Winnipeg Sun;

A looming court battle over Manitoba’s anti-smoking law will hinge on whether the province must treat white bar owners the same as their aboriginal counterparts, an issue that could have implications across the country.
The section of the law that exempted aboriginal reserves from the smoking ban was struck down in August by Justice Albert Clearwater of Court of Queen’s Bench, who ruled it violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The Manitoba government is trying to appeal the decision by arguing, in part, that the charter guarantee was not designed to provide a level playing field for white males.

Damian Penny – “The members of CUPW are acting like, well, fundamentalists.”

Rattling over the 10 miles of gravel road north of the Port of Oungre/Fortuna euphamistically identified as “Hwy 35”, it occurred to me that the Americans are spending a lot of money on fence construction when the more efficient solution might be to hire Lorne Calvert to run the state of Texas.
After all, this is the government that is successfully digging a moat around Saskatchewan, one pothole at a time.
By way of comparison: provincial highway construction in Saskatchewan. (Taken at 4:55 pm on a Wednesday afternoon. Note absence of highway workers)…


And photos of state highway construction in North Dakota, taken the following day…


You can see the problem here.
If they had the foresight to replace the pavement north of the US-Mexico border with the type of road construction we have in Saskatchewan, there’d be no need for a border fence. Illegals would be quickly convinced they were crossing from one third world country into another, and they’d just turn around on their own.

Bumped. Scroll down for updates.
“It’s the season of The Thing That Wouldn’t Die.”

And this year, the Court Challenges Program is playing the part of Jason…
Last month, the Conservative government announced the end of the infamous Court Challenges Program, through which special interest groups, using our tax dollars, launched stunt lawsuits pushing their agendas. Gay “marriage” was the most notorious result. Knowing they could never get their way via the ballot box, activists used the Court Challenges Program to bypass democracy.
Unelected, unaccountable Supreme Court Justices and publicly funded radicals — not the most desirable combination…

It’s a blogburst! Robbing Peter, Robbing Paul DNR Go Gentle into that Good Night Do Not Resuscitate Court Of SHHHH!! Hey Activist – Get A Job. Ding Dong, The Witch Is Dead! Today comes word that the grand-daddy of all self-interest groups, the Canadian Bar Association, is calling for the restoration of the program. Write your MP and tell them to keep this monster dead – or heads will roll!

And more …..
“Too Freekin Obvious”
Taxpayer funded advocacy – more background on the CCP
Unemployed Lawyers?
“It is a tale told by an idiot…”
A tax funded not-for-profit – nice gig!
Dawn of the Dead.

More from Steve Janke, including this;

Ottawa is spending millions to push gay rights and ”stringent” feminist views of equality by funding legal cases, says a political scientist who has studied the court challenges program.
The money is supposed to go towards ”important court cases that advance language and equality rights guaranteed under Canada’s Constitution.”
But Ian Brodie of the University of Western Ontario says the court challenges program has made up its mind which groups will get the cash.
”They’re heavily funding the one side,” he said Thursday. ”It happens to be the gay-rights side, the pro-pornography side, the feminist side and the abortion issue.”
Since 1999 the program has adopted a policy of absolute confidentiality, refusing to provide any information on the cases or groups it funds.
Brodie analysed the program prior to 1992 by obtaining records that were available under access to information laws. His study is being published in the June issue of the Canadian Journal of Political Science.

Janke rightly points out that the Harper government deserves kudos for “reject[ing] the temptation to use that tool for themselves.”

Mark Peters confesses;

Now, unfortunately it appears that our son is a victim of domestic violence at the hand of both his mother and me. This evening we will have to turn ourselves in at the nearest RCMP station and make our children wards of the state lest we commit any more violence against their fragile bodies and minds. After all, the 21st century world government has determined that parenting is illegal.

The Fraser Institute released a study yesterday comparing market performance of auto insurance in jurisdictions across North America and in Great Britain.

Data were collected on 15 variables describing the regulatory policy environments and outcomes in each jurisdiction using comparable measurement units. From these 15 variables, five indices were constructed that comparatively measure market quality and regulatory severity across international jurisdictions. Two indices measure market quality outcomes from the perspective of consumers regarding cost and choice; one index gauges market quality outcomes from the perspective of insurers regarding the business climate for auto insurance; a fourth index measures the regulatory severity of auto insurance policy in each market; and the fifth index measures overall market quality combining the scores for each jurisdiction across all 15 variables. This study also examines statistical correlations between variables that can be conceptually separated into distinctly dependent and independent categories.

PDF
(Note – some commentors are having problems getting through the spam filter. The word “insurance” is the problem. Try spelling it in abbreviation, and I suspect the problem will alleviate.)

In the comments, Bryceman asks for help;

I have a question for my fellow conservatives. 99% of the time, I can handle myself well in a political discussion/debate on any of the hot-button topics of the day. And I can usually send the more left-leaning of my political adversaries to the defensive. Not in a bad way. Most of the people I discuss politics with are very cool and reasonable people who will give and take political points on grey-area issues. These aren’t knock-down, drag-out arguments with extremists…just friendly debate.
But, there is one approach to one topic that I never have a very good come-back for. It’s about gun control.
Now, I don’t actually own any firearms. While I have not kept the tradition alive, I come from a long line of hunters. I used to be certified to handle and carry guns (except for restricted weapons). But, my old certification was declared null and void (thank-you Mr. Rock) because I hadn’t had it since before 1979.
So, I have to take it all over again. And I will – since I am set to inherit some guns that have been in my family – some of them going back as far as the 1870’s.
Anyway, when something like the Dawson College incident happens, I always react by saying, “Hunters and farmers from BC to Newfoundland will be made to pay for this.”
And my “less-right” political sparring partners respond by posing questions like, “Yeah. But, in today’s world, what do we need guns for anyway? And what’s the limit on what kind of guns a person should be allowed to own? Should they be allowed to own a tank? How about a SAM launcher?”
I’m never able to answer these kinds of questions to my own satisfaction. I never get that “slam-dunk” feeling when arguing back. Sure, I can go on about the creeping nature of the state unecessarily taking away the rights of law abiding citizens in a hollow response to a problem (like Dawson) that has nothing to do with them. But, I can’t go much further without my own argument sounding weak – even to me. Second Ammendment arguments don’t have any relevance in Canada. And, as I am a prime example, the argument that there is a need to hunt for you and your family’s food is all but gone in the modern world.
Has anyone got a suggestion on how to answer this one better?

Yes, I do. Concede the point.
“I agree. There is no need in today’s world for a citizen to own a gun.”
Having come to agreement that “need” is the threshold for a citizen’s right to own a firearm, the discussion is ready to move forward.
Announce to your friend that you are ready to accompany them to their home. You will begin with an inspection of the kitchen, and from there, will work your way through their house, tagging each possession you believe they do not need in “today’s world”.
Don’t forget the garage.
There’s no logical reason to limit the inspection to possessions that pose a threat as weapons. With the consequences that await society from global warming, and the alarming increase in energy consumption, those homes with a television in every room, two cars in the garage, and appliances of pure convenience – food processors, cappuccino makers – cappuccino makers! – must come under review.
Tagged items will then be removed to a truck and taken to a location for safe disposal.
Explain that only possessions for which you determine there is current need will be allowed to remain – the “greater good” is not open to negotiation. You might point out that this position is perfectly consistant with your friend’s determination that there is no “need” to own a firearm. The only thing that has changed is the person doing the determining.
(In addition to those tagged for immediate seizure, items with the potential to become unecessary in the “today’s world” of tomorrow will be recorded in a registry. In that way, future unecessaries may be confiscated more efficiently. Some accomodation may be made for heirlooms and items with sentimental importance – antique automobiles, plasma tv’s, recreational vehicles – so long as they are rendered permanently inoperable. Plus, they’ll need a permit.)
When you are interrupted – and you will be interrupted – ask your friend this;
If “need” is to be a criteria for the private ownership of property, then what’s so damned special about guns? And if the definition of a citizen’s “need” is at the perogative of the state, then what’s so damned special about yours?

*
(Git yer leaked NDP draft policy documents here!)

Facing the consequences of 30 years hard work by the left in breaking down societal taboos and replacing it with a culture of permissiveness;

LONDON – British Prime Minister Tony Blair said yesterday the state should intervene early – possibly even before birth – to stop the children of problem families growing up into troublemakers.
One think-tank said the idea, the latest step in Blair’s drive against crime and anti-social behaviour in Britain, verged on “genetic determinism”.
In his first interview since returning from a Caribbean holiday, Blair told the BBC that teenage mothers could be required to accept state assistance with bringing up their children and could face sanctions if they refused.
Intervention might even be needed “pre-birth”, he said.
“If we are not prepared to predict and intervene far more early then there are children that are going to grow up in families that we know perfectly well are completely dysfunctional, and the kids a few years down the line are going to be a menace to society and actually a threat to themselves,” Blair said.
Blair is seeking to put the focus on his policies to try to halt a slump in his Government’s popularity and shift media attention away from the question of when he will step down.
He said the Government could say to an unmarried teenage mother who was not in a stable relationship: “Here is the support we are prepared to offer you, but we do need to keep a careful watch on you and how your situation is developing because all the indicators are that your type of situation can lead to problems in the future.”
Anastasia de Waal, of social policy think-tank Civitas, said: “It is teetering on genetic determinism this kind of saying that before children are even born they are labelled as problematic.”
Oliver Letwin, policy director for the opposition Conservative Party, slammed Blair’s idea, saying more state intervention and bureaucracy were not the answer.
“The only realistic way forward lies with social enterprise, charities and voluntary groups. It is no good the Government simply trying to run peoples’ lives,” he said.

On the other hand, it’s not as though Blair’s Labour Party has been altogether reluctant to assume the responsibilities of failed parenting – and then some. Flashback:

Mr Ternouth’s thriller flooded back to me this week when I read of the Government’s plan to spend £224million of your money and mine on setting up a database, recording details of the lives of all 12 million children in England and Wales.
Among other things, the Children’s Index will record whether a child’s parents are providing a ‘positive role model’, how the child is performing at school — and even whether youngsters are eating the daily five portions of fruit and vegetables recommended by the Government. Presumably, children will be questioned at school each morning on what their parents fed them the night before.
The database, we are told, will be made available to social workers, teachers and doctors, who will have the power to flag up ‘concerns’ when they think that children are not meeting the criteria laid down by the state.

Captain Capitalism;

You mean a bunch of uneducated, leftist, professional activists with no real education, job, work ethic or life experience who now currently head up the Bolivian government are not financially savvy enough to run a multi-billion dollar industry???? Let alone have the engineering know-how to maintain and run has fields???
How can that be???

“Rantings and tirades of a frustrated economist.” – A great find.
h/t to reader “Karen”.

*
BBC;

The mayor of Venezuela’s capital Caracas says he plans to expropriate two exclusive golf courses and use the land for homes for the city’s poor.
Mayor Juan Barreto has said playing golf on lavish courses within sight of the city’s slums is “shameful”.
Mr Barreto, an ally of President Hugo Chavez, has been trying to address a dramatic housing shortage in Caracas.
But critics say property rights are being eroded in Venezuela, where farms and ranches have also been seized.
Three years ago Mr Chavez’s left-wing government started redistributing agricultural land that it said was underused to help landless peasants.
But this is the first time officials have announced plans to expropriate privately-owned urban land to make way for public housing, says the BBC’s Greg Morsbach in Caracas.

*

Intolerance in Scotland;

Celtic have asked for a meeting with police after goalkeeper Artur Boruc was cautioned for a breach of the peace during an Old Firm game at Ibrox.
Boruc was accused of making gestures during a game with Rangers in February.
The Crown Office said the procurator fiscal had issued the caution as an alternative to prosecution.
A spokesman explained that Boruc’s actions “included a combination of behaviour before a crowd in the charged atmosphere of an Old Firm match”.
The Polish goalkeeper’s behaviour had “provoked alarm and crowd trouble”.

Emphasis mine.
I won’t spoil the surprise. A description of the “gesture” is buried deep in the fifteenth graf.
Good ‘ol BBC.
More on the gesture that launched a 6 month police investigation, at the Daily Mail.

Via reader kdl in the comments;

Gwen Landolt, VP of REAL Women, will be a guest on a call-in show on CBC Radio, Saskatchewan, at 1:00 p.m. on Monday August 28. Last week she was on a CBC Radio show in Ontario. I understand they selected three callers with scripted messages, all in favour of Status of Women funding. Time for some Saskatchewan spontaneity, I would suggest.

Kathy Shaidle has more including a copy of her letter to Minister Bev Oda, and a link to the predictable feminist sqealing over the suggestion they be weaned from SOW.
Speaking of which, the Progressive Bloggers are running an online poll on this question. To preempt any PB complaints that my mention of this poll might be somehow responsible for “rigging” the result, I am not disclosing whether I voted yes or no.
Update – as noticed by commentor “lookout”;

Hey, what happened to the poll at Progressive (sic) Bloggers? Last time I looked, it was 67% in favour of defunding SOW and only 32% in favour of funding it. I just checked again. The poll’s disappeared altogether. Sore losers?

Not at all. The regressive chauvinists have (as someone put it last week) “just had their ass handed to them by a girl.”

Memo to Jennifer Ditchburn of via Macleans: I’d like to draw your attention to something –

Several pro-Conservative Internet blogs have signed onto a campaign to eliminate Status of Women Canada, a Trudeau-era federal agency that promotes women’s equality and advancement.
The campaign was kickstarted by REAL Women of Canada, one of Canada’s most vocal organizations of social conservatives. It has long urged the federal government to axe Status of Women – but this time its message is being widely discussed and supported among some in the Conservative Internet community.
[…]
But fears that the campaign might find favour within a caucus that includes many social conservatives have taken root in some quarters.
Halifax communications consultant and blogger Audra Williams has mounted her own counter-offensive, urging readers to write to their MP in support of Status of Women Canada.
“This actually turns my blood to ice,” Williams wrote last week. “I am calling my MP right now. I mean, I know she’s on board, but still I am calling her.”

It isn’t just “social conservatives” who want the “Harper government to axe Status of Women Canada” and marginalizing their critics in such a manner is disingenuous – at best. Had you bothered to report on who and what SOW spends our taxdollars on, those fearful squeals from feminists might have been placed in the appropriate context.
This quote from Monica Lysack of the Child Care Advocacy Association of Canada is particularly ridiculous:

“When you look at women in Canada and their human rights compared to international standards, we have a long way to go.”

What complete and utter bullshit. Modern organized feminism has nothing to do with human rights for women, and everything to do with pushing the agenda of the left – the word “Women” in Status Of Women reduced to a device to ensure continued government funding.
If this were not the case, if SOW genuinely functioned as a voice on “womens issues” in Canada, the organization would maintain official political neutrality on issues like abortion and child care. There would have been no us-vs-them content in the Ditchburn article, because the “social conservatives” she refers to would be playing a meaningful role in policy development within the organization.
Pamela Bone, in the Australian, illustrates how (like the word “progressive”) the word “women” has been quietly appropriated as yet another euphanism for “the hard left”;

IN Tehran in June, several thousand people held a peaceful demonstration calling for legal changes that would give a woman’s testimony in court equal value to a man’s. The demonstrators, most of them women, were attacked with tear gas and beaten with batons by men and women from Iran’s State Security Forces, according to Amnesty International.
Iranian women may not travel without their husband’s permission but they are allowed to wield a truncheon against other women.
Do you think women in Western countries marched in solidarity with the Iranian women demonstrators? Of course not. Do you think there are posters and graffiti at universities condemning the Iranian President? Of course not. You know, without needing to go there, that any graffiti at universities will be condemning George W. Bush, not Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. (I concede Bush is easier to spell.)
You know, before you get there, that at the Melbourne Writers Festival starting this weekend the principal hate figures are going to be Bush and John Howard. You know there will be many sympathetic references to David Hicks but probably none to Ashraf Kolhari, an Iranian mother of four who has been in jail for five years for allegedly having sex outside marriage and, until last week, who was under sentence of death by stoning.
Thank goddess, as they used to say: a few Western feminists have begun to wonder why women who once marched for women’s rights are marching alongside people who would take away even the most basic of those rights.
The latest is Sarah Baxter, a former Greenham Common protester, who in Britain’s The Sunday Times had this to say about a recent demonstration in London calling for a ceasefire in Lebanon: “Women pushing their children in buggies bearing the familiar symbol of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament marched alongside banners proclaiming ‘We are all Hezbollah now’, and Muslim extremists chanting, ‘Oh Jew, the army of Mohammed will return’.
“I could never have imagined that many of the same crowd I hung out with then would today be standing shoulder to shoulder with militantly anti-feminist Islamic fundamentalist groups whose views on women make Western patriarchy look like a Greenham peace picnic.”

A little late to the game, Ms. Baxter is.
More reaction…

Humboldt Journal (jpg);

In her acceptance speech [Rev. Brenda] Curtis said some people think the United Church is a front for training New Democrats.
“But I assure you that it’s not. However, I have my suspicions that if Jesus had been a party politician, he would have been a card-carrying New Democrat.”

First things first – would Jesus have been a member of the United Church of Canada?

Now made easier by The Lefty Lexicon. A few examples;

Aggressive outreach – the process of actively soliciting trade for social workers. Generally employed when ‘customers’ fail to show required enthusiasm for services on offer.
Fascism/Nazism – apparently the ‘opposite’ of Socialism – despite sharing party members, ideology and – in National Socialism – the name.
Intolerance – Intolerance can only committed against certain defined groups of people. These do not include, Americans, the middle class, white manual workers, rural people, business and Christians obviously.
Marx – a Victorian gentleman whose theories cannot be disproved by observation, experience or factual evidence. See ‘religion’ and ‘post-modernism’.
Racist – means “shut up!” – and is much, much worse than being violent, thoughtless or unkind. In fact, easily the worst crime ever conceived of.

Canadian Cerberus;

Well this sure isn’t going to help cement the crumbling legacy of Trudeaumania. And it may very well have ended any thoughts Alexandre may have had of a political career, at least one can hope.

Be sure to read the comments, too.

So sayeth the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench;

A judge’s ruling that Manitoba’s anti-smoking law must apply to native reserves has raised a legal question other provinces will face as they decide whether to allow band councils to set their own smoking rules.
Justice Albert Clearwater of Court of Queen’s Bench ruled Monday that an exemption for reserves is discriminatory because it violates Section 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which guarantees that all people receive equal treatment under the law.
“It is every bit a breach of the charter to create offences for certain conduct by persons . . . and to concurrently exempt aboriginal persons from prosecution for the same conduct,” Clearwater wrote.
He said the Manitoba government was wrong to think it does not have jurisdiction over smoking on reserves.
But aboriginal leaders disagree and are already warning the province will be in for a fight if it tries to enforce its ban on reserves.

And why wouldn’t they? Aboriginal leaders can respond with “warnings” to any court decision they don’t like, knowing there is minimal legal risk in issuing implied threats of civil disobedience and violence. The precedent has been set in Caledonia – Canada has moved beyond race-based law, to race-based enforcement,

And Jew Lieberman.