68 Replies to “Reader Tips”

  1. Borat Dion with another version of run and hide.
    Liberal Leader Stephane Dion has said his party will not run a candidate in Central Nova. That could make the race between May and MacKay a lot closer, Harris-Decima president Bruce Anderson stated in the poll results.

  2. At the end of the skit, after Jean Paul says “oui” and Mlle. Cleese says “I told you so”, what does the other lady say?

  5. According to the National Post, Pierre Elliot Trudeau was the biggest spender on defence in the last 37 years.
    Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau may still be widely reviled in the military community as a “pinko” who slashed the budget of the Canadian Forces in the ’70s, but a new analysis done by Parliament’s research branch ranks him as the top spender on defence in the last 37 years.
    The figures, detailing the defence budget as a percentage of the country’s gross domestic product, indicates Trudeau even outspent Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney, who brought in a hawkish defence policy in the late ’80s.
    The figures also show the Harper Conservatives, who have portrayed themselves as being strong on defence, have a long way to go to match Trudeau’s levels.

  7. ET: Phone Home. Trudeau inherited a Military of something close to 300,000 soldiers. He would not have been in office long enough in 1971 to have had much effect on Military Spending.

  8. One wonders also how much defence spending during the P.E.T. years was devoted to the kind of bureaucratization and politicization that characterized increased federal spending in other departments of government?

  11. Gunney99 – the forces levels when Trudeau took over were Air Force: 52,000, Army 48,000 and Navy 25,000 – all ‘Regular Force’ – I don’t think the Reserves added another 175,000. ET WTF’s claim doesn’t say over how many years Trudeau spent the money – he was PM for all too long regardless. If ET WTF would give annual averages corrected for inflation it might mean something.

  12. On Calgary news tonight a newscaster reporting on a brutal assault/murder actually described the 6 attackers as “ARABIC”. I don’t know any details about the victim or circumstances surrounding the crime other than a man was swarmed by 6 men and is near death,but I was shocked by the description. Tomorrow they may have morphed into “asian youth”,but tonight they are “arabic”.

  14. Sorry, but Mr. Harper has no traction with the electorate. He is partly saddled with a weak caucus (the top performers are Liberal-elect David Emerson and senate appointee Micheal Fortier), his flip flops have been extremely damaging ($35 billion evaporated on income trusts and he has not collected the $5 billion from the Americans for softwood) and the in and out scandal.
    Harper has not delivered his own Conservative base. We still have a gun registry, abortion and Calgary is nott the capital of Canada yet.
    He is running a DEFICIT.
    He is a control freak.
    People remember he wanted to invade and occupy Iraq. Thank God he was not PM then. Think how much Canadian blood and treasure were saved by Jean Chretien.
    He is a climate change denier but panders with half baked environmental policies.
    His only hope for electoral success is to try to get people to hate Liberals rather than have his own positive policy. Hence, the misleading and childish attack ads. Harper knows and you know that great prime ministers are not made by diminishing every one around him.
    For all those reasons and more we need the integrity of Stefan Dion.

  15. If Harper is a “control freak” for controling the behaviour of his caucus, what does that make Dion who wants to control the behaviour of the whole country through his carbon tax?

  17. Finally Someone other then the tory’s Speakout
    This is a Liberal Dominated country with a long way to go, As the liberals state they are Entitled to their Entitlements & they just don’t give a crap as long as someone else pays for their entitlements. You try being late on your payment to the Bank.
    “Elections Canada’s Double Standard”
    National Post

  18. Aviator:
    The National Post article points out that Trudeau was the biggest spender on defence when you look at the percentage of the GDP and the percentage of the federal government expenditures over his whole tenure if not also in every single year. For example, he was spending about 2 percent of GDP throughout his terms. Harper by contrast is at 1.2.

  19. re the python skit:
    hard to make out what the comedians are saying with
    – british accent
    – the falsetto delivery
    – canned laughter parked on top of the punch lines
    et wtf: please provide numbers on the time frame.
    I pegged M. Trudeau as a fraud right from the get go and never voted for him once in all those years in Liberal wilderness. please people, cite your sources eh? dynamic links are quite common now.
    mr/ms double a battery:
    I agree with all of it except the last line. dion has zero integrity. he is an effete academic with scant connection to huge sections of the country’s geography and even less with the people in those areas.
    integrity is *earned*, he’s done nothing to earn it.
    personally, I think an oxygen tax is more appropo. I’m no chemist but I doubt there are a whole lot of endothermic chemical reactions involving O2. its everywhere. I betcha its in the top 5 common elements; all the oceans, most rocks and a good share of the atmosphere.

  20. I don’t know who ET WTF is so I have absolutely no reason to defend or help him/her, but you people should have clicked on the link ET WTF provided and read the article,
    here is an excerpt,
    …In terms of spending on national defence as a percentage of federal government expenditures, Trudeau again leads the pack at 13.3% in 1970.
    That figure starts to drop after that, hitting a low point in the Chretien era in 1998 of 6.7%. Under Harper defence spending has climbed to 8.7% of federal government expenditures. All figures have been adjusted for 2006 dollars.

  21. Just a little poem I came across. Sad but true.
    Tax his land, Tax his bed, Tax the table at which he’s fed.
    Tax his tractor, Tax his mule, Teach him taxes Are the rule.
    Tax his work, Tax his pay, He works for peanuts Anyway!
    Tax his cow, Tax his goat, Tax his pants, Tax his coat.
    Tax his ties, Tax his shirt, Tax his work, Tax his dirt.
    Tax his tobacco, Tax his drink, Tax him if he Tries to think.
    Tax his cigars, Tax his beers, If he cries Tax his tears.
    Tax his car, Tax his gas, Find other ways To tax his ass.
    Tax all he has Then let him know That you won’t be done Till he has no dough.
    When he screams and hollers, Then tax him some more, Tax him till He’s good and sore.
    Then tax his coffin, Tax his grave, Tax the sod in Which he’s laid.
    Put these word Upon his tomb, “Taxes drove me to my doom—”
    When he’s gone, Do not relax, It’s time to apply The inheritance tax.
    Yeah, bring it on Dion!
    Dolly

  23. Cmdr. Philip Kapusta and Capt. Donovan Campbell, How to Contain Radical Islam
    The events of Sept. 11, 2001, brutally announced the presence of an enemy seemingly distinct from any our country had faced before. Unlike previous adversaries, such as Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, or the Spanish monarchy, this new enemy was difficult to define, let alone understand. It was not motivated by causes that an avowedly secular government could easily comprehend, and it took an amorphous yet terrifying form with little historical precedent…
    Yet what we face today is not wholly novel: It is a war of ideas, mirroring the Cold War. Like the Communists, violent Islamic extremists are trying to spread a worldview that denigrates personal liberty and demands submission to a narrow ideology. And, as with the Cold War, it must be our goal to stop them. The United States should therefore adopt a new version of the policy that served us so well during that last long war: containment…

  24. aa (astounding a**hat?): “Think how much Canadian blood and treasure were saved by Jean Chretien.”
    Well, we’ll never know if the Canadians had helped the Americans, will we, whether or not the war in Iraq would have been won more swiftly. We’ll never know if the terrorists in Iraq could have been subdued much more quickly.
    We do know, however, that one of the main reasons Chretien decided not to go to war with Iraq was because of the oil/gas holdings in Iraq of his inlaws, the Demarais of Power Corp fame.
    I’m clear that former PM Chretien made not so much a principled–we don’t like war–decision not to send Canadian troops to Iraq but, rather, made a self-interested decision so that his daughter France, married to Paul Desmarais Jr., her in-laws, and her children’s considerable oil intersts wouldn’t be compromised.
    Always follow the money…

  25. batb:
    Chretien didn’t make any decision at all. He said he favoured getting rid of Hussein but only if the UN supported it. In other words, he allowed the UN to set Canadian foreign policy and make the decision for him.

  27. Shalom Carmy, “So Soon?” A Nachmanidean Meditation on Death
    Precisely because my mother died so full of years and full of sanity, giving of herself though her body was entirely, irrevocably spent, she posed the paradox of death in its purest philosophical form. How is it that even the most fortunate death, approximating so closely what the dying person and those who cared for her and about her would wish for, is nevertheless a tragic, shattering event that casts a dark shadow over what follows?

  30. aa: “integrity of Stefan Dion”
    First of all, spell your hero’s name right.
    Secondly, when I think of Stephane Dion, I think laughable, embarrassing wimpiness and awkwardness, not integrity.

  31. Beheaded on a greyhound bus!
    In Canada???
    OMG! My condolences to that young man’s family and loved ones. This is so sickening…
    SHIT my kid takes greyhounds all the time!
    She always listens to her music, claims it helps her sleep by blocking the noise of the bus ride -oh friggin crap!
    Those poor parents, my heart weeps.
    – think we’ll be spending the money, time and effort now to deliver her to and fro ourselves in our car or by air or something where people with hunting knives are not allowed to vent on any innocent kid close by… oh man…. why?
    Hope the true facts come to light in this case.
    Unreal…

  32. Re: Trudeau the Great outspends Conservatives on the military.
    It would help if the people who wrote these articles were there at the time, I guess.
    In 1970, Trudeau had only been in office since April 1968.
    In 1970, the FLQ kidnapped James Cross and killed Pierre Laporte. Trudeau suspended all civil rights in Canada and imposed the War Measures Act in Oct 1970.
    In 1973 The PQ became the official opposition in Quebec.
    So in the early 1970s, Trudeau spent money on the military preparing for an ‘apprehended insurrection’, in Quebec by the separatists.
    In the late 1970s, Trudeau was getting ready to fight the greedy oil rich Western separatists in Alberta.
    That’s why most of the ‘military’ spending was on crowd control equipment from Bombardier, ie APVs.
    Over 1000 armed personnel vehicles ordered at one time.
    And that’s why the slimey Trudeau Liberal cabinet secretly passed the Emergency Planning Order only days after Parliament broke for the summer in June 1980.
    This EPO, complete with concentration camp provisions, was to be used to take over conrol of Alberta’s oil fields since AB Premier Peter Lougheed had cut oil production as a retaliation against the National energy Program.
    Ya, Trudeau was a real war hero spending vast amounts of money on the military to point guns at Canadians.
    Trudeau was not a part of the Great Generation.
    And I would be ashamed if I wrote a POS like that National Post column trying to portray Trudeau as a Canadian military giant.
    What utter rubbish!

  33. One for the Goracle:
    John was in the fertilized egg business. He had several hundred young layers (hens)called ‘pullets,’ and ten roosters to fertilize the eggs.
    He kept records, and any rooster not performing went into the soup pot and was replaced.
    This took a lot of time, so he bought some tiny bells and attached them to his roosters. Each bell had a different tone, so he could tell from a distance which rooster was performing. Now, he could sit on the porch and fill out an efficiency report by just listening to the bells.
    John’s favorite rooster, old Butch, was a very fine specimen, but this morning he noticed old Butch’s bell hadn’t rung at all!
    When he went to investigate, he saw the other roosters were busy chasing pullets, bells-a-ringing, but the pullets, hearing the roosters coming, could run for cover. To John’s amazement, old Butch had his bell in his beak, so it couldn’t ring. He’d sneak up on a pullet, do his job and walk on to the next one. John was so proud of old Butch, he entered him in the
    RenfrewCountyFair and he became an overnight sensation among the judges.
    The result was the judges not only awarded old Butch the No BellPiece Prize but they also awarded him the Pulletsurprise as well. Clearly old Butch was a politician in the making.
    Who else but a politician could figure out how to win two of the most highly coveted awards on our planet by being the best at sneaking up on the populace and screwing them when they weren’t paying attention.

  34. batb and ET WTF are both right.
    Chretien and the Power Corporation’s large stake in France’s Total Oil which had a big piece of Saddam-era oil production, and Maurice Strong as Kofi Annan’s chief adviser set the policy for the Liberals.
    The country deserves to know the truth. Chretien did not stay out of Iraq due to any pacifist or internationalist (don’t invade non-aggressive sovereign countries) principle.
    One time I’d like to hear Dion criticize polluters in Ontario and Quebec. Any time Dion’s lips move in approximation of a language, it is Maurice Strong’s hand moving the puppet.

  35. Posted by: rockyt at July 31, 2008 11:33 AM – glad to see some people remember the needs of the Libranos – to screw western canadia when their power base could be mobilized.
    To the Librano ghouls, having their ideology in place is worth the subjegation and enslavement of regions.
    But it’s also a telling story about the media: they need controversy. They need dozens of letters to the editor, talk about it on blogs, and links to the story. By publishing provocative items contrary to their usual slant, they are sure to get more eyeballs on their ads and happier sponsors.
    The media ain’t about relating the news of the day any more than they are about grabbing eyeballs and marketshare.

  36. Obamessiah proclaims – We don’t need more oil, just inflate your tires
    ================
    “There are things you can do individually, though, to save energy,” Obama said. “Making sure your tires are properly inflated – simple thing. But we could save all the oil that they’re talking about getting off drilling – if everybody was just inflating their tires? And getting regular tune-ups? You’d actually save just as much!”
    http://www.worldnetdaily.com/?pageId=71044

  38. The Oil-for-Food Scandal – the Canadian Connection
    Charles R. Smith
    Tuesday, Jan. 18, 2005
    “Its all about the oil” was the chant issued by a vast army of protesters around the world.
    Yes, it may have been “all about the oil” – but it didn’t involve Americans, who did not own any of the oil in Iraq, but rather a horde of rich global fat cats who wanted to make millions in a so-called U.N. humanitarian program.
    One of those who made out like a bandit is a rich Canadian whose bank made millions and whose Paris-based holding companies include the originally French-Belgian oil company TotalFina Elf, which cut lucrative deals with Saddam’s Iraq and is currently operating in war-torn Sudan.
    Various congressional committees have launched hearings into what has been described as the biggest corruption scandal in history. Not surprisingly, U.N. officials have refused to cooperate with the congressional investigations.
    The investigations have turned up a number of damning facts that point directly to the incompetence at best, complicity at worst of the most senior U.N. officials and those involved.
    It is now well known, for example, that U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan’s own son was getting big cash payments from a Swiss firm that profited from the program, in return for his “expert” opinions and advice. Recently published evidence shows that Annan’s son was paraded as a high-level contact within the U.N.
    The congressional investigations have surfaced preliminary accounting figures that show that Saddam Hussein likely siphoned off as much as $15 billion, almost a quarter of the entire funds transferred.
    While the anti-U.S. critics wailed at the impact of the embargo on the Iraqi people, their attention miraculously centered on the nation that liberated the victims of Saddam’s original aggressions – and not on the Thug in Chief or his numerous continental ‘partners’.
    Free to “govern,” Saddam did so with a vengeance, and the rest, as they say, is history – which, thankfully, Congress is now exposing after the U.S. military put an “Out of Business” sign on Baghdad.
    Hussein was not alone in his corruption, and several others involved in the money flow, including government firms and politicians in Europe, are now nervously following the investigations while checking out one-way flights to Paraguay.
    BNP Paribas
    Top among these is the European-based BNP Paribas bank, which the U.N. chose to administer the program and which reportedly received nearly $1 billion for its efforts. Congressional investigators reviewing the bank’s actions have discovered broken rules, missing documents and improper transfers by BNP Paribas, which up until now has been assumed to be a French bank.
    In fact, BNP Paribas is actually controlled by Power Corporation, an appropriately named Canadian company that has a shocking track record of ‘business’ relationships with the worst gangsters and tyrannical regimes in the world.
    BNP Paribas also has one other distinguishing feature: a direct corporate and familial relationship with the persons running the government of Canada for the last 20 years.
    The truth about BNP Paribas and Power Corp. sheds a new light on Canada’s seemingly bizarre anti-American foreign policy in the Middle East, in China and elsewhere.
    BNP Paribas bank is part of a holding company, Pargesa Holding, which is jointly owned and controlled by the Frère and Desmarais families. Paul Desmarais Sr. is the chairman of the group, while Albert Frère is the vice-chairman. Gerald Frère, Albert’s son, is one of three general managers who oversee day-to-day operations, and Paul Desmarais Jr. is also an officer.
    Pargesa, and thus Power Corporation and the Canadian Desmarais family, holds a controlling significant stake in TotalFina Elf, the Belgian-French petroleum multinational corporation formed from the merger of Total and Petrofina.
    BNP Paribas and TotalFina may have blood-stained corporate histories, but the intimate and intricate connections of Power Corp. to Canada’s governing elite raise the truly disturbing questions.
    Power Corporation CEO Andre Desmarais is the son-in-law of former Prime Minister Jean Chretien, who went out of his way to oppose U.S. intervention in Iraq, where the family’s business interests with the Saddam regime would be jeopardized.
    Current Canadian PM Paul Martin is a former Power Corporation employee who made his fortune when he bought Canada Steamship Lines from Power Corp. aided by loans from Power Corp. To this day both CSL and Power are reported to have mutual equity interests in each other.
    The most senior foreign affairs/international trade adviser to current Canadian PM Paul Martin is Maurice Strong, former CEO of Power Corp. and a longtime U.N. and Kofi Annan adviser.
    TotalFina Elf
    So, who is TotalFina Elf? Just an oil company that cut a deal with Saddam to develop and exploit the Majnoon and Nahr Umar oil fields in southern Iraq. These properties are estimated to contain as much as 25 percent of the country’s oil reserves.
    With Saddam under arrest, the Canadian-controlled company has expanded its “client base” and now has a deal with the murderous Sudanese regime to quietly extract its oil and funnel profits back to Khartoum for its infamous social programs.
    Disgusted by the lethargic pace and willful blindness of the U.N.-led investigation of itself headed up by Paul Volcker, the U.S. Congress opened its own investigation. Committee investigators found that eight government agencies notified BNP Paribas about “deficiencies” in handling money in the U.N. program.
    No wonder Congress smelled a rat when it watched the deliberately ineffectual U.N. ‘review’ of the ‘Food-for-Oil’ program. Thankfully, it followed up on that and launched its own investigations which, if allowed to follow their natural course, will inevitably expose fraud, corruption, sleaze, theft, incompetence and, perhaps in the long run most significantly, the corrupt political and personal motivations of supposedly friendly governments, including Canada, in this entire mess.
    For our Canadian friends and supposed partners, we are left with the disturbing question: Who’s really in charge and whose interests are they really serving?
    http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2005/1/17/133225.shtml

  39. Thanks for the backup, Klondike Mike.
    Yeah, I call Power Corp and the Desmarais family the Librano$’ puppet masters–with Mo Strong’s (aka Mao Stlong’s) grimy paws all over the strings.
    Can you imagine if the CPC had a family like the Desmarais, with a Conservative Prime Minister’s kid married into the clan, a conniving shyster like Mo Strong in on every money-making deal going (even now, in China), with oil interests in the ME?
    The Canadian MSM would be going ballistic. As it is, they’re as quiet as mice to the extent that most Canadians–in the spontaneous, on-the-spot surveys I do from time to time–have no idea who Mo Strong is, who the Demarais Family is, what Power Corp is, or the connections the Liberal Party of Canada has to all of them.
    And, now, we have Bob Rae’s strings being pulled by Power Corp. For those who don’t know yet, John Rae, Bob’s bro, is a VP at Power Corp.
    It’s a very tangled web of which every Canadian voter and taxpayer should be aware. Spread the word…’cause the TorStar, Probe and Fail, CBCPravda, Global, and CTV, sure aren’t going to.

  40. MSM dares to publish this expose of the Liberal-Librano$.
    More, please.
    …-
    “Tories woo new Canadians without ‘community godfathers,’ Kenney says
    LEVIS, Que. – The man charged with spearheading the Harper government’s “ethnic-outreach” efforts has accused former Liberal governments of running “Tammany Hall”-style operations that funneled grants to local immigrant “godfathers.”
    “Typically, I think, the Liberals pursued what some people have called an ethnic-brokerage model of outreach, where they would identify leaders of certain groups who somehow magically would become the recipients of substantial grants and subsidies for their community organizations,” Jason Kenney, secretary of state for multiculturalism, said when asked how his government’s approach differs from that of the Liberals.
    “They would establish a kind of Tammany Hall operation of patronage with certain individuals and certain organizations. That, I think, is the kind of cynical and passe approach that is not relevant to the diversity of Canada today.””
    http://tinyurl.com/5th25x

  41. I am just devastated by the horrible killing of a young man on a Greyhound bus. The murderer should get the death penalty. I think this is the worst thing I’ve ever heard.

  42. About the murder on the bus, which is simply horrendous.
    Was there a connection between the man who was murdered and his murderer or were they total strangers?
    Either way, it is a despicable tragedy. But, if it was a stranger who was randomly murdered, it raises all sorts of horrendous spectres for those travelling on public transportation, as another commenter has pointed out in relation to his daughter who travels on Greyhound buses.

  44. “How come so few Canadians know about it?”
    Because it is even more ludicrous than suggesting Haliburton is running the US government right now.

  45. Regarding the bus tragedy…
    I just want to know…which opposition MPs used this incident to suggest a “knife registry”?
    See the G&M story for that little tidbit.

  46. Regarding the bus tragedy…
    I just want to know…which opposition MPs used this incident to suggest a “knife registry”?
    See the G&M story for that little tidbit.

  47. “Icy reality cools the climate cultists”
    “… news from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute that there is more ice than normal in the Arctic waters north of the Svalbard archipelago.
    According to the Barents Observer there are open areas in this area in most years during July – but this year the area is covered by ice.
    A fortnight ago a Norwegian research ship, Lance, and a Swedish ship, MV Stockholm, got stuck in the ice in the area and needed to be freed by the Norwegian Coast Guard.
    While one ice floe does not amount to a mini-ice age, the dramatic evidence runs counter to the mantra of the climate warming cult which has claimed the Arctic is becoming progressively free of ice.
    The mantra of less ice has long been coupled with the warning that rising sea levels will soon swamp coastal areas and both claims have been used to heighten fears about climate change and add a greater sense of urgency to calls for action now.
    It follows last week’s revelation from leading US hurricane expert Kerry Emanuel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that even in a dramatically warming world hurricane frequency and intensity may not rise during the next two centuries.”
    “Singer and a team of renowned international scientists earlier this year published a report titled “Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate”, under the banner of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (N).
    It should be mandatory reading for all who wish to participate in the climate debate – be they policymakers, private individuals or representatives of business organisations.
    After rigorously examining the same data as the IPCC, particularly the claim that “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely (defined by the IPCC as between 90 to 99 per cent certain) due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations,” (emphasis in the original), and reached the opposite conclusion – namely, that natural causes are very likely to be the dominant cause.
    Unlike the hysterical IPCC report, which was riddled with errors and mis-statements, ignored available scientific data, and has already been contradicted in several major areas by more recent research, the N authors don’t say that anthropogenic greenhouse gases cannot produce some warming, but they do say that the evidence shows that they are not playing a major role.”
    http://tinyurl.com/6mqqvb (telegraph)

  48. BTW ET WTF? Who said Mulroney was friend of the military? He did nearly as much damage as Trudeau, who’s real fait accompli was restructuring and bureaucratizing the CF. Sailors in green garbage bags, that sort of thing.
    Read Jack Granatstein’s book on the topic of who did more damage to the military. (Hint: We all did)
    I would also argue that two big ticket items, CF 18s and Patrol Frigates dominated Trudeau’s spending impact. When both were delivered, the military was in dire straits, with little ability to project military capability.
    Now, they are a fit fighting force, albeit with many limitations. With its help, we are becoming a foremost nation, that if if this country can actually stop apologizing for itself, and provide the positive international influence that’s needed.
    So E….?, Trudeau’s black legacy, and Chretien’s subsequent regurgication, still rank up there as the biggies for most military types.

  49. Charles MacDonald,
    Thank you for the link to “A Nahmanidean Meditation on Death”. I have just passed the sheloshim and am now into the 11 months for my father. I haven’t been reading blogs much but looked today and happened on your link. It deeply touched me.
    Thanks

  50. Ex-liberal, I’m glad it helped. Kaddish has almost unimaginable power to heal, as well. Hang in there.

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