A U.S. Shoot 'em Up

It usually takes three of a kind to establish a pattern. Here are two of a kind from the United States, apparently on the same day. Yet they establish a pattern.

A U.S. soldier was shot at his homecoming party in San Bernardino, California. He had just returned from a tour of duty in Afghanistan where he survived a suicide bombing. Police said that the victim's brother and a partygoer got into an argument over football teams. When the soldier intervened, the partygoer pulled a gun and opened fire. The veteran is permanently paralyzed from the neck down.

Another report tells of seven people all of the same family found shot to death in a Dallas apartment. Six of the dead were opening Christmas presents when the shooting began. Police believe the shooter to be among the dead. They also found two handguns. Police said, "We think he was just inside there celebrating Christmas with the rest of them and decided for whatever reason that's how he's going to end things."

The pattern is the total absence in such reports of the need for gun control. Such is the hold of the National Rifle Association -- the lobbying arm of gun and munitions manufacturers. Such is the mind-boggling interpretation of the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment.

IKEA

To be sung to the tune, more or less, of Maria from The West Side Story

The most beautiful sound I ever heard,

All the beautiful sounds of the world
in a single word, IKEA.

I just found a store named IKEA
And suddenly my world
Will never be the same to me, IKEA

I just found a store named IKEA
And suddenly I found
How wonderful shopping can be, IKEA.

Go down aisle twelve, there's music playing;

Check out Bin Four, you’ll be saving. IKEA

I'll never stop saying IKEA
IKEA, IKEA...IKEA

Sing it loud and there's elevator music playing.
Sing it soft and it's almost like praying. IKEA

I'll never stop singing IKEA
The most beautiful sound I ever heard.

IKEA

A Crash Course in Class-Action Nonsense

A class-action lawsuit has been authorized by a Quebec court against Air Canada, a company in business transporting people and goods. The airline charges for each seat passengers occupy.

In this action, obese people claim it discriminatory to be charged for the two seats one of them needs to occupy. About 15 people have already joined the suit that seeks $1,000 for pain, suffering or inconvenience, plus an additional $500 for punitive and exemplary damages. The instigating lawyer invites people with a medical condition to join the suit which also claimed as discriminatory the airline charging for two seats when the ill person requires a companion on the trip.

Back in 1957,  Midgets of America demanded: half fare, two in a seat for half-fare, free rides in "big people's" laps if they are willing, or free rides in over-head racks in exchange for entertaining other passengers. It is not reported how this issue was resolved.

Air Canada, like any other carrier, offers the public aircraft with seats of fixed dimensions to anyone who can fit into them. The company may lose money on give-away seats. Samoa Air has a part-solution. The fare is determined by the combined weight of passenger and baggage. The missing part is the need for two seats for one passenger.

May an obese person sue a taxi company because he cannot fit through the car door? May someone with a medical condition sue a rail or coach line because they cannot accommodate necessary medical devices? In Michigan, a blind Muslim woman uses a seeing-eye pony, because some Muslims believe that dogs "violate ritual purity." May this person sue local bus operators if her animal cannot fit on their vehicle?

"It's a violation of fundamental rights to discriminate against people with [medical] deficiencies," the lawyers state. The question remains: When did it become a fundamental right to fly Air Canada or any other airline, railroad, bus, limousine or rickshaw?

Human Rights Decisions and Other Mischief

The Ontario Human Rights Commission ordered Coffee Time owner, Sien Yian Tay, to pay Zuper Direk $15,000. The crime? The operator called Direk a "gypsy" as the latter badmouthed the coffee to other customers. The Commission decision itself smacks of racial discrimination. How would a member of Roma, i.e.Gypsy, regard the calling another person a member of his race an insult?

Other recent decision of equal wrongheadedness.

A Federal Court judge, Madame Justice Marie-Josée Bédard, ordered Air Canada to pay Michel and Lynda Thibodeau $12,000. Air Canada failed to provide the aggrieved couple with services in French. The learned judge decided that the violation of the plaintiffs' rights "caused them a moral prejudice, pain and suffering, and loss of enjoyment of the vacation".

A New Brunswick appellate court dismissed two drunk driving charges against an Acadian francophone. The arresting officer spoke to the accused in English, despite hearing his strong French accent, and later gave him a roadside breathalyzer test which he failed. Thirty minutes later the accused was asked his preferred language. The appellate court ruled that the thirty-minute delay constituted a violation of the drunk driver's rights. Even courts can make strange judgements.

The Ontario Human Rights Tribunal ordered the Brampton Youth Hockey Association to pay sisters Robyn and Shaunna Demars $18,000. Tribunalist Judith Hinchman found that the association prevented the girls from using the boys' dressing room, and failed to find a suitable room elsewhere.

The Quebec Human Rights Commission ordered a condominium board to pay Marise Myrand $10,000. The board discriminated against Myrand in not taking the parking spot of a woman in her 60s who suffers from a dislocated shoulder, and give it to her. Commission lawyer Pierre-Yves Bourdeau said, "It's reasonable accommodation" to displace an elderly handicapped woman for an obese one. The condo lawyer observed that the Commission has established a hierarchy of handicaps.

The Ontario Human Rights Commission ordered Mississauga businesswoman Maxcine Telfer to pay $36,000 to Seema Saadi, an employee of six weeks. Saadi said she felt pressured to wear skirts rather than her hijab, and Telfer complained about the smell of food she warmed in the microwave. Saadi was fired. Her complaint was discrimination "on grounds of race, colour, ancestry, place of origin, ethnic origin, disability and sex". Her lawyers. operating at tax-payer expense, obtained a writ of seizure of Telfer's home to collect the money.

The Ontario Superior Court quashed the conviction and ordered a new hearing before a different tribunal officer. The Court said, it was "simply not possible to logically follow the pathway taken by the adjudicator." It found nine points in which the adjudicator failed to provide a fair hearing, or made legal errors. For example, the adjudicator did not give Telfer the opportunity to call a key witness who would have testified about Saadi's choice of clothing, and her "unauthorized intrusions into other people's desks, and missing files." (The silencing of material witnesses is a technique borrowed from the courts in Burma.)

It's depressing to thank of the result had the businesswoman not the resources this appeal this wrong-headed decision.

And this, according to Barbara Hall, in her fading time as Ontario Chief Human Rights Commissioner, is only "the tip of the iceberg". The good ship Common Sense has already struck the Barbara Hall iceberg.

How much injustice remains uncorrected when the accused cannot afford to appeal the adjudicator's judgement? On the other hand, the complainant's legal fees, even on appeal, are paid by the taxpayer.

Fines levied should go into general revenue, not to the "aggrieved". This would result in a much lower number of complaints. The net result would be that these commissions would no longer be viewed by the public as an easy source of tax-free money.

Conrad Black has observed, "I doubt if the Charter [of Rights and Freedoms] accomplished much substantially beyond unleashing Canada's under-qualified judges to meddle open-endedly in social animation."

Christianity and Diversity

Letter published in the National Post, December 3, 2011

As usual, Rex Murphy presents readers with insightful comment (What the tolerant must tolerate, Nov. 26). Murphy points out that "there is a radical inconsistency to the treatment afforded to Christian believers and that of most other religious groups."

We constantly hear appeals for tolerance. The question remains -- Why does it not apply to Christians? Why does diversity not include Christianity? Too much contemporary behaviour seeks to obliterate our Christian heritage.

In Canadian media, the National Post stands out as a giant among pygmies in its coverage of religious, particularly Christian, matters.

Church and State

Unpublished email to the National Post, Dec 5, 2011

Gagan Rehill (Letter, Dec.5) writes that the U.S. Constitution "clearly stated the separation of church and state". Not even remotely so. Nowhere in the Constitution does that expression appear. The First Amendment speaks to the protect churches against governmental interference, that is, against the establishment of a church.

Later judicial distortions of this obvious meaning gave rise to the American concept of separation of church and state. Fortunately, it is irrelevant in Canada where we do not get into the nitpicking about such matters.

Mr. Rehill should know that the first to advocate recognition of the duality of church and state was Jesus when he said, "Give back to Caesar what belongs to Caesar -- and to God what belongs to God." Is it because they do not believe in God that atheists are unable to acknowledge this distinction?

Bombs From an Earlier Generation

An unexploded bomb dropped by the Allied air force during World War Two has this week been defused in the German city of Koblenz. In 1997, the President of Germany was forced out of his residence due to the discovery of unexploded ordinance under the presidential palace. Soon after that, thousands of residents of Hanover were evacuated while another bomb was defused.

Given that 2,000 tonnes of bombs and munitions are found each year in Germany, there is nothing unusual in this. Some of these air raids consisted of up to 3,000 bombers -- American by day, British and Canadian by night.

Sixty-five years after the last bomb was dropped during the Second World War, danger still lurks. There are areas of France which have yet to be cleared of First World War ordinance.

It's poignant to reflect that some of those bombs were manufactured in Toronto, dropped from aircraft made in Toronto, and flown by young men from Toronto.

Unexploded German bombs continue to be uncovered in England. The Imperial War Museum estimates that of the 19,000 tonnes of bombs dropped on London during the Blitz of 1940-41, 10 per cent did not explode, much of it remains buried somewhere in the city.

People, not then born, live today with a legacy of possible sudden death bequeathed to them by people likely no longer alive.

A legacy of the First World War continues to take lives one century later. During one of the epic battles at Ypres in Belgium, the British alone fired more than four million shells into the German lines. An estimated 30 per cent of those shells were duds or slipped deep into the ground unexploded, causing two or three deaths of local villagers a year. Farmers refuse to plough their fields, for fear a blade must strike a shell. Curiously, this ordinance rises ever so slightly as time goes by..

We have cause to worry at home as well. In April 2014, a 105-millimetre live shell was found on the land of the Enoch Cree First Nation west of Edmonton, Alberta. From 1942 to 1944, part of this land was used by the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan to teach Allied crews navigation and bombing techniques.

Medieval Education

In a recent report (Deliver us from the universities), National Post columnist George Jonas wrote that the "origin of schools and scholars is ecclesiastical, not liberal." This implies a difference, if not a dichotomy, between ecclesiastical and liberal.

History illustrates otherwise. In the Western World, the liberal arts began in Catholic institutions. Refusal to acknowledge this fact still handicaps victims of the Enlightenment who speak of "bookish monks looking for heresy", and use the word medieval as a pejorative.

What was actually taught in these places of learning?

Erasmus (1466-1536): "The task of fashioning the young includes instilling a love for, and thorough knowledge of, the liberal arts."

Required reading for Thomas More (1478-1535) while at Oxford included Aristotle, Boethius, Cicero and Ovid.

The curriculum of the sixth century cathedral schools consisted of the seven liberal arts. Boethius (475-525) listed them: grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music.

Bicycle Safety

Email to the Toronto Star. Unpublished

Re Woman killed when bike collides with large truck, Nov. 8 (2011):

There are ways of reducing such tragedies. One would require the installation of turn signals every two or three meters along the sides of large vehicles, and that they be operated well in advance of the intersection where the driver intends to turn. Similarly with cars, turn signals should be incorporated into the outside rear mirrors. And rear turn signals should be mounted on the roof corners of cars, as with the DS model of the French Citroen.

Food Engineering

A November 2, 2001 newspaper report tells of food experiments in the American military. "The U.S. army wants its soldiers on the battlefield alert and performing well," the report begins. "Our mission it to assure the U.S. fighters are the best fed in the world."

Soldiers receive a variety of foods, from caffeinated meat sticks to baked goods containing omega-3 acids. The latter reduce bad cholesterol while increasing good cholesterol, we are told. The caffeine would keep them alert. Another experiment involves a complex carbohydrate called maltodextrin. This source of "extra energy" is served in apple sauce, dubbed Zapplesauce."

Is this the cold hand of big business directing the Soldier Research Development and Engineering Center of Massachusetts? In time, soldiers coming home from war may be addicted to these concoctions.

Coming soon to a grocery shelf near you will be "nutritious and battle-tested (fill in product name)."

On the other hand, this food manipulation may be kept secret in order to get the public addicted to certain products. Business interests have already successfully lobbied governments to enact laws to keep consumers unaware of food products that have been genetically modified. These same interests may keep the public ignorant as to which products are laced with caffeine, Omega-3 acids, maltodextrin, or whatever.

Note: The European Union proposed that sugar and fat content be included on food labels. This initiative was snuffed out by food industry lobbyists.

Indian Residential Schools

Email to the Toronto Star, October 31, 2011, Not published.

Re A century of RCMP ignorance (Oct 30):

Media reports of the Indian residential schools has left the general public with the belief that 150,000 aboriginal children were "torn" from their families, "forced to lose their culture", "brutally punished",  and "sexually abused." Without minimizing what harm was done, there is an untold aspect to the story.

The Mt. Elgin Indian Residential School in south western Ontario was built in 1849 by an Ojibway chief, Peter Jones, also a Methodist minister. Jones visited England to raise building funds, while local aboriginals donated land for the school and model farm. As there was no federal government at that time, the school was totally church-financed.

Mt. Elgin and other schools in the area were located on land donated by Aboriginals. School was a short walk from home. Attendance required no compulsion.

Chief Jones intended that classes be taught in English. No talk or fear of "cultural genocide."

The James Bay treaty, among other treaties, was signed by Indian chiefs who realized the benefits of a European education. They knew the operative language was English -- the common language among children of different tribes. To state the signatories were unaware of what they were doing smacks of paternalism.

Discipline in these schools differed little from that in public and parochial schools of the time.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been informed that some of the sexual abuse was perpetrated by senior students and band elders.

Lea Meadows, a worker in human rights and conflict management for 20 years, and an Aboriginal, wrote in the Calgary Herald that her mother's time in a residential school "included some of the happiest days of her life," that her education helped her through university where she became a teacher, and that she returned to teach at a residential school "to provide the same opportunity for other aboriginal girls and boys".

Common media opposition to the contrary, it is also to be hoped the Commission learns of those who benefited from their residential school experience.

The Feast of Life - a Prayer

Dear God, thank you for the feast of life
You have spread before us.
Grant us the courage and strength
To drink deeply the wine of joy,
To savour fully the fruits of the earth, and
To enjoy completely the friendships we have created.

Bombardier versus the Taxpayer

Since 1982, Bombardier Inc. has received over $1-billion in government grants and loans.

According to Andrew Coyne writing in Maclean's, Bombardier is not in the aircraft business. "It's business is collecting subsidies. The aircraft are effectively loss leaders, sweeteners thrown in to keep the supply of government funds coming ..." The cost of these subsidies is borne by the taxpayer.

The company recently posted notices of dividends. One would think the government to demand re-payment of this corporate welfare before the company is allowed to distribute profits to shareholders.

To the extent that dividends are paid, to that extent the taxpayer is subsidising the company's shareholders.

Government Attacks on the Family

The first principle of society consists in the marriage bond, the next in children. So declared Cicero 2,000 years ago. As the basic unit of society, the family plays the primary role in education. So declares the Charter of the United Nations.

Historically, education began in the home, then with private tutors, eventually with teaching institutions operated by non-governmental secular and religious organizations. Government is a late-comer to this process.

A public servant of the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) bearing the title "co-ordinating superintendent, equitable and inclusive schools" recently published and distributed student planners to Grade Two pupils. Among other topics, the planner referred to prostitution, female circumcision, Dyke marches and Palestinian solidarity.

On the provincial level, Ontario Transportation Minister (and former Education Minister) Kathleen Wynne, a lesbian, uses her office to promote a curriculum that teaches sexual orientation in Grade Three, masturbation in Grade Six, anal intercourse in Grade Seven.

Premier Dalton McGuinty approves of men prancing naked down our main streets, and on parade floats rubbing their genitals, and simulating anal sex. Under the guise of “equity,” the Ontario government urges schools to participate in the Pride parades.

From the TDSB text book Are You A Boy Or A Girl?

Page 44: Read some traditional folktales and fairy tales with the class. Have students write/illustrate their own "gender bending" versions.

Page 53: The class discusses the the significance of Toronto's annual Pride Week celebrations.

Pages 54-56: Search images of Pride Week ... make posters for the TDSB float and/or school bus that are in the Pride Parade. Additionally, students have their own Pride Parade in their school.

Page 56: Read Gloria Goes to Gay Pride. If this story book is not available, cut out a photo from a newspaper or magazine of the Pride Parade.

The common media tell us to take our families to Pride activities. Yet these same people censor their coverage of the event by not publishing photographs of naked participants, or blanking out their genitals. They do not want children to see these things in their media, yet affirm that viewing it in the flesh is quite acceptable.

What the Ontario government describes as consultation is merely telling parents what will happen. "We do not take public referenda on curriculum," Wynne condescendingly warns. Big Sister knows best.

Parents are not allowed to remove their children from the classroom during controversial discussions. The TDSB won't even tell parents when it happens. Study after study has revealed that students learn better when teachers and parents work closely together. This initiative alienates a large part of the population, to the detriment of our children.

Among other measures lacking transparency is the TDSB's Curriculum - JK to grade 3. It orders: "Should schools send notes of permission slips home before starting any classroom work on LGBTQ (Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual/two spirited, queer) issues. NO."

If parents decide to homeschool their children, Ontario Human Rights Chief Commissioner Barbara Hall will examine all educational materials to ensure it includes what Commissar Hall (as she is know in the media) deems adequate promotion of homosexuality.

Ontario's future is foreshadowed in London, England. Teachers there must report any children, as young as three years old, who utter words deemed by the teachers to be politically incorrect. Accused children's names are entered into a government data base where they are permanently recorded as racist or Islamophobic etc., depending on what was said. This information remains there to be used against them as adults.

In June 2009, Swedish police and social workers seized a seven-year-old boy from his family because his parents chose to homeschool him. Authorities have permanently destroyed parental rights, and actually jailed some parents. Sweden learned this from Germany where homeschooling was first declared a crime by the Nazis. That's what purported modern governments are capable of doing.

Back in Ontario, we have bureaucrats and politicians imposing on our young people their views of sex, family life and other personal matters beyond their authority. This unwarranted intrusion into the exclusive jurisdiction of parents is an attack on the family.

State intervention into education must be limited to tax gathering, basic curricula standards, and uniformity of examinations. It must not use education to further a political or social agenda.

The Right to be Offensive

One evening last February, French fashion designer John Galliano, in a drunken, drug-driven stupor, shouted racist and anti-Semitic insults at a couple in a Parisian restaurant. He lost his job at the Dior fashion house, and was charged with the crime of rendering "public insults based on origin, religious affiliation, race or ethnicity." Yes, that's actually a crime in France. He faced six months in prison and a $30,000 fine. Found guilty, he was sentenced to a suspended fine.

Feel-good laws override basic rights, in this case, the right to be offensive. They attack freedom of expression. Galliano's confrontation was non-violent. The only harm done was hurt feelings -- a matter better settled in civil court.

In a different context, Salman Rushdie advised, "It's better that even the worst things be expressed. Evil doesn't disappear by being obscured."

From a Globe and Mail editorial of November 6, 2010 -- "This newspaper has argued that offensive and disgusting opinions, including deeply racist ones, should not be criminalized under anti-hate laws, because those laws may silence legitimate debate and because the best way to deal with offensive views is to trounce them in the public square. But we draw the line at expression that promotes violence."

The post you are now reading was influenced by our family's experiences in downtown Toronto in the 1930s and 1940s. Some neighbours regularly shouted across George Street, "dirty Catholics," "dirty Germans" and other terms of endearment.. My parents were German-speaking Austrians. Our reaction was that those neighbours had a problem, not us. This harassment in no way diminished our self-confidence, as is too often now alleged by "victims" in similar circumstances. Our neighbours, all of whom later became good friends, had the right to be offensive, the right to be wrong.

Had there been a human rights commission at the time, my parents would have avoided it. Had they done so, and the neighbours forced to give us a bag of money, as is the incentive today, would we ever have become friends?

Raelian Madness at the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal

A copy of this blog post has been sent to Jeff Poirier, Senior Policy Analyst, Ontario Human Rights Commission. No reply.

In 1973, while wandering through the woods of France, race-car driver Claude Vorilhon encountered a UFO.  This inspired him to found Raelism.  According to the organization's website, the UFO occupants informed Raël (Vorilhon's cult name) that life on Earth was scientifically created by extraterrestrials.  The organization is currently looking for land on which to build an embassy for these visitors from space.

Among other things, Wikipedia tell us that Raëlians boast liberal views of sexuality which are shared by women who make up a significant number of the organization. These women are strong advocates of refinement and erotic sensualism, and participate in groups such as Raël's Girls and the Order of Angels. An off-shoot organization is the Raël Happiness Academy. On their own website, they describe themselves as a cult.

In November 2006, an Ontario school board hired three members of the Canadian branch of this group to provide "emotional pedagogy" training for its teachers. The cult delivered such sessions through their Academy of Pleasurology and Emotional Intelligence. Two months later, the board did some research and decided to end the contract.

The usual course of action would be a court action for breach of contract. But no, the Raëlians appealed to the Ontario Human Rights Commission. On December 15, 2010, tribunal vice-president Michelle Flaherty ruled Raëlism to be a religion, despite the fact they claim to be atheists, and that the board in breaching the contract had discriminated against them the basis of their beliefs. It was not revealed how much the board was ordered to pay the aggrieved party. The OHRC is famous for over-the-top financial awards.

As for Michelle Flaherty, the OHR Tribunal website offers a biography indicating no experience in religious matters. Yet, her authority allows her to declare a religion what common sense and the plaintiff's website tell us is a sex organization with beliefs in matters extraterrestrial. According to the Toronto Star, "Raëlians consider themselves as atheists, but believe scientists from another planet came to Earth and created all life."

On August 26, comes news that this cult is involved with a proposal for women to march topless through a city park. In the belief that this promotes sexual equality, the men of the cult will wear bikini tops. Google Raelian sensual meditation.

The more one reads about Raelism, the more mind boggling the Flaherty decision becomes. Did she even check their website? Yet again, the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal and its Big Brother Commission stand on the wrong aside of common sense. How much longer must Ontario taxpayers support this nonsense?

"Medieval" a Pejorative?

A quick summary of some of the massacres, slaughters and ethic cleansing in the twentieth century:

1.5 million Armenians (1915-23); 7 million Ukrainians (1930s); 6 million Jews (1933-45); 2 million Chinese (1937-45), 30 million (1966-76) and  6-8 million in Chinese slave camps; 250,000 Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945); 2 million Nigerian Ibos (1967-70); 1.5 million Cambodians (1975-79); 150,000 Iraqi Kurds (1988); 200,000 Bosnian Muslims (1994); 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis (1994); 200,000 East Timorese (1967-96); 500,000 Ugandans under Idi Amin Dada (1971-1979) etc.

Compared to these numbers, civilians killed during the Middle Ages would today be "collateral damage." Dare we use the word medieval as a pejorative?

To describe something as backward, murderous, torturous or insane, better to say, "It is so twentieth century."

McLuhan's Message

Letter published in the Toronto Star, July 22, 2011

Re The fall and rise of Marshall McLuhan, Opinion, July 20:

Philip Marchand neatly encapsulates Marshall McLuhan's message: "With understanding, there is no such thing as inevitability."

Visual symbols are media techniques designed to paralyse the mind, McLuhan warned. In his first book, The Mechanical Bride, he instructs us how to read, study and understand 60 advertisements. It is a source of strength if we are aware of, and understand how, media attempt to manipulate us.

From this, we can each develop personal strategies for dealing with the messages that constantly bombard us. My former professor's reaction to all this was amusement.

Canadian Superiority?

From a note to Richard Gwyn concerning his May 14, 2011, newspaper report about Canadians' feelings of superiority over Americans.

If I have a sense of moral superiority over our "American cousins," it would be for reasons not mentioned in your recent piece. It deals with a comparison of the development of our two nations. The difference, in a word, is "violence".

The U.S. was conceived in a violent revolutionary war. We all know how relatively amicably Canada achieved nationhood. Because our history is quieter, some consider us dull. That suits me.

The American Civil War was the deadliest in all history -- if one compares the number killed against the size of the warring populations. In one particular day, Americans killed 20,000 of their own. In comparison, Canadian "rebellions" were picnics. Civil unrest consisted mainly of skirmishes on street corners after the pitchfork-wielding rebels emerged from the local tavern.

The development of the American west occurred through violence, never mind the violence against the aboriginals. Homesteaders fought for land. There's a famous drawing by Charles Jefferys that illustrates how Ontario was settled. On a certain day, loyalists appeared at a designated place. Each drew a piece of paper from a hat. This gave them ownership of a certain plot of land -- no fighting, no shooting, no violence, all very Canadian.

Known murderers roamed the streets in the U.S. west. If the sheriff proclaimed law and order, he was shot. It took the U.S. cavalry, lynch mobs and vigilantes, the latter with their history for even greater violence, to produce a modicum or order.The plot of my favourite film, High Noon with Gary Cooper, while fiction, would not have been plausible in Canada where the North West Mounted Police, not an isolated sheriff,  assured that law preceded settlement.

Peace, order and good government (originally peace, welfare and good government) still reflects our attitude of courtesy and non-violence. This is well described by John Ralston Saul in his book, A Fair Country. Whereas, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" and "the right to bear arms" have  abetted a murderous gun culture.

If it takes violence to be noticed, world, avert your eyes from Canada.You will notice us again when Europe again needs liberating, or when there is a cry for peacekeeping.

No, I don't feel a superiority to the United States, just pity.

Nortel and Employee Benefits

"Disabled Nortel workers suffer again," states the headline. The report is about how, yet again, employees of that fallen electronics giant are dispossessed of their entitlements.

Employee wages and benefits must rank first in line when a company's assets are sold off. To deprive, however legally, a worker of his due is a wrong that cries to heaven for vengeance. No similar treatment awaits investors' losses. The law must be changed to put workers first.

P.S. Criminal action against those who destroyed the company ended when the court found them not guilty.