Canadian Politics, Vol. II

[rockkid]

All seriousness though, some daft female lawyer (from Vancouver) has actually made attempts to file suit.
I’m hoping our Canadian courts won’t waste time with such trivialities.

[Dr. Drum]

Newfoundland legalizes same-sex marriage

cbc.ca
21 Dec 2004

ST. JOHN'S, NFLD - The Newfoundland Supreme Court has cleared the way for two lesbian couples to marry legally, making Newfoundland and Labrador the seventh province to sanction same-sex marriage.

Two couples – Jacqueline Pottle and Noelle French, and Lisa Zigler and Theresa Walsh – were asking for the right to marry legally.

They had applied earlier for marriage licences, but were rejected.

Justice Minister Tom Marshall said earlier this month the provincial government would not oppose the court ruling.

Newfoundland now joins Ontario, British Columbia, Quebec, Saskatchewan, Nova Scotia, Manitoba and the Yukon in legalizing same-sex marriages.

The decision comes in the wake of the Supreme Court of Canada ruling that cleared the way for the Liberal government to introduce a bill early in the New Year giving gays and lesbians the legal right to marry.

The decision ruled that Ottawa has exclusive jurisdiction to decide who has the right to get married in this country.

[Philemon]

The decision ruled that Ottawa has exclusive jurisdiction to decide
who has the right to get married in this country.


I,m so eager to see how Steven Harper will navigate
the coming vote in the House of Commun
trying to appear like a moderate in the eyes of the Canadian public
while keeping his leadership intact with the Western Reform folks ...

Will Ralph Klein use the nonwithstanding clause in the constitution
to keep Albertains free from the dangers of gay marriages ??

[riley]

If he can sober up long enough to sign off on it.

[Philemon]

LOW BLOW ! LOW BLOW !!

(doesn't it feel good or what ... ??)

[Dr. Drum]

Ralph is a complete and total dinosaur, with his 'personally offended' nonsense but his position at least has the virtue of being intellectually honest, in contrast to Stephen Harper’s. If you’re opposed to this and you want to stop it, you have one – and only one – option, use the notwithstanding clause to overrule the courts. Opponents can otherwise propose all the legislative amendments they want – whether they pass is completely irrelevant.

_{Earth to Stephen, Earth to Stephen...}

[Philemon]

HÉ ! You think Ralphie would OK islamic tribunals in his province
like the Boyd report wants the Ontario government to put in place ... ??

I don't have a good feeling about this !!

[Dr. Drum]

Oh Danny Boy, pipe down

Margaret Wente
The Globe and Mail
Thursday, January 6, 2005

In Newfoundland and Labrador, Danny Williams can do no wrong. These days, he's more popular than God. Following his lead, the people of the Rock have banished the Maple Leaf from their dominion. Angry citizens are flooding open-line shows and threatening that, unless they get what's owed to them by Canada, Newfoundland should go it alone.

My grandpa had a saying for moments like this. He would have said, "Here's your hat, what's your hurry?"

I like Newfoundlanders. I really do. But their sense of victimhood is unmatched. And their flag protest isn't winning them much sympathy on this side of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In fact, the sensation on this side is of a deep and painful bite to the hand that feeds. Mr. Williams reminds me of a deadbeat brother-in-law who's hit you up for money a few times too often. He's been sleeping on your couch for years, and now he's got the nerve to complain that it's too lumpy.

The ins and outs of the current squabble between Newfoundland and Ottawa would baffle any normal human being. Technically, the fight is over the esoteric details of equalization payments and offshore revenues. But according to Mr. Williams, it's really about treachery, deceit and betrayal.

Peter Fenwick has a different view. Mr. Fenwick, a long-time Newfoundland political commentator, says it's about having your cake and eating it, too. "He's going to end up with a cake and a half," he says. "And he's got 95 per cent of the province behind him."

Over the years, those of us not blessed to be born on the Rock have sent countless cakes its way in the form of equalization payments, pogey, and various hare-brained make-work schemes. (Who can ever forget the hydroponic cucumber farm?) In return, the surly islanders have blamed us for everything from the disappearance of the cod stocks to the destruction of the family unit, because if people had to work more than 10 weeks before they could collect EI, they might have to move away.

This hallowed policy of siphoning money from the haves to the have-nots, so that everyone can be equal, has turned Canada into a permanently aggrieved nation, in which every region of the country is convinced that it's being brutally ripped off by every other region. No one is better at this blame game than the Newfs, egged on by generations of politicians. The only way to get elected there is to pledge to stop the terrible atrocities of Ottawa (i.e., not sending enough money). If you should make the error of suggesting that people might have to become more self-sufficient, your political career is dead. Politicians like to get elected, which is why things never change.

Newfoundland's population has dwindled to something less than that of Scarborough, Ont. Because of stupendous political malfeasance, it is at least $11-billion in debt. But it still has seven federal seats. And so we send more money so that people can stay in the scenic villages where they were born, even though the fish are gone and there's no more work and never will be, unless they can steal some telemarketing from Bangalore. Rural Newfoundland (along with our great land north of 60) is probably the most vast and scenic welfare ghetto in the world.

But who can blame people for wanting to stay put? Not me. No one will ever gobble down a plate of cod tongues and pen an ode to Scarborough.

Scarborough is not romantic. It is filled with ugly high-rise towers of immigrants scrambling to gain a foothold in a new land far from home. The difference is that, when they do it, we congratulate them and call it enterprise. No one will ever buy a scenic picture postcard of a strip mall. But Scarborough supports itself, and Newfoundland does not, and I wish Danny Williams would explain why it's a good idea to keep picking the pockets of Chinese dry cleaners and Korean variety-store owners who work 90 hours a week in order to keep subsidizing the people who live in Carbonear, no matter how quaint and picturesque they are.

I like Newfoundlanders, I really do. Where would we be without Rex Murphy and Mary Walsh and Rick Mercer? On the other hand, they left.

As for you other people of the Rock, maybe we can strike a deal. You can keep all the oil and gas revenues. And you can pay us back all the money we've sent you since you joined Confederation. Fair enough?

I thought not.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wanted to comment on this after the flap started last week but since The Globe website is now a subscription service, it took a little while to actually get hold of an actual copy of the article.

You can count me as one Newfoundlander who’s never though that Danny Williams can do no wrong – He’s a Tory so as a general principle, I’m going to be on the other side of the political fence from him anyway. On this issue, I thought that taking down the flags was at best a tactical error.

However –

I’ve been living, working and paying my taxes in Nova Scotia for 20 years now, no doubt at least partially as a result of the lack of economic opportunity at home. My wife, also a Newfoundlander, has done the same all her adult life. I have seven brothers and sisters. We are spread out across this country from Nova Scotia to Alberta. Every one of us has left Newfoundland, the last this past December.

I am the second owner of the house I live in. The first owners were a couple from Burgeo who emigrated from the then Dominion of Newfoundland in early 40s. Same story – there was nothing for them at home – but they made a life of it here and had three kids, two of whom ended up as adults contributing to the economy of Nova Scotia, the other to the economy of Alberta.

Newfoundlanders have been going down the road as long as there’s been a road to go down, like a lot of people from this end of the country.

So, with all that, I just wanted to say that Margaret "I like Newfoundlanders" Wente can go to hell!

[riley]

I believe the city/town with third largest population of Newfoundlanders is actually Fort Macmurray, AB. So if one wanted to split hairs in a funny chuckles sort fo way, one could suggest that the Alberta provincial debt load that was recently retired in full might have come in some small part from both the economical and physical backs of many a Newfoundlander. I doubt very much if anyone's done the math to determine if there's any kind of financial offset for the per civillian debt servicing component of Alberta's revenue base against their per civililan transfer payment expense lines.

This pops up every once in a while, and the whole debate is every bit as boring each time, given the blinders that get strapped on by these inter province fund transferring victims. It's convenient to forget how the country was established and who's resources were used to set up certain thriving economic centres, who are either situated on ideal trade routes or happen to land on nice petroleum industry, without having done anything particularly unique to find themselves in preferred economic circumstance.

Sure there are issues with hand outs in Atlantic Canada, but we're not alone, and the convenience of carting out the notion that somehow other areas of the country have done a better job at managing resources and creating opportunity is peculiar, given that no one in Newfoundland decided all corporate head offices would be set up outside Atlantic Canada anymore than people in Alberta put the oil in their own ground to gain economic benefit. Not everyone stays put at all cost, (Doc Drum et al - case in point), and sweeping generalizations have no place in credible journalism.

The country was founded on the sharing of resources. If this experiment we call Canada is a no go because someone now feels they're shipping too much cash to the areas that helped put them in positions of privilege in the first place, then let's pack the whole fucking thing in and I'll just move to Texas for the shits and giggles experience of it all.

[Dr. Drum]

Yeah, absolutely, Riley. Conventional wisdom has it that if all the expatriate Newfs in the country and their immediate offspring were to pack up and move back to Newfoundland, the population of The Rock would swell from under 500,000 to 2.5 million. That’s got to be pretty significant for somebody’s provincial ledger sheet, somewhere. Wouldn’t be surprised if the story’s not similar for the rest of the Atlantic Provinces, given the history of the region.

[Dr. Drum]

Worth a read...

The Rock and the Tsunami

Rick Salutin
The Globe and Mail
January 14, 2005

What bothers me in the Wente-Williams uproar over Newfoundland, as well as the tsunami aid tsunami (as it's been cleverly called), is that both echo with timeless, dualistic mythologies. What tends to be assumed in each is a strict separation between giver and taker; one side is worthy, the other is needy.

Yet haves and have-nots don't usually just co-exist. They are intricately related. It's like the rising gap between rich Canadians and the rest. The rich have got richer largely because the rest declined -- via tax and program cuts etc. Newfoundland isn't naturally poor. St. John's was a bustling economic and cultural entrepôt when Toronto didn't exist. It had the wealth of the sea and forests, it was the gateway to North America, its oldest continuous settlement. What did Toronto have going for it at the start besides some decent farmland nearby? But the British built it up in the 19th century as a counterbalance to the French in Quebec. Sure there were a raft of "factors" in its rise, but Ontarians have no right to feel economically or otherwise superior. They lucked out, for a while. Economic success is generally about power and luck, not character, merit or, for sure, nature's bounty.

That goes globally. Britain and France were once contemptible outliers to the economic powerhouses of the Mediterranean. The "discovery" of the new world made them, Spain and puny Portugal, mighty economies. Britain destroyed India's textile industry to create a market for its goods. It forced its way into China through the Opium Wars and subjugated China for a century, leading to -- well, the odd situation there today. In the modern era, going back centuries, everything is an effect of everything else. So when the haves, like Ottawa or the Western world, dispense aid or largesse to have-nots, such as Newfoundland or Africa, the attitude ("deadbeats . . . scenic welfare ghetto") is out of place. The haves have often made the have-nots that way, or at least benefited from the process that did so.

Take Iraq, the very "cradle of civilization." Twenty-five years ago, it was an oil-rich, industrialized, secular, well-educated society. Then it made a disastrous war on Iran, egged on by the West. Then came the ruinous 1991 gulf war, followed by years of crushing Western sanctions, and the recent war, with the ensuing chaos. It has been turned into a social and economic basket case from which the West proposes to rescue it with elections and aid. After a few more decades of this kind of intervention, will Canadian columnists start calling Iraqis welfare bums?

As for tsunami aid, no, I'm not going to say the West is responsible for the earthquake. But it wasn't just standing around in the region waiting to give generously. U.S. intelligence abetted the 1965 Indonesian coup in which perhaps 500,000 people were murdered. Western countries, including Canada, backed the regime during its genocide in East Timor, in return for investment rights. In one of his splendid diatribes, Australian journalist John Pilger says the Howard government is now "denying East Timor its due of oil and gas royalties worth some $8-billion. Without this revenue, East Timor, the world's poorest country, cannot build schools, hospitals and roads." More generally, the effects of structural adjustment policies imposed on many such nations by Western financial bodies are estimated to kill millions of children yearly. One result is reliance on Western tourism, a debilitating and humiliating sector, which people turn to if other jobs are unavailable. It seems partly responsible for the deforestation of coastlines, leaving them vulnerable to the waves. Rather than viewing current aid as proof of a benevolent, disinterested West, it might make sense to take it as restitution, which I think is how many individuals, in their way, do see it.

But dualism is a tenacious mythology. It seduces both sides of the equation. Take the Newfoundlanders. Even they seem convinced, like desperate gamblers, that one final heave of the dice -- now it's oil -- is their "last chance," as they often say, to escape their needy, rotten destiny.

[Dr. Drum]

One last kick at the can on this one...

I like Margaret Wente. I really do

Rex Murphy
The Globe and Mail
Saturday, January 15, 2005

'I like Newfoundlanders. I really do."

My esteemed colleague Margaret Wente wrote that in a recent column on Newfoundland. Twice. Well, let me say at the top of this one: "I like Margaret Wente. I really do." But I fear her repeated assurance -- and I wish I wasn't writing this -- leaves me unconvinced.

After all, if you write a column describing Newfoundlanders as "picking the pockets of Chinese dry cleaners and Korean variety-store owners who work 90 hours a week," describe them as "surly" ingrates, "gobbling" cod tongues while they luxuriate in a great "scenic welfare ghetto," and, in general, put down everyone in Newfoundland as part of a set of lazy, self-indulging, whining spongers -- rote-chanting "I like Newfoundlanders" doesn't salvage the piece from being one sour, willful, collective putdown.

It's a nasty cast of mind that traffics so generously in stereotypes. The Chinese are drycleaners; Koreans know only convenience stores; Newfoundlanders are shiftless pickpockets. It's a spurious contrast she sets up and she knows it.

If the point Margaret was hoping to insinuate -- that it is only "hard-working" new immigrants who actually "pay" into the revenues that provide equalization; that it is only the most industrious being extorted to pay for the least industrious -- then she has so bizarre a conception of the Canadian tax system, and the principle of equalization, that it is beyond my ability and, more to the present point, my desire, to rescue her from it.

She makes other scattershot observations that are insult trying to dress as candour. Newfoundlanders have a "sense of victimhood that is unmatched." Dear Lord, the global industry of professional victimhood has landed on many shores, and infested whole multitudes of causes and groups like a plague, but if one were seriously to look for a few places where the posture and cant of "the victim" is considered unseemly and unworthy, Newfoundland would be one such place.

For all the social clichés and easy characterizations of "pogey" and "handouts" that seem to teem in Margaret's "I like Newfoundlanders" brain, any real acquaintance with Newfoundland would have introduced her to a strain in my province's character that is the radical opposite of her wildly gratuitous calumny.

I've known people so hostile to every notion of something for nothing, they wouldn't trouble a neighbour to borrow a cup of milk. I've known legions of men and women who put in a lifetime's work of a kind that those of us who spray words for a living should be embarrassed to stand next to.

Try going to Long Harbour, or Burgeo, or Lamaline, or St. Anthony, or Port de Grave and meet with some of the men and women who have worked, really worked, for a living, Margaret -- and try telling them to their faces they're the spoiled delinquents of your furious imagination. Try telling the same to those who, after a life of work, have nothing, and have abandoned their homes and history to find work elsewhere.

We have our louts and layabouts. Point me to any region of any country that doesn't. But where you come up with the notion that Newfoundlanders -- of all people -- are the artists of victimhood is a trawl too confused for me to fathom.

Then there's this business where Margaret writes of Newfoundlanders blaming "us" for the collapse of the fishery. Who's this "us"? The citizens of Canada didn't collapse the fishery, and no one in Newfoundland even dreams they did.

The only point on which any blame is being assigned is over the stewardship of the resource since Confederation. That was federal. No one argues otherwise. And it is surely fair, and not victimhood, that if the government that had control failed in its stewardship, then it should bear some responsibility for so failing.

As for the money being poured into Newfoundland while we guzzle cod tongues and stare out the scenic bay, keep in mind the billion dollars a year going "outward" from Churchill Falls. Churchill Falls alone nullifies the equalization "debt."

Her last shot was as carelessly aimed as all the rest. You can keep all the gas and oil revenue, she says, but pay us (there's that enigmatic "us" again) back what we've sent down. Well, say I, not so fast.

Restock (and return) the Continental Shelf, turn back Churchill Falls and, one last thing, rescind the contemptible practice -- that obviously has appeal to very limited natures -- of dealing in caricature and stereotype, and maligning an entire province on the basis of little more than ill-acquaintance and condescension.

Shut down the Newfie joke industry, of which, it mildly saddens me to say, Margaret Wente's column is an extended and singularly hostile example.

That said, I like Margaret Wente. I really do.

[Philemon]

I love Rex Murphy ... I really do !!

[Dr. Drum]

Oh, I agree, Phil – with Rex, much more often than not I find myself on the opposite side of the issue. Nonetheless, he’s always entertaining and I agree with few reservations with this one.

Never fuckin' cross a Newfoundlander about Newfoundland.

[Philemon]

Religious right sends cash north

To fight same-sex marriage in Canada. U.S. groups taking credit for Bush re-election fund local allies' efforts to 'save the family'

ELIZABETH THOMPSON; KIRSTEN SMITH of CanWest News Service contributed to this report.
The Gazette; CanWest News Service


Monday, February 07, 2005

Powerful religious groups in the United States are quietly sending money and support to allies in Canada fighting same-sex marriage.

Moreover, some U.S. groups say they are prepared to spend whatever it takes to ensure same-sex marriage does not become legal north of the border.

Patrick Korten, vice-president of communications for the Knights of Columbus head office in New Haven, Conn., says no limit has been set on the help his organization is prepared to offer.

"Whatever it takes," he said. "The family is too important."

Korten said the U.S. headquarters of the Catholic men's group paid $80,782 Canadian to print 2 million postcards now being distributed in Catholic churches across Canada and is already contemplating printing more.

"It has been extremely enthusiastically received in Catholic parishes all over Canada. As a matter of fact, we may have to print some more - there was a great deal of interest in it. It offers a quick, simple but effective way for Catholics ... to make their feelings about the same-sex marriage bill known to their MPs."

Another formidable opponent of same-sex marriage, Focus on the Family, is also sending support and services worth hundreds of thousands of dollars a year north of the border to its Canadian affiliate.

Sending money across the border to fund allies fighting Canadian legislation is not illegal under Canadian law. While Canadian-registered charities must spend no more than 10 per cent of their budgets on political activity, interest groups are restricted in what they can spend on political lobbying only during elections and referendums.

While the $304,125 Canadian that Focus on the Family Canada received in services from its U.S. parent in 2003 - and didn't declare in its financial statement - is equivalent to only 3.1 per cent of its total revenues that year of $9.6 million, Alex Munter, national co-ordinator for Canadians for Equal Marriage says it is several times more than the $46,000 his opposing group has been able to raise within Canada since the Supreme Court reference on same-sex marriage.

"In terms of scale, we're dealing with an enormous operation that has charitable status and is funded by deep pockets, including deep pockets from the United States."

Munter said his group has not received any money or services from U.S. groups supporting same-sex marriage.

James Dobson, the charismatic founder of Focus on the Family who has been described as one of the most influential Christian figures in the United States, personally waded into the Canadian same-sex marriage debate two weeks ago in a radio show taped in Colorado Springs, Colo., and transmitted as a paid broadcast to 130 radio stations in Canada.

"It is clear here in the United States that the American people do not want same-sex marriage. I would hope that Canadians who also do not want same-sex marriage would be encouraged by what has happened down here."

Dobson also attacked Prime Minister Paul Martin for refusing cabinet ministers a free vote.

"Your prime minister, Paul Martin, has recently done things to subvert the will of the people," he said.