With The Thanks Of A Grateful Nation

War. Nobody likes it, least of all the people who have to go and fight but go they do. Most go because they consider it their duty to serve their country. Some never return from war, some return wounded. All who survive and who do return come home changed by the sheer brutality of the experience.

Canada’s military brass and the government talk a good talk about the courage and dedication of the men and women who serve in our armed forces. They show up to greet returning coffins and even named a stretch of highway for the fallen, calling it the Highway of Heroes.

How nice.

What they don’t do is treat returning veterans with the respect and gratitude to which they are entitled after having risked their lives in defense of what these same politicians felt was important.

The Department of National Defense (DND) has gone out of its way to dismiss as unproven, the idea that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is a real mental illness which entitles returning veterans to benefits under their healthcare and disability plan. Imagine that, these are the same men and women who have spent endless nights and days fearing that their next step might trigger a land mine or that the approaching car might have a bomb in it.

They have been caught in firefights where people they don’t know and can’t see are trying to kill them and they experience this far from their families and the normalcy of life the rest of us take for granted.

Of course some of them will come home mentally wounded.

Peter McKay, the Minister of National Defense has chided the Defense Ombudsman for taking a role that was too close to that of advocate rather than mediator in disputes between DND and veterans. It isn’t hard to understand why. It is impossible to mediate when DND refuses to acknowledge a problem and is intransigent in its response to the real suffering of individual veterans and veterans issues as a whole.

Indeed, the government actually fought its veterans in court after being sued for having clawed back some of their benefits. The government has lost the first round. In other words, the courts have determined that the government’s position is quite simply wrong but they have magnanimously offered to settle the court case rather than appeal it. Settle it? That’s just another way of saying that if veterans take less than they are owed, then the government won’t drag the case out through various courts over a few more years at even greater expense.

It reminds me of the foot-dragging the government employed when it came to light that previous governments had surreptitiously used Canadian soldiers as guinea pigs in the testing of the effects of Agent Orange. When it came to light that disproportionate number of those soldiers was contracting cancer in later years and they sought compensation, the government fought the case in court in the cynical knowledge that many of the claimants would die before the case was concluded.

Two years ago, the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) took it upon themselves to fight the very veterans they represent to the point that they illegally accessed one particular veteran’s medical records and leaked them publicly in an attempt to embarrass him into silence. No one at DVA was fired for this incredible breach of ethics and the law.

Like many countries, Canada talks the talk but doesn’t walk the talk when it comes to the men and women who serve in our armed forces. A young soldier suffering from PTSD, and who was suicidal, was ordered back into the combat zone after only one month of treatment. The result? He committed suicide and DND dismisses any responsibility but has fought the family tooth and nail over release of documents related to their son’s case.

The Liberal Chretien government ordered support troops to Iraq during the first Gulf War. We didn’t have desert camouflage so the government sent them to a desert country disguised as trees. Fortunately, the Americans provided some desert camouflage uniforms so that our troops wouldn’t look like a forest walking down the dusty road.

The Navy’s Sea King helicopters passed their shelf life thirty years ago. The Conservative government under Brian Mulroney finally ordered replacements in the early 90s. The incoming Liberal government under Jean Chretien cancelled the order at a cost of $500 million and initiated a new procurement for helicopters.

It is now 2012. None of the replacement helicopters have been delivered and nobody in the Conservative government of Stephen Harper has a clue when they might arrive. Meanwhile, the Navy continues to repair and fly its Sea Kings which has resulted in more than one crash and the death of at least one pilot.

The situation isn’t any better in the United States.

Officials at Houston’s National Cemetery banned all religious observances at funerals and the Obama Administration was forced to reverse a decision to ban any and all religious symbols and literature in veteran’s hospitals.

Imagine the stupidity of that policy for a moment.

The government banned religious books, like the bible, from people who actually offered their lives to preserve the freedoms of the United States which includes religious freedom. That absurd policy actually meant that a Catholic veteran who was dying in hospital would not be permitted the last rites by his grateful nation.

I spent six weeks in Miami on business two years ago and was overwhelmed by the number of veterans I saw who were missing limbs and needed wheelchairs. Many of them were poorly dressed and living on social assistance in poverty. They were the forgotten, no longer of use to government and so were discarded.

Too many of our veterans find it challenging reintegrating into civilian life. They have difficulty finding meaningful employment but the bureaucrats and the politicians are far too busy to implement programs to assist them. Instead, they waffle, speak honey words while clawing back benefits and fighting in court the very men and women who served with distinction and courage.

Many of the same bureaucrats who deny the legitimacy of the effects of combat on veterans avail themselves of their benefits program to go on stress-related leave because....well....it's just very stressful pushing paper all day and fighting citizens on behalf of the government. It makes one wonder how quick they would be to deny veterans their benefits if they were veterans returning home after having lived for months in the 24/7 stress of a combat zone. It makes you wonder how well they would hold up in Afghanistan or some other God-forsaken war zone when they can't handle the stress of a 9-5 job downtown.

My guess is that they wouldn’t come close to meeting the standards of the men and women who have worn the uniform with courage and honour.

It is a disgrace that government doesn’t show them the honour they deserve.

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

all rights reserved

The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others

Follow The Bear on Twitter: @maggsbear or connect on Facebook: Maggie's Bear

Flights Of Fantasy - The Left's Approach To The Economy

If you're planning to read this post, you probably should get a coffee because it's a long one.

Canada’s socialist New Democratic Party is worried about Canada’s trade imbalance. I know this because their leader, Thomas Mulcair, has waxed poetically in another of his apoplectic fits as he blamed the government for this newfound crisis. He is positively livid about the fact that Canada is currently importing more than it is exporting.

Sometimes, he gets so livid his face turns red and I worry about his blood pressure rising to the point that he becomes dizzy and might trip over his sanctimonious rhetoric and hurt himself.

Earlier this year, he was positively livid about the fact that western provinces like Alberta were doing very well while Ontario and Quebec and were struggling economically. Mr. Mulcair, in what has become the mantra of the left these days, blamed the successful economies in the west for the failure of those who mismanaged their affairs in the east. Sounds like so many today who blame their personal plight on those who have succeeded doesn’t it? 

Blame and envy are something at which the left has become very accomplished.

The Ontario and Quebec Liberal governments who had bought their way into power on borrowed money weren’t responsible for their economic woes according to Mr. Mulcair; it was the success of the resource driven economies in the west. It wasn’t absurd entitlement and meddling policies of the left-leaning governments that were responsible, it was the successful governance of the Conservative government in Alberta.

That argument sounded good but didn’t fly very well unfortunately because a rather significant wave of inconvenient facts in both Parliament and the media undermined Mr. Mulcair's carefully crafted criticism..  Undeterred, Mr. Mulcair has switched course and is now blaming the state of things on Canada’s trade imbalance. 

Mr. Mulcair is nothing if not flexible and willing to embrace change on a moment’s notice.

While I’m sure that most of us welcome the NDP’s newfound interest in the benefits of trade to our economy, I think it would be prudent if they took the time to learn how it all works before jumping into the debate. 

The NDP seem to want to have it both ways. They criticize the government for negotiating free trade with Europe and parts of Asia while criticizing the government that we don’t have enough markets for our exports and they positively deplore our free trade agreement with the United States. 

The NDP have, in fact, consistently voted against every trade deal negotiated by the government over the years, including one with Liechtenstein. They were quite concerned about the negative impact of trade with a nation that has a population of 35,000 and whose major exports are ceramics, sausage casings and false teeth. 

One shudders to think of what will happen to Canada’s sausage casing industry now that our government has negotiated a trade deal with Liechtenstein. 

The simple reality is that trade is a two-way street. You can’t trade by yourself. Trading with yourself could be called hoarding and doesn’t work very well. You have to have someone to trade with and if they aren’t prepared or able to trade with you because their economies are in the toilet, then there is going to be some kind of slowdown in trade activity. 

Apparently Mr. Mulcair was so focused on blaming other Canadians for the mess in Ontario and Quebec while trying to save the sausage casing industry, he didn't notice that most of the world is in economic recession.

Canada’s economy is quite stable, in fact it is outperforming all countries in the G7. This means that we have stuff to trade and the ability to buy but some of our trading partners are in less stable economic shape than we are. Hence, we’re importing more right now than we’re exporting. Mr. Mulchair and his NDP would shout that we wouldn’t have to import so much if we manufactured more and he’s correct. You can’t manufacture more, however, when government tax and energy policies along with unions salary demands have priced manufacturing jobs right out of the market.

The simple truth is that manufacturers are leaving the country, taking their jobs with them to countries where labour and operating costs are less expensive.

The fact is that if it costs more to manufacture something, that cost will be reflected in the selling price which affects whether or not people will buy it. It is difficult to trade Canadian manufactured goods when so many of them are more expensive to produce thanks to high labour costs, than those same goods can be produced elsewhere.

It is one of the great weaknesses of the left, that it has never understood that government does not control the economy. In fact, most politicians on the left don’t fully understand how economies work at all . That is evident by the interfering policies they implement.

In Quebec, for example, the new PQ government is moving to protect Quebec-owned corporations from foreign takeover. This is in response to a recent offer by Lowe’s to purchase Rona, a large Quebec-owned hardware/lumber chain. The government refers to Rona as a “champion of Quebec business”. Some champion. Over the past five years, Rona’s shares have plummeted 48% which is more than four times the drop in the Standard & Poor’s/TSX Composite Index over the same period. It makes you wonder how well the non-champions in Quebec are performing and how much that's going to cost taxpayers.

Fortunately, the new socialist PQ premier has reassured us that both she and her new finance minister, a former academic, both have MBA's so I guess we can all sleep better tonight.

The Quebec Government authorized the purchase of shares in Rona to artificially prop up the share price. Who pays for that? Why taxpayers of course.

And that’s the problem with the left’s approach to the economy. 

They introduce policies that negatively impact the market which hurts shareholders which include every day folks like you and I, as well as, many public sector and private pension funds. That drives capital to other, more attractive investment opportunities, which undermines economic growth. This has a negative impact on the companies that the government was trying to protect for political optics which results in more tax money being spent to prop up those companies as we saw in the bail out of the auto sector in 2008/09. It undermines investor confidence which reduces business development and job growth.

It also discourages new business start-up and foreign investment which further impedes job growth and economic prosperity.

The government of the United States is shutting down coal plants at the cost of thousands of jobs at precisely the time when unemployment is a huge problem in America and without a plan in place to replace those jobs. It bans off shore drilling in the United States but provides billions in support of the same thing in Brazil. Only the left would spend billions to prop up in another country what it bans in its own, providing jobs to that foreign country rather than its own unemployed citizens.

It was the same government that declined to approve the Keystone pipeline which would have provided thousands of high-paying American jobs and a stable supply of oil from a friendlier ally than many from whom America now depends on for oil imports.

This is done to win favour with the environmental movement that love sustainable energy and who are as clueless about the economy as fruit flies.

Sustainable energy is the darling of the left with claims of new jobs and cleaner environments. For the foreseeable future it is nothing but wishful thinking, a flight of fantasy that was tried in Europe and which is failing. Even the NDP's much vaunted cap and trade policy has been tried only to result in increased cost, slower economic growth and outright corruption.

The problem with sustainable energy is that it remains too expensive and unable to meet industrial demands. Millions were spent by the Obama administration on Solyndra to advance solar energy only to see the company go bankrupt, taking its promise of cleaner energy and a half billion of tax payer money with it.

In Ontario, the government squanders billions on wind and solar which is seeing companies paying absurd increases in energy costs. In some cases, increases under Ontario’s Clean Energy act have been upwards of 1000% and that, my gentle gum drops, causes companies to shut down and/or relocate which costs jobs which cause economic hardship and undermines prosperity.

Ontario's economy, which just a decade ago was the powerhouse of Canada, isn't even the envy of Greece these days and most of it is the fault of bad economic management by a Liberal government and it's fuzzy economic policies.

Quite frankly, if the objective is simply cleaner air, the left’s program will work well because in the end, nobody will be able to afford to live here and everyone will have moved away leaving a big empty place with lots of clean air.

The really stupid thing about the Clean Air Act in Ontario is that of the top 10 cities with the cleanest air in the world, Canada already had eight of them. Considering how the left has screwed up our economies, I would suggest that stupidity was a bigger problem than clean air.

It almost makes you long for the good old days when the Liberal Party of Canada simply stole money from taxpayers as they did during AdScam. At least we didn’t have to deal with all this pretentious, self-serving and uniformed rhetoric every day and it really didn't hurt the economy or cost jobs.

Clean energy, like fair trade and equitable labour practices, are all laudable goals and should be part of a nation’s long-term economic planning but the left doesn’t plan. It reacts. It grasps at trends and politicizes issues to the point where more damage is done by their policies than by simply leaving things alone. 

Studies have shown that prosperity has consistently been higher during periods of reduced government interference than during those periods where government increased its presence through regulation and control; but that doesn’t deter the left. Despite repeated historical failure, it persists in its absurd attempts to do what cannot be done, control economies and socially engineer societies.

Government doesn’t belong in business any more than business belongs in government. It is government’s job to provide a level and fair playing field with sufficient regulation and safe-guards to protect investors, employees and the public and then get the hell out of the way. It is the responsibility of business to make a profit and in so doing, provide jobs and prosperity for the country.

The sooner the left realizes that, the better off more of us will be. Don’t hold your breath, however, as people like Thomas Mulcair have shown time and time again, when it comes to the economy the left are slow learners.

I told you this was going to be a long post.

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

all rights reserved

The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others

Follow The Bear on Twitter: @maggsbear or connect on Facebook: Maggie's Bear

The Power Of Silence

Every day, without exception, social and the mainstream media offer up reasons for voting against Barack Obama or Mitt Romney; the same reasons over and over and over and over again. God! It is so tedious and inane most of the time that it leaves me with the same disgusted shiver I get when I hear someone drag their fingernails down a blackboard. 

Most of them are tweeted or posted by people who have never looked beyond their political bias at simple things like facts, political records and the real details being promised by both party platforms. Indeed, some of the most strident comments come from people who haven’t got a clue what is being offered by either party. They never allow objective analysis of the country’s economic or foreign affairs situation to get in the way of what they tweet or even what they believe.

Obama is black and cool, therefore he should be president. Romney is conservative and has nice hair; therefore it is he who should be president. The country would be no worse served if both names were simply put in a hat and one drawn to become president.

The rhetoric and hyperbole has has gone beyond partisanship and become blind fanaticism in many cases.

There are plenty of reasons not to vote for Barack Obama but these aren’t them even though they are the most often offered up by Twitter:

- He wasn’t born in the United States and is not an American

- He is a Muslim agent of Iran

- He is secretly gay and has had gay affairs while in the White House

- He’s stupid

There are also plenty of reasons not to vote for Mitt Romney but none of these are any of them even though they are offered up daily but those who support the President.

- He is wealthy and earned his money by raiding companies and firing people

- He wants to give more money to the rich at the expense of the middle class

- He has initiated a war on women

- He’s a racist

What a crock this stuff is. None of it is true for either candidate and none of it is relevant to deciding for whom to vote. It is noise and invective that is designed to bolster weak and prejudiced opinions that have no factual basis or to distract the opposition from exposing the weakness of the candidate they support and, quite frankly, there are more than enough weaknesses to go around.

Barack Obama is an intelligent, well-intentioned person who has simply failed to deliver on the promises he made in the 2008 campaign. The American economy is a disaster that can no longer be blamed on the previous administration, recent events in the Middle East and North Africa have underscored the weakness of his foreign policy and the country has become more divided and angry under his administration than under any that went before it.

Unemployment is too high, America’s credit rating has been downgraded again, and the national deficit has increased by $6 trillion in four years compared to the $4 trillion over the eight years of the Bush administration. In other words, it is accelerating.

Mitt Romney is an intelligent, well-intentioned person who stumbles from one gaff to the next. He is caught between the radicals and the pragmatic within his party and hasn’t figured out quite what to do about it. His approach to leadership is timid and weak. He lacks vision. Consequently, his policy initiatives also lack clear direction or consistency which becomes clear every time he opens his mouth. His economic policies are as rooted in the failed ‘trickle down’ theories of the past as Obama’s are rooted in some fuzzy concept of redistribution of wealth.

Neither candidate is Satan but neither is very good. It’s amazing to me that a few billion dollars in campaign funding can’t produce better than what either the Democratic or Republican parties have offered to the American people this year.

I’m conservative and I make no apologies for it but I am not an idiot nor am I so partisan that I would rather sink and drown because I voted a failed conservative ticket than voting for a liberal ticket that actually made sense. The problem in this election is that neither platform makes much sense nor is either candidate offering much hope for the next four years.

The Obama Administration is a record of failure and lack of direction and is offering a continuation of the policies that created that failure. The Romney platform is a confused mish mash of economic and social policies that are out of date and will simply continue the downward slide of a great nation. 

Neither party is addressing the real issues facing the United States today.

More than 26 million Americans go to bed hungry or without knowing where their next meal will come from. Half of them are children. Where is the candidate who has a plan to deal with that level of poverty in America, let alone even thought about it?

More than 23 million Americans are unemployed. That is 2/3 of the population of Canada. Where is the plan to stimulate economic growth to produce jobs and not the low income and part-time jobs that have been produced over the past three years but real jobs; jobs that can sustain families?

Where is the commitment to reform taxation so that all pay their fair share? Both candidates are promising to tinker with taxation again but it will only add more complexity to the already 22,000 tax regulations that exist at the expense of one or another group of voters over another. It isn’t tax reform; it’s the same political pandering that has been going on for decades.

Where is the focused and comprehensive approach to foreign policy that goes beyond dreaming about past glories and continuing to make the same mistakes over and over again at the expense of American prestige and the lives of American citizens? How much longer will the leadership of the United States continue to pour billions of borrowed dollars into countries that have no respect for America and wish it harm? Where is the candidate who recognizes the failure of that stupidity?

The American people were promised change you can believe in during the 2008 election. What they got was more of the same confused leadership that bounced from issue to issue without much thought or direction and obstructionism from the opposite party at the expense of the people.

The simple fact is that American politics are now more about elections than governing. More effort, money, time and energy is spent getting candidates elected than in having elected candidates do their jobs. The President of the United States has spent more time traveling to and from campaign events this past week than in leading his people through the chaos of the latest radical Islamic uprisings.

For his part, Mitt Romney has criticized to varying degrees (depending on the latest news commentary) the actions of the President but always from some campaign event and never with any hard-core, specific alternatives offered.

It’s small wonder that those who would harm America don’t take the country seriously. They see a weak, confused leadership regardless of who gets elected. They see a super power that conducts itself like an adolescent with a huge military at best or standing like deer caught in the headlights at worst. 

More than a decade has passed since 9/11 and all that has changed is that Americans are subject to more intense security at their airports than is seen in many American embassies and consulates around the world.

All of that makes me wonder why so many people spend so much energy and are so aggressive in trying to prop up one or the other candidates for president. It seems to me that the nation would be better served by Americans, regardless of political affiliation, coming together and demanding better from the two main parties rather than supporting one of them as they are now.

And I do mean demanding.

How? What if they held a campaign rally and nobody showed up to cheer and chant? What if they asked for campaign funding support and nobody wrote a check?

What if they held an election and nobody showed up to vote?

What indeed! Revolutions don’t always have to involve guns and guillotines. Sometimes the most revolutionary acts are a simple refusal to continue to play the game or to be pawns in the games being played by others.

Every time someone supports their candidate by calling supporters of the other candidate a liar, a racist, a fascist, a homophobe or any one of a hundred other ridiculous and inaccurate labels that I’ve seen on social media over the past week, they support the game and perpetuate the downward slide.

Every time marauding gangs of virulent supporters try to shout down or overpower legitimate criticism of their preferred candidate rather than engaging in a reasoned and informed discussion, they only support the further decline of their government leadership.

It’s like cheering for cancer rather than working to save the patient.

Imagine what would happen at both campaign headquarters if Twitter and Facebook suddenly went silent about the election. Imagine what would happen if people just stopped talking about the candidates and refused to publicly take sides.

Imagine what would happen if Americans refused to tell pollsters how they were going to vote or the mainstream media who they were supporting. Imagine what would happen if Americans simply refused to play the game anymore and stood silently until the political class took its head out of its ass and finally came to its senses.

Imagine what would happen if nobody showed up to vote because they were so disgusted by the alternatives being offered to them they refused to participate or be treated like morons as they are to a great extent now.

Imagine what would happen if people suddenly realized that freedom of speech include the freedom to say nothing at all.

It won’t happen, of course, but just imagine how much power there would be in that for the people compared to how little power is in all this absurd bickering, accusation and noise. Silence isn’t just golden…..

......it often has far more power than noise ever will.

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

all rights reserved

The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others

Follow The Bear on Twitter: @maggsbear or connect on Facebook: Maggie's Bear

Aliens Walk Among Us - They Are Called Bureaucrats

After many years of thought, I have come to the conclusion that government is only good at two things; regulation and collecting money. I know some of you are thinking they’re really good at spending money too but I think they spend money poorly but boy do they know how to find more of it and how to extract it from even the most reluctant of us.

Government has figured out how to tax everything and when all that tax money proved to be insufficient for what they were spending it on, they invented user fees for things our taxes had already bought and paid for. They created fees for permits, licenses and the documents they require us to have and they have built a bureaucracy to control it all.

Canada’s GDP is estimated at $1.74 trillion annually. User fees, income and capital gains taxes alone take more than $299 billion out of the economy (source: Canada Revenue Agency and Stats Canada). Add to that consumption taxes which include the federal Goods and Services Tax, provincial sales taxes, excise taxes, school taxes, municipal property taxes, provincial income taxes and my particular favourite, the Welcome Tax in Quebec. (Home buyers pay what is referred to as a welcome tax on the purchase of a home as a way of making them feel welcome in their new community.

Overall, all levels of government combined take approximately 50% of the income earned by Canadians in the form of taxes or user fees and that, my friends, is greed at a level that would make the guys from Enron drool and Bernie Madoff positively slap his forehead and ask himself, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

They use that money to provide services, many of which we never hear of or see. Why? Because they turn the money over to the bureaucracy and the bureaucracy is quite simply a world of its own. In fact, I actually believe that government bureaucrats are the direct descendants of a race of aliens who came to earth eons ago after their home planet became so weighted down by red tape and regulation, it imploded.

I also believe that politicians are the descendants of the cross breeding between the ancestors of those bureaucrats from another planet and human beings.

They look like us. They walk like us but they don’t think, talk or live like us. They have no soul. That is how we know that they are not from around here. They are like ants living in a colony. They each have assigned tasks and go about those tasks like robots and because of that single-minded focus they now control everything.

Bureaucrats exist to regulate and control Politicians exist to spend money. That is their only purpose in life. They were bred  by bureaucrats to feed the bureaucracy. Without the politicians, bureaucrats would have nothing to do and all that money they collect so industriously would sit in a big room somewhere collecting dust. They are like bees who collect pollen every day, it has to be used or sooner or later the hive drowns in it.

Initially, politicians weren’t very good at spending money. Some, in fact, were downright frugal which really tended to gum up the works so bureaucrats had to come up with additional ways to spend money and they did. They invented regulations and they found that it was good. This had the advantage of not only increasing cost but it also helped to teach their political offspring new ways to spend money. This allowed bureaucrats to find new ways to target the collection of money.

They have become so good at imposing regulation that nothing escapes them; nothing is too small or insignificant for some form of government control. They regulate everything.

They regulate traffic with signs instructing us to follow the rules: stop, no parking, no stopping, no turns, right turn only, left turn only, do not enter, no left turn, no right turn, yield, merge and my favourite, proceed with caution.

If it moves, they license it including; boats, cars, bikes, dogs, motorcycles and aircraft.  If it’s fun they require a permit be purchased. Bureaucrats are suspicious of fun and so charge citizens to hold parades, community sports events, festivals, outdoor concerts and to make a few bucks as buskers on our streets.

If it is stationary, they tax it and have developed property taxes, agricultural taxes and marketing boards, parking fees and fines for non compliance.

They have effectively squeezed the mob out of the distribution and control of cigarettes, booze and gambling and soon will have pushed them out of illegal drugs. The bureaucracy and their political offspring is considering ways to legalize drugs which will lead to a whole new group of regulations, fees and taxes. Soon, the mob will be reduced to holding garage and bake sales and no one, not even Francis Ford Coppola will want to make movies about them anymore.

If you buy it, you pay a consumption tax. If you sell it you pay income tax on the money you made over a certain amount. If you die, they tax the pennies on your eyes.

They regulate safety, health, transportation, communications, education, the environment, infrastructure development, hunting, fishing, professional and amateur sports and business. In fact, they regulate everything except credit card interest rates and gas prices. 

They impose costs on manufacturers with ridiculous labeling restrictions and delay new product development with endless assessments, reviews and licensing processes. The bureaucracy lives for process. It is their oxygen.

The list is endless and even as I write this, somewhere in Canada….perhaps in many somewheres….there are government bureaucrats developing, refining and considering new regulations and planning the number of new bureaucrats it will require to monitor and enforce those regulations.

The simple fact is that the single biggest industry in Canada now is government. When you add all governments together, government employees more people than any other industry. It touches more lives than any other industry including technology. In fact, government touches pretty much every Canadian’s life from birth to death and then, of course, they don’t want anything to do with you although in some jurisdictions you are still permitted to vote after you die .

And that, my friends is the real problem. Government is not an industry. It produces nothing and creates no wealth. It erodes it. Government takes wealth from its citizens and the more wealth it takes the more it threatens the prosperity of every individual and the nation as a whole.

I believe we should all contribute our fair share to provide the common services we need as a society. I even believe in a responsible social safety net but when government is taking half of the wealth generated by a people, it’s starting to cross over into Marie Antoinette territory and that creates unrest that didn’t end well for anybody, especially Marie and many of her friends.

In the United States, the situation is not much better as exemplified by the 22,000 income tax regulations that country's bureaucracy has developed and by the current presidential election campaign. Both candidates are offering government in one form or another as the solution to the problems our American friends are facing but just as it is in Canada, and every other country in the world, democratic and totalitarian alike; government is the problem.

How do I know this?

I ran this post by someone who works for government at a fairly high level and he told me that he agreed and wanted to work towards bringing about real change to government…….and he was prepared to hire as many people as necessary to make that happen. 

I could almost hear the mechanical voice inside his head  whispering over and over and over again , “this does not compute”.

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

all rights reserved

The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others

Government Has Discovered The Organic ATM Machine.- We're Screwed!

I stumbled over an interesting tidbit yesterday. The Parliamentary Budget Officer released a report that shows the federal government is now raking in some $10 billion in user fees. It was a striking number that made me ask a simple question. 

For what?

Aren’t government user fees sort of the same things as having your own employees charge you for using the facilities and services for which you already paid and own? Where’s that money gone for Pete’s sake? It’s like having your kids charge you for the hug you want to give them and thought the new iPhones you bought them last week had earned you.

It was mildly annoying but I thought I’d let it go because I’m feeling pretty magnanimous this week and decided to cut the government a break but…..I couldn’t let it go and ended up doing a little research.

Guess what?

User fees have become a major windfall for governments at all levels. In fact, the combined amount of user fees charged by all levels of government in Canada is more than $60 billion. I will repeat that for you, my fellow gentle, organic ATM machines. Our governments are charging us $60 billion to use the services and facilities we paid for out of our tax money.

Municipal governments charge user fees to use ‘our’ sports facilities even though we paid to have them built and pay the salaries of those who operate them. They charge for permits that they require us to have and that’s an excellent racket if I ever saw one. Make it mandatory to get a permit and then charge to supply it. Only two organizatons could come up with an idea like that; the government and the mob.

They even charge to park in our parking lot at City Hall when we go down to interact with our municipal government. I’m thinking of requiring them to come to my home where I can park for free the next time they want to interact with me.

Provincial governments also charge user fees for things like parking at hospitals and provincial offices and copies of our records like birth certificates. They charge user fees to use the parks we paid to build and pay to maintain. Many schools now charge users fees for extracurricular activities that were once free and for specialized courses like French, art and music. Imagine that; charging a user fee to learn one of Canada’s official languages in a school.

In Quebec, where I live, the government actually charges a $2.50 fee if you show up at the license bureau to pay your registration in person rather than mailing in a check. Unbelievable; a user fee for the privilege of paying another user fee in person. I'm thinking that next year, I'll bury the money for my registration in the front yard and sent them an email treasure map where to find it.

Government, of course, justifies this by telling us that we must pay these fees if we want to benefit from and continue to enjoy these services and facilities. I think, however, that what we need is some fresh blood in government because I tend to believe that government has lost its sense of perspective at best and its collective mind at worst.

Let’s back up just a bit. We agreed to pay income tax, property tax and school tax to provide certain fundamental common services. We’ve even, reluctantly at times, agreed to increases in those taxes to offset the rise in the cost of living. Government, for its part, took that money and spent it. To be fair, some of it was used for its intended purposes but much of it went to bloated bureaucracies, extravagant facilities we didn’t need or ask for and, of course, entitlements that are very handy things to offer at election time.

Government further compounded the situation by managing to find the most complex and expensive method of doing anything while at the same time reducing the pool of tax payers by handing out tax breaks to political parties, charities, non-profit foundations and unions which pay no tax at all on the membership income they take in and use to support their political campaigning and activism.

This meant that government didn’t have enough money to do everything it was supposed to do so it introduced other taxes including: consumption taxes like the GST and provincial sales taxes, health taxes, excise taxes and capital gains tax among others. Of course, once that money started to flow, government came up with new things to spend it on.

The bureaucracies grew, the entitlements expanded and public sector compensation packages became a thing of beauty.

More money was needed, so after raising the taxes on sin products like cigarettes and booze, the government took over the mob’s old rackets and got into the Numbers Game with lotteries of all shapes and sizes. Of course, that necessitated even more administration so some governments expanded again and opened up casinos. 

In Quebec, where I live, there is a lavish casino that makes about 10% profits. Imagine, a casino that only made a gross profit of 10%. How is that possible when you are the only casino in the region? It’s possible because government knows as much about running a casino as it does about managing health care services in an efficient manner.

Now governments are charging us user fees for the very things all that tax money paid for and continues to pay to maintain. Somehow, this makes sense to government but it doesn’t to me. They seem to believe that we are nothing but organic ATM machines and to be very blunt, I don't much like where they insert their debit cards in order to make withdrawal. 

I think we’ve reached a stage where we should just send all of our money to government and live for free. Government can buy our food, pay our mortgages, and give us weekly spending allowances to use for clothes, gifts and entertainment. We will pay for nothing. Government will pay for it all. When we need a new car, we’ll just call the car department of the government, give them the style and colour we want and they will send one right over.

It will be less expensive than what we’re living with now. At least we won’t need all those bureaucrats and tax departments who collect the taxes, user fees and other income now. Of course, now that I think of it I realize that they won’t actually get laid off. They’ll just get transferred to new departments in the bureaucracies so maybe that idea won’t work either.

Perhaps we should just bend over and kiss our asses goodbye or in the alternative bend over a little farther stick our heads up our asses until we can’t breathe and just suffocate ourselves to death so that we don’t have to live with this inanity any longer.

Of course, government will probably have a user fee for that too.

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

all rights reserved

The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others

Hating Harper - Canada's Prime Minister

The Public Service Alliance of Canada has started a campaign called “Harper Hates Us”. As a former marketing guy, I thought it was quite clever.. They’ve had little badges made up for union members to wear to work and even hired a small plane to fly around the nation’s capital with a big Harper Hates Us sign behind it. Of course, the RCMP took a dim view of that for some reason and ordered the plane down.

That’s annoying. Canada is a country that knows that Stephen Harper is the root cause of all of our problems and we should have the right to express our angst and displeasure.

It’s not for nothing that Canada’s Prime Minister has been one of the most unpopular politicians in recent memory, or at least, one of the most vilified. Almost from the day he first tossed his hat into the ring for the leadership of the Conservative Party, Stephen Harper has been the object of justifiable ridicule, rancor and demonization.

It’s not difficult to understand why.

It started right after he was first elected. Thank God for the unbiased Canadian media who were quick to point out what a cold fish the man is. They devoted more than a few days to commenting on how he was so cold, he actually shook hands with his son when the PM dropped him off on the fist day of school. Thanks to the media, we weren't fooled by the story that it was his son who asked the PM not to hug or kiss him goodbye in front of the media cameras.

Unlike his predecessor, Paul Martin who slashed health care transfer payments to the provinces, Stephen Harper not only reversed those cuts, he had the unmitigated gall to provide stable funding increases for the next eight years. Can you believe the temerity of the man? It was clearly a blatant ploy to get votes and obviously a reckless thing to do during these times of global economic uncertainty but fortunately, the provincial premiers weren't fooled. They were quick to condemn the Prime Minister, no doubt out of nostalgia for the good old days under Paul Martin's cuts during the strong global economy of the 90s.

In his first term in office, despite having only a minority government, Prime Minister Harper kept the five major promises he made during the election campaign. Unbelievable! Canada is a country that is used to its politicians lying to them. We depend on it now. It’s small wonder so many were outraged by this redneck from Alberta showing some integrity. If you can’t count on your politicians to be consistently dishonest, how can you decide where to cast your next ballot?

He was the first prime minister in Canada to introduce and have passed, a motion recognizing Quebec not only as a distinct society but as a nation within a nation. The Quebec electorate rightly refused to be taken in by his action which they had been demanding for decades and refused to vote for his party in the subsequent election. Good for them! They stood on principle and voted against Harper because he cut some funding to the arts in the rest of Canada during the global economic meltdown in 2008. Quebecers weren’t going to be fooled by silly things like reality or economic responsibility. They voted for the NDP, who presented them with candidates almost nobody, including the NDP had ever heard of (please excuse the dangling preposition but this has all just really upset me).

During the 2006 Election, the Liberals accused Stephen Harper of wanting to impose martial law and put troops on the streets of Canadian cities if elected. Being the only party that actually ever did impose marital law, you could trust that the Liberals knew what they were talking about but, once again, Prime Minister Harper failed to deliver.

He didn’t put troops in the streets, he didn’t declare martial law; he didn’t even get all that wound up about the Occupy movement. No wonder he is so unpopular. He can’t even get oppression right. It's enough to make you wonder how he can continue to pretend he's the fascist that Canadians know  he dying to be.

Fortunately we got to blame him for the police actions during the G8/G20 meetings in Toronto even though it was actually the Liberal Premier of Ontario who enacted emergency police powers legislation and it was the municipal and provincial police who were involved in all of the allegations of police brutality.

Thank God the Prime Minister has done some things which confirm our beliefs. He prorogued Parliament which even though it is perfectly legal and constitutional, was seen for what it was; a deliberate attempt to prevent the opposition parties from defeating the government and forcing an election. Of course, the prime minister had already announced he would introduce his new budget in 60 days and that would give the opposition ample opportunity to kill the government but it was very undemocratic to use a legal process to delay the non-confidence vote until after the budget was actually introduced.

We are used to the back room deals and dirty tricks that usually allow minority governments to avoid being defeated. We're seeing some of that in Ontario today thanks to more cheap moves by Liberal Premier Dalton McGuinty, a premier you can count on to be consistent with what we expect from our politicians.

Ultimately the government was defeated and an election called. It didn't work out quite the way the opposition promised, Mr. Harper was reelected and this time with a majority government. Now we are stuck with this guy for at least three more years. It’s very distressing that so many Canadians have been taken in by this guy and voted him a majority. It's even more annoying that he is the first prime minister n decades to have seats in every province and territory in Canada. Clearly there are a lot of people out there who need to give their heads a shake.

What were they thinking?

Oh sure, Canada now has the strongest economy in the G-7 but so what!

He has opened up trade with China and is in negotiations with Europe to expand free trade with the European Union. He leaves provincial matters to the provinces and does not interfere. The idiot actually believes in the Canadian Constitution as it is written and not as the premiers and former prime ministers wish it had been written. Ho hum!

He gave western farmers back the right to sell their wheat to whomever they want by abolishing the Canadian Wheat Board monopoly and has restored the Canadian military after decades of government neglect and budget cuts. Along the way he completed what everyone agrees was the most efficient and fair procurement process for the building of new ships that this country has ever seen. He even reached out to the family of the late Jack Layton, former leader of the New Democratic Party and offered them a state funeral for Mr. Layton, something totally out of the ordinary. Big deal!

None of that is important.

What is important is that he is very mean-spirited. He runs terrible ads against his political opponents (as opposed to the satirical ads they run about him) although he hasn’t quite reached the stage of former provincial NDP Leader Steven Lewis who used his eulogy at the state funeral for Jack Layton to publicly castigate the prime minister for his policies.

Clearly Prime Minister Harper lacks the class of the NDP.

He has been accused of various unethical breaches but once again isn’t very good at it. He lacks the skill of the Liberal Party who in the past 14 months have seen one of their senators sentenced to prison for misuse of government funds and had to fire a senior staffer for misuse of government resources to release personal information about a sitting cabinet minister. Recently they are are being unfairly attacked for  yet more political cheap tricks by taking advantage of one of their own senators who has dementia and who was declared mentally incompetent six months ago. Fortunately the mainstream media tend to downplay or rationalize this stuff so that they can keep the country properly focused on the nefarious intentions of Stephen Harper. No point in criticizing what is, we need to stay focused on criticizing what we want to believe may happen.

Unfortunately, Harper isn't cooperating (big surprise) because he isn't very good at being nefarious or even small-town cheap. As we all know, it takes Liberals to get that right.

He certainly can’t keep up with the NDP who used the death of their leader Jack Layton as a fund raising gimmick before he had even been buried (and for which they were rapped on the knuckles by Canada Revenue Agency for misuse of their political party tax status). The NDP were nailed last month for improper fundraising from the unions for which they were fined more than $300,000. Now that is beahviour we understand and can trust because we have seen it so often before.

Harper just doesn't get it. He is just too stubborn to actually stop and think about the possible shortcuts and ethical corners he should be cutting which only proves that he isn't a team player.

He has, for example, only managed to get into a wrangle with Elections Canada over the moving of campaign funds between the national and local election campaigns. It was called In and Out. One court found for Elections Canada, one for the Conservatives.

How typical! Harper’s biggest scandal was a question of interpretation of legislation on which even the courts couldn't agree. Instead of doing the proper Canadian political thing and fighting it all the way to the Supreme Court at taxpayer expense, he instructed his party to reach a settlement on the case and move on.

The bastard undercut months of opportunity for journalists and opposition politicians to rail and condemn. He really is insensitive to the needs of others.

There was still hope with Robocall, the scandal that would publicly prove once and for all that Stephen Harper and his party were dishonest, corrupt and unethical. Well, damn it! Elections Canada has gone and completely botched that investigation too. Not only were they unable to find any evidence of wrong doing by the Prime Minister or his party, they’ve had to admit that their lead investigator actually got some of his initial claims incorrect. That's just bloody annoying.

In the end, only one charge has been laid in Robocall and it was against the Liberals. It isn’t fair, I tell you. Stephen Harper is the enemy not the Liberals. He should have been charged even if he didn’t do anything wrong, not the Liberals even though they did once again.

We are a liberal country that is not happy unless we are unhappy. For decades we have been led by politicians that misled us, stole taxpayer money (Adscam), cut social program spending and balanced budgets by downloading expenses onto the provinces. We’ve had politicians that made promises like scrapping the GST only to continue it after being elected and which make grandiose gestures like signing the Kyoto Accord but who only showed up for the photo op but didn't bother following through on its implementation.

We have been led for decades by politicians who have consistently caved to the petulant demands of Quebec and other special interest at the expense of taxpayers and the undermining of basic and fundamental rights of some citizens. It was politics on which we could depend because it was so much easier to vote for someone with nice hair because there was nothing else to differentiate between them. They were all unethical but Harper’s gone and screwed that all up.

He is a prime minister who keeps his election promises, has piloted Canada through one of the worst economic crisis in decades and who has reduced unemployment. It’s small wonder he is so disliked.

If you can’t count on your politicians to lie to you and cheat the system like the Liberals have for years and the NDP are learning quickly to do who can you count on?

I have no difficulty understanding why the Prime Minister is so often trashed. He’s has turned Canadian politics upside down by actually believing he was supposed to do what he promised to do during the election.

What a moron!

The sooner we can get back to political leaders we can trust to lie to us, the happier most of us will be.

© 2012 Maggie's Bear

all rights reserved

The content of this article is the sole property of Maggie's Bear but a link to it may be shared by those who think it may be of interest to others

Non sinas bastardi tere te deorsum

I had a conversation on Twitter yesterday although to call it a conversation is to do the term a disservice. It would be more accurate to say that I was accosted by a fervent supporter of President Obama who decided that there was a need to straighten me out on a few things. She had jumped into another 'conversation' being led by yet another fervent Obama supporter who was offended by comments I had made on my blog.

She started by talking about all the jobs created by the president and it is true that over the past 29 months, the United States has seen consistent job growth and a decline in its unemployment rate from just over 10% to 8.3%. When I pointed out that this was still significantly higher than the 6.1% unemployment rate in 2008 when President Obama was elected, I was informed that the unemployment rate was fluid.

Fluid? Of course it is fluid; that was never at issue. The issue was, and remains. is it higher or lower under this president and according to the United States Board of Labour, it is higher. I was then sent a blog post by someone who went to great lengths to point out that the president wasn’t responsible for anything that happened during the first nine months of his presidency. Therefore, the steep increase in unemployment was the fault of the previous administration.

Sometimes the contortions people go through to try and avoid facing reality amazes me.

Innocence Destroyed

I write virtually every day. Sometimes I write about politics, sometimes social issues and sometimes just a rant about poor customer service or some other issue that;s on my mind. . I also write about children at risk and they are the most difficult articles to write. I find it difficult to control my anger as I try to speak out about what we are doing and are allowing to happen to our children.

Every ytear in North America, more than five children a day are killed by members of their own family/. Since 2006 more than 800,000 children in the United States and 60,000 in Canada have gone missing and more than 1,000 children in the care of Child Protection Services in the United States are murdered annually.

These are our children but nobody talks about them.

In The Shadow Of The Blade

In July 1789, the people of Paris rose up and stormed the Bastille, Paris’ notorious prison and symbol of autocratic rule and oppression. They grabbed the warden, beat the crap out of him until he was dead and then cut off his head, stuck it on a pole and marched it around the city. It was probably a bit over the top considering that he was merely a bureaucratic functionary doing his job but the people corrected themselves later by going after the monarch and aristocrats. 

Things really started rolling then, especially heads.

Unfortunately, the revolutionary government became even more oppressive than the monarchy it replaced. It ruled by tyranny in the name of democracy and used terror as a political instrument. Eventually, the people who had started and led the revolution, turned on each other and themselves became victims of the same blood-thirsty tyranny imposed by the Revolutionary Council.

Robespierre and St. Juste used corruption charges to remove Camille Desmoulins and Geroges-Jacques Danton (two of the revolution’s founders), among others, from their positions and had them executed. Shortly thereafter, it was time for St. Juste and Robespierre to feel the sharp edge of the revolution on the back of their necks.

It was tyranny dressed up as a democratic republic but as so often happens, it was all dressed up but had nowhere to go. It became known as the Reign of Terror and it was intentional and chaotic. Eventually order was restored and Napoleon crowned himself emperor, embarked France on European wars that eventually led to his downfall and that, my friends, led to the restoration of the monarchy. Events had come full circle and a lot of people had lost their heads to achieve pretty much nothing up to that point.

France did eventually become a democratic republic which continues to thrive to this day but it was a violent and circuitous route to get here.

So what has that got to do with today?

I Am Racist!

I know I’m racist because I’ve been told so. I’ve been told I’m racist because I don’t believe Barack Obama has been a very good president. Even though I could care less about the colour of his skin, I’m a racist because I believe he is the ultimate triumph of glib rhetoric over real accomplishment. I’m a racist because I believe his record as president illustrates his lack of commitment to his stated values and demonstrates little more than a love of the spotlight and a lust for power.

The American economy is in tatters. Unemployment is consistently over 8% and this president has ignored not only the spirit of the constitution but the letter of it. It is his Attorney General who stands in contempt of Congress for failing to turn over documents that were subpoenaed in the Fast & Furious scandal. It is this president who supported him in his disdain for the people’s representatives.

Democracy! "Everybody Knows The Good Guys Lost"

Everybody knows that the boat is leaking,
everybody knows that the captain lied 

Everybody got this broken feeling, 
like their father or their dog just died 

-Leonard Cohen

Merriam-Webster’s defines democracy as:

a) Government by the people

b) a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections

The Oxford Dictionary defines democracy as:

a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives

I see more posts, tweets and commentary on democracy than any other single topic. Everyone talks about it including politicians, the media, academics and every day people. Democracy is not a homogenous thing and it takes many forms. In fact, there are almost three dozen different forms of democracy currently in existence.

Some democracies use a first-past-the-post system of allocating representation. Canada and the United States are examples of this approach. Others, like Italy, Israel and Germany have representative democracies and allocate seats based on the percentage of votes received by each political party.

Some democracies, like Canada and Sweden, are constitutional monarchies while others like the United States and France are republics. Some democracies are actually totalitarian and a few are outright dictatorships which seems incongruous to our basic concept of democracy but which is true nonetheless.

One thing they all share in common, however, is that they are too easily corrupted by those who run for office.

The Redistribution Of Wealth

Canada is a nation that believes in equality and it has proven it by devoting decades to a bizarre concept of redistribution of wealth that borders on insanity. Through various transfer payments from the federal government, both national unity and fair distribution of wealth are meant to be improved across all provinces. The problem is that it hasn't worked.

One of the largest recipients of transfer payments is the province of Quebec. This year it will receive just over $7 billion in equalization payments plus an additional $10 billion in transfers for healthcare and other social programs. This represents 25% of Quebec's annual budget but despite this injection of federal money, the province still has a budget deficit. Over and above the transfer payments, the federal government also covers the cost of Old Age Security and Employment Insurance.

Despite this, there is still a significant resentment in Quebec directed towards the federal government specifically and the rest of Canada in general. It's clear that wealth redistribution has purchased neither cooperative federalism nor fiscal responsibility in la belle province.

It isn't merely Quebec, however. The Maritimes benefits from the Canadian idea of redistributing wealth and the uneven application of social programs. In the Maritimes, EI is almost a second job for some and is seen as necessary to allow people to continue in seasonal occupations that cannot sustain them independently over an entire year.

Nationally, the idea of transfer payments on the scale applied in Canada simply hasn't worked. It has penalized successful provinces while rewarding poor economic management in others. It is a solution that only politicians, looking to get elected, could develop.

The Charter Of Common Sense

I have invited people in the past to write a post for this blog with great result. Each brought a unique point of view and sometimes certain poignancy to a topic that made each post well worth reading. I’ve invited a well-respected man to provide posthumously today’s post because I think what he said and wrote encapsulated the entire conversation in every area in which we are all participating.

It's a very short post but then he was a very thoughtful writer who was able to say in only a few words what most of us struggle to say in many. Ronald Regan referred to these 10 points as 'The American Charter' but I think of them more as simply a Charter of Common Sense.

How Much More Stupid Can It Get?

There are days when I have to remind myself that I am living in the 21st Century and not the late 1800s. Some of the commentary and opinion, the beliefs and prejudices that get thrown about are so out of touch with today’s reality that I wonder if the Internet and the iPhone are part of a technological conspiracy to warp us back in time to a bygone era.

This week, for example, Missouri Rep Todd Aikin mused about ‘legitimate’ rape on national television. It wasn’t just his attempt to characterize rape as legitimate and illegitimate that was so bizarre; it was his assertion that the female body can actually prevent pregnancy in cases of legitimate rape. Apparently Mr. Aikin is of the opinion that a woman’s body not only can differentiate between the two but will actually make a judgment call as to whether or not to allow the pregnancy to proceed.

Is it possible, in this day and age, to get more stupid than this?

Well….actually yes it is.

My Quebec Does Not Include The Bigotry Of The PQ

"Never, never and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another."

– Nelson Mandela

"We must, therefore, insist. . . not only on the need to respect human rights worldwide, but also on the definition of these rights . . . for it is the inherent nature of all human beings to yearn for freedom, equality and dignity, and they have an equal right to achieve that." 

-The Dalai Lama

My post yesterday about the discriminatory nature of the PQ platform in the Quebec Election stirred up a bit of controversy. I’m not surprised. It has been my experience that those with the weakest opinions are the most likely to shout the loudest.

Most of the criticism I received was because I compared Pauline Marois, leader of the PQ, to Adolf Hitler and others of his ilk. They clearly didn’t read beyond their emotions. My statement was that the attitude of both her and of her supporters has much in common with the attitudes of Hitler and the others I mentioned. Like them, Mme Marois promotes a singular version of society that is only fully open to those that she and her supporters deem worthy. The rights of others are treated with disrespect and restricted or taken away.

Her vision is an intolerant, nickle and dime perversion of democracy.

Only The White Hoods Are Missing In Pauline Marois' PQ

Pauline Marois continues her attack on the language
and religious rights of non-francophone/Christians

Sometimes I think we have become so jaded that in our rush to pick over the minutia of political campaigns we overlook and ignore the real threats. We are quick to condemn the other side and even more quick to forgive and embrace the sins on ours. We are particularly forgiving when the mea culpa is accompanied by a few handouts and entitlements.

There is an election campaign in Quebec right now and along with the usual promises to clean up government and hand out more cash, there is a disturbing undercurrent that has more in common with the darker side of human history than with a modern society like Canada.

History is littered with the remains of oppressive regimes led by those who rose to power through oppression and there were always excuses for suppressing the rights of others; racial purity, defending religion, protecting the rights of natural-born citizens and the list goes on. Inevitably, these regimes failed because they were built on intolerance, bigotry and fear.

The Satisfaction Quotient

Canadians live in a pretty decent country. Physically it is beautiful and much of it remains uninhabited and pristine, our economy is reasonably stable compared to the rest of the world and except for the odd gang shooting downtown or hockey riot in Vancouver, we’re a pretty safe and stable society.

We have national healthcare and while it is in trouble thanks to years of government dithering and stupidity, it does still provide some measure of health services to anyone who needs it and who is prepared to sit in the emergency room for a few hours waiting for their name to be called.

Canadians are, by and large, a fairly tolerant people although lately we’ve been getting a bit impatient with each other. I think a lot of it has to do with a rising level of frustration with politicians and government but I don’t believe that is the only cause. In fact, I don’t believe it is even the primary cause.

I believe that there is an inability to be satisfied that has gripped too many of us, especially on the left. I call it the Satisfaction Quotient.

The Real Choice In This American Presidential Election

"The great strength of the totalitarian state is that it forces those who fear it to imitate it."

"It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything."

"It is true that liberty is precious; so precious that it must be carefully rationed."

Consider these three political quotes. Each speaks to the idea of government by fear both of its external enemies and of its own people. Who spoke these words is revealed at the end of the post.

There was a time when the United States was the strongest and freest democracy in the world. It was criticized, mocked and even accused but nobody doubted its commitment to freedom and the triumph of the rights of the individual over the power of government.  Even its critics gave grudging admiration for the fierce independence of individual Americans and how quick they were to resist attempts by government to undermine their rights and freedoms. Perhaps no nation on earth held its constitution in such high regard as the United States. 

It is, quite frankly, what set it apart from other nations, including most other democracies.  As a result, it was the first and only choice of millions fleeing oppressive regimes and impoverished nations around the world. 

America has changed.

Canada's Council Of Fools

Canada's Council of the Federation

The provincial premiers of Canada met this past week in what they have come to call the Council of The Federation. These semi-regular get togethers used to be called First Ministers’ Meetings but that appellation was no longer grand enough for a group of political hacks who see themselves as leaders and statesmen.

A better name for the meeting would be The Council of Fools because that is precisely what they are, a group of cynical, self-serving politicians with little to no vision and just enough authority to be dangerous to the nation's prosperity and future.

For decades, this group of provincial premiers gathered regularly to condemn the federal government while at the same time begging for more federal money. They met, had nice lunches and dinners, provided quick sound bites for the television news shows, posed for photographs and then trundled off home after agreeing to study their latest 'agreements in principle'. It was then, as it is now, all talk which accomplished nothing.