not in the equation. You cannot forgive the monstrous."

I agree with him.

BUT...

None of the above means wallowing in victimhood or self-pity or stopping in one's tracks from living life to the fullest.

Nor does any of the above mean I want to curtail any fool's right to say any foolish thing.

When you say something stupid, foolish, hurtful or damaging, these are my choices: Change the channel, toss the newspaper, laugh at your idiocy or denounce you in equal or louder voice.

We cannot, must not have the "state" regulate expression of opinion. Offensiveness is the central right of a healthy democracy.

Crocodile Crock

I have it on excellent authority that the first NPA caucus meeting after Sunday's win for Peter Ladner was an unholy mess.

Instead of being grown-ups and recognizing that a contest had just been held and one man had won, the shreiking meemies apparently cried and cajoled and hectored with plaints like,

"How could you do that?"

"Sam was the greatest mayor we've ever had."

"Traitor."

and like that.

And we wonder why this sorry slate is going down.

Crocodile Rock

Fueling the Madness

The world-wide reaction to skyrocketing fuel prices is becoming increasingly violent.

Prices at the pump are high enough here and then you realize that they are cheap relative to prices in the US, in Europe and around the globe.

Solutions?

Now You're a College, Now You're Not

Vaughn Palmer, as he often does, got it completely right is his column this morning about the Premier and Higher Education.

In April, Campbell re-named 5 Colleges as Universities.

Within days, the orders went out from his government instructed everybody on how to not spend money and how to live with less.

Read this excellent piece here, and think about this government's continuing pea and shell game with the public it was elected to serve.

Holy Theft, Batman

Congratulations to the "unsophisticated Lower Mainland career criminals."

It is encouraging to see that we are raising our level of culture and crime in one fell swoop.

Stealing Bill Reid art objects from the UBC Museum of Anthropology puts us on the map, for sure. I'm surprised Ladner or Sullivan or one of the other city boosters wasn't there for the ribbon cutting.

Cutting Deals on Bad Guys No Way to Run the Shop

It is not enough to know that once again Corrections Canada and the National Parole Service has failed the community by putting a dangerous violent sex offender in a Vancouver half-wit house. It is not enough to know that, of course, the maniac simply walked away and is now being searched for across the country.

What you have to understand is the complex and dire melodrama that surrounds a story like this.

The half-wit house should refuse this kind of client. We did for 10 years. Why risk your other resident clients and your reputation for one lunatic?

The answer is simple.

Because they (the half-way house) have to.

They are funded by government and piper calls the tune. "Take this putz or else" is basically how their contract runs.

What remains when the lights go out is how do you live with yourself running this kind of operation?

Bargoons

The Sun business section reports today that prices are coming down in "rec property."

Ha!

If your idea of a little get-away cabin is $1.3 Million at the bottom level, than you might buy that tripe.

Salt Spring Island is basically off limits for most people. Forget waterfront. Try finding even a 50-year old wood frame 2 bedroom, one bath house in the woods for under half a million.

We live in a dream.

Tom Waits - Waltzing Matilda

"Ladner has all the right stuff."

So claims The Province editorial this morning. Although the piece itself never goes on to explain exactly what these qualities are.

Everyone else in town knows that Peter Ladner is a bright and nice and dull and not particularly industrious fellow. We all know that his voting record is a Xerox of Sullivan's.

I predicted months ago that Ladner could make a perfectly unremarkable and decent mayor in the mold (mould?) of Philip Owen.

This morning's Sun has much hand-wringing about how the poor old NPA is going to weather this frightening experience of two guys fighting for the nomination. Everybody, they claim, is in disarray.

The question has to be asked: If City Hall or the NPA or The Vancouver Sun can't handle this puny melodrama, what will they do with a real issue?

Ladner gets the biggest laugh and the Quote of the Day himself when he mourns, "We're going to have some big shoes to fill with B.C. Lee's departure..."

Hahahaha...

Lee had absolutely no impact on city council whatsoever - none, gornisht, nyet, zerokins, zilch.

Who knew Ladner was this funny?

On the Op Ed page the 3 Vision candidates spell out their alleged platforms. Yawn.

If you can't do either of the crosswords today, try to count how many times Allan de Genova uses the word "I."

One From the Heart

The song below, "Broken Bicycles" written and sung by Tom Waits, is from his album composed for the 1982 Francis Ford Coppola movie, "One From the Heart."

I've always thought that this was one of the greatest sound tracks I've ever heard.

The movie itself failed miserably, which was a bit of a shame, because it was such an interesting experiment. Coppola created an entire Las Vegas on a sound stage and had the camera weaving in and around some funny and tragic love stories. Teri Garr was wonderful. as she often is.

Find it at a video store; it's worth a look, and Waits' music is terrific.

Tom Waits - Broken Bicycles

Sam and Janet Evening

I'm so sorry I missed the opportunity to see two unworthies blubbering in public.

So we are told that in learning of the End of the Reign of One Term Wonder, Sam the Destructor Sullivan, B.C. Lee (a man who never said a word in 3 years in Council) and Kim Capripants (who said way too much) both burst into teen-age tears for the cameras.

Clearly these are starving souls with not much to think about these days.

For the rest of us, YEAH!!!

For one returning home just before the count on Sunday afternoon...HAHAHAHAHA!!!

As for the Miro Cernetig headline (Sullivan-Ladner Feud damages NPA Image), how do you get some things so wrong?

a) That's called democracy. Two guys want the same seat. They fight like hell in public and one guy wins. Get used to it.

b) What image? The NPA have been paragons of public virtue for 60 years? Back to the medicine chest.

c) The NPA is an entire class of people, not a mere political handle of convenience. Be assured that those who believe in their natural born right to rule the stupid masses and keep us all safe from the madness of something they call Socialism ( eek! shriek! freak!), will gather together in the halls and pergolas of privilege to wipe the floor with whatever lamb Vision sends to slaughter later this month.

Let the Uniting begin!

In Flight

Thank goodness, I wasn't near a TV set to witness the demolition of Roger Federer.

Setting all kinds of records, Rafael Nadal, who might very clearly win Wimbledon in a few weeks, absolutely bombed the world number one player, 6-1, 6-3, 6-0. That's right, Bagel the last set!

Yikes...

So you think it's bad here...

In Ireland, gas at the pump is almost double the already exorbitant rate we are paying here in Pokeyville.

And check out this headline from today's NY Times: "Rural U.S. Takes Worst Hit as Gas Tops $4 Average" Read that story here.

Food in Ireland, which thanks to the EU has in the last years prospered enormously, is double what we are paying here. Yet, somehow, the restaurants are full. In London, I payed almost $90 for two of us at a Chinese restaurant; in Dublin and Edinburgh $50 for myself at several Italian joints.

Let us join hands and count our blessings one more time...

Five Grammys Later

Judge Craig Condemns Insite Ruling

INSITE RULING BAD MEDICINEDecision a Prescription for Crime
June 4, 2008

WAVING the flag of the Charter of Rights, judicial activism marches on, oblivious to its over-riding duty to maintain law and order.

Yesterday’s judges and magistrates were a muscular deterrence to the anarchy of habitual criminals including those who possessed or sold narcotics. Not so today, as hard-core addicts from across the country flock to the squalor of Vancouver’s skid road, comforted by the reality of easy-gotten bail and revolving-door sentences. They know how lenient our judiciary is, the hands-off attitude of our police, and they know all about our supervised injection site (Insite).

Insite is a deceitful first step by bureaucrats in the Health Authority of B. C. in their agenda to decriminalize possession of narcotics and other controlled drugs. Insite is just the cornerstone for introduction of an Orwellian system of bureaucratic regulation and distribution of illicit poisonous drugs. These pro-legalizers shun any discussion of the fact that their scheme will be unable to eliminate deadly competition from criminals engaged in local and worldwide illicit production and sale of drugs.

Insite is a surreal experiment which enables drug abuse. It claims to be managing each addict’s “illness” as part of a medical scheme. But there is no medical practitioner at the site doing individual medical assessment of each addict user and providing a management technique that, heaven forbid, would stop the addict from injecting an untested drug and send him into immediate detoxification and an attempt at abstinence.

On the propaganda side it is important to remember that the Health Authority self-evaluates this wacky scheme as the best health care delivery technique to deal with injection drug use. That claim is not even remotely true and is bunkum.

Let’s get down to hard, raw basic truth: Insite is a dressed up shooting gallery that provides a nurse to assist addicts in completing a safe and sanitary injection of unsafe and untested illicit drugs.

Insite was to close at the end of June unless granted a further extension of it’s exemption from proscriptions of the federal Controlled Drugs and Substance Act (CDSA).

However two drug addicts, the Health Authority, and an association of drug users began a civil suit to forestall closure. On May 28, Justice I. Pitfield accepted the plaintiffs’ claim and granted Vancouver’s Insite a constitutional exemption from the criminal offences of possessing and trafficking in drugs stipulated in the CDSA. Pitfield invoked the Charter and ruled that the provincial health authority intervention of Insite in treating addiction has constitutional paramountcy over federal criminal law.

In a 159-paragraph judgment Pitfield chewed his way through a legal cud of half-digested arguments and granted lawful status to Insite and its drug abusers.

Although the judgement is long and tedious, the basis for the ruling is concisely stated in the following excerpts:

“117. The difficulty in this case results from the fact that the CDSA prohibition against possession indirectly controls injection … and in doing so, has an incidental effect upon (Insite).
“119. …(Insite) is concerned with health care (and) …directly confronts the operation of the criminal law by permitting the possession of (drugs) …
…the Province has no capacity to override the criminal law by creating an environment in which individuals can conduct themselves free of its constraints.
“120. ...the conflict must be resolved by application of the doctrine of paramountcy. Absent Charter considerations, the criminal law must prevail.”

Pitfield then asked this question: Does criminalization of the drugs within the premises of (Insite) violate section seven of the Charter, the right to liberty and security of the person? After more ruminating he decided that denying a habitual criminal access to a health facility that enables safe injection was a denial of a fundamental right to justice.

The Plaintiffs took the judge up the garden path and into their briar patch called harm reduction. They convinced him that Insite is an actual health care facility because it provides nurse-supervised injections coated with talk to fuzzed-out addicts about referral to treatment. Without a practising physician on hand at all times, Insite is quack medicine without even a quack cure.

We are forced to live with the absurdity of the estimated 500 addicted habitual criminals, regular users of Insite – only a small fraction of the many thousands who are active in Metro Vancouver – are prowling about 24/7 in search of property to steal and sell, all deserving of a stint in jail, all absolved of their criminal behaviour and patted on the head when they step into the facility. Once inside, the magic of words of Judge Pitfield make criminal behaviour into a health issue. Ill-gotten drugs – paid for by sale of stolen property or robbery – satisfactorily injected.

Judge Pitfield says it is an addict’s fundamental right to management of his “illness.” I say it is a bungling accessory after the fact to rampant property and sometimes violent crime, and it is deserving of scalding condemnation.

It is a gross distortion of Charter rights to reward criminality with immunity.

Contact Judicial Gadfly at wallace-gilby-craig@shaw.ca or by posting your comment on the Writer’s Corner of http://www.realjustice.ca/.

TRAVEL WARNING

I leave this afternoon for England and will not be posting my customary blather until I return in early June.

In stead, a new uncustomary kind of blather.

Starting on Friday, when I arrive in Edinburgh, or maybe Saturday, after I've had a full day of wandering about, I will add notes and photos to my new travel blog:

http://laughingintheisles.blogspot.com

On Friday, May 30th, I will fly to Dublin - mostly just to claim that I once flew Air Lingus.

Eight nights on the River Liffey should be fun.

Bookmark the travel blog address and check it from time to time.

Shlante!

Let's Hold the System to its own, useless Standards

When parents have to go to court and sue the government du jour for medical help, you know something is fundamentally wrong.

I chose the word, "fundamentally" for a reason.

The current benchmark for determining the eligibility of a child with certain mental or psychological disabilities for government support is the child's IQ.

Think about that.

Whether or not your child can be cared for has been encased in some bureaucratic rule book to be decided by NUMBERS.

But this is not about numbers, including the obvious numbers of cost.

As long as governments continue to disrespect their employees and hold no trust in the ability of case workers to make reasonable judgments, we will all be bound by "The Manual."

The particular code book in this case is called, ironically enough, Community Living British Columbia. Nice moniker. Too bad it doesn't know how to run its own affairs.

The dreadful minister in charge, Tim Christensen, opines that "more work needs to be done."

What the fool means by this, of course, is that they need to find a better encoding or better rule book methodology, when, in fact, what is needed is exactly the opposite. The system starts from exactly the wrong place.

Hire knowledgeable, skilled workers and let then make responsible decisions.

Under the current system, you could simply answer a web test.

"My child has an IQ over/under 70."

What's the IQ cut-off for Ministers?