Then:“I think it is contemptuous to tell people we are going to target your religion...

Now: Liberals launch outreach campaign in bid to recapture ethnic vote.

Oh oh. This isn't going to sit well with Michael Ignatieff or all of the others who took offense to the CPC's efforts in this area.

Michael Ignatieff: “I think it is contemptuous to tell people we are going to target your religion, we are going to target your ethnicity, we are going to target your national origins. No! We must target the fact they are Canadian citizens.”

“I don’t like the word “ethnic,” Ignatieff said, in French. “A Sikh is a Canadian, a Hindu is a Canadian, a Muslim is Canadian, a Tamil is a Canadian.”

What about the current placeholder err leader Bob Rae?  Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae suggested the initiative was more about winning support in ethnic communities — groups that Mr. Kenney has been actively courting for the Harper government in its attempts to build a majority government.
“It has much more to do with Canadian domestic politics than it has to do with the necessity of having a coherent strategy for the promotion of democracy and human rights,” said Mr. Rae.
“It's more a domestic strategy than a foreign affairs strategy.” (ht BC Blue)

BTW how do you reach out to the 'ethnic vote' without a leader or any policy other than 'we will try super extra hard the next time to get it right'. Sorry Liberals but being totally rudderless does not inspire much confidence in your party to anyone, including the 'ethnics'.

"The decline of marriage isn't the fault of gays"

James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal wonders why opponents of the recent legalization of gay marriage in New York aren't also up in arms about a law passed last August instituting "no-fault divorce" in the state. After all, isn't it all about defending traditional marriage?
Last August, to far less public attention, lawmakers in Albany enacted legislation making New York the final state to institute no-fault divorce, thereby abolishing even the pretense that marriage is a lifetime commitment under the law. Under this regime, marriage is a lifetime commitment only until one spouse decides otherwise.

As a Bloomberg report noted at the time, the Legislature took this step for a good practical reason, "to reduce long, cutthroat court battles over who's to blame when marriages fail":
"There is a human cost and a financial cost" to a system demanding fault-finding, Robert Ross, supervising judge of the matrimonial division in Nassau County, New York, on Long Island, said before the bill became law. "It's hard to know what impact a new law will have, but we do know that a grounds trial, and the expense and delay associated with it, is not a good thing."
New York's previous fault-based divorce system was out of step not only with the laws of the other 49 states but also with a culture in which divorce is commonplace and marriage for life is no longer the norm. This state of affairs has multiple and mutually reinforcing causes: female careerism, which reduces the value of the traditional male provider; the social acceptability of nonmarital sex (still quaintly termed "premarital"), made possible by the easy availability of contraception and abortion; and welfare and child-support laws that create incentives for childbearing outside marriage.

None of these developments have anything to do with homosexuality. Deroy Murdock made a good point some years back when he observed, in a column posted at NRO, that "social conservatives who blow their stacks over homosexual matrimony's supposed threat to traditional marriage tomorrow should focus on the far greater damage that heterosexuals are wreaking on that venerable institution today."
Edward Morrissey at The Week makes a similar point:
Part of the decline of families that began in the 1960s can be blamed on cultural changes and rebellion against older social paradigms, and some on government interventions, such as welfare regulations that undermined marriage specifically. It also resulted from liberalized divorce laws, especially so-called no-fault divorce. While divorce was never illegal, until the latter half of the twentieth century, government treated marriage as an actual contract whose abrogation carried substantial civil liabilities. To obtain a divorce, a spouse needed actual grounds for termination of the marital contract, and courts, at least theoretically, issued property and custody settlements on the basis of fault. At the least, this approach made divorce costly and potentially ruinous, which may have left unhappy marriages in effect, but also solidified the stability that social conservatives seek.

After no-fault divorce and its equivalents prevailed, there were no substantial penalties for abrogating the marital contract. The original intent of no-fault divorce was to make the process easier and get courts less involved, and on those counts, it succeeded beyond anyone’s imagination. One spouse can end a marriage and end up with half the property and custody merely by walking out on the other. It’s the only kind of legal partnership in which one party can opt out with little consequence just because he might find another potential partner a little more attractive, or has unilaterally tired of the other partner.

American marriage didn’t get devalued because New York’s legislature followed that of New Hampshire and Vermont in legalizing same-gender marriage. It got devalued when we began treating marriages as less important and less binding than business partnerships.
Morrissey's solution is to get the state out of marriage altogether:
Instead of demanding that states define and enforce marriage in a narrow sense, conservatives should demand that government stay out of defining and performing marriages at all. Couples that want to form partnerships should create a legal relationship based on existing contract law that is neutral to issues of gender and sexual preference. When one partner wants to end a partnership, then the terms of the contract should be enforced by courts. That will not only get rid of government as a spiritual arbiter in marriage, a role for which it has repeatedly proven unsuitable, it would encourage couples wishing to marry to discuss and agree in great detail the terms of their relationship up front. That kind of preparation — and the knowledge that a court will enforce a partnership agreement — will produce better and longer-lasting partnerships, in part by discouraging impulsive decisions to leap into marriage in the first place.

Essentially, we would replace government-defined marriage with civil unions, or domestic partnerships. What would happen to marriage? Those who want to enter into a marriage relationship would have to go to the places better equipped to deal with sanctification: churches, synagogues, mosques, and temples. Will that mean that some churches have different definitions of marriage? Possibly. Some churches may decide to marry same-gender couples, others may not.

However, when government gets out of the marriage business, it won’t be anyone else’s business, and it will end government definitions that end up being seen as endorsements of certain lifestyles or denunciations of others. At the least, it would save the people who fought to get government to define marriage from the regret of watching how it gets defined as tradition wanes.
I think it is hypocritical for people who oppose gay marriage on the grounds that it amounts to a "war on the family" to remain silent about no-fault divorce and extending the legal rights of marriage to common-law partners, both of which have had far more impact on families than gay marriage ever will. Morrissey's suggestion makes sense to me: let churches define what the religious sacrament of marriage means, but extend the secular legal and contractual benefits of partnership to gays and straights alike.


It Starts NOW!!!

Times have never been so exciting in Alberta politics. For the first time in years we have a real race going on.  The PCs have been in power for 40yrs now and they need to go.  Now they have a real rival. The Wildrose party is a relatively new party and is an honest to goodness real contender.

Alberta's Wildrose party held it's Annual General Meeting over the weekend. The theme was "It Starts Now" They signaled they are ready to take on the PC's who have been in power way too long and have become arrogant,entitled,and in recent years, incompetent and corrupt.  The Progressive Conservative party  have done nothing "conservative" in the few years. Alberta is a mess!  Wildrose is the only real conservative party in Alberta. I believe they are quite capable  to fix the province especially with Danielle Smith who is articulate, smart, credible and who has a lot of great ideas. 



As Wildrose lays out their platform they will be urging voters to give them a chance. She also told delegates that the PC's had their chance even changing leaders won't cut it,  they blew it and it's time for them to go.
She took dead aim at the six Tory candidates vying to replace Ed Stelmach as PC leader and premier, accusing them of being just as responsible for a long record of government failures.
Smith said would-be premiers Alison Redford, Ted Morton, Doug Griffiths, Doug Horner, Gary Mar and Rick Orman are "pretending" to disagree with some of Stelmach's unpopular policies.
They're also pretending to stand up for Albertans, protect land owners and search for real health reforms when, in reality, they're "running away from their own records as fast as they can," she said.
"The uncomfortable truth is this: they all helped create the problems we face today and now they are all pretending they are the ones who can fix it," Smith, flanked by Wildrose candidates, told party members packed into the Telus Convention Centre.
"They had their chance. They blew it. All of them. It's time for them to go.
If I were the PC's I would take Wildrose seriously because the latest poll says Wildrose is in striking distance of the PCs. and we're not even into an election campaign yet when the public pays closer attention.

Yeah the PC's and the media will try to smear Leader Danielle Smith and her party but  it's not going to work.
They saw what happened to the old Reform party now the Conservative party and it's leaders from Preston Manning to Stockwell Day to Stephen Harper.  They will be prepared. 

So to all you small "c" conservatives in Alberta why don't you get on board and help get a real conservative party elected in the next election.  We need change. Wildrose is your only choice. It's time to get to work and yes it starts NOW!!!

PS. Wildrose will scrap the Alberta Human Rights Commission. That alone should be enough to support them.  PCs have no intention of doing anything about the kangaroo courts. 

New ice age imminent?

I guess we're going to have to start burning fossil fuels like mad & pumping as much CO2 into the atmosphere as we can while we have the chance. This item from the website Peak Oil suggests that the Sun is entering a prolonged period of quiescence like that last seen in the 17th century during the so-called "Little Ice Age". Al Gore is going to explode when he reads this:
The sun is most likely going into hibernation as the latest unusual solar readings, including fading sunspots and weakening magnetic activity near the poles suggest that we are headed towards a solar event that hasn’t happened in hundreds of years, according to new data released Tuesday at the annual meeting of the solar physics division of the American Astronomical Society in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

Even though the Sun has been active recently as it heads towards solar maximum in 2013, there are three lines of evidence including a missing jet stream in the solar interior, fading sunspots on the sun’s visible surface, and changes in the corona and near the poles suggest that the next 11-year-long solar cycle will be far quieter than the current one or it may not even happen.

There are some scientists at the conference who said the current findings from the studies mean that we are at the beginning of a Maunder Minimum, a 70-year period that began around 1645 when hardly any sunspots were observed.

This decline in sunspots coincided with below-normal temperatures, in a climate period known as the Little Ice Age that struck Europe and North America, where temperatures dropped by 1.8 to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1-1.5 degrees Celsius).
However, don't get excited all you climate change deniers:
But scientists warn that the temperature change due to a decline in sunspot activity would likely be minimal and not enough to compensate for global warming.
Sure, pal. Whatever you say. I don't believe any of you anymore.

My BSdar is going off on 'gaydar' study.

The term junk science comes to mind.

A new study led by researchers at the University of Toronto suggests that ovulation significantly improves a woman’s ability to judge a man’s sexual orientation.  The researchers found that the nearer a woman was to peak ovulation, the more accurate judge of sexual orientation she was."These findings suggest that women's accuracy may vary across the fertility cycle because men's sexual orientation is relevant to conception and thus of greater importance as women are nearer to ovulation," Nicholas Rule, lead author from the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto, said in a release. (link1 link2)

The women did not meet, or speak to any of the men (gay or otherwise), they were able to determine that the men were gay or straight by only looking at photos of their faces. (The men were all equally attractive and wore the same facial expression, researchers said. Women were encouraged to use their intuition.)

There is so much wrong with this that I don't know where to begin. Do all gays look alike? (or straight males) Were the study males ( who self identified as gay or straight) totally honest? Did this Kreskin like ability of ovulating women reveal some straight males as being only in denial and fooling themselves because they really were gay; since 'science' doesn't lie. Did any ovulating lesbians participate, or do they not have the same power? I have more but I think I will might apply for funding to conduct my own study to disprove, and I bet it would be quite easy to do so, this study that was no doubt partially funded by your tax dollars.

I hope the Iranians or any other non gay friendly country doesn't ever catch wind of this study. The next thing you know they will be putting ovulating women out in the street to identify gay men for 'special treatment'. After all, it is now science.

I wonder what GLAAD or any of the other gay rights organizations have to say about this.

Mayor Ford: I won't be at the Pride parade either

Since I'm one of a tiny group of gay conservative bloggers, my eight regular readers sometimes expect me to weigh in from the right side of the rainbow on gay issues in the news. This week's outrage is the revelation that Toronto Mayor Rob Ford will not be attending the city's Gay Pride parade on the Canada Day long weekend. Good for you, Mayor Ford - I won't be there either.

The Pride Parade is not my cup of tea. I think its over-the-top displays of hedonism and sexuality perpetuate some of the worst stereotypes about gay people. It sends a message to straight people that we're shallow, image-obsessed, licentious and horny all the time. When I finally came out to my mother a few years ago, after a good cry she said to me "Well, as long as you're happy I'm OK with it, but I have to tell you that I have a problem with Gay Pride parades". I assured her that she would never turn on the six o'clock news and see me marching down Church Street in assless leather chaps.

However, the parade is important to a lot of gay people who have in many cases suffered real pain and alienation as a result of their sexual orientation. Attending a Pride parade is an important rite of passage for many newly-out gays and lesbians who find for the first time an opportunity to be open and honest in a supportive environment.

My problem with the Pride parade is the political baggage that now clings to it like barnacles on a whale. Should it be publicly funded? Should Queers Against Israeli Apartheid be allowed to march in it or not? What politicians are marching and which ones are conspicuous by their absence?

In the old Soviet Union there was a huge May Day parade every year in Moscow and members of the Politburo appeared on the top of Lenin's Tomb to watch it. Pundits pored over the pictures to see who was there and who was standing where to glean some kind of insight into the secretive inner workings of the Kremlin. The Pride parade now serves the same purpose; elected politicians now feel obliged to attend to publicly prove their tolerance and open-mindedness. It has become a Canadian political litmus test into which people read all kinds of ulterior motives whether they are intended or not.

The so-called Gay Community is not monolithic; the only thing we all have in common is our sexual orientation. Our Venn Diagrams overlap in only this one area of our lives. We are urban and rural, old and young, professional and blue-collar, single and married, parents or childless, and - believe it or not - left wing and right wing. Marching in a parade should not be a yardstick by which politicians are judged when they have such divergent policies on the real issues that affect gay lives; mundane things like taxes, snow removal, garbage collection and policing.

Chris Selley wrote in today's National Post:
Is Mr. Ford homophobic? A few moronic outbursts notwithstanding, I see no reason to think so. His reputation as a sort of minorleague all-purpose bigot is baffling when compared with his record as a municipal politician: He obsessively solves people's problems, no matter who they are. This is a man who wouldn't hang up on a dude trying to score OxyContin. So the idea that riding a float at Pride would change anyone's mind about Mr. Ford is laughable in the first place. Many of the people professing "disappointment" at his decision this week were clearly overjoyed to have an opportunity to hate him even more.
So Mayor Ford would rather spend the weekend at the cottage than attend the Gay Pride Parade. So what? I agree with Chris that there is no evidence that this makes him homophobic or that he cares less about this segment of his constituency than any other. Did he march in the St Patrick's Day Parade, and did the Irish community wail and gnash their teeth about it? Is his attendance at Caribana now mandatory to demonstrate his support for Caribbean immigrants? He should be judged by his actions at City Hall, not by superficial photo ops at festivals.

For the record, I too am relaxing on "Pride Weekend" with my partner over beer and barbecue, miles away from the parade. I'll raise a toast to Mayor Ford while I'm at it.

The Opposition and the Media Pundits Should Now Apologize To the Troops

The opposition and the media should immediately apologize to our troops.  This whole Afghan detainee issue has been nothing but a witch hunt from day one. The Liberals used this cabal to find a "gotcha," a "smoking gun" moment on the Conservative government for shear political gain and  the media played right along.  This as with other faux scandals was unfounded and a total waste.

In the process they used the troops waging a smear campaign against our them.  Remember this from John Macallum on CBC when he accused our troops of war crimes?


Over 4000 pages of documents on the Afghan detainee issue was released on Wednesday.  There was absolutely NO evidence our troops or the government was complicit in any war crimes at all. Matthew Fisher  a correspondent for Post Media who has spent a great deal of time in Afghanistan knows a little bit of what goes on there, has a must read piece today in the Calgary Herald says it's time to give this detainee nonsense a rest.
There is still not a jot of proof that Canada and Canadians did anything wrong while overseeing and handing over Taliban prisoners of war during the early days of the combat mission in southern Afghanistan. The so-called scandal has been much ado about nothing. 

I agree with Mr. Fisher. This has been much ado about nothing.  The smear against the troops was disgusting and uncalled for. They do deserve a public apology.  The taxpayer deserves an apology too for that matter for a waste of 12 months and $12 million for this fiasco. 

I advise you to read the whole article, he also has some interesting  info about Richard Colvin,remember him the one who the Tor Star who portrayed  as a "whistleblower"?  
I have known Colvin for nearly 20 years. I spent several hours with him the night he left Kandahar at the end of his brief tour in 2006. I have always found it strange that during our discussion that lasted several hours, the treatment of Afghan detainees by Canadians or by the Afghan authorities never came up in any way.
Colvin spoke at great length that evening about three things: how troubled his love life was, how Foreign Affairs had repeatedly passed him over for promotion and how because of the death of diplomat Glyn Berry in a suicide bomber attack a few months earlier in Kandahar, he had not been allowed to go out into to field to get a sense of what was going on.

NHL Awards Show Mixup

Just finished watching the NHL Awards show on PVR. I never noticed how much Mike Gillis looks like Steve Tambellini before. 

NDP Out of Touch with Most Canadians Re: Back-to-Work Legislation

The NDP are out of touch with Canadians again so what else is new?  The most recent is the back-to-work legislation that the government has tabled to force postal workers to go back to work.   Most people are on side with the Conservative government.   and not with Jack and the Dippers.
PARLIAMENT HILL—The first nationwide opinion poll on back-to-work legislation for postal workers puts the NDP on the hot seat, with 70 per cent of Canadians supporting the measure.
But the poll taken Monday of 2,354 Canadians found that despite overwhelming support for the federal government’s bill to legislate an end the dispute, two-thirds of the respondents also opposed privatization of Canada Post.
“I think it puts the NDP in a squeeze,” Forum Research pollster Lorne Bozinoff told The Hill Times on Tuesday morning as MPs began debating Bill C-6, which proposes to impose wage settlements on 48,000 members of the Canadian Union of Postal Workers that are lower than the last offer from Canada Post.
I'm not surprised by this.  NDP supports CUPW because unions are a big part of the NDP base and you don't want to do anything to tick them off  They supported CAW in the Air Canada strike too. 

The NDP seem to be most of the time off side with most Canadians.  If last weekend's convention was any indication of  a party aiming for the ultimate prize they're not going anywhere soon. They're going to  have to develop a sense of common sense.  That's where most Canadian are.

The Senate reform act. Coming soon to a Senate near you?

Take a look at the news release



Personally I think it is the best that can be expected without reopening the constitution.


The fact is that the PM gets to appoint Senators, it is his constitutional duty. IF Provinces elect candidates, and this could be anyone (even Duceppe), the PM should have to consider that democratic choice in his decision. He doesn't have to appoint them but heaven help him come next election if he does otherwise. (Quick someone ask Jack Layton if he would respect this if he ever became PM)

Oh and I believe this same principle applies to the legislation, ( again more like a suggestion per our constitution) of the PM not calling an early election in a majority situation. He can do it but come that election....toast.



As I said, the best that can be expected without opening up that can o' worms that is our Constitution.

Update: Canadian Sense had a great idea  "A substantial cut in pay/benefits for upper chamber would help with turnover and not require Constitutional talks."

That would get some of those hanging around just for the perks to willingly depart sooner.  Making it a volunteer position could also be an option....

 Another update: Pat Martin agrees

"We can't just rely on shopworn rhetoric,"

he declared, relying on shopworn rhetoric.

James Delingpole on the IPCC

James Delingpole vents at the Telegraph, prompted by the recently-revealed collusion between Greenpeace and the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change:
The Man Made Global Warming industry is a crock, a scam on an epic scale, fed by the world’s biggest outbreak of mass hysteria, stoked by politicians dying for an excuse to impose more tax and regulation on us while being seen to “care” about an issue of pressing urgency, fuelled by the shrill lies and tear-jerking propaganda of activists possessed of no understanding of the real world other than a chippy instinctive hatred of capitalism, given a veneer of scientific respectability by post-normal scientists who believe their job is to behave like politicians rather than dispassionate seekers-after-truth, cheered on by rent-seeking businesses, financed by the EU, the UN and the charitable foundations of the guilt-ridden rich, and promoted at every turn by schoolteachers, college lecturers, organic muesli packets, Walkers crisps, the BBC, CNBC, Al Gore, the Prince Of Wales, David Suzuki, the British Antarctic Survey, Barack Obama, David Cameron and Knut – the late, dyslexic-challenging, baby polar bear, formerly of Berlin Zoo.

And you really don’t need to be a contrarian or an out-there conspiracy theorist or a hard-core libertarian or a rampant free-market capitalist or a dyed in the wool conservative to think this way any more. This is reality. This is how it is. This is where all the overwhelming evidence points. So what kind of a bizarro, warped, intellectually challenged, cognitively dissonant, eco-fascistic nutcase would you have to be to think otherwise?

Ban the hammer

The government of Australia should perhaps follow Canada's example and establish a National Hammer Registry after a Supreme Court judge in Brisbane suggested making carrying a hammer a criminal offence:
In the Supreme Court in Brisbane, Justice Ros Atkinson was taking submissions on the second day of a hearing in which eight men are being sentenced for the bashing death of rugby league star Jonathan Thurston's uncle Richard Saunders.

Prosecutor Todd Fuller, SC, and defence lawyers for the four men and four juveniles completed their submissions on sentence today.

Mr Fuller asked for sentences ranging from 10 years, with an automatic serious violent offence classification meaning eight years must be served, to five years detention with an immediate release order after time served.

Justice Atkinson will sentence all eight on Thursday.

During submissions for a juvenile offender, Justice Atkinson noted that while he was not the one to use the hammer in the attack the juvenile had been carrying a hammer before the events of the night.

"It is such a dangerous thing to do and it is almost inevitable that somebody would be hurt," she said.

Justice Atkinson asked Mr Fuller if there should be legislative reform to make carrying a hammer in such circumstances an offence.

Maybe they could compromise and just register claw hammers or hammers capable of driving nails larger than three inches. After all, if it saves one life ...

Vancouver riots: Preston Manning's fault

Deluded article from Murray Dobbin that takes the usual lefty line and applies it to the Vancouver riots by blaming others for the actions of the rioters. 

Yes, of course, it is a big stretch to suggest that Preston Manning, the former head of the Reform Party had anything to do with the rioting in Vancouver after the hockey game. But in trying to determine what is at the root of this mindless violence – and the almost equally mindless spectator sport of watching the violence and doing nothing – we need to examine just how it could be that so many young men’s lives are so meaningless. I think it comes down to community – or rather its dramatic decline – a deliberate by-product of neo-liberalism and consumerism.   

Read the rest here

( BTW I will wager every penny I have that most of those involved in the rioting were not CPC supporters, if they voted at all)

Here is one poor lost young man's story. ( A member of our national Water polo team, or should I say used to be a member of...) 

Why All These Riots Around the World?

Is this what the world is coming too?   The world seems to be on fire!
Hat Tip to a poster at Calgary Puck forum for a comparison between the Vancouver riot  the other night with riots in Egypt,Libya,and Somalia.  Take a look.  They look pretty similar to me.
Then you have the riots in Greece.over austerity measures.



All this violence has made me think, why all these riots around the world?. The world it seems is becoming a more violent place. The violence seems to be coming at the hands of younger people but why so much more  now than just a few years ago?

I'm going to take a guess.. Not that I'm criticizing all youth, their are some kids out there that are pretty decent kids.Those kids though being mostly more conservatively minded have a really hard time with their profs and their more left wing peers. 

Here it goes, here's my take.  There has been a gradual erosion of a  sense of right and wrong over the years  The youth have lost respect for their fellow man and property  They've grown up with a sense of entitlement without responsibility  and have been brainwashed by left wing teachers and professors.  They simply are detached from the real world.

They spend most of their time online using facebook and twitter which can further disenfranchise them from the real world spending less and less time with their families and doing other things.

  It's time for parents to take charge of their kids again and teach them some  good old fashioned common sense, responsibility. respect and make sure they know the difference between right and wrong.