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This is getting pathetic

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What’s next? Promoting abortion?

OTTAWA — Stephen Harper is ruling out re-opening a debate over abortion law for a future Conservative government, saying today there are too many other important issues to manage.

“We have a lot of challenges in front of the country,” the Conservative leader said this morning during an announcement about arts and fitness funding for children.

“We have a difficult world economy as we all know. That has to be the focus of the government and I simply have no intention of ever making the abortion question a focus of my political career.”

He said that some of his caucus members would like him to do so, and so would some Liberals: “But, I have not done that in my entire political career. Don’t intend to start now.”

“I have been clear throughout my entire political career I don’t intend to open the abortion issue,” he said. “I haven’t in the past; I’m not going to in the future.”

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Andrea adds: I never had any expectation of Harper on abortion, something I’ve publicly stated before. What bothers me is this:

After today’s event, however, Mr. Harper’s spokesman Kory Teneycke clarified in an email to The Globe and Mail that Mr. Harper would “whip” his front bench so that none of his cabinet ministers would support any private member’s bills that could re-open the debate.

Whipping his cabinet? Ah, freedom of speech, apparently such a tenuous concept that even the party that was supposed to not be like the Liberals is, well, just like the Liberals. Get ready for some splashy new fountain to appear in Harper’s riding, maybe a small golf course… At least Chretien never pretended to be decent.

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Rebecca asks: How has it come about, that we can’t even have a debate about this? Are feminists and “choice advocates” so insecure in their convictions that they fear an honest discussion? (And if so – what does this tell us?) Is there any other issue about which so many Canadians disagree, that is nonetheless off-limits politically in all parties?

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Andrea is trying to think positive: At least he has not said the dreaded “I believe in a woman’s right to choose,” those special words that mean in point of fact that a politician has never given abortion any thought at all and is rather running scared from the likes of Judy Rebick.

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Véronique adds: I’ll just say that I’m glad my Conservative candidate is pro-life: I can still vote for him even if the party at large is now officially pro-choice. About the matter of conscience and the issue of “whipping” your cabinet, nobody said having convictions was going to be easy: ask Michael Chong who gave up his seat in cabinet because he didn’t support the “Quebec as a nation” motion (wow, that’s snappy, I should write a song). I think that any cabinet minister with a backbone would rather resign — or refuse a seat in cabinet to start with — than being told what to vote on such an important issue.

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Tanya has to say it: We all can’t fight every battle all the time. In my mind, Harper won’t win any election with pro-life guns-a-blazing. And then where would we be? Slow and steady wins the race. He’s setting the pace for eventual Conservative majority government in this country. 

 

In the meantime, we need to keep up the dialog. We need to make sure no one gets away with calling this a closed debate. That being said, Harper, you don’t need to “open the abortion issue.” It’s already open. So please find some new wording for the arms length you choose to keep with it.

 

The fact massage

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CBC apologizes for Heather Mallick’s Mighty Wind column.

Portions of Ms. Mallick’s column do not meet the standards set out in policy for a point-of-view piece since some of her “facts” are unsupportable. She may, of course, resubmit her column taking account of our editorial standards. The editors are free to, in fact obliged to, exercise appropriate editing standards.

I used to be a fact checker. Yes, magazines usually have a department dedicated to driving ambitious, young journalists to insanity, by having them confirm the facts as written by others.

There could have been no fact check that would have caused this column not to run.

Fact checker: “Having perused many pornographic web sites, I conclude that Palin does not look like a porn star.”  

OR

Fact checker: “Having called some male Republican’s wives… it would seem sexual satisfaction is, er, high.”

This apology from the CBC is grand, except it isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. They entirely fail, consistently, to note there is another set of views out there and they monopolize the media with their views using my tax dollars.

On that note, if you want more bias…check this most recent “news” report on “women’s rights” and Bill C-484. How’s about interviewing those victims groups that support Bill C-484 instead of claiming there were none? How’s about challenging the opinion that abortion is a “woman’s right”? Yes, I know, it would have required research. And a fact check.

Or maybe the CBC has an official policy–something that goes a little like this: Slander now, apologize later.

Election financing rules and double standards

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Election financing. We have regulated speech, not free speech, in Canada. This means that groups and individuals (“third parties”) cannot spend as much money as they’d like for (or against) candidates in an election. (For more on Canada’s gag law, this Calgary Herald editorial explains.)

This runs contrary to rules of free speech. I am against that law. But it still stands. And if Friends of Science and Barry Cooper can be charged, as the Herald piece explains they were, who else should be?  

Why am I asking these questions? Because I’m curious to know how much money pro-abortion groups are spending telling me not to vote for Harper? Has anyone asked that? Are they registered? Should they be?

Representatives from Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, Canadian Labour Congress, the Ottawa Coalition to End Violence Against Women, Federation du Quebec pour le planning des naissances and Action Canada for Population and Development (ACPD) held the press conference, describing themselves as a united front in the mobilization of women voters.

Does spending money telling voters who not to vote for (Harper) qualify under the Elections Spending Act?

Let me be very clear–I think those pro-abortion groups should be allowed to speak freely, and spend as much as they want. But what I’m not keen on is a double standard, whereby groups on the “wrong” side are charged (Friends of Science, National Citizens Coalition to name but two) and groups with elite support (pro-abortion groups) are not.

(Cross-posted to The Shotgun.)

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Brigitte is jumping up and down, clapping her hands: Oh, good one! Any minute now, we should expect the thought police Elections Canada to descend on the gals, right? Right?

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Véronique must start reading more Alberta-based newspapers. Whoa, this is so refreshing to read!

Courageous Canadian students

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A column in today’s Citizen in which ProWomanProLife is mentioned:  

The spirit of the thing is renewed, in Canada today, by, for example, Andrea Mrozek and the girls at the Ottawa website, ProWomanProLife. Just as strident feminism renews itself, by finding a new generation of embittered young women and confused men, attracted to the task of infiltrating our legal and political bureaucracies, so also we find a new generation of women determined to resist them, and to defend common sense with unflappable courage.

But thankfully, there are many more like us at PWPL. I can say I met many great students–both male and female, from New Brunswick all the way to British Columbia this weekend, speaking at UofT and at the National Campus Life Network conference–very courageous, very cool people, working in an environment far more difficult than where I find myself, and doing it at an age where I didn’t give serious issues a serious thought. It’s good to see. (And one of them has put one of the presentations I made on YouTube: should you have absolutely nothing to do, come oh say, mid-winter, feel free to look it up.)

[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5B6gvvbpJ5g]

Left, right, and centre

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There’s an interesting feature in the weekend’s Ottawa Citizen (couldn’t find it online) where they run the four major (Canadian) political parties through the political compass and see who comes out right and left. Recognizing that the simple right-left dichotomy is no longer appropriate to describe today’s complex political landscape, the political compass places respondents on an economic left-right x-axis and a social authoritarian-libertarian y-axis. The questions are very superficial and I itched for the opportunity to explain my answers but in the interest of full disclosure, I placed in the libertarian left quadrant although just a hair left of centre.

I don’t feel adequately described by my placement. I thought I was more right-wing free market to tell you the truth. But since I don’t think that big corporations are a moral absolute and only want what’s good for me, I place as left-wing. A little simplistic, wouldn’t you say?

What I found particularly interesting from our political parties’ placement — and the Citizen treatment of it — is how the Bloc, NDP and Dion Liberals placed in the libertarian left quadrant (aren’t I in good company?) along with Ghandi and the Dalai Lama; whereas the Conservatives placed smack in the middle of the social scale but definitely to the right of the economic scale… along with Georges Bush and Hitler. If my history lessons serve me well, I seem to remember that Mao Tse Tung and Pol Pot were on the left as well, and that Robert Mugabe is probably as left-wing as Ghandi. But let’s not digress: I have a graduate degree in bioethics, what do I know about politics, anyway?

Another feature of interest was the parties placing on the social libertarianism to authoritarianism scale. Of all the parties, the Conservatives placed more authoritarian than the others and the journalists to comment: “(…) [The liberals] have become even more resolutely libertarians on social issues like abortion and gay marriage.” Is that so??? Pro-life protesters are limited in what they can say and where they can say it, the Human Rights Commission is increasingly looking like some kind of thought police and efforts to reform it have been harshly criticized by those very “libertarian” parties. The previous Liberal government imposed the party line to MPs voting on Bill C-38 (gay marriage bill) and Stephen Harper was accused to be some kind of right-wing nut for “re-opening the debate” by which we mean that he allowed MPs to vote freely on the issue. We haven’t had a policy discussion on abortion in the House of Commons since Morgentaler gutted Canadian law on abortion. Gilles Duceppe kicked off the election by kicking people with religious beliefs  and the Liberals believe that the government should handle arts and culture because Joe Frontporch can only be trusted to buy tickets to Canadian Idol and other American franchises. That’s saying nothing about the idea of a national childcare program to make sure that kids are trained early in whatever the government thinks they should be. And we think we are moving toward a libertarian ideal?

Am I missing something?

Palin disinvited

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Organizers disinvite Sarah Palin, who was originally scheduled to speak along with Hillary Clinton at a rally. The New York Sun published the full speech.

In the words of one Jewish journalist, the rally was “against Iran’s plan to destroy Israel.”

It was a remarkable speech, prepared by a remarkable woman. But it was not heard…because the Democratic Party and Jewish Democrats believe that their partisan interest in demonizing Palin and making Americans…hate and fear her to secure their votes for Obama…is more important than allowing Palin to elevate the necessity of preventing a second Holocaust to the top of the US’s national security agenda…

The moment that Clinton found out that she was to share a stage with Palin, she cancelled her appearance. By cancelling, she signaled to Jewish Democrats – and Democrats in general – that opposing Palin and the Republican Party is more important than opposing Ahmadinejad and the genocidal regime he represents.

THE JEWISH Democrats on the rally’s organizing committee got the message loud and clear. Two of the rally’s co-sponsors…disinvited Palin…

[Liberals]…uphold themselves as champions of human rights… They care about the environment. They care about securing American women’s unfettered access to abortions. They care about keeping Christianity and God out of the public sphere. They care about offering peace to those who are actively seeking their destruction so that they can applaud themselves for their open-mindedness and tell themselves how much better they are than savage conservatives.

Those horrible, war-mongering, Bambi killing, unborn baby defending, God-believing conservatives, who think that there are things worth going to war to protect, must be defeated at all costs. They must intimidate, attack, demonize and defeat those conservatives who think that the free women of the West should be standing shoulder to shoulder not with Planned Parenthood, but with the women of the Islamic world who are enslaved by a misogynist Shari’a legal code that treats them as slaves and deprives them of control not simply of their wombs, but of their faces, their hair, their arms, their legs, their minds and their hearts.

Be yourself, Sarah!

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A neat column:

If Sarah Palin is John McCain’s secret weapon, let her go, whoever is holding her back. And, frankly, if it turns out that the “authentic” Palin of rallies and the Republican convention is just good speech delivery in a woman with some good spirit, I want to know that sooner rather than later. (Mitt’s still available. Someone in Washington who can actually run a business and knows something about the economy will come in handy once the federal government owns the U.S. banking system.) But if the Palin we know and love and have projected our hopes for sanity in American politics is the real Sarah Palin — then come out from the shadows, woman. You’re the one who is going to win this election. Be yourself. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Two Quebec staples

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Steamés and $7 a day daycare.

I was sitting on a terrace yesterday enjoying lunch of hot-dogs and fries with my daughter (because, apparently, Listeria doesn’t scare me one bit). Along came a 50-something woman, asking if she could share our table. “But of course!”

The conversation quickly turned to childcare. (For some reason, she believed a woman having a weekday lunch with her 3-year-old could be some sort of a resource.) This woman’s daughter is looking for a daycare for six-month-old twins, but keeps encountering waiting lists up to 4 years long.

I suggest: “Why not enroll them in private daycare and pay $30 a day only to get it all back on her income tax?”

She comes back with: “Oh, well she and her spouse make too much annually to qualify to get any money back.”

Yes, of course. When it comes to daycare, it’s deplorable to think that a family making 6 figures should have to pay more than $1,820 a year per child. Thank goodness even those families receive $100 a month per child under 6 in childcare benefits. How ever would they make ends meet?

And there you have it. Another example of how enviable our childcare system is in Quebec.

Wooing the female crunchy con

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Kris Sims writes this about “urban aprons” in today’s Post. She makes the claim that there is a fair amount in Harper’s electioneering meant to woo this vote. If you recall “Zoe”–she was the type of urban female voter the Harper government decided they would never win–Sims calls this type of voter Zoe’s older sister, or the “urban apron vote.”

That’s right: the federal Conservatives want the Urban Apron vote — they just aren’t admitting it out loud. The Prime Minister has been making announcements about health, safety and product regulation throughout his extended stay in minority government, often getting his non-threatening Milhouse of a Health Care Minister, Tony Clement, to deliver the feel-good news.

She lists a bunch of things the Conservatives are promising–I admit, I’ve heard of none of them and in my experience, if you are Zoe’s older sister, you’re not listening, either. It is just too “uncool” to vote Conservative for many in this downtown core. (I’m writing from Toronto today. Yesterday I gave a pro-life talk at beautiful Hart House at UofT–just down the way there was some sort of organic food fair, and Mayor Miller was outside. For the organic food, not the pro-life stuff. Sigh.)

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