Angry in the Great White North defending Warren Kinsella?
Well, he certainly doesn’t need my help to defend himself, but I hate to see a person being misquoted and misrepresented to the media.
And in this case, I think that’s exactly what is happening to Warren Kinsella.

I just got a call to let me know that Julie Murray, reporter for the West Quebec Post, who worked with me on publishing some of the elements of the Abotech affair involving Liberal MP David Smith of the riding of Pontiac, will be interviewed on CBC Radio One at 2pm (in about 10 minutes).

I can’t listen to the radio here, but if anyone out there can tune in to CBC Radio One, let us know how the interview goes.

From Angry in the Great White North to the West Quebec Post to the Ottawa Citizen to CBC Radio One…

Update: This might not actually be a live interview. It might be a taped interview, segments of which would form part of a 3-minute news report to be aired during the news segments. Sorry, I’m not sure which it will be.

Many bloggers are getting an email from the CBC today. Here is a portion of it:

In your message you cited an e-mail sent out by a CBC News associate producer working on a news item about the federal election.
When CBC News management became aware of the e-mail in question, they looked into the matter and concluded that this action was indeed a breach of CBC�s Journalistic Standards and Practices – specifically issues pertaining to the appearance of partiality or perceptions of partiality in all stages of story production. As a result of this conclusion, disciplinary measures have now been taken.

This was in response to an email campaign to complain about a CBC producer looking for voters who were “freaked out” scared of the Conservatives, and so switching their votes to the Liberals.
“Freaked out” — her words.
Needless to say, she wasn’t looking for people disgusted with Liberal Party corruption.
Disciplinary measures? We don’t know the details, and frankly, maybe it’s not our business. But let’s hope it’s more than “Don’t get caught next time!”

Gun crime is up in Toronto. Criminals using unregistered handguns have been shooting people, mostly each other.
There’s an election on, so it’s time to look tough. But criminals are hard to find, and they fight back.
Still, Paul Martin wants to be seen as doing something. How about all those law-abiding citizens who followed the law and registered their handguns?
They’re probably going to vote Conservative anyway.
Let’s punish them.

One wonders just who thought this counted as a compromise:

Saying it would be “inappropriate” to include them, Memphis, Tenn., library officials have banned Mary, Joseph, Jesus and the wise men from a promotional nativity scene – leaving only the stable animals and a shepherd boy.

I wonder if the shepherd boy figure would be posed shrugging his shoulders, while the sheep are positioned as if looking around in other mangers to see if the Son of God is next door taking visitors.

You can read about the whole silly business at Angry in the Great White North.

There’s no pleasing some people.
The Conservatives have been accused of having a “hidden agenda” — a plan to do something bad once elected.
Pick your favourite cause — for or against — and there is someone out there who will tell you that the Conservatives plan to do exactly what you don’t want them to do.
Typically, that someone works for the Liberal Party. The “hidden agenda” scare did a lot to hurt the Conservatives in the 2004 election.
So this time around, the Conservatives are spending the opening weeks of the campaign putting it all on the table. Here’s what they promise to do. Some might like it, some won’t — but when you are looking at that ballot, you’ll know what to expect from the Conservatives.
This is better, right? The media is going to give the Conservatives credit for eliminating the “hidden agenda” problem so effectively, right?
Wrong.

Angry in the Great White North has a post about Jodie Wheatle, a young black man arrested in a Toronto mall crowded with families shopping. After unsuccessfully resisting arrest, officers discovered a loaded .45-calibre handgun in his possession. Not just loaded, but cocked and with a round in the chamber.

A justice of the peace looked over the multiple weapons charges, and put him back on the streets on $10,000 bail.

Three weeks later, police arrested him again. This time on suspicion of murder. A 25-year-old car salesman was shot in the head and the chest in his sales lot when Wheadle and his friends got angry over financing difficulties related to their car purchase.

Our Chief Justice just delivered a speech in which she said the judiciary whould do whatever they think is right “even in the face of clearly enacted laws or hostile public opinion”.

I don’t think she knows what “hostile” really means. Jodie Wheadle is a hostile man, and now a family must struggle with a violent murder just three weeks before Christmas. I guess that justice of the peace took Chief Justice McLachlin’s advice on doing whatever you think is right, and the public be damned.

Maybe if Canadians become more “hostile”, our judges would start taking us seriously.

Not Stephen Harper.

Not even Paul Martin.

It’s Beverley McLachlin, Supreme Court Justice:

“The rule of law requires judges to uphold unwritten constitutional norms, even in the face of clearly enacted laws or hostile public opinion,” said a prepared text of the lecture Judge McLachlin gave to law students at Victoria University of Wellington late last week.

“I believe that judges have the duty to insist that legislative and executive branches of government conform to certain established and fundamental norms, even in times of trouble,” she said.

Nine unelected (essentially) life-long appointees who weren’t even vetted by Parliament before taking on their positions, telling us what to do if a mere majority of them decide it’s right, regardless of what the law actually says.

Why bother even having elections?

Full post at Angry in the Great White North.

Questions first raised in a blog-based investigation of the Abotech affair involving Liberal MP David Smith are continuing to find traction in the main stream media.

In this case, the Ottawa Citizen is running a lengthy article reporting on questions being raised by the NDP candidate in David Smith’s riding of Pontiac, Quebec. The questions are about the legitimacy of David Smith’s claim to aboriginal status. Céline Brault gives credit to the report by Julie Murray and Steve Janke (aka Angry in the Great White North) appearing in the November 25 edition of the West Quebec Post for raising this issue.

Read the whole thing.

Stephen Harper? Paul Martin?
Or is it Jean-Pierre Kingsley, Chief Electoral Officer and head of Elections Canada?
You decide.

At Angry in the Great White North, one union member has a serious issue with Buzz Hargrove’s endorsement of Paul Martin and the Liberals:

I’m a member of the CAW, and am mightily pissed at Hargrove telling us who to vote for, as if we are a bunch of imbeciles that need to be led. FU** off Buzz and take that union hating SOB Martin with you.

Are you a union member or an NDP supporter? Angry is inviting more opinions.

News at Angry in the Great White North. Buzz Hargrove, head of the Canadian Auto workers union, has thrown his support behind Paul Martin and the Liberals, abandoning Jack Layton and the NDP.
This despite the fact that the NDP is making support for an auto industry aid package a non-negotiable part of any deal for NDP support in another minority government.
Jack Layton is learning the difference between liking people and trusting people. Is this announcement going to lead to a more visible alignment between Stephen Harper and the Conservatives on the one hand, and Jack Layton and the NDP on the other, providing Canadians with a viable anti-Liberal choice?
Layton might not like Harper, but I think he is thinking he can trust Harper, more than he can trust “friends” like Buzz Hargrove.

Goldilocks, of course, was the little girl face with three choices — porridge that was too hot, porridge that was too cold, or porridge that was lukewarm.
Since we were children, we’ve been taught that the lukewarm porridge was “just right”. The other two choices were extremes, and fit only to be dismissed.
The Liberal Party has presented itself to Canadians as the “just right” party for decades.
The Conservatives (aka Alliance aka Reform aka PC)? Too reactionary.
The NDP? Too radical.
Has this been the formula for effective government? Go to Angry in the Great White North for why this approach, as sensible as it might seem to Goldilocks, is really not the right way to run a country.

Angry in the Great White North explains why a tax exemption for the Church is about doing the State a favour:

In my post about Slinger’s suggestion about how to deal the Catholic Church with the temerity to enforce her own rules within the walls of her own churches, I focused on how the attitude Slinger exhibits essentially puts politicians, and by extension, the State, above both the Church and above the people, answerable to no one.
To me that seems to be such an obviously bad idea that I thought the discussion could end there.
I didn’t discuss the issue of Slinger’s proposed punishment — taxation. To me, it is so clearly a bad idea that I thought I could pass over it without comment. But from the comments people have left on the blog (from both those who support Slinger and those who don’t), I get the feeling that just about everybody seems to misunderstand what the purpose of a tax exemption for the Church actually is.
The State is not doing the Church a favour by granting tax exempt status. It’s the other way around. The Church is doing the State a favour by accepting it.

Essentially the argument is this: if you tax the Church, she becomes a constituent like any other taxpayer, and will demand time with MPs and ministers to discuss this and that. The whole idea of a tax exemption is to minimize Church interference in matters of State, yet the punishment for becoming involved in one or two major issues being proposed by Slinger and others, that is, to start taxing the Church, guarantees future involvement in all issues, major and minor.
Leave it to liberals to craft a punishment that promotes the very behaviour it was supposed to deter.

Angry in the Great White North takes on one of his favourite subjects — people who think the Roman Catholic Church should be destroyed for suggesting that Catholic politicians act more, well, Catholic.

But because the Church dares apply her internal rules to a politician, she must be bankrupted and destroyed. Now communion is obligation that the Church must provide, at least to all politicians who demand it, lest they be embarrassed.
Does the same go for me? If I embarrass a politician, is Slinger going to demand that I lose my house too? If too many people write nasty things about the Prime Minister (or about Slinger) on the Internet, is Slinger going to demand that the Internet be brought to heel as well?
So Slinger is leading the charge to put the Church back in her place. Or more accurately, to put politicians in their place. A place above all criticism, where the rules that others live by do not apply, whether those rules are obligatory or willingly accepted.
Where all that matters is that politicians are not embarrassed.
Come to think of it, Slinger seems to worship at the altar of the Liberal Party. What? Someone has embarrassed you, Lord Martin? I will crush them!

From an opinion piece in the Toronto Star:

Patrick Watson [former chairman of the CBC] has taken the recalcitrant bull by the horns in proposing a bold new start for public broadcasting in Canada, and demolishing the CBC in its present form. His ideas are breathtaking, a little scary, and I think deserving of a scorching, soul-searching public debate. They raise enormous questions, for media is the pulsing, breathing heart of our national culture, and CBC is its central artery.
Watson has rendered a public service in proposing surgery for public broadcasting. It’s astonishing that this man, who has devoted much of his creative life to vitalizing the CBC, can now contemplate its demolition. This underscores the need for reform and the urgency for government to take action.
But how to begin? Not more public hearings, that would be useless. Maybe a commission of vast experience ranging across the cultural and business mosaic. For argument, here’s a shopping list of unconventional thinkers: Lloyd Axworthy, Margaret Atwood, Conrad Black, Adrienne Clarkson, Jean Chr�tien, Garth Drabinsky, Michael Ignatieff, Laurier Lapierre, Stephen Lewis, Peter Pearson, David Suzuki and of course, Watson.
Imagine what astonishing ideas such a consortium would produce.

Let’s see, with the exception of Black and Drabinsky, you’ve got an excellent cross-section of the best that America-hating eco-communist Canada can offer. That’s 10 out of 12. Of the two token conservatives, Conrad Black is busy with his own troubles with regards to Hollinger, and Garth Drabinsky, as far as I can tell, is still facing charges for accounting fraud in the United States and Canada resulting from the bankruptcy of Livent.
A consortium made up of two conservatives who probably won’t even show up, and a bunch of lefties and hard-lefties. This is the group that’s going to revolutionize the CBC?
Astonishing ideas? Let me guess: more government funding, more Canadian content, more funding for the arts, more preferential treatment when bidding for broadcast rights, more focus on environmentalism, more focus on socially progressive issues, more critical treatment of the United States, less focus on profitability, less focus on ratings, less focus on government scandal. Yeah, that’s astonishing.
See the extended entry at Angry in the Great White North.

Check out the list of “dream leaders” they want in charge:
1 – Nelson Mandela
2 – Bill Clinton
3 – Dalai Lama
4 – Noam Chomsky
5 – Alan Greenspan
6 – Bill Gates
7 – Steve Jobs
8 – Archbishop Desmond Tutu
9 – Richard Branson
10 – George Soros
11 – Kofi Annan
12 – Tony Blair
13 – Aung San Suu Kyi
14 – Bono
15 – Michael Moore
Moore? Bono? Soros? Annan?!!
And Osama bin Laden came in at 70th out of 100. How did he even get a single vote?
Full story at Angry in the Great White North.

The number of girls entering engineering schools in Ontario is dropping, and this has people worried:

“We’ve raised the red flag about this because engineering needs to represent the full diversity of life experience � cultural and gender � to be truly creative,” said Ecsedi.

Here’s the cruel truth to any of the girls out there reading this — the only “creative” thing I’ve had to do from dealing with engineers from the Middle East or China is trying to figure out what they’re saying half the time. Do women in the mix make a difference? In fifteen years, I have yet to note a single incident where I was convinced that this is true. Not that a woman engineer didn’t contribute here or there, as much or as little as any man, but her contribution had everything to do with being a good engineer and nothing about being a woman.
Bottom line is that an engineering solution is one that meets the minimal requirements of the physical problem for the least cost. Creativity plays a role in it, but it is constrained by science and math and physical reality. The strength of a beam is not a function of how many women you have on the design team, nor is the criticality of eliminating a memory leak from a real-time embedded software program mitigated by having your test team look like a “Colours of Benetton” ad.
The full rant can be seen at Angry in the Great White North.

Angry in the Great White North looks at the demands by black community leaders for special treatment:
* special sentencing guidelines
* less jail, more skills training
* investigation into police racism
* separate schools with separate standards
If justice is no longer blind, then why should regular Canadians be? It opens the door to Canadians to provide “special” treatment to their fellow citizens who happen to be black — store owners would be allowed to refuse service to black kids in gang outfits, for example.
But he also points out the obvious — a determination would be required of who is actually black. Do you think these “community leaders” would approach former South African bureaucrats on how this is best done?

Angry in the Great White North is angry. Really. Apparently, listening to university dropout Belinda Stronach lecture the rest of us on the importance of a post-secondary education is grating on his nerves.
Is she being hypocritical?
Maybe not.
Maybe she really is worried about Canada’s economic health if we don’t graduate enough people from post-secondary institutions.
If Canada were to start a dramatic decline economically, her fortune might be at risk!
So she’s going to make sure that the rest of us have the opportunity to do all the heavy lifting required — the studying, the assignments, the exams — to make sure that Canada remains an economically safe place for multi-millionaires to play at being cabinet ministers.