44 Replies to “Lizzie May’s Successor?”

  1. Here I was, thinking that ALL CULTURES are equal and should be celebrated equally. I guess not… Now, where’s my socialist decoder ring? I know I left it here somewhere…

  2. “Holly Chabowski works in education and has a passion for urban planning.”
    Says it all, doesn’t it?
    Perhaps she should visit in the winter time to see why so few of us walk or bicycle to work.

  3. Denmark is 20% smaller than Nova Scotia with a population of 5,600,000. So, everyone is crammed in together and bicycles and walking work ok.
    What she is really saying:
    “I like certain Socialists in Canada and your country is very pretty, but you the majority of you are fat slobs in big cars and trucks and you suck as a country”.
    Got it.

  4. I love your term “Socialist Decoder Ring”. I think we should all use it in the future, as in, “Using my Socialist Decoder Ring, I was able to translate Leftist-speak into English.”

  5. “Holly Chabowski works in education and has a passion for urban planning.
    Says it all, doesn’t it?
    Al_in_Ottawa, you beat me to it.
    In general, people who profess to have an excess “passion” for anything should be regarded with suspicion. And in particular, those who express a zeal for “urban planning” should be jailed preemptively for the protection of free society.

  6. In rural Alberta buses only travel on busy routes between owns. If you don’t drive, you walk.

  7. In rural Alberta buses only travel on busy routes between TOWNS. If you don’t drive, you walk.

  8. WTF is it with intercontinental jet setter’s propensity to tell everyone to live as they can’t?
    Suck it Holly.
    And why do you have to join the richest punk in history’s douchebag facebook club to comment at a Canadian newspaper?

  9. Traffic congestion contributors: car free lanes for buses, bicycles in general, red light cameras, planners obsessed with a singular centre.

  11. Denmark has done such a great job running their own country, not! Currency controls has inspectors checking on holidaying Danes as they try to take money out of country. Did Holly declare her cash?
    A buddy of mine came from Denmark. His father was still farming back home. The EU controls a lot of the farm subsidies, which are huge. Farmers are paid to fallow fields. Buddy’s Dad signed up for this program. At some point he ran his discs along the edge of his field to knock down encroaching weeds. Next day he got a phone call from the government asking him why he was out on the field. Talk about big brother watching.
    The Euros have done such a great job on how they run their countries they cannot resist advising everyone else. The fact that the majority of these countries are broke means nothing. Talk is cheap and the BS has no accountability.

  12. I’ve visited Denmark several times (we attended a former exchange student’s wedding and observed her modest lifestyle as a doctor) but never felt the need to write public open letters to the Danes to lecture them about what I perceive as their deficiencies, including its economic problems and its cultural problems.

  13. Yeah well, the recurring theme of her silly letter, was urbaN URBAN URBAN….
    Canada has became more an urban society in this last 60 years but with a land mass exceeded only by Russia…..there’s a helluva lot of Canadians that are not urban….Canada is not uninhabited beyond city/town limits.
    Europe with it’s concentrated population does not really extend mass transit beyond the urban areas….private cars are a necessity.
    Mind you, Europe largely is still oriented to close proximity to small stores/pubs etc. that have disappeared in rural Canada in my time. Places such as Benington, Oliver, Golspie 40 years past had General/grocery stores even Post Offices are now merely an isolated clutch of houses.
    Automobiles/trucks extended travel range beyond horse and buggy. On the plains trucks spelled the end of small towns clustered about a grain elevator.
    Southern Ontario, is crisscrossed with abandoned rail lines….doomed by 18 wheel diesels….Only mainline rail remains….
    Europe may have a medieval landscape but Canada (North America) has moved on…

  14. Traffic problems will, to a large degree, sort themselves out without a lot of meddling by urban planners, politicians, and other busybodies once autonomous vehicles become common. Yes, there will be laws regarding the auto autos, but that shouldn’t be as bad as telling people where and how to live. We need to make sure non-congested areas remain open to manual cars, though.

  15. Is Holly Chabowski of Denmark https://www.facebook.com/hchabowski who visited Canada with her girlfriend the same Holly Chabwski who travelled the world for a year http://www.blurb.co.uk/b/1801658-holly-and-richie-s-walkabout with her then fiance? because they certainly look the same, they’re both teachers and the name appears only once in Facebook.
    I only ask because she must have an enormous “carbon footprint” and that would confirm that she’s a Green.
    By the way, if you want to spend 120 Canadian Dollars then the book is still available.

  16. She’s got a point. Canadians are getting fat. I’ve lived overseas for 6 years and every time I come back for a holiday I’m amazed at the increasing number of very obese people. I’ve mostly noticed this on my visits to rural Alberta and suburban Calgary. You used to occasionally see a family of mom, dad and a couple of 20 something kids tipping the scales and over half a ton. This visit I’d see a couple of tables of them anytime I was in the Strathmore Station restaurant.
    People in urban Vancouver are much slimmer. They are slimmer for the same reason most Europeans are, they walk more. They walk more because they don’t have to hop in a car to pick up a quart of milk or loaf of bread.
    Post WW2 urban design was designed for cars not people and we are getting fat because of that. Cars aren’t the problem. Communities that require cars for every little chore are the problem.

  17. Denmark is a lovely, tidy country with wonderful people* and good beer. It has been settled and groomed for a thousand years or more.
    Although I’m out in the Ottawa Valley countryside, I live just inside the limits of what is now the city of Ottawa. The whole area of Denmark is only 7.5 times that of Ottawa.**
    I invite Ms Chabowski to spend January here riding her bicycle between my residence and Parliament Hill, a 100-kilometre round-trip journey that includes gravel concession roads.***
    We should always take such sniffy European comments with a grain of salt.
    * Of whom almost 90 percent are ethnically Danish, i.e., a very “homogenous” culture indeed. Imagine if Canada were 90 percent ethnically Scottish Presbyterian.
    ** A mere six times the area of Toronto.
    *** And this is only in pretty tame, long-cultivated and settled Ontario country. I am sure my friends from out west or up north could describe far more austere conditions!

  18. If you really want to hear something scary.
    ?- Rumors are flloating about Obama taking the leadership of the UN -Are you ready for the new world order now?

  19. We had the mercury dip below -45 here in Manitoba a few times last winter. I’m sure this chick knows all about walking in that kind of cold. Especially with kids in tow. She needs to STFU and stay in Europe.

  20. Well twist my knickers. If you only knew the torment that Holly’s comment has caused me, Sleepless, I am.

  21. This is rich coming from a person whose nation is now a sharia ridden hell hole run by Islamic nuts with no free speech, or a press that lives for the totalitarian ideal of Marxism.Saturated by no go zones, with the police against their own citizans for even speaking out against the invasion of their land. But they are allowed to hate Jews, or hound ex Muslims out of the Country.By the way Denmark is a pimple besides the size of this Nation that is not just Toronto. Look at a globe Wonder Women to see just how far North we live. Peddling a bike in -40 below is no ideal. As Kate at SDA says. Public transport is like riding with 20 random hitch hikers.
    Our parks are bigger than Denmark, or most of Europe’s wee Countries , which is one huge congested city.
    Clean up your own Nation before condemning ours, you Nanny statist nag.

  22. I had the joy of being in Copenhagen after a major snow storm.
    Bike lanes were plowed first, then bus lanes and then regular lanes. Sidewalks are the responsibility of the person who owns the building they are in front of so that was hit or miss. I found getting around after a snow storm much easier than in Ottawa even though they aren’t used to lots of storms.
    I have Canadian friends who have settled there and they point out that people ‘choosing’ to take transit and bikes is a falsehood. Cars are taxed at over 100%. Even used cars are taxed highly. Registration fees are high and as well as the price of fuel. Even so, most of our friends (same economic class as we) have at least one car they use. They also use bikes and transit but they own a car (1 per family) as well. They don’t use them daily as we do here, but then again there isn’t the need to do so like there is here (less distance, better transit systems.)
    I’ve visited in rural Denmark and marveled at how one ticket allowed me to take an inter-town bus, then an inter-city train and finally the city bus back to my flat in Copenhagen. Very convenient. But distances covered are a fraction of those in Southern Ontario and the concentration of people is greater. Still, I can’t travel by public transit at all between the villages in the rural City of Ottawa and often can’t get to central Ottawa from the villages but that is an economic choice our governments have made (one can assume driven by the voters.)
    I’ve chosen to move into the city and will be biking and walking a lot more (and hope to move from obese back to healthy as a result.) We’ve ‘lived’ (for a few weeks at a time) in cities around the world and enjoy that lifestyle and now that we are older were finding the isolation of the village life a bit confining. It is great if you can drive but once you are too ill to drive, you are stuck relying on the kindness of neighbours to keep you supplied and give you rides to doctors, which are all 30+ km away – and this is in rural Ottawa, not out in true rural Canada.
    Now we have more options when we can’t drive – transit is at our door and taxis are another option. We still use the car a lot, though, because often it is a cheaper option. Transit costs $6 a round trip so with two of us, you can cover a lot of parking and gas for $12 and save a lot of time. And I haven’t even started to deal with the weather issues since I just moved in June.
    I’ll find the right balance of driving vs biking/walking/transit for me now that I moved. But it will be my choice, not the a social engineering choice as it is in Denmark. I guess that’s what I find scariest about the comparison – no-one is doing a proper analysis, they are just parroting the ‘party’ line. I love Copenhagen the best of all the places I’ve traveled and probably because of all the social engineering (it is clean, healthy, artsy, rule-abiding, generally safe.) But I’d prefer to live here in Canada and choose the best of what the world has to offer, than be forced to live a certain way by the government through financial penalties if I try to live outside their expectations for me.

  23. “I have Canadian friends who have settled there and they point out that people ‘choosing’ to take transit and bikes is a falsehood.”
    Yes, people generally don’t take public transit because they want to. They take it because they have no other choice.

  24. Why everyone gave this attention starved lefty the spotlight she desired, I have no idea.
    The letter should have been tossed in the garbage.

  25. Personally, I am insulted by all of the bigotry towards fat people.
    I’m not aware that they’ve(fat people) collectively solicited the opinion or judgment of those who are not fat regarding their arses.
    For those who are concerned about the weight of others… I will speak for them and say “fcuk you; mind your own business”.(not directed at you particularly cal; unless of course you are concerned about other people’s weight).
    BTW… I look good.
    “What I eat doesn’t make you isht” – Jay-Z

  26. the danes like the swedes are being over run by muslims. wait until she tries to drive her bike down the road in a halter top. wow. head leaving body before she can say dhimmi.

  28. Yeah – all Danes are antiSemites. And to think we spent blood and treasure to help free them from the Nazis.

  29. The kind of people who make sweeping generalisations tend not live a particular way. Canada (it goes without saying) is far more vast than Denmark and has more precipitation. Having a “passion for urban planning” doesn’t change reality.

  30. I hate to point this out, but Holly is from England,(which even makes it worse) her friend is the Dane.
    Public transportation works in Europe because it is the most densely populated continent on the planet. That’s why they were at the forefront of the carbon offsets. Try to find a table showing CO2 emissions per sq.km, impossible, they all show per person, which puts Canada and Australia near the top of the list, and European countries well down.That and the fact they use a lot of nuclear energy. Nice scam, too bad you lost billions. China is slightly smaller than us, but have what, 12 times the CO2 emissions. Whom is the better steward of their land? Seems clear to me.
    Urban planners use the word sustainable often, too often. Public transportation in Canada loses money, big time. City taxpayers and the province (I can only speak for AB) subsidize it to the tune of mega millions. Is that sustainable?
    Holly, is having your federal government, like most in Europe, spend vast amounts more than they bring in sustainable? Is what is happening in London? I suggest you clean up your own effing back yard first. Strongly.eith
    And remember this, we are Canadians and really, really don’t want to be European, or anyone else for that matter, a continent that has for centuries done nothing but fight and tell the rest of the world how great they are. Compare the line ups trying to get into our respective countries. That should tell you a lot.

  31. @John Lewis: “all Danes are anti-Semites”
    Funny you should say that. Allow me to quote an historical fact:
    “Despite great personal risk, the Danish resistance movement, with the assistance of many ordinary Danish citizens, managed to evacuate 7,220 of Denmark’s 7,800 Jews, plus 686 non-Jewish spouses, by sea to nearby neutral Sweden.”.
    The fact is that Danish Jews had the highest survival rate of all the countries occupied by the Nazis.

  32. Don’t you just love it when a hippy from a country roughly the size of a Holland Marsh Onion. Tries to explain how she’d handle mass transit in the second largest country in the world.

  33. I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, but this makes me want to go for a long drive with a large Ford V8 to so maybe, just *maybe*, my carbon footprint will approach that of the green lefties.

  34. Holly Chabowski?, CHABOWSKI?? From Denmark? Naaaw. Sounds like you have already pissed some of the people off in your home country to the extent that they kicked you out? Don’t be coming back here, sweety, unless you change your attitude. Better yet, just don’t be coming back here. We kinda like our cars, especially in the winter time.

  35. “The fact is that Danish Jews had the highest survival rate of all the countries occupied by the Nazis.”
    “Where Religious Prejudice and Hate Did Not Exist”[1]
    Jews in Albania
    On the whole, Albania did not discriminate against its Jews. Due to Albania’s liberal visa application process, Jews began coming from all over Europe, and once the United States closed its door to them in 1938 and the Italians invaded in 1939, they realized that they would have to stay in Albania for the duration of the war. They did not realize at the time how lucky it was to have ended up there.
    …
    Albania, the only European country with a Muslim majority, committed itself to saving all of its Jewish inhabitants. Almost all Jews living within Albanian borders during the German occupation, those of Albanian origin and refugees alike, were saved, except members of a single family. Ultimately, there were more Jews in Albania at the end of the war than before.
    http://www.yadvashem.org/yv/en/education/newsletter/22/main_article.asp

  38. Wait a minute – isn’t Elizabeth May is a fat hypocritical hippo that drives around in cars…?

  41. Imagine having to pedal a bike from Regina to Saskatoon, only to arrive at the warehouse and being told that the new GE Fridge I ordered doesn’t fit on the rear basket of my Canadian Tire 26 inch cruiser. Now that would depress me! But I could carry a dozen ”cinnamon danish” to munch on the way back!

  42. “…Perhaps she should visit in the winter time to see why so few of us walk or bicycle to work.”
    If she comes for another visit she is welcome to borrow my bicycle when I am not using it. I.e. November to April, typically.

  43. One might argue that the Danes in Viking history caught the Euro disease first and then spread it to Sweden and Norway! Shame on them.
    Making suggestions on how to live life more responsibly or with a softer eco foot print means absolutely nothing if not done within a balanced budget. Anyone who argues otherwise wants to ignore long term sustainability or simply wants on a gravy train that is unaccountable. Food, shelter and heat first then talk about what art to put on the walls!

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