McGuinty's MMA Flip-flop a Way of Securing Pan Am Stadium for Hamilton?

I’m asking, not telling, but here are the dots.  You can connect them yourself.  

The Pan Am Games is an international sporting event.  The location for such events is chosen years in advance, in a contest.  Entering the contest happens as follows.  A number of good ole boys get together, smoke some cigars (literally), and dream up a scheme in which they will fill their city with new stadiums, track and field facilities, pools…and fresh new transportation infrastructure, like new roads and mass transit.  They are a mixed lot: politicians or former politicians who want to be praised and remembered for what they brought to their city, hotel owners and, of course, construction companies.  They call themselves a “bid committee”. 

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Shedding Light on Day: "Unreported Crimes" Code for "Cannabis Offences"

There is a perfectly logical – if disgraceful – reason why Canadian Treasury President Stockwell Day (a Conservative MP) yesterday cited “unreported crimes” as the reason for spending $9B on the building of more prisons.  I submit that, with the phrase “unreported crimes”, Day is implicitly referring to cannabis offenses and other consensual drug-related offenses for which minimum prison sentences will be imposed if Bill S-10 becomes law.  The Conservative government’s announcement today that it has expanded the range of things constituting “serious crimes” provides additional evidence to that effect. Read more

Accountability, Tyranny and Democracy

Proponents of the collectivist status quo do not like a recent decision that appears to have been made by the Prime Minister of Canada. As a result, some of them are now telling us that this can mean only one thing: the PM is a tyrant, democracy is under attack, and Canada is being turned into a totalitarian state. Given the gravity of their remarks, the reader will be forgiven if he is baffled upon discovering that the decision in question was the decision to eliminate penalties for choosing not to complete the long form of the 2011 census. Given the form and content of a column by Ottawa University law professor Errol Mendes in today’s Ottawa Citizen newspaper, we are apparently meant to conclude that an elected officials’ failure to follow, or to release to the public, the advice of an unelected public servant is tantamount both to an assault on democracy and to a drift into totalitarianism. Such a conclusion is utter nonsense and, when written by a law professor, for public consumption, it is worse than nonsense. Read more

Bullshit, and the Ironic Invalidity of the Census Debate

“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” – Professor Harry G. Frankfurt, “On Bullshit”, pp. 55-56.

The ironic truth is that a debate focusing largely upon the validity of census data is comprised of so much bullshit as to make the debate itself invalid. Witnesses and Parliamentary Members at committee hearings, columnists, and even those who write letters to the editors of our vestigial newspapers have decided that the this issue – more than most others – demands that all concern over truth and falsehood must be abandoned if the debate is to be resolved favourably.  The debate has turned even serially honest thinkers, writers and speakers into at least second-class bullshitters for the purposes of either backing or opposing the Conservative government’s decision to make completion of the long form census voluntary; to repeal laws that impose penalties of fine or imprisonment for failing or refusing to fill out the long form census and remit it to government. Read more

Optional Long Form Census a Blow to Racism

Canada’s Conservative government has announced that completion of Canada’s “long form” census will cease to be mandatory in 2011. Shrieks of condemnation can now be heard from a wide range of interests. None of them are justified. To the contrary, this is one step the Harper government has announced in recent history that is actually praiseworthy. Read more

Run from the Rahn Curve

Recently, Shotgun blogger PUBLIUS featured a video made by the Center for Freedom and Prosperity concerning a graph of the so-called “Rahn curve”. The video serves as a good example of what is wrong with the idea of founding upon quantitative economic arguments ones advocacy of individual freedom. And, given the political orientation of those telling us about the Rahn curve, an explanation of why libertarians are prone to making the aforementioned error is warranted. Read more

Identity, Blatchford, Journalism, and Oz

Christie Blatchford is a writer whose writings currently are printed in the Globe and Mail Newspaper. She is probably most widely recognized as a writer who reports the facts as they relate to court proceedings. She is well respected in that role and, in my view, such respect is warranted.

However, Blatchford writes (or, on radio, speaks) her opinions on non-legal matters (e.g., matters of politics or culture) at times and, in that capacity, she is decidedly weak. Those of her opinions I have heard or read are of the Joe six-pack “it just seems to me” or “I feel” variety, rather than being the result of a applying any consistent and coherent set of philosophical principles to the facts of a matter.

That weakness did not stop her from flashing her press credentials to take an unwarranted swipe at unpaid blog writers who attended and reported upon G20 protests and who think that they deserved to be treated with the same dignity and respect as paid reporters. Read more

In Defence of Religious Belief and Expression

Four men appear on a public street, outside of the perimeter of an “Arab Festival”. The town reportedly has a large population of Muslims. The men hand out free copies of the Gospel of John – written in both English and Arabic translations – to those who approach them. Within 30 seconds, 8 or more police officers converge on the location and approach the men. The men are taken into custody as a crowd of Muslims cry “Allahu Akbar” (“God is Great!”). Their video camera is confiscated. They are told by police that they may not distribute the Gospel of John anywhere within 5 blocks of the Arab Festival. They are essentially told that if they distribute the Gospel within 5 blocks of the Arab Festival, they will be committing the crime of disturbing the peace (or assault, or inciting a right, or some such offence). It is arguably a violation of Sharia law for a non-Muslim to proselytize a Muslim.

The men are not in an Arabic country. They are not in a European city. They are in Dearborn, Michigan, USA, and the police arresting them are bound by the provisions of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. Read more

Free Speech, Policing, and Falsified Assault as a Pretext for Arrest

The video speaks for itself.

Within one minute after the peaceful arrival of two Canadians at the Niagara Falls constituency office of Canada’s Justice Minister, Rob Nicholson, a police officer arrives on motorcycle. He says he has been called to the scene. He asks that the video camera recording him be turned off. When the camera person refuses to do so, the officer – shockingly – asserts that the camera filming him is “interpreted as a weapon”. Read more

Quantity, Quality, and Government

In today’s Globe and Mail newspaper, Professor Tom Flanagan – professor of political science at the University of Calgary and a former campaign manager for the Conservative Party of Canada – argues that a number of issues currently hurting the governing Conservatives would not have arisen were it not for their having grown the government. Flanagan points to three examples. The Conservatives created a $1-billion Green Infrastructure Fund, pursuant to which former Conservative MP Rahim Jaffer is alleged to have sought subsidies, such that there is now speculation that he did not comply with lobbying rules. As chair of the G8 and G20 summits, Stephen Harper chose to promote foreign aid for maternal health, excluding funds for abortions, thereby reigniting the abortion debate in Canada. And the Harper government cut funding to Toronto’s gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgender Pride parade, redirecting those funds to non-gay events, and thereby (deliberately?) creating the impression that Conservatives are anti-homosexuality. Flanagan’s conclusion:

Rahim Jaffer, abortion, the Toronto Gay Pride parade – these three issues have recently involved the Conservative government in heated debate. There is a common thread to these seemingly unrelated issues. They all illustrate what happens to a conservative government when it increases, rather than decreases, the size of the state.

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