Quote of the Day

In defending his indefensible closing down of the fall sitting of the legislature, Premier Tickets says he wants his cabinet ministers dashing about the province speaking to citizens on "how we can share the prosperity."

"How we can share the prosperity..."

OK. I admit it. I'm speechless.

No Shame

Surrey Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal is Jewish. Who knew?

Either that or he's just stolen the whole idea of chutzpah.

It takes some sechel to stand up in public and defend the act of defending a gangster.

Dhaliwal admits that he has never checked on the gangster's record current or past.

Go ahead, Surrey, re-elect this disgrace to parliament.

Life Long Learning

The young woman who is auctioning off her virginity - and we are supposed to believe she is still in possession of same - to pay for more education already has a bachelor's degree in....wait, please...
"women's studies" and now wants to capture a master's degree in...hold, hold...marriage and family therapy.

You cannot write material like this.

"Max" is one of the many lovelies available at Dennis Hof's world famous Bunny Ranch, where our academic's sister works to pay off her college debts.

This is a family with a whole new take on things.

Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed?

Surrey Liberal MP Sukh Dhaliwal has written to a U.S. District Court judge on official House of Commons stationery in support of convicted international drug trafficker Ranjit Singh Cheema.

Hahahaha...

In short, a parliamentarian has written his support for a gangster.

The fact that the parliamentarian is a Liberal should have no bearing on your understanding of this situation.

The fact that the parliamentarian and the gangster share ethnicity should have no bearing on your understanding of this situation.

The gangster also received letters of support from a religious organization that was embroiled in controversy earlier this year when a parade it was hosting featured photos of assassins and leaders of designated terrorist groups, who were depicted as martyrs.

My distaste for the Liberal part of Canada deepens by the hour.

As for ethnic politics, the less said the better.

Justice Derailed

This is how our criminal justice system has devolved.

We now have university psychologists recommending how judges can make their instructions to jurors understandable.

We're not quite sure if the problem is that the judges mumble or the jurors are both hearing and intelligence impaired.

But, clearly, when the Kelly Allard-Reena Virk file can be properly and finally laid to rest, something is terribly amiss.

(F)Arts Dollars

It is appropriate that the announcement was as paltry as the content.

Relegated to a paragraph or two on page B2, the miscellany of local news, the "news" is that the BC Arts Council has awarded - wait for it, hold the apple sauce, er, applause - $7 Million to 270 artists and cultural organizations.

Oh, whoop-a-tee-ai-oh!

This is lunch money.

When I learn that we have invested $70 Million or $700 Million, I'll get off the couch and dance. Until then, keep the mediocrity coming.

Democracy demands that any damn fool have his/her day

Let Elizabeth May debate and appear in public during the election.

Then we will see what a paucity is her platform.

Harper, Dion nd Doucette may be accused of many things, but sheer irrelevance and silliness may not be among the charges.

Wonderful, Informed Commentary on My province Column on Education

Dear Sir:

Thank you for encouraging people to make education an issue during elections. I wish more people in the media would scrutinize this vitally important part of our society and suggest ways in which politicians could and should improve education, which is, as you rightly point out, the key to our future and our prosperity as a society, besides being probably our second biggest public investment after health care. This second factor alone demands more public scrutiny of whether we are investing all our education funds in ways which benefit as much as possible our students, our schools, our society.

My view may not be worth a bean, but it is based on thirty-two and a half years of experience as a secondary school teacher and teacher-librarian in B.C. I thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of teaching kids and working with them in the school library, but I feel that educators and the education system are being suffocated by the ever-increasing bureaucracy and politics of local school boards and their ballooning school board offices, added to the politics and bureaucracy of unions and the ministry.

Much criticism is being made (quite rightly) of the recent enormous salary raises granted provincial government bureaucrats, but the media breathes not a word of the steady increases in the number of school board office bureaucrats and of their salaries over the years, absorbing education dollars that are dearly needed in schools, in classrooms.

I am convinced that the only way to achieve renewal and improvement in our education system is to carry out a long-overdue reform similar to that adopted recently in Sweden. There local boards were abolished, and responsibility and funds were redirected to the schools, just as in the private school system. This reform was resisted by unions and bureaucrats, but it has proved to be a success for education in Sweden, and almost everyone now supports it. This is precisely the type of reform advocated by Quebec's new party, l'Action Democratique, which nearly won the last provincial election in Quebec.

Sadly, I feel that both the major parties in BC are too wedded to Big Bureaucracy to ever introduce such a healthy reform in education, and they are happy that the media almost never digs into exactly how our education dollars are being spent and what alternatives there are to this wasteful, bureaucratic and outmoded status quo. Until a sensible new political party is born in BC, as occurred in Quebec during the 1990's, I am convinced that the only real alternate viewpoint and "official opposition" that we can hope for in the issue of education (and justice and other major issues, alas) will come from the media and public comment. For this reason, again I thank you for your interest in this matter and the informed viewpoint on education that you expressed in your recent article.

Yours truly,

Richard Sharpe

---

Dope

The methadone story has found its way from The Courier, where it began last Friday with Mark Hasiuk's excellent piece, to Sunday's Province to this morning's Sun.

Good to see that the story has some legs.

But will anything be done? All of the usual suspects - the politicos and the professional "Colleges" - all claim to having deep investigations in process.

Oh?

Here in BlogLand, every time I have every mentioned the word methadone in public - and I've been doing that for only 40 years now - as predictable as rain, voices emerge from the shadows to extol the virtues of this poison and its deadly, destructive official uses.

All I can say is thank you for your comments and I hope that one day you will find the strength to move on without this entirely unnecessary drug as your main companion in life.

Roger, the Great

For a year and a half now, I have been frothing at the gills, exhorting Roger Federer to come to net, to serve and volley, to play more aggressively.

Good man, he finally listened to me.

Yesterday, in defeating And Murray handily in 3 straight sets, he became the first tennis player of any of the 12 genders to win five Wimbledons in a row and five US Opens in a row.

He was magnificent and a joy to watch.

Hmmmm....Smells Good!

The Prime Minister of Thailand, Samak Subderavej, may have to step down from office.

He is accused of taking money from a private company to host his TV cooking show.

The show is called "Tasting and Grumbling."

Let us not ask why Canadian PM's have never had cooking shows?

Let us not ask if Ryan Baloney's son can host "Canadian Idol," could Papa Gucci's cooking show not be far behind?

Let us not ask if Kim Campbell lives on take out.

Instead ask who is prepared to back my new TV culinary hit, "Cooking & Kvetching and Noshing from every pot."

Played this before, but it's just so great, I have to run it again...

Monday Province Column

Keep the candidates on their toes with tough questions on learning

David Berner The Province
Monday, September 08, 2008

The kids are back in school.

And elections -- municipal, provincial and federal -- are on the horizon.

A perfect time, then, to reflect on what learning really means in our lives, and what those who seek your vote will really do about education.
There is no purpose in life higher than learning. Wealth, fame, sex, food, and other pleasures are all transitory. The only thing we can still be doing until our last breath is learning. To contribute in any way to the opportunities for young men and women to learn is an honour and a core duty.

As the various political contests heat up, ask the candidates pointed questions about the specifics of their commitments to learning. Here are four good sample questions to get you started:

One. Utilizing dead quiet buildings for everyone's benefit is fiscally-responsible. Will we open school buildings during evenings and on weekends for yoga classes, language labs and the like?

Premier Gordon Campbell said recently that he would like to see schools turned into neighbourhood centres of learning, for people of all ages to use, all year round. "Maybe the best thing is to make schools the centre for the community again," said Campbell. "They are actually centres of learning for everyone."

To this end, the $30-million Neighbourhoods of Learning pilot project will see three Vancouver schools accommodate additional services. Queen Mary Elementary, General Gordon Elementary and Lord Strathcona will be renovated to include new learning opportunities.

That's wonderful, but do we really need all that money spent and only three schools to benefit? How about making hundreds of schools across the province available to their neighbourhoods for those bake sales and clarinet classes?

Two. Drug Prevention. Every school corridor in the land is a drug mart. If you don't know this, you don't know your own kids. Ten minutes a week on drug prevention is better than nothing.

Will we invest in counsellors or recovering addicts to add some real girth to drug prevention? Or, are we going to continue to say nothing about this epidemic?

Three. Obesity. Education Minister Shirley Bond has declared that at least 30 minutes-a-day exercise is now mandatory in B.C. schools. But has she backed it up with a budget? Where are the phys-ed teachers or playground supervisors? Do math and history teachers still "volunteer" for these duties?

Four. Even with the availability of Google and Wikipedia, school libraries are essential. But we are closing and starving these sanctuaries too often in B.C. The heft and smell of a good book in the hands of a student leaning over a wooden table are treasures not to be lost. "School librarian" used to be an honourable title. Is it still?

So challenge the political wannabes for the sake of your children, for the sake of the future.

david@davidberner.com

Ennie, Meenie, Miney, Moe

A good friend writes in about the very real dilemma of voting in a wasteland:

Hi David,

As always I enjoy your blog and your occasional unscientific polls. I voted in the most recent one, my vote was for "nobody".

I understand your sympathy for our most recent prime minister, but I have to say that I still don't trust him. I still think that if he gets a majority we will see a brand new government agenda, and it will be a socially conservative, not a fiscally conservative one.

Having said all that, I am incredibly frustrated as a Vancouver Centre voter. These seem to be my choices:

- Hedy Fry - Liberal who has achieved nothing for my riding in almost 20 years of representing us.

- Lorne Mayencourt - Openly gay socred MLA who achieved nothing in all the years he represented us and who now wants to be a conservative MP! Has he ever noticed or has anyone ever pointed out to Lorne that the BC Libs/socreds and the Federal Conservatives HATE GAY PEOPLE? Its like he is suffering from the Stockholm syndrome. He is only in this for himself.

- The UBC socialist wingnut running for the NDP.

- The Green Party candidate who is still out on the streets begging for people to sign her nomination form.

Whom from this list would you vote for?

What would a poll for Vancouver Centre look like?

Best,

John

Everywhere Boredom takes You

The CBC is spending scads of your tax dollars buying up full pages of papers across the nation to announce that they will now be showing those two great Canadian productions, "Wheel of Fortune" and "Jeopardy."

They are so lost and confused.

CBC Television should be, simply put, the Canadian PBS. It should show Canadian and World drama, comedy, music and public affairs programs.

It should not be showing the same old syndicated programs that run on every American station available. It is not their mandate.

Rather than being ashamed at their paucity of ideas and courage, they trumpet it in daily newspapers at taxpayers' expense.

Corruption has many guises.

More truths About Methadone

From an actual clean and sober addict comes this important email. Please read it and understand how evil this sham is.

Hello,

I did quite a bit of research into the history of methadone programs and I found some interesting stuff.

The first methadone "maintenance" program in the world started in Vancouver in 1963. Prior to this there were other programs for methadone "withdrawal" programs already in operation in other countries but no maintenance programs, some say the first was in New York, but my research shows the first was most likely here.

Good old doc Halliday (Dr. Robert Halliday) from Vancouver applied to Ottawa and received the okay to start a methadone withdrawal program in Vancouver, the first in Canada in 1959-60. True to the roots of harm reduction, he applied to Ottawa to change the program from a "withdrawal" program to a "maintenance" program within a year of getting the withdrawal program up and running.

It seems that once the good doctor had his foot in the door with the approval from Health Canada for his withdrawal program , he immediately started to push for the envelope for change to a maintenance program, which took abstinece as the priority, out of the concept. Harm reductions been alive here for a long time. eh, half a century now.

I know from personal experience, that years ago, if an addict on the program tested dirty for other drugs they were removed from the program after a couple fo dirty tests, now I ahve learned that after every screw up they just give them more methadone, they think the problem is just not enough methadone. It has morphed into one of the worst of all harm reduction initiatives and it is more liberally applied here than almost anywhere else.

From a clean and sober heroin addicts perpective, it is the wost of all drugs. Coming off heroin is like a mild to mid range flu for 4-5 days, coming off methadone is excruciating pain for up to a month in most cases, even walking is very painful, the only thing to cause the pain to dimish is lots of hot baths. Methadone gets in the bones and detox is the worst of any drug, if you will notice how crippled and broken and hunched over addicts are on the DTES, they are mostly the ones who have been on methadone for years.

Now we see if the paper what I have known for years, but you get the watered down story, girls have told me about sexual favours for methadone and guys fencing hot good for there methadone, it is an evil empire, that harm reduction, junkie industry. 54 million is just for the drugs and dispensing fees, that's just the tip of the proverbial ice-berg, the regular doctors visits just to check in with the doc to keep the free legal dope coming and, overdose call outs from poly-use including methadone interactions and on and on.

Also, those on methadone are considered medically sick so they quailfy for almost a thousand bucks as month on the dole as they are considered eligible for welfare disabilty, I know of people who have went on the program just for the, almost double, welfare rates.

The real sad story is the doctors are putting non addicts on it now for long term pain relief for chronic pain, you will hear real horror stories about this in the not too distant future.

Hopefully the talking heads in Ottawa and Victoria will see the light, I hold out hope for Ottawa, but not so much for Victoria and absolutely none for the city of Vancouver.

Barry

PS The new community court isn't so new, they are doing almost exactly the same thing they did when they tried to adopt the "Drug Court Program" from the states in 2001. Predictably they will once again take a program that has had success south of the border and bring it here and put their "professional" harm reduction twist on it and render it ineffective, just as they did with the drug court thing.

Whats wrong with throwing them in jail like they do other criminals, thats the only way many of us got straight long enough to take a sober look at our life and find the desire to change. All this harm seduction, enabling, caretaking and mollycoddling is the exact opposite of what addicts need.

I was on the community consultation committe for the drug court when it started up in 2001, I was pretty hopeful and excited at first, like some are now for the new community court but I quickly lost hope as it's all based on harm promotion.. I mean reduction. Maybe Justice Gove will see through the b.s., I don't know

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My Weekend

and well into Monday...

The Methadone Scandals

In an excellent follow-up to the Courier's expose of methadone, the Province this morning ells us even more.

Today's piece by Susan Lazaruk is headlined:

Methadone kickbacks investigated

At least one pharmacy allegedly gave cash to addicts for prescriptions

None of that surprises me, but I must admit I was shocked to read that this province, which spends next to nothing on treatment, spends $54 Million a year of your taxpayer money on giving this synthetic drug to drug addicts.

What I have known for 40 years is 1) that methadone is 6 times as addictive as heroin and a nightmare to quit; and 2) 99% of all addicts who take "free" (to them, but not to you and me) methadone also use heroin and booze and drayno and anything else they can get their hands on each and every day.

There will be those among you who will claim that this - giving methadone - is better than nothing...and in saying that, you will reveal how little you understand of the nature of addicts and addictions.

Methadone is WAY WORSE than nothing.

It is one of the great ways that a lazy society has figured out how to keep addicts stupid and enslaved to their addictions.

And what about these righteous "professional" organizations - College of Pharmacists of B.C. and the College of Physicians and Surgeons, which administers this sick program?

Are they enjoying their lifestyles and their families and sleeping well at night while they rob the public and keep stupid, vulnerable people locked in misery?

$54 Million. My god! I'm still reeling over that news.

Stephane, We hardly Knew You

If you check the hilarious results of my Prime Minister survey - in the right hand cloumn - you will see that NOBODY trusts Stephane Dion

I think I will take to calling him Le Petite Weasel.

My Friday Province Column

will appear in the paper on Monday.

Don't even ask...