More censorship at the Toronto Star

The issue here is the Toronto Star's apparent double-speak. The photograph that appears in the Star shows Justin Trudeau in a Pride Parade alongside a young women with her breasts exposed. The Star blurred out her nipples. Thus my unpublished letter of August 8, 2015. 

Re Topless photos with Trudeau cause Internet commotion, Aug. 7:

The Toronto Star promotes the Pride parade as a "family event." In other words, you recommend we take our children to see topless women in the flesh. Yet, when it comes to publishing photographs of this "family event," you indulge in censorship, as in this case. Can you explain this double-dealing scented with a whiff of hypocrisy?

Canada Post, censorship or not?

In March 2014, Canada Post issued a public apology. It had delivered to residents of Happy Valley-Goose Bay flyers critical of the homosexual lifestyle. In a published letter to the Toronto Star, I asked if the corporation had become a censorship agency responsible for the content of what it delivers.

This month, the issue flared up again. The flyer in question was pro-life (anti-abortion to others) but found offensive by some. The postal union got into the act by claiming some letter carriers were upset about the flyers and have balked at delivering them. The union "supports our members who feel they have a legitimate concern that a corporation like Canada Post should work to preserve family values."  So now it's the the union that wants into the censorship business.

Common sense at last. A Canada Post spokesperson stated that the corporation is not responsible for the content of mail and is legally obligated to deliver all such material.

How not to win friends

To secure an advocate for one's cause, there are ways to go about it, and ways not to go about it.

At a trial in Toronto, the charge was living off the avails of prostitution, in street parlance, pimping. As the Crown Attorney's questions became more pointed, the accused thought he would win the jury's sympathy. He shouted at the prosecutor, "Admit it. You've been after me for years because I once shot a cop."  If any jury members were asleep, that woke them up. He was found guilty.

Land-locked Bolivia would like access to the nearby Pacific Ocean over the territory of its neighbour, Chile. During the return flight to Rome following his recent visit to South America, Pope Francis was asked by a Bolivian national if he would mediate this dispute. The pope said he could not comment as the issue was currently before the International Court of Justice. In any event, was the pope disposed to help?

A few days earlier, Bolivia's leftist president, Evo Morales, presented Francis with a gift. It was a cross in the shape of a hammer with a sickle mounted on it.  A "communist cross" is hardly the way to win a friend then ask him for help.

Greece, Toronto and Subsidiarity

Letter to the Toronto Star. Unpublished.

Richard Gwyn points out the flaw in bigness ("Taking on the bullies," July 7, 2015).  Much of the pain now endured by the people of Greece can be traced to the enormous bureaucracy of the European Union, Gwyn maintains. 

Elsewhere in the same issue of the Toronto Star we see the headline "Amalgamation a flop, Fraser study suggests."  The report questions the purported financial advantage of amalgamating Metropolitan Toronto into a mega-city. Purported cost savings were not realized. In fact, overall costs increased. This mistake was the work of the government of Mike Harris who believed bigger is better. 

In Toronto, there is talk of de-amalgamation. Europeans should also be thinking in terms of de-centralization, of invoking subsidiarity, that is the placing of control of various matters with the smallest government level best able to handle it.

Equity Demands Equal Pain

In a recent decision, Ontario Court of Appeal Justice Peter Lauwers wrote, "The legislative scheme offers no way out for people who are impoverished, dealing with health issues, or other difficulties, and who bear the burdens of these enormous fines for many years... It is most unfortunate that there is no process in the system for commuting old and back-breaking fines for people who have little prospect of paying therm, and whose lives are being ruined."

 The Canadian Law Dictionary defines equity as "Justice according to natural reason and good conscience as distinct from that which is strictly according to law."

In the spirit of Justice Lauwers' enlightened approach to law enforcement and in a spirit of equity, I propose that motor vehicle fines be levied in such a way as to produce equal pain for all offenders, that they be levied according to the defendant's ability to pay.

A $50 parking fine is a serious burden for a low-wage earner but a mere nuisance to a rich person and unlikely to discourage further violations.  Therefore, fines for parking and traffic offences be rated according to the value of the car. Thus the $50 fine for the owner of a modest car would be $100 to $150 for the owner of an up-scale vehicle. The brand name of the car can be programmed into the hand-held devices of ticketing officers such that the ticket automatically indicates the amount of the fine.

Equity demands equal pain for equal violations of the law.

"To kill the Indian in the child" -- never uttered

I recently criticized the Toronto Star for its editorial use of the odious expression "to kill the Indian in the child."  The basis of my objection was the Star's placing these words in quotation marks and failing to attribute them to some actual person.

This occurred in the midst of the vacuous debate of whether the Indian residential schools constituted cultural genocide. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, Beverley McLachlin, waded in thereby shedding her robes of judicial impartiality and exposing the legal activist.

Toronto Star apologist Cathy English replied with an excerpt from a speech by Stephen Harper where he used phrase again in quotation marks, again without attribution. On occasion the expression was attributed to the poet Duncan Campbell Scott, long-time Superintendent of Indian Affairs responsible for the residential schools.. Worse still, one correspondent claimed it appears in Canadian legislation.

Statements in quotation marks must be the exact words uttered by an attributable source. Neither the Star nor the Prime Minister followed this essential rule.

For the record, an excerpt from Conversations with a Dead Man; the legacy of Duncan Campbell Scott by Mark Abley:

"But the offending phrase is not Scott's. He never used those words. Neither did any other Canadian official. The quotation can be traced back to a somewhat different statement uttered by a high-ranking officer in the U.S. Army, Richard Henry Pratt, the nineteenth-century superintendent of a residential school in Pennsylvania: 'All the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him and save the man'."

"Homophobic" rendered meaningless

The word "homophobic" has had a three-stage history.

Early in the twentieth century, "homo" was from the Greek meaning "the same." Homophobic meant fear of the same, that is, fear of boredom.  Apparently ennui was a major concern at that time.  Oscar Wilde described it (ennui) as "the one sin for which there is no forgiveness." According to engram, the word disappeared from common use.

In the mid-1930s, it reappeared, this time in its Latin derivation of "homo" meaning "man." For a short while, homophobic referred to a woman who feared men.

The use of the word since the 1970s should be rendered "homosexualphobia."

Beyond fear, the word is currently used as a pejorative to castigate any questioning or disagreement with homosexual behaviour in public such as walking naked on our main streets or simulating sexual acts many consider lewd.

The word has now used so broadly it has no definable meaning.

Erasing Toronto history

Letter to the Toronto Star, June 3, 2015. Unpublished.

The Star shows concern for the erasure of aboriginal street names (Ojibe street signs bold reminder of aboriginal heritage, June 3), yet none for the disappearance of other historic names. 

I refer to the changing of Cawthra Square in downtown Toronto to Barbara Hall Park. Surely there was some better way to honour the former Human Rights Commissioner than by blotting out the name of one of our early families? 

For more than a century, Cawthra Square was the name of a plot of land in the Isabella and Jarvis area near where William Cawthra's widow lived after her husband's death in 1880. William was a businessman and philanthropist.

"Who am I to judge?"

Letter to the Toronto Star published June 5, 2015

This report (Can Pope create a climate for change? May 30) describes Pope Francis as one who “opened the church’s doors to gays by simply saying, Who am I to judge?” 

In a press conference, he said, “A gay person who is seeking God, who is of good will – well, who am I to judge him?” 

In fairness, the entire sentence must always be cited.

The message and the messenger

Letter to the Editor, Toronto Star, May 27. Unpublished.

Re The folly of the 'density creep' crew, May 26:

This column by Heather Mallick is an object lesson on how not to debate an issue. 

Mallick disagrees with residents' objections to a real estate development on their street. "A surly bunch," she describes them.  "Stubby-legged and trousered, sturdy as the two-storey, single-family homes they're defending, they pose in a hostile clump as they alert all Toronto to a coming menace. If you want to catch them smiling, turn the photo upside down."  

Mallick does not like the message, so she attacks the messenger. 

One event, three observations

The event:
Adolescents in a Toronto are vehemently protesting their high school dress code, specifically the injunction against clothing which exposes girls' midriffs. The piece of clothing in  contention was once called a halter top. Young girls believe they have discovered something new because haberdashers now call them crop tops.

Observation One:
"Youth due to its limited experience, tends to gravitate to absolutes. If it rejects, with cause, the absolutes of U.S. policy, it moves easily to separate but equal absolutisms."
               --- Rick Salutin, Toronto Star, May 29, 2015.

Observation Two:
"The young, at an age when they have not yet any experience other than sexual, when they do not yet have years of personal suffering and personal understanding behind them, are jubilantly repeating our depraved Russian blunders of the Nineteenth Century under the impression they are discovering something new . . . But of those who have lived more and understand, those who could oppose these young, many do not dare oppose. They even such suck up, anything not to appear conservative. Another Russian phenomenon of the Nineteenth Century which Dostoevsky called "slavery to progressive quirks."
                --- Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture in Literature 1970

Observation Three:
Recently, I saw a reference to "the ethical sensitivity of youth."

Omar Khayyam

OK's to-do list:

--  a loaf of bread from the baker
--  a jug of wine from the vintner
--  a book of verse from the library
--  two song sheets
--  pick up thou
--  head for the wilderness.

P.S. That's Paradise enow.

Muslim dress vs French hot pants

A 15-year old Muslim girl in France has been banned from school for wearing a long black skirt. That's anathema to the nation's cult of secularism. An official said it was not the skirt that was the issue. Rather, because she wore it as a sign of her faith. Are we at that point in Western history where one's motive for wearing a certain piece of clothing is of greater importance than the clothing itself?

She was ordered to wear "neutral clothing." Does that mean mini-skirts and hot pants? Would the government object if a Paris fashion house introduced The Muslim Look?

Much of the current situation stems from idolatry of the state. Its current manifestation, secularism, tends to eliminate personal freedom, as in the case of this young woman. France has a poor record in this regard. The search for a national persona continues. How about something yet untried -- a tolerant and accommodating secularism?

Canada should launch an immigration program in France designed for Muslims. Advertising would read: "Come to Canada. Come as you are. You will be welcomed (except in Quebec)."

In her book "Belonging," former Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson wrote, "True secularism means the acceptance of many beliefs, not the eradication of them all."  

We should all work towards a balance between extreme freedom of expression which sews the seeds of violence and extreme criticism of religion which demeans personal belief. Life entails a balancing of interests, a compromise.

The TTC has gone PC

The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) is ending Sunday stops outside churches. I can understand the TTC ending Sunday stops for business reasons. 

The excuse offered was intellectually insulting. The spokesperson said, "It's just about ensuring there's some equity." In other words, because some receive an extra service, equity says none can have it. Does that mean consideration for the handicapped and seniors will be abolished?  

The TTC has expressed the race-to-the-bottom mentality of the politically correct. 

Sex education

Letter to Toronto Star, published May 9.

Re Dispel myths on sex ed, Editorial, May 2:

This editorial claims that 49 per cent of those polled support the Ontario government's proposed sex education curriculum, while 34 per cent oppose. In the same edition of the Toronto Star we read that 42 per cent support while 40 per cent oppose. Within the margin of error, this constitutes a tie. 

Whichever numbers one uses, each side is a minority. Neither can rightly be described as a "vocal minority" with its covert message of disapproval.

Ninety per cent of Ontarians may agree the curriculum needs updating. That does not confer blanket approval for whatever some in the government deem acceptable. With so many opposed to parts of the proposed curriculum, this has become a classic case calling for accommodation for both sides.

What standard to judge the past?

Letter to the Toronto Star, April 26.

Re War poet remembered, April 26:

In his review of of a new biography of Rupert Brooke, James Cullingham comes close to the error of presentism -- the judging of historical events in the light of today's purportedly superior standards. 

For example, in his travels across Canada, Brooke met Duncan Campbell Scott whom the reviewer describes as the "now notorious assimilationist Canadian poet and Department of Indian Affairs mandarin." Scott believed the best future for our first nations was assimilation into the European culture. 

That was a common feeling a century ago. Today, some consider it notorious. A century from now, who knows?

Order of Canada B-list

Published in the Toronto Star of May 3, 2015

Burnishing the honour, Editorial April 27

The government is correct when it says there are “under-represented sectors” among recipients of the Order of Canada. That group includes discredited Conservative senators, media clowns and other denizens of yahoo land.

Honours must not be awarded according to geography, notoriety or a misguided notion of democracy. The purpose of any award is to recognize special achievements of deserving people, achievements that serve as inspiration for the rest of us.

The proposed affirmative action program will create a B-list of winners and the attendant dumbing down of this unique award.

The Dis-Order of Canada

Letter to the National Post, April 23, 2015

Stephen Harper intends to dumb down the Order of Canada (Order of Canada reform in budget, Apr 23). The Prime Minister is correct in his belief that certain sectors of society are under-represented such as discredited Conservative senators and inhabitants of the yahoo element. The reported feeling is that there is too much Margaret Atwood and too little Don Cherry among Order recipients.

By coincidence, elsewhere in today's National Post (Where culture wars were worth fighting), we read, "A TV-ready image is valued considerably more than any literary pedigree . . . People today go to pundit school. They learn how to be on TV as a pundit, but they don't have any substance. Intelligence has been replaced by volume."

Honours are not intended to be brought "closer to the people," as Harper asserts. Their purpose is to recognize quality achievements to which we should all aspire. Is it time to bid farewell the nobility of the Order of Canada?

Sex education. At what age?

Letter to the Toronto Star, April 21, 2015. Unpublished.

It is unfortunate when a message is answered by an attack on the messenger. Such is the case with three letter writers who disagree with protesters of the sex-ed program proposed by the Ontario government (Ignorance's last bastion, April 20). 

Rather than deal with the concerns of the reported thousands of parents, the letter writers, one of them a teacher, resort to abuse and name-calling. There may be much to commend the program. Yet it does spawn reasonable doubt, for example, as to when young children should be exposed to more mature sexual situations. 

Protests, such as that at Queen's Park recently, voice the failure to address honestly held opinion. The government should immediately undertake an educational program along with a clear message as to its purpose. The reaction might surprise. 

A new embassy in Israel

Israel is the sole nation whose purported capital city, Jerusalem, no government in the world recognizes as such. In April 1979, Opposition Leader Joe Clark announced before the Canada-Israel Committee in Toronto that, should he become Prime Minister, Canada would move its embassy to Jerusalem.

"Next year in Jerusalem," he said, "is a Jewish prayer which we intend to make a Canadian reality." In June of the same year, newly-elected Prime Minister Clark affirmed his election promise. Eighteen days later, he said the decision would be deferred "until the status of Jerusalem is clarified within a comprehensive agreement between Israel and her Arab neighbours." That has yet to happen.

This month, Stephen Harper announced the construction of a new Israeli embassy in Tel Aviv. Not even our Israel-obsessed Prime Minister dares risk the opposition that greeted Clark's error.

On occasion, reality does have its effect.